Haunting Beauty (2 page)

Enormous rocks poked from the hillside, forcing them to weave as they descended. The exertion warmed her and now she could hear sounds rising from down below. A woman’s voice . . . Danni paused, listening to the agitated tone.
Frantic, pleading.
There were other voices, too.
A man, maybe two. And children. Frightened children.

Danni’s blood raced so fast she felt sick. The sound of their young, scared pleas propelled her back into her own history. To nights in the communal bedroom of the group home, where someone was always afraid, always crying.

Solemn and intent, the man continued down with effortless grace, dislodging pebbles that rappelled to the bottom. Danni remained frozen where she was, listening to the troubled but unintelligible words. Whatever was happening down there wasn’t good, and every instinct Danni possessed urged her not to continue.

There was a loud bang—a shot followed by screams. Danni flinched, her palms slick with clammy fear. She didn’t want to follow the man anymore. She wanted out of this vision. She wanted to be back in her kitchen where it was safe. She clenched her fists tight, wanting to escape it. To reject it.

The man paused and looked back. It seemed he knew what she was thinking. His eyes darkened with compassion, but also with disappointment he couldn’t quite hide. She felt it as much as she saw it. He gave her a small nod.
Go ahead
, he was saying. The gesture came without condemnation. He was giving her permission to turn away. To run away.

For a moment the steep seawall, the glowering sky . . . the compelling man watching her . . . it all wavered and Danni could see her kitchen through the overlaid image. All she had to do was step through, step out.

Down below the children sobbed, and the woman beseeched with frantic, incoherent words. Danni felt her despair, her terror. Her desperate need . . .

The man started down again, now with urgency. Danni clenched her eyes tight and breathed deeply. Knowing she couldn’t turn her back on such desperation, she mentally closed the passage to her kitchen, slamming the door on safety and sanity. She began to follow once more, hurrying to catch up as he disappeared into the deep gloom covering the bottom.

Broken shells and rocks crusted the shallow strip between massive boulders and angry surf. The path crunched painfully beneath her feet as she followed the man to a door cut into the base of the wall rising up to the cliffs. Danni peered through the gathering shadows and thick fog that hugged the ground, obscuring her feet.

She couldn’t see anyone until she reached his side. And then, with the
pop
of her ears clearing and a surreal rush of color and texture, the source of the voices emerged from the blur into shocking focus.

Danni was suddenly inside a cavern of some sort that hunkered low over a tide pool. A stone floor circled it, and on the far side she saw people standing in the glow of a lantern. The muted lighting turned their faces into masks, distorting their features with ghoulish hollows and shiny plateaus. They stood in a cluster—a woman with two children. A man knelt on the ground just at the edge of the lantern’s glow. He held something in his arms. Danni couldn’t make out what.

She wanted to move closer. She wanted to see their faces. But she stayed where she was, motionless beside the green-eyed stranger as the scene played out.

The children she’d heard crying clung to the woman’s legs, trying very hard to be a part of her. A boy and a girl. Danni guessed their ages at four or five, but she couldn’t be sure. The woman was speaking again in a high-pitched, fearful tone. Someone cloaked in the concealing shadows responded. The voice was deep and masculine, but Danni couldn’t see the speaker or understand what was said.

The man Danni had followed from her kitchen approached the woman. Pausing to look back at Danni, he lifted the hem of the woman’s light jacket and blouse, revealing the bulge of an early pregnancy and . . . bruises. Huge discolorations that covered her ribs and abdomen in a mottled mixture of black, blue, neon yellow, and sickly green. Old and new, the marks layered one on top of the other.

The woman spun with a gasp, her eyes wide and frightened. She stared at the place where Danni stood for a long, breathless moment. Danni felt the contact of the woman’s gaze as it settled on her face.

She can see me . . .

But that wasn’t possible. Danni wasn’t really there. None of them were. This was a vision . . . a hallucination . . . wasn’t it?

