Twilight Prophecy (13 page)

James moved toward her, and she scrambled away across the basement floor like a panicked crab.

“It’s okay. It’s all right, Lucy, it’s all right.”

There was a long purple vein dangling from his hair. She lifted a trembling hand, pointed. “What…why…you…
How?”

“It’s okay, it’s all okay.” He shot Brigit a look. “Why the hell did you bring her down here?”

“She’s figured out where to find Utanapishtim. And I’m out of here.” Brigit looked at Rhiannon. “Are you both okay?”

“I would have gotten the better of them momentarily,” Rhiannon said, batting at the muck in her hair in irritation. And then she frowned. “What is that sound?”

Rhiannon turned her attention upward, toward the floor above, but Lucy heard nothing.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I want to go home
now
. I did what you asked, and I’m finished here. I really am. This is not my problem, and I want to go home.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” James bent to grip her elbow and help her to her feet. “It’s okay, you’re safe.”

“What were they? What did you do?”

“What was necessary, Lucy. What I had to do.”

“But…but they looked like…like the dead. Did you bring them back from the grave? Is that what you— God, James, how could you? That’s so wrong. That’s just so
wrong
.”

“Is it wrong to try to save my family?” He met her eyes, then looked away, his attention turning upward, too. “I hear it now.”

“Mortals. A lot of them,” Rhiannon said.

And then even Lucy heard the roar, the shouting, the motors and squealing tires. Right on their heels came the sounds of shattering glass, and the smell of smoke and burning wood.

“They’re torching the house!” Brigit shouted.

“Oh, God, and we’re in the basement.” Lucy looked around frantically. “We’re trapped!”

J
ames took Lucy by the hand and tugged her back into the lab. She resisted, pulling against his grip, but he couldn’t let her go, and he couldn’t wait for her to get over her current state of shock and fear, or try to reason with her. He had to move her now, or they would all die.

He didn’t blame her for being traumatized by what she had seen. He understood why she didn’t want to walk through the gore that Brigit’s zombie blasting had left behind. But again, no choice.

He yanked her arm when she tried to pull away, enough so that it hurt, because the pain would be the fastest way to cut through the haze of panic in her eyes. He could tell he’d reached her.

“There’s another way out, Lucy. Come with me. If you don’t, you’ll die.”

She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before and said, “Forgive me if I have to think about which option I prefer.”

Angry words, delivered in a voice that was thick with unshed tears. He narrowed his eyes, impatient and remorseful and determined. Pulling her close, he hauled her up and over his shoulder, then strode through the lab. His feet slapped down into the remnants of the bodies, fat and flesh and parts of organs, and plenty of fluids. He heard her gag, whether at the sight or on the choking, cloying smells, he couldn’t be sure. He was close to gagging himself. But he hurried onward, to a shelf along the rear wall. And then, holding her with one arm, he pulled on a hidden catch and the shelf swung inward, revealing itself as a door in disguise.

Once it was open, he stepped aside, and let Rhiannon and Brigit race through ahead of him. As Rhiannon hurried past, Lucy spoke.

“Pandora?” she asked. “Where’s Pandora?”

Rhiannon stopped in her tracks, looking back at the woman hanging over James’s shoulder. Then at James. He saw what was in her eyes. Surprise, and appreciation that Lucy, their captive, would be concerned about Rhiannon’s unconventional pet. “I sent her away with Roland earlier. I…was afraid something like this might happen.” Then she nodded at James. “Put her down, for God’s sake. She can walk.”

And then they hurried through the wall and down into the darkness.

“The tablet,” Lucy whispered, as James set her on her feet and she peered into the deep gloom ahead of them.

“It’s too late.” He took her arm and led her down into the sloping, earthen passage, pulling the door back into place behind him. And then he led her onward, through utter darkness.

A moment later she stopped walking and turned to stare at him, though it was pointless, with no light to see by.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Lucy,” he said, wondering what she was up to.

“You mean like trying to reanimate rotting corpses, for example?”

“That wasn’t stupid. That was necessary. This way.” He took her hand to lead the way, holding it too tightly for her to try wriggling free and running back to those murderous mortals.

“Necessary? You’re playing God, James. With human lives. What could possibly justify that?”

“The need to prevent the extermination of my people.”

“No. No, those were human beings, with souls. What if they were in some kind of afterlife or—”

“I was given this ability for a reason, Lucy. I’m meant to use it.”

“How can you possibly be sure of that?”

He refused to answer, because she was asking the same questions he’d asked himself. And yet, he’d been overwhelmed by amazement that his healing ability was so much more powerful than he’d ever realized. More than he could even have imagined. He wasn’t just a healer. He had the power of restoring life to the dead. No one had that, no mortal, no vampire. Surely he had been given that power for a reason.

