The Beholder
Authors: Connie Hall
“Hold still, I won’t hurt you,” he grumbled, his lips brushing her pant leg.
“I told you not to touch me,” she said, her body shaking uncontrollably.
It had to be her magic that was driving him crazy.
“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again,” he said, voicing a direct order to himself. For his inner beast wanted Nina Rainwater in the worst way.
And she had no idea how much danger she was in at the moment.
Books by Connie Hall
Harlequin Nocturne
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The Guardian
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The Beholder
CONNIE HALL
Award-winning author Connie Hall is a full-time writer. Her writing credits include six historical novels and two novellas written under the pen name Constance Hall. She is thrilled to now be writing for Nocturne.
An avid hiker, conservationist, bird watcher, painter of watercolors and oil portraits, she dreams of one day trying her hand at skydiving.
She lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, two sons and Keeper, a lovable Lab-mix who rules the house with her big brown eyes. For more information, visit her website or email her at [email protected].
Dear Reader,
Whatever you do, don’t ask Nina Rainwater if she likes being the baby in her family. You see, she lives in the shadows of her older and more bodacious sisters, Fala and Takala, who have extraordinary powers. All Rainwater women are connected through white magic. Their unique abilities are passed down through the female line.
If you asked Nina about her gift, she’d probably tell you it’s nothing. But don’t be fooled. She possesses the gift of tongues. She can communicate with any creature, alive or dead, and she has sacrificed her whole life in using her gift to help others.
So when she discovers Kane Van Cleave, a beast of a man, with a sinister past and even bleaker future, she finally meets a creature she’s unable to help….
Connie Hall
I
t is said that the Creator formed the earth and all life. He left the Maiden Bear to rule over his creation. The newborn mother earth still spewed furnaces of molten rock. Earthquakes trembled and churned and gouged the hills and valleys of her skin. Consequently, all living creatures were thrown together helter-skelter, forced to establish hunting grounds in this tumultuous world. Maiden Bear hoped they would live in peace, but the animals and humans were neophytes, driven strictly by instinct alone, and many fought over sparse hunting grounds. There was much dissent, for the animals could not communicate among themselves or with any other creatures.
Maiden Bear knew she would have to do something so the animals could understand each other or death would reign supreme and the earth would become barren. So
she sought out the Patomani tribe, her followers, and bestowed one female brave with the Gift of Tongues. This new emissary could translate the language of life and death and could communicate with any type of being. Consequently, the creatures communicated through her, and they learned not to fear each other as well as those different from themselves. Thus, order and peace were established, and every creature found its mark on the web of life.
Maiden Bear was so greatly pleased with the progress of her mediator, she decided to pass the extraordinary gift down through the Patomani female line to a deserving and sensitive soul.
“Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.”
Blue Ridge Mountains
A
feeling of doom woke Emma Baldoon. She glanced at the clock. Midnight. The witching hour.
She sat up in bed. In the silence her breaths sounded like the beat of huge wings. For two days now a strange quiet had saturated the air, squeezed every sound from it: the kind of stillness that swept over a graveyard at night.
Emma shivered, rubbed her arms and heard her four parakeets rustling in their cage. She left her bed. Her gaze swept the dark shadows in the cabin as she found the cage and opened the cover. Her babies thrashed around in the bottom, banging their bodies against the bars.
“Shh, quiet, little ones.” She opened the door. In a
flurry of feathers they flew out and landed on the rafters, huddling together. It calmed them for the moment.
She glanced up at them and shook her head. Yesterday morning they had stopped eating. She thought they might be getting sick. Now she feared it was something much worse.
Suddenly the sheep bleated and baaed, their bodies ramming the paddock fence. If they didn’t stop soon, they’d knock the fence down. Bessie, Emma’s milking cow, caught the fever and lowed in distress. Even the chickens squawked in the coop. She firmly believed animals had a sixth sense when it came to danger, and they were definitely warning her. What was upsetting them?
Over the past twenty years, she had lived alone, ever since her husband, Harvey, had died. She had never felt insecure or afraid…until tonight.
