Forbidden

by Jacquelyn Frank

  She opened the rear door and gestured for them to jump in. They did so, if a bit awkwardly. After all, they weren’t used to using four legs. SingSing hopped into the front seat and buckled in.

  “All right! Here we go! And no butt sniffing back there, you two!”

  Ram lay down on the backseat and did a contemptuous doggy eye roll.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was dark. And cold. Bitterly cold. That was the first thing that plagued Jackson’s awareness as he walked out to his car, fumbling for car keys with fingers that refused to work right. Not that the weather would have bothered him any other day, but all he could think of was … what if Docia was out there somewhere, lying in the cold? Needing him? His only reassurance that she was fine was the word of some very weird rich guy whose promise of having her call him had not panned out as yet and who had let half his house blow up while she was supposedly in his care.

  Jackson had bashed his head against stubborn walls all day, trying to convince people that something wasn’t right about all of this. Eventually his credibility dissolved as he grew more tired and lost his temper with them, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. His brothers in blue had then forcibly kicked him out of the station, sending him home. Leo was off somewhere supposedly following something in his gut, which was the only source of comfort Jackson had … but that left him at loose ends with nothing constructive to do. No way of convincing anyone something was wrong. No way of finding Docia.

  Or so they thought. Screw them. Screw all of them. He was going back up to Windham and that wealthy fucker was going to tell him where Docia and this supposed friend were or he was going to blow up the other side of his goddamn house.

  “Jackson.”

  He dropped his keys in the snow at the sound of her voice. That sent him off into a blue streak of cursing that would have made his grandma slap him upside the head if she were still alive. But like his parents, like Chico, like everyone, she was dead.

  “What the f—” He broke off, growling and hissing as he restrained himself. “What? What do you want, Marissa? Seriously? What? What? What!”

  He was explosive, not giving her so much as a breath in which to answer him. But she was patient, waiting for him to steam down a little, which he did after a moment spent snatching his keys out of the cold slush. Still, he was breathing bullishly through his nose, as though all it would take was a single spark and he’d be breathing fire on her.

  “I know you. I know you aren’t going to just go home, take a bath, and curl up with a good book. Where are you going?” She moved closer to him, and he noticed that a cute pair of polka-dot snow boots had replaced the tried-and-true CFM heels she usually wore all day long.

  I mean, seriously, he thought, how does she wear four-and five-inch heels all day long without keeling over at the end of the day? And she has to know they accent her legs and ass until grown men are left crying in her wake. She has to know that, doesn’t she? That’s what the damn things are made for! It certainly isn’t because they’re soft and comfy! And now those boots, like something a kindergartner would wear … so … frickin’ … cute! Damn her.

  “I’m going home, Doctor, like a good boy,” he said, purposely throwing her the most insincere smile he could muster.

  “You aren’t. Where are you going?”

  “Like I would tell you?” He snorted out a laugh and unlocked the car.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, hurrying around him. She snatched the keys from his hand and body blocked him from getting in his car.

  “Oh, hell, no,” he growled, glaring at her. Yet he didn’t make any aggressive moves toward her. “Give me my keys.”

  “Letting you drive home would be like putting a .2 BAC on the road. Not happening. Friends don’t let friends drive on the verge of a sleep-deprived coma.”

  “We’re not really friends, though, are we,” he reminded her, making a lame attempt to reach for his keys.

  “Fine. Colleagues, then. And while I could give a rat’s ass about you, Waverly, I’m not letting you get in this car so you can fall asleep at the wheel and run head-on into some nice family with boys who’ve been raised to be polite, like to shop, and are good listeners. God knows the women of the future can’t afford to lose any of those.”

  “Yeah, well, the women of the future are screwed either way, because those guys … those polite good listeners who like to shop? They are also really, really gay.”

