Love Beyond Sanity

  "You're being obtuse. Enough is enough. How can you have survived living with that thing as long as you did and now you're wasting time?"

  She had the kind of tone he hadn't heard since grade school. It still managed to make his head pound. The last person who had used it had been what he supposed was a well meaning fifth-grade teacher who had chided him for daring to stand up for himself against the son of the richest man in town.

  Those had been the oil company days in Louisiana. The teacher hadn't wanted her husband to lose his job and had sat Gabriel down to explain to him how life worked. The gist of it had been that some people in small town Louisiana counted and some people didn't. As the fifth foster-child in a house built to hold three people, Gabriel was not amongst the people who the teacher felt could afford to get into a fistfight with someone who mattered.

  Gabriel had listened intently and then broken all the windows in the woman's car. At the time, he'd hoped her husband's job was good enough to pay for the repair. Later that night, guilt at his actions had led him to sneak out of the house and personally repair every window. The teacher had never known they'd been broken. Even then he had a talent for putting the unfixable back together. Of course, he'd gotten caught sneaking back into the house. He'd been expedited back to New Orleans and a boy's foster home.

  He hadn't minded. Alexa had been sent back from Baton Rouge after she'd beat down three men who'd thought it would be funny to sexually harass an orphan.

  They were never far from each other for very long. The last weeks since he'd removed himself from her presence to figure things out had been the most they'd ever been out of contact. It concerned him a little bit that she wasn't in touch. How much had Sebastian, the evil dragon creature, gotten to her in his absence?

  Gabriel shook his head. There was no time for that now. Not with the strange woman with her absent dog harassing him on the street.

  Putting on his most charming smile, he hoped he pulled off the southern gentleman look. "I'm sorry, ma'am, you must have me mixed up with someone else. I'm not sure what you're talking about." He put his hands in his pocket, not moving his eyes from hers. For a second, he was struck by the deep green of her eyes. It reminded him of the Spanish moss that grew on the trees in City Park. "My deepest apologies."

  The old woman put her hands on her hips. "I forgot you could be like this. Oh thank heavens for sweet time." She moved closer to him and he narrowed his eyes. Something about this geriatric person was making him nervous. "Gabriel, you are late, and if you run out of time, everyone will. Go inside, you can't wait to spy on the little man in there. Get your information, get out, and get yourself to New Jersey."

  Swallowing, he had to acknowledge that she knew quite a lot about what he was doing. "New Jersey?"

  Lowering her voice, she whispered. "That is where Sebastian is."

  "You know a great deal."

  "I know that there are two ways this turns out. Nothing is set. It never is, and it breaks my heart to think of the second."

  Gabriel shook his head. "How is that even possible? One person lives one reality."

  "Not true." She poked him in the chest, shocking him. "And you're smart enough to know that by now."

  "Who are you?" Enough was enough.

  The dog that had left her ran back around the corner and rubbed her leg as he growled at Gabriel. She stroked its ears. "Stop it, Futon." The dog stopped snarling. "Don't ask me questions. A lot of people risked everything to make sure this moment happened. It doesn't always."

  "Hell, there is nothing I hate more in the world than riddles."

  Her grin shocked him. "Yes there is. You just don't know it yet."

  "So if this is like one giant science fiction episode, then you're from the future and you've come back to warn me that if I don't hurry and get to New Jersey then the future will be bad?"

  She sighed. "I know it's like that movie with the robots and the woman who's going to give birth to the only guy who can save us. It makes your head hurt. It doesn't make it any less untrue."

  Nodding, he looked at his wristwatch. It was almost time for Trent to go out to lunch. The fat man had been very insistent that he took his lunch at the same time every day. Eleven in the morning seemed early to Gabriel, but whatever. Who was he to judge when people ate?

  The prophetic problem of an elderly person turned around. Almost against his will, he reached out and grabbed her shoulder. She jumped. The dog, which he expected to growl, didn't and instead wagged his tail.

  "Have you and Futon ever heard the legend of the Spanish moss?"

