Dalirs salvation, p.7
Dalir's Salvation, page 7
As he phased, the dark border of space separating The Earthly dimension from The Drift beckoned. He shouldn’t show up at her place. She’d mentioned being a grown up. He had a few centuries on her in age so he had no excuse for not acting like one. Dalir pushed forward into the future. He materialized in the entryway of her home.
Ari smiled as she dropped her purse on a padded bench seat against the wall. “I guess I better get used to you doing that.” She slid off her stilettos and chuckled. “Take off your boots. Stay awhile.”
Ignoring warnings why he shouldn’t, Dalir took them off. He’d tuck her safely in bed and hold her. That’s all.
He followed Ari to her bedroom.
She flipped on the light. Ari smiled coyly and backed away from him. Holding his gaze, she unzipped her dress.
He remained rooted to the spot.
She left him spellbound with the sweep of her tongue along her lower lip. Mesmerized him with a striptease that revealed her delectable curves and ended with the dress falling at her feet. Ari sashayed forward. She unbuttoned his shirt.
As he shrugged it off, she brushed her lips over his chest.
His heart raced. He went to unfasten his jeans.
“No. Let me.”
He didn’t warrant the desire or trust in her gaze. If she only knew what he held back from her, but he couldn’t resist. Couldn’t stop wanting her.
An eternity passed before she tugged down his zipper. As she pushed down his jeans, she tortured him with barely there kisses to his stomach. She stroked his shaft. Each slow glide from base to tip grew bolder.
His hips bucked of their own accord. His balls drew tight. Dalir gritted his teeth. “If you keep that up, I won’t last.”
“Oh.” She swiped over the moisture leaking from his tip. “Then I guess it’s not a good idea for me to suck your cock.” As Ari’s lips closed around her finger, a jolt of pure lust shot straight through him.
He knees wobbled. “Later. I need you now.” Dalir picked her straight up. She clung to his shoulders as he carried her. If he had to lose himself and his will to resist, he’d do it buried inside of her.
Lying on the bed, he worked two fingers inside of her. She was already wet for him. Deep hard kisses and the walls of her sex clenching as she climaxed drove his need higher.
He fisted his cock. Condom. He almost tore the bedside table drawer off its hinges as he searched for a one. Gloved in protection, he settled between her legs, ready to thrust forward.
As Ari spread her thighs in invitation, she smiled.
His heart stuttered. Dalir dragged his cock through her slick folds.
Ari’s eyes fluttered closed. She looked sweet and sinful at the same time.
As he did it again, he grazed over her clit.
She stretched her hands over her head. As she gripped the edge of the mattress, she arched her back.
Entranced by her face softening with desire, he kept it up, nestling a bit farther into her sex.
Each time, Ari rolled her hips to meet him. A pink hue tinged her neck and breasts. Her lips trembled. She was close.
Sweat covered his skin. Dalir ached. He reached between them and strummed her clit.
She bucked underneath him. “Yes, Dalir. Yes.”
The sound of her calling his name snapped control. Dalir cupped her ass and thrust in hard, over and over. Skin slapped skin. His heart raced.
Ari tightened her legs around his waist, driving him harder.
Her pussy clutched around him. Tension gathered at the base of his spine and exploded in a rush of heat. He came so hard, spots floated in his vision.
Dalir collapsed, arms trembling as he kept most of his weight off of Ari.
She stroked his back and released a sigh of contentment.
Moments later, he regained enough strength to roll off of her and dispose of the condom. Dalir crawled back into bed.
Ari curled up against him.
Why couldn’t he stay away? Was attraction the connection that made him visible to her? No. It couldn’t be that simple. He had to figure it out. His throat tightened around the question he’d never had to ask anyone. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I thought you could read my mind.”
“Not always.” Another mystery he needed to solve. “You’ve locked me out.”
“Probably because I’m embarrassed.”
“You shouldn’t be. I won’t judge you.”
“All right.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you. I’m thinking you’re an angel assigned to keep me in line, but I corrupted you in the process.”
A real laugh, rusty from disuse, unexpectedly shot out of him. It felt good. “Trust me. I’m no angel.” Dalir kissed the top of her head. “Why don’t we make a trade? You ask me something. I’ll tell you what you want to know, then I’ll do the same.”
The rustling sheets almost masked her quiet laugh as she adjusted position. “All right. Who are you? Where are you from?”
“Are you sure you don’t mean what am I?”
Ari leaned back in the crook of his arm and gave him a hard stare. “No, I mean who. You’re not a foreign object. I may not understand everything about you, but I’m smart enough to know you’re a who not a what.”
Five years ago, in the desert with Thane and the team, he’d answered that question with a proposition. Follow me and save the world. With Ari, where should he start? How much should he leave out?
“I’m Dalir, son of Athan. I’m from a dimension called Alandia.”
“Okay, not exactly what I expected. Guessing I won’t find it on Google maps.” Her attempt to lighten the mood failed to erase all of the anxiety in her tone. “Why am I the only one who can see you.”
“You asked three questions. That’s not how the game is played.”
“But you just claimed you’re from another dimension. That type of answer deserves an automatic follow-up question.”
