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“I need your help,” she said finally.
Something flickered in his eyes at that, but his facial features didn’t shift an iota.
“My son…he…”
“I help no one,” Teo rasped.
“But…the mechanic?”
Teo waved a hand dismissively, but didn’t try to correct his obvious falsehood or to explain away the contradiction.
“Please…” she murmured, staring up at him, blinking away the sudden sting in her eyes. “You have to help me.” She wasn’t surprised that her voice sounded as hoarse as his.
“No.”
“I can pay. I’ll pay you anything,” she said, knowing even as she said it that it wouldn’t help, wouldn’t matter. The amount of money he’d gained control of years ago, money in an account established by the PRI, was enough for anyone’s needs. More than that, however, was the fact that anyone able to survive in the wilds of the New Mexico mountains—alone—for so long couldn’t have much interest in material objects.
Something flickered in his gaze. “If you know what’s good for you, señora, you’ll leave now. Women don’t travel alone in these mountains,” he said softly, his tone far from kindly.
“Please…I’ll pay anything,” she repeated desperately, hoping the words could be heard over the painful pounding of her heart. She tried pushing to her feet, but her hands only slid in the mud and she merely scooted forward an inch or two.
“Señora,” he said, a dangerous light now in his eyes. “Your money means nothing to me.”
The silence left in the wake of his words was torn by the shrill pulse of the sirens’ screams. Melanie jumped and automatically turned to watch the arrival of a brown Bronco bearing a sheriff’s silver star on the side panel. It whipped into the muddy gas station lanes. Not twenty yards behind the Bronco was a large, white ambulance with red lights whirling angrily in the gathering afternoon dusk.
She turned back and was too late: Teo Sandoval—El Rayo—was gone, having disappeared as thoroughly as if he’d never been there. She frantically sought his solid figure among the shadows of the surrounding forest, but saw nothing save pine boughs, sodden scrub oak and dark, dark shimmers of raindrops winking at her as though in amusement.
The unmistakable sound of tires losing their grip in mud called her attention and she turned just in time to see the sheriff’s mud-spattered unit spin across the gas station driveway. By yet another miracle on this peculiar day, the unit avoided slamming into anything, but did serve as a sharp reminder that she’d left her son alone in the car. With a single backward glance toward the seemingly empty woods, she awkwardly pushed to her feet and made her way to Chris.
In the pandemonium that reigned upon the sheriff’s arrival, and the ambulance driver’s frantic attempt to avoid collision with the sheriff’s Bronco, Melanie realized that Teo Sandoval had been allowed to fade from sight. Amid the explanations of why the sheriff had been called—a call Pablo now said apologetically had proved unnecessary—Melanie noticed that no one mentioned El Rayo. It was as if he didn’t exist.
She listened to all the explanations and the carefully worded evasions, and with one eye on Chris—who, thankfully, was now asleep and therefore unable to maintain his dancing game—searched the woods across the road for any sign of the most powerful telekinetic on record.
She wouldn’t betray El Rayo by asking the voluble townspeople about him in front of the sheriff, but she intended to stay where she was until she could ask where the healer had gone. She also preferred to be the one to approach the villagers rather than have any of them get close enough to the car that they might wake Chris and witness his amazing bag of tricks.
Wiping as much mud as possible from her clothing and hands, she waited quietly until the furor had lessened somewhat. Then, with one last reassuring glance at her son, she walked around the building.
Despite the gathering darkness, the evening shadows, Teo could see the woman clearly. He watched her round the corner and rejoin the fringe of the group surrounding Demo. She was covered in mud and her hair was sodden from the rain. But there was nothing amusing about her. Nothing at all.
His gaze remained on her, and he willed her to look his way, to find him in the shadows. He’d seen her looking before, trying, squinting her remarkable eyes against the mist, questing for him. Though he’d felt the shock of her gaze sweeping the branches beside him, around him, seemingly right at him, she hadn’t spotted him, had stared through him as though he were invisible. Her gaze had merely traveled on, taking in the oak, the red and shriveled leaves, the wet shadows surrounding him.
Why couldn’t he read her? Why couldn’t he hear this woman’s thoughts, feel her wants, needs, and the thousand other confused little memories, impressions and dreams that seemed to bombard him from everyone else in the world?
