She was his soulmate.
She was the one who was supposed to have walked with him through different lives, being born and loving and dying and being born again. They'd been born for each other, to help each other grow and blossom and discover and evolve. They should have had many lives together.
And none of it was going to happen. He was an immortal creature-how could he die and be born again?
And she was dying because of him. He'd destroyed it all, everything. He'd killed his destiny.
In the enormity of it, he sat silent and stunned. He couldn't say, "I'm sorry." He couldn't say, "What have I done?" There was nothing that he could say that wasn't so trivial as to be demeaning to her. He simply sat and shook, looking down into her eyes. He had an endless feeling of falling.
And then Hana spoke.
I forgive you.
It was just a whisper, but he heard it in his mind, not with his ears. And he understood it, even though her language was different from his. Thierry reeled with the discovery that he could talk to her. Oh, Goddess, the chance at least to tell her how he would try to atone for this by spilling out his own blood.. .
You can't forgive me. He could see that she understood his own hushed answer. He knew he didn't deserve forgiveness. But part of him wanted her to realize that he had never meant this to happen. I wasn't always like this. I used to be a person-
We don't have time for that, she told him. Her spirit seemed to be reaching toward him, drawing him into her, facing him in a still and separate place where only the two of them existed. He knew then that she had seen the same thing he had, the same corridor of time.
She was gentle, but so sad. I don't want you to die. But I want you to promise me one thing.
Anything.
I want you to promise me you 'II never kill again.
It was easy to promise. He didn't plan to live... no, she didn't want him to die. But he couldn't live without her and he certainly couldn't live after what he'd done.
He'd worry about it later, about how to deal with the long gray stretch of future waiting for him. For now, he said, I'll never kill again.
She gave him just the faintest of smiles.
And then she died.
The gray eyes went fixed and dark. Unseeing. Her skin was ghostly white and her body was absolutely still. She seemed smaller all at once as her spirit left her.
Thierry cradled her, moaning like a wounded animal. He was crying. Shaking so hard he almost couldn't keep hold of her. Helpless, pierced by love that felt like a spear, he reached out to gently push her hair off her face. His thumb stroked her cheek- and left a trail of blood.
He stared at it in horror. The mark was like a blaze of red against her pale skin.
Even his love was deadly. His caress had branded her.
The few survivors of Hana's clan were on the move, surrounding Thierry, panting and gasping with their spears ready. They sensed that he was vulnerable now.
And he wouldn't have lifted a hand to stop them... except that he had made a promise to Hana. She wanted him alive to keep it.
So he left her there. He picked up her still, cooling body and carried it toward the nearest hunter. The man stared at him in fear and disbelief, but he finally dropped his spear to take the dead girl. And then Thierry walked out of the cave and into the merciless sunlight.
He headed for his home.
Maya caught up with him somewhere on the steppes, appearing out of the tall, ripping grass. "I told you
how you'd end up. Now forget that washed-out blonde and start enjoying life with me."
Thierry didn't even look at her. The only thing he could imagine doing with Maya was killing her... and he couldn't do that.
"Don't walk away from me!" Maya wasn't laughing now. She was furious. Her voice followed him as he kept going. "I chose you, Theorn! You're mine. You can't walk away from me!"
Thierry kept going, neither slower nor faster, letting her voice blend into the humming of the insects on the grassland. But her mental voice followed him.
I'll never let you get away. You'll always be mine, now and forever.
Thierry traveled fast, and in only a few days, he reached home and the person he'd come to see.
Hellewise looked up from her drying herbs and gasped.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I need your help."
What he wanted from her was a spell to sleep. He wanted to sleep until Hana was born again.
"It could be a long time," Hellewise said when he told her the whole story. "It sounds as if her soul has been damaged. It could be hundreds of years- even thousands."
Thierry didn't care.
"And you might die," Hellewise said, looking at him steadily with her deep, soft brown eyes. "And with what you've become-I don't think creatures like you are reborn. You would just... die."
Thierry simply nodded. He was only afraid of two things: that Maya would find him while he was asleep, and that he wouldn't know when to wake up.
"I can arrange the second," Hellewise said quietly. "You're linked anyway; your souls are one. When she's born again, voices from the Other Side will whisper to you."
Thierry himself figured out how to solve the first problem. He dug himself a grave. It was the only place where he could count on being safe and undisturbed.
Hellewise gave him an infusion of roots and bark and Thierry went to sleep.
He slept a long time.
He slept straight through the epic battle when Hellewise drove Maya and her son Red Fern out of the tribe and away from the witches. He slept through the origins of the Night World and thousands of years of human change. When he finally woke up, the world was a different place, with civilizations and cities.
And he knew that somewhere Hana had been born in one of them.