Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(42)

He did neither. Instead he froze when she touched him. His big, tough body was so taut it felt like he might break.

At last her fingers curled around his clenched hand. It was so much bigger, so much more powerful, than hers. She put the lightest pressure on him, a silent request more than anything to ease the gun away from his head. He let her, until the nine-millimeter rested against his heavy, muscled thigh.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. She didn’t try to take the gun from him. Instead she stroked the back of his hand and his thick, corded wrist. “You’re all right. You’re safe.”

Reassuring him just as he had reassured her in her hallucination, her dream.

He opened his eyes and looked ahead at nothing. His eyes were bloodshot. He said, “I’m really tired.”

How crazy was this? Her heart twisted for him, this big, strange, dangerous man. “I know you are.”

They sat quietly, her hand resting on his wrist. Then his taut body relaxed. He took his hand out from under hers and holstered his gun. He said, “Have you figured out yet where you were?”

She was completely unprepared for the question.

Realization blasted her back against her door. Her hands went out in front of her. She grasped at the dashboard as her world reeled yet again. She gasped, “You were in my head. Just now. You were in my f**king head.”

He said nothing.

“You’ve had the same dreams,” she said. The words kept coming and coming, a deluge pouring out of her mouth. “You know that place. You think I’m one of that group. You think I’m one of you. Who do you think I am?”

* * *

EVEN THOUGH WE’RE trying to take care with each other, Michael thought, we’re still tearing each other’s barriers to pieces. He couldn’t find a way to slow down the revelations. Instead they came in an uncontrolled convulsion.

Without warning, his own burden of agony, which he had transformed to rage in order to survive each killing day of an interminable existence, welled to the surface. A deep groan broke out of him like the girders on an overstressed bridge.

“Michael?” she asked, searching his face.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t. He had imagined a thousand times or more various scenarios like this one. He had coached himself on how he would behave. None of it meant a goddamn thing.

He grabbed her and yanked her to him, bowing his head and shoulders over her slender body. Holding her so tight he felt some of her bones shift under the pressure, he put his face in her hair and shook so hard he thought he would fly apart from the force of it.

He said in a hoarse voice, “You were my mate. The other part of my soul. And you have been missing for over nine hundred years.”

A couple of heartbeats thudded between them. For a wonder, she didn’t struggle to free herself. He felt her arms encircle his waist in a light, tentative hold. She leaned into him, and for a moment he recalled with shining clarity what it was like to cradle his second half, to rest against a luminous being of grace and beauty.

For a moment to his parched and destitute soul it felt like he had come home, after wandering in a strange and hostile wilderness for such a long, long time.

After a moment she whispered, “I have no idea where to put that, on top of everything else.”

Despite her guarded and rational words, he felt her arm muscles tense, until she was holding him with as tight a hold as he held her. He rubbed his face in her hair, savoring every fleeting sensation.

“You don’t have to put it anywhere,” he forced himself to say. “It was millennia ago. We were quite literally different creatures then.”

Her head moved under his cheek. “You believe that.”

“Belief has nothing to do with it,” he said, his voice flat. Just as what he wanted had nothing to do with it. “It’s the truth. When the Deceiver escaped, there was only one way we could follow him. We had to leave our lives behind in order to travel to another dimension, or another universe, if you will.”

“That’s why we had to die. It was the only way to transform,” she muttered. She seemed to recoil from what she had just said, as if it sounded too real. She added quickly, “I mean that’s what happened in my dream.”

“We became hybrid creatures when we grafted on to Earth’s ecosystem,” he said. He forced himself to speak as clinically as possible. “In order to regain a physical existence, we had to become part of this world’s cycle of death and rebirth. We were forced to adapt and evolve beyond our origins. On top of that, you and I have survived something unprecedented. No other mated pair has been subjected to and survived nearly a thousand years of separation. We are, quite literally, not what we once were.”

Somehow he had to remember that. Somehow he had to come to believe it.

Chapter Fourteen

MARY HUDDLED AGAINST him, soaking in the illusion of strength and safety his big body offered as she considered everything that he had told her.

Of course the whole thing was outlandish, outrageous. It was also the only explanation she had ever encountered that explained everything she had experienced in her life.

Someone else knew of her dreams. Someone had walked inside her head, had looked at the bizarre images and said, Yes, I remember that too.

Damn, it made all the puzzle pieces fit. That didn’t mean she had to like it. She wasn’t sure she believed in it. It just . . . fit.