Dark Sins and Desert Sands (14 page)

It was true,
Layla thought. Until Seth had breathed life into her, she’d been nothing but sand. Is it any wonder that without Seth she’d felt nothing but fear? Yet, as Ray rocked her, it was more than fear that surged through her. Steam had clouded the air around them, shutting out the rest of the world, and as he mopped water off her face, she tilted her head and kissed him. She kissed him because words failed her. She kissed him because he was good, and loyal, and loving, and brave. She kissed him because it might be the last time she could.

She’d never thought that Ray was hers to keep, but
she hadn’t realized before now that she wasn’t even her own to give. As they kissed, the warm water pooled between them where her breasts pressed against his chest. It seemed to ease him a little bit, but as she ran her hands down his arms, she realized that his fists were balled. It was taking all the strength he had to sit here in this glass box.

“Layla,” he finally said, “are you gonna let me get you out of here? I’m kinda buggin’ out.”

She nodded, her whole body limp. He got to his feet, then hoisted her into his arms. His boots squeaked on the tile as he stepped out of the shower, and she was afraid he’d slip, but Ray managed to stay on his feet even when every force in the world conspired to knock him down.

He found a towel and dried her off, from head to foot, and she let him. It felt somehow wrong to have someone take care of her like this, but she didn’t have the strength to protest. If it made her selfish and childish and needy…well, those were small crimes next to the others.

Then he carried her to the bed. Only when he’d wrapped her up in blankets and made sure she was safe and warm, did he strip out of his wet clothes and find something dry to wear. If he’d crawled into bed beside her naked, she would’ve run. The intimacy of what they’d shared before was now too raw for her, and he seemed to know it. Instead, he pulled the chair close enough to the bed that he could touch her. “Layla, you need to tell me what you remembered.”

“I’m a sphinx,” she said again.

Ray was part Greek. The history wasn’t lost on him. “Like the one in Oedipus? The one who wouldn’t
let any traveler pass into Thebes without solving her riddle?”

“That was a different sphinx, but yes. We aren’t just mythical creatures or monuments of stone. We’re real.”

He ran a hand through his wet hair. “Look, it’s not that I don’t know that a lot of unexplained shit goes down in this world. I can do things that shouldn’t be possible, but I stopped believing in God a long time ago—”

“Gods,” Layla corrected. “There are lots of them.”

Ray’s jaw tightened. “You know, if I was going to believe, I was taught the
Shahada
which says, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.’”

“Some say the more rightful interpretation is, ‘There is no God worthy of worship above Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.’ For the Christians and Jews it’s, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ It doesn’t say that there aren’t any other gods. It doesn’t say what happened to the old ones when people stopped believing in them. I can tell you. They’re here, living amongst the mortals. And Seth is one of those gods. A terrible one.”

“What about you?” Ray asked.

“I’m not a goddess, but I’m not mortal either.”

“That’s why you heal.” It was the one solid fact that he’d seen for his own eyes, and he seemed to cling to it. “Do you have other powers?”

“Yes,” she said, though she couldn’t force herself to speak them over the lump in her throat. What she could do to men—what she
had
done to men—was difficult to admit. “I’m a riddler.”

He looked puzzled. “Can you show me?”

“It’s not a parlor trick. With my questions, I can
force people to answer me. I can put them into a trance. I can hurt them, or cause them to hurt themselves…”

He nodded slowly, no doubt remembering all the times she’d used her powers against him before he was tortured. What he finally said was, “So you get into people’s heads. You’re like me.”

“No. Seth fashioned me from the sand and breathed me to life. But you were born of flesh and blood. You’re human. You’re mortal. You’re war-
forged
. But I’m war
born
and I belong to the desert. I belong to Seth.”

“The
hell
you do.”

She recognized possessiveness when she saw it, and it was there, but more besides. Anger, confusion, and maybe even deeper feelings than that. She didn’t dare probe them, didn’t dare ask. “Ray, don’t you want to know if I remember anything about you?”