As she searched for the cause of her discomfort, the woman continued to stare right at Danni. Danni saw a shiver work its way through her body, shuddering down to the hands that held on to her children. A feeling of déjà vu riveted Danni, the sense that she’d been here before as real as it was impossible. She didn’t know this place, this woman, these children . . .

The silent denials collided with doubt. She looked at the boy standing so quietly beside his mother then at the little girl holding her other hand. The child’s face was tear stained, her eyes big and gray, her hair golden brown. She blinked back at Danni with wide, knowing awareness.

It felt like a giant fist had punched through time and yanked Danni from her body. The little girl was no stranger, but neither was she an acquaintance or a friend. Like the vision itself, she was of the impossible. She was Danni . . . Danni as a child.

She was looking at herself . . . Herself as she’d been twenty years ago.

Danni felt hot with feelings she couldn’t process, couldn’t comprehend in this moment, that had no place, no substance in the world she knew. Slowly she shifted her attention back to the woman, now seeing the familiar features, remembering how it felt to put her arms around her, to be held by her.

The woman was her mother.

The mysterious male voice said something in a vicious, sharp tone, jerking her mother’s attention abruptly away.

“No,” Danni shouted. She rushed forward and tried to turn her mother back around. Tried to touch her, hold her, beg her to see Danni again. But whatever connection had been made for that brief instant was gone. The little girl began weeping inconsolably, and the man who knelt beside them rose, unsteady on his feet. Through the twilight, Danni saw his face was wet with tears, swollen and red, ravaged by grief. She felt his pain pulsing off him like the lapping waves in the pool at her feet.

From some forgotten alcove in the buried corner of her mind, a realization began to surface. It wasn’t déjà vu—she
had
been here before. But even as she tried to bring the elusive memory into focus, it was gone.

There was terror in her mother’s eyes now. In the way she flicked her gaze back and forth between the disembodied voice and the man at her side, who lifted his hands, holding them away from his body, palms out—the universal sign for compliance.

But the hostile words exchanged between the woman and her unseen antagonist grew louder until they echoed all around them. The tension in the air tightened like a noose of thin wire that would soon cut through the skin. Why couldn’t Danni understand what was being said?

Suddenly another bang resounded in the cave, and Danni’s screams joined those of her mother and the children.
A gun
, she thought.
That was a gun.
Even as her mind catalogued the sound, her body reacted to the bite of pain slicing through her. She felt it—
felt it—
as if a bullet had burrowed into her heart. She looked down, expecting to see blood. To see her life draining out of her. But there was nothing, nothing to explain the bewildering agony. She looked around her in shock, in panic, seeing again the crumpled shape on the ground beside the cluster of frightened people. Only then did she grasp what it was—what the man had been holding when they’d first come in. It was a body.

She managed to turn to the stranger who’d brought her here. He only watched her, his face impassive, his presence neither comforting nor threatening. As she stared at him, she felt trapped by his gaze. She couldn’t look away, couldn’t turn back to the unfolding drama. The voices of her mother and the children waned, taking with them the searing pain. They were fading—all of it, vanishing.

Danni wanted to cling to her mother like the child she’d once been. But she couldn’t break the hold of his enigmatic green eyes, couldn’t make her legs support the weight of her need.

Again a swirling mixture of grays and browns frosted the air, making Danni think of a giant God creating sand art on an unending pane of glass. The light changed from dark gloom to hazy murk, and they were outside again. The wind joined the sensation of biting fresh air and bitter cold. It was just the two of them now. The crushing pain of the gunshot was gone but Danni’s heart filled with grief at the loss of her mother.
Again.
Again Danni had been abandoned by her.

The man moved, not giving her time to mourn. He had a mission. She’d forgotten that he was there for reasons of his own.

They were back in the valley. Danni followed him as he strode away, a tall dark figure in a world painted with shades of obscurity. Their time was nearly at an end. She could sense it, feel it in the crackling air. It would turn again and the vision would be over.

Towed in his wake, Danni trailed the man to a mound of dirt amidst the lush pasture. Silently she waited by his side, once again aware of something huge casting a shadow on them, but unable to turn and face whatever it was.

