Her head throbbed like the morning after a late-night vodka binge. And she couldn’t see. Was it night? No, she was…
Blind!
Her scream scattered into the whipping wind and rain.
A hand swipe to pull from her eyes whatever obstructed vision didn’t resolve the issue. Pain rocked her head with each breath she dragged in through her mouth, a necessity since, like her eyes, her nose also refused to work.
She spat out salty water as a wave rolled over her.
Which way to swim?
She thrashed around again, contacting only the insecurity of angry water. Chaotic waves smashed into her.
Thunder crashed close. She screamed again, not willing to surrender. But she was smart. Longevity under these conditions was poor.
I’m not ready to die!
At twenty-eight she had plans, like learning how to salsa.
And what about Tasure?
No one wanted her eccentric cat long-term. Her two-week leave had taken a battle to convince her roommate to care for him, and she’d already received over twenty nasty emails about the feline’s misbehavior.
Her arms frenetically flailed to keep afloat. Sooner than expected, her arms and legs tired of the unrelenting battle. The harder she struggled to keep her head above water, the drowsier she became. Her arms refused commands. Minutes felt like hours. The thought of slipping beneath the surface, of breathing in water…she wasn’t ready to go there. Yet. But the more fatigued she got, the more drifting below the surface seemed right.
Abruptly, something yanked her out of the water. She landed hard on rough flooring. Her sluggish mind sought explanation. Solid support. That was all that mattered. Wind whipped a blistering buzz around her and rain pelted. The loud clicking racket of her teeth echoed in her head.
A dry, scratchy blanket landed around her shoulders. She burrowed tightly into the cloth. Given the rocking sensation, she assumed this was a boat. A small one.
She attempted to speak, to ask her rescuer where she was and who helped her, but failed. Only garbled sounds emerged. Why couldn’t she speak? No voice, no vision, non-functional nose. What was going on?
Her heart skipped to bird-tempo beats. Her breaths came in short gasps.
A lyrical male voice spoke, somehow crystal clear despite the wind. “Be calm,
shani
. I will take you to a place where your people can help.”
Shani? He knew her name? No, that meant red in Egyptian, ancient Egyptian. As in her red hair. But no one spoke that language anymore. How had she known what he’d said? She knew her translation was as irrefutable as if he’d spoken her first language, English.
He must know her. Was another archaeologist playing an elaborate practical joke on her?
A hand massaged slow circles on her back through the blanket. At his touch, she forgot about the cold, but the skull-splitting head pain continued. She reached to touch her face, determined to know why her vision was lost and what was going on with her nose, but he captured her hands.
“Do not touch.” His other hand cradled the back of her head while he hummed an unfamiliar, yet comforting melody.
He stopped humming. “This will be difficult for you. There is much blood in your head. I regret the pain you feel and can help this, but I am not allowed to heal you entirely, nor give back lost memory. To me this seems a blessing. He will help you remember. For now, I will gift you protection until he finds you. Doubt not that he will find you.”
Great.
She was on a boat in the middle of a hurricane with a guy spewing nonsense. What had happened to her?
Oh God. She might be permanently blind and mute.
His gentle massaging motions against the back of her head soothed the escalating panic. Her migraine-worthy head pounder receded.
His touch disappeared. “I must row now. Stay still.”
Through drowsiness, she wondered what kind of idiot took a rowboat into a storm like this. As her mind drifted, the image of a gladiator with streaked black hair flashed in her mind.
Did he do this to her?
The male voice said softly, “Sleep,
shani
. When you wake, vow to me this: Do not kill him. Not this time.”
Chapter Two
Restless, Dakar paced.
He glared at the floor of his small, humid room where there should be a groove. He’d walked the perimeter a zillion times, but the damned concrete wasn’t kind enough to give him any credit. Every crack in the painted cement wall was etched into his brain. He had composed a symphony to accompany the light’s flicker pattern.
Confinement made him want to tear the skin from his skull. How long had he been in this putrid closet? Two weeks? Four? He’d lost count.
