When an entity began to probe at the corners of his mind with a subtle, delicate dexterity, he roused.
He met it head-on. When he recognized it, he managed to stay the daggerlike psychic lash he had almost flung in its direction.
He said, Astra.
Michael. Amusement colored Astra’s words. Always the stronghold.
Naturally, he told her. It’s what I do.
I’ve never once managed to get all the way inside your head, she mused. Or touch your dream images, not even when you were a child.
He said nothing. He remembered it well, how she had probed at him, trying to get in.
I wish I could figure out how you do that, she continued. It’s a hell of a talent. I can get into anyone else’s dreams, human or otherwise, even the Deceiver’s, although I do not like going there. But not you. You do dream, don’t you?
Of course I do. He pulled an image around him, the mental gesture like donning a cloak.
A great hall in an early Norman castle appeared, with a long scarred wooden table, a massive fireplace standing cold and empty and suits of armor displayed at various points around the room. The castle was from that first, strong memory he had recovered, their home in a previous life. The life that had taught him the simple, powerful lesson of happiness.
He had never let Astra see any other mental image but this public arena where he had once ruled as warlord. It served as both message and reminder to her.
After he had formed the great hall, he created the mental construct of his physical self. Soon afterward, Astra’s small dark, feminine shape appeared. She never appeared as an old woman in dream or psychic sendings. Instead, she wore the appearance of the young woman she had once been so long ago.
She looked so delicate and innocent, in the first blush of her youth, and that, he knew, was one of the most dangerous illusions anywhere in the world.
“What do you want?” he said, his tone truculent. He stalked over to the head of the table and sat. “I’m busy.”
“Are you? Busy doing what?” she asked. She studied him with large, expressive eyes. “I wouldn’t have been able to reach you if you hadn’t been sleeping. Why don’t you want to visit with me?”
She still probed along the edges of his awareness with delicate little touches, rather like a cat lapping at a bowl of cream. He had lost count of how many times he had endured it before. He had always been faintly repelled by the sensation.
“I was resting,” he snapped. “Which is entirely different from just sleep. Let’s get this over with. What do you want?”
She ignored that. “How long will it take for you to reach me?”
“We’ve stopped, so it will be a couple of days.” His foul temper prompted him to add, “If we come.”
“What?” The single word hit him like a slap. Fury suffused her features. “You would never seriously consider such a thing. Why would you make such a threat?”
“Because you’re pissing me off,” he said. “Seriously. I am sick to death of your constant questioning and testing. Now quit screwing around with me, and tell me what you really want. Are you trying—again—to see if I’ve been corrupted?”
Anger vibrated through her. “I have seen it happen.”
“I’m sure you have,” he said, regarding her with weariness.
“You of all people should know why I do the things I do!”
“Should I?” His voice turned hard. “There’s a huge difference between someone who refuses to be controlled by you, and someone who’s been corrupted by the Deceiver. I know you’ve always been freaked out that you can’t get inside my head. You think I’m not aware of how often you’ve wondered whether or not I might be too great a risk for you to handle? Get the fuck over it, Astra.”
“You forget your place,” she hissed. “How dare you speak that way TO ME.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything. My sense of autonomy doesn’t mean I’ve been corrupted, and I don’t want to play this game right now. Be straightforward for once in your life—if you can—or I swear Mary and I might just walk away, because I’ve earned better from you over the years, and I’ve had it.”
Silence fell. Underneath the illusion of imagery, her energy roiled with anger. He remained as still and obdurate as stone.
Finally her energy calmed, and she approached to sit at the table near his right hand. She asked, “I could sense when Mary stopped bleeding in the psychic realm. You don’t have the skill to heal something like that, and she couldn’t have healed herself. That wound was too severe. I want to know who healed her, and what happened to her.”
He drew on his reserves of patience. “She summoned one of the Eastern dragons. It was a very old, powerful one. It remembered her from a former life and looked on her kindly.”
Quick suspicion chilled her features. “She knew to call a dragon?”
He pinched his nose. “Mary is not faking. She’s not twisted, and she’s not controlled by anyone either. Once I found her, I haven’t left her alone for any discernable length of time. I watched when the dragon breathed fire on her. It burned her clean.” He paused then added slowly, “It was quite a miraculous sight, and I don’t say that lightly, because I’ve seen a hell of a lot.”
“Why have you stopped moving? You know he’s going to redouble his efforts to find you.”
He had to quell another upsurge of irritation. He told her what Mary had said earlier. “We made the best decision we could under the circumstances. We’ve had a complicated, dangerous and exhausting couple of days. Mary was attacked by two of his drones, and we’ve both had traumatic memories surface. Yes, stopping is a calculated risk, but it’s a necessary one, and I’ve taken every precaution.”
She searched his expression. “You’re sure?”