“No. It doesn’t.” He kissed her. “I answered two of your questions. I expect the same.”
Ari glared. “Why do I get the feeling you’re way better at this game than I am?” She settled against his shoulder. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Where did you grow up?”
“California, Texas, South Carolina, Maryland.”
He needed to proceed carefully to keep her talking. Her mother was a sensitive subject, but Ari had cracked the door open. “Did you live with your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Those memories, what happened? Why did she say you were cursed?”
Ari stiffened. “I should have known that’s where you were headed.” She slipped from his hold and got out of bed. “By the way you cheated. That was three questions.”
He sat up, reining in the impulse to pull her back to bed. “You asked why can you see me? I don’t know but I think you do.”
She paused midway to the bathroom but kept her back to him. “How would I know?”
“I don’t have the answer, but we can find it together, if you stop shutting me out. Both of us need to understand what’s happening between us. Let me in.”
Ari’s shoulders fell with a deep exhale. She picked up his shirt from the floor, put it on, and closed a few buttons. Several sizes too large, it dwarfed her. She got back into bed and leaned against the pillow propped on the headboard. For a long moment she stared at her hands resting on her lap.
“My dad died before I was born. My mother worked as a secretary. We lived with grandmother. She took care of me while mom worked.” A small smile softened Ari’s expression. “I called my grandmother MiMi. She was the first to notice I was different. She said when I was a baby I would touch her face and smile as she sang lullabies to me in her mind.” Happiness faded from her expression. “MiMi died when I was five.”
He took her hand. “That must have been hard.”
“Financially, my mother managed to cover the basics. Everywhere else, we struggled. We moved to Texas because she found a better job. Then she lost it. She missed work a lot because of meetings with the principal or teacher at my school. I’d blurt out things I sensed about the kids or the staff that I shouldn’t have. I couldn’t control it.”
Ari’s grandmother sounded wise like Jalan. If Ari and her family had lived on Alandia, they would have received guidance from the temple. “Is that when you moved to South Carolina?”
“Yes. That’s where she met my stepfather. Right after they got married, the company promoted him to the head of the IT department in Baltimore. His son Oliver came to live with us.” Ari hugged her knees to her chest. “He was a devious, manipulative brat. One weekend, my stepfather’s boss threw a children’s party for his seven-year-old daughter, Missy, along with a gathering for the parents.” The recollections brought a haunted look to her gaze.
“What happened?”
“Oliver told lies about me to the kids at the party. They turned against me. The backyard was huge. The adults at the party were having too much fun to notice what was happening. Oliver, Missy, and some of the other kids dragged me to a secluded area. Missy thought it would be fun to lock me in the storage shed so they did. Then she turned up the music on her new portable stereo so no one could hear me yell. The song with the lyrics don’t stop believing came on. That was one of the songs the tech at the hospital played when I was in the MRI machine. It reminded me how when I was locked in the shed, all I wanted to do was stop believing that anyone cared and give up.” She released his hand.
Dalir wanted to hold her, but her body language dictated she needed him to keep his distance. Where was her mother when all of this had happened? How could no one have noticed the other kids beating Ari up? If he could go back in time, he’d knock the hell out of every parent at the party. “But they found you?”
“After the party ended. None of the kids would admit to what they’d done. They’d claimed I’d hidden in the shed because I didn’t want to play with them. One of the parents even suggested that maybe I’d locked myself in for attention. Then I saw Oliver’s smug face and I lost it.” She swallowed hard. “I told every thought or feeling I’d picked up in their minds, including Missy’s bedwetting problems.”
“I guess that didn’t go over too well.”
“No.” She smiled sadly. “But it felt good for a minute. Then the consequences set in. My mom was embarrassed. My stepfather was furious and worried that he’d lose standing with his boss. She confessed to him that I could sense things about people. Oliver must have overheard them. He started pretending that he was scared of me. My stepfather gave my mom an ultimatum. Their marriage or me.”
That glimpse he’d caught in Ari’s memory filled in the blanks. “She chose him and sent you away.”
“Boarding school. Good thing is, I learned to control the visions and to only sense things when I chose.” She picked at a loose string on the edge of the sheet. “I thought my mother would let me come home if I didn’t cause problems at school. She didn’t. Not even when she remarried a second time. During the winter holidays, I didn’t need a vision to understand no one wanted me around. In the summer, they shipped me off to camp. As I got older, I started going home with my friends from school. Their families didn’t treat me like I had the plague.”
Outrage simmered in Dalir. In Alandia, as a gifted one, she would have been admired, cherished, and treated with the utmost respect. “Where is she now?”
“My mom? She’s in Massachusetts. We talk once or twice a year.”
“How can you stand to speak to her?”
Ari shrugged. “She’s my mom.” Her gaze took on a faraway look. “And I also remember the good times. Like my fourth birthday. I have this thing for pineapples, so she and my grandmother gave me a pineapple party. We wore paper pineapple hats and pretty yellow dresses. My mom even saved up to buy me a nice cake. They let me eat it for breakfast the next day.” She held his hand. “I’m not making excuses for what my mother did to me. I choose to forgive her. For me. I have my own stuff to deal with. I refuse to carry her emotional baggage, too. I usually don’t think about back then at all. That’s why dreaming and thinking about it so much lately is”—she glanced at him—“well, kind of unusual.”
