Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL) (29 page)

The bullet had entered just below her collarbone. It had flattened as it moved through muscle and tissue, creating more damage where it exited than where it had entered. As she followed the damage to the back of her shoulder, she sent commands to her body that would stop the worst of the bleeding.

And just like Michael’s body had when she had commanded it, her body obeyed.

The abused flesh began to knit back together at the microscopic level.

She felt herself lifted and turned. The Deceiver probed curiously at her wound. As she tried to push the hard fingers away, she flashed back to that ancient horror when he had reached into her body and handled organs that were never meant to endure such exposure.

“The bleeding has already starting to slow.” He sounded thrilled. “You are remembering. How delicious.”

Inside, the door to her secret, golden treasure chamber opened, and precious knowledge scrolled out.

She staved off the lethargy of shock and kept her temperature controlled. White blood cells started to locate and destroy foreign bacteria.

Of course. How could she have forgotten?

She had always known she was a healer. This was how she healed.

The Deceiver picked her up and carried her toward the limousine. “You know, in that life when I found you, your family had sheltered you so much you never had a clue how famous you had become,” he said, his tone conversational. “I wanted you from the first moment I’d heard of you. I was sure that you were one of us.”

She only gave him part of her attention. Most of her awareness focused on her internal reality.

This was how she knew how close Michael had come to cardiac arrest, yesterday in the bathroom.

This was why she had poured so much energy into him, how she had calmed his heart. He had sunk so deeply into the memories of his own death he had almost killed himself again.

His heart. The blood, the arteries, and the rhythmic pumping of his heart, all normally so strong.

“You should have heard the names they called you in the city.” The Deceiver jerked his head at one of his soldiers, who sprang forward to open the back door. “Blessed of Allah, Daughter of Heaven. You were a legend before you were twenty. They said you had a face like an angel and a touch like Jesus. It looks like you still do, Mary, Mary.”

Quite contrary.

Before the intention had formed properly in her mind, she slapped a hand flat on his breastbone. She sent her awareness through that touch, thrusting into him like a scalpel.

And if she had the nerve to wield a scalpel, she could shoot this gun.

Justin’s heart was wonderfully healthy, thirty years old and strong as an ox. He should have lived to be a wisecracking, mischievous old man.

She tangled her awareness in veins and arteries. She gripped the rhythmic pumping muscle with her mind like a fist then she—

Yanked.

Shock bolted across his face. His arms loosened. She fell hard and awkwardly. She cried out as the impact shot burning pain through her left shoulder and lung. Pushing against the ground, she managed to turn onto her back. She looked up.

He hunched over, clutching at his chest. The normal healthy tan of Justin’s complexion turned purplish. His features contorted with astonishment, pain and rage.

DAMN YOU!
he roared in her head like a cyclone.
GODDAMN YOU!

Wheezing, he fell to one knee. His eyes turned toward her, and they were black diamond eyes, as vast as twin black holes, and they were filled with her destruction. He reached an unsteady hand toward her.

Oh God. She couldn’t let him touch her.

She rolled away and kept rolling as he lunged after her. How long before his hemorrhaging heart brought him to immobility, unconsciousness? Would it be soon enough?

He sprawled full length, his grasping fingers scant inches from her ankle. She glanced back at him. He fought to get his knees underneath him again.

Gunfire exploded nearby. She realized she’d been hearing gunfire in the background for a few minutes now.

The Deceiver grabbed for her ankle again. His fingers brushed the cuff of her jeans and hooked underneath the hem.

“WHY DON’T YOU JUST DIE!”
she screamed at him.

She kicked him in the face. His head snapped back, and blood sprayed from his nose. Jackknifing away, she got to her hands and knees. The weight made her injured shoulder pulse with agony. She curled her left arm around her torso and scuttled away like a wounded crab.

After five feet, she sent a terrified glance over her shoulder.

He had to be close to death. He had to be.

He had abandoned his pursuit of her. He lay curled on his side, his psychic presence as malignant and as powerful as ever. The soldier that had opened the limousine door for him walked toward him. The man’s aura was smudged and dark, his expression blank.

The soldier bent over the dying man with the stiff disjointedness of a marionette puppet. Not-Justin grabbed the soldier’s hand. The soldier convulsed then collapsed on top of him.

She didn’t dare wait to see any more. Instead she pushed to her feet and lurched down the gravel driveway in a stumbling run, supporting her injured arm with the other.

Ahead of her, Michael lunged around the bend in the gravel drive. He was limping badly, sweating profusely and bleeding from several wounds. In one hand, he held an automatic weapon. In the other, he gripped a foot-long knife that dripped ruby liquid. The savage expression on his hard face made her sob.

