Dark Sins and Desert Sands

by Stephanie Draven

  The door in the bathroom creaked open and Ray hesitated. “Layla, are you okay?”

  She made another sound, like a wounded animal in pain.

  “Shit,” Ray said, crossing the threshold. “Are you hurt? What’s happening to you?”

  “I’m remembering,” Layla choked out. The shampoo had long since washed from her hair, but something still stung her eyes. Another sound came out of her. It was a sob.

  Ray’s voice softened. “Layla, come on out of there. Let me help you.”

  “You can’t help me,” Layla said, near-hysterical laughter bubbling up in her throat. “You said you saw inside me. You said you saw a lioness. That’s not what I am. I’m not a woman and I’m not a lioness. I’m both. I’m an abomination. I’m a sphinx.” It was a relief to hear the truth spoken aloud after all this time. Her secret name. Her secret self.

  “You’re not making any sense,” Ray told her, pulling open the shower door. She saw that his hands were shaking. The confines of the bathroom were like kryptonite for him and he must have felt as if the walls were already closing in. Somehow, in spite of this, he made himself crouch down and reach for her. “Come on out of the shower. Let me help you.”

  Layla pulled away, feeling the sting of the needles as the water beat down on her back. “I told you, you can’t help me. I’m not even a mortal woman, don’t you understand? Please just go, Ray. Get away from me before you end up dead. Like Nate Jaffe or the men in those pictures.”

  Ray shifted on his heels, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed. “I’m not leaving you like this.”

  But he’d have to. Layla would just stay here in this shower until the end of time. She might just live that long. She’d go on and on, long after Ray and his soulful eyes had turned to dust, and the only one who would know her was the loathsome god of the desert.

  Seth. Her mate. Her maker. Her master.

  “I’m not coming out,” Layla whispered.

  Ray muttered a dark curse, unintelligible. “Then I’m coming in.”

  It was a hollow threat. There was no way he’d be able to make himself climb into the shower with her. She could see the way his body tightened in rebellion, the way his knuckles went white on the shower door. “Just go away, Ray, before you have another panic attack. Go away before Seth finds you and kills you. Or before I do.”

  Ray snorted. “You’re not going to kill me.”

  Then, with a slow heave, he pushed himself into the shower with her, his body low to the ground as he squeezed inside. She knew what it cost him. She heard the pace of his breathing double. She felt how cold his skin was as he brushed past her. She felt the erratic beat of his heart as he enfolded her against his chest and smothered his anxiety under the steam and water. Water ran over both of them now, soaking his clothes. His shirt sucked tightly against the muscles of his chest and his jeans went to soggy dark indigo. He smoothed her hair back, holding her face away from the spray.

  He’d done this for her sake—for her—and now his voice was a shaky whisper. “Whatever it is, Layla, you can tell me….”

  “No, I can’t,” she said, burrowing her face against him. The burning in her eyes was nearly unbearable now. That’s when she realized that the water on her face wasn’t just from the shower. All those pent-up tears breached the barrier, spilling from her lashes and scalding her cheeks. She was crying. Sobbing, really, and couldn’t stop.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” Ray said bracing against the shower wall with his boots so that his wet, denim-clad knees made a cradle for her.

  It wasn’t going to be all right. She was the twisted minion of an evil god. What comfort could a mortal man like Ray really offer her? And yet his arms were the only safe place that she’d ever known. “Oh, Ray…you have no idea who I am or what I’ve done…”

  “I know what you’ve done. I was there, remember?”

  “I’m nothing, nothing but what he made me!”

  “Don’t say that,” Ray murmured against her lips. “Don’t ever say that again. It’s not true.”

  It was true, Layla thought. Until Seth had breathed life into her, she’d been nothing but sand. Is it any wonder that without Seth she’d felt nothing but fear? Yet, as Ray rocked her, it was more than fear that surged through her. Steam had clouded the air around them, shutting out the rest of the world, and as he mopped water off her face, she tilted her head and kissed him. She kissed him because words failed her. She kissed him because he was good, and loyal, and loving, and brave. She kissed him because it might be the last time she could.

  She’d never thought that Ray was hers to keep, but she hadn’t realized before now that she wasn’t even her own to give. As they kissed, the warm water pooled between them where her breasts pressed against his chest. It seemed to ease him a little bit, but as she ran her hands down his arms, she realized that his fists were balled. It was taking all the strength he had to sit here in this glass box.

  “Layla,” he finally said, “are you gonna let me get you out of here? I’m kinda buggin’ out.”

  She nodded, her whole body limp. He got to his feet, then hoisted her into his arms. His boots squeaked on the tile as he stepped out of the shower, and she was afraid he’d slip, but Ray managed to stay on his feet even when every force in the world conspired to knock him down.

  He found a towel and dried her off, from head to foot, and she let him. It felt somehow wrong to have someone take care of her like this, but she didn’t have the strength to protest. If it made her selfish and childish and needy…well, those were small crimes next to the others.

