They were no angels. They didn’t even make very good humans.
She whispered, “Do you remember it?”
He said, “I haven’t bothered to try recovering those first memories of Earth. I figured I would sometime if I needed to. But Astra remembers. She remembers everything. She has had to, in order to help the others of us remember.”
She shivered. “How could she bear to do that?”
He had often wondered that, how Astra could stand to remember every minute of their unending exile. “I don’t know. Maybe she can because she must.”
“There were seven in my dream,” she said. The goblet image her mind had manufactured melted away with the change in her attention. She leaned forward to grip his arms. “Where are the others? You haven’t talked about them.”
“They’re gone,” he said in a flat voice. He hated to witness the fresh horror and grief on her face. “There are only four of us left—you and I, Astra and the criminal. The Deceiver. He destroyed the others. And you’ve been missing for so goddamn long—”
Her body stiffened and her gaze snapped into a sharp blue focus, locking with his. “Wait. You think I’m one of you, that I belong in your group?”
His gut clenched, and he went to red alert. Carefully he took her by the shoulders. “Don’t you see that’s why you keep dreaming of this place?”
Her body arced away from his touch. “Let me go. You’re wrong. This is a mistake. I’m not one of you. I can’t be one of you.”
His fingers loosened immediately, and he let her go. She scrambled back until she hit the wall. Her face was filled with horror. “It’s all right,” he said. He held a hand to her, palm out. “You’re going to be all right.”
She screamed at him, “I’m human!”
“Of course you are,” he said. He fought his own sense of horror. This was beyond disastrous. None of them had ever recovered so much of their memories before without realizing their real identities. “You need to calm down. You’re safe.”
“I’m safe until you decide to kill me?” she said, her voice hoarse. She pushed to her feet and turned to face the wall, looking up at the carving of the two inhuman figures, and she made an inarticulate sound that was so wounded and afraid, it scalded his senses.
He straightened, keeping his movements slow. He kept his voice soft as he said, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not sorry,” she said in that stranger’s voice. She began to feel along the wall, running her fingers over the carvings as though reading Braille. As though the scene was a prison that she was trying to escape. “You meant it. Where is this place? How did you bring me here?”
Step by step, with seeming effortlessness, she peeled away all the layers of indifference that he had built up over the centuries until he felt raw with agony. Fighting every instinct he had to move forward, to take hold of her again in a grip so tight she would never get away from him again, he took a step back then another. Then he waited until she looked over her shoulder at him.
He said, “You’ll have to figure that out on your own.”
Fresh devastation flared in her eyes. Steeling himself against the expression, he turned away, unable to talk in this mental landscape and hold his energy separate from hers, unable to stand the sight of the unnatural gash down her psychic body.
Exiting her mind with as much care as he could, he pulled his gun even as he opened his eyes to look around. They had been motionless for perhaps a half hour.
When he had pulled to the shoulder of the road earlier, he had refrained from putting on the car’s hazard lights, hoping they would look like an abandoned vehicle to those passing by at high speed. Whether by luck or by his design, they had been left alone.
Mary’s body rested against his chest. He had been quietly feeding her energy the whole time he had been in her mind. Despite her confusion and anguish, her body felt relaxed and more natural now, no longer feverish. She seemed to be asleep.
In a stealthy movement he pressed his lips against her shoulder blade and rubbed his mouth lightly on the thin, warm cotton material of her T-shirt. Then he eased her over more to the passenger seat, tucked the jean jacket around her and buckled her seat belt into place. She sighed, shifted and went still.
Cars and trucks shot by, providing quick flashes of illumination. The psychic landscape was restless with movement as whispers tickled the edges of his mind. Despite all his instincts screaming at him to get moving again, he took another stolen moment to lock in his memory the sight of the precious curve of her living cheek.
Then he faced forward and acknowledged some hard truths. He gripped the steering wheel with his left hand, gun clenched in his right. Holding rigid was the only way he knew to survive.
There was no road map for where they were in their history. He still didn’t know what had been done to her to cause the kind of wound that she had. All he could tell was that her energy was skewed somehow, different than it had ever been, and every time he looked at her with his psychic senses she looked cracked wide open like an egg. The evidence of such a violation, the sheer wrongness of it, made him feel like roaring.
He thought about what it would be like to put the gun to her head right now and pull the trigger. Death was just one gentle move and a click away. It would be good to do it while she was asleep, and it would be over with so fast, faster than she could comprehend. She wouldn’t experience any more pain. Then it would be so simple, the work of a moment to turn the gun on himself.
His head ached so ferociously, he thought he might split apart from the force of it. He rubbed the barrel of the gun against his temple.
* * *
MARY OPENED HER eyes. She leaned against the passenger door, wrapped in the warm jacket. She was still overtired and her body hurt, but mercifully the raw feeling had eased in intensity.