  Her eyes seemed to glisten. "Tell us again."

  "I haven't heard it in a while but I think I remember it. Legend goes something like this. Sometime in the seventeen hundreds, a settler came to Charleston, South Carolina. He brought with him his Spanish fiancé, quite beautiful as I hear it."

  The woman nodded. "She would be. They always are in these kinds of things."

  Gabriel grinned. "Right. So one day they go for a walk together when some Native Americans suddenly attack them. The indigenous people didn't appreciate their land being taken over by this guy and his raven-haired wife."

  "Imagine that?"

  "Exactly." Where had he been in the story? He wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve as he realized how hot it was getting outside. One thing you could count on in New Orleans was that sometime during the day it would get very hot. "As a final statement, the native people cut off her hair and threw it onto the Live Oak Tree that they were near."

  "Over time the hair shriveled up and jumped from tree to tree until it travelled all through the south eastern part of the United States." She grinned as she finished the story.

  He nodded. "So you do know it. But did you know that if you stand under a Live Oak today, you can still see it jumping from tree to tree preparing to defend itself?"

  "I forgot that." She paused for a moment before shoving at his arm. "Get moving Gabriel."

  He stumbled backwards surprised by her strength. Nodding his head, he smiled. "Yes, ma'am."

  Turning, he picked up his tools. When he looked back up, the woman and her dog were gone. Whirling around, he looked for her but she was nowhere. Narrowing his eyes, he wondered if he'd lost his mind.

  Quickly, he walked to the front of the store. He knocked on the door and waited a second. No response met his pounding, so he opened it and walked in.

  He should have asked that woman where he was supposed to be going in the Garden State. It's not like it was just a few square feet to navigate. What had possessed him to start talking about southern legends when he should have been demanding information from the little woman who clearly knew things he did not? That didn't seem like him.

  Sighing, he stepped further into the store. "Trent?"

  Nothing. Not a noise. He couldn't possibly have left for his lunch yet. Gabriel would have seen him. Knowing exactly where he needed to go, he walked with determination to the back of the store. Whatever Trent had made for Sebastian was back there.

  He pressed gently against the door and it swung open. The lights in this part of the store were fluorescent and one of them hummed loudly. The whine hurt his ears and he covered them for a second. His senses had always been more acute than other people's. It was a problem in the best of circumstances and this wasn't anywhere near that. A moan caught his attention.

  Whirling, he walked towards the source of distress. Gabriel crouched low to the floor, instincts telling him he didn't want to get caught by Trent. Not if he really wanted to see what was going on.

  "Damn it." Trent's nasal tones filled the back room. Gabriel narrowed his eyes and physically stopped himself from sucking in his breath. Two young women, twins, he would guess, hung from the ceiling. Their wrists shackled above their heads. The veins from their necks were open and red blood oozed in a steady drip down their bodies. Trent had applied two containers that resembled medical vials to catch the drips as they flowed.

  Son-of-a-bitch. Gabriel
sniffed the air. He didn't know how he knew this but he knew those girls, who couldn't be more than fifteen years old at most, were still alive even though they were slipping away quickly. If he didn't move, he would lose them.

  As he stood, the strangest song filled the room. Gabriel looked around but Trent made no move like he heard it. In a language he didn't understand, celestial voices began to sing, chant actually. Gabriel closed his eyes for a moment and let the sheer rightness of the experience fill his senses. The longer it went on the more resolved he was to fulfill his goal. He would save those girls and fry the dirty man who did that to them.

  His eyes flew open. "You know, Trent, I've heard intravenous lines work better than vials for this kind of experience."

  Trent dropped the vial he held in his right hand. The sound of glass breaking permeated the room and Gabriel looked down to see a pool of red stain the floor.

  "How dare you come back here? I didn't invite you." Trent ran behind the unconscious women towards a chest of drawers.

  "No. No. No." Gabriel came up behind him, grabbing his arm as he reached inside the chest. Trent screamed, trying to lunge backwards.

