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 otherwise 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.”