Without even trying, he could “hear” everyone standing around Pablo’s gas station. Demo was filled with pride over being the object of everyone’s attention. Tempering that pride was a heavy dose of relief, not that he had survived the car falling on him, but that he had lived through El Rayo’s touch of lightning. Doro, his wife, was thinking of the pot of frijoles she’d left on the stove when the men had first called that Demo had been hurt. Were the beans burned? Did they need salt, more chili? The baby’s diapers were wet and his nose itched. Jaime was wondering who the new señora was and if she would talk about Teo, about what she had seen. And then there was Pablo, the hardest to read of all of them. His thoughts were half closed, gifts like Teo’s twisting the thoughts into chaos. Pablo was hoping, as he always did, that he would live long enough to be forgiven an afternoon’s trip many, many years ago.
But Teo couldn’t read her at all. Not even a glimmer of her mind was revealed to him. It both frightened and intrigued him, because, for a startlingly clear moment, he had been reaching for her thoughts. Then she had shut him out. He’d felt a distinctive mental slam. It still echoed inside him. Yet before she had slammed the door on his probing, for a few charged seconds he’d seen something in her that he’d never encountered before.
An intangible something, almost like a daydream. And it rocked him to his core, for that intangible something had seemed all too like a promise of hope or connection. But he knew all too well that promises only led to despair and pain—
He shook his head in anger. Damn this woman. Who was she? What did she want? The only other time he’d felt blocked from someone’s thoughts had been at the PRI, and then only because the men in the lab coats had stood behind leaded glass and lead-lined doors. But there hadn’t been any intangibles there, only fear, hatred, need and furious control.
She had touched him. She had held him in her arms, moved the hair on his brow, smoothed the rain from his cheeks. Her fingers had been warm and soft, not healing hands such as his were, yet oddly remedial in their very presence.
Why had she helped him? Was it because she didn’t know his terrible curse? But she had to have known. She had called him by his name. His name. How long had it been since he had been held, even in sympathy? How long had it been since he had heard his name upon a woman’s lips?
She had said something about the PRI. She seemed afraid of it. She had damn good reason to be; if the PRI wanted her, they would succeed. Or had he misunderstood…and she was from the PRI?
He wanted to scream out in anger, lash out in denial. No. It couldn’t be. Yet, wasn’t he weak from the healing? He might have been too weakened from the healing to recognize all the dangers today. He fought the rage building in his lungs, the pain boiling in his heart.
God, he thought, and then stopped. No amount of prayer would help him. It never had, it never would.
He cursed her silently for ever coming to Loco Suerte. She was too damn beautiful and, though he knew nothing more of her than her name, and perhaps a measure of her desperation, he was too attracted to her. She’d stripped him naked not only with her gentle embrace, but by the very fact that she’d touched him at all. He ached for more and, though he knew it was irrational, hated her for that, for making him want her…for making him remember that for him there was to be no touching, no love, no life. Ever.
A host of questions clamored in his mind like the raucous calls of piñon jays in winter, and slowly answers coalesced. She wasn’t from the PRI, but she wanted him to help her son. She would pay anything, she’d said, but he’d told her to leave. And he’d meant it. It was far too dangerous for her to stay. Too dangerous for him.
His thoughts turned to her son and his gaze followed their direction. The child was no more than a babe and was asleep, dreaming of his mother and a host of simple, nothing thoughts.
As if recognizing the intrusive stranger even in his dreams, the small child sat up suddenly and, standing on tiptoe, peered through the rain-streaked rear window. Unlike his mother, the boy located Teo easily. Honey-brown eyes, totally unlike his mother’s deep green, stared from a baby’s rounded features. They were old beyond his years, yet the child still remained an innocent. A small hand raised and fingers waggled in Teo’s direction.
Unconsciously, Teo smiled in response. The simple gesture felt foreign on his lips, crooked somehow. He felt something shift deep inside him, a shaft of pain that somehow transcended the pain he felt whenever he healed or even the joy of making the universe move to his will.
Watch.
He heard the child’s clear command. The smile faded from Teo’s lips as the unfamiliar touch settled in his mind, possibly in his soul. It was cool and light against his senses, but clear nonetheless, and knowing. The boy had known he could talk with him, mind to mind. How?
Watch me!
The little fingers wiggled again, but this time Teo knew it was no wave, but another command. Various objects in the car—a pen, a comb, a red ball, some kind of little man doll and other things—suddenly began to bob around the back seat.
The shaft of pain that had shot through him earlier returned, except this time it twisted, driving the hurt deeper, wrenching at him. The boy was like him, could have been a blond version of himself at that age. The child, her child, was another of the damned.
Then, like his mother’s had before him, the child’s mind suddenly closed to Teo, and a barrier he couldn’t penetrate was welded across the small head.
It was then he understood exactly what the woman wanted of him. And he knew he could help her, but knew he wouldn’t dare. If he spent any time at all with the child, with the mother, he would not survive. Some small, locked away part of him would finally die, because even a moment in their company and he would surely be overwhelmed by painful memories, longing for things he couldn’t have. He would be reminded of far too many broken promises and shattered dreams.
