Haunting Warrior (2 page)

When she was stripped bare, she stood in the flickering light and stared at something just over his shoulder.

He turned—every time he turned, even though by now a part of him knew what he’d see. A tall man with overlong hair stood just behind him. A man dressed in a weird getup that looked like it had come from a movie set. Archaic, like the dress the woman had stripped.

His cloak was made of some animal fur—not politically correct faux fur, but the real thing, with paws stretched flat at four points and the stub of tail nearly dragging the floor. It was flung back from his massive shoulders, revealing a heavy circle of gold round his throat. An obscure word floated to the top of Rory’s thoughts.
Torque.
That’s what it was called. It was as thick as Rory’s fingers and engraved with Celtic spirals. It looked heavy. The man’s shirt had a wide slit for his head, boxy sleeves that fell to his forearms, and a front embroidered with more spirals and symbols in purple and gold at the hem and seams. It hung to his thighs, like a dress. Beneath it were short pants that gathered below his knees and leather sandals wrapped midway up powerful calves, Roman style.

But even his bizarre attire was not the strangest part. What made Rory gasp was more tangible, more figurative. It shook him no matter how many times he faced it.

The man looked exactly like Rory. He didn’t resemble; he wasn’t similar. He could have been Rory’s reflection.

As Rory stared he became aware of the ebb and flow of noises coming from beyond the curtained wall, a rumble that now emerged as laughter and conversations he hadn’t noticed while he’d watched the woman strip. He’d heard only the beat of his heart pounding in his ears then. Now sounds surged into the candlelit room, the drone of speaking men mingling with raucous hoots and jeering, an occasional giggle or shriek of mirth from the women. One man’s words rose above the rest as the speaker threatened to come in and show Rory where everything went. The man used Rory’s name, but pronounced it with the same Gaelic inflection that his dream-woman had used when she’d urged him to hurry. Ruairi.

Rory frowned, realizing he recognized the man’s voice. He knew he’d heard it before. From their expressions, it was familiar to the naked woman and his identical twin, too.

A surge of lewd cheers followed the man’s threat. Volunteers offered to help with the endeavor.

The taunts galvanized Rory’s twin into action, and he began stripping away the strange costume with nimble, frantic fingers. He unfastened a gold chain holding the fur cloak at his throat and tossed the heavy garment onto the bed before bending to untie the sandals. Frowning, Rory went back to watching the woman as she watched his double. She stood straight and proud, neither hunching to cover her nudity or posing to flaunt it. She wore no expression, but her eyes sparked and flared with something Rory couldn’t quite identify. It couldn’t be longing. There was too much anger for that. Her fingers curled in on each other in a tight fist. Then they eased, then they contracted again.

But it was the way her gaze swept over his twin, the way her breasts lifted with a soft breath and her tongue moistened her lips that enthralled him.

He couldn’t look away, though that distant awareness inside him was shouting again, warning him not to relax, not to be mesmerized by the rise and fall of those lovely breasts. But he couldn’t stop himself as he stared at her, longing to touch her.

He knew the end of this fantasy dream was coming, as it always did just at this point when he felt he might explode with the want and need rising inside him. He braced himself for it, for what came after when he finally awoke alone and aching, still feeling that somehow it had been more than a dream, though he knew that was crazy. She would torment him during the wakeful hours afterwards. The sight of her, close enough to touch . . . to smell . . . to taste . . . He would imagine she was everywhere, just out of reach.

But this time the dream took another turn, veering unexpectedly. Shocking him.

Rory tensed, suddenly uncertain in unknown waters. What next? Would his body double do what the real Rory longed for? Would he take her in his arms and bury himself deep between the woman’s warm thighs? Would watching them be better or worse than always wondering what came after that heated look in her eyes?

Her gaze flitted over his twin’s body, lingering on the bunched muscles in his shoulders, the tight ridge of his abs, sliding lower to the hard-on that stood tight against his belly. She flushed and turned away, moving to the table where she filled a cup with wine and gulped it down. Rory found himself entranced by the play of candlelight on the slope of her spine, the curve of her ass, the long length of leg. His body double watched with equal fascination.

