by Anna Windsor
Possible, and now she realized, probable.
Ona was telling her the truth: it really was possible to open the channels anywhere—for a Sibyl with strong pyrosentient skills.
“I can learn to do this,” Camille whispered, hearing a slight buzzing sound in her head. Shock, no doubt. “I can do it if my pyrosentience is strong enough.”
“It will take much practice. Endless practice.” Ona rushed to a table and pulled over a tablet and pen. She began sketching different sorts of diagrams, very simple ones compared to the complex charts Motherhouse Ireland had required Camille to memorize. “We have to reteach you, retrain your thinking on the channels, because in truth they’re infinite, and in being infinite, they become one.”
Camille knew she was staring like an idiot again, not comprehending. This was striking her like theoretical math—it made a little sense, then just left her behind.
Ona held up her paper and pointed to the picture, which was of a stick figure with lines moving in all directions away from her. “One,” Ona insisted. “Wherever you ask it to be.”
Camille felt a strange urgency to this, a crawling along her instincts. She wished she had more of the prescience air Sibyls had. She had a sense of needing to know what was coming, how this would be important, but of course she couldn’t do that. Not really.
She was just about to ask Ona why the Sibyl was the center of the drawing when a restless blast of energy from John made her teeth click together.
Ona felt it this time, Camille could tell, because she put her hands to the sides of her face and squeezed her eyes shut. “Perhaps,” she said, her quivery voice more solid than usual, “you should go see about him after all.”
“Looks like it got cooked …”
“Blackjack’s been gone twenty minutes. It’s time.”
The Italian priests don’t say a word, but they dispatch two of their ranks to check the bits and pieces of city still visible above the sands in the Valley of the Gods. The rest wait for John to lead them inside.
He has no idea why, or what they want, or what they’re looking for, but it’s not for him to ask questions or get answers in situations like this.
John gestures for the soldier in motion between the four outer corners of the temple to join them. The kid’s blond, good-looking, and barely eighteen. He joined Recon last month and John can’t even remember his name. Too many lately, coming and going—and not always in one piece.
Together, John and Golden Boy head through the crumbling arched entry. The kid’s got his weapon ready, pointing it left and right, letting the muzzle lead them into the ancient structure. The stone beneath their feet looks so old and cracked and sand-covered that it mimics asphalt, or maybe concrete. The whole place smells dry and wasted, like a crypt that hasn’t been tended in a hundred years.
Late-day sunlight punches into the structure in shafts through the open roof area, but shadows cling to the deeper spaces. Scorpions could live there. There are what, twenty or twenty-five different kinds in this region? At least three or four are poisonous. And there are spiders and rodents and snakes, and truly, God only knows what else.
“Something’s gonna bite us,” the kid mutters as he starts checking spaces.
“Probably,” John says, checking corners himself.
“Don’t get why we’re dragging a bunch of priests through Afghan ruins, sir.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re a priest, sir.”
“Contrary to popular belief, we’re not all psychically connected.” He leans over to the soldier like he’s sharing a terrible secret. “I don’t even speak Italian.”
Golden Boy looks horrified.
They check the entry space pretty thoroughly. No hostiles. No scorpions, not that they can find, anyway. The priests, eight of them, file into the twenty-by-twenty entry space, which appears to be the first of two chambers in the temple, and completely ruined by weather, or maybe other things. Nothing in it but sand and broken, blackened rock, but they look at it. Touch it. Talk to one another. Make notes.
The kid watches them. “Looks like it’s been bombed, doesn’t it, sir?”
“It does, but I don’t think bombs were around when this place got destroyed.” John notices a hint of spice—incense, probably from one of the priests’ traveling clothes. The floral smell seems out of place in this stony skeleton of the past.
Best John and the kid can tell, there’s only one other room in the temple, and this one has stone doors with no handles. It also appears to have a roof—stone, too. Whoever made this place sealed it, and they intended it to stay sealed.
The oldest priest, who seems to be in charge of the Vatican contingent, gestures to the stone doors.
“Open, please,” he says.
“We can’t destroy local sites, sir,” the kid says to the priest, but when the priest doesn’t look at him, Golden Boy says the rest to John. “Especially not religious sites.”
“Open, please,” says the priest again. John wonders if the guy knows any other English words. He probably does. Vatican priests usually speak several languages.
John and the kid exchange looks.
“How far do we go?” the kid wants to know.
“Blackjack said to do what we have to do.”
Golden Boy pulls out his combat knife and chips the aged stone. Weathered by the endless movement of sand and wind, it crumbles like hard dirt against the sharpened blade. It takes some time, half an hour, maybe more, but they kick and hack until they hollow out a man-sized opening, just enough for one person to get through.
The kid goes first. John goes in right behind him.
The sealed chamber looks darker than purgatory, and the only light comes through the hacked hole. John and Golden Boy use their flashlights to show a surprisingly wide and deep expanse with an altar on the very far side of the room. There’s a pattern in the floor near the altar, with something round in the center of the pattern.
