Forever

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “Nickname. I think it was football related or something.”

  Okay now that was weird. Why did it feel like he was lying to her? If so, it was a really silly thing to lie about. What the hell did she care where the name came from? He could have said it was his alter ego’s name for all she cared. She’d heard stranger and weirder things in her career.

  She decided to let it go. She told herself she was being oversensitive. After all, she had been on edge around him lately, waiting for his other promised shoe to drop. She’d been envisioning hundreds of scenarios, a thousand ways to face the application of his promised assault on her, and it had made her hypervigilant.

  “We’re here,” he said abruptly, throwing the SUV into park. Sargent went wild, pacing in the back of the car, whining at an earsplitting pitch and consistency.

  Marissa fumbled for the door handle on her side, determined not to look at the lean, powerful line of his athletic body in uniform with the autocratic weight of his gun belt and vest lending a quintessential air of powerful masculinity. She would not allow herself to devolve into some kind of girlish flirt who giggled and twirled her hair as she checked out the cop’s hot bod. Nope. That was so not her.

  Mostly, she amended as she watched the sexy cop clip a leash onto his dog, bring him out of the car and, with a deep-throated sound, command him to heel. She would have to be dead as thoughag. not to notice how truly fine a male specimen he was. Watching him hold all that frenetic canine energy in abeyance was practically primal. Man and beast, moving as one, a team of ultimate power and strength.

  She looked over the crowd of people assembled. Cops, civilians, EMTs, and every other sort of official she could imagine had been drummed up for the search. Something like this was a big deal in such a small town, and the local news crew was there right on schedule. But what she was looking for was …

  There. Loss. Abject horror dulled by the weight of ultimate shock. Tears of disbelief quivering in the lashes of a woman being comforted by nearly a half-dozen people. The mother. The phalanx of loved ones surrounding her was keeping her protected from the media. There was that at least. But those loved ones would eventually become obstacles, in one way or another, that she would end up in contention with unless this situation resolved in a quick and harmless manner.

  “How long?” she heard Jackson ask the chief of police—a tall, autocratic man with salt-flecked black hair and a pair of serious dark eyes. Devlin Morris was a good chief. He was just the right mix of hardcore cop and clever, diplomatic politician. He was accessible to the policemen and -women who worked under him, revered by them in many respects because he was a legendary figure on the force. Just the other day she had heard a story about him her patient had dubbed “The Polka-Dot Dress Story.” It said something about how far you had made it in the world, when people referred to your adventures in work and in life with a title.

  “Best guess is three hours. She sent the kid to his friend’s house to play about four p.m. She figured he might have stayed for supper when he didn’t come back after a couple of hours and says she tried to call him then. When she finally got seriously worried, she called the friend’s house and found out he’d never gotten there.”

  “Three hours then,” Jackson agreed grimly after a glance at his watch. She looked at hers even though she already knew it was close to seven p.m. They would assume the last sighting was at the time of the incident … whether that incident was accidental or by nefarious means … and work all following courses of action outward from there. For her part, she was looking at a mother who was no doubt kicking herself and asking why she hadn’t called the friend’s house sooner, why she hadn’t walked him there herself, why she had ever let him out of her sight in the first place.

  But Marissa was also there for another reason. She looked carefully at each and every face that was there and was not obviously an official. She would consider them later on if it came to it. For now, she was focusing on the lookie-lous and those seemingly close to the family. Especially those close to or part of the family. Statistics showed that a high percentage of child disappearances were instigated by another family member. Uncle. Cousin. Brother. Mother.

  Mother. Marissa hung back from introducing herself to the mother just yet. Instead she leaned back against the warmth of the SUV’s hood, the spring night coming in a little chillier than it had been. She had been in such an all-fired rush to jump into the car with Jackson that she had forgotten to grab her coat. Or her purse for that matter. But she wasn’t going to waste time examining the reasons why she had done that. She had bigger fish to fry.

