Cover Him with Darkness (19 page)

“Ahhh.” He looked a lot more concerned than me. “It didn't cross my mind.”

“Don't worry. It's a big bed. We'll manage, I suppose.”

“I suppose…”

I thanked Jelena, smiling through my blushes. She showed us two small flashlight lanterns on a table by the bed and told me, “Soon we will lock the front door and turn the generator off. If you need to piss in the night, there's a pot under the bed.”

Oh, how startled Egan looked when I passed that one on…

Jelena turned to leave us. There was a small wooden crucifix by the door and I saw her pause and cross herself with an odd shrug of her shoulder before she disappeared down the hall toward the stairs.

“Well, this is a bit awkward,” said Egan.

A part of me was disappointed that he looked more embarrassed than as if he were looking forward to taking advantage of the situation. Those dreams I'd been having had a lot to answer for, I admonished myself. “Well, obviously, we just keep our clothes on.”

“Obviously.” He folded his arms and nodded.

“Do you snore?”

“I…don't think so.”

“That's okay then. We're good.” I smiled brightly and kicked off my boots.

“Are we, um,
safe
? From your man there?” Was I imagining the tease in his voice? It made me want to rise to the challenge.

“I don't know,” I said, affecting an air of innocent inquiry. “What do you think?”

Egan cleared his throat. “I think we should get as much sleep as possible. We've got a long way to go tomorrow, with luck.”

I woke in the middle of the night, from a dreamless sleep for once—but with the urge to pee. I lay there for a while, hoping it'd go away and looking at the moonlight on the sheet spread over us both.

Egan didn't snore. Top marks to him.

I'd snuggled up against him in my sleep, just a bit. He lay on his back and my cheek and breasts were pressed against his shoulder and upper arm. My raised thigh was actually resting on his hand.

Oops
, I thought.

Then
Aargh—I've got to get up
. There wasn't any way I was going to fall back into sleep. Nor, I was adamant, was I going to use the pot in the room with him. Nobody deserved to wake up to that.

Wriggling out from under the sheet, I groped for a flashlight and then the chamber pot, and stole in my socks out of the room. The hall was in absolute darkness, and seemed to yawn like a black mouth to either side of me.

Too public,
I thought grumpily. Jelena and Petar slept downstairs, but what if they heard my footfalls and came up to investigate? I wanted to be behind a door.

There were other rooms opening off this corridor. I tried a handle, and the door creaked open. The room inside was empty—bare floorboards and no furniture at all—and moonlight shone in through the open shutters and the glassless frame. I shone the beam into every corner and then up overhead to check if there were bats or anything roosting up there, and I caught a glimpse of stars through gaps in the tiles.

Quickly, I did what I'd come here for. I was zipping up my pants when
I caught a pale movement from the corner of my eye and looked round to see a woman in the room with me.

It was a
really
good thing my bladder was empty at that moment.

I hadn't heard the door open or close again: she couldn't have followed me in from the hall. But she was pressed up against the door as if she'd just rushed in and slammed it against someone. She wore a long dress and there was some sort of scarf on her head; I could see her shoulders heaving. Then she backed off from the door and crossed herself. Her mouth moved, but I heard nothing. She looked wildly round the room—ignoring me as if I were not there at all—and then suddenly back at the door with an expression of absolute terror.

I looked too: I couldn't help it. She had me expecting it to burst in and a troop of soldiers appear. But the door didn't move. I looked back at the girl. She crossed herself again, backed up two more steps, turned—and then fled to the window. With a scramble she was balanced on the stone frame.

Then she jumped.

chapter nine

A SEA DREAM

N
o!” I shouted as the night swallowed the girl.

“Milja!”

The door was open behind me. Egan stood there, shining his flashlight in my eyes as I turned to him.

“Milja—for God's sake don't move!
Don't move!
”

I looked around me, confused, and I went cold inside and out—colder than I'd ever felt. The bare floorboards under my feet were black and scorched and sagging with rot. Near to the window they'd collapsed completely, long ago, and a huge hole gaped just where the girl had run across. I was standing right next to a section where the joist had clearly given up and the floor had slumped like a suspended sheet.

But
I had looked
when I walked into the room.

I had looked but I hadn't seen.

“Milja.” Egan stretched out his hand from the doorway. “Come here. Come on. Quickly now.”

I walked toward him, my eyes so round they were nearly popping out of my head, and I felt the floor bend and sway under my feet with every excruciating step.

He grabbed me the moment I was within arm's reach, pulling me into the hall and crushing me against his chest. I clung to his waist, knotting
my hands in the fabric of his shirt and burying my face against his breastbone as I started to shake.

“What on earth were you doing, Milja?” he asked.

I made a sort of tortured moan, which was the only thing that came to my lips.

“It's okay. It's okay now.” He ran his hand over my hair. “Were you sleepwalking? The cat jumped on my face and woke me up—and then I heard you scream.”

I didn't recall screaming. Maybe I had. “I wasn't asleep,” I said. “I was wide awake. I really saw her.”

“How did you get out on that floor? You could have gone straight through!”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“The girl—did you see her? She ran and she threw herself out of the window.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She didn't make any sound but I saw her. I think she was a ghost. I don't even believe in ghosts,” I said desperately. “There's no such thing! When we die we go to God for judgment, don't we?”

“Milja…calm down. You were dreaming.”

