Dark Prism

by Cherry Adair

  Barely an hour had passed between their departure and their return to Sara’s suite at the hacienda. They’d made it to dinner with minutes to spare. A few glances were all their absence warranted, and if anyone noticed a certain air about them, no one commented on it.

  After dinner, Sara had claimed a headache and gone to bed. Jack had hit the pool for two hours, then gone to his own room. Eventually he’d managed to fall asleep.

  “BEEN HERE BEFORE?” he asked, swatting at an iridescent insect the size of his fist as it buzzed past his nose. While his arm was up there, he wiped it across his face. Small insects clung to the sweat on his skin, making him itch. If he never saw green foliage again, he’d be a happy guy.

  “Several times,” Sara told him cheerfully. “This is where Carmelita’s mother, Inez Armato, lives. It’s a small village. Maybe twenty-five, thirty people.”

  “So this is where Baltzer met Carmelita?”

  “About twenty years ago. She—and later Alberto—has traveled with him, managing his household, ever since.”

  “Very loyal.”

  She frowned as she wiped away a rivulet of sweat running down her throat. “Yes.”

  “What did he have to say about what happened to his chef?” Jack asked curiously. He’d bet Baltzer’s concern had been for his own comfort. He’d never given Jack the impression that he gave a damn about anyone but himself. And Sara. In that order.

  “There wasn’t really time for him to say much of anything. He’s very concerned, of course. And I’m sure he’ll pay for any medical treatment they need.”

  “I’m sure he will.” If you tell him to.

  Their two Indian guides were about twenty yards ahead, hacking through the jungle with razor-sharp machetes to reclear the path to the village. The rain forest kept covering the scars made by man. All he and Sara had to do was follow the trail.

  He took his handheld out of his back pocket and started tracking the magnetic field as they walked. An accurate reading would require objective-prism spectra of the major sources of light visible from the stars. No interference from cities or major civilization way the hell out here to mess up his readings, which would make it somewhat easier.

  “Don’t tell me—you’re testing to see if the village is on a leyline.”

  He ignored the light mockery. “Yeah. And it is. I’ll need my theodolite and other equipment to confirm it. Can’t you feel the energy pulsing up through your feet?” He’d teleport his equipment from Australia when they got back to the house. He didn’t like leaving it in the middle of the bush even with a protective spell over it.

  “I’m not sure,” Sara said cautiously. “What’s it supposed to feel like?”

  “A low-pitched hum, a buzz almost. Goes up through my feet and travels through my entire body. I like it. It’s like a low-amp power surge.”

  “God, I hate to say this, but yes. I do feel exactly that. But then, I have that same feeling at the house.”

  “That’s because Baltzer’s place is on the same ley.”

  “Jack …”

  “What?”

  “I know you don’t like Grant, but don’t pull him into any of this.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences, do you?”

  “Well, I assure you, Grant didn’t buy a house on a leyline intentionally, because he would have no idea what a ley is.”

  She’d never put much store in his research into leylines. He’d never convinced her of their reality. She hadn’t believed in leys, but she’d believed in him. Or so he’d thought at the time.

  “The hacienda couldn’t be more than, what? Maybe seventy-five years old? This ley goes back thousands of years—so no, but his house is definitely on a ley. Fascinating that out of all the choices he had, he went for this place.”

  “I can pretty much guarantee you the ley had nothing to do with it,” she told him dryly. “I think he bought it from some long-lost uncle a long time ago.”

  He’d have to come back at night, which he didn’t relish. Fortunately, Jack wouldn’t have to walk in; he could teleport and take aerial readings. This was a ley, without a doubt. And a strong one. He couldn’t wait to see just how strong. How far did it run? And more important-—what was the point of origin?

  He’d need an objective series of soil samples, of course, and an accurate reading from his version of a surveyor’s wheel. He’d built his own specifically for the measuring of leys. Electronic, it calculated the energy emitted from the earth as well as distance between major points.

