But I had looked when I walked into the room.
I had looked but I hadn’t seen.
“Milja.” Egan stretched out his hand from the doorway. “Come here. Come on. Quickly now.”
I walked toward him, my eyes so round they were nearly popping out of my head, and I felt the floor bend and sway under my feet with every excruciating step.
He grabbed me the moment I was within arm’s reach, pulling me into the hall and crushing me against his chest. I clung to his waist, knotting my hands in the fabric of his shirt and burying my face against his breastbone as I started to shake.
“What on earth were you doing, Milja?” he asked.
I made a sort of tortured moan, which was the only thing that came to my lips.
“It’s okay. It’s okay now.” He ran his hand over my hair. “Were you sleepwalking? The cat jumped on my face and woke me up—and then I heard you scream.”
I didn’t recall screaming. Maybe I had. “I wasn’t asleep,” I said. “I was wide awake. I really saw her.”
“How did you get out on that floor? You could have gone straight through!”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“The girl—did you see her? She ran and she threw herself out of the window.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She didn’t make any sound but I saw her. I think she was a ghost. I don’t even believe in ghosts,” I said desperately. “There’s no such thing! When we die we go to God for judgment, don’t we?”
“Milja…calm down. You were dreaming.”
I looked up at him. “I wasn’t. I was awake. What’s happening to me, Egan?”
Angels and now ghosts—what was wrong with me?
He cupped my face in his hands. They felt warm. “All right. I believe you. Now come back to bed. Everything’s fine.”
He took me to bed, and I lay with his arm around my shoulders and my head against his chest for the rest of the night.
The next afternoon we went to the coast.
The morning was uneventful. Well, if you don’t count the dream where I was kneeling between Azazel’s spread knees, sucking away obediently as members of the U.S. Congress, looking uneasy and scandalized for the most part, tried to pretend we weren’t there and get on with debating some finance act. Azazel even made a reasonable show of listening to the politics, I believe, though he also made sure to pull up my short dress and expose my bare ass to the entire House. I was wearing a red velvet collar about my throat, and a red leather leash went from it to loop about Azazel’s careless hand. It made me melt. Oh, I like giving head. I loved doing it to Ben, when we were engaged; I loved being able to give him the thing he craved. I loved the strength and the length and the excitement of the member in my mouth… And Azazel was in another league altogether. I ate him with true enthusiasm. I remember some man coming over to sit beside him and watch, saying with a sigh, “Can I have her when you’ve finished with her?” And Azazel laughing before answering, “I’ll never have finished with her.”
Uneventful if you don’t count me having to pretend it was some nightmare that caused me to wake up in Egan’s arms twitching and blazing with heat.
It’s just a dream.
That was becoming my mantra.
I flung myself out of bed before instinct could catch up and make me run my hand over his oh-so-warm-and-solid body. I didn’t even dare look at him as I pulled my boots on, though he woke with a grunt of surprise and stretched his back and stared around. Razor-edges of light were knifing through the slats of the shutters.
“Milja?”
“It’s gone eight,” I told him, determined to preserve some dignity. Not mine, perhaps—it was probably too late for that after last night’s visions—but his. He didn’t deserve me watching him as he struggled out of sleep. “See you downstairs.”
But when I went into the kitchen Jelena was waiting with a big kettle of hot water on the propane stove, and when she saw me she poured it into two ewers decorated with roses under their cracked glaze. “There you go—you can take these up so you can both have a wash,” she told me.
It wasn’t really possible to refuse. She draped two tea towels over my shoulder and stuck a sliver of rock-hard soap in my pants pocket. When I asked, embarrassed, if she had some toothpaste to spare, she laughed and fetched me not just toothpaste but a toothbrush, still in its plastic packet. Words couldn’t express how grateful I was, but I swore to myself that I was never again leaving a house without a toothbrush in my purse, not for as long as I lived.
The jugs of water were surprisingly heavy by the time I’d climbed back up the creaky wooden stairs. I was glad to see I’d left the bedroom door ajar.
Inside the room, Egan was talking.
“No, she doesn’t,” he said.
For a moment I froze, chilly doubt inveigling its way into my mind. It’s not nice suspecting yourself the subject of discussion. There was no audible response to his voice, so he had to be on the phone. I was faced with the choice of standing discreetly outside and listening in, or barging in on the conversation.
The water was just too damn heavy. I turned my back and bumped the door open with my ass, backing into the room with the disingenuously cheerful warning: “Hope you’ve got your clothes on!”
Egan was standing by the window—fully clothed of course—with his phone to his ear. “Okay, that’s fine,” he said quickly. “I understand.” Then he pressed the button to sign off.
“Hot water,” I announced, pretending not to see the concerned look he had locked on me. I banged the ewers down on the side table with the setin washbasin. “And soap and toothpaste. We’ll have to share the brush, I’m afraid.”
“Are you all right Milja? You shot out of bed first thing.”
“I just…had a nightmare.”
“Well, I’m not surprised, after last night.”
“Yeah.” I thought about the ghost and shivered. I was still absolutely sure I’d not been sleepwalking.
“D’you remember what happened?”
“Yep.”
