Outlaw Carson (19 page)

She turned her head in the other direction,
toward the monastery, and felt his hand slide down her back in a
gesture of comfort.

“Can we get there from here?” she asked,
unaware of the wistfulness in her voice.

His smile teased her. “Only if you get off
me. But truly the choice is yours,
bahini
. I have no
complaints.”

Chivalrous to the end, she thought, knowing
what she looked like. He must have noticed, too, because he’d
called her
bahini
. She’d looked the word up, and little
sister was a far cry from wife, a damn far cry from what they’d
shared in her bedroom. With a soft exhalation of air, she rolled
off him. She would have gotten up except he rolled, too, pinning
her to the ground.

“You are well, then?” he asked.

“Pretty well,” she hedged. Physically she
was fine, rather invigorated by the high mountain air in fact. Any
anger and anxiety she’d felt during her ordeal had been subjugated
by the sheer beauty and the uncommon opportunities of the place
she’d been brought to. Emotionally, though, she’d had a couple of
major glitches, the cause of which was looking down at her with
such tender concern, she wondered if she was blowing them out of
proportion.

“You’ve been too long in the sun.” His
fingers traced the bridge of her nose and caressed her cheek.

“I forgot to pack my sunscreen,” she said
softly, feeling the spell of him bind her anew and wishing it
wasn’t so.

“Are you hungry?”

“Maybe.” Her gaze fastened on the mouth mere
inches from her own, and she watched a smile form.

“We have work to do, Kreestine, and quickly.
I do not wish to attempt the paths at night.”

“Work?” she questioned, then silently cursed
herself. Of course, work. Wasn’t that what she’d just been telling
herself?

His smile widened into a grin. “We are in
Chatren-Ma,
bahini
. I do not wish to leave empty-handed,
but I also know we should leave before dark.”

An outlaw, his words confirmed in her mind.
No monk or mystic, but an outlaw to the core.

“You may come with me,” he said. “I will not
insist that you wait, but it would be my choice. I—” He stopped and
reconsidered his words, then only said, “It would be my choice for
you to wait.”

“Not a chance,” she said, looking him
straight in the eye.

“You have surprised me,” Kit said, edging
around a curve in the much narrowed trail and reaching a hand back
to help her. “I did not think you would get this far on your
own.”

What could she say? Kristine mused. She was
more than a little surprised herself.

“How did you get past the first avalanche?”
he asked.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly an avalanche.” She
grasped his hand and swung around the corner, coming up hard
against the new cliff-face and letting out her breath. “I thought
so at first, but then I noticed the boulders had a kind of pattern
to them, like somebody had placed them there to block the trail, or
a least give the appearance of having blocked the trail, and I
figured anybody that determined to make an illusion had done it
because the trail wasn’t really blocked at all. It probably took me
another fifteen minutes, though, to find the opening. I’d like to
be able to date it, maybe shake up some conceptions on the early
technological advances of a people still considered backward. It’s
a remarkable feat of engineering.”

“Yes, a remarkable feat,” Kit said,
surprised again. It had taken him over an hour to find the opening
the first time. “And Heaven’s Steps?”

“Harder coming down than going up,” she said
with a nonchalance he would have been hard pressed to emulate.
“What makes you think they were called Heaven’s Steps?”

“There’s an inscription carved into the
stone at a juncture in the trail about twenty yards earlier.” He
edged around another crumbling precipice. “The words don’t
translate into English with precision, but they’re very
celestial.”

“I don’t remember a juncture twenty yards
before the staircase.” Talking helped, she thought, unwilling to
look either up or down. Knowing the strength of his arm also
helped.

His hand tightened on hers, and she glanced
over at him. “You took the tunnel?” he asked.

She nodded. “I figured it would be kind of
hard to fall off a tunnel.”

She amazed him. She had more courage than he
had thought, much more. He’d avoided the tunnel his first time in,
but by the time he’d returned, he’d been forced into many tunnels,
all of them to his detriment. There was no other way to enter
Chatren-Ma. The monastery was impregnable from the valley floor.
The sole access was from inside the earth, deep behind the
cliff-face.

