“A-aren’t you?” she stammered. She definitely wasn’t at all sure of that. Not any more. Never again.

“Fair question,” he said, his breath washing hotly down over her shoulder. “I’m willing to explain if you are willing to listen.”

“I-I don’t see how I have any choice,” she said, struggling to speak as chills of fear and excitement chased each other down her skin over her spine. Just a little closer, part of her whispered. Run away, run far far away, another part whispered.

“Now there you’re wrong. With me you will always have a choice. I can’t promise a lot of things, but I can promise you that. Go on. Ask me to let you go. See what happens.”

Marissa’s heart thundered against the press of the wall, her palms sweaty where they were braced against the cool stone. There it was, the perfect opportunity to get away, to be free. If he meant what he was saying she could leave. She could run away. She had that choice.

She opened her mouth. She had every intention of asking him to let her go. But instead a shaky whispered left her.

“If you’re not human, what are you?”

Goddammit her curiosity was going to be the death of her, she thought fiercely.

“Oh I’m human,” he assured her. “But I’m more than just the human male you know as Jackson Waverly. So much more.”

“So I gathered,” she said roughly.

His lips were against her temple and she felt him smile. For some reason it calmed her to know he was smiling. It was a ridiculous reaction, but it was there just the same.

“I want to tell you a story, Marissa. Short and sweet. Something to help answer a few of the questions swimming around in your head.” He lifted a hand away from the wall and brushed cool fingers across her lips. The coolness turned to fire, as though he’d turned to flame against her, only this reaction was all her, coming from within her. Could he manipulate her body? With all she had seen him do … what couldn’t he do?

“Once upon a time, a very long time ago, when pharaohs walked this earth and built tremendous monuments in the scorching desert sands, there lived a powerful and intense man … a king … named Menes. Menes was a great warrior as well as king. His great campaigns unified upper and lower Egypt. Brought disparate nations together under a single monarchy. It began a long age of Egyptian prosperity … and he was revered for it. They called him Scorpion … deadly … respected … acknowledged.

“And though he had two wives, he never knew love in his original lifetime. No …” She felt him breathe a sigh across her cheek. “He didn’t even know the love of his son. He was foolish. He was focused on conquering the lands within his reach, thinking that was a value that was needed to make a life truly satisfying.”

“But what …”

“Shh,” he said against her ear. “Wait for it, angel. You’ll ruin the story.”

The truth was, his story was having a calming effect. Although how calm she could be with all that intense male power against her back was relative. But he was distracting her from her fear of him. And it occurred to her that this was probably precisely why he was doing this.

“Do you know what happens to great men of such hubris?” he asked her, his lips moving against the shell of her ear as he spoke.

“They fall,” she answered breathlessly.

“They fall,” he agreed. “They die in ignominious ways. They fail to be remembered for what they wanted to be remembered for. They become a punchline. Did you hear about the great pharaoh? Oh, yeah … didn’t he get mauled by a hippo?”

She didn’t want to laugh. At least she didn’t understand how she could possibly find humor at that moment. But the breathy laugh escaped her just the same.

“Life can be so bitterly amusing,” he said, and she could imagine the grim expression to match the tone of his voice. “But death can be ironic. As can rebirth.” His lips turned against her ear once more. “I was given a second chance I did not deserve. I was given a love for the ages that I did not deserve. I was given all of this, angel, and all I had to do was trade away ever knowing the finality of peaceful death. Instead I live forever, and die again and again and again. Each time more painful than the last … or so it seems. This time I was reborn in this body, my soul sharing this space with the man you know as Jackson Waverly. We have since become one in most ways. And we are called the king of all of our kind. We are pharaoh of all the Bodywalkers.”

It took a long minute after he stopped for her to grasp that he was dead serious about this claim.

“Okay wait a minute. A pharaoh? A king? Jesus Christ I would never have taken you for having a god complex,” she spat out. “This is preposterous!”

“This is real. As real as the strength and body pressed against your back.” He leaned forward into her to illustrate his point. “As real as the heat of life that burns inside of me. A heat that rises every single time we lay eyes on you.”

“Will you stop calling yourself a we?” she barked at him, trying to throw her temper at him in order to cover the liquid burn of arousal that splashed up against her every nerve ending just from the feel of him. “I swear to god I’m going to have them put a psych hold on you!”

“And what about you, Marissa? Are you crazy? Or did you really see what you saw only a little while ago? Did what you see have any human explanation? When you tell someone else about it, will they believe you or threaten you with a psych hold?”

Tears, inexplicable and wild, leapt into her eyes, her heart racing once again as she realized just how right he was. She wished, oh how she wished, she could unsee what had been seen. She wanted to go back. She wanted to once again be ignorant that these deadly things truly existed in their world. She knew without a doubt that ignorance was bliss in this instance.

“Menes,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he whispered back, again ending with a warm wash of breath over her that caused her ni**les to tighten painfully against the wall she was still leaning on. “And Jackson,” he added. “Two souls, one body. We call ourselves Bodywalkers. And you do not remember this, but you were there the moment I was reborn.”

She scoffed … well half a scoff because he chose that moment to run the knuckles of his hand over her cheek and the sensation was ridiculously electrifying.

