Pablo pulled back from the mechanic and Melanie had to cover her mouth with both hands to restrain an instinctive cry of dismay. It would take nothing less than a bolt of lightning to help this man. In fact, Melanie doubted there was much a trained physician could do, even if he carried patented miracles in his little black bag, for the mechanic was all too obviously dying. Automatically she lowered her precious mental guard to seek the mechanic’s thoughts and caught them too easily.
Madre de Dios…why can’t I breathe?
She slammed the gates of her mind tightly closed. She couldn’t bear hearing a dying man’s thoughts.
Seeing the crumbling face of the woman holding the child tightly to her shuddering breast, hearing the murmurs of the men around the dying mechanic, Melanie felt disassociated. She seemed in two places at once. Here, in the chill October afternoon rain in a lonely mountain village in northern New Mexico, carnage at her feet, and there, in a too bright laboratory, watching a team of white-coated men attach electrodes to her son’s chubby chest while he cried at the chill of their fingers and shrank from the fear and longing in their eyes.
“The ghost clouds come,” the mechanic’s wife moaned, snapping Melanie back to the present. “Demo will die. See how they come for him!”
Melanie tilted her head to follow the woman’s gaze, not needing to squint her eyes against the soft rain. Thin, fog-like wisps of white snaked through the tall pines, slinking over the high, treeless peaks and silently creeping downward toward the village. Melanie restrained a shudder. She could see why a superstition about the clouds might be generated. They did indeed look like stalking ghosts.
A bird swooped down from a nearby tall pine and, as one, the crowd around the mechanic gasped. The mechanic’s child began to cry, restively, perhaps from being held too tightly against his mother’s breast.
An older woman called out, “An owl! It’s an omen! Call Tierra Amarillo’s church for a priest!”
Pablo growled something about “talking goats” at the woman, then fell silent, his gaze fixing in Melanie’s direction. One by one, the rest of the group turned, grew quiet. For a moment Melanie thought all eyes were trained fearfully on her, then she realized their cumulative gazes were just beyond her shoulder. She felt an almost atavistic fear of turning around to discover what could hold that many voluble people so absolutely silent. Could Chris have left the car, dancing objects in his wake?
She fought the sudden attack of nerves and turned.
The youth, Jaime, stood to one side of the muddy station stalls, as though keeping a fair distance from the man who strode across the water-burdened street toward him and the garage. Melanie had the urge to do the same as the young man and couldn’t resist drawing closer to the damp and chipped adobe wall.
Behind her, the crowd now gathered around the dying mechanic sighed and whispered, “El Rayo…El Rayo.” The muted voices underscored the strangeness of the man approaching them.
He walked as though in no particular hurry, though his stride was steady and broad. Like a bullfighter’s, Melanie thought, snared by the sighing, chanting voices behind her, or like a king’s all-powerful steps.
“The car fell on Demo,” Pablo called out to the silent figure, cutting through the whispers. “He lives. But only just.”
“El Rayo,” the mechanic’s wife begged, “help my Demo, please.”
Melanie turned to look at the group of townspeople and noticed they had all pulled back—like Jaime, like herself—as though contact with this stranger would be injurious to their health. She couldn’t blame them. There was something so dark, so forceful, about the man that it seemed to exude from his very pores. And yet, almost as if whatever it was about him was electrical—and if he was the man she sought, it might very well be electrical in nature—she felt her skin respond to his presence.
He was of Latin descent, with a dark complexion and jet black hair that hung far below the collar of his shirt, farther still, perhaps beneath his shoulder blades. Either one of his recent ancestors had been Anglo or he was a throwback to the true Spanish that had originally settled these mountains, for the man’s eyes were a glittering pale blue-gray, the color of the sky on a stormy winter’s afternoon.
This imposing stranger wasn’t tall, perhaps only six feet or so, but his shoulders were broad enough to strain at his rough flannel shirt. His hips were narrow, and his thighs, tightly encased in his jeans, were muscled and thick. Moisture clung to his dark hair and seemed to shimmer, creating the impression of a dark liquid halo.
This had to be him, Melanie thought wildly; everything about him exuded dark mystery and raw sensuality. He was more spirit than man, a wild black stallion, a lone timber wolf, a clap of thunder on a cloudless night. He gave the impression of absolute power.
She had to know if he was, indeed, Teo Sandoval, the man she’d needed so desperately. She unveiled her mind a notch and reached out to him when he paused, stopping at the side of the building. His eyes seemingly took in the entire scene at a glance.
His mind was questing so—reading all—she couldn’t get through, and dropped her guard another notch.
He said nothing as most of the people tried explaining what had happened at the same time. He turned his gaze finally, and with cool appraisal, to Melanie.
She felt a moment’s pure shock as her gaze linked with his, as his mind tried to probe hers. It was a rare enough occurrence, to actually lock eyes with someone, but it wasn’t the rarity of it that triggered an inner quaking in Melanie. An elemental sexuality seemed to transmit from the stranger like the coldest of mountain winds and, at the same time, like the heat of a cliff’s edge baked too long by a summer sun. She knew instinctively this man was like no one she had ever known before, and she couldn’t seem to think clearly enough to decide whether that boded well or ill.
Lines from the files on him she’d read chased through her mind, incoherent, fleeting. After the fiasco, after his demolishing an entire wing of the PRI when they had pushed him too hard, after he had escaped their clutches, one psychiatrist had written of him: He’s a man of extreme conscience. I don’t know whether Teo Sandoval should be condemned or praised. But at all costs, he should be left alone.
If not for Chris, at that moment Melanie would gladly have turned and left the man alone, abandoned her quest for his help, because, linked with his gaze, for a single, shattering moment she had felt as though they were the only two people on earth. She shivered, feeling totally and wholly exposed. Then she felt him strengthen the probe to her mind, as though ready to rifle through her thoughts, glean every drop of knowledge about her. She swiftly clamped her mind closed, slamming the door on her thoughts, her soul. That slam seemed to echo inside her and it somehow hurt.
Though he didn’t so much as flinch, some instinctive knowledge told her that she wasn’t the only one affected by their exchange. Something about it had shocked him, as well. She had the oddest notion that for a single flicker of time she had been looking into the man’s very soul. She had caught a glimpse of a well of anger and loneliness trapped inside him. An aloneness so extreme that it seemed far removed from any mere lack of human companionship, to the point of being another emotion altogether, one that would make others cringe in terror.
She didn’t have the sensation of reading the man’s thoughts, there was no tingling awareness of any sort of telepathy or mind transference; she knew that feeling all too well. This was more simply and starkly a case of knowing some facet of his innermost feelings. Nothing anyone said could have persuaded her that she was wrong at that moment. What she’d seen, what she’d felt, was an intimacy as strong and bonding as the marriage of night and day, as sharp and poignant as a final farewell.
Something flashed in the man’s eyes and as abruptly as he’d pulled her into the depths of his gaze, she felt released, or