He pressed a question to the boy, but the child didn’t respond. Teo understood the boy like he couldn’t the mother. The child was concentrating on making things “dance” and while he did so, he was blocked to all other influences. He, too, had done that once. But only as a small child.
He could remember the peace, the sense of blessed quiet that came with that kind of focused thought, and longed for it still.
Two people who could block him in one day? Yet, weren’t they mother and child?
He heard her tension-stretched voice in his mind, “I’ll pay anything.” What if—
He angrily lashed out at the sodden scrub oak before him. He couldn’t afford to finish the thought. Wondering was for fools and innocents. He’d made his path, and damn her for making him even doubt the certainty of his need to be alone.
She shouldn’t have asked him. She shouldn’t have come here with her satin-soft hair and her green eyes that brimmed with tears and pain. And she shouldn’t have brought that child who even now made his world spin with no more effort than another little boy might send a small top careening across a linoleum floor.
Yet a part of him wanted to say yes to her plea. That part wanted to tell her that he would help her, would help the boy. And another part hated her for making him feel this foreign and long, long buried want.
He was right to deny her cry for help. He didn’t need to add any grief to his life; he deserved his hard-won peace. He deserved the solitude he’d fought to achieve. A child such as he had once been, a woman who wasn’t afraid to touch him…both would conspire to shatter that peace, to erode his fragile hold on control.
He could feel that control slipping now, could feel the electricity building in him, aching for release. His heart beat too fast, his chest rose and fell with each ragged, shallow breath he took. His fingers still felt the silk of her hair, his nostrils conjured her scent, and his body trembled with the need to hold the power inside him. Damn her.
“No,” he murmured roughly, denying the need within. But the electricity didn’t subside, it only gathered strength.
With a growl of rage, he turned and crashed into the woods, needing to get as far and as fast away from the woman and her son as he possibly could.
A branch struck his cheek and he cursed softly, groaning in a mixture of anger, hurt and sharp, anguished want. The sky above him exploded in lightning, answering his pain. Blue and jagged, the bolt rent the sky, suffusing his face, reflecting, he knew, the fury in his eyes.
The crack of thunder that followed nearly deafened him, but he didn’t slow his raging race up the mountain. Then another streak of fire shot across the sky, followed by another deafening clap of thunder. His chest heaved and he shook with the effort to keep his emotions under control. But the storm raging around and above him was proof that he’d failed.
The sheriff, Johnny someone, turned to Melanie with an expression that told her clearly he considered her at fault for having been on the scene of an accident in his district.
“Did you see the car fall on Demo Aguilar?”
She felt rather than heard the collective holding of breaths.
“No, I was beside my car. I only heard it fall. Heard him scream. Then everything happened so fast,” she said casually.
She could tell the townspeople suffered the tension of waiting for her to expose what had really happened, to reveal the presence of one healer—destroyer—named El Rayo, who carried the force of lightning in his hands. They hadn’t helped him, but neither did they want the sheriff to know he had been there. She didn’t have to ask why; she knew the answer. Teo wanted it that way.
“She was buying gas when the Chevy fell off her jack onto Demo,” the elder of the two checker players said.
“The Chevy was on your jack?” Johnny asked, his bushy eyebrows pushing upward.
“No, no, Señor Sheriff,” Pablo corrected. “It was the jack of Demo’s, but she broke.”
Melanie looked at the attendant with new respect. This broken, ignorant speech routine was an act. She’d heard him speaking perfectly understandable English just a few minutes’ earlier.
“The car, she fell on Demo. We thought he was dead. That was when we called you. But the car, she didn’t kill him. No. See for yourself. We lifted it off him. Now he is fine!”
The crowd murmured assent and pushed Demo forward to show the sheriff the faint remains of his once near-fatal wounds. Melanie was struck by how adroitly Pablo had turned the sheriff’s attention from her. The townspeople obviously wanted no mention of El Rayo to reach the sheriff’s ears. If it weren’t for the warning she could read in almost every pair of eyes, she might have wondered if she hadn’t imagined the entire episode.
But it had been real. And what she had seen in Teo’s eyes and had felt in his touch had also been real. Too disturbingly real. If they didn’t want her to talk about him, she would play along, but they couldn’t stop her from talking to him.
The sheriff wrapped up his futile investigation a few minutes’ later and departed into the early night amid much good-natured assistance from the men in the crowd, who helped him extricate his vehicle from the mud.
