by Anne Stuart
Taka still wasn’t saying anything, but he was very still. Either he’d given up on trying to cut his bonds or he’d already managed it and was just choosing his moment to jump up.
Either way, he’d done nothing to release Summer, and clearly he wasn’t going to. If Taka was somehow able to stop them before they released the gas, then she might survive. Otherwise she could take small comfort in the fact that at least Jilly was safe. Small comfort that if she was going to die, so would Taka. Slowly and painfully.
The Shirosama’s British followers approached silently. One was a tall, bespectacled man, the colorless kind of person who’d disappear in a crowd. The woman with him was similarly nondescript—dull clothes, glasses, dishwater hair, frumpy. Older than her partner. And then Summer realized with horror that they weren’t alone—two of the brethren were dragging someone else behind them. Someone with flame-red hair, dressed in black leather. Taka must have brought his cousin up the mountain, for all the good it was doing him.
The British scientist approached the Shirosama first, sinking gingerly to his knees in front of him and bending his tall body in half, so that his forehead almost touched the ground. Beside her, Taka had grown very tense. He must have seen Reno being dragged along behind them.
“Greetings and blessings, holy father,” the man said in a perfect upper-class British accent.
“Greetings and blessings, Brother Neville. Greetings to Sister Agnes, too. You have served me well.”
“And will continue to do so, your holiness. The world will be cleansed by blood and fire, and a new order will arise in your image.”
Summer couldn’t keep her mouth shut a moment longer, always her abiding failure. Brother Neville was like some unctuous Dickens character—rail-thin and dependent on a cane, as if he’d recently been sick. His plain older wife would have looked at home as a prison warden, and Summer was damn if she was going to sit silently by while they congratulated themselves on their upcoming Armageddon.
“I thought it was going to be plague and poison, not blood and fire,” she called out from her place outside the sacred circle.
Brother Neville lifted his head to look at her, and in the brightness of the fire she could see piercing blue eyes, like chips of ice, glance her way.
“Pay her no attention, Brother Neville,” the Shirosama said blandly. “She will soon be in a better place. Who have you brought with you?”
“You cannot see, your holiness?”
“My ascension is almost complete. I have lost most of my sight, becoming one with my ancestor. But I can sense there is someone with you.”
Brother Neville’s eyes slid to Taka, and for a moment Summer thought she might have imagined a slight nod. Crazy, of course. Unless Taka really was a follower of the Shirosama, and everything had been a lie.
“I think the young man came with your two guests. We caught him as he was trying to sabotage the airplane. I’m afraid he’s dead, but we thought we should bring him here as well, so that he may be joined with you in the ascension. Your mercy and forgiveness know no bounds.”
“Indeed,” the Shirosama breathed. “Put the body over by his friends. They will join him soon enough in the liberation of their souls.”
“I only wish Sister Agnes and I could be here, as well,” the man said.
“Your work out in the world is more important, Brother Neville. I’m counting on you to make sure the supplies get dispersed properly.”
“It will be as it was ordained,” he murmured in a sanctimonious voice. Summer opened her mouth to say something, but Taka managed to nudge her into silence.
Two of the white-robed brethren were dragging Reno’s limp body around the outside of the circle, dropping him onto the hard ground beside them, and Summer stared at him, wanting to cry. He despised her, he’d done nothing but razz her, but seeing his body on the ground was somehow the last straw. A small, broken sound escaped from her throat, one of hoarse pain.
Taka glanced at her, face impassive, then back at his beloved cousin. And it was at that moment that Summer realized Reno was still breathing.
As a matter of fact, there was no blood, no sign of injury at all. His eyes were closed, his body still except for the barely discernible rise and fall of his chest. He wasn’t dead.
She looked away from him, afraid her expression would be too revealing, and back to the tableau in the center.
“May we stay for the first part of the ceremony, Master?” Brother Neville asked in that oily voice.
“You may. It is time. Brother Heinrich?”
