Silver Master

Chapter 28

WHEN HE EMERGED FROM THE BATHROOM A SHORT TIME later, he listened very intently for a moment. No sounds of movement came from the living room. Evidently, Celinda was still asleep. Max had disappeared from the bed. A dull, silvery gray light infused the sky.

He opened the suitcase that Trig had packed and found several items including a black crew-neck T-shirt and a pair of black trousers. He donned the T-shirt and trousers and then stopped to listen again.

There was still no sound from the living room. He considered his options. He could either stay here in the bedroom until Celinda awakened, or he could go out into the kitchen and see if Trig had left any coffee.

It was a no-brainer.

He went barefoot down the hall. The drapes were open, allowing the pale light to illuminate the living room. He told himself that he would go straight into the kitchen and not even glance at the sofa. He discovered immediately that his normally inexhaustible well of willpower had run dry.

Celinda was sound asleep amid a tangle of sheets and blankets. Her face was turned away from him on the pillow. He came to a halt, unable to move beyond the sight of her lying there in the early morning light. The memories of their night together in Frequency flooded back, igniting his senses.

Forget it. Whatever you could have had with her is probably finished.

As though she had been awakened by his thoughts, she stirred, opened her eyes, and turned her head to look at him.

“Hi,” she said in a voice softened and warmed by sleep.

“Hi,” he said. He couldn’t think of any other intelligent conversation. Do you still want me? was what he really wanted to ask.

“How are you feeling?” she said.

“Normal. Thanks to you.” Again the unspoken question went through his thoughts: Do you want to go to bed with a freak?

She looked around the rumpled bedding. “Where are Max and Araminta? Don’t tell me they took off again?”

“No.” He inclined his head toward the small balcony. “They’re dining alfresco at the moment.”

She followed his gaze. The sliding glass door was open a few inches. Araminta and Max were perched on the railing, munching cookies while they watched the sun come up over the Dead City.

“They were both pretty cool last night, weren’t they?” Celinda said proudly. “I couldn’t believe how they went after those thugs.”

“You were pretty cool, yourself.”

“Mmm. Well, you did most of the work. All I had to do was drive us all home.”

He groped for words. “Sorry I didn’t have a chance to tell you about what I can do with silver light.”

“Trig explained it.” She contemplated him for a long moment. “It’s a little disconcerting to watch someone disappear, especially when you don’t know there’s a rational explanation.”

“It’s more than disconcerting.” He remembered the dream about Janet. “Even when people do know there’s an explanation, they can’t deal with it. It’s just too damn weird.”

She searched his face with sudden understanding. “That’s what happened to your engagement, isn’t it? Your fiancée found out that you can go invisible, and she couldn’t handle it.”

“I told Janet the truth. I even went invisible in front of her once to let her see what it was like. I could tell it bothered her, but she insisted she could deal with it. I don’t do it very often because it’s such a huge psi drain. But once in a while it comes in handy in the course of my work. As long as I don’t push it for more than a couple of minutes, I’m okay.” He paused. “Until a few months ago I was always in complete control.”

“What happened?”

“I think all those drugs they gave me while I was in a coma had some kind of long-term side effects. Occasionally now, when I dream, I pull a little silver light without realizing it.”

“Without amber?”

He nodded. “Janet and I were together one night when it happened. I woke up to the sound of her screams. Looked down and saw that a chunk of my leg was missing.”

She gave him an understanding look. “An awkward moment in a relationship.”

“Yes,” he said. “It was definitely that.”

“That was when the two of you decided you weren’t a good match?”

“Things hadn’t been going well for a while,” he admitted. “We got engaged before I wound up in the hospital. After I got out, we both pretended that everything was back to normal. But it wasn’t. We started having problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“I lost most of my clients, for one thing. No one wanted to risk hiring a known burnout case. Business was bad. The rumor went around that I would never recover from the psi trauma. Some of our friends started avoiding us.”

“I see.”

“At any rate, the night I accidentally pulled the silver in bed was the last straw. Janet grabbed her keys, ran out of the apartment in her nightgown, and drove to her parents’ house. The next day her father phoned to say that they were all very sorry, but everyone hoped I would understand that no one wanted my genes in the family.”