“I know my calling now,” he told her. “I was born with a power normally reserved for the gods them selves. It’s a power no one, mortal or vampire, has ever possessed. The power of life over death.” He shook his head as she stared at him with horror in her eyes. He could see her quite clearly. He doubted she could see him much at all, aside, perhaps, from the outline of his form in the darkness. “I don’t expect you to understand. You’re just a human.”

“Right. I’m not a god, like you, with this ever so useful ability to make rotting corpses do bodily harm. That wasn’t exactly a resurrection back there, James. You’re fooling yourself if you think it was.”

“They might have improved with time.”

“They were mindless, animated sides of beef.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I
saw
that. And so did you.”

He shook his head. The ground was sloping upward now, and he dearly wanted to change the subject. “Rhiannon has a car parked in a cave at the far end of this tunnel. Roland borrowed Brigit’s T-Bird, leaving the bigger Lincoln in case we needed it.”

“What if they’ve already found it? What if they’re waiting for us?” she asked.

She sounded terrified, and he felt a little sorry. “I’m scanning for their presence, and so are Rhiannon and Brigit. We would sense them out there.”

“What if you don’t? What if someone told them how to…how to block?”

It was, he thought, a very good question. What did he expect? The woman likely had a higher IQ than anyone he knew.

“If there’s anyone out there—and there won’t be—then we’ll back off and take another fork. This tunnel has several. One leads out to the Sound, where there’s always a boat or two nearby. Another leads deep into the forest, where we can go on foot.”

“This place is like a fortress.”

“My people are used to being hated, feared and hunted,” he explained. “Though this latest uprising is above and beyond anything in our history—at least as far as I know.”

“That’s why you’re wishing you had…some godlike ability to fix it, then. Isn’t it, James? But you don’t. You’re a man, not a god. Part vampire, yes. Able to heal, yes. But not a god. You can’t restore life to the dead—”

“I can. Or did you not see that for yourself back there?”

“I meant can’t in the sense of shouldn’t. Just because you’re capable of doing something doesn’t mean you should. Nothing good can come of working in complete opposition to nature itself, James.”

“I have no choice,” he said.

She blinked then, planting her feet quite suddenly, tugging him to a stop. “My God, is that why you want to find Utanapishtim’s resting place? Are you planning to try to reanimate a man who’s been dead for more than five thousand years?”

He faced her slowly. “You know where he is, don’t you?”

“Yes. I think I do. And you’re out of luck, thank God. According to your own tablet, back at the house, he was cremated, James. There’s nothing left of him but ash.”

Up ahead, Brigit called back in a harsh whisper, “It’s all clear. Hurry up, you two.”

Nodding, he pulled his captive into motion again. “I have to try.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Look, I’m supposed to do this. I wouldn’t have been chosen as the one to save my people if I couldn’t make it work. It’s not supposed to be easy. But I’ve got to try. It’s what I was born to do.”

“You are so full of yourself I can hardly believe you’re the same man who was sneaking in and out of hospital rooms trying to cure dying children.”

“Not trying to, doing it. And we’re done discussing this. I didn’t ask your opinion.”

“I didn’t ask to be kidnapped!”

“I get that. You would rather have run away and let everyone else fend for themselves. You told me you were a coward, and I guess I should have believed you. But get this. Just because running and covering your own ass are the things you would do in this situation, that doesn’t mean they’re the things
I
should do, Lucy. I will
die
for my people, if that’s what it takes.”

She yanked her hand from his and stomped past him, and for one brief instant, as she walked by, he distinctly felt that his words had torn open a deep, deadly wound in her heart, and left it wide and bleeding.

He’d hit a nerve. He didn’t know why. And he regretted it, but he didn’t know how to make it better. There was too much else going on for him to worry about the professor’s hurt feelings at the moment.

She emerged from the tunnel into a cave, the mouth opening to the darkness of the night, and as predicted, a large black Lincoln Continental was parked there waiting for them. Rhiannon and Brigit were already sitting in the backseat, so Lucy yanked open the passenger door and got into the front.

James smelled the smoke and saw the glow coming from the direction of the house, though the woods blocked the mansion itself. He went around and got behind the wheel, then drove out of the cave and across the rough ground. He pulled the car onto the road a half mile from the mansion and headed away from it. A look in the rearview mirror showed him a night sky alight with an angry red-orange halo, and arrow-sharp flames licking at the very stars.

