Dark Time: Mortal Path (19 page)

Though he should be bowing to me, for both age and experience.

“I see you’re not wearing pads.” Greg was referring to the helmet and the chest, arm, and leg pads worn by students for sparring. “Sure that’s okay?”

“Not a problem. If you can do without, so can I. Open hand or weapons?” The dojo had a well-equipped weapon wall.

“No weapons. I wouldn’t want to hurt—”

She swept his leg, vaulted over him, punched a strike at his throat, stopping her hand a fraction of an inch away from his Adam’s apple, and ended up standing on the other side of him as if nothing had happened. She offered him a hand up from the floor, but he didn’t take it.

“Okay, let’s get serious.”

Yeah, let’s.

Maliha kept him on edge but didn’t dig deeply into her set of skills. It was clear he’d been trained by someone with an eclectic style similar to the way she fought: whatever works. They switched to eskrima sticks and then swords. Greg called a halt after twenty minutes of testing. He was red and sweating.

Maliha’s heartbeat had barely ticked up a notch.

“You’re certainly a match for me,” he said, puffing a little. “I thought you said you dabbled in martial arts. How’d you get so good?”

“Years of practice, I guess. I started when I was a lot younger.”

“You must have started as a baby, then.” He laughed at his own joke. “What do you think about taking on someone with more experience? My trainer’s here today. I’m sure he’d love to work with a more advanced student than I am.”

I’ve got better things to do than this. Like carve a bar of soap into a dragon or something.

“Sure, I’m up for it.”

The trainer turned out to be a taciturn man from Central Asia who didn’t say a word. She placed him as Mongolian.

Wind howled outside the small
ger.
Inside, in the sweaty aftermath of fierce lovemaking, Susannah
lounged naked in front of the fire. Wood smoke rose to the open hole in the ceiling. Snowflakes from the
storm outside drifted down into the hole, met the rising column of smoke, and winked out of existence.

She ran her hands across the furs beneath her and listened as her man sang and played the
morin huur,
a
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two-stringed fiddle with a carved horse’s head on the handle. The instrument produced the sounds of a
horse galloping across the steppes, and his voice rose and fell to match the rhythm. He set the fiddle
down and turned to her, his eyes hot with lust, hotter than the fire. Her smile was all the invitation he
needed.

The trainer was a man about her height, well-muscled, compact, with a low center of gravity. He’d be harder to take down to the mat than Greg, but all that was needed was a feel for how much force to apply where, and she’d find that out the first time she tried.

She gave him a traditional bow, but he inclined his head slightly in return.

Arrogant son of a bitch. This is going to be fun.

Her first few attempts to throw him to the mat failed. She couldn’t seem to use his weight against him, so she adjusted her strategy to swift, powerful kicks and rapid punches. He blocked everything she did, and answered her attacks with more-effective ones. Tempting as it was, she didn’t want to get into it and show skills that were exceptional. She called it quits, admitting that he was too much for her.

Greg looked smug. A win by his trainer was a win by proxy for him, and it was apparent that Greg didn’t like to lose. He excused himself, saying that he had to make a few phone calls and would meet her after she changed clothes. He hinted that she should shower in the dressing room, and she wondered if he had a peephole in there.

As soon as he left the room, the trainer spoke for the first time.

“Shall we continue?”

The trainer’s voice was like a blast of cold air. She shivered and the hair rose on her forearms.

Before she could answer, he launched an attack that drove her back to the edge of the mat. In defense, she began to move faster, strike harder, use the walls as springboards. He was relentless, and the blows he used would be lethal if they connected. All pretense of a sparring exercise had vanished.

What is this? Who is this?

He came away from the weapon wall with a sword, leaving her no choice—she chose a sword, too.

The pace of the fighting accelerated. He drove past her defenses and slashed her right arm, a stroke to weaken the muscles there. Instantly she spun to keep him from inflicting damage on her other arm, switching the sword to her left hand before her blood even hit the mat. She ended the spin in a crouch, an unusual position that she thought might take him off guard. His blade whistled above her head, a stroke that would have cut her in half if she’d been standing. She found an opening, and jabbed upward toward his armpit. It should disable him enough for her to put a stop to this contest. She had to stop it, because very soon she’d have to reveal skills that had taken more than one lifetime to acquire.

He blocked her unexpected jab, but a fraction of a second late. The blow was deflected downward into his arm. She was off balance, leaning forward into the movement, and struck harder than she meant to. The sword bit into his wrist, nearly severing his hand.

Horrified at what had happened, she pulled up on the next strike she’d launched, and stood motionless, as did he. He was bleeding profusely from the wrist, and his hand was hanging by thin band of skin.

Going to be hard to explain to Greg. I come for lunch and chop off somebody’s hand.

The Mongolian pushed his hand back into place and held it there. She stared as the bleeding stopped and the flesh rejoined. In a minute he flexed his wrist with no sign of damage except red stains on his clothing.

He’s Ageless.

The realization hit her hard. She was standing a few feet away from a being like she’d been, a servant of a demon. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. All the blood seemed to have left her limbs, leaving them cold and immobile. Like her first days as a martial-arts student, she was in the presence of someone who could strike her dead at any moment. Her heart thudded against her ribs with a force that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with fear.

“My name is Subedei. We’ll meet again on another battlefield.”

He was gone in a flash. Or was he? The dojo was silent and threatening. At any moment, he could reappear behind her and slash her throat, or in front of her and run her through with the sword. With a running leap from the edge of the room, he could decapitate her, and in that second she would enter Rabishu’s unending torment, her goals on Earth unfulfilled. The thought made her ill.

Subedei. S. My stalker, who put his initial on my photo like I belonged to him, who violated…

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She pictured the black panties, then herself wearing them, and gasped. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she knew for certain that Subedei’s hand had rested on them between her legs. He’d done nothing more, but the touch was to claim her.

