A Boat Made of Bone (The Chthonic Saga) (10 page)

There were others around. Kate glanced at them. Their olive-complected faces were illuminated by the firelight. The flames flickered in the prisms of their eyes and cast shadows in the folds of their brightly colored robes. Strangers. Maybe Bedouins or some sort of desert dwellers. There were large tents surrounding the fire, but her eyes kept coming back to the set of sapphire eyes straight across from her. Who was he?

His gaze warmed her. He wore no headdress or flourish, just a dark cap of short hair and a clean, shaven face, which was unusual amongst the other men. A tingle danced up her spine, hot like the touch of a summer breeze, though her back was cold. Overhead, the Milky Way was a white gash across the night sky—a sky so dusted with stars she felt like she may be one of them, fallen into darkness and lost in a desert.

She lowered her eyes and he was still staring at her. He winked. She glanced around to see if she was confused about whom he was looking at. When their eyes met again, he tilted his head at her and grinned. Her heart thudded at the sight of that smile. There was something familiar about it.

He stood and moved around the fire. He was wearing a white linen shirt and black linen pants. His bare feet brushed against the edge of the soft red coals of the fire, but he paid them no attention. Cinders shot up around him at being disturbed, dancing around him in the jetties of air his passing created. He seemed to glow in the firelight as though he too were made of stardust. He was in front of her, taking her hand and lifting her to stand beside him.

He pulled her past the fire, through the ring of people around it, and to the opening of one of the tents. He pulled the flap back and guided her inside. A lantern glowed in one corner, shedding muted light on a lush, Persian rug and piles of red and golden pillows. He moved close to her and kissed her. Kate’s heart drummed a thunderous, galloping beat that seemed to echo across the desert plain outside their tent.

He paused long enough to whisper, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

He has? Who is he?
she wondered, distracted by how her body responded to his proximity. She wanted to hold him, even though he was a stranger. He pushed her gently into the bed of pillows, one hand supporting her back as he lowered her into a reclining position. His lips sent shivers through her. He kissed her cheeks, her neck. The fingers of his free hand interlaced with hers and he raised their joined hands above her head as his body came to rest atop hers. He pressed her arm back into the cushions above her head. Kate surrendered. His fingers beneath her back parted her clothing and found her skin. In the soft golden glow of the lantern light, his blue eyes glimmered when he opened them. They stared directly into Kate, into her soul, which was crying out for him.

Recognition flashed through her as his gaze pierced her eyes and seared the back of her skull.

“Will!” Her voice was a hungry rasp. “Will, I remember you.”

“I thought you never would,” he said with a smile, his mouth sinking into hers. He flowed through her; he moved like a desert wind across her body and into it. Kate was suddenly alive, suddenly remade, suddenly completed. Outside the tent, she heard the beating of drums—strange drum beats, and the soft chanting of an old song that awakened some dormant part of her soul.

***

“Where are we?”

“Does it matter?” Will asked, sitting up where he lay beside Kate. The soft orange glow from the lantern dressed the contours of his body in shadow and light. He smiled and his dimple appeared as he put on his shirt.

“Don’t,” she said, touching his arm to stop him.

“Oh, you little . . . you’d just love it if I simply paraded around nude all the time, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head, unable to maintain a straight expression as he tried to frown at her for being so indulgent in him.

“Well,” Kate said, shrugging. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. That’s my motto. But I’m not very good at following it myself, so I let other people keep it for me.”

“Sorry Kate, now that I’ve had a chance to soak up the afterlife, I really have a sense of modesty that I didn’t have when I was alive,” he explained as his head popped out of the top of his white linen shirt. Kate smiled—he looked so good in it, all she wanted to do was pull it off him.

“OK fine, but at the very least, leave your pants off,” she pled in a joking tone. She continued to recline in the mountain of soft pillows.

“Ha, you wish. I’m not too keen on that idea, actually. If you’d caught me fifty years ago, maybe then. Maybe. But we’ve been over that . . . that name . . . whatever you called me once, man-whore? Man-whore phase.” He shook his head. “I still can’t get over it. Anyway, I was old-fashioned and kind of modest, even then.” He stepped into his pants, stood and pulled them up, tying the drawstrings quickly and then plopping back down beside Kate. “So, what about you?”

“Modest? Ha. A man calling himself modest. Sounds so, so odd. As for me, I thought I’d just lay here for the rest of the dream.”

“Naked?”

“You don’t love the idea?”

“No—I—uh, do, I love it. Just, well—” he scratched the back of his head, looking perplexed. Kate frowned and suppressed the cold chill of worry at the thought that she was ugly or undesirable. There must have been some other reason for his hesitation.

“Wow, ouch,” she whispered, sitting up and retrieving her clothing. She paused, wondering momentarily if she needed to physically dress herself, or if her mind could take care of that. She moved to a part of the bed away from Will and sat down, getting ready to pull her dress on. Maybe she could just imagine herself in clothes and it would work. She still hadn’t figured out all the intricacies of the dream-law.

“Kate, Kate, it’s not that,” Will said, crawling toward her. He flopped over on his back like a cat and wormed his way closer to her till he was looking at her upside down. “You’re beautiful, you know that, right? Which is why,” he paused. Kate was covering her mouth slightly with one hand, trying to suppress a laugh. He frowned. “What? What’s so funny?”

“You. You make me chuckle,” she said, leaning over him to give him a kiss. When she pulled away, his eyes had gone all glassy with primal desire.

“Come back,” he mumbled.

“I thought we were getting dressed,” Kate said.

“We were.”

“But don’t you want to explore?”

“I
did
.” He flipped over and tackled her. She laughed and returned his passionate kisses. His chest heaved with deep breaths as he devoured her face and neck with his mouth. He stopped suddenly.

