Heart Of Darkness

by Maggie Shayne

She turned in his arms, her gaze bent from his. “I am afraid.”

  He lifted her chin and stroked her cheek. “All of life is within us now,” he said. “It cannot be stolen from us.”

  Resting her palms on his chest, she let him embrace her. And as her body pressed against his, he knew she had at last let fall the final barrier between them.

  Tameri was a feather in his arms. He carried her to the couch and laid her upon it. Her eyes did not flinch from his as he knelt beside the bed, slid the straps of her dress from her arms and touched her breast.

  “How can this be?” she murmured. “How can I feel so—”

  She spoke no more as he took her brown nipple between his lips. Her back arched high. He stroked her thigh through the fine linen as he suckled, and her breath came fast.

  “Maahes,” she cried. He raised her again, untied her sash and removed her sheath. Her nakedness was as sleek as a leopard’s pelt. He worshiped her, paid tribute to her breasts and belly and thighs and what lay between them.

  “Like wine,” he whispered, drinking deeply. She parted her thighs with soft whimpers of excitement. He removed his kilt with a sweep of his hand and lay beside her. She touched his cheek with little words of endearment and locked her legs about his waist.

  One thrust, and they would be joined. Once he entered her and she took his seed into herself, all that they knew would change. But first there would be pleasure, the clenching of her body around him, the flight of the hawk at twilight.

  He slid deeper inside her. She cried his name again and again. He moved, felt the wall that had never been breached, closed his eyes.

  Now.

  “Leo!”

  He opened his eyes. Tameri lay beneath him, her skirts and petticoats rucked to her waist and her drawers torn as if by impatient hands. His trousers were unbuttoned, and his cock…

  Leo lunged up and away, fumbling for the buttons. Tameri lay still a moment longer, her eyes no longer green but black.

  “Where are we?” she said. She turned her head, seeking him in the darkness. The door was closed, and there was no other light save the faintest luminescence emanating from the chest.

  Half-afraid to touch her, Leo reached for her hand to help her up. With a sharp motion she pulled down her skirts and scrambled out of his reach to sit against the wall.

  “Tameri,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know…I didn’t mean—”

  But she didn’t seem to hear him. “Where are we?” she repeated. “It is so dark. So dark.”

  “It’s only a room in the Museum,” he said, keeping his distance. “If you will wait here, I’ll make certain—”

  That no one saw us, he thought. He could only pray that it was so. Part of him was still in that other place, unfulfilled, aching with need. But none of that mattered now.

  He found his way to the door. It wouldn’t open.

  “We cannot get out,” Tameri said, panic rising in her voice. Her shoes scuffled on the floor. “They have sealed us in!”

  Leo made one more effort and then accepted the fact that they had somehow got themselves locked into the room. “No one has sealed us in,” he said. “The door has accidentally been locked. Someone will find us soon.”

  “No. No one will come.”

  The words were no longer fearful, but dull with despair. Erskine could just make her out where she stood against the wall, her arms tightly clasped across her chest. Just as she had stood in that other place and time.

  “There is nothing to fear,” he said. He reached for her, stopped, let his arms fall. He dared not touch her again.

  But she came into his arms, letting him hold her as he so desperately wished to do, though his common sense told him that this was as much a dream as that other vision. He stroked her hair, black as that other Tameri’s had been, fallen loose about her shoulders.

  “More beautiful than the lotus flower,” he murmured.

  She raised her eyes to his. “You were there,” she said haltingly. “You were…”

  The door creaked open. Leo let Tameri go, tucked the scroll in his coat and stepped away. Light spilled into the room.

  “Who’s there?” a man’s voice demanded.

  Leo went to meet him. “Leo Erskine,” he said. “And Her Grace the dowager Duchess of Vardon. We took a wrong turn, I fear.”

  The man, one of the Museum attendants, glanced from Leo to Tameri. He stared an instant too long at Tameri’s loosened hair.

