Blood Moons (30 page)

She was losing herself to that nightmare, losing everything it meant to be Dara, little by little. It was like trying to stop a flood with paper napkins and it terrified her, but she had to try.

She paid for it, drowning, sinking; fighting the whole way down.

Another orderly squeezed in close to her and leaned his weight on a forearm against her chest to hold her still. Two more were holding her legs. They were scared. Dara couldn't block out their fear and it intensified her own. The weight on her chest was choking her. She was getting light-headed, weak. Unable to draw enough breath into her lungs, her struggles eased, but the orderlies wouldn't move. They were killing her.

Dara's vision became cloudy, and she was glad for a reprieve from the sharp, stinging light. The fight was going out of her. It was a death sentence she passed over herself. A woman condemned, she turned her mind from impending death and faced her executioner. Looked in a mirror and saw her face contort and change into a mask of madness.

The murderer was an ordinary-looking man, with nothing to brand him as a psychopath, except his violet eyes. They almost glowed and he wore his brown hair long to shade 271

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them. She looked for a weakness; that's what Tristan would have done. Dara only needed one small thing to use against him and bring him to his knees.

And she found it...

"Don't look. Don't listen."
It was a sharp command she couldn't disobey. Her eyes squeezed shut; her ears began ringing. She perceived nothing. Unable to breathe, light-headed and shivering, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, Dara was dying. It was about to be over and she was almost relieved. Her only regret was that she couldn't tell anyone about what she'd found.

Then the weight on her chest was gone and she sucked in a huge, dizzying breath. Hands fell away from her; she could move again. She curled into a tight ball, pressing her hands to her ears to shut out the horrible sounds, but they kept leaking through. Things were breaking, shattering all around her. People screamed and yelled for help, but no one else entered her room. Fabric tore as something heavy flew through the drapes, and then came the thuds and thumps she was familiar with. Fighting. Bodies falling to the ground.

When everything fell silent, she felt the mattress depress behind her. A low cry escaped her as big hands grasped hers and pulled them away from her ears. Those same hands, hot on her freezing skin, then pressed against her head and then Tristan was there in her mind.

He didn't take the demons away as he had before. He didn't shield her from their claws. Instead, he stood with her, sharing her pain. He purposely sought out her nightmares and dreamed them with her, watching, listening. Learning.

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Hunting.

He couldn't reach through her, couldn't find the murderer himself. But now he knew, and with images and feeling she could grasp, explained to Dara that somehow, a connection had been established between her and the monster.

Only a few days ago, Dara had wanted to hunt the murderer herself. She'd thought about helping the police catch him despite the risk to herself, already sensing that she was probably the only one who could. Now she and Tristan both knew she'd been right. And there was no more choice in the matter.

The only way to get him out of her head was to find him.

And take him out.

Tristan bared his sharp fangs at the guards standing in the doorway with their guns pointed at him. Three more were at the balcony, picking up the unconscious orderlies. He dared them to try something. He didn't know how he'd managed it, but Tristan hadn't killed or permanently injured any of them and the guards would find that out as soon as the orderlies were examined.

But if even one of the guards took a step toward him and Dara, if even one shot was fired, he'd slaughter them all. He could kill them before they even made the decision to react.

Tristan opened all his senses, listening for cues.

Christ, what is he?

Where the hell are the tranq rounds?

Their guns were loaded with live bullets. Tristan shifted to shield Dara with his body.

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"Go find Dr. Chase," the apparent leader ordered, not taking his eyes off Tristan.

—no fucking protocol for this!

—I can take him out. No. He's too close to her. Fuck if it
matters —

Tristan snarled at that guy and he started shaking, eyes wide with fear.

Got a pulse. Holy shit, this one's alive.
The man who thought this was outside with the orderlies. He gave a silent signal to stand down, but no one moved.

Dara was shivering on the bed, her eyes still shut, even though he'd removed his command. She was scared and she had every right to be. Tristan was shielding her mind from everyone, but she still remembered their emotions when they'd all rushed her. She couldn't shake them off. And Tristan couldn't help her and protect her at the same time. He needed the rest of them gone.
Now.
He was seconds away from forcing them.

When Amelia pushed her way through the army of guards and took in the scene, she dismissed everyone from the room, efficient as ever. She smartly kept her distance, recognizing a potentially lethal situation when she saw it, but her tone was arch when she addressed Tristan. "I think maybe it's time you and I had that talk."

An hour later, the three of them were sitting in a greenhouse with plush furniture and carpets hidden among an oasis of exotic plants. The sun beat down on them; the air was thick and humid. Dara was bundled in thick blankets, with a cup of hot chocolate in her hands. She was nestled 274

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against Tristan's side and each time he shifted to move away, she made that small, desperate sound that made him want to kill something.

He did most of the explaining, because Dara wasn't up to talking, and she probably wouldn't say much even if she was.

Even to him, talking about what his mind could do felt like a noose tightening around his throat. Tristan worked through it.

Dara couldn't afford to hide anymore. She wouldn't make it through another episode like this one.

"You can read minds," Amelia said with a disbelieving look.

"Yes."

"That's why Dara went to Wolf block, and why you protected her all this time."

Tristan didn't like her tone. "We can sense each other."

"Have you been reading my mind?"

"Not exactly."

Her eyebrows inched up. "Just what does that mean?"

"It means that I haven't consciously made the decision to enter your mind and look. But your thoughts sometimes ...

leak through to me."

"Explain."

"There are more important things to talk about, don't you think?"

