Twilight Prophecy

She shook her head. “Twins, he said. Mongrel twins. Crazy.”

“I see. And did he say who or where these twins are?”

“No. He had to go.” Lucy felt her heartbeat quicken, and her breath came a little faster. “And then someone shot him—” Her voice broke as her throat went too tight for words to fit through, and hot tears surfaced in her eyes.

“It’s all right, Lucy. It’s all right. You’re safe here,” the woman who sounded like Stevie said softly. Lucy wished she would sing. “Now I want you to think about what happened right after that terrible shooting. What did you do?”

Lucy kept her eyes closed, but the scalding tears slipped through anyway. “I ran.”

“And why did you run?”

“It’s what I always do.”

The woman was silent for a moment. “When have you had to run before, Lucy?”

But before Lucy could answer, the man spoke, his voice deep and low and rough, like sandpaper. “When she was a kid. Eleven, I think. On a dig with her archaeologist parents in the Northern Iraqi desert, by special arrangement with the government. Bandits raided the campsite by night, shot the entire team and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. She was found cowering in a sand dune, sole survivor. It’s all in her dossier.”

Lucy felt the woman’s hand covering hers. “That must have been awful for you.”

“It was the worst day of my life. Until today.”

“I’m very sorry, Lucy. And I’m sorry to have to make you relive this, too. But we’re nearly done. Now, I want to get back to what happened at the studio. You were in the greenroom, but you saw the shooting. How did you see it, when the greenroom is so far away from the soundstage?”

“I … I saw it on the TV.”

“I see. So you saw it happen on the TV in the greenroom, and then you ran.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“And then what happened?”

Lucy sniffled hard and wondered why she was spilling her guts this way. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “S-Someone told me to stop. He was dressed all in black, I think. And he had sunglasses. So I froze, and I tried to stay still, like he said, but I just … I just couldn’t. My legs just wouldn’t obey. And I ran. And he … he shot me. He shot me.”

“But you’re all right now,” the woman said.

“There was all this blood. It was everywhere. And I fell down, right in it. And it started to hurt. And then … and then he was there.”

“Who was?”

“I don’t know.” She frowned, her eyes still closed, as if to keep the memory inside. “He touched me, and I felt like I knew him. And he had these eyes …”

“And what did he do to you, Lucy?”

“Nothing. He just touched me.”

“How, Lucy? Where did he touch you?”

“My chest.” She lifted a hand to press it to her own sternum, where she was sure there had been a gaping, jagged hole before. But there was only soft fabric, not her own clothing, and though she explored with her fingers, she felt no sign of any injury beneath it. “And then the man who shot me and … other men who looked like him were pushing him away and putting me in the ambulance. And now I’m here.”

“But you don’t know his name?”

“No.”

“But you said you felt like you knew him?”

“And yet … not. You know?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Ask her what she felt when he was touching her,” the scarred man barked.

She didn’t like his voice, and she didn’t like him speaking as if she wasn’t even in the room. And she wanted to go home. To her cozy one-story house with the flower boxes in the windows and the neat sidewalk that was all bordered in flawless flower beds, just like the house itself. Her house was sunny and yellow and orderly and neat, and above everything else, it was safe.

Safe. Like the big maple tree at her grandpa’s house, when she used to go there as a child and play tag with her neighbors. The giant tree was always safe. She’d convinced herself that her home was the same way. Off-limits. No one could get to her there. No pain, no violence. Home was her haven.

“When the stranger put his hands on you, what did you feel?” asked the woman with the Stevie Nicks voice and Cruella de Vil hair—Lillian, Lucy remembered.

“I was terrified. I’d just been shot. At least … I thought I had. I was covered in blood, and it hurt, it really did. But I guess I must have … hallucinated it, or maybe I hurt myself when I fell down.”

“What did you feel physically?” the woman went on. “When the stranger put his hands on you?”

“Oh, that. Well … his hands felt … warm. And then hot. And it seemed like there was a light sort of … coming from them. And it filled every part of me. And for just a second, I thought I might be dying, and that he was an angel.”

“An angel,” the man said, nearly spitting the words.

“That’s an interesting thing to say.”

Lucy sighed. “I really want to go home now. I’m all right, aren’t I? I mean, I wasn’t shot after all, right?”

