Heart Of Darkness

by Maggie Shayne

  He didn’t. But as she shook him, she felt the hard lump of his cell phone in his pocket, and quickly, she yanked it out and hit the dial button without even inputting a number in her panic.

  To her surprise, she heard ringing on the other end, and pulled the phone close, looking at the screen, which told her she was “Calling Randy…”

  A man’s voice answered. “Dave?”

  “Help!” Sara cried.

  “What…who is thi—”

  “Help us, please! We’re in the house. It’s burning. We’re trapped. Please—”

  “Sierra?”

  “David’s unconscious. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t you, any of you, it was my father. Oh, please, please—” She choked on the smoke, but heard Randy shouting orders to someone before she keeled over and passed out cold.

  WHEN SHE WOKE, TWO VAGUELY familiar men were leaning over her.

  “Come on, come on!” they shouted. One of them already was helping David to his feet, shaking him awake. And the other was scooping Sara up into his arms. Together the group headed for the stairway, but she heard David say, “We can’t get out that way. The entire ground floor is engulfed.”

  Lifting her head, she choked out the words, “Just like last time.” She shook her head. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “We got here before the firefighters—what were we gonna do, stand out there and wait?” Kevin said. “If we go down, we go down together.”

  “Over my dead body,” David said. “Hand her over, Kevin, and then follow me.” He took Sara from Kevin’s arms, and the three of them headed down the second floor hallway to the farthest end, then entered a room there and closed the door behind them.

  It appeared to be a library. Randy raced to the windows, flinging them open wide. The rush of fresh air was almost too good to believe. Sara sucked in breath after breath of it as David carried her close to the window and set her down on the floor.

  “The floor’s hot!” she cried, hissing air through her teeth and pulling herself to her feet. But her feet were bare, and burning.

  “Just breathe. Breathe as much as you can.” David ripped the drapes from the windows, rushing to stuff them against the bottom of the closed door, even as Sara yanked a chair closer to the window and knelt upon it to get her feet up off the scorching hot floor.

  “Sirens!” Randy said. “I hear sirens!”

  “Good.” David returned to the window, putting his face to the outside air. “They’d better hurry. It’s too far to jump.”

  Kevin said, “We’re going to have to jump. I don’t think we have a choice. And while dying with her this time around might be poetic irony, maybe even justice, I’d prefer not to.”

  “It wasn’t you,” Sara said, but her throat was raw with smoke. “The firebomb you threw went out. I saw it. It was my father. Her father. It was Frank. He was here, too, with gasoline. He set the fire. He killed me—her—because she knew he’d murdered her mother.”

  “What?” Kevin and Randy said it almost as one.

  The three men looked at each other, and then at her. David said, “We have to get out of here, or it’s not going to make a difference. It’s only the second floor. We can lower you half the distance, Sara. Come on, climb over.”

  “But—”

  “Do it,” Randy ordered. And there wasn’t time to argue. Sara set her rear end on the windowsill, and swung her legs around. David gripped her forearm, and she locked her hand around his. Randy did the same with her other arm, and the two men leaned over as far as they could, until she dangled so low, her feet were touching the top of the window below.

  “On three, let go,” David said. And she heard the roar of flames beyond him, and knew the fire had somehow breached the room where they’d taken refuge. “One, two…”

  She released her hold on three and plummeted ground-ward, hitting far faster than she had thought possible. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she scrambled to her feet again, casting her eyes up toward that window.

  But this time, she saw only flames on the other side. “David!” she cried.

  And then sirens and lights, heavy hands moving her away, water blasting the cursed house. But no sign of David.

  She sobbed as she told the firefighters where the three men had been, and pushed against the oxygen mask they kept pressing to her face.

  And finally, she saw them. All three, stumbling around from behind the house, their faces sooty, their backs bent. Arm in arm, they came, and when they looked up and saw her, white smiles appeared in their sooty faces and they shuffled closer.

  When they finally reached her, all three men wrapped her in a group hug. They were all sobbing. She sobbed, too. Something powerful was happening here. Eventually, Randy and Kevin backed off a little, but David kept holding her, and she didn’t think he had any intention of letting go anytime soon.

  As she looked at the faces of the men, she saw the wonder in their eyes, and she understood it. This was no ordinary night, she thought as the firefighters did their work, trying to save the old Muller place yet again. This night, history had repeated itself. Men who’d lived with misplaced guilt had the chance to relive the worst night of their lives, and make it come out right this time. She hadn’t died in the fire this time. She’d lived.

  And she knew why. She had to live to tell the tale. To tell the truth.

  David stared down into her eyes. She blinked through tears as she met his. “It’s over, isn’t it?” she asked him.

  He smoothed a thumb over her cheek, catching the tear and probably some soot along with it. “No, Sara, I hope not. I hope it’s just getting started.”

  And then he bent and he kissed her, and she relaxed against his strong chest, nestled in the embrace of his powerful arms and felt as if she were right where she belonged.

  EPILOGUE

  SARA STOOD WITH A SMALL group at the cemetery, where the body of Sierra’s mother, Tamara, was being given a proper burial, right beside her daughter and her sister, Pakita.

