Chapter Three
Slipping her hand around the back of his neck, she drew him down toward her. His lips parted as their mouths fused, and his tongue pushed inside, saturating her with the familiar hot, spicy taste of him.
She sank into the sensation, her nostrils filling with the warm musky scent of sex; they’d been making love for endless hours. She would never get enough. She ran her palm along the rough skin of his jawline, kissed the silky spot where his shoulder met his neck, trailed her fingers over the scar from the bullet wound that had nearly killed him, pressed her lips to it. She’d come so close to losing him. Now, he was hers, and she would never let him go. She would protect him with everything she had, because he was her entire existence.
She couldn’t envisage life without him.
He pushed up on his elbows and stared into her eyes, so close she could see the flecks of black in his golden irises. Then he drove inside her with one smooth thrust of his hips, filling her, making them one.
“Tell me you love me,” she murmured.
“I—”
A knock sounded in her head.
No!
She needed to hear those words, but the knock sounded again, and all around her the dream—if that’s what it was—faded.
She blinked open her eyes.
“I knocked, but there was no answer.” Jake stood over the bed, hands on his hips, a frown on his face. “I need to talk to you. Kitchen. Ten minutes.”
It had been after midnight when the police had finally released them last night. Dave, Rose’s biker boyfriend, had come to pick them up, but Sadie had needed some fresh air, and time to think. She and Max had walked for hours, and she’d got home not long before dawn. Now she glanced at the clock, it was three in the afternoon. She’d slept for nearly eight hours, dreamed for most of them, and her body felt heavy, lethargic, as though she’d really spent those hours making love.
“Are you okay?” Jake asked, his frown deepening.
She pushed herself up, dragging the sheet with her. Was she okay? Her mind was still saturated with that feeling. Love? No way.
She’d already lost the one person closest to her, her twin sister. Even four years later, just the thought of Josie sent a stab of pain to her heart. They’d been so close.
Never again.
If that made her a coward, so be it.
“I was late to bed,” she said.
“So I heard.”
At that moment, the door behind him pushed open and Max appeared. He stalked into the room, put his front paws on the bed, and licked her face.
“A new friend?” Jake didn’t sound impressed. “He’s been howling for you. I’m surprised you could sleep through it.”
“Down, Max.”
The dog gave her one last lick and backed away.
“Ten minutes,” Jake said and turned and left the room.
Sadie closed her eyes for a few seconds, but the dream was gone, and a sense of loss washed through her mind. Followed by a wave of foreboding. Who was her dream lover? She had a name: Ethan Weiland, but little else.
While she’d considered him a figment of her imagination, she’d enjoyed the dreams; they’d been a safe way to let herself go, let herself feel. With a start of shock, she realized she hadn’t actually slept with anyone real since the dreams had started months ago.
But he’d not been a dream last night; he’d been all too real.
After dressing quickly in jeans, a black sweater, and flat boots, she combed her fingers through her hair but couldn’t be bothered with anything else. She wandered down the stairs with Max at her heels. This place was a big old mansion close to Hampstead Heath, not too far from their first safe house that had been blown up. She liked the area, liked to walk on the Heath with its illusion of fresh air and being out of the city.
Jake was sitting at the big wooden table in the kitchen, a mug of coffee in front of him. She poured herself one from the machine, and dropped down into the chair across from him. Max sprawled at her feet. She lowered her head and breathed in the fumes from the coffee, took a sip, and sat back.
“Where is everyone?” she asked. Not that there were many of them in London right now, most of the group were either in Uganda or the States.
“Christa has gone to confer with her old professor at Cambridge. Something she wanted a second opinion on. The colonel went with her.”
Christa was Jake’s wife and a brilliant genetic scientist who had been unknowingly working on the Tribe’s DNA for years. The colonel was her father and their old government controller from back in the day when they had been a covert operations group. That was before they had realized that their members lived or died depending on whatever goal was deemed necessary at that moment. Sadie’s twin sister, Josie, had been one of the ones who had died. And while the colonel hadn’t given the order—that had come from the Conclave—Sadie would always hold him responsible.
He was working with them now, but Sadie would never trust him again, and she would never, ever forgive him for his part in Josie’s death.
“And Rose?”
“She’s taken the day off.”
“Good for her. Can I have the day off, boss?”
“No. I’ve got a call scheduled with Kane in an hour, and we need to decide on our next move before then.”
“He’s going to be so pissed.” The thought almost cheered her up. She still wasn’t convinced allying themselves with Kane was the right thing to do. Kane had been their enemy, and she was finding the transition to ally a little hard to take.
