Twilight Prophecy (21 page)

She would not have a single regret.

He met her eyes, part of the statue in each hand, and said, “It’s time, Lucy.”

She didn’t ask him again if he was sure. She wouldn’t insult him that way. She’d made her arguments. He’d made his choice. She wasn’t even entirely sure he was wrong.

He turned to face the table. Lucy walked up to take her place beside him, determined to be of whatever help she could, for as long as this interlude might last.

James tipped one half of the broken statue up and poured its contents onto a crisp white bedsheet that he had spread over the table. Right in the center. Then he looked up at Lucy, standing directly across from him, and she held his eyes, biting her lip.

It had been good between them. He’d known it would be, had sensed that it would be fiery. Amazing. Special. More than just sex. But the reality of it had been even better than he had imagined. And he had been imagining it. A lot. Making love with Lucy had felt natural and easy, as instinctive as breathing—and yet at the same time exciting and thrilling almost beyond endurance. He liked sex with her. He liked holding her and kissing her. He liked her, period, and he thought it was mutual. But he was already sensing that she was…pulling back. Withdrawing from him. And he didn’t know why.

She didn’t have a clue what a gorgeous, sexy woman she was, he thought. She saw herself as the nerdy, buttoned-up professor.

Clueless to her own charms, really.

And right now she wanted to ask him not to do what he was about to do. But she was trying not to. He wondered if she knew how much he appreciated that.

It was quiet on the
Nightshade
. Dark. They’d turned off all the lights, except for a soft yellow night light, and shut down the engine, so they wouldn’t draw any attention that might evolve into an interruption at the crucial moment of this miracle he was about to try to perform. Well, partly that. It was also partly a precaution to ensure that Utanapishtim wouldn’t be startled if and when he woke up.

He knew that the ancient one would. His only fear was that he would raise some kind of mindless monster, like the corpses back in Byram.

He picked up the statue’s head and shook it, to ensure any bits it might contain joined the rest. As he did, the wind picked out outside, howling past them and heaving the boat without warning. Lucy grabbed the table, and James grabbed Lucy, as they both lost their balance.

Then the boat stilled again, and she met his eyes, her own wide as she whispered, “What the hell was that?” She looked around as if expecting to see a ghost.

“Just a gust, Lucy. Just a gust. We’re fine.”

“Are you sure?” She looked at the ashes. “I mean, I didn’t think I believed in gods and curses before now, but hell, I’ve been living with vampires for the past week. I’ve seen the dead raised and your sister blowing things up with her freaking eyes. Are you sure someone’s not trying to tell you not to proceed?”

He drew a deep breath and opened his mouth to say of course he was sure, but then he didn’t. Couldn’t. “No,” he said at length. “No, I’m not sure at all. But you know I have to do this, right?”

She drew a steadying breath and nodded once, firmly. “Yes. I know.”

“Ready?”

She had painstakingly drawn lines of cuneiform on a piece of paper, spelling the words
Friends
and
Safe,
to show the Ancient One when he awoke, but James knew she couldn’t hope to write out entire conversations without several hours—if not days—and a half dozen reference books by her side. This was going to have to do until they managed to get the Old One to Gilgamesh, which they could do in less than an hour’s time.

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she said.

Nodding, James opened his hands and extended his arms, holding them palms down over the small pile of ash and bone fragments. He stared at the dust on the table, and he willed the power to rise up from within him, to surge up from the earth far below, up through the ocean water, up through the hull of the boat, into the bottoms of his feet and up through his body. He willed the power to rain down from the white light somewhere in the universe, through the atmosphere and the sky, through the boat’s cabin and upper deck, and to enter through the top of his head to beam down into his body. He visualized the energies meeting in his solar plexus, swirling together and blazing ever more brightly, shooting as one up to the very center of his chest and then splitting into twin beams that shot into his shoulders, down his arms and into his hands. He visualized portals opening in his palms to let that light out, and he felt his palms heat and tingle in response.

And then the glow began to emanate from his hands.

He watched, unable to look away as the ashes seemed to absorb the light. To glow with it themselves, and then to demand more. It felt as if the ashes were sucking the light from his hands, rather than simply receiving it. It was a startling feeling. Entirely different from the way he usually felt during a healing.