Why? Why, she demanded of herself, does his touch always seem so electrifying! It was just a touch!

“I don’t know what you’re …”

“Dream. Remember the dream you had when a blast of energy sent me crashing into a windshield. You cried over my body—”

“Oh my god! Oh my god please shut up! Let me go!” She had already been trembling from head to toe, but now she was shaking because she was so incredulous and upset by his words … by the implication of his words. “It was just a dream! Just a—”

“If it were just a dream, then how would I know about it?” he asked, completely ignoring her request to be freed. “How would I know that you cried over me, dropping beautifully tender tears onto my face?”

Marissa’s chest ached, partly from the way her heart was racing and now also because the emotion she had felt from that dream came rushing back over her. She wanted to push it away. To run away. To be anywhere but there and feeling what she was being forced to feel.

“Please. Please,” she whispered. “Please stop.”

Then Jackson’s hands were on her shoulders, and she felt him stepping back half a step. The relief she should have felt didn’t come because her traitorous body whimpered like a child who’d just had its favorite teddy bear taken away. Jackson pulled her away from the wall, but only enough to turn her around, his hands sliding up, his thumbs touching the underside of her chin and tipping her head back so that she was coaxed to look up into his eyes.

“My people have lived among and within your people for centuries,” he said, the gentility of his voice reassuring and comforting in spite of her need to hold on to her panic and fear, because she knew that letting them go would mean acceptance and she did not, under any circumstances, want to accept what he was saying. “I will not claim we never harm anyone.”

“Ya think?” she bit out.

It made the right corner of his mouth curl into a smile that reached into the stunning blue of his eyes.

“Like any society we have our villainous element. If anyone can appreciate that it would be a psychiatrist who tries to ease the souls of officers who have become jaded and bitter when they see just how horrible humanity can get. But lawful Bodywalkers always ask for permission to reside in the bodies of their prospective hosts. The day Jackson’s life was being stripped from him, as you shed tears for him, he was in the Ether, meeting me, accepting my proposal of a newer, longer lifetime and a position in it that will influence the well-being of thousands of people, be they original humans with a single soul or those of us who have been given another chance at life. You were witness to all that led to that. The battle. My death. Your grief. And we could not let any of you go out in the world with knowledge of us, putting us at risk, so your minds were nudged into believing it was nothing more than a dream.”

And she knew the very dream he was talking about because it had been the realest thing she’d ever experienced in her sleeping life. She had seen him go flying through the air, crashing back first into a windshield and then … dying.

She was shaking her head in negation even as his thumb came up to stroke the width of her bottom lip, sending more of that electrical awareness through some very private nerves inside her. If she accepted what he said, accepted what her very own eyes had just seen, then maybe his touch truly was full of magic. The idea made her shiver, warring with her still-healthy fear of the man touching her.

“I will not hurt you,” he promised her in deep, gentling tones. “You mean too much to us, Marissa.”

The sentence took her breath away. And it wasn’t because his use of alternating personal pronouns was disturbing to her. Well, it was, but that wasn’t she was reacting to. Was he implying that he had feelings for her? Was she excited by that insane thought? There were thousands of reasons why she shouldn’t entertain or encourage something like that, but what she had witnessed him do to that other person was really all she should need.

So why was her heart leaping with excitement?

“I want to tell you you’re insane. I want to say you are delusional and hallucinatory. Hell, I want to say that about myself. But I know this isn’t a dream. I know what you are capable of is not normal or human.”

“On the contrary,” he argued quietly. “It was the most basic act of humanity you will ever see. A being with good morals and conscience eradicating one without. He was from a sect of Bodywalkers called the Templars. Somehow he must have discovered that we are Menes, the leader of the Politic Bodywalkers. The lawful ones. He was an assassin bent on destroying me, hoping that my death will give them an advantage in the war we fight against his kind. If he had succeeded in killing me Jackson would be dead, and I would have returned to the Ether, trapped there for another hundred years.”

“Why a hundred years?” she asked. Of all the things she should be asking … questioning … it seemed to be the safest choice.

“It is as the gods decide, Marissa. We are powerful as a species, but we are not omnipotent. Far from it. I am not a god,” he said as he gently brushed her hair back with his fingertips. How, she wondered, could a touch be so comforting and disturbing at the same time?

“I don’t want to believe anything you are saying,” she confessed to him fiercely. “I want to be a thousand miles from here and I want to wish I had never laid eyes on you, Jackson Waverly … or … Menes. Whoever you are! I just want you to let me go. Are you going to let me go? Now that I know this incredible secret, are you going to let me go or … or do you have to d-do something to make me not remember any of this again?”

“It cannot be done twice, Marissa. The human brain is too fragile to be manipulated in such ways too often. And yes, I would set you free and I would trust you to keep your countenance.”

“I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming,” she said wryly.

“But,” he obliged her, “I believe you would not be safe unless you were under my protection from now on Marissa. The creature that escaped has seen you. He will report to his masters about this battle, and part of that report will include you. They will assume you”—he paused with difficulty—“are of importance to me. If I let you go, they would seek you out and try to find a way to use you against me. Whether as a bargaining chip or as a corpse meant to shatter my calm, they will see to it your value is used for their benefit.”