Stephanie Draven - Dark Sins and Desert Sands

She shook her head as if she didn’t know what he was talking about and it made him even angrier. “Oh, give it a second and you’ll remember me. You see, everything has a price, sweetheart, and your bill has just come due.”

What can you hold without using your hands?

Layla couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The stranger had told her not to scream, and she hadn’t. He told her to sit down, and she’d done as he bid, like a marionette. He seemed to have some power over her. Something that she couldn’t explain. Even now, it was as if he could silence her and keep her from calling out for help.

That wasn’t possible , she told herself. It was her job to help the mentally ill, not become one of them. Was it just the fear or the lack of oxygen that had her thinking this way? The situation was so volatile, so unpredictable, so outrageous, that her mind must be suggestible. Hypnotists took advantage of such suggestibility all the time. She just had to calm down and analyze this situation rationally.

The stranger obviously felt persecuted. It was a classic symptom of schizophrenia, but was it possible that she did know him? Was this was the man who had been stalking her?

Layla studied him more carefully. He was dark like an Arab or maybe a Greek, with full and familiar lips peeking out from beneath the stubble on his face. Surely if she knew this man, she couldn’t forget those features. He looked like some desert warrior, some Far East prince, but he spoke like an American, without even a hint of an accent. He was also large, with overly broad shoulders and big hands, but it was his eyes that Layla fixated on. Surely she would remember eyes like those, dark and burning like coal.

“Ray, is that your name?” Layla began. “My assistant said—”

“Remember me, damn you!” His shout reverberated throughout the room like a clap of thunder. It vibrated through her as he stared into her eyes. Too late, she tried to throw up a defense against the invasion of her mind.

And then he was inside her.

* * *

Sand. In all the minds Ray had explored, in all the labyrinths in which he’d hunted down his prey, he’d never encountered a mindscape like this. Layla Bahset’s was nothing but silence and sand. It had to be some kind of facade, a mirage. Where were her memories? Trudging through the dunes, Ray struggled to find the sights and sounds to tell him what she knew.

She must be blocking him, somehow. It couldn’t be possible for a woman with a life, with a past, to have an empty inner world. Up ahead, he noticed a darkened shape on the horizon, sand-swept and half-submerged. He squinted into the imaginary sunlight and pushed forward. What the hell was it? A triangle? No. A pyramid . Was that where she’d locked everything away?

Ray scrambled through the sand, focused on finding an entrance, when he felt the ground go soft beneath him. She’d buried all her secrets beneath this arid desert, and now she was trying to bury him along with them. The desert swallowed his legs, yanking down. Startled, Ray fumbled his way back, trying to follow the thread of consciousness back into waking reality. She was still fighting him. He sank deeper and deeper into the sand. But Ray had come too far—been through too much—to give up now. Did she think she could stop him? She could just forget it!

Forget it!

Those were the words echoing in Layla’s mind when she was wrenched out of some kind of hypnotic state. It was Isabel’s insistent knock from the other side of the door that jarred her back into the present. “Dr. Bahset?” Isabel called, her voice shrill. “ Que pasa? Everything all right?”

Layla startled to realize that she was sitting across from a very attractive man and in the tension of the moment, she felt her cheeks burn. What had just happened? The stranger took great gulps of air, as if he’d been drowning. Blood dripped from his nose and she noticed that an end table had been overturned. Had he tripped over it?

The pounding on her office door became louder. “Dr. Bahset, I have a key, you know!”

The bleeding stranger stood, staggering a little as he did so. “This isn’t the end of it,” he told her, accusation in his eyes. “I’ll be back for you.”

So it must be him . The man who had broken into her office and left her a threatening note. The man she’d feared for two years now. So why didn’t she run from him? Instead, all she wanted to do was help him.

“You’re bleeding,” she whispered, pulling a tissue from the box on her desk.

He took it, their fingers touching softly, just as Isabel threw open the door. Then the three of them stood there awkwardly until the stranger brushed past Isabel and walked away without a word.

“Hay Dios!” Isabel said, eyeing the overturned end table. “What happened?”

“I—I have no idea,” Layla croaked. Her throat felt raw and sore, but she had no idea why.

This had never happened before. It was true that she didn’t remember her past, but she remembered everything since the day she first arrived in Vegas. There’d been no gaps. No blackouts. At least not until now.

Isabel came to her side. “Did he do something to you? I’ll call the policia … “

Layla straightened the collar of her blouse, her fingers hovering over the top button. “No police.” If she let Isabel call the authorities, the life she’d struggled to build for herself here would all come tumbling down. All the lies she’d told to cover up her memory loss would be exposed. Her patients would be hurt. What’s more, she was certain to her very bones that her stalker was no ordinary man and that the police couldn’t help her.

Maybe no one could.

It had taken at least five hours for the roaring pain in Ray’s head to settle into a dull ache. Since his escape, he’d never come up against a mind that could physically resist him. But Layla Bahset had. Not only had she fought him, she’d nearly buried him right along with her memories. He’d trapped others in a state of madness, but he’d never come close to being trapped himself. If the assistant hadn’t knocked at just the right moment, Ray wasn’t sure he’d have made it back out with his own mind intact.

He was afraid to try it again without someone to shake him out of it, but the teenaged prostitute’s expression hovered somewhere between curiosity and disgust, her lips making a perfectly cherry-round circle of surprise. “You some kind of freak?”

“Look, kiddo, it’s easy money,” Ray said, setting the alarm clock by the bed. He wondered if motel-rooms-by-the-hour came with a wake-up call service. Probably not.

“Easy money,” she mimicked, shaking out her blond hair and pointing at him with the stained end of her Popsicle stick. “Easy money is how girls like me end up missing.”

He didn’t have time for this. “Just sit down, Missy. That’s your name, right?”

“It’s Artemisia, but yeah, you can call me Missy. Most everybody does.” The hooker looked at him in lurid appraisal for a moment, as if considering whether or not his dark looks and hard body were enough to make her stay. Then some wiser instinct took hold of her. “Never mind. I’m outtie.”

Ray sighed. Nobody ever wanted to do things the easy way. Before she broke eye contact, Ray seized her mind. “Sit down, Missy.”

She fell back into the chair as if pushed. He was relieved to find that it wasn’t a struggle. Except when it came to Layla Bahset, Ray was able to use this power whenever he needed people to look the other way at an airport, or give him money from their wallets. Most times, people didn’t realize what had happened, and shook it off. Unfortunately, Missy seemed acutely aware. “H-how did you do that?” The girl’s garishly painted fingernails clawed at the chair as she stammered, “You’re in my head. You forced me … “