“Will it kill her?”
“No,” Cleo said sharply. “But it could drive her insane given enough time. And believe me, the last thing you want is to be host to an insane Bodywalker.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ram was lurking in the doorway of the queen’s suite, eavesdropping on everything Cleo was telling her. Not that he didn’t trust the oracle. He did. Mostly. Desirée had a sound head for the most part, and so did Cleo. But they both had a streak for mischief a mile wide and loved to take any opportunity to give him, Asikri, and any other highly placed male in the government pantheon a bit of trouble now and then.
However, it seemed she was being genuinely kind to the new queen of the Bodywalkers.
When he had sent Cleo in to Docia, he had realized all of this might come more easily to Docia if it was delivered by a woman’s touch.
And much easier on you.
On that, he and Vincent were in complete agreement, as they usually were about most things. Vincent had been just as floored by the feel of Docia in his arms as Ram had been. He was just as stunned and at a loss as he was. They had been rocked to their core, neither understanding why or how. Ram had been advisor to Menes for thousands of years, by his side at every incarnation. He had protected and cared for Menes’s beloved queen, hunted for her, and brought her to Menes every time she was reborn. Every time he had put her hand in his and handed her up to his pharaoh, giving her away to him with ease and pride in his success.
And never once in all his many years of touching her, dancing with her, handing her up and taking her down from conveyances or beasts of burden … never once had he felt the rocketing sensation of heat and desire that he had come to feel every time Docia touched him.
True, every original brought something new and different to the carbon it hosted, and it was because of that that they were an ever-evolving species and every incarnation, every regeneration, made them something a little bit more … or even a little bit less … than they used to be.
But the one constant in their universe had always been thus:
Menes loved Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut loved Menes. His soul was devoted to hers, and hers was devoted to his. Theirs was a love like no other in the history of man or time. It had transcended death over and over again. It was the one thing the Bodywalkers could count on never changing. It was the one thing that gave them enduring faith in their king and their queen. It was the one thing that kept them coming out of the Ether again and again. For they all wished to have what Menes and Hatshepsut had. They all hoped to one day find what their king and queen had found. What had withstood the test of time.
So when he had kissed her earlier, things had shattered within him in ways he could not explain. He had broken faith and trust with Menes. He had accosted his queen. He felt as though he had somehow tainted that perfection between Menes and Hatshepsut. It felt as though he had just destroyed his every ideal.
And yet deep inside of him there was this powerful, insidious force that seethed with the need to feel her again. It wanted her so desperately and would not listen to his harsh internal lectures about how she was forbidden to him and any other man save Menes.
Perhaps it was because she was so much more Docia than she was Hatshepsut right then. It was not his queen, but this fragile young original that had stirred his body and his soul. But that was splitting hairs, fabricating excuses. Only death would cleave Docia from his queen … and that made her forever and always Menes’s. Menes had all but gone mad with grief the last time he had lost his beloved queen. Ram dreaded to think what would happen if he ever learned that she had been touched intimately by another. By his most trusted friend.
You must close yourself off to her forever.
But how was he to do that when she would be there every single minute of every long day that he lived and served his pharaohs?
And that was when she screamed. Screamed as though Bodywalker and mortal were being ripped apart. As though fear itself had been born in her heart. He was in the closet and by her side in a heartbeat, preternatural strength making it an action that took all of an instant. Thunder crashed against the house in a sudden violent percussion, the black beyond the window flashing a brief bright white as lightning chased back the darkness.
He was there, reflected in the mirror she had been staring at in horror only a second before she’d kicked it over, sending it crashing into pieces on the floor. The instant she felt him she threw herself against his chest, seeking comfort from the only familiar thing she knew in a world rife with unfamiliar things. He thought nothing of wrapping her in his arms in comfort, hushing her with gentle sounds against her forehead as he cupped her head and pressed her face to his chest. Her hands were gripping him against his back, trying to lock on the broad muscles she found there, but he was holding her so tightly that they had flexed into hard planes of unyielding flesh. Eventually she just fisted her hands and pressed them against him.
“No! No! I can’t do this!” she wailed, her voice muffled against him. “I can’t be her! I just can’t!”
He knew what had upset her. Until she Blended fully with the queen, she would see only Hatshepsut’s reflection in any mirror or reflective surface. At least, the way Hatshepsut had looked in the prime of her original life. He had barely caught a glimpse of black braided, beaded hair and brightly painted eyes before the mirror had fallen. But he didn’t need to see it to know how beautiful she had been in her time. He had seen that reflection time and again over many generations before she had fully Blended with her host. But it wasn’t that face he wanted to see. It wasn’t those eyes he yearned for.
He touched her chin and pulled her face up, fighting as she resisted him, her fear still palpable. But eventually she gave in and looked up at him, her tear-washed mink-colored eyes so painfully beautiful to him.
