The Serpent's Shadow

her.

'Maya?' There had been no footsteps to warn her of Peter Scott's approach, but he was normally soft-footed. His voice startled her; she rose swiftly and turned to face him, the light from the hall lamp falling on her face, and her wide and dilated eyes. His face was in shadow, but there was no mistaking the gasp he uttered. Nor the words he blurted out. 'Maya, my God—you are beautiful—' His honest, clean reaction undid her. With a sob, she flung herself into his astonished arms.

'. . . and the bitch hit me,' Simon Parkening whined, for the tenth time. Shivani was heartily tired of his complaining. So far as she could make out, he had tried to seduce some hospital servant and been repulsed; why should she care? If he could not carry out a successful conquest on his own, how was she supposed to help him? He could use magic if he chose; he had the modicum of power needed to overcome a woman's reluctance, and the knowledge of how to apply it. If he failed to use what he had, what was she supposed to do about it?

Punkah-fans operated by ropes going through holes in the wall to two of her servants in the next room kept the air stirring, but the fact that there was no breeze outside meant that the room was stiflingly hot, the air heavy with the incense she burned to keep away the stench of the street outside. It was no worse than the stink of Delhi, but it was not a familiar stink, and therefore she hated it. She did not want Parkening here; he had come of his own, straight, it seemed, from the hospital and he stank of disease and despair. Why he had come here and not to his club where he might have a better reception for his complaints among his fellow sahibs, she was not certain.

Unless it was that he could not rail freely about what had made him so angry anywhere else. Perhaps his conduct was not acceptable even to similar arrogant English males, and he knew it.

She was far more interested in what he could tell her about the hospital, but from the moment he had walked in the door, all he had done was to whine about his problems. It was too hot. He couldn't leave London because his firm wouldn't allow him to take a holiday. He was tired of his current mistress, but the woman he wanted was the property of another and he didn't dare challenge the man for her. And the girl he had tried to seduce in the hospital that afternoon in his boredom and frustration had turned against him and struck him.

She yawned under the cover of her veil—and stopped with her mouth open, struck numb by his next words as his anger increased, as he uttered the first original thing he had said since he first began to whine.

'—that damned half-breed bitch, acting like a white woman, aping her betters, pretending to be a doctor —'

Shivani throttled her own impulse to interrupt his raving. She did not want him to know she was interested in what he had said. He would use it to try to manipulate her. He had done this before, and this time she was in no mood to fence with him, placate him, or give in to his demands. He was coming to the end of his usefulness, and was no longer worth the time it took to work with him. She would listen to him rant, and wait him out.

She had patience, more patience than he. And to make him more loquacious, she surreptitiously added a handful of drugs to the single block of charcoal in the incense brazier below her. Could it be? Could it possibly be that she had found her sister's child?

Carefully, surreptitiously, she opened her Third Eye, and practically snorted her contempt for his blindness aloud. How could he possibly have thought the girl had struck him physically, when he practically reeked of the power that had been used to render him unconscious? How could he have missed something so blindingly obvious? Perhaps only because he himself was so stubbornly blind. It would never have occurred to him that the girl could have as much or more power than he, therefore he had never looked for the signs of it. Stupid swine.

She couldn't tell much from the residue, but in a way, she felt a grudging admiration for the girl that had done this, even if it did prove to be the traitor she sought. The girl had, after all, managed to knock him unconscious without actually damaging him in any way.

But that might simply be a matter of accident rather than control. Admittedly, striking a man dead in the midst of a crowded building would leave one with a corpse that could prove very difficult to explain—but the man was a sahib, and arrogant sahibs were prone to do foolish things that caused them to die with great suddenness. There would be no marks on the body to explain, and heat did kill. And with every moment that passed, Shivani considered that if it had been her and not the unknown who had been molested, Parkening would be in his coffin at this very moment.

As the drugs filled the air, she armored herself against their effect, while waiting for them to loosen Parkening's tongue further.

She did not have long to wait.

Before long, Parkening embarked on a long, rambling condemnation of two of the doctors in the hospital, the one that Shivani was interested in, and a second, an Irishman, that Shivani could not have cared less about.

Unfortunately, this was the one that Parkening blamed for all his misfortune, so this was the one he expounded at length upon.

Great length. Shivani was getting ready to strike him down herself if he didn't get to the girl soon. How on earth could this fool be so obsessed with a man who probably didn't even think about him unless Parkening did something to interfere with him? If the Irish doctor was not his enemy yet, Parkening seemed determined to make an enemy of him. Was his life so very empty that he had to go out of his way to create enemies to enliven it?