Sleight of Hand (22 page)

I was relieved and disappointed. Relieved, because I really didn’t want anyone else messing with my head, but disappointed too. Surely this type of communication must be easier between friends.

“I don’t think you need to look at me,” I said after a few minutes. “And relax. Try thinking through an exercise—say, the crane form. Then tell me to move my hands to it.”

He settled back and closed his eyes. I had taught him several of the Kung Fu forms that I practiced with Master Liu. The crane wasn’t the simplest, but it had very specific hand movements.

“I’m having difficulty thinking through the whole crane,” he said after a minute.

“Okay, let’s try something completely different.” I cast around for a question to distract him. “Tell me why you wanted to become Athanate.” The question popped into my head and I asked it before thinking. I held my breath. This was one of the very personal areas we had avoided before.

There was a flicker of pain across his face and I regretted asking it. He was silent so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. Finally, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “My sister, Rachel, was a couple of years older than me. She was very good to me, from when I was a child, especially when our parents died. She was always there. You know, the one I could rely on, the one who could help me when things went bad.” He stopped and a sigh passed through him. “She died from a disease called Metzl-Duncan Syndrome. It’s hereditary, and I’ve got it too. The doctors said it was possible I would die in a couple of years. They didn’t know for sure.”

I sat silently. He’d stopped trying to mesmerize me, but I wanted to listen to him.

“About a month after Rachel died, I was at the gym and some of us got talking. I told the others the story. There was a guy there called Paul. He’s an Athanate, though I didn’t know it at the time, of course. He talked to me a lot of times, and then just turned around one day when we were alone and said that there was a cure. You know, I would have gone through a lot for a cure that just left me alive, but instead there was this change that would remake me. Is remaking me.” He took a sip of his cooling coffee and turned to me, his eyes intent. “I’m on the brink of something wonderful, Amber. If only I could show you.”

He did. I could see the sun rising over cold mountain peaks, the promise of a glorious new day. Mists lifted from sleepy valleys and my blood rose to meet the sun. I felt I could soar into the dawn skies.

“David!” I whispered, dizzy with the sensation, and it vanished.

We looked open-mouthed at each other.

I cleared my throat. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble if you can do that again,” I said.

I was shivering and sweaty. I didn’t know how strong it could get. David’s vision was pleasant, even uplifting, but it was the same thing that Skylur had done and I didn’t want the kind of mental beating that he had given me. But this was David, and I had to trust him.

Trust and jump, Farrell.

“Try it again, just for a second, just the feeling,” I said and steeled myself. “Stop if I look hurt, or raise my hand.”

He looked as scared as I felt, but settled down and I could see him repeating the words to himself as he turned to look at me. It took a couple of attempts before the vision of the dawn burst into my head again.

“Wow!” I raised my hand and he stopped immediately. “Well, I guess that’s the first part. You can make the connection well enough.”

We tried it different ways and found he couldn’t connect unless he could see me and was actually looking at me. The sensation for me was vivid, but not disturbing and I found I could somehow push it down, make it less vivid.

The confidence that gave me led to the mistake.

“Okay, try making me offer you my neck,” I said.

“Amber, no, this is getting dangerous. It’s all mixed up—”

“Skylur couldn’t do it.” I smirked. “What makes you think you’re—”

He looked sideways at me as if he didn’t really want to, and his silent shout in my head stopped me in my tracks.

What followed was a blur. From sitting a couple of feet away from each other, we were standing face to face in less time than it took either of us to draw a surprised gasp. My hands were on his shoulders and his grasped my hips. Our faces were almost touching. I could feel his breath on my face and his body quivering with excitement and hunger. His eyes went from baffled to glittering in a heartbeat.

I had been right, it was easier between friends—much, much easier. I could feel his hunger in a way I couldn’t feel Skylur’s. There were no words that he was whispering in my ear or in my mind and my own inner voice was quiet. Instead of these, there were emotions, raw and uncontrolled. It didn’t hurt like Skylur’s had, and it wasn’t just David’s hunger. There was my own in there as well. This wasn’t a one-way connection.