“D’you want to talk about it then?”
“No.” Two could play at being stubborn, I thought.
“Okay then. Well, I’ve had a call,” he said, rather unnecessarily.
“Uh-huh?”
“A good thing too, because this thing’s nearly out of charge.”
“So what’s going on?”
“Good news. We’ve got our way out. We’re taking a boat out from Budva tonight.”
Budva is the biggest tourist town on the coast. I’d never been there. In fact, apart from river ferries, I’d never been on a boat. I eyed him dubiously. “Where to?”
“Um.” He moved closer, as if to reassure me. “Italy.”
“Huh?”
“It should only take a few hours.”
I shook my head, slowly at first, then with increasing vehemence. “That’s no good, Egan! You’ve got a European Union passport, okay—that’s fine for you—but that’ll make me an illegal immigrant. And what the hell am I going to do in Italy?”
“Whoa.” He held up his palms, placatingly. “Don’t worry. Once we’re on Italian soil you’ll be absolutely safe from the guys following you. And don’t fret about passports: I can get you any paperwork necessary. But you have to trust me.”
That should have set alarm bells ringing—it would have, only a few weeks ago, when I was law-abiding and blameless. But I didn’t live in that world anymore. I stared at him. It was slowly beginning to sink in that I was a fugitive, of a sort, and in an increasingly desperate state of vulnerability. The old rules were no longer enough to keep me safe.
“Will you trust me, Milja?”
Did I trust him enough to take the risks he proposed?
Did I have any choice?
“You’d better be sure you’re doing the right thing,” I said softly.
Egan closed his eyes, almost in pain, and nodded with lips compressed. “Yes.�
��
“Because if this is some convoluted attempt at sex-trafficking,” I said, my voice low and shaking, “I’m going to be really pissed with you.”
I’d never seen a man look so shocked. “You…oh shite, Milja, is that what you think I’m after?”
“You hear about these things.”
“For feck’s sake.” If he wasn’t genuinely horrified and hurt, he was an actor of absolute genius. Even his pupils contracted. It was the first time he’d really sworn in my presence too. “No. Just no. I’m trying to help, here—you came to me…”
“I know.” I touched his hand. “You’re just…” Too likable. Too honorable. Too nice. You haven’t even made a move on me, and it would have been so easy. Would I have even have tried to say No? “Like an answer to my prayers,” I finished sadly.
Oh Egan, please don’t let me down; I like you so much.
He swallowed. “Don’t you believe prayers can be answered?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“But you’ve seen an angel…you said.”
I thought of Azazel lying in torment. “Maybe that’s why.”
We spent the morning helping stack a pile of cordwood, and then Petar took us west over the mountain range that stretches like a wall up the Adriatic shore, and down the long drop to the narrow coastal strip beyond, the three of us side by side in the front seat of his van. There wasn’t much opportunity for Egan and me to talk, so we just watched the scenery. Which was spectacular.
How strange, that I’d never been to the part of my own country that’s best known to the outside world. Never seen how the fragile green veil of foliage is swept aside there and the rock revealed in all its parched Mediterranean ruggedness, the yellowed grass contrasting with bright-flowering oleanders and dark pencil cypresses and red-tiled roofs. Never seen the clear turquoise waters of the Adriatic that lured so many tourists.
Petar dropped us off at the marina squeezed between Budva’s fortified Old Town and its long, umbrella-packed beach. The great tilted wedge of St. Nikola’s island loomed in the bay like a shark’s fin.
“What are we looking for?” I asked as we walked past the ranks of yachts and rental boats—everything from scuba tours to pirate-themed booze-cruises.
“The Grlica. Have I got the pronunciation right?”
“Yep. It means the Turtle Dove.”
We found it in amidst a cluster of boats advertising fishing trips. I eyed it dubiously—okay, so the Adriatic might not be the roughest sea in the world, but I’d have liked to see something a bit bigger. Worse, much of its length was open deck, presumably for fishing from, with only a glassed-in cabin at the back. A muscular, leathery-looking man stood on the stern, sorting out a selection of fishing rods.
“Dobar dan,” said Egan.
“Hello, Guten Tag,” he answered, knowing instantly that he was looking at a foreigner. “Do you want to go fishing?”
“Petar sent me. He said you could take us night-fishing.”
The man on the boat straightened up, looking us over with narrowed eyes. Then he nodded. “Yes. No problem. Did Petar tell you how much it would cost?”
I didn’t understand what it had to do with Petar at all, but I kept quiet and Egan answered for us. “He did.”
“That’s good.” He nodded at the sky and grinned. “We leave at sunset then. We’ve got calm seas tonight. Be back here on time. With cash.”
“Well, that gives us time to go shopping,” Egan said as we turned our backs to the sea and headed into Budva. “I’ve got to buy a charger and feed my phone. And get some money out.”
“Is this costing a lot?”
“Quite a bit.”
“Well, have my euros,” I said, passing him my cigarette packet.
He fended it off. “No you don’t.”
“It’s not fair that you’re paying for all this.”
“I’m not taking money off you. Not now, not ever.”
