Angel of Desire (24 page)

After ten tension-filled minutes waiting on the platform, the train arrived. They boarded without incident and as they crossed the countryside, heading back into the Alps toward the Yaznovian-Montacroix border, Rachel realized she was exhausted. Unaccustomed to such bursts of adrenaline, she was now drained.

"It's going to take us a few hours to get to the border," Shade told her. "Why don't you take a nap?"

"I'm fine." Knowing that their precious time together was slipping away, Rachel did not want to waste a single moment sleeping.

Her ragged smile did not fool him. "You're a helluva lot better than fine, angel." Putting his arm around her, he coaxed her head onto his shoulder.

As his broad hand stroked her hair, Rachel breathed a soft, shimmering sigh of pleasure. Her eyelids fluttered shut. Within moments, she was asleep.

On the other side of the small private compartment, Conlan dozed, as well, leaving Shade to contemplate how much his life had changed in such a short time. The woman asleep in his arms was not only beautiful, she was intelligent and brave and as cool under pressure as any professional he'd ever met.

She was perfect. And, he thought with a burst of purely masculine Possessiveness, she was his. All his.

They were going to get away with it. The soft glimmer of dawn was hovering on the horizon, tinting the Alpine glaciers a glistening pink and gold as the train approached the border station. The squeal of the brakes brought Rachel out of her deep sleep.

"I'm still here," she murmured in surprise as she found herself looking up into Shade's emerald eyes. Sometime during the journey, he'd arranged her so she was lying with her head in his lap.

"You didn't think I'd let you get away, did you?"

He was looking down at her with such love, Rachel almost burst into tears. How could she ever say goodbye?

Although she'd only wanted to help Shade, she fretted that she was going to end up hurting him after all. For all his life he'd operated on a single ideology of distrust. And although such cynicism had always saddened her, it had, in its own way, protected Shade's heart from pain.

But she had changed all that. She'd gotten him to open up, to let another person in. She'd taught him to not only trust but to love.

And what was his reward for such a dramatic character change? He was going to be abandoned. Again.

"We made it." He brushed a few strands of honey hair away from her cheeks with a cloud-soft touch.

Rachel managed a smile. "Thanks to you."

"And you." He dipped his head and kissed her. "We make one helluva team, Sister Rachel."

She longed to tell him the truth, to assure him that whatever happened, she would always, for eternity, love him. Despite the fact that Conlan was in the compartment with them, pretending intense interest in the scenery outside the window, she almost risked it.

But then the train had come to a screeching halt and the conductor was outside the door of their compartment, instructing all passengers to disembark.

"It's standard procedure," Shade assured Rachel. "The general isn't wild about his citizens leaving Yaznovia, so passengers have to pass through a border check before they can enter Montacroix." He kissed her again, briefly, but with a flare of emotion so strong it scorched her to the core. "It'll be all right," he promised. "
We'll
be all right."

They joined the procession of sleepy passengers making their way in a ragged line toward the two armed guards at the border. Across the wire fence, Rachel saw Prince Burke and his brother-in-law, Caine O'Bannion, standing beside a silver Bentley. An ambulance bearing the international symbol of the Rescue the Children Fund was parked nearby.

"Zdeslav and Duha contacted them after the train left the station," Shade answered Rachel's questioning look. He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. "Two more minutes, sweetheart. And we're home free."

He'd no sooner spoken when one of the guards turned in their direction. From his expression, it was apparent that he recognized Shade.

Later Caine would tell Shade that from that frozen instant of recognition, everything appeared to happen in slow motion.

The guard raised his rifle, pointing it at Shade. He pulled the trigger. A shot rang out.

That's when Rachel, responding the only way she knew how, threw herself in front of the man she loved. Blood darkened the back of her blouse. "Rachel!" As she slumped in his arms, Shade cried out.

Before the guard could get off another shot, a group of armed freedom fighters came surging out of the woods, effectively holding the border guards at bay while Shade carried Rachel across the border into Montacroix.

The instant he reached the other side, he dropped to his knees, cradling her against him, praying to a God he'd never believed in to save her.

He thought his prayers were answered when she opened her eyes and with obvious effort, lifted a palm to his tortured face.

"I love you," she whispered through lips that had gone as dry as dust.

"And I love you." He covered her face with kisses, he rocked her in his arms. "You're going to be all right, Rachel." He brushed her hair away from her ashen face, he stroked her rapidly cooling flesh.

"And we're going to be married and have lots of kids and I'll teach them to fish in the creek behind the house, and we'll all take long walks in the woods. We'll even get a dog. What would you say about a golden retriever? They're supposed to be good with kids…"

"Shade." Conlan put his hand on Shade's shoulder. "It's too late."

"No!" Unaware of the tears streaming down his face, Shade pulled her more tightly against his chest, as if protecting her from harm. "It's not too late, dammit! She's going to be all right, Con. She has to be."

"I'm sorry." Conlan's own gentle eyes were wet. "But she's gone, Shade. Rachel's dead."

Immersed in their own grief, neither Shade nor Conlan noticed Joshua, dressed in the navy blue uniform of a Yaznovian train conductor, watching soberly from the sidelines.

Chapter Thirteen

RACHEL WAS BURIED in Vermont.

