Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(43)

She muttered, “I have to think.”

“You do that. In the meantime we’ve been sitting here like stationary targets on an open-air shooting range. We have got to move.” He gripped her by the shoulders and pushed her away.

For a moment her traitorous arms resisted letting go of him. Then her muscles loosened and they separated. She settled back into her seat, her gaze lingering on the lines of his face that had settled back into his earlier expression of grim endurance.

He started the car, checked behind them and pulled onto the road.

She huddled under his jacket and leaned her forehead against the cold glass of her window. She wasn’t ready to talk again so she pretended to fall asleep. She wasn’t ready to sleep and risk another dream, so she fought to stay awake. She labored under the burden of too much information that had come at her too fast. At the same time her need for answers had built up to such a desperate extent her mind kept racing on to the next question, and the next.

The physician in her realized that she wasn’t out of triage yet.

How she felt about Michael was a question she wasn’t ready to examine, so she set it aside. At first his withdrawal had pierced her with a strange hurt. Then she was grateful for it. If he was right—if he was right—and she was not quite human, she was still no longer that creature from her sacred poison dream.

When she had put her arms around Michael, for a few brief moments she might have felt that she held her mate in her arms, her essential twin, the missing piece of her soul. But that feeling, if she believed it—if she believed it—was an anachronism, like feeling phantom sensation from an amputated limb. It had to be. She knew nothing about him in this life, or what kind of man he had become.

She stretched and felt her companion’s attention snap to her. She remembered her first impression of him, that physically he was forgettable, nondescript, like a thousand other tough soldierlike men.

Now she couldn’t connect in the slightest way to that earlier impression. He was not conventionally handsome, but the lines of his face were stamped with intelligence, and he radiated forcefulness like the blast of heat from a volcano. The heavy muscles of his long, hard body rippled, sleek and sinuous, under his tanned skin.

Watching him was a hypnotic experience. Every movement he made flowed like water. If he stood in the middle of a crowd, her eyes would be instantly drawn to him. She was drawn to him—to the magic encased in his physical form, to his masculine scent. Something about his hands caused her body to pulse with awareness.

With a slow sense of incredulity she realized that she was sexually drawn to him. And they might not be twinned souls any longer, but she basked in the vitality of his strong presence.

Even though she already knew she had his attention, she said, “Michael.”

“Yes.” He was curt.

She wanted to touch him. She frowned at his profile. “Did you have a rough time recovering your memories?”

He stirred. “No, but my circumstance doesn’t compare with yours. I was eight when Astra found me. I was able to recover my memories over time. She both shielded and taught me as I grew up. It was a good thing she found me when I was so young. I was not, shall we say, headed down the right path. Whereas she and I are pretty sure this is the first time you’ve incarnated since you sustained your spirit injury. It may be the first time that you’ve been strong enough.”

The first time she’d been strong enough in over nine hundred years. Her breath whistled between her teeth. “That bad.”

“Yes,” he said, the word a quiet hiss. Then he continued, “This is all happening for you in a much more traumatic setting, as an adult in a dangerous situation. To be frank I’m amazed you’re as sane and intact as you are. We didn’t know what we would find when we recovered you. We had to be prepared for you to heal in stages—over lifetimes—and we didn’t dare hope for more than a chance to help you heal in this life as much as you could.”

“Talk about taking the long view,” she muttered. She stared at the night sky. The earlier clouds had dissipated. Now a hard edge limned the landscape as if it were cut from sapphires and diamonds. When the sun rose later, the jewels would melt in a gush of heat and light.

She was disturbed by how Michael talked about dying and being reborn with such apparent dispassion. It seemed as if a part of him didn’t connect with the miracle of being alive in the present.

She tried to look at it from his point of view, to consider the realities he had been forced to endure. The woman Astra had influenced him from an early age. Was that the elder she remembered from her dream? She wondered what kind of person Astra had become.

Then she realized she was falling into a thought pattern of acceptance. The realization made her stiffen. She said, “Do you think I’ll stop dreaming those images, if I accept what is happening?”

He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Who knows? Maybe after you’re healed you’ll go on to dream of other lives and other things.”

The words he used triggered something else.

“I was a healer,” she said. “Back then, in the first life. Wasn’t I?”

He paused as he shifted track with her. “Yes. It was one of the ways in which you and I balanced each other.”

Healer and warrior. Yin and yang. The two aspects would provide a sometimes tense balance. She chewed her lip as she considered. She wondered if they had managed their partnership without conflict.