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Instantly the waif became aware of his presence. Her arms wrapped around her breasts and the sponge dropped into the pool of water at her feet. Her eyes were round with fear and Tarak felt instantly ashamed. In reality he’d behaved no better than a Peeping Tom. But while he chastised himself for it, he certainly didn’t regret it. He wouldn’t have missed this show for the world.
Her eyes, however, were still wide with terror.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said gruffly in English although he repeated the phrase in Hindi.
He assumed her fear stemmed from the thought that he would rape her, but after his words she stood slowly. One arm shielded her femininity from him. The other she wrapped securely around small but pert breasts.
“Do not come any closer,” she said in English.
“I won’t. I promise,” he replied. “You didn’t expect anyone to be on this side of the courtyard?”
“They are all in study. I did not expect you to be up and walking so far.”
Tarak nodded, then glanced around the washing area. “You bathe here instead of with your sisters down by the river?”
An irrational bolt of anger accompanied his statement. Yes, the monks were celibate but they were still men. There were times a man’s sexuality couldn’t be so easily controlled with meditation. A woman so beautiful it hurt to look at her could incite the weak-willed to dangerous acts.
“Yes. I cannot bathe in the river.”
He heard her words, but they made no sense. “Well, you shouldn’t bathe here. Anyone might come along and…”
“Like you.”
“Worse than me.”
“If you mean the monks, they know better than to touch me. The villagers, too. I am safe from everyone who knows me, but you do not. You must stay back.”
“Have I taken a step forward?”
Slowly she shook her head.
There, he thought, satisfied. The beginning of trust. “I’m not a boy to be controlled by my desire. But if I were…” He smiled softly. “You would certainly be a danger to my self-control. Do you have something to dry yourself off?”
He watched her glance toward the robe she’d left hanging on the edge of the partition, but he realized she would have to either drop her arms or turn around and give him an altogether different view of her body to reach it.
A gentlemen would have turned his back. Tarak could almost hear his father’s stiff English voice in his head ordering him to turn around and allow the woman her privacy. That nostalgia for his father won out against a hard urge to see if her ass was as shapely as the rest of her.
Tarak turned his back to her. “Hurry,” he warned.
He heard the ruffle of movement as she stepped out of the basin and reached for her covering. He counted to what he was sure was a fair five seconds in his head before turning again. The silk material she wore fluttered to her feet and he sighed with disappointment.
“Who are you?” he wanted to know.
An expression crossed over her face that he couldn’t name. Sadness or maybe confusion, as if she didn’t know how to answer such a basic question.
“Your name,” he said, making it easier for her.
“I am Lilith.”
It didn’t fit her, not at all. But he didn’t press. “Your surname?”
She shook her head. “I have no surname. My…father would not give me his.”
He didn’t know what to say to that so he offered his own name as a way of building further trust. “I’m Tarak Hammer-Smith. My father was English, but my mother was Indian. She was a niece to Punab. It is how I came to be here.”
“I thought you came to be here because of a bullet hole in your leg.”
Tarak ignored the implied censure and asked his own question. “Why are you here?”
He didn’t think she would answer, but he had to ask it anyway. She was a jewel, he thought. Half woman, half creature. So completely beautiful. But she was tucked away in the jungle among lepers, nuns and celibate monks. It made no sense.
“Are you a Catholic missionary?”
She shook her head. “I am here because I have nowhere else to go. Because I choose to stay.”
“You came to my room a few nights ago.”
“You were in pain. Sometimes I can help make pain go away.”
“You’re a healer?”
Again, she shook her head. “No.”
“But you brought medicine. I remember drinking from a cup and then…”
And then the pain had stopped. Almost as if he’d gone numb from the roots of his hair to his toes. He hadn’t been asleep and whatever he’d sipped had done nothing to reduce his fever. But the next thing he knew the nun was leaning over his leg with a small knife in her hand.
She’d found part of a bullet fragment the medic he’d gone to in Monteria had left behind. The extraction should have been excruciating, but he hadn’t felt a thing. Funny that it all came back to him now. But why shouldn’t it? He’d been awake the entire time.
