by Jasmine Walt
“Wake up, Little Ivanov,” murmured a quiet, masculine voice. It was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard. The hand I’d been holding when I’d fallen asleep was gone from my grasp—instead his fingers were gently stroking my mess of mahogany hair. I smiled into the comforter before raising my head.
Though he was still the middle-aged version of himself, the sight that greeted me was breathtaking. Marcus was awake . . . smiling . . . alive.
“Come here,” he said softly, patting the comforter on the opposite side of his body.
I yearned to cuddle with him, to feel his warm, solid body next to mine, but I shook my head. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Come here,” he repeated, demanding.
I bit my lower lip in hesitation, but the yearning in his eyes won me over. I walked around the bed and carefully slid closer to him.
“I’ll recover, Lex,” he murmured, and a rush of relief filled my chest. Part of me hadn’t believed that he really was okay until that moment.
I curled up against him, and voice wobbly, said, “I’m counting on it.”
He sighed and tightened his arm around my waist.
I breathed in, eager for his spicy scent, but I was disappointed. “Why do you smell different? I mean, you don’t smell bad, just . . . different.”
His thumb began caressing my ribs as he spoke. “Well . . . as far as I could tell, I was shot in the heart. Am I correct?”
I nodded against his shoulder, attempting to keep my breathing steady. The skin he was stroking burned with a pleasant fire.
“Then I must have been given blood from another Nejeret—possibly several. Until my own blood cells replace it, I’ll smell a little bit like each of them. You’re developing heightened senses rapidly, Little Ivanov, if you could smell the difference. Did you know that in the most powerful of us, our sensation of touch is heightened as well? I am one of those . . . are you?” He chuckled as his thumb continued its gentle stroking.
“Marcus,” I finally growled between uneven breaths. It just so happened that all of my senses had been slowly becoming more sensitive, including touch.
“Ah . . . very well,” Marcus said, ceasing his tactile ministrations. Lightly, he pressed his lips to my forehead, the hint of his stubble a pleasant scratchiness.
“Pardon the interruption, Meswett,” Carlisle said from the doorway. “But Heru should really eat now that he’s awake. It’ll hasten his healing process. There’s a tray of food for you as well in the sitting room,” he said as he wheeled in a multi-level food cart heaped with a variety of dishes.
Sitting up, I gaped. “That’s all for him?”
“Regeneration brings on a hearty appetite,” was Carlisle’s response. It made sense; I recalled my own increased appetite after waking from the coma.
“Why’s my food out there?” I pointed my thumb over my shoulder toward the sitting room. “I’ll eat in here with him.”
“Meswett, I’m not sure you want to watch him eating just yet. After recovery from such a fatal injury, the first few meals can be . . . unpleasant,” Carlisle warned. I tried to picture polite and proper Marcus shoving handfuls of food into his mouth, but couldn’t.
I clenched my teeth and stated, “I’m staying.”
“Lex . . .” Marcus said, his voice laden with warning.
“Marcus.”
He sighed at my mulishness, and followed up with a groan as Carlisle rearranged pillows and propped him up into a sitting position. “If you let me eat my first five meals alone, I’ll tell you the truth behind the Contendings of Heru and Set myth.”
A glimpse into Marcus’s past, a chance to see the man who’d inspired one of the most famous Egyptian myths, was almost too much to pass up . . . almost. “Three,” I countered.
He narrowed his eyes. “Five.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
I snorted in exasperation. “Fine, five meals. But you’d better let me know as soon as he finishes,” I told Carlisle. I really didn’t want to leave Marcus’s side, but I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, either.
“Of course, Meswett,” Carlisle said with a bow and minutely shaking shoulders. I was pretty sure he was laughing at me.
I left the bedroom and quickly ate my own food—lemon and herb-roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and glazed heirloom carrots, paired with a small carafe of a light white wine—at a small, granite-topped dining table set in front of a picture window. Staring out at the tree-lined horizon, I sighed. He really is okay.
“Daydreaming?” Dominic asked in his smooth, French accent. I’d been so lost in thought, I hadn’t heard him enter the room.
