Black dawn (11 page)

She'd never tasted anything as
good as that
water. No Coke she'd drunk on the hottest day of summer could compare with it. It ran through her
dry mouth and down her parched throat
and then
it seemed to spread all through her, sparkling
through her body, soothing and reviving her. A sort
of crystal clearness entered her brain. She drank
and drank in a state of pure bliss.

And then, when she was in the even more blissful
state of being not thirsty anymore, she plunged the
leather bag under the surface to fill it.

"What's that for?" But there was a certain resig
nation in the boy's voice.

"Cady. I have to get back to her." Maggie sat back
on her heels and looked at him. The light danced
and flickered around him, glinting bronze off his
dark hair, casting half his face in shadow.

"Thank you," she said, quietly, but in a voice that
shook slightly. "I think you probably saved my
life again."

"You were really thirsty."

"Yeah."
She stood up.

"But when you thought there wasn't enough
water, you were going to give it to her." He couldn't
seem to get over the concept.

"
Yeah
"

"Even if it meant you dying?"

"I didn't die," Maggie pointed out. "And I wasn't
planning to. But
yeah, I guess
,
if there wasn't any
other choice." She saw him staring at her in utter
bewilderment. "I took
responsibility
for her," she
said, trying to explain. "It's like when you take in
a cat, or-or it's like being a queen or something.
If you say you're going to be responsible for your
subjects, you are. You owe them afterward."

Something glimmered in his golden eyes, just for
a moment. It could have been a dagger point of
anger or just a spark of astonishment. There was
a silence.

"It's not
that
weird, people taking care of each
other," Maggie said, looking at his shadowed face. "Doesn't anybody do it here?"

He gave a short laugh. "Hardly," he said dryly.
"The nobles know how to take care of themselves.
And the slaves have to fight each other to survive." He added abruptly, "All of which you should know.
But of course you're not from here. You're from
Outside."

"I didn't know if you
knew
about Outside," Mag
gie said.

"There isn't supposed to be any contact. There
wasn't for about five hundred years. But when
my-when the old king died, they opened the pass,
again and started bringing in slaves from the out
side world.
New blood."
He said it simply and
matter-of-factly.

Mountain men, Maggie thought. For years there had been rumors about the Cascades, about men
who lived in hidden places among the glaciers and
preyed on climbers.
Men or monsters.
There were
always hikers who claimed to have seen Bigfoot.

And maybe they had-or maybe they'd seen a
shapeshifter
like
Bern
.

"And you think that's okay," she said out loud.
"Grabbing people from the outside world and drag
ging them in here to be slaves."

"Not
people.
Humans.
Humans
are
vermin;
they're not intelligent." He said it in that same dis
passionate tone, looking right at her.

"Are you
crazy?"
Maggie's fists were clenched; her
head was lowered.
Stomping time.
She glared up
at him through narrowed lashes. "You're talking to
a human right now. Am I intelligent or not?"

"You're a slave without any manners," he said
curtly. "And the law says I could kill you for the way you're
talking
to me."

His voice was so cold, so arrogant
...
but Maggie
was starting not to believe it.

That couldn't be all there was to him.
Because
he was the boy in her dream.

The gentle, compassionate boy who'd looked at
her with a flame of love behind his yellow eyes,
and who'd held her with such tender intensity, his
heart beating against hers, his breath on her cheek.
That boy had been real-and even if it didn't make
any sense, Maggie was somehow certain of it. And
no matter how cold and arrogant this one seemed, they had to be part of each other.

It didn't make her less afraid of this one, exactly.
But it made her more determined to ignore her
fear.

"In my dream," she said deliberately, advancing
a step on him, "you cared about at least one
human. You wanted to take care of me."

"You shouldn't even be
allowed
to dream about
me," he said. His voice was
as tense and grim as
ever, but
as Maggie got closer to him, looking directly up into his face, he did something that amazed her. He fell back a step.

"Why not?
Because I'm a slave?
I'm
a
person."

She took another step forward, still looking at him challengingly. "And I don't believe that you're as
bad as you say you are. I think I saw what you
were really like in my dream."

"You're crazy," he said. He didn't back up any
farther, there was nowhere left to go. But his whole
body was taut. "Why should I want to take care of you?" he added in a cold and contemptuous voice.
"What's so special about you?"

It was a good question, and for a moment Mag
gie was shaken. Tears sprang to her eyes.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I'm nobody
special. There
isn't
any reason for you to care about
me. But it doesn't matter. You saved my life when
Bern
was going to kill me, and you gave me water
when you knew I needed it. You can talk all you
want, but those are the facts. Maybe you just care about everybody, underneath. Or-"

She never finished the last sentence.

As she had been speaking to him, she was doing
something she always did, that was instinctive
to.,
her when she felt some strong emotion. She had
done it with P.J. and with Jeanne and with Cady.

She reached out toward him. And although she
was only dimly aware that he was pulling his hands
back to avoid her, she adjusted automatically,
catching his wrists....

And that was when she lost her voice and what
she was saying flew out of her head.
Because some
thing happened.
Something that she couldn't ex
plain, that was stranger than secret kingdoms or
vampires or witchcraft.

It happened just
as her fingers closed on his
hands. It was the first time they had touched like that, bare skin to bare skin. When he had grabbed her wrist before, her jacket sleeve had been in be
tween them.

It started as an almost painful jolt, a pulsating
thrill that
zigged
up her arm and then swept
through her body. Maggie gasped, but somehow
she couldn't let go of his hand. Like someone being
electrocuted, she was frozen in place.

The blue fire, she thought wildly. He's doing the
same thing to me that he did to
Bern
.

But the next instant she knew that he wasn't. This wasn't the savage energy that had killed
Bern
, and it wasn't anything the boy was doing to her. It
was something being done to both of them, by
some incredibly powerful source outside either of them.

And it was trying ... to open a channel. That
was the only way Maggie could describe it. It was
blazing a path open in her mind, and connecting
it to his.

She felt
as if she had turned around and unex
pectedly found herself facing another person's soul.
A soul that was hanging there, without protection,
already in helpless communication with hers.

It was by far the most intense thing that had
ever happened to her. Maggie gasped again, seeing
stars, and then her legs melted and she fell
forward