He should’ve latched onto that. He should’ve been more concerned with his own welfare than hers. But she couldn’t seem to dissuade him from the direction of his thoughts. “Don’t change the subject. You don’t belong to Seth. He scares the shit out of you—”

“Of course he does. In his prime, he was the fiercest god of the world. He wrought such bloodshed and chaos that no nation wanted to own him. Even the Egyptians called him a foreigner, and when they depicted him in the hieroglyphics of their tombs, his face was a creature none recognized. He’s not as powerful as he used to be, but there’s still plenty of war in the modern world and bloodshed for him to feed on. Men may not mean to worship him, but they do. With their bullets and their bombs. They call for him.”

Ray pulled himself to the edge of the chair, so that he was nearly standing. “You’re serious….”

“Dead serious. Seth’s been an advisor to kings. He’s been a battlefield general. He’s been the wicked voice that whispers into the ears of men who crash planes into buildings. In every age, he becomes whatever he must to stay close to the forces of war, so right now, he’s a government contractor.” Layla laughed bitterly. “He was so sure that I wouldn’t remember him that he actually gave me his card. It’s on the dresser.”

Ray stood, walked to the dresser and snapped up the card. “Scorpion Group. What is it?”

“It’s a group of mercenaries that the government uses to do the things they don’t want to do themselves. A way of avoiding accountability. Trust me, Scorpion Group isn’t the only government contractor out there willing to interrogate and torture prisoners—it’s just the only one run by a god with powerful minions. I was one of them. I questioned prisoners. I got them to trust me. I built a rapport with them, and I used all my training and all my powers to do it. I asked them questions, and I posed riddles to them, until they choked on their own guilt. Literally choked on it. Until you.”

Ray stared. “What was so different about me?”

“You never reacted to my questions like a guilty man would….”

“Because I wasn’t guilty,” Ray snapped.

“I was sure you had a secret and that I just wasn’t asking the right questions,” Layla said softly, and when she saw him wince, she hurried to add, “I know you’re innocent now.”

Ray clasped his hands together, staring down at them. “Do you?”

He seemed to go somewhere, his mind lost in the past. She hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he
deserved to know the truth. “I can’t prove your innocence, Ray. I never even knew who it was that accused you. Seth didn’t want me to know because he didn’t care.”

Ray’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “But Seth knows, doesn’t he? If he’s a god, as you say, then he must know everything about why I was arrested.”

“He’s not omniscient. If he was, don’t you think he’d have found us by now? If he knows why you were arrested, it’s only because someone in the government gave him a file.”

“A file?” Ray asked, eyes bulging. “You’re saying that the Egyptian god of war and chaos keeps notes on paper?”

“Or on papyrus, or on a stone tablet, or written in blood,” Layla said, thinking back over all her years. “Besides, the military can be surprisingly low-tech. There’s usually a paper copy of everything. Contractors keep notes. I did.”

“Where are your reports, then? Do you have them?”

“I’m sure they’re stored away in some box at Scorpion Group. But what I do remember is that you weren’t just accused of working with the enemy in Afghanistan. You supposedly set up an ambush that went wrong. When it did, you allegedly massacred a village full of civilian witnesses to shut them up.”

He staggered back. The chair must have bumped the back of his legs and made him unsteady, because he collapsed down into it so heavily that all the air hissed out of the cushion. His face twisted in anguish. “That’s not what happened…”

“Why don’t you tell me what really happened?”

He looked away and she realized that not
all
the
boundaries between them had been breached. She watched his head stoop and his shoulders sag as some burden pressed down on him. He ran a hand through his hair, staring at the floor before he said, “I can’t talk about that.”

After everything she’d just told him about who and what she was, it seemed impossible that he could hold anything back. “You can’t or you won’t?”

“Either. Both. I dunno,” Ray said, then went silent.

If you have one, you want to share it. But if you
share it, you don’t have one.

“R
ay, you helped me unlock my secrets,” Layla said. “Let me help you with yours.”

