"How long were you looking?" she breathed. Was he talking years?

"Lifetimes," he said. The brief reply blasted away her a.s.sumptions and shook her to the core all over again. "We know our enemy has been looking for you too, but it's been like you've been hidden behind a veil. We've gotten brief glimpses of you and your life, but we never got quite enough information to find you until today. Today it felt like you ripped past the veil yourself. My guess is that's what reopened your spirit wound, because you couldn't have been bleeding like this your entire life. If you had been born like this, you would have died in a matter of days."

"That beacon you mentioned. Is that how those two men were able to find me? No," she said, in answer to her own question. "That doesn't make sense. My house had to have caught fire before I prayed in the Grotto. The blaze was too far along by the time I saw it on the news."

"It could be that your house isn't connected to this," he said. "Maybe the fire is just a coincidence."

She heard the lack of conviction in his voice, and she was not rea.s.sured. "You think it's more likely that your enemy was closer to finding me than you two were?"

"Anything's possible," he replied. "Especially that."

"Why burn down my house? Wouldn't it have been smarter to wait until I got home? It's not," she said in a caustic voice, "like I've had a clue about what I've been doing, or what's really going on."

"We don't have enough facts yet to answer that question. But if your house fire was arson, most fires are started to hide something. It could also have been set to draw you back home, although that reason on its own seems excessive when all someone would have to do is wait for you to return."

"I saw the fire on the news. I had contacted the police and was starting to return home when those two men attacked." She rubbed her shaking mouth. She whispered, "What they did was excessive. There was no reason for it. They didn't have to kill those people. They were brutal because they liked it."

"Our adversary is like that. He enjoys cruelty, and he feeds on pain." His profile had turned harsh, the bones of his face slicing through the shadows thrown by the dashboard lights. "When he creates his tools, he destroys something essential in their souls. They can still function but they no longer have a moral code, or creativity or any real free will, or whatever it is that makes them human."

She closed her eyes. What kind of creature had the power to destroy someone's soul? It was appalling, too much. She had to give up on the puzzle for now. She thought she ought to give up on all of it and try to rest. Her body and soul, or spirit, as Michael had said, felt frayed almost to tatters. Even though she had fallen into that black pit earlier, it had only been for a couple of hours. Her dreams had been so restless and vivid she had gained no real refreshment from it.

Her dreams.

A sudden flood of memory brought back the dream of the wounded woman. Like the sacred poison dream, the wounded woman was another recurring dream that she'd had throughout her life. Blood-shot and filled with disturbing imagery, she had tended to dream it only in times of great stress.

And her dreams . . .

Her breathing roughened, became erratic. Michael's jacket no longer provided welcome warmth but became a stifling restriction. She couldn't get enough air inside her lungs. She fumbled to unlatch her seat belt and struggle out of the jacket, and she began to claw her way out her T-shirt.

"Okay, easy," Michael said, his voice sharp. "You need to take deep, slow breaths. Try not to fight it."

She heard his words but not their meaning. All her attention was focused inward where an immense heat blazed up. She was burning to death. She felt suspended in time as though she had waited all her life in a silence so profound it seemed to roar, waited to hear the first sonorous clang of a terrible gong.

Remember who you are.

My dreams are real.

And she was racing back in her mind to the small child she had been, and what that child had said to upset her mother so badly, she had learned to bury it and eventually forget, and how ever afterward her mind would slide away from that memory because it was such a bad, bad thing. . . .

Mommy, I had the strangest dream, she had said.

I dreamed I was human.

Unspeakable loss welled up inside her again, only this time it was deeper and stronger than ever before. This time it wasn't held at a distance or tucked behind a veil. It roared into her like a tsunami, and she cried out and doubled over from the force of it.

Chapter Twelve.

EXHAUSTED BY HER long-distance astral journey to talk to Mary, Astra rested on her narrow bed under a pile of every blanket in her bedroom, but she still couldn't get warm. A deep chill had settled into her aching bones last winter, and it had never gone away. Despite all her best efforts, her body was wearing out. She knew part of the reason why was her spirit was as worn as her flesh.

There used to be some things that mattered to her more than existence. Sometimes now it seemed neither existence nor those things mattered at all.

Time and again the group had struggled, and for what? They died and they died, and now some of them were gone forever.

Raphael and Gabriel. Ariel and Uriel. All destroyed beyond reclaiming.

A tear rolled down her cheek, sliding down the furrows and creases of her face.

A gentle tap sounded at her doorway. "Grandmother?"

