After a moment, he sighed and wandered back into the clinic, still not sure what to do next. He smiled when he found Manara and Leslie working side-by-side as if they worked together for years. He wondered if Leslie had any idea what Manara was capable of. Hell, he wasn't even sure of what she was capable.
Chapter Eighteen
They left Tall Abta early the next morning, and Matt noted with concern how pale and tired Manara looked. He doubted she got more than a couple moments of sleep with all of those sick and wounded so desperately in need of help. Even now, she looked worried.
"You can't help them all, you know," he hedged gently.
The look she shot him was heavy with mingled sadness and anger. "What would you have me do? I swore an oath to help people -- I cannot just abandon them."
"And you're no good to anyone, least of all yourself, if you work yourself into the ground." He couldn't believe how stubborn she was. How had he never seen this side of her before? At the hurt in her eyes, he gentled his tone. "You're exhausted, sweetheart. Did you get any sleep last night?"
Her gaze darted away from his, giving him all the answer he needed even before she mumbled, "My dreams trouble me."
That wasn't an answer -- at least, not one he understood -- but Matt let it slide and they continued in silence.
As the sun started to sink in the sky, they came across a goatherd's hut. Matt breathed a thankful sigh. His leg throbbed, and Manara was so dead on her feet he began to worry she'd collapse on the spot. If they were lucky, the goatherd would take pity on them.
As they approached the small, sand-covered building, Matt could tell a sandstorm hit this region very recently. Everything carried a layer of fine silt. But why? They encountered no storms today and he doubted this was as recent as last night.
"This is not right." Manara's quiet assertion raised fine hairs on his already-tingling scalp.
"Stay behind me." The order left him in a clipped tone as he gestured her back behind the shield of his body.
Manara didn't argue, which told him immediately how worried she was. She paused to brush the thin layer of sand from a turned-over bucket on the edge of a covered well. Matt was aware of her location, his senses heightened by the impending sense of battle.
His sidearm drawn and at the ready, Matt approached the hut's door and knocked. No sound left the interior of the building -- not even the shuffle of movement.
"No one's home."
Manara nodded as she came to stand beside him. "I did not believe they were here."
He glanced over, and the weariness in her eyes made up his mind. "We need shelter. Do you think they'll be back tonight?"
A profound sadness he couldn't discern the root of flitted across Manara's face. "I do not believe they will return."
Matt pushed on the door and was surprised when it swung open easily. He edged his way inside, glanced over the sparse, one-room interior, and gestured Manara inside.
"It's safe. I'm going to have a look around the perimeter, just in case," he informed her from the doorway as she sank wearily onto a seating cushion on the floor. "Don't go anywhere."
She nodded vaguely, further concerning him. Something was up with Manara. He pushed it aside and focused on the hunt as he circled the building's perimeter. There was nothing -- no signs of life at all aside from himself and Manara.
Matt sighed in relief as he turned back toward the hut. As his fear for their safety calmed, Matt's gut roiled with a new fear. It was time. He'd promised to talk to Manara about his past. It was time to keep his promise. He had to find the courage to lay his past, and his crimes, at Manara's feet.
He entered the hut to find Manara huddled near the fire she must have made in the hut's central hearth while he searched the perimeter. Her expression was so sad, Matt's throat tightened in kindred pain.
"What is it?" He hunkered down beside her, one hand brushing her shoulder lightly in comfort.
"They are gone and they should not be."
He blinked, not following her thought process. "They?"
"The herdsman and his wife. They are Kurds."
He was flabbergasted. "How--?"
She gestured and he belatedly registered the pile of clothing scattered near the sparsely covered bed. Both men's and women's clothing.
"I fear what has become of them." Manara's quiet voice held so much misery Matt couldn't stand it. He enfolded her in a comforting embrace as he sank to sit beside her.
"Shh." He rocked her gently for a moment before Manara drew away. He sighed and, respecting her need for space, moved to crouch on the other side of the fire where he could still study her expression.