These humans should worship him as a hero for sending a daemon back where it belonged, not throw him in prison. Yet he wasn’t surprised when they attacked and locked him up in solitary. Getting caught coated in blood in a foreign land guaranteed all the wrong conclusions by captors.
When they hauled him from the Cartagena church into this shithole, blood loss, sleep deprivation, and starvation had him too weak to put up much of a fight. They scoffed when he swore the blood on his clothes was his. The fact his wounds appeared as little more than superficial cuts by the time they examined him hadn’t helped his case. Had he divulged that most of the blood belonged to a daemon, he would have bought himself a one-way visit to the loco ward.
Perhaps they had discovered the woman’s body nearby, and presumed he murdered her. Inadvertently, perhaps he had.
No. She’s not dead.
His chest clamped tight. Memory of her in past lifetimes flooded his brain, inciting a hotbed of contradictory desires. He needed to kiss his way from the delicate arch of her instep to the last freckle on the bridge of her nose. He wished to wrap her tight in his arms where the heat of her body could reassure him she lived.
And he must kill her.
But the thought of hurting her shredded his soul. If that daemon had harmed her…
Stop.
Such thoughts needed to move into a dark corner. This time, this life he must strike first, before she conjured some new way to take him out of the world.
Recall of her beaded nipples and that low-cut shirt of soft transparent cloth had him groaning as blood beelined for his groin. He clenched his teeth.
Do not think about her.
Telling himself that only worsened the situation. Incarcerated in this small room, his mind was his worst enemy. His torturer.
A vision of her furious green gaze when he let her fall and almost hit the floor had his lips twitching upwards. The hard-on worsened. With a curse, he halted his trek.
Do not dwell on such thoughts
.
Learn to hate her.
Otherwise, he would never be able to do what he must. Surely, this desire for her reflected nothing more than a combination of the gods’ meddling and their shared curse.
He threw himself into push-ups at a brutal pace in an effort to shut down his mind.
It failed.
How long had it been since he last saw her?
Two hundred twenty-three years
, his annoying mind chimed in like it had a calendar where he’d been ticking off the days.
That time had been spent imprisoned in the hellpit that was the Middle Realm. This purgatory zone rested on either side of the road blessed human souls walked on their post-death journey to be judged by the god of the afterlife, Osiris.
He jumped up and wiped at his mouth, a habit needed hourly to remove sandy accumulates in that godsforsaken desert hell he’d just escaped. With pleasure, he twisted the handle of the dripping faucet. Cool liquid bathed his hands. Pure luxury. He splashed his face and drank. The water tasted earthy and had a foul mineral odor, not that he cared.
He glanced up at the flickering light bulb and marveled at the changes in this world. No candles. Automatic glass-covered lights. In the brief moments he’d seen of the outside world before imprisonment, the differences left him unsure he could maneuver alone. Even so, he would escape. Confinement was far worse than fear of the unknown.
He appreciated the bulb’s dim sputter. It cast more light than anything in that land of ever-present darkness where he’d been trapped. Only a sporadic red moon had lit his way through the endless sandy mountains populated by nightmare-worthy reptiles in addition to daemons and the occasional lost human soul. But he had mastered the art of moving in darkness.
His traitorous mind moved back to the woman in the church. Was it
her
? His body had apparently decided so. When reincarnated, she remembered nothing of him or previous lives until he nudged her mind into recall, which meant right now she had no memory of him. He had purposefully not mental-nudged out of fear the daemon might attack during the several minutes required to assimilate previous life memory.
What a misconceived plan. Now he didn’t know if she lived or had drowned.
If that was her, she lives
, his brain screamed. He slapped his hand against the wall when panic squeezed his chest to the point he could barely move air. “She is alive,” he said aloud. Were she dead, he wouldn’t be debating this. Their curse mandated they each die by the other’s hand, not by inadvertent daemon attack. And once one was dead, the other swiftly followed.
He would find that woman.
