Night Game (26 page)

“Lily doesn’t know we’ve had any contact. No one told her anything. If Whitney is alive and he’s aware of your presence here, it didn’t come from any of us.”

She believed him. She rarely believed anyone, not really. Not all the way. But with Raoul, she felt almost as if she knew him intimately, the real Raoul, not the one every one else saw. And God help her, she actually believed him. “Maybe I’m just tired.” She murmured the words aloud.

“You didn’t do this, Flame. You didn’t cause Burrell’s death.”

“How do you know that? Whitney’s capable of anything, even killing a kind old man just to get the end results of his experiment. He must have changed a lot over the years to have you think he wouldn’t do it, or he hid that side of himself well.”

“I didn’t much like him. None of us did. He was cold. Inhuman.” He shifted her as gently as possible until they were turned around in the bed. “Lie down.” He waited until her head was on the pillow before he pulled a blanket over her. “I never could understand how Lily loved him. She didn’t know he wasn’t her biological father. She found out after he died.”

“He isn’t dead.”

“Maybe he isn’t. In all honesty, you’ve got me halfway believin’ the man is out there somewhere recording every move we make.” Gator switched off the lights and stretched out on the bed beside her, careful to avoid touching her leg.

“I should leave.”

He heard the sound of his heartbeat accelerate. He knew she heard it too. The protest surged up, a strong tidal wave of denial. The walls rippled with a low pulse of dissent. She laid her hand over his.

“I’m not going. I have to find out who did this to Burrell. I’m just saying, it’s the smart thing to do. And there’s Joy. Someone did something to her. I wish I could believe she was dead, but I don’t.”

In the darkness he turned his head to look at her. “You don’t think she’s dead? Why? What makes you think she’s still alive?”

She would never have told anyone else. Ever. She would have gone to her grave and never told a single soul. Sometimes when I go places I hear echoes of sounds.” She waited for him to snicker. To laugh. To say she was crazy.

He twisted his fingers through hers and brought her hand up to his chest, over his heart. “Go on.”

“I think plants sometimes absorb the sound. It gets trapped there in certain plants and I can hear it.”

“You think the sound is trapped in the plants?” The pad of his thumb brushed idly over the back of her hand. “I’ve heard it too, the echo of screams, or laughter. The murmur of voices. At first I thought it was because my hearing was so acute, but then I realized that I was hearing something that had taken place in the past, minutes to months earlier. I thought it could be pockets of space, like the air pockets in a car when it sinks under water. But sound disperses. That didn’t make any sense at all. But plants don’t have ears. How the hell would they hear?”

“The echo of the past in certain places really bothered me.” She sniffed, still trying to get a handle on her emotions. It helped that Gator had bantered a little with her, but she still wanted to cry a river of tears for Burrell. For Joy. For herself. She forced control, wanting to share something of herself with Gator, just because he cared enough to comfort her. The casual rubbing of his thumb over her hand should have been trivial, but it wasn’t.

“I did consider that maybe Whitney had managed to drive me out of my mind, but then I remembered it had happened a couple of times when I was really young, before I realized just what a monster he really was, so I did some research. I wrote down each time I heard the sounds and tried to remember everything that was around me at the time. The one thing each incident had in common was that there were plants there. Not a single plant, but a large group of plants.”

“I never thought of plants. How would they hear things?”

She was acutely aware of his thumb on her hand, stroking caresses back and forth. It wasn’t sexual. She almost wished it were. There was comfort, an intimacy, the small gesture tying her to him where any other touch might have driven her away. She stared up at the ceiling, shocked she was talking about things that mattered to her, revealing secrets she’d never dared to tell another soul—things she’d never
wanted
to tell another person.

“There’s an Asian plant with transparent leaves called Hydrilla verticillata. Under a microscope you can see live streaming protoplasm. And before you think I’m brilliant and a scientist, I looked it up and someone else had conducted an experiment. In the research I read about, Huxley used a tuning fork and managed to speed up the protoplasm by using sound.”

“And this relates to the voices we hear, how?”

