Prisoner of Shera-Sa Read online

  “You talk too much,” Mac grumbled, directing him to the outer perimeter. “The sun is about to set and we’ve barely gotten started here.”

  Minarra’s heart thudded in her chest. Mac in love? But with whom? What other woman had come into his life? And why hadn’t he married her? Was another woman the reason he’d left her six years ago? Damn it, why wouldn’t he just be honest with her and stop sending her these ridiculous mixed messages?

  Whoever said women were complicated and mercurial had obviously never looked inside the mind of your garden variety male, she mused. Pulling out the map and an accompanying notepad, she set about marking the day’s progress.

  They were on the way. Within a day or two…finally.

  This one will be for you, Daddy…

  * * * * *

  Mac had a very bad feeling in his gut. Maybe the worst ever. Something bad was going to happen. Looking for Shera-Sa was one of those accursed quests. The kind of obsession that eats a man’s life and bleeds bad luck, staining all the people he loves and touches. Roger Hunt was one such example, but there’d been others before him. Sir Edward Mathison, the nineteenth-century explorer who’d gone mad in the desert and returned to England only to lose his fortune and his family in a series of freak accidents. Farrouk of Algeria, who’d been set upon by rats and eaten alive and most recently, the final king of Alcazara, who’d mounted seven expeditions before his assassination.

  If only Minarra had accepted his proposal. If only she had let him take her away to some beautiful island for a secret wedding and a quiet honeymoon. He couldn’t blame her for refusing, though. Why should she trust his motives? He didn’t understand them himself.

  Besides, no man, or woman could fight destiny. And theirs led here.

  Had they been meant for happiness, they’d have united in the beginning and had a little family, pursuing a pleasant career at some Ivy League school, teaching the archeologists of the future and venturing occasionally into the field.

  Those dreams were a bad omen, make no mistake. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but even the most scientific of explorers had to be a little creeped out by some of the things that had happened to the various unearthers of ancient tombs over the years. Mummy’s curses, odd diseases, latent ghost traps. Masses of mysterious energy. He’d made a mint selling these ideas on television. Personally, he had never cared if he offended any supernatural powers that be. What did a man have to lose who had no love in his life?

  But now he had Minarra back—at least under his temporary care—and so he had everything to lose. He didn’t like the look of her at all. She was pale. She was glassy-eyed. She was covering up just how bad all of this was. His every instinct was to protect, to distract, and to wrap her as tight as he could.

  Naturally, she was suspicious, if not downright hostile. All through dinner—falafel and bread heated over a crackling fire—she’d avoided his company in favor of Hassan. He’d have been jealous had he not known that Hassan would never make a move on anyone in his crew. He was just too much of a gentleman that way.

  And Minarra was a lady. She had no intention of seducing or even flirting with Hassan. She simply wished to keep clear of Mac—a man, a situation in which she felt compromised. Steering a wide berth around her, he tended to camp business, checking vehicle engines, adding fuel and organizing the night watch schedule. Minarra spent a little time by the fire and went to bed alone, in her own tent.

  Mac, meanwhile, had pretty much reconciled himself to a night alone. Volunteering to keep the fire going, he let Akbar hit the hay. A rifle by his side, a full pack of Turkish cigarettes in his pocket, he settled in by the fire to wait out the darkness. There was nothing like the silence of the desert to help a man sort out his thoughts. There was no lying to oneself out here. Not under these stars, sharp as scimitar points, laid out on a canvas of black velvet, your bottom resting on the endless sand, a timeless symbiosis, an ecosystem harsher and more beautifully brutal than any man could bear with the naked soul.

  Maybe it was time to return to teaching, he thought. To try to pass on the few things he’d learned over the years. Maybe find a protégé to take under his wing, like Minarra’s father had done for him. Hopefully the relationship would end up better. Mac would make sure not to have a beautiful daughter for him to fall in love with—that would help.

