Come Fill Me (The Prophecy) (10 page)

“I’ve learned through trial and error that it does speed healing, but it won’t cure in the normal sense. I can’t lay my hands on someone with cancer or any other terminal illness and rid them of the disease. I can only heal the damage for a short time, after which it may come back.”

Instinctively, Zeke touched the healed wounds on his chest. “Are you saying what you fixed on me tonight won’t last?”

“That’s different. Bullets, not disease, nearly killed you. With the appropriate medical care, you would have survived. All I did was speed up the healing process, as I’ve said.”

“Without an operating room or surgeons. Trust me, your gift is remarkable.”

“Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? I loathe it as much as you do yours. It’s brought us to this. You almost dying. Your brother injured. My father a prisoner. My mother dead.”

Another surprise he hadn’t expected. “Was Carreon responsible?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “It looked like any other auto accident; at least that’s what the cops claimed. She was out during a storm. Her car hydroplaned and went off the road. By the time my father got there, he couldn’t save her. What we have isn’t perfect, Zeke. Neither are your visions if they didn’t warn you well ahead of time what Jacob intended to do tonight.”

He argued, “You’re here, so it worked out. It will work out.”

“You can’t know—” She stopped as the van slowed, and the moon disappeared, throwing the back of the van into darkness.

“What happened?” she asked. “Where are we?”

A tunnel built into the side of the mountain. A place so hidden and inaccessible, Carreon’s men couldn’t find it.

“My people’s stronghold,” he said.

Chapter Five

A loud metal clang sounded from the rear of the van, followed by a whir Liz couldn’t identify. New sounds emerged, reminiscent of bulbs popping in old-time cameras. With them, a blaze of light lit up the van’s windows.

She stared at what looked to be steel walls and the line of blue-white tubes on either side of them, emitting enough illumination to make her squint. The vehicle’s tires whooshed over the suddenly smooth road. Those sounds and the surroundings reminded Liz of tunnels she’d driven through when visiting New York and other major cities.

However, this was the desert, with nothing but desolation for miles. “Are we going underground?”

“We’re already there.”

She regarded Zeke in the sudden brightness, her body weakening with need. He was so damn gorgeous…so seemingly kind, although that part of him was lost beneath pure male temptation. He was all muscle and hard angles that would have made Michelangelo’s David envious. The ends of his hair grazed his stubbled jaw, making him look deliciously mussed, as though he just rolled out of bed, having had a hell of a good time there. That was, if she didn’t consider the gouges she’d put in his chest and the piece of flesh Carreon had cut from his arm. In the unforgiving light, the wounds were an angry red, the edges black with dried blood. “You have a subterranean stronghold?”

How was that possible?

He glanced at the lights and walls whizzing by. Liz estimated the van was going sixty miles an hour or more.

“It’s built into the side of the mountain,” he said. “A leftover, if you will, from my ancestors.”

“Your people actually built this?”

He smiled at her obvious shock. “Not my clan; my ancestors, the Others. My people discovered the stronghold by accident decades ago, treating it more as a religious site than anything else. You know, making the yearly pilgrimage. Asking the Others to return and show themselves.

“That changed when Carreon came into power after his father’s assassination. He’s forced us to use it for shelter and protection. We explored its perimeters. There, we found holograms from the Others. When we played them, they were in our language. God, it was weird. They more or less explained how the stronghold operated…how to open doors, get lighting. What appears to be steel on the tunnel’s walls is actually an alloy we don’t have on this planet. My guess is it can’t be detected by any means as normal metal would, not even with the so-called sophisticated technology the Feds use. If that’d been possible, this place would’ve been studied and restricted by them, much like White Sands and Area 51.”

Liz’s head spun with any number of questions. “You and your clan live beneath a mountain range?”

“Within it,” he corrected. “A portion of the stronghold is between the peaks. It’s still shielded from aerial view, but there the children can play outside. We’ve set up an area with trees and flowers. We grow our own plants.”

That didn’t jibe with what he’d told her earlier. “You said Carreon’s men fired at Gabrielle and the other women and children at a birthday party you’d taken her to. Surely, it wasn’t here.” If it had been, Carreon would have already stormed this place, trying to win it for his own use.

Zeke’s good humor shifted to cold fury. “As I just explained, at the time of the attack we weren’t using the stronghold. We still lived above ground. The adults worked at local businesses they owned. Their children went to public school. There was no reason to do otherwise because no one in the recent past deliberately and coldly attacked the women and children. While Carreon’s father was in charge, we even had a truce. His men rarely set foot into our territory. His son finally changed that.”

And awakened the murderous rage of what Liz sensed was a truly good man. “Carreon thought you were at the party?”

Zeke spoke through his teeth. “My guess is he knew I wasn’t. He wanted to hurt me in the worst way possible to prove his power. That he’d go to any lengths to get what he wants. Being the coward he is, he probably thought I’d cave just as he would have done, begging him not to harm me, predicting the future for him if it meant sparing myself.”

“Have you tried to assassinate him before tonight?”

Zeke offered an icy smile, bringing to mind the predatory look Liz had so often seen on Carreon’s face.

“I wanted to,” he said without any shame.

“On the day your daughter died?”

He studied her. “Have you any idea what it’s like to lose a child? To know that she won’t have a chance to grow up, to become a person in her own right? From the moment Gabrielle could talk, she let me know what she thought, what she wanted. Her favorite color was yellow. Not pink. She called it a sissy color.” His smile turned wistful. Sudden tears sparkled in his dark eyes. “She nagged her mother and me for a yellow top and shorts to wear to the birthday party. We surprised her with them that morning.”

Liz reached out to touch him, to comfort, then thought better of it, bringing back her hand before he noticed.

