Lord of Lightning (7 page)

The Volkswagen hit a rut and nearly threw Lise out of the cracked Leatherette bucket seat. “Slow down!” She grabbed for a wrist strap dangling above the window as Julie veered to avoid another pothole. Lise’s taped ribs ached with every jolt.

“Not until I see the white line on Highway Nine,” Julie vowed. “I want to get as far away from this place as possible. That guy’s weird, Lise. Majorly weird.”

Glancing into the rearview mirror, Julie swung off the dirt access road and onto a paved two-lane highway. Frank’s truck was right behind her, followed by Lise’s Cordoba, which was being driven by one of Frank’s attendants.

“He’s not weird,” Lise said softly. “He’s just different.”

Julie tossed her a look. “Are you sure you’re all right? You seem a little flushed to me. Maybe you ought to see a doctor.”

“A doctor, why?”

“The guy did give you knockout drops, did he not? No telling what else he did.”

“Julie, for heaven’s sake. He didn’t do anything like that.”

“Oh, Lise, you’re so naive. Didn’t you ever see
Children of the Damned
? There were these aliens trying to repopulate their planet. They drugged the whole town and made all the women pregnant!”

Lise rolled her eyes. Julie was off and running now. There’d be no stopping the endless scenarios of alien visitations and UFO’s spinning in her head. “Well, if he decides to take another shot at impregnating this earth woman,” Lise said sardonically, “I hope he doesn’t knock me out first. I’d hate to miss all the fun again.”

Julie looked properly shocked and Lise shrugged apologetically. That was a wicked thing to say, she realized. Julie really believed Stephen
was
Darth Vader. Actually, it wasn’t too hard to understand the rampant rumors. Stephen was a strange and fascinating man. Remembering the white capsules he’d given her, Lise found herself wondering what was in them. They’d been tasteless, quick acting, and powerful.

She stared out the window at the passing scenery, her imagination taking a paranoid turn. A moment later she shook her head. No, he hadn’t done
that
. A woman would know if she’d been made love to, wouldn’t she? Lise knew there were telltale signs, but not having ever done it before, she wasn’t altogether certain what they were.

She glanced at Julie, determined not to grill a nineteen-year-old about sexual hygiene. Julie would probably be more than happy to oblige, however limited her experience, but Lise had gone to great lengths to keep that part of her life private. Even if the whole town knew she hadn’t been intimate with anyone since she came to Shady Tree, they weren’t privy to what she’d done before. For all they knew, she’d moonlighted at Kitten-With-A-Whip Escort Services before settling in their bucolic mountainside village.

Julie flipped the car radio on, complaining about the lousy reception as static erupted. As she switched it off, Lise remembered absently that her car radio had been acting up too. The thought got lost as Julie began to probe none too subtly for information. She wanted to know if Lise had seen Stephen eat or drink human food. She wanted to know if he’d kissed Lise, or tried anything else while Lise was conscious.

Lise assured her he hadn’t, but Julie wasn’t deterred. Did he stare into Lise’s eyes? she wanted to know. And what did Lise think of him? Did she find him attractive, for example?

“Majorly,” Lise said.

“Yeah?” Julie zeroed in on that one. “What is it you like about him? His blond hair?”

His hair, his face ... his bedside manner, Lise thought. “That’s part of it.”

“He is sort of a babe, actually. So ... if you could describe him in one word, what would it be?”

“Tactile.”

“What?”

“He’s very ... tactile.” A magnificent understatement, Lise thought. Stephen Gage could send out alternating currents with his fingertips. What in the world would it be like to make love with a man who had spark plugs for body parts! The possibilities made her
woozy.

Julie had grown silent by the time they arrived at Lise’s house, but when Lise reached for the door handle to let herself out of the car, Julie stopped her.

“I don’t want to scare you, Lise, but I really don’t think you should see him again.”

“Stephen? Why?”

“You know the exhibit at the Fairchild Museum? The display of Eskimo fertility artifacts? Well, two of them are missing. The first one disappeared Sunday evening; the second, yesterday—”

“Somebody’s stealing Eskimo art? Why?”

“
Fertility
statues, Lise. And it’s obvious why. To gain knowledge of the mating habits of humans.”