  The mother looked suitably distraught. There really was no right or wrong way for a parent to act after their child disappeared; line-height:1.4em; } div.toc_. i, but there were certain things you wouldn’t expect to see in their behavior.

  For instance, the mother pulling out a compact and checking herself before allowing a reporter to speak to her. She dabbed at her eyes, pulled out a lipstick, tugged at her curls in order to make them settle better and more attractively. Now, it was highly possible that these behaviors were rote, that in her shock she was resorting to motions and actions that were comforting and familiar. But there were also triggers for certain behaviors. The trigger here, she imagined, was the desire to look at her most appealing to anyone watching her. Now why would a mother care about that when her child was potentially lying dead in a ditch somewhere?

  A cold dread clenched in Marissa’s stomach. She flicked her attention to Jackson, who had Sargent out of the car. The dog was twisting and turning around after having been given the scent he was supposed to search for. Jackson’s brow was drawn in a wrinkled wave of perplexity and concern. He kept tugging at Sargent, redirecting him, but the dog seemed to be lost. Either that or he simply wasn’t as well-trained as he needed to be yet.

  She found the latter very hard to believe. She had watched out of her window for three weeks solid as Jackson had run Sargent through drill after drill after drill, ending every one with triumphant praise and the genuine pleasure of a job well done. She moved closer to him.

  “Jackson?” she hedged, not wanting to interfere. She didn’t even realize she had called him by his given name rather than “Officer Waverly” as she usually did.

  “He’s not catching on,” Jackson said, the frown deepening.

  “Jackson,” she said more softly. “The mother.”

  That brought his attention sharply away from Sargent and up to her face. She couldn’t help but jerk in a short breath when she found herself the center of his attention and staring dead into his brilliant turquoise eyes. They were that bright tropical ocean blue that made you jealous of their beauty and the power behind them could either scare the bejeezus out of you or make you melt into a puddle of hormones.

  She was trying hard to resist doing the latter. Very, very hard.

  And it was strange, but she had never thought they were so sea-colored before. She had always thought they were more of a classic blue. How strange …

  Jackson redirected Sargent without looking at him and the pup obediently sat at his heel. He released her from his penetrating regard for all of a second to steal a glance at the missing child’s mother. But then he was back t3.org/1999/xht

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kamenwati was slowly turning the pages of a prayer compendium. It was dead silent in the room, so the rasping sound of one page against another filled the otherwise vacant air. There was one other sound. Breathing. There was an inadequate touch of comfort in the sound of her breathing as she slept. Sleep being a subjective term.

  At least she was alive, he kept telling himself. But Kamen could not rejoice overmuch in the understanding that it was a matter of semantics in Odjit’s case. Her host, Selena, who had given his mistress new and glorious life, was now Odjit’s warden. Her prison.

  When he got his hands on that mortal who had dared to injure her those three long weeks ago, his blade nearly severing Selena’s head from her body as
he had cut her throat, he was going to destroy him slowly, molecule by molecule, so he would know the same pain that Kamen was feeling and had been suffering from ever since Odjit had been wounded.

  Her body was healed, finally. The process of drawing her away from the brink of death had been arduous and he had come close to failing in spite of her Bodywalker ability to heal rapidly.

  Yet she lingered in a coma. Dead but alive. Alive yet dead. It was an infuriating limbo and she didn’t deserve such an ignominious existence. Odjit was the most powerful and beautiful priestess of her time. She communed with the gods whenever she walked on this earth, providing the Templar Bodywalkers with a conduit to them. All she had ever done, all she had ever tried to do, was bring the Bodywalkers closer to their gods.

  But Menes and his foul followers in the body Politic thwarted her efforts time and again, leading the so-called “lawful” Bodywalkers further and further from the only resource open to them that could perhaps, one day, bring a peaceful end to this interminable existence where they resurrected over and over and over.

  Life had become so empty for him. He would do anything … anything at all to finally find a sense of peace and finality. And he believed with all his heart and soul that Odjit was the only way to do that. Only her fervent belief could bring them there.