Lucy didn’t speak again that night. Not to anyone. Not even to demand he let her go. He supposed she had figured out that he still couldn’t do that. For one thing, she hadn’t told him where to find the remains of Utanapishtim. And once she did, she would know where he was going next. He couldn’t risk her telling anyone what he was up to until it was done.

And even with all that, all the worry and the remorse and the anguish of having lost friends, relatives, in this war…he still couldn’t quite quell the thrill of challenging his powers to the ultimate extent. Restoring life to a pile of five-thousand-year-old ash.

It was almost dawn when they arrived at a gorgeous—but normal-gorgeous, nothing out of a period fantasy—house on a jutting peninsula that thrust itself into Salem Harbor like a forefinger pointing out to sea.

It looked to Lucy like the kind of place a presidential family would go for a weekend summer break. And yet it was filled with vampires, she was sure of that. She didn’t know how many, but she knew there must be a den of them.

Brigit and Rhiannon hurried inside as soon as the car came to a stop in the curving driveway. Lucy saw Roland in the doorway, as he flung it open to greet them, and she could tell there were others beyond him, though she barely glimpsed them.

“This is Will and Sarafina’s place. They’re friends,” James said softly.

“I don’t care.” She sat in the car, hugging herself, staring at the sea.

“She’s a Gypsy—and a vampire, of course—and he’s mortal. You won’t have to be the only human around anymore.”

“I told you, I don’t care.”

He sighed. “Please come inside, Lucy. I need to find out if there’s any word from my family and—”

“Then go. I’m not setting foot in that house until the sun comes up and the undead freak show closes down for the day, all right?”

He was wounded. She felt it, and she didn’t care about that, either. His words had really hurt her earlier.

“I can’t leave you alone.”

“If you don’t, I’ll never tell you where to find Utanapishtim.”

He blinked at her. She saw, but refused to meet his eyes.

“I want some time to myself. I’m going to go down to that beach, and I’m going to sit there and watch the sunrise, and I don’t want you to bother me. I’m not going to run away. If I did, you’d only find me anyway. But I want this time alone, and if you don’t give it to me, I swear to you, James, I will refuse to help you even if Rhiannon kills me for it.”

And with that she opened the car door, hefted her bag up onto her shoulder, got out and walked away from him. She walked into the darkness, onto the white sand, down toward the water’s edge. And that was where she would stay, she decided. She would wait for the sun to rise, when they would all—most of them, anyway—finally, fall silent and asleep….

Like the dead.

God, it was all just too much.

She sat in the sand, drew her knees up to her chest, lowered her head and let the tears flow. She heard James open and close the car door, and then his footsteps crossing the large wooden deck, the door opening, then shutting behind him. Finally, she thought. Solitude.

And so she sat there, weeping and wondering how the hell it was that she had been dragged into a war that was not her own. And how it was that she had let herself begin to care what some half-breed demon angel thought of her.

Because she
did
care. He thought she was a coward. And it probably wouldn’t hurt so much if it wasn’t quite so true.

She was still weeping when, a few minutes later, a large hand landed on her shoulder from behind. She lifted her head, dashed away her tears and tried to pretend she hadn’t been crying. “Sorry. I’m just so…stupid.”

“That’s not quite the way I’ve heard it.”

It wasn’t James’s voice.

She turned at last and found herself face-to-face with an imposingly handsome man, large, broad, with raven hair and eyes and skin that seemed dark for a vampire. And yet she had no doubt that was what he was. And, in fact, an old one. He exuded power. The glow in his eyes was almost constant, and his skin was even more flawless than the others’ were.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Professor. I actually…I came out to thank you. And to introduce myself.”

She blinked, staring up at him, not moving. He should have seemed ordinary. He wore jeans and a forest-green knit pullover sweater with the collar of a white T-shirt showing at the neck. But he wasn’t ordinary at all. She got chills, he was so far from ordinary.

“We share some interests, I understand.”

“D-do we?”

“Ancient Sumer. You study it…and I lived in it. Ruled it, actually.” He extended his large, powerful hand. “I’m Damien Namtar, but you’d be more familiar with my earlier name. Gilgamesh.”

Her eyes widened, and her heart tried to pound a hole straight through her chest.

“You…can’t be…”

He smiled gently.
“Idib balazu nam hé-ébtarre.”

“‘When you cross the threshold, it is a blessing,’” she translated, blushing at the compliment. “Thank you.” Then she shook her head in awe and quickly scrambled to her feet, brushing the sand from the front of her khaki cargo pants and pressing her palms together in front of her body, then bowing slightly to him. “It’s…it’s an amazing honor, great king, to meet you. And a bit of a miracle. And I feel like I might faint, so I’ll apologize in advance if—”