Lise heaved a sigh. “Since Margaret Mead is long departed, you must be referring to the guy who wants to repopulate his planet, right?”

“Who else? Were statues disappearing before
he
got here?”

“Julie, really—”

“
Lise,
I’m worried about you. He’s picked you out for some reason. Maybe he’s going to alter you genetically and turn you into his termite queen or something. You know, a one-woman breeding farm.”

“Oh, thanks—”

Lise’s dry comment was lost in the roar of a car engine. The pickup truck screeched to a halt behind the Volkswagen. It was followed closely by Lise’s Cordoba.

Lise swung around and glared out the rear window. “I wish those yahoos wouldn’t drive like that, especially with my car.”

“What are you going to do about this guy?” Julie pressed.

Lise hesitated, debating that very question. What
was
she going to do about Stephen Gage? A moment later she turned to her teaching assistant and said quietly, “I’m going to ask him to help us with the class’s science project.”

“What? Why?”

“Because winning the scholarship could prove to the school board that our school has merit. That our kids don’t need to be bussed to a larger community. Besides, I don’t know how to build a minimetrorail, do you?”

Julie slapped a hand to her head, apparently flabbergasted. “Oh, Lord, this is worse than I thought. He’s taken control of her mind.”

S
TEPHEN STOOD ON THE
porch of the cabin, his eyes following the rutted dirt road to the place where it curved west toward the highway and was swallowed up by a tunnel of sycamore trees. Three cars had disappeared down that road several moments before, but dust continued to swirl up in little cyclones, golden devils that couldn’t find a place to settle.

Restless energy, he thought, feeling a swirl of sensation in the reaches of his stomach. The woman had stirred up more than dust in her wake. She had made him restless too. He could feel it gathering inside him, creating its own faint, sweet suction, another kind of dust devil. Desire.

Irony brought a smile to his lips. The past had taught him a survival skill—self-control. He had honed it the way a bodybuilder defines his outer musculature—armored himself against emotion, punished himself. And yet despite everything he’d done, it was coming back, that raging need to make love to a woman, he’d held in check for so long. It was stealing into his thoughts, plaguing him with dark impulses.

He wanted like hell to give into it. But he couldn’t.

It could destroy him this time. It could destroy everything he’d come here to do. Experience had taught him that physical desire was an illusion. The forces behind it were as seductive as the dust devil—and as deadly as the eye of a storm. He’d been caught by those forces before, and the result had been tragic.

Every sane instinct he possessed told him to stay away from Lise Anderson. Physically she was too desirable. Emotionally she was too quick to protest the slightest touch, and too transparently eager for more than touching. A dangerous mix for a man in his state of mind and body.

And yet something about her, something even beyond the physical, drew him. An odd sense of destiny struck him as he considered the risk she represented—and its ultimate implications. Perhaps the choice wasn’t his to make. His mind began to stir, picking up the restless whisperings of his body. Perhaps
she
was the reason he was here ...

He heard a rustling in the tree above him, and looked up. The sparrow hawk was perched on a limb in the uppermost branches. Sunshine brushed its head with gold and tipped its feathers.

Stephen smiled as the bird glanced down at him.

“You feel it, too, don’t you?” he said.

The bird’s head inclined quickly, something very near a nod, and then its eyes returned to the road.

The dust devils were still moving, floating endlessly, a golden mist in the sunny breezes. The rustling that moved through the trees was a hushed sound that could have been her name.
Lise
.

Even the foothills could feel it, Stephen thought.

She was the one.

“What happened in here?” Lise’s voice was light with shock as she entered the classroom later that morning. There were dismantled cardboard boxes, uncoiled coat hangers, buckets of plaster of paris, and crumpled newspapers strewn every which way. The place looked as though it had been ransacked by vandals.

“Surprise,” Julie said, grinning through the wallpaper paste that decorated her face. She swept an arm toward the table where the metrorail pike was under construction. A tiny skyscraper was listing dangerously toward a mountain range that looked like a reject from Picasso’s cubism stage.

“What is that?” Lise asked, and then she answered her own question. It was Malibu,
after
the mud slide.

“It’s Los Angeles!” the kids cried in unison.