  Then he carried her to the bed. Only when he’d wrapped her up in blankets and made sure she was safe and warm, did he strip out of his wet clothes and find something dry to wear. If he’d crawled into bed beside her naked, she would’ve run. The intimacy of what they’d shared before was now too raw for her, and he seemed to know it. Instead, he pulled the chair close enough to the bed that he could touch her. “Layla, you need to tell me what you remembered.”

  “I’m a sphinx,” she said again.

  Ray was part Greek. The history wasn’t lost on him. “Like the one in Oedipus? The one who wouldn’t let any traveler pass into Thebes without solving her riddle?”

  “That was a different sphinx, but yes. We aren’t just mythical creatures or monuments of stone. We’re real.”

  He ran a hand through his wet hair. “Look, it’s not that I don’t know that a lot of unexplained shit goes down in this world. I can do things that shouldn’t be possible, but I stopped believing in God a long time ago—”

  “Gods,” Layla corrected. “There are lots of them.”

  Ray’s jaw tightened. “You know, if I was going to believe, I was taught the Shahada which says, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.’”

  “Some say the more rightful interpretation is, ‘There is no God worthy of worship above Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.’ For the Christians and Jews it’s, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ It doesn’t say that there aren’t any other gods. It doesn’t say what happened to the old ones when people stopped believing in them. I can tell you. They’re here, living amongst the mortals. And Seth is one of those gods. A terrible one.”

  “What about you?” Ray asked.

  “I’m not a goddess, but I’m not mortal either.”

  “That’s why you heal.” It was the one solid fact that he’d seen for his own eyes, and he seemed to cling to it. “Do you have other powers?”

  “Yes,” she said, though she couldn’t force herself to speak them over the lump in her throat. What she could do to men—what she had done to men—was difficult to admit. “I’m a riddler.”

  He looked puzzled. “Can you show me?”

  “It’s not a parlor trick. With my questions, I can force people to answer me. I can put them into a trance. I can hurt them, or cause them to hurt themselves…”

  He nodded slowly, no doubt remembering all the times she’d used her powers a
gainst him before he was tortured. What he finally said was, “So you get into people’s heads. You’re like me.”

  “No. Seth fashioned me from the sand and breathed me to life. But you were born of flesh and blood. You’re human. You’re mortal. You’re war-forged. But I’m warborn and I belong to the desert. I belong to Seth.”

  “The hell you do.”

  She recognized possessiveness when she saw it, and it was there, but more besides. Anger, confusion, and maybe even deeper feelings than that. She didn’t dare probe them, didn’t dare ask. “Ray, don’t you want to know if I remember anything about you?”

  He should’ve latched onto that. He should’ve been more concerned with his own welfare than hers. But she couldn’t seem to dissuade him from the direction of his thoughts. “Don’t change the subject. You don’t belong to Seth. He scares the shit out of you—”

  “Of course he does. In his prime, he was the fiercest god of the world. He wrought such bloodshed and chaos that no nation wanted to own him. Even the Egyptians called him a foreigner, and when they depicted him in the hieroglyphics of their tombs, his face was a creature none recognized. He’s not as powerful as he used to be, but there’s still plenty of war in the modern world and bloodshed for him to feed on. Men may not mean to worship him, but they do. With their bullets and their bombs. They call for him.”

  Ray pulled himself to the edge of the chair, so that he was nearly standing. “You’re serious….”

  “Dead serious. Seth’s been an advisor to kings. He’s been a battlefield general. He’s been the wicked voice that whispers into the ears of men who crash planes into buildings. In every age, he becomes whatever he must to stay close to the forces of war, so right now, he’s a government contractor.” Layla laughed bitterly. “He was so sure that I wouldn’t remember him that he actually gave me his card. It’s on the dresser.”

  Ray stood, walked to the dresser and snapped up the card. “Scorpion Group. What is it?”

  “It’s a group of mercenaries that the government uses to do the things they don’t want to do themselves. A way of avoiding accountability. Trust me, Scorpion Group isn’t the only government contractor out there willing to interrogate and torture prisoners—it’s just the only one run by a god with powerful minions. I was one of them. I questioned prisoners. I got them to trust me. I built a rapport with them, and I used all my training and all my powers to do it. I asked them questions, and I posed riddles to them, until they choked on their own guilt. Literally choked on it. Until you.”

  Ray stared. “What was so different about me?”

  “You never reacted to my questions like a guilty man would….”

  “Because I wasn’t guilty,” Ray snapped.

  “I was sure you had a secret and that I just wasn’t asking the right questions,” Layla said softly, and when she saw him wince, she hurried to add, “I know you’re innocent now.”

  Ray clasped his hands together, staring down at them. “Do you?”

  He seemed to go somewhere, his mind lost in the past. She hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he deserved to know the truth. “I can’t prove your innocence, Ray. I never even knew who it was that accused you. Seth didn’t want me to know because he didn’t care.”

  Ray’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “But Seth knows, doesn’t he? If he’s a god, as you say, then he must know everything about why I was arrested.”

  “He’s not omniscient. If he was, don’t you think he’d have found us by now? If he knows why you were arrested, it’s only because someone in the government gave him a file.”

  “A file?” Ray asked, eyes bulging. “You’re saying that the Egyptian god of war and chaos keeps notes on paper?”

