As if thinking about them brought them to life, Max and Angelina hurried to the doorway behind them as they entered the room.
“Marissa!” Angelina cried, but Max held her back from rushing to her sister’s side. The man recognized the intensity of the situation, could see it was best to keep her away for now. That was probably what he had been doing all throughout this mess, keeping her inside, away from the death being dealt outside.
The Angel laid Jackson down, legs first, and then gingerly settled his head on the pillow as though she were tucking her sweet beloved grandfather into his sickbed. Marissa rounded to the other side of the bed, climbing up onto it and crawling quickly across the mattress in order to reach Jackson, take up his hand and press his knuckles desperately to her lips. Her hands and clothes were still stained with dirt, and it was obvious she couldn’t care less about bringing that dirt into her bed. Leo had to grudgingly acknowledge the sense of priorities he was feeling from her. Whatever he thought of this situation, whatever he thought of them, there was no denying the fierce sincerity of her emotions toward Jackson.
“Jackson,” she breathed over the backs of his fingers, her distress and sadness filling the space around the people standing anxiously in wait…in wait for an Angel to create a miracle.
The Night Angel stood, bracing her feet apart and facing the bed. She reached out her hands, palms down, fingers loosely splayed, like a magician about to make the beautiful assistant levitate into the air. But Leo was hoping she had something better to offer than an illusion.
“His souls are intact within him,” she said with obvious relief after a moment or two…moments that felt like forever to everyone in the room. “This is very fortunate. Had the imp god excised either of his souls there would be nothing to be done.”
“How…how do you know?” Marissa asked, her voice tremulous and catching softly as she tried not to sob outright, tried to keep her composure even though it was thoroughly frayed at the edges.
Yellow eyes flicked over the distraught queen, assessing and thoughtful.
“If you have Hatshepsut within you, you already know the answer to that.”
“I-I can’t…I don’t…” She stammered, clearly at a loss and floundering. “I’m not even fully Blended with her yet. I can barely hear anything from her except these…these powerful, choking emotions.” New tears came to her eyes. “As if I needed any more than my own.”
“I am a Night Angel,” she said with a quiet helpfulness as she reached over to cover Marissa’s hand where it grasped Jackson’s. “We see souls, both inside and outside of their corporeal bodies. Both living within the human body and walking lost upon the earth in spirit. It is our lot in life to ferry the lost ones to a portal leading them to the next stage in their lives.”
“Lives? But if they no longer have corporeal selves…” Leo spoke up, then wondered why that, of all questions, was the first to come to his lips.
The Angel turned her head slightly in order to look at him, her glowing eyes brushing over him from head to toe in a quick assessing look.
“You are human, so I don’t expect you to understand,” she said dismissively. “Suffice it to say, there are stages of the life of a soul far beyond your limited understanding.”
Well. Shit. He’d just been snobbily slapped down by an angel. Were angels allowed to do that? Then again, were angels allowed to be na**d as jaybirds? Or were Night Angels something completely different than, say, your run-of-the-mill angels? She certainly didn’t look like the angels his very Catholic mother had had nailed to every wall and flat surface in her house…except those that had been occupied by Jesus.
Rosarita Alvarez would have been shocked to shit to see an angel like this one.
The Angel turned back to look at Marissa. “Since you are barely Blended, you are very likely unable to access all of what Hatshepsut knows about my breed. But if you turn yourself inward she will assure you that no one can care for your mate’s soul better than someone of my breed can. At least, in the short run.”
Marissa nodded as tears trembled on the curves of her lashes. “I can feel that.”
“Then you must believe me when I tell you there is very little time for us to repair the damage done to Menes and his host.”
“Jackson,” Leo bit out. “His name is Jackson and he’s worth ten of your Menses…or whatever his name is.”
“Menes,” the Angel corrected him, somehow making him feel like navel lint with just the dismissive tone in her voice. It was very clear what she thought of him. “Menes, the most powerful unifier in all Egyptian history. Menes, the leader of this vast race of very extraordinary peoples. Have you any idea what it takes for two souls to inhabit the same corporeal body like this? If you would look with eyes other than those filled with anger and contempt you might come to appreciate that.”
Damn. Two slap downs in as many minutes. Leo felt a sudden urge to smile, but he fought it back. This was hardly the time for amusement. Still, it was a little nice to know he could find appreciation and humor in things again, no matter how small or fleeting.
