Linnear 06 - Second Skin by Eric van Lustbader

Author:Eric van Lustbader [Lustbader, Eric van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Detective and mystery stories, Suspense, Thrillers, Action & Adventure, Espionage, Linnear; Nicholas (Fictitious Character)
ISBN: 9781439189450
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1995-01-01T13:30:00+00:00

"Yes," she said in a hoarse whisper. "It interests me greatly." "Ah, greatly," Bernice said with a nod. "That is good, because from the first I have known that you are-as I aman agent of change." She offered her hand, and when Jaqui took it, she allowed die charismatic warmth to transfer itself to the girl.

"There," Bernice said. "The compact has begun." What Jaqui always thought about her brother Michael was this: that there was a wolf inside him, eating at him, desperate to get out. And it was this desperation that frightened her. She could admire his innate intelligence, she could applaud his decision to keep his distance from the family business that had already ensnared Caesare, but she recognized the danger of this beast inside him and it made her tremble.

And yet What was it about Michael that made him seem to her as if he were a kindred spirit? All alone in the night, she dreamed of him. In her dream, they stood in a glade of a vast woods. All around them was cluttering darkness where beasts of prey prowled. The glade shone whitely in moonlight, but the dense canopy of treetops would not let the light penetrate the woods.

Michael stood tall and handsome and absolutely unafraid, but she could feel her terror like a second skin, crawling over her like a skein being drawn by an invisible insect He smiled at her with that peculiar, goofy smile he directed only at her.

Michael! she screamed, more loudly.

But he could not hear her, and now she realized that she was mute. She heard the rhythmic liturgical chanting of Latin prayers, and she grabbed Michael's hand and fled with him into the darkness of the woods.

And in that darkness, she could hear the twin beatings of their hearts, synchronized and harmonized, like the choral voices of the liturgical song. Deeper and deeper into the dangerous woods she drew him until both glade and moonlight were but a memory. Why? Why? What was she seeking?

She awoke knowing they were about to be attacked, and the thought in her head, revolving like a wheel: I've done this to him. It's all my fault.

This dream was alive and glowing in her mind that hot June night in 1961 when she found Michael up on the roof of their apartment building in Ozone Park. Grandpa had given him a telescope, the perfect present for a boy longing to outpace the boundaries of his limited world. But then Grandpa always seemed to know just what his grandchildren wanted most. On her last birthday, Valentine's Day, when she had turned nineteen, he had given her a book on the birth of Italy. For Caesare's birthday, he had chosen a gun.

There was a peculiar kind of fever coming off Michael that night, as if he, too, possessed that second skin beneath which a hitherto unknown person was thirsting to emerge.

That night, he was by turns avid and unresponsive, as if a central question in his mind had not yet been resolved.

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