Twilight Prophecy

“Such as?”

Leaning still closer, looking as if she was either going to kiss Rhiannon on the mouth or bite her nose off, Brigit said, her tone dangerously soft, “Why don’t you back up out of my face and I’ll tell you?”

Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed. “You’re treading on dangerous ground, Brigit.”

“Just like you taught me to do.”

Rhiannon’s scowl lasted a few more seemingly endless ticks of the clock. Pandora flattened her ears and a deep, soft growl emanated from her chest. And then, finally, Rhiannon rolled her eyes and paced away, almost gliding, despite the four-inch stiletto heels she wore. “Fine. Talk. Take your time about it, too. It’s not as if our entire race is at stake, after all.”

“Drama queen,” Brigit muttered.

Rhiannon whirled. “Excuse me?”

They stared at each other across the room for a long moment, and James tensed, wondering if the great Rhiannon, formerly known as Rianikki, the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh who never let anyone forget her rank, was going to try to annihilate his twin sister. He was about to step between the two women when Rhiannon smiled. It was a slow, gradual smile, but a smile nonetheless.

“You are extremely fortunate that I love you as I do, firecracker.”

“And I know it,” Brigit replied. But her own face and voice softened, as well. “All right, come sit. Here’s the deal.” Moving to the nearby sofa, the two sat down, and Brigit began recapping everything that had happened. Relaxing, the large cat curled up at Rhiannon’s feet and closed her eyes lazily.

James ignored them, for the most part. He hadn’t been home in a very long time, and while this was not his parents’ place, he had spent a large portion of his childhood here. “Aunt” Rhiannon had insisted on having a hand in raising him and Brigit. And he’d always been secretly glad of that, too, because while he, already adored by all, hadn’t needed the extra attention, his sister had thrived on it.

After all, to everyone else, she was the bad twin. Oh, no one ever said it that way. Not out loud. But she’d been born with the power of destruction, and she’d spent her entire life having to listen to her parents and every other role model in her life telling her that her power was bad. That it was dangerous and must be controlled, contained, kept on a tight leash. While he had been born with the power to heal, with everyone always oohing and ahhing over it, telling him how special he was, how someday he would do great things with his powers. How he was meant for something very special.

No one had ever blatantly compared the twins, called him the good one and her the bad one. But it was still the impression they’d both received from the adults in their lives. And it was an impression that ran deep. It had filled him with a perhaps unwarranted sense of pride and of goodness that had eventually led him to leave his people in search of meaning. While it had, he sensed, left his sister with a feeling of unworthiness. Or would have, if it hadn’t been for Rhiannon.

She alone praised Brigit’s ability as something special, something worthy, something good. She was constantly telling Brigit how there could be no creation without destruction. How goddesses of death were also goddesses of rebirth. How sacred her power was, how holy. And how James’s talent meant nothing without Brigit’s to balance it.

He’d never really believed any of that. He’d figured Aunt Rhi was probably just trying to make Brigit feel better, feel worthy. And he loved her for it. He’d never liked thinking that his sister’s feelings were hurt just because he was born with the gift of healing, even restoring life, and all she got was the ability to blow things up.

“Did the healing take?”

It was a beat before James realized the two-thousand-year-old vampiress was addressing him. “Yeah. I think so.”

“You think so?” she asked.

“I can’t be sure. They took her away before I had the chance to—”

Rhiannon was glaring at him, her full lips as thin as they could get, arms slowly crossing over her chest, forcing her breasts together.

He looked away, sighed. “Yes. It took.”

“Are you sure?”

He thought back, relived it all in his mind, and then got stuck in remembering those eyes. Those doe-brown eyes, and the fear and confusion in them when they’d opened up and stared so deeply into his.

I know you.

What the hell was up with that?

“J.W….” Rhiannon prompted.

“Yes.” He knew the light and the heat flowing from his hands had peaked, then just begun to ebb when he’d been forced away from her. “I’m sure. The professor was fine.”

“Was being the operative word,” Brigit said. “We can’t be sure of anything now that those bastards have her.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t an ordinary team of paramedics?” Rhiannon asked.

