Phantom Series Boxed Set (78 page)

Though she did not seem the fearful type, Mariah Hunter did appear to be a sensible woman who harnessed her fear and turned it to her advantage, but whoever she spoke with now frightened her. And she’d been startled to hear Rafe’s voice. Yet despite her apprehension, she approached the stone again and knelt, her elbow on her knee and her chin resting on her fist. Her eyes narrowed with curiosity.

He could hear the tinny sound of a voice emerging from out of the slim silver device, which, now that he could see it more closely, resembled a decorative case often used for snuff. The idea that people could converse over any distance with no more than a piece of metal as their conduit fascinated him.

“Yes, I understand that you invested a lot of money,” she said, her tone distracted. “But these things happen. You knew the risks.”

With a jolt, she moved the box abruptly away from her ear. The harsh voice inside the box increased in both volume and anger.

“I need more time,” she said finally.

Rafe sensed her annoyance increase as she pushed any fear completely aside.

“A week?”

She paced around the room now, stopping once to glance out of the window. When she moved the shade, no light came into the room. Rafe assumed this meant the hour was late. For a split second, he allowed himself to wonder what view existed outside the window, and the thought increased the drag he’d been fighting since she first touched the stone.

He resisted again, something that became easier after she walked away.

“What if I find you something even more valuable than the Mayan coins?” she asked.

Her smile was enhanced by a cunning light in her eyes, a gleam suddenly in balance with the rest of her face. Rafe watched in wonder. Her anxiety dissipated as her sense of control increased. Her excitement and anticipation seeped into the stone, even from a distance, building his curiosity to unbearable levels.

She was no ordinary woman. He sensed that she fed on risk and danger. He couldn’t remember experiencing such an intimate connection to someone he’d never yet touched. Never
would
touch.

His resistance to the pull faltered, but did not break.

“Well,” she said, “I may have something interesting for you. I’m doing research. I’ll be back in touch when I know more. You could end up recouping your investment and making a tidy profit. That’s win-win, yes?”

Her smile broadened. She said good-bye, tossed the silver case onto the bed and threw her hands up with an excited whoop. With her exhilaration canceling out her wariness, she scooped the stone into her palm and talked to it directly.

“I don’t know what you are, but if you get me out of this fix, you’ll be worth all the added craziness you’ve brought into my life.”

Rafe concentrated on remaining silent. He washed his thoughts of any possible response, focusing instead on the nothingness that had been his only company for centuries. Mariah continued to eye the stone quizzically, then finally tossed it onto the bed, double-checked the lock on the door and then proceeded to remove her clothes.

Rafe knew he should look away. But as she peeled her snug shirt from her skin, revealing a lacy contraption that buoyed her breasts, the distinction between right and wrong disappeared. Like a man, she wore breeches that reached her ankles, but the fabric hugged her hips and buttocks, with shocking emphasis on the parts of her that were, undeniably, female.

She flicked a button at her waist and, seconds later, shimmied and undulated provocatively until only the lace on her breasts and a sheer scrap of silk cut into a triangle at the apex of her thighs kept her from total nakedness.

Had he a mouth, Rafe knew it would have watered.

He had to look away or douse the room in darkness to preserve the privacy she had no idea she did not have. Suddenly, the lanterns she’d lit upon entering the room flickered, then went out.

“Strike me, what now?” she shouted, frustrated.

She stumbled away and then a light from a smaller room behind her flicked on. Backlit, her body tortured him anew. She was lithe and slim, yet muscled. Her skin glistened as if she’d spent her whole life in the sun.

Despite the wrongness, he wanted to see all of her. The lights in the room came back on. She gasped, eyed the stone warily again, then whispered something to herself that he could not hear, though her uncertainty rang loud and clear. She closed the door to the smaller room with a decisive bang.

Moments later he heard water, as if a rainstorm had started inside the tiny room where Mariah had disappeared. After a while, steam seeped from a gap between the door and the floor. Water? Inside? And how had it heated so quickly? He sensed no fire. Saw no maid to draw a bath.

