Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL) (16 page)

When he had pulled to the shoulder of the road earlier, he had refrained from putting on the car’s hazard lights, hoping they would look like an abandoned vehicle to those passing by at high speed. Whether by luck or by his design, they had been left alone.

Mary’s body rested against his chest. He had been quietly feeding her energy the whole time he had been in her mind. Despite her confusion and anguish, her body felt relaxed and more natural now, no longer feverish. She seemed to be asleep.

In a stealthy movement he pressed his lips against her shoulder blade and rubbed his mouth lightly on the thin, warm cotton material of her T-shirt. Then he eased her over more to the passenger seat, tucked the jean jacket around her and buckled her seat belt into place. She sighed, shifted and went still.

Cars and trucks shot by, providing quick flashes of illumination. The psychic landscape was restless with movement as whispers tickled the edges of his mind. Despite all his instincts screaming at him to get moving again, he took another stolen moment to lock in his memory the sight of the precious curve of her living cheek.

Then he faced forward and acknowledged some hard truths. He gripped the steering wheel with his left hand, gun clenched in his right. Holding rigid was the only way he knew to survive.

There was no road map for where they were in their history. He still didn’t know what had been done to her to cause the kind of wound that she had. All he could tell was that her energy was skewed somehow, different than it had ever been, and every time he looked at her with his psychic senses she looked cracked wide open like an egg. The evidence of such a violation, the sheer wrongness of it, made him feel like roaring.

He thought about what it would be like to put the gun to her head right now and pull the trigger. Death was just one gentle move and a click away. It would be good to do it while she was asleep, and it would be over with so fast, faster than she could comprehend. She wouldn’t experience any more pain. Then it would be so simple, the work of a moment to turn the gun on himself.

His head ached so ferociously, he thought he might split apart from the force of it. He rubbed the barrel of the gun against his temple.

* * *

MARY OPENED HER
eyes. She leaned against the passenger door, wrapped in the warm jacket. She was still overtired and her body hurt, but mercifully the raw feeling had eased in intensity.

Why had they stopped moving? What had just happened?

She must have had another hallucination and passed out.

No.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, she must have crossed over into sleep without realizing it. That was odd but not impossible for the dangerously sleep-deprived, and boy howdy the dream she’d just had was a rough one.

No, that didn’t work either.

Then she heard a quiet sound. It was Michael, whispering.

The fine hairs at the back of her neck rose. She gave him a surreptitious look between her lashes.

He rubbed the barrel of his gun against his temple as he whispered, “It was too a mistake. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any choice. I’m sorrier than I can say.”

The sight of him struck her hard, like a slap in the face. Some of the words he used were straight out of her hallucination, her dream.

She took a deep, careful breath and didn’t give herself time to think. Slowly she reached toward him and touched his arm. A flash of emotion seared her, and it was not her own. She got a sense of suffering so intense it felt like a mortal wound. She let her gentle fingers trail along his arm, keeping the motion unhurried and nonthreatening, giving him plenty of chance to react and pull away.

He did neither. Instead he froze when she touched him. His big, tough body was so taut it felt like he might break.

At last her fingers curled around his clenched hand. It was so much bigger, so much more powerful, than hers. She put the lightest pressure on him, a silent request more than anything to ease the gun away from his head. He let her, until the nine-millimeter rested against his heavy, muscled thigh.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. She didn’t try to take the gun from him. Instead she stroked the back of his hand and his thick, corded wrist. “You’re all right. You’re safe.”

Reassuring him just as he had reassured her in her hallucination, her dream.

He opened his eyes and looked ahead at nothing. His eyes were bloodshot. He said, “I’m really tired.”

How crazy was this? Her heart twisted for him, this big, strange, dangerous man. “I know you are.”

They sat quietly, her hand resting on his wrist. Then his taut body relaxed. He took his hand out from under hers and holstered his gun. He said, “Have you figured out yet where you were?”

She was completely unprepared for the question.

Realization blasted her back against her door. Her hands went out in front of her. She grasped at the dashboard as her world reeled yet again. She gasped, “You were in my head. Just now. You were in my fucking head.”

He said nothing.

“You’ve had the same dreams,” she said. The words kept coming and coming, a deluge pouring out of her mouth. “You know that place. You think I’m one of that group. You think I’m one of you.
Who do you think I am?
”

* * *

EVEN THOUGH WE’RE
trying to take care with each other, Michael thought, we’re still tearing each other’s barriers to pieces. He couldn’t find a way to slow down the revelations. Instead they came in an uncontrolled convulsion.

