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The pole sat heavily in my hands.

“Are we going to fight with these?” I asked. “Aren’t there some other, more basic things I should be learning first? Like how to scream and run?”

A ghost of a grin tilted his lips.

“We will go through some basic movements,” he said.

“Why are we doing this?” I said.

He twirled the stick first on one side of his body and then on the other side.

“This will expend physical energy and give you something else to think of other than your telekinesis. We’ll warm up first. Do as I do.”

He held the stick with one hand in front of him and twisted it like a propeller around one way and then the other. I grabbed my stick in the middle and mimicked his movements. After a few moments, we switched to the other hand. For the next exercise, we moved the stick horizontally behind our back and wound our forearms around the shaft on either side. We twisted at the waist, swinging the sticks from side to side.

After our warm-up, Rune took me through several simple movements with the sticks, which he told me were called Bo. The movements were simple, but took concentration and coordination to duplicate. After a half hour, a sheen of sweat covered every inch of my skin. He finally rested one end of the stick on the ground and held it there with both hands, his feet shoulder width apart. It amazed me how he could make just about anything look sensual.

“Well that was fun,” I said. “But really what purpose did it serve? Unless the bad guys attack me in a broom factory, I won’t have a stick.”

“Bo. It is called a Bo.”

“Okay. Unless the bad guys attack me in a broom factory or a Bo factory, I won’t have a stick. Plus, I think I’ll need a lot more practice to hurt them. Aren’t they what people call mercenaries?”

He returned his Bo to a rack on the side wall.

“Have you thought of anything but the stick and the movements for the last half hour?”

“Well, no.” That was a lie. I had actually thought about his butt a few times.

“How do you feel?”

“Sweaty. Tired. Good, I guess.”

“Are you more relaxed?”

I flexed my shoulders and bent my head from side to side. He was right. Darn him. I smiled.

“Aha, sneaky,” I said. “Plus, nothing has flown around, and nothing else has been destroyed.”

“Positive distraction and physical exercise seem to help you with your power. You can use those along with visualization as tools for control.”

“Why do I feel like David Carradine in an episode of
Kung Fu
?” I said.

He raised an eyebrow.

“Who?”

“Never mind. Seriously, don’t you ever watch TV? I grew up on old reruns and cartoons.”

“Was that at your parents’ request?”

“My dad’s mostly,” I said. “He’d put me in front of the TV so he didn’t have to see me or hear me while he was in the garage drinking.”

Where had that little confession stemmed from? It was odd but comforting to talk to someone about my life, my family, and my abilities. Rune exuded danger and the unknown, then understanding and caring. I wavered between fear of him and attraction, the urge to flinch away and the urge to lean in.

I returned my Bo while I mulled that over, and then grabbed a hand towel from a nearby table to mop up my face and neck.

“Could it have been that your father also knew the value of positive distraction to your abilities?”

Could it?
Thinking back through my childhood, there were dozens of memories of my abilities creeping to the surface—toys rising, spoons stirring coffee by themselves, my father’s beer bottle shooting across the room or tipping over, drenching him. No wonder he took to drinking in the garage. All those incidents were quickly followed by him or mom giving me something to do like coloring or watching TV.

I slid the towel down my chest and under my shirt neckline until I noticed Rune’s watchful gaze.

“Throw the towel on the ground and levitate it,” he said.

I held back the urge to say, “Yes, master” and did as I was instructed. This time I thought of my grandmother’s rose garden in the backyard and the little stone bench in the center. Terra cotta pavers surrounded the bench and led out of the circular garden in a narrow path. Anyone sitting on the bench when the roses where in bloom was engulfed in a dazzling display of color and rich perfume.

The towel rose.

“Now, move it in a circle.”

It moved smoothly in a clockwise circle, first slowly then I sped it up. Feeling cocky, I switched to a tight figure eight widening the path until the towel made six-foot arcs from side to side.

Rune moved a few feet behind the dancing towel directly in my line of sight. As the towel crossed over the center of the figure eight, he was in full view. The towel’s path wobbled a little at first then smoothed back out as I got used to the sight of him there.

He backed up a few steps and reached down to grab the bottom of his T-shirt. One of my eights went a little wide but was spot on by the next pass. Then in a slow, deliberate movement, he peeled off his shirt, revealing firm pecs and a flat, ridged abdomen.

The towel hit the far right wall, and the Bo rack lifted, shook spasmodically, and then tipped over.

“Not fair,” I said.