I thought of my stash of antiquities in Podgorica train station with an inner sigh. I’d been sitting on a small fortune, if only I’d been able to do anything about it. Some railway official was in for a nice surprise when the locker lease ran out.
So we shopped, and ate sea bream and black squid-ink risotto at a fish restaurant. A Russian tourist at a nearby table had one of those fashionable little dogs in her oversized handbag, and when it saw me it started howling.
“Shut up,” I muttered—and it did, diving back into the safety of its designer satchel.
“You could make a fortune doing that,” said Egan with a smile. “Milja the dog-whisperer.”
I tried to look amused. How could I tell him that dogs now hated and feared me? It was as if I wore an aura of contamination that humans were blind to.
After dinner we returned to the sea front and boarded the Grlica. There were three crew members besides the one we’d already met, and no other passengers. Everyone made a show of presenting us with our fishing rods and showing us the buckets of bait. I pulled on my life jacket and hoped desperately that I wasn’t the kind of person who got seasick.
Budva had seemed a tinselly, rather brash place from the little I’d seen of it, but as we nosed out of the marina I felt a pang of loss at our separation. I’d left the soil of my home country, perhaps for the last time, and now the town was nothing but a thinning line like a crust upon the waves. The island in the bay, and mountains beyond Budva, stayed in sight for a while longer, gilded by the sunset.
I thought of the little church under the cliff face, and snow, and eagles.
Our captain was right: the sea was calm as we headed west, though I quickly found that it was breezy enough to throw up cold spray if I stood at the bow, and that the stink of diesel fumes made me feel queasy if I went to the back where the engine was. So Egan and I retired to the cabin and I tried to get some rest on the padded bench.
Egan offered me the use of his leg as a pillow.
And that was the point at which everything started to go wrong.
I was in a dark place, underground. There was only one spot of light, off in the distance, so I headed toward it, feeling cool flagstones beneath my bare feet.
The light shone on Egan. He hung against a stone wall, cruciform, his arms spread wide by manacles and taut chains, wearing only a pair of jeans so old and faded and worn that the fabric was down to the weft in places; those jeans hung perilously low on his smooth hips, hinting at places I badly wanted to touch. His chest was bare, and scrawled with red letters I couldn’t read. His head hung to the side as if in exhaustion, and his eyes were shut.
I bit my lips, unable to stop myself staring at a body just as solid and muscular as I’d imagined. Different from Azazel’s long, lean frame, for sure, and with only a little sandy-blond hair on his breastbone, but just as enticing—if it hadn’t been for the writing. It had been cut into his skin, I thought at first, but then I realized that it was written in scarlet lipstick. There was something uniquely cruel about that, I thought, as if it was intended to humiliate.
Egan, chained up and helpless. It was a combination that sent my heart thumping and my body into rolling waves of heat. It scared me and oh, I confess, it filled me with a sick, vertiginous longing that scared me even more.
I took a step forward. He opened his eyes.
“Milja?”
“Egan, it’s okay.”
His eyes opened wider. That was when I realized that I was dressed in that silly striped pajama jacket again, and nothing else.
“Oh,” I said, and giggled in delicious embarrassment.
“Milja, what the…?”
“It’s okay!” I held out a hand as I closed on him. “It’s just a dream, Egan.” Should my conscience have pricked me harder? But I’d dreamed like this, hot and vivid, several times now, and the sky hadn’t fallen in.
No harm, no consequences. Lucky lucky Milja.
“A dream?” He looked wrecked, and nervous. Now that I was close enough, I could see that his nose had been broken out
of true and there was a red mark across the bridge.
“Relax. Don’t worry.” I put my hand on his bare chest.
He jerked at my touch and shook his head slightly.
“What happened, Egan? Where’d the writing come from?”
“Writing?” He tried to follow my gaze and look down at his torso. “What does it say?”
I stared at the jagged letters, trying to make sense of them. Reading is always fantastically difficult in dreams, I find. “We have seen,” I announced at length. The words sounded familiar.
Egan took a deep breath, his eyes widening.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Milja, please get me out of here!”
“Don’t worry,” I repeated. “It’s just a dream—it doesn’t matter.” Standing on tiptoe, I kissed him gently upon the lips.
Egan made a hungry noise in his throat. I felt his lips move against mine, sweet and soft, wanting me. Then, abruptly, he jerked away. “Milja, no!” he groaned. “We can’t!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t—just don’t,” he protested, not looking at me, looking anywhere but me.
“Shush.” I pressed up against his body, my soft breasts to his torso, and my bare thighs to his denim-clad legs. He groaned again, and gritted his teeth, but I felt the heat of him through the thin cloth, and I knew he was hard already and getting harder. “It’s all right,” I whispered.
“No. No it’s not.”
“I’m sorry,” said Azazel in my ear, and I jumped half out of my skin. Without moving, I found myself six feet back from Egan’s bound form again, and Azazel standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders. “Is she not pretty enough for you?” he asked.
Egan’s jaw went slack and I watched the fear flood his face. I looked up over my shoulder and saw Azazel, smiling and complacent like always. This time, however, he wore wings—not bald and bat-like but feathered, as raven-dark as his hair, and huge, even folded.
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