Sara listened intently. There was no sound of a key being turned in the lock. No guards and no ropes to bind her.

She sat on the bed, staring at the door. She had never been given to wild imagination, priding herself on good sense and excellent reasoning.

And yet she didn't want to move. For long minutes after he was gone, the scents of cardamom and cloves drifted in the air, rich and earthy as his touch.

The line between reasoning and magic was getting harder and harder to find, she thought grimly.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE CRUSADER SEETHED.

Striding through the dark corridors, Navarre felt the pull of images that mocked him, seduced him.

He saw a woman's face, pale and determined. Over that face were features from another time. A mouth of strength and gray eyes of rare innocence, the face of a lover forbidden to him, vanished and dead centuries before.

Her death was beyond changing, he told himself. Revenge for Draycott's treacheries had kept his spirit alive over the long centuries caught in punishment between worlds. His own death would have been a gift then.

He sensed that gift would come soon. As Navarre strode toward the moat, the wind fed on his fury, screaming across the abbey walls. Rain beat at his shoulders and he smiled, glorying in the weather's very outrage. But even then memories stabbed, sweet with trust and longing. Memories of a woman with eyes the color of a summer's twilight.

The memories left him weak, fighting questions he did not want to answer. His revenge would target Sara along with the abbey. Even if he somehow managed to draw this woman away from the danger, how would he begin to be free of her in his thoughts?

Strangely, Navarre had never planned what would follow his act of destruction. He had never hoped for a future of any kind as long as his act of revenge was fulfilled. The shattering of his own soul seemed a small price to pay for the torment Draycott had caused him and those he loved centuries before.

But now he paused, rain drumming on his face, cold wind digging at his shoulders.

He realized just how lonely those cold centuries had been, watching history unroll through a dim window, but forbidden from having any part in it. Now the window had opened, and that same magic might hold a life for him here in this world's future.

Not dead. Not cursed.

The possibility left him shaken.

The storm roiled over him, tossing up gravel and broken branches. In the storm of his mind, Navarre felt the prick of some other intrusion. He recognized Sara's thoughts. By all the saints, she was strong, and even now she sang in his blood, stormed through his head, twisted his will.

He wondered if she knew what power she held. He decided she did not. Like any mortal, she did not believe in her own magic.

But their contact could not continue. He had to drive her from his mind before their link was too deep to be broken. He could not risk weakness now.

Flinging up his cloak, he whispered harshly, sealing her away from his thoughts with the mark of his hand against air. Yet the silver cord of contact between them shivered and held, drawing him to her like the north-pointing metal he had seen direct caravans through the desert.

Through their restless link Navarre felt the fury of her thoughts. Beneath that lay the weight of duty that tied her to her work. But he also sensed her curiosity about him, mixed with the half-buried embers of desire. The knowledge made him whisper a protest. He was a warrior and a mage, not some boy to be swayed by the beauty of a woman. Furious, Navarre shoved her from his mind with a final spell, tearing away every thread of thought between them.

It was done.

Separate at last, he stood sweating, face toward the storm. A vast sense of emptiness engulfed him.

So be it. Empty he would be. Lonely he had always been. Either one was a small price to pay for his success. He had given up homeland and friends when he left for the Crusades. After a decade of fighting, he had lost his family and his own life on those hot, deadly sands.

He had no more left to give up.

THE WIND CRASHED and banged at the old shutters.

The crack-crack of wood hammering against stone tore at Sara's thoughts as she struggled to the doorway. She turned to walk outside-and her foot stopped in midair. Nothing visible blocked her, but her body refused, no matter how she willed it. There was no passing beyond the threshold.

Damned man. Damned house.

She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, struck by exhaustion. There was a sensible explanation here somewhere. She just hadn't found it yet. With all her will she fought her memories of Navarre's hands, surprisingly gentle on her face.

Her struggle brought more memories.

The moon like a sickle in an indigo sky. Hot winds, hot skin and a lover infinitely persuasive, all too gentle. She didn't want to remember any of that.

But suddenly her old world composed of task forces and document assessments seemed to close in on her like a tunnel. How long had it been since she'd eaten cotton candy with sticky fingers or walked barefoot on a white-sand beach? How long since she'd seen her own smiling reflection in a lover's eyes?

Her fingers clenched shut. When had she lost sight of her own joys? How had her life become so narrow and governed by routine?

And why had it taken Navarre to show her that?

Staring at the framed abbey maps on the wall, Sara thought of her assignment, but now the old maps and yellowing captain's logs seemed part of someone else's world. Some new part of her mind hungered for hot nights and soft sighs, her hands raking a man's skin in passion.

And the man in those reckless visions was Navarre, softer somehow, smiling when she least expected it, conquering her with his ability to see deep and true into her heart.

Sara bit back a soft moan. Had she gone completely mad, driven to the breaking point by the stress of the past months? Was everything that had happened at the abbey an intricate hallucination?

Navarre held the answers.

And he was the last person she could trust to tell her.

