Dark Angel; The Chosen; Soulmate (43 page)

“Oh, boy.” Paul's breath came out and he shifted on the desk. He bowed his head, then lifted it, looking for a pencil. “Okay, I have to admit, I'm lost. Let's just go back to the beginning here. You feel that somebody is after you, and that he's tried to kill you before? Some old boyfriend who's stalking you, maybe?”

“No. He hasn't tried to kill me. He
has
killed me.”

“He has killed you.” Paul bit his pencil. He muttered, “I should have known better than to have started this. I don't believe in hypnosis anyway.”

“And he's going to do it again. I'll die before my seventeenth birthday. It's my punishment for loving him. It always happens that way.”

“Right. Okay. Okay, let's try something
really
basic here…. Does this mystery guy have a name?”

Hannah lifted a hand and let it drop. “When?” she whispered.

“What?”

“When?”

“When what? What?” Paul shook his head. “Oh, hell—”

Hannah spoke precisely. “He's used different names at different times. He's had—hundreds, I guess. But I think of him as Thierry. Thierry Descouedres. Because that's the one he's used for the last couple of lifetimes.”

There was a long silence. Then Paul said, “The last couple of…?”

“Lifetimes. It may still be his name now. The last time I saw him he said he wouldn't bother to change it anymore. He wouldn't bother to hide any longer.”

Paul said, “Oh, God.” He stood, walked to the window, and put his head in his hands. Then he turned back to Hannah. “Are we talking about… I mean, tell me we're not talking about…” He paused and then his voice came out soft and boneless. “The Big R? You know…” He winced. “Reincarnation?”

A long silence.

Then Hannah heard her own voice say flatly, “He hasn't been reincarnated.”

“Oh.” Paul's breath came out in relief. “Well, thank God. You had me scared there for a minute.”

“He's been alive all this time,” Hannah said. “He isn't human, you know.”

Thierry knelt by the window, careful not to make a noise or disturb the dry earth beneath him. It was a skill so familiar to his body that he might have been born with it. Darkness was his native environment; he could melt into a shadow at an instant's notice or move more quietly than a stalking cat. But right now he was looking into the light.

He could see her. Just the curve of her shoulder and the spill of her hair, but he knew it was her.

Beside him, Lupe was crouched, her thin body human but quivering with animal alertness and tension. She whispered, softer than a breath, “All right?”

Thierry tore his gaze from that shoulder to look at her. Lupe's face was bruised, one eye almost closed, lower lip torn. But she was smiling. She'd stuck around Medicine Rock until Thierry had arrived, tailing the girl called Hannah Snow, making sure no harm came to her.

Thierry took Lupe's hand and kissed it.
You're an angel,
he told her, and made even less sound than she had in speaking because he didn't use his vocal chords at all. His voice was telepathic.
And you deserve a long vacation. My limo's at the tourist resort in Clearwater; take it to the airport at Billings.

“But—you're not planning to stay here alone, are you? You need backup, sir. If
she
comes—”

I can take care of things. I brought something to protect Hannah. Besides she won't do anything until she talks to me.

“But—”

Lupe, go.
His tone was gentle, but it was unmistakably not the urging of a friend anymore. It was the order of her liege lord, Thierry of the Night World, who was accustomed to being obeyed. Funny, Thierry thought, how you never realized
how
accustomed you were to being obeyed until somebody defied you. Now, he turned away from Lupe and looked through the cracks in the boarded-up window again.

And promptly forgot that Lupe existed. The girl on the couch had turned. He could see her face.

Shock coursed through him.

He had known it was her—but he hadn't known that it would
look
so much like her. Like the way she had looked the first time, the first time she had been born, the first time he had seen her. This was what he thought of as her true face, and though he'd seen various approximations of it through the years, he'd never seen
it
again. Until now.

This was the exact image of the girl he'd fallen in love with.

