Instinctively, my whole body tensed up, and I pulled back a few inches.
Raiden froze, his eyes meeting mine. “Cora, I didn’t mean to—” He swallowed roughly, lowering his hand until both rested on his chest, almost like he was praying. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I would never hurt you.”
“Not awake, maybe,” I murmured, regretting the words the instant I said them.
Raiden looked crushed. Just like he’d looked in the dream. Only this time, it was because of me.
I sat up, pulling my hands from the floor. The shift in position made my precarious perch atop Raiden all too apparent. I was straddling him, my hips directly aligned with his. It was the closest I’d ever been to a man . . . or to anybody, really. But the fact that he was a man—and an attractive one, at that—made my body burn with a strange mixture of embarrassment and excitement.
I should have moved off him, I knew that. And yet, I didn’t want to.
Slowly, Raiden sat up, his abdominal muscles bunching into a defined pattern. “I mean it, Cora,” he said, his hands coming to rest on my hips. His eyes locked with mine, and the intensity of his dark stare paralyzed me. “Hurting you is the last thing I would ever want to do. You have to believe me.”
My eyes searched his, my heart hammering in my chest.
His grip on my hips tightened. “But I did hurt you,” he said, his stare dropping to my neck. “And I’m so fucking sorry.” His tone alone sent cracks snaking through my heart, but it was his expression that shattered it into a million pieces. At that moment, I would’ve done anything to take his pain away.
“Hey,” I said, raising my hands to hover on either side of his face. I hesitated, taking a deep breath, then rested my palms on his cheeks.
He winced when the fingers of my right hand touched his jaw. It looked like I wasn’t the only one worse for the wear after our little wrestling match.
I shifted my right hand down to rest on his shoulder, using my left to angle his face upward so his gaze met mine, once more. “I’m all right,” I said, twisting my lips into a wry smile. My arm didn’t even hurt anymore, which was surprising, but I wasn’t about to complain about not being in pain. “Turns out I can hold my own against a tough guy like you.” I raised one shoulder. “Who would’ve thought . . .”
I ignored the part of my mind wondering how, exactly, I’d managed to fight Raiden off. How my body had, once again, done things I didn’t actually know how to do.
Raiden’s fingers began to knead my hips, pulling me closer. His gaze dropped to my lips, just for a moment, before returning to my eyes. “Cora . . .”
I was pretty sure he was about to kiss me. And I wanted him to. I really, really did.
But fear reared its ugly head, gripping my heart tighter than Raiden had gripped my neck just moments ago.
“I saw the explosion,” I blurted.
Raiden went completely still.
I licked my lips, shifting my left hand down from the side of his face to his shoulder. “I saw what happened in the desert,” I told him. “I saw the child. I saw what you did . . . what you had to do to protect your team. And I saw what happened after . . .”
Persephone’s words echoed through my mind. “There’s nothing you could have done,” I said, and it almost felt like she was speaking through me.
Raiden’s eyes searched mine. “How could you possibly know any of that?”
“I saw it,” I told him. “In a dream.”
Raiden moved his hands from my hips to the floor behind him and leaned back a little, his eyes slipping away from mine as his stare grew distant. When he spoke next, his voice was the faintest whisper.
“That was no dream.”
24
Raiden and I sat on the edges of our respective beds, facing each other. It was just after midnight, and the lamp on the nightstand between our beds was on, bathing the room in a soft white light. I picked at a pull near my knee in the fabric of my jeans as I watched Raiden out of the corner of my eye. My arm still didn’t hurt, which struck me as odd, but that was hardly the most pressing concern at the moment.
Raiden was staring at me. He’d been staring at me for the past ten minutes. Not speaking. Not moving. Just staring.
“Do you know what I’m thinking, right now?” he asked, breaking the silence but leaving the tension intact.
I shook my head. With a deep breath, I raised my hands and pulled the pendant out from inside my shirt. The stone was amber, which meant the regulator was in what I was coming to think of as safety mode.
“It’s called a regulator,” I told him, eyes locked on the pendant. “Well, actually, it’s called something else in an alien language I don’t really know, but regulator is the closest translation, I think.” I shrugged. “When the stone is amber, like it is now, it makes me more or less normal—I can touch people without getting knocked on my ass.”
“I’ve noticed,” Raiden said, his voice a soft rumble.
I nodded, still staring at my knee. “But not when it’s blue.”
“It changes color?”
Again, I nodded.
“What happens then—when it’s blue?”
I glanced at Raiden, just for a second, then tucked the regulator back into the neck of my T-shirt and returned to staring at my knee. “I relive your worst memories, apparently . . .”
Or, I could tear him apart with a blast of psychic energy, like Despoina had done in the dream—memory—whatever it was, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. I wanted him to stay, not run for the hills, afraid I might obliterate him with an errant thought.
“Hm,” Raiden murmured. “Do you have control over it? Do you make the stone turn blue, or does it just happen?”
“I control it,” I told him.
He was quiet for a moment, upping the tension. “Will you show me?”
