Shivers Box Set: Darkening Around Me\Legacy of Darkness\The Devil's Eye\Black Rose (51 page)

Thunder began to rumble halfway up. Sheet lightning accompanied it. Ryder felt his mind starting to haze. His right side had gone numb. But he’d gotten them into this mess, and he intended to get them out of it.

If he died after that, no problem. He’d miss out on making love with Mia, but that was his own fault for not letting Grogan…What, he wondered as the haze became a looming cloud of gray. For not letting Grogan make love to her instead?

Mia poked him from behind. “You’re climbing in slow motion, Ryder.”

“I’m carrying your suitcase plus whatever Desdemona loaded into two large backpacks,” he pointed out.

“Well, it’s not food. I’ve got that, and she sent enough of it along to feed ten people for six months, so climb faster before either I collapse or the stairs do.”

With a glance at the top, he upped the pace and hoped like hell he’d done the right thing bringing her here.

The lightning that flashed lent an atmosphere of fairy-tale entrapment to the swamp. Go in and never come out. Or find your way out as Helene and Madeleine had done and wind up dead.

Thunder was crashing directly overhead by the time they reached the shack. Ryder pulled the key Desdemona had given him from his pocket, worked it into the lock and would have kicked the door in if he hadn’t heard the click.

A blast of damp air and a hint of spice greeted him. Ryder dropped Mia’s suitcase and the backpacks, felt for a match on the sill and struck it.

Mia brushed past him while he held the flame to the first of two hanging oil lamps.

“Wow.” She turned a slow circle. “This place is amazing. Iona would love it. It looks like a swamp version of a voodoo palace. You are not going to tell me Desdemona’s friend actually lives here.”

“She used to.” He unhooked and handed her one of the lamps. “There’s a generator outside the back door. Fuel’s in the shed next to it. Shower’s in the loft. You’ll find a small fridge just outside the kitchen. Plumbing’s decent. There’s a TV, but no cell or Internet service.”

Swinging to face him, Mia started to speak. Then she stopped and raised the lamp. “Ryder, are you—Oh, my God, you’re not all right, are you? Is that blood?” She snatched his jacket aside, causing him to hiss in a sharp breath. “That’s not a scratch.”

“It’s not a snake bite either.” But it burned like one. He stopped her hand before she could yank his T-shirt up. “The bullet went right through, okay? I don’t think it hit any major organs.”

“Ryder, skin is a major organ, and blood’s vital. You should have said something.”

He fixed his eyes on hers, as much to steady himself as anything. “We had to get here, Mia. We made it, and I’ve told you what you need to know.” Enough anyway, he hoped. “There’s no way in except up those stairs. You hear someone coming, you shoot. Do you understand?”

“I hear, I shoot.” She caught him when he swayed. “Ryder…”

He shook off her alarm. “Bleeding’ll stop. I’ll be fine.” The room wavered and began to dissolve. “Just need to sleep for a while. Stairs creak, Mia. You can’t miss…”

He knew she said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the thunder. Or the jackhammer beat of his heart. The room went dark in stages, until all that remained were her mist-green eyes.

In a distant part of his brain he heard a final snap. A second later, the room, Mia’s eyes and everything around him went black.

Ryder couldn’t escape the slimy cesspool that was alternately ice cold and scorching hot. Wherever he was, whatever part of hell he’d landed in, it had claws and teeth, and it used them with gleeful abandon.

It also called him a bastard more than once. Then it smiled and thrust a pair of fiery spikes into his side.

He wrestled with the leading edges of pain, but mostly he just searched for a way to stay ahead of it.

One way in, one way out. Or was it the other way around? Or simply a circle with no end?

Think twice, act once. Okay, there was an expression he remembered. His grandmother had lived by those words. Because of him, she might have died by them. Grief didn’t mix well with alcohol, and he’d been tied up on a case the night she’d arrived in New Orleans…

He saw her face through a child’s eyes. She’d been a stunningly beautiful woman in her youth, but there hadn’t been a clairvoyant bone in her body. He’d heard her sigh over the lack more than once.

