Dark Lover (20 page)

His gaze held hers. “It's a trap.”

“He knew I was going to jack his chain and wrap it around his scummy throat. He left because he was afraid.”

“He's not afraid of ye. It's a trap.” His stare was unwavering now.

She seized his wrist and said, “Open the vault for me.” But the moment she held on to him, she recalled every heated moment of the night before, much to her dismay.

He stared at her, his eyes changing, too. They became a darker gray, warming.

She dropped her hold. “Let's go. Time's a-wasting.”

He seized her hand now. “Who's afraid…of who?”

Her insides vanished. “Last night was a bad idea.”

He slowly smiled. “Really? Forget the vault.”

Unbelievably, she was tempted. She wet her lips and shook her head. “The vault, Maclean. We can debate the merits of our having sex another time.”

He released her. Whirling, he started toward the vault. She hurried to keep up.

He reached for the lever, pausing. Sam glanced at his face. It was hard and set. He was angry, but she wasn't sure why. Again, she wondered if he knew about Hemmer's video.

If he had to put an effort into disarming the security system and the locks, she couldn't tell. He pushed down hard on the lever and the steel door opened. He then stepped back. “Go ahead, Sam.” He was disapproving.

Sam ignored the tone of his voice. She stepped past him quickly, excited now to find the evil in the vault. Once inside, she paused. Maclean remained in the doorway. She realized she didn't feel a thing. Softly, she cursed. “I'm not sensing it. Can you help me out here, Maclean?”

He stepped into the vault reluctantly. As he did so, his blunt fingers went to the collar of his polo shirt, adjusting it as if he were warm. It crossed her mind that he often acted as if his shirt collars were constricting.

He nodded behind her. “It's over there.”

Sam turned. As she did, she felt a finger of black malice touch her and she shivered. Suddenly she knew it had been waiting for her, before making its presence known. But she still didn't know what “it” was.

Maclean walked over to a dark painting of a family gathered at a small table in a cottage. He lifted it from its hook.

Sam hurried over. An inscription was engraved on the cement wall behind the painting, consisting of hieroglyphics that glowed, as if burning embers. “What is that?”

Ian didn't answer her. Sam realized he had paled. “Ian?”

“I've seen this before,” he said grimly.

Laughter sounded.

As one, Sam and Ian whirled. Hemmer stood in the doorway, grinning at them. He simply shut the vault door in their faces. The locks clicked.

Ian inhaled sharply.

Sam glanced at him and saw that he was very white now. She didn't get it. Ian could leap—or so he said. He could not be locked inside a vault.

“Ian? Hemmer's obviously toying with us.”

He ripped his collar open, breathing hard.

It took Sam a split second to realize he was having some kind of attack. “Do you have asthma?” she asked.

He didn't answer, choking. He was turning red now.

“Ian!” She put her arm around him, alarmed. “Is it asthma?”

“No…I can't breathe!” He went down to his knees. Sweat streaked his brow and temples. He gasped for air.

He was either claustrophobic or having a panic attack. She knelt with him, keeping her arm around him. “Ian, there's plenty of air in here. And we're not locked in. You can leap.”

He looked at her. His eyes were wide with panic.

Sam was stunned.
He was truly afraid
…

And then he simply vanished into thin air.

But she heard his screams.

 

O
N HIS BACK
, he stared up at the ceiling of his library, moaning uncontrollably. Tears streamed. There was so
much pain. He couldn't bear it. He had to remind himself that he wasn't a child now or a prisoner. He had to consciously recall that the pain would pass. It felt like he was broken in a thousand bits and pieces. It felt like he was dying. He'd leapt before, when there hadn't been a choice. Or when a desperate and reckless urgency had outweighed his fear of the leap. But just then, he wanted to die. Not for the first time, he prayed he would finally find release.

“Sir!” Gerard knelt beside him.

He felt a finger of relief. Even as he moaned and shuddered, racked by the torment of broken bones and shattered limbs, he was vaguely aware of Gerard's presence, of a cooling compress, of pills being pushed into his mouth.

He closed his eyes tightly. The leap through space and time was horrific. Traveling at that velocity turned a man inside out. It felt as if his every limb was being ripped from each socket, as if the skin was being torn from his body, as if his muscles were shredding, the bones cracking apart and then splintering into a million pieces. His organs felt like balloons, overfilled and then bursting.

He'd begged the gods for mercy
.

No one had been able to hear him, of course.
He'd begged them for mercy long ago, too, but silently, so his tormentors wouldn't hear him
.

The gods had ignored those pleas, too. Because they'd wanted him alive. To this day, he couldn't comprehend why.

The pain was finally easing.

“Sir, is that any better?” Gerard asked softly.

Tears moistened his face. He had the ability now to swipe at them. He hated himself.

But the pain had receded to mere tremors. He hadn't been flayed until he was more dead than alive, or electrocuted, or ripped apart on a rack. He wasn't in a dungeon, a cellar or a cage. He was in his twenty-million-dollar
Park Avenue town home. He lay on a beautiful Oriental rug surrounded by works of art and antiques, with his majordomo kneeling beside him.

“It's better,” Ian gasped. Then he rolled onto his stomach and vomited.

Then, somehow, he sat up, with Gerard's help. It always shocked him to find out that his body wasn't broken after all, that he could still function. Gerard pressed a glass to his lips. He swallowed aged scotch whiskey. As he did, the panic and fear finally rolled away, as the ocean did at low tide. He breathed deeply.

