“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 either 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