“Yes. It would,” Docia squeaked. The idea of them hurting Ram made the whole room begin to spin. The idea that she would be the reason for it had her fighting an incredible urge to hurl.
“Don’t worry, Docia,” Vincent said, his strong voice booming and fierce. “I’ll have you out of here long before your feet ever touch the ground of this pile of fetid rock they call a temple.”
Selena chuckled softly, and Docia could envision her touching delicate fingers to her lips, daintily covering the sound.
“Honestly, Vincent, you’re too amusing. But that’s what I’ve always enjoyed about Ramses and his choice of hosts. They are always so laughably stubborn! Now try and rest a little, Docia. The Suspension will be complete come nightfall tomorrow … and with the sun soon to be up outside you can’t really go anywhere in any event.”
With that bit of logic, Selena departed the room. Only the sound of her heels walking away was left behind. There was no clang of a heavy prison door … no click of a lock securing them in. She seemed pretty darn confident that a bunch of ropes would be enough to keep them right where they were. And possibly a couple of guards. It would be silly to think they weren’t guarded, wouldn’t it?
She heard Vincent exhale harshly. It wasn’t exactly a sigh of frustration. She really couldn’t pinpoint the feeling behind it.
As for everything Selena had said … how was Docia to know if Selena was or wasn’t the one she should be listening to? To be honest, she kind of liked the lure of free will and making her own choices. She’d been rather anxious ever since she’d grasped that this guy Menes was about to be reborn and wouldn’t take more than a couple of breaths before hunting her down and trying to make her his queen. What if she didn’t like him? What if she didn’t want to get married? Was she supposed to, like, give birth to his heirs or some crazy shit like that regardless? And how did that work, exactly? Did you give birth to a Bodywalker … or just a normal human being?
“Docia?”
“I don’t feel like talking right now,” she told him, biting her lip.
This time it was most definitely a sigh.
“Docia, you can’t listen to her. She’s … you have to think of her like a cultist. She leads a cult of misguided Bodywalkers. She’s very dynamic and very convincing. She is also very powerful and very deceitful.”
“And you’ve been so up front with me about the whole Menes thing and the no daylight thing?” She hitched in a breath. “No more sunrises. No sunsets. One touch of the stupid sun and I explode into fire and ashes or something.”
“No. Nothing so dramatic. The sun affects all Night-walkers in some way, it’s true. The Gargoyles turn to stone at the touch of sunlight. The Djynn become smoke and will remain formless if they don’t hide in their shells, jars, or bottles.”
“What about us? What happens to us?”
This time she heard the weight of sadness in his voice.
“It paralyzes us. Every bit of us freezes up, we collapse numb and mute and powerless right where we stand. It’s what I always imagined a coma to be like. Trapped inside my own body, watching the world but not able to connect to it. But if we are in shelter, out of the touch of the sun, we simply go to sleep as usual. Or not. We can have insomnia just like anyone else. We can stay up late and watch TV. We can goof off on the Internet, if we so choose.”
“As long as you stay out of the sun.”
“Yes. And Docia, Ramses would have told you, had he been given the opportunity. He was teaching you slowly to help you adapt, handing things out piecemeal so as not to overwhelm you. I hope you can understand that. He wasn’t trying to be deceptive like she was making it sound.”
“And did you agree with his methods?” she asked him.
There was one of those silent spaces, a long one, before he said, “I don’t always agree with Ramses on every little detail, but I admire and respect him always. He is a brilliant entity, he has lived almost a dozen lifetimes. I would be an idiot not to defer to his wisdom in things.” A pause. “And I would be an automaton if I didn’t question his choices. As for you, I agreed with everything he did, except kissing you.”
Ah. The kiss. She had kind of hoped that was a hallucination on her part. Or that maybe they were just going to pretend it had never happened. Both very disappointing ideas.
“I think I can do without your opinion on the matter,” she said, an embarrassing flush creeping up her face.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone’s feet blush before,” he said with a chuckle.
“Shut up!”
“Docia, honey, relax. I’m not saying it was hateful and dreadful or anything.” There was a sound like a thud, and then in an abrupt slide of movement he appeared beneath her, grinning up at her. “In fact,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows as he gazed up at her as if she were some kind of fascinating constellation, “I’d say he’s kind of an idiot for walking away from it.”
With that, he pushed up from the floor and gave her a sure and solid kiss. It was so fast that she hardly had the chance to react, but then he was rolling away and standing up beside her. He stood there a minute and she got the feeling he was …
“Stop looking at my ass and get me out of this contraption!” she exclaimed.
“Shh,” he shushed her, his chuckle telling her she’d been right about his contemplations. “You mean you don’t want to stay and give Selena a chance to show you how evil Ram and the rest of us are?”
“Mister, I don’t give anyone who ties me up like this a chance to do anything to me!”
“Well, now, honey, I gotta say … that’s a crying shame.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Why didn’t you tell me you were getting loose?” she demanded through her teeth as he began to snap off the cords by her feet, gently lowering her to the ground a bit at a time.