  “I…see,” he said, remembering the wisdom of diplomacy. He moved from the doorway. “Your Grace?”

  Whatever her previous fears, Tameri seemed to have regained her usual aplomb. Leo watched anxiously as she left the room, praying that the young man would continue to be prudent. He paused just outside the door and gave the attendant a long, meaningful look.

  “Her Grace has always been a generous patroness,” he said casually. “It would be a pity if she were to lose interest in the Museum.”

  The young man’s gaze flickered downward. “I quite understand, Mr. Erskine.”

  Leo clapped his shoulder companionably and followed Tameri, but his legs were not quite steady. It was all bluff. As it was surely bluff on Tameri’s part, as well, though she moved with her accustomed assurance.

  The assurance of a true princess. A princess afraid of the dark.

  Giving his head a quick shake, Leo let Tameri get well ahead and paused before the Egyptian bust he had examined earlier, waiting until he was certain that he could face the world with composure.

  A world that no longer seemed entirely his own.

  He smiled and nodded to a few acquaintances, paused to exchange a few words with one of the Museum’s directors and left the building. He knew he ought to go after Tameri, make sure she was well, but he also knew she would only rebuff any offer of aid. The papyrus rattled with each beat of his heart. He was, as Tameri had said, no better than a thief.

  But he must understand. The scroll held the answers he had been seeking. He had meant to save Tameri from herself, but he had begun to wonder if he must save himself, as well.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TAMERI’S FIRST THOUGHT was to go directly to her friends in the Widow’s Club. It was an instinct she followed as far as Wilton Crescent, where her mind cleared and she remembered how Frances, Lillian and Clara had badgered her about her supposed “illness.” She had never fully confided in any of the widows where her dreams and visions were concerned; they knew and accepted her assumption of a past life, but if she were to attempt to explain the rest, they were likely to feel even more justified in their fears for her. Far less would they comprehend how she had come to find herself lying on the floor, legs exposed, with Leo nearly ready to…

  Tameri bit her lip with such force that she drew blood. She had always been one of the most adamantly dedicated of the Widows, refusing to consider either marriage or a less formal liaison with the many men who would have been happy to share her bed, “eccentricities” or no. How astonished the others would be if they knew.

  The vision had been so real. So true. Leo would never have acted in such a way had he not been caught up in it with her.

  It cannot be.

  She refused to consider the matter further—or to allow her body to feel again what she had felt in that ancient time. The wetness of his tongue on her nipple. The glide of his hands on her naked flesh. The nearly unbearable sensation of his thick, hard member between her thighs.

  Help me, Aset. Help me.

  Perhaps the goddess heard her, for she was able to return to Maye House without her coachmen or the other servants recognizing her distress. She attempted to answer letters and invitations without success, then retreated to the conservatory, where she sat amongst the potted palms and exotic flowers of tropic climes she had never seen.

  How often she had thought of visiting Egypt. Egypt, her Mother, the very breath of her life. Of that other life.

  Where the tomb waited, its mouth gaping to receive its sacrifice….

&n
bsp; A distorted memory, no more. Her destiny did not, could not, end in such a terrible fate. And Leo had not been in that tomb with her. He was not Maahes, beloved of Asar.

  Leo. A lion’s name. And Maahes was the Egyptian lion god, who stood beside the sun god as he battled the evil serpent god Apep.

  Only coincidence. Her imagination.

  I could not love him.

  But was that part of the destiny she refused to acknowledge? Was it the tomb she feared most, or Leo himself? And what had become of the scroll they had found? She had never seen its contents. Had Leo taken it?

  Tameri brooded until nightfall, pacing the garden, the corridors and her private suite. The inscriptions of peace and joy and love painted on her walls gave her no comfort, nor did the images of benevolent gods and their good works on behalf of mankind.

  She was almost relieved when Bab announced the arrival of a visitor. It was well past the hour for calling, but Tameri could not bar him from her door. Especially when she so badly needed the understanding of one like herself. Even if she could not tell him the full truth.

