Touch of Darkness

by Christina Dodd

  But no. If she threw herself headlong at saving Rurik, everything—the icon, Rurik's family, humanity itself—would be lost.

  And she couldn't save him. She'd seen his life vanish in a blink of an eye.

  She knew now. She'd been a fool, chasing the wrong dream. The bitter dream. Revenge for her own family, even if it was possible, would be an incomplete victory.

  But she could save the Wilders. They were Rurik's family, the people who had brought him into the world, the ones who formed him, shaped him into the man who had given his life for her and for the icon.

  His sacrifice would not be in vain.

  She would follow Rurik's directions. No matter how hard the road, she would take the icon to Washington.

  But while she could not kill a Varinski, she knew she could hurt him. Hurt him badly.

  Without compunction or pity, she lifted the rifle to her shoulder.

  Kassian took one look at her steady hand, and ran downhill toward the place where Rurik had landed.

  She shot and missed.

  He vanished from sight.

  "You coward! You son-of-a-bitch coward!" She wanted to kill him. She so badly wanted to kill him—

  The eagle gave a screech of triumph, tucked in its wings, and dived down. . . .

  Her heated fury vanished under the surge of cold hatred. This time, she aimed coolly, and shot.

  The bullet smacked the eagle right in the breast.

  The bird exploded in a flurry of black-and-white feathers, and the dive became a free fall.

  Take that, asshole.

  As much as she would like to savor the triumph, she had only a little time to escape.

  Rurik was right. She had only one possible route.

  She ran back the way they had come, and watched for the remains of the tree, black and crumbling, that marked the entrance to the cave.

  And there it was.

  She lowered the backpack and rifle through the little crack in the earth. She easily squeezed through, then lowered herself down until her feet dangled.

  Her mission was crystal clear in her mind. Escape through the tunnel. Deliver the icon to safety.

  All she had to do was let go.

  Let go and disappear into the endless darkness where nothing lived, not even a breath of air. . . .

  But in the end, what did her old fears matter?

  The worst thing that could have happened had happened. Rurik was dead. She had to go on.

  So she did.

  She landed on the soft dirt floor, breathing the cool, damp air. A sunbeam from above touched her head. The tunnel wound away from her, down into a dark so black it hurt her eyes. At the end, she knew, was safety, another country ... a different life.

  She'd already been reborn once from this tunnel. Now she had to go through the painful process once more.

  But this time, she wasn't a child. This was her choice.

  Taking up her backpack, she dug through and found her flashlight.

  The plastic case was cracked.

  Of course. On this journey, she could have no light.

  She placed her fingers on the small ridge in the rock and started forward.

  If only she weren't alone . . .

  She strangled that thought before it could take over her mind.

  She would not think of Rurik, of the flame of his life blinking out.

  She would concentrate on getting away. She'd really hurt one Varinski, but the other two were alive. Would they hunt her right away? She thought not. They had a brother to care for, and Rurik's body to ... to ...

  It didn't matter what they did to Rurik's body. What mattered was escaping. So she hurried into the endless night. The light from the hole into the cave gradually dwindled, as she'd known it would, and each step became a step into the unknown. No, not the unknown. Into the past. She'd been young, so young, and angry at being dragged away from her mother. She'd kicked at her governess, trying to get away, to go back and help put out the fire, and make that woman stop screaming. But Miss Landau had dragged her along. It was proper Miss Landau's imperviousness to Tasya's fuss that had finally captured Tasya's attention; Miss Landau always insisted on correct behavior no matter what the circumstances, and Tasya was not behaving properly.

  Once Tasya stopped throwing her tantrum and started paying attention, she noticed the dark. She noticed other things, too—the smell of dirt, the slow, erratic drip of water, the feel of the stone beneath her fingers. She noticed that the unflappable Miss Landau shook with a fine tremor.

  But it was the dark that had overwhelmed everything. Tasya and her governess were walking—Tasya was putting one foot in front of the other—so she knew they were moving. But it had seemed fake.

  Like any child—like any person—the young Tasya had measured her progress by what she could see and feel and smell, and down here, nothing changed. Nothing changed for miles ... for millennia. Now Tasya was taller. Her steps were longer. Life had transformed her from the imperious child into someone who believed she could fix everything with her camera, her story, and, if necessary, her fists.

  As she moved through the tunnel, keeping a steady speed, she wondered who she would be when she escaped this time.

  She walked for hours, stopping only to press the light on her watch and look at the time. Two hours. Four hours. Eight hours.

  Sometimes she felt a breath of air as another cave opened onto the main tunnel. Most of the time, it was just cool and pure, but once it seemed malignant, and for just a flash the veil of time lifted, and in her mind, she saw a man, laden with gold. He collapsed under its weight, and died there in the alcove nearby.

  She didn't run, but she wanted to, away from the skull's empty eye sockets that watched her in amusement.

  Was she going mad?

  Her feet hurt. Her eyes ached. She wanted to cry from loneliness, from the thoughts that circled in her brain like the hawk itself—that she'd once lost everyone who loved her, and now she'd lost again. She faced an eternity bleak with loneliness, and maybe, just maybe ... an eternity of darkness, for there was no way out of this cave.

