Dark Sins and Desert Sands (17 page)

Wasn’t it plain as day? Did he have to spell it out for her? “Because I love you, Layla. And because you’re the only one who
knows
I’m innocent. The truth of who I am needs to be safe with you.”

With that, Ray started walking the shoulder of the road. Layla followed him a few steps, but then paused, as he knew she would. The truck was causing traffic to slow. It was the kind of disorder that someone like Layla couldn’t abide. She called after him. “Ray!”

He dared not look back, but picked up his pace.

“Ray!” she shouted again, but her voice was warped by the wind and the passing cars.

It’s pleasure mixed with pain. On your heart it
makes its claim.

L
ayla didn’t know whether it stunned her more that Ray had said that he loved her, or that he’d left her standing there on the side of the road. Layla ditched Ray’s truck, then set out on foot to find him, not realizing until she’d hit the National Mall that she had no idea where she was going. Now she meandered there, trying to make sense of it all.

Loved
. Layla was loved. In all the thousands of years since Seth had shaped her from the sand, no one had ever loved her before and now the whole living world looked different to her. The flowers were in love with the sun, lifting their faces to gaze up in adoration. The passing traffic in the streets had a pulse of its own, like blood moving through the veins of a heated lover. The
marble buildings were like the carved headboard of some giant bridal bed, with the silken sheets of grass folding out beneath it. Layla walked through it all in a daze.

Ray
loved
her. Rayhan Stavrakis—a man she’d interrogated, humiliated and manipulated—had not only forgiven her, but
loved
her. Yet, he’d also left her.

And he’d left her before she had a chance to tell him that she loved him right back. She shouldn’t stay here now. Seth had destroyed her memories once before and if he caught her this time, he’d destroy her memories of Ray. What if she had to live the rest of her life never knowing that someone had loved her? That thought alone was more than Layla could bear standing up.

Luckily a park bench was nearby, and she collapsed onto it, staring at the children playing next to the reflecting pool. It was hard to believe that such a beautiful day could exist while her insides were in such turmoil. How could the sun be shining when Ray was out there somewhere, in danger?

Ray would go to the Scorpion Group compound in Arlington. He’d go there to look for Missy and he’d go there to find evidence of his innocence. Maybe he’d even go there to confront Seth for transforming him into a minotaur. And then he’d die, or worse. There had to be some way to stop him. Layla put her face in her hands, trying to focus. Trying to think calmly and rationally.

“It can’t be as bad as that,
chica,
” someone said.

Layla looked up, squinting into the bright sunlight. Surely she was hallucinating. “Isabel?” Layla’s eyes widened, staring at Isabel—seeing Isabel not as a mortal would, but through the eyes of a sphinx. She’d
always sensed Isabel’s feminine power, but how had she ever thought that Isabel was a simple administrative assistant? How had she never noticed the golden skin and supernatural aura? How blind she’d been! “Wh-what are you?” Layla stammered.

“I’m your friend,
mija,
but I’m more than that, too.”

Isabel was a goddess. It was all Layla could do to still the tremor that ran through her. Should she kneel in reverence? She didn’t know how to behave in the presence of a deity who didn’t own her.

“Relax,” Isabel told her, and sat down on the bench.

“But how?” Layla was so startled, she blurted out, “It must have been so hard for you to pretend that you’re an ordinary woman.”

“Bite your tongue, riddler,” Isabel said. “I never pretended to be
ordinary!
”

“You knew I was a sphinx? The whole time, you knew?”

“I knew you were a sphinx, but I didn’t know who you belonged to until Seth walked in the door looking for the minotaur. He was hoping to catch you both together.”

Somehow, against all odds, Isabel had found her first. “How did you find me?”

“I let my butterflies help me,” Isabel said with a quirky little smile as if she had secrets. “Seth won’t be happy about it.”

Layla blanched. “I don’t want to be his. I don’t even want to be what Seth made me.”

“Lucky for you that I won a wager,” Isabel said.

Layla listened with scarcely contained shock as Isabel explained. When Isabel was finished, Layla asked, “So then…I belong to
you
now?”

“No,
mija
. I didn’t make the wager so that I could have a sphinx of my very own. I want you to be free to give your heart and to live your life in any way you please.”

“That’s…” Layla couldn’t find the words to describe what an immense and gracious gift this was. “What do you want in return?”

“I want you to be happy and make others happy,” Isabel replied.