Zeke drove his fingers through his hair. “By the time I saw my daughter again, her pretty yellow clothes were wet with—” He stopped and swallowed, then drew in a deep breath. “While I held Gabrielle’s body in my arms, I was already picturing myself attacking Carreon. Not with a gun or even a knife; my bare hands. I wanted to feel that bastard’s bones breaking, his throat collapsing. Jacob and my friends had to restrain me from hunting Carreon down that day. They reminded me that he’s like a snake or a rat, always hiding, moving from place to place to avoid detection. We were never certain where he might actually be or where his main stronghold was. As I stated before, his men taking me there tonight changed all that.”

Indeed it had.

Despite the mild temperature inside the van, a chill ran through Liz. Now that Zeke and his men knew of Carreon’s principal location, would they raid his stronghold. hoping to murder him and perhaps harming her father in the process?

Before she could beg him not to, the vehicle slowed.

“Here.” Zeke handed her a blanket.

Its beige and brown threads were woven into an abstract Indian design consisting of triangles, arches and diamond shapes.

“Go on,” he said when she simply held it. “Put it around yourself.”

Right. The soft texture surprised her. While Liz wrapped the blanket around her as she would a sarong, Zeke grabbed a pair of worn jeans from behind the cache of weapons and got dressed.

The van stopped. Footfalls rang out. The back doors swung open. Two men Liz had never seen before stared at her, their black hair and coloring similar to Zeke’s, their ages somewhere between late twenties and early thirties.

Zeke scooted out and embraced both men. Siblings? No. He’d told her the only family he had left was Jacob. These men weren’t even Zeke’s cousins. She tried to picture Carreon greeting one of his lieutenants with such affection. As the image formed in her mind, Liz saw Carreon pretending to welcome the man, then plunging a knife into his side, twisting the blade to ensure the greatest pain before death.

Shivering at the thought, she noticed a young woman standing to the side. The girl watched Zeke, her mouth tense with worry. No more than mid-twenties, she wore her straight black hair loose, the ends grazing her waist. Her eyes were equally dark, suiting her tawny complexion. A supermodel couldn’t have looked better than she did in her white tee, jeans and moccasins, her tall, slender figure as lovely as the rest of her.

Who was she?

Biting her lower lip, the young woman waited as more men came around to the back of the van, their black clothing and weapons similar to what Liz had seen on the two guys who’d arrived with her and Zeke.

“Where’s Bartholomew?” he asked the others.

A tall guy in the back spoke up. “Carreon’s men trapped him. He signaled for us to leave…that he’d take care of matters.”

Undisguised grief flooded Zeke’s face.

Why? Because he knew Carreon would torture the man for information, or because Bartholomew would never allow that to happen, sacrificing his own life first?

One of the brawnier men rested his hand on Zeke’s shoulder in a consoling gesture. The girl bounced in place as an impatient child might, then stopped when she noticed Liz. Hatred blazed in her eyes.

“Kele,” Zeke said.

She went to him, slipping her arms around his neck with a familiarity that Liz found more disturbing than the girl’s previous hostility.

Who in the hell was she? A wife? Girlfriend? One of Zeke’s lovers who wasn’t happy about having to share her man with an enemy woman?

Whoa. What are you thinking?

Liz made a face. No way was she Zeke’s newest conquest or jealous of whatever he had going with this Kele person. If not for tonight’s events, Liz would never have met Zeke. She never would have known how deeply he could love, what it was like to lie within his arms.

How often did he and Kele make love? Did they want children, little ones to protect as he hadn’t been able to with his beloved Gabrielle?

“Is that her, Carreon’s lover?” Kele asked. The volume at which she spoke said she wanted Liz to hear. “How can you be so certain she’ll help Jacob?”

Zeke pulled her arms from around his neck and stepped back. “She healed me.” Going to the van, he extended his hand to Liz.

She accepted his help without pause or comment. The sad truth was she couldn’t speak. His fingers curled around hers with such confidence and care, it awakened something deep within Liz. A longing for assurance. To be important to a man. Cherished. Her earlier thoughts of not being his newest conquest came back to mock her. Aware of the others watching, Liz fought her desire.

Kele wasn’t fooled. She pressed her lips together, her disdain seeming to have more to do with distrust than jealousy. Given her worry over Jacob, Liz wondered if they were a couple. Would she be inside the room, observing, when Liz healed him?

What if Jacob mounted her as Zeke had? Not because he was aroused, but because he wanted to sink deep within her core, believing that would afford him the full extent of her healing power. What would Kele do then?

“This way,” Zeke said.

Liz followed him around the van, getting her first good look at the tunnel. It arched twenty or more feet above them, dwarfing everything within. The unearthly blue-white lights and gray walls went on forever behind them. On either side were vehicles, mostly Jeeps built for the desert terrain. One was parked haphazardly, bullet holes marring the back doors, no doubt from Carreon’s men firing at it tonight.

Liz sniffed, expecting to smell the acrid bite of gunpowder, oil and gas. The air was fresh and clean, cooler than it’d been in the van. Pumped in from the outside? Were generators the source of the constant whirr, providing power for this place?

Zeke stopped at a door that was wide enough for a tank to move through, constructed of the same material as the walls. Kele placed her palm on what seemed to be a control panel.

Was it reading her fingerprints?

A series of clicks sounded from within the door. It slid sideways, disappearing into the wall, allowing entrance into Zeke’s stronghold.

Liz gaped, unable to help herself. On either side of the hall, electric torches—the flameless kind one sees at summer barbeques—provided a soft, golden glow in contrast to the tunnel’s sterile light. Here, the walls were mahogany, the wood gleaming, the floor made of polished stone the color of strong coffee. Priceless Indian art and Comanche blankets, similar to the one she wore, decorated the space.