Books by Maggie Shayne (310 page)

“Go where, Nathan?” Sheila asked.

He cleared his throat. “To New Jersey. To ... to this hospital. I need to see her.” Lowering his head, fixing his gaze on that fuzzy photo once more, he muttered, “I need to be sure.”

Masses of raven hair, uncombed, unwashed and tangled, spilled over the shoulders and down the front of her straitjacket. She sat on the floor in the darkest corner of her locked room. Knees drawn up to her chest, eyes focused on nothing and utterly vacant. Onyx eyes. Thick, dark lashes. She never blinked, seemed totally unaware of Nathan, peering at her through the tiny square of double-paned, mesh-lined safety glass in the door.

“So?” Dr. June Sterling asked. “Do you know her?”

There was a tight knot in Nathan’s chest. This couldn’t be ... it couldn’t be Nidaba. “Can I go inside?” he managed, though his voice came out hoarse and barely audible.

“It’s your neck.” The short, slender woman with her bobbed auburn hair and gold-rimmed glasses took a jangling key ring from her pocket and unlocked the door. “Just don’t get too close.”

“I don’t imagine she could hurt me if she wanted to,” he said, staring at the heavy-lidded eyes veiled by locks of matted hair. “It looks as if she’s drugged to the point where she’s not even lucid.”

“Mild tranquilizers don’t make people catatonic, Mr. Smith.” Pushing the heavy door open, the doctor stood back to let him pass.

“Not most people, no.” He walked into the room, saying nothing more. What could he say? That in immortals, certain drugs could have exaggerated effects? No, of course he couldn’t. Not without ending up in the padded room next to this one. So he said nothing at all.

He stood there for a moment, just staring at the woman, torn between hoping she was Nidaba and hoping to the Gods she wasn’t. Because he’d known Nidaba. Fiercely proud, stubbornly independent. She would hate the way he’d been living his life, he thought vaguely. She had been the opposite of this boring man he had created. Free. Unashamedly proud to be who and what she was and refusing to tone it down or hide her truest self for anyone. And let those who had a problem with that be damned.

No, the Nidaba he had known wouldn’t like Nathan Ian King very much. Not the way she had liked King Eannatum.

And she would rather have been dead than reduced to this ... this ... shell of a woman. If she was aware of her surroundings, the confinement alone would have been enough to drive her mad. She had always been a free spirit. The freest he had ever known.

This woman could not be that fierce priestess he had known. She could not be his Nidaba.

His throat painfully tight, Nathan spoke without turning, his eyes on the pathetic piece of humanity curled into the fetal position on the floor in front of him. “Leave me alone with her, will you?”

“I don’t think—”

“Just go out and close the door. I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Mr. Smith, that isn’t—”

“For the love of God,
do it.”
If he put some small portion of his power into the command, he couldn’t help it. Manipulative it may be, but, dammit, he needed privacy. He needed to see her. To touch her.

To
know . . .

Dr. Sterling said no more. She backed out, her steps echoing as she left. The door groaned as it closed again. Good. Nathan braced himself, took a deep breath, told himself this woman wasn’t Nidaba. She couldn’t be Nidaba. He crossed the room to where she sat on the floor, moving slowly so he wouldn’t startle her. “Hello,” he whispered, keeping his voice low, filling it with tranquility and calm. Whoever she was, the last thing he wanted to do was frighten her. “I’ve come to visit you. Is that all right?”

The woman didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just sat there, her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, head tipped down against them, hair curtaining her face. Her hospital gown had bunched around her hips, and her underpants were showing. He couldn’t see her hip. If she were immortal—and Nidaba or not, he suspected she must be immortal—the mark would be there. She was still rocking slightly back and forth, forehead to her knees. Her tangled hair was wild, and the room smelled of disinfectant and vaguely, urine.

Nathan moved closer, crouched before her, and very slowly lifted a hand to her hair. For more than a week she had been confined here. And he had to wonder if she had been bathed or properly cared for once in all that time. Her hair was matted, knotted, and dull. He touched that hair, pushed it aside and tried to see her face. But she tipped her head downward even more sharply, and she hunched her shoulders against him.

“It’s all right,” he whispered. “I just want to see you.”

