CHAPTER Seventeen

He couldn't lether go, couldn't stop blaming himself for taking chances with her. Nothing he'd seen, experienced, theorized, had ever terrified him the way watching Ripley change in front of him had done.

"It's all right." She stroked his back, patted it. Then realizing they were both trembling, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held tight. "I'm okay."

He shook his head, buried his face in her hair. "I should be shot."

Since gentle soothing wasn't working, she switched tactics into something more natural to her. "Get a grip, Booke," she ordered and shoved at him. "No harm, no foul."

"I took you under, left you open." He pulled back, and she could see it wasn't fear on his face but fury. "It hurt you. I could see it. Then you were gone."

"No, I wasn't." His reaction had given her little time for one of her own. Now her stomach quivered. Something had come into her. No, she thought, that wasn't quite right. Something had comeover her.

"I was here," she said slowly, as she tried to puzzle it out for herself. "It was like being underwater. Not like drowning or sinking, but just ... floating. It didn't hurt. More of a quick shock, then the drift."

Her brows drew together as she thought it through. "Can't say I cared for it, though. I don't like the idea of being tucked aside so someone else can have her say."

"How do you feel now?"

"Fine. Actually, I feel great. Stop taking my pulse, Doc."

"Let me get these things off you." But when he started to remove the electrodes, she closed a hand over his wrist.

"Hold on. What did you get out of all that?"

"A reminder." He bit off the words. "To be more cautious."

"No, you don't. Think like a scientist. The way you were when we started this. You're supposed to be objective, right?"

"Fuck objectivity."

"Come on, Mac. We can't just toss the results out the window. Tell me. I'm interested." When he frowned at her, she sighed. "It's not just your deal now. I have a pretty personal interest in what went on here."

She was right. Because she was right, he dug down for calm. "How much do you remember?"

"All of it, I think. For a minute I was eight years old. It was kind of cool."

"You started to regress, on your own." He pressed his fingers to his temples. Clear the brain, he ordered himself. Bag the emotion. And give her some answers.

"Maybe the game was the trigger," he considered. "If you want a quick analysis, I'd say you went back to a time when you weren't conflicted. Subconsciously you needed to go back to a time when things were simpler and you didn't question yourself. You used to enjoy your gift."

"Yeah. And for a while, the Craft-the learning, the refining, I guess you'd say." Restless now, she moved her shoulders. "And then you get a little older and you start thinking about the weight. The consequences."

He laid a hand on her cheek. "This, all of this, troubles you."

"Well, things aren't simple now, are they? They haven't been for me for ten years."

He said nothing, watching her patiently. Words trembled on her tongue, then began to spill out in a flood. "I could see, in dreams, how it might be if I took a step too far. If I didn't strap it in, wasn't careful enough. And sometimes, in those dreams, it felt good. Amazingly good to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Screw the rules."

"But you never did," he said quietly. "Instead you just stopped it all."

"When Sam Logan left Mia, she was a wreck. I kept thinking, why the hell doesn't shedo something about it? Make him pay, the son of a bitch. Make him suffer the way she's suffering. And I thought of what I'd do. What I could do. Nobody would hurt me that way, because if they tried ..."

She shuddered. "I imagined it, and almost before I realized, a bolt of light shot out of the sky. A black bolt of light, barbed like an arrow. I sank Zack's boat," she said with a weak smile. "Nobody was in it, but they could have been. He could have been, and I wouldn't have been able to stop it. No control, just anger."

He laid a hand on her leg, rubbed. "How old were you?"

"Not quite twenty. But that doesn't matter," she said fiercely. "You know that doesn't matter. 'And it harm none.' That's vital, and I couldn't be sure I could keep that pledge. God, he'd been in that damn boat not twenty minutes before it happened. I wasn't thinking of him, wasn't concerned about him or anyone. I was just mad."

"So you denied yourself your gift, and your friend."

"I had to. There was no one without the other in this. They're too twined together. She would never have understood or accepted, and damn it, she'd never have stopped nagging at me. Plus, I was pissed at her because ..."

She knuckled a tear away and said aloud what she'd refused to admit even to herself. "I felt her pain like it was my own, physically felt it. Her grief, her despair. Her desperate love for him. And I couldn't stand it. We were too close, and I couldn't breathe."

"It's been as hard on you as it has on her. Maybe harder."

"I guess. I've never told anybody any of this. I'd appreciate it if we kept it between us."

He nodded, and when his lips brushed hers they were warm. "You'll have to talk to Mia sooner or later."

"I choose later." She sniffled again, rubbed her face briskly. "Let's move on, okay? Or I guess it's back. You got your readings, you got your tape," she said, nodding at his equipment. "I didn't think you'd be able to put me under. I keep underestimating you. It was relaxing, even pleasant." She pushed back her heavy hair. "And then ..."

"What then?" he prompted. He didn't have to check his machines to know her heart rate and respiration were spiking.

"It was like something was trying to get it. Claw its way in. Something crouched and waiting. Boy, that sounds dramatic." And though she laughed at herself, she drew her knees up protectively. "Not her. It wasn't her. It was something ... else."

"It hurt you."

"No, but it wanted to. Then I was sliding underwater, and she was the surface. I can't explain it any other way."

"That's good enough."

"I don't see what's good about it. I couldn't control it. Like I couldn't control what happened to Zack's boat. Couldn't control what I started with the lights tonight. Even though she was inside me, some part of her, it didn't seem as if she could control it either. Like the power was caught somewhere between. Up for grabs." She shivered and felt her skin grow icy. "I don't want to do this anymore."

"Okay, we'll stop." He took her hands, soothed. "I'm going to put everything away."

Though she nodded, she knew he didn't understand her. She didn't want any of it any longer. But she was afraid, deeply afraid, that she wasn't going to be given the choice.

Something was coming, she thought. For her.

He tucked herin like a baby, and she let him. When he drew her close to comfort her in the dark, she pretended to sleep. He stroked her hair, and she felt the beginning of tears.

If she was normal, if she was ordinary, her life could be like this, she thought bitterly. She could be held close in the dark by the man she loved.