Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  “I’m not most men.” His hands tangled in her hair and cupped her nape. “And I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Briefly, the rawness of everything he had lost was reflected in the depths of his eyes: family, friends, his home—a woman. Then his mouth touched hers and clung, unexpectedly soft and warm, surprising her beyond measure.

  As his mouth lifted, Cuin went up on her toes, automatically following the source of warmth and softness as he slowly lifted his head. She lifted her lids slowly. “So that’s a kiss.”

  The faint wariness that lurked in his gaze, faded. “No, this is a kiss.”

  His mouth touched hers again, and this time her lips gave way under firm, coaxing pressure as his tongue slid into her mouth. Shock momentarily paralyzed her. He tasted like melons and guava, sweet and tart, and inimitably male. His arms closed around her as the kiss deepened, and, once again, she lifted up on her toes, drawn deeper into his warmth as she curled her arms around his neck and fitted her body against his. The metal of his armor was cool against her breasts, and the hard shape of his male flesh pressed into the soft curve of her belly, making her stomach flip queerly and an odd, shivering heat start in the pit of her belly.

  Now she could see what all the fuss and anxiety were about. Now she could see why this was forbidden.

  The aching, shivering sensation grew, but as Achaeus lifted his head, she became aware that the shaking was emanating from outside her body.

  The vibration turned into the grinding roar of an earthquake as the ground surged and bucked. Achaeus caught her to him as they fell in an awkward sprawl, cushioning her landing with his body, and the section of the maze they’d walked through just minutes ago collapsed, the detonation deafening. Dust spewed in a choking wave, and with a muttered oath, Achaeus rolled, taking her with him so that they were wedged against a wall. For long minutes he held her pinned beneath him as the ground continued to surge, and dust and fragments of stone showered down.

  When the movement finally stopped, Achaeus pulled Cuin to her feet and gathered up the torch, which had been dislodged from its holder. He opened the flaps on the satchel and slipped out a metal canister that contained the maps he’d drawn of the maze. He selected the level they were on and spread the rough parchment out on the floor.

  Frowning, he examined the complex drawing and pinpointed their position. “The stonemasons who built this place knew what they were doing—I’ve never seen stone fitted so cleanly—but if this part has caved in, the chances are the whole structure could collapse. Show me the safest route out.”

  Coughing as dust swirled and settled, coating everything in gray, and still shaken from the unprecedented power of the earthquake, Cuin crouched beside Achaeus and studied the honeycomb of tunnels. “When we leave the inner chamber, this is the route we should take.”

  “We’re not going to the inner chamber—there’s no time.”

  Her jaw set. “I can’t leave until I’ve got the Sun Stone.”

  “No.” His glance was unequivocal. “The risk is too great.”

  Grimly, she stood her ground. “I’m the Cadis. I have a responsibility—”

  “The temple is finished. I don’t care if the gateway to paradise itself lies here—we’re leaving.” His expression was bleak. “The only responsibility you have is to twenty-nine women, twelve children and yourself. You’ll have your work cut out just surviving—and in this land, it won’t be long before every one of those women, old or not, has a husband.”

  Cuin flinched. The brutal succinctness of Achaeus’s logic was as sharp as a lash, and the notion that she could strike out on her own and collect the jewel herself died. Cloistered and protected for years, she wasn’t capable of the feat of endurance and strategy required to escape the valley alone. She needed Achaeus. Better that the jewel was buried with the temple than that it fell into pagan hands.

  The temple is finished. It won’t be long before every one of those women, old or not, has a husband.

  Achaeus hadn’t included her in the statement, but it was sweeping enough to hammer the reality home. In leaving the temple, they were leaving everything that was familiar and safe, and stepping into the unknown.

  A raw shudder swept her. The adjustment was huge. A husband.

  Yet the shock of her changed status wasn’t so great that she couldn’t accept it. Months of persecution and fear had done their work, slowly grinding away almost every part of the old life, turning their refuge into a prison and turning them into fugitives—yet, like amputees, they’d resisted change, clinging to the severed limb of the old until finally it had been forced from them.