John can’t study that for long, because he’s too fascinated by what else his flashlight finds. He and the kid illuminate dozens and dozens of metallic statues, filling the room. To John, it looks like the terra-cotta soldier pits from China. Looks like several hundred of the things, side by side, jammed together. A few have human shapes, but the rest are absolutely demonic.
Satan in tiger form. That’s the best John can do to describe the things.
“Creepy, sir.”
“Yeah.”
“Should you bless us or say a prayer or something?”
“They’re statues, kid.” But he does a quick blessing to make Golden Boy feel better.
Seems to help.
As the kid heads for the front altar, John lets the Vatican priests come through the opening in the stone doors.
They take one look at the cat statues caught in John’s flashlight beam, cross themselves, and start talking frenetically among themselves.
Clearly, this is what they’ve come to see.
John leads them to the first cat-Satan, and he has an urge to pray over the thing like Golden Boy asked him to, to neutralize it somehow even though it’s a statue.
“Sir?” The kid’s hollering at John through all the priest chatter and statues, using his beam to gesture across the pattern on the floor in front of the altar. “Did you see this? Looks like a necklace.”
“Leave it,” John tells him.
He glances at the kid.
The kid’s not leaving it.
John’s gaze shifts to the priests studying the cat statue. Back to the kid. He’s inside that design on the floor now, and John gets a bad feeling. Superstitious. Sinful, really, by the letter of his religion.
“Leave it be,” he tells Golden Boy, hearing his Southern drawl deepen because he’s nervous. He hates that.
“I think it’s a coin.” The kid bends down.
Instinct kicks John’s ass and he leaps away from the priests, leaving them in darkness, charging toward the kid. The priests call out in surpri
se and maybe anger.
John shouts at the kid, who seems to be trancing out as he keeps bending down, down, toward the center of that pattern.
The kid picks up the necklace, steps back, and raises his light to examine it—and his boot crunches against stone outside the circles and runes etched into the rock.
John gets to him. Grabs the necklace. Starts to hurl it back into the design where his gut tells him it has to stay—
The flashlights wink out.
John holds up in midthrow, gripping the cold metallic chain of that necklace.
“We’re in a desert in the daytime.” John’s talking out loud, way beyond nervous now, heading toward freaked out and ready to take the kid’s knife off him and get ready to fight. “How is this thing cold?”
The ground shivers and the stone cracks, like the walls and ceiling want to fall in, or maybe explode out, sending shrapnel all over the Valley of the Gods.
“Sir?” The kid sounds terrified.
John thinks the priests are praying. He’s holding that weird necklace in one hand and fumbling for his own crucifix with the other because the room smells fertile and fresh all of a sudden. Darker than ever. And the air keeps getting thicker. A dark stench rolls over them, and they cough.
Rot? Ammonia?
What is that disgusting stink?
John’s not sure of anything, but he doesn’t think they’re alone in the chamber anymore.
Then, behind the kid, something moves.
It starts to growl.
“Sir, I thi—”
A hard rustle of motion.
John reaches out in the dark. Golden Boy’s gone. He hears growls and shouts, then chewing sounds.
John clings to the necklace and backs up, hoping he’ll hit wall and not anything else.
One of the priests starts to scream.
Energy brushed over John, hot and strong and jarring.
His eyes flew open.
The energy touched him again, softer this time, almost like lips and nails running across his bare chest and arms.
He sat up in the strange bed, confused as hell, mouth open, eyes wide. His whole body itched and burned, and it was hard to see even though he sensed lights were on all around him. His nose was expecting ammonia and sand and the stench of blood and entrails, but he couldn’t smell anything. His ears were expecting laughter, terrible and psychotic and demonic in every sense of the word, but he didn’t hear anything except his own breathing.
His teeth felt too big.
Fuck.
His head pounded like his brain was trying to crack against his skull. “Are you back with me now?” a woman’s voice asked, and then John smelled the lilies.
“No.” His voice came out guttural, not totally his. “Get out. Get away from me.”
Fear for Camille blasted his senses clean, and he could see the room he was sitting in. Cream-colored paint with some kind of green trim. The furniture was green, too. Artwork on the walls—and he was sitting on very feminine silk sheets. His side gave a dull ache where … a sword had cut him.
A very weird sword.
A few seconds later, he pulled far enough out of his dream-flashback to remember coming down to this room—and to remember kissing Camille the night before.
She was standing at the bedroom door watching him, her arms folded across a bulky green sweater that covered her from her neck to the hips of her jeans. Everything about her looked so soft that John instantly wanted to touch her, but that thought cleared out pretty fast when he realized what had just happened. He’d had one of his dreams again. He’d gotten stressed like he always did, only this time Strada had almost gotten him.
“It may not be the best idea for me to stay here.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes. “I almost—just now I—”
“You were dreaming about the war.” Camille unfolded her arms, and he realized she was holding a packet of papers. “I could sense it. It seemed like a good idea to wake you, but I didn’t want to come too close or do anything too abrupt. I just turned on the lights and gave you a little elemental punch.”
