Stealing Kathryn

Book 2: Gatherers

by Jacquelyn Frank

Genres: Paranormal Romance; General Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

Sandman. Angus. Morpheus. He is known by many names, except his true one, Adrian. When he departs his world, it is to enter the sacred space of sleep, and he is not there to sow sweet dreams. Adrian's mission is to reap the dark energy of nightmares, work that has twisted his soul as well as his once-handsome face. Now he lives only to await the day darkness finally overcomes him . . . and to collect exquisite reminders of what he's lost. But there is one treasure that stands apart. Having risked everything to obtain her, Adrian soon realizes his mistake. For Kathryn has a wholly unexpected power over him, not only for what she represents but for what she is: a soul with desires as strong as his own, tempered by compassion that could save Adrian from his self-made hell-or condemn them both . . .

Release date: May 1, 2010

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

“Light. Now.”

The stifling blackness was cut almost rudely by the sound of a striking match. The torch made of rag and kerosene caught the puny flame, held it, and exploded in a flare of fire.

The light chased the darkness back into tighter packs of shadow, where it hesitated at the borders of its ragged, imperfectly constructed circle of illumination. It wavered wanly at its edges, as if it knew it was nowhere near powerful enough to obliterate the darkness and dared not push its limits.

“Light, Master,” the torch holder announced needlessly. His eyes were gobbling up the sight of the magnificent twisting flames. His pupils had dwindled to tiny, brackish pinpoints at the sudden brightness. His eyes hurt, but still he stared at the delicious fire as it licked and devoured its fuel. He continued to gaze at it in utter fascination even after his eyes had burned dry from the near heat and his neglect in remembering to blink.

“Closer, Cronos.”

Cronos finally blinked, wincing at the painfully sudden lubrication. Then he obediently shuffled forward, his spindly legs working hard not to trip over themselves. The Master, he knew, would have no patience for his usual clumsiness this eve.

Something told him that this night was special, different from all the others. He could almost hear the complex, ominous machinations of the Master’s thoughts.

He moved forward, the light progressing with him and creeping slowly along the floor before it began to hesitatingly encircle the Master, as if afraid of the darkness it battled back from around the enormous cloaked figure.

“Stand.”

Cronos froze midstep.

Gingerly, without moving himself or the torch a millimeter closer, he put his raised foot down. He released an anxious, shaky breath as quietly as he could. Then, willing himself not to be entranced by the torch flames again, he looked with curious expectancy to the Master.

The Master’s back was to him, so all he could really see was the expanse of the coal-black cloak stretching across his broad, bulky shoulders. From there it cascaded in massive, flowing folds to the bare stone floor, where it swept the dust-laden gray slab. Upward, the Master’s head was covered, hidden completely within a deep-hooded cowl.

Cronos was glad of this. It was always easier to watch when he could not see the Master’s chilling features. Yet he knew the Master was well aware that he was watching. Cronos kept his simple thoughts carefully neutral.

There was no movement for many heartbeats.

Then slowly, the Master extended a pale, long-fingered hand from the ebony abyss of himself. A large onyx ring glittered from the third finger of this hand, flames catching the facets until it looked as if the ring was burning as well. To Cronos it was a most fascinating effect. Almost too fascinating for his easily distracted mind.

The hand reached farther.

To the mirror.

The mirror was a breathtakingly eerie thing and it, too, never failed to earn Cronos’s attention. It was the shape of an inverted triangle that spanned the entire height of the wall, nearly two feet taller than the Master’s towering figure. The glass gleamed with dark foreboding, a wicked midnight blue and perfectly unflawed. There was an iron framework bordering its three edges. This brown-black ornate edge curled forward toward the glass in arching fingers of twisted metal, looking rather like the Venus flytrap plants up in the Master’s study.

The Master’s hand continued heading for the blue glass mirror, every inch of motion a proclamation of respectful reverence.

Cronos always held his breath at this point, waiting, wondering, almost hoping that this trap, too, would spring, closing upon the Master and gobbling him up like insignificant fly meat.

Fearfully, Cronos checked his thoughts, though the Master likely was not listening to them presently. It was safer not to take any chances, however. And no matter how anxious he was for his own safety, Cronos still could not look away.

There was no reflection of light where there should be in the inky, watery glass.

Only a ghostly reproduction of a pale hand reaching…

The Master’s fingertips touched the glass gently, stroking downward in an almost loving caress. His hand turned palm side up, slowly, so slowly, as a lover might do when carefully cupping a woman’s soft, full breast.