Tears were still such foreign things to Layla, but they slipped down her cheeks now. She didn’t know that gratitude could make her cry, too. Isabel had done her a great kindness, but Layla had already given her heart to Ray and feared she might now have to live a long life without him.

Ray liked his chances. The Scorpion Group facility in Arlington was off the main road. A chain-link fence surrounded the large parking lot, and a set of stone stairs marked the entryway. Somewhere in this building he might find Missy. And if he didn’t find her, there might be a file that would prove his innocence. Whatever strength Ray still had as a minotaur, he planned on using to get inside.

The two armed guards by the gate were easy enough to dispatch with his powers. He told them to take a walk and forget they’d seen him. Security was notably less lax inside the building where he forced the guy with a radio to pull the fire alarm. As soon as people started evacuating, Ray took the stairs up a floor and slipped into an empty office.

It was then that he felt the hard muzzle of a gun on the back of his neck.

Ray didn’t panic. He just slowly raised his hands in mock surrender. Eventually whoever it was on the other end of the gun would let him turn around. And when that happened he’d catch their eyes and…
Shit
. The guy was wearing mirrored sunglasses, and a malicious smile, like he knew just what Ray had been thinking.

“So sorry to disappoint you, Rayhan, but you’d only hurt yourself in the labyrinth of my mind. My memories are as old as the world.”

Seth
. There was no question about it. Ray had never thought he’d lay eyes on a god until he died, and maybe not even then. Seeing one in the flesh was both humbling…and disappointing. Seth wasn’t shining with light or wielding thunderbolts in each hand. In fact, the war god was of modest stature; Ray towered above him. But even in his mortal guise, when Seth removed his sunglasses, his burning amber eyes made Ray wilt under their intensity. Incredible power frayed the edges of Seth’s mortal image and if everything Layla had told Ray was true, he was standing face-to-face with her creator as well as his own.

“Your abilities are coming along nicely,” Seth said, tracing the barrel of the gun across Ray’s skin. He was close. Too close. It was always safer to keep your distance when you were holding a gun on somebody. Ray tightened, waiting for the moment he could grab the firearm. “Oh, don’t bother trying to disarm me, Rayhan. I can kill you without shooting you. It’s just easier to explain bullet holes to the police than it is to explain a pile of human ash and bones.”

Ray believed him. “You went to a lot of trouble to fashion me into a minotaur just to kill me now.”

“Ah, so you know what you are.” Seth smiled without showing his teeth. “I suppose it was good of Layla to save me the tedious explanations. Just where is my little domestic house cat? I felt certain that she’d be with you.”

Ray silently seethed. Ever since he’d left Layla he’d been thinking he’d made the worst mistake of his life. Now he was glad that he had no idea where she was, because that meant he couldn’t tell Seth anything even under torture. “Layla and I parted company.”

“That’s inconvenient,” Seth said.

“For you, maybe. Now where the hell is Missy? Where are you keeping her?”

“Missy?”

Something inside of Ray shriveled and died when he saw the look of confusion on Seth’s face. Ray wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Seth was an expert liar, but he had a sinking feeling that Layla had been right all along. Somebody else had snatched Missy.

“Who is this Missy? A lover?” Seth asked. “You seem like a virile man….”

Ray clamped his jaw. He wasn’t going to say anything else about Missy or about Layla or about anyone he cared about. But Seth’s attention seemed to have wandered. “You’ve bulked up, I see. Good. I like a strong ox to pull my plow.” Seth circled Ray, examining him as if he were a slave upon the auction block. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Seth insisted on inspecting Ray’s teeth. “But you look overtired. Did your mind games with the guards tire you that much?”

Ray ground his teeth, determined not to answer.

“Did Layla tell you that it’ll kill you one day? Minotaurs get lost inside the minds of their victims and
eventually turn into drooling simpletons. They waste away. But I think you might last a good deal longer than most. I let you escape from your Syrian prison to see how you’d survive. Thus far you’ve proved yourself capable, but from now on, you’ll reserve your strength for me.”

Oh. That wouldn’t be a problem. Ray was all about saving his strength to crush Seth. “What the hell do you want from me?”

“Hell.”
Seth let the word roll off his tongue as if he were tasting it. “Hell is such an interesting concept, don’t you think? In my time, dying men worried that their hearts would be found unworthy and fed to the crocodiles. We too had our lakes of fire. Now you fear Satan and his eternal flames. Yet, your living world is already burning with war. You’ve seen it.”