  “Or on papyrus, or on a stone tablet, or written in blood,” Layla said, thinking back over all her years. “Besides, the military can be surprisingly low-tech. There’s usually a paper copy of everything. Contractors keep notes. I did.”

  “Where are your reports, then? Do you have them?”

  “I’m sure they’re stored away in some box at Scorpion Group. But what I do remember is that you weren’t just accused of working with the enemy in Afghanistan. You supposedly set up an ambush that went wrong. When it did, you allegedly massacred a village full of civilian witnesses to shut them up.”

  He staggered back. The chair must have bumped the back of his legs and made him unsteady, because he collapsed down into it so heavily that all the air hissed out of the cushion. His face twisted in anguish. “That’s not what happened…”

  “Why don’t you tell me what really happened?”

  He looked away and she realized that not all the boundaries between them had been breached. She watched his head stoop and his shoulders sag as some burden pressed down on him. He ran a hand through his hair, staring at the floor before he said, “I can’t talk about that.”

  After everything she’d just told him about who and what she was, it seemed impossible that he could hold anything back. “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “Either. Both. I dunno,” Ray said, then went silent.

  Chapter 14

  If you have one, you want to share it. But if you

  share it, you don’t have one.

  “Ray, you helped me unlock my secrets,” Layla said. “Let me help you with yours.”

  Her voice held the promise of healing, but what happened in Afghanistan wasn’t Ray’s secret to tell. What’s more, he wasn’t sure if she was using her powers as a sphinx on him or not. Certainly, her questions were tying him in knots. She’d given him a lot to think about and an entirely new way to look at the world. It was a lot to process.

  “Ray,” she pressed. “What happened in Afghanistan?”

  “I said I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “Have you ever told anyone about it before?”

  Yeah. Once. They’d kept him awake for more hours than he could count, and he’d started hallucinating. He’d started to hope that he’d pass out when they zapped a current through him, because then he’d get some sleep. But the pain hadn’t been bearable, and in his desperation to say something that would make the torment stop, he’d confessed everything that’d happened in Afghanistan. He’d given up Jack to stop the pain and his only consolation was that his captors only laughed; they hadn’t believed him or maybe they hadn’t cared.

  “Ray?”

  “I’m not your prisoner anymore, Layla. I don’t have to answer your questions.”

  At that, her face fell, and she reached out to him. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. I just want you to know that when you’re ready, I’ll be here to listen.”

  He wanted to tell her, but there was a code soldiers lived by. To have each other’s backs. To stand up for your brothers-in-arms when no one else would. Ray, more than anyone, lived by that. How was he going to explain it to her? As it turned out, he was spared the effort. It took Ray a moment to remember that he had Missy’s phone and to realize that it was ringing.

  “I’ve gotta take this,” Ray said, flipping the phone open.

  It wasn’t Missy; it was Jack and he got right to the point. “We’ve got a problem, brother. The gal you sent to me for safekeeping just got herself arrested. I got in the truck and met up with her at a bus station. I was holding her bags when they nabbed her. She managed to give me this number to reach you.”

  Ray felt the veins at his temples throb and if he hadn’t needed the phone to actually speak, he’d have hurled it across the room. “Arrested? What the hell did she do? Turn tricks on the bus?”

  “Naw, it wasn’t local police or anything like that.”

  “Then who took her? FBI? Homeland Security?”

  “That’s just the thing,” Jack said. “They had that look, but they didn’t identify themselves, and they didn’t show badges.”

  Scorpion Group. Given what Layla had just told him, there wasn’t a doubt in Ray’s mind. “Do you know where they took her?”

  “N
o, but she’s just a kid. Whatever she knows, she’s going to spill. So, look, you know I got some money. I can get you out of the country and I think you better start fixin’ to leave.”

  No, Ray thought. This was his country. He’d fought for it. He’d bled for it. Why should he have to leave? Ray closed his eyes.

  “You can’t prove your innocence from behind bars, brother,” Jack said. “Pride’s a bitch, Ray. Let’s meet somewhere and come up with a plan. Just tell me where you are.”

  Ray didn’t want to give an address over the phone. Whoever figured out that Missy had a connection to him had either been watching him or tapping the phone. “I’ll be in touch.” He hung up without another word.

  Ray’s frustration was a palpable presence in the room as he paced back and forth at the foot of her bed. The real world—not as Layla had seen it before, but as it really was—was crashing in on them both. This place had been their refuge. In this cabin, she’d found herself again, and just a little bit of happiness with Ray, but Seth always said that nothing good was meant to last. “What are you going to do, Ray?”

  “I don’t know!” With one broad arm, he swept everything off her dresser. A hand mirror shattered, a lamp crashed and sparked out, and a decorative wooden box hit the wall and exploded into splinters.

  Layla didn’t care about the mirror or the lamp or the decorative box. The only broken thing she cared about right now was Ray. He needed her to talk him through this. “We’ll think it through, step by step.”

  His chest rose and fell, fists clenched at his sides as she slowly got through to him. “I need to find out where they took Missy.”

  “Okay. How can you do that?”

  “I remember Missy’s eyes. If I had a picture of her, or something to focus on, I could get into her mind. I could go into her dreams.”