“Sort of,” I said, turning to look at him. He was sitting in an oversized, steel-gray armchair on the opposite side of the room. His chin-length, nearly black hair was slicked back as usual, but it looked wet. I figured he’d taken a break from chaperoning me to get cleaned up. Last I’d seen him, his clothes had been stained with nearly as much blood as mine had been, but his current attire—black-on-black pinstriped suit pants and a midnight blue dress shirt—was immaculate. “You’re very sneaky, you know.”
Amusement touched his handsome features, curving his thin lips and making his coal-black eyes sparkle. “Precisely the reason your Marcus frequently employs me as a spy,” he told me. “And I prefer the term ‘stealthy.’”
“Alright . . . stealthy,” I agreed.
For the first time, I had a chance to examine the décor in Marcus’s personal space. His house in Ravenna had been decorated generically, reflecting none of his actual taste, but his sitting room screamed “MARCUS” as loudly as if he’d stamped his name on every chair, table, and trinket in bold, garish letters. Gray and black, the two colors that dominated his wardrobe, seemed to govern his home décor tastes as well. Every piece of furniture was sleek and elegant, somehow managing a level of subtle sensuality.
Strewn about the room on shelves and tables were little bits of bright blue, orange, red, and violet, all in the form of priceless antiques. And they weren’t corner-shop-in-a-quaint-town antiques, but million-dollar, personal-invitation-to-a-silent-auction antiques. They were black market with a capital B.
“You can return, Meswett,” Carlisle said, making me jump. I was glad I’d refrained from picking up any of the irreplaceable statuettes or vases—otherwise one might’ve been in pieces on the floor.
“Thank you.” To Dominic, I said, “Maybe you should ask Neffe to come up and keep you company, if you plan to hang around.”
My comment earned a bark of laughter from the bedroom.
“I think not,” was Dominic’s reply. “Go to him. Saga and Sandra will join me here soon enough.”
I nodded, thanking him silently for releasing me from the guilt of abandoning him. I hurried into the bedroom and shut the door.
“I expected you to look different,” I told Marcus as I crawled toward him on the bed.
Locked on me, his irises bled from gold to black in an instant before his eyes narrowed, and he groaned.
“What? What is it? Does something hurt?” I asked frantically, my hands fluttering around him.
He squeezed his eyes shut. “No, definitely not. Definitely, definitely not.”
“Okay . . . will you tell me your tale now or do I have to actually wait until you’ve consumed all five of the agreed-upon meals?” I asked as I cuddled against him.
“After I rest,” he said, pulling me closer.
With my head laid on his shoulder, I warned, “You’d better not back out of our deal.” When he didn’t respond, I looked up at his face. He was already asleep.
Sometime during the next morning, I woke and adjourned to my suite to brush my teeth and shower. When I returned to Marcus’s bedroom, he was already awake and sitting up in bed. I gasped when I saw him.
“Marcus! You look ten years younger!” I exclaimed. He didn’t look his usual late-twenties or early-thirties, but he was getting there.
“Do I?”
he asked, unconcerned.
“Are you going to tell me about the myth now?” I settled in the large cushy chair at his bedside, dropping a leather tote stuffed with books and my laptop on the floor.
“No,” he said, smiling mysteriously. “I must eat again, and then rest. I hope you don’t mind.” His eyes twinkled. He was toying with me, seeing how far he could push me.
We danced that little routine at least a dozen times over the next several days, me asking for the true story behind the myth, him denying me and then eating and falling asleep. I would sit at his bedside and watch him breathe, or I would read or hold quiet discussions with other Nejerets in his sitting room. It was simple and domestic—an easy routine to fall into.
On the fifth evening after the shooting, while I was sleeping in my own bed for once, my ba found its way into the At of its own accord.
I was watching five-year-old me play lackadaisically on the swings in my parents’ backyard. A dark-haired and golden-skinned man dressed in a colorful, belted robe was approaching the little-girl version of me. Turning, he sat on the next swing over, and I inhaled sharply.
