By Anne Fraser and Barbara Zuchegna
With assistance from Sharon Pickrel and Jean Lamb
Copyright 1999

Chapter Thirteen

Adrian was rather pleased that it was one of the Baluchis who had alerted the troopers and not he or Richard ... until he learned that it had been Naajy, and that the mistake had cost him his life. Just yesterday, he thought sadly, looking down at the shapeless bundle that had been a vibrant young man only moments ago.

It was eerily silent in the pass now, while the Baluchis rounded up the bodies of the dead border patrolmen for hurried burial ... to avoid attracting vultures, Richard had said, which could alert a helicopter patrol tomorrow that something of this sort had happened here and draw more patrolmen before their group had cleared the area. Naajy would be buried separately, when they had moved away from this place.

The smell of blood was almost overwhelming, especially to Adrian's flaring nostrils. He was grateful for the darkness; he knew his eyes were glowing red, and he forced himself to keep them downcast while he fought to bring himself under control. He had killed two men, silently, with his knife, before Naajy's terrible mistake, and then another with his pistol. There was blood all over his hands and the temptation to taste it was making him giddy.

Richard seemed to understand. He brought a waterbag, silently, and poured while Adrian washed his hands. He had already washed his own.

"What will Shahid do with them?" Adrian asked.

He was talking about the five border patrolmen who had thrown down their guns and surrendered. Richard's eyes met his for a long moment, but he said nothing. Adrian already knew the answer anyway.

They had to stay until it was over. Adrian didn't want to, but he understood the reason for it. Richard had taken command of these people, and he was assuming the responsibility for this, too. If they were under his command, they would do this under his eyes.

The unarmed Iranian patrolmen probably knew from the beginning how little chance they had of surviving this night. They made no effort to get away, and none of them cried out when their throats were savagely slashed. Adrian watched Mansour step back from the man he had just killed and bend down to wipe his knife on the fallen man's clothing.

Someone brought horses. Richard mounted and held the other while Adrian stepped up to the saddle. The horse, already excited by the smell of blood, hardly noticed who was climbing onto its back. Richard reined his horse around and headed for the far end of the pass, with Adrian following close behind.

It didn't take them long to catch up with the pack animals and the other members of their group. Richard called an immediate halt when he saw that Will was wounded and insisted on examining the wound himself. Satisfied that it wasn't serious and that the bleeding had mostly stopped, he allowed Will to get back on his horse and they continued.

"Where are the Baluchis?" Jake asked as Adrian came up beside him.

"Cleaning up."

Jake stared at him, trying to see his face more clearly. Jake's night vision was better than a normal human's, but it wasn't good enough to make out the expression on Adrian's face. "Cleaning up what?" he asked.

Adrian sighed wearily. "Come on, Jake. You're not a child. You know what they're doing."

Jake thought about it. They were burying the dead. That had to be it. The realization twisted something deep inside him. Adrian and Richard, and all the Baluchis, had just killed people. He said, "They killed them all?"

Adrian didn't answer. Jake reached out and grabbed at the reins of Adrian's horse. "Dammit, answer me. How many?"

"What difference does it make?" Adrian said. "We could not pass them. We could not wait and hope they would go away without discovering us in the area. It was the only way, Jake. It was their misfortune to have chosen to watch this pass on this night, and no one's fault."

"And they killed them all?" Jake wasn't sure why he was doing this; the words just seemed to be coming out of him by themselves. "How many? Dammit, Adrian, how many men..."

"Jake." Richard was there, reining his horse in between Jake's and Adrian's. "Stop it. Adrian is right. We had no choice."

Anger boiled up inside Jake and turned almost joyously on this welcome target. "What the hell do you mean ... no choice? We didn't even have to be here! This is all some kind of damned game for you, isn't it? Just something to get your rocks off on. Not for T'beth. Not for Adrian. Just Richard bloody Plantagenet with the chance to order people around as if he was still the king of bloody England. Isn't it?"

