Path of the Tiger, стр. 449
She could not fight the stinging blade, serrated with tragic remorse, sadness and regret, that ran her through with the brutal efficiency of a rapier. She knew, she absolutely knew that inside this mind, in this body that her soul inhabited, there existed so much potential, so much passion, so much drive, such goodwill … and love. Oh yes, love, the kind sung, written and painted of by bards, poets and artists through the ages. How she had longed to feel it, to plunge herself into its electric neon spectrum of dazzling light and colour just once in her life. To blaze unseen beams of heat from her eyes into her lover’s, to feel the driving energy that coursed invisibly between all living things condensed and concentrated in the touch of her skin against his. She could not fight back the tears as the realisation that she would never experience this flooded her entire being, like billowing black ink through clear water.
Even as the tears flowed, though, she bit her quivering lip and growled softly in the lonely darkness.
No.
Now was neither the time for self-pity nor remorse. It was the time for action. A final, ultimate action. An act of defiance, of pent-up wrath, of determination and ultimate liberation. She drew in one final breath of the foul air as she prepared to take the last step she would ever take in this world. That was when the flashlight beam hit her square in the face.
Her eyes, accustomed to the dark, felt like they had been seared with the flame of a blowtorch. All she could do was shriek in fright and wrench her face away from the pain-pulsing light, twisting to the side and cowering like a feral cat cornered in an alley.
‘Who are you, and what are you doing down there?’ a voice from above demanded.
Something about the voice sent an uncanny shiver rippling along every square inch of Adriana’s skin. She knew this voice, she knew it intimately somehow, like a voice from a long-forgotten childhood dream. Despite the fear soaking through her skin like winter rain, a wash of serenity and calm bleached away her fear and anxiety.
‘My name is Adriana,’ she managed to stammer. ‘I’m nobody, I’m just, j-, just a prisoner of Sigurd’s.’
‘A-, Adriana?’
The voice from above changed abruptly in tone. From stern curtness, verging on raw aggression, it had abruptly taken on a softer edge, in which vulnerability and confusion were intertwined. Perhaps this voice knew hers as well, against all odds.
‘Yes. Please sir, please, help me! Help me, please, please!’
‘Stay right there, I’m coming down.’
Up above, William’s heart was thundering out a heavy, intense rhythm in chest, and unsettling washes of alternating hot and cold were surging through his body. His eyes were wide and white, stark against the asphalt shadows of the shaft; he had seen a ghost, he was sure of it, in that split-second in which his flashlight beam had fallen on the face of the woman perched on the ledge below him. It couldn’t be, surely. What devilry was this? Had his mind finally caved in to the unending pressure that needled it from all sides, and tipped over into the tumbling, cartwheeling freefall of pure madness, of full-blown clinical insanity?
Yet … that voice.
So hauntingly familiar, tattooed onto his ear drums, every familiar vibration of which sent shivers of pleasure fizzing across his skin.
It could not be. It could not be.
He slung his rifle over his shoulder with its strap, took a short run-up and sprang with nimble agility across the shaft, grabbing onto the steel rungs of the service ladder as he landed. He scurried down it, with a sense of growing excitement fluttering like light-crazed moths in the night inside his upper torso with every rung he descended. Reality began to swirl, the images he saw before him melting with psychedelic abandon; shadow dripped liquid-like all around, and the steel and stone bent and flexed like rubber. All thoughts fled the theatre of his mind, departing like a flock of startled birds at dusk, leaving a darkened stage with sign of neither actors nor audience, until a lone spotlight crashed through the darkness, revealing a lone white-clad figure at its centre.
‘Aurora,’ William whispered as he descended, caught in the grip of a feverish delirium. ‘Aurora, Aurora, Aurora…’
Eventually he reached a rung that was on the same level of the ledge on which Adriana was perched. He could hear the steady rhythm of her breath, feel the microscopic ripples of her pulse vibrating its waves through the molecules of the still air. And he could smell the delectable scent of her hair, her skin, her breath; scents that at once were deeply familiar to him, even after more than a century apart.
It cannot be, it cannot possibly be … this goes against every law of nature, every scientific principle of the physical universe. Yet … it is.
Adriana could not see much of William through the inky dark, but she could make out the outline of his body as he came down the ladder, and the closer he got the more a deep part of her could feel his presence in a way that she never had with any other human being. Instinctively she understood that she would be completely safe with this stranger, as odd and alarming as that notion seemed when