Her pensive expression reflected what he’d started to wonder. “And you think I might be the cause.”
“But it could also be a coincidence. I hit my head before I saw you. That could have triggered the memories.”
Or he’d caused her pain.
She squeezed his hand. “And the MRI. I hate small, enclosed places. I think that experience alone caused my nightmare about being in the shed to come up again. In fact, I think it added to it. Before you woke me up last night, I was dreaming about sun and infinity symbols. That’s exactly how I felt in the machine. Like it wouldn’t end and I’d never get out.”
Unease slipped down his spine. She’d dreamed of two symbols of the Alandian royal house? He sat up. She’d almost convinced him of one coincidence involving him showing up in her life, but two? “Where did you see these symbols in your dream?”
“I’m not sure. Inside the shed I think. Nothing at the end of the dream made any sense.”
“I need you to think. Where was it? How did they appear?”
She stiffened and snatched her hand from his. “Stop screaming at me. I told you I don’t know what the changes mean.”
He forced a calming breath and cupped his hand to her cheek. “I’m sorry, Ari. I didn’t mean to yell, but it’s important. Has anything else different happened with your visions or have you sensed anything unusual lately?”
“No.” She frowned. “Well, maybe one thing. I usually have to be focused on wanting to sense something from someone or better yet touching them for it to happen. Last night, Brooke just brushed me and I picked up on horses. And earlier at the club, when we were kissing. I could hear the thoughts of people at the other table.” A light pink tinged her cheeks. “They weren’t kind.” She worried her lower lip with her teeth. “I also can’t read you.”
Not surprising. Out of habit, he always shielded his thoughts. But the other incidences she’d mentioned, he’d been there, possibly influencing her gift. “Tell me about the dream, especially the part that was different.”
Ari shifted as if the mattress had suddenly become uncomfortable.
He hated to make her relive it, but he had to know about the sun and infinity symbols. “Please.”
She nodded. “The dream started the same, with the kids carrying me by my arms and legs. My sandals are gone. My favorite dress is dirty and ripped. The sky is so blue.” Unshed tears brightened her eyes.
As Dalir listened, it was as if he could see the younger Ari struggling to break free from the bullies. Unable to stand the desolation in her gaze, he took her in his arms.
She laid a hand on his chest. “I’m in the shed. Slivers of light are shining in through a vent at the top of the wall, but it’s still pretty dark. I can hear the song playing and people talking and laughing in the distance. I saw spider webs inside of the shed before they locked me in. I think I feel something crawling up my leg. I scream. That’s usually the point where I wake up, but the other night, the dream kept going. The symbols, they glowed on the door like a brand before it flew open. I walked out and I was near water. There was this gray storage building. And ships.” She wiggled out of his embrace. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Water. Ships. That could be anywhere in Florida. Anywhere in the world, but maybe it was more familiar to her than she realized. “Isn’t there a port nearby?”
“Yes. It’s just a few miles away, but I don’t know if that’s the place. Why is my dream so important to you?”
“The symbols mean something to my family. I’m looking for someone.” And just like every other trail Thane and the team had followed, Ari’s dream could lead them nowhere. By sending them to investigate this, he could end up wasting more of their time. If he didn’t, he could end up missing an important lead.
She gripped his arm. “Who are you trying to find?”
“My brother.”
Chapter 7
Ari steered her car down the highway exit ramp. “Since you convinced me to prowl around at four in the morning, the least you could have done was let me stop for coffee.”
“I’m sorry.” Dalir kissed the back of her hand as he looked out the window. Street lights illuminated the tension hardening his angled jawline. “I just need to know if what you saw in your vision has anything to do with my brother.”
Other than a falling out driving his brother from home, Dalir wouldn’t tell her more about what happened. Ari switched on the air conditioner. Welcome coolness seeped through her T-shirt and jeans. She didn’t have a blood-related sibling that she knew of, but she could understand it. For her, Lauren and Celine were her sisters. If one of them ran off because of an argument, she’d want someone to help her find them.
She turned right at the light. The last time she’d travelled this direction was summer of the previous year. She, Lauren, and Celine had taken a Caribbean cruise. Once they were all together in a few weeks, another girls trip would definitely show up on the welcome home agenda. Not far, just a local weekend someplace where they could relax and catch up. She missed them so much, she’d even consider going with them to Lauren’s mountain cabin in Mazree, Georgia. Ari sent up a silent prayer. She hadn’t heard from them because they were in remote areas without access to the Internet and no cell reception. Wherever they were, right then, she wanted them happy and safe.
Ari backed off of the accelerator. “Well, this is the main road. To the left takes us to the cruise ship docks. Farther up, takes us closer to the clubs and restaurants on the waterfront.”
“What you mentioned sounds more industrial. Where’s that area?”
“I think it’s up ahead.” As they continued on, the landscape grew less commercial. Shipping related businesses and warehouses took over the scenery. “It’s so dark. If the building I saw in my dream is here, how am I supposed to see it?”
