Sharing The Darkness

To Melanie’s wonder, then consternation, he appeared to do nothing at all. Then he gently pulled away the mechanic’s bloodied shirt, exposing the ravaged, lacerated chest. Melanie bit her lip to keep from groaning in horror.

El Rayo then raised both hands over the man’s chest and flexed his shoulders as if steeling himself against a great ordeal. A multivoiced sigh rippled through the anxious crowd. As if that were a signal of sorts, El Rayo lowered his rock-steady hands to lay them directly on the man’s bloody chest. Again Melanie had to hold in a cry of instinctive protest.

Though his back was to her, she could see a shudder seize him and shake him as violently as though he were caught in a tornado. A moan escaped the mechanic’s wife and her baby whimpered once, then all were silent again. Even the winged denizens of the forest seemed to be holding their breaths.

Unconsciously, Melanie had drawn closer, and now took another step forward, as much to see better as to offer whatever assistance she might have to give. Pablo’s arm shot out to restrain her. A work-roughened hand encircled her wrist.

“No, señora,” he whispered. “Wait.”

“What is he doing?” she asked, and though she had only breathed the question, she was shushed by the older woman flanking the mechanic’s wife.

“Wait,” the attendant said again, and turned his gaze back to the tableau at their feet.

As if rigidly locked in a battle as ancient as the mountains themselves, the stranger beneath her seemed frozen over the dying mechanic. Ignoring both rain and the people crowded near him, his concentration was solely and absolutely on the man under his hands.

Melanie had the disorienting feeling that she had experienced the merest hint of that concentration just seconds earlier when they had locked gazes. And a dim part of her wondered what his hands would feel like against her skin, and if that deliberation of mind and soul would accompany his touch. She shook her head as though the movement would rid her mind of such unusual imagery.

From the reaction of the crowd, and from the rumors she’d heard, read about, back in Pennsylvania, Melanie half expected thunderbolts to shoot from the rain-heavy sky or for the ghost clouds to come snatch the mechanic and his odd healer from their midst. But in actuality the rain only continued to fall softly and silently, the ground grew muddier, and the people standing around got wetter and colder.

Somehow, to Melanie, this seemingly prosaic attitude of Mother Nature’s only strengthened the illusion of magic that was transpiring before her very eyes. A contrast, nature’s indifferent energy versus that of the man at her feet. She felt as though she were watching a play that had been written in the Dark Ages, but was seeing it unfold in another country, another time.

And in watching this bizarre spectacle wholly at odds with all she had known to be true before, Melanie trembled. Could it be true? Could this man really heal with his touch? She suspected—no, she knew—he would, if by no other means than sheer force of will.

The thought sobered her. And made her hopeful for the first time in six months. Could Chris ever learn to harness his talents for good, for tremendous good, instead of making his toys dance, and instead of the sorts of goals the PRI had in store for him?

She dimly pondered what she was witnessing: an old-fashioned, often disputed healing. Even as she realized the implications of this “healing,” she wondered, almost in anger, what, if it was true, this man was doing in the backwoods of nowhere. Why hide such a gift? If he was indeed such a healer, he should be out in the world helping millions, hundreds of millions.

She remembered the notes on his telekinetic abilities, remarks recorded when Teo Sandoval had been only some nineteen years old and as wild and furious as a trapped mountain creature. And then she remembered the detailed description of his destruction of one entire wing of the PRI. That he hadn’t killed anyone had been a miracle in and of itself. The PRI scientists had termed him “untrainable,” “irredeemable,” a barbarian with untold powers. When he’d fled the institute, no one had tried to stop him. Nor had they done anything to stop the annuity the PRI had established for his father and his heirs when he essentially sold Teo to the PRI almost fifteen years ago. As Tom had tried doing with Chris.

But with such powers, such a tremendous gift for healing, how could Teo Sandoval remain at the edge of nowhere, allowing pain and misery to exist in the world, when by a touch he could alleviate so much?

More than that, he should be out in the world helping children like Chris learn to live with their unusual gifts. Keeping them safe from being exploited as he had been. Would she be able to persuade him to help her? To protect her son and teach him how to live with his double-edged gifts?