He couldn't comfort her with evidence the goatherd and his wife were safe, either. He turned up nothing on his search. Nothing except his own ghosts, he admitted with a wince as his gaze dropped to the crackling flames. During his sweep of the surrounding area, he came face-to-face with exactly how much uncovered ground remained between Manara and himself. She deserved the truth; if he could find a way out of the web of lies he built to protect himself over the years.
Matt glanced up from the fire again to see Manara shiver even under the layers of heavy shirt and thermal blanket. He nearly smiled. It was beastly cold in the desert at night, though the chill never bothered him anymore. After three months in a metal cage in the middle of the Sahara, Matt was immune to changes in temperature. It was a survival trait learned at great expense, and his good humor collapsed at the memory. Temperature resistance came at a brutal price, a survival trait he was not about to force this woman to learn. He swallowed hard, his heart doing a slow roll in need as Manara reached to carefully push a strand of long, dark hair from her eyes.
He didn't think she wanted as much space as she claimed, either. The lonely air around her beckoned him closer, and Matt wasn't about to ignore the summons. Getting up, he moved back around the fire to sit just behind Manara. Gently, he drew her shivering form into the shelter of his arms, wrapped himself around her, and added his own body heat to the blanket's warmth. She stiffened in his grasp as if she meant to pull away. Then, with a soft sigh, she sank against him and cuddled closer.
"I'm glad you decided not to be a martyr," he commented wryly against her ear. "I always knew you were a smart lady."
"You are warm," she murmured drowsily, snuggling into him. "Do you never get cold?"
He rested his cheek against her hair, closing his eyes as he breathed in her spicy scent. If she only knew just how warm she made him, she'd probably leap away in fright, he mused dryly.
"Not since Somalia," he admitted, burrowing his face against her shoulder. Desire coursed his veins as he breathed in the spicy scent of her skin, woven with a deeply mysterious scent he knew was all Manara. "You smell amazing."
She smiled affectionately, reaching up to smooth a lock of his dark hair. "It is frankincense. It purifies the body and the soul. The ancients used oil made from frankincense to anoint kings." She sighed softly, leaning contentedly against Matt's chest. "Is that when it happened? In Somalia?"
Though the query came out of nowhere, he knew what she meant. He didn't even try to pretend.
"No," he whispered with a shake of his head. "Somalia was just another hell hole, a little more memorable than others because of the hospitality I received there."
"Like Deng-Fan?"
He drew a deep, hurtful breath and came face-to-face with the first of many crimes. "No. Deng-Fan was a goat fuck... a damned massacre that should never have happened. When I was a SEAL, we were sent into Cambodia on an S'n'D--"
"S. N. D?"
"Search and Destroy. Someone at CIA got a tip some communist Chinese guy was stirring up trouble in Cambodia. They pinpointed him at Deng-Fan, a little village near the Vietnamese border. So, someone got the bright idea to send the teams in. My team was point for the mission." He swallowed hard against bile as he fought the memories that paraded across closed eyes, his ears filled with screams. When he spoke again, his voice was a hoars
e rasp he barely recognized as his own. "We went in there with orders not to kill anyone. But no one told us the revolutionaries knew anything about bombs or planting mines. Four of my team got blown to pieces when they tripped some hidden claymores."
Manara gasped at Matthew's words, every muscle in her body tensed as if he physically struck her. The memory of the canyon flooded over her. Blessed Ishtar, she let it happen again! No wonder he didn't trust her. She tried to pull away, sick with her own sins, but his arms were like steel bands around her waist. His gaze, when she turned to look at him, was fixed in another time.
"I guess I just flipped out or something. I don't really remember. They said I turned the teams loose and ordered them to 'waste every goddamned gook' they saw."