This woman brought him nothing but confusion and conflict. He had not wanted to leave Valoren. He’d never wanted to know the world outside of his homeland. Unlike his brothers, Rafe had been born in the Gypsy colony, and unlike his sister, who longed to explore, Rafe had never entertained any desire to leave. Now, trapped within Rogan’s magical stone, he had no choice but to go wherever this woman took him.

And added to his torture now was Mariah Hunter herself. She moved with the same sensuality as the wind in a storm, possessing all the same flashes of emotion, the same thunderous desires. Her tempestuous emotions wreaked havoc on his long-dormant abilities to care about the world outside. Long ago, he’d come to terms with his fate—or at the very least, he’d forgotten how to rage against it. What point did fighting serve? No matter how he’d once tried, no matter what he’d lost, he could not free himself from his magical prison.

And yet, until he’d crossed paths with Mariah Hunter, he’d never experienced the incredible pull he suspected would lead him to the outside. All he had to do was surrender. Give in. Trust that submitting would not result in something worse than perpetual imprisonment.

Suddenly, the memory of his first hours trapped inside Rogan’s marker rushed back at him. Pain slashed at his nonexistent innards. He tried to push the images away, but he had nowhere to hide from the anguish, nowhere to run from the guilt.

He remembered little of what happened to him immediately after he’d drawn his dagger to destroy Rogan’s mark on the gemstone embedded in the unfinished gate. He recalled a flash of light, intense pain—and then nothing. Only at daybreak had he determined that he’d been magically sucked inside the stone he’d attempted to destroy, unable to free himself or communicate with anyone who passed.

Unfortunately, the only people entering the village through the unfinished gate were the soldiers. They’d marched in just after dawn, as he’d learned they would when he’d ridden reconnaissance for his brothers the night before. The mercenary army had carried swords and bayonets and shields, as if the tiny community of peaceful Romani would offer resistance. He heard the paid fighters curse the emptiness of the village, endured the sound of the leaders ordering the scouts into the mountains to search the caves. Trapped inside the stone, he could not warn his people—he could not help his wife.

And then she appeared.

Irika
.

As if he’d conjured her with Rogan’s black magic—the same way he’d saved Mariah from falling off the cliff—his wife had appeared.

Had he magically summoned Irika to her death? Though his memory was untested, he recalled hearing his wife desperately shout his name before she’d crossed into his line of vision. Why had his beloved, strong-willed wife left the safety of the caves? To search for him? Had she mistaken the marauding army for allies of his father, the former governor, instead of enemies of the Romani clan?

He’d never know. Her calls for him had nonetheless sealed her fate. In seconds, a soldier had captured her, slammed her to her knees and held a blade to her throat while he shouted for his superior. Quickly surrounded, Irika was assailed by questions about the whereabouts of Rogan and the Gypsy inhabitants of the village.

She refused to speak another word, so they killed her.

And there was nothing Rafe could do to stop them.

Suddenly, the thick blackness of the memory pressed in on him like the smoke of a lethal fire. He choked on his rage, on his powerlessness. Irika had died trying to find him. He’d wanted to emerge from the stone and save her from the murdering soldiers, but he’d been unable to move. Squeezed tight inside black magic, he’d pounded against the invisible walls for hours, to no avail.

And then, he’d simply…faded.

His existence since that night had been as uncertain as it was unending. At first, he marked the change of seasons as the snow fell or melted around him, as the birds nested and sang or abandoned the cold climes for warmer weather to the south. But after decades of watching the world go on around him, watching the stain of Irika’s blood fade into the soil, he stopped caring. He slept, unconcerned about the world outside.

Now a strange woman had touched the stone for the briefest instant, and he had to employ all his strength to remain within.

A greater torture did not exist.

A sound from outside the rented room suddenly cleared the darkness. Rafe sensed someone coming near—someone who fed on vile emotions such as hatred, disgust and the kind of frenzied anger that resulted in bloodshed. The rain-like sound from the smaller room had stopped. Mariah emerged, swathed in only a towel, her hair dripping wet, when the door from the hallway burst open. Two men charged inside. Dressed entirely in black, one grabbed Mariah roughly. Her towel dropped in the struggle. Rafe hardly noticed until he saw a silver blade flash against her moist and vulnerable neck.

