“I knew you before,” she said, “a thousand years ago,” and only after those simple words flowed so easily from her wonderful lips did they begin ringing in his mind. Banging. The full import of their meaning hit him, and as it did he felt himself waver. His jaw had gone slack.
Her gaze came into focus and dropped, to her crossed legs on the bed, hands brushing idly at the edges of his shirt where it lay in her lap. Looking for all the world in that brief instant like normal Jess, eyes downcast, their inhuman color not visible; just her; sweet, young Jessica, average teenage girl who’d simply landed in the middle of something epic. Yet as he looked at her …
He knew all at once how wrong that was.
She was something far more than that.
You’re here!
A roiling rush of significance swept over and through him.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been together,” she said, pushing on. His skull had begun to throb. “You helped me once.” She raised her eyes to his. Such power! “Long ago.” For an instant her attention fluttered back to her lap. “Talk about soul mates,” it seemed as if she tried to ease some of her own tension. “This takes the cake.” But she returned to seriousness, lifted her eyes and held his. “Please. Please know that I don’t mean to put ideas in your head. Understand I’m not trying to tell you what’s true for you. Please, Zac, understand how hard this is for me. I have to tell you this. You have to know. I’m not trying to shake your reality. This doesn’t change us. We’re still who we are. Who we’ve always been. Jess and Zac. Understand?” Deliberately she straightened, holding her posture erect. Firm. “But the truth is we were together. Before Jess, before Zac. We fought together. We shared the same passions, the same goals. We wanted the same thing.
“We were together at the end of that time.” Her shoulders were back as she held his gaze. “We were together when Aesha died.”
He could feel his temples pulsing. Her face had taken on an otherworldy quality, her whole being, and he saw her with sharper definition than he ever had as she said:
“We were together when I died.”
The words went thundering around his head with all the rest. He looked deep into those powerful, yellow eyes. All doubt gone. So sharply in focus right then that nothing could have been more intense, more real, so changed from the eyes he remembered. Portals, they were. Magnificent windows to something fantastic. Gateway to a Jessica that was far more than she appeared.
Aesha …
“I’m not the herald,” she forged on. “I am the priestess.
“Zac. I’m Aesha.”
He should’ve been having a different reaction. What she was saying was impossible. Her incredible statements should not have been drawing him in so fiercely, as if it were the realest thing she ever said. He should’ve been pulling back, worried she’d lost her mind or something, or was in the process of losing it and he should’ve been concerned about what he could do to help. What he could do to bring her back to reality. Not falling into the trap.
But it wasn’t a trap. This was reality.
Her gaze became distant again, eased.
“How do you know?” he asked, even as his mind struggled to dredge up scattered images, to make it so and to understand, feeling hugely displaced, more so with each passing second, each new contemplation. Each fresh realization striking hard and threatening to send him spiraling.
“I guess there’s no way to prove it,” she said. “But I know.”
She sank a little and he worried he’d made the wrong move. But her slump was brief, and when she looked up he could tell she’d come to a decision.
“This may be as good a time as any.” She slid from the bed, stood beside it on the floor and, without further comment, took up a fighting stance. He tensed.
“On this other world,” she told him, “where I just was, the old man, Galfar, opened my eyes to things. Remember the Bok?”
His skin began to crawl.
“I can do it too.” And … she wound up a hand and threw it out, giving a little flick and a curt “HA!” and the air warbled, ripping across the room toward her desk and chair. It knocked the chair away and the desk slid too. A small action, but in the quiet of that gentle little room it was like a bomb.
Again Zac held himself. With great difficulty he held still. Didn’t move. Fought away the cascading fears and uncertainties at what his love, his life, his everything until then, had become.
Jessica.
Ancient priestess.
Aesha.
Only … this was who he knew. It was her. Just as she said. Nothing had changed about who she was.
He made himself believe it.
She lowered her arm and climbed slowly back onto the bed, eyes locked desperately to his, wider now than they had been at any point in this mind-blowing conversation, fearful, studying him, gauging his every reaction. Holding fast; it was as if she gripped him with all her might, keeping him there, hoping not to drive him away. He could tell she was frightened at the effect she might’ve caused. What would he do? she seemed to be thinking. How would he respond?
When she spoke again it was tentatively. “I knew how to do it long ago,” she said. “Galfar knew it, handed down to him by all that went before. He showed me.” Then, looking away, almost sheepishly: “But it came from Aesha.” Now she seemed almost embarrassed. “It all came from me.”
A long silence hung between them. There was an incredible charge in that absence of sound. Whether from what she’d just done or the tension of the conversation itself … Zac could feel the crackle. His hair stood ever so slightly on end. Though he believed her, though he accepted what she said—all of it, he made himself; all of it—he was having a hard time coming to grips. This little show of force was rocking him. It was difficult enough to imagine Jess as a timeless being, as she claimed, difficult enough to imagine himself as one, as she insisted, but now to learn she was also in possession of this power …
He needed to speak. That much he knew had to happen. His muteness needed to end; he needed to say something, to reassure her, to open his mouth and respond.
