The Eye Of His Storm Read online

  The Eye Of His Storm

  Casey Cameron

  Contents

  The Eye Of His Storm

  Books By Casey Cameron

  Truth By His Hand

  More Than Luck

  Perfect Game

  Love Keeps Giving

  Tying the Knot

  Omega Studies

  His Alpha’s Alpha

  Omega On the Line

  About the Author

  The Eye Of His Storm

  I make it a point never to take in strays, but the kid just looked so pitiful in the rain, leaning against the wall of my apartment building with that soulful look in his eyes. I swear, he could have come straight out of Dickens, raggedy clothes and all. Hell, maybe he did. It’s as good an explanation as any.

  Normally I’d have breezed right past him—the Dark can do funny things to desperate people, and these days you never know when a harmless bum might turn out to be something else. Keeping your head down is always the best policy, but I’d gone and noticed him, and he’d noticed me noticing. He stared at me with those quivering eyes, clear and crystal-blue, and it was so over-the-top I might have laughed, if only the “pathetic drowned rat” act hadn’t already begun to tug at the proverbial heartstrings.

  I stopped in front of the kid and looked him over. Well, “kid” is a relative term—he was probably around 20, but something about him felt impossibly young. Maybe it was a sign of my own advancing years, the onward march of my forties coloring my perception of the younger generation, or maybe it was just that he was a mess of jutting limbs and awkward angles where living on the street had taken all the meat off his bones.

  “You waiting for someone, kid?”

  He shook his head, a few strands of limp brown hair falling into his face. As he shifted under my stern gaze, I noticed he was barefoot.

  “You live here?”

  He shook his head again, unblinking. There was a glimmer of something in his eyes, a faint trace of ethereal not-rightness lurking under the pitiful desperation. A chill went through me that had nothing to do with the rain.

  “Can you talk, kid?”

  He opened his mouth, and for a second I though he would, but it just hung there for a moment before he closed it again with a look of puzzlement. Frowning, he shook his head again.

  I rubbed at my forehead with a sigh. I knew better than this, but the rain was starting to soak right through me, and he’d obviously been out in it all afternoon. Pity was pretty rapidly overwhelming my cautious self-interest.

  “Come on, let’s dry you off and get you some food. My name’s Rick,” I said as I offered him my hand. Tentatively, he reached out with his own dirty mitt, and I shook it firmly while he stared curiously at our joined hands like he’d never heard of a handshake before.

  I led the way upstairs to my apartment, feeling like a bigger idiot with every step. I can’t say exactly what made me do it—maybe I was just lonely. After Jerry left, I didn’t go out very much, and the apartment just felt so damn empty without him that even a mute vagrant kid could seem like good company by comparison. Maybe I was just trying to show a little kindness in a world that had so little of it left to give. Maybe he reminded me of a childhood friend, just lingering on the edge of memory. And if I ran out of excuses, I could always blame it on the Dark. It’s good for that, if nothing else.

  He shivered when we got inside, wet clothes dripping on my carpet. The apartment was heated with massive cast-iron radiators, which was another way of saying it wasn’t really heated at all, so I flipped on the space heater in the living room for him. “You look like a drowned puppy, kid. Sit tight—I’ll get you some sweats or something.”

  I rummaged through my clothes, but I hadn’t done laundry in way too long, so pickings were pretty slim. Granted, even the dirtiest shirt on my bedroom floor probably would’ve been the cleanest thing the kid saw all week, but the last lingering vestiges of my pride drove me to the box under the bed instead. The kid was scrawny as hell, and a good six inches shorter than me. My clothes would’ve fit him like a tent anyway.

  Old ghosts take a lot of shapes. This one was size medium, heather grey, with “UCLA” printed on the front in red block capitals. My fingers traced the faded letters like a rosary as I breathed in deep. The whole box still smelled like him—musk and motor oil and the faint sour tang of his sweat. Jerry had always kept a couple spare changes of clothes at my place, and he hadn’t bothered to take them with him when he left. “I’ll be back, dummy,” he’d said, flashing that crooked smile at me—the one that made me melt a little inside.

