Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  Jackknifing, Quin shoved damp strands of hair back from her face, every muscle taut.

  Through some strange mental process she’d ended up in a ship’s cabin with an injured stranger. She’d smelled salt and diesel fumes and blood—and she’d been acutely aware of him.

  Her gaze swept the grove, as if she could see something—find something—tangible that would account for dreams that stepped out of nowhere and gripped her so tightly they seemed more real than the ground beneath her feet.

  The memory of the last time she’d “dreamed” was abruptly vivid, and something in her mind connected and fused. Gooseflesh rose all along her back and arms, and prickled at her nape.

  “Great,” she muttered. The last thing she wanted to dwell on was the fact that she’d psychic-dreamed twice, and that, just to add to the general weirdness of it all, the same guy had starred each time.

  FIONA BRAND

  Touching Midnight

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Claire Russell of the Kerikeri Medical Centre for medical information, both technical and anecdotal, for finding the perfect drug to fit the crime—and supplying the spellings.

  Any errors are, of course, my own.

  Contents

  Part 1

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part 2

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  PART I

  Prologue

  Fifteen years ago, Valle del Sol, Peru

  The interconnecting series of chambers lay buried deep beneath layer upon layer of rich soil and gritty rubble, protected and enclosed by massive blocks of granite—a complex outer sheathing in the form of a maze, which had been constructed with exquisite care to conceal the secret within.

  Millennia had passed; civilizations had risen and fallen. The landscape itself had altered—resculpted by violent deluges of rain-rich frontal weather forced high over the Andes and the slow, ancient grinding of tectonic plates. But despite the powerful external stressors, the hidden chambers had remained locked beneath the ground, although with the passage of time the crumbling outer bones of the maze had been laid bare in places.

  The western sector had sustained the most damage, situated as it was on the floor of a crescent-shaped valley that, with the erosion of softer limestone at its southern end, had become the natural conduit for the Agueda River. Over the years the Agueda had meandered and braided, its banks dissolving as it broadened, greedily eating away at the rich alluvial soil of the valley floor until it exposed amongst the chaotic tumble of river-smooth rocks the unmistakable edges of precision cut stone.

  Destructive as the Agueda was, beneath the valley floor an infinitely more powerful force was at work. The damage was invisible but profound, as the hot inner sea of the Earth’s mantle flexed and strained at cooler crustal layers, undermining the age-old rift that formed the cradle of the valley.

  Tension built, rock compressed, softer materials began to liquefy, and the raucous community of parakeets perched on the thick canopy of trees that rimmed the valley went silent.

  The first shock wave radiated from a point just fifteen miles away and only two miles beneath the Earth’s surface, vibrating up through the still, silent chambers, disturbing deposits of rock dust ground as fine as talcum powder until they shimmered in glass-smooth pools of water formed by the slow leak of blocked aqueducts. The cleverly fitted granite blocks encasing the hidden chambers groaned beneath the subtle flexing, then shivered and crumbled, no match for the power that had thrust the Cordillera de Los Andes more than twenty thousand feet up into the atmosphere.

  Long seconds passed in which decayed and misshapen blocks moved an infinitesimal degree—enough, finally, to undermine the technical and engineering brilliance that had produced a structure that had withstood century upon century of seismic shock waves.

  Abruptly, on a densely forested slope, an entire wall collapsed and the ground itself ruptured, spewing rubble amidst the tangle of undergrowth and vines, and baring the northern gate of the maze.

  Jewel-bright parakeets, tiny motmots and noisy jacamars exploded into the clear blue arc of the sky, squawking their displeasure, eyes sharp as they wheeled above the disturbance.

  But, collateral damage aside, deep within the hillside, cushioned by layers of granite and soft, malleable dirt—the most primitive of shock absorbers—the inner chambers themselves remained, as always, protected…impervious.

  One

  The raucous scolding of parakeets pierced thirteen-year-old Lady Victoria Quinton Mallory’s doze.

  Her eyes flipped open. Birds circled above, noisy and agitated, and she became aware that both the ground and the interlacing leaves shading her from the afternoon sun were shivering.

  A scarlet macaw landed on the thick, cylindrical branch of a rubber tree and added to the scolding, the sound as sharp and precise as Aunt Olivia’s when she reminded Quin of everything she had to do—and most especially everything she hadn’t done—which today had amounted to a list almost as long as Quin’s arm.

  She fixed the bird with a steely glare, not bothering to get up from her reclining position on two sun-warmed rocks that were handily positioned like an armchair. “Oh, be quiet! The quake’s just a baby. Hardly even a two, I’ll bet.”

  If a quake was a two on the Richter scale, no one even bothered to comment on it, if they noticed it at all. If it was a three or four, Aunt Hannah got that anxious look of hers and began fussing about the bone china. A five—which had happened once—and they had to get out in the open, and stay away from buildings and tall trees. If it was a six or a seven—which had never happened in Quin’s memory—according to their gardener and handyman, Jose, you didn’t do nothing but bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

  A chuckle burst from deep in her belly at the thought of Jose, who was short and thickset and close to seventy, even trying to complete that maneuver.

