“Is...it?” He rested his head against the pillows, deciding he had little choice but to comply at the moment.
“It is,” the doctor assured him. “I’d like to know what you remember.” As he spoke, he motioned to the first female, who came closer to wrap a device with tubes and bulbs protruding from it around his upper arm.
He stared at her in wonder and a little fear as she attached the thing.
“She’s just checking your vital signs, Father Dom. We need to make sure you’re all right. Just ignore her and focus on me, all right?” the doctor said.
He watched the woman look up at him from beneath her lashes. She was pretty, he thought. And afraid.
She should be.
What did he remember? Ahh, so many things. His city, a gleaming jewel in the desert. Babylon. The power he’d had, the life he’d lived. And the tragedy that had torn it all apart.
But no. That wasn’t what the doctor was asking him.
He closed his eyes and searched the old priest’s memory, presuming this doctor wanted to know what had happened to him to put him here in this place, which, he had deduced, was a place of healing. And it came to him. All of it, playing out in his mind as if he were watching actors on a stage.
Father Dom had tried to kill the first witch to keep her from releasing the damned man Demetrius from the Underworld. The old priest believed Demetrius was a demon, the witch his accomplice. Because that’s what I wanted him to believe. He’d tried to kill her, to throw her from a cliff. He’d wanted her executed, sacrificed, as she and her wretched sisters had been sacrificed once before. Poetic. Very poetic.
But of course the old priest had failed and gone over the edge himself.
“Do you remember anything, Father Dom?”
He lifted his gaze, shaking off Father Dom’s memories. “He—” He bit his lip, started over. “I...fell.”
“Yes. You fell. The impact should have killed you. You were pulled from the cold lake some four months ago. You’ve been unconscious—in a coma—ever since. Frankly, Father Dom, we didn’t expect you to ever wake up again, much less to wake as lucid as you appear right now.”
Well, I did wake up. But I’m not Father Dom.
But he couldn’t very well tell the doctor that. “This body...” he said, frustrated with how slowly this brain seemed to translate the simplest of commands into their corresponding actions. “This body is weak. Will it heal?”
Doctor Assad nodded. “There’s no way for us to know just yet how fully you’ll recover. We’re going to need to run tests, get you fully evaluated. Then, once you’re strong enough, we’ll get you started on some physical therapy. From there...well, only time will tell.”
“I do not have...time.” Then he frowned. “What month is it?”
“It’s March, Father Dom. March seventeenth.”
“Mmm.” He nodded while the slow-working, formerly comatose brain translated that for him. “I have...some time. A few weeks. No more.”
“It’s going to take considerably longer than that for a full recovery, Father,” the doctor said.
Then the nurse, who had removed her device once she’d finished squeezing his arm with it, said, “Maybe you’d like to talk to your friend.”
“My...friend?”
“He visits you every weekend. Even brought some of your most cherished belongings, so you’d have them near you,” she added with a nod toward the items on the stand nearby. Father Dom’s rosary, the aging journal, handed down to him through his priestly line, a well-worn Bible. “Tomas Petrosa?”
His smile was slow and knowing. “Tomas.” No doubt he was still with the witch. And she would lead him to Demetrius. That bastard was here somewhere, in human form again and using his powers. That was what had summoned him into this frail body that Father Dom had long since left behind. He had vowed to return if Demetrius ever managed to do so. To destroy him utterly this time, and the three witches with him.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, please call my friend Tomas.”
He relaxed against his pillows, deciding he might have time after all.
* * *
When Demetrius ran from her as if in terror and was smashed into by a powerful automobile, Lilia was devastated.
The power of her beloved, performing the ancient Great Rite of witchcraft—lowering the blade into the chalice in a symbolic re-creation of the sex act—had brought her into physical existence at last. She’d been trying to get him to perform the rite for weeks now. But she hadn’t been able to reach him until he tapped into his own inner magic, his imagination. But he hadn’t even recognized her! Lord and Lady, this wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting. Yes, she’d known he would resist what she wanted him to do, but she’d expected him to at least know her. Remember her.
People flooded out of their businesses onto the sidewalks, crowding around Demetrius, who lay broken and bleeding in the street. Lilia backed deeper into the alley as quickly as she could, knowing he would be fine. He might not know it, but she did. He wasn’t quite human. He was immortal. For now, anyway. She had to restore the final piece of his mortal soul in order for him to become fully human again, and she couldn’t do that until he asked for it. Just as she hadn’t been able to manifest until he used the powers he apparently didn’t know he possessed to bring her through.
One thing at a time, she told herself. And the first thing is clothing. I’m naked here, and that’s not the accepted mode of dress just yet.
She wrapped herself as best she could in Demetrius’s dropped baby blanket and slipped out the far end of the alley. It opened into a parking lot behind a series of stores whose rear entrances were labeled with their names.
Daisy’s Unique Boutique appealed, and the door was unlocked, so she opened it and walked in.
Through the glass windows in the front she could see that the shopkeeper was on the sidewalk out front, looking at the fallen man. She knew her by the Daisy’s emblem on her jacket. An ambulance was arriving now, and the scruffy homeless man who’d been with Demetrius was talking to a well-dressed man who’d emerged from the car and was wobbling on his feet.
Drunk driver?
No time to mull on that.
