Kiss Across Deserts Read online

  She sipped carefully. “Oh, that’s…it’s so strong!”

  “It’s all in the boiling,” Alex said.

  She sipped the tea while Alex settled on the footstool, the only other seat in the small room.

  “You like history,” he said.

  She glanced at the reproduction map on the wall. She had found it rolled up in a reduced-price bin at a little bookstore in New York. It was a map of the Middle East and the route the crusaders took to get to Jerusalem, with hand-drawn figures of knights in armor and lords in robes, and little footsteps marking the trail. The colors were faded, but still clear. Rather than spend the hundreds of dollars it would have cost to get the thing framed, she had taken a framing course and learned to do it herself. She had found archaic-looking framing wood and had stressed and finished it. The end result looked fabulous on the wall.

  “What gave me away?” she asked Alex.

  “The early editions of Dickens. There’s copy of Poor William framed on the kitchen wall. And you have books. Everywhere. None of them are romances, that I’ve spotted so far.” He looked around the room once more. “And no TV. In your spare time, the little you have, you must read.”

  “I can’t read now,” Sydney said dryly. “Not for a few days, anyway.”

  “You wouldn’t like it if you tried,” Alex assured her. “Your brain is sorting itself out after being rammed up against the inside of your skull. There’s swelling that has to go down, before it will start to operate normally. The swelling produces excess fluids that must drain.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, doctor.” The dry tone was still there, but she couldn’t help it. She grimaced. “It’s going to be a long twenty-four hours,” she muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, the next twenty-four hours are going to be very long.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to stay awake.”

  The expression on Alex’s face was indescribable. “Who told you that?” He stood up again. “The attending?”

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Keeping a concussion patient awake went out of practice a decade ago,” Alex said shortly. “I’ll have his guts for garters, I swear.”

  Sydney bit her lip. She had never seen Alex angry, or sad or anything other than perfectly in control. She could see he was simmering, incensed by the medical advice she had been given.

  “So, what should I be doing?” she asked simply.

  Alex let out his breath in a big gusty sigh. “You can sleep when you want, you should rest as much as you can, and you should take it easy when you don’t. If you want to try to read, try it, but it might make you feel nauseous.”

  “If I can’t read, then…?”

  Alex shoved his hands into his pockets. “When I was growing up in Jordan, it seemed to me that talking was the primary entertainment.”

  “Talking?” She smiled. “Gossip and weather?”

  “Stories,” Alex amended. He sat back down on the footstool again and clasped his hands together, resting them on his knees. “Did you grow up in Los Angeles?”

  She blinked. “No…I…” She cleared her throat. “Pennsylvania,” she said flatly.

  Alex smiled a little. “You don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

  “Not particularly, no. All my family is dead. There’s just Bruce.”

  Bruce shoved his nose under her hand.

  “You?” she asked curiously, patting Bruce. “I mean, I know you come from Jordan originally, because you just said so. I know you converted to Christianity. I know you’re a doctor and I have a feeling you’re a very good one. Did you always want to be a doctor?”

  “From as early as I can remember, yes, I wanted to help people heal and thrive,” Alex said. “But medicine was not an honorable profession among my…people. My family insisted I…join the army.”

  Startled at this revelation, Sydney pulled her feet up onto the sofa, tucking them under her, as Alex went on with his story. She sipped her tea and listened to stories about his early adulthood, and difficulties with his family, to his conversion and the taking of the cross, to his travels, which were astonishingly extensive. It seemed that he had been everywhere.

  He had a story for every moment of his life. Sad ones, funny ones, insightful ones. Alex was a student of character and people and seemed to have hundreds of tales about some of the stranger people he had met.

  Just sitting there and listening to his voice was very relaxing. She knew she would never remember all of the stories, but the overall impression followed her down into sleep, where she saw an open desert, wide blue sky and silence, broken only by the soft, warm wind. One could truly be alone there where the approach of another would stand out against the sky or the dun colored dunes.

