Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series)

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 it 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 slapped 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.

Aaron tried to scramble out of the way, but the Jeep hit him headlong, the front bumper and grill plowing into his chest and knocking him off his feet. Either Michel’s foot had slipped off the gas pedal, or he’d stomped on the brakes; the Jeep had slowed but was still shooting forward at a good thirty miles an hour or so—lethal force had Aaron been human, and only slight less dramatically so for a Brethren victim. When Aaron hit the ground, he landed hard in the carpeting of dried leaves.

“Michel…!” Naima gasped, rushing forward. She yanked open the driver’s side door to the Jeep, and only Michel’s seat belt kept him from tumbling out on top of her. With a groan, he pitched sideways, and she caught him clumsily. Karen’s call had roused him from bed; he was barefooted and dressed for sleep, in sweatpants and an old ratty T-shirt that she could see was now soaked with blood. “Oh, my God!”

“I…I’m alright,” Michel wheezed, pawing blindly, trying to clap his palm against the entry wound just below his collar bone on the right. Grimacing, he struggled to sit up, despite Naima’s frantic efforts to hold him.

“Keep still,” she said. “You’re bleeding, Michel. You have to be still!”

The stubborn furrow between his brows deepened, and he tried to shrug away from her. “Is…he one of them?” he seethed—and she didn’t need to ask to know who he referred to. A Davenant.

“I…I don’t know,” she lied, her voice shaking and hoarse.

“I…I’ve got a rope…in the back,” Michel said. “Tie him up.” “We have to get you back to the clinic,” Naima said. “Mason’s still at the compound. He can—”

“Naima.” Michel’s blood-smeared hand clamped heavily against hers, and he locked gazes with her, his eyes shrouded in heavy shadows from his crimped brows. “Forget me. Tie…that son of a bitch up.”

She had only ever seen a look of intense ferocity in his eyes like that once; had only ever seen him steel his ordinarily gentle face into a mask of granite-like, murderous fury once before. It had been two hundred years ago, October 12, 1815 to be exact.

The night of the fire.

“Alright,” she whispered, nodding once.

She found the length of coarse rope coiled in the Jeep’s rear compartment, beneath a tangle of tarp and tools. Cradling it against the crook of her arm, she hurried across the small clearing. Beneath the canopy of pine crowns, it was too dark for any human eyes to see, but Naima could extend her field of vision by hyperdilating her pupils, letting them expand until they seemingly swallowed all of her visible cornea and irises. By doing so, her sensitivity to even the faintest hint of light was heightened exponentially. In this eerie landscape, which to Naima looked very much like depictions of night-vision goggle viewpoints seen in TV shows or movies, she could see Aaron’s fallen form clearly ahead of her. He hadn’t as much as twitched since he’d hit the dirt, as far as she could tell.

She nudged him once with her foot, pushing her toes into his hip and giving him an experimental kick. Although he didn’t respond, she still wasn’t entirely convinced, given how swiftly consciousness had returned to him in the clinic. Blood had smeared across his cheek, the right side of his face, trailing from his nose.

Aaron? she tried hesitantly. There was no reply; there was nothing at all. She couldn’t read his mind. It wasn’t as if he’d closed it off to her; even then, her telepathy allowed her to sense someone’s peripheral thoughts, the most basic imprints in the forefronts of their conscious awareness. She hadn’t been able to sense even this modicum of his presence when she’d chased him through the woods, and she couldn’t now. It was as if he’d turned off his mind somehow; as if he’d simply ceased to be.

She heard Michel groan from behind her, she pulled against Aaron’s arm, rolling him face-first to the ground, brows narrowing with urgent purpose. Squatting to bind him, she planted one knee against his ass, using her weight to pin him to the ground. He murmured softly, fitfully; she tensed herself, ready to scramble in recoil from any attack, but he remained still.

He was dressed all in black, a hooded sweatshirt with zipper front over black jeans, a black T-shirt. She took a moment to pat him down, because before, she hadn’t thought to check him for any other weapons than the knife he’d had back at the clinic, and realized now that this error in judgment could well cost Michel his life.

She felt the empty shoulder holster where he’d kept the pistol just beneath his right arm pit. On the other side, she found a couple of ammunition clips tucked in a separate, three-compartment holster. At the small of his back, she found an empty sheath attached to his belt; small enough to hold a knife, she suspected this had been the one he’d used to attack Tristan at the clinic.

He looks like he’s come here to fight a war, she thought in dismay, and again, she thought of the boy whose had tried to comfort her in the darkness. God, Aaron, what’s happened to you?