They’d stopped beside a shallow grave, freshly dug and unmarked. The bitter scent of tilled earth mingled with the damp fishiness wafting from the sea. She could hear waves crashing furiously against the rocks below.

Her stranger wore an expression of inconsolable remorse as he looked upon the open hole gaping in the oasis of green. Danni swallowed painfully, more afraid than she’d ever been. The grave was an ominous symbol in this vision. Or was it real? The muddied ground at her feet seemed to call out to her. It coaxed her closer. It promised sweet and seductive rewards.

Danni slowly leaned forward and looked into the hole. There were two bodies sprawled at the bottom as if they’d been carelessly tossed in. One was an adolescent boy, and some shadowy part of her mind said his was the body she’d seen in the cavern. He was gangly and hollow-chested. His legs were twisted beneath him in an unnatural position and his face turned away. Crumpled beside him was a woman wearing leggings and an oversized T-shirt—an outfit reminiscent of the eighties. Her long golden brown hair lay in a fall over her shoulders and against the boy’s chest. Half of her face was concealed, but the other half . . .

Danni recoiled, her mind fighting what her eyes displayed as truth. Once again, she was face-to-face with herself, only this time not the child she’d been, but the woman she was now. The other body in the grave was Danni’s.

Impossible, impossible, impossible . . .

The man beside her stared into the grave for another introspective moment. Then he looked to the distant, turbulent sea. Danni felt his grief and anger mix and grow until it burned like the whipping wind. She felt the power of it consume him, drive him to a point as perilous as the cliff ’s edge.

Then suddenly he turned those desperate eyes on Danni. He reached out, as if realizing for the first time that he might touch her. She waited for the contact with a biting combination of terror and anticipation.

Visions couldn’t touch, couldn’t feel . . .

He brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers, and his warmth was electric against her cold skin. She stared at him, stunned, seeing her own astonishment mirrored in the glittering silver and green of his eyes.

He touched her again, settling his palm against her jaw, cupping her face—both hands now. Both hands warm and rough and undeniably
real
. Transfixed, she stared at him, catching her breath when his gaze shifted to her mouth.

Her hands came up to the muscled wall of his chest, feeling it rise with his deep breath, grappling with the sense of his heart beating beneath her palms. Her fear knotted with the rush of sensation and became a ball of heat in her belly, a longing that smoldered and sparked. She waited as his head bent, his lips moving closer to hers. But the air was turning—she could feel it coming. Even as his mouth hovered over her lips, his breath a hot whisper, a seductive secret she couldn’t quite hear, he began to fade.

She tried to stop him from going, tried to hold back the air even as it hissed away. In an instant, the man, the grave, the steel wool sky . . . all of it became a mist that floated just on the surface. Beneath it, Danni’s kitchen waited for her to come home.

She felt a ripping sensation as she was sucked back to where she’d begun. She sagged against the counter, drawing in deep breaths of warm air. Her cup sat just where she’d left it, coffee not yet cooled, though it seemed hours should have passed. She couldn’t stop the shaking in her legs or slow the pounding of her heart. She sank to the cold tile and curled in on herself.

She didn’t understand what the vision meant, who the man was or why she’d seen him. Why he’d shown her the mother she barely remembered. She knew one thing, though. The green-eyed stranger was looking for Danni. And it was only a question of when he would find her.

Chapter Two

S
EAN Ballagh paused on the sidewalk in front of the woman’s house, trying to contain the uneasiness building inside him. It seemed to press in from everywhere. He looked over his shoulder, feeling the silent stalk of an invisible foe that could be imagined . . . or could be frighteningly real. He had no way to know.

Nothing moved but the whispering breeze and the long morning shadows. Low on the horizon, the first rays of sunlight trailed a golden haze across an endless azure, teasing shades of amethyst and ruby from a lacy layer of clouds. The sunrise was breathtaking, beautiful beyond description. But it didn’t ease his tension or alleviate the cloying disquiet. For years he’d searched for the woman who called herself Danni Jones, and now that he’d found her, Sean feared it was too late.