Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL) (21 page)

“So I saw. You are certainly full of surprises.” He laid the gun aside.

“Yes, I’ve found that I’m full of surprises to me as well,” she said in a dry voice. She pulled the towel off of her head and tried to run her fingers through her damp, curling hair. “Anyway, in that life I was in the process of recovering some sense of my real identity through dreams and meditation. I knew about you, or at least I knew enough to start looking for you.” She dug the heels of her hands into tired, scratchy eyes. “We searched everywhere we could for clues. My father interviewed anyone who claimed to have any magical arts or esoteric knowledge. One morning someone tried to assassinate me.” Even though the dull ache was gone, she pressed a hand to her chest, hyperaware of the still, tense man beside her. “It was a sword.” She gestured down her own torso. “You saw the path where it cut.”

“Yes.”

“For anyone else it would have been a mortal wound. Maybe it would have been mortal for me as well. I know I tried to start healing myself, and the household was in a panic. My father had been interviewing some petitioners that morning. One of them claimed to be a magician and a physician. He was the Deceiver, but nobody knew that, nor would they have understood what that meant if they had.”

His fists pushed down on the tabletop. “And you would have been too injured to be sensitive to his energy signature, or unable to protect yourself if you had.”

“Yes.” She frowned. “I don’t know where that wonderful teacher of mine was that day. Maybe he had traveled back to his homeland or maybe he had died. In my dream he was elderly and seemed pretty frail. He was also wise, and an adept at psychic nuances. I think he would have known not to trust the Deceiver.”

“What happened?”

“My family was desperate for any chance to save me, so the Deceiver became my physician. God knows what he used to treat the wound.” A convulsive shudder shook through her body, and his gaze jerked to her. “One of my recurring dreams was about him sprinkling the wound with some kind of powder and probing at it with his fingers. I was disoriented from the drugs and the constant pain. I’m not sure how long that lasted. It felt like a long time. Weeks, maybe months. The understanding I got from the dragon’s healing was that he was somehow poisoning me.”

Michael flattened his hands on the table. His face was the color of old ivory. “If you had died, he would have lost you,” he said. “If you had healed, you might recognize him. He could have just destroyed you, of course, but then he couldn’t use you as a pawn, and besides you would have been no danger to him as long as you were so badly injured.”

“Yes.” She frowned. “There was something, too, that the dragon showed me about the poison. It was alchemical in nature. He wasn’t just keeping me from healing or dying. I think he was trying to turn me, or to break me in such a way that he could control me. And I think the whole thing was a setup, starting with the attack.”

Michael took a breath. “Why didn’t it work?”

“It might have worked eventually, but a—a friend realized the truth of what was happening. He helped me to die.” She looked away. “You see, by then I was too damaged for my body to heal. Besides, I was so tired from the pain I was ready to go.”

When the silence became prolonged, she looked back at Michael. He had closed his eyes, and he rubbed his temples again as though his head still pained him. “Who was this friend?”

When it came right down to it, she couldn’t tell him. “What difference does that make now?” she said. “After a while, somebody was perceptive enough to see that something had gone horribly wrong, and he was brave enough to help, that’s all. It happened a very long time ago.”

He shook his head. “You said that you had a teacher who would have known not to trust the Deceiver, but that everyone else did. They were your family and they loved you. They would have been too full of hope to kill you.”

“Michael, please let it go.” She kept her voice calm and quiet. It was her ER voice, used in times of crisis.

White teeth showed as he bit out, “I can’t.”

She watched him with shadowed eyes and hurt for him. She couldn’t make herself tell him what she knew, yet she understood instinctively the struggle going on inside him, how in spite of all reason, he was driven to know.

He lifted his head and met her gaze. His face was stark. “I did it, didn’t I?”

In the gentlest way she knew how, she said, “Yes.”

When he stood, he knocked his chair over. When she would have laid a hand on his arm he jerked away. “I can’t see it,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“Don’t you think that’s for the best?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he strode into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Chapter Eighteen

THE CREATURE CLUNG
to the underside of the car outside the cabin. It was a tattered handkerchief of shadow, a dark spirit from the psychic realm that liked to feed on the negative energies of pain, anger, hate and despair. Intelligence or species didn’t matter to it. Pain was pain.

