Storm of Visions (16 page)
Authors: Christina Dodd
Tags: #Good and evil, #Secret societies, #Paranormal, #General, #Romance, #Psychic ability, #Twins, #Occult fiction, #Supernatural, #Fiction, #Love Stories
Where had the frivolous, worldly Zusane learned to care for a baby?
She told him she intended to keep the abandoned infant as her own, that her name was Jacqueline Lee, and uncurled the little hand to show him, for the first time, the distinctive mark of the eye.
She told him the baby would need to be protected from people who would do her harm, and that when he grew up, he could be Jacqueline’s bodyguard.
Zusane had never kept her promise. Until today.
Oh. And one other time ...
Chapter 16
Winter, two years ago
C
aleb woke with a start. It was still early, just past ten. The warm Bermuda night sang with the wash of waves on the beach and the breeze in the palms. The full moon shone through his window, and the island scents were rich with flowers and sea spray.
aleb woke with a start. It was still early, just past ten. The warm Bermuda night sang with the wash of waves on the beach and the breeze in the palms. The full moon shone through his window, and the island scents were rich with flowers and sea spray.
Yet something was wrong.
He heard it again, the noise that had brought him out of his first hour of sound sleep—the creak of a floorboard on the lanai.
Pistol at the ready, he was out of the bed in a flash. Clad in his shorts, he opened the door of his bungalow.
Zusane stood there, swaying gracelessly, clutching a bathrobe around her chest.
Caleb had seen the signs before—the unfocused eyes, the strain in her husky voice, the jerky lack of coordination.
She’d had a vision.
Reaching out, he yanked her into his room and shut the door. Hands on her shoulders, he sat her in a chair and poured her a brandy. Shoving it in Zusane’s hand, he knelt before her. “What is it? What did you see?” Because if she had managed to fight her way through the post-vision exhaustion and come to him, it must be dire.
“I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but Jacqueline is in danger.”
He came to his feet, flicked on the light by his bed, put a call through to Jacqueline’s cell phone. It went right to voice mail. But ever since Jacqueline had gone to college, she had seldom answered calls from her mother and never from him. Not that he’d tried too often, but Zusane occasionally showed her maternal feelings and wanted to check up on her daughter.
He knew the truth, although he never told Zusane. Zusane embarrassed Jacqueline. Jacqueline desperately wanted to be ordinary, and Zusane was too flamboyant for ordinary.
Gathering his black T-shirt, black jeans, and bulletproof vest, he headed into the bathroom. He dressed, shaved, and was back out in five minutes.
Zusane looked better, not as pale, but still drawn with worry. “I’ve arranged for Peter’s corporate jet to take you to Nashville.”
“Right.” Jacqueline was a freshman at Vanderbilt University.
“I would go with you, but Peter wouldn’t understand.”
Caleb wrapped his holster around his chest, checked to make sure his pistol was clean and loaded, and slid it inside.
“If it weren’t my honeymoon, I would be there for the child.”
Caleb hated Zusane’s honeymoons. They were boring as hell and embarrassing to watch, and knowing how the marriage would end, he always felt a bit of pity for the guys she married. They were invariably rich, powerful men, the kind who were used to making the decisions and walking away from the relationships.
Not with Zusane.
But the grooms didn’t want to hear that. They were always desperately in love, enthralled by whatever acrobatic feats Zusane performed in bed, and they didn’t realize that she rather despised the men she captured with such transparent arts. For Zusane, marriage was the beginning of the end.
“Is this danger deadly?” Caleb asked.
“Not yet. But it could be.” Zusane clutched the brandy glass in both shaking hands.
“Then you should go to identify the body,” he said. It was cruel, but he wanted to shake her out of her self-absorption. Just once, she needed to put her daughter first.
“Don’t be silly!” Zusane’s voice grew shrill and petulant. “I’m sending you, my best bodyguard. You’ll find her. You’ll save her. I mean, what else would she want? She always liked you better than she liked me, anyway.”
With that, Caleb tuned her out. Put one knife up his sleeve and one in his boot. Grabbed his LED flashlight and mini-GPS locator. Leaned down and kissed Zusane on the forehead, and said, “I’ll do what I can.”
He left Zusane rambling on, justifying her neglect to an audience of no one.
With the two-hour time change, it was eleven when he landed in Nashville to find some friend of Peter’s had a car waiting for him.
Caleb reached the campus in fifteen minutes. Vanderbilt University was steeped in night, quiet . . . tense. Something stalked at the edges of his consciousness.
He could hear fear on the prowl.
So he moved as he’d been trained, silently and always on the alert.
He went to Jacqueline’s dorm first, checked in with her roommate, and discovered Jacqueline had been dating Wyatt King, one of the premier frat boys from a respectable family in Buffalo, New York. Her roommate hadn’t seen Jacqueline all afternoon, hadn’t heard a word from her at all—and it was now eleven fifteen p.m. She said she wasn’t worried, but as she talked to him, she bit her fingernails down to the quick. The girl knew something, but he couldn’t shake the truth out of her. As far as she was concerned, she was covering for her friend.
So he went out hunting.
First, he checked at Wyatt’s frat house. The guys said they weren’t concerned, either . . . except they were.
One of them, Richie Haynes, followed Caleb out to the parking lot and told him that, with the downturn, Wyatt had lately had money problems, and he’d been acting strangely. Sort of exuberant, sort of ashamed, and considering how hot Jacqueline Vargha was, he hadn’t been bragging much. In fact, he’d kind of been pretending he wasn’t dating her.