  With his other hand, Gabriel reached inside and pulled out the weapon Trent had been attempting to get. Looking down, Gabriel raised his eye at the .45 caliber pistol.

  "This is just ridiculous." Using the man's own gun, Gabriel pressed it straight up against Trent's temple. "Few things you should understand, I think. First, I'm not so easy to kill. I'm not going to explain why that is." Truthfully, Gabriel had no idea why that was. "Second, I don't take kindly to seeing women abused in any fashion. Third, whether you like it or not, you are going to tell me what you made for Sebastian yesterday. You will tell me why you made it, what it did, and any other thing you think is pertinent. So, I'm going to suggest you tell me sooner rather than later."

  Gabriel slammed Trent's head into the tabletop. The other man snorted like a pig, which might ordinarily have been amusing; however, Gabriel was in no mood for laughter. Pulling him backwards, Gabriel picked up an extra pair of restraints off the ground and tied Trent's hands behind his back before hooking him up to the same contraption that held the girls.

  Within seconds of dangling from the ceiling, Trent's face had turned red. Raising an eyebrow, Gabriel wondered exactly what the right amount of time would be to keep him up there. He had to weigh the information gained versus the possibility that Trent might have a heart attack and die at any time. Turning back to the girls he reached up and slid them down until they both lay on the floor. Glancing around quickly, he looked for anything he could use to stop the bleeding. Finding nothing readily available, he pulled off his shirt and tore it in half with no trouble then tore it in half again. For once, he didn't have to hide his true strength. Something like tearing a shirt in six pieces was like asking him to rip apart a piece of paper.

  He wrapped the girls' wrists and necks with the shirt and waited a few moments to see the bleeding slow. He had no way of predicting if they would wake up. Right now what he needed was to get Trent talking.

  "Who are you?" Trent's voice was strangled as he huffed and puffed.

  "Exactly who I said I was." He moved closer to Trent, keeping his voice even and his movements deliberate. It was important the other man understand that Gabriel was completely in control of the situation. "Let's start at the beginning. What did you do for Sebastian yesterday?"

  "I see you are aware of the Master."

  The Master? "You could say that."

  Coughing for a second, Trent continued, "I made him the potion he needed."

  "The potion he needed for what?" Gabriel moved forward and picked up the knife from the table. Trent had mostly likely used it to slice the young women.

  Trent's legs flapped in the air. "To stop the hunger."

  "Did you take these women for the Master? Were they part of the potion?"

  Shaking his head, Trent bobbed up and down. "Not these two for that potion, but yes, I'm bleeding them for his future needs."

  Gabriel stood face to face with the red-faced killer. "What is Sebastian?"

  "What are you?"

  Grabbing the side of Trent's face, he held the man still so that he no longer swung back and forth. Once he was sure he had the man's full attention, he smiled. "I have no fucking idea, but I have every intention of making whatever it is that I am the thorn in Sebastian's side. So tell me, Trent, what is the Master?"

  As Trent explained the truth behind Sebastian, Gabriel raised an eyebrow. Demons and something called an Outsider. Had he done something to try to destroy the people who were out to get the man who basically held Alexa captive and had for years fooled him? Was Gabriel one of them?

  Whatever happened next, he was getting to New Jersey.

  "Any idea why Sebastian took a trip to the north?"

  Chapter Ten

  "Are you not going to speak the entire trip back to Maine?" Charma watched as Marina drummed her hands on the steering wheel, and then squirmed in the driver's seat for the hundredth time since they'd gotten in the car an hour earlier.

  "I'm not going to discuss Jason with you right now." Charma's head pounded, and she wished she had a pain reliever. "Amend that, I'm not going to discuss Dr. Randall with you ever." That was it. Better to distance herself with the use of his title. It kept him away from her heart. Sort of.

  "I can't believe we just left your soul mate back there. Leonardo is going to kill us. We're supposed to be finding our people, not leaving them practically defenseless in a mental health facility." Marina pounded on the steering wheel. "Hell, Charma, what are you thinking?"