She wiped the tear away and turned her head. "What is it?"

Jamie still refused to lift his head and look directly at her. "Your light was still on," he said. "I wanted to ask you if you needed anything."

"No." She needed nothing this kind child could give her. "How is your grandpa?"

He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, and said hopefully, "He's resting well. I think his color looks better."

"Good." She said it like she believed that Jerry's condition would improve, or like she cared anymore. Jerry wasn't getting better, and she didn't. He would be dead in a week, and she didn't care about any of the people on this earth anymore. She wanted to go home. "Go to bed, boy," she said in a rusty-sounding voice. "You'll not be of any use to your grandpa if you don't get some sleep."

"Yes, ma'am." He hesitated as if about to say something else but then, for a mercy, he kept silent and turned away.

At last, filled with dread, she crept into sleep.

She dreamed. She had known she would.

She stood in a dry wasteland devoid of any green or growing thing. There was no wind, no day or night, just a vast barren grayness. Even when her dream self closed her eyes, she saw the image of the gray landscape. If she had been in control of the dream, she would have changed the landscape to add color and life, but she wasn't in control. This wasn't her dream.

She waited in despair for what would happen next.

A figure appeared and strolled toward her. It shone with a ferocious black light. In its hands it held an agonized slip of lavender mist.

Old woman, the Deceiver said.

She looked at the wind spirit he held and recognized it immediately. It was the one she had sent to help Mary. She said, This is unbelievably petty, even for you.

I promised you a long time ago, the figure said. You remember, don't you? I will destroy every creature that you hold dear, even down to the smallest one.

Creator, have mercy, not for me but for your fragile child who is in such pain.

Forgive, forgive.

She didn't bother to try to gather her strength. She had none, and she couldn't have acted even if she had. Neither she nor the Deceiver could actually hurt or touch each other in this dream, for it was merely a sending, a message filled with events that had already occurred. He liked to show her his executions.

The black radiant figure took the wind spirit in both hands and savaged it to shreds. The delicate creature had no defense. It made a m.u.f.fled whimper as it was destroyed almost instantly.

The Deceiver showed her its empty hands. Until next time, b.i.t.c.h.

How many times must she be summoned to this killing field?

The world wasn't large enough to contain her grief.

Chapter Thirteen.

WHEN ALL WAS said and done, Michael found himself surprised that he was walking and talking with any semblance of coherency.

He had prepared his entire life for this very encounter with Mary, and still the reality of coming face-to-face with her blew through all of his expectations. He had never quite found his equilibrium after her scream in the psychic realm, and internally he was still reeling.

He had to get grounded and centered again, to reconnect with his sense of purpose. He knew how to do that when he was alone, but he didn't know how to do it in her presence.

When he had opened the door to her Toyota and looked upon her unconscious face for the first time, he felt as if he had been dealt a body blow.

She was young, possibly as much as ten years younger than he, and she had fine-boned features and a honey-toned skin color that had turned pallid. Her face was lopsided with a swollen bruise that had begun to turn a dark purple. Her tawny hair was kinked with curls that were confined in a braid. She was dressed in nondescript, comfortable clothing.

Her looks didn't matter in the slightest. He knew she could have been old or young, or of any nationality, and before he had laid eyes on her, he would have said that he'd had no expectation or desire for her to be anything but what she was.

But this . . .

She was beautiful.

He spiraled down into a place of astonished enchantment and did nothing to try to stop it. Instead he embraced his fall.

He gently laid the tips of his fingers on her cheek, and the impact of that first touch sent him to his knees. She was warm, living and embodied, and it was such a G.o.dd.a.m.ned miracle, his eyes flooded with moisture.

He, who had experienced relatively few emotions in this life, was overcome with a feeling so powerful, it shook his body to the marrow. Blinking hard to clear his eyesight, he traced her soft, lush lips. The delicate warm brush of her breath on his hand thrilled him utterly.

She was revolutionary, transformative. He had not known beauty before he looked at her. He had not known desire, until he touched her face.

Connecting with her hemorrhaging energy shocked him back to the present, along with the realization of the real extremity of her situation. Then every emotion that had exploded into life inside of him seemed to redouble in reaction: rage and fear, hope and determination, and a wicked hate for the one who had damaged her.

He fought to keep his expression and manner neutral, to hide what went on inside of him and to give her as much room as he could to deal with her own reactions. The last thing he wanted to do was to escalate her before they were able to get help from Astra, and precipitate a crisis that neither one of them would be able to handle on their own.