Then with precision and intensity, the fingertips trailed patiently upward.

The Master’s head turned, just enough so that Cronos could see beyond the borders of the cowl.

Eyes of malachite and black widened slightly as they fixed on the progress of his own hand against the mirror. They were large, haunted eyes with pupils that flickered with swift-moving phantoms of death, suffering wraiths, and impending misfortunate fate. Set into deeply shadowed sockets, the eyes seemed to fairly glow with their wicked splendor.

This eerie illumination was fringed with lush, spiky lashes that curled upward in abundance. These lashes were deceptive, mockingly emulating those of an innocent, wide-eyed child whose lashes seemed to go on forever. These were not innocent. They were reaching.

Reaching. Reaching toward thick black brows. Brows that seemed to curl down in their centers, as if attracted toward the lashes. Both were waiting.

Waiting for the tiniest morsel of a fly.

Cronos’s stomach turned sour and he shuddered as he looked quickly to the floor. He could never look long upon those eyes, even when they weren’t trained piercingly upon him. Even when they weren’t boring into him and sucking…sucking at his frantic, twisted soul.

Little fly that he was.

But he quickly drew his faint courage back around himself and looked eagerly back to the mirror and the thing he knew was about to happen.

Gently, without a ripple or a single smudge of a fingerprint, the Master’s hand slipped into the blue waters of the glass.

The Master drew in an audible breath. It was almost a sound of pleasure, echoing in the vast room before disappearing in the refuge of the smothering shadows. He leaned forward slightly until his wrist had become enveloped by the mirror as well. An oppressive feeling of power began to bleed forbiddingly into the room. The torchlight quavered and dimmed, beaten back by this new, overwhelming darkness.

Suddenly, an electric blue and white finger of energy, like a small bolt of lightning, jumped from one of the curling tendrils of the mirror’s iron frame. Cutting a quick, jagged path to the Master’s wrist, it touched and ricocheted off. It rebounded in a precise V, heading directly to the framework on the opposite side of the mirror.

This one spark was the first of a cascade of similar bolts of static energy, each starting from and ending at a new claw of the reaching frame.

A charge built in the room, causing Cronos’s hair to stand on end in long gray spikes. The mirror was alive with lightning now. The Master’s eyes reflected the blue-white glow with unearthly intensity and a hunger for its power.

Then the mirror went abruptly dark and forbidding again. Yet the hot, nerve-tingling charge of power continued to fill the room until it created a whining hum.

The Master yanked back his hand, suddenly alive with movement as he shoved the cowl back from his head. A contorted growl erupted from him as he tore the entire cloak from himself, revealing his ghostly white, naked flesh.

He stepped up to the glass in such a way that one step might take him entirely through, his muscles flexing and twitching with potency and expectation.

The step was taken.

Cronos blinked once as the Master disappeared.

The torch guttered once before dying.

He entered her sleeping mind with an unexpected thrust of force. But he should not have been surprised by her resistance. She always resisted sleeping, it seemed, as if she didn’t have time for it and wished she could do away with the restful state completely.

Not that it was going to be restful now that he was there.

At the moment there was no cohesion to the visions in her mind, the things surrounding him merely remnants of the electrical impulses and memories of things from the boring waking world in which she lived. He didn’t understand why anyone would want to wake up. The worlds of the mind were so vast and creative and could keep a person entertained forever.

Of course, they could also torment them endlessly, he conceded with a private little smile to himself. The emotion-evoking land of nightmares could range from simple guilt and self-induced fears to the roaring dramatics of beasts and the running from or falling to certain death.

The latter was a somewhat lazy method, he felt. It took the finesse of a true artist to work an environment and the mind of his subject in such a way as to turn every part of her own psyche into an antenna of fear, emitting the emotion in powerful, satiating waves of energy. Energy he needed. Energy he craved.

He found her at the very center of her mind, the exhausted need for sleep having forced her under, and her uncooperative imagination was simply tossing up flickering images of a sick girl in bed or her father’s robust laugh.

“No, no, this will not do at all,” he murmured.

He painted their surroundings in perfect pitch of night, the sparkle of stars above and below them as if they were flying among them. She was, as yet, unaware of him, but she responded to the change in her surroundings with awe and wonderment. Her heart raced at being unsure of her footing. Physics and reality were suspended, but her mind had a hard time accepting that.