“Kreestine.” He spoke her name with a note
of gentle pride and a share of warning. “There are more tunnels
ahead of us, and in many of them it would be an easy thing to fall
off. The caverns are riddled with traps of emptiness for the
unwary.”

Traps of emptiness for the unwary, she
slowly repeated in her mind, then caught his gaze. “You mean
holes?”

“Holes,” he confirmed, keeping his other
knowledge to himself, not knowing how or if she’d be affected. “Big
holes.”

* * *

He was right, Kristine thought, edging
around another “trap of emptiness.” Without him guiding her, she
would have disappeared about a mile back. She wasn’t afraid of the
dark, but she’d quickly worked up a steady stream of gratitude for
Kit’s presence. She was following him. She didn’t know what he was
following, but he hadn’t missed yet.

“If you knew about the tunnels, why didn’t
you bring a flashlight?” she asked. If she’d known what she was
getting into, she would have asked the Turk to stop someplace where
she could have grabbed one of those halogen quartz things, or maybe
two or three.

“Your eyes can deceive where your intuition
will not fail. I spent many years, Kreestine, many years learning
to see through the darkness of thoughts, learning to tread a path
of light.”

Lois wouldn’t have liked his explanation,
she mused. It was a little too mystical for the curator’s pragmatic
tastes. Kristine had no choice but to believe, and the only things
she didn’t like were the strained quality of his voice and the
increasing heat of his hand in hers. She had a ridiculous urge to
press the inside of her wrist against his forehead to see if he had
caught a flu.

“You wouldn’t have accidentally shot me,
then?” she asked.

“You were safe from the minute the Turk
discovered my knife in his door. The message was clear. He knew his
life depended upon your safety. And—and the man I questioned in
Shanghai assured me you were unhurt when he last saw you.”

The hesitation in his voice and something
about the way he said the word “questioned” bothered her. “Did you
hurt him?” she asked quietly.

“I touched him, nothing more.”

Touched him like he’d touched old Luke in
the bar, she knew. “How did you get your knife into the compound
gate?”

He hesitated again, as if reaching for a
breath, then said very softly. “With much anger, Kreestine, much
anger.”

It was practically a declaration of love,
but she wasn’t going to push her luck. She was going to let the
words float around inside her for a while, let them soak in, sort
out. She knew what kind of man he was, and she was sure nothing
short of the truest emotion, of undeniable need, could have snapped
the rationality of his mind. The amount of anger he’d demonstrated
left no room for rational anything. It must be love. But she wasn’t
going to push her luck.

“Come up behind me and put your arms around
my waist,’ he said, his voice tense with concentration.

She did as she was told, keeping an inch of
distance between them to help her ignore how good he felt, just in
case she was wrong.

“Closer,” Kit insisted, pulling her arms
farther around him. “Match every step I take. Start . . . start
with your right foot.”

He was fighting a losing battle, and he
cursed himself for a fool with every passing second weakening him.
Because he’d had to hurry after her, he hadn’t had the time to
meditate, as he had before, focusing his energy so that all that
was unseen in these tunnels could not distract him from the path.
They couldn’t turn back though. A thousand lost, soft-shod
footsteps filled the caverns behind them, echoing through the
centuries. They were dreams, thoughts with substance, and he heard
every one, every question, every answer, trying to confuse him and
make him lose the way. There was no evil, but there was warning,
and certain death for an unsure footfall.

Kristine was another difference between the
first time and this. Her strong will shone like a beacon behind
him, attracting the ancient amalgamation of souls and the prayers
they’d chanted into the rock. His sensitivity was both a blessing
and a curse. He wasn’t blind in the darkness. On the contrary, he
saw too much, and he didn’t know how long he could handle it
all.

They moved along a path Kristine could only
guess at, one slow step at a time, for what seemed hours. She knew
merely minutes had passed, but darkness changed time, elongated it
or suspended it altogether until a mark was met. It added an
other-worldliness to the earth beneath her, to the walls around
her. She couldn’t see anything, but she felt . . . something.

