Forever (5 page)

She should have been offended. She should have slapped his face off in a single blow. But she hadn’t. She had been paralyzed as his heated suggestion caused her
to get weak and wet in all of a heartbeat. And she had been terrified that he would know it. He seemed to perceive a lot of things lately. Ever since …

She shook herself mentally and then forced herself to converse with him, trying to prove to herself that he didn’t rattle her in the least.

“I heard your sister is getting married,” she blurted out—an obvious stumble for conversation.

He smiled with one side of his mouth, his entire face changing from a guarded expression to one so warm that it peeled years away from him.

“Yes. To Vincent Marzak.”

The man who had “kidnapped” his sister three weeks ago. Only it had turned out to be just a very big misunderstanding. She didn’t know all the details … she just remembered Jackson apologizing to everyone for his behavior and then eating a lot of crow and taking a lot of shit from the brotherhood of the SPD. There was very little room for error in an environment like the one they worked in. If you made mistakes you paid for it. But Jackson had wit of Random House, Inc.n when hstood the weeks of ribbing and practical jokes far better than she would have expected from him, considering the short fuse he’d been displaying at the time of the incident.

But it was like … it was as if she were dealing with an entirely different man. As though the incident with his sister had flipped some kind of switch inside of him that made him recognize where he had been coming up short … or perhaps it finally forced him to reconcile with the recent loss he’d suffered.

Or so she had thought. But that move a few minutes ago of trying to throw her off balance and disturb her line of concern when he had called Sargent by Chico’s name, that was a classic avoidance maneuver. He was throwing up a smoke screen of sex and inappropriateness
to obscure her focus on the one thing he didn’t want to address.

Ahhh … so that was it
, she thought. The ultimatum he’d given her had been his way of trying to cut off her access into his mind and emotions! Why hadn’t she seen it before?

Because a little part of you wanted it to be genuine …

Marissa ignored that nagging little whisper in her subconscious. She couldn’t afford to indulge it. And honestly, Jackson couldn’t afford it either. He needed her to be far better at this game than he was. He didn’t know it … but he needed it.

“It must be a very big change in your relationship with her,” she observed.

“Not really.” He shrugged. “Vincent treats her like a queen.” For some reason she got the feeling she was missing an inside joke when he smiled rather mischievously. “Ram would rather take a bullet than let any harm come to her. She’s in very good hands.”

“Ram?” she queried.

He blinked, a small line of tension tautening up the length of his arms and his grip on the steering wheel.

“Nickname. I think it was football related or something.”

Okay now that was weird. Why did it feel like he was lying to her? If so, it was a really silly thing to lie about. What the hell did she care where the name came from? He could have said it was his alter ego’s name for all she cared. She’d heard stranger and weirder things in her career.

She decided to let it go. She told herself she was being oversensitive. After all, she had been on edge around him lately, waiting for his other promised shoe to drop. She’d been envisioning hundreds of scenarios, a thousand
ways to face the application of his promised assault on her, and it had made her hypervigilant.

“We’re here,” he said abruptly, throwing the SUV into park. Sargent went wild, pacing in the back of the car, whining at an earsplitting pitch and consistency.

Marissa fumbled for the door handle on her side, determined not to look at the lean, powerful line of his athletic body in uniform with the autocratic weight of his gun belt and vest lending a quintessential air of powerful masculinity. She would not allow herself to devolve into some kind of girlish flirt who giggled and twirled her hair as she checked out the cop’s hot bod. Nope. That was so not her.

Mostly, she amended as she watched the sexy cop clip a leash onto his dog, bring him out of the car and, with a deep-throated sound, command him to heel. She would have to be dead as thoughag. not to notice how truly fine a male specimen he was. Watching him hold all that frenetic canine energy in abeyance was practically primal. Man and beast, moving as one, a team of ultimate power and strength.

She looked over the crowd of people assembled. Cops, civilians, EMTs, and every other sort of official she could imagine had been drummed up for the search. Something like this was a big deal in such a small town, and the local news crew was there right on schedule. But what she was looking for was …

There. Loss. Abject horror dulled by the weight of ultimate shock. Tears of disbelief quivering in the lashes of a woman being comforted by nearly a half-dozen people. The mother. The phalanx of loved ones surrounding her was keeping her protected from the media. There was that at least. But those loved ones would eventually become obstacles, in one way or another, that she would end up in contention with unless this situation resolved in a quick and harmless manner.

“How long?” she heard Jackson ask the chief of police—a tall, autocratic man with salt-flecked black hair and a pair of serious dark eyes. Devlin Morris was a good chief. He was just the right mix of hardcore cop and clever, diplomatic politician. He was accessible to the policemen and -women who worked under him, revered by them in many respects because he was a legendary figure on the force. Just the other day she had heard a story about him her patient had dubbed “The Polka-Dot Dress Story.” It said something about how far you had made it in the world, when people referred to your adventures in work and in life with a title.

“Best guess is three hours. She sent the kid to his friend’s house to play about four p.m. She figured he might have stayed for supper when he didn’t come back after a couple of hours and says she tried to call him then. When she finally got seriously worried, she called the friend’s house and found out he’d never gotten there.”

“Three hours then,” Jackson agreed grimly after a glance at his watch. She looked at hers even though she already knew it was close to seven p.m. They would assume the last sighting was at the time of the incident … whether that incident was accidental or by nefarious means … and work all following courses of action outward from there. For her part, she was looking at a mother who was no doubt kicking herself and asking why she hadn’t called the friend’s house sooner, why she hadn’t walked him there herself, why she had ever let him out of her sight in the first place.