“That’s funny, I seem to recall doing exactly that. But I won’t hold it against you for not believing in me. You really don’t know me that well yet.” He helped her put both feet on the floor, moving her slowly upright. “This is going to make your head pound like a bitch.”
“You’re standing … so where’s Ram?” she asked as she watched him disentangle her from the ropes around her waist with the sharp, succinct movement of a man with a knife. Only there was no knife in his hand that she could see. It was as though he were slicing them with an invisible weapon.
“Miss the old guy, do you?” he teased her.
“Absolutely n— Well, maybe a little. But,” she said quickly, “only inasmuch as he’s a lot more polite than you are!”
“Well, do you want me to have manners, or do you want me to get you out of here? Your choice. I could just sit down over here and wait for Ram to show up.” He walked away from her, leaving her wrists still bound, and pointed to an area on the floor with both open hands. That was when she noticed the bleeding around his wrists. They hadn’t been as gentle binding him as they had been with her.
“No! No, it’s fine,” she said hastily.
He gave her a crooked grin and moved back over to her. He went to her left wrist. She watched as he took the rope in one hand and slashed the other across it and they fell apart instantly. But what really threw her, more than the seemingly magical melting away of her bonds, was that there was no longer any sign on his forearm of the beautifully lithe contorted snakes and the ornamental dagger they embraced. In that same moment, she realized her shoulder had ceased to itch. She could easily extrapolate why that was. The tattoos were gone. Just as they, Ram and Hatshepsut, were gone.
And though she’d hardly known her presence, Docia suddenly felt bereft just the same. She had to swallow hard to keep from getting too emotional about it. As with everything else, this wasn’t the time.
“Good, because there’s no telling what the future holds for you if Selena gets her hands on you. The conjurings and curses they use are very dangerous things, things that shouldn’t be messed with. They like to convince themselves the
y are carrying out the wishes of the gods, but it’s really the wishes of something far more base and human inside them that give them their impetus. Good old-fashioned greed and power-mongering.”
“I see,” she said as her other wrist finally came free. She took a moment to get her bearings upright again, and he pulled her close to his body to let her lean on him while she did. She wanted to feel weird about it, to be put off by this annoying version of the Ram she had come to know, but the fact was this was very much Ram’s body … and it still smelled and felt as good as always when she got close to it. He still exuded that aura of virility and confidence, that quiet sense of knowing his position in the world. When she thought about it, the only caustic difference between Ram and Vincent that she could see was that Vincent was a bit of a smart-ass and gave the appearance of not taking things all that seriously. But the truth was, she knew someone exactly like that, and having been raised by him side by side with her brother, she had never had a doubt that in his heart he was one of the kindest people she knew, with a measureless capacity for love and loyalty.
“She was going to torture you,” she said with sudden understanding. “It had nothing to do with my sensibilities. She was going to torture you once she’d completely suppressed the Bodywalker inside of you that could give you the strength to resist her methods.”
He gave her a brief nod, reaching to rub circulation into her hands by moving his quickly along the outside of hers. “As second in command, Ramses knows a lot about where things are located. Safe houses, for example. Wealth stores. Artifacts, laws, historical documents. Touchstones.” He shook his head when she opened her mouth to query. “I’ll explain that to you another day. Suffice it to say, if she found out where all these things were, it could be devastating to the law-abiding Body-walkers, not to mention some of the other Nightwalkers out there.”
He walked away from her, holding a hand up to keep her silent a moment as he checked out the nearest part of the hallway. He suddenly reached behind a pillar, grabbed a heavy body, and slammed it into the wall. Then, with sickening precision, he caught the guard’s head in both hands, and with a quick jolt, not to mention an audible sound, he snapped the man’s neck and let him fall into a heap at his feet. When he came back to fetch her, holding out his hand, she must have looked every inch as horrified as she felt.
“Oh …” He chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. He’s a Bodywalker. That’ll heal after a while. Takes much more than that to kill one of us. But it is an excellent method of paralyzing him so he can’t yell for help and so he can’t come after us or cause us some trouble. Anyway, he kinda deserved it, letting himself be distracted … wearing an iPod, of all things. I mean, c’mon!” He gave another low chuckle. “He’s guarding prisoners in a room with no doors!”
“He thought we were tied up!” She defended him, probably because she was feeling sorry for him. Somehow the lack of instant death made the neck-breaking act even more sinister than it had been initially. Was he just lying there staring and hearing everything they were saying? She shivered in revulsion.
“Look, my queen,” he said, the title nowhere near owning the respect and reverence Ramses had always used when addressing her as such, “whose side are you on here? Because if you want to stay, I’ll be happy to let you. But you have to know … I can’t leave you here alone. Ramses would never forgive me if I did. And since usually there’s no escaping him …” He shrugged and moved away from her. “So I’ll just go over here and sit down and contemplate what an outright coward you are while you wait for the queen of the nutballs to come back.”
“I am not a coward!” she hissed at him, catching his hand and yanking him away from that spot on the floor he seemed so obsessed with.