Manara saw pain flash across his face, heard the hollow regret in his words. This, she realized, was but one of his demons, spawned from whatever great evil tore loose that piece of his soul. Sadly, she knew his tale wasn't over. Covering his hands with her own, she asked, "What happened?"
His gaze came back to her and Manara wanted to weep at the coldness of his eyes. This was the man she didn't know -- the one she saw only a glimpse of when his demons held her prisoner. "They did exactly what I said. Afterward, we found out there weren't any revolutionaries in that village. Just farmers. The claymores were leftovers from military skirmishes in the Seventies. They just weren't uncovered until my men triggered them. I ordered an entire village wiped out, for nothing. Nothing!"
Tears welled up in Manara's eyes as she watched him struggle with the evil truth he held silent for so long, a mistake such a good man could only suffer under.
"Matthew." She reached to stroke his cheek. "You cannot blame yourself when the true fault lies with another. Who made that madman? What was her name?"
He swallowed hard and Manara's heart broke for him. To live with such painful secrets... His eyes met hers; she saw surprise, and then gratitude, light within the depths of his darkness. He knew she understood. Perhaps the knowing would make his tale easier for him to share. A sigh left him and his eyes closed as he hugged her to himself and the words flowed out.
"Her name was Rachel Murray, and I was all of fourteen years old."
Manara's head jerked up, bringing their faces within inches of each other as shock avalanched through her. She had not expected the pain to run so deep within his past. "You were...?"
He laughed darkly. "Don't be so naïve. Lots of kids do things they aren't supposed to, even in Lebanon. It's part of being a kid."
She hadn't. Nor did she share his culture's narrow, stigmatized view of sexual maturity. Wisely, she kept that to herself.
"But you did not want to." A statement, not a question. He looked at her in surprise but answered her with a shake of his head.
"Hell, no. Rachel was my foster-mother. I told you my parents were killed in a car accident when I was seven, remember?"
She nodded.
"Well, I didn't have any other family I could go to. The court let my father's secretary, Rachel Murray, take me in until they found a decent foster home for me. Only, I got shuffled out of the system and no one ever came to check up on me again. I think Rachel had something to do with that. She was... ah, hell--" He stopped, as if searching for the right words. "I don't really know what she was, but she had some damned sick fetishes."
Manara closed her eyes to block out pain as the rift between them widened. Small wonder he lashed out at her. As much as she knew he needed to tell her this horrible secret, she did not want to know more. Manara was familiar with the horror one person could inflict on another; she saw it every day. She even knew what it was to feel that sense of pain and desolation. She could only imagine the tale he would tell, and she was afraid to feel that pain with him. She listened anyway, silently and with a shattering heart, as he poured out a past so filled with horror it reeked of the stagnate putrefaction of Arulla.
"Rachel liked to mutilate things. I guess the technical term for it is sadism, but that never sounded quite nasty enough to me. She was part of some weird group that thrived on gaining power from death and blood. I don't know if they had any kind of religion at all, but they practiced these really sick rituals."
Manara's breath caught at his description. She had encountered this evil before. The Brotherhood of Spiders was legendary for their cruel and barbaric rites, and it was whispered they gained power and youth through blood sacrifices. There were even murmurs that the oldest of them, Black Widow, saw the fall of Nineveh with her own eyes. Certainly, the histories of Babylon and Sumeria abounded with the terrors of the deep desert, which were unleashed by the faceless horde, and how Sargon fought -- and eventually died -- in Ishtar's name to drive them from his empire.
For millennia, the evil influence of the Brotherhood was banished from this land. Now, however, it appeared to have returned in much the same way it fled. That Matthew already faced it was bitter consolation. He was conditioned now to flee that evil, and he would have to face it again before his destiny would be fulfilled. His terror at even her beliefs, devoted as they were to life, told Manara he was far from prepared to face the Brotherhood.
"How long did you live within this woman's home? What did you see?"