When they had broken away from their government controllers nine months ago, they’d gone looking for the origins of the Tribe—Jake had believed that only by understanding who they were, could they work out a strategy to protect themselves. None of them knew where they came from. They’d all been fostered as children, had no clue who their real families were.
The truth had turned out to be far crazier than Sadie had ever anticipated. It turned out they were connected to a group discovered in the Mountains of the Moon, in Uganda, over a hundred years ago. All black haired and blue eyed, all long-lived and all telepathic. While most of that group had left Africa and moved to Scotland, a small number had secretly remained. The “Guardians,” led by Kane Revilla. According to Kane, his people had spent the last ten thousand years guarding an honest-to-God time machine and preparing for some mysterious mission that was going to save mankind. Delusions of grandeur or what?
Sadie wasn’t buying it. Not the mission and certainly not the time travel crap. But Kane believed, and he’d seen the Tribe’s existence as a threat to his precious mission. He’d infiltrated the Conclave and set in motion a plan to eliminate the Tribe and everyone associated with them.
They’d now resolved their differences, were on the same side, and in pursuit of a common enemy—the Conclave. But Sadie was reserving her judgment.
“Tell me exactly what happened last night,” Jake said.
She went through it quickly, telling everything except the little part about where she’d seen both the man in the car and Max before. In her dreams. She’d build up to that one slowly.
“So we’re back where we started.” Jake sighed and ran a hand through his messy hair. She could sense the frustration radiating out from him.
“I’ll get working on a list of Forrester’s contacts,” she said. “Rose can help when she gets back.”
Jake sighed. “Christ, we could do with a break.”
An image flashed up in Sadie’s mind. A man with midnight dark hair and golden eyes. The man in the car outside Forrester’s last night. The man who haunted her dreams.
She pursed her lips. “I might have that break. The guy who was hanging around last night. I only got a few snippets from his mind. But I’ll see if I can find anything.”
“You think he’s involved?”
“Maybe.”
Jake gave her a narrowed-eyed stare. He knew her too well, was no doubt aware she wasn’t sharing everything. “You got anything to go on?”
“I told you—snippets. I’ll tell you as soon as I have more. There’s also the fact that the police showed up so quickly. The alarms weren’t tripped—they were off. I think someone saw us and wanted us picked up, so they used their police contacts, which screams Conclave. We know they have people within the Met.”
“You think this guy you saw called in?”
“Yeah. He was probably just being thorough, otherwise we wouldn’t have got out so easily. But I’ll see if I can find out anything from that end.”
“What are you hiding?”
She grinned. He definitely knew her too well, even without delving into her mind. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
Jake got up and poured them both another coffee. “Well, try and be ready quick. This waiting around is driving me crazy.”
“Is the plan still to destroy the Conclave?”
“Yes,” Jake replied. “If there was any hope the hostages were alive, our priority would be finding them, and freeing them. But Kaitlin and the others are dead. They have to be.”
For a second Sadie’s breath constricted in her lungs as a sharp pain wrapped around her chest. Kaitlin and her twin brother, Sam, had been the youngest members of the Tribe, only seventeen, and everyone’s favorites. It seemed inconceivable that they were both dead.
It had been Sam’s death, nine months ago, that had precipitated their escape from their government controllers. Three months later, five of their members, including Kaitlin, had been taken hostage. The colonel, who’d been working with the Conclave back then, had tried to use those hostages as leverage to bring the rest of them in. That was when Jake had taken drastic measures and kidnapped Christa, to give them some leverage of their own.
One of the hostages, Teagan, had been killed as a ploy to force their hands. The others hadn’t been heard from in six months.
It had been too long, and there had been no hint of them. Kaitlin was the strongest of them all. If she was alive, she would have gotten some sort of message out. They were dead. Sadie had to accept that. However much it hurt.
Max must have sensed her mood. He sat up, nudged her knee, and she stroked his glossy head. There was something else she wanted to ask Jake, though she was still trying to formulate it in her mind.
She peered into his face. He looked tired but relaxed, the dark shadows gone from beneath his eyes. At ease. It made her realize how stressed out he had been until Christa had come into his life. Despite the tragedies of the past months, and finally accepting that the others were dead, he’d been strong enough to come through, to not take the whole blame on his head as he would have before. Jake felt responsible for them. He always had.
Now he returned her scrutiny. “Are you okay?”
She gave a quick nod, though it wasn’t entirely the truth.
“Nothing you want to share?”
“Maybe. I’m working myself up to it.”
He shook his head. “You were always a loner, even before Josie died.”
Had she been? Maybe. At least, as much as it was possible, in a group like theirs.
“I know it’s because you feel too much,” Jake said. “And you don’t want us all to share that. But we’re here for you.”