When Caleb pinned Richie to the wall and threatened to choke him to death, the guy admitted Wyatt had tried to get him involved in a hinky plot to kidnap this girl with the weird eye tattoo in the palm of her hand, and sell her to white slavers. When Caleb choked him a little more, Richie recalled it hadn’t been white slavers, but some spooky guys who sounded like Satanists or something. After that, the dam burst and he babbled freely, telling Caleb that Wyatt had taken the chick into the country to a local sinkhole to deliver the girl and pick up his fee, and before Richie knew it, he was in Caleb’s car, giving directions to the sinkhole.
Caleb didn’t bother with stealth. It was far too late for that. With his brights on full blast, he drove up the pitted gravel road at seventy miles an hour, ignoring Richie’s warnings as he leaped potholes and left a choking cloud of dust behind him. The sinkhole opened right under his tires, and he slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways. Before Richie had even finished screaming, Caleb was out of the car with his pistol drawn. A quick survey with the flashlight located two cars parked off the edge of the road in the trees, and a path leading down into the sinkhole. Yelling for Jacqueline, Caleb ran down the path, sliding past rusting fenders and ruined sofas, through mounds of garbage left by people too cheap or lazy to take it to the dump.
She didn’t return his calls; she was unconscious or gagged or . . . or they’d already taken her somewhere else.
He refused to think he’d been too late.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of movement. He leaped up onto a battered dryer, grabbed a length of kudzu vine, and swung out over the sinkhole and around behind his attacker. The guy had some kind of power that could have knocked Caleb cold, but his focus was forward; all Caleb had to do was kick him between the shoulder blades and the guy went over the edge and into the abyss.
After that it was easy. The people Richie called the Satanists were some discombobulated branch of the Others, and once their muscle was out of the way, they ran like hell for the rim of the sinkhole. That left the sniveling Wyatt standing on a ledge, the earth crumbling around him. He held the unconscious Jacqueline as a shield, a kitchen knife at her throat, and in a trembling voice, he yelled, “Come close and I’ll kill her.”
The full moon was rising, slipping through the trees, groping toward the bottom of the sinkhole twenty feet below. The light gave the scene an unearthly cast, and Caleb saw Jacqueline, limp, drugged, gagged, and tied hand and foot.
He wanted to rip that little shit Wyatt from stem to stern.
He knew that the boy clearly saw him slip his pistol into the holster at his side and flex his hands. “Give her to me and I won’t kill you.”
Wyatt was a stupid, privileged kid who had never faced an adversary in his whole life. Caleb watched the parade of expressions across his face. He was frightened, defiant, angry, frightened again, and finally, like a spoiled little kid, determined to get his own way.
“Let me make myself clear.” Caleb spoke softly, but his fists clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened. “If you kill her, if you hurt her in any way, if she slips from your grasp and falls and needs a bandage on her skinned knee, I will spend the next three hours making you pray for mercy as your blood slowly drains into the dirt, and when I’m done, you’ll be alive. You’ll wish you weren’t . . . but you’ll have no way to scream in pain. No way to end your own life. No way to even wipe your skinny white ass.”
Wyatt may have gotten into Vanderbilt because his father was a paying alumnus, but he wasn’t a total moron. Keeping his gaze fixed on Caleb, he let Jacqueline’s limp form slowly slide to the ground.
And as soon as she was free of his grip, she came to life and kicked Wyatt’s feet out from underneath him.
He toppled over the edge and screamed all the way down.
Chapter 17
One week later
C
aleb threw Jacqueline to the mat again.
aleb threw Jacqueline to the mat again.
She lay there, panting, exhausted, her white karate gi soaked in sweat.
“Get up,” he said. “You’re not done yet.”
He’d been training her for seven days, teaching her to fall, to kick, to break a man’s nose and rip off his testicles. She knew a thousand percent more than she’d known before, but still she didn’t know enough.
She staggered to her feet. “I’m tired.”
“Oh, please. You slept until eight this morning.” He glanced at the sun slanting into the gym at Zusane’s Connecticut home. “It’s barely three.”
“I’m hungry. I’m tired. I’m quitting.” Jacqueline stood with her hands on her hips, her elbows akimbo. “For once, just be satisfied with what I’ve done.”
He was never going to be satisfied. Not as long as the memory of Jacqueline’s bound, gagged body remained in his mind. He’d untied her, removed her gag, and carried her to the car while she lolled in his arms, passing in and out of consciousness. At the top, he’d called an ambulance and the cops. She’d gone to the hospital to have her stomach pumped of an almost lethal combination of alcohol and Valium. Wyatt had gone to jail for as long as it took his father’s team of lawyers to get him released.
But Caleb didn’t tell Jacqueline that. She was so mad—at herself for being a willing dupe, at Wyatt for being a slime bucket—that she focused on the fighting to the exclusion of all else.
Only now . . . she had a funny look on her face. He’d seen that look before, right before his mother started sobbing from sadness or loneliness or memories that weighed too much for her fragile shoulders to bear.
Yeah. Caleb was afraid Jacqueline might have other issues he was ill equipped to deal with, but for now, he knew what to do. Beat her down again and again. Break her. And lift her back into the confident girl she’d been when she had left for college.
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