Without warning, his own burden of agony, which he had transformed to rage in order to survive each killing day of an interminable existence, welled to the surface. A deep groan broke out of him like the girders on an overstressed bridge.

“Michael?” she asked, searching his face.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t. He had imagined a thousand times or more various scenarios like this one. He had coached himself on how he would behave. None of it meant a goddamn thing.

He grabbed her and yanked her to him, bowing his head and shoulders over her slender body. Holding her so tight he felt some of her bones shift under the pressure, he put his face in her hair and shook so hard he thought he would fly apart from the force of it.

He said in a hoarse voice, “You were my mate. The other part of my soul. And you have been missing for over nine hundred years.”

A couple of heartbeats thudded between them. For a wonder, she didn’t struggle to free herself. He felt her arms encircle his waist in a light, tentative hold. She leaned into him, and for a moment he recalled with shining clarity what it was like to cradle his second half, to rest against a luminous being of grace and beauty.

For a moment to his parched and destitute soul it felt like he had come home, after wandering in a strange and hostile wilderness for such a long, long time.

After a moment she whispered, “I have no idea where to put that, on top of everything else.”

Despite her guarded and rational words, he felt her arm muscles tense, until she was holding him with as tight a hold as he held her. He rubbed his face in her hair, savoring every fleeting sensation.

“You don’t have to put it anywhere,” he forced himself to say. “It was millennia ago. We were quite literally different creatures then.”

Her head moved under his cheek. “You believe that.”

“Belief has nothing to do with it,” he said, his voice flat. Just as what he wanted had nothing to do with it. “It’s the truth. When the Deceiver escaped, there was only one way we could follow him. We had to leave our lives behind in order to travel to another dimension, or another universe, if you will.”

“That’s why we had to die. It was the only way to transform,” she muttered. She seemed to recoil from what she had just said, as if it sounded too real. She added quickly, “I mean that’s what happened in my dream.”

“We became hybrid creatures when we grafted on to Earth’s ecosystem,” he said. He forced himself to speak as clinically as possible. “In order to regain a physical existence, we had to become part of this world’s cycle of death and rebirth. We were forced to adapt and evolve beyond our origins. On top of that, you and I have survived something unprecedented. No other mated pair has been subjected to and survived nearly a thousand years of separation. We are, quite literally, not what we once were.”

Somehow he had to remember that. Somehow he had to come to believe it.

Chapter Fourteen

MARY HUDDLED AGAINST
him, soaking in the illusion of strength and safety his big body offered as she considered everything that he had told her.

Of course the whole thing was outlandish, outrageous. It was also the only explanation she had ever encountered that explained everything she had experienced in her life.

Someone else knew of her dreams. Someone had walked inside her head, had looked at the bizarre images and said, Yes, I remember that too.

Damn, it made all the puzzle pieces fit. That didn’t mean she had to like it. She wasn’t sure she believed in it. It just . . . fit.

She muttered, “I have to think.”

“You do that. In the meantime we’ve been sitting here like stationary targets on an open-air shooting range. We have got to move.” He gripped her by the shoulders and pushed her away.

For a moment her traitorous arms resisted letting go of him. Then her muscles loosened and they separated. She settled back into her seat, her gaze lingering on the lines of his face that had settled back into his earlier expression of grim endurance.

He started the car, checked behind them and pulled onto the road.

She huddled under his jacket and leaned her forehead against the cold glass of her window. She wasn’t ready to talk again so she pretended to fall asleep. She wasn’t ready to sleep and risk another dream, so she fought to stay awake. She labored under the burden of too much information that had come at her too fast. At the same time her need for answers had built up to such a desperate extent her mind kept racing on to the next question, and the next.

The physician in her realized that she wasn’t out of triage yet.

How she felt about Michael was a question she wasn’t ready to examine, so she set it aside. At first his withdrawal had pierced her with a strange hurt. Then she was grateful for it. If he was right—
if
he was right—and she was not quite human, she was still no longer that creature from her sacred poison dream.

When she had put her arms around Michael, for a few brief moments she might have felt that she held her mate in her arms, her essential twin, the missing piece of her soul. But that feeling, if she believed it—
if
she believed it—was an anachronism, like feeling phantom sensation from an amputated limb. It had to be. She knew nothing about him in this life, or what kind of man he had become.

She stretched and felt her companion’s attention snap to her. She remembered her first impression of him, that physically he was forgettable, nondescript, like a thousand other tough soldierlike men.