He swallowed hard and hugged Manara to himself, tightly, as if her presence could hold his demons at bay. "I was lucky enough to not know about it for several years. I saw Rachel as the sweet woman she portrayed to the rest of the world -- a loving replacement for the mother I missed so much. I loved her as a son loves a mother. Innocently. It wasn't until I was fourteen that anything changed for me. I came home from school a little early one evening to find Rachel in the basement, blood and animal parts all over the place. She was just sitting there, in the middle of it, naked and smiling, like some damned gargoyle." He shuddered violently and she knew he struggled against terrifying memories. "I think she'd been bathing in the blood. She was covered in it and it was everywhere. The whole place looked like the Marquis de Sade's slaughterhouse. I nearly puked on the spot, it smelled so disgusting." He turned his head away and she knew he fought the urge to be ill again; the memory cut so deeply into him. He rasped, "I haven't eaten meat since that day. The mere sight reminds me of her."
He grimaced. "I was a stupid idiot to ever think she hadn't seen me come in. She'd probably been waiting for me. When I tried to sneak back out, she looked right at me and said to come kiss her hello. There was no way in hell I was going anywhere near her, but a part of me was begging for a sign it was all some horrible nightmare I was going to wake up from. I thought I could outrun it, but when I tried to run, these two guys suddenly appeared behind me. They were both built like linebackers and scowling like monsters. They grabbed me. I fought like hell to get away, which was probably as dumb as it was useless. One of them broke my arm in three places, keeping me still long enough for the other one to strap me down on this table Rachel had in the middle of the room. It was sticky as hell, covered with blood and animal guts. I must have passed out because when I came to, I was naked, and Rachel was cutting me."
Manara sucked in a sharp breath. This was worse than she believed. "She bled you?"
Matthew's lips curled in disgust. "You could call it that. She was lapping up my blood like some kind of damned animal. Then she said some words I've never understood. She..." he flinched away from the memories and rasped, "There are things no mother should ever do to her child. It killed me inside," he choked out the words, his arms closing convulsively around Manara as he hid his face against her neck.
Manara felt moisture against her skin. Tears clogged her throat as Matthew croaked, "I was locked up in that basement, smelling rotten meat and blood for three days. I finally broke out through a basement window and took off. I ran away and never looked back. When I heard she died several years later, I realized I was already dead. There was a part of me just gone, vanished. She took it with her to whatever hell she found."
Manara squeezed his hands beneath her own, tears flowing silently d
own her face. He was wrong. He looked back every day of his life. This was where he went that night he captured her in the desert. It was the same place he spent two agonizing months, unconscious and pleading for mercy in fevered sleep. She thought it was a prison memory he relived, but now -- Ishtar help her! -- she knew his prison was no memory. He carried it with him, worse than any hellish torture he had endured since. She brought it all back to him. From the well of her memory, her own mother's final words to her echoed.
"The Gods test harshly the mettle of humanity. The brave and the wise do not stay the course. Only the strong and the foolish survive."
She was a fool, she decided with a small sob. She foolishly believed she could have it all -- her temple, her lover and her destiny -- without a price. Instead, she paid the ultimate price for her folly. She betrayed a man already betrayed by life. She only hoped she was strong enough to set things right again.
Chapter Nineteen
"There is something I must tell you, as well."
Matt blinked back from his nightmarish memories with a shudder as the sound of Manara's voice reached him. The words were so quiet Matt thought he imagined them at first. The rigid set of Manara's shoulders and the stark pallor of her skin told him otherwise.
"What is it?" He asked softly, squeezing her gently. "Please, Manara. I promise you I'll never judge you again."
She drew in on herself, her shoulders sagging in defeat.
"Do not be so hasty in your promises, Matthew," she whispered dully. "I have known for a long time that I would one day be judged for my crimes." Her sad gray gaze met his. "I only prayed I would never have to confess them to you."
Matt's heart clenched at the hollow tone of her voice and the stark misery in her eyes. What could she possibly have done that was so horrible she didn't want him to know?
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