Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(41)

His fingers loosened immediately, and he let her go. She scrambled back until she hit the wall. Her face was filled with horror. “It’s all right,” he said. He held a hand to her, palm out. “You’re going to be all right.”

She screamed at him, “I’m human!”

“Of course you are,” he said. He fought his own sense of horror. This was beyond disastrous. None of them had ever recovered so much of their memories before without realizing their real identities. “You need to calm down. You’re safe.”

“I’m safe until you decide to kill me?” she said, her voice hoarse. She pushed to her feet and turned to face the wall, looking up at the carving of the two inhuman figures, and she made an inarticulate sound that was so wounded and afraid, it scalded his senses.

He straightened, keeping his movements slow. He kept his voice soft as he said, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry,” she said in that stranger’s voice. She began to feel along the wall, running her fingers over the carvings as though reading Braille. As though the scene was a prison that she was trying to escape. “You meant it. Where is this place? How did you bring me here?”

Step by step, with seeming effortlessness, she peeled away all the layers of indifference that he had built up over the centuries until he felt raw with agony. Fighting every instinct he had to move forward, to take hold of her again in a grip so tight she would never get away from him again, he took a step back then another. Then he waited until she looked over her shoulder at him.

He said, “You’ll have to figure that out on your own.”

Fresh devastation flared in her eyes. Steeling himself against the expression, he turned away, unable to talk in this mental landscape and hold his energy separate from hers, unable to stand the sight of the unnatural gash down her psychic body.

Exiting her mind with as much care as he could, he pulled his gun even as he opened his eyes to look around. They had been motionless for perhaps a half hour.

When he had pulled to the shoulder of the road earlier, he had refrained from putting on the car’s hazard lights, hoping they would look like an abandoned vehicle to those passing by at high speed. Whether by luck or by his design, they had been left alone.

Mary’s body rested against his chest. He had been quietly feeding her energy the whole time he had been in her mind. Despite her confusion and anguish, her body felt relaxed and more natural now, no longer feverish. She seemed to be asleep.

In a stealthy movement he pressed his lips against her shoulder blade and rubbed his mouth lightly on the thin, warm cotton material of her T-shirt. Then he eased her over more to the passenger seat, tucked the jean jacket around her and buckled her seat belt into place. She sighed, shifted and went still.

Cars and trucks shot by, providing quick flashes of illumination. The psychic landscape was restless with movement as whispers tickled the edges of his mind. Despite all his instincts screaming at him to get moving again, he took another stolen moment to lock in his memory the sight of the precious curve of her living cheek.

Then he faced forward and acknowledged some hard truths. He gripped the steering wheel with his left hand, gun clenched in his right. Holding rigid was the only way he knew to survive.

There was no road map for where they were in their history. He still didn’t know what had been done to her to cause the kind of wound that she had. All he could tell was that her energy was skewed somehow, different than it had ever been, and every time he looked at her with his psychic senses she looked cracked wide open like an egg. The evidence of such a violation, the sheer wrongness of it, made him feel like roaring.

He thought about what it would be like to put the gun to her head right now and pull the trigger. Death was just one gentle move and a click away. It would be good to do it while she was asleep, and it would be over with so fast, faster than she could comprehend. She wouldn’t experience any more pain. Then it would be so simple, the work of a moment to turn the gun on himself.

His head ached so ferociously, he thought he might split apart from the force of it. He rubbed the barrel of the gun against his temple.

* * *

MARY OPENED HER eyes. She leaned against the passenger door, wrapped in the warm jacket. She was still overtired and her body hurt, but mercifully the raw feeling had eased in intensity.

Why had they stopped moving? What had just happened?

She must have had another hallucination and passed out.

No.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, she must have crossed over into sleep without realizing it. That was odd but not impossible for the dangerously sleep-deprived, and boy howdy the dream she’d just had was a rough one.

No, that didn’t work either.

Then she heard a quiet sound. It was Michael, whispering.

The fine hairs at the back of her neck rose. She gave him a surreptitious look between her lashes.

He rubbed the barrel of his gun against his temple as he whispered, “It was too a mistake. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any choice. I’m sorrier than I can say.”

The sight of him struck her hard, like a slap in the face. Some of the words he used were straight out of her hallucination, her dream.

She took a deep, careful breath and didn’t give herself time to think. Slowly she reached toward him and touched his arm. A flash of emotion seared her, and it was not her own. She got a sense of suffering so intense it felt like a mortal wound. She let her gentle fingers trail along his arm, keeping the motion unhurried and nonthreatening, giving him plenty of chance to react and pull away.