“I love the sarcasm in your voice. You’re such a skeptic.” She laughed softly, a small sound that actually held humor when deep inside she was weeping. Flame had a difficult time analyzing why she wanted to share her theories with Gator and why he could make her smile in the midst of overwhelming grief. She didn’t even know why it was okay with her to be lying in the dark, his body solid and warm and so comforting she wanted to cling like a small child to him. The sound of the rain beat down on the roof and only added to the surreal feeling.

“Well come on.”

“We can destroy things with sound, why not make them grow? For years scientists have believed songbirds contribute to plant growth by singing all the songs in the early-morning hours. A French physicist conducted a very successful experiment exposing how plants respond to sound waves. He composed musical note sequences that helped the plants grow. Each note is chosen to correspond with an amino acid in a protein with the full tune corresponding to the entire protein. It’s done with electromagnetic energy…”

“Sound waves.”

“Exactly. He also warned musicians not to play the notes because they might become ill.” She loved the sound of his voice, the way he drawled his words. She could lie in the dark and listen to the combination of his voice and the rain forever.

“So low frequencies. You think the plants absorb and possibly retain low-frequency notes in their makeup?”

“As well as high acoustical sounds. Like laughter. Like screams. The low murmurs we hear and the edge of violence.”

He brought her hand up to his mouth, his teeth nibbling gently at her knuckles. He seemed unaware of his action, but she felt it all the way down to her toes. Her stomach did a series of interesting little somersaults. She tried to be analytical about the strange sensation, but all she could think about was the feel of his teeth and tongue on her skin.

“So you caught something repeating back from the past that had to do with Joy? Where? What?” His teeth nipped the end of her finger, a tiny stinging bite instantly gone when he drew her finger into the warmth of his mouth.

Her breath hitched but she couldn’t quite bring herself to pull her hand away from him. She heard her accelerated heartbeat, but it meant she was alive, living, able to experience whatever she could before time ran out. She wanted to be with Raoul Fontenot, tonight, this night, when her world had once again crashed and she’d failed vet another human being. She wanted to lie beside him and feel his heat and his solid body, to let him comfort her in the darkness.

“I heard Joy cry out. She begged someone not to hurt her. Most of what he said was very unintelligible, but I caught something about her coming to enjoy the things he would do to her. I don’t think whoever took her meant to kill her, at least not right away. I think if we work fast enough, we have a chance of finding her alive.”

“But you have no clue who the man was?”

“None. The more I tried to listen, the less I heard. The bottom line is, we have to find Joy Chiasson. I won’t be able to live with myself if we don’t. I believe she’s alive and I think she’s in the hands of a monster.”

“Then we have to search together. Where did you hear this?”

“Just outside the Hurican before I went in to sing. She was there.”

“Everyone knows that, she never made it home from the club. You’re not going back to the Hurican to try to tempt every pervert there to follow you home.”

“I wasn’t tempting perverts.”

“That’s exactly what you were doing.” His teeth nipped a little harder at her finger but before she could protest, his tongue swirled around to ease the slight ache. “You were trying to draw out whoever took Joy and make them come after you. You had no backup, no real plan, no help whatsoever.”

“So what’s your big plan? I don’t see hanging out in the clubs did you much good. You had less information than I had.”

“I found out that James Parsons lied his ass off to the cops. He isn’t the least bit broken up over Joy’s disappearance, other than the attention it’s gotten him.”

She gave a little sniff of pure disdain. “You didn’t find that out in the club. You met him and we discussed it.”

“Briefly. It was a brief discussion. I have sharp perception when it comes to readin’ people,
cher
.”

“Only after I said he was a good suspect,” she reminded. “Was there a fire in here? You have scorch marks on the windowsills and around the door. What happened here?”

“Dahlia was here. After the attack on the sanitarium, Nico, one of the men in the GhostWalker squad, brought her here. She has this little problem with energy although she’s working on controlling it.”

