Free Dark Time: Mortal Path by Dakota Banks Page A

Nile from Khartoum to the Mediterranean or pacing alongside wild horses in the pioneer days of the American West.
    When she reached the first alley, Maliha stood surrounded by the trash bins, with her feet, as nearly as she could tell from the crime photos, squarely on the bit of pavement where Nando kneeled before the fatal shots. Few windows overlooked the space, meaning few opportunities for witnesses. Narrow windows high up on one wall were covered with cardboard or paper on the inside. If there was to be a witness to what happened here besides the killer, it would have to be her. She was going to reenact Nando’s death, based on what she’d learned from the autopsy report.
    Kneeling down, she put herself in the position a doomed man would be forced to assume. She held her hands behind her as though her wrists were tied and kept her shoulders hunched, trying to keep her head from becoming such a perfect target.
    It was a posture common through the ages. In this time and place, guns were used for executions in the criminal world. In earlier times, different parts of the world, the about-to-be-executed rounded their shoulders in a last, vain effort to protect their necks from the sword.
    She adjusted her position until the input to her senses suddenly lessened. She’d found the right spot.
    Her eyes were open, but she relaxed her vision and let the scene go into soft focus.
    When a violent death occurred, it left a psychic imprint, or scar, on its exact location. Some people 29 z 138
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    called the phenomenon a ghostly recording. Maliha thought of it as a remnant of the victim’s spirit that didn’t have the chance to pass into its next destination, as it would in a natural death. While others would walk through the scarred location and feel nothing, Maliha could detect the imprint. Experiencing the imprints was an unexpected side effect of her ability to see the auras, or psychic energy, that surrounded people.
    The fragment of Nando’s spirit still clinging to the place he died was drawn to her. It coalesced around her and she was into the imprint. Eyes open, she saw nothing, but felt the pressure of a tight blindfold over her eyes, and heard a voice—no, two voices—having an argument. The wind blurred the words, and then the tone changed, as one person gave an order to the other.
    Then there were no words at all. Her time, or rather Nando’s, was drawing to an end.
    She felt her hands tied, even though no bond existed for her, and struggled against it. She tried to stagger to her feet, but a heavy hand on her shoulder pushed her back into the kneeling position. A piercing scream tore through her mind, a shriek of desperation that drowned out the sound of the shots, and then pain lit up the right side of her head, two bright streaks like lightning bolts her head could never contain. She felt pieces of her skull go flying. The blindfold slipped down over her ruined face, and her intact left eye registered for a fraction of a second someone visible in the night, a blocky shape with a gun still pointed in her direction. She thought she heard a sigh of satisfaction.
    Maliha crumpled as Nando had done. Her left eye now shut, there was internal darkness, the rush of her last breath leaving her lungs, the stilling of her heartbeat, and then the swooshing of her blood settling in its vessels.
    After Nando’s death, Maliha remained prone and watched through her now-closed eyelids as the spirit fragment brightened into a glow around her body, and then faded. She got shakily to her feet. The imprint in the alleyway had been released. Wherever it was, the spirit belonging to Nando was whole.
    Heading for the spot where the murder of Hairy Borringer occurred, she knew she would find a dark, bleak place where humanity had turned its back on one of its own. But it was her duty to go through it one more time.
    To let Harry’s spirit use her as a launching pad into the next world.

Chapter Eleven
    T he flight