But it had not been done on purpose. In good faith, the priests and priestesses had developed the mum-mification rituals, believing that they were helping their people pass into the afterlife. Instead the gods had looked on it as an insult, as an act of greed and bribery, the way they tried to preserve themselves and take their riches with them. And so, as was the way of many gods, they had given them exactly what they wanted. A way to preserve their youth. A way to carry wealth with them. All they could ever want or ask for … except true death, a peaceful afterlife, and the sun.
“I am sorry,” she said, all the sincerity of two women poured into the words as she reached out to touch him, moved closer to him, all her pique with him forgotten. “Would that all on both sides could connect like we have done, Ram. Weapons and warcraft would fall away so easily and there would never be any question that we would want the best for one another.”
His eyes narrowed just a touch, the gold of his lashes gleaming from the flash of passing streetlights just as her tears had earlier. It made her think that he was really quite beautiful and such a magnificent man. She had known many of his forms over time from a distance, and they had been widely varied, but she had always found each one to be handsome. Often much to her confusion and chagrin. Now she understood why. Even as she had stood at the side of her aunt, helping her to subject war, even if only by not speaking against her, something in him had called to her.
“You know, there were rumors long ago that Hatshepsut was not only a great queen but a devout priestess before she was wed to the pharaoh of her time. She has never spoken as to the truth of it, and it is never questioned because she is so clearly Menes’s queen, but … what if … ?”
He didn’t finish the thought aloud. He didn’t have to. As they looked into each other’s eyes, they both wondered. What if? What if these enemies on opposite sides of this war were, in actuality, soul mates in hiding from each other? The Politic and the Templar had become polarized over time, but what if the gods had chosen that as yet another punishment? Or what if, in their never-ending hubris, they were adding yet again to the curse they had pulled onto themselves? What if the gods had cursed them but given them one gift of succor? The gift of true and perfect mates of the soul.
Only they squandered the gift, keeping it distant on opposing sides of a civil war.
Ram reached for her, wrapping her in his arms and drawing her deep into his lap and hotly against the press of his lips. He kissed her, as she kissed him, with a depth of emotion and tragic sense of desperation … but more than anything, an overwhelming sense of gratitude that they had somehow seen the light.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Lord, could this place be any more gothicy creepy?” Marissa asked as they headed up the long drive toward the Windham Mansion.
If she thought that the general feel of it was bad, she should see it from his perspective, Jackson thought. All those massive columns lining the drive, some of which had been bare previously, had suddenly sprouted brand-new monsters of stone on their tops, their fierce, grotesque faces glaring down at them, their carved bodies like those of powerfully muscular men, each crouching, stretching, or as though on the verge of flight. Fangs, hollowed-out pupils, and twisted, swollen lips only added to their monstrous effectiveness. Jackson couldn’t help the chill that walked up his spine, and Marissa’s visible shiver spoke to her similar reaction.
But once again, the thing of note was that everything around was piled with soft mounds of snow. Everything except those stone creatures. There simply was no explanation for it. His mind could try to explain it away, but the fact was there was no solution to be found. No intelligent one, in any event. A fanciful one leapt immediately to mind, that they could and did come to life at a moment’s notice to protect the home beyond.
Yeah? Where the hell were you all when the house was blowing up? he thought wryly.
The guardhouse had been mostly restored already and was heavily staffed, almost a little too heavily. But a flash of his badge had been more than enough to gain them this long trek onward. If they had noticed he was a little out of his jurisdiction, they didn’t say anything to question him or Marissa, who didn’t even have a badge to fall back on. She had credentials of her own, but nothing that could open any doors.
Although they hadn’t gotten past any doors yet, just a gate.
As she too stared into the hollow irises of stone, Marissa was trying to figure out what had gotten into her lately. Between staying ridiculous hours when there was no reason to and now aiding and abetting Jackson Waverly on this particular tilt at an incredibly large windmill, she had no comprehension of her own actions. Well, practically none, anyway. She was more than capable of admitting to herself that she felt somehow protective of a man who was far more qualified to protect her backside than she was to protect his … physically, in any event. But the danger Jackson was in had very little to do with physicality. She no longer attributed her actions to guilt. She honestly didn’t know what she did attribute it to. She’d simply never behaved so erratically before. And from what she had learned of his character, she suspected neither had Jackson.
She was well aware that this was nowhere near normal behavior for the dedicated lawman. In her sessions with him, she had come to realize that his attachment to rules and the law bordered on a neurosis. He defined himself almost entirely by it. And she suspected that one of the reasons he was having such difficulty letting go of Chico’s death, outside of the obvious understandable attachment issues, was that in the moment of his canine partner’s death he had seen a side of himself that did not fit with his lawful perceptions. And until he faced that, until he coped with it and accepted it for the natural thing that it was, he was never going to move onward. But he was a reasonably well-adjusted man, for a cop, and she had faith he’d find his way eventually. But then why the need to shadow him?