  Tamara had been killed by a blow to the head, the autopsy had determined. And when he’d been picked up for questioning, Frank Terrence had confessed to everything…murdering his wife, setting the fire that had killed his daughter twenty-two years ago and setting the more recent one intended to kill a young woman who bore a striking resemblance to her. He claimed she’d come back to make him pay for what he’d done. But most people thought the years of guilt had finally driven him insane.

  Nikki and Cami were there, as were all five of the men who’d spent the past two decades blaming themselves for the young girl’s death. Mark was in a wheelchair being manned by his wife, Janet. But he looked good, and was expected to make a full recovery. Brad was walking under his own steam, and already ten pounds lighter since the heart attack. All five men looked years younger, just by the removal of the burden they’d been carrying from their souls.

  David and Sara stood arm in arm, and they remained at the grave after the others had all gone. Sara said, “It’s odd. I grew up in foster care. I don’t even remember having a mother of my own. But I feel like maybe I do now.”

  David nodded, holding her more closely. “What are you going to do now, Sara?”

  “That kind of depends on you,” she said softly. Turning, she gazed up into his eyes. “I could go back to New Hampshire and pick up my life where I left off. Or…I could start looking for openings for an art teacher in Boston.”

  The tension that had been in his face vanished, replaced by a warm, real smile. “You’d do that?”

  “Yeah, I would. I mean, maybe we just met—”

  “Or maybe we didn’t,” he said.

  “But either way, I want to see where this goes. It’s…it’s powerful, what’s between us. It could be…it could be the real thing. I want to find out.”

  “I do, too, Sara. I do, too.” He held her even closer. “You gave my life back to me.”

  “Well, you returned the favor.” She smiled up at him. “So what are yo
u doing for the rest of it?”

  “If I have my way, a lot more of this,” he said, and he bent over her and kissed her as if there were no tomorrow. But for the first time, it really felt like there was.

  LADY OF THE NILE

  Susan Krinard

  CHAPTER ONE

  London, 1890

  “YOU ARE QUITE INCORRECT.”

  Leo Erskine heard the voice, ringing as clear as the bells at Winchester Cathedral, but he didn’t register the flustered response of the learned gentleman at the podium. He was too thoroughly occupied with examining the lady who had spoken out so boldly.

  She was lovely, of course. One could hardly be a duchess and fail to be lovely, could one? The fact that she was only the dowager duchess at a very young age could scarcely be held against her.

  He noted the other faces turned toward her, some quizzical, others admonishing, and a few—belonging to those gentlemen with minds liberal enough to appreciate intelligence in a woman, or simply engaged by her beauty—openly admiring.

  The lady finished her brief argument with the distinguished Egyptian scholar, looked down her nose at him—an impressive feat, given her position below the dais—and swept from the lecture hall. Her skirts, draped with pleated linen and cinched with a gold sash in the ancient style, rustled furiously, and her long earrings tinkled with every long stride. If she had been a royal princess, she could not have been more regal.

  Of course, that was exactly what she claimed to be.

  Leo excused himself to his astonished companions and followed the dowager from the room. He knew very well that his fascination with her was not due to her beauty, remarkable as it was. Nor was it because of her influence in Society, whose members were not prepared to forgo her elaborate parties and elegant balls because of a little old-fashioned British eccentricity.

  No, it was not such shallow motives that brought him to observe her so closely whenever they met. Since the marriage of his friend the Earl of Donnington to one of the dowager’s select friends—Nuala, the former Lady Charles Parkhill—he had been thrown more often into the dowager’s company. And he had begun to think that she actually did believe that she was an Egyptian princess come back to life.

  That was the problem. She believed it. Just as his own father had believed. And died for it.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Erskine.”

  He came to a sudden halt, moments from colliding with the woman in question. She stood before him, chin lifted, cool green eyes appraising. “You wished to speak to me?” she asked.

  Unaccountably flustered, Leo bowed. “I fear I have disturbed you, Your Grace.”

  “You fear no such thing. You have been following me. Have you something to say?”

  Her frankness must have discomposed most English gentlemen. Leo had seen far too much of the world to take it amiss. “You have made no friends in the Museum today,” he said with equal candor.

  She laughed, a warm, rich sound that Leo felt down to his toes. “I have never desired the friendship of men who are prone to such egregious errors,” she said.

  “Are you so certain of your facts, Your Grace?”

  The humor vanished from her face, and those remarkable eyes, made even more striking by the careful application of kohl, regarded him steadily. “I was there when the events in question occurred,” she said.

  Events that had taken place three thousand years ago.

  Delusion. Yes, that was the source of her certainty, not a deliberate desire for attention. “If so,” he said, “your knowledge would surely be invaluable to historians all over the world.”

  THERE WAS NO MOCKERY in his voice. If there had been, she would have turned on her heel and walked away.