“Men in black were giving the orders. We both saw it.” Brigit glanced at James, who nodded in confirmation. “We’re going to have to plan and execute a rescue,” she said.

“What could the DPI want with her?” James asked, trying to force his focus to stay on the matter at hand.

Rhiannon leaned forward to stroke her panther. “They must know about the prophecy, and that it applies to us. Our race. The descendants of Utanapishtim. The tablet says our race will be no more. And believe me, nothing would make the DPI happier than that. They see us as a threat. They’ve been hoping to get the green light to wipe us out for as long as they’ve known of our existence.”

“Why haven’t they gotten it?” James asked.

Rhiannon leaned back on the sofa, which was as ostentatious as everything else in her homes. Red velvet, with gold braid and fringe. “There are a few leaders wise enough to know that war with our kind might not be easily won. By keeping our existence secret, they’ve managed to maintain a tense but fragile, and entirely unspoken, truce. Now, though …” She lowered her head with a sigh.

James had never seen Rhiannon this worried before, and it got his attention. He moved to the sofa and sat down beside her. “Now?” he prompted.

She lifted her head, looked him right in the eyes. “Now, thanks to Lester Folsom and his book, the entire world knows we exist.”

“The book was pulled.” Frowning, James shot a look at Brigit. “Isn’t that what Will Waters was saying in the intro? That the government had banned it, called a halt to the release, confiscated every copy before it ever hit the bookstores?”

“Yeah, J.W., but you’ve gotta know when the author of a banned book is taken out on national TV, the public will start turning over every rock to find out what the book had to say,” Brigit said.

“And I have no doubt there are copies somewhere. And there are certainly people who know what was in those pages. His publisher, for one,” Rhiannon added.

“No doubt the DPI has already absconded with every computer that ever came within reach of the manuscript,” she went on. “But that won’t stop word from spreading. No, this cat is thoroughly out of the proverbial bag.”

“We need to know what’s in that book,” James said softly.

Rhiannon nodded. “I agree. But we also need to keep our focus here. Our main goal has to be to prevent the foretold annihilation of our race. And to do that, we need to understand the parts of that clay tablet that were incomplete, the missing pieces. And the other clay tablet in our possession, the one we’ve kept for centuries, never quite sure why.”

“I’d forgotten about that. Legend has it that clay tablet will one day save our race,” James said, recalling the tales told to him over and over throughout his childhood. The legends of his race, how they began, and the story of the tablet that must be protected. “Where is it?”

“Damien has it,” Rhiannon said. “I’ll get it from him. The prophecy suggests that all of this so-called Armageddon is heavily dependent upon the involvement of two things.”

“Yeah,” Brigit muttered. “Us.”

“And him,” Rhiannon said.

James frowned. “Him? Him, who? You mean Utanapishtim?”

“Precisely.” Rhiannon rose from the sofa, paced across the room, then turned and paced back again. “So what Folsom wrote in that book, and what the government intends to do about it, and whether it becomes public knowledge—all of that is on the back burner. Our first goals are these—we have to find and rescue the professor, so that she can help us locate and translate the rest of that prophecy. And we have to enlist the help of the very first immortal. The Ancient One. The Flood Survivor. The father of our race. Utanapishtim.”

“How the hell are we going to do that?” James asked. “A séance?”

“Of course!” Brigit said. “Aunt Rhi was a priestess of Isis—”

“Not was, is. And that’s high priestess,” Rhiannon corrected.

“Yeah, yeah,” Brigit said, no doubt pissing Rhiannon off again, James thought. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you know how to contact the dead and all that shit, right? Right? So is that it? Are we going to have a séance?”

“Not exactly,” Rhiannon said. “We don’t need to speak to the dead if Utanapishtim is alive.”

“But he’s not,” Brigit said. “He’s been dead for more than five thousand years, Aunt Rhi.”

“Yes, well, that’s where your brother comes in.”

Rhiannon speared James with her eyes, even as he felt his own widen. “You can’t mean … you want me to—”

“Raise him, J.W.”

He shot off the sofa as if it had electrocuted him. “I can’t!” The panther’s head came up, and she looked irritated at being disturbed from her nap by his sudden movement.

