Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(40)

Mary sat in a room hewn out of rock. Intricate carvings, gilded with silver, covered every inch of the walls. The carvings flowed and looped together in never-ending spirals. On one wall two stylized and graceful, inhuman figures reached out to each other. Where they touched their hands melded together.

Michael recognized the room. This was where they had died their first deaths and left their original home forever.

Mary’s mental self-image was dressed as she was in the physical realm, in jeans and T-shirt. Her tangled hair, held back in a lopsided braid, looked dull and lifeless. She curled over her knees, head bent.

He looked down at himself. He, too, had automatically replicated his own physical appearance down to his gun, which was nothing more than a useless image in this place. He walked over to kneel in front of her.

This close he could see that her skin was as transparent as paper. She glowed like a Japanese lantern. The force of her emotion beat against his skin. He put a hand on her shoulder and despite the burning pain that shot through his fingers he gripped the slender bone and muscle in an unbreakable hold.

“Mary,” he said again. He projected the full force of his urgency through the touch of his hand.

She lifted her head. Her eyes shone from within. She uncurled her body.

A jagged cut slashed down the front of her torso. It bled an ectoplasmic light. In her hands she cradled a crystal goblet etched with an inscription in a language that Earth had never seen. He recognized that goblet from ages past when he, along with a group of seven others, had drunk poisoned wine in one last deadly communion.

His breath caught. He reached out and touched the goblet’s rim with a finger. She had remembered and re-created it with perfection, down to the slight nick on the bottom of the stem.

Neither he nor Astra had expected her to be capable of anything like this. They had always assumed that if they found her again, retrieving her memories would be a slow and challenging process that might encompass lifetimes. Instead she was retrieving her memories all on her own by the side of a road.

He touched her cheek. It was just as petal soft to his senses as it had been when he had physically touched her the first time.

“Where are we?” she said. She sounded dazed. “How did we get here?”

The question jarred him. He asked carefully, “Where do you think we are?”

She gestured with a listless hand and bent her gaze down to the goblet. “I’ve been dreaming of this place my whole life,” she said. “I never imagined that these creatures might be real. They were so alien and beautiful.”

“Yes,” he said. He was uneasy with this new, foreign desire to be gentle, but he worked to keep his voice quiet as he knelt beside her. “We were.”

They had been creatures of fire and light, a race of beings forever mated, each one having a twin of essential contrast and compatibility, yin and yang, a harmonic completion of universal balance.

She frowned and rubbed her forehead with the back of one hand. “You were one of them?”

“Yes.” He stroked her tangled hair. “We had to leave our physical bodies behind in order to come here to this world. We’re born to humans and we die like humans, and like humans, when we’re reborn we forget who we are. For a while. It’s actually a mercy, most of the time. It gives us a chance to rest in between awakenings.”

“This happened a very long time ago, didn’t it?” She stared at him, but he knew she wasn’t seeing him. “A long, long time.”

“Over six thousand years.”

Sometimes the humans who were native to Earth had helped in their battles. Corrupted fragments of the resulting stories had survived and been embellished over the millennia. One of the most famous and inaccurate was the story of Satan’s fall from heaven and the group of rebellious angels that had followed him.

They were no angels. They didn’t even make very good humans.

She whispered, “Do you remember it?”

He said, “I haven’t bothered to try recovering those first memories of Earth. I figured I would sometime if I needed to. But Astra remembers. She remembers everything. She has had to, in order to help the others of us remember.”

She shivered. “How could she bear to do that?”

He had often wondered that, how Astra could stand to remember every minute of their unending exile. “I don’t know. Maybe she can because she must.”

“There were seven in my dream,” she said. The goblet image her mind had manufactured melted away with the change in her attention. She leaned forward to grip his arms. “Where are the others? You haven’t talked about them.”

“They’re gone,” he said in a flat voice. He hated to witness the fresh horror and grief on her face. “There are only four of us left—you and I, Astra and the criminal. The Deceiver. He destroyed the others. And you’ve been missing for so goddamn long—”

Her body stiffened and her gaze snapped into a sharp blue focus, locking with his. “Wait. You think I’m one of you, that I belong in your group?”

His gut clenched, and he went to red alert. Carefully he took her by the shoulders. “Don’t you see that’s why you keep dreaming of this place?”

Her body arced away from his touch. “Let me go. You’re wrong. This is a mistake. I’m not one of you. I can’t be one of you.”