The brother stood up, raising his hands, and the place was suddenly flooded with lights—blinding lights, illuminating the setting. Summer saw the cameramen, two of them dressed in the traditional white robes, focusing in on the Shirosama as he sat in front of the kimono and the sacred, ice blue Hayashi Urn.
He began to intone loudly as he poured what looked like dirt and gravel into the bowl. Belatedly, she realized those were probably the remains of the original Shirosama, and she waited for the next stage, wondering if some kind of genie was going to swirl out of the smoke and ashes, ranting like Robin Williams.
Nothing happened. The bone chips and ashes settled into the bowl, the dust dancing in the firelight, as the Shirosama spoke, again in that crazy mixture of languages. One of the brethren sat to the side of the cult leader, gesturing, and she realized he was interpreting in sign language for the television cameras. Brother Heinrich, his loyal lieutenant, sat at his other side and in the bright light she could see what she’d missed before. The shining silver blade lying on the kimono.
She’d forgotten what the Shirosama had told her. She was going to have the truly forgettable treat of watching the ritual of seppuku firsthand, and if she remembered her movies correctly, Heinrich would then decapitate him. Her stomach roiled. Not that she wasn’t perfectly happy to have the Shirosama shuffle off this mortal coil, but she really didn’t want to watch, and she’d never been big on severed heads. Besides, he was going to get blood all over the priceless kimono.
But she said nothing. Taka was utterly still beside her, next to the supposed corpse of his cousin, but either things had spiraled totally out of his control and they were all going to die, or a lot more was going on beneath the surface and she had a slim chance in hell of surviving.
Either way, there was nothing she could do about it, particularly since Taka seemed to have no interest in cutting through her bonds. She sat back on her heels, figuring she could always close her eyes at the gross part, just like she did with CSI.
Other brethren were appearing out of the darkness, forming an outer circle around the kneeling monks, with the Englishman and his mousy wife to one side. As the chanting grew louder the Shirosama began opening his robe, and Summer decided gazing at his soft, pasty body might be even more horrifying than watching him butcher himself. She looked away, meeting Taka’s dark, pitiless gaze. Silently, he mouthed something unbelievable. She was sure it was, “I love you.”
She was going to die, after all, and he’d taken pity on the love-sick gaijin. She would die with his lie in her heart, and even a lie would bring her some comfort.
She closed her eyes. Then opened them again at the rush of wind as Taka surged to his feet, leaping across the kneeling monks to tackle the Shirosama before he could sink the blade into his belly. Suddenly all was chaos, noise, shouting. Taka was leaner and stronger than the Shirosama, but he wasn’t batshit insane, and they rolled on the ground, over the gorgeous kimono, knocking the priceless urn to one side.
Brother Heinrich stood up, but before he could come to the aid of his master, Reno rose from the dead, launching himself at the German. Summer yanked at her bonds furiously, but they wouldn’t budge, and she could do nothing but try to scuttle out of the way of what was rapidly becoming a pitched battle. Almost all the combatants were dressed in the white robes of the True Realization Fellowship, though they seemed to be fighting each other and she had no idea who was winning, until Reno f
ell to one side, his red hair flying out behind him, and lay still.
Taka had managed to straddle the Shirosama, but the cult leader was still struggling, screaming out a mixture of words that Summer couldn’t understand; any connection with sanity seemed to have vanished. Brother Heinrich rose again, and in his hand he held the long, ceremonial katana with the wicked steel blade. For a moment she thought he was going to go for Reno’s still body, but then he turned to Taka.
Summer’s scream of warning was swallowed up in the noise of the battle, and Taka was too focused on trying to restrain the Shirosama to realize death was coming up behind him.
She screamed again as Heinrich raised the katana, and then he froze. The sword dropped uselessly from his hand while he sank to his knees, then pitched over onto the ground, onto the outstretched kimono, the blood from the hole between his eyes spilling out onto the ancient silk.