Sam
.

Ian stiffened in disbelief.
He'd left her alone in the vault
. “Gerard!” He struggled to stand; Gerard helped him.

“Sir, you should rest. Whatever possessed you to leap? You cannot withstand the reminder!”

He met Gerard's concerned gaze. “Bring my car around. Now.”

He should leap back to her. It would take less than a second.

He simply wasn't brave enough.

 

S
AM WAS
in disbelief.

Ian had leapt into time, leaving her a prisoner in the vault!

And Hemmer could come back at any time!

She would have laughed, because it was so absurd, so unbelievable, for him to abandon her that way, except that nothing that had just happened was funny. He had
panicked
.

In that moment, there was absolute comprehension. Ian Maclean came across as an arrogant self-centered jerk, at once wealthy, seductive and powerful. Most people would think he had the world at his fingertips. He sauntered about the city as if he had no cares.

It was a facade.

He'd just become unglued by being locked in a vault, when he had the power to leap through time and space and free himself. Of course he had. They'd put him in a cage. That much she knew. They had probably locked him up a hundred different ways. Being locked in the vault had triggered reactions he couldn't control.

Just the way he'd come unglued when he'd destroyed John. Facing that demon had brought another kind of reaction. He'd gone berserk in the process of destroying it, and broken down afterward. He'd shed
tears
. And she didn't know what those tears had meant, either.

She'd never forget what she'd just seen a moment ago—or what she'd seen in his apartment the other night.

But there was so much more. Maclean was unbelievably complicated. He hadn't been careless or indifferent when he'd been trying to bargain with Nick over his file. He'd been angry and desperate. The facade had been shattered then, too.

Ian Maclean was badly fractured. Beneath the surface arrogance and nonchalance, the indifference and who-gives-a-damn attitude, she couldn't imagine what really existed. She'd seen glimpses. There was fear, anger, pain. Just possibly, there was shame. He certainly was determined to keep his past covered up and she didn't blame him. The bad-boy image was only the tip of the iceberg.

Sam told herself that if she started giving him the benefit of the doubt, she was done. Compassion was bad enough, but trying to make him into someone okay was not. He
wasn't
okay. He wasn't kind or caring—not at all. In fact, he was ruthless and selfish. But she didn't feel better. Because now she knew why.

She'd be ruthless and self-centered, too, if she'd been locked up for sixty-six years by one of history's greatest demons.

He'd come all the way downtown to Hemmer's because he'd thought she was there and in trouble
.

“Get it together, Rose,” she warned herself. The Sam of old would be furious at being abandoned in such a cowardly way. She'd have no respect for anyone who turned tail and ran. But she wasn't angry at all. She was shaken by what she'd seen and what she was starting to comprehend. Very few human beings, mortal or not, could survive what he'd survived with any degree of sanity.

What if he wasn't half as bad as he made himself out to be?

What if a real person was buried beneath the bad-boy facade?

Sam couldn't believe herself. She shouldn't be thinking about him. None of this was her business. Her business was recovering the page.

But she
was
thinking about him. Worse, she wanted to know even more. And she was definitely feeling sorry for him. There was no way to avoid her feelings now.

Sam cursed.

If he wasn't a total jerk, if a heart beat in that hard, sexy chest, so what? The day the page wound up in the right hands was the day they were done. He'd go his way and she'd go hers, never mind that sex tape from the future. Something was wrong with that tape. She wasn't capable of smiling at a lover that way, and Maclean wasn't capable of making love.

She told herself to forget it. She would be thrilled when they were done. Her life could go back to normal: Sam the Slayer, alone against the evil in the world.

And she thought about her sister and Brie, then Allie. She sighed and sat down on the floor. She didn't even know what was normal anymore, she thought.

She was facing the locked vault door. She needed to think about that. There was only one way in and out of the
vault, obviously. At some point soon, Ian would recover from the leap. Maybe he'd return and free her. She was fairly certain he wouldn't leave her in the vault to rot. On the other hand, she was not into relying on others or counting on miracles. She needed to prepare herself for a battle. If Hemmer came back, she'd have to take him out in order to free herself.

She lusted to destroy Hemmer now. The bastard had threatened Ian. He deserved a really good, slow, old-fashioned hanging.

Sam got back up to adjust her weapons. And that was when comprehension suddenly clicked.

Hemmer surely knew that Ian could leap if he had to, because that was how Ian had stolen the van Gogh for him. And that meant that Hemmer hadn't cared about capturing Ian. She'd been the target.

As she realized that, she felt the huge and heavy weight of evil gathering outside the vault. She tensed. Hemmer did not carry such darkness with him. Too much black power was out there.

The locks clicked.

Sam slid her disk into her hand.

The vault door was pushed open, revealing a man in dark robes.

It took her one moment to realize that the evil being wasn't a modern-day monk. His robes were from an earlier time, the wool was coarsely woven, and he wore pointy shoes. He even had a leather and cord girdle, from which hung big, awkward keys.
He was medieval
.

Her brain buzzed.
You're out of your time
. Nick had accused Ian of that. And she was standing face-to-face with a medieval man now.

“'Allo, Samantha Rose,” the cleric said, smiling. He had a heavy French accent. He lifted his hood and cowl, revealing the perfect features, the blue eyes and blond hair of the
purest demon. The monk would give Brad Pitt a run for Angelina Jolie's heart.