The dismal cluster of gas stations had been an adequate feeding ground for it, where it lay in wait for travelers. Plenty were either strong, happy or well adjusted enough, but there was always someone passing through who was grieving or suicidal, or riddled with the wormwood of hate and resentment.

The creature had first been attracted to the woman who had bled with such beautiful, agonizing brightness, but it had been afraid to approach too close to the fierce, dominant presence that traveled with her.

Then the dragon had come and it had healed the woman with its terrible, shining power. The creature had cowered underneath the Ford, staying still and silent, for, other than the ability to drain creatures that were already weakened, it had almost no power. It was nothing more than a small scavenger. One exhalation of the dragon’s breath could incinerate it in an instant. When the dragon left, it had nearly left as well, but it was a greedy little spirit and the two people it followed were not only potent. They were volatile as well.

Unable to leave the promise of such alluring pain, the creature had attached itself to the undercarriage of the car. It sniffed at the emotions of the people inside and hoped to catch them unguarded.

When they stopped traveling and went inside the cabin, it continued to wait, for it could sense the ferocious emotions that swirled around them.

Then there was a maddening, delicious upsurge of pain, and it came, not from the woman, but from the man. The creature detached from the car’s undercarriage and drifted over to the cabin window, hovering at the hot psychic scent, too frightened of the warrior to draw any closer and too far away to feed.

Chapter Nineteen

MICHAEL PUT HIS
hands on the bathroom sink and leaned over it. The pain in his head that had been plaguing him all day turned excruciating. He fought waves of nausea, and his body shook while his eyes watered until they overflowed.

He felt like he stood at the edge of a hot, howling darkness. He saw everything else as though at a distance, through blurred vision. Compared to the howling dark, everything else was pastel.

In their long search for clues about Mary’s disappearance, he and Astra had worked hard to recover his memories of the last time he had made contact with her, but they could not glean anything of significance. Why hadn’t anything surfaced?

For a long while they had believed that something must have happened to Mary in a lifetime before she had remembered who she was, or before she had been able to make contact with anybody else in the group.

But he knew better now.

They hadn’t recovered his memories because he couldn’t bear to remember. He couldn’t bear it, but the darkness was rising, and he couldn’t hold it off any longer. He sank to his knees, rested his head against the cold, hard porcelain sink and the memories came.

They hit him like shards of flying glass, a disjointed attack from within that cut him to shreds.

He had been a mercenary soldier, a captain in command of his own company. They wintered in his home base in Italy. Otherwise his company roamed throughout Europe to fulfill the contracts he accepted.

In that lifetime, he had recovered his memories and had known who he was. He took jobs from various principalities that were both lucrative and wide ranging, which helped to fuel his search for others from the group.

One spring, he heard a tale through traders, of a ruling family in Constantinople that looked for answers to arcane mysteries and paid good money to honest men. Trusting his instincts, he began to journey to the city.

One morning, early at his campsite on the road, he bolted awake to a sharp thrust of pain, though he had sustained no physical injury. The sharpness soon faded, but the pain stayed with him, a ghostly ache that infused him with urgency.

Leaving his company to follow as fast as they could, he rushed ahead to the nearest port city and boarded the first ship he could find. A couple of weeks later he arrived in Constantinople, only to hear a story of an inexplicable assassination attempt that had left a cherished daughter lingering near death, and her wealthy family shocked and grieving.

In the bathroom, Michael shook his head, his breathing growing heavy and uneven. He fell, and the howling dark consumed him.

Mary pounded on the bathroom door with the flat of her hand, a quick, urgent staccato. “Are you all right?”

“Leave me alone,” he said in a hoarse voice.

The memories continued to slice at him.

Try as he might, he couldn’t gain an audience with the wealthy family. They had closed themselves off from the public and were surrounded with a small private army.

“I can’t,” Mary said. “I’m worried about you. Talk to me.”

“Go away,” he managed to say.

So he had to break in to their citadel. He felt the cold stone beneath his hands as he scaled their walls, night shrouding him in a purple gauze of shadows. Combing patiently through the halls and apartments, and hiding when necessary, he eventually found her sickroom.