In the dressing room, still trembling, she stripped off her uniform. The wound on her arm wasn’t serious. She ran water over her arm to clean off the blood, then wrapped the area tightly with gauze she found in the room’s first-aid kit. She put her black dress back on, glad now for the long sleeves that hugged, and hid, her arms. As she stepped out into the hall and saw Greg walking toward her, she remembered that there was blood on the mats in the dojo, both hers and Subedei’s.

Let Subedei deal with it. He wouldn’t want it known, either.

On the way home, the pleasure of driving the McLaren forgotten, she pulled off the road and vomited into the grass when the fear of what could have happened in her encounter in the dojo hit her. Of what already had happened, some night in her home, his powerful hand resting on the most private of places.

She’d had better days.

A
fter his guest took her leave, Greg Shale moved into the room adjacent to his office, which resembled a war room. In the dim light, monitors mounted on the walls surrounded his chair, a swiveling black leather seat that gave him a wide view of the screens. The changing displays showed a variety of information.

Some were charts, some maps with gleaming pinpoints, like diamonds scattered on a spider web. Others were interior views of bright and busy rooms with uniformed people in motion. He could see himself in several of the monitors angled just right to catch his reflection. The colors and designs on his reflected view made him look machinelike, a robot with its electronic workings exposed. He was pleased with the look.

The bulk of the Mongolian blocked his view. It was startling, like a black cloud passing over the sun out of a sky that had been clear moments before.

“Shit, don’t sneak up on me like that!”

Subedei gave no hint that he’d heard the complaint.

He needs to work on his fucking people skills. If he wasn’t such a damned good bodyguard and
trainer, I’d chuck him out.

Greg didn’t mean that. It was a spot of luck that Subedei had come along right after Greg’s former chief bodyguard was killed in a car crash. Being around Subedei somehow gave him a feeling of invincibility he’d never had with a bodyguard before. On the whole, the benefits of having Subedei around seemed more than enough to compensate for the fact that the man wasn’t the kind of deferential employee Greg liked.

Never said one goddamned” sir” to me in all these months, but he takes the personal-protection
crap off my mind and lets me concentrate on important things. Like the Winters woman. Damn, she’s hot.

The way she moves on the mat…I can hardly wait until I get her moving under me.

“How was she, then? What did you think of her?”

“She’s good, very good.” Subedei’s voice was deep, and there was a catch in it Greg hadn’t heard before.

“Good, but no threat to us,” Subedei continued. “You can forget about that and just enjoy her.”

“Just what I wanted to hear. If you want her when I’m done with her, go ahead.” His bodyguard didn’t seem to mind Greg’s castoffs, although Greg was sure that supply alone wasn’t enough to satisfy the man’s immense appetite for sex. For a moment he imagined what it would be like to be the powerful Subedei, who was uninhibited by social restraints and took what he wanted, when he wanted it. The thought aroused him.

Not only a bodyguard, but a role model as well.

He decided it was a good time for a little afternoon delight with Fawn, his current personal—and 65 z 138

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extremely loyal—assistant.

When he looked up from his reverie, Subedei was gone.

Before he could call Fawn, the special phone rang—the one he didn’t dare ignore.

He listened for a minute. “I’ll be right there.”

No longer in the mood for a romp with Fawn, he headed to his private parking area. It had just turned into a shitty afternoon. He had to give a progress report to the boss, known to him as B. T., since he had some unpronounceable Chinese name. Mentally, Greg called him Big Turd.

Fucking Chinese are taking over the world.

Greg drove to Morton Arboretum, where he’d met with the boss twice before. Walking through the East Woods, Greg had to admit that the woods were beautiful in October, with the brilliant gold of the sugar maples as a backdrop to a scattering of oaks, with their deep crimson leaves. It was a place where peace could soak into a person’s bones. Greg wasn’t there for peaceful meditation, though.

He rounded a bend in the trail and spotted the old man sitting on a bench, wearing a floppy hat to protect his nearly bald head from the sun. He had binoculars to his eyes, staring into the trees looking for some damn bird or other. It was quite a trick, since at other times Greg got the impression that the old man was blind.

Greg sat down on the bench and neither of them said anything for a few minutes. B. T. finished his observation, put down his binoculars, and made a quick notation in a journal.

“A cerulean warbler. Rare in this area. This little one should have left for South America already.”

Greg shrugged. The man’s voice sounded like paper crumpling, and his body looked as though a good kick to the belly would snap him in half.

Subedei spoke of this man with humility, even a twinge of fear, and Greg couldn’t imagine his bodyguard bowing his head to a weakling. Subedei had once called him Grandfather, but Greg didn’t think there was a literal relationship. It was a respect thing. Taking his bodyguard’s warnings to heart, Greg stayed on his best behavior and refrained from making the smart-ass remarks he might direct at a weak old man. Subedei had warned him not to speak until B. T. asked him a question. He had also hinted that Greg should sit on the ground at the boss’s feet and that he should keep his eyes lowered, but all that was too much. Did his bodyguard think this was the Middle Ages or something?

This is America, and we don’t do that peasant shit.

“The sun is pleasantly warm today,” the old man said.

Does that call for an answer?

Playing it safe, Greg nodded. He noticed that the man’s clothes were summer-thin, and he wore no coat. Greg was wearing a sweater, and a jacket on top of that, against the fall chill in the air.

“I believe you have diverted some of the project’s development funds for your own use in propping up your corporation. Is that true?”

How the hell did he know that?

Greg hesitated. With anyone else, Greg would lie. With B. T., he tried to gauge whether he could get away with it or not.

The man suddenly fixed Greg with eyes as hard as stone, ancient and cruel and supremely confident, and full of utter disregard for human life.