  Baltzer’s sprawling estate was definitely built on a leyline and so was the village they were about to visit. Fascinating. If he couldn’t combine his research with the job he was doing for the Council, he’d come back later—if there was a later—and do a thorough job mapping this one. He wouldn’t have to interact with Sara if he returned; hell, she wouldn’t even have to know he was there.

  His shirt clung unpleasantly to his back in the stifling hothouse atmosphere, but he was able to ignore it as he input more numbers and saw preliminary data compute on the screen. His heart thumped with excitement. God—a new leyline, confirmed.

  Every surface either oozed or dripped water. Thick and hard to breathe, the humid air felt like a living presence and smelled exactly like rotting vegetation in a compost heap.

  Sara’s long legs matched his strides. Wearing khaki pants, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a black baseball cap, she looked like a fashion plate in heavy hiking boots. With a sheen of perspiration on her golden skin, she could have been the girl in some commercial for clean living and beautiful people. Small hoops and the sunstone studs in her ears caught stray rays of sun and glinted gold and orange as she walked. He closed his eyes briefly as he inhaled the soft lemon fragrance of her skin.

  He wanted her naked under him again.

  Jesus. Talk about making one hell of a bad call—he wished he hadn’t made love to her. It had been too amazing. Too fantastic.

  Loving Sara had been so damn easy.

  Recovering from Sara had taken much, much longer.

  Their physicality had the same undeniable magic. That had never been the problem.

  The thick carpet of dead leaves underfoot was spongy and dank, the undergrowth littered with man-size ferns and knots of leafy vines. He heard the shrill, tortured cry of a bird, the rustle as a small animal rushed unseen through the trees.

  “How many wizards in this village?” he asked, keeping the conversation casual because he wanted to ask her what she’d been thinking that day, the day everything had ended. He wanted to resolve the two-year-old conflict now. But that conversation would take more than a few minutes. They’d both been furious, both been hurt by the words flung like weapons at each other.

  She’d changed since they’d broken up—now, wasn’t that a fucking apropos expression? Broken up. Yeah. That’s how his heart had felt at the time.

  He’d mended, of course. His father had done a bang-up job of teaching him to suck it up and move on, to be a man. No complaining, no whining. But the experience had sure as hell inoculated him against ever falling in love again.

  Seeing her played havoc with his libido, however. He could, and had, switched off brain and heart; his dick was another matter. It had a mind of its own, and its mind was on Sara. On all of her.

  Idiot.

  One of the character traits they shared was a strong sense of self-preservation—Sara because of the early death of her parents, Jack because of his father. They’d opened up to each other in a way Jack had never experienced before or since. But he’d never imagined that Sara would take matters into her own hands and make the decision to abort their child.

  He knew, that unlike himself, she’d been ambivalent about having kids. But once she discovered she was pregnant, he’d been sure she was becoming increasingly excited about it. Man, had he been wrong.

  She had a thousand great qualities, but quick decision-making wasn’t one of them. She considered. She meditated on things. She waffled. T
here, they were different. But she hadn’t taken time to weigh anything. She’d made up her mind and acted on it without a word, without input. Without his input.

  Fire was Sara’s power to call, but that last day, she’d been colder than an arctic winter.

  Water under the bridge, he reminded himself. Nothing he could do about it now. Or ever, for that matter.

  He’d moved on, and so had she.

  He’d do well to remember that.

  A little black snake—okay, possibly a worm—dropped from a twig right in front of his eyes and landed on his shirtfront, then arched, flicked back and forth, and fell to the dirt at his feet. His heart pounded, jolting him out of his memories.

  Christ, he loathed all this green and the things it hid. The soil was black and rich and alive with creatures large and small. Jack didn’t mind bugs, didn’t mind spiders, not even creatures with sharp teeth. But his eyes moved carefully in search of fucking snakes.

  In a rain forest, they hung lazily from branches, tauntingly slithered over his boots, and generally made their presence felt, their beady little eyes tracking his every move, their forked tongues flicking.

  He realized Sara hadn’t answered his question. “Any wizards?” he repeated.

