The Miko - 02 Read Free Page A

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 robbed—so she said—by 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 melancholy mood. He felt his love for her like a gently purling river in the night, hidden from sight yet present nonetheless. “Anyway, don’t you think it’s better that we’re both so busy before the wedding? No time to get cold feet and back out.” He was joking again but she lifted her head and he stared into her extraordinary eyes, highly intelligent yet possessing an odd kind of naiveté he had found so alluring when he had first met her. He still did. He watched the several crimson motes floating like a hint of her soul in the midst of her left iris. Her eyes were hazel, that day more green than brown, and he found himself feeling grateful that the harrowing events of the past year had not altered the essence of her. For through those eyes he could still see her heart.
    “Do you ever dream of it?” he asked. “Do you ever find yourself back in the house with the dai-katana in your hands; with Saigō in your mind?”
    “You took all that he did—the strange kind of hypnosis—away,” she said. “That’s what you told me.”
    He nodded. “That’s what I did.”
    “Well then.” She took his hand and led him from the chilly curling wavelets up above the high-tide mark, strewn with the dark wrack of sea grape and odd bits of ashy wood, as perfectly smooth as stones. She turned