Forever (22 page)

Jackson was watching her face very closely at that point, waiting like a cat in front of a mouse hole, waiting for it to dawn on her what he was truly asking her to do.

And there it was. The widening of clear blue eyes and the sharp intake of breath.

“You mean you want me to
die?
” she asked him incredulously. “That is what you mean, right? In order for this queen or whatever to come and share space with me, I have to
die
first! You are out of your mind if you think any sane person is going to volunteer for something like that! And what in hell do you need
me
for? I’m sure there are dozens of gutsy, curvy little redheads running around dying all over the world! No!” She held up a hand and cut him off when he opened his mouth to speak. “Absolutely no! No talking. No touching.” She pushed his hand away sharply. “No anything! I’m not letting you run roughshod over me and my life just because you need a vessel for some dead Egyptian queen. Sorry, mister, but you have got the wrong woman.”

She shut him down completely by dodging out of his reach and marching off in fairly high temper. He ought to have been concerned for her, he supposed, but the truth was he was just too tickled to death by her. Everything
she did gave him pleasure in one form or another. Be it intellectual, emotional, or physical, she lit him up on every single bumper.

But she did have a point. Jackson had become aware, at last, of Menes’s plans for her almost at the same time she had. But it would be wrong to say they were all Menes’s plans or all Jackson’s plans. It was all boiling down together, a reduction of motives all pointing in the same direction. It was about wanting a woman and being willing to get her by any means necessary.

Of course he didn’t like the dying part any more than she did. The thought of her going through that kind of trauma was not well received in his mind. Menes concurred on that, but he was more practical. One way or another she was going to die, be it now or many years from now. At least this way she would be saved and she would be hisaid when that, for as long as the fates allowed for them. And by the gods he prayed it would be longer than the last time. That was perhaps what had been the sharpest of the pain of losing Hatshepsut last time. She had only been reborn for a week before Odjit had taken her life. One week. It had been as heated and fervent as it always was, their spirits close in the Ether but lacking the physicality to touch. So when they were reborn they wanted nothing more than to feel each other in any way possible.

But one week had not been enough. Not by half. And he had not dealt with it well at all. He had failed her then, failed to protect her and keep her safe in life as well as in his heart. But this time he would not fail. This time Odjit had been dead for three weeks and this would be the safest incarnation they would enjoy in perhaps five or six hundred years.

But none of that would matter if he couldn’t convince her to be a part of this future he found himself captain to. He was home now he thought, as he looked around
the grand kitchen and the casual dining nook within it. Beyond was a large formal dining room and other rooms equally made for a big household. And the royal household was always quite large. Now that he was there, the house would fill with friends and staff, and the machinery of a government would begin to take place.

Not that Ramses did not do well in his stead. As far as he was concerned either of them could have been designated to rule over their people in perpetuity. But long ago the people of the Politic had chosen him. The Templars …

He despised this war, he thought with vehemence. He was sick to death of it. Why could they not see reason? Why did they fear the right to live their lives for themselves so much that they wished fervently for the god Amun to rise up and destroy them if they were not well behaved? It sickened him that half his people were wrapped up in this blind faith, this dark age of being oppressed by beliefs tempered into them by the fist of that zealot harpy who called herself a priestess. Why could they not see her for what she truly was?

He had asked himself these questions over and over, incarnation after incarnation and still there was no answer.

Except …

“Docia!” he called out as he moved from the kitchen into the main body of the house. The house was all new to him, so he wasn’t exactly certain where he was going to find her. It was a great frustration for him, to feel like he wasn’t completely in charge of matters close to him. But, he counseled himself, patience and time would see him where he needed to be, would help give him the strength and fortifications he would need if …

“Docia!”

“What?! Quit hollering at me! Jeez.” Docia shot the
command at him with all the exasperation a baby sister could muster, though she was well into her twenties, and her Bodywalker Tameri was almost as ancient as he was.

“I had a question for Tameri. She has told you that there are others like her who want to defect from the Templars?” At her nod he hurried on. “Just exactly how many Templars are we speaking about?”

Since Docia was also only three weeks into her Blending, she had to go quiet for a moment and access her Bodywalker’s memory. He watched as her face turned incredibly peaceful, so unlike the turbulent energy of his sister. He realized then that he had missed her terribly since she had done what he ought to have done from the start and had come out to New Mexico with Ramses. It tickled him, actually, that Ramses had, earwww.ballantinebooks.comesihlyly on in their Blending, mistaken Tameri for Hatshepsut. True, these things were hard to discern at times, but the idea that his astounding and dynamic queen would choose someone like the adorable and slightly mousy persona of his sister … well, it wasn’t a likely fit. Of course he and Hatshepsut had once altered sexes, he resurrecting in the body of a female and she in a male, just to see what it would be like. The novelty had made them ravenous for each other and the experience of seeing things from the other’s perspective had been, in a word, wild. The sex alone had been outstanding. But he also remembered it as one of the most turbulent choices in their relationship.

God, he missed her. He craved her so terribly. Even now his body still ached with the arousal being close to Marissa had engendered. They must be together, he thought with no little amount of heat. Marissa and Hatshepsut must come together. It was the only solution he would be satisfied with. Yes, intelligent, curvy redheads were dying all the time, but he wanted this
redhead and no other. This redhead had tormented Jackson with her very presence for so long … and there was a reason for near you when

Awakening.

