Dark Sins and Desert Sands

He was afraid to try it again without someone to shake him out of it, but the teenaged prostitute’s expression hovered somewhere between curiosity and disgust, her lips making a perfectly cherry-round circle of surprise. “You some kind of freak?”

“Look, kiddo, it’s easy money,” Ray said, setting the alarm clock by the bed. He wondered if motel-rooms-by-the-hour came with a wake-up call service. Probably not.

“Easy money,” she mimicked, shaking out her blond hair and pointing at him with the stained end of her Popsicle stick. “Easy money is how girls like me end up missing.”

He didn’t have time for this. “Just sit down, Missy. That’s your name, right?”

“It’s Artemisia, but yeah, you can call me Missy. Most everybody does.” The hooker looked at him in lurid appraisal for a moment, as if considering whether or not his dark looks and hard body were enough to make her stay. Then some wiser instinct took hold of her. “Never mind. I’m outtie.”

Ray sighed. Nobody ever wanted to do things the easy way. Before she broke eye contact, Ray seized her mind. “Sit down, Missy.”

She fell back into the chair as if pushed. He was relieved to find that it wasn’t a struggle. Except when it came to Layla Bahset, Ray was able to use this power whenever he needed people to look the other way at an airport, or give him money from their wallets. Most times, people didn’t realize what had happened, and shook it off. Unfortunately, Missy seemed acutely aware. “H-how did you do that?” The girl’s garishly painted fingernails clawed at the chair as she stammered, “You’re in my head. You forced me … “

“Look, I promise I won’t hurt you,” Ray said.

“I won’t touch you. I just need you to wake me up if I haven’t come back to myself in an hour.”

“You just want me to wake you up in an hour?”

“That’s right,” Ray said. “One hour.”

The call girl bit her lower lip, shaken but wary. “Anybody could do that for you. Why me?”

“Three reasons,” Ray said, ticking them off. “First, because it keeps a kid like you off the streets for an hour. Second, because hiring a hooker isn’t exactly suspicious behavior in this town. And third, because underage girls like you don’t talk to the police.”

“Why are you afraid of the police?” Missy was way too curious for her own good. “Are you, like, a drug dealer?”

Ray removed his coat and threw it over the back of a chair. It was too damned hot for a coat in Vegas anyway. “No.”

“Then you’re an addict,” she decided, eyeing the scars on his wrists. “You’re going to shoot up, and you want me to make sure you come out of it.”

“No drugs,” he said, holding up a bottle of bourbon. “Just booze.”

And he’d save that for later, when he was sure he’d need it.

Missy was still staring at him, giving careful consideration to his black hair and dark complexion. “You’re a terrorist?”

“No, goddammit,” he snapped. In the army, everybody was supposed to be one color. Green. So he’d laughed it off when war buddies called him Captain A-Rab or teased him about being a Muj. But the assumptions people made about him now were no laughing matter. “I’m just going to sleep for an hour.”

“No you’re not,” she said shrewdly, narrowing her eyes. “You’re going into someone else’s head, like you just went into mine. Aren’t you?”

Clever girl, Ray thought. But he hadn’t any use for clever girls right now. “Will you shut up, so I can close my eyes?”

“How do you know I’m not just going to take your wallet and walk out the door once you’re asleep?”

“Because I peeked into your memories and I know you’re not a thief,” Ray replied. “Now, look, I’ll pay you another hundred bucks to just shut up and let me close my eyes.”

With the promise of cold hard cash, she went silent and Ray tried not to think about how nervous he really was. When his victims were in the same room, it was easy enough to enter their minds, but he’d blown it today with Layla Bahset. She’d nearly swallowed him up in the sands of her mindscape. Now he knew to be wary.

Flopping onto the hotel bed, Ray took a picture of Layla Bahset from his pocket. It wasn’t a glamorous photo; it was from a directory of mental health professionals, and showed her with her hair swept back and a pair of glasses precariously balanced on the bridge of her nose. Ray just needed the photo to help him focus. To help him remember that she had no power over him now. And if he could channel all his strength, she couldn’t hide from him. He’d have to enter the maze of her mind from afar, with just the memory of her cat-green eyes as his guide. He’d stared into those eyes enough times to remember them—he’d pleaded with her to believe him when he said that they had the wrong guy. It was a thin thread of shared memory with which they were joined, but now, hopefully, he could follow it back to her.

Once, he’d been at her mercy, but tonight Layla’s fate would be in his hands.

She’d taken sleeping pills to calm her nerves, so when Layla was half awakened by the rush of air by her ear, she told herself it was nothing. Just an all-too-vivid dream. Then she heard the sound again. A pant, bestial and strange. A breath not her own. A shadow fell across her, as if the darkness was a physical weight pressing down on her.

