Parallel Attraction Page 17

  Kneeling in the middle of the floor, her face drained of color, Thea reached with all of her senses. She hummed slightly, both arms wrapped around her body, rocking as she knelt on the same pillows where he and Kelsey had made love not long ago. He wondered what private moments might be unveiled to her, but the time for propriety had vanished the moment Kelsey had.

  Pausing in the room's center, Scott scowled, turning first one direction and then another. "What do you see, Lieutenant Dillon?" Jared deliberately forced his manner into that of leader, not a desperate lover.

  Scott said nothing, but resumed his pacing. His sensory abilities always involved movement, a physical outworking of his interior life. Only Jared sat, quiet and still. "One man," Scott finally told him in a whisper. "He came alone and he left with her."

  Jared swallowed hard, urging Scott on with a firm nod. "What else? I need details, soldier."

  "Refarian." Scott narrowed his eyes as he gazed about the room. "Full-blooded, sir, no doubt about that." Scott paused, sniffing at the air like a timber wolf. "Rogue all the way."

  Jared's hands clenched at his sides. "Why?" he cried, no longer able to control his simmering emotions. Why would this man have taken her? Why now, of all nights? On the floor, Thea's humming ceased, and Jared lowered his voice again: "Tell me, Lieutenant Dillon, of this man's motives."

  Scott met his gaze with a forceful expression, one that spoke of endless loyalty, boundless commitment to his king. "His intentions are obscured from me, my lord," he replied, "but I promise you I will uncover them."

  Jared swore aloud, leaping to his feet, and pushed past Scott and across the room. He cursed his own lack of intuitive abilities, an innate skill that his warrior's life had never allowed him to nurture. "Where did he take her?" he wondered aloud. "And how did he?"

  On the floor Thea stirred, lifting her pale eyes to meet his own. "The man has a name," she said in a quiet voice, "a secret name that no one else knows."

  "Tell me," Jared said.

  "Marek Shaekai. It's his Refarian birth name," she said.

  Scott shook his head, not recognizing it. Neither did Jared. Thea stared into the fire. "He knows you, Jared," she said. "Extremely well."

  "I've met no one by that name."

  Scott shifted on his feet, rubbing the bridge of his nose, and said, "You might know him as someone else. Maybe by his human name."

  Marek Shaekai. Jared turned the name over within his mind. Bracing his hands on the mantel, he swept his thoughts over his comrades, the Refarians who had served him these many years. Who had left his ranks disgruntled? Who had spun damaging rumors about him? Not a man or woman in his corps.

  "What does he look like, this Marek?" he asked, already knowing that if either of them gotten a vision of the man, they would have spoken up already.

  "Dark," Thea answered. "I see only darkness, cousin."

  Scott murmured his agreement, but offered nothing more.

  "You should try to reach across the bond to her," Thea said, unable to disguise the anguish the words caused her. "Your connection with her is very strong, Jared, and wherever he's taken her, you might be able to...." Her voice trailed off and she swept her gaze toward the hearth, the words unfinished.

  "You're right," Jared agreed, bowing his head. What he didn't say was that for the past minutes he had repeatedly been spinning his energy toward Kelsey, bringing more and more of his soul's force to bear. But in return he felt nothing. Sensed nothing. Still, he had to try again, and closing his eyes, he quieted his mind. Focus—she needs your focus, warrior. Her life depends on your discipline.

  And so, in his heart's center, he conjured the image of his beloved's blue eyes, her fiery hair. Then, fanning the energy inside of himself, he centered on her soul, the vibrant magentas and purples and blues he'd glimpsed as they'd mated.

  The bond did not come to life in answer—not precisely. Yet he did sense something in the room, something of extreme importance.

  Behind him! Whatever it was lay on the floor behind him. Jared wheeled in the direction of the object he sensed, dropping to his knees. Beneath the bed, he detected the object that seemed to burn into his consciousness.

  "What is it?" Scott asked, pressing behind him.

  Jared knelt there, grasping with both hands beneath the dark wood of the bed frame—pulling with his intuition to identify the clue he had detected. His palms met dust and hardwood, but still he swept his hands, feeling, reaching....

