Revelations: Book One of the Lalassu (19 page)

The urge to surrender was compelling. But primal revulsion was equally powerful. Dani shook her head. “I never asked to be part of a line of High Priestesses.”

“None of us did. But it hasn’t stopped the women of our family from stepping up for over three thousand years. The world needs us.” Virginia could have taught a master class in parental guilt.

“Virginia, stop,” Walter interrupted gently. “Dani, I know you have your reasons, but you need to think about the bigger picture.”

Dani’s self-control, already dangerously shredded, dissolved in a tsunami of temper. “The world doesn’t need us. We’ve become con artists and grifters, skulking in shadows and feeding off the world’s leavings.”

Virginia sniffed disapprovingly. “You can’t appreciate the necessity of sacrifice. Your selfish decision could ruin us all. Without the divine, we can’t be anything but shades of our true selves. Without a High Priestess, we become vulnerable. If you hadn’t been so stubborn, we could have been warned when this man first began to hunt us—”

“Don’t! Just don’t,” Dani snarled. She hated feeling helpless nearly as much as she hated regret. She always charged into the action. She wasn’t left on the sidelines.
And I don’t do regrets
, she insisted defiantly. Even when part of her wondered if her mother was right.
Please, wake up, Michael. I need you back with me.

She ignored the parental glances flying over her head. As furious as every arched eyebrow and slow nod made her, none of it mattered right now. More than anything, she wanted a chance to make things right with Michael. She wanted to be a hero for him again.

Gwen’s eyes were closed almost as if she were asleep. But Michael wasn’t adapting to the trance state. In the silence, she could hear faint rustling, the delicate whisper of shifting cloth—coma-induced micro tremors from psychic synaptic overload.

“Hold them!” Dani shouted, wrapping herself around Michael’s prone body as the first seizure hit. Virginia held tight to Gwen.

He thrashed under her, limbs flailing. Dani pinned him, trying to use her weight to prevent him from getting enough leverage to hurt himself. She cursed her strength, enough to crush his bones but not the knowledge of how to keep him intact.

His head bashed against the rock and she released an arm to tuck underneath. But her movement gave him enough room to twist and bounce wildly under her. Dani fought to hold him still. “Michael, please! It’s me! Don’t fight it!”

His legs bucked in place.
Oh shit. What if it’s me? What if I’m downloading memories into him, making it worse?
If she was, it was too late. Virginia kept her hand pressed on top of Gwen’s, holding her daughter’s fingers to Michael’s skin. Breaking the connection meant his spirit might be trapped between worlds forever. A wild blow smashed into her side, hard enough to leave bruises on anyone else.

“Keep him there!” Her mother ordered, trapping his flailing arm. Dani stretched out on top of him, her legs pinning his knees, one arm holding his and the other cradling his head to keep him from cracking his skull against the floor. They were nose to nose, chest to chest, points of contact along every inch, but Dani had never felt so isolated from another person.

His beautiful hazel eyes quivered and swirled under half-open lids, inches from her and yet indefinable distances away. She’d never been so physically close to a man and had him still unaware of her. She didn’t like the feeling. It made her want to hit something, smash the barrier between them to pieces. But nothing presented itself to be hit. So she held on.

“Michael, please,” she whispered. “Come back. Come back to me.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“She’s into you.” Gwen rendered her verdict as if it didn’t matter in the least.

“So people keep telling me.” Michael remembered Raoul’s words.

“Because she isn’t going to tell you. She’s—”

“Scared.” Michael crouched beside their unconscious bodies, watching as Dani and her mother argued. The constant din of other voices made it hard to distinguish what they were saying.

Everything from the so-called real world felt more distant here. It was eerie, seeing Dani right there but not sensing anything from her. He should be more worried about his body, but somehow he couldn’t quite summon up the emotions.

“If you’re curious, this is what death is like,” Gwen said.

“Am I dying?” He wasn’t ready to die. He watched as Dani held herself back from touching him. “Shouldn’t there be a bright light? A
This Is Your Life
screening? Reception line of dead relatives?” He wanted Gwen to tell him this wasn’t actually the end.

“I’ve never seen it or talked to anyone who has. People die, and then they step out of their bodies and then no one can talk to them but mediums like me. They try to get their families to see them, but they almost never do. They have to watch as they get relegated to back corners and basements and garages, their lives piled in smelly boxes.” Gwen shrugged, more interested in twining her fingers and twisting her arms into poses that would freak out yogic masters.

“Gwen—” he began, the beginnings of panic starting to set in.