He thought about stopping, right then, breaking the contact, stopping the flow. But he was mesmerized by then, and dying to see what would happen next. Then the ashes began to crawl like microscopic bugs. He thought he was imagining it at first, the movement was so slight, as if each granule had somehow come to life and begun to wriggle, to squirm. Were his eyes playing tricks on him? Or was it real?

“Something’s happening,” Lucy whispered.

Okay, it was real. She saw it, too. And then he knew it was true with even more certainty, because those granules were skittering across the sheet, moving apart, spreading out, forming a sort of oblong shape…and then spreading out more, as he recognized the picture they were drawing.

Ash—flat, one-dimensional ash—painted itself outward from the shape he now realized was a human torso. And it continued moving, growing, expanding, shaping itself into arms and legs and a head.

“It’s like some kind of demon-possessed Etch A Sketch,” Lucy muttered.

James nodded, unable to take his eyes off the spectacle unfolding before him, beneath his hands, which were pulsing now with white heat. He willed the power to keep flowing, even though it was starting to take an incredible effort. He pushed the light outward, and the shape, the drawing, began to rise up from the sheet, growing thicker, taking on three dimensions, filling out. Fingers took form, the features of a human face growing clear. The ash was multiplying itself, there was no question. There was far more now than there had been before.

And now a body lay on the table, an ash-gray body that seemed as if it would disintegrate if he so much as touched it. So he didn’t. He kept his hands hovering just above it, lifting them higher as the body thickened, and still he kept channeling that light. It felt as if the body on the table was sucking him dry, and yet he pushed on.

The ash grew denser, its texture changing now, color seeming to bleed into it from the very room around them. He saw translucent skin, fingernails and deep black strands of hair writhing from the head. And deep inside that conglomeration of ash, James saw the bleached white of bone appearing, then vanishing again beneath the pink of muscle, the blue of veins twisting and swirling into shape like a thousand tiny snakes scurrying to take their places. Organs appeared, purple and healthy. The heart formed, and then suddenly, with a powerful sucking of energy from his hands, that heart began beating.

Beating!

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.

“Oh, my God,” Lucy whispered.

James knew without looking that her head came up then. He felt her tearing her gaze from the miracle taking place on the table between them to look at him. He felt her attention, but he couldn’t return it. He was locked on to what he was doing, and he couldn’t stop. What was most alarming was that he tried to. And couldn’t. It was as if he’d grabbed hold of a live wire, and now it was feeding from him, controlling him so he could not let go.

The figure’s skin turned opaque, then pink and then copper, and then eyebrows sprouted, thick and black. Lashes curled from the eyelids. A shadow of beard appeared.

“James, are you all right?”

He couldn’t answer her. He couldn’t speak. He finally managed, with great effort, to rip his eyes from the powerful naked body on the table between them and look into hers. Without the ability to speak, he tried to tell her that he was dying. That this was going to kill him. That this creature was draining the very life force from his body. And that he was sorry for that—sorry for leaving her behind.

Lucy’s eyes widened, and she reached down, grabbed James by the wrists and pulled upward with all her might, grunting with the effort.

The grip of the creature was broken all at once. James flew backward, as if released from a powerful grasp without warning. He hit the wall and sank to the floor, and then he just lay there, gasping for breath, trembling with muscle fatigue and weakness.

Lucy raced around the table, and leaned over him, her eyes searching his face, one hand pressing to his cheek. “James, my God, you’re white as a sheet! Are you all right? Please, say something.”

He stared at her, trying to gather his wits, to catch his breath, to form words. He was shaking right to the very core. And then his attention was caught by what was happening behind her.

As he stared, riveted, the body on the table slowly sat up. Its eyes opened, black as the night itself, staring straight ahead and then scanning the room, taking in everything all at once. It got to its feet and looked down at itself, naked, copper-skinned. Massive. It opened and closed its hands, staring at them as if in wonder, and then it turned its vivid onyx eyes on James, met his stare, held it.

And James couldn’t look away.