“Well, there are certainly no bullet holes in you now,” the woman said, sounding cheerful. And then she got up and joined the man, then spoke in a very, very soft whisper, “The pentothal is wearing off. Is there anything else you want, before …?”

“Ask her about her blood type. We tested her, came back positive for the antigen. I want to know if she knew.”

Why, Lucy wondered, did they think she couldn’t hear them?

But Lillian was returning to her bedside now. Lucy heard the woman’s footsteps on the floor tiles. Smelled the soap she used, too.

“Lucy, do you know if there’s anything … unusual about your blood type?”

“Yes, there is. It’s … very rare. Only a few people have it. It makes me bleed easily. And it’s hard to find a donor to match me, which is why I donate regularly and have my own supply in storage. But that’s at Binghamton General—and I keep some at Lourdes, too. That’s another reason why I was so afraid when I saw all that blood all over me.” She paused, opening her eyes now. “If it wasn’t my blood, whose was it?”

“We don’t know. Can you tell me any more about your blood ty—”

“But how can you not know? If someone else was shot on that sidewalk, how could you not—”

“Lucy, I’d like you to take a breath and calm yourself.” The woman put a soothing hand on Lucy’s forehead. “A lot of people were shot at that studio last night. Inside and outside. It was chaos. And I wasn’t there. I’m sure someone knows the answers to your questions, but it’s not me.”

Lucy sighed. “I want to go home.” She sat up in the bed and looked around the white room while waves of dizziness washed over her brain. “Where are my things?”

“Lucy, about your blood type,” Lillian said. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the Belladonna Antigen?”

Lucy blinked and met the woman’s eyes. Her head was beginning to feel clearer. “How do you know? I never told you what it’s called.”

“We want to know what you know about it.”

“What kind of a medical question is that?” Lucy narrowed her eyes, suddenly suspicious of this woman, who she’d assumed was a doctor or a shrink—or maybe a grief counselor, sent in to help her process what had happened.

“You want to know if I’m aware that I’m going to die young? I am. There’s no treatment, and there’s no cure. People with this antigen usually die in their thirties. And I’m in mine now, but so far I feel fine. No symptoms.”

“And what would those symptoms be?”

“You tell me, you’re the doctor.” Lucy watched the woman’s face and knew, just knew. “Or if you’re not, then I’d like to know who you are.”

“I am a doctor. And I work for the government,” Lillian said. “And I think we’re all through with your questioning now. You can relax. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“I don’t want to relax,” Lucy said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve told you everything I know.” She was suddenly terrified, and while she thought she might benefit by demanding her rights or a lawyer, she decided to wait until those things were truly necessary. She didn’t like conflict or confrontation, but she liked the unknown even less. And she had no idea who these people were or where she was being held. And it was feeling more and more as if she was … being held. She’d assumed she was in a hospital, but she wasn’t so sure anymore.

The woman crossed the room to where the scar-faced man waited near the door, and then they stepped through it, leaving her all alone.

Lucy got up and went to the door—the windowless door—as well. And as she did, a feeling of fear rippled up her spine, because she had a pretty good idea of what she was going to find when she got there.

She closed her hand around the doorknob and twisted, her heart in her throat—and then it sank to her feet when the knob didn’t budge an inch.

Locked.

She was being held by people who had drugged her and questioned her. And might even have shot her.

But then her hands rose to her chest, and she pulled the fabric away from her skin and looked down her neckline. The necklace she’d found inside the crazy author’s book was still hanging there, Kwan Yin looking serene and gentle. But there was no sign of any wound in her chest. Not a mark.

And yet she remembered it all so vividly. She’d felt that bullet tear through her.

God, she wondered, how could that be?

But she knew how. It was that man. That angel.

He’d healed her.

She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to him right then and there. “If you really are my guardian angel, please, come find me again. Save me again. I need to get out of this place. I want to go home.”

4

“Well? Where is she?” Rhiannon demanded.

James tipped his head to one side and met the eyes of the most powerful vampire he had ever known. Also the most beautiful. And the most dangerous. Rhiannon stood beneath a crystal chandelier in the foyer of the Long Island mansion that was her summer home, or one of them. She wore her usual choice of attire, a floor-length gown, with a slit up to her hip on one side and a neckline that plunged to her navel. Black satin that was almost as shiny as her endless raven hair, or the black panther, her beloved pet, that rubbed against her legs as she spoke.

