The Companion (26 page)

He did not want her to have won
.

The sun would be up in another hour or two. Ian pulled up the hood of his burnoose
.

He had to get to an English doctor
.

He glanced to the water sack. Beside it lay the leather pouch that held diamonds. His resolve hardened inside him. To have any chance of thwarting Asharti’s revenge or escaping what she had made him, he would need both sustenance and the means to get help. He must avail himself of both Fedeyah’s parting gifts
.

He needed blood to survive. So be it, for now. He looked around for the ragged strips of fabric that had fallen from the burnoose. They were half-buried in the sand. He shook them out and wrapped his feet and hands. Pulling the burnoose around him, he stalked out into the desert. He would do his walking at night and huddle under the burnoose in the daylight, his eyes wrapped with the remaining strip of cloth
.

The fever was coming back, stronger now, and he was shaky on his feet, but he knew what would keep the fever at bay. He stooped to scoop up the two leather articles. He hung the tiny bag of diamonds around his neck. He squirted a small stream of the thickening blood far down his throat in the hope that he could prevent gagging. He couldn’t. But he kept the blood down. Was it some slave’s blood, or was it Fedeyah’s? He bet on Fedeyah, as strength flowed through his body. Only the blood of one of them could confer such vibrant, frightening consequences. He slipped the water bag over his shoulder. He could follow the track of the caravan as far as the first oasis
.

Then he would turn away from Marrakech
.

Ian’s eyes cleared as the memories drained away. The girl was speaking earnestly.

“Are you well?” she was asking.

He shook his head as if that could dispel the memory of that night when he had discovered what lived in Kivala and lost his humanity into the bargain. How long had he been staring at his hands, immobile? He cleared his throat before he dared to speak.

“As well as I can be these days.”

Her eyes were round with concern. Concern? He did not deserve the concern of a virtuous woman. “Is the one you saw at Kivala so horrible?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“Horrible enough. It was also the night I became what I am today.”

“Ahh. Was Asharti the one who waited? You said it was her blood that poisoned you.”

“No. She wanted his blood. Apparently he is the ancestor of her kind. His ancient blood is very powerful. She thought his blood would make her invincible.”

“To what purpose?”

“She wants to rule men. My guess is that she has plans for that corner of the world.”

The girl pressed her lips together. “That would be bad.”

He roused himself and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if to wipe away memories. “But we will be in England. She cannot reach that far. And neither can the One Who Waits at Kivala.”

She was about to ask another question but apparently thought better of it. “Well, back to our original intent then. That is all the scroll tells us about the Old Ones. It moves on to talk about the monuments. What have we learned?” She glanced back at the scroll. “There is a ‘blood companion,’ whatever that means. It sounds like more than a disease. We see that they are very old. There is some power of compulsion that goes with the reddening of the eyes. And this reference
to being ‘invisible bats.’ ” She looked up. “Did you ever become a bat?”

“No.” He made his voice as repressive as possible. But she would not be repressed.

“Well then, we must concentrate on what we do know. Tell me what happens when your eyes go red. Can you do it at will, or does it just come on you?”

He yielded to her matter-of-fact approach. “I suppose it comes on me.”

“When?”

“When . . . I have the hunger and there is an opportunity to . . . feed.”

“Could you call it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Asharti call it at will?”

He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

“Try it,” she urged. “Try to make your eyes go red.”

“No!” he exclaimed, his brows drawing together. “Are you mad?”

She cocked her head, exasperated. “It is an experiment. You said you wanted to know more about your condition. How else will we find out?”

He got up and paced the room, automatically compensating for the roll of the ship and bending under the beams of the low ceiling. “What if I unleash something I can’t control?”

“How can you learn to control it if you don’t try?” She lifted her chin in challenge.

He whirled away and took another turn, hands clasped behind his back. As he faced her again, she raised her brows and pointed to the chair. She was right, of course. If he said he wanted to know about his condition, he couldn’t run from it. He sat.

“Try to go red.” He could detect some quaver in her voice, but she nodded resolutely at him in encouragement.

He had no idea how to go about it. He sat there, blinking. Nothing. He shrugged helplessly. “What do I do?”

She bit her lip. “Hmmm. Try closing your eyes.”

He closed his eyes. What difference would that make?

“Can you smell the tar that holds the ship together?” she asked, her voice soft.

He nodded slowly. He felt her rise and walk around behind him.

“Can you smell the wet of wood and seawater?”

“Yes,” he breathed.

She rubbed his temples gently. Her touch was soft, revealing her tender nature. He began to be distracted by her touch until her voice brought him back. “Now, think about your body. Feel the weight of it in the chair, shifting with the sea beneath us.” Her voice carried a curious lilt. His body had weight and substance he had never noticed. “Feel your muscles shift to brace yourself against the roll.” Yes. He could feel that. “Now think about the air coming into your lungs. Breathe in, deeply.” He filled his lungs. “Hold it there. Now breathe out. Bodies are quite marvelous, are they not?”
Yes, they are
, he thought. It was just her voice, in the night, and the roll of the sea beneath him.

“Now press your right hand across your breast and feel your heart pumping there.”
Lub-dub, lub-dub
. Her fingers rubbed his temples in time with his heart. “It’s pumping blood into your lungs and your belly and your legs and back again. Feel the blood coursing through your veins. The blood is the key, you see. Feel the blood.”

Ian felt blood sliding along his veins. It pulsed in his carotids, down through his loins into his thighs, throbbing in his femoral arteries. Low, just above the throbbing of his heart, some song beat where he could not quite hear it. Behind him, she stepped back. The tender touch faded away, leaving only the rhythm of his heart. His strength, his feeling of well-being, was like a song. Something sang in his blood. To listen was dangerous. Yet he listened.

