Revelations (6 page)

“Teeth?” I said, unable to help myself. So far, I’d seen him smile, but he’d been careful not to show his teeth. I hadn’t even taken notice of this until that moment in time, but I guess there was a reason for that. I had plenty more on my mind.

Philip, sensing or perhaps reading my curiosity, pulled the car over to the side of the road. As I watched him, he pulled back his upper lip in something of a snarl, an expression that did nothing for his good looks. His two upper canines were longer than normal in any human being I’d ever encountered and pointed at the ends. He used his tongue to touch the tips, which were not really sharp, but more along the lines of a large dog’s front teeth. They were pointed enough to break skin though certainly not razor sharp.

“Neat,” I said.

“You think that’s something,” he said, “you should see Jonas.”

I smiled. “Guess I will, soon enough.” I paused, then said, “And you can read minds.”

“Yes,” Philip said. “I can read your immediate thoughts. Nothing more. I can block, but that’s a trick taught to me by one of our former residents, Sally, who died about a year ago. So you’ll be our resident mind reader.”

“Guess so,” I muttered.

“That’s everyone at home. And then there’s you,” he said as he pulled the Beetle back onto the road. We were deep into desert territory now, and all I could see were Joshua trees and scrub brush. And dirt. Lotsa dirt….

“Then there’s me,” I said, shaking my head and knowing I was getting very good at repeating.

“You read minds,” he said a bit absently.

“Yes,” I said. “Perfectly.”

“And you can break down my barriers.”

“Yes,” I admitted, though that was no secret.

“The members of the Commune won’t be offended if you read them, however I recommend getting to know them before you do so in depth. Their all pretty open and honest, but you’re new—”

I stopped him. “I know. They don’t know me, and I don’t know them. I’ll respect them. As long as they respect me.”

“They will.”

“I mean no questions,” I said firmly.

He glanced over at me then returned his attention to the road again. “What are you afraid they’ll find?”

“I’m not afraid of what they’ll find,” I said, “but about who will find me.”

“Chris,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Christiana,” he corrected. “You spent three years in a coma. A coma during which your only visitor was myself. If anyone was going to come and find you, they would have done so. They knew where you were. They left you alone. They probably thought you were as good as dead.”

Philip was right, and I knew it. If they, meaning the gov and Holt’s operatives, the inevitable Men in Black, wanted me, they could have me. I probably was as good as dead. I probably should have died on impact. However, being me, I survived. I was left for dead on the side of the road, left for dead in a hospital room, and I was left alone for over three years. Nobody now knew where I was going.

While these thoughts ran through my head, the logic of it all became clear. A comatose healer was useless. A comatose mind reader was useless. The most they could do was open up my head and see what dwelled inside, but that wouldn’t tell them how it worked. Michael Daniels was pretty protective of me. Very few people were able to enter my room without his permission. He guarded me well without ever really guarding me. I began to feel somewhat safe. For the very first time in my life, I felt safe.

Chapter Eight

I put my head against the window and closed my eyes as we drove on through the desert. My head still ached but the pain was subsiding gradually. I felt the desert breeze brushing through my hair, blowing through the partially open window. There was the smell of water on the wind, and I smelled the freshness of the desert. I have a highly sensitive nose, so much so I could smell the dirt if I tried hard enough.

I opened my eyes when I felt the car leave the asphalt and hit gravel. A street sign flashed by and Cima Road would be forever engraved upon my mind. I watched as we drove down a long, empty stretch of dirt road. The world passed by, and the highway disappeared as we rounded a corner and went behind some large hills. We drove at least ten miles off the highway, a trip that took about an hour, avoiding many a pothole, before the house began to loom up ahead. We crested a hill, and there it was, the Commune, sitting off to the side of the poor excuse for a road. What else could it be in the vast emptiness of the desert?

Fashioned after many an old farmhouse, there was a wrap-around porch with carved railings and posts. A small garden growing off to one side had what looked like tomatoes and herbs sprouting in it, though I could not fathom how anyone got those things to grow in a desert. The door and porch railings were painted a clean white while the rest of the place was cream-colored stucco. The color of the stucco was just such it made the building kind of blended into the desert beyond.

I loved it from the first moment I saw it.

Two cars sat parked outside the building; a beat up Mazda four-door and a white pickup truck. The truck’s hood was up and someone was messing about beneath it. Philip pulled his bug up beside the truck and put it in park.

“That would be Jonas,” he said, nodding his head towards the man beneath the truck’s hood.

He got out first, and I found myself hesitating, as I remembered Philip’s description of Jonas. Philip appeared in my line of sight and opened the door. I took his offered hand and got out of the car. Philip went around the front to get my one and only bag from the trunk, which is actually at the front of the car, if you don’t know Beetles. The man under the hood of the truck straightened as Philip said hello to him.

Philip gestured to me, and I went to his side for my first introduction. “Jonas, this is Christiana.”

Jonas looked exactly as Philip described him. He held out a hand to me that I took tentatively. His fingernails were pointed, yet he shook my hand gently, well aware of his nails. When he took back his hand, he reached into his back pocket and produced a red cloth, which he handed to me. I looked down at my hands to see a streak of black oil on the back of the right one then took the cloth.

“Sorry,” Jonas said, taking back his towel so he could wipe his own hands. Then he tucked the cloth back into his pocket. “We’re all really glad you could come and join us out here in the middle of nowhere.”

I smiled at his joking tone of voice.

Jonas was five foot eight, about two hundred and so
me pounds of muscle and looked down at me with the most beautiful amber colored eyes I’d ever seen (and I’ll go on and on about those eyes, I’m sure, so be ready for it). It was like looking into two pools of molten lava, white hot and yellow. Yet his eyes were gentle and kind, unlike his teeth, which were filed down to points just like his fingernails. When he smiled, I took a step back.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t bite. Now Philip however….”