“All I appreciate is that something I don’t understand just tried to kill my best friend,” he said sharply. “You said you could help? So help.”
“I can temporarily trap his souls within his body,” she said, clearly ignoring his tone and the threat that bracketed it. “The power the imp used has severed his spinal cord at the midpoint of his neck, effectively paralyzing him. But more importantly, it has rent a hole in his aura…a hole through which his souls might escape. Our souls are tethered to our bodies quite tightly. This is necessary because every injury the body suffers opens a hole, however temporary, in the fabric of the aura that contains that soul. Think of the aura as an embryonic sack and your soul is the baby within it. Any injury causes a small tear in that sack. The greater the injury the larger the hole, and the larger the opportunity for an untethered soul to escape prematurely. This injury and the power that was used to create the rent have also severed the tethers to his souls and left an enormous tear in the aura containing them. I’m amazed he is still harboring both of his souls. It is a testament to his strength of spirit and will that his souls didn’t burst free of him at the moment of injury.
“I can close the hole in his aura, keeping his souls from exiting, but I cannot regenerate the tethers and neither can he. Not spontaneously. And until those tethers are repaired he will not wake, he will not sleep, and he will not be able to recover from the injury. And, after enough time has passed with him in that kind of state, his aura will disintegrate in entirety and he will die. This is a state similar to when a human is comatose. Eventually the body withers and the person dies. In this case, the aura will wither and the souls will move on.”
It sounded utterly nightmarish to Leo. He knew Jackson. What she was describing was a fate worse than death for men of action like Jackson and himself. The idea of becoming a burden on others, of tormenting loved ones instead of allowing them to grieve and then move on with their lives, was intolerable. And that was to say nothing about what it might feel like from Jackson’s perspective. What if he could feel the brokenness of his body? What if he was aware of every single excruciating moment that he remained trapped in that painful sort of limbo?
“Is he aware?” Leo asked softly.
“Not as you might desire,” the Night Angel said with obvious gentility. But she didn’t direct the answer to him, instead aiming it at Marissa. “But there is awareness on a soulful level. He will sense your nearness. He will sense the state of your emotions. Also, it won’t do you any good to cover them up. He will sense it’s a façade.”
“So you put this Band-Aid on him. Repair the hole in his aura. How do you repair the severing of a soul’s tether?” Marissa wanted to know, her knuckles white as she subconsciously gripped Jackson’s hand with all the strength she could muster, as though loosening that hold in any way would allow him to slip away.
“Let me do this first. Then we will discuss the rest,” the Night Angel said softly, meeting Marissa’s eyes and holding her gaze with a compassion that clearly comforted Jackson’s beloved. Marissa finally let tears fall, let herself feel just how dangerous this was and just how close Jackson might be to death.
“He is everything,” she said. Then as if it were something different she said, “He is everything to me.”
Leo supposed both were true. Jackson/Menes was everything to their people, the strongest of his kind and the focal point of their political structure. Although Marissa/Hatshepsut was pharaoh in her own right, it was very clear that she had no interest in ruling without Jackson by her side.
The Angel nodded and leaned forward, resting a palm on Jackson’s forehead, closing her eyes for a minute as though she were seeking for something within herself. The closing of her eyes was eerie. It made her face seem like a void of black with no relief, save for the white of her arching brows and the snowy crescents of her lashes, just as it was eerie when they were opened, a stark glow of yellow in a setting of black.
At first he thought he couldn’t tell if she were pretty or ugly or strangely shaped to match her unusual coloring. But the longer he looked at her the more he began to clearly make out her features. She had full lips, like those of a child pouting with pique. However, there was nothing else childish in her graceful looks. Certainly not when those full br**sts and curving h*ps were taken into consideration. She had an exotic sweep to her cheekbones, the rise of them exaggerated by the tautness of her drawn back hair. Her forehead was gently sloped, the line of her jaw sweeping softly into her chin, throat and neck.
She was pretty, he decided. Very much in her own way, and not just because she was a novelty. There was genuine beauty to her looks.
Otherwise, there was nothing delicate about her. She was athletic and strong and it lent power to the impression of vigor she was exuding. She knew what she was doing and was confident in her ability to do it. Much in the same way that he knew how to kill a man and had utter faith in his getting the job done the way it needed to be done.
