LITMIR.BIZ

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stretch, Teo silently pushed to his feet and, after a moment’s hesitation and a slight sway to the right, turned as though to leave. For a dismaying moment Melanie thought he would disappear without a word, and wondered if perhaps the man was like an idiot savant, capable of incredible feats but not “fully there.” The PRI files hadn’t indicated anything like that, and yet the scientists had deemed him a barbarian. Her mind hotly denied the idiot savant possibility, and without conscious decision, she called out in protest.

      “Teo!”

      He stopped as if shot, and turned back to look down at her. Though she felt none of that soul-shattering connection that had gripped her earlier, she was all too aware of an inordinant amount of relief at the look of wariness, of cold intelligence, in his eyes. She found herself holding her breath.

      “Who are you?” he asked. His voice was still rough and scratchy. And this, too, inexplicably served to ease her confused mind. He wasn’t wholly recovered, and therefore had to be human, after all. His eyes darkened as he waited for her answer.

      She told him her name and he nodded slowly, as if he had expected her to say Melanie Daniels.

      Pablo muttered something, but trailed off when Teo turned his silver-blue gaze in his direction. The attendant shrugged and looked away uncomfortably, shoving his hands into his pockets.

      Teo’s eyes were narrowed as he switched his gaze back to her. “How do you know my name?”

      Melanie could see a wealth of wariness on his face and noted that his entire frame seemed a testimonial to that tension. She knew, by his question, that her earlier suspicions that he didn’t wish to be found were accurate. Teo Sandoval. The one man who could possibly help her son. This was him. Until this moment she hadn’t let herself truly believe it. But it was true. She’d found him. He had to help her, but instinctively she knew she would have to tread very carefully.

      He was still waiting for an answer to his terse question. Melanie drew a shallow breath. Was he telepathic, as well? Her mind was closed to him, certainly—she had been able to close it at will since childhood, even though it opened alarmingly easily in sleep—so he couldn’t be reading her thoughts. But was it possible that he could read deeper than mere surface thoughts, perhaps pluck the truth from her subconscious?

      “I—I heard about you. I read about you in the f-files at the Psionic Research Institute.”

      If she’d expected him to look shocked or even recoil in some exaggerated rendition of horror, she would have been disappointed; he did neither. He merely stared at her with the cold flat expression she was coming to associate with him.

      “I need your help,” she said finally.

      Something flickered in his eyes at that, but his facial features didn’t shift an iota.

      “My son…he…”

      “I help no one,” Teo rasped.

      “But…the mechanic?”

      Teo waved a hand dismissively, but didn’t try to correct his obvious falsehood or to explain away the contradiction.

      “Please…” she murmured, staring up at him, blinking away the sudden sting in her eyes. “You have to help me.” She wasn’t surprised that her voice sounded as hoarse as his.

      “No.”

      “I can pay. I’ll pay you anything,” she said, knowing even as she said it that it wouldn’t help, wouldn’t matter. The amount of money he’d gained control of years ago, money in an account established by the PRI, was enough for anyone’s needs. More than that, however, was the fact that anyone able to survive in the wilds of the New Mexico mountains—alone—for so long couldn’t have much interest in material objects.

      Something flickered in his gaze. “If you know what’s good for you, señora, you’ll leave now. Women don’t travel alone in these mountains,” he said softly, his tone far from kindly.

      “Please…I’ll pay anything,” she repeated desperately, hoping the words could be heard over the painful pounding of her heart. She tried pushing to her feet, but her hands only slid in the mud and she merely scooted forward an inch or two.

      “Señora,” he said, a dangerous light now in his eyes. “Your money means nothing to me.”

      The silence left in the wake of his words was torn by the shrill pulse of the sirens’ screams. Melanie jumped and automatically turned to watch the arrival of a brown Bronco bearing a sheriff’s silver star on the side panel. It whipped into the muddy gas station lanes. Not twenty yards behind the Bronco was a large, white ambulance with red lights whirling angrily in the gathering afternoon dusk.

      She turned back and was too late: Teo Sandoval—El Rayo—was gone, having disappeared as thoroughly as if he’d never been there. She frantically sought his solid figure among the shadows of the surrounding forest, but saw nothing save pine boughs, sodden scrub oak and dark, dark shimmers of raindrops winking at her as though in amusement.

      The unmistakable sound of tires losing their grip in mud called her attention and she turned just in time to see the sheriff’s mud-spattered unit spin across the gas station driveway. By yet another miracle on this peculiar day, the unit avoided slamming into anything, but did serve as a sharp reminder that she’d left her son alone in the car. With a single backward glance toward the seemingly empty woods, she awkwardly pushed to her feet and made her way to Chris.

      In the pandemonium that reigned upon the sheriff’s arrival, and the ambulance driver’s frantic attempt to avoid collision with the sheriff’s Bronco, Melanie realized that Teo Sandoval had been allowed to fade from sight. Amid the explanations of why the sheriff had been called—a call Pablo now said apologetically had proved unnecessary—Melanie noticed that no one mentioned El Rayo. It was as if he didn’t exist.

      She listened to all the explanations and the carefully worded evasions, and with one eye on Chris—who, thankfully, was now asleep and therefore unable to maintain his dancing game—searched the woods across the road for any sign of the most powerful telekinetic on record.

      She wouldn’t betray El Rayo by asking the voluble townspeople about him in front of the sheriff, but she intended to stay where she was until she could ask where the healer had gone. She also preferred to be the one to approach the villagers rather than have any of them get close enough to the car that they might wake Chris and witness his amazing bag of tricks.

      Wiping as much mud as possible from her clothing and hands, she waited quietly until the furor had lessened somewhat. Then, with one last reassuring glance at her son, she walked around the building.

      Despite the gathering darkness, the evening shadows, Teo could see the woman clearly. He watched her round the corner and rejoin the fringe of the group surrounding Demo. She was covered in mud and her hair was sodden from the rain. But there was nothing amusing about her. Nothing at all.

      His gaze remained on her, and he willed her to look his way, to find him in the shadows. He’d seen her looking before, trying, squinting her remarkable eyes against the mist, questing for him. Though he’d felt the shock of her gaze sweeping the branches beside him, around him, seemingly right at him, she hadn’t spotted him, had stared through him as though he were invisible. Her gaze had merely traveled on, taking in the oak, the red and shriveled leaves, the wet shadows surrounding him.

      Why couldn’t he read her? Why couldn’t he hear this woman’s thoughts, feel her wants, needs, and the thousand other confused little memories, impressions and dreams that seemed to bombard him from everyone else in the world?

      Without even trying, he could “hear” everyone standing around Pablo’s gas station. Demo was filled with pride over being the object of everyone’s attention. Tempering that pride was a heavy dose of relief, not that he had survived the car falling on him, but that he had lived through El Rayo’s touch of lightning. Doro, his wife, was thinking of the pot of frijoles she’d left on the stove when the men had first called that Demo had been hurt. Were the beans burned? Did they need salt, more chili? The baby’s

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