In a centuries-old cemetery not far from his house. Shade visited every day, bringing bouquets of lilacs and daffodils and tulips.

The flowers were a harbinger of spring. They promised days of sunshine and warmth. But inside his heart, except for that small pocket where Rachel continued to dwell, Shade could feel only cold.

In an attempt to work off his lingering depression, anger and sorrow, he spent his days clearing his overgrown land, wielding saw and ax and shovel until he could barely lift his arms. Then he fell into bed, into a sleep tortured with dreams—vivid, wonderful, horrible dreams of his too-brief time with Rachel.

The only bright spot in his life was the news report out of Yaznovia of an earthquake near the village stronghold of the general. Although the civilians miraculously escaped injury, the general's car, the report continued, was buried beneath tons of rock that had fallen from the Alpine cliffs.

Remembering what Rachel had said about letting others do the judging, Shade knew the general finally had gotten his well-deserved comeuppance.

There were also reports that the partisan leader had taken over the palace and declared that free elections would soon be held.

"I suppose that's good news," Shade said. He was sitting beside Rachel's grave.

Although he knew some people might think him crazy, Shade talked to Rachel often—when he first got up in the morning, during the day while he worked, at night when he lay in his too-lonely bed.

Unable to forget the story she'd told him, Shade traveled to Salem, to the Charter Street cemetery. The burial ground was a dark and moody place with weather-beaten granite headstones dating back to the seventeenth century. On the other side of the iron fence, tucked into a small site beside the cemetery, surrounded by a rustic stone wall that was erected as part of the city's tercentenary commemoration in 1992, was what he'd come to see.

A small park had been created as a memorial to the twenty people executed for witchcraft in that crazy, bloody summer of 1692.

The park was both serene and disquieting at the same time. Inscriptions had been carved into the stone threshold, futile protestations of innocence made during the trials, poignant prayers, desperate pleas that disappeared beneath the wall, just as the truth had been crushed that long-ago summer. The trees planted amid the spring-green grass were black locusts, the kind, Shade read from his guidebook, from which some of the victims had been hung. The ground dipped down at the far end of the grassy space so that the grave markers in the cemetery appeared to be peering in through the iron bars of the fence, as steadfastly silent as those citizens of old Salem who had stood by and allowed their neighbors to die.

Along the wall were twenty cantilevered stone slabs, meant to act as benches. Into each slab had been carved the name of one of the witch-hunt's victims.

His heart pounding in his throat, Shade walked slowly around the perimeter of the park, reading each name and the date of the victim's death. On the other side of the small grassy area, a teacher was telling a class of eight-year-olds all the reasons it was important to remember what had happened on Gallows Hill.

Years ago, Shade had visited the Vietnam memorial in Washington and had been struck by the mute power of all those names. This small memorial was proving no less potent.

Then he saw it.
Rachel Parrish. Midwife. Hanged. July 25, 1692
.

"Oh, my God." Shade groaned and closed his eyes.

"Excuse me." A soft voice beside him asked, "Are you all right?"

Startled, he glanced down, half-expecting to find Rachel smiling up at him. But instead it was the young teacher, concern visible in her eyes.

"I'm fine. This is all just a little rough to take."

"It is a bit overwhelming, the first time," she agreed.

"You come here often?" How could she stand it? Shade wondered. He could almost hear the victims' cries. Rachel's cries.

"I'm a historian of the trials." She gestured toward a neighboring bench. "Susan Martin was an ancestor of mine. She was murdered for trying to overturn her father's will," she revealed in a dry tone.

"What do you know about Rachel Parrish?"

"Ah, Rachel." The woman ran her fingers over the carved name just as Shade had done. "Poor Rachel committed the terrible crime of being ahead of her time. She had the audacity to believe that childbirth was something natural, and not a punishment from God brought down on women because of Eve biting into that forbidden apple. That was, of course, a heretical idea to the Puritan establishment.

"When she attempted to ease the pain of labor, she was declared in league with the devil. She could have confessed and been freed, of course—"

"But she was too damn stubborn to recant," Shade interrupted brusquely.

The teacher glanced up at him, clearly curious at the mix of frustration and anger in his tone. "Rachel was innocent," she said quietly. "There were a great many people arrested that summer. The only victims killed were those who refused to 'confess.' I admire them for that, even though I'm not certain I'd have the nerve to stand up to torture myself."

"Rachel Parrish was a remarkable woman."

She smiled. "Was she a relative?"

"Close," Shade answered. God, they'd come so very close.

A commotion beneath one of the trees, as two boys, tossing a Red Sox baseball cap belonging to a third back and forth in a game of keep-away, halted the conversation. The teacher returned to her class, leaving Shade to stand beside Rachel's bench for a long, thoughtful time.

Although the idea flew in the face of everything logical, everything he'd been taught during those long, dry sermons in the chapel of the Vermont boys' home, Shade knew that the woman he'd loved then lost, and the brave, stubborn woman who refused to swear a false oath even to save her own life, were the same person.

He'd known she was special.

He just hadn't realized how special.

A soft spring breeze began blowing off the harbor, ruffling the leaves. Shade felt something brush against his cheek. Something that could have been the wind.