Maybe it had shattered, she realized, staring at him. Like the Jessica who had risen from the ashes of Raithe’s brutality, the Mason before her was a different man from the male who’d loved Farida. That core still existed, yet something had cracked it, never to be as strong and resolute in its faith again.
Mason rose and went back to the tree, so his words came over his shoulder, brought by the fitful breeze. “Farida’s father was a smart man, even if he was a fanatical traditionalist. He’d sensed the same thing Farida had, that there was something different about me. He employed the talents of what you would call a shaman, or wizard. My life”—his lip curled in disdain—“was spared only because that wizard didn’t exactly know what I was. He concluded I was some sort of djinn and as such, he assumed my essence couldn’t be killed, only contained. He also decided I had some kind of mental bond with Farida.” Jessica studied the pale line of his shoulders, the way strands of his hair lifted and swept across them with the movement of the breeze. Other than that, he’d gone motionless again.
“He created a spell, a complex, impressive one. With it, they were able to ambush me in the desert at night, not far from home. The wizard wove the spell over me so I couldn’t move, then they wrapped me in chains and dragged me, with ten horses and a fifty-foot length of chain between them and me, back to her father’s village.”
“Mason.” She began to rise, but he made a sharp noise, stilling her.
“Stay where you are, habiba. Let me tell it here, to the dark, where tales like this should always be told. And it is not I who deserve your pity. Not even an ounce’s worth.” One arm lifted, his palm bracing against the tree’s rough bark, fingers digging in.
“She was at the cave. I tried to reach out to her with my mind, but that damnable spell blocked the connection. I nearly lost my mind then. I didn’t know it was just the beginning. Because though I couldn’t reach her, I could still hear her every thought.” He glanced up at the bark, noted a nocturnal spider crawling down the trunk, moving over his fingers. Keeping them still, he watched the creature’s progress. “She was making her dinner. Tuning into her thoughts was always like a lullaby, habiba. She was happier in that cave than she’d ever been in her whole life, and it was the truth for me as well. I felt such peace with her. Perhaps it made me stay longer than I should have there. I should have spirited her away to my family home right away, the night she came away with me, but I didn’t want to take her from her desert too soon, hoping her father might eventually see reason, so she could have us both . . .”
He straightened, cleared his throat, though he stayed averted from her. “She sensed something was wrong. My horse escaped during my capture, and so when he arrived at the cave, her panic, and worry . . . I thought that was unbearable.” He gave a harsh laugh, the laugh one heard in a graveyard in the darkest part of night. It made Jess shiver again. She was afraid her distress might stop his story, so she tried to quell it, but Mason’s mind was elsewhere now.
“I expected them to track the horse to her, which is why I panicked when I couldn’t warn her. But the wizard suspected I had enchantments on the cave that could destroy them all. He said, because of my hellish bond on her soul, she would come to me, and then they would have us both. On that part at least, he was correct.” The bitter anger in his voice was undisguised.
“I taught her how to track. I thought it would enhance her ability to survive in the desert. Better I’d have left her innocent, defenseless. She realized I’d been taken to her father’s camp, but she came anyway. You know the next part, how she rode into the camp disguised as a man and then declared herself, and her love for me.” Jessica couldn’t tear her attention away as he squatted. Running his fingers over the soft, willowy branch of a jasmine bush, he disrupted the fragile flowers. “I wish I’d taken more time in that final moment to really look at her, to appreciate what she did.
Farida never thought of herself as brave; did you know that? But everything she did, from the moment she met me, was an act of courage.” He hesitated then, and Jessica’s fingers scraped stone. “She said I made her feel so safe, she wasn’t afraid of anything.” Oh, Mason. She closed her eyes. She’d been irritated with him for not telling her this story, and now she realized she’d been as immature as a child, thinking her parent was depriving her of a story simply to be mean. She was starting to understand the cost of his telling, but she knew she had to hear it. Opening her eyes again, she let him see he had her full attention.
“My horse, Bastion, was exceptionally large. Seventeen hands high and fractious. I’d always been cautious about her handling him.
She rode in as confident as a Berber raider, back straight and hands firm on his mouth. No fear at all when her father came out to meet her. She got off the horse, prostrated herself at his feet and begged for the right to die with me. As my servant, she knew if I died, she would die, but she wanted to be close to me when we went.”
