Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(11)

Michael opened another bottle of Gatorade and drank it at a slower pace. After a minute, he said, “You stopped the bleeding and blocked the pain.”

“I stopped your bleeding and I blocked your pain.” Her tone was short. If he could be Mister Enigmatic, well then, she could be Miss Petulant.

He said slowly, “You’re angry about something.”

All she could hear in his voice was weariness and puzzlement. Her anger drained away and she felt ashamed of herself again.

She strove for a calmer, more conciliatory tone. “Sometimes you talk about things as though they are distant from you. I guess maybe you’ve had to do that. After the last couple of days, I think I can even understand it, but it still disturbs me. It was not a mistake for us to stop at the cabin for a rest.”

“Maybe you’re right.” He didn’t sound convinced.

She gave him a stern glance over the rim of the sunglasses. “We did the best we could with the information we had. It wasn’t a mistake for me to help you just now either. You were suffering, and I couldn’t stand the thought of doing nothing when I have the capacity to help. More than that, I need you to get better as fast as you can. I know I’m outmatched right now. If something else were to happen while you are incapacitated, I couldn’t handle it by myself. I haven’t recovered enough of my memories yet. I’m feeling stretched thin as it is.”

He mulled over that while he drank his Gatorade and shifted the pillow to a more comfortable spot. When next he spoke, he seemed to be making a non sequitur. “I didn’t care about anyone when I was a kid. Not my parents, not my so-called friends. Nothing seemed quite real.”

She frowned. “How did you and Astra meet?”

“She found me when I was eight. Even at that early age, I had already started to do crazier things in an effort to feel something other than anger.” He stretched his injured leg and winced. “Astra was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. She was real like nothing else had been. Of course now I understand why, and what that meant.”

She drove with care as she listened. Her heart ached as he spoke with such matter-of-fact calm. “Do you have any idea how many lives you’ve lived since—over the last nine hundred years?”

Since you killed me, and I stopped reincarnating. Those had been the first words that came to mind, but she couldn’t bear to say them. She might never be able to say them out loud. The memories were too raw. They lay between them like a shadow.

“A few. I connected with two others from our group, Ariel and Uriel, just before they were destroyed. Astra and I found each other in other lifetimes.” He looked out his window. “I haven’t bothered to try to recover much of those memories. They seemed pretty meaningless.”

She gripped the steering wheel. She tried to imagine how he had lived, how he must have recovered his sense of identity time and again, only to realize after searching that she wasn’t anywhere to be found, neither alive nor destroyed but lost somewhere in limbo. That all he could do was fight and wait—and wait—and wait. In all that time, the only person who had been anything like a kindred spirit, the only person he could rely on, had been Astra.

She took a deep breath. “Astra doesn’t trust me.”

“Probably not.” He finished the second bottle of Gatorade.

“I don’t blame her.” She glanced at him sideways. “As damaged as I was—and by the Deceiver, no less—I wouldn’t trust me either if I were her.”

“Don’t take it personally. Astra doesn’t trust anybody, not even me,” Michael said. He punched the pillow and eased his head onto it. “Maybe especially not me.”

“Why especially not you?” Her anger was quick to flare again on his behalf.

One corner of his mouth quirked up. “She had her reasons. Remember, she met and trained me when I was a young and budding criminal.”

She asked, “Do you trust her?”

“I trust her to do anything and everything she can to destroy the Deceiver. So yes, in a way I do. For certain things.”

She nodded although his eyes were closed. After a few minutes, she said in a soft voice, “I’m sorry I got mad.”

She thought he might have fallen asleep until he replied, “You weren’t really mad. You’ve just been scared and upset. You’ve had—”

“—a rough day,” she finished with him. Although it wasn’t really funny, they both chuckled and tension eased from the car. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

He laid his arm along the back of the seat and settled his hand, large and warm and heavy, at the nape of her neck. She startled at his touch and forced herself to relax. A complex set of emotions surged in reaction. Primary among them was a deep sense of comfort.

“I was there. I know what the dragon did for you,” he said. “You were injured, your spirit somehow bent, and now that’s gone. I trust you.”

She blinked. “I didn’t know I needed to hear that, but I did. Thank you. I trust you too. Michael?”

“Yeah.”

His voice was sleepy. She hated to say what she was going to say next, but it had been bothering her ever since she woke up.

“I think the Deceiver has to have ties to the police,” she said. “Don’t you? I can’t think of any other way those two drones could have tracked me to South Bend to try to kidnap me. Nobody knew where I was going when I left my house. Hell, even I didn’t know—most of what I did was on impulse. Maybe he could have found me through his abilities alone, but I don’t think they could have. Could they?” She hesitated, then finished, “You see, I’ve been worrying about this car. He had to have gotten a good look at it, along with its license plate.”