Dark Sins and Desert Sands

by Stephanie Draven

  “Like you found me,” Layla said, not liking the idea at all. It felt, somehow, too intimate a thing for him to do with anyone else. Besides, it was dangerous. Every time he used his powers, it damaged him a little more. “And once you find her, what will you do?”

  “Something crazy, probably.”

  She needed to get through to him. “Ray, does it even make any sense that anyone would have taken her? What does she really know about you?”

  “She knows about you,” he said, still seething with anger. “She knows that you called me to meet you. Given when I dropped her off at the bus stop, someone could use that information to track me here.”

  “If that’s true, then the most important thing for us to do is leave immediately and not worry about the girl. Missy’s young. The authorities will probably just let her go.”

  “What if it’s not the authorities that took her? What if it’s Seth? Would he kill her?”

  Layla could read his unspoken thoughts. Missy wasn’t brown, or Muslim, or any of the things that Ray believed to be at the root of how easily he’d been disappeared. But Missy was a prostitute. She was someone without a family to fight for her. Someone who lived at the edge of the law. Someone that society saw as disposable.

  Luckily, Layla knew that Seth didn’t enjoy killing people half as much as he loved forcing people to kill each other. He wasn’t a god of murder; he was a god of war. “He won’t kill her unless she gives him a reason to. He wouldn’t have taken her unless she was useful to him, unless he thought she knew something that would help them track us down.”

  “Or he took her to flush me out, to lure me into a trap…”

  “I don’t think so,” Layla said quietly, preparing to lay out her arguments rationally, even though she knew they’d offend him. “The authorities think you’re a terrorist. A killer. Given Missy’s age, they probably even think you’re a pedophile. They aren’t likely to think that you’re sentimental enough to come rescue her.”

  “What about Seth?”

  Layla bit her lower lip. “He thinks you’re a raging monster bent on revenge. If he’d dangle anyone in front of you as bait, it’d be me.”

  He glanced at her in surprise, those dark eyes peering up from the shadows of his face, the unspoken question on his parted lips. She could see him trying to form the question in a way that wouldn’t open up old wounds. “In Syria, when you were interrogating me, when you told me that you had feelings for me…that was his idea?”

  “Partly.” Seth had encouraged her to toy with Ray’s emotions. He’d told her to pretend to care about Ray, but somewhere along the way she didn’t have to pretend anymore and when Seth found out, he’d punished her. Layla didn’t want to blame anyone else for the things she’d done, so she said, “He saw everything on camera and when you escaped, he knew you’d hunt me down…”

  “That’s why he was having you watched?”

  “You mean, besides his desire to terrorize me? Yes.”

  Ray squinted. Layla knew all of this was a lot for a mortal to understand—even a special one like Ray. “I don’t get it.”

  “He wants to capture you, Ray, and not just because you escaped. It’s not just a matter of government contracts or professional pride. He knows about your powers. He wants to make you use your powers to do his bidding, just as he made me use mine.”

  “And you were supposed to lure me in.”

  She hadn’t betrayed him. Not this time. So she didn’t flinch. “He just didn’t think I’d run away with you.”

  Ray almost smiled at that. She saw the corners of his lips quirk up as if he was going to make a flirtatious remark, but his mind was on the hapless young prostitute who had helped him and was now paying the price. “If Seth captured Missy, where would he keep her? Does Scorpion Group have a headquarters, or are we talking about Mount Olympus or some fairy-tale palace in the sky?”

  “Scorpion Group headquarters is in Dubai, but there’s an office in Arlington and another in Washington. If Scorpion Group is responsible for nabbing Missy, they might hold her there.”

  “What’s the security like?” he asked her.

  Layla arched a brow. “Why? You’re not seriously thinking of breaking her out, are you?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Yes,” Layla said, biting her lower lip. “Let me do it.”

  “I’m not letting you do this,” Ray said, watching with scarcely contained amazement as the woman who claimed to be a sphinx dressed herself and gathered her things with military precision.