“Do not be afraid,” he breathed over her wet face, drawing on unknown strength to keep from kissing her tears away, even though that was all he wanted to do. But Cleo was there, watching anxiously. He could not take such liberties in front of a witness. He could not take such liberties at all.
“I can’t be a queen! I don’t know how! I like me just the way I am!”
“Were you just the way you were, you would be dead.”
It was a harsh thing to say, but he delivered it in a gentle voice. Still, she jerked back as if he had slapped her in the face. In a way, he had. It made her sobs catch in her throat, and he could tell by the look in her eyes that she wanted to hate him right then.
Perhaps that would be all for the better, he thought.
But he had not overestimated her intelligence and logic. She sniffed hard, her body hiccuping in little jerks as she held on to those little sobs.
“I— I would have,” she agreed after a long minute. “I suppose you think I am very ungrateful,” she said, her words still hitching on her awkward breaths.
“I think you forget that everyone in this room has gone through exactly what you are going through,” he said gently. “Do you think Vincent was thrilled to take on so much baggage? He was a professional soldier, born to live and die as a navy SEAL. Then I come along and screw up a perfectly heroic, noble death, telling him I’m the right-hand man to a king. He balked a great deal at first. Almost dangerously so.”
“But you changed his mind?”
“Actually … Vincent has a very strong grasp on concepts like duty and honor. It wasn’t much of a stretch for us to find common ground in that.”
“Okay. Right.” She took a breath. “I made a deal, after all, didn’t I? I can’t renege because it’s not always comfortable for me. I came back for a reason.”
“And that reason was?”
“Well, for a lot of reasons. I just … I just wasn’t finished yet,” she said. “And I couldn’t let my brother deal with my death on top of all the other deaths he’s had to deal with. His family … our family has all died, and we’re all that’s left. Just me and him.”
That made Ram frown.
“You’re saying all your family is dead, except you and your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Shit,” Ram muttered.
That got her immediate attention.
“What?”
“Well, let’s just say if it were me and I was a cop whose sister was the only loved one left in my life … I wouldn’t take a phone call as proof positive that everything was okay.”
“Well, he can’t find me here. He doesn’t even know where here is,” she said hastily, reaching to take hold of his hand. “Seriously, if I say I’m okay, Jackson will listen to me. He knows I don’t lie to him.”
“Jackson will think you are being coerced. Or forced. Or that it was some kind of a fake. He won’t be satisfied until he lays eyes on you.”
And he could tell by the way she bit her lip and the worry creasing her forehead that he was right.
“So what do we do?”
Good question. It wasn’t as though he could just let her go. There were too many things out there dying to get their hands on her. If they got hold of her in this vulnerable stage, there was no telling what they might do to her.
Actually, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly what they would do to her.
Marissa sat at her desk, tapping a pencil anxiously. It was very late at night and there was no logical reason for her to be sitting in her office, sneaking peeks out the glass in her door at the bullpen, where Jackson Waverly and a small contingent of cops were poring over hundreds of camera shots of cars going through the tolls at estimated time slots, looking for a black Lincoln SUV.
Marissa knew she was pretty much the designated asshole in the station. She was there reminding them all that they had feelings, something that most of these alpha males and type A females had no interest in being reminded of. But when bad things happened, they were forced to do the dance with her, in their minds kowtowing to her and kissing her ass and trying to look as normal and healed as they possibly could so she would sign off on them going back to work.
But honestly, she could care less about having her ass kissed. She could care even less than that about them treating her like an idiot and making fun of her on a regular basis. She hadn’t taken this job because she wanted to be liked. She had taken it so she could be on their side. So she could help those who were out there every day trying to help everybody else. Bitch and moan as much as they wanted, they needed her. A lot. And often. It cracked her up sometimes the way they would sneak into her office as if dodging a hail of bullets, pulling the shade so they wouldn’t be seen, as if they were in some kind of cloak-and-dagger detective novel. But that was all right, too. She didn’t mind that they didn’t want to be caught dead in her office. All that mattered to her was that they came. And over time she had developed some pretty good relationships with these guys. They’d knock her in public, tease her mercilessly to her face, and when she was a good sport about it, she won them over little by little.
And then she had to do something stupid and irresponsible like tell Jackson Waverly that his sister was stone cold dead before making sure someone triple-checked the facts. But she had taken that phone call and her stomach had sunk into her heels, the memory of his mandatory visits with her washing over her. He had felt the loss of Chico so deeply. Though he had never truly exposed himself to her emotionally, he had talked about it, about the loss and the emptiness, but always in that calm, controlled tone of voice he used. She had been fine with that. At least he was talking. She understood that Jackson’s feelings for Chico had been intensely private, something he shared just with himself, his dog, and maybe his Creator.
Oh. And his sister. Marissa had known without a doubt that he had shown everything worth showing to his sister. Marissa had been with the SPD only a year and a half, but she still remembered that the first welcoming smile and attitude she’d ever had was from Docia Waverly. She’d been in the bullpen one day, surrounded by a crowd of cops about to change shifts, all laughing riotously as they made plans for some kind of barbecue Jackson was hosting. Then Docia had looked up, caught her eye, and invited her to come, too.
