The Serpent's Shadow (37 page)

That was the thing that made her want to run up to her room and never come out again. He would surely try to molest her again, and she was sickeningly sure he hadn't any intention of stopping at a kiss.

The animals must have sensed her disturbed emotions and wisely left her alone to deal with them herself. Right at the moment, she didn't want anything touching her; she couldn't be sure that she wouldn't strike at it.

She shook with conflicting emotions, wanting to kill him, wanting to run away, afraid of him, white-hot with anger at him. She heard the doorbell, but ignored it; if it was a patient, Gupta would come and get her. She hoped it wasn't a patient, that it was just some tradesman that Gupta could deal with or send away. Right now she didn't want to have to face a patient, not when she was so uncertain of her own control over herself. For at the moment, all of her emotions had given way before a terrible, black despair, and the certainty that she could never go back to the hospital again, nor out on the street, nor
anywhere
that Parkening might find her.

“Maya?” There had been no footsteps to warn her of Peter Scott's approach, but he was normally soft-footed. His voice startled her; she rose swiftly and turned to face him, the light from the hall lamp falling on her face, and her wide and dilated eyes.

His face was in shadow, but there was no mistaking the gasp he uttered. Nor the words he blurted out.

“Maya, my God—you are
beautiful—”

His honest, clean reaction undid her. With a sob, she flung herself into his astonished arms.

“... and the bitch hit me,” Simon Parkening whined, for the tenth time. Shivani was heartily tired of his complaining. So far as she could make out, he had tried to seduce some hospital servant and been repulsed ; why should she care? If he could not carry out a successful conquest on his own, how was she supposed to help him? He could use magic if he chose; he had the modicum of power needed to overcome a woman's reluctance, and the knowledge of how to apply it. If he failed to use what he had, what was she supposed to do about it?

Punkah-fans
operated by ropes going through holes in the wall to two of her servants in the next room kept the air stirring, but the fact that there was no breeze outside meant that the room was stiflingly hot, the air heavy with the incense she burned to keep away the stench of the street outside. It was no worse than the stink of Delhi, but it was not a familiar stink, and therefore she hated it. She did not want Parkening here; he had come of his own, straight, it seemed, from the hospital and he stank of disease and despair. Why he had come
here
and not to his club where he might have a better reception for his complaints among his fellow sahibs, she was not certain.

Unless it was that he could not rail freely about what had made him so angry anywhere else. Perhaps his conduct was not acceptable even to similar arrogant English males, and he knew it.

She was far more interested in what he could tell her about the hospital, but from the moment he had walked in the door, all he had done was to whine about his problems. It was too hot. He couldn't leave London because his firm wouldn't allow him to take a holiday. He was tired of his current mistress, but the woman he wanted was the property of another and he didn't dare challenge the man for her. And the girl he had tried to seduce in the hospital that afternoon in his boredom and frustration had turned against him and struck him.

She yawned under the cover of her veil—and stopped with her mouth open, struck numb by his next words as his anger increased, as he uttered the first original thing he had said since he first began to whine.

“—that damned half-breed bitch, acting like a white woman, aping her betters, pretending to be a doctor—”

Shivani throttled her own impulse to interrupt his raving. She did not want him to know she was interested in what he had said. He would use it to try to manipulate her. He had done this before, and this time she was in no mood to fence with him, placate him, or give in to his demands. He was coming to the end of his usefulness, and was no longer worth the time it took to work with him. She would listen to him rant, and wait him out.

She had patience, more patience than he. And to make him more loquacious, she surreptitiously added a handful of drugs to the single block of charcoal in the incense brazier below her. Could it be? Could it possibly be that she had found her sister's child?

Carefully, surreptitiously, she opened her Third Eye, and practically snorted her contempt for his blindness aloud. How could he possibly have thought the girl had struck him physically, when he practically reeked of the power that had been used to render him unconscious? How could he have missed something so blindingly obvious? Perhaps only because he himself was so stubbornly blind. It would never have occurred to him that the girl could have as much or more power than he, therefore he had never looked for the signs of it. Stupid swine.

She couldn't tell much from the residue, but in a way, she felt a grudging admiration for the girl that had done this, even if it did prove to be the traitor she sought. The girl had, after all, managed to knock him unconscious without actually damaging him in any way.

But that might simply be a matter of accident rather than control. Admittedly, striking a man dead in the midst of a crowded building would leave one with a corpse that could prove very difficult to explain—but the man was a sahib, and arrogant sahibs were prone to do foolish things that caused them to die with great suddenness. There would be no marks on the body to explain, and heat did kill. And with every moment that passed, Shivani considered that if it had been her and not the unknown who had been molested, Parkening would be in his coffin at this very moment.

As the drugs filled the air, she armored herself against their effect, while waiting for them to loosen Parkening's tongue further.

She did not have long to wait.

Before long, Parkening embarked on a long, rambling condemnation of two of the doctors in the hospital, the one that Shivani was interested in, and a second, an Irishman, that Shivani could not have cared less about.

Unfortunately, this was the one that Parkening blamed for all his misfortune, so this was the one he expounded at length upon.