“Just a touch, you would’ve thought. Ah, but gifts and other things go how they go. It’s not for me to question what is. And, who knows, maybe a gift like that is more of a burden than a blessing in the end.”

He hadn’t understood what she meant. And as he’d grown, he’d stopped being curious about cryptic remarks.

He’d wanted to be a cop. To solve homicides. To solve anything, really. If a crime went cold, he wanted a shot at finding the answer. So how could he have done anything other than waylay Grogan in that dockside bar?

Protect Mia LeMay. That was the assignment. It wouldn’t be easy, but he was up to the task. He’d protected other witnesses on other cases.

He’d just never used one as bait to trap a killer.

Grinding his teeth, Ryder sweated out a renewed burst of double-edged pain. Desdemona’s voice reached him on its blistering heels.

“Always something you don’t count on gonna jump up and bite you, Ricky. You loved your grandmamma, that part’s easy. But now you’re starting to love the pretty woman who believes in you, who trusts you. Suddenly, tables are turning, maybe all the way around. You can’t bring back the dead, even if you love them. But you can keep the living alive, and if you’re lucky and she don’t clobber you for deceiving her, you might find a whole different kind of love.”

Yeah, find it after everything was too screwed up to fix.

Ryder drifted for a while, trapped in a churn of guilt. He saw Mia’s face, her mysterious eyes. He heard her voice as well, if not the words she spoke. If she was actually talking and not putting a voodoo spell on him.

“I should,” she said and, oh yeah, he knew she was talking to him then, because those haunting eyes hovered over him and she was pressing something that felt like a red hot poker into his side.

“You’re a lucky man, Ryder, that I have no psychic ability, no power to bend people to my will.” He sensed her cool smile. “All I have is my Magnum and a clever mind. Now, go back to sleep and pretend you’re on the
African Queen
.” She bent close to whisper, “Cut to the part where a bunch of leeches attach themselves to the reluctant hero’s half-naked body.”

Fair enough. He deserved to have that thought planted in his head. As for the fire in his side…

He felt her lips moving against his cheek, or thought he did. Might be delirious. Dreaming. Wishing. “Sleep a bit longer, Lieutenant, and be grateful you can, because I’m going to have my way with you very, very soon.” Catching his earlobe between her teeth, she gave it a sharp nip. “You think you know pain, Rick Ryder, but you weren’t raised in the bayou. Here, we take care of our own.”

Her eyes gleamed as she rose above him. And showed him her knife.

* * *

She could do this, Mia thought. She could do anything she set her mind to. But the feathers and bones and teeth scattered around the room made doing it here a great deal more daunting. Not to mention the sensation she couldn’t shake of someone hanging over her shoulder, watching her every move.

Imagination, it had to be. Whose mind
wouldn’t
overreact in bizarre circumstances like these?

She needed to shove it aside and use the knife. A quick thrust, a quicker twist, and it would be done.

Kneeling on the floor beside him, Mia stared at Ryder’s face. The man was so damn sexy. But the damn sexy man had lied to her. He’d dangled her like a carrot at the end of a string.

Should she punish him for that? Maybe. Should he die for it? She sighed.

Outside the shack, lightning continued to flash. It made the swamp seem grotesque and evil. But swamps weren’t evil; people were. And there was one person she knew who truly did deserve to die.

Exhaling, Mia banished her jitters, firmed up her grip on the knife, and plunged the blade into Ryder’s flesh.

* * *

He woke as he’d gone under. In stages. First there was muffled noise, then a glimmer of light, and finally, a combination of the two, with gray and black shadows playing over the walls and scratchy music grating on his nerves ends like coarse sandpaper.

He could close his eyes and block the shadows, but the music kept on scraping at his nerves.

“If you want me dead, Mia, use the knife I saw you holding and kill me quickly.”

