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The vampire went very still, frowning at her. She had his full attention now. “She is my sister,” she said. “And I know she is the reason you follow our band and prey on us.”
The vampire rolled his eyes, smiling. “You know nothing, mortal. I take only those who need killing. And I follow only to protect.”
“To protect her?” she asked. “Nonsense, you want to kill her, as you did Belinda.”
He said nothing, but he licked his lips, and his gaze returned to her throat.
“The others are beginning to question Sarafina’s link to you now,” Katerina said, speaking quickly, one hand pressing to her throat, as if it were a protective collar. “They’ve seen her behavior. She isn’t well. Something…weakens her.”
“It is always the way,” the vampire whispered.
Will frowned. What on earth was that supposed to mean?
“What are you talking about?” Katerina asked, echoing Will’s own thoughts.
“Nothing. Tell me, why would you hand your own sister over to a creature you believe would kill her?”
She shrugged. “That’s none of your concern.”
“I watch your tribe, Katerina,” he said. And she gasped, surprised, perhaps, that he knew her name. “I know about you and the man-Andre. And I know your burning jealousy. It blackens your soul and clings to you like a foul stench, more powerful, even, than the garlic you thought would repel me.”
She jerked backward as if he had struck her a blow, but she caught herself quickly. “Do you want her or not?”
“I want her,” he said. “But I want her alive and unharmed.”
She nodded. “There is a cave, that way, with a tiny stream at the far back. Do you know it?”
God, not another cave, Will thought. He’d had his fill of them.
The vampire nodded. “I know it.”
“She will be there waiting for you tomorrow night. Midnight.” Katerina started to turn away.
The vampire stopped her, a massive, pale hand clasping her arm.
She went stiff. “If you kill me, you won’t have her. Your chance will be gone.”
“I’ll have her either way,” he said. “On my terms, and in my time. So tell me now, how will you do it?”
She blinked in fear. “Nothing harmful, I promise you. Only a sleeping powder. I’ll put it into her evening meal tomorrow. By midnight its effects will begin to wear off. She will be awake and alert for you to use as you wish.”
He released her quickly and wiped his hand on his trousers. “You are a poor excuse for a sister, Katerina. I will likely kill you after this is done, despite the fact that I imagine your blood will taste bitter as bile.”
“I shall not be an easy target, vampire,” she told him.
“No doubt your garlic and wolf’s bane will be a challenge for me. Go on. Go back to your pathetic band before I decide to do mortal man a favor by killing you now.”
Something, some urgent sense, told Will he had to withdraw from this place in the depths of his mind. But he didn’t want to obey. He had to see this through. He found himself following Katerina as she hurried back through the forest. Eventually she slowed her pace, and he soon saw why.
The old woman sat there still, her head bowed low, as she rocked slightly beside the still, waxen body of her daughter.
The words of the vampire floated through Will’s mind again. “I take only those who need killing.”
What had the young Belinda done that made her “need killing,” according to that creature’s twisted logic?
Katerina stepped quietly out of the trees and settled herself on the ground. The other woman gave no sign of even noticing that she had been gone.
Will drew his focus away from them. Where was Sarafina? He had to find her, to warn her-somehow.
He looked around him but couldn’t tell which way to go. Finally he simply put her image in his mind, thought of her face, her eyes, the sound of her laughter, which had kept him alive for weeks now. Through torture, starvation, the very darkest nights of his soul, she had been there. He had always been able to find her. Surely he could find her now.
He thought of her, saw clearly her face, her eyes…and suddenly he was there. Instantly, magically, he was standing inside her wagon tent, looking down at her as she slept.
Beautiful. He wanted so badly to touch her. Trembling, he reached out his hand to stroke her hair, but his hand wasn’t solid. Or maybe she was the one who was made of something unreal. But whatever the reason, his hand moved through her. He couldn’t touch her. He tried to speak to her, both aloud and with his mind, but neither method stirred any reaction in the sleeping woman.
God, he was tired. More tired than he could remember ever being. And cold, shivering with cold. He knew he should go, that something urgent was awaiting him back in the real world. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave her, not when she was in danger this way. He had to stay with her. He had to warn her that her sister was going to drug her food and hand her over to that monster in the forest.