  He took a drag off the half-spent cigarette. Who the fuck was he kidding? He didn’t have it in him to stand in front of a lecture hall and spout dry science. He was a field man. An action junkie. Besides, any classroom would be full of young women to remind him of Minarra. That would be a pain worse than death. To look at all those eyes, eager and pretty, all the while thinking of the one and only woman who ever really meant a damn thing to him.

  No, he wasn’t meant to be a professor.

  From here on in, he decided, he’d be spending his social time with mummies. And cutthroats, at whatever hellhole bars he could find to get drunk at in between expeditions. It wasn’t the most original plan for forgetting a woman, but then again, sometimes the tried and true methods were the best.

  * * * * *

  “Do you think you will find it?” Asked Hassan, quietly announcing his presence over Minarra’s shoulder.

  She shrugged, still very much engaged in the map. It had become her friend by now, her constant companion. In a way, her lover. “Many have looked,” she replied, knowing that Hassan himself had sought the fabled city at one point in his life. “People far better than I.”

  “And many who are far worse. May I sit?”

  She nodded.

  “Thank you.” He took up a place across from her, legs crossed beneath him. He was a man who seemed comfortable in any position, anywhere. Clearly, with those deep eyes of his, that centered countenance, there was more to him than just the mercenary and guide he was purported to be.

  “Why did you agree to help Mac?” She asked, somewhat impulsively.

  He smiled, elusively. “You mean given that I myself have already failed in finding Shera-Sa?”

  “I meant no offense.”

  “None taken. I have passed the point of attaching my own happiness to earthly accomplishments. Our successes choose us and not the other way around.”

  “That sounds fatalistic.”

  “Not when one considers the need for intense preparation to meet that which may come our way,” he countered. “Love for instance. One’s destiny is shaped by how one faces it.”

  “I have no use for love.” She stiffened.

  “You think yourself too strong,” he said, nodding. “Or too young…or too old. Perhaps you even dismiss yourself as too weak. But it does not matter. It comes nonetheless. Just as Shera-Sa will come to you…if the city chooses.”

  “Has Mac ever talked about me?” She wanted to know.

  “He does not speak to me of personal things.”

  “Well he must have dropped some clue. He asked me to marry him, for heaven’s sake. We haven’t even seen each other in years. And the last time…well, it wasn’t exactly a parting to leave a woman eager for more.”

  Hassan pursed his lips. His eyes were dancing in the moonlight, as though some very ancient merriment were plucking the heartstrings of his soul. “He is afflicted by love, Miss Hunt. You know that as well as I. These and all the other questions you have—for him, for Shera-Sa—they have answers in only one place. And you alone know where that place is.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she sighed, rising to her feet. “I think I’ll just go to bed.”

  She paused to give him a peck on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” Asked Hassan.

  “For being Mac’s friend.”

  * * * * *

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Mac looked up, momentarily taken aback. It was Min, wrapped in an army blanket against the mild chill—unusual for this climate, to say the least.

  He moved the rifle across his lap. “Be my guest.”

  She sat
about six inches away. Close, but not touching. “How long have you been smoking?” She asked.

  “Since…a while ago.” He’d been about to say since her father’s funeral, the day he’d lacked the guts to talk to her, going instead to a nearby liquor store and gas station, obtaining a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes, in that order. “You want one or are you still habit free?”

  “I have other addictions. Anyway, those look more like rolled tar sticks.”

  “Are you kidding? These are tame, by Turkish standards,” he quipped. “Only old women smoke this brand.”

  Minarra laughed lightly and then turned her attention to the fire. She looked preoccupied, older than she had since he first saw her in Malcolm’s office. “Mac,” she said, after a few moments’ pause. “About this morning…”

  “No,” he cut her off. “No explanations. Let’s just leave it. Please.”

  She sighed. “All right. Can I ask you something, then?”

  “Sure. As long as you don’t make me promise up front to answer.”

  “How come you never talked to me about your childhood?”

