Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL)

by Thea Harrison

  “Yes. I come here when I can. The lake is about a third of a mile down a path that ends behind the cabin. Sometimes I fish.”

  He got out of the car and she followed. He handed her the four grocery bags. As she took them, she saw that two of the bags were filled with food, and the two other bags were stuffed with simple, new clothes. She caught a glimpse of a gray sweatshirt, and a packet of white women’s socks.

  Then he reached into the backseat again, and he pulled out two large black canvas bags. One of them seemed an ordinary bag one might pack for a weekend. The other was longer and he hefted it with more effort, so it had to be heavy. She looked at that bag for a thoughtful moment.

  He turned and walked up the porch steps to the door, warning over his shoulder, “The cabin is pretty rustic.”

  “Is there any chance of hot water?” She followed him onto the porch.

  He unlocked the door and shoved it open with a foot. “In about a half an hour.”

  “Then it sounds like heaven on earth to me,” she said.

  He stood back and let her walk into the cabin first. She stopped in the middle of a large room, pivoting to look around as he brought in his bags and tucked them out of the way.

  He was not exaggerating when he called the cabin rustic. The walls were wooden with a few built-in bookshelves. A table and a few chairs sat in the middle of the floor. Two corners at one end of the room were filled with a wide bed and a dresser.

  Against the far wall a counter, a small stove, sink and refrigerator comprised a kitchenette area. More bare shelves were under the counter, stacked with a variety of canned foods. A large fieldstone fireplace took up most of the third wall, with wood stacked in a nearby box. A package of long matches sat on the mantel.

  A closed door was in the last corner. Michael walked over to the door and disappeared. He stepped back in the room moments later.

  “This is the bathroom. I’ve turned the water heater on,” he said. “We’ll be able to wash in comfort soon.”

  “Thank God,” she said. She felt like she had picked up twenty miles of road dirt. “I like your cabin. How long have you owned this place?”

  “Eight years. It’s only a day’s travel from Astra’s place, and it’s private and independent. Sometimes I need to get away from everything, even her. Especially her.” He walked over to the refrigerator, opened the door and looked in the freezer. “The fridge is working fine. Aside from what I picked up at the store, I have some frozen stuff, mostly steaks, ground beef and vegetables. I keep the coffee in the freezer, and there’s the canned stuff under the counter.”

  “It all sounds terrific,” she said.

  She set the grocery bags on the table and unpacked the food he had bought. Most of the items were off-brand, just good, plain food, enough for several meals. There were containers of flavored yogurt, eggs, a small tub of butter, another small container of half-and-half, apples, cheese, a package of pasta noodles, a jar of spaghetti sauce, crackers, a loaf of bread and a few packets of fresh vegetables and fruit.

  Asparagus, mushrooms and strawberries.

  Her eyes moistened as she stared down at the fresh produce. He had bought ingredients to make her wish breakfast at a dream hotel: a mushroom and asparagus omelet, fresh fruit and coffee with cream.

  She gathered up the perishables and tucked them into the otherwise empty fridge.

  Then she rummaged through the other full bags. He had bought a petite-sized pair of jeans, two T-shirts, a hooded gray sweatshirt, the white socks she had glimpsed earlier, a packet of pink underwear and a set of three sports bras. There was also a new toothbrush, antiperspirant and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste.

  The sports bras looked a bit big, and the T-shirts and sweatshirt would be baggy but useful enough, and hopefully the jeans might fit. The socks and underwear should be fine. They were all treasures.

  “I already had soap and shampoo. Is it okay?” he asked. He had picked up the lighter of the two black bags and paused with it in his arms. He was watching her with an uncertain expression that looked odd on his normally confident, decisive face.

  “It’s more than okay. It’s amazing. Thank you so much for thinking of it.” She looked with longing at the bathroom door. “Do you think the water has warmed up enough by now?”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it. If you want, you can shift things in the dresser to make a space for your clothes.”