Until the creature, the five-thousand-year-old thing that James Poe had somehow raised from ash, tipped back its head, its long ebony hair trailing down its back. And then, its face contorting in some kind of unspeakable anguish, it released a roar that was deafening in both decibel level and in the utter agony it contained.

L
ucy had never in her entire life been as terrified as she was when she heard that blood-curdling roar and realized that James had done the impossible.

Frozen in fear, she almost couldn’t move. But she had to move.
It
was right behind her. She forced herself to turn, to face it….

Her eyes fell upon a hairless, powerful, naked chest, then rose as she tipped her head back, her gaze rising over thick neck, shoulders bulging with muscle and a face that was undeniably human. And Middle Eastern. And furious as it stared back at her.

No. Not it. Him. He was a man, and his expression looked like one of pain. Emotional pain, perhaps. Maybe physical, too. Who knew? She dug in her pocket for the paper she’d scribbled on earlier, the lines that spelled out the words for
friends
and
safe
in cuneiform. She sent up a silent prayer that she had accurately matched the form of the text to the period during which this man had lived, or at least to one close enough to it that it would be recognizable to him.

Then again, according to legend, his life had spanned so many years that he could be familiar with the styles of several different periods. He had been the first immortal, after all. She used to think the Sumerian myths she’d studied and taught—about the flood survivor, the Epic of Gilgamesh—were just that: myths. But now she knew they were real. All of them, real. Even she couldn’t deny that any longer. Not with Utanapishtim, the Flood Survivor, standing right in front of her.

She unfolded the paper even as he stared at her, and then at James, behind her. James scrambled to his feet then, gripping her shoulders and trying to get between her and the creature, but she shook her head. “No, no. He’s not going to hurt me.” She held up the paper, held it toward the ancient one’s face, and she made her voice as gentle as she could. “We’re friends, Utanapishtim. Friends.” She pointed at the symbols as she said the word.

Scowling, he snatched the sheet from her hands, staring at it, blinking, but more interested in the paper, its thinness, its texture, than the words she’d written.

“You…” He jabbed a finger toward James, ignoring her. “You…” he said, then slapped his own chest. “This?”

“Good God, he speaks English!” Lucy was stunned. “How is that possible?”

Utanapishtim’s eyes narrowed on her. “I…” He tapped his ears with his palms.

“Hear?” she asked.

“Mmm. I hear. Long time.” He cleared his throat, his voice hoarse, no doubt because he hadn’t spoken for thousands of years.

“He wasn’t dead,” James said softly. “My God, he wasn’t dead at all. The tablet says that the punishment from the gods for breaking their edict that he never share his immortality with anyone was that he would die, yet remain immortal.”

Utanapishtim nodded slowly. “Im…prisoned.”

Imprisoned, Lucy thought. All those years he’d been conscious, aware within the prison of that stone statue.

Utanapishtim’s eyes dampened, but they were also wild, frightening. “How…long?”

“Five thousand years, maybe more,” James said softly.

The man only stared blankly at him, then shifted his gaze to Lucy, as if awaiting her explanation, and she realized he had no way of knowing what a year was, much less what their numbering system meant. “A year is…a sun cycle. From planting to growing, then to harvest, to resting and to planting again. That’s one year.” She held up a single finger to show him one.

“Mmm. What is…five tousun?”

She blinked and lowered her eyes. Then she found her pencil and started writing on the sheet of paper. Utanapishtim watched with great interest as she drew the Sumerian symbols for 5000 on paper, no doubt curious that she wasn’t engraving them on wet clay with a stylus reed.

If he was this impressed by a simple pencil and paper, Lucy thought, he was going to be overwhelmed when he saw actual modern technology.

Unsure whether it was wise, but convinced he had a right to know, she showed him what she had written.

His eyes shot to hers, then back to the number again and he shook his head in disbelief.

“I know it’s shocking.”

“Aiee, so long!” He shook his head in denial. And then he closed his eyes and backed up to the wall, hugging himself, and rocking, and chanting in his own tongue.

Lucy started toward him, but James stopped her with a hand on her shoulder when she was still a few feet beyond the reach of Utanapishtim’s powerful arms. “We will help you, Utanapishtim.” She spoke carefully, enunciating each word. “We will. I know it will be hard, but—”

He was completely unresponsive.

