Seeing Is Believing (7 page)

“In your world you live on your faith, your belief,” he said.

“Yes, every moment I breathe is an act of faith. Faith in the unknown, knowing that it is there—even if I can’t see it or prove its existence with human machines or methods.”

“My world is on a different level.”

Sadly, Diana nodded. It was vital to her that Wes accept her reality, although it was diametrically opposed to his own. If he could not, then she knew there would be no bridge built between them. And she saw that he understood that, too. Grief serrated her. Wes had given her life when she thought no man would ever touch her heart again. But Diana couldn’t offer her heart to him unless he accepted her world; to do so would be living a lie. She had lived a lie once before, and she’d sworn never to make the same mistake twice.

“Bob always made fun of my beliefs, my gift for psychometry,” she said softly, opening her hands. “He hated my mother and said she was a witch.”

“He didn’t respect either of you.”

“That’s true.” Diana’s voice became low and fervent. “Wes, you need to understand, I can’t give any man anything unless he values what I bring to him. He doesn’t have to embrace it, but he has to accept it.”

“I know….” And he did. “All this talk about songs, rattles, ceremony and pipes is alien to me, Diana. It’s like having someone from outer space drop in and talk to me.”

Miserably, Diana nodded. “I realize that.”

The utter grief in her eyes moved him deeply. “I know I’m not the most open-minded person in the world, but you have to understand where I come from. In Delta Force, everything was black and white. It was all about training, about men working as a team, getting reinforcement from satcoms, satellite communications—real things we could see and hear.” Gripping her hand, which was now cool and damp, Wes probed her sad gaze. “We had no room for feelings, for intuitions or some psychic energy floating around us, Diana. Hell, if any of us had counted on those kinds of things, we’d be dead.”

“Maybe not,” Diana said quietly. “Maybe if someone had used his intuition, his gut hunch, he might have checked those helicopters before they took off and crashed in the desert, killing so many of your friends.”

Bleakly, Wes held her gaze. “I don’t know….”

“I do. My psychometric gifts aren’t my imagination, Wes.” She held out her hands to him. “Why isn’t it possible that some people in this world have hands that can feel more than just the texture of something? Why isn’t it possible to pick up the energy that surrounds that object? The whole universe is composed of nothing but sound vibration. Why isn’t it possible that a human being could pick up on these subtle vibrations and be able to accurately interpret them?”

“I don’t know,” he said grimly.

Desperately, Diana searched for a parallel in Wes’s world. “What if you’re out in the desert and there are hidden enemies in front of you? What tells you there’s danger ahead?”

Wes shrugged. “Experience.”

“What do you base the experience on?”

“The fact that it’s happened before.”

Frustration thrummed through Diana. She sat up and gestured strongly. “You haven’t seen them or heard them, yet you know where they are. How do you explain that, Wes?”

Stubbornly, he shook his head. “You don’t understand, Diana.” He jabbed his finger into the air. “If I have an enemy in front of me, I’ll be looking and thinking about a lot of things based on my training and experience. First, there are better places for an enemy to hide than others. I’m trained to look at camouflage and terrain for a potential hiding place. Secondly, if I have radio contact with other squads, infrared info or satellite intelligence, I can narrow it down even further.” Wes saw her disappointment. “Everything in my world can be explained.”

“Mine can’t be.”

Wes shook his head. “No.”

Grimly, Diana sat back. “Then I’ll have to prove to you. Somehow, before this is over, you’ll understand, Wes.” Somehow…

SHAD11004SEEING IS BELIEVING

D
iana took in the natural beauty of the red-rock country of Sedona, Arizona. They had landed at Phoenix International Airport an hour earlier, then hopped a single-engine Cessna aircraft that took them a hundred miles north to the smaller airport just outside the town of fifteen thousand people. The red sandstone rose around the tourist community like natural cathedrals against a dark blue sky. A white limestone cap on the sandstone made the geology even more spectacular. Wes, however, seemed immune to the staggering beauty of the region. He had said little since landing at the Phoenix airport.

They met a local police officer, Larry Thomas, at the gate, and Diana followed the men, locked into absorbing the sensations of the area. Her mother had told her that Sedona was a very sacred place to all Native People in North and South America. It was a female region, an area rich with energy and invisible vortices that whirled at incredible rates of speed. Indeed, Diana felt a bit dizzy from the powerful energy surrounding the airport, which was high atop a mesa overlooking the town.

