Dark Sins and Desert Sands

He’d always wondered if his tormentor felt any guilt or regret. Now that he saw it through the guard’s eyes, he knew the answer. No guilt, no remorse. Not even the coldness of duty. Instead, he felt the man’s sadistic pleasure at the memory, sickly sweet, almost sexual in nature, and it stoked his rage.

“What do you want?” the guard pleaded again. “What more do you want?”

“I told you,” Ray said. “I want the woman.”

“She was a civilian contractor working with the Americans. I don’t know her name!”

But he did. The memory was filed away in the cluttered recesses of the Syrian’s mind and Ray was able to find it. Ah, there she was. Dr. Layla Bahset. How could someone so exquisitely beautiful have taken any part in such ugliness? He’d have to find her and ask her himself. Ray would be the interrogator this time, and she’d help him clear his name if it was the last thing she did. The very last thing.

The Syrian lingered in the torture room, obviously enjoying the memory. Inside the mindscape, Ray could make the Syrian feel anything. Ray could make him gasp for air and think he was dying, so he grabbed him by the throat and the man stopped breathing. But unlike the Syrian guard, Ray didn’t enjoy the pain of others, so he relaxed his mental hold.

The man came up gasping, without any apparent gratitude. “I’m not sorry for what we did to you, Rayhan,” the guard rasped. “I liked how you screamed. And why shouldn’t I have enjoyed it? For once, they gave me a real traitor to punish. A man who cannot decide if he’s one of us, or one of them.”

It was a common, but foolish taunt. As if Ray couldn’t be both an American and a Muslim—not that he believed in God anymore. “You enjoyed my screams?”

The guard wheezed. “So much. And when they catch you and throw you back in that box, I’ll make you scream again. You’ll beg—”

“Shut up!” Ray’s teeth clenched, his temper a haze of red blood. This same man had burned his inner thighs with cigarettes and had locked him in a coffin for days on end. Now Ray shoved him against the blood-spattered wall of the imaginary torture room and growled.

The guard laughed, an edge of fear in it. “When they catch you, I’ll break each bone in your hands and feet and make you thank me like the dog you are.”

Ray felt himself snap, pulling the Syrian forward by the neck.

The guard gasped over the fingers clamped around his imagined windpipe. “Where are you taking me?”

Ray didn’t answer; he just dragged the man like the carcass of a hunted animal. The guard began to scream even before he realized it was the room with the scorpions. Ray had glimpsed it, the memory of a boy playing in the sand, stung again and again by the creature’s venomous stinger. Perhaps it was a real memory or only a childhood nightmare. It didn’t matter either way. Hauling the man to the door, Ray threw him inside.

There, in anticipation of his fear, the scrambling scorpions multiplied and swarmed over the guard’s face and hands. The man struggled to escape them, his mouth open in silent horror. He tried to pull himself up from the depthless sandpit of his own terror, but before he could, Ray slammed and locked the door.

On the dark streets of Aleppo, one man slumped under a lamplight, clutching desperately at his face. His eyes rolled back and his lips went blue with fear as he screamed incoherently about scorpions. The other man—the one in the dark leather coat—dabbed at the rivulet of blood that dripped from his nose. “Dr. Layla Bahset,” he murmured, then turned and walked away.

Chapter 1

Questions to try, answer or die, what am I?

Layla Bahset had a secret; she didn’t know who she was.

Oh, she knew her name, but standing here with her feet in the timeless sand, staring up at the persimmon sunrise over the Mojave Desert, she remembered nothing of herself before she’d come here. Beyond the past two years of her life, Layla’s mind was bare—every glimpse of memory bounced like tumbleweed out of her grasp. She remembered no family. She remembered no friends. She didn’t even remember where she’d lived before moving to Nevada.

The certificates on the walls of her office told her that she was a licensed therapist; her diplomas boasted the finest schools. But she couldn’t remember attending them. She was a riddle with no answer—a complete mystery to herself—and the one rare puzzle she didn’t want to solve.

As the dry morning winds whipped hair into her face, it prickled like the needles of a cactus, but Layla didn’t mind. For in spite of all the things she didn’t know about herself, there was one thing of which she was absolutely certain: she belonged to the desert.

It wasn’t just that her skin was the color of golden sand and that her hair was as black and glossy as a scorpion’s shell. It wasn’t even that her eyes had been described as a lush green oasis. It was that when she looked into the desert, she felt as if the desert looked back.

Even out here, alone in the dunes, she knew that someone was watching her. She didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. She only knew that he was closing in on her like a storm, getting darker, and closer, every day.

“Tell me how you felt the last time it happened,” Layla prompted and her patient twitched like a frightened warhorse, about to rear up. Some people might be surprised at how shy the eighteen-year-old art student was, given that his gregarious father was a Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter, but Layla’s heart went out to him. “Tell me, Carson. I want to help you.”

The young man just shoved his hands down into his pockets like he was totally lost in the world. “You’re gonna laugh at me.”

“No. I only want to help you,” Layla said in her most soothing voice, just as everything about her office was meant to soothe. The neutral colors, the soft rug and the nondescript lamps had all been chosen carefully. “I promise, I won’t laugh.”