Richard's face was perfectly expressionless. He said, "Yes."

"And for that people have to die? People have to get shot and killed so that you can have something to do with yourself that doesn't get you slapped in the nearest jail? How many people, Richard? Don't your Baluchi friends believe in taking prisoners?"

Richard didn't say anything. But there was the slightest tightening around his mouth, and Jake knew. "Oh my god," he said, whispering suddenly. "They did, didn't they." It wasn't a question. "There were prisoners."

"Yes," Richard said, in a voice Jake didn't recognize ... a voice light and oddly precise.

"And they killed them, too?"

"Yes." In that same strained tone.

Jake looked wildly across the neck of Richard's horse, trying to see Adrian's face, but Adrian was looking down at his hands. "Adrian?" Jake said.

'Let it go,' Adrian's voice whispered in his mind. 'Just let it go, Jake.'

Behind them, the Baluchis were returning to join them, laughing and chattering among themselves, no longer concerned about noise. There was no one left to hear it. Jake felt physically ill. They carried the smell of blood with them.

Richard's hand shot out to catch Jake's wrist with sudden ferocity. "Jake," he said quickly, his voice low and commanding again. "Say nothing to these people of what you are thinking. This is their world, and their ways. This is a war they have fought on this border for generations. That we were with them tonight made no difference. If they were not smuggling us over the border, they would have been smuggling something else. And the same thing would have happened." Jake stared at him, rebellion flaring in his eyes, and Richard's fingers tightened on his wrist, threatening now to do permanent damage. "Do you understand?" Richard said.

"Yes! Goddammit, I'm not a kid, Richard!"

"That is not always evident. Be angry with me, if you choose. But show no anger toward these people. What they do with their enemies is none of our business." He almost threw Jake's hand back at him and reined his horse sharply away.

Adrian's voice came to Jake, inside his head, again. 'He's right, Jake.'

'Dammit, Talbot, I know it!' He could see Adrian now, and something had suddenly dawned. 'You watched them do it. You watched them kill the prisoners. Oh, shit, Adrian...’

But Adrian said nothing, aloud or silently. He touched his heels to his horse and followed Richard.

It was Ed Perry who told Jake Fowler about Naajy's death.

They had stopped, just before dawn, in a deep fold of the mountains where an overhanging rock wall would conceal their tents from overhead, and the Baluchis, still maddeningly cheerful, were busily setting up camp. Jake noticed that three familiar faces were missing and asked about it. Ed Perry said, "Rafiq and Yazid stayed behind to find the patrol's horses. This bunch always admires the patrol's horseflesh. They'll stash them in a canyon somewhere and pick them up on the way back to Pakistan. It works two ways: nobody else will stumble across them and wonder what happened to the patrol, and they'll bring a pretty penny across the border."

Jake didn't miss that he'd only mentioned two of the missing. "Where's Naajy?"

Perry had sat down on a rock and was pulling his boots off. He didn't look up. "He didn't make it."

Jake stared at him. He knew several of the Baluchis were wounded. He knew Will Scrope was wounded. But he hadn't known about this. Stupidly, and knowing how stupid it was, he said, "He's dead?"

It didn't deserve, and didn't get, an answer.

Jake looked around for Adrian and saw him standing with Alexis a little ways away, watching while Richard carefully cut away Will's bloody shirt. Jake joined them, with some idea in mind of saying something cruel to Adrian about Naajy, but the words died in his throat when he saw the slowly seeping wound in Will's shoulder. The bullet had passed all the way through, and from what Richard was saying as he carefully cleaned the mess, it hadn't done any permanent damage. Will, sitting on another rock with his king squatting on his heels in front of him, said nothing, but from the set of his jaw, it was clear that the wound, and Richard's cleaning, however gentle, hurt like all hell.