  Layla tucked a small pistol into her boot and another at the small of her back. “I told you. I have security passes. They’re expired but they might still get me into the building. People might remember me there and let me inside.”

  She’d handled her weapons like a pro, and he’d be lying if he said that her sudden proficiency with firearms wasn’t a turn-on, but the change in her was enough to give him whiplash. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “For me?” She glanced up at him. “Ray, it doesn’t matter if I walk into a hail of bullets. You saw how my skin heals. I’m a sphinx. Nothing can kill me. Well, almost nothing anyway.”

  “I’m not talking about bullets, Layla. I’m talking about Seth. If everything you’ve remembered is true, you were right to run from him. He broke your mind and left what remained of your identity swirling down a shower drain while you sobbed. You’ve said that he could do worse things to you than kill you, but suddenly, you want to just turn around and risk falling back into his hands?”

  Slinging a backpack over one shoulder Layla said, “He’s after you, too, but you’re the one who is determined to break into Scorpion Group buildings.”

  “That’s because I have to find Missy. She shouldn’t be involved in any of this. The kid wouldn’t be involved in any of this if it weren’t for me. She trusted me and I put her in harm’s way. But you don’t have to put yourself at risk for Missy. She doesn’t mean anything to you.”

  “Yes, she does. She means something to me, because she means something to you.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. It humbled him a little bit.

  “We need to get going, Ray,” Layla said. “We’ll be spotted if we go anywhere near an airport so we’re going to have to drive, and it’ll take more than thirty-eight hours to get to D.C. even if we trade off driving in shifts.”

  It wasn’t until they’d reached the border of Utah and Colorado that Ray finally turned to her and asked, “What did you mean when you said almost nothing could kill you?”

  She’d been hoping he’d glossed over that slip of the tongue. “What do you think I meant?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question, Layla. Can something kill you or not?”

  It was a complicated question. “Not now. Not the way I am. I’m immortal unless I pass my life force on to someone else.”

  “Pass your life force onto somebody else?” Ray eyed her suspiciously, his hands tightening on the wheel. “Like who?”

  “Like a child,” she said, staring out the passenger side window at the passing road signs. She’d always wanted a child—a family—even if it meant that she wouldn’t live forever, but Seth was the god of the sterile desert, the veritable patron of infertility. He couldn’t give her a child and her desire to be a mother was blasphemy against her creator. “If I give birth, I pass on the breath that Seth gave to me, and become a normal human woman who ages and dies.” When Ray was silent, she asked, “You don’t believe any of this, do you? You don’t believe what I just told you and you don’t even believe I’m a sphinx.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you.” Ray rubbed the stubble on his unshaven chin. “Okay, I don’t know what the hell to believe, Layla. But what you’re saying makes as much sense as anything else I’ve been through in the past few years. It’s just the whole idea that you think of yourself as not human. That Seth created you…”

  “He created you, too.”

  He looked at h
er and the expression on his face wasn’t pretty. “What do you mean?”

  “Seth fashioned me from sand, from nothing. But just as surely as he made me a sphinx, he used the horrors of that dungeon to turn you into a minotaur.”

  It seemed as if Ray had only heard one word, and now he repeated it, his lips moving slowly. “Minotaur.” He probably knew about the monster of Crete, the one that the ancient king locked in a labyrinth. The one that hunted down and devoured youths until Theseus slew him. Even schoolchildren knew that story, and the way Ray’s eyes blazed, she could see that he didn’t like the comparison.

  “The minotaur in the Greek myths wasn’t the first minotaur and won’t be the last,” Layla explained. “It wasn’t just happenstance that you became this way, Ray. Seth made you into what you are.”

  “There were hundreds of prisoners in that Syrian jail,” Ray protested. “You’re saying that someone is turning them all into minotaurs?”