“Of course, I should have known.” Lise managed a faint smile. It was her own fault. Julie had dropped her off at the house to change her clothes and had gone on ahead to hold down the fort until Lise got there. Lise vaguely remembered suggesting that Julie get the kids started on the layout for their project. It was supposed to be a model of the Los Angeles freeway system, through which their metrorail would run.

Lise had thought that cutting, pasting, and papier-mâchéing would be a harmless enough diversion—the perfect pastime for twenty restless little minds. Foolish woman. It looked as if they’d taken a wrecking ball to the classroom.

“Hi, Miss Anderson!” Danny Baxter hollered at her from the back of the room. He was mixing a fresh bucket of wallpaper paste to the consistency of heavy cream, and the circle of kids gathered around him were deliriously tearing paper towels and toilet tissue into confettilike strips.

The strength to endure, Lise thought, that’s all she asked.

She was trying to figure out where to start the salvage operation when she noticed how much fun the kids were having. By the look of them they’d probably eaten more paste than they’d slapped onto the wire screen forms, and they were definitely sporting more construction paper than necessary for the metrorail pike. One boy had toilet paper trailing behind him. Another had a “Personals” ad stuck to his cheek. But there was no question about it. They were having a high time of it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Danny Baxter laughing like that.

“Come on, Lise,” Julie said. “We need bodies!”

“Help me get my lipths unstuck, Mith Anderson,” someone mumbled from behind her. Lise turned to see little redheaded Susie Laudermilk muzzled by a patch of dried paste.

Susie was a nonstop talker, and Lise was toying with the idea of leaving her lips temporarily disabled when a loud crash sounded behind her. A glance over Lise’s shoulder confirmed her worst fears. One of the confetti makers had stumbled into the glop Danny was stirring.

When you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, Lise thought.

She rolled up her sleeves.

By the time school let out that afternoon, Lise was as grungy and paste smeared as the best of them. Working as a team, they’d made impressive strides with their futuristic vision of Los Angeles, and although she was sure most Angelenos wouldn’t have recognized their fair city, she was proud of the kids’ progress and told them so.

She and Julie were recruiting a cleanup crew when Lise felt someone tugging on the back pocket of her jeans. She turned to see Emily Baxter’s wide gray eyes staring up at her in alarm.

“Look out the window, Miss Anderson,” Em whispered, her voice shaking. “They got him!”

“Got who, honey?” Lise bent down to steady the little girl.

“The spaceman. The sheriffs got him across the street at the museum!”

When Lise arrived at the museum, she had to fight her way through the curious throng that crowded the marble steps of the proud old Georgian mansion. By the time she’d pushed past Harley Pomerance, the dog-catcher, and several waitresses from the Rib-Eye Restaurant, the crowd began to take notice of her and give way.

“It’s Miss Anderson,” someone whispered, “let her through.”

As the human sea parted for her she saw the reason for their avid curiosity. Stephen Gage was surrounded by the gang of roughnecks from Frank’s station. As usual, Buck Thompson was the leader of the pack, making wild accusations and agitating the crowd. The rest of the men were taunting Stephen with verbal gibes and threats, much as a pack of hyenas might bait a cornered lion. And Stephen looked every inch a great golden cat who didn’t know which way to strike out first. He also looked as if he could do great damage if he did strike.

“What’s going on here?” Lise demanded.

Sunlight flashed off Stephen’s hair as he saw her. “Stay out of this, Lise. I can handle it.”

“He’s a damn thief!” Buck spouted.

“That’s right.” Billy Cornmesser appeared, dangling his brand-new stainless steel handcuffs. Billy had just been sworn in as a deputy sheriff of San Bernardino County, and he took his new responsibilities very seriously.

“We’ve got ourselves a coupla’ missing statues, Miss Anderson,” Billy said. “And this fellow’s the prime suspect.”

“Why?” Lise asked. “What did he do?”

“Well—let’s see now. I think somebody saw him hanging around by the back of the building. Isn’t that right?”

He looked around at Frank’s boys for agreement, and it took Lise all of ten seconds to figure out what was going on. Buck Thompson and his cohorts were spoiling for some trouble, maybe even a public hanging. Buck obviously saw Stephen as a rival and was determined to get rid of him one way or another. The museum theft had provided him with the perfect opportunity. He’d probably even convinced Billy to detain Stephen.