I looked at him, finally meeting his eyes. Slowly, I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
Raiden leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “You saw inside my mind, Cora. You don’t have a condition. You have a gift.” He laughed softly and shook his head. “If you’re telepathic, I think you should try—”
“It’s more than that,” I told him, standing. “It’s more than telepathy.” I moved to the foot of the bed, farther away from him, and started pacing the room. “I’ve been having these dreams—these memories of someone else’s life.”
“Like how you saw my memory,” Raiden said.
“Yeah,” I said, then shook my head, raising one hand to rub the back of my neck. “And no. This is different. She is different.” I took a deep breath, then continued on. “Her name is Persephone, and she’s not human.”
Raiden sat up straighter, his eyes opening wider, but he didn’t say anything.
“She’s one of them—one of my people,” I explained, still pacing. “She’s a warrior of some kind, with amazing psychic powers. I think she lived a long time ago, and that this was hers,” I said, touching the regulator. “It’s like, somehow, this device gives me access to her memories. Every time I go to sleep, now, I relive different parts of her life.”
I stopped at the door to our room and hugged my middle. “The things she could do with her mind when the stone was blue . . .” I shook my head. “It’s fun to daydream about having superpowers when it’s not an actual possibility, but nobody should be able to do those kinds of things.” I bowed my head, clutching my sides.
Overwhelmed, I scrunched up my face, and my chest convulsed with a barely contained sob. “I don’t want to read your mind, Raiden,” I managed to say, voice thick with emotion, “and I don’t want to accidentally tear your body apart with a thought.” My shoulders shook, and I hugged my middle tighter. I was barely holding myself together.
I could hear Raiden’s quiet footsteps as he approached. He stopped behind me and rested his hand on my shoulder. “All right,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” He squeezed my s
houlder. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but I can see how scared you are. I’m here for you, Cora. Whatever you need, I’m here.”
I closed my eyes, inhaling a shaky breath. “If you want to go,” I said, voice tremulous, “I won’t blame you. I would understand.”
“I don’t,” Raiden said, no hesitation. “I won’t. I won’t leave you, Cora . . . not again.” His words reminded me of the thoughts I’d witnessed in the dream. Of how much he’d missed home. Of how much he’d missed me.
His hand glided down to my elbow, and he pulled my arm free, sliding his hand down to mine. His fingers slipped between mine, setting my nerve endings aflame.
It was the first time anyone had held my hand in for as long as I could remember, and it felt incredibly intimate. Was it always like this? Or was it so intense because of who we were to each other—because what we wanted from each other had been off limits for so long?
My chest rose and fell with each too-fast breath. I looked down at our joined hands, heat creeping up my neck, and turned partway, forcing myself to raise my eyes to meet Raiden’s. I needed to know if this was all in my head. I needed to see if Raiden was feeling the same things I was feeling. The same pull. The same long-buried desire.
His gaze was intent, focused. He had never looked at me like that before. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before.
“Raiden, I—” I glanced down, brow furrowing, and shook my head. “I don’t know how to—” I swallowed roughly. “I’ve never—” Again, I shook my head. “Obviously I . . .”
Raiden raised a hand to my chin and tilted my face up toward his. “Shut up,” he whispered, his lips curving into the tiniest of smiles.
A heartbeat later, his lips were pressed against mine, and all of my thoughts and worries and fears faded away. I tensed up, just for a moment, and then I sighed, melting against him, giving in to my first real taste of passion.
Raiden’s hand slipped behind my neck, his arm around my back, and never in my life had I felt so afraid and so safe at the same time. I was overwhelmed by sensation. It was too much. Not enough.
I broke the kiss, breathing hard, heart pounding in my chest. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and I buried my face against Raiden’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I don’t know why I’m crying . . .”
Raiden curled his arms around me, wrapping me up in my first real hug in over two decades.
“Give it time,” he said, holding me tighter. “I’m not going anywhere.”
25
Sitting on the foot of the bed, I stared down at my freshly bandaged arm. Now that Raiden had cleaned and redressed the wound, I knew why it hadn’t bothered me much during the night—not when I’d been fighting Raiden, or later, when I’d been kissing him, or later still, when I’d been lying with him on his bed, unable to sleep so close to another person, but unwilling to move away, either.
The cut from the crash was healing better than expected. Way better, if Raiden’s expression while removing the sutures had been anything to go by. The cut had fully scabbed over during the night, and it seemed to have shrunk quite a bit, leaving the skin around the wound pink, puckered, and new.
I rubbed the bandage absently. The wound itched more than it hurt now. An echo of the sharp sting remained as a dull throbbing sensation, but the itching nearly drowned out the pain.
This was the most serious injury I’d ever had, and as such, my first chance to notice anything unusual about the way my body healed. Like that I healed faster than normal. Like, scary fast. Inhumanly fast.
I’d had bumps, bruises, and scrapes before, of course, most in the form of skinned knees or papercuts, and they’d all healed in a day or two—a relatively normal time frame, or so I’d thought. Now, I wondered if those wounds had all been too minor for me or my mom to notice anything unusual during the healing process. I also wondered if my mom had noticed but had chosen to hide my own abnormalities from me. Wouldn’t want me to start thinking anything crazy like, I don’t know, that I was an alien.