Her voice held the promise of healing, but what happened in Afghanistan wasn’t Ray’s secret to tell. What’s more, he wasn’t sure if she was using her powers as a sphinx on him or not. Certainly, her questions were tying him in knots. She’d given him a lot to think about and an entirely new way to look at the world. It was a lot to process.

“Ray,” she pressed. “What happened in Afghanistan?”

“I said I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Have you ever told anyone about it before?”

Yeah. Once. They’d kept him awake for more hours
than he could count, and he’d started hallucinating. He’d started to hope that he’d pass out when they zapped a current through him, because then he’d get some sleep. But the pain hadn’t been bearable, and in his desperation to say something that would make the torment stop, he’d confessed everything that’d happened in Afghanistan. He’d given up Jack to stop the pain and his only consolation was that his captors only laughed; they hadn’t believed him or maybe they hadn’t cared.

“Ray?”

“I’m not your prisoner anymore, Layla. I don’t have to answer your questions.”

At that, her face fell, and she reached out to him. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. I just want you to know that when you’re ready, I’ll be here to listen.”

He wanted to tell her, but there was a code soldiers lived by. To have each other’s backs. To stand up for your brothers-in-arms when no one else would. Ray, more than anyone, lived by that. How was he going to explain it to her? As it turned out, he was spared the effort. It took Ray a moment to remember that he had Missy’s phone and to realize that it was ringing.

“I’ve gotta take this,” Ray said, flipping the phone open.

It wasn’t Missy; it was Jack and he got right to the point. “We’ve got a problem, brother. The gal you sent to me for safekeeping just got herself arrested. I got in the truck and met up with her at a bus station. I was holding her bags when they nabbed her. She managed to give me this number to reach you.”

Ray felt the veins at his temples throb and if he
hadn’t needed the phone to actually speak, he’d have hurled it across the room. “Arrested? What the hell did she do? Turn tricks on the bus?”

“Naw, it wasn’t local police or anything like that.”

“Then who took her? FBI? Homeland Security?”

“That’s just the thing,” Jack said. “They had that look, but they didn’t identify themselves, and they didn’t show badges.”

Scorpion Group
. Given what Layla had just told him, there wasn’t a doubt in Ray’s mind. “Do you know where they took her?”

“No, but she’s just a kid. Whatever she knows, she’s going to spill. So, look, you know I got some money. I can get you out of the country and I think you better start fixin’ to leave.”

No, Ray thought. This was his country. He’d fought for it. He’d bled for it. Why should he have to leave? Ray closed his eyes.

“You can’t prove your innocence from behind bars, brother,” Jack said. “Pride’s a bitch, Ray. Let’s meet somewhere and come up with a plan. Just tell me where you are.”

Ray didn’t want to give an address over the phone. Whoever figured out that Missy had a connection to him had either been watching him or tapping the phone. “I’ll be in touch.” He hung up without another word.

Ray’s frustration was a palpable presence in the room as he paced back and forth at the foot of her bed. The real world—not as Layla had seen it before, but as it really was—was crashing in on them both. This place had been their refuge. In this cabin, she’d
found herself again, and just a little bit of happiness with Ray, but Seth always said that nothing good was meant to last. “What are you going to do, Ray?”

“I don’t know!” With one broad arm, he swept everything off her dresser. A hand mirror shattered, a lamp crashed and sparked out, and a decorative wooden box hit the wall and exploded into splinters.

Layla didn’t care about the mirror or the lamp or the decorative box. The only broken thing she cared about right now was Ray. He needed her to talk him through this. “We’ll think it through, step by step.”

His chest rose and fell, fists clenched at his sides as she slowly got through to him. “I need to find out where they took Missy.”

“Okay. How can you do that?”

“I remember Missy’s eyes. If I had a picture of her, or something to focus on, I could get into her mind. I could go into her dreams.”

“Like you found me,” Layla said, not liking the idea at all. It felt, somehow, too intimate a thing for him to do with anyone else. Besides, it was dangerous. Every time he used his powers, it damaged him a little more. “And once you find her, what will you do?”

“Something crazy, probably.”

She needed to get through to him. “Ray, does it even make any sense that anyone would have taken her? What does she really know about you?”

