Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series)

CHAPTER FOUR



“You’re a real nowhere man, aren’t you, salaud?” Rene snarled, clamping his hand against Aaron’s chin, forcing his head back. “No name. No identification. Hell, boy, you don’t even have much by way of a face left going for you, from the looks of things.”

Brows furrowed deeply, Rene leaned close to Aaron, crushing his jaw in his hand. “You aren’t fooling anyone. You got the Davenant stink all over you. You feel like a big man now, trying to carve up a bedridden kid? That’s how you Davenants work it, no? You like going after anyone weaker than you are—Tristan while he’s on the mend, or the women and wives you beat like dogs. Well, guess what? This ain’t your great house, mon ami. The only one weak around here is you.”

“How…how is Tessa?” Aaron rasped. “And the baby, of course.”

He looked directly into Rene’s eyes and managed a crooked smile as all the color abruptly drained from the other man’s face. Ashen, Rene recoiled as if Aaron had bitten him. Then the surprise faded, and Rene’s eyes hardened again. His brows narrowed, and he seized Aaron by the hair, wrenching his head back.

“What did you say?” he seethed, balling his free hand into a tight fist. When Aaron didn’t immediately respond, Rene shook him by the hair, forcing him to grimace. “What the f*ck did you say, enculé?”

Aaron turned his head, spit out a mouthful of blood, then glared at Rene again. When he grinned, his teeth were blood-smeared, his smile ghoulish and humorless. ““J'ai dit la salope est une Davenant par l'édit de les Tomes,” he said in French. “Est enceinte d'un enfant Davenant. Nous entendons par là pour les récupérer.” Roughly translated, it meant: I said the bitch is a Davenant by the edict of the Tomes. She has a Davenant child growing in her womb. We mean to have them both back.

Rene got the message loud and clear. “You son of a bitch…” he began. He would have said more, except that Aaron drove his heel into the side of his right leg, just above the knee. They’d jacked up his telepathy for the moment; Mason had injected him with some kind of sedative, and Aaron couldn’t focus enough to summon one of his debilitating psi-bolts. But it didn’t matter.

Aaron hit Rene hard enough not only to send Rene stumbling sideways, but to knock the stump of his amputated leg loose from the silicone cradle of his prosthetic. Rene had on jeans, so his leg couldn’t completely fall out, but once out of place, he could no longer stand up, and he fell with a crash to the floor.

Whereupon Aaron rammed his heel directly into Rene’s face, feeling the moist, satisfying crunch as his nose shattered, hearing his sharp, startled cry muffled against the sole of his shoe. Leaning forward, taking the chair to which he was bound with him, Aaron fell first down onto his knees, then over onto his side. His hands were tied; he couldn’t catch himself, and banged his head and left shoulder hard against the linoleum. While Rene writhed on the floor, his hands clapped to his face, blood streaming through his fingers, Aaron whipped his legs around Rene’s neck.

When he clamped his thighs together in a fierce stranglehold, Rene’s throat was abruptly crushed. Gagging for breath, Rene slapped and pawed at Aaron’s knees, struggling to hook his fingers between them and pry them apart. He tried to kick at Aaron, but couldn’t manage. He pawed and punched, trying to strike Aaron’s crotch, but to no avail. He was strangling, growing weaker by the second, his face flushing from red to a dusky shade of plum as his furious struggles began to subside.

Aaron held him pinned between his legs until at last, Rene’s fingers scrabbled weakly against the floor, then fell still. His eyelids drooped closed, and he had a thin froth of bloody saliva smeared all over his chin and cheek. He was still alive, but only barely so, and only because Aaron needed him.

For a long moment, Aaron remained immobile, loosening his legs around Rene’s neck just enough to prevent him from suffocating. Eyes wide, breath bated, he opened his mind. Mason may have dampened his telepathy with his damn injection, but Aaron could still sweep the medical clinic. Mason and Michel Morin and the woman, Karen Pierce, down the hall in a surgical room. Tristan Morin three doors down, still in bed…Augustus Noble is with him, keeping vigil.

Damn it.

Aaron had no doubt he could take Augustus out in a telepathic duel. It would be little more than a matter of concentrating his psionic blade, probably honing it as finely and sharply as he ever had. But at the moment, he was doing well just to sense his immediate surroundings. Until the sedative wore off, there would be no way he could challenge Augustus.

Beyond the confines of the clinic, several miles away, he sensed Eleanor Noble. Tessa was with her, the baby in her womb a momentary surge of warmth and light in Aaron’s mind.

Naima is there, too.

He closed his eyes, abruptly collapsing his telepathic field. She knew my name, he thought, and God, but it had taken everything he had—every ounce of strength from his internal reserves—not to flinch when she’d said it aloud to him. She knows who I am. It has to have been from before my accident.

But while the fact that Naima had recognized him—when no one should have rightly been able to do so—remained intriguing, he knew he didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment.

