Forbidden
Page 13

Landon smiled and nodded.
“Looks like I’m going to have to rework the schedule for the next two weeks.”
“So, I was wondering, how long have you been around? Bodywalkers, I mean,” Docia asked carefully, trying to figure out if it was okay to ask questions. They had seemed very forthcoming so far, so why not? Didn’t she have a right to ask about the thing that was inside her?
Oh jeez. She suddenly had a violent fear that something was going to come bursting out of her chest and fall wriggling to the floor. She laid a hand on her chest and tried to take soft, steady breaths. Nothing of what she had learned of them had suggested the Bodywalker inside her had any desire to leave. Or that it even could. By the sound of it, her hitchhiking Bodywalker was very much dependent on her. But what was the Blending? And … at some point was this strong, dominant female presence inside of her going to take her over completely?
“Thousands of years. We predate Christianity. By quite a bit,” Ram said, resting a hand on the small of her back and guiding her a little deeper into the house. It was clear as they went that the Bodywalkers did not lack wealth. Or taste, for that matter. Every room they passed or entered was more magnificent than the last. There was a tremendous collection of antiques throughout. Conspicuously placed in the hall in a glass and gold-etched cabinet mounted on the wall was a beautiful Egyptian crook and flail, the accoutrements of Egyptian royalty. The cobalt-blue inlay and gold that striped them looked as perfect and splendid as it no doubt had when some distant pharaoh had handled them. If it had looked a little more worn, she would have wondered why it wasn’t in a museum somewhere. But its clean condition told her it was most likely a replica and not the actual item.
At least, she thought …
“Thousands of years?” she echoed as he led her to a pair of enormous doors. It was as if they were made of obsidian stone, only in hundreds of crafted pieces, each shape laid into the door like a stained-glass window, where the individual pieces might not make much sense but a true artist could shape them into something beautiful that told a story. Here the image was of a sun, raised high in the upper right-hand corner of the right door, its strong rays streaming down across both heavy doors until they touched the bottom of the left-hand door.
The raised curves and shapes of the stone begged her fingers to touch them, but Ram was already pushing through the doors, their heavy size and weight seemingly nothing to him. She could see the flex of muscle in his forearms as he grabbed the long vertical handles, also made of black stone, two bands of gold on each at top and bottom and the metal mounts equally golden. It was clear they had cost a fortune to make, and as those doors swung open she quickly came to realize that they were a minor detail in comparison with the room they guarded.
It was what she imagined walking onto the set of The Ten Commandments might have felt like. That the theme was ancient Egyptian would have been obvious to any idiot. The quantity of stone in the room was astounding. Walls. Floors. Ceiling. Beams and columns. And every inch of every surface was either carved or painted with bright, colorful pictures laid out in rows and rows, around and around the room, reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, only it was hieroglyphs as if they had evolved over time with modern paints and medium, modern artist flairs and training. Docia stopped, feeling breathless and overwhelmed as the enormous room surrounded her. There was a fall of water at the far end directly across from the doors, but the water was running down a channel in the far wall and was diverted through a series of other channels down to the floor, where it ran all the way around the room in a collection of canals covered in beautifully etched frosted glass.
There wasn’t a single surface she could see that wasn’t covered or carved in a breathtaking pictoral impression or story.
“Thousands of years,” she squeaked out. “Holy shitcakes. You’re from …” She pointed wordlessly at the walls.
“Ancient Egypt. In those ancient times, as you may know, we practiced complex burial ceremonies.” He shut the door tightly behind them. That was when she noticed the infusion of soft, smoky musk and a layer of other scents. Golden burners hung in dozens of places, and several of them were smoking in delicate curls of fragrance. “We worshipped our pantheon of gods, had our deep belief in the nature of the afterlife and how best to bring the mortal world and our possessions with us. We were very material … and very arrogant to believe that we as mortals could in any way dictate to death.
“The Templars— our priests and priestesses— prepared our bodies and, presumably, our souls, for the afterlife. They promised us they knew how best to deliver us to the eternity we craved.” Ram moved forward to the enormous statues set on either side of the stream, sandstone carvings of a distant and majestic pharaoh, one a king and the other a queen, both holding the crook and flail, one wearing the double crown of Egypt and the other wearing the striped nemes that marked them for the important beings they were. “The methods evolved and became more complex over time,” Ram continued, reaching to pick up a small, carved jar resting at the feet of one of the statues. He held it up to her. “The use of canopic jars, herbs, and wraps were all methodical steps taken to prepare us for the afterlife. But …” He set the jar back down, his golden lashes dropping for a moment to hide the emotion that was racing through his equally golden eyes. “We were arrogant to think we could force the hand of death. In the end all we managed to do was deny ourselves the comfort of final peace. The mummification process, instead of preserving us for the afterlife, ended up tethering us to the mortal plane. We had stumbled on a way to live forever.”
There was grimness in his tone, telling her that there was a great deal of regret attached to what so many others would consider an amazing gift.
“You never die? Forever forever?”
He laughed under his breath, the caustic sound full of painful irony.
“Oh, we die. Believe me. Over and over again, we die. I myself have experienced eleven deaths. Each was excruciating and devastating.” He met her eyes, his pain radiating clearly within them. “And I remember every second of them as clearly as I recall my own name.”
“Oh, my God. That … how horrible for you!” she said, feeling in prickling touches over every inch of her skin the anguish emanating off of him.