  Chest squeezed tight, eyes burning, Cuin stared at the wall of rubble dimly visible at the edge of the circle of torchlight until her vision blurred and swam. The total destruction of the path they’d just walked somehow seemed symbolic; there was no going back, only forward.

  There was no longer a temple, and she was no longer the Cadis; she was simply…Cuin.

  Brushing dust-laden strands of hair back from a face that was unaccountably damp, she forced her attention back to the map and blinked until her vision cleared. Achaeus hadn’t asked her to find the fastest way out but the safest. That made sense, given that the structure was built from so many disparate parts. She had to think…think—she could walk these passages blindfolded, she knew them so well.

  Her finger traced a route that passed achingly close to the main chamber and the Sun Stone, but she firmly closed the door on the idea that she could make a detour. With Hotec on their heels, along with the threat of more shock waves and cave-ins, it was suicidal to remain in the maze any longer than they had to. “Even though it might seem a contradiction in terms, the oldest structure will be the safest.”

  Frowning, Achaeus studied the quadrant she’d pointed out, then jerked his head in assent. “The workmanship there is different—the construction more complex—and the stone’s as hard as adamantine. As for the rest of this place…” He rerolled the map, returned it to the canister, then slid the canister back into his pack. “If Hotec manages to gain entrance, he’s welcome to it. The whole lot’s ready to crack like a rotten egg.”

  They were almost at the West gate when the aftershock hit, the jolt not as violent as the first, but prolonged.

  Achaeus pulled her tight against him, one large hand pressing her head into the curve of his shoulder and neck. She could feel his warmth, smell that familiar spicy blend of herbs and clean male skin—the resinous scent that always emanated from his hair—feel the thud of his heart, the faint, regular vibration comforting as the world shook itself to pieces around them.

  With a jolt of surprise, she realized that when she was with Achaeus, even when they were at logger-heads, she was happy, the joy permeating even the darkest moments. She would happily die in his arms.

  The grinding roar increased. Pain scored her back, her head—a heavy weight forced her down, down—as if the whole world had up-ended and was caving in. Then everything went black….

  Six

  A sharp sound jolted Quin out of sleep. She became aware of a stiff breeze cutting through the trees that sheltered the grove, and an ache at the base of her spine, as if she’d been lying on the rock for far too long.

  A hard grip on her shoulder jerked her fully awake. She blinked into a glaring white light, and for a split second she swam in confusion, certain she was still in the underground tunnel staring into the guttering flame of the torch while the walls crumbled….

  “About time. Girl, you frightened the living daylights out of me.”

  A sense of inevitability grounded Quin with a thump when she recognized Aunt Olivia crouched over her, a frown on her face.

  Olivia’s hand closed around hers, warm and calloused from endless hours spent tending the vegetable garden and orchard, and Quin scrambled to her feet, limbs stiff and awkward, and found herself pulled into a hard hug.

  When Olivia released her, Quin’s apology died on her lips. Even without the light of th
e torch, she could make out the worry etched into Olivia’s face, and she was stricken with remorse.

  She’d expected it to be daylight when she opened her eyes, but the sun had long since set. The faint rim of color still showing above the distant hills told her that it must be after nine—not quite full dark, but close.

  She’d expected to catnap for a few minutes, and instead she had slept for more than five hours. A quick glance at her watch confirmed the time.

  Five hours.

  She flinched, her mind reeling, for a moment deaf to Olivia’s scolding. It felt as if she’d been in the dream no more than a few minutes.

  As Olivia began easing out of the rucksack that was strapped to her shoulders, Quin gripped her arm, halting the movement, and was abruptly reminded of how she’d felt when she’d been very small and had crawled into bed with Olivia whenever she’d had a nightmare. This hadn’t been a bad dream, exactly. That was the problem; she didn’t know what it had been.

  Tersely, she related what she could remember of the dream, although parts of it had already slipped into oblivion. She could remember the woman’s name, because it had been the same as her own, but when she reached for it, the name of the warrior eluded her.