“Good to see you, too, Rhiannon,” he said. “It’s been a while.” He glanced at the cat. “Hello, Pandora.”

Rhiannon made a dismissive sound like a set of air brakes releasing a brief spurt of excess pressure. “You walked away from us, J.W. Not the other way around. Don’t expect a warm welcome when you finally deign to honor us with your presence.”

“Rhiannon, he’s—” Brigit began.

“Where is the professor?” the arrogant one asked again, and this time her tone brooked no argument. No discussion.

“She got away,” Brigit said softly.

“She got away?”

“She was taken, actually.” Brigit lowered neither her head nor her eyes. She held the regal Rhiannon’s gaze firmly and strongly, and for just a moment James was amazed and impressed by his sister’s moxie. She’d grown up just as tough as everyone had known she would. And even though she’d been Rhiannon’s favorite, he hadn’t expected her to be able to stand up to, much less hold her own against, the most feared vampiress of them all. He could do so, always had. But that was because he didn’t particularly care whether or not he gained her elusive approval.

“Taken by whom?” Rhiannon asked, taking a step nearer, so the two women stood nearly nose-to-nose on the imported Italian marble floor. Black with swirls of silver. Pandora tensed, her sharp cat’s eyes watching every move, as her tail twitched.

“DPI,” Brigit said, not backing down a single inch. “Or that’s my best guess. There’s more going on here, Aunt Rhiannon. A lot more.”

“Such as?”

Leaning still closer, looking as if she was either going to kiss Rhiannon on the mouth or bite her nose off, Brigit said, her tone dangerously soft, “Why don’t you back up out of my face and I’ll tell you?”

Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed. “You’re treading on dangerous ground, Brigit.”

“Just like you taught me to do.”

Rhiannon’s scowl lasted a few more seemingly endless ticks of the clock. Pandora flattened her ears and a deep, soft growl emanated from her chest. And then, finally, Rhiannon rolled her eyes and paced away, almost gliding, despite the four-inch stiletto heels she wore. “Fine. Talk. Take your time about it, too. It’s not as if our entire race is at stake, after all.”

“Drama queen,” Brigit muttered.

Rhiannon whirled. “Excuse me?”

They stared at each other across the room for a long moment, and James tensed, wondering if the great Rhiannon, formerly known as Rianikki, the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh who never let anyone forget her rank, was going to try to annihilate his twin sister. He was about to step between the two women when Rhiannon smiled. It was a slow, gradual smile, but a smile nonetheless.

“You are extremely fortunate that I love you as I do, firecracker.”

“And I know it,” Brigit replied. But her own face and voice softened, as well. “All right, come sit. Here’s the deal.” Moving to the nearby sofa, the two sat down, and Brigit began recapping everything that had happened. Relaxing, the large cat curled up at Rhiannon’s feet and closed her eyes lazily.

James ignored them, for the most part. He hadn’t been home in a very long time, and while this was not his parents’ place, he had spent a large portion of his childhood here. “Aunt” Rhiannon had insisted on having a hand in raising him and Brigit. And he’d always been secretly glad of that, too, because while he, already adored by all, hadn’t needed the extra attention, his sister had thrived on it.

After all, to everyone else, she was the bad twin. Oh, no one ever said it that way. Not out loud. But she’d been born with the power of destruction, and she’d spent her entire life having to listen to her parents and every other role model in her life telling her that her power was bad. That it was dangerous and must be controlled, contained, kept on a tight leash. While he had been born with the power to heal, with everyone always oohing and ahhing over it, telling him how special he was, how someday he would do great things with his powers. How he was meant for something very special.

No one had ever blatantly compared the twins, called him the good one and her the bad one. But it was still the impression they’d both received from the adults in their lives. And it was an impression that ran deep. It had filled him with a perhaps unwarranted sense of pride and of goodness that had eventually led him to leave his people in search of meaning. While it had, he sensed, left his sister with a feeling of unworthiness. Or would have, if it hadn’t been for Rhiannon.

She alone praised Brigit’s ability as something special, something worthy, something good. She was constantly telling Brigit how there could be no creation without destruction. How goddesses of death were also goddesses of rebirth. How sacred her power was, how holy. And how James’s talent meant nothing without Brigit’s to balance it.