Now she couldn’t connect in the slightest way to that earlier impression. He was not conventionally handsome, but the lines of his face were stamped with intelligence, and he radiated forcefulness like the blast of heat from a volcano. The heavy muscles of his long, hard body rippled, sleek and sinuous, under his tanned skin.

Watching him was a hypnotic experience. Every movement he made flowed like water. If he stood in the middle of a crowd, her eyes would be instantly drawn to him.
She
was drawn to him—to the magic encased in his physical form, to his masculine scent. Something about his hands caused her body to pulse with awareness.

With a slow sense of incredulity she realized that she was sexually drawn to him. And they might not be twinned souls any longer, but she basked in the vitality of his strong presence.

Even though she already knew she had his attention, she said, “Michael.”

“Yes.” He was curt.

She wanted to touch him. She frowned at his profile. “Did you have a rough time recovering your memories?”

He stirred. “No, but my circumstance doesn’t compare with yours. I was eight when Astra found me. I was able to recover my memories over time. She both shielded and taught me as I grew up. It was a good thing she found me when I was so young. I was not, shall we say, headed down the right path. Whereas she and I are pretty sure this is the first time you’ve incarnated since you sustained your spirit injury. It may be the first time that you’ve been strong enough.”

The first time she’d been strong enough in over nine hundred years. Her breath whistled between her teeth. “That bad.”

“Yes,” he said, the word a quiet hiss. Then he continued, “This is all happening for you in a much more traumatic setting, as an adult in a dangerous situation. To be frank I’m amazed you’re as sane and intact as you are. We didn’t know what we would find when we recovered you. We had to be prepared for you to heal in stages—over lifetimes—and we didn’t dare hope for more than a chance to help you heal in this life as much as you could.”

“Talk about taking the long view,” she muttered. She stared at the night sky. The earlier clouds had dissipated. Now a hard edge limned the landscape as if it were cut from sapphires and diamonds. When the sun rose later, the jewels would melt in a gush of heat and light.

She was disturbed by how Michael talked about dying and being reborn with such apparent dispassion. It seemed as if a part of him didn’t connect with the miracle of being alive in the present.

She tried to look at it from his point of view, to consider the realities he had been forced to endure. The woman Astra had influenced him from an early age. Was that the elder she remembered from her dream? She wondered what kind of person Astra had become.

Then she realized she was falling into a thought pattern of acceptance. The realization made her stiffen. She said, “Do you think I’ll stop dreaming those images, if I accept what is happening?”

He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Who knows? Maybe after you’re healed you’ll go on to dream of other lives and other things.”

The words he used triggered something else.

“I was a healer,” she said. “Back then, in the first life. Wasn’t I?”

He paused as he shifted track with her. “Yes. It was one of the ways in which you and I balanced each other.”

Healer and warrior. Yin and yang. The two aspects would provide a sometimes tense balance. She chewed her lip as she considered. She wondered if they had managed their partnership without conflict.

In her dream of that first, strange life she had been a fine healer, a really good one. She didn’t remember much, but she remembered that.

Had she always been a healer? It seemed like such an essential part of her. Her mate in the dream had been very much a warrior, just as he was now. How much had they changed? How much had they remained true to their core identities?

“I need to think,” she muttered again. They fell silent.

She rebelled at the thought of going to someone else for healing. She frowned, aware that the feeling was not quite sensible. After all, if she needed an appendectomy she would go to another doctor.

This shouldn’t be any different, but it was. This was, as Michael said, a spiritual wound not a physical one. When she met Astra, she might feel welcome and safe, like she was reuniting with a lost long friend or a mother, but that hadn’t yet happened.

She didn’t know the other woman. All she had were too-brief dream images of Astra, or what had once been Astra, and Mary was tired of being vulnerable. She was tired of feeling broken.

She would much rather heal herself, if she could. Michael was an overwhelming presence all on his own, and her reaction to him was complex and bewildering. Astra must be just as overwhelming in her own way, if not more. When Michael and Astra were together, the effect would be multiplied. They had worked together as a team for a long time, long enough that they would know each other well.

Mary would rather be whole and independent when she dealt with them together. And what if she and Michael ran into more trouble before they reached Astra? She would like to be more useful than she had been when she was last attacked.

Huh, listen to her. When she was last attacked. She shivered as she realized that she had accepted just how much danger they were in.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Just south of Grand Rapids,” he replied.