But he had not counted on how hard that would be, when the reality of his own reaction to her was so volcanic, it eroded his own reasoning and his control.

And as it turned out, there was nothing he could do to stop her anyway.

When Mary cried out and doubled over, Michael checked traffic, yanked the car onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes.

Cars shot past, headlights blazing like comets. He turned to his pa.s.senger. Although the car was filled with night shadows, he could see quite clearly with his psychic senses. Mary's spirit wound was bleeding bright, feverish gouts of energy.

He tried to shift her. She was rigid, clamped in a fetal position. He twisted in his seat, got a firmer hold and hauled her toward him. Her skin felt burning hot and dry. Her spirit wound was affecting her physical body. He wondered how high her temperature had spiked. If it went too high for too long it would kill her.

Stopping for any length of time on the side of a major highway was all but suicidal. He gave up on trying to conduct any risk a.s.sessment and instead focused on the problem at hand. Slipping one hand under Mary's chin, he tried to turn her face up. She was locked in place, the tendons in her neck standing out against his palm. He didn't want to force her head around in case he hurt her.

Awkward in the cramped s.p.a.ce, he wrapped his arms around her. He put one hand to her forehead and pushed his other hand under her arm, laying it against her sternum. Then he rested his cheek against the delicate protrusion of bone at the nape of her neck, closed his eyes and sent his awareness into her mind.

The psychic landscape was the land of spirit, which lay interlocked with the physical world. The interior of the mind was quite a different matter. It was a small, private realm comprised of perception, memory, thought, emotion, dream images and imagination. After pushing into her mind, Michael paused to let her adjust to his intrusion while he attempted to get oriented.

Tattered sc.r.a.ps of images drifted around him. He kept from focusing on any one image and allowed them to continue drifting, as he spent precious time forcing himself to settle into the calm, aware state of utter mindfulness. He could not help her if he was in a panic.

When he was centered and still, he extended his senses throughout her mind.

Turbulent emotion buffeted him. Trauma, shock, horror, fear. Incredulity. The sour taste of guilt.

Why guilt?

The question almost snared him, but at the last moment he let it go and let it wash through him. These were her surface emotions, connected to recent experiences and relatively shallow. He could not sense her active, aware presence in any of them.

He reached deeper and sank into an agony so raw and acidic it burned. He had to force himself not to recoil but to push further until he could sense her presence.

"Mary," he said to her. MARY.

He found her presence. An image slammed into him. This time he was unable to let it wash past. Since this was the image he had been searching for, the image that held her awareness, he embraced it and entered a scene.

Mary sat in a room hewn out of rock. Intricate carvings, gilded with silver, covered every inch of the walls. The carvings flowed and looped together in never-ending spirals. On one wall two stylized and graceful, inhuman figures reached out to each other. Where they touched their hands melded together.

Michael recognized the room. This was where they had died their first deaths and left their original home forever.

Mary's mental self-image was dressed as she was in the physical realm, in jeans and T-shirt. Her tangled hair, held back in a lopsided braid, looked dull and lifeless. She curled over her knees, head bent.

He looked down at himself. He, too, had automatically replicated his own physical appearance down to his gun, which was nothing more than a useless image in this place. He walked over to kneel in front of her.

This close he could see that her skin was as transparent as paper. She glowed like a j.a.panese lantern. The force of her emotion beat against his skin. He put a hand on her shoulder and despite the burning pain that shot through his fingers he gripped the slender bone and muscle in an unbreakable hold.

"Mary," he said again. He projected the full force of his urgency through the touch of his hand.

She lifted her head. Her eyes shone from within. She uncurled her body.

A jagged cut slashed down the front of her torso. It bled an ectoplasmic light. In her hands she cradled a crystal goblet etched with an inscription in a language that Earth had never seen. He recognized that goblet from ages past when he, along with a group of seven others, had drunk poisoned wine in one last deadly communion.

His breath caught. He reached out and touched the goblet's rim with a finger. She had remembered and re-created it with perfection, down to the slight nick on the bottom of the stem.

Neither he nor Astra had expected her to be capable of anything like this. They had always a.s.sumed that if they found her again, retrieving her memories would be a slow and challenging process that might encompa.s.s lifetimes. Instead she was retrieving her memories all on her own by the side of a road.

He touched her cheek. It was just as petal soft to his senses as it had been when he had physically touched her the first time.

"Where are we?" she said. She sounded dazed. "How did we get here?"