“No,” I gasped. This was wrong.

“No,” he replied, but we were so close, his lips touched mine as he said it, and the feather brush of lips became a fierce kiss. My mouth opened to his and a heart-stopping shock of desire crashed through me.

We weren’t looking at each other anymore, but the connection was still there, ragged and flickering, as if electric charges were jumping between our bodies. For a moment, I was lost. It didn’t matter that this was David. Frustrated desire raged through my body. The thought came to me that he was one person I couldn’t infect with prions. What the hell if he drank my blood as well. I could feel the freaking fangs in his mouth and I didn’t care.

There was a last moment of clarity, a last realization that this was a path we could not walk back up and it would change us forever. It felt like something we had been driven to, not something we truly wanted. And because of the connection, that was a thought that we shared. The sharing gave us the strength to break the embrace. We fell apart and collapsed.

“Shit! Amber, I’m sorry.” David was the first to get his voice back as we sat sprawled on the floor.

“My fault,” I said, my head in my hands. “I pushed you. I pushed you.”

I crawled back to my chair and lay back against it, too weak to lift myself up, my breath still coming hard and my whole body trembling.

“Damn.” I managed a shaky laugh. “You did say that new Athanate are highly charged. If that’s an example…”

“How can you laugh? I nearly—” he shook his head.

“
We
nearly, David. But we didn’t.”

“It’s all mixed up,” he said, still shaking his head as if that would clear it. “Sex and blood.”

“Must be difficult sometimes,” I said, and he blushed.

“Yes. You need to understand this now, Amber, how it works all the way around. Most times with an Athanate, sex will lead to blood, and blood will lead to sex. But it’s not just that. Being bitten can make you excited or scared, and in the same way, being excited or scared around Athanate can lead to you getting bitten. They—
we
—trigger on emotion. Feed on it.”

I levered myself back into my chair slowly. “When we kissed, there was something else, not just the mind thing? Like the hottest feeling ever. Quite a shock.”

David nodded tiredly. “We can make the experience good. Pheromones and chemical agents released in saliva or through the fangs. An exchange for the blood, making it pleasurable to be bitten. Or kissed. Or whatever.” He managed a slight laugh. “I’m not controlling it at all at the moment, but with more experience, I should be able to create feelings of desire and euphoria. I’ll learn to create healing agents and local anesthetic, so you wouldn’t even feel the fangs and the wound will heal quickly.”

“Hmm. Okay, well, I think I got the desire dosage full on.” I smiled at him. I was nearly back to normal and I wanted to bring David back from the self-doubt that our loss of control had caused.

“Sorry,” he said. He lifted himself into his chair and slumped bonelessly.

“No harm, no foul.” I cast around for something to lighten the mood. “I’m surprised my smell didn’t turn you off. I still haven’t had the chance to shower after the run.”

David’s head was cradled in his hand. One eye opened and looked up at me. “You’re wrong about that,” he muttered. “That was part of the problem. Yeah, I can smell the sweat, but underneath it, Amber, since the third bite, I find your smell…” He didn’t know how to finish.

“Tasty? Bian seemed to think so, although I’m not sure if she was jerking my chain.”

David snorted. “Yeah. Tasty. Exactly. Must meet this girl.” He paused and rubbed his mouth. “You gave me something back as well in that kiss.”

“I gave you the lust cattle-prod thingy? I can do that?”

“No.” He laughed. “No, you were a bit subtler than that. For once.” He ran his tongue around his mouth thoughtfully and I noted his fangs were back to being normal canines. “I’ll tell you when I figure out what it was.”

His laughter was an improvement, the joke even more so, but I still felt the need to show that I trusted him. “Can I use your shower, then?”

David smiled and waved over at the right door. I went out and got my stuff from the car. Once out of his sight, I took a deep calming breath and willed all the shakes to stop. Yes, we’d had a scare, but we were fine. I was sure he wouldn’t flunk his mesmerism test now. If the cost was the fright we’d given each other, I was happy with the price.