Jake stared at it. He understood that a bunch of border patrolmen had died. He understood now that Naajy had died. He had smelled blood all over Adrian and Richard and the Baluchis when they came out of the pass last night. But it wasn't until he saw the neat, puckered hole in the back of Will's shoulder and the larger, ragged hole in front, that what had happened last night really hit him. The flesh all around the holes in Will's shoulder was swollen and blue, and the whole shoulder was vividly inflamed in the meager dawn light. And Will was not seriously hurt, according to Richard. It brought unwelcome and sickening images into Jake's mind of what the wounds must have looked like on the men who had died.

Abruptly, so sudden he could do nothing to stop it, Jake vomited. He had barely time to turn his head before everything in his stomach erupted violently out of him. Behind him, he heard Richard's snapped, "Get him out of here," said with irritation, before Alexis took his arm and led him away to find a rock of his own to sit on.

"Jake, dear," Alexis said kindly, "you have got to get a hold of yourself."

He was shaking. They had killed unarmed prisoners. "I'm okay," he told Alexis, to try to get her to go away. His stomach was churning; he knew he was going to throw up again. He did, or tried to; there was nothing left to expel, but his stomach was more than willing to keep trying.

Adrian appeared at his side, sitting on his heels with real concern on his face. Jake's own enhanced sense of smell could still detect the residue of blood on him. "You need to lie down, Jake," Adrian said.

Along the horizon, the glowing color was brightening. The first tent the Baluchis had set up had Adrian's little black bower inside it, and Adrian should already be inside; the sun would rise in moments. "I'm okay," Jake said again. "Adrian, go on before you get your ass fried. I'll be along in a minute."

Adrian's hand on his arm was steadying. "You've seen death before, Jake."

He had. He had watched Adrian kill. But Safelli had been trying to kill Adrian, too, and the prisoners had been unarmed...

He shared a tent with Will, because the Baluchis were supposed to understand that Richard was sleeping with Alexis. And Will, freed by his wound from keeping Alexis from messing with Richard, had dropped off to sleep almost immediately, with no conversation beforehand. Will was a soldier; people died in wars, and Will understood that what happened between the Baluchi smugglers and the Iranian border patrol was an ongoing war. Jake understood it, too ... intellectually. It was his stomach that didn't seem to understand.

He tried to sleep. The temperature soared as soon as the sun rose, and continued to rise throughout the morning. Lying there, sweat streaming off of him, his stomach still churning miserably and noisily, Jake stared up at the tan silk stretched above him and tried not to think about last night. But for a long time, he could think about nothing else.

The truth was that he wasn't angry with Richard, or with Adrian. They had done what they had to do, and except for Naajy, they had seen to it that everyone else made it out of the trap in the pass alive. What was bothering Jake, and he knew it, was the same thing that bothered him whenever he had to face how very much his life had changed since he had met Adrian Talbot. This crazy trip to Iran might be the worst they'd gone through together, but it was really just one more episode in what promised to be a long line of them, in which the normal, ordinary life he kept trying to get back to was shown up for the hopeless play-acting that it really was. He was not a normal, ordinary person anymore. He never would be again. And things like this trip happened to the kind of person he was now.

They were very likely to keep happening for the rest of his life. And if Adrian was right, it was probably going to be a very long life ... or unlife. He had better get used to it.

He gave up. He wasn't going to be able to sleep, and outside the tent there would at least be moving air. He got up, one hand clutching his painful midsection, careful to avoid stepping on Will's sleeping bulk, and went outside into the furnace heat of the desert noon.

The Baluchis had vanished. He knew they were all asleep, in their tents or hidden in bedrolls that blended into the scrub brush lining this shaded depression beneath the overhanging rock wall above. They had moved the horses away, into a nearby canyon, so that if they were seen from the air they would appear to be nothing more than a small herd of the wild horses that were scattered throughout these mountains. Carefully hobbled, the horses could move around and graze but would not wander far.

Jake felt his own need to wander. So long as he stayed out of the sun, as much as possible, he would be okay. And it did feel better to be outside.