In front of her, Kit stopped twice, three
times, then four, and cursed softly at the fifth halt.

“Don’t move.” His voice echoed plainly,
chasing the air into the dark void.
Don’t move
. . .
don’t move
. . .
don’t
. . .
move
. .
.

She felt one of his hands leave hers and
shove into his pocket. A striking sound came from the vicinity of
his knife sheath, and a match flared. She took one look and froze
like a rock.

She wanted to go home. She had no business
being there, no history business, no love business, no sensible
business. A gust of wind from somewhere extinguished the match.

He struck another, and Kristine looked
again. She still wanted to go home.

They were balanced on a spit of land jutting
out into a fathomless, floorless cavern, though land seemed too
substantial a term for the bit of earth and stone beneath their
feet. As if to confirm her opinion, an almost infinitesimal portion
of pebble and dirt gave way, whispering off into the darkness. The
match followed the fall, snuffing out in the abyss.

“We are almost there,” Kit said. She forced
herself to concentrate on his spoken words and not on the echoes
wafting around them. “Let go of me, but do not move until you feel
my hand around your ankle.”

“Where are you going?” she whispered, trying
to keep her own echoes out of the air.

“Over the edge.”

“The edge?” Oh, she didn’t like the sound of
that, but he slipped away from her before she could voice an
opinion or offer an alternative. Worse, she thought she heard him
stumble, a man who could run on four-inch wide rails, a man whose
grace exceeded that of the stars in the sky – and she began to get
very nervous.

Standing there on the small promontory,
surrounded only by her own shallow breaths and a whole lot of
timeless blackness, she discovered a few new things about herself.
She was afraid of the dark after all; her balance, like his, didn’t
seem to be what it used to be—she swore she was swaying from side
to side; and she’d picked a very interesting place to die.

She’d definitely make the news with this bit
of folly.

“Krees, give me your hand.”

This time she jumped at the opportunity,
figuratively speaking.

He eased her over the edge, the front of her
body sliding down the front of his. Suddenly the darkness filled
with a crackling awareness. He pressed closer to her, closer than
was absolutely necessary, she was sure.

She didn’t mind the closeness, but she’d
felt weakness in his arms where only strength had been before. He
leaned against her, quietly, seriously.

“Are you okay?” she asked, smoothing loose
strands of hair behind his ears and secretly checking his
temperature. He was burning up.

“I missed you.” His hand slowly rose to cup
her face, and his voice grew husky. “I will not let anyone take you
from me again.”

He lowered his mouth and found what he
searched for with her softly spoken. “Good.”

The kiss was sweet, yet erotic in its
creative intensity. His tongue slid across her lips, laving the
tender skin before slipping inside the welcoming warmth of her
mouth.

His groan echoed around her, heightening her
senses and pushing her toward an edge she longed to fall off again,
the one he’d taken her to when they’d made love.

Tonight, Kreestine, you will be
mine
. He deepened the kiss, the muscles in his arms
tightening, giving her a taste of the power of his desire.

She sank under the pliant assault of his
mouth, and she knew in her heart she could get addicted to his
barbaric ways and Neanderthal tendencies. She would be his,
indeed.

“We must go,” he murmured weakly as he
lifted his head, then he returned for another kiss, and yet
another. “It is not far now.”

The fathomless cavern actually proved to be
about twenty fathoms deep, by her estimation of the rise between
switchbacks. She doubted if she’d ever return, and certainly not
without Kit, but even taking his phenomenal memory into account,
she thought two heads full of catalogued facts were better than
one. Especially since he seemed to be tiring at a rather
accelerated pace.

The last tunnel grew narrower and narrower,
giving Kristine her first bout with claustrophobia. The rough stone
walls caught at her coat, the uneven floor twisted beneath her
feet—rising up unexpectedly to trip her, then falling away in
short, lurch-inducing drop-offs. She fell against him repeatedly.
He caught her every time. And every time she felt his strength
ebbing, and she started to know real fear of this strange
place.