  Olivia’s faded blue gaze sharpened as she listened. “Who was he? Did you recognize him?”

  Quin’s face went utterly blank as if she were looking inward to some secret place.

  Olivia had long since ceased to question the strangeness of her great-niece. For a start, she knew that whatever odd genes Quin had inherited had originated from Olivia’s own side of the family.

  The Chambers’ family skeleton was, by now, well documented. They had a long history of both men and women who had exhibited abilities beyond the norm, and those same abilities had relegated a good many of them to mental institutions. The rogue genes had skipped a generation, leaving Olivia and her two sisters, Hannah and Grace, living “normal” lives, only to reappear, seemingly stronger than ever, in Grace’s youngest daughter, Rebecca, and then in Rebecca’s child, Quin.

  Quin shook her head. “He was Ingles,” she said, using the Spanish word for European. “Very tall, with black hair.”

  Ingles. Olivia didn’t like the detail; it pushed Quin’s dream too close to the realm of psychic phenomena. There weren’t many Europeans around del Sol or the nearest village, Laguedo. Apart from old Avery Stanton, a doctor from the coastal settlement of Vacaro, who visited occasionally, the only Europeans Quin had ever seen were members of the medical teams who came to do vaccinations or, more rarely, mining companies’ employees checking for mineral deposits. Not one of those men fit Quinn’s description of the man in her dream.

  Olivia eyed Quin sharply, frowning at her bare, sun-browned arms. Now that the sun was down, the temperature was chilly, courtesy of an icy westerly wind blowing off the Andes. “How do you know he was a European? If he had black hair, he could have been Latin or Indian.”

  “He could have been Latin,” she allowed. “Definitely not Quechua or Mestizo.” Her shoulders lifted in a brief shrug. “I don’t know what made me think he was European. It was just an impression.”

  Olivia allowed herself to feel a cautious relief. She hoped that what Quin had experienced had been a dream and not a vision of some kind. God knows the girl had had a tough enough time of it as it was. She’d lived here since birth and run wild with the local children. Already the villagers knew she was different. Olivia did her best to keep the girl isolated from them, but Quin was her own worst enemy. She disappeared at the drop of a hat, flitting off into the jungle and mooning around the hills.

  Quin’s light blue gaze pierced Olivia’s in the gloom, and Olivia’s skin went goosy beneath the thick insulation of her sheepskin jacket. Sometimes the girl’s gaze was ancient in her thin face, giving Olivia the ridiculous impression that the child was older than both her and Hannah’s ages combined.

  “I think he’s coming here.”

  The flat certainty in Quin’s voice made the small hairs at Olivia’s nape lift. Over her dead body. “What on earth makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know, I just—” Quin shivered as if someone had just walked over her grave, and her gaze slid away, abruptly a child’s again. “I just have this feeling, that’s all.”

  A feeling.

  With an effort of will, Olivia reined in the pent-up fear and frustration that had eaten at her when Quin had failed to turn up at sunset. The last thing any of them needed—and most particularly Quin—was for her to start giving credence to “feelings” and visions. “For a start, my girl, he doesn’t exist. You had an unsettling dream—end of story. Don’t go looking for complications.”

  “I have to help him,” Quin said flatly, completely ignoring Olivia’s statement. “Why else would I have dreamed like that?”

  Impatience surged through Olivia, momentarily eclipsing the cacophony of aches and pains from stiffening muscles and brittle bones that made her feel every one of her sixty-one years. As much as she loved Quin and tried to understand the difficulties posed by her extra abilities, sometimes she wanted to shake all the nonsense out of her. “Help who, exactly? It was a dream. Forget about it.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  Despite the vulnerability inherent in the question, Quin’s jaw was stubbornly squared, and Olivia heard what she was really saying. What if I don’t want to?

  Grimly, Olivia eased out of the light rucksack she’d brought with her, dumped it on the ground, rummaged inside, and handed Quin a jacket and a torch. The psychic stuff might rattle her cage, but this she could cope with. “Try harder.”

