Leo then took note of the fact that he himself was bound at all four points, each wrist wrapped up tight in a leather bracer that not only immobilized his wrist, it immobilized his entire arm. He couldn’t bend or so much as flex any of his arm muscles and the same was true of his legs. Leo fought down a wave of panic, knowing that the feeling would weaken him. And he knew by looking into the cold clear irises of his jailor that he was going to need all the strength he could possibly muster.

“Let me explain something to you. Because,” he injected in a conversational tone, “it occurs to me that you may not even be aware of the curse you have brought down on your own head.”

“Play?” The plaintive word was almost like a pleading whimper off to his right. Leo jerked his head to look in that direction, the sound and tone of that voice sickeningly familiar. It was the voice he had heard giggling over him as he’d been slowly and methodically stabbed to death.

Only somehow he wasn’t dead. His body burned with the memory and pain of each of those injuries, as if he’d had surgery and was in a state of healing, but not far enough in to have found relief from the damage. How long had he been unconscious? Had they repaired him only to—

“I want to play,” Andy hissed, his feelings of impatience coming through loud and clear, his eyes alight with the fire of his desires.

The desire to cause pain. The fire all too easily defined as psychopathic elation. The very same expression that had been on his face with every slow stab wound he’d created. All of it simmering behind the face of innocence, the sweet roundness of a Down syndrome man. A young man, nearly a boy. Leo had never known that a Down-affected adult could exhibit such violent, lunatic tendencies. It just didn’t make sense.

But Andy still had Leo’s knife in his hand and he leaned forward now to poke Leo with two fast, sharp stabs aimed for his left biceps. Leo gritted his teeth against the pain of it, the tensing of his body ripping at all the original wounds he sported. Healing but not yet healed.

“In a moment, Chatha,” the other man said dismissively. And as if Chatha were a dog on a leash, he subsided and sat, waiting with avaricious impatience for his master to let him loose. “Now, I will sum the situation up as efficiently as possible. You see, you have taken something very precious away from me, and while I wait to get her back, I am going to content myself with watching you suffer the death you consigned her to over and over and over. Do you understand?”

He didn’t need details. Leo understood. He was going to be tortured. It was clear he was going to meet death in the process. But he was going to damn well make it as unsatisfying for them as was in his power to do.

Then the man nodded to Chatha and Chatha pounced, grabbing Leo by the hair and pulling hard until his neck was stretched to the limit. Leo struggled to not make a sound as pain and anxiety scraped through him.

And then Chatha used his hunting knife to cut his throat, the knife so sharp it severed everything with ease and purity, like spreading soft butter on bread.

Now Leo couldn’t scream even if he wanted to.

Hours later, Leo woke up. His throat, cut nearly to the bone the last time he was conscious was back in working order. He could breathe and swallow, although both acts felt like he was swallowing razor blades. How was this possible? How was he even alive? Twice now he had experienced what should have been his own death, only to wake up once more …

To the same nightmare. The calm, regarding eyes that were so eerily light blue they bordered on colorless, like the facets of diamonds. His expression was equally as hard and as cold as that particular stone.

“Where were we?” he asked aloud, clearly rhetorically speaking. He didn’t want Leo’s input. “Oh yes. The reason for all of this. You slit the throat of a woman, a very powerful woman whose gloriousness and magnificence so outshines the dingy, pissing existence you call a life. You nearly killed her. Not an easy trick, to kill one of us, and I suppose on some level you are to be commended for your strength and prowess.

“But on the other hand … you have sinned grievously against me and mine and I cannot let that stand.”

“Somehow I knew you were going to say that,” Leo croaked out. Hearing himself was a shock. Maybe it was because he’d worked so hard at his speech and its patterns, worked to rid himself of the barrio influences that could make him a caricature of his heritage. He was an intelligent Latino man and he damn well wanted others to show him the respect he deserved. Hearing himself sound so rough hit him on a level that he would never allow this pendejo to ever see. “Anyway, you’re going to have to be more specific. I’ve slit a lot of bitches’ throats in my day. Just which bitch is yours?”

That was a ballsy bit of lying, but he could play this game, too. He’d shot a woman once. Punched one once, too. But in all fairness to him, one had been holding a gun to his head and the other had tried to stab him. Not that he’d blamed them. After all, in both cases he’d just killed their husbands. But hey, that was the risk you took when you hooked up with a drug kingpin and a sadistic mercenary, respectively. The only time he’d cut a woman’s throat had been in his dreams. A very vivid dream at that, he thought with a frown. It’d been a hell of a piece of fantasy fiction with spell-casting bad guys and himself, Ram, and Docia cast as the good guys. That dream had creeped him out in huge ways, mainly because in it Jackson had died.

“The fact is you will only remember the act as a dream. I can tell by the energy surrounding you that your memories have been altered. Let me expedite matters by telling you it was not a dream. Everything you did and everything you saw was absolutely real.” The other man stood up and loomed over Leo. What made it so unnerving was that he wasn’t trying to bully him, nor was he interested in convincing him. He was just dropping information for factual purposes. “The way you remember it is of little significance to me. It was what it was. It was a lowborn beast, a savage, thinking he had the right to rid the world of a queen. There is recompense to be paid for such things.” Those icy eyes flicked upward to above Leo’s head.

“Again,” was all he said.

Chatha pounced, this time the knife slicing so deeply that Leo could almost feel it at the back of his throat. As blood filled his mouth and lungs, as it pumped out of his body once again, he couldn’t keep himself from wondering what kind of fresh hell he had managed to find.