  “Just you,” Layla whispered. “You had the right ancestry. The right circumstances…”

  “What circumstances?” His fingers flexed around the steering wheel in annoyance. “The minotaur was a flesh-eating monster locked in a labyrinth under some Greek palace. So what? It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “It has everything to do with you. The minotaur you’ve read about was a bastard child and so are you.”

  Ray glared at her. “My mother—”

  “Not literally, Ray. Figuratively a bastard. Because of your skin, your upbringing, your religion, the languages you speak. Your countrymen couldn’t decide if you belonged to them or to the enemy they’re fighting. You’re the unwanted offspring of mixed heritage and they locked you up. They didn’t have the courage to torture you themselves, so they brought in Scorpion Group to do it for them. That’s when Seth saw an opportunity to twist you into a creature that could serve him.”

  “And you knew this?” Ray asked.

  Layla shook her head quickly, violently. “No. I’d never willingly help Seth create another monster and I’d never help him use someone else the way he’s used me. When I found out what he was doing to you, I demanded your release.”

  Layla trailed off, not wanting to tell him how Seth had laughed at her demand. She’d refused to interrogate Ray anymore and promised to defy Seth until he was forced to return her to the desert sand from whence she’d come. So he’d done just that. He’d taken her memories from her and buried every desire she’d ever had.

  It almost comforted Seth that so many of the old gods were without power and influence in the world, because if they knew just how many ways his minion had betrayed him, their mocking laughter would go on for eternity. Layla had been here. He could smell her deceit in every crevice of this cabin. How many years had it taken his clever little sphinx to find a remote spot like this one and squirrel away supplies? To set up a safe house like this one meant that she must have been planning to run away from him even before her heart softened toward Rayhan Stavrakis. It meant she’d been planning her escape even before he decided to destroy her memory. It was a shame he only had the power to bury memories, not read them, or he might have predicted this.

  Seth found a Hello Kitty phone tossed haphazardly on the bed, no doubt hastily ditched so that the authorities couldn’t track them. The bed looked rumpled and slept-in, which made Seth scowl. It wasn’t like Layla to leave her bedsheets askew. Had she shared this bed with the minotaur? No, surely not. He put the horrifying thought out of his mind at once, then stooped down to survey the wreckage.

  Glass shards and wood splinters littered the floor, and a broken lamp lay sprawled like a corpse. It looked like there’d been some kind of violence here, perhaps a fight. Now that was an idea more to his liking. It would be inconvenient if his all-but-immortal sphinx managed to kill his very mortal minotaur, but it was hard for him not to delight in imagining what would have been a powerful clash between the two.

  The war god heard a sound at the door, and he thrilled at the notion he might have captured his quarry after all. Perhaps she’d not abandoned the cabin, merely gone for supplies or returned from burying the minotaur’s body. Oh, it would be so sweet to capture Layla and not just because of the way he’d enjoy crushing her beneath his thumb. It also meant that he’d win the wager with Xochiquetzal. With the promise of victory humming through his veins, Seth stalked silently toward the entryway, positioning himself so that he could take his prey by surprise.

  The door opened and just as he reached to grab her, he saw a flash of the woman’s hair. It was a wild tangle of brown curls, not Layla’s jet-black mane.

  “You!” Seth growled, grabbing her by the wrist.

  “You!” Isabel said at the same moment, whirling to face him.

  They stared at each other for a moment, then he let go of her as if he’d caught a serpent by the tail. He was stunned to find her so close on his trail. He’d used all his government connections to get here ahead of the authorities. “How did you find this cabin?”

  “You have your minions, Papi,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “And I have mine.”

  Seth glanced out the picture window where several butterflies danced on the wind, but he had difficulty believing that the winged creatures were as effective as global positioning satellites. “Layla’s not here.”

  “Qué lástima,” Isabel said with a heartfelt sigh, then walked to the sliding glass door. “You can see the whole of the Mojave from here. It looks so barren….”

  “You’d be surprised at how much life you can find in a desert.”

  “Tell me about the desert you ruled, Seth. Were you very powerful?”