Aw. “Thanks, boss.” She traced a pattern with her fingertip on the wooden table, while she got up the courage to ask her question.
“Just ask.”
She smiled. He was perceptive, even when he wasn’t reading her mind. She took a deep breath. “I know you’ve been talking with Kane and the others, going through what we can do, if there’s anything we didn’t know about, any other powers—like me finding out about the animal thing.” She patted Max on the head, and he gazed at her quizzically.
“Well, we have found that while we all have things we are better at, we can all learn to some extent. It’s just a matter of understanding the pathways. So Rose can teach you to throw a psi-bolt, once she understands how it works.”
That would be useful, but not what she was looking for. “What about new stuff, stuff we didn’t know about?”
He gave her a sharp glance. “Do you want to be more specific?”
She squirmed in her seat. No, she didn’t, but she was going to, because it was driving her mad. The idea was crazy, but so was just about everything they could do, everything they had discovered over the time since they had broken free.
“Come on, Sadie, I’m intrigued now.”
What the hell. “Seeing the future.”
She waited for a comment. When nothing came, she raised her gaze from her hands to Jake’s face. He looked…way past intrigued.
“You’re seeing the future?”
Dangerous ground. She didn’t want to get into specifics. “I don’t know. I’m seeing things, in my sleep.”
“And then they happen?”
“They didn’t. I thought they were nothing more than dreams.”
“But…?”
“Last week I dreamed this. I saw us sitting here.”
“Not unusual.”
“With Max?” She nodded to the Doberman sitting at her side, his head on her lap.
“Ah.” Jake was staring into space. “Prescience. Wow.”
He was taking it well.
“So Kane never mentioned anything?”
“No. But—wow.”
Her heart sank. She’d been hoping for something…anything…that would help her make sense of what was going on. Help her distinguish dreams from reality. “Well, glad I could cheer up your day.”
“I’m not sure you’ve cheered me up. The…implications are huge. Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of—or rather nothing that’s been proved.” She had a flashback to making love with Ethan that morning. No way was she mentioning that—it was clearly never going to happen. She might not have been so discriminating about her bed partners in the past—sex was the one thing that kept the negative thoughts at bay—but she’d certainly be on her guard. Forewarned was forearmed.
Presumably not everything she saw in her dreams would come true. Some were maybe just dreams.
So where had her subconscious plucked him from? There had to be a logical reason somewhere. She just couldn’t come up with one as yet. Give her time.
“Sadie?”
“Sorry, I was…”
“Working out how much to tell me? I know there’s more. It really might help to share.”
“And I will. I’m still sort of reeling from the shock.” She patted Max’s head. “Before last night it never—and I mean, never in a million years—occurred to me that my dreams could be real.”
“You’re dreaming more than you used to.”
“Before this, I never dreamed. Nothing.”
“So any dreams you have now, you can presume are due to this…change?”
“I suppose.”
They were both silent for a minute. “Well, if time travel is possible,” Jake said, “then anything is. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this—and a lot of discussing with Christa, who by the way is convinced it’s true—about how it could work. Are all different times existing at once, like places, so if you know how, you can move between them? Are they fixed? Or can we change stuff? It’s enough to make your mind explode.”
“Huh, tell me about it.” The whole telepathy thing had been crazy enough, this was beyond crazy.
“I suppose what I’m saying is, maybe prescience is almost inevitable. You’re merely getting a glimpse of a time that’s already existing, parallel to us. It’s beyond amazing.”
Well, she was happy he liked the sound of it—he could have it. “I don’t want to see the future. Knowing the past is bad enough.” She shrugged. “I just wanted to know if Kane had mentioned the possibility. I guess not. Maybe it’s nothing. A glitch and it will go away if I try to ignore it.”
“What if it’s trying to tell you something important?”
A shiver ran through her as she remembered the sensation of hands on her body, the touch of his mouth against hers. The feeling of being loved.
No! Not going there.
“I don’t believe that. It’s more likely just random crap.”
He pursed his lips. “You’ll talk to me when you’ve thought it through. Tell me if there’s anything I need to know.” A twinge of guilt nudged her in the side but she ignored it. “Or talk to Christa, if you think it will help more.”
“And then she’ll tell you. I know you guys don’t keep anything from each other.”
“I won’t ask for more until you’re ready.”
“Good. Now, I’m going to take my new dog for a walk on the Heath. Clear my head.”
He nodded. “You’ll do what’s right.”
It was knowing what was right that was the problem. She’d do a little digging, find out a little more about Ethan Weiland, and then she’d decide what to do next.
“Come, Max.”
She paused and turned at the door. “You know, I wish Kaitlin were here. She would love seeing the future.”
Pain flashed across his face. “Kaitlin’s dead.”