if to touch him. But she couldn’t. Not yet.
He was the same as she remembered him. His body had been reconstituted just as it had once been, since his soul had been ripped away before he died, an unnatural perversion of the order of things. She wouldn’t get her own body back when she returned to earth to join him. Hers had been dashed against the rocky ground from a great height before her own soul had flown free. She would have to manifest a fresh new form when the time came. She’d glimpsed that new form in a vision, so different from her former body that it had shocked her.
Oh, but look at him.
He rose from his crouched position, looking around, blinking in confusion, and her heart ached. So long … it had been so long!
He looked the same, and her heart twisted in her chest with a mingling of joy that she had come this far, was this close to success, and heartache that he was still out of reach. She hadn’t seen him since that bloody dawn in 1501 BC, in Babylon, when he’d murdered the King in defense of the woman he loved, the King’s harem slave: Lilia herself. When the quarters she shared with her two sisters were searched, the tools of their forbidden magic had been found and the three of them sentenced to be sacrificed to Marduk, chief god of the pantheon. Demetrius had been the King’s right hand, his friend. She never should have fallen in love with him. The cost had been so high.
But she had loved him. She loved him still.
The high priest Sindar had been in love, too—with the King, or so Lilia had always suspected—and so his wrath had been bitter. He’d used his own magic, dark magic, to strip Demetrius of his soul and banish him to a formless, sensory-deprived existence in an Underworld void—just after having Lilia and her sisters thrown from a cliff to the bloody rocks below.
But he hadn’t counted on the power of the three Daughters of Ishtar. They’d refused to cross the Veil until they’d taken Demetrius’s stolen soul from the twisted holy man and split it among themselves for safekeeping. Indira and Magdalena had reincarnated lifetime after lifetime until the opportunity came to right the ancient wrong, while Lilia had remained in limbo, pulling their strings like a master puppeteer, awakening their memories, making them keep their vow to set things right.
The newly reborn Demetrius pushed himself up from the ice-cold ground, rising slowly. Lilia saw the amulet he wore gleaming in the moonlight. And even as he stood there, two other magical tools fell from nowhere and clattered loudly to the rocky ground.
He jumped at the sound, then moved closer, picking up the golden chalice, turning it slowly and examining the semiprecious stones embedded in its rim. Then he reached for the blade, looking it over the same way. She wondered what he was feeling. Did he recognize the tools? Did he have any clue as to the power he could wield with them? They’d held parts of his soul for a time, so he must feel a bond to them, a connection, yes?
Indira had returned the first piece of Demetrius’s soul, along with the amulet in which it had been protected, thus freeing him. She’d opened the Portal, allowing him to escape his Underworld prison. But he’d had no form, and little ability to reason. And now Magdalena had returned another piece, one the sisters had secreted within a chalice accompanied by a blade, which, when used together, had allowed Demetrius to manifest physically here near the Portal, in the cold of a February night in the Northeast.
He was freezing and shaken, she was sure. But not entirely confused. He would know about this world into which he’d sprung. He’d been floating wraithlike about it since last Samhain, after all. By now he knew the language, the slang, the customs. But he wouldn’t know how to get by. Even with the powers he’d brought along with him, he needed food, shelter, clothing. And he didn’t even know he had any powers just yet.
Demetrius looked around, and as the snow began to fall everything in her yearned to go to him. To help him.
But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not until he used the magical tools that had been given to him to call her forth from the place that was not a place, and the time that was not a time. He had to bring her first into physical existence, and then he would have to render her fully human, fully mortal. He was the only one who could.
And when he realized what she would ask of him, he might wish her gone again. For Lilia had to convince him to give up his powers, his seeming immortality, and accept the final piece of his soul from her, so that they could have the lifetime together that had been denied them so long ago. And she wouldn’t even be allowed to tell him that if he refused, they would both die.
But first he must be allowed to live, to discover his powers, to experience this existence, so that he knew what he was giving up. He had to want to be human again—and want it badly enough to choose it over supernatural powers he had no idea would expire either way.
It was not going to be an easy sell.
But one way or another, this curse had to end now, and one way or another it would.
Cold. He was so cold. He hadn’t expected the sensations he was feeling, had been formless for so long that the notion of what form brought with it was alien to him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Demetrius knew that he’d been human once. But he didn’t remember it. It was a vague bit of knowledge floating around his subconscious and having little impact on anything. He felt no connection to that particle of information.
He looked behind him at the cave, knowing instinctively that that way lay the Portal, and beyond it the Underworld, his prison for as long as memory reached. He wanted no part of that. He didn’t remember it in detail. Not the way he would remember this … this night, the sensations racing through his body, the thousands of messages singing through his senses, the tastes in the air, the smells of the forest, the sounds of an infinite bird choir … this he would remember vividly.
As to what came before, he remembered an endless, vast, dense … void. There was nothing to remember but nothingness itself. No feelings. No light. No sound. Rage, there had been rage, and hatred, and struggling to get free without even knowing what freedom meant. It was a vague concept that he’d thought of simply as the opposite of what is. He’d known captivity, powerlessness, and craved its opposite. Time had no meaning. Emotion was nonexistent. Touch was not even a concept to him then.
Eventually he’d discovered that he could peer through the Portal at the world he could not reach. He could see through the eyes of some of the creatures that roamed the physical world, and from there he’d begun to understand what he wanted. Freedom from his world, entry into that one. And only then had he honed his focus enough to begin to plot his escape and to crave vengeance on whatever nameless force had imprisoned him.
Once his essence had been set free, anger had driven him, and he’d discovered the power to influence the minds of humans. He’d done things that even now, freshly born into this body, seemed evil to him. Human-beingness must have some sort of intrinsic, preprogrammed morality, he thought, and the things he’d done flew in the face of it. And yet, at the time, he hadn’t been human. He hadn’t been … anything. The desire for freedom at any cost had controlled him, alongside a rage so old he didn’t even remember its cause.
He shivered, hugging his arms around his unclothed chest, the golden blade that had fallen from the sky clutched in one fist, the silver chalice in the other, and started trekking downhill in search of warmth. That was first. Warmth. He was so cold. He took the tools with him because they had arrived here with him. They belonged to him. And along with the amulet they were, at the moment, his only worldly possessions.
But he was free, he thought, as his feet slowly went numb. He was free. He had a body. He could experience the pleasures he’d observed other humans experiencing. Warmth was one of those pleasures,