“This is why I wanted to get dressed, Kate. See? I can’t resist you. I don’t
want
to resist you. You make me an animal.”

“Oh? Oh. I get it now. Sorry for being so sexy and amazing. You should have said something,” she apologized. He rolled off her and crawled to the edge of the bed of pillows and stood up.

“I was trying, and then you kissed me, and your breasts were in my face, and what sort of man can resist that temptation?” He laughed, blushing.

“Good. Because I was worried you could,” she said, gathering up her clothes and dressing. “Will?”

“Hmmm?” He turned away as though just the sight of Kate was too much. She beamed at that thought, grateful to be desirable. Now that she understood, the idea that she did something to him was hard to ignore. She pulled the linen dress over her head. It reached to her ankles, but the arms were tank style. It was dark red and embroidered with a Middle Eastern design across the chest.

“Have you ever tried to think things into existence here, in the dream?” Kate ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed it down.

“No. Have you?”

“So far, no. But maybe we should try it. Maybe we can also go places—I mean, we always start somewhere in the dream, and then we go for a walk to explore the place. But maybe we can do more. Maybe we can imagine ourselves in another location and appear there.”

“Are you dressed yet?” he asked, still avoiding looking at her.

She paused, tempted to say yes, and then when he turned around, surprise him by being naked again . . . just as a joke. But she kept her clothes on. “Yep,” she answered. He faced her.

“I thought for sure that you’d still be as nude as the day you were born.” He shook his head and rubbed his hands together.

“I almost was—I had the same idea.”

“Oh, did you now?” He swaggered toward her, pressed his hips to hers and put his hands around her waist. “Consider yourself lucky that you didn’t. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened.”

“I think I know,” she whispered. His breath tempted her. She pushed him away and he laughed, letting her weak shove make him stumble away.

“So what, you want to try thinking ourselves into different places?”

“Yes, but we should start small,” Kate said.

“Right, in case imagining ourselves to say, Victoria Falls or somewhere, proves disastrous and we end up without any arms or legs or worse, I end up with your body and you end up with mine.” He gestured between them as though to illustrate the possible ill-effects of dream-traveling, then paced a ponderous circle across the Persian rug.

“Exactly,” Kate said, inspecting the lantern atop an old trunk standing on one end. “I would not want to end up in your body.”

“Nor I in yours,” Will said. Kate glanced at him. “At least, not like
that
.” He arched an eyebrow and gave her a lecherous look.

“Oh please,” she laughed. “Modest my arse.” She turned and fiddled with the knob on the lantern, the light glowed brighter, then became muted as she lowered the gas. She loved old things. The location of this dream was ideal. Exotic, even. She would have adored actually being with Will in the desert somewhere, as if they were world travelers. Maybe they were here to do a story for National Geographic. Maybe they were back in time on an expedition for the British government. It could be anything, any time, since she didn’t know how to know where in time they were.

“Besides, that only applies to the way I dress. Not to flirtatious banter.” He came to stand beside her. “You like it?”

She nodded. “It’s like a dream. Well,” she laughed softly. “It
is
, but it’s such a gorgeous setting. I never want to leave.”

“Neither do I,” he agreed.

“Anyway, we need to be careful. We don’t know how powerful the dreams are, or if they’re powerful at all.” She recalled the saying that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life, and while it might not have been true, she didn’t exactly want to be the one to test it.

“Very true. Well, should you go first?” He backed away. “Ready? Are you going to tell me what you’re trying?”

She shook her head, moving to the center of the rug and already beginning to concentrate. It took her a while, but soon her dress vanished and she was standing naked in the lantern-light.

Will grinned appreciatively, his sapphire eyes twinkling. “I knew you’d do that.”

“Sure, I believe that,” she said softly, thinking about her next trick. Kate visualized some red lingerie she’d seen in the window of the adult store after work one day.

“Oh,” Will mumbled. “Mmmm, even better.” He took a step forward like he was going to take it off her. But she quickly thought herself into something new.

“Bravo, Kate.” Will laughed and clapped softly. She was covered head to foot in a snowboarding outfit. “Now something normal, like what you’d wear in real life, and not in these dreams.”

She closed her eyes and thought about it. When she opened them and looked down at herself, she was dressed in red skinny jeans, a black fitted T-shirt and a little cardigan that was cropped short in the torso.

“Hey, that’s pretty cute. Is that the style these days?”

“I guess so, yeah,” she answered with a shrug. “It’s how I dress, anyway.”

“I like it.”

“Thanks.” She felt a surge of pleasure at his approval and her cheeks grew hot. “Now you do it.”

He moved toward her and took her hand in both of his. “I want to try out something else.”

“Wait a minute,” she had visions of him going too far, too soon, and the possible dangers. “What? What are you going to do? Will?”

“Patience, Kate,” he said. His eyes glittered mischievously.

“What are—?” she blinked. When she opened her eyes again, they were standing in broad daylight, on a red, thin spire of rock in the middle of northern Arizona. Will squeezed her hand tightly, as though worried she might leap away in shock and fall to the rock-strewn ground hundreds of feet below.

Kate gasped and stepped closer to him, grabbing around his waist with her free hand. “A little warning would have been nice.”

“I’ve got you. You’re safe with me,” he said.

“I was thinking that, but then you got all unpredictable. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were planning to throw me off this cliff. So why here?” she asked, feeling the sun on her skin and a soft wind brush across her cheeks.

“Kate, if we were having these dreams so that I could kill you, don’t you think I would have done so already?” He squeezed her hand and pulled her tighter against him. He lifted his gaze and peered around, scrunching up his eyes. “I don’t know. I guess because I’ve always loved it here. This red stone is like the veins of the Earth, bare and vulnerable and so breathtakingly beautiful. I think of it like it’s God’s country,” he whispered, staring into the distance.