The shaft of pain that had shot through him earlier returned, except this time it twisted, driving the hurt deeper, wrenching at him. The boy was like him, could have been a blond version of himself at that age. The child, her child, was another of the damned.
Then, like his mother’s had before him, the child’s mind suddenly closed to Teo, and a barrier he couldn’t penetrate was welded across the small head.
It was then he understood exactly what the woman wanted of him. And he knew he could help her, but knew he wouldn’t dare. If he spent any time at all with the child, with the mother, he would not survive. Some small, locked away part of him would finally die, because even a moment in their company and he would surely be overwhelmed by painful memories, longing for things he couldn’t have. He would be reminded of far too many broken promises and shattered dreams.
He pressed a question to the boy, but the child didn’t respond. Teo understood the boy like he couldn’t the mother. The child was concentrating on making things “dance” and while he did so, he was blocked to all other influences. He, too, had done that once. But only as a small child.
He could remember the peace, the sense of blessed quiet that came with that kind of focused thought, and longed for it still.
Two people who could block him in one day? Yet, weren’t they mother and child?
He heard her tension-stretched voice in his mind, “I’ll pay anything.” What if—
He angrily lashed out at the sodden scrub oak before him. He couldn’t afford to finish the thought. Wondering was for fools and innocents. He’d made his path, and damn her for making him even doubt the certainty of his need to be alone.
She shouldn’t have asked him. She shouldn’t have come here with her satin-soft hair and her green eyes that brimmed with tears and pain. And she shouldn’t have brought that child who even now made his world spin with no more effort than another little boy might send a small top careening across a linoleum floor.
Yet a part of him wanted to say yes to her plea. That part wanted to tell her that he would help her, would help the boy. And another part hated her for making him feel this foreign and long, long buried want.
He was right to deny her cry for help. He didn’t need to add any grief to his life; he deserved his hard-won peace. He deserved the solitude he’d fought to achieve. A child such as he had once been, a woman who wasn’t afraid to touch him…both would conspire to shatter that peace, to erode his fragile hold on control.
He could feel that control slipping now, could feel the electricity building in him, aching for release. His heart beat too fast, his chest rose and fell with each ragged, shallow breath he took. His fingers still felt the silk of her hair, his nostrils conjured her scent, and his body trembled with the need to hold the power inside him. Damn her.
“No,” he murmured roughly, denying the need within. But the electricity didn’t subside, it only gathered strength.
With a growl of rage, he turned and crashed into the woods, needing to get as far and as fast away from the woman and her son as he possibly could.
A branch struck his cheek and he cursed softly, groaning in a mixture of anger, hurt and sharp, anguished want. The sky above him exploded in lightning, answering his pain. Blue and jagged, the bolt rent the sky, suffusing his face, reflecting, he knew, the fury in his eyes.
The crack of thunder that followed nearly deafened him, but he didn’t slow his raging race up the mountain. Then another streak of fire shot across the sky, followed by another deafening clap of thunder. His chest heaved and he shook with the effort to keep his emotions under control. But the storm raging around and above him was proof that he’d failed.
The sheriff, Johnny someone, turned to Melanie with an expression that told her clearly he considered her at fault for having been on the scene of an accident in his district.
“Did you see the car fall on Demo Aguilar?”
She felt rather than heard the collective holding of breaths.
“No, I was beside my car. I only heard it fall. Heard him scream. Then everything happened so fast,” she said casually.
She could tell the townspeople suffered the tension of waiting for her to expose what had really happened, to reveal the presence of one healer—destroyer—named El Rayo, who carried the force of lightning in his hands. They hadn’t helped him, but neither did they want the sheriff to know he had been there. She didn’t have to ask why; she knew the answer. Teo wanted it that way.
“She was buying gas when the Chevy fell off her jack onto Demo,” the elder of the two checker players said.
“The Chevy was on your jack?” Johnny asked, his bushy eyebrows pushing upward.
“No, no, Señor Sheriff,” Pablo corrected. “It was the jack of Demo’s, but she broke.”
Melanie looked at the attendant with new respect. This broken, ignorant speech routine was an act. She’d heard him speaking perfectly understandable English just a few minutes’ earlier.
“The car, she fell on Demo. We thought he was dead. That was when we called you. But the car, she didn’t kill him. No. See for yourself. We lifted it off him. Now he is fine!”
The crowd murmured assent and pushed Demo forward to show the sheriff the faint remains of his once near-fatal wounds. Melanie was struck by how adroitly Pablo had turned the sheriff’s attention from her. The townspeople obviously wanted no mention of El Rayo to reach the sheriff’s ears. If it weren’t for the warning she could read in almost every pair of eyes, she might have wondered if she hadn’t imagined the entire episode.
But it had been real. And what she had seen in Teo’s eyes and had felt in his touch had also been real. Too disturbingly real. If they didn’t want her to talk about him, she would play along, but they couldn’t stop her from talking to him.
The sheriff wrapped up his futile investigation a few minutes’ later and departed into the early night amid much good-natured assistance from the men in the crowd, who helped him extricate his vehicle from the mud.
Melanie was about to ask Pablo for help regarding locating Teo Sandoval when she happened to catch a glimpse of her son in the back seat of her rented Buick. His entire entourage of movable objects was bouncing around the interior of the car like a mobile without strings, like leaves snared by a whirlwind.
She ran to the car and tried opening the back door. It was locked. She called to Chris, but he didn’t hear her; he never did when he played this way. Another thing to thank the PRI for, she thought as she wrenched open the driver’s door and lunged over the back seat to grab his shoulder. He started and turned, a sunny smile lighting his lips. Objects fell like heavy rain, clattering on the dash, the seats, the steering wheel.
“Chris, honey. Please don’t dance anything for a minute, okay? Try very hard. Listen to me. People are here. Don’t dance. Okay?”
Chris shook his head solemnly. “No dance.”
“That’s right. No dance.”
She backed out of the car, keeping a finger pointed at Chris to reinforce her point. She knew the gesture was largely in vain, for like any three-year-old, memory was only a vague dream and soon he would be lured