When a subject first began to dream, the person was only a black shape of himself or herself. Like a person in a head-to-toe body stocking, the subject had no color, no hair, no skin or bone. Just the semiformed black mannequin the subject’s perspective allowed for at first. But depending on the nature of the dream, that would quickly change. The heavy and encumbered could become thin and spry, the ugly could become beautiful, and the beautiful could become plain; all according to the subconscious needs of the dreamer at hand.

But what he liked about this particular woman was that she never once altered her base appearance. The moment she began to dream with him, the blackness would melt away, giving shape to her tall frame with its wickedly long legs and the wide expanse of hips that filled out every outfit she wore with such a nicely pronounced curvature that led to an equally delectable backside. She was busty as well, every movement making her curve in one way or another. Her face was something else, though, aristocratic and elegantly planed, the look of a stern but beautiful schoolteacher. Perhaps it was the tight and strict ponytail she kept the incredible length of her chestnut hair in or it was her gray eyes that made her seem so severe at first, but then she would smile or cry and it would all change. Or she would become gloriously angry and her beauty would truly explode.

He was convinced that this was the way she looked in the waking world. There was never any variation and, in his opinion, there was hardly any need for it. The changes in her appearance came later, by his hand, when it suited his mood, and it was rarely anything more dramatic than the nature of her clothing.

Tonight she was flying and her usual jeans and T-shirt were unacceptable. With a thought he dropped a long white gown over her head, the simple silk flowing from shoulders to toes, outlining the curved perfection of her body, clinging to the beauty of her breasts and their outthrust nipples. She liked the gift, the pleasure clear on her lovely face, and he couldn’t help but stare at her just a few moments longer. They had so little time together, and…

…and there were rules he must follow.

Shapeless and dark, he thrust himself up against her from behind, his arm ringing her shoulders and his brute’s body like a solid wall of muscle and masculinity against her. She startled, her hands immediately going to the arm that held her so tightly. She didn’t call out a name, telling him that she didn’t have any notable men in her life whom she felt would come up on her like this. Why the idea should please him, he didn’t know. Nor did he care.

He wrapped his hand around her neck, the delicate length of her throat so unexpectedly narrow compared to the rest of her voluptuous body that he had a moment of fear that he had grabbed her too hard. Then he laughed at himself because it was only a dream, and grabbing her too hard was a part of the nightmare to come.

He could see into her mind, all her thoughts and emotions, all the trials of her life…and most of all, every fear she had ever had. It impressed him that she did not have very many things that scared her. She was as tough as she was beautiful. But everyone had fears no matter how tough a person was, and she was no exception. He merely enjoyed the challenge for what it was. She began to struggle against him in earnest, her feet and legs flailing as she tried to kick him. But she couldn’t hurt him here in this place. Not really.

Enjoying how she fought him, he threw her down on the bed that suddenly appeared. He followed over her, a dark hulking figure she could not make out or fight off no matter how hard she tried. She gritted her teeth in frustration, and he simply held her there, trapped and immobile.

“Who are you? What do you want?” she wanted to know. Then he paid great attention to the details of her trapped body. How soft she felt. How incredibly perfect she seemed. As far as jobs went, this wasn’t the worst one to have.

“You tell me first,” he taunted her, his voice like gravel and sand. “Obey me or you will not like the consequences.”

She thought about it, the stubborn set of her lips telling him she’d rather get her teeth pulled than tell him anything, but in the end her psychological make-up was going to defeat her.

“Kathryn,” she spat out.

Kathryn. Oh, how he loved to hear her name. He asked her for it every time, just to hear that defiant burst of passionate declaration. In the first three or four dreams he hadn’t asked for her name, not wanting to attach himself to her too personally, perhaps knowing on some level that there was a danger of it with this creature that was not present in others. Now he knew, and he could not take back the knowing. And he didn’t want to. He liked her name. Liked her. It was as bold and glorious as she was. She was, he thought heatedly, a one-of-a-kind and most perfect thing.

He rose over her, relieving her of the burden of his weight as he hovered above her. She might not be able to make his features out, but her mind would interpret his menacing and covetous expression as he ran his eyes over her stretched-out body. He reached to hold her hands above her head in one of his, then raked a hard hand and curved fingers down over her face, throat, and chest.

“You always fight,” he growled, and his harsh hand yanked up the gown and exposed her legs all the way to her thighs. The movement was such a hard one that she shimmied in all of her softest places, emphasizing just how much of a woman she really was. “But I know what you really want,” he told her as his hand scorched up over her thigh and his palm briefly cupped her bare sex. Kathryn gasped and lifted a leg as if to kick him, only succeeding in opening herself to him.