“She knows about
you,
” he said, still seething with anger. “She knows that you called me to meet you. Given when I dropped her off at the bus stop, someone could use that information to track me here.”

“If that’s true, then the most important thing for us to do is leave immediately and not worry about the
girl. Missy’s young. The authorities will probably just let her go.”

“What if it’s not the authorities that took her? What if it’s Seth? Would he kill her?”

Layla could read his unspoken thoughts. Missy wasn’t brown, or Muslim, or any of the things that Ray believed to be at the root of how easily he’d been disappeared. But Missy was a prostitute. She was someone without a family to fight for her. Someone who lived at the edge of the law. Someone that society saw as
disposable
.

Luckily, Layla knew that Seth didn’t enjoy killing people half as much as he loved forcing people to kill each other. He wasn’t a god of murder; he was a god of war. “He won’t kill her unless she gives him a reason to. He wouldn’t have taken her unless she was useful to him, unless he thought she knew something that would help them track us down.”

“Or he took her to flush me out, to lure me into a trap…”

“I don’t think so,” Layla said quietly, preparing to lay out her arguments rationally, even though she knew they’d offend him. “The authorities think you’re a terrorist. A killer. Given Missy’s age, they probably even think you’re a pedophile. They aren’t likely to think that you’re sentimental enough to come rescue her.”

“What about Seth?”

Layla bit her lower lip. “He thinks you’re a raging monster bent on revenge. If he’d dangle anyone in front of you as bait, it’d be me.”

He glanced at her in surprise, those dark eyes peering up from the shadows of his face, the unspoken question on his parted lips. She could see him trying
to form the question in a way that wouldn’t open up old wounds. “In Syria, when you were interrogating me, when you told me that you had feelings for me…that was his idea?”

“Partly.” Seth had encouraged her to toy with Ray’s emotions. He’d told her to pretend to care about Ray, but somewhere along the way she didn’t have to pretend anymore and when Seth found out, he’d punished her. Layla didn’t want to blame anyone else for the things she’d done, so she said, “He saw everything on camera and when you escaped, he knew you’d hunt me down…”

“That’s why he was having you watched?”

“You mean, besides his desire to terrorize me? Yes.”

Ray squinted. Layla knew all of this was a lot for a mortal to understand—even a special one like Ray. “I don’t get it.”

“He wants to capture you, Ray, and not just because you escaped. It’s not just a matter of government contracts or professional pride. He knows about your powers. He wants to make you use your powers to do his bidding, just as he made me use mine.”

“And you were supposed to lure me in.”

She hadn’t betrayed him. Not this time. So she didn’t flinch. “He just didn’t think I’d run away with you.”

Ray almost smiled at that. She saw the corners of his lips quirk up as if he was going to make a flirtatious remark, but his mind was on the hapless young prostitute who had helped him and was now paying the price. “If Seth captured Missy, where would he keep her? Does Scorpion Group have a headquarters, or are we talking about Mount Olympus or some fairy-tale palace in the sky?”

“Scorpion Group headquarters is in Dubai, but there’s an office in Arlington and another in Washington. If Scorpion Group is responsible for nabbing Missy, they might hold her there.”

“What’s the security like?” he asked her.

Layla arched a brow. “Why? You’re not seriously thinking of breaking her out, are you?”

“You got a better idea?”

“Yes,” Layla said, biting her lower lip. “Let me do it.”

“I’m not letting you do this,” Ray said, watching with scarcely contained amazement as the woman who claimed to be a sphinx dressed herself and gathered her things with military precision.

Layla tucked a small pistol into her boot and another at the small of her back. “I told you. I have security passes. They’re expired but they might still get me into the building. People might remember me there and let me inside.”

She’d handled her weapons like a pro, and he’d be lying if he said that her sudden proficiency with firearms wasn’t a turn-on, but the change in her was enough to give him whiplash. “It’s too dangerous.”

“For me?” She glanced up at him. “Ray, it doesn’t matter if I walk into a hail of bullets. You saw how my skin heals. I’m a sphinx. Nothing can kill me. Well,
almost
nothing anyway.”