The mousy British woman was heading toward her, and Summer tried to scramble farther out of the way until she realized it was her husband, Brother Neville, who’d shot Heinrich. The tall man was now leaning over Reno’s fallen body, and he no longer looked like a gray ghost at all.
“Stop squirming, Summer,” the woman said in a clipped British accent. “I can’t untie you when you fight me.”
Summer stopped moving, her gaze focused on Taka, his hands around the Shirosama’s neck, squeezing, as the man’s pale eyes began to bug out of his bleached face. “He’s going to kill him,” she said in a hoarse voice.
The woman glanced toward them. “No, he won’t. There’s nothing Hayashi would like more than to be a martyr. Taka knows what he’s doing.”
Summer’s hands were free, and even as her shoulders screamed in pain she started for the bonds around her ankles herself. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
The battle was already over. She could no longer see Taka and the Shirosama—the silent, defeated brethren were blocking her view. Brother Neville seemed to be directing things, and Summer had the sudden fear that this was simply a religious coup, one crazed guru overthrowing another. Until he headed toward them and she looked up into icy blue eyes and he held out a hand for her.
“Are you all right, Dr. Hawthorne?”
She let him pull her to her feet. “Who the hell are you?” she said again. She still couldn’t see Taka past the crowd of silent brethren, and she couldn’t fight the clawing panic in her stomach.
“Takashi works for us,” he said simply. “That’s all you really need to know. We have to get you and Taka’s cousin off the mountain. Now. The plane is waiting.”
“The plane with the poisons?”
“They’ve been neutralized,” the woman said, rising, suddenly looking a great deal more authoritative. “This young man must get to a hospital, and I think you need to get out of this country and back to your sister.”
For a moment Taka was forgotten. “You have Jilly?”
“I’m the one who brought her out of L.A.,” the woman said. “She’s staying with Peter’s wife right now, and they’re waiting for you to join them.” She nodded toward the tall man. “That’s Peter, by the way. Peter Madsen. And I’m Madame Lambert.”
“The head of the Committee,” Summer said.
The woman did not look pleased. “Takashi has been much too talkative. He’s usually more discreet. Just exactly what went on between you two?”
“None of your business, Isobel,” Peter Madsen said easily. “Besides, Takashi never gets involved during his missions. He knows how to separate the job from life.”
And Summer was the job.
The stunned, defeated brethren had moved enough so that she could see where Taka and the Shirosama had been battling. They were both gone, and only the body of Heinrich, his blood soaking into the kimono, remained.
“Where are they?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Madame Lambert said in her cool, controlled voice. “It’s over, and the sooner you forget about the last few days the better. In the meantime we need to get the boy airlifted to a hospital and take you out of Japan before there are any kind of political repercussions. I’m sure you can’t wait to leave here.”
Summer glanced around her, at the frozen hillside. One of the ceremonial torii gates had been smashed, and the prized Hayashi Urn lay on its side in the dirt, forgotten. She’d lost track of time long ago, but it seemed as if she’d only just arrived in Japan. And leaving the country would mean leaving Taka forever.
“I can’t wait,” she echoed in an expressionless voice. Reno was being loaded onto a stretcher by a couple of the white-robed brethren, though they were clearly working with the Committee, not the cult and she felt as if her head was exploding. “Can you tell me just one thing?”
“I doubt it,” Isobel Lambert said, taking Summer’s arm and leading her up the hillside, skirting the fallen bodies.
“Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?”
The woman stopped to look back at the fallen bodies, then at Summer. “Shades of gray, Dr. Hawthorne. It’s all shades of gray.”
26
Post-traumatic stress syndrome, wasn’t that what they called it? It didn’t matter that she was sitting in the window seat of a beautiful old country house an hour outside of London, and that even in winter the garden outside was calming and beautiful. It didn’t matter that her almost-six-foot-tall baby sister seemed completely unscathed by her adventures, and spent her time either in the kitchen with their hostess or foraging through the impenetrable textbooks Peter Madsen had managed to procure for her. Jilly was safe and happy, adjusting. Genevieve was the perfect hostess, warm but not intrusive, and Peter turned out to be absolutely charming. Nothing the slightest bit scary about him, despite Summer’s initial doubts.