She continued, ignoring him. “It’s worse when they aren’t forgotten. Wouldn’t you feel awful knowing your memory was a constant source of pain to someone you cared about? Kids are the worst. Their parents almost never get over it, keeping their rooms as shrines. They don’t get it. All they know is that Mommy cries because of them and they want to tell her it’s okay. So they scream and yell and pester me to do it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said automatically, wishing he could help.
If I die, I could try. Therapist for the dead.
He tried to make it a joke but the shouting rising from outside the walls brought home how relentless the dead could be. His heart went out to Gwen, gaining a small glimpse of what she must have to deal with every day.

“I don’t think you’re going to die. Well, not yet anyway.” Abandoning her attempts to twist herself into a pretzel, Gwen crouched down by his body just as Dani threw herself over him. His body started to shake and writhe on the ground. A strange tug began to pull on his mind, like one of his compulsive flashes. It pulled him back toward his body.

“You need to see it,” Gwen told him. “It won’t make you happy, but you need it.”

He couldn’t answer as memories overloaded him. He was still separate from his convulsing physical form, but now he couldn’t see Gwen’s room any more—just the memories from Dani’s past.

Did Daddy come home?
The question echoed in an immature mind as tiny feet silently climbed down the stairs. An unwitting passenger in her mind, he watched as she tiptoed into the basement. He felt her fear, sharing her knowledge that they had abandoned their trailer, the only home Dani knew, to seek out this safehouse. He knew her father had been gone for weeks, missing her tenth birthday, but the sound of his voice and her mother’s pulled her out of sleep. She woke Vincent up and the two of them went to see.

Anticipatory terror seeped into his awareness. He knew the children were walking into a nightmare but couldn’t stop the inevitable progression of the past. He wanted to pick up the little girl Dani had been and shelter her from what she was about to see. The images shattered under Dani’s fear, leaving him with tiny glimpses. A much younger Virginia, her belly rounded in pregnancy. Walter, lying on the ground, his clothes and skin burned and bloody. Dani’s attention was ripped from her parents to focus on a small statue on the altar behind them.

Michael couldn’t make out the details clearly, it looked like a woman with a flowing robe behind her. Or was it supposed to be wings? As he tried to figure it out, the dark, rich clay began to fade, the color and strength draining away even as Walter began to roll and twitch on the ground. Virginia looked up in horror, her dark eyes covered with a thick, white film. Michael shared Dani’s sense of something unseen and monstrous hovering around her parents, demanding something horrible from them.

The memory vanished into inaudible screams, but another wrapped around him.

A young man, tall, with brown hair.
Justin.
Dani’s date to senior prom. He could feel her reckless excitement and had to squash a small spark of jealousy in himself. Only the knowledge that he was revisiting Dani’s darkest moments kept it from growing any larger.

Her father had forbidden her to go, but she’d sneaked out of the house, wanting to have a normal teenage moment. Over the last two years, lots of boys from school found excuses to speak with her, joined clubs she joined, offered her rides home. Sometimes their presence seemed to spark something dark inside her but she held it at bay. Her father insisted it was all part of her destiny as High Priestess, that men would always find themselves attracted to her. But Dani was determined to have a normal life. She’d seen how being High Priestess destroyed her mother. Years of trances and never knowing who would be at their home and ever since the night in the basement, Dani’s mother barely left her bedroom.

The memory brought traces of remembered fear, but the teenaged Dani put them away with practiced ease. She would be different. It wasn’t going to get her the way it had gotten her mother. Michael hoped she was right, that they could find a way to make it work.

At first, the prom was everything Dani hoped for, but things began to go badly. Justin grew sulky and possessive, refusing to let her dance with anyone else, frightening her. Shoving matches began to outnumber dancers on the dance floor. Two boys cornered Lila Svenson and ripped open her dress. The teachers who were supposed to be supervising had vanished into the utility closet.

Michael shared Dani’s dawning realization that she was somehow responsible for what happened. His heart was already battered on her behalf, and this was yet another blow. She tried to flee, but Walter appeared at the school as she left. A long lecture on her irresponsibility followed, and the promise of a banishment to her European cousins. Shame choked the lovely memories from earlier, smothering them.

Another blink. He downloaded more snippets of memory and time had passed.

Dani was older now, more confident. She could use the attraction from her heritage to her advantage—hers and her brothers. Male salespeople routinely gave her discounts and free samples. Her brothers shamelessly traded on the effect, using her to establish contact with Chomp, the local underground connection. Like any young woman, she enjoyed the exercise of her power even if she wasn’t always sure about what she was doing. Her mother had finally emerged from her depressed withdrawal, but all of their conversations boiled down to: “Do the ritual. Now!” Dani refused to accept surrender to the alien being she could feel lurking below her conscious mind. The sense of darkness inside was growing, but she was determined to keep it out.