Carson stared out the office window and Layla followed his gaze. Her office had a spectacular view of Las Vegas and the mammoth mountain ridges that encircled the city like a fortress, cutting it off from the ordinary world. By daylight, the flat expanse of Vegas seemed almost commonplace with its craggy maze of middling skyscrapers and tired tourists stumbling out of the casinos like bleary-eyed vagrants. But at night, Las Vegas would be different. The lights would sparkle even before darkness chased away dusk. Then the tourists and the gamblers would be gods again, their eyes clear but for the avarice. At night, the visitors and the city’s residents would mingle on the streets together to party. There would be an atmosphere of festival, the magic stuff of life. But unless she could help young Carson Tremblay, he would never get to experience anything like that.

“My dad thinks I’m on drugs or just doing it for attention,” he said.

“Are you?” Layla asked.

Carson shook his head. “I guess I thought I was just some kind of moody artist who gets off on destroying shit. You know, like those rockers who smash up their guitars? I even wondered if maybe I was allergic to paint. But it doesn’t just happen to me in galleries or studios. The last time it happened, I was visiting the Grand Canyon with my family and my girlfriend. Well, she’s my ex-girlfriend now. I scared her off with what I did.”

“What triggered it?” Layla asked.

Carson’s lower lip wobbled. “It wasn’t fear of heights or fear of falling down the cliffside, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just that when I looked at the enormity of the canyon—the jagged rocks and the water-carved curves—I picked up the tire iron and started swinging it blindly.”

It was hard to imagine a gentle soul like Carson Tremblay wielding a tire iron. The young man hadn’t hurt anyone, but he’d destroyed his father’s car, upset his family, and scared away the girl he loved. “Were you angry, Carson? Did something make you so angry at your father that you’d want to smash his windshield and the headlights?”

“Yeah. No. I dunno. My dad wanted us all to look at it, you know? He’s gotta know everything. He’s gotta uncover everything. I guess that’s his job as a reporter. But I was just staring at the rocks and the scrub. The wildlife and the barrenness. It was everything right and wrong with the world, and my heart started pounding.”

Layla’s heart started pounding, too. Thinking of the desert. Thinking of the yearning.

“I heard this rush in my ears and I went weak with a cold sweat,” Carson said. “I tried to close my eyes, like I couldn’t bear to look. It was just too …” He struggled to find the word.

“Beautiful,” Layla breathed, finishing for him.

At last, Carson met her eyes. “Yeah. Exactly. Too beautiful. Can things really be too beautiful?”

Layla was sure of it. Things could be too beautiful. Too delicious. Too pleasurable. Desires were dangerous. Passion unlocked things in a person that might otherwise be best left undisturbed and unexamined.

Layla cursed herself. She shouldn’t have let her mind go there. Without any real memories of her own, she seldom brought her own issues into therapy. It was one of the reasons she was very good at this, she told herself. One of the reasons she justified keeping her memory loss a secret. This way, it could be all about her clients. She could help people. Heal people. “Carson, you may be suffering from an unusual case of Stendhal Syndrome.”

“I looked that up on Google,” Carson said, meandering around her office as if he couldn’t make himself sit still. He stopped by her bookshelves, running his fingers over the spines of her neatly organized books. “It’s where tourists faint or freak out after seeing great works of art, right? But I told you, it doesn’t just happen in a studio, and even if it did, I’m an artist. I can’t avoid art. I’ve got an exhibit this week. There’s got to be a cure.”

Some therapists would recommend a psychiatrist who would almost assuredly prescribe antidepressants, Layla thought. But that would treat his symptoms, not the underlying cause. Besides, she worried about deadening his emotions. She didn’t want to turn Carson into someone like her. Someone numb to everything but the fear. Someone who couldn’t even remember herself and didn’t want to.

“Carson, I think we’re going to try something called trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re going to slowly expose you to the trauma until you have a more balanced perception.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Carson said. “But I guess you know what you’re talking about. I mean, you must get some real crazies who come in here.”

Layla glanced up to see that he’d plucked a piece of paper off of her shelf. Carson handed it to her. “I like to think I’d never really hurt anybody, but if I ever get like the guy who wrote this, I hope you have me locked up.”

Layla didn’t recognize the note or the handwriting, which spelled out the words in bold strokes upon a slip of paper that was crisp and textured like papyrus. But she recognized a threat when she saw one: I’m always watching you, Layla, and when I come for you, there will be a reckoning.

As she crumpled the note in her hand, her heart hammered so loudly in her chest that she worried her patient would hear it. All this time, she’d been half-convinced that her nighttime rituals of checking her locks were simply what any sensible woman who lived alone would do. But now she knew her dread wasn’t imagined. It was all real, scrawled in bold black ink.

He’d been here. He’d slipped past her vigilant assistant and her locked doors. Whoever he was, he’d been in this very office. And he was coming for her.

It took Layla several long minutes to regain her composure. If she let her mask slip, her patient might see how terrified she was, and it might ruin all the progress they’d made together. “You’ll never become like that, Carson, and no one is going to lock you up.”