The sun was shining brightly, and the temperature hovered in the nineties, but Diana felt comfortable in her short-sleeved, white cotton blouse and light blue skirt. Glad she’d worn sandals, she continued behind the men into the geodesic-looking airport building to retrieve their luggage. Sedona was high desert country at four thousand feet above sea level. The red earth was thickly dotted with dark green junipers for as far as she could see in any direction. Officer Thomas was speaking in low tones to Wes, who nodded occasionally. But Diana was content to wait in the center of the airport structure while they retrieved the luggage. If Wes wanted her to know something, he’d tell her. She was glad to be left alone just to
feel.
And feel she did. The invisible force of the vortex was incredible, and her body swayed subtly with the flow of the circular release of energy coming from deep within Mother Earth.

She spotted many colorful flyers on a bulletin board. Going over, she began to read some of them. They were all New Age related. Smiling, Diana noted one flyer showing a vortex right where the airport sat! She wondered what the vortex energy did to the flight instruments on planes. Walks With Wolves had taught her much about vortices. They were a natural part of Mother Earth, and they existed all over the world in different sizes and degrees of energy output. The Sedona vortices were known to be among the most powerful in the world, mainly because there were four of them in such a small, concentrated area. That was why Native Americans held the region sacred. Too bad, Diana thought, that the white man had seen fit to build a tourist trap of a town on top of such sacred land, but it was typical of their attitude toward anything outside the context of their accepted reality.

Feeling a little sad about the situation, she turned when she heard Wes coming. It was more a sense of his approach than actually hearing him, because he walked soundlessly. Hefting one of their bags, Officer Thomas guided them out the door, and they left the airport in a Sedona police cruiser. In the back seat, Diana remained quiet, inwardly attuning herself to the area’s vibrations. Occasionally, Wes gave her a strange look, a question in his eyes, but he said nothing.

Thomas drove them to Los Piños, a five-star hotel and resort near Oak Creek, on the west side of Sedona. Diana appreciated the Santa Fe-style architecture of Los Piños. Its walls were stucco and painted a pink shade to mirror the red of the sandstone buttes, hills and mountains that surrounded them. Nothing here was more than two stories tall, so that every visitor might enjoy the dramatic scenery. The resort itself was a series of over fifty casitas, or small stucco homes.

Wes leaned over and said, “People pay five hundred dollars a night to stay here.”

“The Palm Springs of Arizona?” Diana ventured.

“Yeah, this is a popular watering hole for the rich and famous. Officer Thomas was telling me that the Hollywood jet set comes here to get away from the gawkers and autograph hounds in California.”

“Somehow,” Diana said, “I can’t feel sorry for them. Can you?”

“No. They’ve made their bed, now they can lie in it.”

“Can’t we all?” She hadn’t meant to sound derisive, but it came out that way. Giving Wes an apologetic look, she added, “It must be the vortex energy. I’ve been feeling out of sorts since we’ve landed.”

“Vortex?”

“Yeah,” Officer Thomas piped up with a laugh. “All the New Age hippie types come to Sedona swearing there are vortices here. A lot of them live in the area because of them. They’re nuts.”

Diana held on to her anger. She saw Wes’s jaw tighten, because he realized she believed in vortices.

“I think,” he said lightly, “that your opinions aren’t shared by everyone in the cruiser, Officer Thomas.”

“Oh…er, sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just that…well, you know, we get some crazy fringe factions out here. You know how it is.”

Diana smiled, just barely. “Officer Thomas, I am the fringe faction.”

“Oh, er…”

Wes laughed deeply. He saw the sparkle in Diana’s eyes and knew she hadn’t taken offense at his laughter, realizing it was directed at the embarrassed officer. “It’s all right,” he told Thomas, and sat back, grinning.

“You’re enjoying this immensely,” Diana accused him.

“Yeah, I am.” He placed his hand on hers. “Tell me about these vortices. What are they?”

She could see that his question was sincere. His warm, strong hand over hers rattled her, but Diana realized Wes was truly trying to understand her, and a warm feeling unexpectedly flowed through her heart.

