"No. He hasn't tried to kill me. He has killed me." "He has killed you." Paul bit his pencil. He muttered, "I
should have known better than to have started this. I don't believe in hypnosis anyway."
"And he's going to do it again. I'll die before my seventeenth birthday. It's my punishment for loving him.
It always happens that way."
"Right. Okay. Okay, let's try something really basic here.... Does this mystery guy have a name?"
Hannah lifted a hand and let it drop. "When?" she whispered.
"What?"
"When?"
"When what? What?" Paul shook his head. "Oh, hell-"
Hannah spoke precisely. "He's used different names at different times. He's had-hundreds, I guess. But I think of him as Thierry. Thierry Descouedres.
Because that's the one he's used for the last couple of lifetimes."
There was a long silence. Then Paul said, "The last couple of ... ?"
"Lifetimes. It may still be his name now. The last time I saw him he said he wouldn't bother to change it anymore. He wouldn't bother to hide any longer."
Paul said, "Oh, God." He stood, walked to the window, and put his head in his hands. Then he turned back to Hannah. "Are we talking about ... I mean, tell me we're not talking about..." He paused and then his voice came out soft and boneless. "The Big R? You know..." He winced. "Reincarnation?"
A long silence.
Then Hannah heard her own voice say flatly, "He hasn't been reincarnated."
"Oh." Paul's breath came out in relief. "Well, thank God. You had me scared there for a minute."
"He's been alive all this time," Hannah said. "He isn't human, you know."
Chapter 4
Thierry knelt by the window, careful not to make a noise or disturb the dry earth beneath him. It was a skill so familiar to his body that he might have been born with it. Darkness was his native environment; he could melt into a shadow at an instant's notice or move more quietly than a stalking cat. But right now he was looking into the light.
He could see her. Just the curve of her shoulder and the spill of her hair, but he knew it was her.
Beside him, Lupe was crouched, her thin body human but quivering with animal alertness and tension.
She whispered, softer than a breath, "All right?"
Thierry tore his gaze from that shoulder to look at her. Lupe's face was bruised, one eye almost closed, lower lip torn. But she was smiling. She'd stuck around Medicine Rock until Thierry had arrived, tailing the girl called Hannah Snow, making sure no harm came to her.
Thierry took Lupe's hand and kissed it. You're an angel, he told her, and made even less sound than she had in speaking because he didn't use his vocal chords at all. His voice was telepathic. And you deserve a long vacation. My limo's at the tourist resort in Clearwater; take it to the airport at Billings.
"But-you're not planning to stay here alone, are you? You need backup, sir. If she comes-"
I can take care of things. I brought something to protect Hannah. Besides she won't do anything until she talks to me.
"But-"
Lupe, go. His tone was gentle, but it was unmistakably not the urging of a friend anymore. It was the order of her liege lord, Thierry of the Night World, who was accustomed to being obeyed. Funny, Thierry thought, how you never realized how accustomed you were to being obeyed until somebody defied you. Now, he turned away from Lupe and looked through the cracks in the boarded-up window again.
And promptly forgot that Lupe existed. The girl on the couch had turned. He could see her face.
Shock coursed through him.
He had known it was her-but he hadn't known that it would look so much like her. Like the way she had looked the first time, the first time she had been born, the first time he had seen her. This was what he thought of as her true face, and though he'd seen various approximations of it through the years, he'd never seen it again. Until now.
This was the exact image of the girl he'd fallen in love with.
The same long, straight fair hair, like silk in different shades of wheat color, spilling over her shoulders.
The same wide gray eyes that seemed full of light. The same steady expression, the same tender mouth, upper lip indenting the lower to give her a look of t unintentional sensuality. The same fine bone structure, the high cheekbones and graceful line of jaw that made her a sculptor's dream.
The only thing that was different was the birthmark.
The psychic brand.
It was the color of watered wine held up to the light, of watermelon ice, of a pink tourmaline, the palest of gemstones. Blushing rose. Like one large petal, slantwise beneath her cheekbone. As if she'd laid a rose against her cheek for a moment and it had left its imprint on her flesh.
To Thierry, it was beautiful, because it was part of her. She'd worn it in every lifetime after the first. But at the same time the very sight of it made his throat clamp shut and his fists clench in helpless grief and fury-fury against himself. The mark was his shame, his punishment. And his penance was to watch her wear it in her innocence through the years.
He would pour out his blood on the dry Montana dirt right now if it would take the mark away. But nothing in either the Night World or the human world could do that-at least nothing he'd found in uncounted years of searching.
Oh, Goddess, he loved her.
He hadn't allowed himself to feel it for so long- because the feeling could drive him insane while he was away from her. But now it came over him in a flood that he couldn't have resisted if he'd tried. It made his heart pound and his body tremble. The sight of her lying there, warm and alive, separated from him by only a few flimsy boards and an equally flimsy human male...