a trip caving with her brother and sister as soon as the senator and his wife were safely back home. She crossed space. Smelled the rain. Felt cool and moist in the mist of the mountains. Far below her, she saw the entrance to a cave, spotlighted by the small sliver of moon that managed to peek around the thick cloud cover. Smiling, she dropped down to enter a world of crystal and ice. Whether she was dreaming or hallucinating didn’t matter; all she cared about was escaping from the pain of her wounds and the smell of the hospital.
Carpathian Mountains
Traian lay in the cool earth, gazing up at the high, cathedral-like ceiling. His body hurt in so many places, he just wanted to rest. The beauty of the cave was breathtaking and took his mind off his physical pain. The network of caves he’d entered deep beneath the earth was part of a huge subterranean city. Great waterfalls of ice cascaded down from ceiling to floor, some lapping around one another until it looked as if great bows of thick ice had gift-wrapped the entire cave he lay in.
Despite the cold, some insects and bats dwelled in the realms above him, but he had gone deep, where few living creatures could exist. The cold helped to numb the pain and bring him a soothing sense of peace he so badly needed after the last few risings. In the far corner of the cave the formation actually looked like thick ice walls with a covering of ice clouds over them. As he worked at forcing some of the burning embers from his body he tried to imagine the forces it would take to forge such a dramatic thing of beauty deep beneath the earth.
Traian turned his head and saw her. His heart nearly stopped and then began pounding. The breath left his lungs in a long rush. She was hovering just overhead to his left. She’d entered silently and somehow gotten past his safeguards. Had he been so exhausted that he’d forgotten such an important life-saving detail? Impossible. He could feel the weave, strong and in place. No one—nothing—should be able to get passed his safeguards.
He studied the woman. She had a cap of dark, glossy hair, very thick—the kind a man would want to run his fingers through. The thought brought him up short. He didn’t have thoughts like that about women—at least any that he could remember—and he had lived a very long existence. Her eyes were large and gray, heavily fringed with thick lashes. She stared back at him with complete astonishment.
“You’re hurt,” she said. “If you were real, I’d send the paramedics.”
Her voice seemed to go right through his skin, wrap itself around his heart and squeeze so tightly he lost his breath. His vision blurred. Tiny pinpoints of light burst behind his eyes, a light show of colors. Pastels at first so that some of the ice formations took on subtle blues and greens.
“What makes you think I am not real?” He tested his voice, not certain if she was real or if he’d dreamt her up. He’d been wounded a thousand times and nothing like this had ever happened to him before. A woman hovering above his head? Floating in the air like an angel? He was so far removed from heaven none of this made sense. He wasn’t a man to panic and was willing to see what she would do. He had no doubts that he could kill her if she made a wrong move.
“Because I’m not really here,” she answered. “I’m in a hospital many miles away. I don’t even know where here is.”
Traian frowned and rubbed his eyes. Colors shot at him like sparks, a fireworks show inside of his head. Great. The last thing he needed with a new, potential threat was to lose his vision. She didn’t feel like a threat. If anything, there was a sense of amusement and serenity about her. She didn’t look transparent, but it was possible she was telling the truth. Her voice had a soft melodic echo to it, as though it was disembodied.
“You look real enough to me.”
“What in the world are you doing lying in the mud in the middle of a cave?” Her soft laughter rippled through him. “You didn’t mistake this for a beauty spa, did you?”
His heart nearly ceased beating. He blinked several times as the colors behind his eyes burst into a spectacular display of raining