We knew each other before. It hit him, harder. Gripping him tightly, a suffocating reality that could not possibly be true and yet was. It’s true! He’d been alive, with her, in the distant past. Which meant …
“We were after something,” she broke the spell, he confoundingly unable to get his voice working. “Back then. I told you about the Codes? Well, a thousand years ago we found them. You and I. They’d been lost, and we found them. Information that could set men free. The Bok were supposed to help us keep them safe. As you might imagine the idea of making people free wasn’t particularly well received. Not by the Kel regime of the time. We, you and I, were on our heels as soon as we tried to bring what we found into the light. That was the beginning of the end.”
Zac was experiencing all sorts of images, flooding his mind. Pictures like clips from a movie, of him, of her, in action, in motion, frames of chaos, intensity. Not memories of anything he could rectify with anything he knew but there they were, flashing across his mind’s eye, catching just at the edges; like a peripheral memory to which he could place no form.
Jess inhaled. “The Codes caused the war. I tried to set something up here, on Earth. A refuge. The Bok were meant to interact with the humans of this world, to help pave the way for a place where these things could be learned. We were Kel, we would’ve been demons here, but this world was unknown to the rest of the Combine. The rest of the Kel had no idea it was here, and they went to war to stop us.
“Somewhere in all that I was killed.”
Zac could see the thought of that, for her, was still overwhelming. As well for him; the thought that he himself had died—must have, at some point—and yet here he sat, maybe even having died many times and suddenly it was all overwhelming.
Jess shook her head. As she did her eyes focused and it was as if she snapped easily to the present. Zac wished he could say the same for
himself. Now that she’d stirred all this up … Each new revelation was only piling on the confusion, not lessening it, and he found himself struggling to orient. “All I know,” she said, “is that everything was lost. Apparently we hid the Codes. The Codex Amkradus. To protect them. And it looks like they may be right here on Earth.”
Another silence followed. Zac worked to find a center. The light in the room was soft; Jess had turned on a lamp, must’ve, before she woke him earlier, as no one had turned it on since he awoke, a small one on the dresser, floral shade with a warm white glow, and it suffused them with enough light to see by as the darkness outside deepened. She looked so exquisitely beautiful in its gentle radiance, the same girl he’d known all along, making it hard to imagine her as anything else. But she was. Her changes had not just been physical. The yellow eyes, the darker skin, the subtle defining of shape … These were the lesser changes. The real changes were far more significant.
But they weren’t really changes. Were they? If all was to be believed they weren’t changes. More … a restoration. And as the shifting of that point of view took hold, smothering him with the promise of yet more significances, Jess sighed, breaking a little of the spell.
“It’s like I’ve been running downhill,” she said. “Stumbling out of control, one situation to the next. I never knew why. There were times I could’ve chosen differently. Times I almost did. Why didn’t I?” She looked down at the tray. Touched one of the sandwiches as if preparing to pick it up then withdrew.
“I asked myself,” she looked around the room, eyes roving over her things without seeing, trophies and posters and all else, searching for answers, “what’s been driving me? What’s been driving me forward through all this?” Her voice became contemplative, as if having become aware of something quite real and yet unable to believe it. “I’ve been driving me. My whole life. Like I’ve been trying to close the book on these past incomplete actions. To bring this Codex to everyone. That’s a ridiculously huge goal. Right? But it was mine. It is mine, it was ours, and I’ve seen now what it means.
“I’ve seen what it will take. What’s at stake.”
Slowly Zac was gathering his thoughts. He was Zac, as she said, no matter any other thing that had happened or any other thing that was true or was not true, just as she was Jessica. He kept repeating that. Neither of them had transformed into something else. Both were who they had been, who they’d always been. There she was, sitting only a few feet away, having found him time and again, having been through so much to even be there—too much, seen too much, experienced too much, suffered too much, been denied too much and all else and he wanted to take her to him, to shield her from the world, from all things that had happened and give her back her innocence, her carefree joy, to restore her so she might once more be the laughing girl in the photo, filled with happiness, in love with life.
She was staring harder at him. “I need you,” she said simply, words sounding no different than anything she’d said so far but they drove a spike through him. Inflamed everything he’d just been thinking and he pushed aside the pillow and the tray and embraced her. She grabbed him, feeling the same impulse, and he pushed everything away and gathered her into his lap.
“I’m here,” he told her. He thought he felt her tremble but it was so slight, so less than anything he’d experienced from her so far he wasn’t sure. A slight, slight tremor, nothing more. She was stronger now, there was no doubt of that, so much stronger, of spirit, of mind, indomitable, perhaps, but there was no getting around the fact that she’d endured more than anyone ever should. If anyone deserved to cry it was her.
But she didn’t. She simply held him. Slid herself further into his lap and got closer, pulling her legs into his and twisting herself to press fully against him, face buried in his shoulder. He stroked her hair, arms wrapped firmly around her, rocking gently.
They stayed like that a long time.
Then she sighed against him. “I should’ve taken the blue pill,” she spoke quietly into his shoulder, breath warm against his skin.