She hurried back to the gun case. With trembling fingers, she groped for the loaded 20 gauge Mossberg. A long time ago she had learned the hard way that an unloaded shotgun was useless.
A growl pierced the night air, close enough to rattle the windowpanes.
Her breath froze in her lungs.
She recognized the cry of bobcats, bears and coyotes. Had lived with them all her life. This unnatural sound came straight out of hell.
The hairs at the back of her neck stood on end. Her heart raced and her skin prickled as she aimed the gun at the door. Her arthritic hands shook so badly she had a hard time keeping the weapon still.
Footsteps thumped up onto the front porch.
The knob shook.
Her finger tightened on the trigger, but before she could pull it, an invisible force knocked her down.
The gun clattered to the floor beside her. She reached for it, but an invisible claw tore through her chest, bored down into her very core. Molten lava spread to her organs.
Pain seared her, arching her back, slamming her down onto the floor again. She felt her life force being drawn out, burned out of her, blood boiling in her veins.
The door rattled angrily on its hinges, then something kicked it open.
Plop! Plop! Plop!
Emma felt something hit the floor next to her. Dear heavens! Her babies. Flames engulfed their wings.
She drew her last breath as her own body erupted into an inferno.
O
h, no! Make it stop! Nina Rainwater grabbed the steering wheel with both hands but still weaved over the white line. The guardrail and sheer drop below filled her headlights.
She gasped and jerked on the wheel.
Tires swerved right and hit the opposite shoulder. Gravel crackled against the undercarriage.
She braked the car to a crawl and straightened out, heart thumping, keeping time with her pounding head. Close call, that one.
Sunlight gnawed at the edges of ominous clouds but refused to break through. Their angry billows engulfed and eddied and animated the rounded peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A northern wind screamed downward and swept another huge, angry fist against her Taurus. The whole car shook.
It wasn’t the impending storm that concerned her at the moment, but the terror and desperation that throbbed in her head and prickled her skin.
If she could only concentrate fully on driving. The shivers wouldn’t let up. At the age of two, when she had first realized her own clairvoyant powers, she had innocently called her perceptions
shivers
because they made her feel as if she were trapped in a freezer.
If the entities involved were few, she could usually manage the shivers. But the more energies tangled up in the intricate web of thoughts, the stronger the connection and her reaction to them. The awareness she experienced now was legion, the massed fear a throbbing jackhammer in her brain, a siren song with no end.
The maddening thing was that her empathic abilities had limits. She couldn’t tell if the shivers were coming from living or deceased souls. She had to actually locate the harmed being or animal, or its place of death, to detect that information. And if they didn’t want to be found and stopped sending her messages, she couldn’t find them at all. In those instances, she assumed they were souls and had moved on to heaven. Sometimes being a lightning rod for spiritual emotions was like playing hide-and-seek in a foggy labyrinth. But once she cornered and tagged the shivers, any physical distress she had experienced seemed insignificant when compared to the benefits of helping others.
A chill went through her, and she glanced at the outside temperature display in her Taurus: twenty-four degrees and dropping. She had already jacked up the heater as high as it would go, but she knew the closer
she drew to the source, the lower her body temperature would drop. Until she found the source of the perceptions and helped the beings, the sensations of cold and her headache were hers to bear. As was this crazy northern clipper that threatened to toss her car over the side of the mountain.
Bits of sleet began to chime against the windshield. She turned on the wipers and slowly accelerated, fighting the wind to stay in her lane. Dark squiggles formed in her vision. Great! If she didn’t do something soon, she knew the shivers would escalate into a full-blown migraine and she might end up running over the side of the mountain. She needed help and fast.
A relentless wind pounded the rooftops of Brayville, shaking shingles, testing wall supports, cracking icicles. Bits of sleet pinged the roof of Kane Van Cleave’s Jeep as he drove down Main Street. The snarl of the wind drowned out the purr of the engine.
He coasted into a parking spot in front of the Wayside Café, then hopped out.
A frigid breeze hit him, raw against his face, piercing through his jeans and flannel shirt. He braced himself against the cold and easily fought his way inside the café. The cold didn’t bother him. His inner-body temperature was five degrees warmer than a human’s. But the wind was brutal this morning.