“Mother says that it’s the angels who do God’s work, now,” Miriam said, her forehead creased. “Are you an angel?”
He shook his head. “Just a friend. Will you keep this secret, Miriam? So your brother will live?” She frowned, but nodded, and he smiled. “Good girl. I’ll take him to safety by the water. Go back to your mother, now. She’ll have need of you.”
Miriam pressed her lips together, turned, and ran.
Thor followed her flight with a light touch in the back of her mind to be sure she did not meet any trouble, and then waded into the water with the basket. He knew exactly where he would take the baby, where he would be safe even from the pharaoh. After all, why would the king question his own daughter if she presented him with a child gifted to her by the gods?
Chapter Four: Present
“Abby?”
Garrit’s mother stood in the doorway when Eve looked up. She hadn’t meant to lose so much time, sifting through her memories.
“Juliette.” She rose from her seat to greet her with a kiss. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you were here already.”
Juliette smiled. She was stunningly beautiful, with bright blue eyes and dark hair. Charming, too, which she would have to be to marry into the family. The DeLeon men had always had an overabundance of charisma, but they generally preferred women who weren’t bowled over by them when they took wives. Eve had never been sure if that had been a result of nature or nurture.
“Garrit told us you had a difficult day. I hope you don’t mind the interruption, but Ethan was most insistent that you would wish to see him right away.”
“Ethan?” Eve frowned trying to remember anyone by that name. The door swung open the rest of the way, and she saw the man standing behind Juliette. Her pulse jumped as he locked eyes with her, an arrogance pulling at the corners of his lips. “Oh!”
“Merci, Madame DeLeon,” he said, smiling with so much power that Eve took an involuntary step back.
Juliette nodded, returning the smile and stepping out of the way. “I’ll leave you to your business. We’ll see you at dinner, Ethan?”
“I would be thrilled to join you.” He watched her leave before slipping into the room and shutting the door behind him. His attention turned to Eve, then, and he studied her with stone gray eyes she knew too well.
“Eve.”
She straightened under his inspection and raised her chin. “Adam.”
She would not give him the satisfaction of fear or discomfort. Not in her own home, among her own family. Even though looking at him brought back the memories of Michael’s threat. She closed her hands into fists to keep them from shaking.
He wasn’t supposed to remember. Michael had promised her that much, and she had witnessed it for herself in past lives. Never before now had Adam ever recognized her, ever known to come looking for her, ever remembered who he was. Not since Creation. The punishment for his sins.
“What are you doing here?”
“Your family was kind enough to share with me the details of this part of your past.” He was glancing over the books in the library. “Or at least some of them.”
She stepped behind a table, keeping it between them. “Because you forced them to.”
He inclined his head. Not quite a nod, but an admission. “It was no small effort. In particular, your future father-in-law. His mind is quite strong. Madame DeLeon was no trouble though, and very informative. It appears René keeps no secrets from his wife.”
The idea that he had wriggled his way into their minds, manipulating and controlling her own family made her taste bile. “You have no business here, Adam. And frankly, I’m not sure how you remembered to find me at all.”
“Time heals all wounds, Sister.”
“I’m your sister now, am I? I thought you had intended to have me as your wife.”
“Clearly you’re otherwise engaged at the moment.” He smiled that smug and powerful smile again. “Not that I would object if you changed your mind. He’s not good enough for you.”
“That line is getting old.”
He picked up the journal from the table beside him and opened it. “Your late husband’s?”
She nodded stiffly, resisting the urge to rip the book from his hands before his very presence in the same room could taint it.
“‘Anessa has agreed to become my wife. Her father was glad to be rid of her, and I am relieved that I can save her. We will depart directly for my estate. The sooner she is out of the public eye, the better. I can keep her safe in the country.’” Adam stopped reading aloud and laughed. “So noble of him to rescue you. What were you then? A nobleman’s daughter?”
“I was.”
“And what was your crime that your father was so happy to see you gone?”
She shrugged, not wanting to give him even that much information. Her hands closed around the edges of the small end table. At this point, she wasn’t above throwing furniture.
He stepped forward, all of the smugness leaving his expression, replaced with an earnestness she had never thought to see in his face. It was more terrifying than the arrogance, and for a moment she remembered another life, when if it hadn’t been for the war and the angels, and knowing what would come, she might have welcomed him. But not today.
“I can give you more than this, Eve.”
“More was your dream, not mine.” She sat down in a chair, hoping he would do the same. That he would be forced to keep some distance between them.
He did, but barely, perching on the edge of the seat across from her. “Yet here you are, about to become the wife of a very rich man. If you want money, I can make you a queen, Eve, an empress.”
They’d had this conversation once before. In a golden city, while his memory had still been lost. Did he realize it? It made her head spin to hear the words again. She would never forget any of it. “That has never been my ambition.”
Adam closed the book and set it back down on the table. He leaned forward, placing his hand on her knee. “We were made for each other, Eve.”
She tried to ignore the way his touch clouded her mind. Heat spread up her thigh, tempting, inviting. More of his games. It had to be.
