Darkness at Dawn (34 page)

Read Darkness at Dawn Online

Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
9.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Cold. Darkness. The lights had gone out. Light snow was falling, slightly muffling the sounds of army vehicles gathering in the huge courtyard. She got up from her bed, shivering, and looked down into the flagstoned courtyard, eyes wide as she watched men spilling out of military vehicles. Hundreds of them.
They were all dressed in black, the color of their weapons. She recognized AK-47s because they’d been present in all the places she’d ever lived. She also recognized what was happening immediately.
Insurrection.
Trembling, she went to the simple dresser that held her few clothes and started dressing. In layers, for warmth.
Shots. Women screaming . . .
She was just tying the laces of her snow boots with shaking hands when her mother burst into her bedroom.
Her mother took in her room in a glance. “Lucy. You’re getting dressed. Smart girl.” She slapped a pistol into Lucy’s hand and moved to the window. A Smith & Wesson .38.
Lucy’s hand curled around the gun with the ease of long acquaintance. She’d fired it thousands of times and had the calluses to prove it. Her mother had tossed two magazines onto the bed as she passed. Lucy slipped one into the butt and put the other in her jacket pocket.
Her mother was already armed herself, with a Glock. She was a superb shot. At the window, she looked down at the courtyard, watching the men’s movements.
Lucy saw that her mother was completely calm. Her hand holding the Glock down alongside her leg was utterly steady, and her expression was pensive rather than shocked as she looked down.
“Mom?” Lucy whispered.
No one down in the courtyard could possibly hear her over the rumbling of the transport vehicle engines, men shouting and running. But Lucy had been taught to be quiet in emergencies, and this was an emergency if ever there was one.
The last big emergency had led to her being bundled onto a plane late at night and crashing in the Nicaraguan jungle.
“It’s okay, honey,” her mother said. She had that faraway voice when she was thinking of something else. Lucy suddenly knew, with a child’s abrupt rush into adult wisdom, that it wasn’t okay.
“Mom? Who are they?”
“Genza’s men,” her mother answered absently, focused on the courtyard below. Genza was the leader of the NLP, the Nhala Liberation Party, a hard-line Communist party funded by Beijing. “He’s making his play. The king must be dead. And by sheer chance, half the Royal Guard has been sent north.”
Lucy pulled in a shocked breath. King Noram. Jomo and Paso’s father. He was an aloof figure, in the pocket of the prime minister. He made ceremonial appearances several times a year, and the rest of his time was spent in the Halls of Meditation.
Lucy had listened to her parents speculate about this moment when they thought no one was listening.
Lucy had also heard guards talking about Genza’s cruelty. She shivered again.
“Mom?” Lucy whispered.
Her mother turned away from the window and chambered a round, the snick of the slide loud in the room.
The Palace was made of stone, and the deep boom of the men’s voices in the courtyard echoed off the walls.
“Come,” her mother said abruptly. “Don’t forget your gun.” No, she wouldn’t forget her gun. Lucy had trained with her father and her mother—who was the better shot—since she was eight. They’d lived in some scary places, and her parents made sure she knew how to take care of herself.
The noises from the courtyard were louder, trucks moving in. Army vehicles, she could tell. Men’s voices, shouting. Not the sound of men out of control, but the sound of disciplined men, on a mission.
The Palace was waking up, but the lights were still out, throwing everyone into confusion.
“Marie?”
Dad! Lucy wanted to run to her father but in the dim light she could see that he was tense, combat ready, not in the mood to calm a frightened girl. So she stood silently while her parents went to their room and came back with combat rifles.
Her father checked out the window and turned away. “Hurry,” he said over his shoulder.
The whole Palace was in an uproar now. There was another noise, and a terrible smell . . . Her parents had their heads together as they quietly conferred. They were good at strategy, Lucy knew. She kept very still so she wouldn’t bother them.
There was a yellow glow lighting their profiles, though the lights were still out. Smoke billowed in the hall. The Palace was on fire! Though the Palace walls were made of stone, the ceilings and door frames were all made of ancient, painted wood, as were the thousands of small altars.
Her parents peeped out into the corridor, nodded at each other and rushed out of her room, firing. Now that her heavy wooden door was completely open, she could see the chaos outside: Palace servants streaming by, screaming, a few soldiers kneeling by the balustrade, firing down into the Great Hall, where what looked like hundreds of soldiers in the unfamiliar black uniforms were flooding into the Palace.
Heat, the crackling sounds of a vicious firefight, yellow flames licking greedily at the ancient tapestries lining the Great Hall. Lucy trembled in the darkness of her room, cold pistol in her hand feeling heavy and alien despite the thousands of practice rounds she’d shot.
She jumped, terrified, when a Royal Guardsman crumpled, dead, over her threshold, half his head blown away. There was something wet on her face, and she swiped at it, looking in horror at the bits of blood, bone and brains of the dead soldier.
She wanted to scream but clapped her bloodstained hands over her mouth. No distracting her parents, who were fighting for their lives at the top of the stairs.
The battle was raging outside her room, huge flames now eating at the big painted wooden banisters, the smell of smoke overpowering the stench of gunpowder.
She stood, shaking, inside the room, hidden in the darkness, pistol up in a two-handed grip, as her mother had taught her, waiting for the insurgents to come swarming up.
Lucy poked her head outside the door and gasped. The huge ceremonial staircase was littered with bodies, blood dripping through the balusters onto the stone flagging below. The battle raged with a ferocity she’d never seen before, a battle to the death.