“Well,” she said briskly, “that certainly explains why you like to sleep alone.”

“Beats waking up to a screaming woman in the middle of the night.”

She arched her brows. “I would just like to point out that you really can’t blame the matchmaker for what happened. I’ll bet you never mentioned your unusual talent when you filled out the questionnaire, did you?”

“No. I told you, it’s not the kind of thing you advertise.”

“How did you expect your marriage consultant to find you a good match when you didn’t provide her with your full parapsych profile?”

“What the hell was I supposed to do? List ‘invisibility’ in the Description of Psychic Talents section? Give me a break. She’d have figured me for some kind of nutcase. And if I had proven that I could do it, she would have told me I was unmatchable. Right after she stopped screaming, that is.”

“That’s always the way it is.” Celinda made a tut-tutting sound. “The client is less than forthcoming on the questionnaires and then complains when the match isn’t perfect.”

Was she teasing him? He couldn’t believe it.

“Damn it, Celinda.”

She drew her knees up under the bedclothes and wrapped her arms around them. “I did some thinking on the way home last night while you were sleeping. It’s not like there isn’t a long tradition of myths and legends about people who can make themselves invisible or appear to do so. Some of the stories go back to Old Earth tales.”

“I know. Trust me, I’ve done the research. A lot of the tales are linked to military or combat traditions.”

“Ninja warriors?”

“Among others. I found a couple of legends involving invisibility when I studied records of an Old Earth group called the Arcane Society, too.”

She frowned. “I remember running across a mention of the Society in a History of the Paranormal class I took in college. It was an organization devoted to psychic research, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. There are also plenty of stories about Old World magicians who could pull off invisibility.”

She watched him very steadily. “What do you think?”

He shrugged. “We’re human. Something here on Harmony is pushing the evolution of psychic talents in the population, but that probably wouldn’t happen if we didn’t already carry some innate genetic ability to access the paranormal plane. I think it’s possible that there may have been a few humans back on Old Earth who could do what I do.”

She thought about that. “The talent is obviously rare. It’s likely to stay rare, too. Judging from what I saw last night, it exacts a huge price in terms of physical and paranormal energy.”

“Yes.”

She searched his face. “Trig told me how you wound up in the hospital for a long period of time after you rescued a little girl who had been kidnapped. To avoid the kidnappers you had to keep yourself and the child invisible for over five minutes. He said the resulting coma lasted for weeks.”

“The real problem,” he said quietly, “was that I wasn’t unconscious that whole time.”

She stared at him, eyes widening with sympathetic horror. “Dear heaven. You mean you were aware of what was going on around you, but you couldn’t communicate?”

“For the first three days or so after I collapsed I was completely under. But after they got me into the hospital, they started experimenting with their damn drugs in an effort to bring me out of the coma. They succeeded, but only partway. I could walk if someone steered me. I could eat if someone fed me. But I couldn’t initiate any action. I couldn’t speak.”

She tightened her arms around her knees, hugging herself. “I was in a similar kind of limbo after Landry shot me full of that heavy-duty tranquilizer drug. But at least I was only trapped for a few hours. I can’t even imagine how bad days and weeks in that condition would have been.”

“The orderlies used to take me outside to sit on the veranda.” He grimaced. “They probably figured that looking at the gardens would be soothing. But I hated those gardens. Every time they sat me down on that damn veranda, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to walk away from that place.”

“I understand.”

“In fairness, it wasn’t the fault of the doctors. They’d never seen anything like my case before. They had no protocol for treating me, so they went with the experimental approach. In their place, I’d have done the same thing.”

“What happened?” she asked. “How did they finally bring you around?”

“They didn’t. For the most part, all the drugs did was suppress my psi senses and tranquilize me into a stupor. Eventually they tried a drug that was not very effective. I was able to surface long enough to say a few words.”

“What words?”

“‘Stop the damn drugs.’”

“Good choice. How long did it take you to recover?”

“Took about three days for the drugs to wear off enough so that I could move on my own without falling down. The first thing I did was check myself out of the hospital.” He smiled very thinly. “The director did not approve.”