After all, as far as struggles went, this one was quite mild. Perhaps she was beginning to remember the game. Perhaps she was becoming too complacent.

“So, you have no desire to fight?” he asked her hotly, his breath coming quick even though she was being too easy. Just being this close to her stirred him to distraction. “Where is your fear?”

As he said it everything around the room exploded into flames. The only thing left untouched was the bed, but the heat felt all too real and dangerous. Kathryn cried out, struggling harder now to get out from under him, to get away from the thing she feared the most. He could feel her heart racing; she was panting hard for her breath. He tore at the top of her gown, exposing her to the waist, pulling her breast out to meet his mouth. When she screamed it was with a splendid combination of terror and arousal. She was filled with confusion as to why she would react in such a way. But he knew her mind far better than she did, and knew that the excitement of a forcible seduction was one of her darkest fantasies, one she would only ever indulge in here, where it was safe. The fear of the fire only heightened the adrenaline coursing through her. The more intense the danger, the more excited she became.

But still the key element was in her resistance to herself. She felt how she responded and thought it was wrong. She felt shame and guilt, like something was defective within her because she grew wet as he gnawed and devoured her nipple over and over again. He wished then that he could truly taste her skin, truly smell the scent of her. He wanted her in real dimensions, not these imaginary ones. He shifted up to crush his mouth upon hers, the full perfection of her mouth calling to him incessantly, day and night, with no quiet to be had. Frustration wormed through him as he kissed her with great passion but could experience none of the depth and flavor of her. He knew she could feel his passionate intentions, but he was just outside of truth of definition to her as well.

With a roar of fury he burst away from the bed and the object of his dissatisfaction. Ever since he had stumbled upon her the first time, he had been utterly obsessed. He’d tried time and again to stop, to carry on his work elsewhere, to fill his time with better sources of fear and focus.

But always she lured him back, with her infuriating perfection and needful body. She craved so many dark and wonderful things; she had the deepest of fears and yet faced them with such unbelievable courage. She was utterly fascinating.

And he wanted her.

Not just in this realm he was limited to, but beyond it. In the real. He would take her—yes! Yes, he could keep her then, keep her for his very own, and no one could stop him. No one would dare to stop him.

He reached out for her, pulling her to her feet and into the fire. Her dress immediately caught flame at the hem and she screamed, struggling to brush away the flames.

“Tell me where you live and I’ll make it all stop,” he promised her.

“Stop it! Please!”

“Tell me,” he coaxed her as the flames leapt higher against her.

Drowning in terror and flame, she did.

 

Ripping out of the horrifying nightmare with a gasp, Kathryn instantly tried to beat out flames that no longer existed. Her sudden movement nearly toppled her out of the plain wooden chair she’d pulled up to her sister’s bedside. It took her a moment to shake off her disorientation, to realize she had fallen asleep while watching over Jillian. She hurriedly left her chair to lean over her sister’s bed. Jillian was shivering weakly, her breath rasping in a sickening staccato rhythm.

“Hush, now. Rest, love,” she crooned gently to the sick girl.

Kathryn rubbed the grit of weariness from her eyes as she turned to the bedside table. It took her a moment to focus on the paraphernalia there. There were bottles of medicine, a thermometer, and a large china basin with rags soaking in water and melting ice. The bottle labels were a confusion to her for a moment as she tried to get a grasp on her weary concentration. Then she found what she was looking for. She tumbled two small aspirin from one bottle into her palm, hoping to keep Jillian’s fever down. Then Kathryn grabbed a glass of cool water and turned back to Jillian, maneuvering herself behind the frail ten-year-old’s head and lifting it until she could manage to wrangle the medicine down the child’s throat.

Jillian accepted the pills well enough for someone who had occasionally been too weak to swallow, and it gave Kathryn a glimmer of hope. What she wouldn’t give for the simplicity of children’s liquid medicine right then. But in the bush of Australia you had to make do with what was in your supplies, and the colorful syrup had run out a while back.

“There now, what a good girl you are,” she praised Jillian softly, stubbornly believing that the child could somehow hear her. She spent a moment stroking her sister’s thin, pale red hair. Then she slid gingerly from the bed.