I got some fresh clothes and my laptop. After the shower, I was going to quiz David about the financial figures from Jen’s spreadsheets, without revealing whose they were. David was an actuary, and a clever guy. I was sure he would have some useful insights.

He did. And by the time I left, David and I were chatting and joking easily again. He looked completely restored as he leaned against my car.

“One last question, David, how long does the test last—the one where Pia keeps draining you?”

He became more serious for a second. “Until I can stop her using my mind,” he replied.

I nodded. “Okay. You can do it. I’ll look in on you when I can. And turn your frigging cell on, bro.”

He laughed and I drove away with that image in my mind, rather than the kiss I could still feel burning on my lips.

Chapter 28

Late in the afternoon, I walked out onto Jen’s tiled courtyard to find her catching the last of the sun. A central fountain bubbled into a dark pool of carp, and terracotta-potted lavender and lemon trees lined the Italian stone patio. At the bottom of the ornamental gardens, past the helipad and through the larch and cypress border, I could make out the empty fairways of the golf club. One of Vic’s guards moved discreetly beneath the trees, their foliage so dark a green they seemed to have leached the blackness from the deep shadows below them.

I took a deep, scented breath and listened to the fountain and the hush of the wind.

Jen was lying on a chaise, a pile of company reports to one side and a glass of something long and full of ice on the other. She smiled and waved me over. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and settled onto the neighboring chaise. Against the wall of the house behind us, a hot pink bougainvillea waved in the breeze above sprays of multicolored chrysanthemums.

“Everything okay?”

Was it?

“I’m frazzled. There are some weird—that word again—weird things happening to me.” I bit my lip. “Let’s put them aside for the moment and if I go quiet or moody, yell at me.”

Jen laughed. “Why is it I think that weird for you means something different than for the rest of us?” She held up an elegant finger. “Don’t answer that.”

The maid came out with a refill for Jen and a glass for me. I sipped carefully, but it was just a pleasant lemon and lime mix, with a tang of bitters.

“I missed our Friday briefing—is there anything to report?” said Jen.

“Some. The wallets from Silver Hills are a dead end for me. All the IDs were false and I passed all of that on to the police. The cell phones, you have at the moment, or your tech department does, and I expect some useful information from them.”

“A guy called Matt will come and see you with them,” said Jen.

I nodded thanks and went on. “At least one of the guys who attacked us was from a criminal organization called ZK. A group of them were rounded up early this morning by the police. Foot soldiers rather than the bosses, unfortunately. I don’t know what will come of it, but I bet at least some of them will be in custody for a long time.”

Jen sipped her drink.

“We don’t know why they might be trying to take over your company or kill or injure you,” I went on. “We don’t know if they’ve simply been hired to do a job for someone else. But between the message we sent back on Thursday, the security we’ve got in place around you now and Morales tossing some of them in jail, we may have bought ourselves some time to figure out what this is all about. The best result, of course, would be that we’ve proved we’re too difficult and they’ll look elsewhere.”

“It sounds as if you have an idea what the motivation might be,” she said.

I shrugged. “It could be that they wanted Kingslund Group as a front for their illegal activities—basically drugs. If that’s all there was to it, they’ll go away now that we’re alerted. Or they’ll stop trying to take it over but may do something for revenge.”

Jen sighed. “Okay. So much on that side. What about the financial picture? Are they involved in that, or have I got two enemies out there?”

“Well, that’s why I’m being careful with my analysis. It doesn’t quite all fit together. It feels like two different strategies.” I let my hair out of the tie and ran my fingers through it. “Anyway, I have a meeting tomorrow with the guy who left the financial department. I may have some clearer ideas after that.”

We sat for a time while Jen thought that through.

“Troy?” Her voice was very low.

There wasn’t any way to say this kindly. “It doesn’t look good, Jen. Victor’s team have found no sign of him anywhere and there’s been no ransom demand to anyone that we’ve heard. I have to say it again: every day means less chance of finding him alive.”

Jen looked down the gardens to where Victor’s guard was patrolling. “Gayle’s team seem competent at security. Are you sure they’ve done as much as they can on the investigation side?”