I looked up at him. “I wasn't. I was awake. What's happening to me, Egan?”

Angels and now ghosts—what was wrong with me?

He cupped my face in his hands. They felt warm. “All right. I believe you. Now come back to bed. Everything's fine.”

He took me to bed, and I lay with his arm around my shoulders and my head against his chest for the rest of the night.

The next afternoon we went to the coast.

The morning was uneventful. Well, if you don't count the dream where I was kneeling between Azazel's spread knees, sucking away obediently as members of the U.S. Congress, looking uneasy and scandalized for the most part, tried to pretend we weren't there and get on with debating some finance act. Azazel even made a reasonable show of listening to the politics, I believe, though he also made sure to pull up my short dress
and expose my bare ass to the entire House. I was wearing a red velvet collar about my throat, and a red leather leash went from it to loop about Azazel's careless hand. It made me melt. Oh, I like giving head. I loved doing it to Ben, when we were engaged; I loved being able to give him the thing he craved. I loved the strength and the length and the excitement of the member in my mouth… And Azazel was in another league altogether. I ate him with true enthusiasm. I remember some man coming over to sit beside him and watch, saying with a sigh, “Can I have her when you've finished with her?” And Azazel laughing before answering, “I'll never have finished with her.”

Uneventful if you don't count me having to pretend it was some nightmare that caused me to wake up in Egan's arms twitching and blazing with heat.

It's just a dream.

That was becoming my mantra.

I flung myself out of bed before instinct could catch up and make me run my hand over his oh-so-warm-and-solid body. I didn't even dare look at him as I pulled my boots on, though he woke with a grunt of surprise and stretched his back and stared around. Razor-edges of light were knifing through the slats of the shutters.

“Milja?”

“It's gone eight,” I told him, determined to preserve some dignity. Not mine, perhaps—it was probably too late for that after last night's visions—but his. He didn't deserve me watching him as he struggled out of sleep. “See you downstairs.”

But when I went into the kitchen Jelena was waiting with a big kettle of hot water on the propane stove, and when she saw me she poured it into two ewers decorated with roses under their cracked glaze. “There you go—you can take these up so you can both have a wash,” she told me.

It wasn't really possible to refuse. She draped two tea towels over my shoulder and stuck a sliver of rock-hard soap in my pants pocket. When I asked, embarrassed, if she had some toothpaste to spare, she laughed and fetched me not just toothpaste but a toothbrush, still in its plastic packet. Words couldn't express how grateful I was, but I swore to myself that I was never again leaving a house without a toothbrush in my purse, not for as long as I lived.

The jugs of water were surprisingly heavy by the time I'd climbed back up the creaky wooden stairs. I was glad to see I'd left the bedroom door ajar.

Inside the room, Egan was talking.

“No, she doesn't,” he said.

For a moment I froze, chilly doubt inveigling its way into my mind. It's not nice suspecting yourself the subject of discussion. There was no audible response to his voice, so he had to be on the phone. I was faced with the choice of standing discreetly outside and listening in, or barging in on the conversation.

The water was just too damn heavy. I turned my back and bumped the door open with my ass, backing into the room with the disingenuously cheerful warning: “Hope you've got your clothes on!”

Egan was standing by the window—fully clothed of course—with his phone to his ear. “Okay, that's fine,” he said quickly. “I understand.” Then he pressed the button to sign off.

“Hot water,” I announced, pretending not to see the concerned look he had locked on me. I banged the ewers down on the side table with the setin washbasin. “And soap and toothpaste. We'll have to share the brush, I'm afraid.”

“Are you all right Milja? You shot out of bed first thing.”

“I just…had a nightmare.”

“Well, I'm not surprised, after last night.”

“Yeah.” I thought about the ghost and shivered. I was still absolutely sure I'd not been sleepwalking.

“D'you remember what happened?”

“Yep.”

“D'you want to talk about it then?”

“No.” Two could play at being stubborn, I thought.

“Okay then. Well, I've had a call,” he said, rather unnecessarily.

“Uh-huh?”

“A good thing too, because this thing's nearly out of charge.”

“So what's going on?”

“Good news. We've got our way out. We're taking a boat out from Budva tonight.”

Budva is the biggest tourist town on the coast. I'd never been there. In
fact, apart from river ferries, I'd never been on a boat. I eyed him dubiously. “Where to?”

“Um.” He moved closer, as if to reassure me. “Italy.”

“Huh?”

“It should only take a few hours.”

I shook my head, slowly at first, then with increasing vehemence. “That's no good, Egan! You've got a European Union passport, okay—that's fine for you—but that'll make me an illegal immigrant. And what the hell am I going to do in Italy?”

“Whoa.” He held up his palms, placatingly. “Don't worry. Once we're on Italian soil you'll be absolutely safe from the guys following you. And don't fret about passports: I can get you any paperwork necessary. But you have to trust me.”

That should have set alarm bells ringing—it would have, only a few weeks ago, when I was law-abiding and blameless. But I didn't live in that world anymore. I stared at him. It was slowly beginning to sink in that I was a fugitive, of a sort, and in an increasingly desperate state of vulnerability. The old rules were no longer enough to keep me safe.

“Will you trust me, Milja?”

Did
I trust him enough to take the risks he proposed?

Did I have any choice?

“You'd better be sure you're doing the right thing,” I said softly.

Egan closed his eyes, almost in pain, and nodded with lips compressed. “Yes.”