She tripped and almost went down. He limped up to her, slung the gun onto his shoulder and sheathed the knife. Then, with as much care as if she were made of spun glass, he put his arms around her. She dropped her forehead to his collarbone. Heat poured off of him in waves.

“Thank you, God,” she whispered.

“Where is he?” His voice was gravel. His chest heaved.

“Back there.” She pointed with her good hand toward the clearing as she leaned against him, hungrily soaking in the sensation of his strong body next to hers.

He held her away from him. “Christ, you’re covered with blood.” His voice shook. “How bad is it?”

She shook her head and forced herself to take a deep breath. “It hurts, but I’ve slowed the bleeding. Michael, somehow he was in my ex-husband’s body. I induced a cardiac arrest. He went down, but it doesn’t feel like he’s gone. One of his soldiers collapsed when he touched him.”

“All right.” Michael turned an executioner’s expression toward the clearing. He asked, “Can you keep running?”

Words exploded out of her with violent force. “I’m not leaving you again!”

Sword gray eyes met hers in brief, perfect understanding. He let go of her, took his gun in one hand and started down the drive. “Come on then.”

A car revved to life near the cabin. Michael spun, grabbed her good arm and dragged her into the tangled brush. Her aching body whimpered at the headlong pace. One of his hard hands clamped on to the back of her neck and pushed her to the ground.

“Stay down,” he hissed.

She ducked her head and stayed down.

Gleaming black metal flashed between gaps in the foliage as the limousine roared past them. Michael stood and sprayed it with gunfire, but the car was armored. It disappeared. The Deceiver’s raging presence faded.

Silence descended. No birds called. No wind rustled the trees. The mass of dark spirits had scattered. The scene seemed as peaceful as it had been before the intruders had arrived.

She sensed Michael scanning the area before he shouldered his gun again and knelt beside her. That was when her body exerted control, and she started to shake so hard her teeth clattered.

He eased an arm under her shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. Then he wrapped his arms around her so tightly she thought he might break one of her ribs.

“Easy,” she gasped as her gunshot wound gave a warning throb, and his hold loosened. She could feel tremors shuddering through his long hard body. He pressed his hot face into her neck.

She managed to get her good arm around his waist.

“Shoulder wound?” he asked. His hands passed compulsively down her back.

She nodded. “I’m okay,” she gritted. “If I get enough quiet time, I think I can heal it. You?”

“I’ll be okay.”

Pulling back, she glanced down his body, noting the tears in his clothing that indicated injuries underneath. No matter what he said, those wounds needed attention. They needed to get back to the cabin. She needed her first aid kit.

She looked up and their eyes met. He said between his teeth, “What the hell were you doing?”

She struggled to speak coherently. “I did what I had to. I thought—I felt him start to tear you apart somehow. I didn’t know there could be anything so horrifying. And there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to keep from feeling that again.”

He rocked her. His voice vibrated in her ear. “I’m so pissed at you I can’t see straight. And grateful too. We’re both alive and that’s what counts. Come on. We don’t have time to dissect what happened.”

He raised her to her feet and kept a supporting arm around her. She put her good arm around his waist as they limped back to the cabin. “I was so sure I had him,” she said. “He was dying, but then he drove away. Can he heal himself?”

“We all can heal ourselves to a certain degree,” Michael said. “But not to the level of your abilities. In any case I doubt he healed himself. He takes life, he doesn’t repair it.”

If Michael believed Astra could have healed Mary’s old psychic wound, apparently, Astra had more aptitude for healing than most of the group. “I saw Astra fighting with you,” she said. “Then she disappeared. She wasn’t injured too, was she?”

“No, but she is weakened.” His mouth tightened. “She used all her strength in the fight. We can’t expect any more help from her for a while.”

It was illogical to take that news as a blow, since any anything Astra could offer was so limited by distance anyway, but still her shoulders sagged. She felt that they were more cut off than ever, and very alone.

They reached the edge of the clearing. Michael glanced at the bodies on the ground. He said, “Go straight into the cabin. I’ll be there in a minute.”

She ignored the order, refusing to turn away from the carnage. Instead, she stared at the body of the handsome man that lay curled on the ground. “That’s my ex-husband,” she whispered. “Did you see him earlier? That’s Justin’s body.”

She walked over to Justin, and he followed. Remembering the black diamond aura that had surrounded him, she cautiously paused to study the edges of his curled figure. Just as she had suspected, the aura was gone.