The silence was incredible. There was not the smallest sound of life. No people talking, no birds singing, no insects doing whatever the hell insects did to make noise. Even the wind had died down, and the silence pressed against his ears like a physical weight. Jake didn't think he had ever been exposed to such a total absence of sound. Always before, he had been asleep as soon as he put his head down in the morning, exhausted with riding all night. And during the nights, even when there was no talking, there was the soft fall of the horses' hooves, the creak of saddles, the soft swishing sound of fabric moving as the Baluchis' long robes lifted in the breeze. This was the first time he had been awake, alone, after everyone else had gone to bed, and the totality of the silence was unnerving.

And then, from somewhere off to his right, there was a small sound ... a human sound. The sound of an indrawn breath, and then a long, shuddering sigh. Curious, and a bit apprehensive, Jake took a few carefully placed steps in that direction, until he could see around a projection in the rock wall.

What he saw was Richard Plantagenet, on his knees in the dirt, with his face buried against his upraised arms on the rock wall before him.

Jake knew immediately that no one ... no one at all ... should be seeing Richard at this moment. He tried to take a quick step backwards, and caught his foot on a rock. The small sound of his boot striking the ground as it slipped off the rock drew Richard's head up at once.

Jake wasn't sure what he had expected to see ... tears, anger, laughter? But he hadn't expected to see what he did. For that instant, for just that one unforgettable instant, what he saw in Richard's face was a haggard grief that tore at his guts as if it was his own. But it was gone so quickly, that he was not even sure, an instant later, that he'd seen it.

"Jake." Richard's voice stopped him as he tried to turn away. "Don't go," Richard said.

Jake wanted to. He felt awkward and ashamed, as if he had invaded the privacy of the man's bedroom or toilet. But there was a tone in Richard's voice he'd never heard before, almost a plea, and his feet moved forward almost automatically. Richard had pushed himself to his feet and was waiting, his face now under control, until Jake joined him.

"Here," Richard said. "Drink."

He was holding out an open canteen, and Jake took it without thinking and upended it to his mouth ... and nearly choked. Richard's canteen contained straight bourbon.

"Again," Richard said, and Jake obeyed. There was a very nice, very solid warmth deep inside him almost at once.

He handed the canteen back and watched Richard lift it and drink, once, before capping it and hanging it on a belt loop. "Better?" Richard asked.

"Uh ... yeah." Was their ex-king leader a secret drinker? Jake studied the finely-drawn face. Richard, he realized, had lost weight since this trip had started, and there was an unhealthy pallor beneath the newly tanned skin. Richard's face was gray under the tan, and the hollows under his eyes were almost blue. Why hadn't he noticed it before? This couldn't have happened in one night.

Abruptly, Richard flopped down on the ground, his back propped against the rock. "Please," he said, "sit down, Jake. Talk to me."

Talk to him? Jake sat, and had no idea what in the hell he was supposed to say. What came out of his mouth wasn't planned. "You look like hell."

Richard's eyebrows lifted in surprise, but then he smiled ... that same damned, startlingly gentle, self-mocking smile Jake had seen on the boat on Lake Ontario. "Well, at least that's honest," Richard said, amused. "Perhaps you'd better not talk anymore. I don't think I'm up to hearing whatever you might say next."

That was fine with Jake. He wasn't sure he was in any shape to control his own damned mouth at the moment.

After a minute, his eyes fixed somewhere out on the distant, lower range of mountains they would be crossing tonight, Richard said, "You should not blame Adrian for what happened last night. If Adrian had not done his part so well, we might all have died in that pass. The border patrol, Shahid tells me, does not take prisoners either. Smugglers are not arrested; they are killed like vermin."

Jake was getting that funny feeling in his stomach again. "I don't blame Adrian," he said.

Richard smiled again. "You blame me."

"No." He had surprised Richard again, and Richard turned to look at him, his eyes questioning. Jake sighed. "Shit, Richard, I know it wasn't your fault. It's just ... I just never thought I'd ever be involved in something like that. Normal people aren't."

