Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) (3 page)

You will have to get through me first to hurt him.

Aaron had sensed the presence of another Brethren in his mind a split second before hearing the voice—low, husky and menacing—and had already started to pivot upon the words:
You will…

He caught a glimpse of a shadow-draped figure crouched cat-like on the sill, poised to leap down into the room.
The knife, which had just settled into Tristan’s flesh, now winked in midflight, reflected glow from the nightlight as Aaron threw it, blade still extended. He could hit a target dead center from thirty meters in nearly pitch blackness; had anticipated the wet, meaty
thunk
as the knife hit home before the figure at the window could move out of its path, and blinked in surprise as instead, the blade’s course abruptly shifted, as if it had been hooked by an invisible line. It cut a nearly perfect one hundred and eighty-degree turn in midair, spinning around so that when it flew again, it now came straight for him with the same lethal accuracy with which he’d hurled it.

Aaron
’s surprise was short-lived.
They can move things with their minds,
Lamar had warned him of the Morins.

He shifted his weight, cut sideways and ducked his head
, feeling a whip of wind against his cheek as the knife sailed past. It clattered against the floor, spinning in broad, looping sweeps before coming to a stop somewhere beneath Tristan’s bed.

Aaron
whirled back to the window, readying his telepathic defenses, and for the first time, got a good, clear look at his opponent.

Holy shit,
he thought, eyes widening.
It’s a woman.

Not the human he’d sensed earlier inside
the clinic—this woman was
like him—
a Brethren
.
Not only that, but he could see now that she was stunning, with elegant features, chocolate-colored skin and dark hair worn closely cropped to her scalp. For some reason, she appeared to be barefooted but wearing a cocktail dress, the gold, shimmery kind that showed off generous amounts of both cleavage and legs. As he looked her in the eyes, he was struck with the most peculiar notion that he
knew
her, though for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how or from where.

A
ll at once, like the knife, Aaron found himself flying backwards, as if unseen hands had grasped him fast and flung him hard, sending him crashing into the far wall. He hit with enough force to feel the drywall beneath him crunch at the impact. For a long, impossible moment, that invisible grasp held him, the air around him seemingly collapsed, pressed tautly against him.

Brows furrowed, he locked
his gaze—and his mind—on the woman, converging all of his psionic energy the way a magnifying lens will focus a broad shaft of sunlight into a narrow, potent beam. Like this spear of light could then have devastating effect, at least if you were an ant in its path, so, too, could Aaron use this single, concentrated telepathic force. Like an epileptic seizure, it caused a sudden firestorm of neural-electrical energy to surge through the woman’s brain. She cried out sharply, her entire body jerking in violent, spastic reaction, and the crushing sensation that held him pinned to the wall was abruptly gone.

Freed from its grip,
Aaron dropped to his feet. The woman had crumpled to the ground and lay in a shadow-draped, shuddering heap, the last convulsions shaking her slim form.

“
Sorry about that,” he said, his voice shaky and hoarse. “You didn’t leave me much choice.”

H
e went to her side, leaning over long enough to press his fingertips against the slope of her neck and feel her pulse. Her skin was soft and warm, her heart beat fluttering, but palpable. Again, he couldn’t shake the idea that he’d seen her before—
knew
her somehow—but even now, seeing her close up, he couldn’t place her face.

Did I know her from before the accident?
he wondered.

In the year 1815, he’d been thrown from his horse, shattering his skull.
He remembered the date quite well—October 12, his mother’s birthday. According to his older brother Julien, the accident had occurred shortly after a party Lamar had hosted at their clan’s great house to celebrate.

“I think you must have imbibed a bit too much brandy,” Julien had once remarked with a laugh. “You were always a fairly adept horseman, Az, but have never been able to hold your booze.”

After the accident, Aaron had languished in a coma for more than a year. When he’d come to, he’d forgotten how to speak. He’d forgotten everything, in fact, his entire body and mind reduced to the level of a newborn infant. It had taken him years to recover, decades in fact, but even now, there were large parts of his past that Aaron simply could not recall. He hadn’t lived in Kentucky after that, but instead, in the city of Boston, surrounded night and day by a staff of physicians, nurses, nannies and tutors—all of them human. To that day, with the exception of his brother, Julien, and father, Lamar, had seen no other Brethren like himself. Least of all a woman.

“Who are you?” he whispered, caressing her cheek, fascinated and bewildered.

From behind him, he heard the soft, nearly imperceptible whisper of feet against the tile floor and realized what he’d forgotten—or rather,
who
; the human, Karen Pierce. The Brethren woman had distracted him—so beautiful, fierce and somehow familiar. He’d lost his focus and had about a millisecond to chide himself for the careless oversight.

Stupid,
he thought.
Stupid, stu—

Then,
with a whistle of wind, and a soft grunt as she put all of her weight into the blow, Karen struck him with the broad base of a fire extinguisher, connecting solidly with his head, and knocking him immediately out cold.

CHAPTER TWO

“Who
is he?” Karen asked as Naima Morin wrestled the man’s limp, unconscious form into an office chair.

“I don’t know.”
Naima shook her head, teeth gritted as she supported his dead weight, while Karen squatted behind the chair to bind his hands with a plastic zip tie.

Less than ten minutes earlier, she’d been
waiting for her uncle Mason to arrive so they could drive together to Reno, Nevada, for a cocktail party. Mason was partial owner of the Nevada Mustangs, a minor-league baseball team, and the party celebrated their recent advancement in the Pacific Northern division championships. They’d planned to arrive fashionably late and stay overnight, and Naima had been standing out on her balcony, watching for the approaching headlights from her uncle’s Cadillac Escalade, wearing a sheer, sleeveless cocktail dress made of gold tulle and a treacherously high pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos. When she’d caught sight of a shadowy figure cutting stealthily through the trees below, she’d kicked off her shoes and followed, barefoot through the woods. Her initial curiosity had changed to alarm when she’d realized the hooded man’s ultimate destination—the compound’s medical clinic, and her younger brother’s bedside.