“It is even worse than you can imagine, Docia. You see, when we tethered ourselves to this world, we found ourselves in the Ether. It was quite by accident that we discovered the ability to choose a new human body like our queen chose you; choose a human willing to share their mortality with us. And yes, by entering a mortal, we make them incredibly strong and significantly extend their life span. Perks, as Cleo likes to call it. But there is … a downside to that.”
He turned away a little and she saw him shrug his shoulders, as if shrugging away a terrible cloak of negativity.
“But this relationship is not about death, Docia. It’s about a second chance at life. For you, the host … or the original, as we like to call you … and the Body-walker within you, which we sometimes call a carbon.”
“That’s very modern of you. But … I’m trying to … I don’t mean to sound callous, but only eleven lives between ancient Egyptian times and now? That seems like … well, kind of a small amount for such a vast time span.”
“Every time we die we return to the Ether. Whether because of the trauma of death or just some arbitrary cosmic rule, we cannot leave the Ether immediately after being ejected from our last original. Firstly, death is a very weakening experience, to say the least. It takes quite some time to overcome the trauma of it.”
She could tell he was fudging. She didn’t know how. How could she know anything at all about this stranger? And yet listening to him talk about the ultimate of intimate experiences, a person’s relationship with death, it was like seeing into him, straight to the core of him. And the heat in his gold eyes with their nimbus-edged pupils told her he was quite aware of that fact. He had chosen to bare these parts of himself to her. She knew he could just as easily have turned her over to Cleo and let her explain all the finer details about what it meant to be host to a Bodywalker, sparing himself this emotional nakedness.
But he was glossing over certain details. Docia knew from recent experience that dying was very much a private experience, and sometimes a horrific one. And doing so multiple times …
“But you will live your life pretty much exactly as you would have otherwise,” he went on to say. “Although you will most likely outlive the rest of your family … and sometimes the Blending, the combining of what makes Docia unique and the soul, or Ka, of the Body-walker, can cause significant changes in the host’s life and personality to the point where … the people in your life might not be able to adapt to you. You might find you lose some of the relationships you hold dear at the moment. Humans can be very limiting like that. They have a hard time expanding their understanding of things they have grown comfortable with.”
Docia found herself toying with the cuff of her sweater. She reached up and scratched her shoulder, too. She had noticed this morning that some kind of weird rash was evolving under her skin. She had not said anything for fear Jackson wouldn’t let her leave the hospital. But all her fidgeting couldn’t help her escape the dreadfulness of what Ram was trying to explain to her. Trying to brace her for. Her life would not be the same. She could even lose her friends. What of her family? What of Jackson? She didn’t want to live a life without her beloved brother in it. Even the foreknowledge of outliving him made her heart ache.
“What is the point of living a long life if you can’t keep the things that are most important with you?” she murmured.
Ram chuckled softly and moved to stand in front of her, reaching to touch the pad of a single finger under her chin and guiding her gaze up to his own.
“This was the most painful lesson we learned as our existence evolved into what it is now. But, I promise you, for all the hurt you might experience, there are other beautiful souls, fantastic people that you might otherwise have missed in a shorter life span that make it very much worthwhile. But as with all things, this opportunity is only what you make of it. What you and your carbon make of it together.”
“I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know … what can you tell me about her? Did you know her? I mean, do you know her?”
She saw hesitation in his eyes, and again she had the feeling he was guarding information from her. Only this time she suspected a deception behind it that she had not felt the previous time. Strange that she should feel that way. She wasn’t known for being all that intuitive when it came to others.
“It is not my place to tell you who she is. You have to find that out for yourself. Your relationship must be built together, based on your own experiences with each other, not based on the outside opinions of who she is.”
“That’s very diplomatic of you,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I have some ideas, though. She seems very composed. Very calm. And I think she’s sophisticated. She seemed so when I met her briefly, and I get a strong sense of it when I find I would normally be inclined to run around screaming with my hair on fire.”
He grinned at that, a healthy flash of bright white teeth. It was a crooked sort of smile, half of his rugged face curling up with it much more strongly than the other. It was ridiculously endearing and made him ferociously handsome. But there was nothing boyish about it. There was too much eternity in his eyes and too much power and strength in his stance. He couldn’t have affected boyishness in a million years. Or even a few thousand of them.
“Of course, I get the feeling she doesn’t take any shit, either,” Docia observed, trying to stay focused on the situation at hand. “So … you have two names. Everyone does? Which is very confusing.”
“We tend to choose one of the two after the Blending … but as you can imagine, it is the human name we must use publicly in order to function efficiently in human society and not raise any questions. Things have gotten more difficult over time and as everything became automated and computerized. It’s far easier to keep track of us and our unusual age spans than it used to be. Used to be all we had to do was move from one place to another and just lie about our ages. Now, that’s not as easy. Of course, we have people among us who specialize in altering IDs and hacking into computer systems. Still, hack all you like, there’s always a piece of paper somewhere that could give it all away. And then there is a matter of fingerprints and crossing the law. I’m sure you can grasp the complications that could arise there. Your society is very keen on documenting everything in triplicate.”
“Says the man who calls himself a carbon. You’ve been through life quite a few times now. Done many of the same things, I imagine, over and over again. Like, do you have a wife? Did you have one before? Do you have children? This is a new life for you, but really, you’ll never experience any firsts anymore, will you?”