  Sara wiped her damp face with a swatch of blue fabric dotted with pink rosebuds. Her ponytail, pulled through the back of the ball cap, bounced as she walked. “About half of them are, including the village elder, Enrique Rojas.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jack muttered, keeping his attention on a long, slimy, brown … log as they passed it. There was a good reason why he’d left the plotting of South America’s leylines until dead last. “And the thought of teleporting didn’t enter your mind?”

  “It’s only three miles, Jack.”

  “Three miles of snake- and bug-infested rain forest.”

  “You’ve been in worse places.” She smiled. “Quite a switch, huh? Usually I’m the one who wants to call a cab, and you’re the one who wants to hike all over hell and gone.”

  He felt them then—wizard signatures. Perhaps twelve or fourteen full wizards, most with medium- to low-level powers. They were perhaps a mile off. Yay, he thought sourly. Civilization. He, the man who reveled in sleeping under the stars six months out of the year, longed for sidewalks and the stink of diesel fuel. “I’m not partial to green.”

  She shot him a querying glance. “Uh-huh. You liked the green dress I wore to the awards ceremony when you won the Wollaston Medal in London.”

  The award for proving the existence of British leylines had been nothing compared to seeing Sara wearing a dress made of paper-thin fabric that hugged her curves—light, soft green like one of those party mints, as opposed to dark, dangerous, verdant jungle green.

  He’d barely made it through the speeches before he’d had her back at their hotel, and the dress in a heap on the floor. They’d never made it to the bed.

  Music drifted faintly through the trees—a rhythmic drumming reminiscent of Africa, a little Spanish-inspired guitar, and the indigenous contribution of maracas. Two black-striped snakes with golden bodies dangled threateningly on Sara’s side of the path, their bodies arching toward the path as they reached for another branch.

  He would have warned her of the danger, but his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Pissed him off that he was afraid of anything, especially something he could make disappear with a thought.

  Gritting his teeth, Jack stepped in front of Sara and used the machete he carried to sweep them out of the way. They dropped to the ground in a twined knot and vanished into the undergrowth.

  “That was very gallant of you, but those were striped queen snakes and not poisonous.”

  “I didn’t want them falling on you. Know what I remember about that green dress? Rug burns.”

  Sara gave him a faint smile. “They didn’t bother me.”

  “No, because they were on my ass,” Jack reminded her dryly. Best rug burns he’d ever had.

  The music got louder for a few minutes, then abruptly cut off. Their guides disappeared up ahead, leaving them alone in a forest devoid of the chatter of birds or animals. Humans lived close by, and the animals kept out of the way.

  Sara offered him a drink from the water bottle she’d just unsnapped from her belt. Jack shook his head.

  “We’re almost there. I’ll visit Carmelita and see how she’s doing. Inez can introduce you to the head honcho. He’s ancient but spry and pretty alert. He seems to know everything that goes on within a hundred-mile radius. Interesting guy. I think you’ll like him.” She cast him a curious look.

  She had amazing eyes. Big, beautiful, velvet-brown eyes that could read a man’s soul—if he let her.

  Jack tore his eyes from the movement of her damp throat as she lifted the bottle and drank. God, he’d like to put his mouth there. Sara’s skin tasted like no other woman’s—he could do a blindfolded taste test and know whose skin he was licking.

  “Where were you in Australia before you showed up in Alberto’s kitchen?” she asked after she’d drunk half the bottle down.

  “Rudall River National Park, Western Australia.” He looked forward, seeing glimpses of small whitewashed houses and smelling the cooking fires. “Nice and dry and hotter than hell.”

  She snapped the bottle back on her belt. “Did you follow your ley?”

  “I was in the middle of mapping before you screamed your mental SOS and almost dropped me down a volcanic plug,” he said dryly. “I’d heard myths and legends about that particular ley for years, if you remember. Pretty damned amazing. At least a thousand miles long and incredibly powerful.”

  “We were never able to communicate that way before,” Sara pointed out. “Any idea why it happened this time? Don’t get me wrong, I was very glad to see you. But I question why you think you heard me. Or not why, necessarily, but how.”

