Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(57)

“Very little of this is.” He snapped a piece of his cleaned gun back into place.

“Yes. Well.” She was grateful he had created a physical separation between them, yet unsettled as well.

Was it her human self that felt the urge to sink her fingers into his flesh so deep she could never let go again? Or was it her alien, earliest self that whispered in the crevices of her soul that he was the part of her that had been missing for so long? She felt as though a stranger had slumbered deep in the subterranean recesses of her mind and was now finally coming awake. That stranger had impulses and motivations she didn’t fully understand or trust.

There you are, she had said to his radiant form upon waking up. She had felt such unutterable relief, such incredulity and joy.

But there was the weight of what lay behind them, and between them.

So much, so much.

She slipped into the chair and looked away from his pewter gaze, trying to concentrate on what she should tell him. He needed to know only so much, and then no more.

“About my last life. I was a member of a wealthy family. We were Muslim and we lived in a large Mediterranean port city. I’m not sure where, maybe Constantinople. I guess it could have been Cairo. Anyway, my father was not only powerful but he was progressive, and I was loved and educated quite well. Earlier, before we had stopped at the gas station, I had dreamed of the best of my teachers from that time. He was the one who taught me about the Eastern dragons. That was how I knew to try calling the one I called. The Eastern dragons aren’t anything like the Western concept of dragons. They are very wise.”

“So I saw. You are certainly full of surprises.” He laid the gun aside.

“Yes, I’ve found that I’m full of surprises to me as well,” she said in a dry voice. She pulled the towel off of her head and tried to run her fingers through her damp, curling hair. “Anyway, in that life I was in the process of recovering some sense of my real identity through dreams and meditation. I knew about you, or at least I knew enough to start looking for you.” She dug the heels of her hands into tired, scratchy eyes. “We searched everywhere we could for clues. My father interviewed anyone who claimed to have any magical arts or esoteric knowledge. One morning someone tried to assassinate me.” Even though the dull ache was gone, she pressed a hand to her chest, hyperaware of the still, tense man beside her. “It was a sword.” She gestured down her own torso. “You saw the path where it cut.”

“Yes.”

“For anyone else it would have been a mortal wound. Maybe it would have been mortal for me as well. I know I tried to start healing myself, and the household was in a panic. My father had been interviewing some petitioners that morning. One of them claimed to be a magician and a physician. He was the Deceiver, but nobody knew that, nor would they have understood what that meant if they had.”

His fists pushed down on the tabletop. “And you would have been too injured to be sensitive to his energy signature, or unable to protect yourself if you had.”

“Yes.” She frowned. “I don’t know where that wonderful teacher of mine was that day. Maybe he had traveled back to his homeland or maybe he had died. In my dream he was elderly and seemed pretty frail. He was also wise, and an adept at psychic nuances. I think he would have known not to trust the Deceiver.”

“What happened?”

“My family was desperate for any chance to save me, so the Deceiver became my physician. God knows what he used to treat the wound.” A convulsive shudder shook through her body, and his gaze jerked to her. “One of my recurring dreams was about him sprinkling the wound with some kind of powder and probing at it with his fingers. I was disoriented from the drugs and the constant pain. I’m not sure how long that lasted. It felt like a long time. Weeks, maybe months. The understanding I got from the dragon’s healing was that he was somehow poisoning me.”

Michael flattened his hands on the table. His face was the color of old ivory. “If you had died, he would have lost you,” he said. “If you had healed, you might recognize him. He could have just destroyed you, of course, but then he couldn’t use you as a pawn, and besides you would have been no danger to him as long as you were so badly injured.”

“Yes.” She frowned. “There was something, too, that the dragon showed me about the poison. It was alchemical in nature. He wasn’t just keeping me from healing or dying. I think he was trying to turn me, or to break me in such a way that he could control me. And I think the whole thing was a setup, starting with the attack.”

Michael took a breath. “Why didn’t it work?”

“It might have worked eventually, but a—a friend realized the truth of what was happening. He helped me to die.” She looked away. “You see, by then I was too damaged for my body to heal. Besides, I was so tired from the pain I was ready to go.”

When the silence became prolonged, she looked back at Michael. He had closed his eyes, and he rubbed his temples again as though his head still pained him. “Who was this friend?”

When it came right down to it, she couldn’t tell him. “What difference does that make now?” she said. “After a while, somebody was perceptive enough to see that something had gone horribly wrong, and he was brave enough to help, that’s all. It happened a very long time ago.”

He shook his head. “You said that you had a teacher who would have known not to trust the Deceiver, but that everyone else did. They were your family and they loved you. They would have been too full of hope to kill you.”