Eddie gave her a hard, startled look. “Ma’am. With all due respect, just breathing isn’t enough.”
Rikki clamped her mouth shut. Amiri moved between them and placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder, bending slightly to peer into his dark eyes. An odd sight, but only because he was so gentle; effortlessly so. Everything about him was effortless. The way he moved, his strength, his determination. His mystery. Rare, rare, man. It stole her breath away, at the oddest moments.
Like now. Bodyguard and counselor. Listening to his soft rumble as he said, “There is no shame in leaving those men. It is not an act of desecration. You are not responsible for their deaths.”
Eddie’s gaze never faltered. “Too many people are getting hurt, Amiri. Doesn’t matter whether I’m responsible. I don’t want to get used to that.”
Like you have, Rikki told herself. It wasn’t entirely true—the refugee camp had certainly rattled her—but it was close enough to be disconcerting. She had a cold heart, tough as rawhide, carefully nourished, watered with clinical detachment, isolation, raw science—and she had never questioned why that might be wrong, even if it was a single-mindedness confined only to her waking hours.
Rikki’s dreams at night were another matter entirely.
She looked down at the gun still gripped heavy and clumsy in her hand. Took a deep breath, and walked toward the dead men. She stopped halfway, staring. She did not know them. She did not know why they had died. Might have been for a good cause. Might have been bad. She searched herself for even an ounce of compassion, and managed to dredge up just enough to make her feel ashamed of calling herself a doctor.
“Doesn’t matter whether I’m responsible. I don’t want to get used to that.”
From the mouths of babes and good young men. Rikki knelt in the undergrowth, the thorny vines. Heat bore down on her shoulders. Her throat was raw with thirst. Eddie and Amiri shadowed her. She set the gun down.
Eddie knelt wordlessly and took her hand. He had hot skin, like he was burning from the inside out.
Don’t touch me, she wanted to say. Don’t touch me, I’m dangerous. But she thought again of those other men, at the refugee camp, men and peacekeepers who had worn no protection at all. Acting like they owned the place. And it was too late, anyhow. All three of them had been breathing the same air, brushing up against each other. Touching.
She held up her other hand behind her head. Fingertips grazed her palm, twining slow and soft around her wrist. Amiri: warm, like holding sunlight.
Rikki smelled blood, the stink of dead bodies. Flies buzzed. She closed her eyes, and after some thought, said the Lord’s Prayer, remembered distantly as the echo of her father’s voice at the dinner table, and sitting on the edge of her bed. It was not entirely appropriate as a eulogy for the dead, for men who might not even appreciate the effort, but she had nothing else to offer. She did, however, try to find the meaning in every word that fell from her tongue, struggling to think of what her father would do—and finished, finally, with a quiet and heartfelt, “Amen.”
Her companions did not say a word. Eddie kept his eyes downcast and solemn—so much like her little brother she wanted to look away and cradle her aching heart. Neither he nor Amiri let go of her hands; the young man stood and both of them pulled, lifting Rikki up to her feet, swinging her between them.
Eddie bent and picked up her gun. He offered it to her, but she shook her head and he slipped it into the back of his jeans, alongside his other weapon. Amiri, she noted, did not carry a gun.
She gave the dead a long last look, and felt the hairs on her neck prickle. Like someone was watching. She turned and saw nothing.
Amiri said, “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” She searched the undergrowth, which was spattered with sunlight. “Nothing, I guess.”
Amiri touched her elbow and scanned the same area, eyes sharp as knives. “Come.”
She did, but just as she turned away to follow him, she glimpsed a flash of green—brilliant, the fire of sunlight caught in emeralds—verdant and rich as spring.
Then, nothing. A trick of light. The forest, casting illusions.
Illusions, that for one moment, looked like eyes.
Chapter Seven
Amiri found water on the craggy end of a buckle in the earth. It was a brackish pool that was hardly a hole in the ground, more mud than water. Rikki looked at it with unease.