  That made her stop.

  Yes. There were more passages than this one, and if she went astray, she could wander, lost, until she died.

  Taking off her backpack, she looped her arm through one strap. Putting her back against the wall, she slid down and sat. She'd been walking so long, so fast, so hard, without food or water, that she was starting to hallucinate. She had no reason, none, to imagine a death in these caves, or to despair of escaping when everything was going perfectly well. She had the rock ledge, narrow and comforting, to guide her, and the knowledge she'd come through here before.

  No matter how long it took, she would escape the caves and the shadows, and once she was back in the real world, no one knew better than Tasya Hun-nicutt how to move from country to country without being noticed.

  Well, perhaps Rurik knew better.

  A tear slid down her cool cheek.

  She wiped it away.

  No time for that.

  Digging out her canteen, she took a long drink, then found her granola bars and ate one of the poor, crumbled things.

  This cave was simply a cave, and part of the real world. She wasn't Luke Skywalker, sent to a place out of time where hallucinations tested her strength and her beliefs. Twenty-five years ago, she'd come through this cave and suffered no harm, had no revelations, learned nothing except that her old life was over and a new life had begun.

  Now it was better than before. Twenty-five years ago, Miss Landau had hurried her all the way, and when four-year-old Tasya couldn't walk anymore, Miss Landau had carried her. Then when they at last approached the opening on the other end, Miss Landau had been twitchy. Even the child Tasya had realized Miss Landau feared what she would find.

  Today, Tasya also feared.

  Yet after more than eight hours of walking, she knew pursuit was unlikely, and if the Varinskis hadn't discovered the outlet to the cave the first ti
me, they certainly wouldn't this time.

  So now she needed only to keep her head, stay fed, stay hydrated, and keep moving.

  She shook the remains of the granola bar out of the package and into her mouth, took another good drink of water, stood, and dusted off the seat of her pants.

  How much longer?

  She didn't know. One day? Two? The child Tasya had had no concept of time; it had seemed as if the ordeal would never end. But it had, and it would again.

  She groped until she found the ledge, still at waist level, and started forward. She heard a trickle of water, then a ripple, and realized she was walking beside a stream. The air grew fresher, as if somewhere close there was an entrance to the outdoors. Her heart lifted—and for the first time, she stumbled on a rock in the path.

  She fell forward, her hands outstretched to break her fall. She scraped her palms and banged her shins on the tumble of rocks, and when she cried out, the sound echoed up and out.

  She froze, and listened. Somewhere near, water was trickling. Far above her head, she heard a faint squeaking: bats. It felt damp in here.

  Somehow, she'd reached a huge cavern, and maybe a lake or a stream.

  She didn't remember this place, didn't remember it at all.

  Cautiously she dragged herself back and onto her feet. She groped for the wall that had guided her here. She found the ledge and carefully inched forward, sliding around the rocks that blocked the path—and without warning, the wall disappeared.

  She took a quick, panicked breath.

  That echoed through the cavern, getting louder as it expanded to fill the dead space.

  She backed up, found the wall again, and the ledge, and started forward once more.

  The wall crumbled away beneath her touch.

  Sometime in the recent past, a cave-in had made the wall crumble, and, with it, the ledge that would lead her to safety.

  She couldn't believe it. This wasn't possible. She'd walked miles underground—if she figured three miles an hour for an average, and a minimum of eight hours, she'd walked twenty-four miles under the damned mountain seeking her freedom—to end here? Standing with her hand outstretched into nothing? It wasn't possible!

  She couldn't go back. The Varinskis might not be chasing her into a cave, but she would bet they wouldn't allow her to just sashay back across Ruysh-vania to freedom.

  She couldn't go forward because . . . because she didn't know where to go. She threw her arms forward, waving them around, trying to find the guidance she needed—and the gravel beneath her foot slipped away.

  She fell. For an instant, she kept her footing, skidding down as if she were on skis.

  Then the ground disappeared completely, and she fell into darkness.

  Boris sat at his desk, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring. Waiting for his boys to call and tell him they'd destroyed Rurik Wilder, that they had the woman—and the icon.

  Boris had obeyed the Other.

  He'd found out all about the woman Rurik Wilder had with him, that Tasya Hunnicutt.

  Now Boris knew he was in real trouble.

  Because in New York City, a book made its way through the publication process. A book about the Varinskis.

  A hundred years ago, even fifty, the Varinskis had had an iron grip on the New York publishing industry. They'd held the companies by their tiny little balls, and for safety, they'd bought the editors' souls.

  Then in the last thirty years, women had stepped out of bounds, become powerful editors and even publishers, and those women wore trousers and had piercings in their eyebrows. Some of them were even young and pretty.

  Boris had not thought it would matter. What difference would a book make? No one would believe the truth about the Varinskis.

  But this author had researched everything about

  them. She had written a book chronicling their history, their legend, their long stranglehold on the assassin business, the way they tracked and killed for hire, and how governments hired them to perpetrate "crimes." She'd had a story to tell, and the male editor said she had the voice to make it a best seller. The woman publisher smiled with her white teeth and called the author "the next Dan Brown."