And there were her parents, at the top of the stairs, holding off the insurgents. She moved out into the hall and saw her father recoil, his shoulder blossoming red. Her mother’s shirt was red, one of her arms hanging uselessly at her side, blood dripping to the ground. Lucy ran to her mother, but her mother dropped to the ground, a pink mist around her head.
Lucy screamed and screamed . . .
A strong hand pulled at her arm, a voice boomed. “Lucy!”
Lucy jerked, coming awake on a wave of choking panic, heart racing, terrified, the smell of wood smoke and gun smoke in her nostrils, still seeing her mother’s head exploding . . .
She swiveled her head, eyes wide, trying to take in a foreign environment, huge room in darkness except for a small, dim light illuminating a space around the huge bed. Colorful tapestries, the smell of incense, frescoed walls . . . the
Palace
! Oh God, she was back in the Palace. Flames, gunshots, soldiers . . . danger!
There were techniques to breathe down the terror, but they weren’t working.
She couldn’t breathe!
Oh God, she was dying! Trying to pull in a breath, but it wasn’t working, her chest wasn’t working, her throat wasn’t working,
she couldn’t breathe
.
Her throat was making horrible clicking sounds, her chest bucked as she tried to suck in air. The edges of her vision were blacking.
A large brown hand covered her chest, from between her breasts to her neck. The warmth and weight of another hand pressed against her back.
“It’s okay,” a deep voice said. “It’s okay. You can breathe, there’s nothing wrong, your lungs work. You just need to relax a little so you can pull in a breath. You can do it.” The hands, front and back, pressed harder, she was sandwiched between them, those warm and solid hands. The hand on her chest circled lightly, massaging her. “Now, wait just a second,” that deep voice said, “and breathe . . .
now
.”
As if her chest had burst a steel chain wrapped around her, she drank air into her starving lungs on a great, desperate whoop.
“That’s right,” the voice said calmly. “Perfect. Now again.”
Her head hung low, hair around her face, as she pulled in another wheezy breath, let it out. Coughed.
Her heart was still hammering. Everything was focused in her chest: the pain and the fear and the nightmare. All there, right in the center of her being.
“That’s right, good girl,” the deep voice said, the calm in it somehow calming her, too. Nothing horrible could be happening if he could be so calm. “You’re here, with me. You’ve been sleeping really well until just now, when you had a nightmare. It’s okay. Breathe.”
His voice lulled her. At the quiet command, she breathed again, and found that her lungs worked once more.
And that’s when the reality crashed into her.
The nightmare.
Mike had seen it all.
All her deepest fears were right out there, like exposed nerve endings. She was scraped raw, down to bedrock, with nowhere to hide, nowhere to go, too shaken to gather her dignity around her.
It was why she never had a lover stay the night. The first time she’d had sex was in college, when her roommate was away for the weekend. A sweet guy, a jock who read. The sex had been . . . okay. He’d certainly seemed pleased. Without wanting to, Lucy had fallen deeply asleep, only to bolt up screaming at three in the morning, shaking and crying, terrified.
He’d held her until she went back to sleep, then he’d slipped out of bed before dawn. He’d avoided her all that semester, turning on his heel if he saw her in the corridors.
Who could blame him? Who wanted a lighthearted college romance with a raving lunatic?
After that, she never allowed her few lovers to see her in anything resembling a vulnerable state. Or anyone else, for that matter.
And here, horribly, she had no choice. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, just like the song said.
So horrible to have someone witness her wild panic and grief, all the years of careful construction of herself gone in an instant, yanked back in a heartbeat into being the terrified fourteen-year-old, screaming as she watched her parents shot to death.
Lucy struggled to get away, she didn’t know to where, just
away
. Away from the smoke of panic still clouding her mind, away from the raw humiliation, away from here, away from her life, just . . . away. Maybe rush into the bathroom, pretend to be sick to her stomach, stay there awhile, until she could face the world again in the shape of Mike Shafer.
Now that she was breathing, she’d been pulled by strong arms against a solid, rock-hard chest and held there tightly. The hold wasn’t painfully tight, but it was unbreakable, she found, as she tried to wedge her hands against his chest and push.
Wishing he’d let go, wishing she could just disappear. Just wipe herself out, press the restart button, start over.
But she couldn’t. She knew that through bitter experience. She was what she was, and though she could hide her demons most of the time, so much so that she had a reputation for being a calm, even bland woman, she knew the monsters hiding under her bed and in the closet and above all in her mind were real. They had fangs and claws. They’d bitten huge chunks out of her and had claimed the only family she had.
Who could possibly guess that cool, calm Lucy Merritt woke up screaming in the middle of the night several times a month? That she had to hypnotize herself to get onto a plane?
Well, now Mike knew.
She was plastered up against him, one big hand covering the back of her head, the other around her waist.
She moved her head forward an inch, until it rested more comfortably against his chest. He smelled wonderful, and she smelled of the cold sweat that was pouring off her face, down her back, between her breasts.
“Let me go. I have to go to the bathroom.” Maybe she could just stay in there until morning. By then, surely, she’d be herself again. Do some breathing exercises. Get rid of the aftermath of the nightmare.
“No,” he said calmly and his hands tightened.
Lucy drew in a sharp breath. The inability to breathe had been terrifying. Though the left lobe of her brain understood clearly that she hadn’t been in anaphylactic shock and that her throat wasn’t swollen and that she could, in fact, breathe perfectly well, the right lobe of her brain, the animal part of her, couldn’t
breathe
and was sure she was going to die.

Other books

Thirty Girls by Minot, Susan
My Spartan Hellion by Nadia Aidan
You and I Forever by Melissa Toppen
Selby Sorcerer by Duncan Ball
Wanna Get Lucky? by Deborah Coonts
Calculated Revenge by Jill Elizabeth Nelson
Hunting of the Last Dragon by Sherryl Jordan
Once Upon a Prince by Rachel Hauck