She wasn’t alone.

Even though she’d locked the bolts on her door, even though she’d checked every window latch as part of her nightly routine, and set her alarms, someone was here with her. The certainty of it froze her heart in her chest and shot a liquid chill through her veins.

Layla opened her eyes slowly, an eternity passing as she lifted her lids by creeping degrees. It was dark, but the casino lights of the Vegas skyline flashed garish in the night and briefly lit his silhouette in slashes of green and magenta. The stranger stared at her, his breathing heavier now that he knew she was awake. She couldn’t see the whole of him, only sense the strain of bone and sinew beneath his powerful muscles. Layla stifled a groan of terror, all but paralyzed.

He was an enormous man. Or was he something else? His chest was a mass of muscle. There was froth upon his … snout? It was as if she could see lust trembling upon his sleek haunches and it made her acutely aware of her body beneath the Egyptian cotton sheets. The way he stared at her made her feel vulnerable, obscene. Yet there must have been a time when it pleased her to have men admire her body, because a primal and utterly foreign rush of pleasure ran through her blood right alongside the fear. And she felt suddenly quite unlike herself, filled with some carnal delight that a man would seek her out in her own lair, that any man would dare.

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

As the little rhyme echoed in her mind, Layla slammed back into herself. The pleasure was gone and she pulled the sheet over her body. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice a low, terrified whisper. “I don’t know you.”

His answer was a snort of taurine rage that echoed through the bedroom. “You’re still so pretty when you lie…. “

Layla hissed, pushing herself up so that her back was against the silken headboard of the bed. “I want answers,” he said, coming closer. “I want my life back. I want justice for what you did to me.”

What had she done to him? Was her eal, or some figment of her imagination, one of her lost memories come hauntingly to life? In desperation, she whispered the only words she could think to utter. “Are you the man from the desert?”

The words fell from her lips before she could stop them, and in response, she thought she saw furious flared nostrils. She thought she heard the thunder of hooves on her floor as he shouted, “You know who I am!”

“I don’t,” Layla said, shaking her head so violently that it dizzied her. “I can’t remember.”

“Then I’ll remember for you,” he said, his weight settling on the bed as he crawled overtop of her. “Let me in. Let me inside you.”

Was he a rapist? She’d be overtaken by his bulk, helpless against his size and strength. Layla shrank back, the sheet bunching up to expose one long bronzed leg all the way to the thigh. She saw the glint of sharp horns, as if he were intent upon goring her. Intent upon slashing through the sheets. Intent upon impaling her. She threw her hands in front of her as a defense, then heard herself scream.

This time, Ray expected the barren landscape of her mind. But there were subtle changes. The pyramid was more prominent, and he saw an entrance made of rotted old wood and iron. Maybe he could charge it—break it open and lay her memories bare. Inside the mindscape he was as strong as a bull. Ray threw himself against the entrance, his massive shoulder rolling into his charge. Wood splintered and he heard the groan of hinges. He charged again, and again, smashing and bashing for what felt like hours. He ached with the effort, his throat parched with thirst, but all at once, the entrance gave way and he found himself standing in the labyrinth of an ancient Egyptian tomb.

He found only one torch burning, and he carried it through the sand-filled passage until he heard a low growl. He didn’t see Layla’s memories. Instead, amidst the glittering gold and carnelian pillars, a lioness appeared and said, “You shouldn’t be here. Men who come near me die. They die. Choking, gasping … “

Shit! It was no lion, it was her. It was Layla Bahset. The same cat-green eyes. This was the way his cool, clinical interrogator envisioned herself in her own mind. Or maybe she was just trying to scare him off. “Don’t threaten me.”

“He’ll hurt me if he finds you here,” she said. “More importantly, he’ll hurt you. He’s watching … “

“Who?” Ray asked. “The guards? The sick bastards who got off on watching me bleed? I’ve already taken care of them. They aren’t ever going to hurt me again, and neither are you.”

“I’m different now,” the lioness said. “I help people now. I heal them.”

“I don’t care what you do,” Ray growled, though that wasn’t strictly true. “I want to know why I was pulled out of my unit in Afghanistan. I want to know why I was arrested. I want a name. I want to know who it was that accused me of treason.”

“My memories are locked away from me in the antechamber,” she said. “And even if I could give you a name, what good would it do?”

What good would it do? The question made crimson fury pass like a taunting veil before his eyes. If he had a name, he could confront his accuser. He could prove his innocence. He wouldn’t have to live as a fugitive anymore. He could be a free man.