“How long would the psi coma have lasted if they hadn’t given you the drugs?”

“Who knows?” He shrugged. “For obvious reasons, I don’t have a lot of practical experience with the problem. Going invisible for more than a minute or two just requires too much energy. Take it from me, it’s not pleasant sliding into even a short-term coma.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “The dreams are not sweet.”

“You dream while you’re in that state?”

“Yes.” He felt his jaw tighten. “After what happened last night, I should have been out for at least three or four days, maybe longer. I’ve never burned that much psi before. For all I know, I might not have come out of it at all. But what I experienced was just a routine hunter crash, the kind I get after working a normal level of silver. Trig said you used the relic on me?”

“It not only enhanced my own natural ability to read psi energy, it allowed me to manipulate your patterns. During the fight underground, I was able to use it to enhance the fear of two of the hunters.” She gave him a very sober, serious look. “It’s a very powerful tool, Davis.”

He did not want to fight this battle now, he thought.

“I see,” he said neutrally.

“One more thing.”

“What?”

She fixed him with a determined look. “Bet you ten bucks I wouldn’t have screamed. At least not because I woke up and discovered that part of you was invisible.”

“Celinda.” He stopped. He had no clue what to say next.

“Of course, I might have screamed for another reason,” she added. Her eyes were very green now. “The same reason I screamed the other night in the hotel room in Frequency.”

“I’m a freak, Celinda.”

“No, don’t you dare say that. It’s not true.”

She came up off the sofa bed like a small whirlwind. He had time to register the fact that she was wearing a very demure white nightgown that covered her from throat to toes before she was standing directly in front of him, eyes brilliant with outrage.

“Listen to me, Davis Oakes, you are not a freak. Benson Landry is a freak. Trust me, with my kind of talent, I know the difference. You are a good man, a fine man. You are a brave, honorable man. You are all the things that Landry is not.”

“Hey,” he said, taken aback by her fierceness. “I appreciate the pep talk, but I’m no hero.”

She gripped his shoulders with both hands, tried to shake him a little. “Yes, you are. You’re my hero.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him hard.

His reaction was immediate. He was suddenly hot and desperate for her. He pulled her close against his chest, aware of the gentle, ripe feel of her breasts through the thin fabric of the modest nightgown. He realized that her nipples were hard.

She did not try to retreat. As far as he could tell, she was as hungry for him as he was for her. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back down the hall to the bedroom.

He got rid of the nightgown and dropped her lightly onto the rumpled bed. Within seconds he was out of his own clothes and falling on top of her. She was soft and damp, and the scent of her body made his head spin.

She coiled around him as she had last night, but this wasn’t like last night. Last night had been all about warmth and connection, about holding on the way you hold on to a lifeline. This morning was about headlong desire, heat, and reckless thrills.

They struggled against each other for the embrace. The wrestling was no holds barred. When her hand curled around his erection, he sucked in his breath. When he looked down at her, he saw the sensual challenge in her eyes. She opened her mouth a little, giving him a shadowy glimpse of the tip of her tongue.

In retaliation, he caught her wrists and anchored them in one hand above her head. She taunted him with a sexy, seductive smile that let him know more clearly than words that as far as she was concerned, she had won the small battle.

He kissed the smile off her mouth, leaving her gasping for air and twisting to get free. He moved his hand down the length of her body, over her breasts, past her soft belly. He found the wellspring of her damp heat and explored the swollen flesh until she went wild.

He could have sworn that invisible energy flared between them. In some way he could not explain, he was resonating with her on the psychic as well as the physical plane.

Her release gave him more satisfaction than anything he had ever experienced before in his life. He had to cover her mouth with his own to stifle her little scream of pleasure so that it would not reverberate downstairs and arouse Betty Furnell’s curiosity.

When the last of the tight little shivers inside her was finished, he released her wrists. She immediately rolled him onto his back and took him inside her.

“My turn to be on top,” she whispered, eyes alight with sultry challenge.

She was wet and tight and welcoming. Nothing had ever felt so good.

His climax hit him in surging waves that dazzled his senses a thousand times more than any dose of alien psi energy ever could.

Perfect.