“Sure you are. It’s clear as day you have no desire to be queen. Not yet, anyway. So she waltzes in here and gives you the perfect solution and it’s really tempting. I honestly can’t blame you for that. But standing there prevaricating about it, wasting time until they find us like this, so you can throw up your hands and say, ‘Oops! They caught us! Not my fault!’ instead of owning the choice one way or the other, that’s pure cowardice. Make up your mind, Docia. And do it fast. And once you make it up, commit to it as if it were the difference between life and death. Because to tell you the truth of it, it is. Not just for me. Not just for you. For a hell of a lot of other Nightwalkers out there. Not just Bodywalkers … Nightwalkers. Did you hear the way she talked about them? The other breeds? The contempt just dripping off her lips? She was saying ‘filthy mongrels,’ but she may as well have been saying ‘niggers’ or ‘spics’ … or any one of a thousand ignorant elitist comments you can conjure up in your head. And whether you know anything about them or not, ignorance isn’t a good enough excuse to go along with the idea.”
“Are they? Mongrels, I mean?”
“Well, they’re not all angels, if that’s what you’re asking. Why? Do you think you have the right to make that judgment? Do you think I do?”
“No,” she said softly. “I don’t judge others. I’m just … I don’t know how to make choices for people I’ve never even met. It’s … paralyzing. You tell me to think one way, she tells me another. I barely know either of you. How do I know who’s telling me the truth?”
Vincent came up to her, turned her to face him, and tipped her chin up so she could see right into his eyes. It was strange, but it was almost as if their color had changed. She concentrated for a moment, trying to figure out why. They were still the same gold as before. Just somehow … different.
“As an American, you make choices every day for others by supporting your government and its excursions or military actions into other countries. When you buy coffee at the same café every morning, you are choosing to support that business. When you pass judgment on the girl your brother starts to date, you affect his life. When you work for your boss, you choose to support him in his endeavors, as well as everyone else his business touches. You make choices for others every day. The difference is that now you are beginning to realize it. And now you are beginning to own it.”
Docia saw the truth in what he was saying. Eerily so. She had always thought of herself as something of a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But if she looked at it his way, there wasn’t any such thing as a nobody. And she rather liked that perspective. She was also a little surprised to see the attitude coming from some-one of obvious importance, not to mention the sort of strength and prowess that could give him the tools to be a bully to those less powerful than he was.
“I’ll go with you … but I want a promise from you first.”
He rolled his eyes and she could tell by the tension in his body that he wasn’t as relaxed about their tenuous situation as he led her to believe. If she did decide to stay, she wondered if he really would sit back and let her. Luckily for him, she wasn’t comfortable taking that chance.
“What? Tell me what the tipping point is for you here. I can’t wait to hear it.”
“You know, there’s no need for sarcasm,” she said with a sniff. Then she turned dead serious, making sure he felt the strength of her conviction with every molecule in her body and both of her spirits. “We leave here and you bring me to my brother. Ram was right. There’s no way he’ll be satisfied without seeing me face-to-face. I should have known that. So you bring me to him so I can give him some peace of mind. Then I’ll go with you and learn how to be a Bodywalker. In fact, I’ll learn everything.”
She could tell by his hesitation that it was something of a dangerous promise. She wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was asking of him. But given that his other choice was lollygagging in this room waiting for other guards to show up, she fully expected him to cave.
He smiled at her, the left side of his lips curling up, and a peculiar light shone in his eyes.
“Deal,” he said.
And that was when she realized the light shining in his eyes was an enormous sense of pride.
In her.
Vin
cent tried not to be distracted by things when he was on a mission. He was actually quite proud of the way he was able to weed out all extraneous bullshit and focus on the task at hand. It was one of the qualities that had landed him on SEAL Team Six at a ridiculously young age.
But it was just as likely part of what had gotten him killed, too. Well, almost killed. He had since, with Ramses’s guidance and persona Blended onto his, learned a great deal about seeing the total picture, about processing things in one part of his brain while another part of it got on with the task at hand. So he wasn’t all that heavily critical as he found himself prodding inside his own body for the hundredth time since regaining consciousness, seeking out any sign … even so much as a glimmer … of Ramses’s presence within him. At first the vacancy had been almost crippling, insofar as it had been liberating for Vincent. Dealing with the world as himself, making all choices and decisions alone for the first time in so long, should have been refreshing and enjoyable.
But it was not. It was actually a little frightening, something he could admit to himself only because Ramses had taught him long ago that admitting fear was always the first step in defeating it. Ram had taught him that only a foolish man never felt fear. And considering his fearlessness and his overinflated sense of being a badass had nearly ended his life, it was a lesson that had been very much needed.
Not that he was paralyzed or anything. He wasn’t the type. But every so often he felt as if it were hard to breathe. Usually when he stood between two hallways and had to make the choice to go left or right. He’d been so used to a consensus on these decisions … making them on his own was the starkest feeling he had ever known, next to lying there bleeding and dying and watching a piece of scum shoot his sister and nephew in the head … and doing it only five feet away from him, just to be sure he saw every second of it.