He’d never really believed any of that. He’d figured Aunt Rhi was probably just trying to make Brigit feel better, feel worthy. And he loved her for it. He’d never liked thinking that his sister’s feelings were hurt just because he was born with the gift of healing, even restoring life, and all she got was the ability to blow things up.

“Did the healing take?”

It was a beat before James realized the two-thousand-year-old vampiress was addressing him. “Yeah. I think so.”

“You think so?” she asked.

“I can’t be sure. They took her away before I had the chance to—”

Rhiannon was glaring at him, her full lips as thin as they could get, arms slowly crossing over her chest, forcing her breasts together.

He looked away, sighed. “Yes. It took.”

“Are you sure?”

He thought back, relived it all in his mind, and then got stuck in remembering those eyes. Those doe-brown eyes, and the fear and confusion in them when they’d opened up and stared so deeply into his.

I know you.

What the hell was up with that?

“J.W….” Rhiannon prompted.

“Yes.” He knew the light and the heat flowing from his hands had peaked, then just begun to ebb when he’d been forced away from her. “I’m sure. The professor was fine.”

“Was being the operative word,” Brigit said. “We can’t be sure of anything now that those bastards have her.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t an ordinary team of paramedics?” Rhiannon asked.

“Men in black were giving the orders. We both saw it.” Brigit glanced at James, who nodded in confirmation. “We’re going to have to plan and execute a rescue,” she said.

“What could the DPI want with her?” James asked, trying to force his focus to stay on the matter at hand.

Rhiannon leaned forward to stroke her panther. “They must know about the prophecy, and that it applies to us. Our race. The descendants of Utanapishtim. The tablet says our race will be no more. And believe me, nothing would make the DPI happier than that. They see us as a threat. They’ve been hoping to get the green light to wipe us out for as long as they’ve known of our existence.”

“Why haven’t they gotten it?” James asked.

Rhiannon leaned back on the sofa, which was as ostentatious as everything else in her homes. Red velvet, with gold braid and fringe. “There are a few leaders wise enough to know that war with our kind might not be easily won. By keeping our existence secret, they’ve managed to maintain a tense but fragile, and entirely unspoken, truce. Now, though …” She lowered her head with a sigh.

James had never seen Rhiannon this worried before, and it got his attention. He moved to the sofa and sat down beside her. “Now?” he prompted.

She lifted her head, looked him right in the eyes. “Now, thanks to Lester Folsom and his book, the entire world knows we exist.”

“The book was pulled.” Frowning, James shot a look at Brigit. “Isn’t that what Will Waters was saying in the intro? That the government had banned it, called a halt to the release, confiscated every copy before it ever hit the bookstores?”

“Yeah, J.W., but you’ve gotta know when the author of a banned book is taken out on national TV, the public will start turning over every rock to find out what the book had to say,” Brigit said.

“And I have no doubt there are copies somewhere. And there are certainly people who know what was in those pages. His publisher, for one,” Rhiannon added.

“No doubt the DPI has already absconded with every computer that ever came within reach of the manuscript,” she went on. “But that won’t stop word from spreading. No, this cat is thoroughly out of the proverbial bag.”

“We need to know what’s in that book,” James said softly.

Rhiannon nodded. “I agree. But we also need to keep our focus here. Our main goal has to be to prevent the foretold annihilation of our race. And to do that, we need to understand the parts of that clay tablet that were incomplete, the missing pieces. And the other clay tablet in our possession, the one we’ve kept for centuries, never quite sure why.”

“I’d forgotten about that. Legend has it that clay tablet will one day save our race,” James said, recalling the tales told to him over and over throughout his childhood. The legends of his race, how they began, and the story of the tablet that must be protected. “Where is it?”

“Damien has it,” Rhiannon said. “I’ll get it from him. The prophecy suggests that all of this so-called Armageddon is heavily dependent upon the involvement of two things.”

“Yeah,” Brigit muttered. “Us.”

“And him,” Rhiannon said.

James frowned. “Him? Him, who? You mean Utanapishtim?”

“Precisely.” Rhiannon rose from the sofa, paced across the room, then turned and paced back again. “So what Folsom wrote in that book, and what the government intends to do about it, and whether it becomes public knowledge—all of that is on the back burner. Our first goals are these—we have to find and rescue the professor, so that she can help us locate and translate the rest of that prophecy. And we have to enlist the help of the very first immortal. The Ancient One. The Flood Survivor. The father of our race. Utanapishtim.”

