Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL)

by Thea Harrison

  “Sorry for what—that you couldn’t help me remember? Don’t be,” he told her. “We didn’t recover anything of that lifetime because I couldn’t stand to remember. Now I know, and I needed to know. But I also wish I didn’t.”

  She took a deep breath. “What happened?”

  “I’m not going to talk about it,” he said. “I can’t speak for Mary, so you’d have to ask her what she’s willing to discuss. But my experience isn’t relevant to the present. That’s all you need to know.”

  She nodded and stood. The illusion of the young woman wavered and grew thin. “I will see what I can do pinpoint his location,” she said. “Don’t take too long to rest.”

  He said, “We will see you soon.”

  “Creator willing.” She faded.

  He did not echo the sentiment. He doubted there was a God, but if there was, Michael had no use for him.

  He had no reason to linger after Astra left but he did anyway. He let his gaze roam over the scene. The only items that were anachronistic to the great hall were the suits of armor on display. At one time or another he had worn each one. He had added them to the hall image over the years, as he had recovered memories of different lifetimes throughout the ages.

  He walked toward the oldest sets of armor and let the memories from those lives unfold. The armor was from one of his earliest lifetimes, soon after the group’s arrival on earth. His earliest lives were also his most public. He had only fallen into the habit of stealth much later. This one; yes, he remembered this one well. It had been a time of almost constant war, but then so had most of his lives.

  They’d had the Deceiver cornered and had laid siege to the city that sheltered him. The siege had been a long, filthy, brutal business. He remembered the blood and the dust and the sweltering, crowded life of the army.

  Gabriel and Raphael had been there. In that lifetime some quirk of destiny had seen them born as identical twins, inseparable as always, vivid and reckless and brilliant as two firebrands. They had loved to switch places and pretend to be each other, but they could never fool anybody from their group. Their birth mother had named them Castor and Pollux.

  They had burst into his pavilion late one night, laughing drunkenly over some stupid escapade. Now he couldn’t remember what they had done. He had met the twins just inside the flap, naked, with sword and knife in hand, while Mary had scowled from the pallet of furs where they had slept.

  What had been her name? He frowned, unable to grasp it. Members of their group had fast become the stuff of legend, until the stories took on a life of their own. In that culture and time gods and demons mingled freely with kings and ordinary men. The group hadn’t needed to cloak their abilities, which was refreshing in retrospect.

  He had fast earned the reputation of being an invincible warrior, gifted by the gods. Whatever her name had been, he smiled to remember Mary’s obstinacy. She had insisted on dogging his heel everywhere he went, no matter how many times he had shouted at her to stay behind in safety. It became well known throughout both armies that she was his only point of vulnerability.

  Astra had asked, in equal parts amusement and uncertainty, whether or not he dreamed, and he did. But what he dreamed was none of her business nor was it anyone else’s, except perhaps for one other person. In all four realms, physically, psychically, spiritually and emotionally, he was a fortress. He might be destroyed but he would never be conquered.

  Except, perhaps, by or through one other person.

  The long-dead people from those days had said that to strike at his heel was to strike him down.

  After all this time he supposed that it was still true.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  HUNGER WOKE MARY, an insistent, healthy ache.

  She lay for a while, drifting sleepily through memory while she rested against Michael’s warm, hard body. He was so much bigger than she was. Sprawling together gave her a simple, animal sense of comfort and safety.

  Earlier in the bathroom, he had been trapped in the past and going into shock. Then she had done something. Something important. In that moment, without any time to really think anything through, she sank her awareness into his body and poured her energy into him, just as he had done to her when he had found her. She willed his heart to return back to its normal rhythm and opened constricted pathways, and his body had obeyed. Now, as she thought back to what had happened, part of her wanted to shout in astonished triumph.

  What she had done felt right and true, and familiar, as if she had done such a thing many times before. The realization opened other possibilities in her mind, along with barely glimpsed images of different healings for other injuries and illnesses.

  She felt as though she had discovered a hidden door inside of herself. Opening that door led to a secret, golden chamber filled with such wondrous treasure, she could wander within its halls for years.

  All the pieces of her past that she had recovered thus far pointed the way to further discoveries. She had not only been a fine healer in her first life, but she had learned valuable lessons in successive lives too. She needed to work hard to reclaim those lost skills.

  At last she went into a full body stretch. Bruises and contusions throbbed, and she bit back a groan. Her body had stiffened while she slept.

  When she opened her eyes, she sensed that time had changed.

  The fire that had been crackling in the fireplace had died down, and the shadows in the cabin had shifted places. She thought of those shadows moving throughout the days, not quite dancing the same dance every time, infinitesimally shifting their path throughout the seasons, yet still completing a circle.

  Michael watched her with a serious, contemplative expression, lying on his side, with his head propped in one hand. His short, dark hair was tousled, and the harsh lines on his face had eased. He looked as though he had been awake for some time.

  She had the impulse to smile or say something, and then her gaze connected with his.

  The cabin disappeared.

  Everything disappeared as she looked at her mate.

  The stern, inhuman lines of his strong face, the piercing light in his fierce eyes—every detail was as familiar and as necessary to her as her own hands. His energy mantled his masculine form like a midnight blue cloak and followed the lines of his high cheekbones and lean jaw like a royal collar. He was one of the most graceful of their people, and also one of the strongest and most deadly, and he was utterly devoted to her.

  As she was to him.

  And when he touched her, with his hands and his body, and all the passionate colors of his emotions, everything inside of her sang.

  Then the cabin snapped back into place around her, and she stared at Michael in his human form. A few tiny flecks of white had begun to sprinkle the black hair at his temples, and crow’s-feet etched the weathered skin at the corners of his eyes. Lines bracketed his mouth. If he wasn’t forty, he was only a few years shy of it, and while physically he might appear to look like an ordinary man, for the first time, she truly saw the power sheathed inside his body.

  His light-colored eyes regarded her, the expression on his lean face quizzical.

  Her eyesight flickered from the physical to the psychic and back again, blending the two images.

  Light-colored eyes like—moonstones set in a midnight blue cloak—his energy mantling him like a royal collar—etching his high, strong cheekbones and that thin, mobile mouth.

  She jerked her gaze away, shaking, and stared in the direction of the table across the room.

  He put a warm hand on her arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she croaked, and cleared her throat. “I think I just saw who you were.”

  She heard the frown in his voice. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw an image of you. Not you as you are, here in the present. Well, at least not at first.” Vaguely aware that she was babbling, she made an effort to control herself. “I think I saw a vision of what you looked like in that first life.�
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  But if that was real—and she was so far beyond questioning the reality of her own experiences, so it must be real—then it had been no vision at all, but a memory.

  My God, what a magnificent creature he had been.

  And still was.

  His fingers tightened. She felt each individual one, pressing gently into her flesh. He controlled his own strength completely, not adding a single twinge of discomfort to her still healing body. Not only must he have absolute knowledge of his own capabilities, but she realized that he had studied and marked the position of every one of her bruises. He had to have, to avoid them so completely.

  Then he let her go. As she turned her gaze back to him, he rolled away from her and onto his feet, moving lightly like a dancer. “Come on,” he said. “We slept the day away, and we only have an hour or so of daylight left.”

  Thrown off balance, she fumbled her way out from under the covers. The scuffed hardwood floor felt like a sheet of ice, and her toes curled in protest. Trying to minimize the discomfort, she stood on one foot. “What are we doing?”

  “We’re going outside for target practice, remember?” He strode over to the table where he had left his T-shirt and socks, and he dressed swiftly, the bulky muscles of his arms and chest flexing as he drew the shirt over his head.

  The cabin was too cold for half measures. Either she needed to get dressed or she needed to dive back under the covers. For a moment she wavered, but she knew that if she tried to go back to bed, he would only pull her out again bodily.

  Shivering, she minced across the freezing floor to the dresser and dragged on a pair of socks. As predicted, they fit. Then she tried on the new jeans. They hung on her hips, but her other pair was still drying on the water heater, and these would do in a pinch. Finally she dove into the voluminous gray sweatshirt, hunting for the neck and armholes.

  Her voice muffled by the thick material, she grumbled, “I would rather have some supper, you know.”

  “Target practice first,” he told her. “Then I’ll cook you supper.”

  That brightened her outlook on the near future considerably. She emerged from the depths of the sweatshirt with a smile. “You cook?”

  “I cook.” He sat in the one of the chairs and laced on his boots.

  “Do you by any chance cook omelets?” She hopped into her shoes.

  One corner of his mouth lifted. “I do cook omelets. I cook other things too. It’s not haute cuisine, but it’s good enough.”

  Somehow that didn’t surprise her. Autonomy would matter to him. He would be competent at a lot of things.

  After only a brief hesitation, she walked over to put a hand on his wide shoulder. As he lifted his head in inquiry, she bent and kissed him on his hard, warm mouth. “I noticed that you bought asparagus, mushrooms and strawberries,” she whispered. “I meant to thank you earlier but got sidetracked.”

  His expression relaxed, and he gave her a smile. “You’re welcome.” He stood, foraged in his weapons bag and pocketed a couple of spare clips. Then he strode to the dresser to pick up the nine-millimeter. “Come on.”

  Grimacing, she followed him outside and around to the back of the cabin, noting how he studied his surroundings, his gaze clear and sharp. The clearing hadn’t been mowed in a while, and the long grass was tangled underfoot.

  She muttered, “Have I mentioned recently that I don’t want to do this?”

  “Not since you woke up,” he said. “In fact, I was just admiring your restraint, but I suppose that’s all in the past now.”

  He held the gun out. She turned her back to him.

  Circling her, he came back into view and held the gun out again, his expression implacable.

  She scowled at him and snatched the gun out of his hand.

  “Show me where the safety is,” he said.

  She pointed, her mouth folded tight.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, show me that you remember how to reload it.”

  She pulled the clip out and slammed it back in. Her hands were shaking so that she fumbled the move.

  [flat, popping sounds . . . people falling like mown flowers . . .]