There it was, a small papyrus scroll, probably the most ancient piece of written history in the archive he was presently sitting in. Perhaps even the most ancient of all their written prayers, spells, and other such literature in any of their archives anywhere on Earth;
and to be sure, there were quite a few
, Kamenwati thought as he held open the reedy paper with the barest tips of his fingers, not wanting anything—such as bacteria or the natural oils of his skin—to come into contact with it.
Something this frail and old should not even be touched at all
, Kamen thought with a grimace. The Bodywalkers, both Politic and Templar, agreed on one thing, and that was that their history should be preserved at all costs and with all the respect it deserved. To that end there were a dozen of archives dotted across the world. The methods used to preserve what was in them outshone those of any antiquities museum. Light, temperature, limited contact. There had once been a single tremendous library, but after the great London fire had come within a hairsbreadth of claiming all they had collected, they had broken them down into twelve locations. And when the war had begun between the Templars and the Politic, there had been a huge series of
battles over each and every one until all of the spoils were captured and relocated into secrecy, each keeping the other from accessing whatever parts of the archive they had wrested away.

It had hurt the Templars the most, however, when the Politic had ended up with just under seventy-five percent of the ancient written material, because much of their power came from the incantations and prayer spells such as the one he held so gingerly. Maybe if they had the larger majority of the works they would have gained the upper hand in this blasphemous war.

But there was no point in wasting so much time thinking about what might have been. He must now focus on what was.

It was perhaps preposterous to think a spell from ancient Egyptian times could have any kind of hand in reviving Odjit. It was more likely that Selena, Odjit’s host, had suffered such severe brain damage from the dramatic loss of blood that had occurred when that lowborn mortal beast had nearly decapitated her. That was a physical result, not a magical one. And this spell seemed to be meant to awaken someone from a spell of sleeping or perhaps even paralysis. A useful spell to have regardless of what it did for Odjit, but it was still very much worth trying for her benefit.

He carefully returned the small scroll to its airtight container, then rose to make his way back to his mistress’s side. Of course he made a small detour, stopping in to see what Chatha was up to. To his momentary pique, expression on his facemiibig Kamen saw that the human male was no longer strapped down to the floor. All that was left of his having been there was a very wide lake of blood that was slowly making its way to the drain in the center of the floor. There was a reason Odjit called this her wetworks room.

After a moment he realized that the
pat pat pat
sound
of dripping blood was not that of the fluid draining away. He saw the droplets hitting the wet floor and looked up.

Apparently Chatha had grown bored of doing his bloodletting exercises on the floor. He had the human hung up by his ankles, ropes binding his arms down fast to his body in such a thick nonstop coil it was reminiscent of mummification bandaging. The mortal was unconscious, probably on the cusp of death yet again, while Chatha experimented on him for fascination’s sake. To Kamen’s sudden disgust, he realized Chatha had sewn the human’s lips shut.

“Too loud,” Chatha said by way of explanation as he gave the hanging man a push, sending him spinning and swinging, blood spattering everywhere. Kamen had to step back to avoid becoming part of the bath. “Is it time yet?” Chatha’s eyes were feverish with the question. But Kamen knew Chatha was having far more fun toying with the man than he would if he were given permission to end the man’s life.

Kamen’s fury toward the insolent creature had eased somewhat, but he was still not satisfied. He could not be satisfied as long as his mistress lay still as death and trapped in an oblivion worse than the Ether.

And that was what was at the crux of this whole agonizing ordeal. At some point he was going to have to decide whether he should keep waiting, keep trying to bring her back to him … or take the life of her host and send Odjit back into the Ether for another hundred years so that she could then be reborn.

He must delay that choice as long as he could. He knew that if he were forced to push her back to the Ether, it would mean the end for him in this lifetime. Even with her there it had been an effort to keep a grasp on this existence. Had he not loathed having Odjit face the Politic alone, he wouldn’t even have bothered with leaving the Ether in the first place.

“Do whatever you will,” he said with a dismissive gesture. “Keep him or kill him, it no longer matters to me. He will suffer in the afterlife for what he has done—far worse than anything you have subjected him to.”

Chatha’s face widened into a beatific smile, all dimples and innocence, his eyes squinting shut. If those eyes had remained open, Kamen knew, there would be nothing innocent within them. The soul of the Down’s male was completely subjugated, no doubt scarred into paralysis as the psychopathic monster dwelling inside of him showed him horrors his innocent mind and soul would never have dreamed of, never mind committing them with his own hand.

That left a sour taste in Kamenwati’s mouth. On one hand he had to admire the wolf hiding in the innocent sheep’s clothing. It was a stroke of brilliance that allowed him almost carte blanche entry into places and into peoples’ trust that would normally not be so easy to access. On the other … Chatha was as evil an entity as anything he had ever seen. If there were a way to destroy Chatha’s soul forever, Kamen would very much be inclined to see it done. And then he would see it done to Menes, an act that would end the war in a single stroke. Without Menes to flock to, the Politic would swiftly unravel … just as the Templars tended to unravel” she stammered body g. whenever Kamen and Odjit were killed and sent into the Ether. But to do so with permanence … to make a spirit rest once and for all in the afterlife …

Perhaps he would simply use the method where he craved using it most.

On himself.

“Listen, ya big hunk of ignoramus, if you don’t put me down right this minute I’m going to kick you in the balls again and this time your kids are going to be born with black eyes! You feeling me, mister?”