“How do you know?” Rhiannon asked him.

“For the love of—how could I not know?”

Rhiannon shrugged, graceful, sexy. “I’ve seen you raise the dead, J.W. You’ve been doing it since you were born. You started with your own sister, stillborn, blue, no heartbeat, not a breath of air in her lungs.” Rhiannon moved closer, reaching out and grabbing James’s forefinger, enclosing it in her fist. “You took hold of her just like this,” she said. “And she breathed, J.W. She breathed. You healed her. You brought her back to life.”

“I know. I know. And yeah, I’ve been successful a few other times since then, but only when the subject has just died. Never with anyone who’s been dead for long.”

“But have you tried?” Rhiannon asked.

“What, restoring life to a rotting corpse? Yeah, yeah, that’s how I spend my Halloweens. Are you fucking crazy?”

“So you’ve never tried, then,” Brigit said. She was rising now, too, growing excited, he thought, at this impossible, insane notion.

“No, I’ve never tried.”

Rhiannon nodded. “We’ll start small, say with someone a week dead. And we’ll build from there. We’ll need to find corpses in various stages of decomposition, of course, and—”

“Shit.” James’s stomach convulsed. He took an involuntary step backward. “No. No, this is sick.”

“Call it what you will. It’s necessary,” Rhiannon said.

“It’s to save our race,” Brigit added.

“No way. No way in hell.” James was shaking his head slowly in dawning horror. “And it won’t work. And even if it did, Utanapishtim isn’t going to be in some stage of decomposition. He’d be dust by now.”

Rhiannon shrugged. “Dust, bones, rotted flesh, all just different phases of the same basic components. If you can do it with one, you can do it with the others.”

“You’re out of your mind, Rhiannon.”

She lifted her perfectly arched brows and sent him a look that told him he was getting close to the danger zone.

And then Brigit’s hand landed on his shoulder. “J.W…. James. You’ve spent your entire life asking yourself, and the universe, why you were born with this power. Maybe this is it. Your answer. Maybe this is why. To save your family. Your people. There’s not much that could be bigger, more important, than that.

Is there?”

He stared at her. And he could barely believe that he was letting her talk him into it. Because she had a point. He had always wondered why. He’d always known he had this power for a reason, a big reason, and he’d been searching for it all his life.

Maybe this was it. And if there was any chance it was, then he couldn’t very well turn his back on it, now could he?

He lowered his eyes, released all his breath at once, swallowed hard and whispered, “All right. All right, I’ll … I’m in.”

“Good.” He heard the smile in Rhiannon’s voice, felt his sister’s arms close around him in a relieved hug.

“We’re going to have to get out of the city,” Rhiannon announced, moving quickly toward the nearest window, her cat at her heels. “We need someplace with privacy for these experiments. We’ll leave as soon as possible.”

“But, Rhiannon,” James said, lifting his head. “What about Lucy Lanfair?”

“Lucy … oh, the professor? Obviously we’re going to have to take her with us. We’ll pick her up on the way.” She glanced out the window. “But not tonight. It’s nearly dawn. I must rest. I suggest you do the same.”

Lucy opened her eyes and felt an odd, moist breeze on her face. Almost as if she were outside. She’d been sleeping very soundly and wondered what on earth had awakened her. Something had. And she was nowhere near ready to get up, not after …

No, she wouldn’t think about that. She needed to pull up the covers, roll onto her other side and …

Where were the covers?

Wait, where was the mattress? The bed? All she felt was sand and very finely ground pebbles.

Her eyes popped open, and the first thing they focused on was the giant orange curve of the sun, just beginning to rise over a distant horizon. She was … outdoors. On the shore of the ocean. She was grasping handfuls of sand and shells in search of blankets.

