Linnear 02 - The Miko Read Free Page A

him as if his connection to the earth was not meant for her eyes.
    He bent over her prostrate form and while her mind screamed, Wake up! Wake up! he slowly began to work his magic on her, the icy menace in his eyes as dead as stones somehow transferring itself into her heart.
    She felt the horror squirming there like a palmful of live worms. An unholy bond was forming which she was powerless to deflect. Now she was part of him, she would do his bidding like a servant, take up his fallen katana and slay his enemy for him.
    She felt the cool haft of the heavy katana beneath her curling fingers as she drew it upward off the floor. She wielded it just as Saigo would have had he not been dead.
    And before her stood Nicholas, his vulnerable back to her. She raised the katana, its shadow already beginning to slice through the sunlight striking his spine. Nicholas, my one and only love. Her mind whirled in a sick fury and her last thought before she began the lethal downward strike was not her own: Ninja, betrayer, this is your death!…
    Justine jerked awake. She was in a sweat. Her heart was thumping uncomfortably, as loudly as a blacksmith strikes his anvil. Slowly, she ran a shaking hand through her damp hair, pulling it back, away from her eyes. Then, with a great indrawn breath that halfway through turned into a wracking shudder, she clamped both arms about her body and began to rock back and forth as she had when she had been a child, frightened by dreams welling up from the pitch blackness of the night.
    Blindly she reached out to the empty spot beside her in the large double bed, and fear touched her heart anew. It was not the terror of her own private nightmare which reared up at her. This was a new fright and she twisted, grabbing up a pillow from beside her where normally Nicholas would have been and, holding it tightly to her breast, squeezed it as if this gesture might bring him back to her arms, and the safety of America.
    For Nicholas was on the other side of the Pacific and Justine was quite certain now: the fear she now felt was for him. What was happening in Japan? What was he doing at this moment? And what danger was amassing itself against him?
    In a moment she lunged for the phone, a little cry filling the silence of the room.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our descent into Narita Airport. Please make sure your seat back is in the upright position and that your tray table is closed and secured. All hand luggage must be stowed under the seat in front of you. Welcome to Tokyo, Japan.”
    While the unseen flight attendant repeated her short speech in Japanese, Nicholas Linnear opened his eyes. He had been dreaming of Justine, thinking of yesterday, when they had driven out of the city to get away, as they often did, from the pressurized life they led within the steel and smoked glass canyons of Manhattan. Outside their house in West Bay Bridge they had doffed shoes and socks and despite the early spring chill loped across the white sand.
    Running down to the sea after her, the cerulean waves cutting off her feet and ankles in violent foam. Catching up with her, long, dark hair in his face as he turned her around, linking them, a softly feathered wing coming down at the close of night. His hard burnished arm around her, pulling her to him, the feel of her like liquid against flesh heated by the sun and more.
    Whisper of the salt wind, “Oh, Nick, I don’t think I’ve ever been happy before; not ever. Because of you I have no more sadness in me.”
    She was voicing the knowledge that he had saved her from the many demons that life held in its fisted claw, not the least of which was her own masochistic self; an ego robbedso she saidby the domineering specter of her father.
    She put her head on his shoulder, kissing the side of his neck. “I wish you didn’t have to go. I wish we could be here in the surf together forever.”
    “We’d turn blue.” He laughed, not wanting to catch her abruptly