In this mixed-up paranormal world he had been thrust into, it was good to know he still had the ability to size one of these people up. And though he had no proof one way or another, he forced himself to have faith he was reading her right, even though he really had no faith in anything at all. How was he truly to judge these things he could not understand? Things he didn’t want to understand. And yet, his lack of understanding frustrated him, made him feel helpless. It was a feeling he didn’t like. After all, what else did they know about her? Hell, did they even know her name?
“Faith,” she said, her chartreuse eyes flicking around to meet his.
He realized she was answering his question, a question he had not asked aloud. His entire body bristled in defense, his fists clenching tightly. “Get out of my head!” he bit off at her.
One white brow arched. “Who says I am in your head?” she countered.
“How else would you know I wanted to know what your name was?”
“And of course that means I was in your head.” Her head tilted ever so slightly as she ran that assessing gaze over him again, as though she were figuring him into some kind of complicated algorithm.
“How else?” he countered caustically.
“Perhaps,” she said as she turned her attention back to Jackson, “it is you who are intruding in my head. If humans only realized the power of their own thoughts, a great many ills of the world could be rectified, not the least of which is the constant leaping into misreading the acts and intentions of others.”
Leo floundered, at a loss for a moment as he tried to figure out what she meant. “Last I checked I’m not a telepath,” he said sharply. “That’s an ability saved for this freaks and geeks society.”
“I would argue differently. So should you.”
“Why would I?” he snapped.
“Because if you’ve learned nothing from recent experiences, Leo Alvarez, you have learned you don’t know as much as you thought you did. That there is potentially as much unknown as there is known to you. But, like most mortal humans, you persist in thinking you are the be-all and end-all of the universe. That you are the highest form of living. That there couldn’t possibly be anything brighter or more vibrant than you are. And when something happens to shake that arrogance up, you’re left floundering.”
“What do you know about my recent experiences?” he demanded of her with blistering, barely leashed rage. And he was supposed to believe she wasn’t reading his mind? Oh god…what can she see? Which of the cornucopia of traumatic and shameful events that had occurred could she see? One? A few? All of them? The very idea made him violently nauseous, and it was all he could do to swallow it back down.
“Marissa!” Angelina cried, but Max held her back from rushing to her sister’s side. The man recognized the intensity of the situation, could see it was best to keep her away for now. That was probably what he had been doing all throughout this mess, keeping her inside, away from the death being dealt outside.
The Angel laid Jackson down, legs first, and then gingerly settled his head on the pillow as though she were tucking her sweet beloved grandfather into his sickbed. Marissa rounded to the other side of the bed, climbing up onto it and crawling quickly across the mattress in order to reach Jackson, take up his hand and press his knuckles desperately to her lips. Her hands and clothes were still stained with dirt, and it was obvious she couldn’t care less about bringing that dirt into her bed. Leo had to grudgingly acknowledge the sense of priorities he was feeling from her. Whatever he thought of this situation, whatever he thought of them, there was no denying the fierce sincerity of her emotions toward Jackson.
“Jackson,” she breathed over the backs of his fingers, her distress and sadness filling the space around the people standing anxiously in wait…in wait for an Angel to create a miracle.
The Night Angel stood, bracing her feet apart and facing the bed. She reached out her hands, palms down, fingers loosely splayed, like a magician about to make the beautiful assistant levitate into the air. But Leo was hoping she had something better to offer than an illusion.
“His souls are intact within him,” she said with obvious relief after a moment or two…moments that felt like forever to everyone in the room. “This is very fortunate. Had the imp god excised either of his souls there would be nothing to be done.”
“How…how do you know?” Marissa asked, her voice tremulous and catching softly as she tried not to sob outright, tried to keep her composure even though it was thoroughly frayed at the edges.
Yellow eyes flicked over the distraught queen, assessing and thoughtful.
“If you have Hatshepsut within you, you already know the answer to that.”
“I-I can’t…I don’t…” She stammered, clearly at a loss and floundering. “I’m not even fully Blended with her yet. I can barely hear anything from her except these…these powerful, choking emotions.” New tears came to her eyes. “As if I needed any more than my own.”