For a long moment, I thought the man was Marcus—he bore a striking resemblance in both coloring and bone structure, but there were subtle differences. Marcus was slightly shorter, making his musculature seem bulkier, and he carried himself differently, more like a modern man. The familiar stranger had an alien grace, his movements too smooth, too quick, too fluid. Who is he?
Five-year-old me giggled joyfully, like the tinkling of a dozen bells. “You’re dressed funny!”
The man smiled back at her, but said nothing.
I knew I was in an echo of something that happened when I was a little girl, but I would have sworn the interaction I was watching never actually happened. I couldn’t remember ever meeting this Marcus look-alike.
“I’m Alexandra,” the little girl version of me announced, her swinging newly enthused.
The man who wasn’t Marcus inclined his head and repeated in a foreign, ancient accent, “Alexandra.” It sounded like “Ah-leek-saaan-drah.” He pressed the fingertips of his right hand to his chest and said, “Nuin.”
“No way!” I exclaimed, my voice hushed. “No freaking way!” Nuin, the Great Father, the man who had started our species, visited me when I was a little girl. It wasn’t possible—he was supposed to be dead . . . like, thousands of years dead. Marcus saw him die.
“Alexandra.”
At hearing my name, I swiveled my head to the left and found another version of the same man standing only feet away. Shocked, I accosted him with words. “You’re Nuin! But everyone thinks you’re dead! Can you help us? Can you help me? The prophecy . . . your prophecy . . . it must be wrong! Why did you choose me?”
Nuin shook his head and said something incomprehensible, his words ancient and alien. I had to remind myself that, despite the resemblance, the man standing beside me was not Marcus. Nuin pointed to another part of the yard, a place young me couldn’t see. A now-familiar and very pissed-off man was lurking behind a tree. It would have been comical, like a scene taken from an old Sunday morning cartoon, but for the identity of the man—Set.
“No! He might hurt her!” I exclaimed. I realized the statement was moronic as soon I voiced it. I hadn’t been hurt by Set as a child. In fact, I’d never even seen Set until the first time I entered the echo in the fertility clinic.
Nuin, ancient and radiating some otherworldly power, raised his hand to touch his first two fingers to my forehead. Instantly, I remembered . . . everything.
I remembered waking up to find Nuin sitting in a chair in the corner of my room, watching over me as I slept . . . protecting me.
I remembered catching sight of Nuin in the distance while I rounded the turn of a slide at the park.
I remembered repeating and practicing unfamiliar sounds as Nuin taught me his language during long, sleepless nights.
I remembered Nuin—dressed in modern clothes—sitting side-by-side in the bleachers with hundreds of parents and high school students at the homecoming game during my junior year of high school, watching me watch the game.
I remembered the feeling of Nuin’s lips pressed gently against mine as tears dried on my cheeks. I’d been sixteen, horribly ashamed that a boy had yet to kiss me, and had just learned that my best friend was dating my crush.
I remembered smiling down at Nuin, who was clapping enthusiastically from the front row at my final ballet performance.
I remembered Nuin holding my hand during the entire fifteen-hour plane ride from Seattle to Minneapolis to Rome. It had been my first time flying internationally, and I’d been all alone.
Thousands of memories bombarded me, exploding into and merging with my own, redefining my identity. In a young, naïve way, I’d loved Nuin deeply . . . I probably always would. I wondered if Nuin had been the reason that so few boys, or as I grew older, men, had interested me. None could compare, in looks or substance, to the glorious enigma that was Nuin . . . my Nuin. Well, none until Marcus.
In his ancient language—a predecessor to Old Egyptian—I asked, “Will you take them away again?” Every time Nuin visited me, he left by sealing my memories, only to unseal them again on his next visit.
“No, my Alexandra,” he said sadly, a tear sliding down his chiseled face.
“What’s wrong?” Without hesitation, I closed the distance between us and wrapped my arms around his neck, standing on tiptoes to bury my face against his collar.
“I am weary. I have lived for too long in this body and my time is coming to an end,” Nuin whispered into my hair. “I have done the best I could . . . kept you safe from he-who-would-use-you until my grandson, Heru, could take over. He will protect you now.”
I pulled away and gazed into his color-changing eyes. Remotely, I realized that they resembled the swirling colors in the At. “Heru?” I asked, my mind taking longer than usual to register that he was talking about Marcus.
Nuin nodded solemnly. “I hope to see you once more, but I will miss you, my Alexandra,” he remarked, kissing me lightly on the forehead.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted.
With a humorless laugh, he said, “I know. If everything works out properly, you will understand soon. Sooner than you’d like.”
“You’re going away . . . possibly forever,” I stated, making sense of his forlorn looks and cryptic words. “That’s why I get to keep my memories of you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Before I could wallow in the sorrow of losing him, a hidden constant in my life, he asked, “Do you love him?”
“Do I love him? Who?”
“Heru.”
I frowned and glanced down at the grass. “I don’t know . . . I think so, but I barely know him.”
“Oh, my sweet Alexandra. Love isn’t about knowing, love is about feeling.”
I thought about his words and about Marcus. I knew I loved Nuin, but my feelings for Marcus were different—searingly raw. Nuin had been my comforting, wise companion while Marcus was rage and intelligence, strength and sex, all wrapped up in an enticing, black and golden package. In the past few months, Marcus had made me feel more alive than I’d ever felt before. I craved taking the next physical steps with him like a drug addict looking for a more powerful hit. Around Marcus, my emotions were unusually volatile—anger, lust, joy, and frustration all waiting eagerly for the chance to explode. So, do I love him?
“I admit, he is young and inconceivably proud and ruthless, but I believe time may temper his rougher qualities. I must pass your care into the hands of another, and there is no better man.” Nuin looked around momentarily, as though he could hear something that I couldn’t, and briefly smiled. “I must leave you now, my Alexandra. I have a guest awaiting my attention.”
“But—”
“All will work out—I’m certain of that now.” He looked around thoughtfully, and then his gaze sharpened, focusing on me. “There are three things you must do to survive what’s c
oming: no matter what, do not trust your father, never say his name in the At, and keep your younger sister nearby at all times.”
“Jenny?” I asked, surprised at the mention of my sister. “Why?”
“Not Jenny.”
“But—”
“I will see you again,” he promised and kissed me lightly before disappearing. It was the chaste kiss of a cherished friend. Other than a healthy scattering of gentle pecks and a few hotter, heavier kisses at my more needy moments, my relationship with Nuin had been mostly platonic. Nuin was, and would always be, my first love. But those feelings had been grossly eclipsed by more mature, ferocious versions . . . for Marcus.
I watched the past version of Nuin hover protectively around my five-year-old self for a while, wondering who Nuin could have possibly meant by my “younger sister,” if not Jenny. Eventually, regular, restful dreams replaced the echo.
The following morning, I entered Marcus’s bedroom feeling anxious and a little ill. I had no idea how to tell him about seeing Nuin in the At . . . about everything I now remembered. I started to laugh, a shrill, slightly hysterical sound as I approached Marcus. He was seated at a small, round ebony table by the window on the left side of his bed, watching me. He looked himself, if still a little thinner than usual. His face was carefully composed—expressionless—but there was a pitiless glint to his eyes. Is he mad about something? Oh God . . . does he already know about my history with Nuin? How?
Stopping behind the chair opposite him, I opened my mouth, then closed it again. How was I supposed to start? With the truth, I told myself. I took a deep breath, then said, “Marcus, I think—”
He held up his hand, stopping my words. “Sit, Lex.” It wasn’t a request.
Hands shaking, I pulled out the chair and sat. Seconds passed, and still, Marcus simply watched me. I cleared my throat, preparing to try again.
He beat me to it. “I owe you a story . . . my story.” He looked away, focusing on something beyond the window pane. “One of my stories,” he said, correcting himself. “It’s not a happy tale, and I don’t enjoy telling it, so you’ll have to forgive my shortness.”