Melanie was about to ask Pablo for help regarding locating Teo Sandoval when she happened to catch a glimpse of her son in the back seat of her rented Buick. His entire entourage of movable objects was bouncing around the interior of the car like a mobile without strings, like leaves snared by a whirlwind.
She ran to the car and tried opening the back door. It was locked. She called to Chris, but he didn’t hear her; he never did when he played this way. Another thing to thank the PRI for, she thought as she wrenched open the driver’s door and lunged over the back seat to grab his shoulder. He started and turned, a sunny smile lighting his lips. Objects fell like heavy rain, clattering on the dash, the seats, the steering wheel.
“Chris, honey. Please don’t dance anything for a minute, okay? Try very hard. Listen to me. People are here. Don’t dance. Okay?”
Chris shook his head solemnly. “No dance.”
“That’s right. No dance.”
She backed out of the car, keeping a finger pointed at Chris to reinforce her point. She knew the gesture was largely in vain, for like any three-year-old, memory was only a vague dream and soon he would be lured into the delight of making the items move once more. As always, she knew she could punish him to make him remember to refrain from making things dance, but that seemed the ultimate of cruelties, to punish a child for what came most naturally. It would have been like punishing Mozart for writing a symphony or Einstein for fiddling with physics.
She quickly surveyed the group rounding the gas station corner. They were looking at her curiously, but not with undue questions; they had apparently only seen her race for her car and were now watching her with anticipation for her next unusual move.
All except Pablo. He had seen Chris, had seen the bobbing objects. She recognized the fact in his wide, fearful eyes, in the hand hidden behind his back, no doubt making the finger-and-thumb sign against evil.
“No dance, Chris,” she murmured, still holding her finger up in the air. “Don’t you dare dance now.”
Suddenly lightning rent the blackening sky, blinding her, turning the universe into a jagged gash of blue and red. A monstrous clap of thunder followed before she could even catch her breath. As if the sky itself were angry, huge drops of water pummeled the ground and the people standing numbly in the already sodden driveway of Loco Suerte’s gas station.
When Melanie’s eyes cleared, she saw that as one, the group had huddled together and were now swiftly clearing the area. Within seconds, for the first time since the metal-crunching crash, the place seemed as deserted as when Melanie had first arrived. Again, except for the gas station attendant.
He remained where he’d been before the lightning and thunder. His eyes were on the inside of her car. On Chris.
“You have to help me,” she said urgently.
He turned his eyes toward her. She couldn’t quite read the expression on his face, but instinctively knew it wasn’t unpleasant or even fearful. If anything, she thought she detected sorrow there. She lowered her guard a notch and found she was right. But she didn’t dare relax her protective walls long enough to probe deeply into the reasons for the sorrow. Teo Sandoval was out there somewhere, and she was all too likely to unconsciously seek and link with his mind. And this would be too dangerous now, he’d read the strange feelings she was already harboring about him.
“Just tell me where I can find him,” she said. When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Teo Sandoval, can help me with my—”
“He’s like Teo was,” Pablo interupted quietly, lifting his chin in the direction of the car, and the child inside. “When he was a boy, Teo was like that. God, how I remember.”
Whatever it was he remembered, it wasn’t pleasant, nor was it a comfortable memory. As if Teo were there now, and angry over being discussed, the sky again exploded in light and sound.
“Then you can see I need his help,” Melanie said. She felt tears welling in her eyes. The sudden thunderstorm was frightening and she’d come too far, been searching too long. She felt she had no reserves left. “Please, tell me how to find him. Please help me.”
The attendant looked over his shoulder at the dark, rain-drenched woods, and then back to her. Even through the rain she could sense his indecision, his worry.
“I won’t tell anyone about him,” she said urgently.
“I wasn’t thinking that, señora,” he said.
“Please…”
“Those people that took Teo all that time ago. They hurt him badly, I think. He never talks about it.”
“They are the same people that want my son,” Melanie said quickly, holding back a sob.
“Are they following you?” he asked quietly.
Melanie suddenly realized where his questions were leading. “No,” she said. It was a half lie. They were following her, but according to her prescient dreams, they hadn’t found her yet.
Pablo looked at her for a long moment, perhaps attempting to weigh her words for their truth.
She added urgently, “They want my son. They want to use him, just like they did Teo.” Even to herself, her voice sounded desperate, confused. She took a deep breath and added fervently, “But Chris is only a baby.”
“He’ll refuse you,” Pablo said flatly.
“But he knows what those scientists will do to Chris,” Melanie blurted out, as if by convincing this man, she could persuade Teo Sandoval.
“Perhaps that’s why he’ll refuse,” the attendant answered obliquely. “The niño will remind him. Of too many things.”