  She blinked awake and realized she was being carried. “No, Alex…”

  “Shh. Sleep is best for you now,” he murmured. She was placed on her bed and the covers dropped over her. “Bruce will watch you.” Lips pressed against her temple.

  “You won’t be watching me?”

  “Until the morning, I will. Then I will leave you in peace, so you can recover on your own. You will sleep a lot for the next few days.”

  She didn’t want to sleep. That was the problem. She wanted to find out who had tried to kill her. She had no idea who wanted her dead, which bothered her for two reasons. The first was that someone actually wanted her dead—that was a hard fact to face. The second reason was that she couldn’t start digging up the truth for herself. Now. With no delays.

  She felt the bed shift as Bruce jumped onto the other side and settled down and that reassured her enough to let the concerns go and let sleep take her. Bruce…and Alex, in the room beyond these walls.

  Chapter Five

  Rafe studied the house once more. This was his second visit and the impression of a dwelling built specifically for the heat and dryness of the California climate struck him even more forcibly this time. It helped that the day was blasting hot.

  The thick concrete walls covered in pale adobe could be mistaken for Spanish, but the lack of wrought iron, pretty tiles and curved terracotta on the roof said it wasn’t. The roof was flat, and there were deep balconies and arches protecting the doors, casting shade.

  From his last visit, Rafe knew the inside of the house was almost all white, cool and Spartan in décor. It was too plain for his tastes, which had been influenced by decades living in Constantinople, but it had a certain charm.

  He walked under the wide archway and wondered how many people knew the house was a desert house, built by someone who had lived on the open erg—the sandy waves of country where Alex had been raised.

  Rafe’s knowledge of Alexander Karim had increased somewhat since Alex had stopped by three days ago and derailed his baking. During Rafe’s latest debriefing and strategy session with Brody and Veris, both of them had been unusually talkative about Alex and where he came from. It had filled in some of the blanks nicely. There were far more blanks than knowledge, of course, but that was true of any vampire who had lived for more than a few hundred years. Alex was approaching his millennium, which made Rafe considerably older, but the difference was irrelevant. After the first five hundred years, one became adapted to life passing by at a furious rate while nothing changed, subjectively.

  Alex was facing his first challenge in that regard, and both Veris and Brody had hinted that he was under stress because of it. His faith was adding to the burden, of course.

  Rafe stood with his finger hovering over the door alarm, wondering if he really wanted to get involved with a man—a vampire—who wasn’t sure of his own identity. Then his finger pushed forward, almost by itself, and the question was answered for him.

  Alex opened the door quickly and moved back. “You’re early. Good. Come on through.”

  Rafe stepped out of the blazing heat. “It’s uncomfortable out there,” he remarked and put his sunglasses away.

  “That�
�s June for you,” Alex said philosophically. He moved through the white arches into the dining room. Rafe remembered from before that Alex did most of his work and research here. The piles of papers and books were still spread across the table, but one end was cleared. Sitting in the middle of the clear space was a small ceramic dish with sealed syringes in it, and next to it, a small vial with yellowish liquid in it.

  “Is that the serum you were taking?” Rafe asked. He didn’t like that it was sitting out on the table like this. That made it far too available.

  Alex picked up the bottle and shook it. “That’s it,” he said and tossed it to Rafe, who caught it awkwardly, surprised. “I think you’re under the impression it’s a new recreational drug, one that vampires are vulnerable to, and I’ve been indulging too much.”

  Rafe held his teeth together. That was exactly what he thought. Not that Alex had to worry about addiction. Nothing changed their brain physiology, while most addictive drugs did change the brain, which was what made them addictive.

  Alex pointed to the tiny bottle. “That’s an antidote, or it will be with a little bit more tweaking.”

  “An antidote against what?”