He heard rejoicing, reveling in strength. There was a sense of oneness, two as one. His gladness ramped up until life flowed along his veins, tingling, and Ian was more than he had ever been and what he was rejoiced, even as part of him was afraid of that giddy swirl of power.

From a distance, he heard Miss Rochewell whisper, “Do not cut the connection. Let yourself experience it or we will never know.”

Ian opened his eyes. They would be red, he knew, red like his blood. He felt his core glowing, the song in his blood growing louder. Air could hardly fill his lungs full enough to fuel the fire that sang along his veins. The joy and the power were almost painful, and still they ramped up in some mad chorus of voices or instruments clashing in a music never heard by man. Ian thought he would scream. He was standing, though he had not felt himself rise, and he saw Miss Rochewell through some red haze of joy and power he knew must be wrong. But he couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it. He wanted to feel it all. A blackness grew at the edges of that transparent pool of red. Already he could not quite see the doors to the cabins off the great room and the edges of the stern windows were melting into the dark night beyond the glass. The edges of his vision collapsed. The singing in his veins grew to a shriek and the pulsing blood now screamed, distributing pain throughout his body. All went black for a roaring moment. The pain was excruciating. His body felt as though it were turned inside out.

The shock of ice-cold seawater filling his lungs hammered his senses. He sank into the night-black ocean. For a long moment he was paralyzed, dazed by disconnection. Then he reached the ultimate darkness at the perigee of his descent. His senses shuddered into place. He kicked, lungs bursting, until he caught a glimmer above him that might be the moon. Groping upward, fear making him desperate, he clawed the insubstantial water toward the surface.

Bursting upward into moonlight and a choppy sea, he could see the ship receding, its stern lights glowing in the dark of the Atlantic.

“Beltrane!”
he shouted. But a wave sloshed over him and converted his hail into no more than a gurgle. He looked around and saw nothing but dark night and cold black sea. He cursed the weight of boots that could not be removed. He
struck out for the ship, its sails taking it farther away at every moment.

Beth gasped as the figure before her with the red glowing eyes wavered at the edges and suddenly blinked out. He was there one moment, huge, menacing, a monster she had coaxed out of a man, and in the next moment he was gone.

For a moment she was so amazed she thought she had imagined it. She looked around the empty cabin. “Mr. Rufford?” Her voice was tentative in her own ears.

“Mr. Rufford!” She ran to the cabin doors, but each tiny room was empty, no possible place for him to hide. Did she not believe her eyes? He had disappeared, just as the scroll said he could, like a bat in the night. Panic rose inside her. Was he dead? Had he gone to some other world? Why had she encouraged him to draw the redness? What had she done?

She stumbled to the deck, thrown from side to side in the narrow passage by the roll of the ship. “Mr. Rait!” she called to the first officer she saw. “Have you seen Mr. Rufford?” She searched the deck wildly, but there was no familiar black coat.

“Miss Rochewell,” Rait said, alarmed. “Are you well?” Sailors around her stopped what they were doing to gape at her.

“Where is he?” She looked up at the rigging as though he might have suddenly taken a fancy to climb the shrouds. The sails belled with the wind. The ship was moving fast.

“I couldn’t hardly say, miss,” Rait answered, obviously reserving judgment on her sanity.

At that moment they both heard a faint shout.
“Beltrane!”

Beth ran to the rail on the leeward side, searched the black water, seeing nothing.

“Lookout!” Rait yelled. “What see you?”

A long moment passed. Beth clung to the railing. Rait came to stand behind her.

“Man overboard!” the lookout finally yelled. “Two points east of south.”

“Back topsails!” Rait yelled. Sailors scurried up the yards. “Bring her off the bowline.”

The ship gave way, sails shivering, and still Beth could not see him for the short-breaking, disorganized waves of the Bay of Biscay. There he was, a white face in a trough of the choppy seas. He was swimming strongly now, though the waves broke over him.

“Shall I send out a boat, Mr. Rait?” Mr. Gilman asked.

How could they not send out a boat?

Rait watched the figure a moment, then shook his head. “He’ll be up with the ship before we could get anything launched.” Sailors headed for the rail. Rait cocked a head up at the sails and then glanced out to the figure struggling in the heavy seas. “By the time we wore round to pick him up . . . No, we’ll let Mr. Rufford display his swimming prowess.”

Rufford came up the side by the leeward boarding stairs on the upward roll, holding to the rope they let down for him. Beth had been sure he was drowned a dozen times.

He came up heaving and sputtering. “Apologies, Mr. Rait, for checking your way,” he gasped. He offered no explanation for how he had gone overboard. Beth felt it beyond herself to intervene with anything plausible. She was overcome with the image of a black whirling mist that disappeared from the Captain’s great stern cabin. And she couldn’t say that.

Rufford turned from the questioning glances and made his way, dripping, to his quarters.

Beth nodded to Rait and said she would retire herself after all the excitement. She knew she was leaving rampant speculation behind, but she could not face it alone.

In the light of the common room outside their cabins, Rufford stood, dripping. He looked up at her entrance. “So much for scientific experimentation.” He tried to convey calm dismissal. He failed. Then he could not refrain from whispering a question. “What did you see?”

“Your eyes . . . your eyes went red,” she said with as much
composure as she could manage. “Then a kind of black mist swirled around you and you . . . you disappeared.”

“I reappeared about three feet above the water some forty yards astern. I should be glad it wasn’t farther.”

She swallowed. “I think you ‘moved through the night like a bat, unseen.’ “