Why had they stopped moving? What had just happened?
She must have had another hallucination and passed out.
No.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, she must have crossed over into sleep without realizing it. That was odd but not impossible for the dangerously sleep-deprived, and boy howdy the dream she’d just had was a rough one.
No, that didn’t work either.
Then she heard a quiet sound. It was Michael, whispering.
The fine hairs at the back of her neck rose. She gave him a surreptitious look between her lashes.
He rubbed the barrel of his gun against his temple as he whispered, “It was too a mistake. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any choice. I’m sorrier than I can say.”
The sight of him struck her hard, like a slap in the face. Some of the words he used were straight out of her hallucination, her dream.
She took a deep, careful breath and didn’t give herself time to think. Slowly she reached toward him and touched his arm. A flash of emotion seared her, and it was not her own. She got a sense of suffering so intense it felt like a mortal wound. She let her gentle fingers trail along his arm, keeping the motion unhurried and nonthreatening, giving him plenty of chance to react and pull away.
He did neither. Instead he froze when she touched him. His big, tough body was so taut it felt like he might break.
At last her fingers curled around his clenched hand. It was so much bigger, so much more powerful, than hers. She put the lightest pressure on him, a silent request more than anything to ease the gun away from his head. He let her, until the nine-millimeter rested against his heavy, muscled thigh.
“It’s all right,” she murmured. She didn’t try to take the gun from him. Instead she stroked the back of his hand and his thick, corded wrist. “You’re all right. You’re safe.”
Reassuring him just as he had reassured her in her hallucination, her dream.
He opened his eyes and looked ahead at nothing. His eyes were blo
odshot. He said, “I’m really tired.”
How crazy was this? Her heart twisted for him, this big, strange, dangerous man. “I know you are.”
They sat quietly, her hand resting on his wrist. Then his taut body relaxed. He took his hand out from under hers and holstered his gun. He said, “Have you figured out yet where you were?”
She was completely unprepared for the question.
Realization blasted her back against her door. Her hands went out in front of her. She grasped at the dashboard as her world reeled yet again. She gasped, “You were in my head. Just now. You were in my fucking head.”
He said nothing.
“You’ve had the same dreams,” she said. The words kept coming and coming, a deluge pouring out of her mouth. “You know that place. You think I’m one of that group. You think I’m one of you. Who do you think I am?”
* * *
EVEN THOUGH WE’RE trying to take care with each other, Michael thought, we’re still tearing each other’s barriers to pieces. He couldn’t find a way to slow down the revelations. Instead they came in an uncontrolled convulsion.
Without warning, his own burden of agony, which he had transformed to rage in order to survive each killing day of an interminable existence, welled to the surface. A deep groan broke out of him like the girders on an overstressed bridge.
“Michael?” she asked, searching his face.
He’d told himself he wouldn’t. He had imagined a thousand times or more various scenarios like this one. He had coached himself on how he would behave. None of it meant a goddamn thing.
He grabbed her and yanked her to him, bowing his head and shoulders over her slender body. Holding her so tight he felt some of her bones shift under the pressure, he put his face in her hair and shook so hard he thought he would fly apart from the force of it.
He said in a hoarse voice, “You were my mate. The other part of my soul. And you have been missing for over nine hundred years.”
A couple of heartbeats thudded between them. For a wonder, she didn’t struggle to free herself. He felt her arms encircle his waist in a light, tentative hold. She leaned into him, and for a moment he recalled with shining clarity what it was like to cradle his second half, to rest against a luminous being of grace and beauty.
For a moment to his parched and destitute soul it felt like he had come home, after wandering in a strange and hostile wilderness for such a long, long time.
After a moment she whispered, “I have no idea where to put that, on top of everything else.”
Despite her guarded and rational words, he felt her arm muscles tense, until she was holding him with as tight a hold as he held her. He rubbed his face in her hair, savoring every fleeting sensation.
“You don’t have to put it anywhere,” he forced himself to say. “It was millennia ago. We were quite literally different creatures then.”
Her head moved under his cheek. “You believe that.”
“Belief has nothing to do with it,” he said, his voice flat. Just as what he wanted had nothing to do with it. “It’s the truth. When the Deceiver escaped, there was only one way we could follow him. We had to leave our lives behind in order to travel to another dimension, or another universe, if you will.”
“That’s why we had to die. It was the only way to transform,” she muttered. She seemed to recoil from what she had just said, as if it sounded too real. She added quickly, “I mean that’s what happened in my dream.”
“We became hybrid creatures when we grafted on to Earth’s ecosystem,” he said. He forced himself to speak as clinically as possible. “In order to regain a physical existence, we had to become part of this world’s cycle of death and rebirth. We were forced to adapt and evolve beyond our origins. On top of that, you and I have survived something unprecedented. No other mated pair has been subjected to and survived nearly a thousand years of separation. We are, quite literally, not what we once were.”