“What was in that cup?”
“I need to get back to the village,” she said in answer to his question. “First I must dispose of the water. You need to leave.”
Dispose of the water? Was it some ritual she needed to perform? “I’ll empty the basin for you,” Tarak offered as he took a step toward her.
“No. You cannot. I must do it. Stay back. Stay back!”
Tarak stopped in his tracks. He was now only a couple of feet away from her, and he could see the fear return. She was pressed against the partition and couldn’t easily get around it. For all intents and purposes he had her trapped.
“Please, you must stay back,” she whispered.
“Easy. I told you I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to touch you. I wanted to touch you that night. I remember that. Your skin is so…”
“No,” she said and pressed herself against the partition out of reach of his hand. “You cannot. You need to understand. I will hurt you.”
“You’re not making any sense.” But since his ultimate desire was to win her trust, he folded his arms over his chest. “I hate things that don’t make sense.”
He watched her search for a reply and finally she shrugged her shoulders. “Tough.”
He tilted his head back and laughed. It certainly wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. “All right. You win. For now.” Tarak took a few steps back from her and with each one he could see her relax. “But, Lilith, I will see you again. And next time you’d better come with some answers.”
She said nothing and so he began to head back to his room. Then he stopped as the image of her body came to him, an image he would enjoy conjuring for some time to come. Turning, he saw that she was wrapping the ties around her arms to secure the billowing silk to her body.
“Lilith?”
She snapped her head up, no doubt surprised he was still close. “Yes?”
“It is an interesting necklace. But if you’ll pardon me, I must say that I don’t think it suits you.”
Chapter 4
Lilith stared up at the straw roof of her hut and considered her next move. Considering she was into her second hour of thinking, she feared the answers wouldn’t quickly be forthcoming.
It was his fault. The stranger’s. No, not stranger, Tarak.
She’d gone up to the monastery to clear her mind so that she could think rationally about what needed to be done. Now all she could think about was his gaze on her, looking at her in a way that she’d never been looked at before.
She’d been desired before, but it had been different then. She’d been barely more than a child. Just thirteen. But her father’s brother called her closer to a woman than a girl. A temptation, he’d said. She remembered the look in his eyes whenever he stared at her and thought again of Tarak. Definitely different.
Her uncle hadn’t listened to the warnings that she shouldn’t be touched. Perhaps he should have known better, but that was her father’s fault. Her father had only told others in the village where she lived that she was not to be touched because she was cursed.
Unclean.
It was what she believed, too, until she began to understand that what she could do went beyond superstition. Beyond her father’s hatred.
On that day her uncle caught her alone. He professed that he didn’t believe in curses. He said he would take her to wife if she behaved and did everything he wanted. She remembered the bolt of fear that had shot through her system and how that had caused her skin to dampen with what she believed back then was merely sweat.
She tried to run, but he caught her. Then he tore away the heavy coverings that she wore in layers to protect herself from the cold as well as from incidental contact, and she watched as his hand roughly cupped her barely there breast.
Suddenly his eyes popped open and he hissed through his teeth, struggling to catch his breath. Before she could pull away from him he fell on her. Dead weight.
Her father found her struggling to crawl out from underneath the body. He blamed her for enticing his brother, for causing his death. For being born cursed.
She tried to explain she hadn’t meant to kill him. She just had.
That night he took her to a monastery in Nepal where it was known that one of the monks would soon be leaving for India. He’d warned the monk of her perfidy and insisted that she live among the outcast. The monk obeyed and brought her to this village.
What revenge she might have if her father knew how she’d flourished here. In this place she wasn’t seen as inherently evil or cursed. Here she helped people and worked to find spiritual fulfillment that would help her to someday forgive herself for taking a life.
Yes, he would be outraged to know that she had made a home here.
Lilith bolted up from her sleeping mat as a question occurred to her. Her father hated her. She’d always known that. As a child she imagined it was because of her sickness. As an adult she came to believe it was because she’d caused him sadness, the death of a wife he must have loved greatly.
