Straight through his back ribs.

Straight through his lung.

Maybe even his heart, he thought as he fell to a single knee, fumbling for his own blade in an effort to arm himself. But he was left-handed and working without fresh oxygen. It felt like drowning, like a black weight pressing on his chest.

“No! No-nah-no-nah-no!” Andy sing-songed as he pounced forward, disarming Leo of his knife as though he were a child. With a sense of furious outrage Leo realized he’d just given the little f**k another knife. Andy pushed at him, his strength surprising and powerful, the impact of it sending Leo skidding across the wood floor until he slammed into the wall. It knocked what little breath was left in him right out of his undamaged lung and a moment of pure, unadulterated panic swept over him. It was such an alien sensation after facing so many forms of death, including the possibility of his own. But none of it had been like this. None of it had felt like this. And then the demented man-child was scrabbling over to him on all fours, panting at him like a puppy getting ready to play.

“Oh, so many things to do!” he declared. “Where should Chatha start, hmm? Any suggestions? Preferences?” He held a hand to his ear, as though he were listening intently. “No? No-nah-no-nah-no! Well never you mind, dearie. I have many many suggestions.” Leo watched his vision beginning to go a little dark around the edges as he felt and tasted blood in his mouth, very likely via his lung.

But he was quite conscious when his knife was pulled free of its sheath, and quite conscious when the tip of it was pressed against his gut right above his navel. Then Andy leaned his weight in the slowest of increments onto the blade, watching with genuine curiosity for Leo’s expressions. Leo wanted to shout in agony and fury as the wicked blade eased slowly into his body.

“A little to the left? A little to the right? Come come we want to know. Tell us. We only want to make you happy!”

Leo gagged up more blood, the barest of sound choking out of him.

“Left! To the left! Excellent suggestion! We like it very much.” The blade pulled free, moved two inches to the left and then slowly, very slowly, reentered his body. All the while Andy watched Leo’s eyes, watched his grasp for life as death tried to claw at him and bring him under the surface.

The fight within Leo was his curse. It took two more penetrations by that life-raping blade before he finally lost consciousness.

Jackson woke slowly, something inside of him feeling the fall of darkness, flipping an instinctive switch inside of him that told him it was safe to come awake and face the world. He took in a deep breath, bringing forth the scent of sweetness that instinctively tightened his body with awareness. Then he felt the warmth of her, all along the left side of his body, her back pressed up against him in such a way that he suspected she’d alternated from lying half over him to this attempt at spooning against him. Her head was cradled by his arm, somewhere about the vicinity of his elbow, and he felt her breathing against his skin. She was on her left side, the dips and curves of her body on relaxed display. She had come to bed in her skirt and sweater but the skirt, which had been judiciously knee-length, had crept up her thighs quite a bit. Enough to tease, but not enough to satisfy. He wanted to know what kind of panties she had on. It was the craziest impulse, but he realized he couldn’t figure it out. The conservative length of the skirt could mean very plain white cotton briefs, but the CFM heels she constantly wore in the workplace screamed the possibility of a naughty, lacy thong.

Truth was, it wasn’t the first time he had wondered about it. And like that other time, he grew unbelievably hard at the thought.

“Christ, Waverly, you’re a goddamn pig,” he muttered aloud with a recriminating groan. Then he found himself seriously debating the benefits of reaching to inch the hem of that skirt up just a little farther. Just enough to tell but not enough to make him hate himself overmuch. He discarded the idea almost as soon as he entertained it. Being a pig in his thoughts was one thing, being one in his actions was something else entirely.

She wouldn’t know, his new, smug bastard of a conscience taunted him.

“Shut the f**k up,” he groused at Menes. “You’re more of a pig than I am.”

More a man of action, Menes argued breezily. You spend far too much time debating the right and wrong of things and far too little time seeing where your impulses might lead you. You will not know if she would welcome your touch if you never seek an answer.

Jackson wished it didn’t sound incredibly logical. He wished Menes would just shut up and leave him be. At what point had he thought welcoming another being into his body had been a good idea?

When you were facing no other option but death.

Oh. Yeah. That.

Jackson decided to look around the room and assess where he was. He was still trying to get used to his ability to see in the dark. It seemed so unnatural and strange even after three weeks of slowly realizing his acuity in the dark was improving every day. Now it was like daylight, or close to it, all the details of the large bedroom jumping out at him.

This was a man’s home. He could tell by the way it was decorated, or rather the lack thereof, and the fact that a man’s watch was resting on the bureau across from the bed. The sudden idea that this could be her lover’s home entered his mind in a white hot flash of anger and jealousy.

No! She is ours!

There was such passion in the thought that he didn’t know for sure where it originated from. Himself? Menes? It was all Blending together more and more and he was beginning to have trouble distinguishing between the two at certain times. The only thing he could do was ask himself whether or not he would have thought something like that before Menes had taken possession. He wanted to say no. Never. And with any other woman he would have known loud and clear what to think. But he had to confess to himself that he had imagined things where she was concerned that he never would have thought himself capable of before meeting her two years earlier. He may have kidded himself before, but ever since Menes had taken up residence inside of him he’d faced the fact that she was the rising star of his fantasies. More and more so every damn day. Especially since she’d given him hell for being an arrogant jerk.

Christ, it was as though getting set down and put in his place had been a complete turn-on.

Maybe it had been. Maybe he liked his women a little bit tough. A little bit dominant. Able to stand up for herself. Perfectly capable of telling him where to go when he deserved it. It sure seemed that way to him at that moment. Maybe that was how he’d been getting it wrong all this time. He’d always chased after the curvy vacuous kind, thinking they would be simple to manage and fun to play around with.

