Forever (10 page)

“And though he had two wives, he never knew love in his original lifetime. No …” She felt him breathe a sigh across her cheek. “He didn’t even know the love of his son. He was foolish. He was focused on conquering the lands within his reach, thinking that was a value that was needed to make a life truly satisfying.” once againag.

“But what …”

“Shh,” he said against her ear. “Wait for it, angel. You’ll ruin the story.”

The truth was, his story was having a calming effect. Although how calm she could be with all that intense male power against her back was relative. But he was distracting her from her fear of him. And it occurred to her that this was probably precisely why he was doing this.

“Do you know what happens to great men of such hubris?” he asked her, his lips moving against the shell of her ear as he spoke.

“They fall,” she answered breathlessly.

“They fall,” he agreed. “They die in ignominious ways. They fail to be remembered for what they wanted to be remembered for. They become a punch line. Did you hear about the great pharaoh? Oh, yeah … didn’t he get mauled by a hippo?”

She didn’t want to laugh. At least she didn’t understand how she could possibly find humor at that moment. But the breathy laugh escaped her just the same.

“Life can be so bitterly amusing,” he said, and she could imagine the grim expression to match the tone of his voice. “But death can be ironic. As can rebirth.” His lips turned against her ear once more. “I was given a second chance I did not deserve. I was given a love for the ages that I did not deserve. I was given all of this, angel, and all I had to do was trade away ever knowing the finality of peaceful death. Instead I live forever, and die again and again and again. Each time more painful than the last … or so it seems. This time I was reborn in this body, my soul sharing this space with the man you know as Jackson Waverly. We have since become one in most ways. And we are called the king of all of our kind. We are pharaoh of all the Bodywalkers.”

It took a long minute after he stopped for her to grasp that he was dead serious about this claim.

“Okay, wait a minute. A pharaoh? A king? Jesus Christ, I would never have taken you for having a god complex,” she spat out. “This is preposterous!”

“This is real. As real as the strength and body pressed against your back.” He leaned forward into her to illustrate his point. “As real as the heat of life that burns inside of me. A heat that rises every single time we lay eyes on you.”

“Will you stop calling yourself a we?” she barked at him, trying to throw her temper at him in order to cover the liquid burn of arousal that splashed up against her every nerve ending just from the feel of him. “I swear to god I’m going to have them put a psych hold on you!”

“And what about you, Marissa? Are you crazy? Or did you really see what you saw only a little while ago? Did what you see have any human explanation? When you tell someone else about it, will they believe you or threaten you with a psych hold?”

Tears, inexplicable and wild, leapt into her eyes, her heart racing once again as she realized just how right he was. She wished, oh how she wished, she could unsee what had been seen. She wanted to go back. She wanted to once again be ignorant that these deadly things truly existed in their world. She knew without a doubt that ignorance was bliss in this instance.

“Menes,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he whispered back She nervously licked her lipsvg., again ending with a warm wash of breath over her that caused her nipples to tighten painfully against the wall she was still leaning on. “And Jackson,” he added. “Two souls, one body. We call ourselves Bodywalkers. And you do not remember this, but you were there the moment I was reborn.”

She scoffed … well, half a scoff because he chose that moment to run the knuckles of his hand over her cheek and the sensation was ridiculously electrifying.

Why?
Why
, she demanded of herself,
does his touch always seem so electrifying!
It was just a touch!

“I don’t know what you’re …”

“Dream. Remember the dream you had when a blast of energy sent me crashing into a windshield. You cried over my body—”

“Oh my god! Oh my god, please shut up! Let me go!” She had already been trembling from head to toe, but now she was shaking because she was so incredulous
and upset by his words … by the implication of his words. “It was just a dream! Just a—”

“If it were just a dream, then how would I know about it?” he asked, completely ignoring her request to be freed. “How would I know that you cried over me, dropping beautifully tender tears onto my face?”