“Worried?” Amiri asked, smiling faintly.
“Only because I don’t have an IV of saline and a box of Imodium,” she muttered.
Eddie also eyed the water like it had teeth. “I had a friend once who went camping and drank from a pond like this. He was stuck on a toilet for a week after.”
Amiri crouched and dipped a finger into the stagnant pool. “And here, you forgot to bring toilet paper.”
“Ouch,” Rikki said.
“That’s just mean,” Eddie added.
A low chuckle escaped him. “Both of you, city people.”
“And you?” Rikki replied, hand braced on her hip. Her face was flushed from exertion, her body sweat-soaked, but her eyes were bright and keen, and her jaw was set. So stubborn. Delightfully so.
Amiri’s mouth softened into a smile. “Second nature, Doctor Kinn. I am home, here. Home, where the wild things are.”
“Ah,” she said, with a bite. “And I suppose in your spare time you run around in a wolf costume, and conquer monsters with nothing but a look.”
“Until they crown me king,” he said, and took such pleasure in her startled expression that he almost laughed out loud. Instead, he settled for savoring her smile—a beautiful astonished smile that started small, then spread and spread until she looked at him with a child’s delight, sweet and young and full of wonder. It made him breathless.
“Did I miss something?” Eddie said, glancing between them.
“Maurice Sendak,” Rikki said, without looking away from Amiri. “Where the Wild Things Are.”
“It is a children’s book,” Amiri added. “I have two copies.”
“I have three,” Rikki said. “In a box, somewhere.”
“How sad,” he replied. “They must be lonely.”
“Oh, very.”
“Must be a good book,” Eddie said, looking between them. Much too thoughtfully. It made Amiri uneasy.
He rose, the cheetah stretching with him, just beneath his skin. “Both of you rest. I will go look for something we can eat.”
“I’ll go with you,” Rikki said, surprising him. For one brief moment, he almost told her no. Instinct. Habit. He was used to being alone. He should be alone.
But he could not make himself say it. Not when every fiber of his heart wanted to be alone with her.
He glanced at Eddie, who nodded, shadows in his gaze. Trying to be strong, but haunted.
That changed when Rikki passed and chucked him on the arm. Natural, easy, with open affection. The young man looked almost as surprised as she did, though Rikki covered it better, moving too quickly for Eddie to say a word. But he smiled at her back, all the trouble chased from his eyes, and that, Amiri thought, was another gift, all unto itself.
He held aside the undergrowth, guiding Rikki’s passage, and when they were out of earshot, he said, “You like him.”
She seemed to squirm, just a little. “Sure. But I even like you, for what it’s worth.”
Amiri inclined his head, not quite hiding his smile. “Eddie is young, hardly twenty. He has never been through anything like this. I worry about him.”
“So why is he here? What possible experience could a kid like him have?”
“A great deal. More than he should.” Amiri touched her shoulder, briefly. “It was good of you to give your respects to the dead.”
Again, she looked uncomfortable. “What would you have done?”
“Truthfully?” He hesitated, casting for words. “I would have kept walking. The dead are dead. Life continues and must be preserved. Those men offered us
nothing but the potential of trouble—and I owe nothing to strangers.”
“Pragmatist.”
“As are you, I think.”
She said nothing for such a long time, Amiri feared he had misjudged her. But just before he could ask, she cleared her throat and looked down at her hands. Stared at them with such concentration he felt her mind was in some other place—and that her hands in those memories looked quite different, indeed. It made him uneasy for her.
“I am what I am,” she said, enigmatically. “But it’s been a long time since I had to look into a mirror. Holding myself up against Eddie made me wonder if I’m somehow … less … than I used to be.” She tore her gaze from her hands, looked into his eyes, and for just one moment he saw something stark and vulnerable, something so quietly frightened that a shiver raced down his spine. “Do you worry about that, Amiri? Of becoming someone you never wanted to be?”