He grinned a full-fledged grin. Not a twitch, not a half grin. It was beautiful. He stalked toward me with slow graceful strides.

“It appears that we need to work on your negative distraction issues.”

Nothing about his half-naked body could possibly be considered negative. I stood my ground and thought furiously of Grandma’s roses.

He stopped when the tips of our shoes touched but didn’t move to create any further contact. My gaze remained straight ahead, so I was looking at the base of his neck. The dusting of hair from his chest framed the bottom of my field of vision; his chin’s perpetual five-o’clock shadow rimmed the top. The sinew of his neck arched down from his chin to form a hollow surrounded by the tops of his finely honed pectoral muscles.

Darn.

Roses. Roses. Roses.

The only sound in the room was my heart pounding and my measured breaths. I took the lack of noise of anything falling or flying across the room as a good sign.

The vision of roses implanted in my mind was joined now by their heady aroma with a hint of the cedar bark mulch that blanketed the garden.

After a few long minutes, cool fingers caressed the side of my face, trailing down to cup my chin and tilt my face up. Again his pupils widened to black with thin circles of ice blue ringing them. He drew in a breath, something I’d seen him do only a few times.

“You smell of cedar and roses,” he said as he lowered his lips to mine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
UN
B
URN

I leaned into him and laced my arms around his back, reveling in the cool firm muscle. He grasped me to him. A small moan escaped me, and with a low rumble, he deepened the kiss.

Torrents of power spiraled between my legs, roiling up through my abdomen, twisting my stomach, then blazing a vibrating path to wherever Rune’s body met mine. He reached an arm out and one of the benches scraped across the floor until it hit the other.

We moved, as one, in small, halting steps to the benches. He explored my body, stroking his hands down my back, cresting my hips, and grasping my butt to pull me closer. His hardened need pressed a firm ridge against my stomach. My breaths came in staccato gasps as he ravaged my mouth.

The hair on my arms and the nape of my neck rose as energy flowed in from the walls, floor, and ceiling. Melded signals from the hundreds of people above us in the crowded nightclub streamed through the air and bombarded me—sizzling against my skin. My gift called the power as a separate part of me, lost to my control.

Our kiss broke as Rune lifted my top over my head. His mouth returned to mine momentarily only to break away again to trail kisses and drag his teeth down my neck stopping to suck and nip at the skin. I felt his restraint, his need to taste my blood a wild command shaking his consciousness.

He stroked a hand down my back and my bra came free and took the same path as my blouse to the floor. My too-warm skin reveled in his cool body, pushing heat into him, easing the heat building within me. He clutched my body to his with one hand and eased me back onto the two joined benches behind us. I writhed beneath him, and he groaned against my neck.

My need for him blazed through me, reaching the point of pain. I’d never made love, and the barrage of sensations coupled with the cresting power building within me both frightened and intoxicated me. Rune had been drawing power from me in increasing amounts, but seemed to have leveled off right about the time we laid down. The gorging beast that was my gift continued to draw more and more.

A light in the ceiling surged and burst. Rune lifted from me enough to unfasten my jeans and pull them over my hips. The jeans slid down my legs untouched and rocketed through the air to hit the far wall. I pulled at Rune’s waistband.

My body boiled with heat. Rune’s skin warmed. I tried to grasp at fleeting memories to dampen the intake of power, but the sensations screaming through my body drowned out anything but the feel of Rune’s body against mine and the inferno of energy swirling through me.

Rune’s head jerked up, and he gasped.

“Rune,” I said, my voice almost a shout.

His glowing eyes met mine, and he lowered his head to kiss me, tugging power from me. I raked my hands down the hot skin of his back, and he pressed his hips into me. Pure physical need unlike anything I’d ever experienced burned through me. Snapping and sizzling erupted between us. Rune’s head shot up again, but this time he yelled and pushed himself off me and onto the floor.

I sat up to find him writhing on the floor. The skin on his chest blistered as I watched. Three more lights blew out, and the computer in the corner arced and died in a shower of sparks.

The horror of what I’d done to Rune shut off my intake of power, but my body already throbbed at critical mass. A rack of weapons tore away from its mooring in the concrete wall and shot across the room, the wood disintegrating on impact.

“Open the door,” Rune moaned.

“What?”

“Marlena,” he shouted. “Open the door.”

I shot a glance at the heavy wall of steel, and it flew sideways crashing into the adjoining wall. Griss stood at the entrance, the look of alarm on his face quickly morphing into horror.