“And now I will wait until you are once more on the brink of death, then I will have Chatha heal you, so that we may begin anew.”

And for the first time in his life, Leo Alvarez came to wish he was dead.

Unlike Chatha, Kamenwati took very little pleasure in what he was doing. After all, that would make him the soulless bastard the Politic liked to accuse him of being. He would not give them the satisfaction of making a stereotype of him. And yet, punishment was necessary. He could think of no other way to make the human comprehend the heinousness of the act he had perpetrated. Unlike humans, Bodywalkers did not believe in half measures when it came to their criminals. It was far more efficient to make the criminal truly appreciate what he had done. Only then would he think twice before doing the same thing again. They believed there was nothing better than to make the perpetrator really feel the impact of their actions from a firsthand perspective. It was a punishment, ironically enough, that Kamenwati had not always been a strong proponent of. But he believed that in this instance it was more than justified. The human male had chosen sides with nothing but misguided faith and had decided to act as judge and jury against a woman he knew not at all. It seemed only fitting that he learn what the repercussions of something like that were … and what it felt like from the victim’s standpoint. In this instance of course he was being forced to act in Odjit’s stead, but at least when she roused from this interminable slumber it would be to the news that her assaulter had been justly dealt with.

It was ironic, he thought, that Chatha’s Bodywalker power was healing. It was because of this that they could send the message home to this mortal, again and again, and feel content that justice was being dealt without becoming true criminals themselves in return. Of course, Chatha was a wild card. He was no more easily controlled than a spoiled child, and, again, he did not agree with letting him run amok. But he was one of Odjit’s pets, a true example of how she was willing to see the worth in even the most irredeemable of characters.

Kamen walked into his chambers, intent on reporting to his mistress. Perhaps if she heard of this justice she would find the will to waken. It was his deepest wish that she do so. The grief he felt in dealing with day-to-day life was becoming heavier and heavier. Without her guidance to keep him afloat, he didn’t know how much longer he could bear being in this world. He feared his apathy. Feared it would make him like the thoughtless humans who wasted their lives and their planet in such painfully devastating ways, and feared it would make him like the Politic Bodywalkers, enemy to his own race and displaying a complete lack of faith that would one day be his undoing. And so he returned to her to report his news, and to continue looking through her vast array of prayer scrolls and compendiums made of pressed papyrus as ancient as they were themselves. He had remembered seeing something … a long time past now … a spell that could possibly help.

And he would not rest until he found it.

Chapter Nine

“Hey honey, can you please, please, please call me when you get this message? It’s extremely important. Do not blow me off, okay? I’m not going to lecture you or anything. It’s just … you need to call me.”

Marissa hung up the phone and—like she had been doing for the last twenty minutes—continued pacing. Seeing that kind of discord and discontent radiating from her was almost as ominous as dark clouds swallowing up the sun. It was the third message she had left for her sister, in his presence that is, and he could tell each failed attempt to reach her sister was only ramping up her distress.

“Marissa.”

She jumped in her own skin, apparently so absorbed in her own whirlwind of thoughts and stress that she hadn’t even heard him approaching. Then, as if his presence had pulled the plug, she began to vent.

“I should never have left town. I shouldn’t have left without at least speaking to her. What if they know who I am and decide to question her? She doesn’t even know she could be in danger. I should never have left!”

“Though I think it highly unlikely that they know who you are or where you live, it is still possible, however remote, that they do know. And considering what has happened to Leo, we can assume they are hunting me in earnest and that anyone associated with me is in danger”

She began to pace faster. “If this is your idea of comforting me, it’s really not working!” she hissed vehemently. “What a mess! All of this, everything about you is just a nightmare! Now everything I hold dear, my sister, my home, my job, is all under threat because of you! You knew singling me out could have this effect! You had to know because according to you you’ve done this quite a few times before, this resurrection process and taking on the mantle of this never-ending war you have going on. So how could you do something so stupid like singling me out? How could you just destroy everything in one thoughtless swoop of action?”

“I suppose I could have pretended to be indifferent to you,” he acceded, “but then you’d probably be dead in the woods right now.”

“You knew this could happen,” she railed on. “Why would you carry out this … this farce of being human in a human job? Why would you put so many innocent people at risk?”

“Firstly,” he said with more than a little sharpness to his tone as he snagged her by her wrist and with a solid jerk tugged her out of her circuit across the floor, “I was not pretending and it was not a farce. Whatever I have become, I was and am Jackson Waverly first. Have I struggled with the right and wrong of it? Have I questioned my own wisdom? Of course I have. So don’t stand there and berate me like I did this on purpose with callous thought toward others.”

“But you—”

“Secondly,” he spoke over her sharply, “you are not the only one here missing a loved one. At least your sister is most likely to be alive, whereas Leo Alvarez is most likely dead in a ditch somewhere, so if you please, spare me your recriminations because I am full to choking on my own!”

That, finally, seemed to quiet her. She stood, her posture tense and surly.

“And do you really think,” he added on a softer voice as he pulled her closer to the warmth of his body, pulling her in until her feet were between his and her bowstring-taut body was a hairsbreadth away from his own. So close he could feel the heat of her. Close enough to feel the resentment she was feeling toward him all along the surfaces of his flesh. “That I would leave it up to chance whether or not the Templars will try to use others from my former life against me? Asikri was not on the plane with us because, along with obtaining information regarding Leo, I sent him to your house to fetch some of your things and to ensure the safety of your sister. She hasn’t gotten your messages because he has thrown her phone away and given her a new one.”