  “Thanks.”

  She rifled through the dresser. It felt odd to handle his clothing, adding another layer of intimacy to their already convoluted and confusing relationship. She took one of the new T-shirts and a pair of underwear from the packet then tucked the rest of the clothes, still in their plastic packaging and labels, in the top drawer. The T-shirt looked like it was long enough to reach her upper thighs.

  Clutching the clothes in her hands, she turned to him. “I can’t wait any longer. Do you mind if I go ahead and use the bathroom?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Help yourself, but I’m sure the water isn’t warm enough yet to bathe in comfortably.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve got an agenda,” she said. His well-cut mouth widened in a smile. His unshaven jaw lent his features a rough appearance, and his wide shoulder and chest muscles flexed under his black T-shirt as he moved around the cabin.

  She was fascinated by all the evidence of his existence, by the sight of him, by the quiet sounds he made as he moved around, his warm fragrant male scent, by her own response to him. It took an effort to yank her gaze away and slip into the bathroom. Once inside, she leaned against the door and shook her head back and forth.

  Too much, too much going on.

  On the bright side, a lot of items on her fix-it to-do list had been wiped out. She didn’t have a dirty house any longer that needed cleaning. She couldn’t feel guilty about not finishing any of her quilting projects, and going to work was out of the question.

  On the dark side . . . She thought of Justin again, and her eyes filled.

  Then she shuddered and scrubbed her face with one hand, closed the door on her grief for the time being, and looked around. The bathroom was utilitarian and somewhat outdated, with the water heater in one corner, and a bath and shower, and a white sink with a small mirror, but it was mercifully clean, which gave it a five-star rating in her travel book for this trip. A small cabinet hung over the toilet. When she opened it, she saw towels and washcloths on the two shelves inside.

  Stripping naked, she scrubbed her panties, bra, socks and T-shirt in the sink. Then she tackled washing her dirty jeans, wrung all of the wet clothes out as best she could, and hung everything along the top of the warming water heater so it would dry faster.

  Cleaning her teeth with her new toothbrush was nothing short of heavenly. By then the water had heated enough to make bathing comfortable, so she ran a bath and stepped in as soon as she could. The various scrapes she had acquired throughout the previous day and night stung as they came in contact with the water, and her bruises throbbed. Still, soaking in hot water eased some of the aches. When the water began to cool she soaped her hair and body.

  The soap and shampoo in the bathroom were as utilitarian as the rest of the place. She knew she would pay for that later as her unruly hair dried, but she was so grateful to be clean that she didn’t care. She would have to wrestle the tangles into submission while her hair was wet and then braid it back. With any luck—she paused in the middle of rinsing and her breathing halted—with any luck she would live to wash her hair again with a decent conditioner soon.

  The small bathroom had warmed to a toasty temperature by the time she dried, slipped on the new T-shirt and panties and wrapped her hair in the towel. As she walked into the main room she discovered that Michael had built a fire that crackled as it banished the damp chill from the cabin.

  He had made even more coffee with an old-fashioned percolator on the stove, and he sat at the table with a cup near his elbow. She had thought that the challenging years of her r
esidency had turned her into a heavy coffee drinker, but he had her beat by a mile.

  Any pretense he had to domesticity ended at that point. Her steps slowed as she took in the various weapons he had laid out on the table. The long black bag that had seemed so heavy was open at his feet. A large Kevlar vest draped the back of one chair. He was cleaning his handgun.

  As she approached gingerly she caught a glimpse of something in the bag that looked remarkably like a sword.

  Easing into a chair, she watched his deft, large long-fingered hands manipulate the gun, her body tense.

  “What are you so upset about?” Michael said, his tone brusque. “The weapons? You’ve got to know by now it’s what I do.”