  But Tameri remained where she was. She might have ignored such a comment from any other man. Indeed, she had never been troubled by Leo Erskine in the past. Of late, however, she had been seeing more of him at social events she had attended, even the most exclusive. It was a development no one who knew him could account for. Studious, solitary, ever courteous but generally aloof…those were words to describe the second son of the Earl of Elston.

  And attractive. Not handsome, not precisely. But he was tall, leanly muscular, and possessed a sort of calm authority that Tameri could only wish she truly felt.

  “You know your own sex and avocation, Mr. Erskine,” she said at last. “The so-called expert’s reaction to my correction would be a typical response, would it not?”

  “And yet you continue to try.”

  “I cannot allow such misinformation to be disseminated.”

  “Perhaps you might have approached the matter more delicately.”

  Now he was mocking her. “In former days,” she said, “men such as Dr. Elgabri would have been put in their place.”

  “In what manner would you prefer to go about it, madam? By decapitation, drowning or impalement?”

  Her throat closed, and she almost looked away. The dark. The dreadful dark.

  No. She would not let him claim victory in this engagement. She would not allow him to sense the doubts within herself.

  “I have never sought to execute anyone, Mr. Erskine,” she said, fighting the tremor in her voice.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. Of course you have not.”

  She considered that he might actually be sincere in his apology. He almost looked contrite, his light brown eyes earnest behind their spectacles.

  But I see it, she thought. You do not believe me. You think, like the rest, that I am a fraud.

  They were wrong, all of them. For she remembered. Only bits and pieces, seen through a heavy mist, but she remembered. If she could convince but one man, a learned and thoroughly practical man like Mr. Leopold Erskine…

  A man who would certainly deem her truly mad should she make any such attempt and fail.

  Why should I care for his good opinion? Why—

  Someone jostled past them, a young man who apologized profusely and stared at Tameri a moment too long. Erskine smoothly drew him away, exchanged a few pleasant words with the youth and returned to Tameri’s side.

  “Newly come to London,” he said. “Naturally he would find you intriguing, Your Grace. As one might expect.”

  “You need have no concern for me, Mr. Erskine. I am accustomed to such behavior from those unacquainted with Society.”

  “Of course.” He took her arm, an impertinence she was too startled to correct, and led her away from the flow of pedestrians on Great Russell Street. When he stopped at the corner of Bloomsbury Street, he did not release her.

  “I have enjoyed our conversation, Your Grace,” he said. “Perhaps we might continue the discussion another time.”

  Tameri freed her arm. “What would you propose we discuss? Perhaps you find my way of life a source of amusement. Perhaps you intend to make a study of me.”

  He flushed, a most subtle change of color under his surprisingly sunbrowned skin, and she knew she had caught him out. Other scholars and skeptics might speak critically of her among themselves, women might gossip and twitter, but few would dare to confront her directly. Leo Erskine was prepared to provoke the displeasure of one of the most wealthy and, yes, influential leaders of Society for the sake of his scientific curiosity.

  That was why he had appeared at so many functions at which she had been present. That was why he had followed her today.

  “I am not an exotic bird, Mr. Erskine, to be cataloged and dissected,” she said coldly. “I may be compelled to live in a world not my own, but I do not bestow my confidences on common soldiers.”

  “Soldiers?”

  Tameri clutched at her skirts, striving to keep her feet. What had she said? What had she just remembered?

  The amorphous image flew from her mind, and she found Erskine staring at her with real concern.

  With pity.

  She straightened and pushed past him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Erskine,” she said.

  “Wait.” He caught her up, slowing his stride to ma
tch hers. “At least permit me to escort you to your carriage.”

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “Lady Tameri.”

  She could not have taken another step even had she wished to do so. He knew the name she had chosen for herself, the name she preferred over the title her husband had given her. The power of that name on his lips—the name of her other self—held her like the net of a bird-catcher hunting on the Nile.

  “Convince me,” Erskine said. He removed his spectacles as if he were deliberately setting aside any barrier that might stand between them. “Convince me that what you believe is true, and I will find a way to convince the world.”

  She met his gaze. Once again she was challenged to accept his sincerity, and she began to wonder if she had judged him too harshly.

  Yet how could it be? Was it even remotely possible that he wished to be convinced, that his keen intellect might be fit to grasp the secrets of the ages?

  Could he, believing, help her uncover all that had been forgotten?

  “I have told you that I will not be an object of study,” she said, deliberately scathing. “Surely you do not intend to ‘help’ me out of the goodness of your heart. There must be something more you want of me.”

  He withdrew a pace as if she had affronted him. “Madam,” he said with cool formality, “I am neither in need of your wealth or your patronage, nor do I wish to impose upon you. You may trust me or not, as you prefer.” He bowed stiffly and turned to go.

  “Wait!”

  Erskine stopped without turning. “Your Grace?”

  She threw caution to the fresh late spring breeze. “I am having an intimate gathering of friends at Maye House on the twelfth. I would be pleased if you would join us.”

  “Even though I am not an intimate friend?”

  Something in his words struck a deep and terrifying chord, but she forged ahead. “You will know most of the others in attendance,” she said. “You shall not be a stranger.”