  Liar. Bastard. I loved him so much.

  I grabbed the matching sweatpants and took them out to the kid before I started getting all teary-eyed. “Here,” I said, tossing the clothes on the end of the couch closest to him. “Get changed before you catch pneumonia or something. I’ll whip up some dinner. How do you feel about—”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. The kid was stripping in the middle of my living room, peeling his wet shirt off glistening tan skin. What I’d mistaken earlier for emaciation turned out to be a natural leanness—I could see his lower ribs when his arms stretched overhead, but overall, he was very well put-together. Smooth lines and a trace of muscle, with a trail of soft, dark hair dipping below the waistband of his tattered jeans. The jeans he was starting to remove.

  “Hey!” I jerked myself out of my stupor with a sudden wave of my hands. “Hey, not here. Use the bathroom.” I pointed, and he nodded, flushed, and scurried down the hall. I grabbed his wet shirt off the floor and laid it out on the radiator, pausing to adjust myself with a silent scowl.

  A few months on my own, and I was popping wood at the first sight of skin that came my way. Maybe the kid didn’t have the monopoly on “pathetic” after all.

  I cooked up some spaghetti while the kid wandered around my living room, picking up garbage and knick-knacks alike and turning them over in his hands. When I came out of the kitchen again, he was looking at the framed photos on my bookshelf.

  The picture he held in his slender fingers was one of many I couldn’t bear to throw away. Behind dusty glass, Jerry and I were grinning like idiots, my arm draped over his shoulder and his around my waist. The photographer was his mother; his family’s Iowa farmhouse stood quiet and unchanging in the background. “Me and my boyfriend,” I explained, in response to his questioning look. “Or ex-boyfriend, I guess. He, uh…he disappeared. Left to take a job in Houston and never showed up. Cops couldn’t find a trace of him. Not his car, nothing.”

  The kid looked even sadder than before, if that was even possible. He held the frame out to me, and I took it with a weak smile. Wiping the dust off the frame with my sleeve, I set it back in its place, next to the rest of the ghosts.

  “Come on,” I said, giving him what I hoped was a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Let’s have some dinner.”

  He tore into his food like he had never eaten before; his enthusiasm was flattering, but exhausting to watch. He refilled his plate three times, and probably would have gone for a fourth if we hadn’t actually run out. I chuckled softly as he picked up his plate and literally licked it clean. I’d have taken it as a compliment if the sauce hadn’t come straight from a jar.

  After dinner, the rain was still pouring down. There was no point sending him back outside if he was just going to get soaked again, so I started flipping through my movies. “You can stick around until the rain stops,” I told him, and he nodded his understanding. “Feel like watching a movie while we wait?”

  I picked out something light and inconsequential, because this evening hadn’t left me feeling like thinking too hard about my entertainment. Life had too much thinking in it already. The kid kept looking at me
while the movie played; I saw him out of the corner of my eye, stealing glances. A full belly and a late night were having their effect on me, though, and I found myself drifting off toward the end of the show. The apartment had finally warmed up to a reasonable temperature, and it was starting to feel a just little bit like the cozy little nest it had once been.

  A heavy weight across my thighs jolted me awake, and my eyes shot open to see the kid climbing into my lap. I froze as he curled against my chest, warm and sleepy, his arms twined loosely around my neck. My arms instinctively wanted to circle him, wanted to pull his body tight against me, but the remains of what passed for my common sense these days stopped me.

  He sighed softly—the first sound I’d heard out of him—and shifted, tilting his head upward. I knew what was coming, could see it as clear as the pictures on the TV screen, but I was helpless to stop it, sleepy and warm and pliant under his squirming weight as he leaned up to kiss me.