  “Not much to say. The usual things…skinned knees, baseball leagues, prom dates.”

  “But your life wasn’t usual at all. Daddy told me a couple of things. He said… He said you barely knew your parents.”

  Mac’s jaw set. The tension was old, reflexive. “He shouldn’t have said anything at all.”

  Her hand slipped over to his, covering the knuckles, which at the moment were laying over the stock of the rifle. “Why are you ashamed, Mac? None of us are responsible for the things that happen to us as children.”

  “Sure,” he retorted with a cynicism she did not deserve. “We’re all clean slates, right? I prefer the ancient view—we’re all born fucked on account of every screwup made by our ancestors, every stinking generation of them.”

  “You can’t really believe that?”

  “Sure I can. Look what I did to you. That will live on in my children and their children. If I ever have any, that is.”

  “You want to make me angry,” she decided. “You’re always doing that—trying to make me feel some emotion, trying to push my buttons. Just once, can’t you let your guard down?”

  “There’s nothing to see under there, Min. The lights are out and no one’s home.”

  “You told me before that you wanted to give an explanation about your leaving. What if you start there?”

  He pulled out another cigarette, along with a silver flask, half-filled with whiskey. He kept it for special occasions. Whenever he needed a little anesthesia. “I said there was an explanation,” he held out the flask. “I never said I wanted to give it.”

  Minarra took a swig and handed it back. “You’ve turned into a coward,” she pronounced, with uncharacteristic bluntness.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Min. I always was a coward. I just hid it, there in your father’s shadow. You want to know something about me? Fine. My father was a second-rate boxer, a drunkard who earned his living breaking bones for the Irish mob. When he wasn’t attacking my mother. When I was six, he was shot dead in front of me by one of my mother’s brothers. He was protecting her, standing over her prone body, trying to keep my father from beating her any more. My uncle went to jail because he couldn’t afford a lawyer to get him off and my mother ended up in a mental hospital with a nervous breakdown. The state stepped in and I spent the next twelve years doing the foster home shuffle.”

  “Mac…I had no idea.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing,” he shrugged. “Everybody’s got a tough luck story. You can’t let it rule you, that’s all.”

  “You’re not everybody,” she squeezed his hand.

  “So who am I?” He asked, deciding to turn the tables. “Seems to me I’m not the only one keeping his guard up lately. “Am I someone special to you or not?”

  The hand retracted. She was pulling back, like a scared rabbit. “You’ll always be in my heart, you know that.”

  “Actually, I don’t know shit about what you think, Min.” He pushed the smoldering tip of his latest, spent cigarette into the sand. “You know what the desert is?” he muttered. “It’s one big, ocean wide, fucking ashtray.”

  “You’re getting drunk, Mac.”

  “I should be so lucky,” he took another gulp, hoisting the silver container skyward. It had been Roger’s flask. Apparently, Minarra didn’t recognize it. The old man had stashed it in with the supplies he’d packed for Mac, the morning of his exile. It had the initials RH and Mac often thought it was Roger’s way of letting him feel connected, no matter what.

  By the time Mac looked back down, Minarra was sniffling. Shit—now he was making her cry on top of everything else. “Min, I’m sorry,” he rasped. “Jeezus—I’m such an ass.”

  She buried her head on his shoulder, choking back a sob. “No you’re not. It’s not you I’m upset with. It’s the fucking…dreams. I can’t sleep, I can’t think.”

  He held her tightly. “It’s okay, Min. We’ll beat this, I promise.”

  “But it’s not your fight.”

  He grasped her by the upper arms, looking her in the eye. “I’m making it my fight, you hear me?”

  She nodded, her lower lip still trembling. He’d never seen her like this, so distraught. To think he might be adding to the stress with his own foolish proposal was more than he could bear.

  “Just stay here with me by the fire,” she said softly.