He breathed in the smell of her hair.
“The blue pill?”
She laughed, a short laugh, and the feel of it, pressed against him as she was … was pure delight. As if a cloud had been lifted, and in response he chuckled into her hair. Though as yet had no idea what she meant.
“Nothing,” she said. “Something from here. An Earth thing. When faced with a choice, between being oblivious yet, presumably, happy, or learning the truth and making your own destiny, you have a choice of pills. It’s a metaphor. You take the blue pill and remain blissfully ignorant. The red pill opens your eyes.”
Ah.
“You took the red pill.”
She nodded softly.
He inhaled another deep breath of her wonderful scent and closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he agreed. “A little blissful ignorance wouldn’t be so bad right about now.”
“Nope.” She popped the “p” and was quiet. Contemplative, and he could nearly feel the pull of her thoughts.
Then she asked: “So what happened?” Her voice was quiet, face still buried against him. He did not at first know what she meant. When he failed to answer she added: “Why were you sleeping?”
He should’ve realized he wouldn't get away that easy.
He let go a sigh of his own. “I’ve just been drained.” Maybe he could use that as an answer. “Not physically. More ... emotionally.”
Of course she didn’t buy it. “I thought Kazerai couldn’t sleep.”
“They can’t.” Probably not the best answer. At least, not if he wanted to move on. “They don’t have to. It’s like ... I don't know. Losing you was painful. I’ve never felt like that before.” She was quiet and, without thinking, he jumped into the vacuum of her silence. “I’m entering uncharted territory.”
Great.
“Uncharted?”
“I’m changing too,” he tried to make less of it. “Like you. Your eyes and so on. Not anything to worry about. The beard. My hair’s growing. I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’ve been getting stronger. I can hardly believe it but I am. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.”
“Yeah, yeah. Stronger.” She lifted her face from his shoulder, looking directly into his. “So your muscles make you sleepy now?” A little smile turned the corners of her mouth and she squeezed his bicep playfully. For a moment he hoped that meant he could just add to the joke and be done with it.
“Yeah.” He flexed a little. “That’s it.”
But he could see the look in her eyes. She wasn’t letting him off with a little bad humor. She would get an answer out of him.
Damn.
“So?” she probed.
He shrugged. “The end of the Kazerai was never mapped. They were always retired. When they’re created Kazerai end up frozen in time. When we start to change we’re retired. I’ve been changing. I know I would’ve been retired by now. Since I’m not going to be retired I don’t really know what to expect. No Kazerai were left to continue that I know of.” Maybe that would explain it.
“Why did they retire the Kazerai? Seems like a waste.”
“It was considered honorable. They always told us we’d die after the changes began.”
Oops.
“Die?” She pulled back, face dropping.
Exactly what he did not want to say. He cringed as this uncomfortable conversation just kept getting worse.
Was there any way to stop talking?
Carefully he said: “Maybe not die.” He tried to retract his statement. “I don’t know anything of any Kazerai that went this far. Everyone was always retired so I don’t know. They retired us while at our peak so our place in heaven was assured. We were to pass from this life as the Hands of God. They called it Culmination. Among ourselves we jokingly called it Execution.” Thinly he hoped she would find that funny, maybe even just a little. She didn’t. No part of this was going right. He inhaled and went on, searching for a light at the end of thi
s darkening tunnel. “None of us worried over it. We knew it was coming. The way I look at it I’m better off.”
“How?”
“Now I’m like everyone else.”
“What do you mean like everyone else?”
He tried to smile. “I could die any day. I don't know when it will be. Just like you. Just like everyone.”
She let go of him altogether. Shit, he was really botching this.
“What do you mean?” So far she remained in his lap but her hands were by her side, expression one of someone who’d just been floored.
“It doesn't mean anything,” he tried much too late to backpedal. “It means I don’t know. I have no idea how long I have. It could be years.”
“Years?!” Now she slid entirely from his lap and plopped on the bed across from him. And that really was the last thing he should say, he was convinced. The last time he should ever be allowed to speak ever again. He evidently was no good at making things better. She stared at him; angry, confused—all things he never wanted her to be. He needed to just shut up. Only there was no way to do that now. This conversation would go to the bitter end.
“You may have years to live?!”
“Like I said I don’t know. I just don't know.”
“You think that’s a long time? Zac. This is scaring me.”
He ached to find a way through. “Let’s not dwell on what we can’t know,” he tried. “Ok? Have we ever let these sorts of things get us down? We live for the moment, Jess. You and I. That’s what we’ve always done.”
“You’re not supposed to change,” her voice fell and it was almost pleading. As if he had a choice in these things. He knew she didn’t mean it that way but this idea, the mere thought of him dying was shaking her. “Everything else is chaos. My whole life, everything in it. The whole world. You’re supposed to be the one stable thing. Indestructible, unchanging, always there. The one I can count on. You’re the one thing that doesn’t change, Zac. You never change. You’re always there.” There was a hint of a whimper: “You have to be.”
Star Angel: Prophecy Page 6