Awkwardly, she went down on her knees beside Justin and touched the fingers of her right hand to the carotid artery, just below his jaw. There was no pulse. Gently she stroked his hair back from his forehead while tears swam in her eyes.

I loved you, she thought. Not the way either of us hoped we would when we got married, but I did love you. If I could take that day back again, I would. And I would do something else, something wiser and better. I would have been patient with you, and I would have gone to see Tony. Or I would have stayed home to send you away. Justin, I am so sorry.

Michael stood beside her and waited until she looked up, even though he favored one leg. His expression somber, he said quietly, “He’s dead.”

He didn’t phrase it as a question, but still, she nodded. Passing her hand one last time over Justin’s hair, she struggled to her feet.

Michael put a hand underneath her elbow to help her. He said, “We both felt the Deceiver’s presence leave with the limo. He’s migrating from body to body without dying and being reborn.”

Killing people and taking over their bodies. Michael’s harsh voice sounded matter-of-fact, yet her mind whirled. “That soldier was one of his drones. Do you think he migrated over to that body?”

“Yes. He kills people’s spirits, and either controls them or he takes over their bodies. That way he always remains at full strength as an adult, and he never forgets who he is or where he came from.”

She shook her head. “How?

“I don’t know. None of the rest of us would do such a thing. We haven’t developed the knowledge or the skill for it. All I know is he’s created a lot of drones.” Michael’s chest heaved as he looked around at the bodies in the clearing. His bloody face was set in grim lines as he turned to her. “I really want you to go inside now.”

She stood her ground, staring up into his gaze. “What are you going to do?”

“If any of these survived, I need to put them down.”

It was her turn to stare at the bodies scattered across the clearing. The physician in her rebelled against Michael’s implacable words. It was one thing to fight and kill in self-defense, but to slit a man’s throat while he lay helpless, unable to defend himself?

“These are people,” she whispered. Or at least they used to be.

“They’re
drones
.” He emphasized the last word. “They’re just like the men who attacked you. The Deceiver can control them. They will continue to act out the last orders they received from him. That means if any of them are still breathing and they get to their feet, they will attack us again.”

“They’re his victims too. If any of them are alive, I need to see if I can help them.” She straightened her spine and said in a soft voice, “You already know this, Michael. That’s what
I
do.”

He raked a hand through his hair and swore savagely under his breath.

A shimmering presence formed beside them, appearing to focus all of its attention on her. It was Nicholas. He said,
Two have survived.

She sucked in a breath. There was her answer. “I need my first aid kit out of the car.” She looked at Nicholas. “Will you keep watch over the survivors and let us know if they start to stir?”

Yes,
said the ghost.
What will you be doing?

She turned her attention back to Michael. “I’m going to do triage.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

TRIAGE.

Allocating treatment to patients according to a system of priorities. Usually triage was designed to maximize the number of survivors, especially in disaster situations.

This time, she was going to allocate treatment according to the value of the injured. She eyed Michael’s wounds. “You first.”

A complex expression passed over his grim face, acceptance and understanding, even, oddly, compassion. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “We have to leave here as soon as we can. You might have forced the Deceiver into retreating, but he can still send others after us with a single phone call.”

“Then we’d better get to it,” she said crisply. “I haven’t even examined you closely yet, but I’m still fairly certain you’re going to need stitches. I need my bag.”

“I’ll get it.” Gripping his upper right thigh, Michael made his way to the car.

She put a hand to her injured shoulder. As her adrenaline faded, she felt too hot and cold at the same time. The skin around her shoulder felt raw and painful to the touch. She had slowed her own bleeding and cleansed the wound, but she still needed to be bandaged. She could use some pain medication too. Ideally she should get a blood transfusion, but there was nothing ideal about any of this situation. They should both be in a hospital, and that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Sending a look of silent gratitude to Nicholas’s straight figure, she went into the cabin. Everything inside looked just as it had when they had left it. Items from Michael’s weapons bag lay scattered across the table. The sheets and blankets lay in a rumpled heap on the bed.

Then she saw the bullet holes that scored the cabin walls. Not everything was quite the same. First things first. She couldn’t help anybody else if she was too bad off herself. She rummaged in her purse for a small bottle of Tylenol and dry swallowed two tablets. Then, because she had lost a lot of fluids, she hobbled to the sink and drank as many cups of water as she could. She sprinkled sugar into one cup and gulped it down. Then she sprinkled salt into another cup and drank that down too.

Then she sagged against the sink as the world went gray and formless.

A hand gripped her good shoulder, and she jerked back alert. Michael stood beside her, his eyes dark with worry.

“I’m okay,” she muttered. Her mouth felt filled with cotton.