He was back to being Mister Enigmatic again. She tried to search his expression in the dashboard’s dim light. His eyes were shadowed, and lines bracketed his mouth. “Are you all right?” she asked. She added quickly, “I mean you said you were tired. You’re not too tired to drive?”

“I’m fine,” he said, his tone terse. “I just need food and coffee. We’ll go through a drive-thru when we hit the city.”

“Stopping for a real meal would be nice.” She bit her lip when he looked at her. She sounded like a wife on some kind of crazy-bad vacation. She muttered, “I suppose that wouldn’t be a good idea.”

His voice remained level. “That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“Makes sense,” she said without enthusiasm. “I guess.”

“Things don’t feel very friendly in the psychic realm,” he said. “I’m pretty sure the Deceiver knows somehow that you and I have connected. It feels like he’s picked up the pace of his hunt.”

“About that,” she said. “Why is he called the Deceiver? That’s not just your nickname for him. We called him that in my dreams too.”

“For one thing, we shouldn’t call him by his old name. When we talk and think of him, we open conduits in the psychic realm where all things are connected. We don’t really know for sure what he can sense, and we don’t want to draw his attention to us.”

Shards of ice moved in her veins. She looked around at the already familiar interior of the car, not feeling nearly as secure as she had just a moment ago. “All right, that’s creepy.”

“For another thing, we call him that because that’s what he is. He lived under a cloak of deception for years as he betrayed our laws and our people. He did something unheard of and turned his back on his mate. He was a moral and spiritual deformity, a sociopath in a race that had no concept of what that meant, or a word in our language with which to define him.”

She swallowed hard. “I see.”

He told her, “You should rest while you can. We don’t know what’s ahead of us, but I would bet my shirt that the rest of the trip to Astra’s isn’t going to be easy. We may be caught in a situation where I can’t take time to lend you strength.”

“Understood,” she said.

Actually, that was another good reason to see what she could do to heal herself. She couldn’t rely on Michael being available to keep her stabilized.

She folded his jacket into a pillow and made herself as comfortable as possible. She closed her eyes.

She thought about the wounded woman in her dream. Maybe she could make herself go back in a dream to that life before she was injured. Maybe she could remember what it was like to be whole.

She wasn’t sure she would be able to, but she was tired enough that she fell asleep as soon as she closed her eyes.

* * *

HER FATHER WAS
an accomplished politician and merchant, a powerful diplomat and a kind man. Her mother was clever, well-educated, happy and lovely. It was not hard to be a dutiful daughter under their doting parentage. Surely their family was the most blessed of all the Faithful in a city fabled for its wealth and beauty, where people came as supplicants from all over the world.

She had been educated as well as any man, and better than most. When she became troubled by mystical dreams and visions, her father searched for sorcerers, soothsayers and magicians of all nationalities to help decipher their meaning.

Many were charlatans. A few were true adepts, and she learned from each one. She became skilled in a variety of disciplines, although each teacher puzzled greatly over the mysteries that she presented to them.

One day, her father came to her and said, “Daughter, I have found a kind man for you, for it is past time you married.”

By then she understood enough of her own nature to know what answer she must give him. “Father,” she said, “I cannot.”

“It is your duty,” he said. He frowned, though she could tell it was from concern and not anger.

She knelt before him and bent her head. “Am I not a good daughter and a faithful child of Allah?”

“You are.”

“And do you know that I love you?”

“Most assuredly.” He passed a gentle hand over her hair. “You are second in my heart only to your mother.”

“Then know this, my father. I would give my life for you if you asked. But I cannot marry your kind man, for I have a task to do. Allah in His infinite wisdom has seen fit to make me incomplete. I must look for the other half of my soul. . . .”

Her father listened and believed, and so they searched again, and tales spread of their inquiries.

[Mary stirred as an echo of a bone-splitting pain throbbed in her chest. She surfaced partway from the dream, pressed her hands against her breastbone, and pushed the memory of pain away as she fought against the pull of awakening.]

. . . And she pulled out of her body.

Marveling, she stood beside her physical body, which was dark-haired and strange looking, and clad in a plain tunic and trousers of homespun cotton. Her physical self sat, eyes closed, in a relaxed cross-legged position, mirroring the posture and position of her elderly teacher.

Then she held up her hands and stared at them in wonder. They appeared crystalline in the heavy amber afternoon. The astral replica of her teacher’s slight, frail body joined her. “Celestial Daughter,” her teacher said. “You have done well. I am pleased.”