tools fell from nowhere and clattered loudly to the rocky ground.
He jumped at the sound, then moved closer, picking up the golden chalice, turning it slowly and examining the semiprecious stones embedded in its rim. Then he reached for the blade, looking it over the same way. She wondered what he was feeling. Did he recognize the tools? Did he have any clue as to the power he could wield with them? They’d held parts of his soul for a time, so he must feel a bond to them, a connection, yes?
Indira had returned the first piece of Demetrius’s soul, along with the amulet in which it had been protected, thus freeing him. She’d opened the Portal, allowing him to escape his Underworld prison. But he’d had no form, and little ability to reason. And now Magdalena had returned another piece, one the sisters had secreted within a chalice accompanied by a blade, which, when used together, had allowed Demetrius to manifest physically here near the Portal, in the cold of a February night in the Northeast.
He was freezing and shaken, she was sure. But not entirely confused. He would know about this world into which he’d sprung. He’d been floating wraithlike about it since last Samhain, after all. By now he knew the language, the slang, the customs. But he wouldn’t know how to get by. Even with the powers he’d brought along with him, he needed food, shelter, clothing. And he didn’t even know he had any powers just yet.
Demetrius looked around, and as the snow began to fall everything in her yearned to go to him. To help him.
But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not until he used the magical tools that had been given to him to call her forth from the place that was not a place, and the time that was not a time. He had to bring her first into physical existence, and then he would have to render her fully human, fully mortal. He was the only one who could.
And when he realized what she would ask of him, he might wish her gone again. For Lilia had to convince him to give up his powers, his seeming immortality, and accept the final piece of his soul from her, so that they could have the lifetime together that had been denied them so long ago. And she wouldn’t even be allowed to tell him that if he refused, they would both die.
But first he must be allowed to live, to discover his powers, to experience this existence, so that he knew what he was giving up. He had to want to be human again—and want it badly enough to choose it over supernatural powers he had no idea would expire either way.
It was not going to be an easy sell.
But one way or another, this curse had to end now, and one way or another it would.
Cold. He was so cold. He hadn’t expected the sensations he was feeling, had been formless for so long that the notion of what form brought with it was alien to him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Demetrius knew that he’d been human once. But he didn’t remember it. It was a vague bit of knowledge floating around his subconscious and having little impact on anything. He felt no connection to that particle of information.
He looked behind him at the cave, knowing instinctively that that way lay the Portal, and beyond it the Underworld, his prison for as long as memory reached. He wanted no part of that. He didn’t remember it in detail. Not the way he would remember this … this night, the sensations racing through his body, the thousands of messages singing through his senses, the tastes in the air, the smells of the forest, the sounds of an infinite bird choir … this he would remember vividly.
As to what came before, he remembered an endless, vast, dense … void. There was nothing to remember but nothingness itself. No feelings. No light. No sound. Rage, there had been rage, and hatred, and struggling to get free without even knowing what freedom meant. It was a vague concept that he’d thought of simply as the opposite of what is. He’d known captivity, powerlessness, and craved its opposite. Time had no meaning. Emotion was nonexistent. Touch was not even a concept to him then.
Eventually he’d discovered that he could peer through the Portal at the world he could not reach. He could see through the eyes of some of the creatures that roamed the physical world, and from there he’d begun to understand what he wanted. Freedom from his world, entry into that one. And only then had he honed his focus enough to begin to plot his escape and to crave vengeance on whatever nameless force had imprisoned him.
Once his essence had been set free, anger had driven him, and he’d discovered the power to influence the minds of humans. He’d done things that even now, freshly born into this body, seemed evil to him. Human-beingness must have some sort of intrinsic, preprogrammed morality, he thought, and the things he’d done flew in the face of it. And yet, at the time, he hadn’t been human. He hadn’t been … anything. The desire for freedom at any cost had controlled him, alongside a rage so old he didn’t even remember its cause.
He shivered, hugging his arms around his unclothed chest, the golden blade that had fallen from the sky clutched in one fist, the silver chalice in the other, and started trekking downhill in search of warmth. That was first. Warmth. He was so cold. He took the tools with him because they had arrived here with him. They belonged to him. And along with the amulet they were, at the moment, his only worldly possessions.
But he was free, he thought, as his feet slowly went numb. He was free. He had a body. He could experience the pleasures he’d observed other humans experiencing. Warmth was one of those pleasures, but as he walked on, he thought of many others. Food, and the way they made such delighted sounds as they ate it. Laughter. The concept of laughter had fascinated him anytime he’d heard it, even from a distance, and he was eager to understand what caused it and what it felt like. And touch. The touch of another human being, embracing, kissing. Sex. The pleasures of sex seemed to him like the ultimate goal of being human, and he could not wait to experience it.
This was going to be beautiful. Wonderful. He could hardly wait to get started.
He found a driveway leading to a house with lights on inside, but he sensed people within. People he’d wronged recently. No, he could not stop there. He knew he must go farther.
It was a long walk. Twenty minutes, stark naked, in the cold, but he finally came to an empty house. No movement came from inside, no lights were on. But there was something beyond that, a palpable feeling that no one was home.
The door was unlocked, a bit of good luck for him. Better still, it was warm inside. Warm, safe from the cold. So he stepped in, his bare feet sinking into the carpet he knew would feel good to him when sensation returned. He went directly up to the second floor, where dressers and closets held clothing, and he picked through them, wondering if the jeans and shirts would fit his body, and realizing then that he had no idea, really, what he looked like. So he walked through into the adjoining bathroom, and stood face-to-face with his own image.
He was tall, he thought. He’d seen other men, knew their size. He was broad and hard, too. His chest and stomach rippled with muscle. Massive, powerful arms, big hands, thick thighs. He studied his features with a sense of wonder. This is me, he thought. This is my body. My face … He ran his hand over his bristly cheek. His face was dark, whiskered and sun bronzed, and he wondered how that could be, if this body was brand-new.
Then he lifted his gaze to meet his own eyes in the mirror, and it startled him, the intensity, the depth of them. Dark brown, his eyes, revealing turmoil and pain. A pain he recognized but didn’t remember. Startling, to look into his own eyes for the first time. It felt as if a complete stranger was looking back at him and, more, looking for something within him.
Eventually he dragged his gaze away from his reflection and realized there was a shower stall standing nearby. He knew what it was, how to use it, and he didn’t particularly care enough to worry whether the home’s owners would return before he finished. He needed to get warm.
Reaching into the stall, he adjusted the water flow until it was as hot as he could stand it, and then he stepped in and let the heat soak into his cold new body. It felt good. Not as good as it had seemed when he’d seen others stand beneath the spray, heads tipped back, eyes closed in pleasure. But it was good compared to freezing, and it was warming him up quickly. He stayed until the water ran cool, then toweled off and returned to the bedroom to dress himself in another man’s clothes: