Read Midnight Rainbow for Free Online

sorry."
                  After a moment he said, "All right,"
and got to his feet. Bending down, he grasped her wrists and pulled her up to
stand beside him. Jane inched a little closer to him.
                  "You can see because of those glasses
you're wearing, can't you?" she asked.
                  "Yeah. There's
not a lot of light, but enough that I can make out where I'm going. Infrared lenses." A howler monkey suddenly screamed
somewhere above their heads, and Jane jumped, bumping
into him. "Got another pair?" she asked shakily.
                  She could feel him hesitate, then his arm went around her shoulders. "Nope,
just these. Don't worry, Pris , I'm not going
to lose you. In another five minutes or so, it'll start getting light."
                  "I'm all right now," she said, and
she was, as long as she could touch him and know that she wasn't alone. That
was the real terror: being alone in the darkness. For years she had fought a
battle against the nightmare that had begun when she was nine years old, but at
last she had come to accept it, and in the acceptance she'd won peace. She knew
it was there, knew when to expect it and what to do to ward it off, and that
knowledge gave her the ability to enjoy life again. She hadn't let the
nightmare cripple her. Maybe her methods of combating it were a little
unorthodox, but she had found the balance within herself and she was happy with
it.
                  Feeling remarkably safe with that steely arm
looped over her shoulders, Jane waited beside him, and in a very short time she
found that she could indeed see a little better. Deep in the rain forest there
was no brilliant sunrise to announce the day—the sunrise could not be seen from
beneath the canopy of vegetation. Even during the hottest noon, the light that
reached the jungle floor was dim, filtered through layers of greenery. She
waited as the faint gray light slowly became stronger, until she could pick out
more of the details of the lush foliage that surrounded her. She felt almost
swamped by the plant life. She'd never been in the jungle before; her only
knowledge of it came from movies and what little she'd been able to see during
the trip upriver to the plantation. During her days at the plantation she'd
begun to think of the jungle as a living entity, huge and green, surrounding
her, waiting. She had known from the first that to escape she would have to
plunge into that seemingly impenetrable green barrier, and she had spent hours
staring at it.
                  Now she was deep within it, and it wasn't
quite what she'd expected. It wasn't a thick tangle, where paths had to be cut
with a machete. The jungle floor was littered with rotting vegetation, and
laced with networks of vines and roots, but for all that it was surprisingly
clear. Plant life that lingered near the jungle floor was doomed. To compete
for the precious light it had to rise and spread out its broad leaves, to
gather as much light as it could. She stared at a fern that wasn't quite a
fern; it was a tree with a buttressed root system, rising to a height of at
least eight feet, only at the top it feathered into a fern.
                  "You can see now," he muttered
suddenly, lifting his arm from her shoulders and stripping off the night vision
goggles. He placed them carefully in a zippered section of his field pack. Jane
stared at him in open curiosity, wishing that the light were better so she
could really see him. What she could see gave wing to hundreds of tiny butterflies in her stomach. It would take one
brave hombre to meet this man in a
dark alley, she thought with a frightened shiver. She couldn't tell the color
of his eyes, but they glittered at her from beneath fierce, level dark brows.
His face was blackened, which made those eyes all the brighter. His light
colored hair was far too long, and he'd tied a strip of cloth around his head
to keep the