But truth be told there had been no curvy and no vacuous women in his life for a very long time. Truth be told he hadn’t been much interested in anyone else since a certain redheaded doctor had walked into the station like a breath of soft, perfume-scented air. He could smell her even now, even after they’d both spent hours in the cold night doing their jobs, he could smell the sweet warmth of her. And maybe that was because he rolled up on his side a little and touched his face to her hair, but just the same … only she would figure out how to manage to smell good when everyone else smelled like sweat and too many long hours drinking stale, crappy coffee.

But she wasn’t exactly perfectly kempt at the moment, her glorious red hair spilling left and right and all haphazard directions over her face and his arm. She was wrinkled at the skirt and even a little at her sweater, and peeking over to see her face, he saw the dark smudges of makeup that she had neglected to clean off. He would lay bets she’d rather be caught dead before letting someone see her like this, which made him suddenly realize why she wasn’t in a relationship.

No, the man who owned this place might be a lover, but he was nothing important to her. She simply was too tightly wound and it was too important to her to be seen in a flawless manner. Relationships were messy and unkempt, they were about letting others see you at your dirtiest, your silliest … the real you that you were.

Wow, Jackson thought, he was getting pretty damn insightful in his old age. And there was the fact that he had a very old soul inside of him now. Menes had walked quite a few lifetimes, seen more things and more women than Jackson might have ever conceived of. But what it always seemed to boil down to for Menes was the one, the only one whom he would ever love.

Jackson was given doses of the feelings that Menes had for Hatshepsut. He could feel Menes chafing for her, could feel a level of patience warring with a level of frustration inside him. Menes missed her. This remarkable creature that had his implicit loyalty … he missed her with so much power it left a vacant hole in his heart. And Jackson was forced to remember that it meant one day very soon all of his focus would be directed toward another woman. The thought sat very ill with him, despite Menes’s reassurances that all would turn out well in the end. All he knew was that it would mean more of saying goodbye to his former life and all the things in it. And that filled him with what was becoming a very familiar sadness.

The thought made him think of Sargent. The poor dog. To work so damn hard and his only recompense was two humans who let him starve and thirst for an entire day! The thought galvanized him, making him ease his arm from beneath her and move as carefully as he could off the bed so as not to wake her. She didn’t have an internal clock attuned to the coming of dusk, so she would sleep for as long as her body would let her and as far as he was concerned she could use it. She might not have been tromping through the woods, but she had worked just as hard comforting the mother while at the same time battling the woman with her wits.

And that thought reminded him of something else he had to do. As he moved into the main body of the house looking for Sargent, he was also looking for a phone. He found both in the kitchen, Sargent in the exact same position they had last seen him take up on the rug. But when Jackson entered the room Sargent’s ear pricked forward an instant before he lifted his head.

Jackson instinctively made the sound he used to recall Sargent, which brought the dog quickly to his side. The recall wasn’t just about commanding the dog to come, it was about releasing him from his well-trained position. It was a strange house with strange smells and rules, but Sargent, who was always brimming with curiosity, had stayed exactly where Jackson had left him, not even trying to climb up into bed with him like he usually did.

“Hungry? And I bet you gotta pee, too. I’m with you on that one, my friend.”

Jackson opened the door, hesitating a moment because he didn’t have Sargent’s leash any longer. It had gone up in flames along with everything else from his original uniform. There was a snapping piece of leather on his gun belt made specifically for carrying the coiled up leash, much in the way Wonder Woman wore that golden lasso of hers, freeing up his hands for other things. But, the belt and all else were gone.

After he had taken care of their most immediate need, Jackson started to look for a pantry or cabinet that might have food stores. He opened the refrigerator to find it completely empty and even unplugged. The first thing he had noticed while walking Sargent was that they were really secluded, since he couldn’t see another sign of humanity in any direction, and quite possibly completely off the grid. He didn’t see any elevated wiring and there had been a series of powerful looking solar panels at the edge of the northwest corner of the clearing the cabin was nestled in.

“Ah! Here we go,” he said with triumph a moment later when he opened the door to a small walk-in pantry. It had to be the neatest pantry on the face of the earth, with multiples of each can, and, oddly enough, each label was perfectly aligned in a forward-facing direction like a neatly ordered phalanx of aluminum and glass soldiers. The sight made him a little sick in his gut. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she did have a lover. It would be just like her to pick a man exactly like she was. Perfect. Neat. Every last damn duck in its precisely designated row.

The thought made him so surly he had an extremely powerful urge to shove everything off the shelves. My god, he thought with shock at the wave of wrath that had washed quickly through him. Why am I so hot-tempered all of a sudden?

Not universally, Menes said to him quietly, but whenever you feel your Marissa in threat … in one form or another. Jealousy is to be expected, Jackson, when the winning prize is so exceptional.

Jackson had to grudgingly admit that there was some truth in that. Perhaps even more so now that he’d kissed her … since he’d learned what she’d tasted like on his tongue and felt like in his hands. Since he’d gotten a glimpse of what she was capable of when she let her hair down.

He found a can of stew and pulled the tab up for it. Sargent started to whine eagerly in the back of his throat as Jackson searched for a bowl. He found two, dropping the first in front of Sargent immediately after dumping the stew into it and filling the second with water. He dropped down onto his haunches and scratched the animal that was the pride and joy of its breed. Chico had been a good dog, a dependable dog. A loyal one. He’d never given Jackson a lick of trouble. But neither had he learned so quickly. And Sargent, pound for pound packed a serious bite. Those padded suits weren’t foolproof when it came to protecting the wearer, and a few of his volunteers had come out of training with a good show of bruising.