  He turned the page and found what he had been looking for. A translation of the Bodywalker prophecy they called the Resolution Prophecy.

  The children of the sun will fall into misguidance, will pervert the natural order of things, and find themselves knowing only night. There will be no final peace, no resolution, until Amun rises and holds his hands out to the most repentant and most deserving of his children. Love, blinding and pure, will guide Amun home at last. But should he find poison and acrimony amongst his children, then his fury and punishment will know no bounds.

  All scholars and historians, on both sides of the civil rift, agreed that the falling into misguidance had already occurred. It was wha know how much he means toouhrdt had created the Bodywalker species to begin with. Their elaborate mummification rituals, meant to bring their wealth and households into the afterlife with them and preserve them for their glorious rest had, in fact, ended up tethering their souls to the mortal world. They had suffered for angering the gods with their hubris, waiting in the Ether, numb and in limbo, for hundreds of years before they had evolved enough to learn that they could exit the mists by luring to them a living mortal on the cusp of death. The lesser mortal souls were honored and graced with the Bodywalkers’ powerful presences. They gave them new life and extraordinary power in trade for the dominant control of their mortal flesh. In essence, they paid for their near-immortality by moving to a submissive position and allowing the host full reign over all thoughts and actions.

  And even so, they could never look upon the face of their beautiful sun. They who had been born to the deserts of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the absolute children of the sun and the great god Ra. It was a painful and bitter punishment, and Kamenwati, as well as all of the other Templar followers, longed for the day when this curse would end.

  But here was where interpretations divided. The Templars like himself and Odjit believed wholeheartedly that if Amun rose and found the Bodywalkers at war he would be further angered and there was no telling what greater punishments it would earn them. Templars like Kamen believed that prayer, rituals, and absolute devotion to the gods and to a unified peace was the only way to earn Amun’s blessings and, finally, a place in the afterlife.

  The godless Politic with their modern ways and blasphemous practices would be the ruin of them all. Kamen could not see that happen. Refused to see that happen. He was tired. So very damn tired. He longed for the end of all of this. Sure, he had thrilled in the immortality of it all in the beginning. But it had not taken but two long lives for him to feel disenchanted with all that had once given him joy, like material things and prestigious power. He had been wealthy and powerful in his original life and continued to enjoy those same powerful positions with every rebirth. It was just as easy to pick a wealthy host as it was to pick an impoverished one. When hosts rose into the Ether and touched souls with the waiting Bodywalkers, they learned a great deal about them. It allowed them to choose the most compatible soul they could find.

  For Kamen that had meant physical strength, a position of wealth and power, and, most important, very few human connections, such as family or siblings. He wanted nothing to do with his host’s former life. He had no patience for the petty things mortals worried and squabbled about. His host, an entrepreneur named Thomas James, had been married. It had taken two weeks for him to Blend enough with James to dissolve the marriage. He had made certain to be cruel and do and say the most unforgivable things he could imagine, compelling the wife to walk out and never consider returning.

  He had methodically alienated himself from his host’s former life in all ways except the financial and business aspects. Those he kept afloat, albeit from a distance, by using others to manage the day-to-day affair of maintaining a steady flow of income.

  Because as powerful as the Templars were, they could not simply conjure the means needed to buy them the land that sheltered and secluded them or the food they needed to sustain their hosts.

  “Your pardon, my lord.”

  Kamen looked up sharply, seeing a hesitant acolyte standing just outside of the doorway. He had given strict instructions that no seemed to think on that for a moment and the lone was to cross the threshold into Odjit’s chamber—aside from himself and whomever was chosen to wait upon them. They also should know by now that he was in a perpetually surly mood and would remain as such until Odjit returned to them in her full glory.

  Perhaps not even then.

  Damn this never-ending existence, he thought heatedly.

  “Well? You’ve come this far to test my patience. I suggest you speak with more alacrity.” He shut the compendium in his lap and moved it onto the table. It was heavy and quite old and needed to be treated with a great deal of care.

