Whispers on the Wind (11 page)

She didn’t answer, but half turned back, watching him warily.

“My
Kahinya
also guides me through difficulties,” he went on. “It keeps me as safe as it can. It is my pathfinder through danger, seeking shelter for me when I am injured or ill and unable to find it for myself. It helps me heal myself.

“Though this is my first visit here, I am not entirely unfamiliar with Earth,” he went on. “But I do know that you of this world do not have
Kahinyas
in which to store your
Aleeas
.” He smiled. “Would you like me to help you create one as a reward for assisting me, for coming to me when I called you?”

She shook her head rapidly. “You did not call me! I had a dream, maybe, one so compelling I acted like a fool and hiked up the mountain in the night. I knew of this cave, so of course that’s where I came when the weather became threatening. That I found you here was pure luck. Your luck, buddy, not mine.”

“I would be pleased to teach you to create your own
Kahinya
,” he said, completely ignoring her diatribe. “But to do so, I would need to enter into your earliest memories. I could not, of course, recover them all, but many of them will still be present.”

Lenore wanted to scream and rail against his quiet assurance that he could do what he said. It was insane! As if one of those golden beads that looked more like light than anything of substance could possibly hold that image she had seen of the tropical garden he now claimed belonged to his grandparents.

The bead she’d touched, though, had been warm, almost alive, and had given off a palpable but pleasant current.

“What possible need would I have of a
Kahinya
?” she demanded in frustration. As she repeated the three syllables again they fell short of sounding as liquidly musical as when he spoke them, but she thought, oddly pleased despite her failure, she was improving. He didn’t comment, but his smile told her he appreciated her attempt.

“To access your memories,” he said.

“I have access to all the memories I want,” she assured him loftily. “Anything I have forgotten, I’ve likely done so because remembering it would not be beneficial to my mental health.”

Hell! Talking with him was not beneficial to her mental health, which had been precarious enough for her to have conjured him up.

“Your mental health is excellent,” he said as if he were positive. “You concern yourself for no reason. Seeing me, hearing me, doing as I asked you to, is not evidence of madness, merely evidence of your being receptive to my needs. Even before I came, I believe you must have had some knowledge, whether you are aware of it or not, of me and my kind.”

“I have knowledge of numbers, of facts, of reality,” she insisted. “But certainly no knowledge of voices that whisper on the night winds and disturb my dreams.” Even to her, the denial sounded as hollow as it was.

“You must have,” he said, “or your talents would not be so well-honed. You may be developing a latent talent. I have been told that such exist on Earth, though rarely. Your race is not as evolved as some, but it’s happening. Slowly, as most evolutionary changes do. You could be a harbinger of things to come. But without entering your mind, which I will not do again without your permission, I cannot tell. I know only that your mind is receptive to that of an—”

She didn’t understand the word. “A what?”

“Ah-zone-ee,” he said slowly. “I am from Aazonia.” When he repeated it in normal-time, it emerged as mellifluous and rhythmic as the word
Aleea-Kahinya
, she thought, like the name of a Southwest native tribe or a Polynesian group, though he didn’t look either—except for that bronze skin.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, he hadn’t said “Aazonia.” He’d said “Estonia.” His accent was strange. But did it sound...Russian? No. But...Maybe people from Estonia didn’t speak Russian. “Estonia’s near Russia, isn’t it?”

Jon sat watching her solemnly, his much-less-swollen leg still hanging over the edge, her sleeping bag piled on his lap. He looked strangely vague for several seconds before he nodded and said, “Yes. Estonia is near Russia.”

She stood and kicked the toe of one hiking boot against a chunk that had rolled out of the fire and watched curls of smoke rise and dissipate as twig ends caught the heat and ignited. “I’ve heard that Russian scientists have been doing some sophisticated experiments with mind-control.” Let’s see how he reacted to that.

