Twilight Prophecy (5 page)

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.”

“W
ell? 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.