“A feeling?” Gus looked across the table at Sid. “I told you, she’s something special. Not a normal, everyday woman, that’s for sure.”
“I can see that,” Sid said.
Lilia drew a deep breath, gave a nod. “Yes, it’s true. I’m not an ordinary woman. But I’m not an angel, either. However, I do have some...special abilities.”
“I knew it!” Gus said. “She’s one of the witches who’s supposed to help the boss. Aren’t you, Lilia? Aren’t you?”
She nodded but didn’t elaborate. Instead she sent Gus a pleading look. “There’s a presence in this house, Gus. Someone’s here, someone...evil. The problem is, there are so many people here all the time that it’s hard for me to sort out who the enemy is.”
“Ah, I see now,” Gus said.
“Is it part of your witchcraft?” Sid asked, like a kid asking, Is it Santa? “The way you can...sense someone’s presence and intentions?”
She nodded. “Yes, but it only goes so far.”
“None of my beauties are here now, Lilia.” Gus waved a hand, indicating the grounds. “Can you sense who you’re looking for? Can you feel the evil?”
“I’ve been feeling it ever since I first came to the gate. But that doesn’t mean the person has been here the whole time, or even that he or she is here now. People leave an energy trail behind when they’ve been somewhere. The more time they spend, the longer it lasts. It would be very helpful if we could...just maybe...” She let her words trail off, knowing Gus was going to balk, despite his fondness for her.
“Bar the gate for a while?” Sid asked.
Gus huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. “For how long?”
“A day? Two at the most.”
Gus pouted, his lower lip thrusting out even farther than before, but she knew he would concede.
“Tell them you’re sick, Gus,” Sid suggested. “See how many flowers and get-well wishes you receive.”
“All right. All right, fine, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you, Gus,” Lilia said, patting his hand. “You, too, Sid.” Sid waved a dismissive hand. “And...and I think it might be best if we don’t tell Demetrius that I’m the one who asked. All right?”
Gus nodded and took another bite of his wrap as if he were biting off the head of an unwanted but mysteriously influential guest.
7
He tried to shower away the effects of seeing the woman naked before him, of the things she’d said, of waking up twined around her after dreaming of making love to her with his entire soul. But he couldn’t shake any of it. It had all been too real, too...painful.
Yes, that was the word. Painful. It had hurt him. That was a new experience.
In his dream he’d been wrapped up with the woman, inside her, belonging there, moving together in a rhythm older than time. True, the woman in the dream had looked nothing like the one in his house now. She’d been taller, darker, fuller. She’d had more curves, darker skin, thick black hair, full brows, eyes always made-up. She’d jingled when she moved, the woman he remembered.
Dreamed. Not remembered. None of it is real.
And yet, she was every bit the same woman. He’d felt Lilia, this Lilia, in that dark woman he’d been making passionate love with in the dream. It had been her. She’d looked different, but there was no doubt in his mind that she and his dream woman were one and the same.
Stop thinking about it.
But he couldn’t. He braced his arms against the sides of the tiled shower stall and lowered his head beneath the hot, pounding spray, and the whole thing played out again in his mind, like a film on the giant screen in his entertainment room. It swept him away so thoroughly that when he looked up...
He found himself tangled in silken covers and his lover’s arms, in a room that resembled a palace. Everything was ornate: gold gleamed, sheer curtains were draped everywhere, and tall vases and statues of goddesses in various poses stood in every corner and on every surface.
And then one of Lilia’s sisters burst in on them, and he thought, I know her. That’s Magdalena. “Get dressed and get out, Demetrius. Hurry! There are soldiers. They know—”
He scrambled to his feet, clutching a length of fabric to cover himself, as the soldiers surged into the rooms where no man was ever permitted to set foot. The harem chambers. They were men he knew. Men who’d fought in battles alongside him, whose lives he’d saved, who’d saved his in return. Men he’d considered his friends.
One of them grabbed Lilia, and Demetrius felt something rise up inside him that he knew he was incapable of feeling today. And yet he felt it, in this odd, memory-like waking dream. Rage. Fury. Full-blown and passionate. It was hot and issuing from him like steam from an overheated kettle. He attacked the armed men, weaponless and nude, and still it took three of them to beat him down. But the fourth had Lilia, binding her hands behind her, not even allowing her to dress first, while she cried and pleaded, and her sisters tried to intervene.
He got to his feet, and his comrades put him down again. And again, and again, until he could no longer move. As he watched, one of the soldiers threw a blanket at Lilia’s chest, and she wrapped herself in it with her awkwardly bound hands, her eyes on him where he lay helpless on the floor, tears streaming down her face. “Don’t hurt him anymore,” she begged in a language he did not recognize and yet understood. “This wasn’t his fault.”
The three women were arrested and taken away. He couldn’t follow.
And then one of the soldiers tore apart the room. Demetrius fought to cling to consciousness while bleeding on the stone tiles. His heart sank when the searcher found herbs in tiny bundles, oils in small vials, feathers of various birds, an ornate wooden box filled with nothing but the skins shed by snakes, and a double-edged dagger, its handle engraved with mystical symbols, with a chalice to match.
