Dark Nights Read online

  Something hit the back of his head hard, and Joie found herself staring up at one of her men. “Thanks, John. I think he smashed every bone in my body when he fell on me.”

  She took John’s outstretched hand, and allowed him to help her out from under the large body. Joie kicked the gun from the limp hand of the first man she’d shot, even as weakness overwhelmed her. She sat down abruptly as her legs turned to rubber. “Get the senator and Mrs. Goodvine to safety, John.” The wailing sirens were fading in and out. “Someone help that poor woman up.”

  “We’ve got it, Joie,” one of the agents assured her. “We have the driver. How bad are you hurt? How many hits did you take? Give me your gun.”

  Joie looked down at the gun in her hand and noted with surprise she was aiming it at the motionless attacker. “Thanks, Robert. I think I’ll just let you and John handle things for a while.”

  “Is she all right?” She could hear the senator’s anxious voice. “Sanders? Are you hurt? I don’t want to just leave her there; where are you taking us?”

  Joie tried to lift her arm to indicate she was fine, but her arm seemed heavy and uncooperative. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She just needed to be somewhere else, just for a short time while the medics fixed her up. It wasn’t the first time she’d taken a hit and she doubted it would be the last. She had certain instincts that had taken her to the top of her profession. It was very dangerous at the top.

  Joie could blend in. Some of the men liked to call her the chameleon. She could look strikingly beautiful, plain, or just average. She could blend in with the tough crowd, the homeless, or the rich and glamorous. It was a valuable gift, and she used it willingly. She was called in for the difficult assignments, the ones where action was inevitable. Few others had her skill with knives or guns, and no one could disappear into a crowd the way she could.

  She took herself out of her body, watched the frantic scene around her with interest for a few minutes. The others assigned to the senator and the Austrian agents had everything under control. She was being put into an ambulance and hustled away from the scene. More than anything, she detested hospitals. She’d seen too many of them and associated the smells with death. More than a few of her coworkers—her friends—had gone through hospital doors and had not ever left.

  Joie didn’t know if she truly believed in astral projection, but she had been having out-of-body experiences from the time she was a toddler. She had perfected her craft over the years, directing herself to fly away and leave her physical body behind when she didn’t want to be where she was. It was a useful, exhilarating gift, and all too real. Sometimes too real. Many times the places she found herself in were far more intriguing than where she’d left her body and of course, the danger was always in not finding her way back.

  She’d read numerous articles about astral projection and most seemed to happen to enlightened people, people of faith who believed in a higher, better realm. She was far more practical, dealing with the seamier side of life and finding her faith was in nature and the beauty of the wild, untouched places she sought out both on an astral plane and with her physical body when she had time off.

  The smell of the hospital was overpowering, making her stomach lurch. People moved around her fast, poking needles into her, talking in low voices, cutting her shirt away. She didn’t take painkillers as a rule and tried to tell them, but no one listened to her. An oxygen mask was slapped over her face. What was the use in staying in a place she didn’t want to be when she could roam the world in her mind? Whether she was actually there or not mattered very little. It felt real when she journeyed out of her body. She took a deep breath of the oxygen and let go of her physical body.

  She simply took herself away now, soaring free. She wanted to be outdoors, under the sky or beneath the earth in a world of subterranean beauty—it didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t within the walls of a hospital.

  Joie felt weightless, free, skimming through the mountains she had studied so carefully. As she soared free, she planned a trip caving with her brother and sister as soon as the senator and his wife were safely back home. She crossed space. Smelled the rain. Felt cool and moist in the mist of the mountains. Far below her, she saw the entrance to a cave, spotlighted by the small sliver of moon that managed to peek around the thick cloud cover. Smiling, she dropped down to enter a world of crystal and ice. Whether she was dreaming or hallucinating didn’t matter; all she cared about was escaping from the pain of her wounds and the smell of the hospital.

  Carpathian Mountains

  Traian lay in the cool earth, gazing up at the high, cathedral-like ceiling. His body hurt in so many places, he just wanted to rest. The beauty of the cave was breathtaking and took his mind off his physical pain. The network of caves he’d entered deep beneath the earth was part of a huge subterranean city. Great waterfalls of ice cascaded down from ceiling to floor, some lapping around one another until it looked as if great bows of thick ice had gift-wrapped the entire cave he lay in.

  Despite the cold, some insects and bats dwelled in the realms above him, but he had gone deep, where few living creatures could exist. The cold helped to numb the pain and bring him a soothing sense of peace he so badly needed after the last few risings. In the far corner of the cave the formation actually looked like thick ice walls with a covering of ice clouds over them. As he worked at forcing some of the burning embers from his body he tried to imagine the forces it would take to forge such a dramatic thing of beauty deep beneath the earth.

  Traian turned his head and saw her. His heart nearly stopped and then began pounding. The breath left his lungs in a long rush. She was hovering just overhead to his left. She’d entered silently and somehow gotten past his safeguards. Had he been so exhausted that he’d forgotten such an important life-saving detail? Impossible. He could feel the weave, strong and in place. No one—nothing—should be able to get passed his safeguards.