The same long, straight fair hair, like silk in different shades of wheat color, spilling over her shoulders. The same wide gray eyes that seemed full of light. The same steady expression, the same tender mouth, upper lip indenting the lower to give her a look of unintentional sensuality. The same fine bone structure, the high cheekbones and graceful line of jaw that made her a sculptor's dream.

The only thing that was different was the birthmark.

The psychic brand.

It was the color of watered wine held up to the light, of watermelon ice, of a pink tourmaline, the palest of gemstones. Blushing rose. Like one large petal, slantwise beneath her cheekbone. As if she'd laid a rose against her cheek for a moment and it had left its imprint on her flesh.

To Thierry, it was beautiful, because it was part of her. She'd worn it in every lifetime after the first. But at the same time the very sight of it made his throat clamp shut and his fists clench in helpless grief and fury—fury against himself. The mark was
his
shame, his punishment. And his penance was to watch her wear it in her innocence through the years.

He would pour out his blood on the dry Montana dirt right now if it would take the mark away. But nothing in either the Night World or the human world could do that—at least nothing he'd found in uncounted years of searching.

Oh, Goddess, he loved her.

He hadn't allowed himself to
feel
it for so long—because the feeling could drive him insane while he was away from her. But now it came over him in a flood that he couldn't have resisted if he'd tried. It made his heart pound and his body tremble. The sight of her lying there, warm and alive, separated from him by only a few flimsy boards and an equally flimsy human male…

He wanted her. He wanted to yank off the boards, step through the window, brush aside the red-haired man, and take her in his arms. He wanted to carry her off into the night, holding her close to his heart, to some secret place where nobody could ever find her to hurt her.

He didn't. He knew… from experience… that it didn't work. He'd done it once or twice, and he'd paid for it. She had hated him before she died.

He would never risk that again.

And so now, on this spring night near the turn of the millennium in the state of Montana in the United States of America, all Thierry could do was kneel outside a window and watch the newest incarnation of his only love.

He didn't realize at first, though, what his only love was actually doing. Lupe had told him that Hannah Snow was seeing a psychologist. But it was only now, listening to what was going on in the room that Thierry slowly realized exactly what Hannah and the psychologist were up to.

They were trying to recover her memories. Using hypnosis.
Breaking into her subconscious as if it were some bank vault.

It was dangerous.

Not just because the guy performing the hypnosis didn't seem to know what he was doing. But because Hannah's memory was a time-bomb, full of trauma for her and deadly knowledge for any human.

They shouldn't be doing this.

Every muscle in Thierry's body was tense. But there was no way he could stop it. He could only listen—and wait.

Paul repeated with slow resignation, “He's not human.”

“No. He's a Lord of the Night World. He's powerful… and evil,” Hannah whispered. “He's lived for thousands of years.” She added, almost absently, “
I'm
the one who's been reincarnated.”

“Oh, terrific. Well that's a twist.”

“You don't believe me?”

Paul seemed to suddenly remember that he was talking with a patient—and a hypnotized patient at that. “No, I—I mean, I don't know what to believe. If it's a fantasy, there's got to be something underneath it, some psychological reason for you to make it all up. And that's what we're looking for. What all this means to
you.
” He hesitated, then said with new determination, “Let's take you back to the first time you met this guy. Okay, I want you to relax in the light; you're feeling very good. And now I want you to go back through time,
just like turning back the pages of a book. In your mind, go back….”

Hannah's ordinary mind was intruding, waking up, overriding the dreamy part of her that had been answering Paul's questions. “Wait, I—I don't know if that's a good idea.”

“We can't figure this out until we find out what it all symbolizes; what it means to you.”

Hannah still didn't feel convinced, but she had the feeling she wasn't supposed to argue under hypnosis. Maybe it doesn't matter, though, she thought. I'm waking up now; I probably won't be
able
to go back.