Madame Lambert had kept away, which suited Summer just fine. Isobel was cold, controlled and completely unemotional, which was what Summer had needed for the numb, endless plane ride to England. But right now her main goal was to keep calm, and Madame Lambert simply reminded her of the horror on the hillside.
The Shirosama was in a Japanese mental hospital, babbling, incoherent, totally insane. Summer would have thought that was a little too convenient if she hadn’t seen the blank madness in his eyes as he’d rolled on the ground with Taka. The famed Hayashi Urn was on display in Kyoto, and the True Realization Fellowship was in disarray. And no one seemed to know how close the world had come to total chaos.
She wasn’t going to think about Taka. Not for one moment. Peter and his wife never mentioned him, and Jilly must have been warned not to ask her too many questions. Summer would sit in the garden window, looking out over the wintry garden, and learn how to knit.
It seemed a silly thing to do, but it soothed her. While her fingers manipulated the hand-spun wool, her mind began to heal, when she hadn’t even realized she was wounded.
She even managed to tolerate Lianne’s rushed, abject visit. It was easy enough—most of their mother’s guilt centered on Jilly, and she accepted Summer’s calm at face value before taking off to India on her newest quest for spiritual enlightenment. Summer was even able to laugh about her with Jilly. At night, Summer would lie in her big soft bed, dry-eyed, sleepless, her body restless, empty, and she wouldn’t even think his name.
“We need to think about going home,” she said one morning as Jilly was poring over her physics text. Genevieve was in her office, doing some long distance pro bono legal work, and there were just the two of them at the ancient oak kitchen table.
Jilly looked up. “I’m in no hurry,” she said. “I’ve got my books, and I should be able to jump right in next semester. Besides, I like it here.”
Summer looked out at the garden. They’d been in England for almost two months. It was getting warmer now, with a faint blush of color on the trees, in the grass. There were even daffodils out in the sunnier patches. Things were coming alive again. It was time for her to come alive as well.
“I need to find a new job. The Sansone doesn’t want to have a
nything to do with me or the scandal, and I don’t really blame them. But there are a lot fewer jobs than there are qualified curators, and the sooner I get started looking the sooner I’ll be able to get back to a normal life.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” she said. As far as she could remember, it was the first lie she’d ever told her sister.
She didn’t want a normal life. She didn’t want a job at an L.A. museum; she didn’t want to head west. She wanted to go east, back to Japan, find Taka, slam him against the wall and find out why he’d lied to her. Why had he told her he loved her and then disappeared out of her life? She wanted him groveling at her feet for forgiveness. She wanted him on top of her, beneath her, behind her, inside her. She wanted to put out her hands and feel him, solid and warm. She wanted his beautiful mouth against hers, wanted his eyes staring into hers, unguarded and wanting. She wanted to taste his tattoos.
She wanted what she couldn’t have. He’d lied. When they were both likely to die he’d lied to her, proving he had at least a kind streak in his cold, beautiful body.
Genevieve breezed into the kitchen, her glasses perched low on her nose. “It’s going to be warm today,” she announced. “Tea in the garden, I think. Peter will come home early, and he’ll probably bring Isobel. We all need frocks.”
“Frocks?” Jilly echoed with a laugh. “You’re not putting me into Laura Ashley—I’m bigger than you and I fight dirty.”
“Isobel’s coming?” Summer said in a neutral voice.
“I don’t know why you don’t like her,” Jilly complained. “She saved my life.”
And ordered Taka to kill me, Summer could have added, but she kept silent.
“Isobel’s okay,” Genevieve said, pouring herself a cup of the coffee she still thankfully preferred in the morning. “Just a bit of a cold fish, but she gets the job done.”