Great length. Shivani was getting ready to strike him down herself if he didn't get to the girl soon. How on earth could this fool be so obsessed with a man who probably didn't even think about him unless Parkening did something to interfere with him? If the Irish doctor was not his enemy yet, Parkening seemed determined to make an enemy of him. Was his life so very empty that he had to go out of his way to create enemies to enliven it?

Finally, he got around to the woman in the case.

“—O‘Reilly's mistress,” he growled. “She must be, I'm sure of it. Why no one but me has spotted it—she'd be thrown out of the hospital in a moment, if I could get the proof. Fornication; can't have that in my hospital. Very deep, that one. Must be her. Couldn't be O'Reilly, he hasn't the brains. But that half-breed—mongrel vigor, that's what it is. Cunning. Not brains, but cunning. Should have guessed it. Bloody wogs. Hindoos—can't trust ‘em, too cunning by half.”

He seemed to have forgotten that
Shivani,
upon whom he depended for his further magical instruction and before whom he sat, was Indian; she did snort with contempt at that faux pas, but the drugs had taken him far enough that he didn't even notice.

“Says her father was a doctor. Ha! Probably some ranker. Probably some Cockney Tommy. And if he married her mother I'd be surprised. Half-Hindoo wog bitch. Hit me! Me!” There was a fleck of foam on his mustache, and his eyes had begun to glaze. He would probably pass out shortly; she would have to have her servants revive him. Or—perhaps not. Perhaps she would simply have them bundle him into a cab and leave him to deal with cab and cabby when he arrived on his own doorstep. If he was lucky, the cabby would summon his servants. If he wasn‘t, he wouldn't wake up again, a body would be found in the Thames, and the cabby would be much, much richer. There was no telling which sort he'd get in this neighborhood.

It was of no great matter to Shivani; she had decided now that he was a risk and a nuisance, and she was going to be rid of him. She did not wish draw attention to herself and her dacoits and thugee by murdering him herself, but she would banish him from this place from now on.

“Witherspoon.” He snorted. “A concocted name if ever I heard one! Doctor-my-ass Maya Witherspoon! Not bloody likely! Bastard bitch half-wog—b—b—b—”

He began to splutter, as if he no longer had any control over his tongue. He probably didn't; by now he had breathed in enough intoxicant to fell most men. His head wobbled loosely on his shoulders. He blinked, shook his head.

Then his eyes rolled up, and he dropped over onto the cushions in an untidy heap.

Shivani rang for the servants. Two of them came immediately, bowing to her with utmost servility.

“Take him away,” she said languidly, waving a hand at him. “Put him in a cab, or drop him in the river, I care not which. Only take his stinking body from my sight, and do not admit him to my presence anymore. I am weary of him.”

They bowed again, and hauled him off. They would probably put him in a cab, but only because it was too far to drag him to the river, and there was always at least one cab waiting outside the house of pleasure on the corner.

Shivani got up, and stretched, no longer languid. She had a great deal to do, for now she had a person, and a name. Revenge—and power—would be hers.

It was only a matter of time now.

Shivani flung back her veil, and smiled into the night.

16

Peter had forgotten his original intention of warning Maya about the mysterious deaths the moment she flung herself, sobbing, into his arms. When he'd seen her in the light from the hallway, dressed in her exotic sari with her hair down and her eyes as wide as a frightened deer‘s, the last thing he would have said to her, had he had time to think about what he was saying, was how beautiful she was. But the exclamation had been startled out of him, and it had resulted in this—

He stroked her hair and said nothing as she wept and raged alternately, during which time he gathered the gist of what had happened to her at the hospital. He. didn't know a great deal about women, but his instincts on this were that the best thing he could do for her right now was to listen. And meanwhile, he was beginning to have some glimmerings of what to do about this Simon Parkening.

What he wanted to do, of course, was to march over to the cad's flat and punch him in the nose. Maya's distress had awakened a number of very cavemanlike feelings that were not altogether unfamiliar to him—but he knew very well that what might pass for reasonable behavior on the deck of a ship would only lead to a great deal of trouble in this case. He hadn't worked his way up to captain by punching everyone who offended him.

No, satisfying as that would be for both of them, that was not the answer. Nor was showing up at the hospital and conspicuously carrying her off as soon as her duties were over every day. Given this canard's filthy mind, he would probably decide that Maya was Peter's mistress, and not rest until he had gotten her thrown out of the hospital on charges of immoral behavior. No, that would not work either, satisfying as it would be to demonstrate that Maya was his property.

No, no, no. Peter was fast building a much more involved and detailed plan in his mind.

Finally Maya pushed—reluctantly, he thought—away from him, and sat up straight, smoothing her hair away from her face with both hands. Her tear-stained cheeks and red eyes looked adorable to him at this moment. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, half-veiling her forehead; her eyes gazed at him in distress. “Oh, no—” she said, looking utterly appalled. “What you must think of me!”

He laughed, and caught her hands in his before she could push her hair back. “I think that if I had been in your position, this blackguard would be singing in a higher key,” he replied. “And I understand exactly why you are in such distress. You're in an intolerable position, and if you were alone, you would have very few ways to escape. But I think that, between us, Almsley and I may be able to maneuver you out of it.”

She started to protest. “I cannot involve you, you have done too much for me already—and as for your friend, he owes me nothing, in fact, it is I who am in his debt in the matter of that young man!”