  “You must’ve been thinking of me swooping in like a superhero and saving the day.”

  “Actually, I was just trying to keep myself and Carmelita alive. I wasn’t thinking about you at all, Jack.”

  JACK WASN’T SURE WHAT he’d expected of the mother of plump, motherly Carmelita. But he sure as hell hadn’t expected Sophia Loren. Inez’s café au lait skin was smooth and practically unlined, her voluptuous body was a knockout in blue jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt, and her curling dark hair brushed her shoulders with nary a gray hair in sight. She must have been at least seventy, but she didn’t look a day older than a very hot fifty.

  While Sara visited with Carmelita, Inez escorted Jack to the home of the elder. “You can find your way back to my house, sí?” Inez asked with a smile after introducing him to Enrique Rojas, a slight man who looked every one of his hundred-plus years.

  “Sure. Gracias, Inez.”

  Rojas offered him a seat on a worn-smooth wooden bench outside his house in the shade of several thickly leafed trees. Removing a Coke can from his jacket pocket, he offered it in a gnarled hand with dirt-encrusted nails.

  Jack accepted it with thanks and watched, amused, as the old man pulled a bottle of beer from his other pocket and wrenched off the cap. The man’s skin was nut dark, with so many folds and wrinkles it was hard to make out his features. His black eyes were alight with life, and he smiled often, showing all three of his black teeth.

  “You have heard of Inez’s son-in-law’s illness?” Jack asked in Spanish, popping the tab on his soda. Jack could tell from his signature the man was the highest-powered wizard in the area, but that wasn’t saying much. His powers were earth-aligned, so perhaps he could get a garden to sprout easily, but he wasn’t going to be causing any earthquakes or volcanoes.

  The old man nodded. “Sí.”

  “Is anyone else in your village afflicted with Alberto’s terrible disease?” He took a swig of warm, too sweet, fizzy cola. Hit the spot. “Anyone acting loco in the last few weeks?”

  The dialect was a little tricky, but Jack got the gist of Roja’s response. Yes. Two wizards had become ill.
Both men had died within twelve days of complaining of the fever. Their bodies had been burned by the superstitious villagers. Probably a good thing.

  “What were the symptoms?”

  “High fever. Tingling in their feet. Paralysis.”

  “Tingling in their feet! Perhaps I misunderstood?”

  Rojas repeated it.

  The feet thing really threw him. “Insanity? Violent behavior?”

  Rojas nodded, but his crepey lids fluttered as he glanced away. “Sí. They also had a very bad fear of water.”

  “Agua? Water?” Jack asked carefully, not knowing what to make of this new information. Sara hadn’t mentioned a fear of water when describing Alberto’s symptoms. “Do you know what this sickness might be?”

  “Sí,” Rojas assured him, indicating the almost impenetrable wall of green on the outskirts of his village. “Murciélago vampiro.”

  “Vampire bats are biting the villagers?”

  The old man chugged down half his warm beer before he nodded vigorously. With a lot of hand waving, or rather one hand and the bottle, he indicated how the bats came out at night from the cave outside the village. They came down and bit people on the feet. The young girls in the village were protected by their amulets, which they wore on leather strings around their necks. None of them had been bitten, but three had been taken.

  Jack wasn’t sure they were having the same conversation. Itchy feet. Girls. Amulets. Taken. How did that relate to vampire bats and wizards dying?

  “Do the girls come back?”

  “Sí. Algunas de las muchachas vuelen.” Yes, some of them. “Pero no todas.” But not always.

  “The girls who came back … where have they been?”

  “Sarulu.” Rojas glanced fearfully over his shoulder, then got awkwardly to his feet. He stood there for a moment, irresolute—then shook his head, waved his hands in a never-mind motion, and wandered into his house without looking back.

  Jack didn’t know what the hell to make of any of that. Who or what was Sarulu, and how did it relate to the wizards, the vampire bats, or the missing girls?