"No, I don't think," she said. "You're telling me that for years now one of my patients was a telepath who, for all I know, could have
seen
every last detail of my life in my mind.

So you will explain yourself before we move on to anything else. You owe me that, Tristan."

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"You don't even believe that yourself," he retorted. For all the things she'd done to him that could never be reversed now, risking his life again and again, he didn't owe her a goddamn thing. He'd never had the patience for hissy fits.

"Thoughts have a physical component," Dara said softly, her gaze locked on the carpet. It was the first thing she'd said all morning and it was all Amelia needed to shut the hell up.

"Neurons firing electrical impulses create a ... frequency. We can pick up on it. Most people's thoughts are just a hum; background noise."

"We build up blocks to shield against them," Tristan supplied. "The noise can be overwhelming if you don't learn how to mute it. It also depends on how strong a telepath is.

The stronger the telepath, the softer the frequency he can pick up on, the longer the distance. Imagine being able to hear stray thoughts from everyone in the city where you live, whether you want to or not."

"But sometimes..." Dara shuddered. "Sometimes a thought is too loud to blend into the background. It gets through the shields and you can't ignore it."

"One thing to mess with your body," Amelia said thoughtfully. "Another to mess with someone's mind. This is what you meant." She leaned back in her seat, a bomb blast look on her face. "So exactly how strong are you?"

The question was directed at Tristan, but he answered for Dara. "Strong enough that she connected with the serial killer from here. He found another victim, Amelia."

"So what do you want me to do?"

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Tristan met Dara's gaze briefly. She didn't know how to answer, but Tristan had an idea. He sent it to Amelia directly.

The doctor flinched. "Okay, that was really weird." She crossed her arms over her chest, hunching in on herself. She felt violated, Tristan knew. No more than he had under her examining eye all these years. "And you're out of your mind.

There's no way that can work."

"It has to work."

"There are agents already after her," Amelia pointed out.

"Even if I could somehow get you off world, they'd be on us in seconds."

"I can hold them off."

Amelia pushed to her feet. "You're talking about aiding and abetting fugitives. You're asking me to give up everything—

my work, my
life
to help you. And then what? Even if it works and you get the bastard, what do I do? Go into hiding? Run for the rest of my life?"

"You shouldn't have involved her," Dara said.

"Yeah, that's right. You shouldn't have involved me. And don't say I wanted to be involved. You kept this from me long enough; you should have known better now."

She was angry. For the first time since he'd met her, Amelia was genuinely pissed. Tristan considered manipulation, something he hadn't done since his hunting days. It would be easy. Amelia was ruled by logic. All he had to do was convince her mind that what he wanted from her was the logical next step.

It was a dirty tactic, and there was a chance it could go wrong in more ways than one. When he'd done it before, 277

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those he'd used had come out of the trance ... damaged. He hadn't cared, as long as he got what he needed.

Dara leaned her head against him. She'd exhausted herself, but refused to close her eyes to sleep.
"This isn't her
fight,"
she said.
"Or yours."

He ignored that last bit.
"I'll think of something."

Dara withdrew, moving away from him, leaving his side cold where they'd touched. "How long before I can go back to my house?"

"You did a lot of damage this morning." Amelia was making an effort to calm down. She kept her voice low and even, but her gaze kept shifting nervously to Tristan as if afraid he'd take a bite out of her brain. "I'd like you to be monitored for at least a day or two. But I understand that you're really anxious here. I can probably discharge you right now if you promise to take it easy for a couple of weeks."

"I would appreciate that."

"Do you want someone to go with you?"

"I'll take her," Tristan said. He wasn't letting her out of his sight again.

"You're not going anywhere," Amelia declared. "You can count yourself lucky those guards didn't make a sieve out of you."

"You can't stop me."

"No," she agreed, "but the ten armed guards outside probably can. You earned yourself a padlock. I now have direct orders to keep you restrained for the safety of others.

And I've been told that if I can't keep you in line, you'll be on the next shuttle back to New Alaska. With the research 278

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officially suspended, I don't have any more leverage where you're concerned. Which means they can do whatever the hell they want. So you will be staying put from now on, unless I give you clearance."

"So give me fucking clearance," he growled.

"Meh," she said, shrugging a careless shoulder. "Don't feel like it." Her tone was light, but her gaze dared him to argue.

She was done being nice.

"It's no problem," Dara said, uncurling from her seat to get up. "I can walk that far by myself."

"If I have to stay here, then you're not leaving, either." He made a grab for her blankets, but she let them fall away from her body and moved out of his reach.

"We live as we dream, Tristan," she said and her tone stopped him mid-step. "Alone. I'm ... so tired of being pulled back and forth. You taught me to live with this. And you made me think I could depend on you, so I keep expecting you to come to my rescue every time something bad happens, but you know what? You can't be there. And I feel like an idiot every time things go from bad to worse when I just wait for you to show up."

He knew the look on her face: he had seen it many times before, had been the cause of it. It was absolute defeat.

Tristan's hackles went up, the tiger rising to the fore faster than he could compensate. "What are you saying?"

"I can do this by myself." She moved farther away, her gentle presence fading from his mind. "I
have
to do it by myself, because no one else can do it for me." Only a ghost of her image remained in his mind now.

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"Don't," he ordered.

"I don't have a choice."

She disappeared, but Tristan was still hanging on to her mind. He wasn't about to let her slip away. Everything inside him rejected the idea. "You think I made you depend on me?

You don't think I depend on you?"

His grip on her was loosening. He was letting her go? No.

He was being expelled. "You're stronger than you think." To Amelia, she said, "I'm ready to leave now."