He heard movement, a rustle of cloth. When he cracked his eyelids, there it was: her stunning face, directly above him. Watching him.

He managed a fuzzy smile. “You look like an avenging angel. Sort of.”

“I’m flattered. Sort of.” Bending her head, she did something to his side that had pain zinging through him. “Does that hurt?”

“Should setting fire to every nerve in my body not hurt?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Do you remember what happened?”

“I got shot by poachers.”

“Very good. Now where are you?”

“In a torture chamber masquerading as a shack in the swamp.” He turned his head slightly, brought the source of the shifting shadows into focus and frowned. “Guy on the screen looks like one of my informants in New Orleans.”

“Your informant must have led a very corrupt life to have wound up looking like Nosferatu.” She tapped his shoulder. “Can you raise your right arm?”

Excellent question. He tried and felt a pair of razor-sharp twinges below his ribs.

“You’re doing well, Lieutenant.” The gauze bandage she was inspecting. doubled up when he looked at it.

She saw him frowning and nudged him back down. “If you’re trying to will one of the bandages away, Ryder, it won’t work. You took two bullets. The first one passed right through. I had to dig the second out.”

His gaze shot to hers, but her expression told him nothing.

“It’s only been a few hours since we got here,” she said. “I gave you some bourbon I found in a cupboard. If you want more, I’ll get it. Otherwise, you should probably… Yes, well, there you go. Sleep it off, Ryder. Just don’t go under for too long.”

He didn’t want to go under at all. Better to see her face than the shadowy features of a human predator swimming in his head. A predator who wore a cloak of invisibility and was anonymous to everyone.

Except Mia.

* * *

She watched him through the night and for much of the following day. She slept only when exhaustion made it impossible for her to stay awake.

She discovered three Humphrey Bogart DVDs on a low shelf and let them play all the way through. She prowled and poked in cupboards and drawers. She ate some of the food Desdemona had sent along and listened for telltale creaks on the stairway outside.

The thunder and lightning came and went. Fog rolled in and out, and in again. But most disturbing of all, on three separate occasions when her eyes passed over a cloudy wall mirror, she swore she glimpsed Billy the doll’s face.

Now that, Mia reflected, was creepy, B-movie special effects at their surrealistic best. Or worst. She supposed it depended on how she viewed the glimpses.

A weak beam of light arced through the room while she was checking on Ryder. She heard a distant creak, felt her heart thump and went to the window to look out. She couldn’t see the water, but this was a shack after all, and old wood tended to creak.

“What time is it?”

Ryder’s unexpected question sent her heart straight up into her throat. She spun, caught the window ledge behind her and clenched her jaw to contain a scream. Apparently, old cots creaked too.

Determined, she relaxed her grip. “Feeling better?”

“Marginally.” He swung his legs to the floor before capturing her eyes. “You did a good job, Mia.” Standing, he tested his balance. Then, still holding her gaze, he started slowly toward her. “I’ve had bullets removed in hospitals and been in a lot more pain for a lot longer afterward.”

“Call it a selfish act of desperation, and don’t come any closer,” she warned.

“I’m still not entirely sure I’m talking to you.”

He ignored her and continued his advance. Which was an unfair tactic, in Mia’s opinion. The man couldn’t have looked more gorgeous, all tousled and unshaved, with his red shirt open and loose, his eyes the color of old gold, his feet bare and that far-too-tempting mouth neither smiling nor frowning.

“Madeleine Lessard was my great-aunt,” he said evenly. “She owned this place. She was Desdemona’s childhood friend. She also owned the antique shop before her death.” He motioned sideways with his head. “I saw the photo albums in front of the television when I woke up.”

“I found them in the cupboard with the bourbon.” Mia kept a wary eye on him. “So your great-aunt, Madeleine Lessard, was the first of six victims. First to die, first to get a silhouette calling card.”

“Yes.”

“And Madeleine’s sister, Helene Dubose? Not another great-aunt, I’m thinking. Your grandmother maybe?”