Philip only rolled his eyes when I looked his way.

Back to Jonas. His skin was covered in small, soft scales. I felt them when I shook his hand. It felt, to me, like the underbelly of a lizard. Scales covered his entire body, from head to toe. He had no hair anywhere, except for a layer of peach fuzz on top of his head. No eyebrows to speak of, but the ridges above his eyes were more prominent. I’d seen people like him on television, people who altered themselves to look this way. Jonas was real in every sense of the word, a human lizard, and I liked him right away.

“Where is everyone?” Philip asked, shaking me out of the daze I entered upon examining Jonas.

“Inside,” the lizard man said. “Alendra, anyway. The twins are in the shed. Everyone else is out. Except me, of course.”

Philip rolled his eyes once more. “Would you mind showing Christiana to her room?”

“Sure thing,” Jonas said. “Come on, Chris.”

When he held out his hand to me, I only said, “Don’t call me Chris,” through my teeth. I didn’t take his hand, but he grinned and motioned for me to follow.

“Phil, Allie’s in the kitchen,” he told Philip, and I suddenly knew I probably couldn’t keep this guy from calling me Chris if his life suddenly depended upon it. Not that it would, but still….

I followed Jonas inside the house, Philip walking behind us. He pushed past Jonas as Jonas stopped in the living room and the so-called vampire headed for the kitchen, leaving me alone with the lizard man.

“This way,” Jonas said, moving off down the hallway.

I took a quick look around the living room before trotting to catch him. The living room was typical and quaint. It had an ‘L’ shaped sofa wrapping half way around the small room. There was a coffee table made of faded, dark wood with coasters stacked on it. I took notice of the water rings on the coffee table before turning back around to the task at hand, which was finding my bedroom. What did they need coasters for if they didn’t use them?

“We all have our own rooms,” Jonas was saying. “Not that anyone would mind sharing, but there aren’t many of us here right now. Phil says you’re a mind reader, and a good one at that.”

“Yes,” I said as I glanced in open doors and wondered about closed ones.

When Jonas stopped before the last door on the right, I nearly collided with him as I looked at a picture on the wall of Sir Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June.” I’d always liked that painting, and it caught my eye and nearly caused me to crash into the huge man before me.

“Sorry,” I said quickly as I skidded to a stop.

Jonas only smiled, not showing his teeth. “This one’s yours.” He opened the door and stepped aside to let me in.

The room was simple. There was a bed with light blue linens. The nightstand was mahogany, and there was a chest of drawers to match. The closet doors stood open, and I saw clothes hanging inside.

I instantly dropped my bag and went to the closet. I am a girl, after all. I rifled through the clothing, surprised to discover shirts and jeans of all the right sizes. “How’d you guys guess my size?”

“Ah,” said Jonas, “that would be Allie. Alendra. Phil described you, and Alendra went shopping. She’s good at that kind of stuff.”

“She must be,” I said quietly, already wondering about the lycanthrope who now sat in the kitchen.

“Come on. I’ll introduce you then show you the rest of the grounds.”

“Okay,” I said. This time, when he held out his scaled, clawed hand to me, I took it.

His grip was light and gentle. He knew he had deadly looking nails on the ends of his fingers, and he was careful about that. I ran my forefinger over the top of his hand to better feel his scales. When I went against the grain of those scales, they bit into my skin. They were hard if you went the wrong way, but still soft when rubbing the right way. Does that sound dirty to you, ’cause it does to me?

Anyway, Jonas led me to the kitchen. Alendra— I could only assume it was her because she was the only one in the room—was seated at the round kitchen table with a white coffee mug sitting before her. She stared at the steam rising from the mug and only looked up when Jonas cleared his throat.

“Hi,” she said. She slowly rose from the table, every movement one of grace. “You must be Christiana.” She held out a hand to me.

I dislodged my hand from Jonas’s in order to shake hers. Alendra’s grip was solid, and my skin seemed to tingle when she released me. “Hi,” I said after a moment.

You see, Alendra left me momentarily speechless.

To say Alendra was beautiful is a complete understatement. Alendra was a goddess on earth. She had silver-colored hair streaked with tints of gold and amber that hung in waves all the way down to her waist. Her face was perfectly symmetrical. Well, her face was all around perfect. Her grey eyes were nearly colorless and had pupils so dark they seemed bottomless. She towered over me at five foot eleven, just like Jonas did, yet she was slim and had the greatest hour glass shape. The jeans she wore hugged her body. Her shirt did nothing less. She was striking, to say the absolute least.

Alendra waited until I finished looking to say, “We’re glad to have you here. I hope you’ll like it. The Commune is home to all of us, and we welcome you.”

It was a planned speech. I knew simply by the cadence of her words. Alendra intimidated me and she hated me, knowledge easily acquired by just a quick glance into her mind. She didn’t trust me. That’s why she hated me. When I stepped away from her to follow my tour guide again, I gave Alendra my best smile as she sat back down to her coffee mug. I vowed I would try really hard to make her like me, but I doubted I would ever be able to do so.

Back to Jonas.

He took me outside and the hot desert air hit me like a fist. I hadn’t really noticed, or maybe didn’t care about the AC running in the house. I took a harsh breath and knew I’d need to get used to this. I now lived in the desert, and this was what life in the desert was like. In time I’d come to love the desert more than any setting I would ever come across.

Jonas held out his hand to me again and quite literally dragged me out onto the desert floor. Off to the one side of the house, I noticed a wooden shed. It was to said wooden shed he took me now.

“How come it’s so far from the house?” I asked, knowing, from Philip’s descriptions, this was the so-called ”lab” of Humbolt and Hermione, the bovine twins.