Gently, Will lay down beside her on the sleeping pallet. It didn’t move in response to his weight. The blanket didn’t move. He lay so close to her that parts of his body melded with parts of hers, but he couldn’t feel her. He moved closer, until his body occupied the same space hers did. He was inside her and around her at once.
In her mind, dreams spun. She dreamed of staring into her crystal ball and seeing…him.
She was staring into his eyes and he into hers.
“I’m here,” he whispered to her, putting all the force he could behind the words. “Don’t trust your sister. Don’t trust her. She’ll betray you. Listen to me. Hear me, Sarafina.”
Sighing, the beautiful woman let his image fade and sank more deeply into sleep. But as soon as she fell into slumber, she saw him again. Inside her mind, inside her dreams.
He was lying beside her in her humble bed of straw-stuffed cloth. She met his eyes there, and she smiled. “I knew you would come.”
“I’ve been with you here the whole time.” He whispered the words, never imagining she would hear, but she did.
“I know,” she said. “I felt you with me.”
“You mustn’t trust your sister,” he told her. “She’s plotting against you.”
She shook her head slowly. “She is jealous and cruel. But she is my sister. She wouldn’t do me any harm.”
“I think she would.”
The pain that trembled through her was almost unbearable-he felt it. But she pushed it away and said instead, “Kiss me, spirit.”
So he did. He kissed her, and her dream blossomed and grew. His voice no longer mattered. His warnings were forgotten as he let himself surrender to the dream-her dream or his, he was no longer certain. It no longer mattered.
He touched her freely, intimately. He explored her body, every scent and taste and sound she made was so real-and the answering sensations in him were real, too. Physical and visceral, and yet tender and deep. He made love to her there in her vardo, and she clung to him and told him he was her secret love-the only one she knew for certain would never leave her.
And then, holding him in her warm embrace, she sank into sleep. Almost against his will, he sank into her, and he slept, too.
4
W hen he woke, the first thought in Will’s mind was that Sarafina was no longer asleep in her bed. She was gone. He was alone.
But then reality set in. He wasn’t in the mystical world his mind had created as an escape for him. No, he was in real time. There was pain here, throbbing, burning pain, and bone-chilling cold. He was locked inside a metal box, in a dark cave, in the middle of hostile terrain.
Part of his mind, the fevered part that had confused his dream with something real, wanted to return to the fantasyland of the Gypsies. But most of him was aware that he couldn’t do that, not now. He didn’t know where the hell his mind was getting the stories it wove for him. They seemed so real it was difficult to believe they were not. But they couldn’t be.
He was soaked in sweat. He understood what that suggested. The fever he’d been fighting must have peaked while he’d been sleeping. Normally he didn’t dream about Sarafina and her band of Gypsies. He escaped to that realm only under torture.
Hell, his fever, combined with the pain in his foot, must have felt like torture of a sort to have instigated a dream so vivid. And it had added its own new twists, hadn’t it? Now he was seeing vampires and making love to a figment of his imagination.
He moved slowly, carefully, testing his body, stretching his arms, his back, working out the kinks. Then he went still as he remembered what he’d been doing when he’d fallen asleep: waiting for his captors to fall asleep first. Because once they had, he had to make an attempt to get the hell out of here.
It might very well be his only chance. He knew damned well the terrorists’ newest ploy wasn’t going to work. The U.S. government would be happy to learn he was alive when they got that photo, but that didn’t mean they would be foolish enough to release a pile of terrorists in exchange for the life of one soldier. Especially one like him, with no family, no ties. Hell, the general public back in the good ol’ U.S. of A. would probably never even know about his existence. That was part of the reason he had been chosen for this mission, and he’d known that going in. He had nothing to lose.
He crept to the door, pushed it open as far as it would go, listened with every cell in his body and squinted into the darkness.
The room appeared to be empty, though it was so damned dark it was impossible to be sure. It was dead silent. The entire cave seemed soundless tonight.
He located the bread knife he’d stolen earlier by crawling around his box on all fours until his fingers touched it in the darkness and closed around it. Returning to the chained door, he forced his hand out through the narrow opening. The chain that held the door was looped through a short iron bar on the outside of the door. Two bolts held that bar in place, and they had grooved heads, like screws. Will managed to insert the blunt tip of the knife into the groove, and he twisted it, while holding the nut on the inside with his fingers. It didn’t turn easily. When it finally did, the nut turned with it, so he held it more tightly. So tightly that when he finally did get the bolt to turn, the nut scraped the skin off his fingers. It was old, rusty, but he worked on it until he freed it up. In about twenty minutes it was loose enough to remove.