The guard at the door had been one of the Deceiver’s tools. He killed the man easily enough, but he knew that the Deceiver had sensed his presence. He entered the room and barred the door, but it was only a delay. Death rushed in a rage to snatch back its prey. They did not have much time.

Inside, the room held a scent like violets and putrefaction, and the air was tainted with the twist of her suffering spirit.

He walked over to the bed and lit a lamp.

The images. After being buried for so long the images assaulted him, as vivid as if they had happened yesterday.

The black fan of her long hair on the silk cushion. The haggard beauty of her face, carved with the graciousness of her spirit. The gorgeous, dark eyes that opened, immense with pain and dilated with opium.

The smell. It came from her body.

“Do I know you?” she asked. She could only manage a mere thread of sound.

He stroked her hair. She was so lovely. She was a treasure beyond the price of all princes. “We’ve known each other for a very long time,” he told her in a tender whisper. “I’ve come to help you.”

Her gaze lit with the fragile luminosity of wonder. She breathed, “I’ve been looking for you.”

He caressed her cheek, her dry lips. He whispered, “I’ve been looking for you.”

When she smiled at him, it lit the entire world. “Where have you been?”

Where have you been? Not, where are you from? Because even in those first few moments of reconnection, it was clear that they both knew where they were from.

“Florence,” he said. He smiled back at her. How could he not? His was an old, savage soul, and she had, in an instant, become the single, shining jewel that lived inside of him. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”

“Have you found any of the others?” Cold, delicate fingers like twigs touched at his weathered face.

He shook his head. “No, only you.” Time winged away from them. He wanted to lunge after it and capture it in both desperate hands. He closed his eyes, touched his lips to the tips of her fingers, and with every ounce of passion inside of him, he willed everything to be different. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Maryam,” she murmured. “You?”

“Michel.”

No matter how desperately he tried to capture it, time would not halt its precipitous flight. Guards shouted outside in the hall, and the pounding began at the door.

He had still hoped against hope at that point. He entertained wild thoughts of tying her arms around his neck and scaling the outside wall, until he peeled back the covers and saw the leather corset. He slit the laces and opened it, and as the support fell away, he saw the long purple-edged wound gape open. He caught a glimpse of glistening muscle or organ before he wrenched his gaze away.

Curled on the bathroom floor of the cabin, Michael gagged.

The tiny movements of her rib cage, the ruined breasts, were a torture to witness.

The household guard began to take an axe to the door.

“I’m not going to get better,” she said in that ghost voice. “I’m so sorry. I would for you, if I could.”

He kissed her forehead, her eyes and her beautiful mouth.

“You’re going to get better,” he said. He settled on the bed beside her, moving with infinite care so that he did not cause her any more pain, and he laid his head on the silken pillow beside hers. At the same time, he pulled his stiletto and held it tucked against his arm so that she could not see what he did. “You will like my home, I think. I have cows, and a few sheep. In the winter, there is snow on the fields and nothing to do but laze abed with a fire roaring in the fireplace.”

She breathed, “I would like to see snow.”

The guards were halfway through the door. In a few more blows, it would splinter. He touched his lips to her temple. “A noblewoman nearby has gardens filled with irises and azaleas. We will make love in the winter, and I will steal flowers for you in the spring.”

“And I must learn how to milk a cow.” For a few fleeting moments, amusement and tenderness had banished the shadows in her thin face.

He rose up and leaned over her. “We will live until we are very old,” he said against her lips. “And we will be happy right up until the moment we die.”

“I love this dream,” she whispered. It was the last thing she said to him.

As the final blow from the axe splintered the door down the middle, he slipped his stiletto under her ribs and pierced her heart. Her spirit slipped so easily from her body, with a relieved sigh and the lingering brush of an insubstantial caress.

He’d had a few moments in which to decide against escape, when the realization of empty years stretched ahead of him. While he knew he had done the only thing he could, that he had been right to release her from her torment, something broke inside him.

Nothing mattered anymore, not their eons-long struggle, not the destruction of the Deceiver, nothing. Guards poured into the room. With an expert flip, he reversed the stiletto in his hand, positioned it and thrust it into his own heart. The gush of warm liquid flowed over his fingers, and his body settled beside hers on the bed.