Waves whispered soothing sounds as they whooshed up over the sand, then burbled back out again. The wind smelled like seaweed and brine. She brushed off her hand, rubbing it against her shirt, then paused, because she was wearing clothes. A pair of jeans that were a size too big, and a white button-down shirt. A man’s shirt, she thought. Sitting up, she pushed a hand through her hair, which felt vaguely like a rat’s nest, and tried to remember how she’d ended up here. The last thing she remembered …

They’d fed her. She had supposed that was a plus, even if the food was tepid and sticky, and almost certainly prepared by peeling back the plastic and nuking for five minutes on high. Meat loaf with gravy, soupy mashed potatoes, green beans that tasted the way she thought paint would taste and some kind of cherry dessert that was so tart it made her pucker. About two tablespoons of each, whether she needed it or not.

Famished, she’d wolfed the food down so fast there hadn’t been time to ponder the taste overly much. A blessing in itself.

Or not. Because she didn’t remember anything else. Nothing at all. Apparently they had tranquilized her with something. It hadn’t hit her with the potency of the first injection, in the ambulance, and it didn’t have her spilling her guts on any subject they broached, like the one they must have given her just before starting their interrogation. And she didn’t have any doubt that was exactly what it had been. An interrogation by some secret government agency that wanted to know how much she knew about the murders of Lester Folsom and Will Waters.

Only that wasn’t what they’d questioned her about, was it? They’d seemed far more interested in what she knew about her angel. Her savior. That beautiful man who’d saved her.

Or had it all been some kind of a dream?

Maybe. Or maybe not. She couldn’t be sure, because she didn’t know anything for sure anymore. Except that there was someone walking toward her now, along the sand. Walking at a brisk but unhurried pace. She blinked, but her eyes were so unfocused that it was as if she were peering through a dirty window. She squinted, thought she saw a baby-blue car on the side of the road, some distance beyond him, then shifted her focus right back to him again. Yes, him. Definitely male, tall. And as he drew nearer there was something …

It was him!

She scrambled to her feet, forgetting all about the lingering effects of whatever dope they’d used to season her food. Unconsciously, she pushed one hand through her hair, even as she backed up a step, wobbled, then caught her balance again. Her brain was still foggy, her equilibrium off-kilter. Should she stand there, waiting, or run away? She didn’t know whether she was afraid of this guy or not. She didn’t know anything about him, except that he’d been leaning over her after she’d been shot down on the street outside Studio Three. And that she’d felt as if she knew him from somewhere. And that it had seemed as if he had … helped her. Healed her. Saved her.

On the one hand, if he’d helped her then, maybe he wanted to help her now, too.

On the other, if he were involved in any of that violence that had unfolded back there last night—God, had it only been last night?—then she wanted no part of him.

He stopped walking, maybe sensing her distress as she stood there with one hand trying to hold her wild tangles of hair to the back of her head and the other arm wrapped around her own waist, as if she could somehow protect her vital organs simply by covering them with a forearm.

He wore a tan, short-sleeved shirt with the top several buttons undone, khaki trousers, rolled up a little, and his feet were bare and sinking into the sand. Bare feet. That made him seem less scary, somehow.

“It’s all right, Lucy. It’s me. I’m the one who helped you, after—”

“I remember.”

He tipped his head to one side. “You look as if you’ve had a rough night.”

She blinked. “Rough? I witnessed a double execution, ran for my life, was shot in the back and somehow yanked from the brink of death by whatever magic it is you wield,” she said, and the words came pouring out, faster and faster. “Then I was kidnapped, drugged, held prisoner, questioned, drugged again. And now I wake up in the middle of nowhere in clothes that aren’t my own, and I don’t even have my purse or a hairbrush or—” Her throat closed off and her face pulled itself into an embarrassing grimace as tears strained to break through whatever invisible barrier had held them back so far.

And then they escaped, just as her knees weakened and her entire body went lax, as if there was simply no more fight left in her. She sank to her knees in the warming sand, her head falling forward.

But before she could collapse entirely, he was there. He caught her beneath the shoulders, his arms powerful and strong, holding her upright, and then … And then he pulled her gently to her feet and closer to him. So close that her body rested against his warm, solid chest. So close that she could inhale him, feel him all around her.

“You’re freezing,” he muttered into her hair, and those iron arms tightened just a little to hold her against his warmth. Just enough. She absorbed his heat and his strength as if he were feeding her very soul. And maybe he was. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Lucy. I have you now. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again, I promise.”

