The Lost Night (25 page)

“Everything’s a game to you, isn’t it?” Rachel said. “Except when it’s not,” Harry said. “The dark side of dust bunny life, remember?”

“I’d rather not
think about it.”

Harry wrapped a hand around her wrist and hauled her forward through the mist. The terrain had changed dramatically in the past hour, the dense woods giving way to more tropical vegetation.

She ran with Harry across a small, iridescent clearing and into a jumble of boulders at the foot of a stony cliff.

“We lucked out,” Harry said. “There’s a cave. Thought we’d find one here.”

She thought she heard the splash of water into a grotto pool somewhere close by, but it was difficult to be sure because the wind was growing louder. Another shaft of lightning briefly lit up the sky.

Harry drew her into an opening in the rocks an instant before the rain hit. She came to a halt beside him and gazed in wonder at the gently glowing interior of the cavern. The walls of stone were faintly luminous with a pale, violet-hued energy. A frisson of memory whispered through her.

Harry released her hand and slipped off the pack. Darwina bounded down to the floor of the cave and bustled about, investigating. Rachel wrapped her arms around herself and studied the glowing walls.

“This is weird,” she said.

“No more weird than everything else inside the Preserve,” Harry said. He gave the cave a quick, assessing survey. “The rock is some kind of psi-quartz. It probably got hot in response to the storm energy or maybe it just glows naturally.”

“That’s not the weird part,” Rachel said. She looked at him. “I remember a cave
like this, one that was lit with heavy psi. I’ve been seeing flashes of it in my dreams along with that waterfall.”

Harry stilled. “Was it this cave?”

“No.” She heightened her senses a little and studied the soft luminescence. Memories came rushing back. “The energy was a lot more intense in the other cave. It came from a darker end of the spectrum. It dazzled my senses. There were massive stalactites and those other things, the ones that come up from the floor of a cave.”

“Stalagmites?”

“Right. They were all made of crystals that glittered with ultralight.”

“Any idea what you were doing inside the cave in the first place?”

She pulled harder on the fragments of dream memory but they were already fading. She sighed, annoyed with herself. “No.”

“Were you lost inside the cave?”

“No, not exactly. That is, I knew how to get out. That wasn’t the hard part.”

“What was the hard part?”

“Figuring out how to escape without him seeing me.”

It was the stunned silence from Harry that alerted her to the fact that she had said something very important. She replayed her own words in her head and caught her breath.

“Without who seeing you?” he asked gently.

“The monster.”

“All right,” Harry said. “Take it easy. Your memory is coming
back. Let it happen. Don’t try to force it or you’ll make yourself so tense you’ll start blocking the dream again.”

“Maybe it’s the energy here in the cave,” Rachel mused, looking around uneasily. “Maybe it’s triggering my memories of that night.”

“That’s possible,” Harry said, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about—trying to sound positive.

Should have paid more attention in para-psych 101 back in college
. But he’d known from his teens that his interest in psychology was limited to the study of the monsters, and that was not the sort of subject you brought up in the classroom. He had not needed a degree to do what he did best. Hunting the bad guys came naturally to him because
he could not only track them, he could also think like them.
Always figured I was good at what I did because I had the same damn para-psych profile,
he thought. But Rachel had told him that was not true. And she’d continued to insist on that even after she’d had a close encounter with his dark side.

Now she needed a little positive reinforcement and some helpful understanding and all he could come up with was,
Don’t try to force it
.

He pulled a bottle of water out of the pack and settled down on a convenient chunk of rock. Rachel was perched on another bench-sized boulder. She had Darwina in her lap and she absently stroked the dust bunny while she gazed fixedly at the rain falling steadily outside the cave. Her frustration and anxiety were palpable forces in the small space.

He drank some water from the bottle and tried to figure out how to handle the situation. He was no expert on amnesia. He was just the guy who got paid to keep the bad guys out of the Sebastian family’s business and out of the Preserve.

“Was the cave bigger than this one?” he asked.

“Yes.” She brightened a little. “Much bigger. But the way out was blocked by a crystal chamber. The only way into the chamber was through the waterfall. A second waterfall blocked the far side.”

“You’re talking about those frozen waterfalls that Jasper Gilbert is painting?”

“Yes, I’m sure of that much now,” she said eagerly.

“Lots of caves here in the Preserve,” Harry pointed out. He tried to
be gentle about it, but there was no getting around the facts.

She sighed. “I’m not being terribly helpful, am I?”

“We’ll get there. Do you remember where you picked up the crystal flute?”

She frowned. “I think that Calvin gave it to me. He’s the one who told me how to use it.”

“So Dillard was in this big cavern with you?”

“Yes, at least part of the time.”

“Is he the monster that chased you?”

“No,” she said. “Someone else tried to stop me from escaping. But he couldn’t follow me through the frozen waterfall.”

“That’s how you got out?”

“Yes.” Rachel broke off on a long sigh. “Through the waterfall on the opposite side of the chamber. I ran along another tunnel and then I was outside in the night.”

“With the flute.”

“With the flute,” she agreed. She reached into the day-pack and took out the crystal flute. “I remember Calvin telling me to play it until I got out of the Preserve. He said that I was to listen carefully to the notes and that I should follow only the clear, pure ones. If the music seemed faint or off-key, it meant I was going in the wrong direction. I walked out of the Preserve playing this flute.”

“And good old Calvin Dillard was waiting for you on the other side of the fence. Interesting.”