  Until his open palm centered on something cold and solid—yet smoldering like all the stars overhead at night.

  Marco held Kelsey within his grasp, his hands crushing her face roughly. The tendrils of his power reached around inside her mind, but she was powerless to resist the invasion. With every shred of her will, she worked to block him, focusing all her mind's reserves against his alien prying. Perhaps she succeeded, or perhaps her captor didn't discover what he sought; either way, she sensed him retreating with the same maelstrom's power she'd felt as he invaded her thoughts.

  But he never once released his physical hold on her. "Tell me why this time matters," he insisted, yanking her closer. "Why was it targeted?"

  She could think of only two reasons why their future selves might have deemed this date of monumental importance: It was the night of their mating, and Jared's data still remained lodged within her mind. But she wasn't about to reveal either detail to her captor, not if she could help it.

  "I-I don't know," she whispered hoarsely.

  "How can you not know?" he shouted, tightening his grip on her. "You are his trusted. You are his wife!"

  "No," she said. "No, I'm not." There, maybe if he would finally accept the truth, he would relent, she thought hopefully, but the roar that erupted from the man's chest silenced any wishful thoughts on that count. "It's like I already told you. We aren't married—not, uh, yet."

  "You've been lying to protect him." He met her eyes intently, and she could almost feel him drawing things out of her, some part of her mind giving way to him.

  She began to shake. "No, it's the truth!" she cried, wondering if her plan had been such a great idea after all. But she'd felt that the revelation might gain his trust somehow, and now there'd be no turning back. "I am telling you the truth."

  He made a low sound in the back of his throat. "Kelsey, you are such a disappointment to me. To think how many years I've admired you."

  "I've never seen you before tonight," she tried. "How do you even know me? None of this makes sense. I keep on telling you that I don't understand!"

  "You understand that I am here because of Jared." She trembled in his grasp, but said nothing. "You understand that you have something of priceless value to me," he continued. "Do you not?"

  The creeping nausea returned, and she whispered, "But what is it?"

  Releasing her, he rocked back on his heels and sat in thoughtful silence, clearly considering his next move. She didn't dare flinch, even though she desperately wanted to scurry backward, to distance herself from him as much as she could.

  Tapping his fingers on the cold floor, he seemed to reach a conclusion. "You are not yet married," he said. His eyes shifted from hers in slight hesitation, and Kelsey was struck by the odd notion that his incorrect assumptions about who she was at this point in time had been disconcerting to the man—and on a deeply personal level. It left him seeming strangely vulnerable.

  She seized the moment. "I hardly know Jared Bennett," she lied. At least, it was a half-truth.

  He furrowed his brow in thought. "None of us understood how to set the mitres precisely," he reflected, obviously speaking of her future self. "Perhaps our calculations—your calculations—were wrong."

  "My calculations?" she asked numbly.

  His black eyebrows shot upward. "It was you who taught us how to use this weapon."

  She glanced around them both at the dimly lit chambers. It looked more like a science lab than a weapon. "What kind of weapon?" she asked. "Biochemical? Nuclear?"


  He actually laughed. "Far more devastating than that, my dear."

  "Then what?" she demanded. "If you don't tell me a damn thing, then how can I possibly answer these questions? You're an idiot if you think I can."

  He didn't flinch at the insult, but rose to his feet, walking to the center of the room, and placed both of his hands on a large, liquid-filled tube. It glowed with a phosphorescent light, and as he touched his palms to it, the bluish green changed, morphing to a dark, cloudy consistency—as if it had reacted in some fundamental way to Marco's nature.

  "We stand within the mitres," he said, his voice formal. "Capable of altering time, creating portals of entry and exit throughout eternity and space; this is the revolution's greatest weapon. Jared Bennett's greatest weapon. And only one in our midst possessed—excuse me, possesses," he corrected with a light flourishing bow, "the power to harness it. You, Kelsey Bennett." He continued to use her married name, though it seemed as much out of long habit as from any darker motivation.