She took another drink before facing his twin again, but whatever courage she’d gained vanished when she turned. She looked so vulnerable standing before the massive size and barely restrained power of his muscled twin. Rory wanted to intercede, not trusting his double with his dream-woman. Even now, a part of him caught the irony in that. Rory was no more trustworthy than this stranger who looked like him.

He watched with growing frustration as the two met in the center of the room. His twin reached out and touched her skin, slid his hands from shoulders to buttocks, pulling her tight against his body. It enraged him, watching. Confounded him, because he also felt some strange sense of participation. The old phrase
taking a shower in a raincoat
came to him. It fit exactly. He experienced some of what his twin must be feeling, and yet only through the thick layer of distance.

His twin and the woman backed up until they reached the crude bed and then fell on it. Rory’s gut tightened as they came together in a tangle of limbs and passion. There was little love, that was apparent, but there was heat and need that perfumed the air and sizzled in the silence. The two seemed to clash in a battle for control, yet neither relinquished it and neither retained it. Rory could only ride the wave, dry and isolated, while his mind and his body yearned to take his twin’s place, be one with the complex and fervent confrontation.

When it was over, he was twisted tight and hard as a rock. He cursed under his breath, damning this dream-world that had dominated him. Wishing to awaken but unable to bring his consciousness back to his sleeping body.

He heard a sound to his right. Confused, he looked at the stone wall and saw the woven banner with a crest at its center billow and then move. A man appeared—dressed like Rory’s twin had been only not so fine, not so resplendent. This man’s clothing lacked the adornment and embellishment, but it had the same ancient look to it. He was armed with a bladed weapon—too short to be called a sword, too long to be a knife. His manner said he knew how to use it.

What happened next came in a jerky blur—a film that jumped and dragged then sped forward without pause. His twin leaping off the bed, the woman sucking in a harsh breath that seemed to clog the scream she wanted to release. There was recognition on all their faces, and Rory understood that this intruder was no stranger.

Unfettered by the vulnerability of his nudity, his twin crouched in a fighting stance as the new man circled him with that long and wicked blade clenched tight in his hand. Then they charged one another, one naked, one garbed. The fight was quick, silent, and violent. Rory’s twin overpowered the other but not without a struggle. He unarmed the attacker quickly, slamming him against the unrelenting stone and crushing his throat with his bare hands.

Stunned, Rory looked from the dead man now sprawled on the floor to his naked twin to the woman, who watched from between spread fingers. She rushed toward his twin with a look of horror on her face. Rory spun and saw that his double was on his knees now. His hands clutched his gut, and something dark and viscous ran through his fingers.
Blood.

Rory crouched beside the woman as she stared at the gaping wound across his twin’s abdomen. Blood gushed from it, splashing her bare skin, seeping into the straw and twigs covering the floor. There was so much of it.
Too much.

“Why?” she breathed the question, those eyes scanning his twin’s face.

Yes, why?
Rory wanted to know as well. Why had the intruder attacked them without provocation?

His twin was bent with agony and didn’t answer. As his twin reached out a bloody hand to the woman, Rory knew the life was draining from him. It was like watching his own death, unbearable and inescapable. The look in his twin’s eyes cut him as deeply as the gash in the other man’s flesh. There was rage and there was pain. Desolation. Realization. And something deeper, more agonizing. A wound more painful than the one emptying his life onto the floor.

“It’s the both of us he’s betrayed, isn’t it?” the woman said, her words so soft Rory thought they were imagined.

His twin closed his eyes and nodded once. Then he looked up, and for a cold instant, it seemed he stared right at Rory. There was comprehension in the look—comprehension and shock. Then, relief. Rory felt the
how
forming on his lips, but he had no voice here, in this nightmare that had morphed into something no longer symbolic but terrifyingly real.