She felt that sense of helpless anger coalesce into determination. How dare he linger at the edge of oblivion when the PRI was threatening to take her son away, tear him from her against her will, shunt him away into some frightening institution simply because he was different…and then try to use his unusual talents for their own desires? This man, if he was indeed Teo Sandoval, had endured a similar childhood. How dare he ignore other children like him?

Time seemed to stop and the entire universe seemed to focus on this one small portion of land, man and hope. El Rayo’s beautiful hands, broad-palmed with long, narrow, tapered fingers, seemed to lay upon the mechanic’s chest, or to hover above it for hours, though Melanie found out later that the entire scenario had lasted a mere quarter turn of the clock.

Suddenly she felt a difference in the quality of the air. The low clouds continued to spray a fine mist upon the silent onlookers, the still mechanic and the dark healer, but a new element had been added, or perhaps subtracted. The air all but crackled with electricity, smelled heavily of ozone—as if lightning had struck the ground they stood on.

She could feel the tension rippling through the rough hand around her wrist, and she half suspected the man who held her had forgotten he was doing so. He, like everyone else, was watching, waiting, probably crossing his fingers for a seeming miracle or, like some of the others, against evil.

Then El Rayo gave a sigh, strangely like a groan of pain, and reeled up and backward from the mechanic. His moan was echoed by the crowd, but no one moved to assist the staggering healer. He turned blindly, stumbling over something, nearly falling, slipping on the sodden clay soil that comprised the earth in the New Mexico mountains.

Shocked by his pallor, by the blue rimming his full lips, Melanie ignored the now surrounded mechanic and involuntarily cried out and tried to reach for him. Again the hand on her wrist held her back.

“No, señora. You must not,” Pablo murmured. Not “you should not,” but, “you must not.”

“Let me go!” Melanie cried, snapping her arm away from her would-be rescuer. “He needs help!”

Unaware she was calling out in Spanish, she didn’t understand the look of amazement the attendant turned on her. Or was it something else? Something to do with her wanting to help the “healer”?

“No one can help El Rayo, señora,” he said. “I have tried for many years. It’s no use.” His voice sounded as sad as his face looked, but did he mean the man was beyond help, or that he would not allow another to lend aid?

A cry from the mechanic’s wife snared everyone’s attention and Melanie turned to see the mechanic slowly pulling himself up to his elbows. “Doro?” he asked in a sleepy voice. “What happened, Doro? Why—?”

Everyone pushed to answer him, to assist him, and in the brief distraction, Pablo released Melanie’s wrist. Without further thought, she lunged for the strange healer before he pitched into a thick scrub oak.

Wrapping her arms around his body, she eased him back against her, though his weight pulled them both to the ground. A tremendous shudder worked through his body and he half turned, instinctively seeking the comfort of her arms.

He might be weak but his gaze was as sharp as it had been earlier. And whatever residue there was of his lightning touch seemed to ripple and eddy against her skin, making the hairs on her arms rise. She felt her heartbeat accelerating and knew by the tension on his face that he could hear it, feel it throbbing against his cheek.

She told herself she was holding him as she might a child, but knew this was a patent lie. This man inspired a riot of sensation in her, but none of it was the least motherly in nature. Her mouth felt dry, her fingers against his face trembled.

His lips parted, his eyes glittered at her, a cold distance bridging an anger she couldn’t fathom.

“No one touches me,” he said harshly in English, his deep baritone rough, the words as ambiguous as the man himself. Did he mean that no one had? Or did he mean that no one should?

When she didn’t move, didn’t release him, one of his hands raised to wipe the moisture from her face. Was the moisture a product of the mist, or had she been crying? She didn’t know and with his fingers lightly tracing the curve of her cheek, she couldn’t have begun to guess.

Her heart all but thundered in her chest and she felt a strange languor seeping through her body. Was he hypnotizing her? Was his touch making her feel things she’d never even imagined, let alone experienced?

His silence and intensity frightened her. Dear God, she thought in desperation, what kind of a man was he?