Dahlia.
Flame remembered Dahlia, a rebel, so very much like herself. Whitney had despised them, even in the early ages when they were barely five years old. Dahlia had been in so much pain, rocking back and forth, the nurses begging Whitney to let her be with Flame or with Lily. Either of them could ease the pain, but Whitney had isolated her, just as he’d isolated Flame. The terrible memories crowded in, memories of unbearable loneliness, of fear arid rage. Memories of the slow realization that Peter Whitney, the man who held absolute power over her, was a monster. Worse, that one moment in her childhood when she’d become aware that a monster had begun to grow inside of her. A small sound of despair escaped. She never opened those doors, never looked back. But it was all there, reaching out with greedy claws to suck her down into a dark hole she remembered all too well.

Flame yanked her hand away from Gator and pushed at him. “Leave. You have to go.” She was going to cry again, she could feel the choking in her throat, the burning in her eyes and the weight pressing hard on her chest. “Hurry. Get out of here.” Because if she sank into that darkness, she couldn’t trust herself and she wasn’t going to take a chance on hurting Raoul.

“
Maudit
! Stop pushing me away. I’m not going anywhere.”

She buried her face in the pillow. “You have to. You don’t understand how dangerous it is for me to lose control. I can’t stop crying and I’m so angry with Whitney. I try never to think about him because I don’t know if I can maintain discipline. You
have
to leave. Please, I’m asking you to leave. You don’t know what I’ve done. What I’m capable of doing. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Do you think you’re the only dangerous person here, Flame? I’m like you. I’m worse than you. He developed me into a damn weapon and sent me into a field to test the results without having a clue what would happen. I went like a good little soldier and I did what they told me to do. I killed five people. One was a friend of mine. I injured nineteen others. Try living with that on your conscience. Whatever you’ve done is nothing,
nothing
compared to that.” He pulled the pillow from her face, bracing his hands on either side of her head to stare down into her eyes. “I
murdered
them. Men I’d sworn to protect. Don’t talk to me about discipline or danger. I smile and I swallow anger and I back away from anything that might make me lose control. Not now. Not this time. I’m here to stay. You got that? Are you hearing me? I’m not leaving this time. I’m not giving up something I want as badly as I want you because that
fils de putin
did this to us.”

She shook her head, her fingers brushing his face. Lightly. With tenderness. There was regret on her face. “I don’t even care if he did something to make us want to be together. You’re an incredible man, but you’re a family man, Raoul. You know you want it all. You want a wife and a house filled with children. You deserve that. Wyatt will get married and your children and his children will all be best friends. You can’t want me the way you’re looking at me. You don’t even know me.”

“Flame.” There was a stark ache in his voice. Heat. Desire. He had never wanted a woman in the way he wanted her. “Don’t say I don’t know you. I’ve known you forever. You see me. The real me. You see me where no one else does, where no one else ever will or could. You can’t ask me to give that up. And I know you. You don’t have to be afraid or hide from me.”

“I had cancer. Not once, but several times. I can’t have children, Raoul. I don’t have a future with a family.”

“We’ll find a way.”

“There is no way and you know it. And Whitney isn’t going to let me have a happy ever after. He invested far too much time and money in all of the girls he brought over from the orphanages. And if you think Lily isn’t involved, tell me why she hasn’t figured it out yet. She’s smart. She’s very smart.”

“Not when it comes to her emotions.” He leaned forward, lowered his head. Just enough to brush his lips against hers. He didn’t know if he was comforting her—or comforting him. It was just imperative to kiss her. To feel the softness of her mouth against his. To feel her response to him, as natural as breathing. He wanted to gather her into his arms, hold her against him and just shelter her there.

Flame kissed him tentatively, reaching a little to complete the contact between them. She felt the heat of his mouth spreading through her body, just that one touch, but it was enough to warm her, to push back the cold of death and grief and the fear of being a monster. Her arms slid around his neck to pull him closer to her.

Gator sank his mouth into the heat of hers. His body blanketed hers, a slow stretch over the top of her, so that he felt every soft curve of her body. Her tears were damp on her face and her mouth was fiery hot. “Stop crying. Nothing’s going to happen right now.”