  “I’m still powerful,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “But lonely,” Isabel replied.

  It was true that the modern world was a lonely place for war gods. The violence remained but the glory was gone. It was chaos that thrilled Seth, so he also despaired of the modern mortal obsession with laws. Men even tried to fashion rules for war; it was exhausting to subvert those rules and unbearable that he should have to. To whom could he turn for solace? Could Isabel understand?

  “And you? What did the Queen of Whores rule?”

  “A verdant jungle teeming with beauty,” she said, turning back toward him so that he could see her eyes light up to remember. “There were tribal festivals in my honor, where the silversmiths would come to ply their trade. The weavers and the sculptors would come, too. All the people who created things loved me. But especially the prostitutes who danced with flowers in their hair…”

  “I heard they’d sacrifice a girl and flay her skin off her body in tribute to you,” Seth said, for he knew more about her than he’d admitted. “That sounds like something I would have enjoyed. Did you?”

  “No.” Isabel scowled. “The mortals seem to always get it wrong and lead the religion astray.”

  He enjoyed having wiped the smile off her face. In fact, he enjoyed the sparring altogether too much. “Those days are gone now, Isabel, but if you must live amongst the mortals why take such a menial job?”

  “Helping people is never menial,” Isabel said. “I’m studying to become a sex therapist. Working for Layla was good clinical training.”

  “A sex therapist,” he said, a bitter taste in his mouth. If she must feed off sex, why not become a celebrity starlet? Why not own a pornographic media empire? “How can you disgrace yourself? Aren’t you better than this?”

  “Better than what?” Isabel said with a teasing grin, leaning back against the window so that the light radiated around her curvaceous form. “Better than you? I think I am. I think I’ll find Layla before you do, and then we’ll see who is a disgrace.”

  Chapter 15

  I fly in the air

  And rarely touch the earth

  Men die for me

  Protecting home and hearth

  In all the years Ray had been fighting under its flag, he’d never seen much of the nation of his birth. Now, driving cross-country with Layla, he
was mesmerized by its beauty. The reds and browns of the desert and mountains faded into the plains states and their amber waves of grain. By the time they got to Topeka, Kansas, there was nobody on the road and he’d never seen so many stars in the sky.

  “It’s sooo good,” Layla said, with a sensual moan. She literally writhed in the passenger seat, her well-manicured fingers flexing around her soda bottle with pleasure.

  She’d been doing that with every bite of the cookie Ray had picked up for her in a convenience store and her enthusiasm was starting to turn him on. He glanced over in time to see her licking chocolate from her fingers in a way that made him twitch. She aroused him so easily, under any circumstance, without even trying. Maybe especially when she wasn’t trying.

  For as long as he’d known her, she’d been a serious woman, but now she started laughing. It reminded him of how she’d sputtered with joy in the bathroom of that crappy little motel when she’d first touched him. The pleasure of the memory—of being touched in a way that didn’t bring pain—set him off balance. “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s just that I can’t believe I’ve gone two years without eating anything sweeter than a bran muffin!” Her laughter cut off suddenly, and she stammered, “Oh—oh, Ray. I’m sorry. Next to what you’ve been through…”

  “Don’t do that,” he said. It’s true that he’d spent two years eating any slop they shoved through the slats of his prison cell, but she’d been in a kind of prison, too. He was glad she was finally free of it. “Don’t walk on eggshells like you pity me, Layla, or like you think I’m going to explode at any moment.”

  “Okay,” she said, offering him a bite of the dessert as a peace offering. “Do you want some?”

  “No, thanks. I’m not big on sweets unless it’s my mother’s baklava. The way she brushes the phyllo dough with butter and spices the nuts… My whole family goes crazy for it.”

  Layla stared at him. “What’s it like to have a family?” It was an odd question, and his expression must have said so, because she explained, “When I didn’t have my memories, I always hoped that there was a family out there somewhere looking for me. Now I know that I don’t have parents. I don’t have siblings or children. Just Seth.”