  She rolled her eyes and dropped into the driver’s seat. She started the car and turned on the heat, leaving him standing there with two choices. Either he removed her bodily from the car or he gave in and trotted over to the passenger seat like a good boy. He spent an embarrassingly short amount of time making the decision, and his ego took a bit of a hit for it. Still, that was better than making a brutish ass of himself twice in a row with her. He shuffled around to the other side of the car, muttering, wondering when exactly it was that he had lost control of his life.

  He slid into his seat, slumping down.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “Windham. I’m going to interview dear old Henry myself.”

  “I suppose I’d be wasting my breath if I brought up issues like jurisdiction?” she asked archly, one of her fine red brows curving upward.

  She took his silence as an affirmative, then turned to look over her shoulder in order to back the car out. Habitually, her arm went to the right, touching the back of his seat.

  She hesitated when she saw the safety bars between the front and rear seats, meant to keep a dog contained and away from the driver. She reached with three fingers to touch them, probably thinking he wouldn’t notice. But he did. And as she touched them in homage to his lost friend, Jackson finally felt the empathy she had for him, the empathy she kept contained because it was her job to do so.

  Grudgingly, Jackson found himself liking her for it.

  “We’ll have to go to the safe house in Windham first,” Ram explained when Docia uttered a protest at passing the exit to Saugerties and thereby passing her brother by. SingSing had deigned to return them to their human forms a little while ago … although she’d waited much longer than was necessary, because it seemed she had forgotten that they weren’t actually dogs for a while there. “I’m going to need some reinforcements before we bring you to your brother. I need Asikri. Others. Just in case there is an ambush lying in wait around him. I don’t want either of you in any kind of danger without support and an escape plan.” He touched a finger to her cheek. “You wouldn’t forgive me if anything happened to him. And I wouldn’t forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about me,” Docia said with a grin. “That spell kicked ass! I am officially an ass kicker! Woot!” She pumped an arm in delight. “Let’s see them try and push me off a bridge now.”

  “Docia, be steady,” he warned. “Don’t get cocky. Her power will still be weak and limited until the Blending is complete. With the strain and draining effect of merging two disparate personalities into something harmonic and cohesive … it doesn’t leave much energy for anything else, never mind power on the scope of what a Templar like Tameri uses.”

  “Did you know her name means My Beloved—”

  “Beloved Land.” He raised a brow at her, all but smirking.

  Docia reached up and smacked herself in the forehead. “Duh! Of course you know what it means.” She flushed with embarrassment. “I was just excited I knew that. I like her name. I’m thinking of using it. But I like my name, too.”

  “Docia is very lovely. And there will come a time when you will need to change your name. Be patient. You will live quite a long time, and in this era of Big Brother following your every move, it’s best to pull away from your old life and start a new one after some time.”

  The understanding brought him her full, wide-eyed attention. “You mean, I’ll … No. Wait. I was going to say, I’ll have to leave my brother, but if what you say is true, it wil
l be worse than that.” She lifted wounded eyes to his. “I’ll have to watch my brother grow old and die.”

  “You would have to anyway, even if you aged alongside him. You can’t qualify life and time in the moments of its ending. Life is so much more than it cessation. Trust me. This is one thing I know. As does Tameri.”

  “I don’t know about that part of her yet.”

  “I wish I could spare you from it when you will,” he said with a grim sadness pulling at the edges of his mouth. “But as I said, it does us best to remember the fullness of our lives and leave the dying as the brief footnote it deserves to be.”

  Docia thought about it and nodded. Then he saw her pupils widen a bit. She turned her face away, instinctively trying to hide whatever she was thinking. She didn’t realize it was already too late. Although he couldn’t perceive the exact nature of her thoughts, he could sense her distress and even her intent to deceive.

  Given their conversation, it didn’t take much thought to divine her reasoning, or at least the core of it.

  “Docia, you cannot tell your brother the truth of what you are,” he chided gently. “Surely you can figure out the reasons why that would be a bad idea.”

  “I trust Jackson,” she said, her sweet bottom lip pouting out stubbornly whether she was aware of it or not. He wondered if she had any idea how readable she was.