“Why don’t we give him some space, some time? Maybe something to eat?” James suggested.

The huge man moaned deep in his chest and continued muttering. It sounded to Lucy like a series of prayers. Repetitive, but beautiful.

James took her arm, leading her out of the room and pulled the door closed behind them.

“No,” she said, covering his hand on the doorknob before he’d finished. “Leave it open. If it’s true what he said—”

“You’re right. He’s been imprisoned long enough.”

“Too long,” she whispered.

Leaving the door open, they went up the stairs to the deck above, leaving the ancient man, the first Noah and the first immortal, to his misery. Lucy realized there was no way for her to measure what Utanapishtim must be feeling. No way she could even try. He wasn’t from her culture; his ways of thinking were entirely alien to her. Even if she could guess how she might feel waking up after five thousand years trapped inside a stone statue, essentially buried alive, conscious but immobile and blind—even if she could somehow wrap her mind around that, it still would not bring her even remotely close to what Utanapishtim was feeling.

And then her attention shifted completely when James took a step and collapsed to his knees.

“James!”

She crouched down next to him, her hands on his shoulders, her eyes searching his face, but it wasn’t easy, with his head hanging so low. She pressed a hand to his cheek. “What is it? Was it the resurrection?”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“It drained you, didn’t it?” she asked, but it wasn’t really a question. “I knew it. I could see it. It was as if you were bleeding your own energy into him, as if he were taking your life to restore his own.” Then she blinked, stunned by what she had said. “He truly was the first vampire. Only it was life itself, not blood, he needed to survive.”

“To
re
vive, at least. There was no mention in the writings of him having to drain anything from anyone to stay alive. He was normal, a day walker, an omnivore, just an immortal one, as far as we know, until the gods cursed him for sharing his gift.”

“For creating the vampire race,” she muttered, sitting down on the deck beside him, leaning back, closing her eyes.

“Do you really believe that? That my race, my people, are so evil that the gods would punish the man who created the first of them?”

“Of course I don’t.” She straightened and looked him in the eye, insisting he see that she hadn’t meant it that way. “I’ve seen your people, James. I’ve met them. I know they’re not evil.”

“Thank you for that,” he said, watching her face.

“It’s nothing but the truth. However, we have to remember that we’re dealing with a superstitious man from a time and place where everything from a scorpion sting to a toothache was considered sent by the gods or by demons. Everything was a reward or a punishment to the ancient Sumerians. And I’m telling you, James, that is what he’s going to believe, or perhaps what he already does.”

James stared at the open hatch, the stairs beyond it. “I wonder if he knew, when he gave the gift to Gilgamesh, that it would cost him his soul,” he whispered. “Or that the great king and every immortal who came after him would need to feed on human blood in order to stay alive? Or that they would only be able to live by night?”

“I wonder if he knew there would be others at all,” Lucy said. “He may have assumed Gilgamesh would keep the gift to himself, not share it and create an entire undead, immortal race.”

“He vowed to…share not the gift.”

They both looked up fast, Lucy shooting to her feet and away from the hatch door as if it had burned her. Utanapishtim was standing there, halfway up the steps, staring at them. He was completely naked and apparently unconcerned about it as he came up the last three steps, onto the deck itself. His hairy thighs were like tree trunks, and he towered over her, standing six-five at the very least.

James got to his feet and stepped between the two of them.

Utanapishtim seemed to search the night sky, probably for the correct words to speak. “I meant not to make…immortal race.”

“I know that,” Lucy said softly. “But it happened all the same.”

“I gave…only to my king.”

“Yes.”

“He swore…only Enkidu, he said.”

“Enkidu was already dead,” Lucy explained. “The king could not bring him back. But when someone else he loved was about to die, he…”

“He…” At a loss for the right word, Utanapishtim mimed snapping something in two.

“Broke,” Lucy said.

“Mmm. Broke. He broke his promise,” Utanapishtim moaned. “For that…I have…” He grimaced as if in pain.

“Suffered,” Lucy said. “You have suffered terribly. But it wasn’t a punishment sent by the gods. There is another reason for your suffering.”