Richard seemed to consider that seriously. "I wouldn't know," he admitted. "I have never had the grace to be ... 'normal people.' And I have been ... 'involved' in these things since I was sixteen years old. I'm sorry, Jake. I wish very much that it hadn't happened."

"I don't think our Baluchi friends do. I didn't see anyone all broken up about Naajy. They were all acting like they'd just won the World Cup last night."

If Richard didn't understand the World Cup reference, there was no sign of it. He said, "They won a battle. For warriors, victory is never without a price. They mourn their friend, but he is one of many who have died along this border and that is a risk they all accept when they follow Shahid. They will honor his memory, but they will still exult in their victory."

Jake shook his head. "I don't think I could ever be a warrior, then. Death ought to matter more than that ... especially when the guy who dies is hardly more than a kid. I don't think Naajy was twenty years old yet."

"He was eighteen," Richard said. Jake should have known he would have informed himself about all the Baluchis in their group. "This was his third year with Shahid, and he was a much-admired killer among his friends." Richard's eyes had drifted back out to the distant mountains. "This was to be his last trip across the border. He had become a wealthy man in Shahid's service, and had arranged the purchase of a wife. He would have settled down to raise his flocks and his sons and to grow old with great honor."

Oh, shit. That made it worse. "Then there's a girl back in Pakistan who's gonna get her heart broken when she finds out, right?"

Richard turned to look at him again, and his smile now was genuinely amused. "No. He had never seen the girl, nor she him. That isn't how they do it here, Jake. He paid a high price for a girl from a family that produced mostly sons. He neither knew nor cared what she looked like or if she was a shrew or an angel. He would never have seen her except to couple with her until she was pregnant. If she had sons, he would have been pleased with her. If she had daughters, he would have beaten her. If she had too many daughters, he would have left them out to die of exposure. These people do not lead gentle lives, Jake. You make a great mistake if you apply your own standards to them."

Jake should have known all that. He was an anthropologist, for Christ's sake. He had read about many nomadic people who lived exactly like that. But the young Baluchi men had seemed like such good-natured, ordinary guys ... and probably were. They were just good-natured, ordinary, primitive, savage guys. And there was nothing wrong with that. It just took some getting used to.

Jake sighed heavily. He was a long way from Toronto. After a long moment, he said, "Richard, I think I owe you an apology. No ... I think I owe you about a hundred apologies." He saw Richard's small, puzzled frown. "For a lot of things I've said ... and for even more things I thought, I'm sorry."

"Ah." Understanding now, Richard shook his head briefly. "That isn't necessary. I was out of place in Toronto. You are out of place here. We can only do the best we can, Jake. And we will make mistakes. The only difference, I think, is that here the consequences can be more serious than going to jail."

"I know. You have my permission to slap the hell out of me if I get out of line again."

"Thank you." Richard looked perfectly sober, but there was still a glint of amusement in his dark eyes. "But I had no intention of waiting for your permission."

"Yeah. I know that, too." Jake pushed himself up to his feet. "I think I'd better try to get some sleep." He had actually turned away and taken a couple of steps when he swung back around, without thinking, and blurted out, "Would you have done it? Will, I mean? If he hadn't got hurt, and if Alexis had messed with you again, would you have done what you said?"

Richard's pleasant expression had vanished. His face was very still now. "Yes."

"But it's so bloody unfair! Alexis was just trying to help, and it wasn't Will's fault anyway. What good would it have done to hurt Will?"

Richard's eyes had begun to get that icy look that preceded being courteous enough to roast flesh. He said, "I do not usually find it advisable to explain my decisions, Jake."

"You aren't usually pushing ordinary people around. We're not soldiers, Richard. We can't just jump automatically unless..."

He stopped, and Richard waited, patiently, before prompting, "Unless what?"

Jake wasn't sure. But he said, "Unless we're sure you know what the hell you're doing. Alexis was right; you were exhausted. You needed to sleep, and you wouldn't."