Then he knew no more.

In the bathroom, Michael curled on his side and pressed a hand to his chest as his heart kicked in wild arrhythmia. He was aware, as if from a great distance, of strong, slender arms circling him, a feminine body pressing against his side and fingers pressing against his carotid artery.

Michael
, Mary said in his head. He turned his head away at the intrusion, pressing his sweating cheek against the cold, tiled floor.

Broken.

Radiance cascaded into him. It surrounded and filled him, and soothed his heart back into rhythm. He gasped as it drenched the raw shards of darkness inside, and his spirit gulped at it with ravenous eagerness. He didn’t think he could ever get enough.

Michael.
She pulled him onto his back and passed a hand over his hair.
I have been looking for you.

Her serious, blue gaze was very different from those great, lovely dark eyes from so long ago, but he would still know her anywhere. Anywhere. He gasped,
I have been looking for you.

She was stronger than she looked. She drew his upper body up and cradled his head against her shoulder.
I would have loved to learn how to milk a cow.

And I would have loved to make love in the winter, and steal flowers in the spring.
He closed his eyes. He had never been a man of peace, except with her.

She rocked him.
The memories are terrible, but they are in the past. Don’t let them consume you. Acknowledge them, and let them go.

He nodded. Her physical scent and psychic energy mingled in his senses until he didn’t know where one began and the other left off. It was all the same: warm, fragrant, golden. It nourished him with a lavish, lustrous generosity. Twisting up, he wrapped an arm around her neck. “This was why you didn’t want me driving.”

She laid her warm, soft cheek against his. “You didn’t seem to remember, and—well, I knew how hard my memories have hit me. I would have protected you from them, if I could.”

“I needed to know.” He nosed her neck and rested his lips against the healthy, vital pulse in her throat. Alive, she was alive again.

She pulled back and cupped his whiskery cheek. “I’m going to run you a bath,” she said. “And I’m going to find you some clean clothes. Are you hungry?” He shook his head. “No? All right. Then afterward we’re going to rest, Michael. Mike. Does anyone call you Mike?”

Nobody called him anything. Only Astra knew that his name was Michael. He stood when she stood and let the soothing patter of her voice wash over him like a gentle rain. “You can call me whatever you like,” he said.

She put the lid down on the toilet and pushed him toward it. Obediently he sat.

“Can I? Mike,” she said. Her voice was thoughtful as she turned to start the water running in the bathtub. She bent to test the water’s temperature with her fingers then adjusted one of the knobs. The new T-shirt came just over the curve of her ass. She glanced over her shoulder with a small, calm smile. “Trevor.”

“Aloysius, even,” he said. “Or hey you.”

Whatever she called him, he would always answer.

She straightened and flicked water from her fingers. “I think Michael suits you best. We’ll stick with that.”

“All right.” He leaned against the back of the toilet and let exhaustion sweep over him.

“I found your razor and shaving cream earlier,” she said. She pulled the items out of the medicine cabinet behind the mirror over the sink. Her gaze ran down his lax posture. “You’re too tired to shave, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. He was so tired, he could lie down and die if he thought it would offer him any chance at peace.

“Not to worry. I’ll do it for you, if you’ll let me.”

Incredulous, he watched her wet a washcloth with warm water. After coaxing him to tilt back his head, she placed the cloth on his cheeks and jaw. Then she squirted a mound of shaving cream into one small, capable hand. She lathered his face, rinsed her fingers, turned off the bathwater, and started drawing the razor over his skin with such a light, deft touch he barely felt it.

He regarded her in mute amazement. He couldn’t remember anyone doing such an intimate, caring thing for him before. Certainly no woman had ever done so. Perhaps one or two might have wanted to, but he had always rejected female overtures with a clinical efficiency. Relationships bred vulnerability, and he had known from a very early age he wasn’t going to lead a normal life. Besides, all the women he had met had been too pastel.

“Mary,” he said when she turned to rinse the razor under a trickle of warm water.

“Yes?”

His grave gaze met hers. “Are you fussing now?”