Marissa’s chest ached, partly from the way her heart was racing and now also because the emotion she had felt from that dream came rushing back over her. She wanted to push it away. To run away. To be anywhere but there and feeling what she was being forced to feel.

“Please. Please,” she whispered. “Please stop.”

Then Jackson’s hands were on her shoulders, and she felt him stepping back half a step. The relief she should have felt didn’t come because her traitorous body whimpered like a child who’d just had its favorite teddy bear taken away. Jackson pulled her away from the wall, but only enough to turn her around, his hands sliding up, his thumbs touching the underside of her chin and tipping her head back so that she was coaxed to look up into his eyes.

“My people have lived among and within your people for centuries,” he said, the gentility of his voice reassuring and comforting in spite of her need to hold on to her panic and fear, because she knew that letting them go would mean acceptance and she did not, under any circumstances, want to accept what he was saying. “I will not claim we never harm anyone.”

“Ya think?” she bit out.

It made the right corner of his mouth curl into a smile that reached into the stunning blue of his eyes.

“Like any society we have our villainous element. If anyone can appreciate that it would be a psychiatrist who tries to ease the souls of officers who have become jaded and bitter when they see just how horrible humanity can get. But lawful Bodywalkers always ask for
permission to reside in the bodies of their prospective hosts. The day Jackson’s life was being stripped from him, as you shed tears for him, he was in the Ether, meeting me, accepting my proposal of a newer, longer lifetime and a position in it that will influence the well-being of thousands of people, be they original humans with a single soul or those of us who have been given another chance at life. You were witness to all that led to that. The battle. My death. Your grief. And we could not let any of you go out in the world with knowledge of us once againag., putting us at risk, so your minds were nudged into believing it was nothing more than a dream.”

And she knew the very dream he was talking about because it had been the realest thing she’d ever experienced in her sleeping life. She had seen him go flying through the air, crashing back first into a windshield and then … dying.

She was shaking her head in negation even as his thumb came up to stroke the width of her bottom lip, sending more of that electrical awareness through some very private nerves inside her. If she accepted what he said, accepted what her very own eyes had just seen, then maybe his touch truly was full of magic. The idea made her shiver, warring with her still-healthy fear of the man touching her.

“I will not hurt you,” he promised her in deep, gentling tones. “You mean too much to us, Marissa.”

The sentence took her breath away. And it wasn’t because his use of alternating personal pronouns was disturbing to her. Well, it was, but that wasn’t what she was reacting to. Was he implying that he had feelings for her? Was she excited by that insane thought? There were thousands of reasons why she shouldn’t entertain or encourage something like that, but what she had witnessed him do to that other person was really all she should need.

So why was her heart leaping with excitement?

“I want to tell you you’re insane. I want to say you are delusional and hallucinatory. Hell, I want to say that about myself. But I know this isn’t a dream. I know what you are capable of is not normal or human.”

“On the contrary,” he argued quietly. “It was the most basic act of humanity you will ever see. A being with good morals and conscience eradicating one without. He was from a sect of Bodywalkers called the Templars. Somehow he must have discovered that we are Menes, the leader of the Politic Bodywalkers. The lawful ones. He was an assassin bent on destroying me, hoping that my death will give them an advantage in the war we fight against his kind. If he had succeeded in killing me Jackson would be dead, and I would have returned to the Ether, trapped there for another hundred years.”

“Why a hundred years?” she asked. Of all the things she should be asking … questioning … it seemed to be the safest choice.

“It is as the gods decide, Marissa. We are powerful as a species, but we are not omnipotent. Far from it. I am not a god,” he said as he gently brushed her hair back with his fingertips. How, she wondered, could a touch be so comforting and disturbing at the same time?

“I don’t want to believe anything you are saying,” she confessed to him fiercely. “I want to be a thousand miles from here and I want to wish I had never laid eyes on you, Jackson Waverly … or … Menes. Whoever you are! I just want you to let me go. Are you going to let me go? Now that I know this incredible secret, are you going to let me go or … or do you have to d-do something to make me not remember any of this?”