Her expression was wary but not fearful. John was about to tell her to leave again, but he was feeling more normal by the second. Sweaty and pissed off, but normal. Camille showing up, that had given him strength and fire to fight Strada in a moment of weakness. He couldn’t deny that.
“I should get out of here,” he muttered, staring down at the sheets. “That was—look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let my guard down.”
“You have to sleep and you can’t help what you dream, especially with the memories you have.” Her pretty eyes held his when he looked up at her. “I think the real problem would come if you were alone with nobody to wake you when that happens. You could kill a lot of innocent people before you came back to yourself.”
John swallowed even though he felt like he had rocks in his throat. “I haven’t had a dream like that since I got this body. I thought they were done.” He started to shove the sheets off him to burn some of his annoyance, then remembered he was naked and decided against it. “Maybe I didn’t think at all.”
Camille’s understanding smile gentled him even from across the room. “My bad dreams never go away. They just take brief vacations. Too brief.” Her eyes wandered down from his face to his chest, and lower, to where the sheet rested around his waist. “Don’t punish yourself for being a good soldier.”
Something like embarrassment rose up inside him, and the strange feeling drove him to say, “You’re not responsible for me. It’s the other way around.”
Not embarrassment. Not really. What am I feeling?
His frigging cock knew what it was feeling, and if she didn’t stop staring at his package through the sheet, she was about to see more of it than she bargained for. He could already feel her breasts in his hands, taste her nipples in his mouth.
Good job, John. That kind of thinking, it’s really going to help you give her time. You’ve been here, what, a day?
“In this house, we’re all responsible for each other,” Camille said. “It won’t work any other way.” She was still smiling, just a little, and still giving him that look.
I want her in my arms. I want her staring up at me while I rock her world—and mine. Shit, shit, shit, there’s not a lot of sheet here.
He needed to stop. He needed to get up out of this bed and leave the brownstone, right now.
Camille shook her head, the smile finally fading away. “I know that look, and I really do get your reasoning, but I think you’re wrong.”
“What look?” That came out like a grumble. John heard it and got irritated with himself. His eyes darted from Camille to the walls, the paintings hanging neatly centered in all the right spaces. He couldn’t process what was in the frames, but they distracted him enough to ease the misery stiffening between his legs.
“The I’m-about-to-run look,” Camille said. “I’m good at running, too, so trust me, I know the signs.”
Vulnerable. Is that how I’m feeling? Fuck. That’s as bad as these sheets. This woman does funny things to me. John managed to quit looking at the walls, but he couldn’t do much about feeling like a helpless teenager in Camille’s presence.
“I’m not running away,” he said. “I’m thinking about keeping you safe.”
Her smile came back, and this time her aquamarine eyes seemed to tease him. “How about you trust me to take care of that and you just watch your own ass? Not that you can’t look at mine now and then, if you want to.”
Oh, I’ll do a lot more than look at that ass, and soon, beautiful.
John grabbed a pillow and pulled it across his lap. He felt like his mental age had just dropped from seventeen to fourteen. Damnit, he had more control over the demon in his head than over his body parts. Something about that was jacked.
Camille raised the packet of papers she’d been holding on to, then laid it on a chair near the door. “Present from Dio—which, by the way, I wouldn’t t
ake lightly. She doesn’t waste time, so if she’s making you lists of demons and paranormal practitioners the New York City fighting groups have encountered, she thinks you’re reasonably okay and worth teaching. Air Sibyls are big on their lists and packets and archival info.”
John felt a flicker of surprise that Dio would leave him anything that didn’t have wires and tick as it counted down to zero. “I learned some about all the different demons when I was in Duncan’s head, but I’ll memorize that packet in a big hurry.”
“Good.” Camille backed toward the door gracefully, obviously intending to leave—but not in any way that suggested fleeing.
He didn’t want her to go.
He wanted her to stay so much his common sense tried to desert him and let him start begging.
Let me look at you for five more minutes.…
“These sheets are girly,” he said instead, just to have something to say.
Camille’s gaze moved across the pillow, then up again, seeming to take in every muscle on his chest. “They look good on you.”
She hesitated for a second, then added, “I’ll try not to run if you don’t. But you might want to get up soon. Duncan’s home and I think he’s coming down here to kick your ass.”
And then she just left him, sitting there wrapped in silk sheets with a lily-scented pillow covering his unbelievably painful erection and a Demon Identification 101 packet sitting on the chair waiting for his attention.
John watched the door close and listened to her pad down the hall. He heard the swish and click of the lab door opening, then closing, and he spent some time staring at the painted ceiling over his head … which looked kind of feminine, too. This place was a million miles away from military barracks and tents, and a big change from the dives and hotels and apartments he’d blown through during his black ops years, or even the flat he’d taken in Harlem after his rebirth in this body.
Welcome to your new life.
Who knew it would be so frilly?