First things first, he told himself. He needed his hands free. They’d wised up since using a plastic tie to bind him earlier; that had been easy enough to snap. This time, he’d been bound with rope—thick, rough-hewn, with overlapping knots. There was nothing in his immediate view that he could use to saw through them, and he couldn’t twist his hands enough to try and wrestle with the knots himself. Even if he had been able to, it would have been blindly, which would prove time-consuming.

Which was why he hadn’t killed Rene Morin.

“Alright then,” he murmured with a frown, trying to focus his telepathy again, to override whatever medicine Mason had forced into his system. “Playtime’s over. Up and at ’em.”

He concentrated on Rene, pushing himself into the other man’s mind. As he did, Rene shuddered against the floor, then opened his eyes. He blinked at Rene, but there was no awareness there. He was still unconscious, his body operating solely on auto-pilot—in this case, Aaron.

At Aaron’s mental command, Rene sat up. He adjusted the cuff of his artificial leg beneath his pants so that he could settle his stump back inside of it properly. Or at least, what felt proper to Aaron; having never lost a limb, he really had no basis for comparison, nor did he have any pressing desire to probe more deeply into Rene’s mind to learn from him if his efforts were sufficient or not.

He then stood Rene up, watching as he stumbled to his feet and teetered drunkenly above him. His arms hung limply at his sides, his mouth slightly ajar. He looked like a zombie, straight out of some George Romero flick.

It was like operating a radio controlled car. Using his telepathy, Aaron fired neurological signals from Rene’s brain through his central nervous system, down into the periphery of his limbs. Rene walked, his footsteps lurching and clumsy, until he had circled behind Aaron, and then Aaron had him squat.

Through Rene’s eyes, he studied the rope around his wrists. It looked like it had been secured using a simple series of stevedore knots, maybe a sloppy sheepshank, as well. Using Rene’s hands, Aaron set about unfettering the lines, pulling, tugging, slipping and twining until they fell away from his wrists in lank, loose coils. He sat up, pushing the heel of his hand against his brow when a wave of vertigo swept over him at the motion.

As he broke his mental hold on Rene, he heard the other man fall, collapsing face-down onto the floor with a thud, a marionette with severed strings. He glanced at a clock on the nearest wall again, and limped to his feet, gritting his teeth against a shudder of pain from his ribcage. Between getting damn near run over by an SUV, and then being pummeled by Mason, he realized he was lucky to be alive, never mind have any bones still remotely intact.

It’s going to be awhile before I heal, he thought, biting back a wince again as he took a limping step forward. A long while.

Rene had set Mason’s pistol down on a countertop, presumably so he could beat the shit out of Aaron. Aaron retrieved the gun now, a handsome Glock .45 automatic. Cradling it in his hand, he discharged the magazine, made sure it was full, then slapped it home again in the stock. It wasn’t his Heckler and Kock, but it would do in a pinch.

He couldn’t shoot Rene, though. There was no way to do so without drawing attention to himself, and no way to silence the sound of a gunshot. They had taken his knife away before tying him up, and Aaron had no idea what had become of it. He had more in his car; that was no big deal, but for the moment, it left him with only his hands.

Planting one foot on either side of Rene, he leaned down and cupped Rene’s head between his palms. Quick twist, snap his spinal cord at the brain stem. Dead on arrival.

All at once, though, he heard Naima’s voice in his head, saw her face again, her pleading, anguished expression. Aaron, don’t you remember me?

God, he wanted to, if only so he could understand the breadth of emotions he’d seen in her face, heard etched in her voice. He wanted to know why she was overjoyed to see him, but heartbroken at the same time; why touching him had brought her so much comfort, and yet so much pain. Through his telepathy, he’d been able to sense all of these things, but even without it, he wasn’t blind; her inner turmoil had been written plainly on her face, in her eyes.

Who are you? he’d wanted to ask her. How do you know me?

He looked down at Rene Morin, at his hands still cupped to either side of Rene’s face. It should have been so easy.

It should have been, but all at once, inexplicably, he found it wasn’t. Because he couldn’t stop thinking about Naima.

Aaron, don’t you remember me?

He opened his hands, letting Rene’s head fall with a heavy thunk to the floor.

“Goddammit,” he muttered, then limped away, leaving Rene sprawled on the floor. Crossing the lab, he went to the nearest window and pushed it open. This time, he opted to remove the screen altogether, since his knives had been taken and he had nothing left to cut with. He eased the screen frame out of the window and set it quietly aside, propped against the wall. With a rueful grimace, he ducked his head and straddled the window sill, feeling the rush of cool night air through his pants.

He didn’t like leaving a job unfinished. Neither did Lamar. If it had been a matter of using the gun, it wouldn’t have proven so problematic. But Lamar wanted blood—and plenty of it. Aaron knew how to cut his losses, and when it was most prudent to retreat, regroup and retry. But still…

“Goddammit,” he said again, his voice ragged and hoarse. Lamar was not going to be pleased.

Because I f*cked up, he thought. Again.

And with that, he swung his leg around and slipped off the window sill, dropping silently to the ground two stories below.