Somehow he had to remember that. Somehow he had to come to believe it.
Chapter Fourteen
MARY HUDDLED AGAINST him, soaking in the illusion of strength and safety his big body offered as she considered everything that he had told her.
Of course the whole thing was outlandish, outrageous. It was also the only explanation she had ever encountered that explained everything she had experienced in her life.
Someone else knew of her dreams. Someone had walked inside her head, had looked at the bizarre images and said, Yes, I remember that too.
Damn, it made all the puzzle pieces fit. That didn’t mean she had to like it. She wasn’t sure she believed in it. It just . . . fit.
She muttered, “I have to think.”
“You do that. In the meantime we’ve been sitting here like stationary targets on an open-air shooting range. We have got to move.” He gripped her by the shoulders and pushed her away.
For a moment her traitorous arms resisted letting go of him. Then her muscles loosened and they separated. She settled back into her seat, her gaze lingering on the lines of his face that had settled back into his earlier expression of grim endurance.
He started the car, checked behind them and pulled onto the road.
She huddled under his jacket and leaned her forehead against the cold glass of her window. She wasn’t ready to talk again so she pretended to fall asleep. She wasn’t ready to sleep and risk another dream, so she fought to stay awake. She labored under the burden of too much information that had come at her too fast. At the same time her need for answers had built up to such a desperate extent her mind kept racing on to the next question, and the next.
The physician in her realized that she wasn’t out of triage yet.
How she felt about Michael was a question she wasn’t ready to examine, so she set it aside. At first his withdrawal had pierced her with a strange hurt. Then she was grateful for it. If he was right—if he was right—and she was not quite human, she was still no longer that creature from her sacred poison dream.
When she had put her arms around Michael, for a few brief moments she might have felt that she held her mate in her arms, her essential twin, the missing piece of her soul. But that feeling, if she believed it—if she believed it—was an anachronism, like feeling phantom sensation from an amputated limb. It had to be. She knew nothing about him in this life, or what kind of man he had become.
She stretched and felt her companion’s attention snap to her. She remembered her first impression of him, that physically he was forgettable, nondescript, like a thousand other tough soldierlike men.
Now she couldn’t connect in the slightest way to that earlier impression. He was not conventionally handsome, but the lines of his face were stamped with intelligence, and he radiated forcefulness like the blast of heat from a volcano. The heavy muscles of his long, hard body rippled, sleek and sinuous, under his tanned skin.
Watching him was a hypnotic experience. Every movement he made flowed like water. If he stood in the middle of a crowd, her eyes would be instantly drawn to him. She was drawn to him—to the magic encased in his physical form, to his masculine scent. Something about his hands caused her body to pulse with awareness.
With a slow sense of incredulity she realized that she was sexually drawn to him. And they might not be twinned souls any longer, but she basked in the vitality of his strong presence.
Even though she already knew she had his attention, she said, “Michael.”
“Yes.” He was curt.
She wanted to touch him. She frowned at his profile. “Did you have a rough time recovering your memories?”
He stirred. “No, but my circumstance doesn’t compare with yours. I was eight when Astra found me. I was able to recover my memories over time. She both shielded and taught me as I grew up. It was a good thing she found me when I was so young. I was not, shall we say, he
aded down the right path. Whereas she and I are pretty sure this is the first time you’ve incarnated since you sustained your spirit injury. It may be the first time that you’ve been strong enough.”
The first time she’d been strong enough in over nine hundred years. Her breath whistled between her teeth. “That bad.”
“Yes,” he said, the word a quiet hiss. Then he continued, “This is all happening for you in a much more traumatic setting, as an adult in a dangerous situation. To be frank I’m amazed you’re as sane and intact as you are. We didn’t know what we would find when we recovered you. We had to be prepared for you to heal in stages—over lifetimes—and we didn’t dare hope for more than a chance to help you heal in this life as much as you could.”
“Talk about taking the long view,” she muttered. She stared at the night sky. The earlier clouds had dissipated. Now a hard edge limned the landscape as if it were cut from sapphires and diamonds. When the sun rose later, the jewels would melt in a gush of heat and light.
She was disturbed by how Michael talked about dying and being reborn with such apparent dispassion. It seemed as if a part of him didn’t connect with the miracle of being alive in the present.
She tried to look at it from his point of view, to consider the realities he had been forced to endure. The woman Astra had influenced him from an early age. Was that the elder she remembered from her dream? She wondered what kind of person Astra had become.
Then she realized she was falling into a thought pattern of acceptance. The realization made her stiffen. She said, “Do you think I’ll stop dreaming those images, if I accept what is happening?”
He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Who knows? Maybe after you’re healed you’ll go on to dream of other lives and other things.”