First step: escape. That required strength. The lacerations on his back from the daemon’s strike a few weeks ago weren’t healing. The evil shit had spit on him before he sent it back to the Middle Realm, ensuring the gashes would fester, like the one on his side that had been burning for over a hundred years. It would become a new chronic pain and an infuriating power drain.
Dakar’s captors feared his strength, which, although paltry in his mind, was still stronger than a handful of men. To restrain him, his captors had discovered three to four guards were needed. They resorted to hitting him with a device that shot lightning bolts. That hurt and ultimately drained him. Overhearing their conversation after their most recent success at subduing him, he discovered they suspected he was more than just a man.
He laughed softly to himself
. If they only knew.
****
Hours later, muffled voices halted in front of Dakar’s cell. Shadows registered in the door’s small window. He called forth
seichim
, the mystical energy endowed to each magus that enhanced perception, and boosted strength and concentration. With its power flooding his body, he could hear the conversation between two men and a woman.
A man’s low mesmerizing voice said, “
El hombre peligroso de quien usted habla, esta ahi adentro?
” Is the dangerous one you spoke of in there?
No one replied.
The questioner prompted impatiently, “
Está ahí
?” Is he in there?
“
Sí
,” said a gritty voice Dakar recognized as that belonging to the guard who most frequently “handled” him.
The questioner drawled in English, “Must’ve come on a little strong. I’m a bit off today.”
The woman laughed. “Or he’s gay and, like every person on the planet, other than me, he wants to jump your bones.”
“Could be. Who could resist this? I mean, come on, my stylist did an amazing highlight job this time, but that guy has no chance. Not with that B.O.”
A key sounded in the lock of his cell, but it didn’t complete the one-eighty turn needed to unlock. The guard asked, “
Seguro que quiere ir en paz? Él está loco.
” He made a gesture by his forehead that Dakar could see through his window.
“What’d he say, Christian?” the woman asked.
“Wants to know if you’re sure about going in alone. This guy is crazy.”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
Christian put his face to the small window, but Dakar saw little more than a shadow through the dirty glass. “I don’t have a good feeling. Let me go in there with you.”
“I can handle this,” she said confidently.
“It’s my job to make sure you don’t get hurt. I can’t let you do this alone. I mean, who knows what’s going on in this guy’s head after a few weeks in that locker.”
“You need to trust me.” Her tone broadcasted calm, but Dakar detected anxiety.
“If the bastard so much as crowds your bubble, you yell. Ashor is gonna kick my ass into the next life for this. I still say it’s wrong that he doesn’t know you’re doing this without him.” With unease lacing his tone, he added, “You won’t tell him about this going-in-alone thing, will you?”
“He doesn’t need to know. This is my job now, isn’t it?”
The door scraped along the floor as the guard pulled it open. The guard had a death grip on his gun, which he held in the hand opposite that opening the door. “
Párese contra la pared. Se mueve y le disparo
.”
“Stand against the wall. Move and I shoot.” The tall blond Dakar assumed was Christian quietly interpreted the guard’s command for the woman.
Dakar moved into the shadows and chuckled at the guard whose hand shook. As if the gun would stop him, if he chose to charge.
The guard’s gaze slid to the woman. Her nose scrunched as she stepped into the cell. Yeah, he bet it smelled rank in here. She jumped when the door slammed shut.
Dakar asked, “
Quién es usted
?” Who are you? He detected the subtle buzz of preternatural energy from her. Distrust took a seat front and center.
“Do you speak English? French was my language in school and, honestly, I can’t remember it very well. Spanish is truly beyond me.” She shrugged. Despite high-heeled black boots, the top of her head barely reached his chest. A thick dark braid ended at the top of her skintight black pants. The current fashion for women must be to dress like men. The style left little to the imagination, not that he was complaining. Pretty, but not for him.
“Are they sending whores now? Dark-haired witches are not my type.” He crossed his thick forearms over his chest, hoping she’d read nonchalance. But it was a farce. He was as tightly coiled as a loaded spring. “Not interested.”
“I’m not a prostitute. And I most certainly am not a witch.” Her pale multi-colored eyes widened. Odd, mesmerizing blue-green eyes.