Free Scent of Darkness by Christina Dodd Page A

going to eat me?" she blurted.
    He started to walk. "Now and again."
    She wanted to hide her head. She wasn't used to this kind of flesh-to-flesh contact, or to sexual teasing ... or to the relief in knowing that Jasha always kept his word, and she had something more to look forward to.
    Being eaten by a wolf who was really good with his tongue.
    "You can't carry me all the way back to the house." She was no featherweight, but tail and muscled.
    He didn't pause. "It's only about a half mile."
    "That can't be right," she said indignantly. "I drove farther than that!"
    "But the road winds around. By the way the crow flies, we're close to the house."
    The trees broke away. They were back in the meadow, and when Ann saw the fallen tree with its blackened crown, her brain, so engaged with minor matters like fantasy versus reality, sanity versus madness, and pleasure versus embarrassment, suddenly reengaged.
    She'd left something precious back there. "No. I've got to have the lady!"
    He stopped. "What lady?"
    "I found a painting of the Madonna."
    He froze.
    "I lost her when I hit you, but while you were gone, I found her again and—" His immobility captured her attention. "Jasha?"
    "Where did you find a painting?" He looked down at her, his face still and smooth.
    "When the lightning hit the tree and it fell, weM, there she was." And in a day of miracles, that might just be the biggest.
    "Was she?" He sounded very odd, choked and almost afraid. "Where is she now?"
    "She's back there. Where we were."
    He carried Ann back. He let her legs slide to the ground.
    Ann searched. She recovered the tile. She showed it to him.
    "My God." Jasha knelt beside her, his gaze absorbed and amazed. "I can't believe— " He looked up at Ann, then back at the painting. "You found the icon."
    "You know about it?" Impossible!
    Yet he'd called it an icon, and now that he had, she recognized the stylized method of painting, the use of vivid colors, the Madonna's stiff pose. This was Russian—and so, she knew, was Jasha's family. "Is it yours?"
    He gave a short, incredulous laugh. "In a manner of speaking." Gently he took it from her, smoothed his palm across the Madonna's face . . . and to her horror, his flesh sizzled, a curl of smoke rising from the burning flesh.

Chapter 8
     
    With a shout, Jasha dropped the icon.
    Ann caught his wrists in hers.
    A brutal red mark seared his palm and his fingers.
    "What happened?" She couldn't believe her eyes. "You must be allergic to the finish."
    "Allergic." He yanked his hands away and plunged them into the mud. "Is that what you hit me with? Before?"
    "Yes." That mark on his cheek, the vivid flare of red—that was a burn, too. "Why did it do that to you?"
    "She did it. The Blessed Virgin. I am not to touch her."
    "I don't know what you mean." Ann picked the icon out of the dirt and wiped it with the tail of her shirt. The ragged edge caught on the material. "It's just a painting."
    "In Russia/ icons are not just paintings. The revolution is but a weak obscenity compared to the weight of years when icons embodied the Russian soul, the Russian heart, and the Orthodox faith. It's tradition that an icon of the Blessed Virgin and the baby Jesus be given as a wedding gift, and all family icons are kept in the krasny ugol, the beautiful corner, decorated with candles and red cloth." He wiped his muddy hands on his jeans, but his gaze never left the face of the Virgin. "More important, icons of the Madonna aren't made—they appear."
    "What?"
    "Icon painters do not sign their work. So the icons are said to appear, to be miracles."
    Ann looked at the picture, trying to see what had hurt Jasha.
    The Virgin looked back, serene and unworried.
    "The Madonna refuses to let me touch her," Jasha said. "But you can. She has entrusted herself to you."
    "That's—" Ann drew a breath.
    "That's what? Superstition? Impossible?" Jasha touched his cheek. "Yet I'm burned. No wonder it hurt like a son of a bitch."
    Surreptitiously she