She shook her head against his chest. “Who are you, that you should even care?”

“What the hell did they do to you?” His voice wavered a little as he dodged her question. “How did you escape?”

“I di-di-didn’t,” she managed in between chest-wrenching sobs.

“I’ll ask you to explain that … but later. I think right now you need a warm, soft bed and a decent meal.”

“I need to go home.” She lifted her head and stared up into his eyes, ashamed that her own were probably pleading and needy. And yet, she couldn’t help it. “I just want to go home.”

“I know. I know you do.” He scooped her up, right off her feet, and he carried her across the sand, away from the sea, as gulls cried and swooped overhead. The sounds of the waves washing over the shore grew fainter, and soon they were approaching his car. A shiny car, pale blue with a white convertible top that was currently up, not down. Probably one of those new versions of an old classic. He set her on the white leather seat as carefully as if she were an injured dove, even leaned over to fasten her seat belt for her. And then he got behind the wheel and pulled away.

Yes, she thought, as she drifted to sleep in the comfort of his car, he was definitely a good guy. He was going to take her home. She rested her head against the big soft seat, closed her eyes and basked in the warm air that was blowing from the car’s heater. Thank God.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Soon she would be safe and sound in her own bed again. And then she would try to figure out what on earth all this was about. Not that she even cared. None of it had anything to do with her. And it was all fairly ludicrous, as far as she could see. Vampires and secret agents and tell-all books and public executions. Drugging and questioning and cloak-and-dagger nonsense. None of it concerned her, other than to make her think a letter to the president was in order, and maybe a change of party affiliation soon, if this was the way her side wanted to run the world. Assassinating senile old men with vivid imaginations in the name of “national security” seemed beyond the pale, frankly.

And yet, something very remarkable had happened to her. There was no doubt in her mind that she had been shot and lying in a pool of her own blood on that Manhattan sidewalk. And then that man … this man …

She opened her eyes slightly and looked at him, behind the wheel of the blue car. He was a beautiful man. He had skin that was so flawless he almost seemed like a figure in a wax museum—the kind that looked just like the real person except for being perfect. That was how he looked. Perfect. And not just his skin, but his hair, which was shiny and appeared to be made out of strands of silk, in shades of honey and caramel and gold, one color blending into the next. And his eyes were that way, too. Vivid, electric blue, with a very fine black outline around the irises, and some kind of mysterious backlighting thing going on behind them. Or there had been when he’d been leaning over her on the sidewalk with his hands on her chest. Not pressing, to stanch the flow of blood. No. Not pumping, as if he’d been attempting CPR. He hadn’t been pushing against her. It was more like he’d been pushing something into her. Out of him and into her.

And there had been that glow from his hands and from his eyes.

God, he was unearthly. And so very beautiful.

She remembered that there’d been a woman with him, a blonde who’d hustled him away. And she’d been gorgeous, too, in the fleeting glimpse Lucy had of her.

He looked her way, then looked again as he caught her perusal of him. She was too tired, her brain still too numb from all the chemicals swimming through it, to be embarrassed at being caught. Still, she thought she ought to say something.

“I don’t even know your name.” It was better than nothing.

“It’s James. James Poe. Although my sister refuses to call me anything but J.W.”

“Your sister?” Ridiculous that she felt such a silly spark of hope that maybe he wasn’t romantically involved with the gorgeous blonde after all. It wasn’t as if she herself would ever see him again once he dropped her off at the bus station or airport or wherever it was he had in mind to dump her.

“Brigit. She was there, too, when … everything happened.”

“Oh.”

“We’re twins, you know.”

That made her smile a little. “Twins. That must be amazing. To have someone that close to you, who knows you that well.”

“It’s wonderful. And it’s horrible. Depends on the day.”

She breathed and relaxed. “I think you saved my life on that sidewalk, James.”

His face seemed to tense a little, and she thought he was trying to decide how to answer her. Finally he just said, “You should really get some sleep. We’ve got a bit of a drive.”

“But … you realize I need to know, right? I don’t give a damn about any of the rest of this. But what happened there on that sidewalk—when you put your hands on me—that I need to know.”