Kathryn waited anxiously for several minutes until she was certain the child had quieted again and was resting as peacefully as she could. Then she straightened stiffly, her hands pressing into the aching curve of her lower back. She looked at her watch, trying to determine what day it was as well as the time. She had called for help almost twenty-four hours ago, but things took time out in the bush. But it should be soon. Hopefully very soon.

Kathryn felt her exhaustion with sudden acuteness. Dizziness washed through her and she touched fingertips to her forehead in an attempt to steady herself and her swaying vision.

“Father,” she prayed fiercely, “give me strength.” She gritted her teeth as a harsher wave of vertigo spilled over her.

Kathryn…

Kathryn gasped softly when the low, thick whisper reached her ears. She whirled around drunkenly, taking in the madly tilting room to see who had spoken her name.

A macabre chill rushed her flesh.

“Papa?” she asked breathlessly, widening her eyes in an attempt to focus.

But no one was there but her and Jillian.

Kathryn reached to grasp one of the spiraling bedposts, clinging to it as she searched herself for a store of strength she might not yet have tapped.

There was none.

Kathryn fought back tears.

She must find the strength!

Somehow.

She was the only one left for her desperately ill family to depend on.

She waited, breathing deeply, for the room to stop pitching and rolling around her. She dared not close her eyes. She would surely succumb to the persistent, lurking need to sleep that had harried her every step these last days. She simply did not have the time or the luxury for sleep. And anyway, whenever she did fall asleep, there was nothing there for her but terrible and disturbing dreams. Sometimes, like before, all-out nightmares.

Slowly the room righted itself, becoming once again the firm, solidly built expanse of sturdy antique furnishings it had always been.

Taking another deep breath, Kathryn took a moment to tuck a straggling tendril of hair back behind her ear. She slipped a palm against her slightly rounded stomach, wishing it would settle as the room had. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything, but it seemed very unimportant when the lives of her family were at risk.

Then she took the firmest steps she could manage to the door. She was halfway along the hallway when her vision blurred again and the floor fell away with sickening speed. She collapsed to her knees and hands, jarring her joints as she realized the floor was still very much where it was supposed to be, it was merely her head and her vision leaving much to be desired.

“Get up, Kathryn Louise Macdonough,” she commanded herself fiercely. “You’re the daughter of Connor Macdonough, the granddaughter of Fiona Macdonough. You shame the Macdonough name if you quit now!”

Somehow, after this empowering speech, she managed to drag herself back up to her feet, using the wall as her main support. She slid herself along it so that she could tell right from left and up from down while using it for the stability her betraying eyes would not provide. She finally reached her father’s door.

“Kathryn.”

The whisper was louder this time. Nearer.

She convinced herself that it had been her father after all, even though it sounded nothing like him. But the sickness could very easily have put that rough, mournful lilt into his words…couldn’t it?

Kathryn shrugged off another foreboding chill. She had been living in a stranger’s body for well over a week now, exhaustion robbing her of all that had felt normal. A new, strange feeling seeping into her bones was not all that new or strange an occurrence to her anymore.

She pushed herself into Connor Macdonough’s room and moved to the bed, steeling herself for the weakened image of her father. The preparation did not work. As she bent to change the cloth on his forehead, now heated through with his fever, her eyes misted with tears.

Her father had been a large, robust man. He filled rooms with his very presence and had made stone walls vibrate with a mere laugh. But now her poor papa was but a shadow of himself. In just a week he’d lost a noticeable amount of weight from this wretched flu. His hands, which until now had still been able to toss her around despite her twenty-two years of age and full-grown womanhood, were now knobbed joints and thin, translucent skin. His merry cheeks had lost their natural color, only the occasional spike of fever making them blush.

Kathryn cursed the pilot of the supply plane that had come out to them a little less than two weeks ago. He had brought this vile sickness with him, his simple sneezes and sniffles dooming her father and sister to suffer. The nearest medical help was much too far to drive to by conventional means, and all that rough country and dust while strapped in a car would do her family no good. No, the best thing was to wait for an airlift. Which should be soon. Hopefully very soon.

Kathryn laid the fresh cloth on her father’s forehead, biting her lip brutally hard. She wouldn’t let herself think about the worst. Help was coming. She would go downstairs and call once again, pestering the authorities with all she had to make them come for her family.

The only other option would be to give up…and to bury them next to her sweet, unfortunate mother. The hard life out in this wild country had claimed her mother’s life three years earlier.

Pain of that too-recent loss flooded her, but again she fou. . .