Marilyn Todd - Dark Horse

The demon was happy. It was an exhilarating experience, knowing a person's life — no, wait, their destiny — lay in your hands.

To tell them? Or to keep them in the dark? That was also part of the thrill. The power of decision- making. Making decisions about their lives.

The demon looked into the future. It saw hundreds of people innocently going about their own business, not knowing there was one who walked among them with the power to break their spirit and condemn their soul to destruction.

Sometimes slowly.

Sometimes not so slowly.

Perhaps, in time, the demon might learn how to juggle several victims at the same time. Like with insects or small, furry mammals. Impale them on a pin or a stake. Pull off a wing or a toe at a time. Watch them squirm, each in different — but distinct — stages of annihilation.

The demon was past pulling wings offbutterflies and beetles. Nailing kittens to trees had lost its appeal.

Bigger game was so much more fun.

Who's Clio?' Claudia asked.

They were sitting beside a lake whose water was the green of newly sprung grass and whose clarity showed every fin and spot on the fishes and eels. On the rocks by the water's edge, a small fire crackled and spat from the juices dripping off a small deer brought down with one of Jason's lethal arrows, but there was no fear of Azan's men tracing them from its smoke. Twenty-four hours had passed since the wreck of the Soskia, and the wolf trick had been sufficient to give them the edge in making good their escape. Azan's thugs would not find them now.

Just as Claudia could not find her way home.

With careful precision, Jason had led her deep into the Illyrian hinterland, to the Land of a Thousand Waterfalls. Lying between high forested mountains, this unique valley comprised a succession of crystal-clear lakes falling one below the other in a series of breathtaking cascades as the valley floor dropped. Awesome, spectacular, inspiring, stunning. These were just some of the words to describe this amazing waterworld. Arguably the most beautiful place in the world. She had never seen scenery to equal it.

But then other words bubbled up to the surface of her brain. Trapped. Isolated. Disorientated. Lost.

She concentrated on the venison and refused to dwell on the fact that the landscape was every bit as forbidding as it was magnificent. With its treacherous chasms, plunging gorges and waterfalls that froze into solid white sheets in the winter, the environment was too harsh for man to colonize. This was the domain of the predators. Wolves, bears and lynx were the masters here.

That summed up the valley. Beautiful but deadly — like Jason. From the corner of her eye, she observed the solid musculature straining the thighs of his trousers. How many women had fallen for his dashing good looks? Been swept off their feet by his dazzling smile, easy manner and lilting Scythian brogue? How many women had thrashed beneath that burnished body in the throes of passion? Or simply in their death throes? The venison was succulent and sweet, but it could have been ash. Like the Scythian's gold belt, this ten-mile chain of green lakes was neither separate nor apart, but linked inextricably one to the other. Just as she was with Jason.

'Clio?' He sliced another chunk off the roast. 'I told you, she's a vampire. At least, that was the latest theory, but then, a few days earlier they had her pegged as a flesh-eating monster, which means by now they'll probably have her turned into a harpy.' He chewed without looking up. 'Why do you ask?'

Shortly after daybreak, the name had come back to her. Overtaken by kidnap, the shipwreck, Geta's death and an artillery attack followed by a frantic chase for her life, events at the Villa Arcadia had blurred into insignificance. Now they had clarified once again. Clio was the weapon with which Silvia had tried to blackmail Leo. Clio was the woman Leo had denied knowing. And Clio was the name which had tripped so lightly off Jason's tongue outside the abandoned shepherd's hut.

'Just curious at how you came to know her, that's all.'

'Me?' he seemed surprised. 'I introduced her to Leo. What's the matter? Something go down the wrong way?'

You bet it did, pal. Claudia waited until her choking fit subsided. 'She was your moll, presumably?'

'My…?' He tipped his handsome head back and laughed until tears filled his eyes. 'I must remember that. My — ' he rolled the word around on his tongue '- my moll. She'll love that.'

Claudia wondered why Clio might find that amusing, but noted he didn't deny it. Hmm. No wonder Leo was so keen to put Silvia on the first boat out of Cressia, if she was threatening to blow the whistle on his relationship with a pirate's floozy. Gossip like that could ruin a man. Hundreds of miles away in Rome, where they understood nothing of the situation out here,

Leo's behaviour could easily be construed as being in league with the rebels, effectively branding him a traitor — wait! Give back what is mine.

Very deliberately, Claudia sipped at the cool, mountain water. 'Was Clio the cause of the vendetta between you and Leo?' she asked casually.

Jason pulled off his boots, stretched himself out on the bank and closed his eyes. 'Now what vendetta might that be?'

Still playing games. Cat and mouse. She said nothing, glad beyond words of the knife down her boot. High in the whispering branches, green warblers sang their little hearts out. She nibbled at the wild raspberries she had collected. She could not kill him, of course. The paradox of her situation lay in that her very survival depended on the man who was intent on destroying her. But there would come a time, and probably soon, when paradox became confrontation. She was ready.

'Why did you leave the wolf heads behind?' she asked. About an hour after pulling their stunt, Jason had hurriedly stuffed the sack inside the bole of a dead beech tree. 'You didn't know at that stage we weren't being followed. We could have used them again to frighten them off.'

'Hardly.' He reached for a grass of blade and chewed lazily. 'If Azan's little playmates were still on our trail, there was no way they'd fall for that old chestnut twice. We'd only have wasted precious time trying, so I dumped them in the first dead tree we came across.'

'They were valuable.'

'No point in lugging around stuff we have no use for.'

Claudia thought of Geta, lying several hundred yards away and not a pretty sight any more. And she thought about the axe, whose vicious blade was right now embedded in a silver birch, glinting like a malevolent eye in the sun.

'You used those wolf heads on the Soskia, didn't you?'

Volcar talked about the pirate ship howling like banshees after blood. The sound would have been made by the bronze sculptures impaled upon the same spikes that held the torches the night the little Moth anchored off the villa when she was lit up brighter than a midsummer noon.

'I presume the objective was to drown the screams of the women and children you'd captured.'

The Scythian groaned and covered his face with his hands. 'Good god, woman, your husband must have gone to his grave with his ears plugged. Don't you ever let up?'

In the calm reflection of the lake, she watched two swans flap lazily across the canyon. Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. Like the oars of the warship. The swans were long out of sight before she asked, 'How did you know my husband was dead?'

'Same as I know everything else that happens at the Villa Arcadia. I make it my business. Now for heaven's sake, will you let a man sleep.'

Claudia pictured the battleaxe embedded in his heart, instead of the birch. But the forest was dark and she would never find her way back to the coast. 'Why?' she asked. 'Why is the Villa Arcadia so important to you?' What's the link?