He nodded. “Helene wasn’t gifted with ‘the sight,’ but over time, and for reasons I never had a chance to hear, she became increasingly convinced that Madeleine’s death had something to do with a man she called ‘Leshad.’ That wasn’t his name, it’s just what she called him. Whoever the guy is, he either killed them both or had them killed, and it eats away at me more and more every day that I didn’t listen as closely as I should have to the person who raised me and loved me, and who I loved more than anyone in the world.”

His eyes glittered with anger, regret, sorrow and a dozen other emotions Mia couldn’t decipher. Pushing off from the sill, she regarded him steadily. “So what you’re saying is, Crucible and his agents walked in and snatched an investigation, one that was personal and meant a great deal to you, out of your hands. Out of the hands of the entire New Orleans’s police force in fact. Madeleine was your great-aunt, it was your case, and he slammed the investigative door in your face.”

“Pretty much.”

“Obviously, you refused to accept that.”

“Obviously. But I got nowhere investigating on my own, and I knew Crucible wasn’t doing any better. How could he? The murderer left a card and a voodoo doll on Madeleine’s body. Where do you take that?”

“Dog with a bone,” Mia murmured, and saw his lips curve into a humorless smile.

“You could say. Then my grandmother died, and it became a fever in my blood. No way was the bastard who ended her life going to crawl back under a rock until whatever or whoever drives him to kill struck again. I was going to find the guy this time and make him pay.”

“And to find him, you used me. I saw enough of his face the night he killed Helene that he was bound to want me dead. You knew he’d follow me wherever I went to make sure I couldn’t identify him.”

Although she half-expected Ryder to deny it or use anger as a defense, he did neither. He simply continued his inexorable advance until he reached the narrow window where she stood. Bracing his hands on either side of her head, he stared into her eyes.

“I did use you, Mia. I knew my grandmother’s killer would come after you. I made sure of it by making it possible for him to follow us.”

She’d been about to ease him back, but his last remark shocked her into letting the hand she’d planted on his chest remain where it was while her mind ran the words again.

“You made it possible for him how, exactly?”

“Despar.”

Mia scrambled through her memory. “Sergeant Despar was in charge of the team of officers who guarded me in New Orleans. You…” Her eyes narrowed to slits under her bangs. “What did you do, Ryder?”

“What you’re thinking, I imagine.”

He said it calmly, but with an underlying edge of contempt. Whether it was directed at himself, Despar or both of them, she couldn’t tell. And didn’t care, as her blood began to boil.

“You,” she said clearly, “are almost as big a bastard as the man who killed your grandmother.” The hand on his chest shoved him away. “Sergeant Despar is a crooked cop, isn’t he? And you knew it. What did you do, give him a detailed itinerary of our trip?”

Ryder wisely maintained the distance she’d placed between them. “I let him plant a tracking device on my truck.”

“You let him…” Breaking off, Mia raised both hands, fingers spread. She walked away, then back and fought to keep her voice level. “I don’t think there’s a jury in the country that would convict me if I shot you where you stand.”

“Look, I didn’t—”

“You set me up.” She felt cracks beginning to form in the veneer of her composure. “You let a killer follow us to a diner in the middle of nowhere. Then, while you and the deputy sheriff congratulated yourselves on capturing a pair of armed robbers, you let that killer grab me and haul me into the swamp.”

Afraid she’d start to shake if she didn’t move, Mia paced a wide circle.

“He said he was going to feed me to the alligators, but he changed his mind.” She shot him a lethal look. “Dead sure was better, so he pulled a gun on me.”

“I know what he did, Mia.”

“How did you know? Were you watching? Calculating? Anticipating? Or did you just get lucky because you were distracted, checking the tracking device to see that it was working properly?”

She wouldn’t shout, she promised herself. She would not raise her voice or slap him or poison him with the cyanide she’d seen on the shelf in his great-aunt’s shed.