  “Jackson is a lawman. They tend to be rigid and bound by a very specific code of ethics,” he tried to warn her.

  “He is my brother before he is a cop,” she insisted, her eyes filling with anger that he would suggest otherwise.

  “If he is a good cop, Docia, then he is a cop before he is anything else.”

  “He’s a great cop!” she spat defensively. Then she realized that by his logic, that only weakened her argument. “But he would do anything for me. I know it.”

  “Would he murder for you?” At her visible resistance, he pressed on. “Would he steal for you? Jaywalk for you? Where’s the line, in your mind? And then ask yourself if that line comes before or after locking you up in the mental ward when you start claiming there’s someone else living inside of you.”

  As he spoke to her, he saw two large crystalline tears welling in her eyes, limning the edges of her bottom lids, glittering under the flash of streetlights as they drove past them.

  “Hey,” he said, softening under her pain, pulling her hand into his, and then, on impulse, raising the back of it to his lips. “I’m not saying this to be mean. I’m not trying to be judgmental, either. I’ve just …” He pressed a frown onto his lips. “A hundred years ago, they threw people like us who admitted to what we were into hellholes the likes of which you’ve never known. Now, they pump us full of drugs and …”

  This time she was the one who was quick to see the secret he pushed away.

  “And?” Docia tried to find answers in the woman inside her, but Tameri fell profoundly silent. “What? What happens when they use modern psychotropic drugs on a Bodywalker?”

  “The carbon is suppressed,” he admitted, realizing she would find out eventually. “It’s the only time you can succeed in somewhat permanently regaining your full life from your Bodywalker symbiont. It suppresses their personality, their voice, but also the healing and all other benefits as well. But it’s a living hell for the symbiont, Docia. Even worse than the human that reneges on the deal and fights the Blending is the human that medicates to shut us out.” He was very grim, his golden eyes dark with pain and fear. Perhaps the only fear she had ever seen in him. “Imagine your whole being paralyzed into submission, nothing you can do or say, your entire existence nothing more than being forced to watch as things happen to you, be they good, bad, or otherwise, and you are completely unable to raise a finger in your own defense or assistance. Unlike the Suspension where Ram was unaware of time passing and bore no witness to it until he began to return, the imprisonment of drugs is beyond unbearable. It’s torturous. Carbons are often … damaged. They’ve come back … a little off.”

  “But modern medications aren’t more than a hundred years old,” she said. “You said you have to wait in the Ether a hundred years before coming back.”

  “Oh, the young,” he said with a hollow sort of laugh. It wasn’t patronizing so much as sad and … unfortunate. “There’s always been something. Be it alcohol or opiate abuse for the Middle Ages and cocaine and meth for the modern age … there’s always been some kind of self-medication long before there were things like L-dopa or haloperidol or even the more cutting-edge Tegretol or ziprasidone. It was all about building a better mousetrap, as far as we were concerned.”

  “Oh, my God, that’s horrible,” she breathed, her eyes wide as she truly thought about it. “Not just for you, but for the original involved as well. Whether it’s illegal drugs or even those cutting-edge meds, I know what those side effects are like. The host is just as zombified as you are, believe me.”

  “It’s a bad deal all around,” he agreed. “One that can be avoided if agreements are executed in good faith.” He drew her closer, touching his forehead to hers as he looked into her eyes. “Please, promise me you won’t risk it. I will do anything to keep you safe,” he said fiercely, “and I would hate for that to put me at odds with your brother. I have been many kinds of warriors over many lifetimes, Vincent being one of the most skilled by far, and I would not be willing to bet his skills against Jackson’s.”

  “Don’t you threaten my brother!” she snapped, shoving him hard away from her. “Don’t you dare!”

  “I am not threatening him,” Ram said. “I am putting the gun in your hands, Docia. You are the one who is going to decide whether to shoot the bullet in his direction.”

  She was furious, shoving him back again for good measure, folding her arms defensively across her chest, and huddling up against her door as far away from him as she could. It pained him to feel her withdraw in such a way, but it was for the best that she know exactly what he felt himself capable of doing on her behalf.