“The high priest will want to see these,” said one of the soldiers. “He said they were witches.” He nodded toward Demetrius, still lying bleeding and barely conscious on the floor. “Take him to the King. He’ll know what to do with him.”
Not the King, Demetrius thought. He didn’t want to go to the King, didn’t want to face the man who had been his friend, to see the condemnation in his eyes when he found out that his closest friend had stolen his property by having relations with his favorite harem slave. And more, he needed to go to Lilia, not the King. He wanted them to take him to wherever they’d taken Lilia and her sisters. He wanted to see that she was all right, and he wanted answers.
The soldiers grabbed him, clasping his upper arms, and the pain was so real that it woke him from the daydream. He was standing in his own shower, hot water pounding down on his head. He was in his own life, the life he’d made for himself.
When he’d awakened from his earlier dream—which he now realized had been the lead-up to the final events of this most recent vision—he’d found Lilia in his bed, in his arms, and for the briefest instant it was so like the dream that he’d nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized she was really there.
It had been just that real this time around.
He turned and let the hot water run over his back and shoulders, trying to ease away the phantom pain of an imagined beating. But no amount of rinsing could remove the effects of the dream. It had seemed so real. Could it be true, what the old priest, Father Dom, had told him? That all of this had begun in some past lifetime? To a degree it certainly fit what he’d said, that Lilia was a witch who’d seduced him, convinced him to murder the King and then left him to his fate.
And yet it also fit what she had said, that they had been lovers torn apart by outside forces, and that she’d been as innocent as he was.
Except, of course, for the witchcraft.
Hell, he didn’t know what to believe. But he knew one thing. If pain, like the pain in that dream, was what humanity would bring him, then he wanted no part of it. And he didn’t mean the physical pain of the beating he’d suffered, but the heart-wrenching agony of h
aving her torn from his arms. Of being unable to protect her. Of feeling so much for another person that life without her seemed completely pointless.
He never wanted to feel that way again.
He was dressing after his shower when he heard a tentative tapping from somewhere outside his room. He opened the bedroom door and waited until it came again, and realized the old priest was knocking from inside the observatory. Giving a quick glance toward the other door, the one down to the second floor, and reassuring himself that it was closed, Demetrius called softly, “Come down, Father Dom.”
The trapdoor at the top rose, and the old priest came down the spiral staircase, moving easily. It had seemed much more difficult for him to negotiate those stairs that first night. He moved more powerfully now, like a far younger man, with confidence if not exactly strength.
“Are we alone?” the priest asked, looking around warily and pulling at the sleeve of his black shirt while shrugging his shoulders as if they ached.
“Yes, we’re alone. What’s wrong? You seem uncomfortable. Didn’t you sleep well? Is the mattress—”
“It’s these clothes.” Father Dom tugged at the white tab collar. “I’m outgrowing them.”
It was true. Demetrius could see that the man’s body had changed even more overnight. His shoulders were more rounded, and his belly protruded beneath the black shirt. And there was more. Father Dom’s gray hair seemed thicker, and if Demetrius wasn’t mistaken, darker, too. His face was filling out, his color improving.
“I’ll have Sid—”
“No!” The old priest all but shouted the word, but he did stop pulling on his clothes. “I’ve told you, no one must know I’m here.”
“I remember. But it’s not necessary. I trust Sid completely. Gus, too, for that matter.”
“Really. And have you seen them with her?”
Demetrius frowned. “No, I haven’t. Have you seen them with her? And if so, when? And how?”
Father Dom rolled his eyes. “It’s an observatory. It has a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the house and grounds. She’s with them now, and I can tell at a glance that she has enchanted them already. The magical web she’s been spinning has already captured its first pair of flies. They’re loyal to her now, not you.”
Demetrius narrowed his eyes on the old man. “I think you’re wrong about that, Father Dom.”
“I’m not. You’ll see. Or has the little witch netted you in her sticky strands, as well?”
“Not at all. I want only for her to leave me in peace.”
“The sooner the better, Demetrius. The longer she stays, the greater the chance she’ll find a way to control you, make you accept your mortality, give up your powers for her, die for her—just like before.”
“And yet I didn’t die for her before. Not exactly.”
Nodding slowly, the priest walked away. “No. You didn’t. You suffered something far worse.” He turned to look at Demetrius. “You’ve remembered some of it, then?”
“Being caught with her. Being beaten half to death by men who’d been my friends, while others carted her off to a cell somewhere.”
“And?”
Demetrius gave his head a quick shake. “And nothing. That’s all. It was vivid, though. Real.”
“That’s because it really happened,” the priest insisted.
“Your musty old journal tells you so, I suppose,” Demetrius said. “But it couldn’t have told you who I was now, much less where I was. How did you find me?”
Father Dom shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. I have powers, too, you know. A man of the cloth has...resources beyond an ordinary man’s knowing.”
Priests had superpowers? That was the first Demetrius had heard of such a thing in this day and age. He tilted his head in curiosity. “You’ve never told me what any of this has to do with you, Father Dom. Why do you care?”
