He stiffened but forced himself to relax. He couldn’t very well hold out on her now. Not after she’d trusted him with her deepest secrets. A sigh escaped him.
“No, they weren’t like me. I don’t know of anyone like me.” It sounded utterly pathetic even to him. The hollow loneliness seemed to radiate from his voice. What was he supposed to tell her? That when his teammates had developed their freaky shifting abilities he didn’t feel quite like a one man freak show?
“Then how?” She didn’t even finish her question. She didn’t have to.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” he said simply. “Some twist of the gene pool? Maybe my mother used too many cleaning supplies when she was pregnant with me or maybe she fell. I mean who the hell knows?”
He felt her frown against him. “What did they think about your…abilities? Were they scared?”
Scared? He wasn’t sure that was the appropriate way to describe his parents’ reaction the day he’d run home, terrified, to tell them what had happened to him. He sighed again. This was going to be a long story.
“My parents were…religious.” There wasn’t an easy way to explain their fanaticism or the fact that he’d grown up in an isolated, wary world. “I didn’t have many friends. In fact, most kids avoided me or made fun of my weirdness.”
“You mean they knew?” she asked in surprise.
He laughed softly. “I was weird way before I learned of my abilities.”
She pushed up from his chest and repositioned herself so that she could look into his eyes.
“My parents weren’t exactly role models when it came to parental love and devotion. Not to say that they abused me. They made sure I had food and clothing, but they were far more concerned with their duties to the church. I say church. I’d classify it more as a cult. I’ve been to church, and they don’t have much in common with the nutjob my parents followed.
“At any rate, I spent a lot of my childhood wishing I could disappear. I avoided any and all situations that would thrust me into the limelight. I was quiet and sullen.”
It was her turn to laugh. “But you could disappear.”
He rubbed his hand up and down her arm and ran his fingers over the curve of her elbow. “I didn’t know I could until I was ten years old.”
Her sound of shock was unmistakable.
“I broke my cardinal rule of never being noticed. Some dickheads were picking on a younger girl, and I knocked one of them on his ass. Then I ran like hell because there were four of them and only one of me, and I was a skinny, awkward son of a bitch. I hit a dead end in an alley and knew I was fucked. As I stood there waiting, knowing I was about to get the shit kicked out of me, all I could think was that I’d give anything to be able to disappear. And then the weirdest thing happened. I felt lighter. My vision changed, and I looked down and couldn’t see myself anymore.
“It scared me worse than the bullies I was facing down. But then they ran into the alley. I was so sure I was busted, but they couldn’t see me. They looked right through me and then ran back out.”
“Bet you didn’t think it was so scary then,” she teased.
He grimaced. “I was still scared shitless. I was in total panic thinking I’d never materialize again. And then suddenly I was back. Just like that. I ran the entire way home just seconds away from crapping in my pants.”
She laughed and rubbed her cheek over his chest, burrowing a little deeper into his embrace.
“When I got home, I burst into my parents’ Bible study. They were pretty pissed because no one interrupts the word of the Lord. Then I spilled my story, and all they did was stare at me like I’d lost my mind. Then my mother started muttering about the evils of television and how they needed to start a prayer session for little boys who told tales.
“I knew they weren’t going to listen to me so I shut my eyes and willed myself to disappear. This time I became smoke. It was the freakiest thing. I could see them, and I could see the wisps of smoke. I can still remember the looks of horror on their faces. I couldn’t hold onto it long, and I materialized again.”
He broke off and fell silent for a long moment.
She sat up again and touched his cheek as if she could sense his discomfort. Discomfort. What a word. He was reliving the day his parents had disowned him, and all he could drum up to describe the feeling was discomfort.
“What happened then?” she asked softly.
“They, uh, wigged out.”
“That bad, huh.”
He nodded. “Yeah. They packed up and left with the church. It’s kinda funny now. They thought I was the Antichrist.”
Her eyes were wide with shock. “They left you?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Oh, Eli, I’m so sorry,” she said in dismay. “What did you do?”
He cracked a rueful smile. “Well, I can tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t go around broadcasting the fact that I could do neat little smoke tricks. I was on my own until the local cops figured out my parents had split. They made a half-hearted effort to locate them, and I ended up in foster care.”
“Foster care?”
“Yeah, it’s sorta like an orphanage, I guess.”
She frowned.
“Not like yours, I don’t imagine,” he murmured. “Foster care is when a family agrees to take in a child who either doesn’t have parents or has been taken from them. Anyway, I was in and out of homes until I graduated high school. Then I joined the military, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“And your parents?” she asked. “Did you ever see them again?”
He cleared his throat. “Not exactly. I went to their funeral when I was eighteen.”
“What happened?”
“Mass suicide,” he said with a grimace. “Freaking cult they ran around with decided to pull another Jim Jones and kill themselves. The thing is, all during the funeral, all I could think was that they’d done me a huge favor by ditching me. If I’d stayed with them, I’d probably be brainwashed and dead alongside them.”
“Wow,” she breathed. “That doesn’t make my childhood sound so bad now.”
He wrapped his arms tighter around her. “I was okay, Tyana. No one ever abused me like they did you.”
“We’re both survivors,” she said simply.
He kissed the top of her head. “That we are, sugar. That we are.”
She wrapped her body sensuously around his, her legs twining like silken threads with his.
“Make love to me again,” she whispered.
She turned her face up to his and their lips brushed and held.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Somewhere between the haziness of her dream world and the pleasurable aftermath of their lovemaking, Tyana heard the beep of her communicator. She struggled out from the layers of fog surrounding her like a comforting cloak and quietly extricated herself from Eli’s arms and legs.
“You all right, sugar?”
Eli’s sleepy voice brushed over her ears, the sound giving her a warm buzz.
“I think I just heard from Tits,” she said as she got up and walked naked toward the couch.
She dug into the backpack and pulled out the slim mobile unit. Eli came in behind her and sat down on the couch next to her as she opened the case and entered a series of passcodes.
In a few moments, the message flashed on the screen. She scanned rapidly over it. Classic Tits, no beating around the bush. Just the necessary information.
She glanced up at Eli who had leaned forward. “Esteban is currently holed up in Germany. Neu Ulm. Breeding ground for radical terrorists. Coincidence, huh.”