“Grab her,” Rune shouted to Griss, “drain as much power as you can through touch. Do not bite her.”

I stood and backed against the wall wearing only a thin strip of lace panties. Griss crossed the room in a blur and gathered me to him. I tried to push my almost naked body away from him as he pulled power from me. He grunted as one of the benches upended and slammed into his back, but he held on.

“Marlena, be still,” Rune shouted over the cacophony of scrapes and crashes in the room.

I quit struggling and buried my face in Griss’s chest, trying to concentrate on anything but my burning body. Griss shook as he drained my energy, but still he held on. His hands on my back warmed as my skin cooled. Finally, he gasped and broke contact. He staggered to the remaining bench and propped his massive body against it, head bent.

I slid down the wall to sit on the floor. Rune pulled himself in slow, painful inches to a sitting position. His chest looked like Griss’s arm had earlier but the skin pulsed redder and the blisters spread larger and more abundant. The reek of burned tissue hung heavily in the air.

I reached toward him.

“Rune, my God. I’m so sorry.”

He flinched back.

“No, come no closer. Power still radiates from you,” he said.

I pressed back against the wall and wrapped my arms around myself, half to cover my nudity and half just to hold myself together. Great, wrenching sobs bubbled from deep within me, tearing pieces of my soul on their way out.

“I’m—so—sorry,” I gasped.

He grimaced through his pain.

“I am all right. I will heal with daylight stasis.”

Griss staggered to him and helped him stand. I gritted my teeth with the effort to stop crying. I’d almost killed him and then had the nerve to blubber and feel sorry for myself.

“This may take a few daylights to fix, my friend,” Griss said. He stood back and surveyed Rune’s chest. “She did this?”

Rune stared at me and nodded.

“I’ve only seen the sun do this to our kind,” Griss said. “How . . .”

Rune staggered to the far wall and braced a hand against it.

“The sun burns us because it is pure energy and our bodies cannot regulate it.” His voice was deep and coarse. He probed his chest with his fingers and winced. “Our altered vampire bodies do not have the same protection against the sun as our human bodies did.”

They were both staring at me now like a freak-show exhibit.

“It seems,” Rune said, “that Marlena can produce pure energy.”

“I’ve never seen a human do that. Hell, I’ve never seen anything on Earth do that,” Griss said.

“In over two centuries of life, neither have I,” Rune said.

I levitated a bench and spun it in circles to expend energy. I rocked back and forth in the ball I’d made of myself to calm down. Griss took off his jacket, edged toward me, wrapped it around the front of me, and retreated to where Rune stood.

The intercom system crackled to life.

“Boss,” Tony’s voice announced. “We blew a few circuits upstairs. The bar electricity is down and the floor lights are out. There was a small fire behind one of the ice machines. We’re evacuating the customers and closing the club for the night. We might need help making sure everyone is gone. The bouncers have their flashlights, but your night vision would be a big help.”

Rune shuffled over to his shirt and picked it up, his movements slow and careful.

“Griss, I’ll need your assistance,” he said.

Griss walked with Rune to the door. His hands jutted forward from time to time like he wanted to help Rune, but didn’t know where to touch him that wouldn’t cause further pain. Rune turned back to me. His guarded expression spoke volumes.

I turned my body, closing him out of all but my peripheral vision and hugged Griss’s coat tighter, huddling in my misery. The bench continued its lazy spirals.

I hope the fish are okay
. I didn’t know if that thought was Rune’s or mine. I was working furiously to block him out—not wanting to know what he thought of me. Blocking wasn’t easy with so much of my energy filling his body. After offloading on Griss, even bits of his thoughts were flashing through my mind. I could tell Griss’s thoughts from Rune’s. Griss’s were coarser and revolved mainly around the memory of my naked body, how hungry it made him—in more ways than one—and his concern for Rune.

The two vampires lingered on the periphery of my vision for a moment. Griss left first. Then after a few more intense seconds, Rune walked away. Very slowly.

I slid the metal panel door closed, cringing only slightly when I saw the floor to ceiling gouge it had taken out of the adjoining wall when I’d flung it open a few minutes ago.

I tried using the trick I’d learned a few days ago and thought about my father to block the energy from upstairs. Apparently, this worked not only for taking me off the vampires radar but also for taking myself off incoming energy’s radar. I’d have used it during my little interlude with Rune, but I was pretty sure that, one—thinking of my father would have ruined the moment, and two—would have been just plain creepy and pervy on a number of levels.