  "Thinking? I'm thinking that he abandoned me on purpose eighteen years ago. I fought off a damn demon—which he refers to as Self-loathing and seems to think is his own personal delusion—and he still thought I was an invention of his own mind. With my soul mate, I shouldn't have to justify my existence."

  "Mine took one look at me and ran away. None of this is going exactly the way our girlish imaginations once thought it would." Marina's voice was hard, and Charma sat back in her seat. She wasn't used to the other woman's high emotions making sense.

  Maybe he wasn't perfect but she had just run out on him, not the other way around. Marina was right.

  She needed to say something. "I'm sure it wasn't how you looked that made Drew leave. That would be impossible. You're gorgeous."

  Marina snorted, and Charma grinned. "Okay. Then he just didn't want to be involved in our fight, even knowing what he is. That's worse. Let's give Jason a few minutes to catch up to the idea he's an Outsider. For most people, it's just not that easy to accept."

  Charma nodded. "Turn the car around."

  "Oh thank heavens, because I've been driving this thing fifty miles an hour on the Interstate so that we wouldn't get too far away from him. I think the guy behind me is going to have an aneurism in a moment." Marina sped the car up significantly and Charma braced herself as she took the next exit at top speed.

  Clearing her throat, Charma smiled. "If you say so." Her eye caught the unconscious woman in the backseat. "How much sedative did you give her?"

  "If you had seen her as I did you would have drugged her, too. She was banging into walls. She'd injured an orderly. It was nuts."

  "I'm sure being tied up didn't help the situation. I don't know too many Outsiders who could handle that."

  "I don't even know her name." Marina sighed, and then glanced at Charma out of the corner of her eye. "Can you do me a favor?"

  "No." Charma slammed her foot down on the floor of the car. "I am not going into her mind. I just spent hours roaming around in Jason's. I don't think I can take it if I had to go rummaging around in anyone else's. We'll just return to the hospital, pick up my reluctant soul mate and drive to Maine. I'll deal with whoever this is tomorrow."

  Charma hoped her tone was firm and unyielding. Marina might actually not argue.

  "Please Charma, I need a name. We can't just keep this stranger in th
e back of our car while we go and retrieve Jason. There has to be at least a name to call her."

  Crossing her arms over her chest, Charma raised an eyebrow. "You can't get this information yourself?"

  "No." Marina sounded forlorn, and Charma had no idea if she was just putting on her distress to make her do what she wanted. "That's not my area of expertise, it's yours. I can go in and alter someone's perception but not find out their name or what the most expensive baseball card they ever collected was."

  "I only ever did that once, and it was important because the poor dude was obsessing over it." She wished she'd never shared that story with the others. Now they thought she just looked for random pieces of information and picked it out like she was some kind of thief of identities.

  Marina's eyes glowed. "If you say so."

  Groaning, Charma unhooked her seatbelt and crawled to the back of the car. The woman was laid out flat on the seat, her eyes open but sightless as she breathed shallowly. Her mouth looked dried and cracked. Her arms and legs, visible under the hospital gown she wore, were cut up. Evidently she hadn't warranted as good of care as Jason, and no one had been keeping her virtually pristine despite her illness.

  Thinking of how scrumptious Jason looked even laid out on the bed made her stomach flip flop. She pushed the thought away. Lusting after him would get her nowhere. She had a job, a purpose even, to get through here, and she needed to do it despite her raging hormones.

  The woman had light red hair. Some people might even call it blonde, but Charma thought when it was clean it would probably look more like strawberry then actual gold. Her skin was pale and freckled. The unseeing gaze contained green eyes. Most notably, power radiated from this woman like she'd been bathed in it.

  Charma sucked in her breath. She needed to touch the girl to find out who she was, but the very idea terrified her. Truth be told, she'd had less trepidation about reaching out to embrace the evil of the night or taking on a demon. In her whole life, she'd never met anyone who radiated power quite like this.