Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(58)

“Michael, please let it go.” She kept her voice calm and quiet. It was her ER voice, used in times of crisis.

White teeth showed as he bit out, “I can’t.”

She watched him with shadowed eyes and hurt for him. She couldn’t make herself tell him what she knew, yet she understood instinctively the struggle going on inside him, how in spite of all reason, he was driven to know.

He lifted his head and met her gaze. His face was stark. “I did it, didn’t I?”

In the gentlest way she knew how, she said, “Yes.”

When he stood, he knocked his chair over. When she would have laid a hand on his arm he jerked away. “I can’t see it,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“Don’t you think that’s for the best?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he strode into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Chapter Eighteen

THE CREATURE CLUNG to the underside of the car outside the cabin. It was a tattered handkerchief of shadow, a dark spirit from the psychic realm that liked to feed on the negative energies of pain, anger, hate and despair. Intelligence or species didn’t matter to it. Pain was pain.

The dismal cluster of gas stations had been an adequate feeding ground for it, where it lay in wait for travelers. Plenty were either strong, happy or well adjusted enough, but there was always someone passing through who was grieving or suicidal, or riddled with the wormwood of hate and resentment.

The creature had first been attracted to the woman who had bled with such beautiful, agonizing brightness, but it had been afraid to approach too close to the fierce, dominant presence that traveled with her.

Then the dragon had come and it had healed the woman with its terrible, shining power. The creature had cowered underneath the Ford, staying still and silent, for, other than the ability to drain creatures that were already weakened, it had almost no power. It was nothing more than a small scavenger. One exhalation of the dragon’s breath could incinerate it in an instant. When the dragon left, it had nearly left as well, but it was a greedy little spirit and the two people it followed were not only potent. They were volatile as well.

Unable to leave the promise of such alluring pain, the creature had attached itself to the undercarriage of the car. It sniffed at the emotions of the people inside and hoped to catch them unguarded.

When they stopped traveling and went inside the cabin, it continued to wait, for it could sense the ferocious emotions that swirled around them.

Then there was a maddening, delicious upsurge of pain, and it came, not from the woman, but from the man. The creature detached from the car’s undercarriage and drifted over to the cabin window, hovering at the hot psychic scent, too frightened of the warrior to draw any closer and too far away to feed.

Chapter Nineteen

MICHAEL PUT HIS hands on the bathroom sink and leaned over it. The pain in his head that had been plaguing him all day turned excruciating. He fought waves of nausea, and his body shook while his eyes watered until they overflowed.

He felt like he stood at the edge of a hot, howling darkness. He saw everything else as though at a distance, through blurred vision. Compared to the howling dark, everything else was pastel.

In their long search for clues about Mary’s disappearance, he and Astra had worked hard to recover his memories of the last time he had made contact with her, but they could not glean anything of significance. Why hadn’t anything surfaced?

For a long while they had believed that something must have happened to Mary in a lifetime before she had remembered who she was, or before she had been able to make contact with anybody else in the group.

But he knew better now.

They hadn’t recovered his memories because he couldn’t bear to remember. He couldn’t bear it, but the darkness was rising, and he couldn’t hold it off any longer. He sank to his knees, rested his head against the cold, hard porcelain sink and the memories came.

They hit him like shards of flying glass, a disjointed attack from within that cut him to shreds.

He had been a mercenary soldier, a captain in command of his own company. They wintered in his home base in Italy. Otherwise his company roamed throughout Europe to fulfill the contracts he accepted.

In that lifetime, he had recovered his memories and had known who he was. He took jobs from various principalities that were both lucrative and wide ranging, which helped to fuel his search for others from the group.

One spring, he heard a tale through traders, of a ruling family in Constantinople that looked for answers to arcane mysteries and paid good money to honest men. Trusting his instincts, he began to journey to the city.

One morning, early at his campsite on the road, he bolted awake to a sharp thrust of pain, though he had sustained no physical injury. The sharpness soon faded, but the pain stayed with him, a ghostly ache that infused him with urgency.

Leaving his company to follow as fast as they could, he rushed ahead to the nearest port city and boarded the first ship he could find. A couple of weeks later he arrived in Constantinople, only to hear a story of an inexplicable assassination attempt that had left a cherished daughter lingering near death, and her wealthy family shocked and grieving.

In the bathroom, Michael shook his head, his breathing growing heavy and uneven. He fell, and the howling dark consumed him.

Mary pounded on the bathroom door with the flat of her hand, a quick, urgent staccato. “Are you all right?”