His fingers throbbed, his throat burned, and he was so dizzy he could barely stand, but he’d gone too far to stop now. He set to work on the second bolt.
An hour later, the chain was free. He pocketed his scrap of bread and his lifesaving bread knife, and pushed the door open, cringing at the slight creak of its hinges. He looked around but saw only darkness, broken up by darker shapes, none of them human. Carefully he climbed out of his prison, then closed the door. Taking the bolts from his pockets, he held the bar in place and thrust the bolts back through the holes. By all appearances, his prison was unchanged. Until they tried to open the door to bring him out again-something they might not do for a span of days if they were true to form-they wouldn’t know he had escaped.
He’d wrapped his injured foot thickly in the white makeshift bandage, so it was at least cushioned. He had no choice but to put weight on it as he made his way slowly, silently, across the uneven stone floor. He knew approximately where the opening was that led to other parts of the cave. There was only one, so it wasn’t a matter of making a choice. He found it, went through it, but had no clue where to go from there. He couldn’t see a damn thing. He only knew he wasn’t far from the entrance-if he’d been deep in the earth the temperature would have held to a moderate level, never varying much higher or lower. And that hadn’t been the case.
He was still for a long moment, wishing silently for a clue-and then he heard something: a whispering, moaning sound. The wind? Yes, it was the wind! God, please, he thought, guide me out of this hell. Slowly he moved toward the sound. Every once in a while he would meet a stone wall. Each time that happened, he had to feel his way along the wall, inching sideways until it fell away, and he could again make forward progress.
Finally he saw light, flickering in the distance, illuminating a ragged opening in the cave. He rushed toward it, despite the screaming pain every step ignited in his foot, hope surging in his chest for the first time since he’d escaped the box. But when he reached that opening, he stopped dead, even stopped breathing.
The light came from a small fire in the center of a large room. Around the sides of the room, a dozen or more men lay sleeping, breathing deeply, some of them snoring every once in a while. And just beyond them there was another break, through which he could see stars twinkling in the night sky.
Freedom.
He could smell it, taste it in the air. God, he was so close. Will swallowed hard. Everything in him screamed at him to run for that door, for freedom, but he knew better. He had to think, to use his fever-fogged brain to get himself out of here alive. Licking his parched lips, he looked around at the men on the floor. Most wore robes, others were covered in blankets. But here and there he saw men wearing uniforms. American uniforms. He guessed they had probably taken them from the handful of U.S. troops they’d managed to take out by ambush during the height of the conflict.
Crouching low, Will unwrapped the white cloth from his foot, trying not to make a sound as he did. Then he wrapped it around his head instead, turban-style. He wished to God they hadn’t made him shave. To conceal his beardless chin, he let one end of the turban hang down, then drew it up, just under his chin and tucked it in on the other side.
Finally he moved forward. His foot exploded in agony with each step-even more now, without its protective wrap, than before. But he kept going, gritting his teeth and not making a sound. He moved among the sleeping soldiers, made it past the fire, reached the opening.
One of the soldiers muttered in his sleep and rolled over, and Will went so still he thought his muscles would pull away from his bones.
He waited, waited for a shout, a challenge, the back of his neck tingling in anticipation. But nothing came.
Finally, his heart still pounding, he moved forward again. He stepped through the opening. The fresh night air hit his face, and he sucked it in gratefully as he continued limping, laterally now, away from the cave. Finally he had to pause, to try to get his bearings.
He was high on a mountain, and he had no idea which way would lead him to freedom. There were no roads out here, no landmarks. Certainly no lights shining from below to guide the way.
He was thirty yards from the cave, on a stone ledge that dropped off steeply, when a man’s voice reached him from behind, speaking in one of the tribal dialects. “Where are you going in the middle of the night? Is something wrong?”
He froze. He didn’t turn. He swallowed his fear, told himself not to blow it, not now, not when he was this close. He replied in the man’s own tongue. “Did you not hear the gunfire?” he asked. “It was coming from this way.” He pointed ahead of him, toward the edge, and downward.
“Gunfire?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it. Maybe the Americans have come back.”