The reason was perhaps as simple as that she hated the idea of seeing him self-destruct before he got the chance.
It’s not your responsibility, Mari, she lectured her-self for the thousandth time. But as with most things, she had a follow-up question. If not me, then who? In a world full of people foisting responsibility onto others, no one was stepping up for their fellow humans and humanity. They were all waiting for others to step in. Well, she was an other. She’d always lived by that belief, and she wasn’t going to stop now, even if it cost her a little more than she was willing to give in the long run. At least she’d be able to sleep soundly, knowing she’d done the right thing.
Even if the right thing meant driving toward 1313 Mockingbird Lane.
She parked the car and they both sat there for a moment, staring up at the house through the windshield, listening to the silenced engine tick in the quickly creeping cold.
“Well, no rest for the wicked,” Jackson said, grabbing for the door handle as he handed Marissa her purse from the floorboards between his feet. He looked down at her feet for a moment and then sighed audibly before pushing out of the car. She looked down at her boots and bit her lip for an instant. He had a point. She wasn’t going to look very official in polka-dot boots. That was so unfair. He could get away with jeans and cowboy boots and a leather jacket … which, by the way, made him look ridiculously hot. How was that, anyway? He looked hot half the time without so much as trying. Damn him.
She toed off her boots, fished into her bag for her heels, and stuck them on. She winced as she stood up. The rule of heels was that once you took them off, it really hurt when you put them back on, since it gave your feet a chance to swell.
She slipped, yelping when ice and ass meeting seemed imminent. A strong hand under her arm jerked her upright, holding tight as she got her feet back under her. He held on tightly to her as they negotiated the icy patches between the car and the door.
“Christ, don’t these people believe in ice melt?” she muttered.
“One could argue a sensible pair of shoes,” he said dryly.
“Yeah, well, you wer
en’t complaining when you were staring at my ass half the day today,” she shot back.
He pressed his lips together in an unrepentant smile, and his eyes went light with a streak of life she hadn’t seen in them in quite some time.
Jackson rang the bell and then followed it up with a knock just in case electricity had not been restored to that part of the house. The door opened after what seemed like the longest damn minute in the history of man.
What he saw just about took his breath away.
Docia.
“Oh, I hardly think they’re going to come up and ring the doorbell,” she was calling over her shoulder before she turned to look at him. There was barely an instant for them to see each other and react, to absorb and recognize, before a large hand was circling her arm and jerking her away from the door, leaving the portal to fall open.
Jackson’s weapon cleared his holster in a heartbeat, his instincts and reactions the stuff of cowboy legends to Marissa’s eyes.
“Let her go!”
“Like hell!”
The big blond man thrust Docia out of Jackson’s line of sight, and aggression raced through every line of his body.
“Whoa! Whoa!” Marissa cried, thrusting herself between Jackson and the other man when she read the out-of-control hostility bucking over his features. He had been pushed past all points of reason, and he was going to do something very stupid. She just knew it.
“Back the fuck off, Marissa!” he shouted at her furiously when she denied him the pleasure of a target. “And you let my sister go, fucker, or I’m going to smack a bullet into the back of your worthless skull!”
“Jackson! Knock it off!”
Docia dodged the hands trying to protect her and skipped around Ram’s efforts to contain her, joining Marissa in the wall between Jackson’s weapon and Ram’s vital parts.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouted at her brother as only a younger sister could. It got through, jumping him back a peg, his fingers feathering off the grip of his gun a second before he tightened it once more.
“Me?” he demanded. “Who the hell is this guy? Who are all these people? You’ve been missing for days, Docia, and I just saw him yank you back—”
“He’s doing what you’re trying to do, you dork! He’s protecting me!” She walked up to him, knowing he wasn’t going to shoot her, and reached out to smack him on the side of the head.
“Ow! Hey!” Jackson’s stance dissolved, his weapon lowering. The others in the room exhaled in relief. “What the hell?” He reached out and took her by the arm, unable to contain the need to touch her or the need to shake her in poorly contained fury. “Do you have any idea how sick with worry I’ve been? You just disappeared off the face of the earth!”
“I called you, Jackson Waverly. And I am not two years old. I’m a grown woman who has every right to go anywhere, do anything, and make friends with whomever she damn well pleases!” She seized his arm in return, turning aside and pointing to Ram. “This man protected me from some lowlife with a knife trying to gut me in the street. In my book, that makes him a friend. He brought me to Windham and I like it here. Well, I did until the house blew up. But then he took me somewhere else, again, to keep me safe. I would have called you then, but we kind of left in haste and I didn’t have a phone. I was just about to come find you after Henry told me you were looking for me and seemed upset.”
“Well, when I find said lowlife with a knife gutted on the sidewalk, you’ll forgive me if I’m slightly freaked out. And that phone call sounded nothing like you,” he said, hedging insecurely now, shifting his attention to Marissa, the woman who could very well yank him off the street for his recent behavior, especially now that she was hearing it was completely unfounded. “And you,” he said to Ram, jerking back into the mode he was most familiar with. The mode of a cop. “You have a lot of questions to answer about a dead guy in the street!”