“Don’t you know, señora, that one touch from me can kill?”

CHAPTER TWO

When Melanie had shaken the attendant’s hand from her arm, when she’d run to try to stem El Rayo’s fall, she’d acted out of pure impulse. He’d needed help, she had responded. But this was no pathetic, wounded man. He was all but admitting he could kill her with a single touch. And his hand upon her cheek made the message all that much more ominous.

She wanted to say something, anything, to deflect the conflicting signals in his stormy gaze. But all she could think was, He is the one. She was holding a man whose single glance could destroy an entire two-story building, had her arms wrapped around a force that could maim as easily as he apparently healed.

This was the man she’d been looking for, desperate to find, and now he was not so obliquely threatening her.

But had it been a threat or a simple statement of fact? Something told her instinctively that nothing short of total exhaustion would ever have allowed him to lie so still in her arms. Everything about her first impression of him attested to that single fact. He was a man who stood alone, apart from the rest, needing and wanting no one.

The line from the psychiatrist’s report teased her again. But at all costs, he should be left alone. Not advice, not a casual reference, but a dire warning.

However, his weight, his face against the swell of her breast, his warm breath teasing her through the thin material of her wet blouse made her certain the psychiatrist had other meanings in mind. He should be left alone. Oh, yes. He most certainly should be left alone. To touch him was to dance on the edge of a high cliff without a parachute. To feel his fingers on one’s face was to know the searing heat of a volcano and the icy plunge into a glacier lake.

Melanie swallowed heavily. She had to ask for his help now, at this moment, while his powers were at least moderately on the wane, while his internal batteries were obviously somewhat depleted. This might be her only chance because she knew from the way the townspeople had averted his gaze, had avoided hers, that they would be unlikely to aid her in finding him again. He was their mystery, their El Rayo. A miracle man of this magnitude wasn’t likely to be a subject of much discussion, and certainly wouldn’t be offered to an outsider.

“Please…” she began, only to trail off at an increase in the volume coming from the group to their left. With a great effort, she dragged her gaze from El Rayo, the man she believed—knew—to be Teo Sandoval.

Over the bulk of his shoulder she could see the crowd around the mechanic. To her further shock, the young, bloodied man was being assisted to his feet. Whatever protest she might have uttered died on her lips as the man grinned crookedly and patted his own chest. At that moment all knowledge of her Spanish eluded her and she was never certain afterward what was spoken, but watched, in wonder, as the mechanic gently hugged his openly sobbing wife and baby.

Like the others, she had seen the mechanic’s chest, had heard the gurgle of expiration from his damaged lungs. She’d heard the so-called death rattle often enough in her lifetime to have recognized it here. There had been no doubt that he would die. She’d felt it, had seen it in all the faces of the people anxiously crowding around.

She looked back down at the man in her arms with a combination of awe and fear. She knew now why the townspeople had stood back from him, had avoided his skypale eyes. She was more than a little afraid of him herself. But like the villagers in this small mountain community, she needed him.

She wished she could believe that with him so spent in her arms there was nothing to fear from him, but as if that crew of yesteryear PRI scientists surrounded her, she could sense their doubt, feel their nervousness, hear their murmurs of awe. Was it the influence of the local people, happy that their Demo lived but wary of the man who healed him, or was it something she discerned about him all on her own?

She wished she could feel empathy for him, alone with his gift, but only felt a wary sympathy instead. Something about him, locked anew in his glittering gaze, the dark liquid halo of hair touching her, made Melanie feel that she had dived into a crystal-clear lake and discovered, too late, that it was truly crystal, not water at all. There was something terribly sharp and hard about him, no matter how helpless he might now appear.

He studied her for all the world as if she were the anomaly, as if she were the cause of the commotion beyond them.

“You’re very foolish, señora,” he said.

She agreed with him absolutely. But desperation bred foolishness…and heroics. And she didn’t believe he was calling her silly or inept, but was speaking from dark knowledge, from some untold need to warn her away.