Her rocking had stopped. She sat rigid, tense. Trembling.

She was afraid of him. And while he was sorry for that, it made him even more certain that she could not be Nidaba, despite the resemblance. Nidaba had never been afraid of anything.

He lifted his hand again. She flinched.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Sighing, Nathan lowered his hand, and his gaze with it. And then he saw the edge of a berry-colored birthmark, just peering out from the bottom of the hospital gown, on her right hip. His mouth went dry as he moved his hand to the gown, touching only the fabric, not the woman, watching her the whole time and seeing not a flicker of interest in her unfocused, unblinking eyes. He lifted the edge of the gown. And he saw it—the crescent moon emblazoned on her right hip. His stomach heaved, and his back bowed with the force of it. Nathan bit his lip to keep the shock from taking over, tried to reason with his own mind.

Immortal. Yes, whoever she was, she was that. But he had already suspected that might be the case. For her to have survived the fall from the top of that building, to have revived in the ambulance, to have had the strength to fracture the arm of an attendant—she would have had to be an immortal High Witch. She was one of the Light Ones, obviously—if she were a Dark Witch, the mark of the crescent would be on her left flank rather than the right. But that didn’t mean she was his Nidaba. It couldn’t mean that.

It mustn’t...

“Nidaba?” he whispered.

He touched her chin, to tip it up. The jolt sizzled through him at the contact, as happened whenever one immortal High Witch touched another. Like a static charge, only magnified.

She jerked away so fast that her head slammed into the wall behind her. Had the wall not been padded, he was certain she would have split her skull.

“Easy, easy,” he said, his voice low, soft, coaxing. “I need to look at you ... please ...” Softly, very gently, he cupped her chin again. She flinched, but not so violently this time. And, finally, he managed to turn her face up so he could see her. Her tangled hair fell away, revealing her fully to him.

Sunken eyes, haloed in gray. Hollow cheeks, jaw too sharply delineated. Despite all of that, he knew this face—knew it well. His eyes drank in every bit of it, but only for a moment. Because his vision became clouded ... with tears he thought he’d finished shedding long ago. Seeing her hurt—
physically hurt
—like a blow too powerful to withstand. It was a moment before he could even manage words.

“By the Gods, it
is
you,” he whispered. “Nidaba... what’s happened? What’s happened to you?” Instinctively, he put his arms around her shoulders, pulled her to his chest, rocked her slowly—but it was like embracing a corpse. There was no response. No reaction. Barely any warmth at all. Nothing even to indicate that she was alive. And yet he held her against him, held her close as he hadn’t done in too long ... and realized he was trembling fiercely.

Finally he withdrew his arms from around her, settling his hands on her shoulders instead. He stared into her expressionless face. “Where are you, Nidaba?” he whispered. “Where have you gone? Can you hear me at all? Do you even know I’m here?”

She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. Just curled there limply, eyelids at half mast, head heavy on a boneless neck. He had believed her dead. He had mourned her to the point of madness. He had existed in living anguish for years before he had even begun to recover from her loss. And he never had recovered from it—not fully. Now, his head was spinning—he was reeling with the realization that she had been alive all this time. And he had never known. Never... but then again, he hadn’t known there
were
such beings as immortal High Witches when he’d known Nidaba. He hadn’t learned any of that until much, much later. And by then she had been dead ... her body burned to ash.

Or so he had been led to believe.

He didn’t think Nidaba had known what she was back then, either. But she had learned all the secrets, in time. And when she had, she would have realized that he was immortal as well. Why hadn’t she come back to him, then? Why hadn’t she sought him out, found him, told him she was alive? Why would she have hidden from him all this time?

The door opened. He felt a cold draft but dismissed it quickly. “Well?” Dr. Sterling asked from the doorway. “Is she the woman you thought she was?”

Slowly, Nathan gathered his wits. He couldn’t take his eyes off Nidaba. Sitting there, vacant eyes staring at nothing, mouth slightly agape and wet. If he took her from here now, openly, the papers would run the story. Nidaba had already become fodder for human-interest stories. The tale of the woman who had survived a fatal fall would be told, and they would track her down, track him down, despite his use of a false name. His haven, his perfect, anonymous life, would be ruined. And he would have gladly allowed it to be, for her sake. But it wouldn’t end there. If her whereabouts were known, Nidaba would be in danger. She wouldn’t be able to defend herself in this state. He needed to take her away from here, in secret. Protect her. Try to... try to reach her again, through that darkness into which she’d fallen.