As I thought of dear, old drunken dad, I kept the bench twirling and, one by one, lifted more things around the room at the same time.

Huh, whadda-you-know. Dad’s good for something after all.

Memories of him shouting at me to stop levitating things were the most numerous ones. He’d tried spanking me a few times, but the resulting injuries to him from things flying across the room were more risk than he could handle. So he resorted to threatening my mother and sometimes going through with those threats to control me. I realized now him threatening Mom had started my “think of Dad and shut down” trick. He had actually created it.

Make that two things he’s good for.

I never totally understood why my father hated me so much. It wasn’t my fault I could do what I did. I’d done it since I was a baby. Why didn’t he just leave? It couldn’t have been his deep love for my mother. Not with the things I’d witnessed him do to her. But still, there were other rarer memories of him smiling at me or ruffling my hair that made me unable to hate him back—well at least completely.

So I’d lived my life simultaneously trying to hide from my father and make him notice me for something other than my debilitating gift. No wonder he drank, my mother constantly wrung her hands, and I talked to myself. I had ruined any chance of us all being a real family.

I continued sifting through my memories while I kept things aloft, fuzzing out into la-la land for a time. The snap of the surge suppressor unplugging from the wall as I lifted the entire computer terminal and desk jolted me out of my thoughts. Nothing in the room but my butt and legs touched the ground.

Could I lift myself?

I’d never really thought about trying. I had to complete the circuit to lift things. The energy had to go out, loop around the item, then squeeze at the bottom like a tube of toothpaste to lift, and then come back to me. When I got the item as high as I wanted, I just quit squeezing the bottom, but kept the lasso of energy around it. It’d become so natural to me in the last few days, I didn’t even think too much about the mechanics of it anymore.

I’d pushed people with jolts of energy, but I’d never thought about or even accidentally lifted a person. So could I do it to myself? Would I lose my “ground” and drop all the circuits I had going?

I circled myself with a power stream. My body rocked, odd and clumsy, as it lifted. An inch. Then two. The “ground” I maintained with the earth stretched from my body to the floor below, but it was uncomfortable, like stretching a stiff muscle. A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead as I concentrated.

The metal door slid open with a raucous scrape, and my concentration burst. My butt slammed against the ground along with everything else. Computer shards sprayed across the room, and I jumped behind the bench to shield myself. When the cacophony of crashes and shattering stopped, I peeked over the bench.

Rune stood in the doorway, one forearm on the doorframe to support himself, his handsome face a stone mask. His eyes deepened to midnight blue and focused only on me. I couldn’t read his thoughts, but the vibes he sent into the room weren’t happy ones.

I froze. The stench of his burned flesh wafted in from the open door. Through our connection, I felt the war of his violent vampire self fighting for dominance with his human self. The fine hair along my arms and back of my neck stood on end with primal fear. This was not the coaxing, protective Rune of last night. This was another being. Animal-like. Injured and angry. And he blocked the only exit.

I ever so slowly pulled Griss’s jacket around and looped my arms into it, covering my nakedness. Then, without taking my eyes off Rune, sent psychic feelers out to locate my clothes, which I carefully pulled to me telekinetically. With shaking hands, I gathered the clothes to my chest millimeters at a time, all while trying not to move any more body parts than necessary. Luckily, I’d dissipated so much energy even my abilities stilled.

After what seemed like a lifetime, Rune drew in a breath—a breath his body didn’t require but his frame of mind seemed to demand. Without moving, he spoke.

“Since it seems the only room that you can occupy without destroying is the bathroom, you will go there now and not come out until you are instructed. You will be safe there.”

I stood on shaking legs but hesitated before moving closer to him or trying to pass him in the doorway. That telltale muscle in his jaw flexed, and he shuffled in to the far wall of the room, leaving me a clear path. Inching sideways and then backward to keep him in my field of vision, I exited the weapons room and ran the rest of the way to the bathroom. Once in, I slammed and locked the door.

The click of the bookshelves coming back together preceded the scrape of the metal door as Rune shut himself into the weapons room. Moments later, Tony’s voice sounded from the top of the stairs.

“Boss? Mr. Rune?”

When he got no answer, his tentative steps descended the stairs. After a few quiet minutes, he sighed loudly and mumbled something in what sounded like Greek. Then he set about cleaning the apartment thumping furniture upright, snapping open trash bags, and throwing things away in them.