  He put a hand over hers. His grip was sure and steady. “Are you thinking about what happened to those people?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He tilted her face up. “It’s time to take your own advice, Mary,” he said. His voice was calm. “The memories are terrible, but what happened is in the past. Acknowledge that, and let it go. This is just a gun. It’s a thing, like a scalpel, or a chair, or like any other thing. It’s up to you what you do with it.”

  “There’s something wrong with that argument.” She pressed a fist to her forehead, trying to clear her head. “I can’t think what it is right at the moment, but there is.”

  “You are in control of this gun,” he told her, clearly unmoved by her shaky reaction. “It is not in control of you. If you are not in control of yourself, you might slip and kill or injure someone, but that is true of the scalpel as well. If you have the nerve to wield a scalpel, you can shoot this gun. Now, take the safety off. Hold it like I showed you.”

  His calm, relentless attitude was actually helping, not hurting. She slipped off the safety and held the gun two handed, like he had demonstrated earlier. The muscles in her arms and shoulders bunched with tension.

  He walked behind her and pointed over her shoulder. She sighted along the length of his arm to where his finger pointed. “Aim for that low-hanging branch. Remember, pull the trigger. Don’t yank at it.”

  She pulled the trigger. The gun spat a bullet. Startling wildly, she dropped it.

  Silence. She dared to peek over her shoulder at him. He had raised his eyebrows, and his mouth was compressed in a suppressed smile. “You surprised me. I thought it would take at least another ten more minutes to talk you into doing that.”

  “I hate you,” she grumbled.

  He spun her around so fast she didn’t even have time to squeak. Snaking an arm around her neck, he gave her a savage kiss that was so scorching, she felt as if all of her clothes might burn off of her body. Electricity sizzled through her nerves. By the time he was finished, she was shaking all over and unabashedly clinging to him, with her fingers tangled in his short, fine hair. His mouth left hers with obvious reluctance, and as she sagged limply in his hold, he studied her with a heavy-lidded, predatory look.

  She licked her lips. Even her mouth was shaking. “Okay, you caught me. I was kidding. I don’t hate you.”

  He circled her throat with one hand. It was such a barbaric gesture, and he did it so tenderly. She looked up into the dangerous face of her best friend in the entire world.

  And she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would never hurt her, would always defend her. Always.

  Something invisible hovered in the air, some decision in his edged expression. He looked like a tiger might, as it walked up to a fence and considered whether or not it might be time to jump over to freedom. Then the tiger retreated, slowly, and he smiled again as he let her go.

  Even when he was no longer touching her, the skin at her neck burned with the memory of the warmth from his hand.

  He said, “Pick the gun up, and this time, really aim for that branch.”

  Flooded with sensation and blind with desire, she managed to pick the gun up again and not shoot herself in the foot.

  After a half an hour, he called a halt to the lesson. Not, she thought, because he had any pity on her, but because the shadows were lengthening too much on the branches to use them for proper target practice.

  And not that she had managed to hit any of the branches, anyway. As wrung out as if they had been boxing the entire time, she clicked on the safety and tried to hand the gun to him, but he wouldn’t take it.

  “I did good, didn’t I?” she said brightly.

  The tiger that lived behind his face laughed. “Come on,” he said. “I promised you supper.”

  Back inside, the cabin was almost as col
d as it was outside. Teeth chattering, she went to build a new fire in the fireplace while he pulled out various ingredients from the fridge and set to work.

  While she waited for the flames to take hold, she wandered into the bathroom and checked her clothes that were still draped on the hot water heater. They were dry, and the material felt stiff and rough. She shook them out and folded them, then set them on the dresser. Then she went back to squat in front of the bright new fire, holding her chilled fingers to the growing warmth.

  With his dark head bent to the prosaic task of chopping vegetables, he said, “Tell me your long, stupid story.”

  It took her a few heartbeats to connect to what he meant. When she remembered, she said, “Justin and I both went to Notre Dame. I wasn’t very good at making friends, but he has—had—a knack for it. It’s a big university, but he still seemed to know everybody on campus. One of his friends was a roommate of mine, and she introduced us. We really liked each other, you know. We made each other laugh.” She paused, but he remained silent. She bit her lip. “The truth of the matter is, he was gay and couldn’t admit to it, and I wasn’t interested in anybody. We each pretended to be something we weren’t, and we tried to create a life that would look right. Look normal. I thought if I acted normal for long enough, I might eventually start feeling normal. You know, fake it till you make it.”

  She looked over her shoulder. Michael’s expression revealed nothing but calm interest. He asked, “How long were you married?”

  “Just under two years. It was a relief when we called it quits.” What was he thinking? His reaction, or rather the lack of one, threw her off balance. Did he . . . care? She asked hesitantly, “Have you had a serious relationship?”

  His gaze lifted from his task briefly. “No.”

  Unsure about the undertones in his too-brief reply or in that clear, wry look, and not confident about asking him anything further, she stood and walked over to the table. He had blanched the asparagus and sautéed the mushrooms. Now, he beat several eggs in a large metal bowl while butter melted in a skillet over low heat.