At the sound of the shower being turned on, I looked at the bathroom door. Raiden was in there, washing up before our big day of sitting in a hotel room, twiddling our thumbs. He was no longer just dead set against visiting the Vatican publicly; he was also digging in his heels about dropping by my mom’s last known whereabouts—the convenience store.
His reasoning was sound. The Order knew we were here. They would have all eyes on deck, or whatever. I got it. I really did. And as much as I might enjoy daydreaming about the prospect of being locked up in a hotel room all day with Raiden, exploring my new, touchable reality, facing that same situation in real life scared the bejesus out of me. I was not looking forward to the long day of awkwardness and avoidance stretching out before me.
Besides, I’d come all this way to find out what had happened to my mom—and to get an explanation from her about why she’d lied to me about who I was for so long—and I couldn’t do a damn thing toward that end. Wandering around Rome in search of her was off the table unless I wanted to sneak out on my own, and even I could admit that walking into Vatican City through the public entrance was pretty much the worst idea ever.
If only there was another way to get to the Order’s vault . . .
I stopped rubbing my bandaged arm and sat up straighter. The vault was located in the Order’s underground headquarters, beneath the Vatican Library. And, unless my memory was mistaken, it wasn’t the only thing down there. There was a whole maze of catacombs housing the bodies of long-dead Catholic priests and even longer-dead Romans and Etruscans beneath Vatican City. And those older tunnels didn’t stop at the Vatican’s border. They ran all throughout the earth beneath Rome.
I sprang off the bed and rushed to the corner of the room, where I’d stowed my backpack. I unzipped the main pocket and freed my laptop, then settled in at the little round table near the window.
I knew about the catacombs beneath Rome—like, that they were scattered all over the city, and that they were different from the famed catacombs of Paris, having been created slowly, over two millennia, to house the remains of the deceased rather than having been created all at once, when thousands of bodies had been moved into mine tunnels to clear out overcrowded cemeteries—but I didn’t know much more than that.
But, lucky me, I knew someone who did.
I quickly typed the password into my computer and logged on, opening up the internet browser and clicking on one of the bookmarked tabs beneath the search bar at the top of the window. Dark colors filled the screen—blacks and blues and purples—making the neon green text at the website’s header draw the eye: MMORPG ANONYMOUS. The online forum was a gathering place for a very particular breed of supergeek: addicts of massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Like me.
For at least the past decade, I had spent the majority of my free time logged in to online games featuring dragons, zombies, aliens, and the like, battling the imagined beasties alongside my virtual companions. I’d joined forces with gamers from all across the globe to slay demons, avert the apocalypse, and hunt for ancient, mystical treasures. The majority of my relationships with other humans happened online, where I could connect with people I had never met in real life. Where I didn’t have to worry about a pesky little thing like physical contact.
That virtual existence had seemed like enough, before. But now that I was actually out in the world, doing something real, it just seemed sad.
With a series of clicks on the touchpad, I navigated my way to the page listing all of my online “friends” and searched the starred favorites for the gamertag of the only one I considered a true friend: IceQu33n. A chat box opened in the lower right corner of the screen. My fingertips tapped on the keys.
Need to talk – 911. Meet me in Valhalla.
I hit enter, then glanced at the time. It took me a few seconds to do the time zone math. It was half past eight in the morning here in Rome, which meant it was seven thirty in Dublin. Fiona would be up. She wa
s a daytime sleeper, choosing to align her sleep schedule with her online buddies who lived in the States.
She had a job that allowed for such flexibility, as well as a surplus of free time. It was a dream job, really, working remotely as a researcher for one of the greatest video game producers of all time, Rockville Softworks. Her current project featured a treasure hunter from the turn of the nineteenth century, the golden age of archaeology, locked in a race against time—and against an evil foe—to find the one artifact that could prevent the end of the world.
For months, Fiona had been complaining about how tedious it was to search through the never-ending historical record to map out ruins all across Europe and Asia, the setting of the first installment in what Rockville hoped would be a mega-successful new adventure RPG franchise. I was hoping so, too. The treasure hunter adventure genre had grown stale as of late, with both the long-running Tomb Raider and Uncharted franchises publicly wrapping up, and the audience—namely, me—was ripe for some new material.
I closed the MMORPG ANONYMOUS page and opened a new tab, typing in the address for a public chat room I used to frequent, years ago. Valhalla was a gathering place for players of Thor’s Hammer, an epic one-off single-player RPG set during the time of the Norse gods. It had been released nearly a decade ago and had attained both critical acclaim and a cult following. Fans of the game, like me, were still waiting for a sequel. Online petitions had been made and signed aplenty, but so far, the collective plea for more seemed to have landed on deaf ears.
The Valhalla chat room was now mainly used by the most hardcore, bitterest fans of the game. I loved Thor’s Hammer, but not enough to linger around here like a vulture circling a half-dead animal creeping through the desert. This chatroom didn’t allow for direct messaging, but I hadn’t logged in to Valhalla in years—so long that my username was a long-abandoned gamertag. If the Custodes Veritatis was looking for me online, they wouldn’t be looking here.
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