She took a few items from the racks and racks of clothes in the store, moving fast, feeling guilty. Quick as a wink she grabbed a pair of skinny jeans with a peacock embroidered all the way up one leg, a handful of undergarments, a vibrantly colored blouse, a faux suede jacket, a pair of leatherette boots and some socks. She grabbed a business card from the register so she could pay later for what she’d taken, then ducked out the back door and into the alley to put the garments on.
Demetrius would need some time to heal. A few days, she thought. She couldn’t be sure. But she knew he would live, and that he would heal more rapidly than anyone would likely believe possible.
She walked back out through the alley and onto the sidewalk, moving to the back of the crowd to keep out of the shopkeeper’s line of sight, so she wouldn’t notice her own merchandise on a stranger and realize she’d been robbed.
From a safe vantage point Lilia looked at her beloved Demetrius as several medics strapped him to a wheeled bed and lifted him into the back of the ambulance. His eyes were closed. She wanted them to open. She wanted them to meet her own eyes and fill with recognition, with desire. With love.
Goddess, she’d gone through so much to save him, waited so long to be with him again.
In time, she thought. In time.
When the ambulance attendant moved toward the driver’s door, she went to him, grateful that the vehicle blocked her from the crowd. “Where will they take him?” she asked the man.
He looked at her, and his eyes softened. “Are you family?” he asked.
“I need a ride to the hospital,” she said.
“That’s against regulations, Ma’am, but if you—” He stopped speaking as she began to hum softly, thinking the words that went with her tune but not saying them aloud. It would work eithe
r way.
“Sure you can ride along,” he said. “It’s no problem at all.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” She glanced back at the filthy homeless man. Gus, she thought Demetrius had called him just before he’d brought her through. Gus.
Gus was with the driver, whose car bore a very large dent in its nose due to its impact with Demetrius. The police were there, too, but Gus was stepping between them.
She frowned, sensing something momentous was about to happen, and moved closer to listen. “I was the one driving,” Gus said. “It was me.”
* * *
The nurses at the desk let Lilia use their phone, and she quickly got the number she needed and dialed it.
When Indira answered, Lilia felt tears brimming in her eyes. “By Goddess, I am so glad to hear your voice, my sister,” she said softly.
There was a moment of silence, and then Indira said, “Who the fuck is this?”
“It’s me. It’s Lilia. I’m here. It’s time.”
“Oh. My. Goddess.” Then, in a muffled shout, “Tomas, you’re not gonna believe this!”
Hours later, a battered old Volvo pulled into the hospital’s parking area. Lilia was outside, sitting on a stone wall, waiting. She’d had to leave the hospital before the staff started asking her questions she could not answer about Demetrius. Who he was, where he was from, a last name, even. In their time, last names had not been used. Demetrius was the son of Horum, who was the son of Ferigard, and so on back into history.
Indira got out of the car first, ran toward her, then stuttered to a stop two feet shy. “I... Is it you? Is it you, baby sister?” She squinted a bit, as if trying to see what was unseeable.
“You don’t look the same, either, Indy. I didn’t know there were that many shades of blonde.”
“Yeah, you should talk. You look like you took a shower in peroxide.”
Then Magdalena, who had been the eldest, came up beside Indy, with hair that was a mass of coppery red ringlets and the flawless skin of a porcelain doll. “Lilia?” she whispered. Her lower lip was quivering.
“Lena.”
The hesitation broke, and the three women were suddenly in each other’s arms and sobbing so hard they almost couldn’t remain standing. They held on for a long, long time.
“How?” Indy asked. “We thought we’d have to re-open the Portal, perform a ritual, to get you here.”
“Demetrius.”
They both went stiff, their eyes widening.
“He’s not what you thought he was, not in this lifetime, my sisters,” Lilia said, wishing for their understanding but refusing to use magic to get it.
Lena lowered her head, taking a step back. “He tried to take my baby, Lil,” she said.
“Your baby...” Lilia tore herself from the arms of her older sisters and gazed toward the car and the two handsome men who stood there, waiting patiently while the sisters had their reunion. The dark Spaniard, Tomas, former priest of Marduk, lifetimes ago. The other, Ryan, who had once been a prince of Babylon and was the father of Lilia’s precious niece, Eleanora. He was holding the baby in his arms.
Lilia wanted to rush to them, to hold the child, but she held herself back. “When the time comes,” she said softly, for her sisters’ ears alone, “you’ll want them far from us.”
“When will that be?” Indy asked.
“I don’t know yet, but it will be soon.”
“What happens when the time comes, whenever it is?” Lena was looking from her husband and daughter to her newly arrived sister over and over. “What happens, Lilia?”
“I don’t know. I only know the cycle is coming to an end, and that there will be a great battle.”
Indira rolled her eyes. “With who? Your pain-in-the-ass former demon lover?”
“He was never a demon,” Lilia snapped.
“He sure as hell acted like one.”
Lowering her head, Lilia sighed. “As soon as we know when it’s all coming to a head, you’ll need to arrange to have your loved ones far from you. That’s all I’m saying.” Her eyes were drawn to the baby again. “Now, may I please meet my beautiful niece?”
Lena sighed, but nodded. The moment she did, Lilia hurried closer, reaching out, and Ryan placed the wriggling infant into her arms.
Standing close to her side, looking on, Lena said, “Where is he?”
“Who?” Lilia was so distracted by the tiny baby, only seven weeks old, that she was no longer thinking straight.
“Demetrius, 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 other
wise 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.”
Blood of the Sorceress Page 3