that’s who. I don’t care if he is your love, Lilia, I don’t want him anywhere near Ellie.”
Lilia nodded, tugging her eyes from the child to meet her sister’s steady gaze. “He’s in the Intensive Care Unit. He’s no threat to her now.”
They all looked at her, questions in their eyes. She returned her gaze to the angelic little bundle with her rosebud lips and gentle coo. She was holding Lilia’s forefinger in her tiny fist.
“What happened to him, anyway?” Tomas asked at last.
“He was hit by a car.” Lilia shuddered at the memory. “I … Oh, there’s so much to explain. Is there someplace we can—”
“We can take you back to our place, but then you’ll be hours away. Are you sure you want to leave him?”
Lilia closed her eyes and felt for the answer, and as always, it came from that deep well of knowing that had guided her this far. “I’m sure that I don’t want to leave him. Not ever again. But I have to. He needs to experience life without the final part of his soul before I offer it back to him. He has to choose. And he has to know what he’s giving up when he chooses it. He doesn’t yet. He needs more time to learn what he’s capable of, what life can be like for him as he is.”
“How much time?” Indy asked.
Lilia shrugged. “I’ll know when it’s time to go to him. That’s all I can tell you.”
She gazed up at the hospital, and her heart ached for her love. “Yes, my sisters. For now, yes. I would love to go home with you.”
Demetrius felt pain, and with it, relief.
He’d been in some other state, not feeling anything at all, and wondering if he’d been somehow returned to the Underworld prison, the dark, sensory-deprived void from which he’d escaped. It was similar to that, the darkness, the confusion, the mind-without-body-attached feeling. Not identical, of course, but that sense of being trapped in a dream, of trying to wake and being unable to—it had been enough to terrify him.
So when he felt the pain of his broken body, it brought a rush of relief so big that he was almost limp with it. Only then did he realize that, as miserable as this physical experience of life had been for him, he did not want it to end.
He was alive. Thank the Gods, he was still alive.
Sighing, he forced his eyes open and blinked the room around him into focus. He was in a bed, a real bed, soft and clean. There were crisp white sheets and warm blankets over him, and one arm was in a cast. He looked beyond the stranger who was sound asleep in a chair beside the bed and took in the white walls, the single window, the TV set mounted on the wall. A long curtain suspended from a track in the ceiling to his right ended his visual tour just as the sleeping stranger began stirring in his chair.
“D-man?” he asked.
Frowning, Demetrius turned his head and realized the man in the chair was no stranger after all. “Gus?” He was … he was clean. He’d shaved, gotten a haircut and was dressed in clothes that looked new. Brown trousers, with a matching suit jacket over an ivory button-down shirt without a stain in sight. “Did I wake up in some other dimension? Or am I dreaming you now?”
Gus smiled. His teeth were still stained yellow, which reassured Demetrius that they hadn’t both died and moved on to some heavenly realm.
“I’m just glad you woke up at all, boss. You feel okay?” Gus got up, went to the foot of the bed and pushed a button that raised the top part of the mattress until Demetrius was sitting up.
“I’m sore all over, but otherwise fine. I think. What is this place?”
“Hospital,” Gus said. Returning to the bedside, he poured water from a pitcher on the nightstand, held it out. “You remember what happened?”
Demetrius sipped the water, thinking, nodding, sipping some more. “I remember the car hitting me. I thought my brief stay in the physical world was over, I’ll tell you.”
“It’s just getting started, D-man. Do you remember before that? You remember the magic that started happening with those treasures of yours?”
At the mention of his sole possessions, a cold bolt of panic shot up Demetrius’s spine, and he found himself looking down, even knowing his blade and chalice couldn’t be at his waist. He pressed one hand to his chest, but his amulet was gone, as well.
“Don’t worry, boss,” Gus said. “I got your things. They’re safe and sound, and so are you.”
More memories returned in a rush, and he brought his head up to meet Gus’s eyes. “What about the woman?”
Gus glanced quickly toward that door, as if to be sure no one was listening in. Then he leaned closer. “That was something, wasn’t it? The way she just flashed into that alley, buck naked, like some kind of Terminator?”
“I don’t know the reference.” While his body seemed to have come preprogrammed with knowledge of language and customs and the ways of the world, he did, on occasion, find things lacking. Pop-culture references were topmost on the list. But mention of the woman sent another shot of ice into his blood. “Where is she?” he asked, all but whispering, eyeing the curtain, wondering if she lurked on the other side.
“Don’t know. She was gone by the time I looked for her. Course I was distracted by your … accident.”
“She just vanished?”
“Or ran away. Who is she? Or maybe I oughtta ask, what is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Gus frowned hard, his whole face puckering. “Now I know you’re lying, D.”
“Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know. But I know you know something. Because when that naked blonde popped in, you were scared, man. I saw it, dead fear all over your face, just before you ran for your life, straight into traffic. As lucky as that was for us, I still wanna know what’s so damned scary about her.”
Demetrius lowered his eyes. “I’m not lying to you, Gus. I don’t know. But you’re right, the sight of her scared the hell out of me.” Then he paused, frowned, looked up at Gus again. “What do you mean, it was lucky for us?”
Gus smiled, yellow teeth gleaming. “I’m not sure it was luck, exactly. You were doing all that visualizing, after all.” He nodded. “That fella who hit you? Drunk as a skunk. But even then, I knew who he was. Everyone knows who he is. Ned Nelson.”
Demetrius pursed his lips, shook his head.
“Owns what they call a media empire. TV stations, publishing companies, radio, God only knows what all. He’s so rich he gives billions to charity. I mean, we’re talking big money, D. Big money. Been rumors he wants to run for President next time around, and I guess they’re true, ’cause he was in a dead panic about being arrested for driving drunk and damn near killing a homeless guy. A dead panic. No one else saw it happen—and I don’t think that was just luck, either.” He shrugged. “So we made a deal.”
Demetrius blinked. “What kind of a deal?”
“I