There was an egomaniacal gleam in Seth’s eyes that burned like all the roadside explosions Ray had witnessed—sudden, forceful and deadly. It wasn’t cowardice that forced Ray to flinch away. It was the certainty that he could be drawn into Seth’s magnetic pull if he wasn’t careful. Ray burned with enough rage at what’d been done to him that he already had to fight his urge to smash and destroy. It would be something too easy for Seth to exploit.

“Yeah. I’ve seen war,” Ray said. “I’m done with it.”

“That’s because it was terribly frustrating, I know,” Seth said. “That was before. Now with me, you’ll have so much more control over the outcome.”

“You think I’m gonna help you start wars?”

“Mortal men don’t need my help in starting wars. Your kind has been killing each other since you first crawled onto land. All I’ve done is feed off the bloody
harvest of violence you mortal men sow. But chaos, lawlessness—now
that
is sometimes my doing. I’ve waited a long time for the whole world’s focus to turn to the desert, and even longer for a war like the one in Afghanistan, where the desert itself is starting to swallow a whole nation.”

Ray knew that thirty years of warfare had stripped Afghanistan of her forests and fertile valleys. War had made it a different place—where the only thing anybody would grow was poppy flowers, and drug lords ruled it all. The ecological and economic disaster there was plain for all to see, vegetation disappearing at an alarming rate. Is that what Seth was after? “What’s it got to do with me?”

“You have the power to make sane men mad, Ray. You’re a useful creature that I can unleash when and where I see fit. You see, I like this war very much. I like how mortal men think that it changes everything, and that none of the rules apply. You know a thing or two about that, don’t you, Rayhan?”

Ray turned his head, closing his eyes against the memories.

“You’re going to serve me well until the end of your days, Rayhan.”

As a prisoner in the dungeon, Ray had been stripped of his freedom and of any power to defend himself. He’d been degraded. Humiliated. But the humiliation of being on some evil bastard’s leash was more than Ray could bear. “I’d rather die.”

“That can be arranged, but killing
you
for your disobedience would be so boring. Any true student of humanity would know that there are better ways to punish you. From now on, when you disobey me, I’ll simply
kill someone that you love. You have a family, don’t you? Two little nephews… Two innocent children. The mere illusion that you’d eaten their flesh helped turn you into a minotaur. Imagine how you’ll feel this time, when I make you watch as I peel the skin off their bones and force their flesh down your throat.”

Ray would never, ever, forget the taste, the horror, the bile as he vomited. The violent wish for revenge had turned him from a man into an animal. Even remembering it now, Ray quaked. Seth could get to his family and use them against him, over and over. At least until Ray could find a way to hide them.

Layla had said that Seth didn’t know everything; he could be fooled. Maybe what Ray needed was to buy time. “I’ll tell you what, Captain Sandman. You tell me who it was that got me arrested—who it was that accused me of treason—and I’ll do whatever you want.”

Seth’s smile widened so that his predatory teeth showed. “You’ll do what I want anyway. Here. Let me demonstrate. A wolf must be trained, a lion must be tamed, and a bull must be broken.”

With that, Ray felt the crushing pain of a blow to the skull. Then nothing.

Ray woke up in darkness. Fabric brushed his nostrils when he inhaled and he realized he’d been hooded. In spite of the agonizing pain in his body, he jerked his head up sharply, only to find that he couldn’t move. His head was stuck between two bars with the rest of his body free. Ray tried to feel the outlines of the contraption and his hands encountered cold, hard steel.

That’s when he heard Seth’s voice. “It’s a headgate,”
the god said. “I wouldn’t want you to shift into your bovine form and harm any of my other playthings.”

Ray banged against the metal, struggling to get free as anxiety welled up inside him. He couldn’t get enough air.

“Is everything closing in on you, Rayhan?” Seth asked. “Do you feel the walls shrinking? Do you wonder if this is going to be how you die? If this is your tomb?”

Ray’s heartbeat galloped, slamming against his rib cage painfully. “Stop,” he gasped. He was going to have a heart attack. The crushing weight of it was coming down on his chest. He’d gone cold and felt the sweat drip from his body. He slammed violently against the metal, but the strength was going out of him. He was going to die. He was going to die right here in this headgate if he couldn’t calm down.