  Experimentally, she said the words aloud, still grinning. Despite the fact that she was a teenager—practically an adult—she wasn’t supposed to think “ass,” let alone say it.

  The macaw squawked again—this time the sound so uncannily like Olivia’s that Quin jackknifed in reflex, her sneakered feet landing on soft grass, palms braced flat on lichen-encrusted rock. When it was clear that she was alone in the grove, she let out a breath. It wasn’t that she was scared of Olivia—on the contrary, nothing much scared Quin at all—but she had a healthy respect for both her aunts, and there was an omniscient quality to Olivia’s dark blue gaze that kept Quin on her toes.

  Out of habit, she scanned the hillside, wondering if either of the aunts was near, even though it was unlikely they would trek this far to find her, but, as always, the grove was isolated and peaceful, shrouded as it was by tall, arching trees and enclosed by soft shadows. Where the canopy thinned in places, mellow sunlight shafted through to dapple the ground, warming the large rocks th
at lay scattered, as if a giant fist had hammered the ancient bones of the hill into asymmetrical rubble.

  Letting out a breath, Quin relaxed back into her comfortable seat, rearranged her jeans-clad legs on their warm rest and flicked her long, dark plait to one side so it didn’t bite into her spine.

  Lids lowered against an errant beam of sunlight, she gazed out across the valley. Through a gap in the trees, she could see her home—the mission—where it nestled on the western slopes. Sunlight glinted off deep inset windows, turning the limed walls a pale honey. From this far away the cracks in the plaster and the sagging fence enclosing the small complex weren’t evident, and she could pretend the building was much more than a simple dwelling with a medical clinic attached. Like maybe…a very small castle—still under construction, of course—or a school.

  Not that a school was any more likely a scenario than the castle.

  Olivia had explained why she couldn’t go to a real school. It was because she was different.

  Psychic.

  How different that made her, Quin wasn’t sure, because she didn’t have a lot of people to compare herself with. There were Jose’s five grandchildren, but they were all boys, so it was hard to judge, and the other children from the village who came to the mission for Aunt Hannah’s weekly clinics never stayed long enough for her to learn much more than their names. In any case, there was no way on this earth she would admit to being any more different than her blue eyes and pale skin made her and risk being classed as weird.

  A slight breeze rustled through the trees, carrying with it the mournful tone of a bell. Quin’s stomach sank. The bell, lodged in the small tower above the chapel, had previously been used to call the Sisters Of Mercy to prayer, but the last time it had been rung for that purpose had been more than fifty years ago, when the order had abandoned the isolated outpost at Valle del Sol and withdrawn back to the main monastery in Lima. Since then the mission had passed through several hands and had been used variously as a private residence, a school, a boardinghouse and, under Olivia and Hannah’s stewardship, a medical center.

  Nowadays, when the bell tolled, it tolled almost exclusively for Quin, and it usually meant schoolwork.

  The macaw screeched, the dissonant sound cutting across the richer tones of the bell. Quin caught the flash of bright plumage as the bird hopped onto a lower branch, swung around and hung upside down, peering at her, eyes beady and intelligent. “Don’t you start.”

  Olivia maintained that if Quin was going to be a savage, at least she would be an educated savage, and, with both aunts claiming doctorates from Oxford—Hannah’s medical, Olivia’s in anthropology and ancient history—there was no quarter given.

  Not that Quin usually complained. She loved her lessons, and she loved books and history with passion—but most of all she loved Olivia’s stories.

  Olivia had traveled; her descriptions were so real Quin had practically felt the gritty, sandblasted rock of the Sphinx beneath her palms, smelled the dank mud of the Nile and felt it sliding between her toes.

  She’d been brought up on history—devoured it at every mealtime and been lulled to sleep by it at night—tales that stretched from the ancient courts of the Incas to the pyramids at Giza. But, as much as Olivia gave her, her stories, the books that lined the mission’s library and the albums of photographs had never quite been enough.

  Quin didn’t just want to read or hear about the pyramids, she wanted to be there—the desire a fierce hunger rooted deep in her bones. She wanted to see and explore and to touch—to bury her hands in soil that had been tilled by primitive civilizations and sift for fragments of the past. Most of all, she wanted to unravel the myriad puzzles that had been left engraved in stone and painted on walls, enduring through the ages.

  Ancient languages and symbols fascinated her above all things and seemed to suit her quirky mind. She loved to dabble with context, to stare at inscriptions and glyphs, and pore over Olivia’s books and notes, worrying at the puzzles like a terrier with a juicy bone. And sometimes, in the strange way of her mind, all the hairs at the back of her neck would stand on end and she would understand the meaning without having the first clue what the literal translation was.

  A yawn rolled through Quin. She stretched and shifted position, inching her face away from the glare of the sun and easing muscles that still ached from stoking the mission’s boiler and scrubbing out the dispensing room.

  Gradually, the last subtle layers of tension dissipated and her lids drooped.