  He studied the woman. She had a cap of dark, glossy hair, very thick—the kind a man would want to run his fingers through. The thought brought him up short. He didn’t have thoughts like that about women—at least any that he could remember—and he had lived a very long existence. Her eyes were large and gray, heavily fringed with thick lashes. She stared back at him with complete astonishment.

  “You’re hurt,” she said. “If you were real, I’d send the paramedics.”

  Her voice seemed to go right through his skin, wrap itself around his heart and squeeze so tightly he lost his breath. His vision blurred. Tiny pinpoints of light burst behind his eyes, a light show of colors. Pastels at first so that some of the ice formations took on subtle blues and greens.

  “What makes you think I am not real?” He tested his voice, not certain if she was real or if he’d dreamt her up. He’d been wounded a thousand times and nothing like this had ever happened to him before. A woman hovering above his head? Floating in the air like an angel? He was so far removed from heaven none of this made sense. He wasn’t a man to panic and was willing to see what she would do. He had no doubts that he could kill her if she made a wrong move.

  “Because I’m not really here,” she answered. “I’m in a hospital many miles away. I don’t even know where here is.”

  Traian frowned and rubbed his eyes. Colors shot at him like sparks, a fireworks show inside of his head. Great. The last thing he needed with a new, potential threat was to lose his vision. She didn’t feel like a threat. If anything, there was a sense of amusement and serenity about her. She didn’t look transparent, but it was possible she was telling the truth. Her voice had a soft melodic echo to it, as though it was disembodied.

  “You look real enough to me.”

  “What in the world are you doing lying in the mud in the middle of a cave?” Her soft laughter rippled through him. “You didn’t mistake this for a beauty spa, did you?”

  His heart nearly ceased beating. He blinked several times as the colors behind his eyes burst into a spectacular display of raining drops of dark color. When he stared at her his world was upside down. Her simple questions had wrought a change that would never be undone.

  He was aware of everything—the coolness of the interior, the blue of the ice, the dramatic sweep of architecture formed thousands of years earlier. He was mostly aware that her hair was a rich brown, dark and glossy, the strands, several shades of brown, so many he hadn’t even known the colors existed. Her eyes were a cool gray and her lashes and brows matched her hair color. Her mouth was wide and curved at the corners, teeth small and very white. There were laugh lines around her mouth and eyes hinting at her sense of humor. Her skin was light gold, burnished by the sun.

  He was seeing in color. After hundreds of years of a bleak, gray existence, living in a world without color or emotion, there she was. The other half of his soul. Staring down at him with curious eyes and an amused grin. There was blood on her shoulder and bruises on her face, and she seemed to be wearing a bizarre, thin-looking gown that didn’t cover much.

  His eyes narrowed, trying to see what injuries she had. She’d mentioned a hospital. “What happened to you?”

  She smiled at him as if those injuries were nothing at all when they’d set his heart pounding in fear and dread coiled his belly into tight hard knots. She had no idea how important she was. His lifemate. After so many endless years.

  “I was shot.” She touched her face, wincing as if it hurt. “Someone smashed me in the face. It’s all a little hazy. They’re giving me drugs and I’ve never reacted well to them.”

  For the first time her body shimmered and she appeared transparent.

  “Wait! Don’t go.” He nearly leapt to catch her, but knew his hand would pass right through her if she wasn’t really there.

  Traian had never panicked in his life. Not that he could remember. He’d been in countless battles, but whether she was real or not, he was seeing in color. He was feeling. Emotion. Real emotion. He knew that much was real. Was it possible he was caught in a hallucination? He had lost a lot of blood—too much blood—and there was nothing in the cave to replenish the amount he’d left in the ground. He couldn’t imagine that he could ever conjure something like this up.

  Fear. Elation. Shock. The emotions were far too strong to be memories. She had to be real. He had no idea how she’d traveled to the cave, but she was real enough to bring him color and emotion. He couldn’t lose her. Not now. Not after searching the world over for her. He had to find a way to keep her with him.

  A small shudder went through her body as she made a visual effort to stay with him. “I can’t do this for too long. But,” she frowned at him, “you’re hurt too. Do you often go swimming in the mud with a gaping hole in your shoulder? You have heard of infection and gangrene, haven’t you?”

  “A small run-in with a group of unsavory ruffians. I was uncharacteristically slow.” He kept his voice light, dismissing of his own wounds.

  “Does this sort of thing happen often?”

  He knew she had a good sense of humor from the laugh lines around her mouth. He liked her mouth, that quirky little smile that reached her eyes. “Unfortunately very often. And you?” He felt himself go very still waiting for her answer.

  “Same thing. In my line of work, it’s one of the hazards you just live with.”

  He inhaled but couldn’t catch her scent, telling him she truly didn’t have a physical body present in the cave. “We must do similar work.”

  “But,” she flashed another wide smile, “you’re here in this cave and I’m in a hospital. What does that say about you?”

  His own sense of humor welled up. He hadn’t bantered with anyone since his childhood and he barely had managed to remember those days. “I’m eccentric?”

  Her laughter seemed a melody playing over his body like the soft brush of fingers. “You seem a bit underdressed for a cave,” he pointed out.

  She looked down at her body, one eyebrow arching. She seemed to be in some sort of a hospital gown. She’d forgotten to clothe herself properly in her astral flight. She shrugged, her laughter soft and inviting. “Yes, well, a lady likes to know she looks her best when the cave crickets come calling.”

  Joie studied the man below her. He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Ever. And she trained with some fairly hot men. He had a rock-hard body. Plenty of defined muscle and she was a darned good judge of such things. He exuded power, despite the fact that he was obviously severely injured. He was making light of it, but when she really studied him, she could see a horrific tear in his neck and bite marks all over his shoulders and running down his arms. When he eased his position slightly, she caught sight of more on his back.

  “You look like you ran into a pack of wolves.”

  She bit her lip hard, waiting for an answer. She found, when she took herself out of her body, that she didn’t feel pain, but she did feel cold, and this time, she was colder than usual and it had nothing to do with being in an ice cave. She had never held a projection for an extended period of time, certainly not over a great distance, and she’d chosen a mountain range she’d been studying with the idea of vacationing there.

  The biting cold pierced her through and through. She was worried about this man. Where her body was barely there, and he couldn’t really see the damage to it, with all the blood and gore, she could see the wounds on him easily and the evidence all over the ice where he’d come in. He was really injured. Without a real body she couldn’t help him.

  “More like dogs than wolves. I wouldn’t give my brethren such an insult.”

  She loved the sound of his voice. “You have an incredibly sexy accent. Do women fall all over you just at the sound of your voice?” She was very good at placing people by their accents, but his was different; there was a rich turn to his words. As astral dreaming went, this one was fascinating. The longer she stayed, the more real he seemed to her.

  “I have not actually noticed such a phenomenon,” he replied, his eyes glinting with amusement, “but I will watch for it in the future.”

  The idea of women falling all over him irritated her on a primal feminine level which surprised her. She wasn’t that kind of person. She worked with men every day and never once had she decided she wanted one permanently. How strange that during an astral projection she would run into a man she found attractive. She loved his sexy voice, and hard, firm body. He was definitely European. His hair was longer than she usually liked on a man, but he wore it exceptionally well and it suited his aristocratic face.

  She couldn’t determine his age, but he was definitely all man. A warrior. The type of man who really appealed to her. She realized she was staring at him and sent a small smile his way, trying not to let her teeth chatter. The cold was worse, deep inside her as if her core temperature had dropped alarmingly.

  “You’re too charming not to have noticed,” she pointed out. “You seem a very experienced man to me.” She looked around her. “Nice cave. I love caves. This one looks like a wonderful place to explore.”

  “I do not believe it has been discovered yet,” he replied pleasantly.

  “Really? You just sort of stumbled in blindfolded, did you? An interesting way to explore caves. Where am I? I’d like to come back here.”

  “If you did not know about these caves, how could you find them? Did you float through the air blindfolded?”

  She grinned at him. “I do that sometimes when I don’t want to be wherever I am. A bad habit.”

  Traian studied her. She was beautiful, even though at times her form seemed to fade in and out. “You’re in a network of ice caves in the Carpathian Mountains. This mountain range is considered home to my people. The wilds of the forest, and the deep of the earth.”

  She frowned at him. “I like the way you talk, I really do, very old-fashioned and courtly, but also, you managed to neatly avoid my question. The Carpathian Mountains happen to be a very large range and run through many countries.”

  Traian’s way of life had been deception for as long as he could remember. Carpathians left no traces of themselves behind, no trail, nothing that might indicate they were not human. And they certainly didn’t give the location of their homeland away. He hesitated. The prince was close by and had to be protected at all costs.

  Her form shimmered and her smile faded. “They’re doing something nasty to me, I can’t hold the projection.”

  He sat up, bit back a groan as the embers beneath his skin burned fiercely. “Do not go yet.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked down at her arm, looked back at him, tears swimming in her eyes. “They’re cleaning my wound. It hurts like a bear.”

  “I have to be able to find you. Where are you?”

  She frowned again. “I don’t know. The hospital.”

  “Romania. These caves are in Romania. I can’t lose you.” He held out his hand to stop her.

  She tried. He could see her make an effort. She said something he couldn’t hear, her body fragmenting.

  “I have to be able to find you. Tell me your name. Your name.” He could find her with that.

  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out and then she was gone. That fast. Vanishing without a trace. He sat there alone in the dark of the cave, astonished at how life could change in the blink of an eye. She was real. Her psychic abilities were strong. He had shared her space, shared her mind, and the path was imprinted on his brain. She would not escape him, but it wouldn’t be easy without her name, with no starting point.

  He became aware of his heart hammering out a rhythm of joy. A lifemate. It was the last thing he had expected on this long journey back to his homeland. She wasn’t Carpathian, which was shocking, but the prince had been mated to a human so it was possible. He needed this woman to survive. He had to find her. It was difficult to force discipline on himself and not try to rush like a madman out of the cave into the rising sun.