“Vortices are natural areas where energy is discharged from inside Mother Earth. The energy is invisible to the naked eye, but can be seen by someone who is clairvoyant or has what is known as the ‘sight’.”

“What kind of energy?”

“Depends. Vortices are outlets. Energy builds up in and around Mother Earth, and it has to be discharged. You can think of vortices and their energy as her invisible circulatory system. Just as we have blood that runs through our arteries and veins, Mother Earth relies on her own ‘blood’—this unseen energy. Without it, she would die.”

“Interesting analogy,” Wes said, trying to grasp her concept.

Diana pointed to the west. “I can feel something over in that direction.”

“That’s Boynton Canyon.” Officer Thomas spoke up, trying to make amends for his faux pas. “They say there’s a vortex in that canyon, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Officer.” Diana smiled over at Wes.

“So you can feel them?” Wes was impressed at Diana’s ability to sense the presence of another vortex.

“Yes, anyone who is sensitive can. Animals can. Insects and birds certainly do.”

“Do you think Ruth Horner knew about the vortices? That she might have come here for that reason?”

“I don’t know. If she was as psychic as you say she is, then I’m sure she felt them just as I now feel them.”

“What do vortices do?”

“Most release energy, but some have other special functions.”

“Yeah,” the officer put in, eavesdropping on their conversation, “they say the one over on Bell Rock is a physical vortex that can heal you, and the one in Boynton Canyon brings back past-life memory recall.”

“Exactly,” Diana said. She pointed to Wes. “In the Hindu religion, as well as many Far Eastern religions, they recognize that we humans also have an invisible energy ‘circulatory system,’ with major centers called chakras. They look like wheels with spokes in them, and they rotate. We have one on top of our head, one at our brow where the ‘third eye’ is located, one at our throat, our heart, our stomach, our abdomen and, finally, at the base of our tailbone. These chakras turn, like spinning propeller blades on an airplane, drawing in the invisible energy that surrounds us. The Hindus called it
prana
which is another word for life.”

Scowling, Wes nodded. “Okay, so far so good. I follow what you’re saying.”

Diana smiled a little and gestured with her hands. “
Prana
is sucked up into our chakras by the spinning blades and then distributed throughout our aura, that electromagnetic eggshell that surrounds everything, including human beings. If the chakras are open and running, we are healthy. If they’re closed or blocked, we can get very sick.” She placed her fingertips against Wes’s chest. “When my mother hugged you, healing energy flowed to your closed heart chakra, and it flew open. The blades started to spin, and that’s why you can feel again. You aren’t numb any longer.”

Wes gave her a strange look. “How did you know I felt emotionally numb?”

“My mother taught us that when the heart chakra closes down and stops spinning, you are cut off from your feelings, Wes. When it’s open you can feel. Don’t look at me like that. What I’m telling you is the science of metaphysics—those things that exist beyond the reach of our naked eyes.”

Ruminating over her explanation, Wes pondered her impassioned plea. “So these vortices—how are they connected with our chakras?”

She smiled, pleased by his grasp of her information. “Vortices are Mother Earth’s chakras.” She held her hand about six inches away from Wes’s heart. “You see, each chakra spins, and as it spins, it creates a flow and releases energy. You can actually feel it in the palm of your hand if you’re sensitive enough.”

Wes felt
something.
Although Diana’s hand was well away from his chest, he could feel heat radiating from it. “I feel warmth.”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“What’s going on?”

“My hand is making contact with the energy being sent out from your heart chakra, that’s all. It’s a nice feeling, isn’t it?”

He nodded, more than a little impressed, but not willing to believe all of it quite yet. “Do you think Ruth Horner was out here to investigate these vortices?”

“I don’t know. Sedona is certainly rich with metaphysical phenomena,” Diana murmured. “But we need to get to her casita, and I need to touch something she owned before I’ll know more.”

* * *

Wes had Officer Thomas wait outside in the cruiser, then he opened the door to the casita Ruth Horner had vacationed in for two weeks. Placing his hand in the small of Diana’s back, he guided her into the posh residence. The interior was painted a dusky mauve, the drapes pale pink and the carpet pale green—all colors in keeping with the Southwest tradition, he supposed.