“I want you to see yourself as fifteen years old, see yourself as fifteen. Go back to the time when you were fifteen. And now I want you to see yourself at twelve years old; go in your mind to the time when you are twelve. Now go farther back, see yourself at nine years old, at six years old, at three years old. Now go back and see yourself as a baby, as an infant. Feel very comfortable and see yourself as a tiny baby.”

Hannah couldn't help but listen. She
did
feel comfortable, and her mind did show her pictures as the years seemed to turn back. It was like watching a film of her life running backward, herself getting smaller and smaller, and in the end tiny and bald.

“And now,” the soothing, irresistible voice said, “I want you to go
farther
back. Back to the time before you were born. The time before you were born as Hannah Snow. You are floating
in the red light, you feel very relaxed, and you are going back, back… to the time when you
first
met this man you think of as Thierry. Whatever that time might be, go back. Go back to the first time.”

Hannah was being drawn down a tunnel.

She had no control and she was scared. It wasn't like the rumored near-death tunnel. It was red, with translucent, shining, pulsing walls—something like a womb. And she was being pulled or sucked through it at ever-increasing speed.

No,
she thought. But she couldn't say anything. It was all happening too fast and she couldn't make a sound.

“Back to the first time,” Paul intoned, and his words set up a sort of echo in Hannah's head, a whispering of many voices. As if a hundred Hannahs had all gotten together and murmured sibilantly, “The First Time. The First Time.”

“Go back… and you will begin to see pictures. You will see yourself, maybe in a strange place. Go back and see this.”

The First Time…

No, Hannah thought again. And something very deep inside her whimpered, “I don't want to see it.” But she was still being pulled through the soft red tunnel, faster and faster. She had a feeling of unimaginable distance being crossed. And then… she had a feeling of some threshold being reached.

The First Time.

She exploded into darkness, squirted out of the tunnel like a watermelon seed between wet fingers.

Silence. Dark. And then—a picture. It opened like a tiny leaf unfolding out of a seed, got bigger until it surrounded her. It was like a scene from a movie, except that it was all around her, she seemed to be floating in the middle of it.

“What do you see?” came Paul's voice softly from very far away.

“I see… me,” Hannah said. “It's me—it looks just like me. Except that I don't have a birthmark.” She was full of wonder.

“Where are you? What do you see yourself doing?”

“I don't know where I am.” Hannah was too amazed to be frightened now. It was so strange… she could see this better than any memory of her real life. The scene was incredibly detailed. At the same time, it was completely unfamiliar to her. “What I'm doing… I'm holding… something. A rock. And I'm doing something with it to a little tiny… something.” She sighed, defeated, then added, “I'm wearing
animal skins
! It's a sort of shirt and pants all made of skins. It's unbelievably… primitive. Paul, there's a cave behind me.”

“Sounds like you're
really
far back.” Paul's voice sounded in stark contrast to Hannah's wonder and excitement. He was clearly bored. Amused, resigned, but bored.

“And—there's a girl beside me and she looks like Chess. Like my best friend, Chess. She's got the same face, the same eyes. She's wearing skins, too… some kind of skin dress.”

“Yeah, and it has about the detail of most of the past-life regressions in this book,” Paul said wryly. Hannah could tell he
was flipping pages. “You're doing
something
to
something
with a rock. You're wearing
some kind
of skins. The book's full of descriptions like that. People who want to imagine themselves in the olden days, but who don't know the first thing about them,” he muttered to himself.

Hannah didn't wait for him to remember that he was talking to a hypnotized patient. “But you didn't tell me to
be
the person back then. You just told me to see it.”

“Huh? Oh. Okay, then,
be
that person.” He said it so casually.

Panic spurted through Hannah. “Wait—I…”

But it was happening. She was falling, dissolving, merging into the scene around her. She was becoming the girl in front of the cave.

The First Time…

Distantly, she heard her own voice whispering, “I'm holding a flint burin, a tool for drilling. I'm boring holes in the tooth of an arctic fox.”