  Mac let her nestle in, as close as she wanted. He knew she was terrified to sleep, but he also knew she would succumb, sooner or later. Sure enough, within a few minutes of watching the crackling blaze, lulled by the dancing orange shapes, warmed by their mutual body heat, she began to nod off.

  He gripped the stock of the gun. He’d give anything in the world to get inside her head, to be able to deal with these demons, one-on-one. As it was, he was relatively helpless. Not a comforting feeling for a man who’d struggled all his life to be strong and independent, who’d worked ten times as hard as anyone else to overcome obstacles. From the time he’d known himself truly alone in the world to that fateful moment during a museum trip at school when he’d seen his first mummy, he had become a lone warrior, on a quest.

  The day of that trip, as soon as school was over, he’d gone to the library. Finding every magazine he could, he’d devoured the information. Finally, he’d found Roger’s picture on the cover of a magazine. Bearded, in khakis, the look of a true hero on his face. Mac had smuggled out the magazine. It had become his most treasured possession. He’d carried it to four more foster homes and then to college.

  Eventually he would meet Roger Hunt in person, and apply for a job as his research assistant.

  “Why should I hire you?” He’d inquired in his usual blunt manner, tossing the young man’s scant application on his desk. “I have at least a half-dozen others better qualified than you.”

  That’s when Mac had taken out the picture and handed it over.

  Roger unfolded it, studying his own image. “I abhor sycophants,” he said.

  “I understand, sir.”

  “You’ll work harder than you ever have in your life.”

  “I expect to.”

  He’d scowled roundly. It was an expression Mac would later understand as one of approval. If he didn’t like you, you suffered far worse at the man’s hands. “Report tomorrow,” Roger had ended the interview. “Eight a.m.”

  Thus had begun his work with the great archeologist.

  Mac looked down to check on Min. She was nodding heavily, fighting the sleep she so desperately needed.

  “Got to…stay awake,” she mumbled, her sweet mouth slurring the words.

  Her body was going limp. “Just let go, baby,” he murmured, shifting his weight and moving the gun so she could lay her head in his lap.

  Minarra purred like a kitten. Curling up her legs, the blanket underneath her, she snuggled against him. Mac’s heart swelled. Such a simpl
e act of trust, and yet so very full, and warming to his soul.

  “Sleep,” he promised. “And let me keep guard over your dreams.”

  If Shera-Sa was out there, he’d find it. And if any ghosts or demons showed up, he would send them packing straight back to hell.

  Or die trying.

  Sometime later, Hassan came to relieve him.

  “She pays you the highest honor,” he noted, pointing out the sleeping woman.

  “What honor is that?” Asked Mac, somewhere between skepticism and cynicism. “Pretending to like me in her sleep?”

  “You miss the point, my friend. She came to you, in her time of deepest fear. She singled you out, she made herself completely vulnerable, trusting her body, her soul to you.”

  Mac swallowed. He hadn’t looked at it that way. As usual, he’d been trying to push things another way, out of sheer stubbornness. As a result, he’d missed the bigger picture. She hadn’t agreed to marry him, but maybe the reasons weren’t what he thought. If that was true, then he was really in the dark. Helpless, for the first time in his life. “Hassan, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he rasped. “I don’t know if I can live without her.”

  Hassan’s smile radiated peace, wisdom. “You are not living without her—she is right here. In your arms.”

  “But tomorrow…”

  “What is tomorrow?” asked Hassan. “Can you see it or taste it? What do you know of it but shadows, ghosts in the brain? It is no more real than yesterday. Do you wish to live in dreams…or in reality?”

  “You’re right,” said Mac. “Damn it, you are absolutely right.”

  Filled with determination, he lifted Minarra into his arms. She immediately and comfortably nuzzled his neck, her eyes still closed.

  “I am taking her to her tent,” he said. “You’ll find me there.”

  “I won’t look,” Hassan said.

  “I meant for emergencies. You’ll know where to find me.”

  Hassan grinned. “The universe allows time for things such as this, my friend. You will not be interrupted.”