Richard studied him for a moment, obviously weighing his alternatives. Then he sighed heavily, and said, "Perhaps you're right. You're not soldiers. It is for that reason only that I will explain ... once ... a decision I have made. I will not do so again.

"I did not ask the Lady Alexis to accompany us. She chose to do so, and when she did, she placed herself under my command. For reasons of her own, she is determined to challenge that command. I have no objection, so long as what she does and says does not interfere with my decisions. When it does, I must stop her by whatever means are available to me, and I did so."

"She was trying to help you!"

Richard shook his head slightly. "Her motives are immaterial. I had made a decision. She chose to overbear that decision. I could not allow that."

"Richard, even you need to sleep. She was right. You wouldn't be much use if you drove yourself until you couldn't even think straight."

An expression of weary distaste had grown on Richard's face. He was not enjoying this. But he said, mildly, "She must trust, and you must, that I am aware of my limits, and that I will do nothing that will jeopardize ourselves or the purpose for which we are here. Beyond that, my condition must be my concern, and no other's."

Jake was remembering Alexis saying that they could turn to Ed Perry if they thought that Richard was wrong ... and that Perry hadn't looked entirely unwilling. He wondered if Richard knew ... and if he should say something. Maybe he should...

"Was there something else?" Richard asked politely.

"Uh ... no." Richard had wanted company. He didn't want it now, and Jake couldn't blame him. "Are you going to sleep at all?"

Richard's answer was no answer at all. "I am comfortable here. Sleep well, Jake."

Jake was halfway back to the tent before he realized that he'd entirely forgotten, until this moment, the agony of grief he'd seen for that brief instant on Richard's face. The man was made of stone; whatever was eating him, he had so completely submerged it that Jake had never thought of it again during the entire conversation.

But he was back there, alone now, and Jake would bet that, whatever it was, it was eating him alive again. And that he would allow no one in the world to know what it was, or to help him with it at all.

"'Uneasy lies the head,'" Jake whispered to himself, "even, I guess, when the crown is gone."

"This is what we came almost ten thousand miles to find?"

They had stopped to rest the horses at the top of the last ridge above the village that had been their destination since this journey had begun a week ago. Jake Fowler, standing beside his weary horse with Adrian Talbot beside him, could not help comparing the site of that beginning, in the comfortable luxury of the suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, with the miserable huddle of mud huts barely visible on the slope below them.

"It's called Sa'idi," Adrian said. "This is where T'beth was born, Jake. This is where she must have come to."

The call of his native earth to the troubled vampire. Jake took a moment to thank his lucky stars that, if he was destined to become a vampire, at least his native earth was one whole hell of a big improvement over T'beth's.

Ed Perry was standing on the other side of Adrian. He said, "Shahid's people know this place very well. The people here steal horses and sheep and goats from the more settled land south of here and trade them to the smugglers for guns and liquor, so it's a common stopover for Shahid. The closest town is the administrative center of the region, Saravan, about thirty miles to the south, and there's not even a road to connect the two places. This village has been here for a thousand years or more, and probably hasn't changed at all in all that time ... except for the influx of the black Baluchis."

Jake leaned around Adrian to look at him. "'Black Baluchis?'"

Perry nodded. "African slaves, brought into Persia hundreds of years ago. Some escaped; some were freed. But most came into these mountains to get away from government interference. There was a lot of interbreeding, of course, with the locals and with the Baluchi nomads, and in time they developed their own culture, their own customs. They call themselves Baluchi, and the Baluchis accept them as sort of related, but they aren't nomadic, and their way of life is very different. They pay lip service to Islam, as the Baluchis do, but what religion they've got is more like the Bantu religions of east Africa. Don't be fooled by the look of the place, Jake. These people are more sophisticated than our Baluchi friends here. They just prefer to live where they do because the government pretty much leaves them alone. And they very deliberately keep their village the way it is to avoid attracting attention they don't want."