  “A couple of years ago, I perfected a new sedative. It’s very powerful and I suspect it would kill humans if the dose wasn’t carefully controlled, but vampires are knocked out by it very nicely.”

  Rafe raised his brows. “That would be what you used on the council’s guards. They were out for two days.”

  Alex shrugged. “Vampires don’t have a metabolism to process the serum and eliminate it. You have to wait for entropy to break it down. Which is why I have been working to find an antidote. Waiting for water to wear down stone is sometimes not convenient.”

  Rafe considered the small vial again. “How does the sedative work on vampire physiology? I didn’t think anything could because of the self-healing.”

  Alex sat on the edge of the table. “Vampire self-healing isn’t healing at all, not the way a human heals. Human healing tackles the health problems and solves it. Vampires don’t. They just reset everything back to where it was, by-passing the whole healing process. That resetting happens hundreds…thousands of times a day. The sedative stops the resetting.” He smiled. “In a way, it stops what vampires have for a metabolism and as there is nothing else to replace it, it looks like they’re sleeping, but basically, they shut down.”

  Rafe shifted uncomfortably. “I thought the healing we do was...well, magic.” He felt odd even saying it.

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic to a less-developed consciousness.”

  “That’s what some author said, isn’t it?”

  “Arthur C. Clark. He was talking about the future and other civilizations, but you and I once thought flying was the stuff of magic, too.”

  Rafe veered away from the topic. That vampires were not magical beings was disturbing. He promised himself he’d think about it later and lifted the bottle. “Did you try the sedative on yourself, like you did this?”

  “Of course. Vampires willing to suffer through research trials are non-existent.”

  “So, is the sedative what you used to pull yourself back out, when I was here?”

  Alex nodded.

  Rafe glanced at the vial again. The liquid moved sluggishly inside, like a pale molasses. “You knocked yourself out for three days? Didn’t anyone send up an alarm?”

  Alex grimaced. “Who would do that?”

  “Your friends. Brody, Veris and Taylor. There must be others.”

  “No one who might notice my absence for three days.” Alex stood up. “But let’s not get into my miseries right now.”

  Rafe put the vial of serum back on the table. “Let me try it.” The curiosity emerged out of nowhere, but it was a strong urging, nevertheless.

  Alex considered him. “It’s not a high like humans experience, you know.”

  Rafe shook his head. “I figured that out for myself.”

  “You did?” Alex seemed surprised.

  “Sure. I’ve done my share of research into illegal drugs, mostly from the legal perspective, but there were some mind-bending facts in the reports and briefs. A high really isn’t your body getting high. It’s a removal of fears and worries and anxieties, which let the body relax completely. Everything slows down, while your brain melts under the influence. But this stuff—” and he flicked the bottle with his fingernail, “—speeds everything up, or it should if it’s supposed to counter the effects of the sedative. It’s not a real high, but it probably feels like it because your mind is loping along at Mach speed, so the world would seem to slow down.”

  “I’m impressed,” Alex said.

  Rafe grinned. “Maybe I can find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  Alex’s smile faded. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “What are you looking for, anyway?” Rafe said. He picked up a syringe and stripped the plastic seal away.

  “You really want to do this?” Alex asked.

  “I really do. I want to find out what it’s like.”

  Alex shook his head. “I don’t know….”

  “C’mon, doc,” Rafe replied. “Didn’t you just complain that research victims are impossible to find? I’m volunteering.”

  Alex stood unmoving, clearly torn by the offer and the inherent risks. “Aren’t you supposed to be responsible and law-abiding?”

  “That’s just my day job,” Rafe replied impatiently. “I absolve you in advance for anything that happens.”

  “That doesn’t remove the danger,” Alex said slowly, picking up the bottle. “If I incapacitate their solicitor, Brody and Veris will kill me.”

  Rafe laughed. “Take a deep breath and jump. Uncertainty is what life is all about. Besides, you would never have used yourself as a guinea pig if you thought the risks were too high.” He held out his arm. “Stick me, doc.”