She heard someone ask another how she could be touching El Rayo. Until that moment she hadn’t stopped to truly consider what she’d witnessed. Not one person had touched him, most had even avoided his gaze. He had touched the mechanic, not the other way around. Was this what the attendant had meant when he’d uttered, “You must not,” and held her away from the reeling Teo Sandoval?

On some dim level, not overriding the mesmerizing quality of his gaze but augmenting it somehow, she was half aware of the looks of awe the townspeople were leveling at her. Had none of them ever touched the man? She wanted to open her mind again, catch reasons, rationales, but the power of the man in her arms kept her from lowering that guard.

“Please…” she said again, but wasn’t certain what she was asking of him now. She was too conscious of his warm face against her wet blouse, his hand dropping from her own overwarm cheeks.

She thought of Chris, of how his own father had shrunk away from him in fear, of how baby-sitters had fled the house in terror, of how even the scientists at the PRI had touched Chris only when wearing lead-lined gloves. She had been the only one who wasn’t afraid of Chris, had been the only one to openly give him the small assurances that he was lovable and loved.

Was this man in her arms only a taller, adult version of her son? Perhaps once, long ago. But no longer. Melanie shivered in recognition of the differences. Teo Sandoval was nothing like Chris. Her son had yet to enter life, this man had slammed the door on the outside world. Her son’s tiny fingers made objects dance in the air, this man’s touch either cured or destroyed. Shining light or utter darkness, both sides warred inside this man’s soul. Pray God, Chris never knew such contrasts.

She tried calling on whatever mild powers she herself possessed to reach into the future and see the outcome of this meeting, but with her mind so firmly closed to the man in her arms, her inner crystal ball remained cloudy, indistinct. Then his eyes narrowed in part suspicion, part confusion and she recognized him from her dreams, the same dreams that had led her to this misty mountain and to this man. She recognized his face from the PRI photographs and from her nightmares, the ones that left her choking on tears, the sound of her own screams ringing in her ears.

As if hating what he was seeing, he turned his face abruptly, pressing tightly against her breasts. His hand gripped her shoulder in a rough, nearly painful grip. As vulnerable as he might seem, drained by this unusual healing, Melanie didn’t consider him an object of pity. His power, the strange magic within him, might be quiescent, but she knew it was a momentary, fleeting circumstance. It would be back. And when it came, it would be strong enough to demolish his surroundings…or save a man’s life.

He opened his eyes and met hers. Again she had the fleeting impression of a lone timber wolf. And like the lone wolf, the message in his eyes was definitive. I stand alone…that which comes near me comes in peril.

No gratitude radiated from his eyes, no measure of relief. The only thing she could read was raw distrust. There were other things there, as well, but they were darker, rougher, too frightening to contemplate.

He shivered as if fevered, and suddenly, as if by virtue of having moved, his energy sources seemed replenished. Now his body felt overwarm against hers, making her uncomfortably aware of the intimacy of their embrace. His eyes never wavered from hers and this added to her unease. He wasn’t searching her eyes or her face for answers, was instead staring at her in complete rejection.

For a moment she had the fanciful notion that he stared at her as a creature of the wild would. A creature that was trapped in the piercing beam of a pair of headlights, with an almost weary acceptance of doom, of a fate gone so far awry as to announce certain death. She wished she didn’t recognize the look, but she did. She’d seen it in the mirror of yet another cheap hotel room just this morning. She’d seen it yesterday, last week, a month ago, and all too often since the first day Chris had made the toys on the windowsill dance for his dumbfounded parents.

But Teo Sandoval wasn’t like Chris. Shaking her head slightly to rid herself of the mere thought, Melanie took a shaky breath. His eyelids lowered slightly, dangerously, and any thought she’d had of any similarity vanished. He didn’t look trapped, only supremely cautious and prepared. Deadly.

He didn’t move, didn’t so much as shift, but she was suddenly wholly conscious of the fact that the only thing preventing him from rising to his feet were her two arms wrapped around him. But she couldn’t seem to let him go. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, she did; her arms were numb, as though they’d fallen asleep, though she knew that had to be impossible. What was he doing to her? Or was she doing something to herself, the need she harbored for his help making certain that she wouldn’t let him slip away?