“I am a Night Angel,” she said with a quiet helpfulness as she reached over to cover Marissa’s hand where it grasped Jackson’s. “We see souls, both inside and outside of their corporeal bodies. Both living within the human body and walking lost upon the earth in spirit. It is our lot in life to ferry the lost ones to a portal leading them to the next stage in their lives.”
“Lives? But if they no longer have corporeal selves…” Leo spoke up, then wondered why that, of all questions, was the first to come to his lips.
The Angel turned her head slightly in order to look at him, her glowing eyes brushing over him from head to toe in a quick assessing look.
“You are human, so I don’t expect you to understand,” she said dismissively. “Suffice it to say, there are stages of the life of a soul far beyond your limited understanding.”
Well. Shit. He’d just been snobbily slapped down by an angel. Were angels allowed to do that? Then again, were angels allowed to be na**d as jaybirds? Or were Night Angels something completely different than, say, your run-of-the-mill angels? She certainly didn’t look like the angels his very Catholic mother had had nailed to every wall and flat surface in her house…except those that had been occupied by Jesus.
Rosarita Alvarez would have been shocked to shit to see an angel like this one.
The Angel turned back to look at Marissa. “Since you are barely Blended, you are very likely unable to access all of what Hatshepsut knows about my breed. But if you turn yourself inward she will assure you that no one can care for your mate’s soul better than someone of my breed can. At least, in the short run.”
Marissa nodded as tears trembled on the curves of her lashes. “I can feel that.”
“Then you must believe me when I tell you there is very little time for us to repair the damage done to Menes and his host.”
“Jackson,” Leo bit out. “His name is Jackson and he’s worth ten of your Menses…or whatever his name is.”
“Menes,” the Angel corrected him, somehow making him feel like navel lint with just the dismissive tone in her voice. It was very clear what she thought of him. “Menes, the most powerful unifier in all Egyptian history. Menes, the leader of this vast race of very extraordinary peoples. Have you any idea what it takes for two souls to inhabit the same corporeal body like this? If you would look with eyes other than those filled with anger and contempt you might come to appreciate that.”
Damn. Two slap downs in as many minutes. Leo felt a sudden urge to smile, but he fought it back. This was hardly the time for amusement. Still, it was a little nice to know he could find appreciation and humor in things again, no matter how small or fleeting.
“All I appreciate is that something I don’t understand just tried to kill my best friend,” he said sharply. “You said you could help? So help.”
“I can temporarily trap his souls within his body,” she said, clearly ignoring his tone and the threat that bracketed it. “The power the imp used has severed his spinal cord at the midpoint of his neck, effectively paralyzing him. But more importantly, it has rent a hole in his aura…a hole through which his souls might escape. Our souls are tethered to our bodies quite tightly. This is necessary because every injury the body suffers opens a hole, however temporary, in the fabric of the aura that contains that soul. Think of the aura as an embryonic sack and your soul is the baby within it. Any injury causes a small tear in that sack. The greater the injury the larger the hole, and the larger the opportunity for an untethered soul to escape prematurely. This injury and the power that was used to create the rent have also severed the tethers to his souls and left an enormous tear in the aura containing them. I’m amazed he is still harboring both of his souls. It is a testament to his strength of spirit and will that his souls didn’t burst free of him at the moment of injury.
“I can close the hole in his aura, keeping his souls from exiting, but I cannot regenerate the tethers and neither can he. Not spontaneously. And until those tethers are repaired he will not wake, he will not sleep, and he will not be able to recover from the injury. And, after enough time has passed with him in that kind of state, his aura will disintegrate in entirety and he will die. This is a state similar to when a human is comatose. Eventually the body withers and the person dies. In this case, the aura will wither and the souls will move on.”
It sounded utterly nightmarish to Leo. He knew Jackson. What she was describing was a fate worse than death for men of action like Jackson and himself. The idea of becoming a burden on others, of tormenting loved ones instead of allowing them to grieve and then move on with their lives, was intolerable. And that was to say nothing about what it might feel like from Jackson’s perspective. What if he could feel the brokenness of his body? What if he was aware of every single excruciating moment that he remained trapped in that painful sort of limbo?
“Is he aware?” Leo asked softly.
“Not as you might desire,” the Night Angel said with obvious gentility. But she didn’t direct the answer to him, instead aiming it at Marissa. “But there is awareness on a soulful level. He will sense your nearness. He will sense the state of your emotions. Also, it won’t do you any good to cover them up. He will sense it’s a façade.”