  Alastair Boyd entered the drawing room, bringing with him the scent of a scalding desert wind. His dark, intense eyes sought hers as she rose to meet him.

  “Something has happened,” he said without preamble.

  She sent Bab for tea and settled herself again, making certain that her skirt fell in perfect pleats over her knees. “I have remembered more,” she said.

  “Indeed?” He sat in the chair opposite hers and leaned forward, his brown hands clasped. “What have you remembered?”

  The desire came over her to tell him all, to confide in this one man who knew better than any other how high were the stakes.

  “A ceremony,” she began cautiously.

  “What sort of ceremony?”

  “An invocation of Aset and Asar. Priests were leading me to…” She was unable to finish.

  “Were you alone?”

  It was a disturbing question, when she had just told him that there had been priests present. He couldn’t know what she had discovered in the dream, or its terrible implications.

  “Yes,” she said, lying without understanding why she did so. “I understood very little, only that I was a part of the rite. That it was a part of the Great Battle.”

  “Ah.” He leaned back, satisfaction in his sun-bronzed face. “Perhaps this is the sign that the time has almost come for you to reclaim all you have lost.”

  Lost—over the millennia, the long miles, the years in England when she had been unaware of the Battle and her role in it. A role of leadership that would end in triumph, not a slow, suffocating death.

  “It is too soon,” she said. “I will know when Aset chooses to tell me.”

  “Of course.” He frowned, studying her face. “Yet there is more, is there not?”

  Her wayward, common flesh betrayed her with a blush. “Nothing.”

  “You have seen him again.”

  How did he know? Had he seen her and Leo at the Museum? “I have not,” she said coldly. “But if I had, it would be no concern of yours.”

  “But I warned you. He is not to be trusted.”

  “Trusted with what? You never bothered to explain.”

  “He is a distraction, not worthy of your majesty. You can afford no such diversions now, when we are so close.”

  “You speak as if you fear that he has designs upon me. Such is hardly the case. He has no interest in me except as a…a curiosity.”

  “You underestimate yourself, Tameri.” He rose and came toward her. “Any man would desire you.”

  She started. Maahes had spoken nearly the same words.

  Boyd was not Maahes. He was, like her, a reincarnation, but of a priest named Sinuhé. Her loyal and devoted servant, bound to the same cause.

  “I assure you that he does not, nor I him.” She moved to get up, but Boyd blocked her way.

  “Prove it,” he whispered. “Prove that he is nothing to you.”

  The scent of his body, redolent of unfamiliar spices, washed over her. She felt his lust, as shocking as anything she had experienced since Leo Erskine had first come into her home. He had never behaved so. It was as if he had forgotten who she was.

  “Move aside,” she commanded.

  “I was a high priest of Aset,” he whispered, running his fingertips along the line of her jaw. “I am worthy of you as is no other.”

  She was almost afraid of him. Almost. “Save your devotion for the goddess.”

  He caught her up in his arms. He was strong, like a force of nature, like a gathering storm. “Can’t you see? We were meant to be together, to fight the evil side by side.”

  But it was not you I saw. Not Sinuhé to whom I gave my body.

  And if it were not? How better to remove Leo and the vision from her thoughts than to accept Boyd’s advances? If she must give way to passion over which she had no control, why not let it be to the man who could truly share all that lay ahead?

  “Yes,” he murmured, his breath caressing her mouth. “Together, Tameri.”

  The resistance went out of her body, and she lifted her lips to his.

  LEO LET THE BOOK FALL with uncharacteristic violence, raising a cloud of dust. His housekeeper knew better than to intrude upon his library, and he had let it become little better than a rat’s nest.

  A nest of utterly useless volumes, not one of which could shed the slightest illumination upon the indecipherable contents of the papyrus spread beneath a pane of glass on his desk.