He said nothing, but continued to watch her. She took several steps toward the entrance to the cave. If she ducked and scrambled out, could he catch her? Could he force her, through imposing his will on hers, to stay? Had he truly, in that way, compelled her to come to him? If so, why? Were the Russians, or Estonians, or the Latvians for that matter, any kind of threat to her way of life? No. Not after all these years of relative peace. But why else was he sitting there naked, other than to prevent his place of origin being traced through his clothing? Surely, though, if his people were advanced enough to have perfected ESP, they’d have been able to fabricate a suit of supposedly local clothing and proper identification for their agent.

Oh, damn! She’d obviously read too many international espionage novels from the old books Grandma and Grandpa Francis had left behind.

She paced, stopped, one hand on the rock face, trying not to let him know how hard she was shaking. “Did you—” She swallowed hard. “Did you really compel me come to the cave to help you? Did you get into my head somehow and make me want to come to you?”

He looked faintly wary she thought. “Yes. I did do that.”

“Why?” Again, all she could manage was a taut little whisper.

“Because I needed help. My strength was all but gone. I was near death and you were my best resource. Without water, without food, I was unsure I could even begin to heal myself, even with the assistance of my
Kahinya
. But I did not ‘force’ you to come. I offered you what you needed in return for what I needed.”

“What I needed?” Lenore reeled away another step or two, remembering what he had offered her, remembering how willing she had been to accept it from him. “How could you possibly know what I need?”

“It was all there. It was easy for me to see. And easy for me to allow you to see it. I thought you would be happy. I truly did not know it would cause you pain, my opening your inner spirit to your conscious mind. And I did need you to come to me. But I would never expect you to give me what I require without offering you something of value to you in return. It is not the Aazoni way.”

“Aazoni.” All right. She gave in. He had said ‘Aazoni’, not ‘Estoni.’ She knew that. Her head spun. Dry air and open-mouthed breathing sucked moisture from her throat, leaving her scarcely able to swallow. She looked at him, sitting there so calm, so serene, so...oblivious, or maybe simply uncaring, of the violation he had perpetrated on her, that fury erupted through her body, boiled up, and spewed out as powerful and as sudden and as violent as last night’s storm.

“Y
OU ARROGANT, INHUMAN SON-OF-A-BITCH!”
she said. “You got into my mind! You dipped into my private, most secret places! You intruded where you had no right to intrude! You used me, used my deepest emotions, my most basic human needs and pretended to offer me all I had ever wanted, simply so I’d bring you a drink of water?

“All right, you bastard! I’m getting out of here right this minute! One of us is crazy, and I prefer it not to be me. It shouldn’t be hard for the FBI to locate a Greek god in his birthday suit, so good luck, sucker, I’m turning you in!”

She dove for her pack, intending not to leave him so much as a crumb of comfort. If he’d gotten himself here in the nude, he could get himself out in the nude. He could teleport himself right back to Estonia for all of her, but she wasn’t assisting him in whatever his purpose was, being here. She snatched her sleeping bag off him.

“Lenore.”

His voice, soft, mellow, stopped her as she tried to stuff the bag into its case, from which she had shaken free her spare sweatshirt. She refused to meet his gaze. If he could do all the other things she suspected him of, could he also kill with a glance?

“You are right. I can be arrogant. I am guilty of using your needs to draw you to me. You are also right to call me inhuman. But one point,” he said, and now she lifted her head, looking up at him. “You are wrong on one point.” He stepped off the ledge, took his weight gingerly on his broken leg with its crooked foot, then took another limping step. He was very close to her. Very tall. Very broad. And very, very naked. She was not a short woman. Had always considered herself ungainly. But now...she forced her gaze upward to meet his.

“I was not,” he said, so softly she had to strain to hear him, “pretending. No Aazoni can pretend to feelings such as those of mine I shared with you, while you shared yours with me. Whatever happens from this moment on, I wish you to know my feelings were genuine. As genuine as yours.”

Something in his eyes spoke to her with as much eloquence as his words—possibly more, and told her he spoke the truth, a truth, in his lights. At least about that. She could see he believed what he said. Her anger collapsed as swiftly as it had risen.

“All right, ‘Aazoni,’ where do you come from, then?” she said, fighting to maintain her equilibrium, to prevent his knowing how desperately she wanted to know everything about him. She tried to inject deep suspicion, extreme doubt, into her tone. “Where is this ‘Aazonia’ of yours?” All she managed was frightened sarcasm.