He knew that the closer they came to confronting their old enemy, the more paranoid she had to feel about the possibility of being deceived, but he thought she was beginning to be mollified and reassured. He replied, “Of course I’m sure. You know as well as I do that there are no guarantees, but I’ve set sentinels in place. If he gets close, we’ll be warned.”
“I don’t like it,” she muttered, her delicate brows drawing into a frown. She spread her hands on the table, running her fingers along the scars on its surface.
“You don’t have to like it,” he said, crossing his arms and propping his feet on the edge of the table. “You just have to live with it.”
Her mouth tightened briefly. “At least she’s healed—she’s really healed, and she knows who she is? That is so much more than we dared to hope.”
He smiled. It creased his lean face and lit up his eyes, an expression proud and savage at once. In a soft voice, like velvet sheathing steel, he agreed, “Yes, it is.”
Her glance lifted to his face and lingered on the smile as if it were a strange sight. “You said you both recovered traumatic memories. Do you know what happened to her, and how she got wounded? Were you there?”
The smile vanished, leaving only the savagery. “Yes.”
Her gaze dropped to her hands. After a moment, she said, “I see. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what—that you couldn’t help me remember? Don’t be,” he told her. “We didn’t recover anything of that lifetime because I couldn’t stand to remember. Now I know, and I needed to know. But I also wish I didn’t.”
She took a deep breath. “What happened?”
“I’m not going to talk about it,” he said. “I can’t speak for Mary, so you’d have to ask her what she’s willing to discuss. But my experience isn’t relevant to the present. That’s all you need to know.”
She nodded and stood. The illusion of the young woman wavered and grew thin. “I will see what I can do pinpoint his location,” she said. “Don’t take too long to rest.”
He said, “We
will see you soon.”
“Creator willing.” She faded.
He did not echo the sentiment. He doubted there was a God, but if there was, Michael had no use for him.
He had no reason to linger after Astra left but he did anyway. He let his gaze roam over the scene. The only items that were anachronistic to the great hall were the suits of armor on display. At one time or another he had worn each one. He had added them to the hall image over the years, as he had recovered memories of different lifetimes throughout the ages.
He walked toward the oldest sets of armor and let the memories from those lives unfold. The armor was from one of his earliest lifetimes, soon after the group’s arrival on earth. His earliest lives were also his most public. He had only fallen into the habit of stealth much later. This one; yes, he remembered this one well. It had been a time of almost constant war, but then so had most of his lives.
They’d had the Deceiver cornered and had laid siege to the city that sheltered him. The siege had been a long, filthy, brutal business. He remembered the blood and the dust and the sweltering, crowded life of the army.
Gabriel and Raphael had been there. In that lifetime some quirk of destiny had seen them born as identical twins, inseparable as always, vivid and reckless and brilliant as two firebrands. They had loved to switch places and pretend to be each other, but they could never fool anybody from their group. Their birth mother had named them Castor and Pollux.
They had burst into his pavilion late one night, laughing drunkenly over some stupid escapade. Now he couldn’t remember what they had done. He had met the twins just inside the flap, naked, with sword and knife in hand, while Mary had scowled from the pallet of furs where they had slept.
What had been her name? He frowned, unable to grasp it. Members of their group had fast become the stuff of legend, until the stories took on a life of their own. In that culture and time gods and demons mingled freely with kings and ordinary men. The group hadn’t needed to cloak their abilities, which was refreshing in retrospect.
He had fast earned the reputation of being an invincible warrior, gifted by the gods. Whatever her name had been, he smiled to remember Mary’s obstinacy. She had insisted on dogging his heel everywhere he went, no matter how many times he had shouted at her to stay behind in safety. It became well known throughout both armies that she was his only point of vulnerability.
Astra had asked, in equal parts amusement and uncertainty, whether or not he dreamed, and he did. But what he dreamed was none of her business nor was it anyone else’s, except perhaps for one other person. In all four realms, physically, psychically, spiritually and emotionally, he was a fortress. He might be destroyed but he would never be conquered.
Except, perhaps, by or through one other person.
The long-dead people from those days had said that to strike at his heel was to strike him down.
After all this time he supposed that it was still true.
Chapter Twenty-one
HUNGER WOKE MARY, an insistent, healthy ache.
She lay for a while, drifting sleepily through memory while she rested against Michael’s warm, hard body. He was so much bigger than she was. Sprawling together gave her a simple, animal sense of comfort and safety.
Earlier in the bathroom, he had been trapped in the past and going into shock. Then she had done something. Something important. In that moment, without any time to really think anything through, she sank her awareness into his body and poured her energy into him, just as he had done to her when he had found her. She willed his heart to return back to its normal rhythm and opened constricted pathways, and his body had obeyed. Now, as she thought back to what had happened, part of her wanted to shout in astonished triumph.