She hadn’t gone, but the invitation had meant a great deal. She had waited until one of the actual officers had deemed her worthy of inviting, and she had gone to that one, showing them that she was more than just an annoying rubber stamp they had to get past in order to get back on the street.
And now all those months of carefully pulling down walls between her and these officers had been flushed down the toilet. Because she had just been doing her job based on really crappy information. Now Jackson was just shy of tying her to a stake and striking a match. And she was so upset about it, for some reason, that she was actually in her office lurking. Lurking! Seriously? He was bound to get over it eventually, wasn’t he? She would just do what she had done before. She would do her job and wait patiently for everyone to come around.
Again.
Marissa groaned, dropping her forehead onto her folded hands. She honestly didn’t have it in her to walk on eggshells for another eighteen months as she tried to get these guys to respect her. To like her. She could live without the liking her part. Maybe. But the respect was important. She couldn’t do her job without it. If they all treated her the way Jackson Waverly was treating her at the moment, then none of them would come to her when they needed to. And these guys really, really had to have somewhere to go when they needed to.
Screw it. She wasn’t going to sit there crying in her cold coffee. Hiding in her office. She was going to grab this bull by the horns, aka one Jackson Waverly, and convince him to stop blaming her for what was admittedly a harsh mistake. The only way she was going to do that was by hovering over him and helping him look for Docia. Even if it pissed him off more. She had to help him somehow in the hope that it would balance the scales a little in his head and he would leave off thinking about siccing his new dog on her. She didn’t need his adoration or anything. As long as he moved on to civil, she would be all right with that.
She grabbed her cup of cold coffee, dumped it into her ficus, offering a hasty apology to the poor thing, and with a quick wriggle to set her wrinkled skirt straight on her hips, she moved out into the bullpen.
Strategically, the coffeepot was right across from Jackson’s desk. It allowed her to come up close to them and listen and peer at their progress as they all leaned over Jackson’s computer monitor, obviously in anticipation of an immediate result. Yes! Luck was on her side. The coffeepot was empty, giving her another reason to linger as she slowly prepared the coffee and waited for it to brew.
Then she had an epiphany.
“You know, if your guys are smart, they’re going to figure out that you’ll be doing this,” she said before considering that they’d just spent hours on this little project. When several pairs of eyes narrowed on her, and one set outright glared at her hard enough to make her hair singe, she tried to quickly finish her thought.
“They would have avoided the obvious cameras, but they didn’t. They went right through the 9W camera, let you get a good look at them, and went right through the toll camera, heading south.… Well, what if it was on purpose? I mean, you have to assume they know you’re a cop, right? I mean, if they know anything about your sister, that is.”
Stares.
“Instead of being cops thinking like criminals, why not be criminals thinking like cops?”
It didn’t surprise her that Jackson was the first to let light dawn. She could see it in his eyes.
“The turnabouts. They went through one of the ‘Officials Only’ turnabouts after getting on the south toll road and went in the other direction! We should be looking at the north booth footage as well in case they used one of the turnabouts.”
“I’ll get everything from here to Albany to start. I doubt they’d have time to get much farther than that if they had to go to the south turnabout first, then head back,” said one of the detectives, the young one. Now that was a dynamic she found amusing. Here was this cop, d
etective grade, and he was eager to make an impression on Waverly, who for all intents and purposes was still just a uniform.
But it didn’t surprise her that many members of the SPD saw Jackson as more than a uniform. He and Chico had had all of their backs at one point or another. When it came to hunting bad men in the pitch-black woods of the leading edge of the Catskills, a well-trained team like Waverly and his dog had meant everything to them.
The other two cops hanging around Waverly, including Avery Landon, took the opportunity to stretch their legs, leaving Jackson alone with the footage he’d been rifling through and Marissa, who was still hovering over the coffeepot.
“Little late for that, isn’t it?” he said, nodding to the caffeinated brew dripping with agonizing slowness into the pot. “In fact, why are you still here?” he wanted to know, narrowing his eyes on her. It wasn’t suspicious so much as the look of a man trying to solve a puzzle. The concentrated, dogged look that had been on his face for hours now.
“Just getting some work done. Usually it’s not so populated this time of night and I can catch up on my notes in peace,” she lied, smooth as glass.
Well, perhaps not all that smooth, because he didn’t look very convinced. But she couldn’t go by the jaundiced eye he was using on her since he’d been looking at her sideways for days now.
She suddenly wished the cranky old coffeepot would quit all its spitting and gurgling and just go about the business of producing coffee already. It was one thing to deal with an angry Jackson Waverly when there was a crowd of law-abiding cops in the room and quite another to deal with the still-furious officer one to one.
“So what made you think of the turnabouts?” he asked her abruptly.