But Marissa was also there for another reason. She looked carefully at each and every face that was there and was not obviously an official. She would consider them later on if it came to it. For now, she was focusing on the lookie-lous and those seemingly close to the family. Especially those close to or part of the family.
Statistics showed that a high percentage of child disappearances were instigated by another family member. Uncle. Cousin. Brother. Mother.

Mother. Marissa hung back from introducing herself to the mother just yet. Instead she leaned back against the warmth of the SUV’s hood, the spring night coming in a little chillier than it had been. She had been in such an all-fired rush to jump into the car with Jackson that she had forgotten to grab her coat. Or her purse for that matter. But she wasn’t going to waste time examining the reasons why she had done that. She had bigger fish to fry.

The mother looked suitably distraught. There really was no right or wrong way for a parent to act after their child disappeared;
line-height:1.4em;
}
div.toc_. i, but there were certain things you wouldn’t expect to see in their behavior.

For instance, the mother pulling out a compact and checking herself before allowing a reporter to speak to her. She dabbed at her eyes, pulled out a lipstick, tugged at her curls in order to make them settle better and more attractively. Now, it was highly possible that these behaviors were rote, that in her shock she was resorting to motions and actions that were comforting and familiar. But there were also triggers for certain behaviors. The trigger here, she imagined, was the desire to look at her most appealing to anyone watching her. Now why would a mother care about that when her child was potentially lying dead in a ditch somewhere?

A cold dread clenched in Marissa’s stomach. She flicked her attention to Jackson, who had Sargent out of the car. The dog was twisting and turning around after having been given the scent he was supposed to search for. Jackson’s brow was drawn in a wrinkled wave of perplexity and concern. He kept tugging at Sargent, redirecting him, but the dog seemed to be lost. Either that
or he simply wasn’t as well-trained as he needed to be yet.

She found the latter very hard to believe. She had watched out of her window for three weeks solid as Jackson had run Sargent through drill after drill after drill, ending every one with triumphant praise and the genuine pleasure of a job well done. She moved closer to him.

“Jackson?” she hedged, not wanting to interfere. She didn’t even realize she had called him by his given name rather than “Officer Waverly” as she usually did.

“He’s not catching on,” Jackson said, the frown deepening.

“Jackson,” she said more softly. “The mother.”

That brought his attention sharply away from Sargent and up to her face. She couldn’t help but jerk in a short breath when she found herself the center of his attention and staring dead into his brilliant turquoise eyes. They were that bright tropical ocean blue that made you jealous of their beauty and the power behind them could either scare the bejeezus out of you or make you melt into a puddle of hormones.

She was trying hard to resist doing the latter. Very,
very
hard.

And it was strange, but she had never thought they were so sea-colored before. She had always thought they were more of a classic blue. How strange …

Jackson redirected Sargent without looking at him and the pup obediently sat at his heel. He released her from his penetrating regard for all of a second to steal a glance at the missing child’s mother. But then he was back t3.org/1999/xht

Kamenwati was slowly turning the pages of a prayer compendium. It was dead silent in the room, so the rasping sound of one page against another filled the otherwise vacant air. There was one other sound. Breathing. There was an inadequate touch of comfort in the sound of her breathing as she slept. Sleep being a subjective term.

At least she was alive, he kept telling himself. But Kamen could not rejoice overmuch in the understanding that it was a matter of semantics in Odjit’s case. Her host, Selena, who had given his mistress new and glorious life, was now Odjit’s warden. Her prison.

When he got his hands on that mortal who had dared to injure her those three long weeks ago, his blade nearly severing Selena’s head from her body as he had cut her throat, he was going to destroy him slowly, molecule by molecule, so he would know the same pain that Kamen was feeling and had been suffering from ever since Odjit had been wounded.

Her body was healed, finally. The process of drawing her away from the brink of death had been arduous and he had come close to failing in spite of her Bodywalker ability to heal rapidly.

Yet she lingered in a coma. Dead but alive. Alive yet
dead. It was an infuriating limbo and she didn’t deserve such an ignominious existence. Odjit was the most powerful and beautiful priestess of her time. She communed with the gods whenever she walked on this earth, providing the Templar Bodywalkers with a conduit to them. All she had ever done, all she had ever tried to do, was bring the Bodywalkers closer to their gods.

But Menes and his foul followers in the body Politic thwarted her efforts time and again, leading the so-called “lawful” Bodywalkers further and further from the only resource open to them that could perhaps, one day, bring a peaceful end to this interminable existence where they resurrected over and over and over.

Life had become so empty for him. He would do anything … anything at all to finally find a sense of peace and finality. And he believed with all his heart and soul that Odjit was the only way to do that. Only her fervent belief could bring them there.

He turned the page and found what he had been looking for. A translation of the Bodywalker prophecy they called the Resolution Prophecy.

All scholars and historians, on both sides of the civil rift, agreed that the falling into misguidance had already occurred. It was wha know how much he means toouhrdt had created the Bodywalker
species to begin with. Their elaborate mummification rituals, meant to bring their wealth and households into the afterlife with them and preserve them for their glorious rest had, in fact, ended up tethering their souls to the mortal world. They had suffered for angering the gods with their hubris, waiting in the Ether, numb and in limbo, for hundreds of years before they had evolved enough to learn that they could exit the mists by luring to them a living mortal on the cusp of death. The lesser mortal souls were honored and graced with the Bodywalkers’ powerful presences. They gave them new life and extraordinary power in trade for the dominant control of their mortal flesh. In essence, they paid for their near-immortality by moving to a submissive position and allowing the host full reign over all thoughts and actions.