“How the hell are we going to do that?” James asked. “A séance?”

“Of course!” Brigit said. “Aunt Rhi was a priestess of Isis—”

“Not was, is. And that’s high priestess,” Rhiannon corrected.

“Yeah, yeah,” Brigit said, no doubt pissing Rhiannon off again, James thought. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you know how to contact the dead and all that shit, right? Right? So is that it? Are we going to have a séance?”

“Not exactly,” Rhiannon said. “We don’t need to speak to the dead if Utanapishtim is alive.”

“But he’s not,” Brigit said. “He’s been dead for more than five thousand years, Aunt Rhi.”

“Yes, well, that’s where your brother comes in.”

Rhiannon speared James with her eyes, even as he felt his own widen. “You can’t mean … you want me to—”

“Raise him, J.W.”

He shot off the sofa as if it had electrocuted him. “I can’t!” The panther’s head came up, and she looked irritated at being disturbed from her nap by his sudden movement.

“How do you know?” Rhiannon asked him.

“For the love of—how could I not know?”

Rhiannon shrugged, graceful, sexy. “I’ve seen you raise the dead, J.W. You’ve been doing it since you were born. You started with your own sister, stillborn, blue, no heartbeat, not a breath of air in her lungs.” Rhiannon moved closer, reaching out and grabbing James’s forefinger, enclosing it in her fist. “You took hold of her just like this,” she said. “And she breathed, J.W. She breathed. You healed her. You brought her back to life.”

“I know. I know. And yeah, I’ve been successful a few other times since then, but only when the subject has just died. Never with anyone who’s been dead for long.”

“But have you tried?” Rhiannon asked.

“What, restoring life to a rotting corpse? Yeah, yeah, that’s how I spend my Halloweens. Are you fucking crazy?”

“So you’ve never tried, then,” Brigit said. She was rising now, too, growing excited, he thought, at this impossible, insane notion.

“No, I’ve never tried.”

Rhiannon nodded. “We’ll start small, say with someone a week dead. And we’ll build from there. We’ll need to find corpses in various stages of decomposition, of course, and—”

“Shit.” James’s stomach convulsed. He took an involuntary step backward. “No. No, this is sick.”

“Call it what you will. It’s necessary,” Rhiannon said.

“It’s to save our race,” Brigit added.

“No way. No way in hell.” James was shaking his head slowly in dawning horror. “And it won’t work. And even if it did, Utanapishtim isn’t going to be in some stage of decomposition. He’d be dust by now.”

Rhiannon shrugged. “Dust, bones, rotted flesh, all just different phases of the same basic components. If you can do it with one, you can do it with the others.”

“You’re out of your mind, Rhiannon.”

She lifted her perfectly arched brows and sent him a look that told him he was getting close to the danger zone.

And then Brigit’s hand landed on his shoulder. “J.W…. James. You’ve spent your entire life asking yourself, and the universe, why you were born with this power. Maybe this is it. Your answer. Maybe this is why. To save your family. Your people. There’s not much that could be bigger, more important, than that.

Is there?”

He stared at her. And he could barely believe that he was letting her talk him into it. Because she had a point. He had always wondered why. He’d always known he had this power for a reason, a big reason, and he’d been searching for it all his life.

Maybe this was it. And if there was any chance it was, then he couldn’t very well turn his back on it, now could he?

He lowered his eyes, released all his breath at once, swallowed hard and whispered, “All right. All right, I’ll … I’m in.”

“Good.” He heard the smile in Rhiannon’s voice, felt his sister’s arms close around him in a relieved hug.

“We’re going to have to get out of the city,” Rhiannon announced, moving quickly toward the nearest window, her cat at her heels. “We need someplace with privacy for these experiments. We’ll leave as soon as possible.”

“But, Rhiannon,” James said, lifting his head. “What about Lucy Lanfair?”

“Lucy … oh, the professor? Obviously we’re going to have to take her with us. We’ll pick her up on the way.” She glanced out the window. “But not tonight. It’s nearly dawn. I must rest. I suggest you do the same.”

Lucy opened her eyes and felt an odd, moist breeze on her face. Almost as if she were outside. She’d been sleeping very soundly and wondered what on earth had awakened her. Something had. And she was nowhere near ready to get up, not after …

No, she wouldn’t think about that. She needed to pull up the covers, roll onto her other side and …

Where were the covers?