She brushed his hand from her leg and rose, needing more space between them. The last of the sun cast a red glow through the window. She watched it set, hugging herself and waiting for her mind to clear and her thoughts to organize into the truth she had known for too long.
Michael would not like this. She could still see the angel’s cold face as he whispered the punishment he would rain upon her and all her line if she forgot the lessons of the Garden and let Adam into her body.
If Adam had come to her in her last life? She shook her head. She couldn’t even think of it. He hadn’t, and she hadn’t. Besides, she had been too distracted by her past husbands to have noticed him anyway, lost and drugged into memory and dreams. If it were a choice between Thorgrim and Adam, it would always be Thorgrim. Regardless of her sanity.
She kept her tone even and cool and hoped he didn’t notice her trembling. “Michael would as soon see us both dead than allow it. He’d rather burn the world himself than give it into your keeping.”
“Michael has been absent for millennia. This is what you were made for, Eve. For me. To love me.”
“I was made to correct your mistakes. So that our people would survive and live to their potential, instead of being ground beneath your heel. I was made to love everyone but you.”
His silence was the sound of a thousand men marching out from Troy, and she felt his eyes on her, staring, searching for some weakness to exploit. No. She wouldn’t remember that now. She wouldn’t give him a way in. Whomever he had been then, as Paris, he wasn’t the same man now.
“At least help me find the Garden. I’ll go there and bother no one. Exile myself to prove that all I want is you.”
She turned back to him, frowning. Even if she had believed him, and she didn’t, it made no sense. He honestly thought the Gard
en could be found? Perhaps time hadn’t healed everything, after all.
“It was burned to the ground, Adam. Gone, all of it, wasted.”
His eyes hardened to slate, and the room was suddenly too warm. She felt his mind touch hers, insinuating itself into her consciousness like a worm burrowing into freshly turned soil. She clenched her jaw and shut her mind of everything but the memory he searched for. The Garden, scorched to ash, flared brightly into her mind. He was unbelieving at first, then angry, trying to force himself deeper, pressing against her thoughts and the image of smoke and cinder. She imagined her thoughts, her memories into stone, forcing him back.
“Not like that, Adam.” She couldn’t keep the resentment from her voice, or the anger from her face. Her nails dug into her palm, but she didn’t dare touch him even to slap him. “You won’t violate me. Not then and not now.”
He crossed the room, and had her by the arm before she even thought to move. His anger, his frustration, washed over her in pounding waves of red light and burning heat. Her breath caught, her mind throbbing.
“You will give me what I want, Eve.” His grip was hard, and he twisted her elbow. “It has always only been a matter of time.”
Then he let her go and left the room. She rubbed her arm and wilted against the windowsill. Her head ached from his attempted invasion, but he hadn’t managed to break through her defenses. Whatever power he had, he hadn’t quite mastered it. Of course, he’d probably never needed to learn any kind of subtlety.
She followed the black cloud of his anger as he stormed out of the house and drove off, until he recognized that she was following his mind, and he was gone.
Eve joined the others for dinner. The dining room table was covered with take-out boxes of various sizes, serving forks and spoons sticking out of them. René, Garrit’s father, had heaped his plate high already. She sat down in her usual seat beside Garrit, and he smiled.
Juliette glanced behind her. “Oú est Ethan?”
She didn’t meet Juliette’s eyes. “Ethan had another engagement.”
Garrit passed her a carton and she served herself. He’d ordered beef adana kebabs and there were already two of them on her plate. Probably to keep René from eating them all. Garrit knew she loved them.
“C’est bizarre. I was under the distinct impression he wished to spend several weeks here,” Juliette said. “He seemed adamant about it.”
Eve tried to smile with some kind of reassurance as she served herself from a container of tabouleh. She could have used another hour to herself before dinner, crying with relief that he was gone and no one would die today, but she didn’t have it. And they needed to know. It would be their lives and their blood spilled, in the end.
“Ethan was not exactly the man he led you to believe he was. It’s no fault of your own. My brother has always been brilliant at games of deceit.”
There was absolute silence. Eve could feel them absorbing her words, and then winced at the white-flare of their shock. After fighting against Adam’s invasion of her thoughts, filtering out their emotional responses took more effort than she had the patience for. She pinched the bridge of her nose against the throbbing behind her eyes. It had been a very long time since she’d had to exercise those particular muscles.
“We had no idea, Abby, or we would never have brought him.” René said.
Eve let out a breath, steadying herself. She didn’t want them to see her fear or her worry, and absolutely not her pain. “I know.”
Garrit was watching her, but she kept her gaze on her plate. The timing of all of this was atrocious.
“Am I the only person at the table with no idea of what’s going on?”
She flinched at his accusation, bitter and needling, more than his tone. If she didn’t meet his eyes now—she lifted her gaze, her expression carefully neutral.
“The man your parents brought to meet me, Ethan, is Adam.”
Garrit’s jaw tightened and his mouth thinned into a line of frustration. Better than anger, she supposed. He pushed his plate away and stood up, his gaze going from Eve to his father. Garrit shook his head just once. “Excuse me.”
She watched him leave the room, and sighed. “I’m sorry. He only discovered last night I'm Eve, and he’s upset I didn’t tell him myself, earlier.”