His twin stumbled to his feet and now he clutched an object in his hands. Rory gaped at it, reeling again from the shift this dream-world took.

It was the Book of Fennore. Rory would recognize it anywhere, even here, in this warped fantasy he couldn’t escape.

The Book had a black cover made of leather, beveled with concentric spirals, and crusted with jewels, gold, and hammered silver that twisted and twined around the edges and corners. Three cords of silver connected in a mystifying lock fixed over the jagged edges of thick creamy paper. As old as the earth and sky, the Book was more than a bound text; it was an entity with its own consuming desires and twisted needs. Just touching it gave it access to the heart, mind, and very soul. Its call was irresistible. Its promises, unimaginable. Rory knew better than anyone.

A low humming had swelled around the three of them, a sickening buzz that lodged in the pit of his stomach and blocked out the sounds on the other side of the curtain. He felt hot and cold . . . and scared. The dream breached what little barrier remained between nightmare and terror.

The humming whine throbbed and pulsated—too low to be heard, too insistent to be ignored. With it came a blistering heat that burned like a coal in his head. A reasonable, alien part of him began to cite calming words—
It will be all right
.
It’s just a dream. Just your imagination.
And once again, dream-Rory recognized that the input was coming from his wakeful self. Dream-Rory found that even more terrifying because that implied a plurality that went beyond the symbolic twin.

Everything began to shimmer, became the stuff dreams are supposed to be—translucent, then transparent, then transcendental. . . . Before he could wrap his thoughts around it, the woman turned her head to where he knelt beside her. The cold fear on her face struck an answering chord within him. She saw him.

She lifted a hand that shook and set it against his chest, as if to test his solidity. Her eyes widened; her mouth rounded into an “oh” of disbelief.

And the shock of her icy fingers against his hot skin jerked him awake.

I
T was three A.M. the next night—morning—when Rory got off work at the Low Down Bar on Palm and Sonora. And it was dark like only the wee hours can be.

He’d stayed to help Martina clean after the club had locked its doors behind the last drunk, and he was dead tired. Night after night of chasing the dream-woman had left him gritty-eyed and short-tempered. He’d had zero tolerance for the punks who drank until they thought they were bulletproof, who were basically the only customers stupid enough to frequent the Low Down.

Once all the tables were wiped, floors mopped, and glasses washed and put away, he’d walked Martina, the bartender, to her battered Toyota—a heap of metal and rubber that had turned a hundred and seventy thousand miles but still managed to get her to and from work. There was an autumn chill in the air, and it mingled with the stench of garbage and smog and old grease. They were too far inland to smell the Pacific, not that the ocean breeze could have penetrated the borders of the barrio. Graffiti glowed neon on every surface in sight. The owner had finally taken down the sign that hung over the Low Down’s door, tired of having it repainted after each tagging. Now the clientele found it by instinct—cockroaches drawn to trash.

“Your tires are low,” he said as they approached the Toyota.

“And my
pompi’
s dragging,” she said with a tired sigh.

He let his gaze run down her backside. “Your
pompi
looks fine to me.”

She laughed and wiggled her ass for him, muttering in Spanish, “
not as fine as yours.”
She didn’t think he understood, but Rory had always had a way with foreign languages, an innate ability to interpret and even speak them. It wasn’t that he was naturally fluent in so many different tongues; somehow he could grasp the meaning and intent of the words even when the sound and shape of them was unknown. With such an understanding, it took no time to master the new language. The skill came in handy more times and in more ways than he could count, but it wasn’t something he broadcasted.

“Why don’t you follow me home and find out just how fine it is, Irish?” Martina said in English.

She was only half kidding, and they both knew it. He grinned and raised his brows. “Ah, but then I’d ruin you for any other man, darlin’.”

“I think you’re afraid it will be the other way around,
mijo
. Once you’ve had a taste of some spicy
frijoles
, you’ll be bored with your white potatoes.”