Chains of Ice (18 page)

He took a sip, then another. Then for the first time since he’d been wounded last night, he greedily drained the glass.

“Good,” she whispered, and filled the glass from the pitcher beside the bed. “John, that’s good for you.”

Seeing this man, usually so vital, stretched out flat on his back unable to move . . . it tore her heart out.

He turned his head to look up at her, and his eyes sparkled a deep, rich blue, as if his soul had filled with sapphires. “Genesis, listen to me. You have to leave.”

“I’m not leaving a man in your state alone.” She urged him to drink again.

“I can’t control it much longer. It’s been so long since I released it . . . last night I had a taste, and it felt so good . . .”

“I know,” she said in a soothing tone. “It’s okay. I can handle it.”

“But should you?” He kissed the hand that held the glass. “Is it the right thing for me to do?”

“When you’re feeling better, we’ll talk about it.” She laid his head back on the miserably flat pillow and stood.

He’d been sick all night and all day with no end to his fever.

She had slept on and off for the remainder of last night and in two-hour stints during the day, rousing when he called out to someone called Sun Hee in tones of such desperation, Genny’s eyes prickled with tears.

He sternly ordered Gary to remain where he was, then groaned as if in pain and clasped his head as if dizzy.

Exactly at noon, he had ranted about the Seven Devils, sat up in bed and pointed, told Genny to go look to see if the door to the crossroads was open. He’d been so insistent. When she looked out the front windows, she realized the tall stone formations towered close, rising out of the forest to glisten as if they’d been polished.

At one point, he had been so feverish she stripped him down to his shorts, wiped him down with cool water, and fervently wished she was seeing him under different circumstances. As it was, he was lifeless and unresponsive, the scratches on his shoulder oozed and his muscled frame looked almost gaunt from dehydration and infection.

As the sun began to set, she picked up her cell phone to call for a physician, but she had no signal. No signal of any kind. It was as if those huge stone formations cast a damper over their surroundings.

It was now past midnight. When she tried to return to the woodstove to stir the soup she’d made with his store of root vegetables and cans of beef broth, he caught her arm. “Don’t leave me. I see the faces of all the people I killed, all the friends that are gone, and I can’t bear to be alone.”

“I’m not leaving,” she repeated. Her heart ached for him, for the torments he suffered in his delirium.

He twined his fingers in hers. “But you should go. I’m not safe to be with.”

“No, you’re not.” Because even hurt and torn, he was attractive to her. She felt a different kind of fever, and it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t romantic. What kind of woman lusted after a sick man?

Yesterday, when they arrived here at his cabin, she had sat on him because she needed to remove his shirt and have free access to his wound. She would have sworn that’s why she did it. Then something crossed between his body and hers, a pulse, a surge of such heat that she had instantaneously trembled on the edge of orgasm.

He had used his power on her.

She didn’t blame him. He had been sick; she’d been stupidly provocative. And since then, he had held himself in check. He didn’t want to embarrass her. He didn’t want to drive her away.

All too obviously, he feared what he would do next.

Going to the fireplace, she stirred the soup. It was taking longer to cook than she had imagined. Who knew? She had never been a Girl Scout. She was more of a microwave girl.

She glanced at John.

That pulse of sexual power . . . was that why the women he had carried away wanted him still? Because he provided sexual ecstasy far beyond any normal man’s skill?

“Genesis. Genny . . .” His voice was hoarse. “You have to go. You have to go
now . . .”
He threw off the blankets, twisted on the bed, in thrall to some great pain.

And a glowing blue wave of power arced off him, knocked her backward into the wall, shook the walls, and cracked the logs stacked beside the fire.

She shook her head, trying to clear it. Got her balance and straightened. Staggered from the shock. Then hurried to his side, and caught his shoulders in her hands. “John, are you okay?”

He opened his blue, blue eyes, so full of torment. Through fever-cracked lips, he told her, “It’s too late to run.” His eyes closed again. Again he arched on the bed, and then a red wave of power blew off him.

This time, she was touching him—and the power didn’t push her; it blasted through her—her skin, her blood, her brain, every nerve, every cell glowed red with power. Another wave, and behind her eyes, she saw violet. Another wave, aqua this time. She staggered, alive as she had ever been in her life. Afraid and exhilarated and amazed. “John!”

He put his hands over hers. “Hang on,” he said.

The next blast was bigger than the others, shimmering with heat and so yellow she felt as if she was looking directly at the sun.