He slowly raised a dark, strong hand. The palms of his hands were broad, and the fingers long and tapered, marred by large, slightly irregular knuckles. They could have been the hands of a sculptor…or a murderer, she didn’t care. All she knew was that they held the power of the universe in them. She’d seen the photographs of the destruction he’d caused with a single wave of those hands. And now she’d seen evidence of that power with her own eyes, she was captivated…and terrified of what his touch would do to her.

She willed herself to push away from him, to pull back, but couldn’t seem to move. Somehow she could sense the violent emotion in him, and it frightened her. Then, just as she thought she’d cry out, his hand reached for her. But instead of touching her face again, as she’d more than half expected, he lifted a wet strand of her hair. He caressed the strand with his fingers, as if memorizing its texture, staring at it as if it were some great enigma.

Her heart was pounding so loudly, so furiously, she was certain he would be able to hear it, if not feel it.

He studied her hair, almost as though mesmerized by it, then slowly transferred his gaze to her own widely opened eyes. Then he gave a rather sharp tug to the hair in his grasp.

“You are very foolish, señora,” he repeated. His voice was still slightly raspy, and Melanie suspected the reason why. The harshness had nothing to do with a lack of language skills but was, rather, because he seldom spoke.

Something in his tone, in his rough touch sent a spark of fire through her. Again she had the sensation that the two of them seemed to be alone on this hillside, far away from all humanity. She was suddenly and deeply aware of this strange man’s sheer masculinity and, by contrast, her own femininity. Her lips parted in wonder at the feeling. How long had it been since she’d felt anything like this? More than a year? More than two or three, perhaps. Since Chris had been born probably, and possibly even before that.

Part of her wanted to reach up and cover this healer’s hand with her own. Growing inside of her was a desire for affirmation, need to show him she understood a want he hadn’t voiced. But before she could speak, his hand dropped her hair and came to rest on his chest. Melanie swallowed, tasting an odd disappointment. Such raw power he held in those lax fingers, yet all he’d done was touch her face, hold a single, wet lock of her hair—

“Let me go,” he said. Though his voice was nearly a whisper, the command was as sharp and clear as a clarion.

Slowly, almost painfully, she unlocked her arms, setting him free. She refused to meet his eyes. To do so was to drown in his abject aloneness, that cold, crystalline rejection. To linger there was to willingly submit to what she knew was his double-edged power—the gift of life or the capability of total destruction.

But he remained motionless, didn’t pull away from her. And now that she was no longer holding him, the intimacy of their positions seemed all the greater, for his head still pressed against her breasts, his body still curved against hers.

As if in rescue, she heard the distant whine of sirens. It was probably the sheriff and ambulance the abuelito had called earlier, which raised another set of questions. Would Teo Sandoval stay long enough to hear her request? After meeting his eyes, touching him, did she even dare ask it of him now?

“Quickly, El Rayo…you must go now,” Pablo said. “The sheriff comes. People. You have to go now. Johnny’s only a mile from here, maybe less. If you don’t wish them to see you, you have to hurry. ¡Andale!”

The other man motioned for Teo to rise, but made no move to help him. In fact, he kept his eyes studiously averted. Melanie saw a look of pure hatred cross Teo Sandoval’s face and recoiled from it even though it wasn’t directed at her but at the attendant who had spoken.

His muscles rippled and contracted and Melanie bit her lip against the visceral reaction the motion inspired in her. She saw Teo give Pablo a cold, measured look that seemed to contain some dreadful message, and shivered inwardly. She hoped she would never live to receive such a baleful glare.

“Let him go, señora. It’s no favor to keep him here,” Pablo continued. Melanie’s brow furrowed. Even to her still dazed mind, the man no longer had the look of a backward, poverty-stricken gas station owner, but instead seemed to have something of Teo Sandoval’s strong, potentially threatening aura about him.

“I’m not stopping him,” Melanie said, and even to herself her voice sounded hoarse and taut with tension. She allowed her hands to slide away from him, to the cold, wet ground where the mud felt slimy and slick after the roughness of his shirt, the warmth of his body.