  His lips were soft and full, warm against mine, and I couldn’t help but taste them. Alarm bells jangled in my head, screaming at me that this was wrong, that he was vulnerable and confused and very possibly not human, but his tongue was flicking against mine, slick and insistent, and every instinct in my body wanted me to roll him under me and taste more than just his mouth.

  Somehow, the part of my brain still capable of conscious thought finally kicked in, and I pushed him away. He made a tiny mewling noise, clutching at my shirt as I tried to untangle myself. He was giving the the soulful eyes again, glistening and sad. You’d think I’d kicked him or something, from the look on his damn face.

  “No,” I said, wiping my mouth like I could scrub away my hunger for him, “this isn’t right. I’m at least twice your age, and you’re not…jeez, I don’t even know your name.” I looked out the window. Still raining. Shit. “Look, I’ll…bring you some blankets, and you can sleep out here tonight. But tomorrow you have to go back to wherever it is you came from.” He nodded slowly, his hands clasped in his lap, and I let out an exasperated sigh, stomping off to the bedroom for spare blankets.

  I half-expected him to sneak into my room in the night, to try to convince me to give in to my baser urges. In all honesty, he might’ve succeeded, but my sleep was undisturbed until morning.

  It was still grey and raining steadily when I woke up, though. The kid watched me while I got ready for work, nothing but a pair of questioning blue eyes peering out of a pile of blankets. When I was showered, shaved, and somewhat approaching presentable, I stood in the bedroom doorway, staring back at him. He still looked pitiful.

  And I was still an idiot.

  I leveled my gaze at him, summoning as much sternness as I could muster. “Can I trust you?” The kid pulled the blanket off his head, and the hair underneath was sleep-mussed and shaggy. My fingers itched to smooth it down. He blinked at me, and I could almost hear him asking what I’d meant. “I don’t want to kick you out in the rain, but I’ve got to go to work. Can I trust you not to mess with my stuff?”

  He nodded vigorously, looking for all the world like a giant, skinny puppy, beaming up at me with shining eyes. It was absurd, but I felt my heart melt a little anyway.

  I spent my entire work day anxious and jumpy. What would I find when I got home? Would my door be swinging on its hinges, all my valuables gone? Maybe the kid was a junkie, and I’d find him dead on my floor, overdosed on drugs or something worse. Maybe my entire building would go missing, like a traveler in the desert. I cooked up awful scenarios all day long, and when the clock hit five, I was off and running, the mile and a half between me and my apartment racing by in a rain-soaked blur.

  The building was still there—that was a good sign. When I got upstairs, my door looked perfectly fine, too. I stopped for a second to listen. No spooky, Dark-crazed howling was emanating from inside. Everything seemed normal.

  I opened the door, and Jerry was standing in my living room.

  The air left my lungs in a helpless gasp. I stumbled forward with shaking knees, and he smiled as I gathered him into my arms, tears streaming down my face. I kissed his cheeks, his eyelids, the scar on his forehead, the divot in his chin, laughing through my tears as I cupped his face in my hands. “Where have you been, Jer?” My voice was no more than a choked whisper. “What happened?”

  Jerry shrugged, giving me a helpless little smile. He pulled me down to kiss him, and his lips were exactly as I remembered, firm and smooth and right against mine. I slipped my hands beneath his shirt, drinking in the heat of his skin and the hardness of his muscle, every detail of that body I knew so well.

  And that was when I remembered the kid. I broke the kiss, holding Jerry an arm’s length away. “Where’s the kid?”

  Jerry cocked his head curiously, then tried to move closer. I pushed back, a liquid chill creeping up my spine. “Say something, Jerry.”

  He shook his head and reached out, pressing a finger against my lips. I snatched the hand away.

  “You’re not Jerry, are you?”

  He looked up at me and shook his head, and I saw a flicker of ice in Jerry’s emerald eyes. Pulling him closer, I looked at his left eye—there was a tiny black fleck there, right in the middle of the sea of green. It was my secret spot—you could only see it if you were close enough to kiss him. I tugged at his hand, spreading the fingers with my own, and there between his middle and ring fingers was a small round mole, brown tinged with red.

