Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(37)

“I know it’s asking a lot but try not to worry too much, at least about that,” he said. “As long as you are with me, I can infuse you with energy when you need it. When we get to Astra, she can heal you. You won’t die of that wound if we have anything to say about it. And we have a lot to say about it.”

“Astra,” she murmured. She was not just tired of being scared. She was also just plain tired. She leaned her head against her window. Astra, in Greek, meant star. “Do you know how I got injured in the first place?”

“What I know is that it happened a very long time ago,” he said. The caution had come back into his voice. “Lifetimes ago. It might be better if you tried to remember what happened for yourself.”

Somewhere along the line she had stopped being quite so terrified of him.

That might or might not be a good thing. She simply didn’t have the reserves to sustain such an exhausting emotion. Whether or not she believed anything he said was a different matter. She shelved that for another time when she could think about it in private. For now she suspended disbelief and tried to absorb what he chose to tell her.

“I went to visit the Grotto at Notre Dame University today,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

“Notre Dame is in South Bend, right?”

“Yes. Anyway, I—well, I prayed for help, and I had a vision,” she said. “This lady told me I had to remember who I was, and that I needed to find her. She said I needed to travel north. At the time I wondered if she might be the Virgin Mary.”

“Maybe she was,” Michael said, surprising her. “But from what you’re telling me, it sounds more likely that she was Astra.”

Wait—was he saying that the Virgin Mary could actually exist? She stared. Concepts were coming at her too fast. Was she intrigued or disappointed that her vision might not have been the Holy Virgin? She caught up with what he said. “Astra could do that, make some kind of bodiless visitation?”

“Astral projection? Yes. But it’s exhausting, especially across long distances. She would only do it in an emergency, and if she was safe enough to recover from it afterward. She’s too important to risk.”

“Astral . . . But . . . How would she know to find me?”

“You’ve been blazing like a beacon in the psychic landscape ever since this afternoon. She might have traced you that way. I focused on finding you in the physical realm. I couldn’t afford the time or the energy on an astral projection.” He shook his head, took one hand off the steering wheel and rubbed at his neck. “We’ve been afraid something like this would happen. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

Blazing like a beacon since this afternoon. She remembered the sense of something vital tearing open and shuddered.

“How long were you looking?” she breathed. Was he talking years?

“Lifetimes,” he said. The brief reply blasted away her assumptions and shook her to the core all over again. “We know our enemy has been looking for you too, but it’s been like you’ve been hidden behind a veil. We’ve gotten brief glimpses of you and your life, but we never got quite enough information to find you until today. Today it felt like you ripped past the veil yourself. My guess is that’s what reopened your spirit wound, because you couldn’t have been bleeding like this your entire life. If you had been born like this, you would have died in a matter of days.”

“That beacon you mentioned. Is that how those two men were able to find me? No,” she said, in answer to her own question. “That doesn’t make sense. My house had to have caught fire before I prayed in the Grotto. The blaze was too far along by the time I saw it on the news.”

“It could be that your house isn’t connected to this,” he said. “Maybe the fire is just a coincidence.”

She heard the lack of conviction in his voice, and she was not reassured. “You think it’s more likely that your enemy was closer to finding me than you two were?”

“Anything’s possible,” he replied. “Especially that.”

“Why burn down my house? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to wait until I got home? It’s not,” she said in a caustic voice, “like I’ve had a clue about what I’ve been doing, or what’s really going on.”

“We don’t have enough facts yet to answer that question. But if your house fire was arson, most fires are started to hide something. It could also have been set to draw you back home, although that reason on its own seems excessive when all someone would have to do is wait for you to return.”

“I saw the fire on the news. I had contacted the police and was starting to return home when those two men attacked.” She rubbed her shaking mouth. She whispered, “What they did was excessive. There was no reason for it. They didn’t have to kill those people. They were brutal because they liked it.”

“Our adversary is like that. He enjoys cruelty, and he feeds on pain.” His profile had turned harsh, the bones of his face slicing through the shadows thrown by the dashboard lights. “When he creates his tools, he destroys something essential in their souls. They can still function but they no longer have a moral code, or creativity or any real free will, or whatever it is that makes them human.”

She closed her eyes. What kind of creature had the power to destroy someone’s soul? It was appalling, too much. She had to give up on the puzzle for now. She thought she ought to give up on all of it and try to rest. Her body and soul, or spirit, as Michael had said, felt frayed almost to tatters. Even though she had fallen into that black pit earlier, it had only been for a couple of hours. Her dreams had been so restless and vivid she had gained no real refreshment from it.