Richard was conferring with Shahid Khan, and after a minute, Shahid called Zabour over and said something to him. Zabour bowed, called one of the younger Baluchis over, and said something to him. The young man grinned, swung up onto his horse, and headed down the slope at what seemed like a dangerously reckless speed. Richard came over to join his companions.

"They have sent a man to announce our arrival," he said. "There will be some formalities of welcome; these are customs we must respect. But arrangements will be made to house us for the coming day, and no serious discussions can take place until we have accepted the hospitality offered with as much grace as possible."

"How's Will?" Jake asked. Will was the only one of the group who had not dismounted.

"Stiff and in some pain, but otherwise well." There was a note of irritation in Richard's voice. He did not appreciate being distracted. He went on, "What we can learn here will depend entirely on how freely these people are willing to talk with us. For that reason, I ask you all to remember that we will be guests here, and it is imperative that we display no smallest disapproval of the customs and practices of our hosts."

Jake and Adrian knew perfectly well that all of this was being directed at them, and not at Ed Perry. And if it was irritating, it was probably also a good idea to bear these things in mind. Richard was right. Richard, damn him, seemed to be always right. If T'beth had come here, someone here would know what had happened to her. If they wanted that someone to tell them about it, they would have to be on their best behavior and appear just as trustworthy as all hell.

The Baluchis were mounting up again, at Zabour's direction. Richard left Jake, Adrian and Perry to go to Alexis, who had been standing quietly beside her horse, looking down at the village with a definite air of dismay. She fixed a withering eye on Richard. "My dear Richard," she said, "you do not know how to show a girl a good time. There is not a building in the entire town that looks like it would have a tub in which a lady could relax in bubbles up to her chin." Even a ghost, after a week of riding horseback through this part of the world, could long for a hot bath.

Richard's smile was genuinely sympathetic. "Forgive me. You have been subjected, of course, to abominable conditions, and you have my heartfelt thanks for enduring them so uncomplainingly." Having brought his little troupe at last to their destination, Richard's good humor seemed to have been restored. "I promise you," he said, "when I find a tub, I will certainly ask you to join me in it. I can't promise bubbles. But I think we might well, eventually, relax."

She laughed. The man was so incredibly, and charmingly, arrogant. "That," she said, "is something else we will have to negotiate. When the time comes."

"Of course. Until then, may I help you to your saddle?"

With Shahid and Richard in the lead, the caravan started down the slope to Sa'idi.

Adrian was trying very hard not to let anything of the misery he felt show in his face. They had come all this distance, endured so much hardship and discomfort. They had killed men they didn't know at all and had no real quarrel with. All to reach this place.

And T'beth wasn't here. Adrian already knew that. If she were here, he would have sensed her presence by now. She was the closest thing he had to a family ... except for Jake. She had been his friend, his lover, his playmate, his protector, and so much more. Separated from her, often for years at a time, yet he had always known she was out there somewhere, that she felt for him what he felt for her, and that sooner or later he would see her again.

Now, he wasn't sure. This is where she had come, but she wasn't here. And there were only two possible reasons why she would not be here. Something had happened, something inexplicable, that had placed her in the power of someone who had taken her from here. Or she was dead. True dead. Gone forever.

He could not bear to believe that. That hadn't happened.

He remembered her waltzing into his house when he had been nearly mad with Gabriel's invasion of his mind, slapping his face and telling him with no sympathy whatever to pull himself together. And he had. No one else in the world could have done that for him. If she was gone, there was a void in his world that nothing would ever be able to fill.

She was not, could not be, true dead. She had been here, and she had gone somewhere else. They would find out where she had gone, and they would follow. Whatever trouble she was in, they would find a way to get her out of it. And the first thing she would say to him, when they found her, would be to ask him what in the hell took him so long.

He wondered now what she would say when he told her this whole thing had started, this trip halfway around the world, because she had looked at the ghost of a dead king one night at Hoolihan's with that familiar predatory gleam in her eye. She would probably laugh her ass off. And then tell him to get lost while she turned that predatory look on the same king all over again.

He hoped so. With everything that was in him, he hoped so.