All thoughts of the Dalmation Coast and Marco Polo's family home on the island of Korcula seemed to bleed away to nothing. Even now some part of Navarre stirred in her mind, making everything else seem empty and without meaning. How had he shattered the quiet order of her life, reducing her to this creature who chased shadows?

The man was unhinged, and she would be unhinged, too, if she allowed herself to believe in these hot fantasies he had created so well.

She needed to leave. Sara reached for her coat, then froze. No coat. No briefcase. Her cell phone was gone, left back on the library table. Even if she found it, it would be out of power by now. She grabbed the phone on the nearby chest, but the line was dead.

She had to find a way out of this room. Wind hammered at the roof, and something pricked at her neck. "Is someone there?"

She heard no answer except gravel cracking at the window. She felt the weight of Navarre's anger, which seemed to be part of the storm outside.

And then...

Nothing.

All sense of the man seemed to drop away from her like a stone into a dark well. There was no feeling of contact at all.

She moved to the door, reached out a tentative hand.

His bonds were gone. Nothing held her.

Free, she swept up her blanket against the storm, then crept silently toward the gatehouse foyer, braced for the lashing rain as she ran across the broad courtyard to the main house.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

SARA WENT FIRST to the roof. Struggling against the wind, she tried to rouse the motionless estate manager, but neither words nor gestures seemed to reach him. There was nothing else she could do except call for help.

Back in the library, she found a penlight in the desk and tried her cell phone.

A small bar marked only a little remaining battery time. The landlines were still dead, too. She would have to drive to the village for help.

The wind howled as she strode to the door. But something held Sara there, uncertain.

It called her to the last of the maps left for her by Nicholas Draycott. They were still spread out on the long table, clear in the beam of her penlight.

The fragile paper showed the outlines of the island of Korcula with a row of hills outstretched like the wings of a bird. Their curve was very clear in Sara's modern topographical map, kept nearby for reference. Then she saw the single word on the fragile paper, barely visible after age and handling.

Gerenge.

In Mongolian the word referred to a mark of protection given to favored travelers by Kublai Khan.

The Polos, Sara had always suspected, had carried just such a token of favor on their return journey.

The name on Nicholas Draycott's rare, fragile map could hardly be a coincidence.

This island held the Italian's treasure. She was sure of it.

Her heart hammering, she gripped her cell phone. After a long burst of static, she finally connected.

"SAY THAT AGAIN. You found..." Static hissed and crackled loudly. "...repeat that, Agent Nightingale. Your connection...terrible."

"I said, it's on the Dalmation island of Korcula. There's a hill called Gerenge on the northwest side of the island. Two historically dated maps from the abbey confirm details I suspected from the logs."

"You think...authentic?"

"They are definitely authentic. I needed them to fill in the missing pieces. My other documents were incomplete, but the Mongolian word was the link I needed."

Over another burst of static, Sara heard Harding's quick, sudden laughter. "Fine work...anyone else but you would have taken a month...." More static crackled. "...have a man there before morning.

I'll need...calculations...pack up all the maps for safety." Static cut across the lines. "The storm...

bad, I take it?"

"Conditions are serious, sir. The power is out and I expect there will be flooding all over this area."

"Let me worry about that. You get...sleep...whole lot of people will want to shake your hand. I'll be the first to..." His words were swallowed up.

"Sir, there's something else. The estate manager has been hurt. Things are-strange. I can't-"

Static filled the line and she lost the connection.

She rubbed her forehead, feeling frightened and seriously out of her depth. She was an expert at electrostatic document imaging and infrared luminescence. She had highest skill ratings in marksmanship and surveillance, but the things she faced in this ancient house were beyond her understanding.

A tree branch scraped against the library's front window. Wind howled, tearing at a loose shutter on a higher floor.

A branch broke free and shattered the big window, raining glass over the floor. Sara gathered the priceless maps and swept them into the safe beneath the desk as curtains of rain hammered the room.

Against the restless sky she saw movement. Oily, clawing movement. Darkness twisted.

In a second the shapes were all around her, sliding through the window, over the sill and across the floor. The phone was still in her hands with only a slight charge left. She redialed with shaking fingers, heard a burst of static and then Harding's voice, sounding surprised.

"Nightingale, why-"

She had to warn him. "They're all around me, dark things. Things that I can't describe. Tell whoever you send to be careful. Watch the roof and all the windows. They-"

Pain knocked her backward.

Her fingers opened and the phone fell.

STRIDING TOWARD the stables, Navarre felt a sudden sense of pain. A weight centered at his chest.

More intruders?

He opened his senses, filling his mind with the movements around him, from moat to towers. He found no men crawling through the mud and no sign of vehicles racing from the distant road.

He turned, looking back at the darkened house, and the force of malevolence struck him like a blow.

Dark forms spilled over the high stones in a flood, focused on the shattered window of the second-floor library.

Lightning clawed through the sky. Navarre saw the outline of a woman caught in their demonic train.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.