“All the time,” he whispered. Soft words; soft, cutting, words. “But then I tell myself that lives ebb and lives flow, and that we are all less and more than we used to be. I prefer that to the alternative.”
“Being dead.” No hesitation, no question.
Amiri had to remind himself to breathe. “You understand.”
“So do you.” She smiled, grim. “What does that make us?”
“Dangerous,” he said, without thought. “We are dangerous.”
To ourselves and to each other, he finished silently, feeling his face heat. Talking to this woman was like cutting strings around his heart: too much, too fast, too soon. He was a fool. He was insane. This woman was not for him.
But then she smiled, that soft wondering smile, and he forgot that he should be wary, and he forgot that he should push her away, and all he could think was that he would be a lucky man if he could keep her by his side, even for an hour.
Rikki’s stomach growled. She grimaced. “Pretend that didn’t happen.”
“I would, but my ears are still ringing.”
She balled up her fist and he slid out of reach, taunting, beckoning her to follow. She did, eyes gleaming, and he led her on a slow merry chase, reveling in the heat of her presence, the sound of her breathing. All around them was a new world, green and lush and full of shadows, inviting the beast to run and dream. Not Kenya. Not home. But close, close, the continent beneath his feet the same as a star in the sky—the same for any eye, no matter how distant.
He followed his nose toward food, led them to a damp patch of earth where the ground was soft with decay. He pushed aside slick crumbling leaves, revealed fluted mushrooms the color of apricots. Rikki stripped down wide leaves to roll into a cone, a makeshift container, to hold them in. She ate one of the mushrooms. So did he. The taste was mild, earthy. He preferred meat.
“I would hunt,” he said. “But a fire might give us away.”
She chewed and swallowed. “You think they’re still chasing us?”
“I am certain of it.”
“The chances of anyone seeing us escape—”
“We were seen.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, then.”
“Yes.” Amiri followed the curve of her cheek, the line of her throat. Sunlight dappled her face, bringing out the red and blonde in her short brown hair. More light yet was beneath her skin, as though she were another kind of shape-shifter, something far rarer than he. A small woman, a study in contrasts: She was delicately feminine, but radiating such raw strength in body and spirit that it was quite possible to imagine she could stop the world from turning just by the sheer force of her will alone.
He liked that about her. He liked many things about Rikki Kinn. “You live a dangerous life in Zaire. This is not a stable country, no matter your associations.”
“No place is safe,” Rikki replied. “I go where I’m needed.”
“What inspired you to become a doctor?”
Her smile was slow, self-mocking. “Honestly? At first, only because it was a guaranteed job. Security. I didn’t want to be a lawyer—I hate lawyers—but a doctor? Everyone needs a doctor, and they help people. That’s the mission. Plus, there’s money. Or at least, I thought there was.”
“Somehow, you do not strike me as quite that mercenary.”
“I’m not now. I’ve … matured. But my dad … he died when I was young, and the man who raised me after that didn’t have much except heart and grit. Not that it mattered. Not until he got sick. And then …” Rikki stopped, shaking her head. “Markovic was a gymnastics coach. I was one of his students. We were going to go to the Olympics together. I was sixteen. We’d been preparing for years. But then he got lung cancer, and everything just … fell by the wayside. I started focusing more on school, on getting jobs to help pay the bills. Markovic insisted on college. He had coached the daughter of the Dean at the University of Kansas, and he used that to make sure I got in, with aid, scholarships, the whole nine yards. Just in time. He died a month after I started.”
His heart ached for her. “And yet, you flourished.”
“You fight or you sink. Just so happened I had a very good head for science. Don’t know how or why. Chemistry was easy. Biology fun. I dug Calculus.”
“And viruses?”
“Fascinating.” Rikki’s face relaxed into a smile. “Mysteries. Riddles. Living and nonliving, occasionally lethal, quick to evolve, almost impossible to kill. Something I fantasized becoming, when I was growing up.”
