Shadow’s Edge

cracked lips with a dry, pale tongue. Her eyes fluttered open. One pupil was dilated wider than the other.

“Jenna, get out—”

“Don’t move. Don’t talk,” Jenna insisted, gently brushing a lock of blood-encrusted hair out of Daria’s eyes. “I’m going to get you out of here. You’re going to be all right.”

This was a bald-faced lie. Jenna had never seen anyone who would be less all right.

“I didn’t tell them anything...” Daria’s voice came in a broken whisper. “Not yet...”

Her fevered gaze fell on something behind Jenna’s shoulder. Though it didn’t seem possible, her face went even whiter. Her eyelids fluttered closed again. With a shudder that wracked her whole body, she fell silent.

Jenna made a swift, visual inspection of the room. Another video camera stood on a tripod in the corner, three wood chairs sat against one wall, a bedside table held an open briefcase, a lamp, and a bloodied set of tools on a glistening stainless steel tray. A leather strap, pliers, serrated and sharp-edged knives. The floor was raw concrete, with an open drain in the center. There were no windows.

Jenna felt a deep, gnawing fear begin to supplant her anger.

Fear was replaced by absolute horror when she turned and spied the five-foot-long curved, serrated saw with handles at both ends that leaned against the unpainted wall next to a tall rack of raw wood posts. The rack was composed simply of two seven-foot legs nailed to a top crossbar. Iron ankle shackles dangled down from the middle of it.

She’d seen this before, this gruesome apparatus, in a History Channel episode of torture devices popular during the Inquisition. It was appropriately named “The Saw”; the victims’ bodies, tied in an inverted position, were sawed in half through their spread legs until a confession was made. Or they died.

Inevitably, they did both.

She sprang from the bed, heart pounding, and headed for the desk, looking for a key to the handcuffs. The stink of those men and Daria’s blood and their cruel, incomprehensible intentions hung so thick in the air it was palpable. It sickened her.

What had the Ikati ever done to these men that could justify such depravity? What crime could ever account for this?

There was no key. Not on top of the desk, not in the briefcase, not in the drawers she pulled out and roughly dumped to the floor. She pawed through papers and bound notebooks and found a thick stack of Polaroids rubber-banded together. She nearly gagged when she glimpsed the one on top.

It was a photo of Daria, naked, surrounded by four men. Her nose was bloodied, her eyes wild. She crouched in obvious terror against the far wall of this spartan, harrowing room.

One anonymous, wiry, black-clad man with his back to the camera held a long knife in one clenched hand, a lit cigarette in the other. There was a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. Though small, she saw it clearly.

It was a headless black panther, run through with a spear.

She didn’t bother to look at the rest. They tumbled through her fingers to the floor.

Three long strides and she was back at the bed. A solid yank with two hands and one foot braced against the iron frame, then another. The headboard didn’t give. She swore loudly, planted both feet on the floor, shoved her hands into her hair, and bit down hard on her tongue so she wouldn’t scream.

Just give me this, she prayed, staring at the ceiling. Panic and desperation and sheer animal horror crushed her lungs so she could barely breathe. Her hands shook so badly she was terrified they would be useless. Daria lay on the bed, silent and broken, waxen and gray as a corpse. Just give me this and I swear I will never ask for anything ever again.

She willed herself to breathe, to remain clearheaded, to think, and curled her fingers around the cold iron frame again. She lifted her bare foot and braced it against the bed frame, leaned all her weight onto her hind leg, and slowly, deeply inhaled.

She closed her eyes and heard her father’s voice in her mind.

You are a princess...a princess who will one day be a queen.

“I need you,” she whispered fiercely to the dead room. “I need your help. Please help me!”

She yanked hard. A shrill, moaning protest of bending metal, the bed shivered, the headboard gave by an inch. Daria’s head lolled back and forth on the pillow and she made a low, choked sound in her throat.

Jenna yanked again and it tore free from its moorings on the frame with a loud metallic screech, sending her staggering back with a chunk of twisted metal in her fist. One of Daria’s arms slipped free of the ruined headboard and dangled over the edge of the bed. The silver handcuffs that still circled her wrist twisted and winked in the light.

“Well, well,” a voice drawled from behind her, languid and amused.

Jenna spun around. Her heart seized when she saw a man standing in the open doorway. He was dressed all in black, his long legs spread open, thin arms crossed over a narrow chest. He smiled at her, confident and cunning. He stepped forward and three other men came in, much larger and more animalistic than the first. They had terrifying, hungry faces.

“Another stray pussycat to join our party.” He spread his arms in a fluid, sinister gesture of greeting. “Welcome.”

With her heart pounding under her ribs, she spied the small, black tattoo on his inner wrist. Her mind registered several things at once.

The Smoking Man from the photo.

The leader.

The enemy.

She became acutely aware of her nudity, her hair falling down over her shoulders and chest, the piece of heavy, twisted metal in her hand.

His cunning smile grew wider as the other three men, rabid and bristling, began to move toward her.

29

Jenna was either dreaming...or dead.

She knew this because there wasn’t any pain, not any longer, and also because her father was there, just as handsome and lithe and young as she remembered him. It was dark and humid here, the air perfumed with jasmine and plumeria. A beautiful, typical night in Hawaii. Her father prowled barefoot and silent around the unlit lanai of their small house, gazing down to the empty beach below.

Through the glass patio doors she saw how the palm trees rustled in the breeze, how the moon sparkled off the ocean and haloed his waving dark hair in a wash of pale, shifting elf light. She watched him pace to and fro from her secret place under the stairs, the one with her stash of pillows and blankets and her old friend Teddy.

Happiness shimmered through her like sunlit honey, pure and golden and perfectly sweet. Her father was here, he would protect her, she didn’t need to be afraid any longer.

Even when he turned to a cloud of misted vapor, dropping his clothing to a pile of empty denim and linen slowly leaking air on the woven rug, then morphed to an enormous black crow that flapped its wings and landed on the glass-topped lanai table, she didn’t need to be afraid.

As long as he was here with her, everything would be all right.

The crow turned its head and fixed her with a steady, intelligent gaze from piercing black eyes. It hopped sideways on the table, ruffled its feathers, and blinked at her.

Jenna crawled out from under the stairs, crossed without noise through the dark living room with Teddy under her arm. She stepped out onto the lanai, feeling the humid air cling to her hair and skin like a lover’s caress. She lifted her arm out, whispered to the crow.

“Daddy...what are you?”

The crow made a harsh warning squawk, took another sliding sideways step over the table, and turned into a butterfly with wings of burnished amber and gold.