“It cannot be done twice, Marissa. The human brain is too fragile to be manipulated in such ways too often.
And yes, I would set you free and I would trust you to keep your countenance.”

“I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming,” she said wryly.

“But,” he obliged her, “I believe you would not be saf in the first place. ie unless you were under my protection from now on, Marissa. The creature that escaped has seen you. He will report to his masters about this battle, and part of that report will include you. They will assume you”—he paused with difficulty—“are of importance to me. If I let you go, they would seek you out and try to find a way to use you against me. Whether as a bargaining chip or as a corpse meant to shatter my calm, they will see to it your value is used for their benefit.”

“So you mean just because I was standing next to you I’m going to be a target for the rest of my life?” She sounded angry now, and maybe that was a good thing. She desperately wanted to feel something else other than fear or … or …

“No. Because I protected you. Because I reacted emotionally to you possibly being harmed. That is how they know you mean something to me.” He was touching her lips again, looking at them as though
he
wanted to use her for his benefit. And the thought made frissons of heat slip through every last vessel in her body. “But I will not let anyone hurt you, Marissa. I promise you that.”

“You can’t. You can’t promise me anything of the kind! You can’t be there every second of every day! And I don’t want you there every second of every day!” She tried to pull away, to back off from him, but he followed her until she once again found herself trapped between him and the wall. “Please,” she breathed, not knowing what else she could say or do. She was completely at a loss as to how to handle this situation. All of her training and professional experience meant absolutely nothing because
things like this did not happen.
All her training and education told her was that she must have gone right off the deep end. She must have suffered a psychotic break along with the full boat of hallucinations and denial because it felt pretty damn real and she felt pretty damn sane.

“Please? Are you begging me to protect you or are you begging me to watch you die?”

“Stop. Stop saying things like that! Do you have any idea how crazy this all sounds? Jackson, you aren’t an Egyptian pharaoh! You aren’t a body snatcher o-or anything else. You’re a cop. A really good cop with a really good heart and you have what it takes to go really far in the department i-if you would just …”

“Is that how you think of me?” he asked, sounding genuinely pleased to hear her assessment of him. “Isn’t that funny? I always thought you didn’t think I could cut a lifetime career in the SPD.” A short, rough laugh popped out of him. “How strange. All I’ve ever wanted was your good opinion, Marissa. And now here you are giving it to me … but only so long as I deny the truth of who and what I am. Only so long as I allow you to deny it because you aren’t equipped to deal with the understanding that there are more things in heaven and earth than you have ever conceived of before this. You approve of me only if I am the sum of your ideas of who I am or should be.”

Marissa’s breath caught in the back of her throat at the backhanded accusation that she was being close-minded. He couldn’t have known that it was the one thing she couldn’t bear feeling. The idea that she was being intolerant of another human being …

Human being.

She didn’t know why she reached out to touch him. All she had tried to do since that horrible fight had ended was try to get away, pu autocraticag.sh away, repel and resist. But now she reached to touch him, her fingertip resting
shakily against his chest and then, a moment later her palm followed to press against his bare skin.

There. There it was. A powerful, steady heartbeat.

“A single heart … two souls. Human in almost every way, Marissa. Human and
more
,” he said as though he could read her mind. Hell, for all she knew he
was
reading her mind. Unable to check the impulse, she let her eyes drop down the length of his torso. Naked as he was he was completely exposed to any inspection she wanted to subject him to. But the minute she laid eyes on his sex she whipped her gaze back up. Oh yeah, he sure seemed human to her. And he was definitely
more
!

“I want to believe you. I-I have to believe you because if I don’t it means I’ve lost hold of reality. And at the same time everything inside me is screaming at me to push it all away. To shut it all away, because if I accept this craziness …”