But the woman who’d given birth to her wasn’t his wife. According to Jackie, Petra had been chosen from a family in Tibet who were well paid for their youngest daughter. Her father, Gensen, was from a village far south of that. Had he even known Lilith’s surrogate mother before her birth?
Lilith struggled to recall what she’d read earlier. There had been so much and it had all been so distressing that it was hard to remember the specifics. She reached for the necklace around her throat and looked to the laptop that still sat on her desk.
“Only the information about me,” she promised herself as she got up and walked over to the computer.
She removed the flash drive from the necklace and booted up the computer. Then she walked through the steps Sister Peter had given her earlier to access and read the information in the files. She searched for and found what she was looking for.
Gensen.
She clicked on the folder and selected the first file in it.
Gensen was a proud man. It was his pride that drew me to him in the first place… And made me want to crush it…
Lilith continued to read about how Jackie had met the Buddhist monk. Once a leader among his people, he had been on the path to enlightenment. But Gensen had not been prepared for Jackie’s unique brand of temptation. She didn’t immediately offer him her body. Instead she played on his intelligence, his spirituality and his pride. She made him believe that the two of them were connected in some universal way.
Then she seduced him. Once his vows of celibacy were behind him and he considered himself fallen from the path, he no longer fought her control over him. She asked for and was given his life essence. Once she had what she needed, she left him broken and humbled.
Lilith leaned back in her chair as a wave of regret and sadness threatened to smother her.
“You did not hate me because of what I was or what I did. You hated me because of her. Because I was part of her.”
She knew from the stories that her father had told her that Petra had gone into premature labor with her and that before the doctor had pulled Lilith free from the woman, she had died. Then the doctor who first held Lilith died, too. A quick-thinking nurse with a heavy blanket had pulled the child from the dying man’s hands and managed to save her. Because Lilith had been responsible for Petra’s death, Gensen told Lilith that her mother’s family had disowned her and that all she had left was him.
Doctor. Nurse. The story had always seemed odd to Lilith. All the babies born in the village where she’d grown up and even here in this village were born at home with only a midwife in attendance.
Not her.
Jackie must have been there. She must have waited to see what her egg had produced. Then she had handed her over to Gensen to raise…why? Maybe as a means of protection. Or possibly Jackie wanted to put Lilith someplace where she could easily find her again.
How angry Jackie must have been when she returned to Gensen’s village only to find that he’d banished Lilith to India. Considering what she’d read about Jackie, Lilith had to wonder whether or not her father was still alive. It seemed likely that the woman called Arachne would have dispatched him when his usefulness was over.
Lilith didn’t know how she felt about that. Surely she should be sad if her father was murdered. She had always carried the sadness of killing the woman she’d believed to be her mother. But Petra had been an innocent. Her father was not.
For that matter neither was Jackie. Lilith felt no remorse over her passing.
Vaguely she wondered how many monasteries Jackie had searched before finally finding the one near a leper colony where her daughter lived. Her visits had started years ago. If Lilith had been looking for it back then she might have sensed a certain satisfaction in Jackie’s expression when they first met. But of course, Lilith hadn’t been looking for it. Naively she’d accepted the story the woman spun never realizing that she was in the presence of her mother.
Or the presence of evil.
The memory of each visit would need to be scrutinized. Every word exchanged, analyzed for new meaning. But before any of that happened, Lilith had to make a decision about the information that was now in her control. She was about to turn off the offensive machine when a file name caught her eye.
Children.
Children. Not child. Unable to help herself, Lilith clicked on the file and began to read about Jackie’s other…offspring.
Two other women. Both with unique abilities. Both her half sisters.
Eventually Lilith turned off the laptop. It was too much to learn in one day. About her mother, her father and her sisters. Sisters. Related to her.
Family.
The crush of emotions made her nauseous.
Three women all spawned in a lab from the eggs of a woman who was clearly immoral. What Lilith was given was only a third of the entire picture. Jackie said the pieces needed to be put together, but Lilith wasn’t sure what her mother’s intention had been. Whether she imagined her three children joining together for some nefarious purpose or if somehow the three flash drives were connected.