Rachel glared at him. “I don’t know what is going on here but I am very certain that Calvin is not the bad guy in this.”

“Right.” Harry
recapped the water bottle.

“Are you always this suspicious?”

“Until proven otherwise, yes.”

“I understand.” She was quiet for a beat. “Harry, I have this feeling that I need to remember everything, and soon.”

“You will,” Harry said, going for what he hoped was a soothing tone. “Meanwhile, we’ve got a job to do.”

“Find Calvin.”

“When we do find him, we’ll get a lot of the answers we need.”

“I just hope we’re not too late.”

“If they had intended to kill him inside the Preserve, they would have done so by now,” he said. “But we are following three sets of psi-prints. He’s still alive.”

She awoke sometime later. the darkness at the mouth of the cave told her that it was still night. The rain continued to fall relentlessly. Harry sat at the entrance, his back braced against the cavern wall. In the shadowy ultralight she could see that he had one leg stretched out. His other leg was bent at a casual angle. He rested one arm on his knee. She knew he had not slept.

She pushed herself up on her elbows, wincing a little at the feel of the unyielding stone beneath the thin plastic emergency blanket. The blanket worked well enough when it came to shielding her from the damp, but it did nothing to soften the hard rock floor.

“Do you think it’s necessary to keep watch?” she asked.

Harry turned
his head to look at her. “Probably not. I doubt if anything is moving in this storm. I’ve been doing some thinking.”

Rachel looked around. “Where’s Darwina?”

“She took off a little while ago. She had the doll with her.”

“Good grief. Why would she go out in this rain?”

“She didn’t go outside.” Harry angled his head toward the back of the cavern. “I think she went hunting inside this cave. There’s no telling how far this network of caves and tunnels extends.”

Rachel looked toward the rear of the cave. The walls narrowed swiftly, but the tunnel was wide enough for a dust bunny.

“I suppose she knows what she’s doing,” Rachel said.

“My guess is she does. What woke you? Another dream?”

“Yes.” Rachel drew up her knees and hugged them, remembering the images. “Not one of the bad ones, though. I was using the flute to find my way out of the jungle.”

“You said Dillard told you how to use the flute.”

“Yes.”

“Where was he when he instructed you? At his place?”

“No,” she shook her head and looked around. “We were in a cavern like this one, only a hundred times brighter. He put the flute in my hand, told me how to use it, and then told me to run. That’s what I did.”

“Through the prehistoric sea where the monsters swam?”

“And through
a waterfall of stone,” she concluded. She groaned. “But that’s all I’ve got for now.”

Harry uncoiled to his feet and walked to where she sat hunched on the emergency blanket. He sank down beside her and cradled her against his shoulder.

“You’ll have it all soon,” he said.

“Yes, I think so. Harry?”

“Yeah?

“What if I don’t like the truth when I finally recover my memories?”

“You’re afraid that you’ll find out that you’ve been wrong about Calvin Dillard?”

“Maybe. But there’s a worst-case scenario.”

He tightened his hold on her. “You’re afraid you’ll discover that maybe you’re more involved in this mess than you realized? That maybe you bear some responsibility for what is happening here in the Preserve?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She raised her head so quickly she almost collided with his jaw. He moved in the nick of time.

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?” she demanded.

He turned her in his arms and caught her face between his hands. “Intent is what matters, at least as far as I’m concerned. Maybe we’ll find out that you made a mistake or that someone suckered you into getting involved in something you should not have gotten yourself involved in. But one thing I know for sure, we will not discover that you deliberately set out to hurt anyone or do something illegal for the purpose of personal gain. Whatever your involvement in this
thing, your intentions were honorable.”

She tightened her fingers in his shirt. “You know this, how?”

His smile came and went in the shadows. “Maybe because I’m psychic?”

“Harry, I’m serious.”

“So am I. Don’t ever forget that, Rachel.”

His mouth closed over hers, silencing any protest she might have made. A person could drive herself crazy worrying about the future, she thought. She had something very special right in front of her—a chance to lose herself in Harry’s arms again. She would be a fool not to seize the moment.

She gave herself up to the embrace, longing and need twisting through her.

“Harry.”

She gripped his shoulders tightly and opened her mouth to him. He eased her slowly onto her back and came down alongside her. Gently, deliberately, he opened her shirt and found her bare breasts. His palm was warm and firm and incredibly tender on her sensitive skin.

He kissed her throat, her ears, and then her nipples. She felt his hand glide downward over her stomach. He paused long enough to unfasten her trousers and tug the garment down to her ankles and off altogether. Her panties followed and then his hand was between her legs.

She lowered the zipper of his pants and he thrust into her waiting hand. He groaned when she encircled him.

He caressed her until she was full and tight and desperate; until
she was pulling him to her, demanding that he give her what she craved.

And then he was inside her, filling her until she could not stand it any longer. She wrapped her arms around him and clung to him. He rode her until her release broke through her in throbbing waves that reached far out onto the spectrum.

He followed her over the edge, his climax powering through him. She opened her senses and watched his aura flare—not the graveyard-cold energy that he used to cloak himself in shadows and terrify his prey—but a hot, wild, masculine fire that resonated fiercely with the currents of her own aura.

“Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.”

He said her name as if it were a charm to hold against the darkness.

Rachel heard the gentle, silvery music of her bracelet. The small crystals cast an ultralight rainbow against the wall of the cave.

Outside the storm raged on, but inside the energy felt good, Rachel thought. It felt right.