  Quin was a fitful sleeper. Usually she got enough sleep at night, but if she missed a few hours she was in trouble, because she couldn’t sleep at the mission during the day, no matter how hard she tried. She’d found that the more people there were around, the more unlikely it was she would sleep at all, as if the bombardment of so many different personalities in one place wound her so tight that she couldn’t relax. Lately, following an outbreak of influenza, the mission had become a hive of activity, with entire families from surrounding villages arriving for treatment, some of them electing to stay over rather than risk crossing the swing bridge that spanned the Agueda in the dark.

  Here, in the grove, the “interference” caused by other human beings was absent, and, apart from the isolation, there was something more…a peaceful quality she couldn’t explain and hadn’t experienced anywhere else. Besides that, it was always warm, as if some hidden power source flowed up out of the ground, filtering through rocks and dirt and the thick leaf litter to permeate the air, floating and rippling, as elusive as the heat shimmer that hung over the hills in summer. When she allowed herself to drift, the shadows would go liquid, and seem to shift and move around her, and she would slide into a doze and maybe even snatch a few minutes of sleep.

  Sometimes she saw people—light, insubstantial people—who came and went, silent and unobtrusive, as transparent as veils, but she didn’t feel in the least threatened. She’d seen them all her life.

  Another yawn shook through her. The warmth of the grove enfolded her, making her feel bonelessly content, as if she could melt into the sun-warmed granite, dissolve into the silence and doze for as long as she liked….

  But she shouldn’t; she had to move. The bell had rung, and Olivia would be getting worried—but her body felt leaden, her lids glued closed.

  As she drifted deeper into sleep, a flash of gold followed by the glitter of a light blue jewel suspended like a droplet against a honey-tanned forehead momentarily startled her. For a disorienting moment she thought she was looking into a mirror as eyes uncannily like her own stared back—only the gaze was sharper, colder, the face definitely adult. Then the moment dissolved as blackness enfolded her, and she was pulled under, spiraling down like a swimmer caught in an undertow.

  1200 B.C.

  Temple of The Sun

  Cuin, the Forty-third Cadis of the Sun God, and probably the last, stood patiently in her private quarters as her personal attendants helped her into one of her more elaborate day robes. Stiffened linen, heavily encrusted with thin gold platelets, iridescent sea pearls and a shimmering plethora of multihued gems, slid over her arms and settled on her shoulders, stealing all the warmth from her skin.

  Chuli, Cuin’s head physician, fastened the high collar of the gown with slender gold picks that glinted wickedly in the late afternoon sunlight.

  “Ouch,” Cuin muttered, as the stiff collar rubbed against the tender skin of her neck.

  Chuli nodded her satisfaction at the result. The robe made Cuin look even taller. “Imposing.”

  “You mean choking.”

  Malia, Chuli’s sister and Cuin’s chief advisor ever since Cuin had become the Cadis—high priestess of the Sun God—at age thirteen, twitched the robe into place around her hips, grumbling when she found that a bauble had come loose. With a curt command that Cuin stay absolutely still, she ascended the small stool she’d brought so she could check that Cuin’s headdress was correctly secured and straight.

  “You’ve
grown again,” she muttered. “I’m going to have to get a taller stool.”

  A smile twitched at the corner of Cuin’s mouth—the brief spurt of humor catching her by surprise. It had been a long time since any of them had had anything to smile about. “Either that, or you’re getting shorter.”

  “Hmmph.”

  Chuli and Malia were both considered to be of a good height, but amongst the women of the temple, Cuin was uncommonly tall—topping the tallest of the priestesses by a good two hands’ breadth. Even amongst her own race—the Cadians—which had dwindled almost into extinction, she was considered tall and remarkably different. With her fair skin and sky-blue eyes, she was a throwback to the old people—before their blood had intermingled with the local tribes and been all but lost.

  Chuli coaxed at one of the collar fastenings with deft, nimble fingers, the tired skin of her brow creased in a frown. “Don’t tell me you’re putting on weight?”

  “As well as growing taller?” Cuin snatched a glimpse of her narrow silhouette in a mirror of polished gold that was affixed to the wall, before Chuli demanded she lift her chin so the final, strangling pick could be inserted. “Chance would be a fine thing.”

  Like everyone else in the temple, she was in no danger of putting on weight. They were all hungry—their bellies practically scraping against their back-bones—and tired of supplementing a diet of tasteless, weevil-infested dried fruit and manioc with more tasteless, weevil-infested dried fruit and manioc.

  Malia made a clucking sound and adjusted the frontispiece of the headdress, so that the delicate teardrop sapphire sat dead center on Cuin’s forehead. The light, scintillating blue of the stone was a close match to her eyes and a blunt reminder to the governor of Ar Province of exactly why she was the Cadis.

  In a sea of dark eyes and dark skin, Cuin had stood out from birth, pallid and angular, narrow-featured and long-legged, as awkward and ungainly as a baby crane. She had been the only blue-eyed child born in more than ten generations—a throw-back to the ancient race that had built the temple. Different or not, ugly or not, her eyes had saved her from being left to the crows and had mapped out her path from birth: they had marked her for the temple.