“He wasn’t dead when we left him,” Ram said simply, a shrug of a shoulder telegraphing his lack of concern. Then he smiled smugly. “And I have your sister as a witness to that.”
Jackson was forced to look into his furious sister’s eyes. “Is that true?” he asked needlessly.
“Yes,” she said, dropping the word icily.
Jackson dissolved.
“Ah, c’mon, Docia,” he all but whined to her. “You can’t stand there and blame me for worrying. It’s my damned job in life. And Leo was just as worried as I was and he doesn’t get worked up any more easily than I do.” He pointed at her, realized he still held his gun, and hastily holstered it. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Well, look, I’m fine,” she said, gesturing to herself. “Now you can stop worrying.”
And there it was, that little flicker in her features, the downturn of her eyes for a second, and her lifelong tell of scratching behind her ear on the left side. She was lying to him. She wasn’t fine.
“You’re lying to me.” He jumped on her, getting right in her face, staring dead in her eyes. She clearly forced herself not to look away, and any idiot could hear the slightest quaver in her voice at the beginning of her next sentence.
“I am not!”
“What’s going on, Docia? I’m your brother, I raised you, for God’s sake. You don’t think I know when you’re lying to me? I’ve been catching you in fibs since you were five years old and you tried to tell me your hamster died in a tragic fall from his cage, so I wouldn’t get mad at you for squeezing him too hard after warning you a hundred times not to.”
“I was hugging him!” she said defensively, just as she did every time he brought it up. “I miscalculated. I was five! And will you stop regurgitating that story every time you want to throw me off?”
Jackson watched her face flush in embarrassment as she turned her head to look over her shoulder. It was just a glance, brief, really, but it flipped on a light of understanding in his head.
She liked this guy. And now that he was looking for it, he could read reciprocal intent off the other man. His fists were knotted, as though he were working very hard at not coming to retrieve her, his facial muscles tight with defensiveness as Jackson attacked her verbally and made her uncomfortable, and in his eyes …
Ah, crap.
“Docia, are you kidding me? You’ve only known this guy for two days. At best!” He jerked a hand toward the other man, pointing at him aggressively, as though he wished his gun were still attached to the end of his arm.
“Says the former king of the one-night stands,” she scoffed with a snort.
Embarrassment went both ways. He flushed hot under his skin as he looked at Marissa, who was watching the entire exchange with far too much fascination.
“I was in my twenties!” he argued defensively. “It’s a guy thing! And stop deflecting the point!”
“I will when you stop being a controlling ass!”
Brother and sister glared at each other hard, both breathing bullishly and looking as if they were about to physically butt heads. Since he wasn’t sure how far she’d healed from her cracked skull, Ram decided to step in. He moved forward and reached for her hand.
“Come on, Docia. He’s just worried. Don’t be mad at him for loving you.” He looked at Jackson. “I’m sorry. I should have brought her straight to you after the attempted knifing. But I wanted some time to find out who was after her.”
“A drug dealer named Marcus Degrain.”
They all turned to the open doorway, where Leo stood leaning against the frame, casually picking at his nails with a wicked curved hunting knife. No one there was stupid enough to think he had even a speck of dirt concerning him under those nails. It was a display. A warning.
“Yeah. Apparently, Docia, your boss is laundering drug money for Degrain. About three weeks ago, you found a series of anomalous invoices you weren’t supposed to see and brought them to the attention of your boss. He got scared and told Degrain. Degrain decided not to take any chances, seeing as how you’re the sister of
a cop.” Leo shrugged. He didn’t need to say anything else about it. They could all connect the dots. It was such a stupid, stupid reason to almost die.
“Everything all right, Jacks?” Leo queried archly, the tip of his knife scraping slowly around the crescent of his thumbnail.
Docia watched her brother hesitate in answering for a long minute, his entire body bunched with tension and the desire to say no now that he had reinforcements. He knew Leo would back him up in his concerns, no matter how skewed or outrageous. The thing was, as hard as it had been for him, Jackson had let her live her own life, let her make her own mistakes, relegating himself to the role of comforter and adviser … no matter how difficult that could be sometimes, protecting her only when necessary. All he needed to do was remember that, to ease himself out of this hypervigilance on her behalf, to fall back into what had once been routine. Docia and Marissa both knew that was asking a lot of him, after an accident and disappearance over the past week had threatened to rob him of the only family left to him. Actually, both women could date it even further back than that, when he’d lost a partner that had sent him into the unpredictable world of grief.
“Everything’s fine,” Jackson said with a sigh.
Then, a violent beam of red energy struck him dead in the chest, propelling him out the door behind him, past Leo, past the columns of the porch, and onto the hood of his car, shattering the windshield and decimating two of the bones in his neck.