Farida’s choice had been an incomparable man. Jessica’s would be where she wanted to die.
Killing Raithe had seemed impossible, of course. Since he’d been able to read her mind as easily as she read Farida’s pages, he’d delighted in punishing her every time she’d thought of murder . . . or of running. Eventually, she’d learned to make her mind blank, a dumb, self-lobotomized creature who could endure anything, her life merely a muddy haze of images and obstacles to avoid. But that hadn’t been sufficient. Raithe wanted her full attention and enthusiasm.
Vampires were not only brutal and ruthless. They knew humans so well that they could use kindness, cunning and desire to bait a captive into awareness, no matter how often their subsequent cruelty sent her scrambling back into the deepest cell of her mind.
Once or twice, she made the mistake of believing he could do no worse to her, but evil was bottomless.
Oh, Jesus. Was she destined to follow him to Hell? Some said vampire servants followed their Masters into the afterlife. Another good reason not to die any sooner than she had to. She’d already proven the will was far stronger than X-rays and blood tests.
Though Death wouldn’t wait forever, she’d faced down the Grim Reaper and made him blink, made him back the hell off, at least until she accomplished this one thing.
“So we wait here until dark, then?” Harry, one of her trio of opportunists, stood at her side.
While she needed the three men for passage and protection, for their knowledge of the language and the Sahara, she would have preferred to do this alone. However, there were things she couldn’t do by herself anymore. Harry had put her before him on his camel a couple of times when she fainted into one of her hours-long stupors. She’d warned him of it, instructed him to keep moving no matter what. Time was too short for her. She’d given him the compass heading and some landmarks, but not all of them. They thought they were seeking only a grave marker, not the tomb, her true goal.
When they found the obelisk, she’d have them leave her there. She wasn’t sure she could make the final leg of the journey on her own, but she certainly wasn’t going to dishonor Farida by exposing her secret resting place to others. She owed that not only to her, but to the brokenhearted spirit of the man who’d loved her enough to place her there.
“So are we in the right place?” Harry repeated patiently. They’d gotten used to her silences, her slow response time.
“I think so.” She considered the lay of the dunes, checked her compass and then shuffled through her sheaf of notes, checked the GPS. They’d made camp a couple hours before and her camel’s resting body was warm and solid at her back, a rhythmic vibration as the creature chewed her cud.
Harry sat down and leaned against his pack, considering her. “You know, you remind me of crazy Daisy Bates. She lived in the Outback for years among the blacks. Was as at home there as a baked lizard.” She glanced up at him. Harry was an expatriate Australian, one who’d lived in and around the Sahara for the past twenty years, a swagman gone walkabout far from home. He boasted he’d come here because he’d heard tell it was even hotter than Oz. He’d stayed merely to test it out. In reality, he’d left because he was wanted for killing a man in Queensland, a cuckolded husband who’d come after him with a knife.
Still, he wasn’t a bad sort. Thieves and cutthroats with some type of moral code were the best partners for a fugitive, and she’d done well in that, for the most part. He could have been the type to take her out into the desert and leave her during one of her unconscious spells, going back to try for the jewels she’d promised.
Of course, she’d also made it clear that the bank would be expecting a specific code word from each of them before they’d release the jewels. She was too weak to do anything but die under torture, so any temptation Harry or Mel might have to beat it out of her before they got her to her destination was obviously futile.
Mel was far more unscrupulous, but Harry kept him in line. Despite her aversion to being touched, she worried little about traveling alone with them, and not because Harry’s tastes didn’t run to forcing women. She was skin stretched over bone. Her hair was brittle, lackluster. If she brushed it, it came out. She was as likely to vomit up a meal as digest it, and her hacking cough kept the clothes she wore flecked with blood and sputum so that sometimes she was too tired to wipe it away. The odor coming from her body was noxious, that of a sick and dying animal. The men tended to sit upwind, though Harry and Dawud were more courteous and discreet about it.