“I’m not talking about bullets, Layla. I’m talking about Seth. If everything you’ve remembered is true, you were right to run from him. He broke your mind and left what remained of your identity swirling down a shower drain while you sobbed. You’ve said that he
could do worse things to you than kill you, but suddenly, you want to just turn around and risk falling back into his hands?”

Slinging a backpack over one shoulder Layla said, “He’s after you, too, but you’re the one who is determined to break into Scorpion Group buildings.”

“That’s because I have to find Missy. She shouldn’t be involved in any of this. The kid
wouldn’t
be involved in any of this if it weren’t for me. She trusted me and I put her in harm’s way. But you don’t have to put yourself at risk for Missy. She doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“Yes, she does. She means something to me, because she means something to you.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. It humbled him a little bit.

“We need to get going, Ray,” Layla said. “We’ll be spotted if we go anywhere near an airport so we’re going to have to drive, and it’ll take more than thirty-eight hours to get to D.C. even if we trade off driving in shifts.”

It wasn’t until they’d reached the border of Utah and Colorado that Ray finally turned to her and asked, “What did you mean when you said
almost
nothing could kill you?”

She’d been hoping he’d glossed over that slip of the tongue. “What do you think I meant?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question, Layla. Can something kill you or not?”

It was a complicated question. “Not now. Not the way I am. I’m immortal unless I pass my life force on to someone else.”

“Pass your life force onto somebody else?” Ray eyed her suspiciously, his hands tightening on the wheel. “Like who?”

“Like a child,” she said, staring out the passenger side window at the passing road signs. She’d always wanted a child—a family—even if it meant that she wouldn’t live forever, but Seth was the god of the sterile desert, the veritable patron of infertility. He couldn’t give her a child and her desire to be a mother was blasphemy against her creator. “If I give birth, I pass on the breath that Seth gave to me, and become a normal human woman who ages and dies.” When Ray was silent, she asked, “You don’t believe any of this, do you? You don’t believe what I just told you and you don’t even believe I’m a sphinx.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you.” Ray rubbed the stubble on his unshaven chin. “Okay, I don’t know what the hell to believe, Layla. But what you’re saying makes as much sense as anything else I’ve been through in the past few years. It’s just the whole idea that you think of yourself as not human. That Seth created you…”

“He created you, too.”

He looked at her and the expression on his face wasn’t pretty. “What do you mean?”

“Seth fashioned me from sand, from nothing. But just as surely as he made me a sphinx, he used the horrors of that dungeon to turn you into a minotaur.”

It seemed as if Ray had only heard one word, and now he repeated it, his lips moving slowly.
“Minotaur.”
He probably knew about the monster of Crete, the one that the ancient king locked in a labyrinth. The one that hunted down and devoured youths until Theseus slew him. Even schoolchildren knew that story, and the way
Ray’s eyes blazed, she could see that he didn’t like the comparison.

“The minotaur in the Greek myths wasn’t the first minotaur and won’t be the last,” Layla explained. “It wasn’t just happenstance that you became this way, Ray. Seth made you into what you are.”

“There were hundreds of prisoners in that Syrian jail,” Ray protested. “You’re saying that someone is turning them all into minotaurs?”

“Just you,” Layla whispered. “You had the right ancestry. The right circumstances…”

“What circumstances?” His fingers flexed around the steering wheel in annoyance. “The minotaur was a flesh-eating monster locked in a labyrinth under some Greek palace. So what? It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with you. The minotaur you’ve read about was a bastard child and so are you.”

Ray glared at her. “My mother—”

“Not literally, Ray.
Figuratively
a bastard. Because of your skin, your upbringing, your religion, the languages you speak. Your countrymen couldn’t decide if you belonged to them or to the enemy they’re fighting. You’re the unwanted offspring of mixed heritage and they locked you up. They didn’t have the courage to torture you themselves, so they brought in Scorpion Group to do it for them. That’s when Seth saw an opportunity to twist you into a creature that could serve him.”