“He was after Tristan,” Karen said. “Is he one of the Davenants?”

“I don’t know,” Naima said again, planting her hands on the man’s shoulders. Before she could shove him back in the seat, he groaned in her ear, his face drooped toward his sternum. “Look out. I think he’s coming to,” she warned, drawing back just as his eyelids fluttered open. “His telepathy’s strong, like nothing I’ve ever felt before. He…”

He looked up at her, blinking dazedly, and she recoiled,
her voice faltering, her eyes flown wide.

Oh, my God
…!
she thought.
It can’t be him. It
can’t!

Because i
t had been centuries since she’d last seen Aaron Davenant…but his eyes—the distinctive blue of his irises—were unmistakable. And yet it was so impossible that it could be
him
that for an instant, she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t
think.
It felt like the last two hundred years had just been slapped out of her; like all of the strength in her body had abruptly sapped through her feet and flooded the floor beneath her.

“Aaron
?” she breathed. She would have said more, except for the fact that he abruptly head-butted her, smashing his brow forcefully into hers, knocking her backwards and momentarily witless.

Blinking against stars, she landed hard on her ass, and heard Karen yelp in frightened start. Her gaze was blurred, hazy with sudden tears, her head spinning, but she saw Aaron snap the taut strap of the zip tie cinched around his wrists, freeing his hands
, then leap to his feet.

“Naima—!” Karen cried as Aaron swung toward her, his fist hooking around, connecting swiftly, solidly with her jaw. Her voice cut short as she dropped to the floor, out cold.

Naima tried to catch him telekinetically, thrusting her hand forward, fingers splayed, and managed to collapse the air around him in a sudden, firm grasp. Before she could do more than this, he swung to level his blue eyes—now mostly black, as his pupils had enlarged reflexively—at her.

Aaron,
she thought, opening her mind to him.
Stop! It’s me. It’s—

Her entire body convulsed in a violent, agonizing seizure, and she crashed to the floor, gasping and shuddering uncontrollably. She’d never met anyone with that kind of psionic power—like a singular, concentrated blow, almost blade-like and brutal. Not even her grandfather, Michel, who was the most powerful telepath in the Morin clan, had ever demonstrated such a devastating ability.

Aaron darted past her. Ducking his head toward his shoulder, he leapt forward, crashing through the window, tearing the screen, splintering glass, and tumbling headlong for the ground two stories below.

Naima
stumbled to her feet, even though her entire body felt stiff and sore, all of her muscles aching, her head still reeling. Brows furrowed, she shook her head, trying to clear her mind as she limped after him.

Can’t let him get away,
she thought, ducking out the window, feeling the sudden rush of cold night air against her face and neck as she plummeted toward the ground. She hit the dirt hard, grunting as she caught the brunt of her landing with her shoulders, rolling forward, then dancing clumsily upright. Aaron was already a quick-moving silhouette racing among the shadows ahead of her, threatening to disappear into the darkness of the surrounding forest.

No, goddamn it, no!
Naima’s breath plumed out in a furious, luminescent huff around her face as she bolted after him. She didn’t try to grab him with her telekinesis, not yet, anyway. His lead on her was too far, and besides that, he was in motion. It took an incredible amount of concentration to grab a moving object telekinetically; with her in pursuit, trying to keep him in her sights, she knew she’d stand no chance of focusing sufficiently.

Low-lying limbs and wayward brambles slappe
d at her face and snagged at her cocktail dress. The night was cold, but within moments, her skin was glossed with sweat, beads of it peppering her cheeks and stinging her eyes as she ran with all of her might.

He was heading uphill, which gave him a definite advantage
, because he had on shoes. Her bare feet slipped for purchase against the heavy carpeting of dried pine needles, pine cones and aspen leaves beneath her. The steeper the climb, the slower she had to go to keep from losing her footing, and the further ahead of her his lead became. After several minutes, she lost sight of him altogether, and the sounds of his pounding footsteps, rustling and snapping against the forest floor, had grown faint.

Dammit,
she thought, opening her mind, trying to sense his location. She hated to lower her mental defenses anywhere within his vicinity—those telepathic blasts he’d hit her with had been debilitating, excruciating, and something against which she’d found herself uncharacteristically, and completely, defenseless.

To her surprise, she couldn’t sense Aaron—which should have proven easy, since he was still close enough proximity-wise to be within telepathic range—but realized she could feel someone else nearby, coming toward them fast.

Michel!

Karen had placed a frantic call to him from the medical center as she’d grabbed the office chair and zip ties. His chateau was at least a half-mile away along the winding, narrow, rutted mountain roads; Naima saw the twin spears of headlights thrust through the trees and heard the crash of snapping limbs as his Jeep bounced violently off-road to her right. She estimated he’d driven at least 80 miles an hour to reach them so quickly.

I see you,
she heard him say, as the high beams swung in her direction, pinning her in stark, blinding glare. She saw Aaron in the distance ahead of her, caught by the light for less than a second, his hand pressed to his side. At first, Naima thought he crutched a wound with his palm, but then she caught a wink of reflected glow from Michel’s high beams against metal as Aaron pulled out a hand gun and leveled it squarely at her grandfather’s truck.

“Michel!” she cried, just as the booming report of gunfire resounded through the trees. There was no telekinesis Naima had ever heard of that could stop a bullet in midflight, and when she saw the Jeep lurch suddenly off-course, she knew
Aaron’s had found its mark.
“Michel!”
she screamed again.