Wait, where was the mattress? The bed? All she felt was sand and very finely ground pebbles.

Her eyes popped open, and the first thing they focused on was the giant orange curve of the sun, just beginning to rise over a distant horizon. She was … outdoors. On the shore of the ocean. She was grasping handfuls of sand and shells in search of blankets.

Waves whispered soothing sounds as they whooshed up over the sand, then burbled back out again. The wind smelled like seaweed and brine. She brushed off her hand, rubbing it against her shirt, then paused, because she was wearing clothes. A pair of jeans that were a size too big, and a white button-down shirt. A man’s shirt, she thought. Sitting up, she pushed a hand through her hair, which felt vaguely like a rat’s nest, and tried to remember how she’d ended up here. The last thing she remembered …

They’d fed her. She had supposed that was a plus, even if the food was tepid and sticky, and almost certainly prepared by peeling back the plastic and nuking for five minutes on high. Meat loaf with gravy, soupy mashed potatoes, green beans that tasted the way she thought paint would taste and some kind of cherry dessert that was so tart it made her pucker. About two tablespoons of each, whether she needed it or not.

Famished, she’d wolfed the food down so fast there hadn’t been time to ponder the taste overly much. A blessing in itself.

Or not. Because she didn’t remember anything else. Nothing at all. Apparently they had tranquilized her with something. It hadn’t hit her with the potency of the first injection, in the ambulance, and it didn’t have her spilling her guts on any subject they broached, like the one they must have given her just before starting their interrogation. And she didn’t have any doubt that was exactly what it had been. An interrogation by some secret government agency that wanted to know how much she knew about the murders of Lester Folsom and Will Waters.

Only that wasn’t what they’d questioned her about, was it? They’d seemed far more interested in what she knew about her angel. Her savior. That beautiful man who’d saved her.

Or had it all been some kind of a dream?

Maybe. Or maybe not. She couldn’t be sure, because she didn’t know anything for sure anymore. Except that there was someone walking toward her now, along the sand. Walking at a brisk but unhurried pace. She blinked, but her eyes were so unfocused that it was as if she were peering through a dirty window. She squinted, thought she saw a baby-blue car on the side of the road, some distance beyond him, then shifted her focus right back to him again. Yes, him. Definitely male, tall. And as he drew nearer there was something …

It was him!

She scrambled to her feet, forgetting all about the lingering effects of whatever dope they’d used to season her food. Unconsciously, she pushed one hand through her hair, even as she backed up a step, wobbled, then caught her balance again. Her brain was still foggy, her equilibrium off-kilter. Should she stand there, waiting, or run away? She didn’t know whether she was afraid of this guy or not. She didn’t know anything about him, except that he’d been leaning over her after she’d been shot down on the street outside Studio Three. And that she’d felt as if she knew him from somewhere. And that it had seemed as if he had … helped her. Healed her. Saved her.

On the one hand, if he’d helped her then, maybe he wanted to help her now, too.

On the other, if he were involved in any of that violence that had unfolded back there last night—God, had it only been last night?—then she wanted no part of him.

He stopped walking, maybe sensing her distress as she stood there with one hand trying to hold her wild tangles of hair to the back of her head and the other arm wrapped around her own waist, as if she could somehow protect her vital organs simply by covering them with a forearm.

He wore a tan, short-sleeved shirt with the top several buttons undone, khaki trousers, rolled up a little, and his feet were bare and sinking into the sand. Bare feet. That made him seem less scary, somehow.

“It’s all right, Lucy. It’s me. I’m the one who helped you, after—”

“I remember.”

He tipped his head to one side. “You look as if you’ve had a rough night.”

She blinked. “Rough? I witnessed a double execution, ran for my life, was shot in the back and somehow yanked from the brink of death by whatever magic it is you wield,” she said, and the words came pouring out, faster and faster. “Then I was kidnapped, drugged, held prisoner, questioned, drugged again. And now I wake up in the middle of nowhere in clothes that aren’t my own, and I don’t even have my purse or a hairbrush or—” Her throat closed off and her face pulled itself into an embarrassing grimace as tears strained to break through whatever invisible barrier had held them back so far.

And then they escaped, just as her knees weakened and her entire body went lax, as if there was simply no more fight left in her. She sank to her knees in the warming sand, her head falling forward.