I turned to him suddenly. “Hunter, I have to apologize.”
“For what?” He was only half listening. The elevator was on the top floor. We were in the basement.
“For all this.” His eyes flicked to me, then back.
I knew also what it was to lose everything.
“Let’s not talk about it.” He glanced up at the lighted numbering above the doors, but the way his jaw clenched gave him away.
“Yes,” I said, tentatively, “but just one more thing.”
“What?”
Half turned, I didn’t look at him as I rubbed my wrists where they’d been shackled. “I’m sorry.”
“You said that already.”
“Not for that.”
And I stepped into him, unwinding with my shoulders so my elbow struck him just below his temple. He went down like a tree trunk. I had to lunge to keep his head from whacking the concrete floor, and as I lowered him he somehow managed a belated attempt for my throat.
“Ungrateful bastard,” I muttered as his hands fell away.
I pulled the cuffs from his back pocket, secured them around his wrists, and kept the keys. I hated to cuff him but it would be less believable that he’d been overcome if I didn’t. I told myself it was for his safety, then removed his guns—stuck one in my boot, the other at my waist—his baton, and the telltale mark of an agent of Light, his conduit.
“You’ll kill me when you wake up,” I said to him. “But at least you’ll wake up.”
Which led me to the last thing that needed doing.
Leaning over Hunter, who cut a fierce figure even in an unconscious state, I thought of what I’d learned about him. Not a lot. But there was that way he watched people, the quiet scrutiny belying his casual manner. I admired that. I thought of the way he created things with his hands—weapons, sure, but artistry was a skill I’d always coveted. Then I thought of the way he’d intended to sacrifice himself today, and hadn’t said a thing about it, knowing nobody would realize his intentions until it was too late.
Allowing this paltry information to coalesce in the forefront of my mind, I bent and very gently covered his mouth with my own. The spread of flesh upon flesh was intimate, but nothing compared to the even more private opening of minds and souls. I exhaled, breathing a soft stream of essence into his mouth.
My mother had been right. You could taste the Light in another person, like bubbles on the tongue, and you could smell a person’s soul on their breath. I glimpsed Hunter’s strength, the sweet ardor of his physical essence and the surprising gentleness of his inner spirit. I continued to breathe, allowing our breaths to mingle so that I drew him up, in, and knew that somewhere in his unconscious state he was doing the same with me. In doing so, he was experiencing far more of me than any man ever had.
I allowed it, seeking the connection that would allow me to pass not only my knowledge and memory and experience to him, but my power as well. My kiss became a prayer, my breath a shield. I cupped his cheek with one hand—my touch now a weapon, shared—and closed my eyes to pour myself into him.
And the filmstrip began.
Some memories take only a moment to burn into the gray matter, but their images are imprinted forever. The horrific death of his parents came to me in dull and numbing flashes, viewed from the eyes of a boy watching helplessly from the corner. Shadows were spinning around him, but he was too small and helpless to do anything but watch. I heard his vow, buried beneath hot tears and his parents’ broken limbs, that he’d never be weak again.
The equally sad but still sharp death of my sister was my painful contribution. It came in the one image of that night I recalled above all others; her pinwheeling through the night, calling out my name in bald desperation.
Other memories passed in such blinding flashes they set my skin to prickling. Hunter making love to a slim dark woman, a lone tear sliding over his cheek.
My final night with Ben, a storm cloud breaking like a shot overhead.
The birth of a daughter, and a heart awash in more love than it had ever known or expected.
The birth of another, unwanted, unnamed, and untouched before being whisked away.
Had I not known what memories I’d lived and what I had not, I wouldn’t have been able to tell which belonged to me. As it was, we alternated our lives’ greatest hits in bright flashes, trading knowledge, secret desires, longing and regrets, along with our greatest loves and our most poignant sorrows.
Then a turn into such sudden blackness it was like being pitched down a roller coaster and careening off its tracks. A shiver went through my body and quaked into his. I showed him a hypodermic needle flashing, and Greta’s death powering through my limbs. Breathing the memory outward, I gave the aureole up like a gift, and Hunter took it, his subconscious greedy in a way I knew he’d never allow when fully awake. He sucked the power away, and it pulsed through our mouths, our lips moving, our tongues intertwined, the memory a lead line weighted to our hearts, loins, and heads. He grew hard beneath me. I opened my eyes to find him watching me with his soul— wondrously, thankfully, lovingly—and my body responded. My heart did too.
His hips rose beneath mine, and I pressed into him, forgetting myself in the strong mingling of power and limbs and dreams. The raw sexuality pulsing between us surprised me—what had started out as a chaste kiss now burned torridly between us—but it wasn’t as surprising as what I sensed him thinking next.
Shocked, I pulled away. Breathing hard, I watched his eyes flutter, heard him groan in protest and satisfaction. Then he fell still.
He knew my name. A bell chime, like a warning, sounded behind me as the elevator hit home. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, but sensed nothing of Hunter. There was only me now. Alone.
He knew my name, I thought again as the doors slid open.
And that comforted me. I rose, knowing I might die, but that somebody would remain behind to remember me. Someone who really knew me. After Olivia’s death, and the loss of Ben, I hadn’t believed anyone else ever could.
Placing a final chaste kiss on Hunter’s lips, I left him lying spent and sprawled in the corner against the wall, and didn’t have a bit of guilt. I had given him enough.
I entered the elevator, pushed the button, and lifted my head as the doors whisked shut. The cart began its ascent. Toward Warren, I thought. And toward my next, and possibly last, kill spot.
28
I wondered if this elevator would have opened to me only a month ago. There was no doubt I was operating in an alternate reality. Ions and electrodes bumped along my skin like blind bees, and a metallic taste rose to fill the back of my mouth. There was enough supernatural energy up here, I thought, to fuel a nuclear power plant.
I’m coming Warren, I thought, touching my breastbone. There was no answer, and I began to wonder if it were all in vain. Then, suddenly, there was no time left to wonder.
The elevator chime sounded like the report from Notre Dame’s bell tower. The doors sliding open were the hiss of a snake. My conduit was pointed at a mirrored image of myself, and my trigger finger pulsed. The doors began to close and I stepped into the foyer at the last moment. And they whisked shut, trapping me.
The Tulpa’s anteroom was immediately visible, just beyond a great marble staircase leading into a sunken chamber flanked by four Roman pillars. An identical staircase rose directly across from me to disappear beneath a pair of oak doors carved with mythic symbols, none of which I understood. That, I immediately decided, was where