What she had done felt right and true, and familiar, as if she had done such a thing many times before. The realization opened other possibilities in her mind, along with barely glimpsed images of different healings for other injuries and illnesses.
She felt as though she had discovered a hidden door inside of herself. Opening that door led to a secret, golden chamber filled with such wondrous treasure, she could wander within its halls for years.
All the pieces of her past that she had recovered thus far pointed the way to further discoveries. She had not only been a fine healer in her first life, but she had learned valuable lessons in successive lives too. She needed to work hard to reclaim those lost skills.
At last she went into a full body stretch. Bruises and contusions throbbed, and she bit back a groan. Her body had stiffened while she slept.
When she opened her eyes, she sensed that time had changed.
The fire that had been crackling in the fireplace had died down, and the shadows in the cabin had shifted places. She thought of those shadows moving throughout the days, not quite dancing the same dance every time, infinitesimally shifting their path throughout the seasons, yet still completing a circle.
Michael watched her with a serious, contemplative expression, lying on his side, with his head propped in one hand. His short, dark hair was tousled, and the harsh lines on his face had eased. He looked as though he had been awake for some time.
She had the impulse to smile or say something, and then her gaze connected with his.
The cabin disappeared.
Everything disappeared as she looked at her mate.
The stern, inhuman lines of his strong face, the piercing light in his fierce eyes—every detail was as familiar and as necessary to her as her own hands. His energy mantled his masculine form like a midnight blue cloak and followed the lines of his high cheekbones and lean jaw like a royal collar. He was one of the most graceful of their people, and also one of the strongest and most deadly, and he was utterly devoted to her.
As she was to him.
And when he touched her, with his hands and his body, and all the passionate colors of his emotions, everything inside of her sang.
Then the cabin snapped back into place around her, and she stared at Michael in his human form. A few tiny flecks of white had begun to sprinkle the black hair at his temples, and crow’s-feet etched the weathered skin at the corners of his eyes. Lines bracketed his mouth. If he wasn’t forty, he was only a few years shy of it, and while physically he might appear to look like an ordinary man, for the first time, she truly saw the power sheathed inside his body.
His light-colored eyes regarded her, the expression on his lean face quizzical.
Her eyesight flickered from the physical to the psychic and back again, blending the two images.
Light-colored eyes like—moonstones set in a midnight blue cloak—his energy mantling him like a royal collar—etching his high, strong cheekbones and that thin, mobile mouth.
She jerked her gaze away, shaking, and stared in the direction of the table across the room.
He put a warm hand on her arm. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she croaked, and cleared her throat. “I think I just saw who you were.”
She heard the frown in his voice. “What do you mean?”
“I saw an image of you. Not you as you are, here in the present. Well, at least not at first.” Vaguely aware that she was babbling, she made an effort to control herself. “I think I saw a vision of what you looked like in that first life.”
But if that was real—and she was so far beyond questioning the reality of her own experiences, so it must be real—then it had been no vision at all, but a memory.
My God, what a magnificent creature he had been.
And still was.
His fingers tightened. She felt each individual one, pressing gently into her flesh. He controlled his own strength completely, not adding a single twinge of discomfort to her still healing body. Not only must he have absolute knowledge of his own capabilities, but she realized that he had studied and marked the position
of every one of her bruises. He had to have, to avoid them so completely.
Then he let her go. As she turned her gaze back to him, he rolled away from her and onto his feet, moving lightly like a dancer. “Come on,” he said. “We slept the day away, and we only have an hour or so of daylight left.”
Thrown off balance, she fumbled her way out from under the covers. The scuffed hardwood floor felt like a sheet of ice, and her toes curled in protest. Trying to minimize the discomfort, she stood on one foot. “What are we doing?”
“We’re going outside for target practice, remember?” He strode over to the table where he had left his T-shirt and socks, and he dressed swiftly, the bulky muscles of his arms and chest flexing as he drew the shirt over his head.
The cabin was too cold for half measures. Either she needed to get dressed or she needed to dive back under the covers. For a moment she wavered, but she knew that if she tried to go back to bed, he would only pull her out again bodily.
Shivering, she minced across the freezing floor to the dresser and dragged on a pair of socks. As predicted, they fit. Then she tried on the new jeans. They hung on her hips, but her other pair was still drying on the water heater, and these would do in a pinch. Finally she dove into the voluminous gray sweatshirt, hunting for the neck and armholes.
Her voice muffled by the thick material, she grumbled, “I would rather have some supper, you know.”
“Target practice first,” he told her. “Then I’ll cook you supper.”
That brightened her outlook on the near future considerably. She emerged from the depths of the sweatshirt with a smile. “You cook?”
“I cook.” He sat in the one of the chairs and laced on his boots.
“Do you by any chance cook omelets?” She hopped into her shoes.
One corner of his mouth lifted. “I do cook omelets. I cook other things too. It’s not haute cuisine, but it’s good enough.”