After that, she lost track of time as pulse after pulse of power arced off his body, out of his mind, through hers, and away. Dimly she heard the cabin walls creaking, felt the dirt floor shifting beneath her feet. She saw all the colors of the rainbow growing and crashing on the beach of her mind, then receding to be replaced by another wave, bigger, brighter, more powerful.

She didn’t know how long she stood leaning over him, her hands wrapped around his shoulders, before the biggest wave swept her off her feet. She lost her grip on his shoulders. She crumpled onto his chest, and cried out at the contact, sensitized in every nerve, every inch of skin.

Beneath her, he gasped.

Dimly she realized she had hurt him, and tried to lift herself away.

But his arms came around her, held her tightly, and his voice rumbled under her ear. “Stay with me. Genesis, stay here.”

She collapsed back down on him and huddled there, breathless, exhausted, amazed.

For the first time since the barrage had started, he lay quiet, breathing deeply. But he still burned with fever.

Yes, John was Chosen. More than that, he was a man of great power, greater than she had ever imagined.

No wonder the people who had lent her money for college wanted John to return.

It was only a matter of time before she felt the energy build up in him again, an energy so demanding it almost raised her off his body.

This time, the waves blew directly from him through her. Everywhere they touched, every cell lit with red and blue, burned with fire and froze with ice, sparkled with rubies and diamonds. Tears leaked out of her eyes; not tears of pain, but tears of sorrow and joy. She felt as if she was being born again, torn from the world where she had lived all her life and thrust into another world.

What had he said? That the
rasputye
was changing her?
She hadn’t believed him . . . but now she knew it was true. Because he was here, and he was changing her.

The waves died away again, leaving her exhausted and exhilarated.

His fever cooled, burned away by the release.

When she could speak, she asked, “Does it hurt you?”

“Choking it back hurts me. Releasing it frees me.” He half smiled, an edge of wildness in his eyes. “And you help me stay in control. Will you stay with me tonight?”

“Yes, John. I’ll stay with you tonight.”

When Genny woke up, the fire had died down, liquid dawn was slipping down the glass of the windows . . . and she lay beneath John on his narrow bed.

More important, he had been watching her sleep.

He supported himself on his elbows. His legs wrapped around her legs.

He was naked.

She was dressed.

His belly rested on hers, his erection hard and hot, and his blue eyes glinted with desire.

Her intimate position beneath him, the intensity with which he watched her—they shocked her awake, made her shrink away from him. “We can’t.”

“Why not? Because I was ill?”

“Yes.”

“I’m one of the Chosen, and I am healed.”

She believed he was. “But you’re exhausted.”

“I feel better than I have for two years.”

“All right, then. The truth is—I’m not certain I want to do this.”

He didn’t like that. That sensuous mouth that could make her feel so much tightened, and his deep voice rumbled in his chest. “I can make you certain.”

She stilled. “Make me?”

He lightly touched her lower lip with one finger, a simple gesture that roused her. “Are you afraid?” he asked. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I know that.” But he would wrest her control away, make her weak and clinging, bring her to unwilling peaks of ecstasy . . . make her one of his women.

She didn’t want to be one of his women. She didn’t want to be one of many.

Then he spoke, and a chill swept through her.

For he answered her as if he had plucked the thought from her mind. “I want you to be my woman . . . my only woman.”

He shook his head.

Of course. He would never tell.

“So you want me because I’m dissatisfied with my life?”

John kissed her, his lips chapped by fever. So sure in his touch, he might never have been sick.

“Everything about you is different,” he said. “
I
didn’t find
you
.
You
found
me
. You found me when I was about to give up, to go into the crossroads and never come out, to die there like all the old experiments gone wrong . . .”

His words chilled her. “You could die there?”

“Time runs differently in the crossroads. Sometimes you can waste your whole life dreaming the dreams you can find there.”

“So you truly believe that the crossroads are . . . are a special place out of time?”

“I’ve seen the crossroads, not in reality but in my past.” He slid his fingers into her hair, looked into her eyes. “Let me show you. Watch . . .”

His power opened her mind, and opened his mind to her.

The cabin faded away . . .

In its place, Genny saw a strange countryside. The air was bright, but there was no sun. The sky was blue, but it sparkled preternaturally. Spring-bright grass spread like a carpet over the ground. Flowers grew in profusion around the misshapen oaks and yews. A wide waterfall spilled ten feet into a large, tranquil pool.