The other man sucked in a breath of alarm. Then he said, “But it cannot be the Americans. The border is east of here, not west. And they could only come from that way.” He sighed. “I should wake Ahkmed.”
“Wait,” Will said. “I see something. Down there. Look!”
The man came hurrying closer and ran right past Will to stand in front of him, peering off into the distance, down over the steep precipice into utter darkness. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
In one smooth, silent motion Will stepped forward, clapped a hand to the man’s mouth, put the other to the back of his head and jerked it roughly, fiercely, to the side. The man’s neck snapped with a sickening crack, and his body went limp. Lowering him to the ground, Will bent over him, gripped his shoulders, and dragged him into the cover of some nearby boulders.
As quickly as he could, Will stripped the body of everything on it, which included a rifle, some ammo, a large curving blade with a sheath and the robes of the man’s tribe. Will put the robes on over the clothes he wore. He intended to use the man’s shoes, as well, American-issue Army boots, but they were far too small. His injured foot wouldn’t have fit into any shoe, even had it been a few sizes too large, anyway. He did take the socks, putting them both on his good foot. Then he rewrapped his injured one in swaths of the dead man’s turban before peering out from the sheltering rocks, sitting very still, looking and listening.
No sounds reached him from the cave. He dragged the body to the edge and tossed it over the side. It fell in near silence, except for the dull, distant thud when it hit bottom. Then Will began making his way down the mountain, heading in the direction he surmised, from the other man’s comments, was east.
When he reached the bottom, he just walked. He used the rifle as a staff, and walked despite the pain of his foot and the raging fever. He wondered if it would be better to make use of the large blade, leave the foot behind before it killed him. But he was afraid to stop long enough to do it and worried that he would never get going again if he did.
So he walked. The sun rose, and with its first touch, it burned away the night’s cold. He welcomed its warmth for a short time; then he cursed it, as it blazed relentlessly down on him. The mountain was far behind him. He’d made his way from it, down into the desert, and the farther he walked, the hotter it became. He was dehydrated already from lack of water, illness and fever. The way the sun blasted him now, he thought he would soon be reduced to a man-shaped pile of dust. But the sun did serve one useful purpose. It allowed him to gauge his direction.
At least it did until it was directly overhead and he was frying like bacon in a pan. He tried to keep moving, keep on course, just plodding, putting one foot in front of the other. He had no idea how long he managed to keep going, or how much distance he had covered, when he finally fell facedown in the sand.
He lay there, clinging to consciousness with everything in him, knowing that if he passed out there, he would die there. The vultures would pick his bones clean. He tried to get up, and, failing that, he tried to crawl.
And then he passed out.
When he opened his eyes, he was lying beside Sarafina, watching as she stirred slowly awake. She looked pale, Will thought. Her face tight, there were dark rings beneath her beautiful eyes.
She sat up, looking around her, frowning at the beam of sunlight that slanted through an open spot in the tent flap. She got up and went to it, pushed it open and peered at the sky. “Already so late. The day is nearly done, and I’ve slept it away yet again.”
Sighing, lowering her head and the flap at the same time, she turned, reaching for the dress she’d left hanging from a nail in the wall, then thinking better of it, and taking, instead, the green velvet robe and pulling it on over the white nightgown she wore. She thought of the nightgown as a shift. It was more like an elaborate slip, with lots of lace and embroidery.
She smoothed her untamable curls with her hands, glancing back at the bed just once and smiling gently as she remembered her dream of the night before. “My beloved spirit,” she whispered. “I wonder if he’ll come to me again tonight.”
“I’m here. I’m here right now,” Will told her, but she didn’t hear him. She only turned again, parted the tent flap, stepping outside this time, down the folding steps of her wagon, until her bare feet touched the ground. Will floated along, as if attached to her somehow. She was looking around the camp, noting the smoldering, charred remains of yet another wagon-tent and frowning as Andre came up to her. Will bristled. He hated the man.
“Fina, we’ve been so worried. Are you better now?”
She frowned at him. “Better?”
“We could only assume you were ill. Why else would you sleep the entire day?”
She shrugged. “I was up very late tending to Belinda. I was only tired. I’m not ill.”
She would have walked on, but he caught her chin, lifting her face to his as if he would kiss her, but instead he only studied her closely. “You do not look well, Sarafina. I think you are ill and only denying it.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Andre.” She moved closer, as if to press her mouth to his, but he turned away quickly.