  For a moment she thought Quin was going to argue. She was as strong-minded, as tough, as any of the local boys—a demanding, complex being, neither child nor adult. It was a certain bet that she would be hell on wheels when she was fully grown. Lately, controlling all that pent up energy and intellect had had both her and Hannah tearing their hair out, but God help her, the girl was bright and, so far—touch wood—exhibited none of the mental fragility that had almost seen Quin’s mother—Rebecca—forcibly committed. Despite the fact that Quin had inherited “the Chambers Curse,” this time it seemed that the varied and tortured talents that had haunted Olivia’s family as far back as the Norman invasion had finally metamorphosed into something useful. Quin could heal.

  In her strange way, she healed everyone. Olivia hadn’t credited it at first, until she’d been stricken with one of her periodic bouts of malaria and Quin had touched her with hands that had poured golden warmth. She’d been up and about within twenty-four hours, when normally she would have been confined to her room, too weak to do anything useful, for days.

  Hannah had benefited, too. The arthritis that had been slowly stiffening her joints, and which would have stopped her performing even the most basic of surgeries, had miraculously eased.

  As Quin shrugged into the jacket and zipped it, Olivia played the torch around the grove, spotlighting the giant rocks, now cast in a deep well of gloom, and the claustrophobic tangle of vines and under-growth that crawled over everything, absorbing light even on the sunniest days. Her spine tightened as the play of shadow revealed what daylight had previously hidden amongst the untidy scrabble of boulders and stones—the straight edge of a stone that had been hand-cut and dressed.

  For a split second her heart stopped in her chest and she forgot to breathe. The cut edge pulled at her, making her mouth water and her fingers itch to touch stone that had been worked by a people who had lived hundreds, no, thousands, of years ago—the lure close to irresistible. A large block this far up the hill meant it was likely there was a structure buried right here, beneath their feet, or perhaps further up the slope—since the block could conceivably have slid down the hill. And if there was a structure on the hillside, then it was also highly probable that the site continued on down to the valley floor, because that was just plain good sense. Whoever had built here would have needed the water and, besides, the river would have provid
ed transportation.

  Abruptly, she swung the torch away and turned her back on the mystery of Incan stone in a valley this far east of the Inca Trail. If her logic was correct, the site would be large, and they couldn’t afford the publicity that even a small find would attract. When she and Hannah had removed Quin’s mother from John Mallory’s custody—and from England—they had acted against a court decree. To compound their crime, Rebecca had been pregnant. They had effectively stolen Lord Mallory’s wife and his heir. In saving Rebecca from incarceration in a mental institution, they had become fugitives, but it had been worth it. Rebecca hadn’t lived beyond childbirth, but Quin had thrived. Olivia was certain that if Mallory had had a hand in Quin’s upbringing, he would have crushed her. “Don’t come here again.”

  Her voice was harsher than she’d intended, and for the space of a heartbeat, Quin’s gaze fixed on hers, openly curious.

  “What did you just see?”

  Not for the first time, Olivia wondered if the girl could actually read minds; then she dismissed the fanciful notion and busied herself refastening the flap of the pack. “Nothing, except that this place is even creepier by night. I don’t know what you see in it.”

  Quin’s grin flashed white. She pointed at the opening in the trees, which framed the mission where it nestled, lights glowing, in the distance. “What do you think?”

  The view was clear and unimpeded, and encompassed the river crossings and the track up the hill. As a lookout, it couldn’t be better.

  Olivia let out a breath and straightened, relieved that Quin had allowed herself to be distracted. She obviously hadn’t seen the cut stone. If she had, she would have recognized it immediately and pestered the living daylights out of Olivia until she’d confirmed her “find.”

  Quin had never visited any archaeological sites, but she’d seen enough pictures and diagrams—and she had an uncanny knack for identifying and dating artifacts that others brought to the mission. Tomorrow, if Olivia could slip away unnoticed, she would come back and bury the stone. The girl was fascinated enough with this place as it was. If she knew there was a ruin here, they wouldn’t be able to keep her away or keep her quiet.