“Where is it?” the assailant demanded.

Mariah, like Irika, refused to speak. The second man grabbed the stone from the bed and held it against Mariah’s cheek until the gem bit into her skin. Only her anger overrode her terror.

“Thought you could steal from us, did you?” the man asked.

Despite her nudity, Mariah’s topaz eyes flashed with defiance. “I found it fair and square.”

The man with the stone laughed while the other ran his free hand roughly over Mariah’s breasts, then down her belly. Rafe shouted for them to release her. Both men flew away from her, pushed by the magic that entrapped him, by the dark essence that instantly constricted around his soul.

The man holding the stone scrambled to his feet. He stretched the rock away from him, but did not let go. Rafe sensed his conflict. He was terrified of the voice he’d just heard and the force that had pushed him aside, but he was equally fearful of what would happen to him if he did not complete his mission.

The man with the knife climbed to his feet just as quickly, too dazed to recapture her. She slammed her fisted hand against his nose, then doubled him over with a well-placed elbow to the gut. She grabbed his wrist and twisted until his knife flew from his grip, unaware that his partner had raised the stone above her head.

Rafe could not allow another woman to die. He surrendered to the pull. Pressure attacked him from all sides, as if his entire body were being squeezed through the eye of a needle. He couldn’t contain a furious roar when he finally broke free.

He ignored the dizzying pain and struck out at Mariah’s attacker, throwing the man backward over the bed. His eyes, visible only through slits in a covering knotted tightly over his face, widened with terror.

“Who the hell—”

Rafe turned and watched Mariah crumple the second assailant with a well-placed punch to the jaw.

“Dress yourself,” Rafe ordered, forcing his gaze away from her.

For a second, he anticipated that she might argue, but her nudity demanded attention more than did her shock. She tugged her shirt over her wet skin and jumped into the breeches, then pointed at the dumbfounded man on the other side of her bed.

“That rock is mine,” she insisted.

“He will not take the stone,” Rafe replied, holding out his palm, knowing, somehow, that he could summon his prison back to him with a thought. “Return to me.”

The man cursed as the stone jumped in his grasp. He threw his other hand over it and attempted to pull the rock tight to his chest.

Rafe took a bold step forward and repeated the command.

The stone flew from the thief’s grip and thudded into Rafe’s outstretched palm. The heavy heat against his flesh was unlike anything he’d experienced. In his moment of hesitation, the thief rushed toward him. Rafe waved his other arm and, instead of landing atop him, the attacker flew through the air, crashed against the wall and fell, motionless, to the ground.

Rafe moved to examine the stone again, but his palm was empty. Mariah had reclaimed the marker with amazing swiftness.

“I don’t know who you are,” she said to him, her eyes wide and apprehension rolling off her body, “or what you are, but I think we’d both be better off if we got the hell out of here.”

As she spoke, she scooped her belongings into her bag and tossed her boots over her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She pulled up short, her eyebrows arched high above her wide, amber eyes. She swallowed deeply, then gave the now-splintered door a cursory glance. “I’m leaving. Thanks for your, um, help, but I suggest you do the same.”

She had no idea where he’d come from; of this Rafe was certain. And she’d either not seen him summon the stone from the thief’s grasp, or else she was ignoring what her eyes told her was true. After a split second’s hesitation, she left.

Rafe remained behind.

Though the man nearest to him stirred with a moan, Rafe ignored him, focusing instead on the shape of his own hands. Then his arms and legs and chest. He still wore the leather breeches he’d worn that night. His shirt, nearly as dark as his boots, felt damp against his skin and smelled of rain and horse and sweat. He spotted a mirror near the window. Stepping over the unconscious attacker, he stared into the looking glass, shocked at how little he’d changed.

His hair was still black and long. His skin untouched by time.

But before he could form another thought about the resilience of his youth, the stone’s pull yanked him yet again. He flew from the room like bait on a fisherman’s hook and, a split second of darkness later, he was beside Mariah, sitting on a seat inside a carriage made entirely of leather, metal and glass.