  “I think we have found him, my lord.”

  The heat of instant fury raced through him. His immediate thought was that by “him” the acolyte meant the nameless, as yet untraceable human who had mutilated their mistress. Then he recalled that he had not set that task to the Bodywalkers, but instead to humans. He had sketched the face of the Latino man to the best of his ability and had presented it to three different private detectives, two of whom lived in the area where the attack had taken place. As natives, they had to be able to find some clue as to who this man was. He was not a ghost after all.

  “Menes,” Kamen said quietly when he realized the actual “him” that was being referred to. “Where? New Mexico I take it.” He had been hoping to get a shot at the Politic bastard while he was weak and still in the Blending process. If he was already in his stronghold with Ramses and his contemptible traitor bride to protect them, there was no point in making an attempt on him while Odjit was so indisposed.

  “No,” the acolyte corrected him gently. “It turns out he’s been hiding in plain sight all this time. Sybelle the chantress has seen it clearly, although she is not of equal power to our great mistress—”

  Chantresses were powerful spiritual women, also known as prophets—or a human might call them psychics. They could see things beyond normal ken. The future. Danger. Sometimes messages from the gods themselves, although it was rare for anyone in Templar ranks other than Odjit to lay claim to such a power. Odjit was easily threatened by anyone who harbored the potential to outgun her.

  “Where is he?” Kamen demanded, cutting away the effulgent praise the acolyte was about to heap onto Odjit.

  “Saugerties. New York.”

  “Get Thorn. And my lead Gargoyle.”

  “Of course, my lord,” the acolyte said, bending to enter a deep bow, as if the depth of his ability to bow before Kamen were equal to the amount of loyalty to be expected from him. But Kamen was no fool. If there was one t
hing he had learned in his many lives, it was that no one could be trusted.

  No one.

  The acolyte turned, but Kamen halted him with a sharp snap of his fingers.

  “Fetch Chatha to me,” he said darkly. “I have a special task for him.”

  The servant paled by three shades and his fingers almost instantly began to tremble. Kamen watched him with genuine curiosity. Would the acolyte brave Kamen’s wrath by refusing the request, or would he brave the unpredictability of the psychopathic killer? It was an intriguing contest.

  The repeat of a deep bow gave him his answer, and just like that the moment of fascination was gone. Like all the moments before it, fleeting and ephemeral and nothing. Always such vast nothingness.

  He glanced at Odjit.

  Nothingness. But there was going to be a price to pay for this nothingness. And like anything else, he knew no one source could be trusted to complete the task, so it was best to sic all his best dogs on the problem at hand. Kamen walked over to his mistress, his fingers reaching down to brush over her forehead and over the fading scars at her throat. He knew that if he set a dog like Chatha on the trail of Odjit’s would-be killer that he would go after the quarry with rabid delight, but only for as long as it amused him to do so. Kamen’s job would have to be to make the process as entertaining for him as possible.

  Someone had taken the last vestiges of light from his world …

  … and that someone was going to pay.

  Leo Alvarez opened his eyes to utter darkness and the smell of musty perfume.

  “Shit,” he grumbled under his breath as he fumbled for his watch, trying to do it as gingerly as possible. The owner of the perfume, not to mention the bed, was asleep against him, snoring a little on every breath.

  Six p.m. Or eight a.m. Tasmania time, which is where he’d just spent two weeks routing out the remains of a drug cartel that had been in hiding on the otherwise harmless Australian island. Depending how you looked at it, he had either overslept or was waking just in time to start his day. He groaned softly when pain shot through both the back of his skull and his eyes. No doubt a recollection of the tequila he’d been pounding back, trying to drink some fricken lumberjack under the table last … yester … ah fuck it. He just took pleasure in the idea that the lumberjack was probably still throwing his guts up. Luckily the lady of the stale perfume hadn’t cared whether or not Leo was drunk, she’d brought him home anyway. Which was good last night, but not so good this morning … evening …