“No other…reason. I saw…Great Flood. Felt its…waters. I know the Anunaki.” He looked at her face, and then at the sea and sky around them. “Do not taunt them, woman. The gods hear all.”

Lowering her head, she wondered how she would ever convince a man from ages past to understand science and logic, when all he’d ever known were superstition and magic. To him, the flood itself was proof the gods existed. To her, it was just a flood, brought about by a period of global warming and the partial melting of the glaciers.

And yet, how could she explain Utanapishtim’s immortality? The fact that he spoke and understood English alone was testimony that what he said was true: that he’d been conscious on some level, even while his body had been reduced to ash. For centuries the sculpture in which he’d been entrapped had been in the possession of an American collector. English had been spoken all around him for generations, until the last heir left the naked priest king to his favorite museum.

If Utanapishtim wasn’t immortal, how had that happened?

“My…offspring. You call…vahmpeer.”

“Vampire,” she said.

“Drinkers of…blood. Like demon Lilith.”

Lucy shook her head quickly. This was just the sort of interpretation she’d been afraid he would begin to put on things. “No. No, Utanapishtim. The vampires do not harm anyone. They are good people. Good people, Utanapishtim.”

He didn’t seem convinced of that. “Yet you are not…vahmpeer?”

“No. I’m as you were. Before the gift of the gods, before the flood.”

He nodded, then shifted his black eyes to James. “You?”

“My father is a vampire. My mother only half.”

“I know not…half,” Utanapishtim said.

Lucy was amazed at the hunger for knowledge she glimpsed in those opaque black-fringed eyes. She held her hands out, palms up. “Vampire,” she said, raising one open palm. “Human,” she said, and raised the other. Then she cupped her hands together.

Utanapishtim grunted, nodding, and sat down on the deck. Then he put a hand on his stomach. “My…hunger burn like fire. My—” He tapped his head.

“Brain? Head? Mind?”

“Mmm, mind. My mind hungers also. You have…tablets?”

“Books?”

“I do not know books.” Utanapishtim sighed, frustrated, and lowered his head into his hands.

“I’ll show him,” James said. “Though hearing our spoken language all those years won’t help you much with learning to read our writing, Utanapishtim.”

Utanapishtim, however, was still holding his head, and nodding it up and down, hands completely covering his face. He was once again muttering in Sumerian.

“I’ll find food,” Lucy said, sending a quick look farther along the deck, to where a second set of stairs led down to the galley. “James, why don’t you find him some clothes, and…some books.”

In the midst of his muttering, Utanapishtim lifted his head from his hands long enough to command, “Be fast, woman.”

Lucy was surprised by the order, but she reminded herself that he had been a king once. He was bound to expect his orders to be followed, his authority to be respected. “Yes. I’ll be as fast as I can.” She took three steps, then paused to send a worried look back at James.

He stood tall and strong, as he had done ever since Utanapishtim surprised them. She knew he was determined not to reveal his weakened state to the other…man. And he’d been doing such a good job of it that he had momentarily even managed to make her forget. But he’d been on his knees only moments ago, weakened, his energy drained by the first immortal.

And yet he stood there, looking as strong as he always was. And she knew why. He didn’t want Utanapishtim getting the idea that he could get away with anything. For Lucy’s sake, he needed to meet the man as an equal.

With her eyes, Lucy asked James if he was going to be all right, darting a meaningful glance Utanapishtim’s way.

James caught her look, read her meaning and winked. “Be fast, woman.”

She smiled, admiring him more than she ever had before. Of the two men, James was the one with the aura of leadership about him. Quiet authority, confidence in his own power. She felt better, suddenly, about leaving him with the hulking, confused, living, breathing artifact and hurried on her way.

James watched the Ancient One for a long moment before nodding and taking him below again, where he went through drawers until he found a pair of jeans big enough for the man. He held them out, and Utanapishtim looked at them, then tipped his head in an inquisitive way. “What is?”

“To wear. To, um, cover yourself.” James gestured at the khakis he wore.

Utanapishtim looked at James’s pants, then at the jeans he was holding out and his expression turned to one of horror. “No! It will…bind my—” He didn’t know the word, so he grabbed his genitals and shook them with a low growl.