An odd fantasy for a child, Amiri thought. “And now?”
Her smile turned faintly bitter. “Some dreams never really go away.”
He could not argue with that, though he found it disturbed him, slightly, to hear her say it. “I suppose, here, you would have some cause to fear for your life. Most certainly, after last night.”
“The rebels,” she said quietly, looking away. “All that death.”
“You have had dealings with them in the past?”
Her scent spiked, like a cushion of pins squeezing into his nostrils. Her gaze turned flat. “Some dealings. People have a saying now. If you meet les forces négatives, c’est l’horoscope. It’s written in the stars.”
Amiri made a small, noncommittal sound, trying to hide his distress at having upset her. “When I was young I did not believe in fate. Recent years have made me wonder.”
“I don’t wonder,” she replied. “Fate is nothing but a coping mechanism. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I would suppose it means something to those who need hope. Or explanations.”
“I prefer to believe there are some things that can’t be explained. That there’s no good reason for having your life torn apart, just because someone else decided …” Rikki stopped and turned her face, but not before pure grief crumpled her features, so raw Amiri’s heart twisted like a wrung cloth; wrenched, unbearable.
Your pain, mine, he thought, and had to look away, as well. “No one wants to believe in a destiny of cruelty.”
“No one likes a whiner, either,” she remarked, distantly.
“Or a martyr.”
Rikki blinked, focusing; then she burst out with a sharp bark of laugher. “What did you do? Before you decided to protect strangers for a living.”
“Oh,” he murmured. “It was a different life. Quieter.”
“That’s no answer.”
He looked at her. “And do you always get what you want, Rikki Kinn?”
A faint, sad, smile crossed her face. “Not when it matters.” There was no self-pity in those words, just the truth as she must see it.
Amiri captured her hand.
“Then we shall have to remedy that.”
Rikki gave him a startled look. Amiri leaned close, holding her gaze—holding her, even as she tried to lean away from him.
“What?” she whispered, eyes large.
“I like whiners,” he replied, gently. “One, anyway.”
She stared. He released her hand. She did not move, or blink. Amiri could not help himself. He brushed his thumb across her lips,
savoring their softness, the warm crush of pink beneath the darkness of his skin. Imagining what it would be to taste those lips.
She sucked in her breath, shuddering—with pleasure or concern, he could not tell. He did not let himself taste her scent. He drew back immediately, giving her space. Giving himself room to breathe. He thought of his father, and turned away. Started walking.
Rikki caught up with him. He forced himself not to look at her. But the silence was too much.
“You do not believe we are dying,” he said. It needed to be addressed.
“You have your own doubts,” she replied, and her voice was low, quiet. It was a dangerous, lovely voice.
Amiri steadied himself, studying the jungle walls, the shadows. He listened hard. “The men we encountered at the airfield were professionals. Peacekeepers or not, they knew what they were doing. They were too smart to enter the site of an outbreak without proper protection.” He thought about the man with the clipboard, clicking and clicking. “When Eddie and I first arrived at the camp, we were not allowed off the plane until our biohazard suits were firmly in place, and until the attack I did not see one person who lacked that good sense. The caution, the fear, was too great. But those men who attacked us … those men … they were not afraid. Not of the disease. And that is unnatural.”
“Unnatural,” she echoed, untangling her ankle from a vine. “Fear is the common denominator between all people. Fear and hunger. Death.”
“Love,” he added gently. “Love, too.”
Rikki looked away. “We could still be dying,” she said.
“But?”
“But those people at the refugee camp, every one of them, lost their lives within hours of each other. We have the notes to prove it, as well as the decay of the bodies. And that is unnatural. The transmission of a disease takes time. Some bugs are faster than others, but we’re talking about a camp of a thousand. A regular outbreak would have started with just a handful falling ill. A Hot Zone of individuals. There would have been time to instill a quarantine, to warn others and put some kind of safety measure in place.”
The Last Twilight Page 10