  Alex drew some of the liquid into the syringe, measuring carefully. “This is going to feel a bit weird,” he warned as he slid the syringe into Rafe’s vein. He didn’t swab first. There was no point, for they were immune to any infection.

  The serum felt cold, which was amazing considering the body temperature vampires maintained…or failed to maintain, in truth. Rafe could feel it coursing up his arm and drew in a sharp breath. His heart skittered and fear touched him.

  Alex picked up his hand. “Come with me.” He led Rafe through to a large bedroom suite and waved toward the big bed. “It’s probably better you lie down now, than fall down later.”

  “Really?” Rafe climbed onto the perfectly-made bed and settled the pillows under his head. His fingers were tingling. “I think I feel…something.”

  “It works fast,” Alex agreed. He stood at the end of the bed and glanced at his watch.

  “What should I look for while I’m in this?” Rafe asked.

  Alex shook his head. “You’ll be tempted to chase memories. It will seem very important that you catch up with a memory you can’t recall. It will feel…exciting. But I think that’s a dead-end. You just sink down into yourself, if you do. Let it go and instead reach out around you. Listen to the world. Study it. See where that takes you.”

  * * * * *

  Rafe was perfectly aware of his surroundings. More than aware—everything seemed bright and clear and sharply outlined. Alex was sitting on a chair by the bed, a tablet in his hands, watching and working on the screen. Alex himself was surrounded by an aura that made him glow.

  From somewhere inside him, an insistent thought drew his attention. His heart skittered as he reached for it. What was the thing he was supposed to remember? It felt very old, but very significant. And how weird was it that he, a vampire, should have forgotten anything?

  Then he did remember something, although this memory didn’t have any of the power of the thing he had forgotten. He recalled Alex saying not to chase the memory.

  He thought about it for a while, and even though the forgotten memory was enticing, he deci
ded that he would do what Alex said. He couldn’t think why he might do that instead, but when he looked at Alex, he saw that he was watching him.

  “Pretty thoughts,” he said…or thought he said.

  “Leave them be,” Alex said gently. His voice boomed and echoed.

  Rafe let them be. Instead he looked at Alex, enjoying the play of his flesh against the darkness of his beard. The very blue eyes— not as blue as Veris’, but crystalline. Beautiful.

  The light from the setting sun was orange and red in the window behind Alex, and caught his attention. Rafe examined it with placid curiosity. Something tugged at his chest, not hard or painfully, but like a shoe being removed. It…detached.

  He found himself outside the window. The sun was sizzling its last moments, dipping down toward the Pacific. Then it would be his time.

  Rafe put his back to the sun, but he didn’t turn. He thought about the hills behind him and then he was looking at them. They looked puny from up here. For the first time he realized he was very high up. It didn’t worry him.

  He looked beyond the hills, over flat landscape, then more wrinkled. Down below he could sense that life teamed, millions of lives over years and decades, moving across and over the top of themselves, ghosts to each other. The land bulged with life. It fizzed in his veins, and he laughed out loud at the sheer joy of it.

  Far ahead, he sensed an even thicker manifesting of life. Centuries of it, scrambling all over the top of each other. He was a part of that landscape. New York was far ahead, beckoning.

  But there was a tugging to his left, drawing his attention and he let New York go. He thought about following that tugging and then he was, moving more and more swiftly over the land. Ahead was a lake. One of the lakes. Large, glittery in the pearlescent light that bathed everything. Then he could see a great city. Chicago?

  He was descending, for the buildings were becoming clearer. They were still far away, but the tugging was coming from farther away, ahead of the city. He looked ahead and saw more buildings, more cities and towns.

  Then one caught his eye, for it was dotted with two lakes, almost like eyes, and he knew that was the place. He reached for it and something brushed past him, snarling his progress, as darkness blinked in. Then there was light. Normal light….