  Kelsey was beginning to understand. She stated what she had already begun to surmise within the past hour. "You used it to travel back from the future."

  "I passed through a portal, designed by you, Kelsey—and arrived from the future to this very specific point in time."

  Though as a geologist she had delved deeply into geophysics, she found it difficult to imagine herself capable of such advanced calculations. Without even intending to, she voiced her doubts aloud: "How could I possibly have done that?"

  He spun to face her. "You alone could harness the power of the mitres. You alone were the one capable of it."

  "That’s crazy. I'm nothing more than a geology grad student—a researcher. I couldn’t possibly have done what you’re suggesting.

  He cocked his head, appraising her. "You really don't know, do you? I would sense your subterfuge, but there is none in you."

  Refusing to reply, she waited for him to reveal more until finally he continued: "It was not only the knowledge you possessed of physics and the geology of this location that gave you the ability," he said, sweeping his hand about the chamber, "but the data that Jared fused with your mind."

  Fused? Fused sounded permanent, not like temporary safekeeping, as Jared had described his actions by Mirror Lake. An uncontrollable shiver swept down Kelsey's spine.

  "You came here a week ago?" she asked. It would have been the night after she had first encountered Jared by the lake.

  "Precisely."

  "Maybe we didn't pick the right date," she speculated, and immediately regretted it: she didn't want to go giving this man any ideas. But maybe their future selves had meant to stop the data transfer—perhaps that had been the intention.

  A smile of realization crossed his features. "Or perhaps your future self intentionally miscalculated—to deceive me."

  "You're dealing with universal laws of physics, Marco, not exactly something to go tampering with." She frowned, unable to contain her derision. "How far exactly in the future did you come from, anyway?"

  He stared at her—through her—ignoring her question. "Or perhaps this time was the destination all along," he mused, black eyebrows hitching upward. The ugly scar became more pronounced with the gesture, the white striation stark against the natural black hair of his eyebrows. "Perhaps now is, in fact, the pivotal moment. Perhaps only my assumptions have been incorrect."

  Shit. The man was smarter than he appeared to be—very smart, with a mind that seemed to be calculating faster than she could outflank him.

  "Now I see that my strategy has been all wrong," he said, whirling his full attention back on her. "My focus has been on the wrong Jared: the one who tried to send you back in time. We cannot know what my enemy was thinking—his thoughts are as lost to me as that time will ever be." He slipped his hands firmly about her face again, clasping her hard. "Yes, the other Jared is no longer of any importance," he said dismissively, "and so now I will learn all about your Jared."

  Marco closed his eyes, and an electric sensation shot through Kelsey's mind, followed by a report of immediate, searing pain. He flinched, and his expressions altered repeatedly as she felt her mind being sucked of something, almost as if a giant vacuum were engulfing her thoughts. And then, just as suddenly, the sensations stopped. His eyes flew open, growing wide.

  "You have spoken the truth," he whispered fiercely. "You are not Kelsey Bennett. Not the wife of the leader of the rebellion."

  Kelsey drew in a sharp breath, bracing for his next words as he dropped his hands.

  "However, I see now that you are extremely important to the Refarian ruler," he said into the hush. "You are his bonded lifemate, and that means one thing: Your Jared has a weakness. You. And he will be simple to defeat."

  Jared held the gold ring in the center of his palm, staring into the circle of it like a mystic reading leaves.

  "What is it?" Scott and Thea demanded in unison, each trying to see the object he held close inside his palm.

  He extended his hand toward them. "A wedding band."

  "Whose?'' Scott knelt right beside him. "Who in hell's name would have left a wedding ring in here?" They had purchased the cabin from its builder, and no one else besides their team had ever lived there.

  "Marek did," Jared answered, his gaze never leaving the object. Against his skin, the gold burned like a strake stone, almost scalding him with its supernatural energy, but he wasn't about to let go of it.

  "How do you know that, Jared?" Thea gazed over his shoulder and into his palm's center.

  "I saw it. Him. And her." It was the vision that had sent him to his knees, searching. Oh, yes, he had seen Kelsey here on the floor, naked and frightened, had seen her clutching this same band in her pale hand, unwilling to relinquish it. But what had it meant to her? That answer was one he did not yet know.