He straightened again. “They had me chained and guarded in the middle of the camp, so dawn would have ended me. But it was midnight when she arrived. The lovely, idealistic little fool saved my life.” As he turned his head to look at her, Jessica met his gaze briefly, but then he swung away, paced the length of the garden, came back. When he put a booted foot on the edge of the bench, seeing the tension in his jaw, she thought he might smash it to bits, but he didn’t.
“They’d gagged me, so I couldn’t tell her they’d blocked our link. We were never allowed to touch. When they put a hood over my head and dragged me away, I heard her cries to me, but I could not answer her. Even on her way to the village, she was trying to talk to me in my mind. To her, it was as if we were thousands of miles away from one another. While to me, it was as if she was right before me, just beyond the grasp of my fingertips.”
Dread was gathering in Jessica’s stomach, an understanding of where this was leading. What Mason was intimating was worse than horrible. Thanks to his earlier, chilling demonstration of the third mark, she was in a position now to understand, more than she had been before.
“If they had ungagged me, I would have told them how to kill me. If I could have found a way to stake my heart, take off my own head, set my flesh on fire, I would have done it. But I was never given that chance. They took me out to a pit they’d prepared, threw me into it wrapped in the chains, and buried me under rock, reinforcing the spell over it. The irony was, they finished the task barely an hour before dawn broke and would have ended me.”
Mason was on the move again, making a circle around the fountain, moving in and out of the shadows. Instead of following him, Jess closed her eyes, listened to his voice, the shift between helpless male rage and the raw sound of loss, and grief.
“The wizard told her father that, as a djinn, I was invulnerable, but I had placed my life essence in Farida. While they could not kill me, they could weaken me for many decades, so I couldn’t escape the pit, if they tortured her as long as possible.”
“Oh, my God.” Jessica opened her eyes to meet his, glowing in the darkness.
“But the wizard, who should have known what a demon was, because the son of a whore looked at one every morning in the mirror, said that they must break Farida’s will to protect me first. Sheikh Asim told her that they took me out in the desert and gave me a choice. I could have the spell removed and go my own way, as long as I never returned to the Sahara. Or I could come back and die with her. They told her I chose to cut my losses and run.
“She didn’t believe it at first. But she cried out for me, over and over again, and I was silent.” Mason swallowed, his face a rictus of pain. “As the hours went on, as the desert sun rose and dehydration and blood loss affected her mind, she began to believe their words. Steel through the heart is the only sure death for a servant, though sometimes blood loss can take a weaker one. She wasn’t weak, habiba.” His jaw clenched again and he moved back to the bench, sat. “When they saw her live through what no human could, they tried more lethal torments, like driving steel tent pins through her body. That was how it ended at last.” She died cursing my name. As she should have. She kept calling out for me, pleading with me to answer her . . . Not to save her. She begged me not to let her die alone.
His eyes were on her face, living, writhing fire burning him up inside. Jessica couldn’t bear it. Sliding off the fountain wall, she went to him, sinking onto her knees only a foot away. As she moved toward him, though, he turned away, straddling the bench. The toe of his boot was so near, she covered it with her hand, the atmosphere too charged to dare touching a less protected part of his body.
“Things become very simple at such moments, habiba. I would have done anything. Sold my soul a hundred thousand times, destroyed the universe without a thought, for one second of connection between our minds, so she could know I was there, that I would have moved Heaven and Earth to get to her.”
Jessica remembered his nightmare. The woman’s screams. Her own, and how together they’d driven him to such madness. She reached up now, closed her hand on his calf under the snug riding breeches, drawing his attention there. His hair slid forward over his shoulder, the wind moving strands against his cheek, his hard mouth.
“But you believe in an afterlife, my lord. Even your words to me, in the tomb: ‘Allah decides when we die.’ Surely she knows—”
“I know He is there. But I don’t know . . . It tears at my soul every day, every night . . . as if she suffers still, as if there is something I should have done that I have not.”
His voice broke then and he looked away. Jessica sat for a moment, stunned. In her experience, even with Mason, vampires never showed great emotion, unless it was passion or anger. But then, not too long ago, she’d thought all vampires were monsters.
Jess moved onto her feet and slid her arms around his shoulders. When she guided his jaw toward her with a gentle hand, miraculously he turned and wound his arms around her hips, pressing his face into her bosom.