  As it was, it surprised the hell out of him. Instinct told him he ought to be doing some withdrawing of his own, to put himself at a safe distance until he had taken the time to find proof that she was not deceiving him. But there was no way to prove a negative … and the same question he had asked her would apply to himself. Where would the line be? The tipping point between untrustworthy and trustworthy? What exactly could she ever do to make him fully trust her? How much time? What acts? What sacrifices? Was it at all possible?

  Honestly, it wasn’t. Not without something huge on his side of the table.

  A leap of faith.

  It would have been much easier, perhaps, to make that leap if he were deciding only for himself. But there was an entire people at risk. A longtime friend’s safety and well-being would be on the line every moment his word and his faith put him within reach of his king’s exposed breast or back. His queen’s vulnerable neck. How would he ever live with himself if he chose wrongly and any of them were harmed or destroyed because of his bad choices? And what was he basing his desire to believe her on, anyway? A few moments of compelling conversation? An hour of passionate lovemaking?

  Asikri would be the first to tell him that no man could make a wise choice once his penis was involved.

  But Asikri’s crude and simplistic take on matters couldn’t suit this situation, he thought dismally. There was so much more involved than two physical bodies … and four dynamic spirits.

  What had always amazed Ram was how regeneration after regeneration, Menes and Hatshepsut had managed to mesh so uncontrollably and so perfectly, no matter how different the new spirits of their originals were. And how, he had wondered, had they known the first time that they had something that would transcend everything? He looked over at Docia and wondered … if Ram had met Tameri lifetimes ago, would it have been just as powerful and undeniable a draw? Had they been denied the beauty of what his king and queen had all this time because they were supposed enemies in a war that had gone o
n for much, much too long?

  The thought of it caused a violent pain in his chest, a sensation of loss and grief that had him blinking his eyes rapidly in an attempt to disperse the emotion.

  “I have had many children,” he blurted out suddenly, without even knowing where it came from. “I have watched them come and go from this earth. There is no pain like it.” He turned his head to make certain she could see the raw emotion in his eyes. “But I think losing you in that way … in any way … would be a thousand times more painful now that I have finally learned what I have been missing.”

  She sniffled a little, her lower lip trembling as she swallowed back her own pain and allowed herself to understand his. It wasn’t as hard for her as it was for him. She was a far gentler spirit. A far more empathetic one than he would ever be.

  “How many children?” she asked.

  “Twenty-two. And many more than that who never made it beyond their mothers’ wombs. There is nothing worse,” he felt compelled to add, “than seeing a child never make it out of the first blush of life, be it weeks or just a few years. Nothing worse.”

  “Tameri finds that a surprisingly low number for one of the oldest and greatest of your kind.”

  “Yes. Well … over time I found it less and less welcome an idea to bring children into my world of war. Especially when Templars have not been above using my loved ones in the past in order to get to me.”

  Docia felt immediately and suddenly ashamed. She knew the body of the emotion came from Tameri. Her guilt was profound. Such things had kept her in the Ether, to avoid taking part in the madness of the civil war. But her father had come to her and convinced her to return, coaxed her into taking on the weight of this action. If she wanted an end to the war, she could not simply hide and wait for it, he had told her. She must do her active part, show bravery.

  Of course, he had not meant for her to become entangled with Ramses personally. But that too had had an impetus out of her control. Tameri wondered if it was the generosity and openness of Docia’s spirit that had allowed for it, some ingrained Templar habit inside of her wanting to place blame elsewhere. After all, she still held the body Politic responsible for as much of the war as she did the Templar fanatics. They had been miserly and judgmental, casting censure and prejudice the Templar way, blaming them for the rituals that had, in the end, trapped them all into this cycle of death and rebirth rather than allowing them to pass into the land of the afterlife once and for all. They blamed them for never again being able to look up into the face of Ra, to feel the warmth of the sun on their skin with joy and contentment.