“Sure you are,” he said. His voice was rough, his face clenched like a fist.

He took a knife and cut through the layers of her sweatshirt and T-shirt. She hadn’t taken the time to put on a bra, so when the pieces of material parted, her torso was bared to view.

They both looked at the wound where a blackened bruise the size of Michael’s spread hand covered her shoulder. She patted the area gingerly with a handful of the ruined T-shirt, until the point of entry was exposed. The merest trickle of blood seeped from the opening. It hurt. It hurt a lot, but she kept the expression on her face stoic.

“See?” she said. “I told you I slowed the bleeding. I remembered how. You can dress it for me, but after I see to the worst of your wounds.”

The tension in his features eased. “Okay.”

All those years she spent in med school. All that money spent on her expensive education, and in some ways, she had been a more powerful healer nine hundred years ago. She sucked on her lower lip, thinking. What would she be able to do, now that she had a modern education and she was recovering her memories?

Shaking two more Tylenol out of the bottle, she gave the pills to him to take, then with her good hand, she helped him to strip off his weapons, armor and clothing. When she found several marks on the chest plate of the Kevlar vest, she bit her lip hard but set it aside without comment. He leaned back against the table while she examined the wounds. He had been shot too, several times, but the wounds were very shallow, just glancing scores along the skin of his arms and legs, and one along the side of his neck. They had to hurt like a son of a bitch, but they weren’t serious.

The serious wounds were made by something sharp. Deep knife wounds along his arms and a bad stab in his right thigh that might have grazed the bone. Thank God he had listened to her and had worn the vest.

She noticed something else that troubled her deeply. His energy, normally such a strong, vibrant and bright presence, was mottled with dark lines, like fractures. Had the Deceiver done that damage? How could it heal, or be healed? He looked like he could be breakable. The sight scared her, but she kept the emotion from her expression.

Michael helped her pull out the necessary supplies from her kit. She taped some of his deeper wounds with non-suture strips, and cleaned and dressed the more shallow wounds. Three of the cuts needed suturing. He held rock steady as she worked, and watched her face.

Finally she said, “Okay. You’re done for now.”

“Your turn,” he told her. She eased into a chair as he ran hot water in a bowl. He washed her torso and shoulder, covered the entrance and exit wounds with thick pads of gauze and bound them in place. He muttered, “Christ, you’re covered in bruises.”

“The last forty-eight hours have been eventful,” she said. “I just wish I had been more useful for some of it.”

He snorted. “You saved my life, and you got one of the nastiest entities on the planet on the run. If you were any more useless, they could make an atom bomb out of you.”

A short laugh broke out of her. It hurt, and she gripped her injured shoulder to brace it. Then she sort of pitched toward him and he leaned forward too, and somehow they ended forehead to forehead, looking deeply into each other’s eyes.

The somberness of his gaze. The emotion pouring out of her. They told each other so much, and all of it in silence.

She stroked his broad, bare chest. Then she said, “I don’t know what to do for your other wounds.”

She didn’t specify further. He seemed to know exactly what she was talking about anyway, as he nodded and straightened. “You do nothing for now. We get dressed, we pack up the car, and after you examine the drones, we leave.”

After she examined them. Not after she healed them. He didn’t believe that she could do anything for them.

Her face tightened, but she said, “Okay.”

She didn’t even try to wriggle into another T-shirt. Instead, he helped her to ease into one of his flannel shirts that could be buttoned down the front. Even though her jeans had gotten smeared with grass and dirt stains, at least she had managed not to bleed on them. Michael constructed a sling out of a kitchen towel, and slipped it over her head.

Then he limped into the bathroom. A moment later she heard the sound of running water. While she waited, she went to the sink and drank more water. Then she collected her purse, a pillow and a blanket. Packing was easy when you didn’t own anything.

She put the blanket and the pillow on the table, and sat and put her head on the pillow until Michael came back out.

He wore a fresh pair of jeans and another of his flannel shirts that he left loose and unbuttoned at the waist. She caught a glimpse of the hard muscles of his bare chest and a flash of white bandage at one wrist. His limp was more pronounced, his long mobile mouth bracketed with lines of pain. She watched him stuff weapons into his long black bag.

She cleared her throat and said in a rusty-sounding voice, “I dropped your other gun outside. Round the back by the path.”

“I’ll get it in a minute.” He looked at her. “Ready to go?”

She stood and scooped up the pillow and blanket with her good arm.

He looked at the way she clutched the bedding. A fugitive amusement ghosted across his face. “Right. Let’s hope he was too rattled and busy to fuck with our car, because otherwise we’re going to be on foot and then I will really be pissed.”