  As the world turned its attention to the Varinski trial, word of mouth among the booksellers and the press grew to almost mythic proportions. The gathering publicity around the Varinski Twins was ruining Boris's carefully developed Varinski image of invincible, untouchable murderers.

  And the author was Tasya Hunnicutt.

  Tasya Hunnicutt, Rurik's companion, the female who worked for the National Antiquities Society. She wasn't some old woman with fat, black chin hairs. She was the same woman who had disappeared with Rurik Wilder after the explosion at the Scottish tomb.

  She had promised her publisher that before they published the book, she would provide sensational proof of the Varinskis' history, and what had occurred—the discovery of the gold, the explosion at the tomb, her mysterious disappearance—had created a furor far beyond anything she could have imagined. Right now, the American morning shows were bidding on who would first have her as a guest when she reappeared.

  When the Other found out about Hunnicutt, how she'd done research on the Varinskis, even going so far as to travel to the Ukraine and take photos of their home . . . when the Other discovered Boris hadn't been vigilant and watchful about their privacy . . . when the Other realized Boris had failed to stop the book before it was even submitted . . . Boris would suffer.

  And if the Other asked what had been done to retrieve the woman and the icon, and Boris told him Konstantine's whelp and a mere woman had defeated the might of the Varinskis . . . Boris would die.

  He would die, he would go to hell, and he would burn in eternal agony.

  He knew it. He could already feel the flames.

  Chapter 30

  Tasya's head hurt. Her cheek was icy cold. She didn't know where she was, and when she opened her eyes, her disorientation increased.

  Was she four years old?

  Had her whole life been an illusion?

  Had she died and found the afterlife one huge dark cavern?

  She sat up with a jerk.

  The path through the dark.

  The wall that disappeared. The cavern. The fall. She remembered now, but remembering did her no good. It was pitch-dark. She didn't know where she'd come from. She didn't know where she should go. She was stuck here, in the mountain under her country, and she would die here.

  She would disappear here, and the icon that would help destroy the deal with the devil, avenge her parents, help Rurik's spirit rest in peace—it would disappear, too, never to be found.

  The devil had won.

  She had failed.

  For the first time since she was four years old, Tasya lowered her head onto her knees and cried.

  She cried for her parents. She cried for her lost childhood. She cried for all the sights of pain and inhumanity she'd documented with her camera. She cried for the death of Rurik's hopes.

  Most of all, she cried for Rurik.

  He'd been vanquished fighting for her.

  He could have stolen the icon and run. He would have made it to safety and taken it to his family, and they would have guarded it while they waited for the next piece of destiny's puzzle to fall into place.

  But no. Rurik had believed she was a integral part of the plan, and he'd refused to abandon her.

  Yet that didn't change the fact that she loved him. For the first time since she was four years old, she had dared to love.

  Yet she'd been an idiot. What good had guarding her heart, her words, and her affection done her? Rurik was dead, and he would never know that she'd do anything for him—take the icon to his parents, sacrifice her chance for revenge—because she loved him.

  Lifting her head toward the unseen sky, she said, "God, for years, I haven't prayed to you. I didn't believe in you. How could I? I saw no evidence of your existence. But now I've seen proof that the devil exists. S
o you must exist, too, and now I beg you. ... Rurik Wilder is dead. He's been part of a pact with the devil, but he didn't sign the pact, and he is ... was a good man. If you're everything that is good, then please, I beg you, take him to be with you. Let him come . . . home." She couldn't talk anymore. Grief and anguish tore at her heart. She curled into a little ball. Sobs wracked her, hurt her head, and tore at her lungs. They echoed through the chamber, through the cracks in the rocks . . . and up into heaven.

  She didn't know how long she cried. For an hour or more. But when she finally lifted her head, she felt better . . . lighter, more confident.

  When all the days of her life had burned away, and she wandered into the lands of the dead, she would see Rurik again. And in the dark and the damp of the cavern, she made a vow—the first thing she would say to him was I love you.

  For now—no matter how hopeless it seemed—she had to try to find her way out of this maze of caves. She had to return the icon to Rurik's family, or die trying.

  But—how odd!—it seemed as if there was a light in the distance. Not a real light, not sunshine or a flashlight, but this glow . . .

  She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear them, but the glow was still there. Two glows, actually.

  She glanced around, wondering if the sun had somehow slanted in here. But no, it had to be nighttime. So the moon? Or maybe a phosphorescent fish in the lake or some glow-in-the-dark stalactite? She laughed a little.

  Maybe she'd just gone crazy, because it looked like two people standing across the lake . . . and there was a lake. It filled the cavern, with no way around it.

  But the people—it was a man and a woman— gestured for her to climb back up the way she'd come.

  Tasya hiccuped. She stood up, her gaze fixed to those people. Who were they?

  Were they people? Or were they figments of her imagination?

  Was Tasya dreaming? Still unconscious? Why were a man and a woman underground with her?

  She grabbed her backpack and picked her way through the rockfall back toward the wall where she'd started. She could see the whole way; that faint white light bathed everything.