But the monster always lurked beneath the surface. She remained confident, though. If she didn’t acknowledge it or call on it, it couldn’t hurt her or take over her life. Her naïve bravado hurt so much more when he knew how it all ended.

He still hadn’t seen the worst. A darker memory hid beneath the flashes. Michael could almost see it, but Dani’s consciousness skittered over it, settling on something more recent.

A tall, blond man in expensive clothes. Michael recognized him from the nightclub, and Dani’s memories supplied a name: Josh. The earlier flash of jealousy reignited, and he had trouble concentrating.

Now the Huntress coiled inside, poison dripping from eager fangs—such a difference from a few seconds earlier. He could sense Dani’s reluctance. She didn’t want to be with this man, didn’t want him to touch her. But the Huntress needed to be fed. He wanted to shout at her, to tell her not to do it.

She pulled her prey closer, unwilling to waste time in preliminaries. He tasted her hatred and resentment of the Huntress, a bitter tang on his tongue. She hated the role it forced her into, making her a predator. All she could do was aim at acceptable targets. The Huntress snapped out, slithering across from her body to his through the contact of skin. Ravenous hunger tore into the prey’s spirit, seeking something worthy.

But there was nothing. Fear. Paranoia. An inferiority complex masked by bravado.

The Huntress ripped through social masks, revealing this swaggering male as the coward he truly was. It forced Josh to see himself through eyes scrubbed into surgical sanctity, before sending him back into his body. It coiled back inside Dani, sated if not satisfied. Josh curled up on the couch, shaking with shock.

Michael shook his head in denial, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. He shared Dani’s knowledge of the inevitable dangers if she didn’t Hunt. But to see how the Huntress ripped into Josh and then threw him aside unsettled him.

The memory storm was over. He could see Dani now, struggling to keep him from hurting himself. He winced as he watched his arm flail out and hit her hard. But she ignored it, keeping her hold. He’d seen enough secrets himself not to trust anyone’s outer mask, but he couldn’t reconcile the violence of her attacks on Redneck and Josh with the tenderness she showed to Gwen.

“It’s the Huntress. It’s part of Dani’s legacy as one of the priestesses of Babylon,” Gwen explained. “It comes out through skin contact and orgasm. Through sex, she forges a connection to the divine. But an unworthy partner can’t hold up to that kind of shock. Sucks to have to see yourself through omniscient, impartial eyes.”

An unworthy partner
. A glimmer of an idea started to form in Michael’s mind, but he couldn’t get past the first part. “She fed him to it.”

“She protects you,” Gwen pointed out. “She worries about turning you into a vegetable. She knows it hurts them and leaves scars in their minds. Most of her prey never want to see her again. She really wants to see you again.”

“Michael, please. Come back. Come back to me.” He heard Dani’s whisper clearly. If he abandoned her, if he died, he suspected she would never forgive herself.

“It’s getting madder. She won’t let it out anymore because she doesn’t want to hurt you. If she doesn’t find the path, I don’t know what could happen.”

“You don’t?”
Didn’t Dani say Gwen could predict the future?

“I see things sometimes, but I don’t always know what they mean. But I only really know what the dead tell me. They’re good at figuring stuff out, but it’s not a perfect system. They want her to do the ritual and become High Priestess. Mom was High Priestess when Dad got hurt. She was pregnant with me at the time. She did something, made a bargain that changed everything. It took her eyes, scared Dani, and made me crazy. Mom says she’s sorry for it a lot when she thinks I can’t hear her. It makes me sad.”

Michael had more than a little trouble following Gwen’s explanation. He struggled with what to ask as she continued.

“It’s a test. She has to open her own eyes the same way she opens the eyes of others. She has to face herself, and I don’t think she likes herself too much. I like her, but, you know, she’s my sister and everything so I kind of have to. She takes care of me and she’s nice, mostly. Sometimes she pulls my hair.” Gwen rubbed at the side of her head. “And she doesn’t always believe me when I tell her things. I can understand why. I get confused sometimes, but she should give me a little credit. It’s not easy trying to put stuff into words. It’s why I like making pictures.”

Michael nodded slowly, brow furrowed as he tried to follow the skips and leaps of Gwen’s thought processes.

She smiled, childlike joy beaming out like the sun. “You’re nice. I think I’ll like having you as a brother. You know, if you don’t end up with zucchini-brain.”

“I like you, too. Even if you are a little unusual.” He smiled back, not wanting to expand on the “brother” part of her comment. They had more important issues to worry about.

Gwen knelt down. “You should get back into your body again. I don’t think you’re supposed to be that color.”

His skin had gone pale and his lips were edged in blue. “How do I get back?”

“I dunno. You have to want to.” Gwen crouched by her mother.

Want to.
He stared at Dani frantically trying to keep him safe.

“Yes, like that,” Gwen whispered.