  As he turned toward Thea, the air crackled with energy and came alive around him. The floor shifted beneath his feet as he caught a glimpse of Kelsey in front of his bathroom mirror with nothing but a towel wrapped around her beautiful body. Before he could make sense of it, the image dissolved and faded into another: Kelsey on the floor of his bedroom, a menacing stranger towering over her half-naked form.

  He jerked his head toward the center of his bedroom, as if he might actually see her sprawled there, and flashed on the strangest vision of all: Someone who looked very much like himself, but was older, harder. Scarred.

  Ruined.

  Jared dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and began to shake as the air all around him cooled unnaturally. What was happening to him? What had happened in this room, intense enough to leave a visual imprint in the atmosphere?

  Lifting his face out of his hands, he looked up slowly. "I... I'm getting things... off this room," he told them, wheeling his gaze about. "Things that might help us find Kelsey."

  Scott placed a strong hand on his shoulder. "What sorts of things, my lord?"

  "Emotions... images."

  Jared closed his eyes. Grief... a solid wall of grief. Terror. Delirious ecstasy... more grief. The images came with vivid quickness—almost like watching a fast-forwarding movie. But of all the sensations swimming through his mind, one in particular kept surfacing out of the murky depths: terror. Kelsey's terror shooting like ungrounded electric current all about them: it was the starkest, most recent imprint he was picking up.

  A sharp wave of nausea knotted his stomach, but he had to quiet himself, no matter how difficult that might be—especially because he recognized the emotions in this room.

  It was a raw, confused terror he had felt only one other time in his life.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Jared was twenty-six, just two years after his arrival on Earth, he'd become embroiled in a ferocious firefight somewhere over the open spaces of Idaho. Air force jets had closed in on him, much as they had done recently near Mirror Lake, chasing him with patient resolve. He'd been sure he would die, and had it not been for his craft's advanced engineering, w
hich allowed him to evade missile-lock repeatedly, he would have been killed. Still, in the face of the continuing onslaught from the fighter jets, his plane's propulsion system had eventually lost power, sputtering and lurching until in one heart-stopping instant he had found himself free-falling straight toward the blackened expanse below. With no alternative, he ejected into the night.

  His body gashed and broken, he had scrambled around in the brush and grass and blackness until almost sunrise, trying to make his smashed comm system work and praying that the base had tracked his descent. As the first pink light fingered across Earth's sky, he had glimpsed soldiers appearing out of the morning mist, and he'd thought himself rescued as he ran toward them across an open field. Collapsing in a heap, he gasped his gratitude to his rescuers… until he realized that it wasn't his own side that had found him, but his Antousian enemies. He hadn't even possessed the wherewithal to make his Change.

  Hours later, beaten senseless and within an inch of his mortal life, Jared found himself kneeling before his greatest enemy: the Antousian warlord Veckus Densalt. Leader of the Earth conquest, Veckus wished Jared dead more than he cared about pumping him for information or forcing him to stand trial for supposed war crimes; indeed, the prospect of killing Jared meant more to him than the strategic advantage of having the Refarian monarch within his grasp. Veckus lusted for one thing: vengeance. So for three interminable days the warlord had extracted just that, Jared's captivity a study in depraved torture. In fact, he still bore the scars on his back and face and upper thighs.

  During that long darkness, Jared moved in and out of a death dream, ghastly visions passing through his beating-muddled mind. Images of formless Antousians and silver-eyed devils and winged creatures buoyed him through timelessness. Still, always at the edge of awareness he sensed protection—perhaps from those winged creatures he swore he glimpsed in his fever dreams, or perhaps from the shadow men hovering near, he never knew. By the third night, when Scott finally managed to locate him and send in retrieval forces, Jared's spirit had set to wandering the mid-places, that spiritual line between life and death; he was certain of it.. But his soldiers had come, and although the terrified dreams still tormented him even how, he had lived. Thanks to Scott Dillon. And perhaps thanks to some divine force that still breathed purpose into his existence.