“They’re witches. I’m a priest. They’ve lived lifetime after lifetime, committing their evil, serving their dark lord Satan, while men like you have paid the price. It is my goal in life, my sacred vow, to put a stop to it.” He shrugged. “I was born for this.”
“And how will you do that—put a stop to it, I mean?” Demetrius asked. “Just because I refuse to let Lilia rob me of my immortality and steal my powers for herself, how is that going to put a stop to anything?” He looked the old priest up and down.
There was a definite gleam in the old man’s eyes, and he did not meet Demetrius’s gaze as he answered. “My only concern right now is to save you from her schemes and spells. I’ll worry about the rest later. You’re the one at risk at the moment. We need to deal with that first.”
Demetrius didn’t like it. Didn’t feel the man was telling him everything.
“So you’re telling me this is all real. That what I dreamed was a memory.”
“Yes.”
“What became of Lilia and her sisters after they were arrested?”
Father Dom shrugged, pacing a few steps farther from him. “They got away. You’d murdered the King for them, so they were free of the harem. No longer enslaved. They used their magic to escape their cells and vanished across the desert, never to be heard from again, leaving you to rot in the Underworld on their behalf. Faithless, ungrateful bitches that they were. And are.”
Demetrius nodded slowly, but something deep inside him flared up at the words the old man used, and that same part doubted those words were the truth. Not the entire truth, at least.
“How did I get into the Underworld, then? If they were already gone...”
“Honestly, Demetrius, do you expect me to know every detail about an event thousands of years before my time? They’re witches. They do things.” He ran a hand over his mysteriously lustrous hair. “Throw her out, Demetrius. Don’t let her spend another day here. Send her away.”
Demetrius inhaled deeply, then blew a heavy sigh. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Glaring at him, the priest said, “Can’t? Or won’t?”
“She’s used her magic to bind us, she says. She sliced my palm.” He held it up as he spoke, though the wound was already healed. “Then she sliced her own and pressed, them together, muttered some words—”
“A binding spell.”
“Now she says I’m stuck with her.” Demetrius shrugged, lowering his hand and staring down at his palm, where only a thin pink line hinted that the injury had ever occurred. “So if you can tell me a way to get rid of her, I’ll happily try it.”
“There is none—short of killing her.”
Demetrius snapped his head up fast, horrified to his core. But the old priest waved a dismissive hand. “Figure of speech. She’s right, you’re stuck with her, but not for long. As I told you, she needs your answer by Beltane. It’s only few days away. If you can continue to refuse her until then, this entire cycle simply ends. She’ll go away and never bother you again. The question is, do you think you can withstand her magic and her charms for that long?”
Demetrius smiled slowly. “I thought you said this was going to be difficult. A few days? All I have to do is refuse her for a few more days?”
“Don’t underestimate her, Demetrius. She’s a powerful witch.”
“I’m powerful, too. Don’t worry. I can hold out for a few days.”
The priest sniffed, glancing toward the bedroom with a look of disgust. “I’d suggest keeping her out of your bed until then.”
Demetrius shot the man a look. “You know, you’re far more interested in all this than makes any sense, despite what you’ve said. And as far as who I have or do not have in my bed—that’s beyond your boundaries, old man. I’m thinking I need to move you to a different part of the house.”
“She would find me. It’s amazing that she hasn’t found me already.” Father Dom turned to gaze out the window. “She’s on the east patio ensorcelling your loyal cohorts over breakfast. I’m going to take the back stairs to the kitchen and get some food. Keep her outside for a bit, will you?”
&
nbsp; “Of course. Watch out for the cook.”
Demetrius left the old priest alone in his rooms and headed downstairs, but it sent a shiver of unease up his spine to do so. Something about having that man alone with his most prized possessions, the chalice and the blade, bothered him. Still, they were in a wall safe, and he was the only one with the combination. As for the amulet, he had that around his neck on a chain. He never took it off.
He headed down one flight of stairs and then the next, then sauntered casually onto the patio to take the one remaining chair at the round glass-topped table. “Morning, Gus, Sid.”
“Morning, D-man,” Gus said. “Been getting to know your lady friend.”
“Good morning, boss,” Sid said. “We just asked Ingrid to bring out more coffee.”
“There might still be a cup left.” Lilia tipped the silver pot to a cup, which she filled almost to the top. “Ah, just enough. Coffee is one of the most wonderful things I’ve discovered so far,” she said softly. “But I’ve heard tales of it being addictive, so I limit myself to two cups.”
“People keep saying that,” Demetrius said. “I don’t really see the grand appeal.” He took a sip. “It’s hot and wet.”
She lowered her eyes. “You’ll get it one of these days.”
“Oh, don’t look sad, Lilia. I don’t think I’m missing much.”
“You can’t even begin to imagine how much,” she whispered.
A muscle in his jaw twitched, and he turned to gaze out at the bathing beauties who were usually beginning to gather around the pool by this late in the morning. But no one was there.
He sent Gus a questioning glance.
“Uh, yeah, I um...I put a note on the front gate telling them to chill for a while. I’m not, uh...” He raised a hand to his mouth and faked a cough. “I’m not feeling all that great today.”
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