  He spiked his hands through his hair, carefully gathered up the precious scroll and strode for the door. Whatever venerable scribe had written these words, he had not meant them to be read by any but one familiar with a dialect unknown to modern scholarship.

  The door slammed much too loudly as he closed it. His expression had the unwelcome effect of alarming his few servants, who were not accustomed to encountering anything but a most amiable and liberal master. He might have done a better job of calming himself had he believed it was only frustration that fed his foul mood.

  But it wasn’t. Since he’d left the Museum, every minute had been consumed with thoughts of Tameri and the softness of her skin, the taste of her breast, her little gasps of pleasure.

  It wasn’t real. There was not, had never been a man named Maahes, nor another Tameri. No chanting priests, no tomb, no sacrifice.

  Except that the hallucination had been real enough that he had nearly taken her like some rutting beast.

  In a fine froth of bewildered anger, Leo visited several scholars who had more than a passing familiarity with hieratic writing. As he had expected, not one had anything useful to contribute, though all three revealed keen interest in the document and eyed Leo with speculation and, in one case, suspicion.

  When there was nowhere else for Leo to go and nothing for him to do, he went to Maye House.

  The hour was very late, but even had Tameri not told him that she never retired early, he would have made the attempt. He waited a good ten minutes before a servant answered the door, just a few seconds before Leo had determined to break it down.

  The man was clearly flustered, high color in his normally impassive face.

  “The dowager is not at home,” he said.

  “I must speak with her at once.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Erskine.” He attempted to close the door. Leo wedged his foot between door and doorjamb.

  “Kindly tell your mistress that I am here.”

  Something in his voice or face must have warned the servant that Leo was in no mood to be trifled with. He invited Leo into the entrance hall, asked him to be seated and walked quickly away.

  Leo didn’t wait. He followed the footman upstairs to the door of the Gold drawing room and strode in, barely avoiding the servant as he walked through the door.

  And stopped. Tameri was in Alastair Boyd’s arms, and he was kissing her.

  The words Leo shouted were in a language he had heard only in a dream.
Boyd leaped away from Tameri with a roar no human voice could make. Heat blasted Leo’s face. The footman fled the room.

  A deep, unfathomable hatred expanded in Leo’s chest, crowding the air from his lungs. “Boyd!” he snarled.

  Ignoring Tameri, Boyd came to meet him. “Is it to be here, then?”

  “Get out.”

  Boyd smiled, showing far too many teeth. “You have made a mistake, Erskine.”

  “If you think…If you believe for one moment…” The fearful energy coursing through Leo’s body began to dissipate. “Leave, or I’ll drop you where you stand.”

  “Of course.” Boyd was an ordinary man again, but Leo had no doubt that he was dangerous still. “You are not only a man of books, are you, Erskine? So few know how many years you spent wandering parts of the world into which no sane Englishman would venture, battling the elements, savage beasts and even more savage men with your wits, a Webley British Bulldog and your fists. Only it appears that you have no pistol, and your wits have deserted you.”

  Leo raised a fist. “I haven’t forgotten how to use these.”

  Boyd stepped back. “I have more regard for the lady’s sensibilities. You shall have what you wish, but not now.”

  “You’re a coward, Boyd. Whatever happened to you in that desert—”

  “Silence!”

  Both men turned to Tameri. She was nearly trembling with rage, her pupils so wide that they dominated the verdant green of her eyes.

  “Enough!” she cried. “I will have no men brawling in my chambers like rutting bulls!”

  “I was not doing the rutting,” Leo snapped.

  “Leave this house!” she commanded, leaving no doubt as to whom she spoke. “I do not wish to see you again!”

  Leo searched her face for some sense behind her furious words, but it was hard and unforgiving. She does not recognize me, he thought wildly.

  “You heard the lady,” Boyd said.

  “You’ve done something to her!” Leo snarled.

  “I’ve evidently done what you could not,” Boyd said with a mocking grin.