  “What crawled up your ass and died?” she said. She threw him a nasty glance, pushed to her feet and went to the kitchenette area to rummage for a glass. “I’ve had so much shit hit my fan in the last three days, you take your pick. Four people were gunned down in front of me, for no reason I can tell except that I bumped into them and my attackers liked to kill things.” She couldn’t find a glass, so she took a coffee mug, filled it with cold water and drained the contents. As she filled it again, a betraying quiver ran through her voice. “A lot of people have died on me in the hospital, but I’ve never seen anything like that—not in real life, not right in front of me—so you go ahead and do what you need to do, and you have my blessing. But yes, it upsets me.” Needing to leave the room, she turned toward the bathroom. “Do you want a bath? I’ll run you a bath.”

  His hand circled her wrist as she tried to walk past. She tugged, trying to free herself, but he yanked her toward him, into his arms. Giving in to the simple, animal comfort he offered, her arms slipped around his neck, and she cried for the murdered family, for Justin and for the cruel, unapproachable look that had been on Michael’s face and the life he must have lived that made him look like that.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. One large hand rubbed up and down her back.

  “Me too. For the meltdown, I mean,” she said, leaning against his long, muscular body. He had so much strength it was easy to believe that he had survived so many centuries. She laid her cheek on top of his head and fingered his short military-cut dark hair. “I’m okay. I just haven’t had time to cry for them before now and I needed to.”

  “I’m sure you did,” he said. He pulled her onto his lap, holding her tight. “It’s going to get uglier.”

  “I know. It’s not fair,” she said. She put her head on his shoulder. “I feel like a whole person for the first time in my—in this life. I want to, I don’t know, celebrate. Play. Put on a pretty dress, go out on the town, go dancing, maybe see Paris. Then I look at the terrible things he has done to other people, and I feel like such a whiner.”

  “Well, you are a whiner,” he said. He gave her a light pinch, and in spite of herself, she chuckled. He said in a more serious voice, “You should be able to put on a pretty dress, go dancing and see Paris. But that’s not what we have in front of us right now. I’d say you’re entitled to some whining.” He tilted his head and looked down the length of her body. “Your knees are all bruised and scraped.”

  She looked at her knees too. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters. Poor knees.” To her utter shock, he bent and twisted, and pressed warm lips first to one knee then the other.

  He lifted his head. They looked at each other. His eyes had dilated until they appeared black. Sexuality shimmered between them, a silvery, shining heat. Then he carefully, firmly put her on her feet again.

  “Sit over there,” he said. “And tell me what you need to tell me.”

  Even though the room was comfortable and warm, she shivered away from his body heat. Rubbing her arms, she huddled into herself and tried to adjust. “It isn’t pretty.”

  “Very little of this is.” He snapped a piece of his cleaned gun back into place.

  “Yes. Well.” She was grateful he had created a physical separation between them, yet unsettled as well.

  Was it her human self that felt the urge to sink her fingers into his flesh so deep she could never let go again? Or was it her alien, earliest self that whispered in the crevices of her soul that he was the part of her that had been missing for so long? She felt as though a stranger had slumbered deep in the subterranean recesses of her mind and was now finally coming awake. That stranger had impulses and motivations she didn’t fully understand or trust.

  There you are, she had said to his radiant form upon waking up. She had felt such unutterable relief, such incredulity and joy.

  But there was the weight of what lay behind them, and between them.

  So much, so much.

  She slipped into the chair and looked away from his pewter gaze, trying to concentrate on what she should tell him. He needed to know only so much, and then no more.

  “About my last life. I was a member of a wealthy family. We were Muslim and we lived in a large Mediterranean port city. I’m not sure where, maybe Constantinople. I guess it could have been Cairo. Anyway, my father was not only powerful but he was progressive, and I was loved and educated quite well. Earlier, before we had stopped at the gas station, I had dreamed of the best of my teachers from that time. He was the one who taught me about the Eastern dragons. That was how I knew to try calling the one I called. The Eastern dragons aren’t anything like the Western concept of dragons. They are very wise.”

  “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?”