Her eyelids dropped in a slow blink. Now there was a thought. How could they make it if they were on foot? She looked at the leg Michael favored.

“Well,” he said wearily after a moment. “Let’s not borrow trouble. Come on.”

He carried his weapons bag and her kit outside. She followed him out to the car. With a pained grunt, he heaved the kit and the weapons bag into the back. She stuffed the pillow, blanket and her purse into the passenger seat.

When she turned to scan the clearing for Nicholas, she found the ghost standing in sunlight near two prone bodies. In full sunshine, Nicholas looked like the faintest extra shimmer of light. She was only sure it was him because she could sense his presence, warm and strong.

It was only then that she remembered she had seen his death when she had connected with his energy. Too easy tears pricked at her gaze. She had never met him when he was alive, and yet he had helped her. He was generous and brave, and it was terrible that he too was dead.

When she walked toward Nicholas and the two unconscious drones, she heard a quiet whisper of steel. She looked over her shoulder. Michael had reached into the backseat and drawn his long knife from the weapons bag.

Her stomach tightened. She turned away, and without looking back, she said, “Would you please bring my kit?”

His pause stretched her already frayed nerves. “Of course.”

He walked beside her with the first aid kit in one hand, his knife in another. The growing warmth in the sunny morning messed with her already shaky equilibrium. She fought it off, staying alert by force of will. When she reached the first man, she knelt beside him and said to Nicholas,
Thank you for watching them. Thank you for everything.

You’re welcome.
He knelt beside her.
Thank you for trying to do something for them.

No need to thank me,
she told him.
I have to do this.

Flanked on either side by the men, one alive and one dead, she examined the unconscious drone. A bullet had grazed his head. As far as she could tell, that was what had knocked him out. As head wounds so often do, it had bled a lot, but it was by no means fatal.

Then she opened her other senses and examined him psychically.

The man’s spirit was gone, and there was no way to recall it. She could even see how the Deceiver had killed the spirit but left the body still animate and functional. The long slashing psychic scar was readily apparent to her mind’s eye.

Her breathing turned ragged, and tears pricked at the back of her eyes again. Had he committed this atrocity on Justin before he had stolen Justin’s body?

How did he do that?

She looked at Nicholas, into the faintest impression of dark, intelligent eyes. At the ghost of a courageous and extraordinary man who had not deserved to die.

A chilling possibility opened in front of her. She almost hated the fact that she had the capacity to be so clinical to consider it. But on the one hand, there was one man who did not deserve to be dead. While on the other hand, according to Michael, the Deceiver created lots of drones that no longer deserved to live.

If the Deceiver could take over another’s body, could someone else do it too?

It was one thing to harvest separate organs from a body once a person was declared dead. It was an entirely different thing altogether to consider harvesting the whole body.

She shook off the train of thought. At the moment, she had no answers, only questions. Sitting back on her heels, her heart aching and her mind in turmoil, she shook her head at the other two. “I can’t do anything for these men.”

Without bending his bad leg, Michael bent over and cupped the back of her head gently. “Now will you go to the car and wait for me?”

“Yes, all right.” She took a deep breath, clasped the hand he offered and climbed to her feet.

Michael looked at Nicholas’s insubstantial, shimmering form.
Thank you for coming to help her. Will you do one more thing?

If I can,
said the ghost.
What do you need?

Just check on Astra. Make sure she’s all right.

I’ll do that.

Then Nicholas seemed to turn to her. She felt extra warmth on her right cheek, as if he had touched her face, and he faded from the clearing.

Her eyes welled again as she put a hand to her cheek. Then, glancing once last time at Justin’s body in silent farewell, she turned to walk to the car without looking back.

While she waited for Michael, she leaned against the car by the passenger door and tilted her face up. She may not have a summer of peace in this place, but she could still let the warm, bright sun wash her clean and new.

As a doctor she’d learned to accept that sometimes, despite all her best efforts, death and tragedy happen.

But so does love, life and passion. She lost herself in memories of last night, Michael moving over her, and in her, and the words he had whispered to her.

My miracle. My home.

The next thing she knew, Michael stood in front of her. He had retrieved the gun and held it, along with the knife, in one hand. He leaned forward and kissed her, and she lost herself in the touch of his lips.

He took her free hand. “Listen to me. We’re both hurt, and Astra’s strength is depleted. Thanks to you, the Deceiver has to recover too, but we don’t know how much reinforcement he has, so we can’t stop in one place again. I can drive for a while, but you need to concentrate on healing yourself. Nothing else matters. Heal yourself so you can take over driving, because soon I’m going to need your help. Do you understand?”