And on the east and the west, the horizon slanted toward the ground. Even in this hallucination, Genny knew that wasn’t right.

Into this landscape strode a beautiful woman, tall and blond like the women of Rasputye. As she walked, the grass sprang up from beneath her feet as if she weighed nothing.

Yet that was an illusion, too; her weight was more than usual, for she was heavily pregnant. Her belly pressed into her pelvis, and once she stopped and bore down with her hands to her stomach as if trying to push the baby out.

She was in labor.

Yet she strode determinedly, her gaze fixed north.

Genny followed, not really there yet held in thrall by the drama unfolding before her eyes.

The landscape rolled past faster than it should, and as they approached a bleaker land, the woman fell to her knees. She groaned in the agony of birth, then held her screaming son in her bloody hands. She cut the cord, staggered to her feet, and carried the child at arm’s length toward the steel blue sky ahead.

Genny heard the waves crashing on the rocks, saw the salt spray, felt the bone-chilling cold. Miniature icebergs rested on the rocky shore and bobbed in an ocean that stretched as far as the eye could see. The female walked into the water up to her waist—Genny shivered—held the baby up to her face, and spoke as if the infant could understand her. “If you survive, you can have your gift, whatever that will be, and mine, too. And if all that comes to pass, you’ll be the one they fight over.” Throwing back her head, she gave a wild burst of laughter. She placed the infant on an iceberg, listened to its shriek as if the sound gave her pleasure, then turned . . . to look directly into Genny’s eyes.

Her eyes were the same pale, cold blue as John’s when rage held him in its grasp.

With a gasp, Genny came out of the trance. She was sitting up, her back against the headboard, stiff with horror. “John. John, that was your mother!”

“Yes.” He slid his hands through her hair, touched her rigid shoulders, then wrapped the blanket around his waist and sat facing her.

“She was going to drown herself.”

“Yes. She did.” His eyes were the color of the steel blue sky, of the steel blue sea.

“But . . . how do you know what happened that day?” She lifted a hand, needing an explanation. “Did someone tell you?”

“There is no one alive who knows. That day, there was only my mother and me . . . and her despair and fury.”

“Why? Why would she do such a thing? To herself, to her baby?” Why would she look at Genny as if she knew she was there? Who had this woman
been
?

“Genny, listen! People like me, like my mother, like all of the abandoned children . . . we’re given a gift, a special talent, but that’s weak compensation for coming into this world without the support of a mother, a father, a family. Sometimes we’re lucky and adopted by people who love unstintingly, and those children grow up normally, a part of the real world.” He reached for her hand as if needing the contact. “But sometimes the babies are taken by those who want to use them and their gifts.”

She twined her fingers in his, unable to deny his unspoken appeal for comfort. “Like your adopted parents? Like Olik and Tanja?”

“It can be so much worse than that. The Others seek out the infants. They weigh their gifts; and if the gift has potential, they keep them, abuse them, raise them to be steeped in evil. Very few ever escape that influence.” He clenched his jaw. “My mother never escaped that influence.”

“Your mother . . . was one of the Others?” Of all the things Genny had imagined about John, she never thought this. That he was a son of a gifted mother; that his tragic birth was part of a chain that extended back at least one generation.

“When the man who fathered me discovered who she was, what she was, he ran like a coward, taking the last of her hope and leaving her alone . . . as she had been her whole life.”

Through their clasped hands, Genny experienced a buzz, as if tapping into his mother’s memories created a low level of electric current that ran through John’s body and his mind.

He continued. “She put me on that ice floe not out of malice. For her, life was nothing but misery, cruelty, and evil—and killing me before I could suffer was a kindness.”

“Yet she didn’t drown you. She didn’t hurt you. She gave you a feeble chance to live and let fate make the decision.”

He nodded. “And she gave me her gift should I somehow remain in this world.”

“What is it? What is her gift?”

“Sometimes I can see things about the people who are truly connected to me. As in . . . I’ve always known why she did what she did. And I’ve always known her fate.” He gazed at Genny’s face, but his mind was far away. “I’ve been able to look back and see, like gazing into a flame in the heart of a lamp. The story’s there, told with every flicker. I don’t know how I hear it, but I comprehend the words. I see the scenes. I know them in my heart.”

Something else occurred to Genny, something not so easily explained. “B-but how did you
show
me the story?”

At once John focused on her face, his eyes intent. “When you absorbed my power, you absorbed a part of me.”