“So you put this Band-Aid on him. Repair the hole in his aura. How do you repair the severing of a soul’s tether?” Marissa wanted to know, her knuckles white as she subconsciously gripped Jackson’s hand with all the strength she could muster, as though loosening that hold in any way would allow him to slip away.
“Let me do this first. Then we will discuss the rest,” the Night Angel said softly, meeting Marissa’s eyes and holding her gaze with a compassion that clearly comforted Jackson’s beloved. Marissa finally let tears fall, let herself feel just how dangerous this was and just how close Jackson might be to death.
“He is everything,” she said. Then as if it were something different she said, “He is everything to me.”
Leo supposed both were true. Jackson/Menes was everything to their people, the strongest of his kind and the focal point of their political structure. Although Marissa/Hatshepsut was pharaoh in her own right, it was very clear that she had no interest in ruling without Jackson by her side.
The Angel nodded and leaned forward, resting a palm on Jackson’s forehead, closing her eyes for a minute as though she were seeking for something within herself. The closing of her eyes was eerie. It made her face seem like a void of black with no relief, save for the white of her arching brows and the snowy crescents of her lashes, just as it was eerie when they were opened, a stark glow of yellow in a setting of black.
At first he thought he couldn’t tell if she were pretty or ugly or strangely shaped to match her unusual coloring. But the longer he looked at her the more he began to clearly make out her features. She had full lips, like those of a child pouting with pique. However, there was nothing else childish in her graceful looks. Certainly not when those full br**sts and curving h*ps were taken into consideration. She had an exotic sweep to her cheekbones, the rise of them exaggerated by the tautness of her drawn back hair. Her forehead was gently sloped, the line of her jaw sweeping softly into her chin, throat and neck.
She was pretty, he decided. Very much in her own way, and not just because she was a novelty. There was genuine beauty to her looks.
Otherwise, there was nothing delicate about her. She was athletic and strong and it lent power to the impression of vigor she was exuding. She knew what she was doing and was confident in her ability to do it. Much in the same way that he knew how to kill a man and had utter faith in his getting the job done the way it needed to be done.
In this mixed-up paranormal world he had been thrust into, it was good to know he still had the ability to size one of these people up. And though he had no proof one way or another, he forced himself to have faith he was reading her right, even though he really had no faith in anything at all. How was he truly to judge these things he could not understand? Things he didn’t want to understand. And yet, his lack of understanding frustrated him, made him feel helpless. It was a feeling he didn’t like. After all, what else did they know about her? Hell, did they even know her name?
“Faith,” she said, her chartreuse eyes flicking around to meet his.
He realized she was answering his question, a question he had not asked aloud. His entire body bristled in defense, his fists clenching tightly. “Get out of my head!” he bit off at her.
One white brow arched. “Who says I am in your head?” she countered.
“How else would you know I wanted to know what your name was?”
“And of course that means I was in your head.” Her head tilted ever so slightly as she ran that assessing gaze over him again, as though she were figuring him into some kind of complicated algorithm.
“How else?” he countered caustically.
“Perhaps,” she said as she turned her attention back to Jackson, “it is you who are intruding in my head. If humans only realized the power of their own thoughts, a great many ills of the world could be rectified, not the least of which is the constant leaping into misreading the acts and intentions of others.”
Leo floundered, at a loss for a moment as he tried to figure out what she meant. “Last I checked I’m not a telepath,” he said sharply. “That’s an ability saved for this freaks and geeks society.”
“I would argue differently. So should you.”
“Why would I?” he snapped.
“Because if you’ve learned nothing from recent experiences, Leo Alvarez, you have learned you don’t know as much as you thought you did. That there is potentially as much unknown as there is known to you. But, like most mortal humans, you persist in thinking you are the be-all and end-all of the universe. That you are the highest form of living. That there couldn’t possibly be anything brighter or more vibrant than you are. And when something happens to shake that arrogance up, you’re left floundering.”
“What do you know about my recent experiences?” he demanded of her with blistering, barely leashed rage. And he was supposed to believe she wasn’t reading his mind? Oh god…what can she see? Which of the cornucopia of traumatic and shameful events that had occurred could she see? One? A few? All of them? The very idea made him violently nauseous, and it was all he could do to swallow it back down.