  Boiling rage flared up in me; I squeezed his wrist tighter, and his sad eyes widened in fear. “How did you do this? How do you know this shape? Not from pictures, that’s for damn sure!” I spun and slammed him against the wall, pinning him while he squirmed. Tiny, choking noises tumbled from his lips, broken and helpless. “Was it you? Are you the one who found him in the desert? What the hell did you do to him?” I shook him, hard, and his head knocked against the wall. He started crying, great wailing sobs louder than anything I’d heard from the kid before. “Where is he?”

  The face twisted before my eyes, the shoulders I’d dug my fingers into shrunk, and an instant later I was holding the kid, his face red and streaked with snot and tears. He kept on sobbing, shaking his head desperately while he struggled against my grip.

  He didn’t know a damn thing, did he? Suddenly I felt like the world’s biggest asshole.

  I relaxed my grip slightly, doing my best to hold him steady without hurting, and I schooled my voice into something softer. “I just need to know, okay? How do you know what he looks like? Where did you see him?”

  The kid reached up to my face, and I stiffened, my skin crawling at the memory of him touching me a moment ago with the wrong hands. His fingertips rested at my temples for a moment, barely brushing my skin, then his hands moved down and crossed over my chest, resting there briefly for a moment before dropping back to his sides. He gave me an apologetic look, sniffling through his tears.

  Okay, so the kid was a mind-reader. That was only marginally less sinister.

  “I don’t want you in my head, kid. Stop it.” He shook his head, whimpering. “I’m serious. Do you want me to kick you out?” More shaking, harder this time, his shaggy hair whipping his face. “Then get the hell out of my head. That’s not for you.”

  “Can’t,” he whispered, his eyes downcast. His voice was low and breathy, his tone unsure. Like he had never spoken before.

  I let my hands drop from his shoulders. “So you can talk.”

  He shook his head again—I wondered if all that head-shaking was making him dizzy—and rubbed his shoulders, hugging himself tightly. “Can’t,” he repeated.

  “Fine.” Defeated, I turned and walked away from him, rubbing my temples. I needed a drink. And a nap. And a normal life again—but didn’t everyone, these days? “Whatever. Just...please don’t do that again. You’re not him.” I stopped in the bedroom doorway and turned back for a moment. “And go take a shower or something. You look like hell.”

  The rain didn’t stop that night, either. The relentless b
latter of drops against my window kept me awake most of the night to dwell on youthful skin and lost treasures. The streets were starting to flood when I walked to work in the morning, huddled under my umbrella. My mood was as miserable as the weather, and neither showed any sign of improving as the week wore on.

  The kid continued to creep me out regularly. He started picking up my mail for me, despite the fact I’d never shown him where the mailbox was, and he didn’t have a key. If I got thirsty, he’d get up without a word and bring me a drink. If I thought about a certain food at work, I’d come home to find it on the table. He found my orange striped sock that had been missing for months, and as much as I wanted to know where he’d found it (and whether he’d searched through my stuff to do it), I didn’t bother asking. His vocabulary had increased to include “uh-huh” and “no,” and every conversation I had with him played like a game of 20 Questions. Except that the answer to every round was, “I have absolutely no idea how or why I do what I do.”

  He’d been with me a week when the letter came. He pressed it into my hands with a mournful look that was probably reflected on my own face when I saw the return address: Everly, Iowa. Without a word, I shut myself in the bedroom to read it.

  Dear Rick,

  I was just thinking of you and thought I’d write to let you know how we’re all doing out here. I know we were never terribly close, but you were a big part of Jerry’s life, and so I’ve always considered you to be a big part of our lives, too. I hope you feel the same, and that you’ll write back to let us know how you are.

  Let’s see, where do I start? Carolyn finally finished college, and she’s been talking about making her way out to sunny California like her big brother did. I’d rather she stayed nearby, of course, but I’m sure you of all people are well aware my kids have always had the adventurous spirit.