“He needs only time, Abby. He loves you,” Juliette said.
“Quel imbécile,” René mumbled. “You are the same woman, still, and he should not blame you for not seeing what was before his nose.”
Eve tried not to smile. René was the same sort of man that Ryam had been, from his dark eyes to his imperturbable attitude. It helped to remember that. Ryam had always kept her safe.
“I did point that out to him. I’m afraid it didn’t make it any easier for him to swallow.”
René laughed, his eyes warming. “You are good for him, Abby. A man needs a woman who will speak plainly, though at times he may not care for what she says. DeLeon men, doubly so.”
“René will speak with him,” Juliette said. “He is not so stubborn he will not listen.”
René nodded, unfazed that his wife had volunteered him to an unenviable task. He served himself another helping of hummus.
“Thank you,” Eve said.
Juliette smiled. “Bon. Now, tell us what you have planned for the wedding. Garrit says you would have it here, at the manor? I think the courtyard would suit you, with the chapel doors thrown wide. Is that what you had in mind?”
“Yes.” Eve glanced at René. He rolled his eyes and went back to his dinner. But it was a relief to change the subject. To think about her marriage. She’d be safer then. They all would be. “Garrit was worried about the weather, but I think if we rent a pavilion tent, it would be just fine.”
“Oui, parfait! You will want the shade from the sun, in any event. Have you thought of what you will serve? I know a pastry chef trés bon. He would be pleased to create your cake.”
Eve grinned. “Would you be willing to arrange an introduction? I’d love it if we could do some of this together.”
“Ma chérie, I’ve only been waiting for you to ask.”
Garrit was reading Ryam’s journal when Eve found him in the library. She hesitated at the door. Giving him space was all well and good, but she hadn’t exactly counted on Adam’s arrival.
He looked up at her and smiled. “It’s all right, Abby. I was waiting for you.” He set the book down.
“I wasn’t sure you were ready to talk to me yet.”
He shrugged and then waved her to a seat across from him. It was the seat Adam had occupied not hours earlier. She sat down and tried to pretend her brother had never come, but her hands were shaking, and she pressed them against her knees to stop it.
“Papa found me after dinner,” he said. “He was worried you and I were having problems. He called me a damned fool.” Garrit grinned.
“Your father has never been one to mince words.”
“No. And he makes it very difficult to argue.” His gaze drifted back to the book. “The truth has always been staring me in the face. I just chose not to see it.”
She looked at her hands, forcing herself to open them from the fists they had become. “I should’ve told you.”
“I should’ve known you.” His tone was grim. “What kind of DeLeon am I, if I can’t even recognize you for who you are?”
“The kind who wasn’t looking.” She shrugged. “You had no reason to see me coming. I didn’t come to you for sanctuary. I didn’t use any of the traditional phrases that should have alerted you. I didn’t even mean to find you. It was pure happenstance that we ended up in the same university at the same time.” She grimaced. “And the last time a man learned what I was, he had me locked up.”
“Lord Ryam knew you on sight.”
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her forehead. There were more pressing issues than her late husband’s insight, but it bothered her anyway. “I’m beginning to suspect Ryam had more secrets than I di
d. Which is saying quite a bit.”
He studied her for a moment, his lips pressed together to keep from smiling. “I thought you could read minds.”
“Ordinarily, yes. Among this family, it takes a bit more work. And Ryam had a stronger mind than many.”
“But Adam had no problem with my parents.”
“Adam has no respect for the privacy of anyone else’s mind, though he left me with the impression it was mostly your mother he mined for information. Your father he only had to charm.”
“It would take much more than charm to make my father break his vow. Aren’t you familiar with it?”
She shook her head, but had no trouble imagining it. “I can’t say I’m completely surprised.”
Similar vows had been made periodically, but she didn’t recall telling Ryam anything that might provoke him to that kind of measure. Of course it didn’t have to be Ryam; the last time she had met with this family, she hadn’t been in her right mind. She might have said anything.
He opened the journal to a marked page, and handed it to her. “Our family heritage. I was made to take it also, though I never really understood it until now.”
Eve read the page he indicated. She read it again, to be sure she understood, and swallowed against the tightness in her throat.
Watch for Adam, it said. Now that he has his memory, he will come, and he cannot be allowed near to her, for the sake of all the world. Guard her! And there was more. More of the same.
She would have remembered if she had told Ryam any of this. She was certain of that. It wasn’t the kind of conversation that was easily forgotten, nor was it anything that wouldn’t have come up if it had been known generally within the family. For a dizzying moment, she wondered if Thorgrim had haunted her more than once. It was a long moment before she trusted herself to respond to what she was looking at, and not to the ghost of insanity breathing in her ear.
“How is this possible?”
“Quoi?”
She looked up, clearing her throat and forcing herself not to think of men who should have been dead having conversations with the living. “Until today, when he arrived here, I had no clue that Adam’s memory had been restored. He isn’t supposed to remember anything, Garrit! From one life, to the next. He isn’t supposed to know me, never mind be able to find me this way! But here in this passage, written over five hundred years ago, is a statement by the man I was married to, of his foreknowledge of the very event that took place today. How is it possible?”
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