“Mr. Smith?” Dr. Sterling asked.

“No,” he said. “No, she’s not the woman I knew. I’m sorry I wasted your time.” But with his back to the doctor, he leaned close to Nidaba and whispered into her ear, “I’ll be back for you. I promise. I’ll take you out of here, Nidaba. I’ll make you well again. It won’t be long.”

He thought there was a hitch in her shallow breathing. Perhaps a flicker in her eyes. But nothing more. From her, at least. The reaction in Nathan was nothing short of catastrophic. He was trembling even harder than before, from somewhere down deep. He felt it right to his bones. He brushed his lips over her cheek and got to his feet, but his knees seemed almost too weak to carry him. His steps were as uneven as a drunkard’s when he started toward the door. Everything in him rebelled at the notion of leaving her behind, even for a little while.

“Thank you,” he said to Dr. Sterling as she held the door for him.

She closed it, the locks clicked into place, and he thought he was going to vomit.

“It was no trouble at all,” Dr. Sterling said. “The exit is that way, just down the stairs and—”

“I know where the exit is.”

He walked away in a daze. He didn’t know what had happened to Nidaba to bring her to this point. How she had survived this long, or why she had never sought him out. He only knew that when he took her from this place—and he
would
—he must leave no clue as to where she had gone. He wouldn’t risk drawing hordes of reporters to his door. Because they would be followed, and in very short order, by hordes of immortals.

Dark Ones. And his quiet existence would come to a violent end. As would Nidaba’s life.

He hadn’t recognized her!

Dr. Sterling
stood in the hall, watching the man who called himself John Smith as he walked away. She waited. He rounded the corner, out of sight, and she heard his feet tapping down the stairs, then the closing of the doors to this wing. She let a few more minutes tick by, ensuring that he’d had time to leave the hospital, get into his car, and drive away. Then, finally, she pressed her palms lightly to the front of her face, heels of her hands curving just beneath her chin, and slid them slowly upward, over the top of her head, through her hair, and down to her nape, wiping out the glamour she had cast.

When she took her hands away, she once again appeared as she truly was. Dark. Small. Ever young.

She almost smiled as she thought that perhaps her most well-honed magickal skill might not even have been necessary. If John Smith—or rather Nathan King, as he called himself these days—hadn’t recognized his precious Nidaba, then it wasn’t likely he would remember her.

Ahh, but then again, Eannatum was a wise man. His name had gone down in history as one of the greatest leaders Sumer had ever known, and not without reason. His intelligence was legend—as was his cunning. It would not do to underestimate him.

She had been afforded precious little time to plan for this. Always she’d had to keep herself hidden from Eannatum, knowing he would have killed her with his bare hands if he had crossed her path again—
if
he had ever put it all together, realized the truth of what she had done.

Yet she had managed to see him from time to time. Sometimes from a distance. Other times, using her favorite spell—the glamourie. It had become something of a game, seeing just how close she could get without his seeing through the illusion. It was an occasional lark, a way for her to pass the time, all the while laughing at him from behind her borrowed countenance. She’d had conversations with him in one guise or another. She’d shared tea with the man. She’d even toyed with the idea of seducing him. Though if she had acted on the idea, he’d have known her as an immortal at her first touch.

But in all that time, she had never seen the priestess Nidaba. Until recently, the name of Nidaba had been unspoken among immortals. And she had become convinced that the harlot truly had died in that long-ago fire, her body burned to ashes.

She should have known that was a tale too perfect to be true.

Nidaba had been alive. All the while, alive. She had certainly kept her existence a secret. Until a year ago, when that detestable name began being whispered among the Dark Ones. She was old—one of the oldest, they speculated, their tones awed, almost reverent. Her heart would be a prize worth seeking. And many had begun doing just that. Hunting her. For a time, Puabi had convinced herself that was enough. That she could just sit back and wait for one of the other Dark Witches to destroy Nidaba forever.