“A time and space not...here. Not...now.”

She reared back. “Hold on! Are you seriously telling me now you’re an alien? From another planet? Or another time? Another dimension, maybe? I don’t believe you.”

“You do, Lenore,” he said, his tone gently chiding, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. “But it frightens you to believe it, so you deny it. You cannot deny, though, that when I called you, you responded.”

“I...” She shook her head in confusion. Oh, brother! Had she ever responded! It should have made her blush to remember, but it didn’t. It only made her ache again with the kind of longing that just wouldn’t go away. She backed away from him and his hands fell to his sides.

“I was weak, near death,” he said, “after my Octad broke apart. In those extremes, yours was the spark of warmth that drew me. I was trying to reach you, but I could not complete the translation to your exact location. The best I could do was bring you to me when I fell short and was injured, unable to translate again.”

Her head careened with the effort of trying to understand, trying to accept the unacceptable, believe the unbelievable. He was tiring visibly now, and returned to the shelf of rock where he lay back without his makeshift pillow, which now lay at her feet along with her sleeping bag. “I had need of your strength. I called you and you came.”

“Close, but no cigar,” she muttered. “You kept backing out on me just before the crucial moment.” He only gazed at her quizzically as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what she was getting at. Okay, so he probably didn’t. “Come” had several meanings, and he might not be familiar with the idiom as she used it. That he didn’t pick up on it and smirk told her better than anything that he probably was as good as his word about not poking his mental feelers into her mind. And possibly even alien...A human male of his apparent age, unless he were a particularly sheltered priest, would surely have picked up on her innuendo at once.

“Now,” he continued, “thanks to you, I can hold my corporeal form with less trouble, and can heal myself and provide warmth and light for us both.”

She gazed at him from near the front of the cave, aware again of the glow filling the space, light that appeared to have no source. The warmth—why hadn’t she realized before?—could not possibly be produced by her now nearly burned-down campfire. Despite the balmy temperature, chills trickled over her skin.

“You’re dreaming again, Lenore,” she said.

“You liked the dreaming.” He smiled. “I gave you pleasures, did I not?”

“Pleasures!” She’d die before admitting that. “Frustrations, maybe, fears, horrors and heebie-jeebies, but not pleasures!” Her denial held as much substance as his body had an hour before.

“It might not be the best choice of word, but you have forbidden me to share your thoughts. I must therefore take my words from...others.”

She felt dizzy. She felt sick to her stomach. Had he been sharing his phantom visits with her around the community, asking what he should call her responses? Had all of Rocky Point been made privy to her erotic dreams? Would they all gawk at her when she next showed up in the community? Would Nancy Worth sell the story to one of her favorite tabs? Lenore could just see the lurid headline flashing across the screen of her reader: Accountant Has Close Encounter. Stupendous sex with alien in mountain retreat.

“What...others?” she asked, her voice a raspy croaking sound. “What others?

“There are not many, and the two I can best access are...weak...distant and scarcely receptive. Like most humans, they lack your...special gifts. But they would have sufficed, had you not come to me. One wants gold. With the promise of that, I would have brought him to me.” His brow wrinkled. “Why would he want gold?”

“Gold means wealth.”

“But he has great wealth already. He has lands, family, friends.”

“You said two. What does the other want?”

“Escape. Escape from...boredom. I do not fully understand this ‘boredom,’ but she does not like it. She craves adventure.”

“And these other two. If I hadn’t come to you, would you have given the man gold, given the woman adventure?” The thought of the ‘adventure’ he could provide for the other woman gave her a momentary, powerful stab of gladness she had complied with his compulsion. Then she quickly reminded herself he did not belong to her. And that jealousy was a useless emotion.

“I would have, yes. But first, I would have tried to make each of them see that what they already have is probably better for them than what they secretly desire.”

Lenore stared at him, wondering if he would soon begin trying to persuade her that her secret desires were not what were best for her. As if she didn’t already know that! The idea of a woman her age yearning for a child to raise on her own was ludicrous. She knew that without his having to tell her.