Of course he didn’t like the dying part any more than she did. The thought of her going through that kind of trauma, well it was not well received in his mind. Menes concurred on that, but he was more practical. One way or another she was going to die, be it now or many years from now. At least this way she would be saved and she would be his for as long as the fates allowed for them. And by the gods he prayed it would be longer than the last time. That was perhaps what had been the sharpest of the pain of losing Hatshepsut last time. She had only been reborn for a week before Odjit had taken her life. One week. It had been as heated and fervent as it always was, their spirits close in the Ether but lacking the physicality to touch. So when they were reborn they wanted nothing more than to feel each other in any way possible.

But one week had not been enough. Not by half. And he had not dealt with it well at all. He had failed her then, failed to protect her and keep her safe in life as well as in his heart. But this time he would not fail. This time Odjit had been dead for three weeks and this would be the safest incarnation they would enjoy in perhaps five or six hundred years.

But none of that would matter if he couldn’t convince her to be a part of this future he found himself captain to. He was home now, he thought as he looked around the grand kitchen and the casual dining nook within it. Beyond was a large formal dining room and other rooms equally made for a big household. And the royal household was always quite large. Now that he was there, the house would fill with friends and staff, and the machinery of a government would begin to take place.

Not that Ramses did not do well in his stead. As far as he was concerned either of them could have been designated to rule over their people in perpetuity. But long ago the people of the Politic had chosen him. The Templars …

He despised this war, he thought with vehemence. He was sick to death of it. Why could they not see reason? Why did they fear the right to live their lives for themselves so much that they wished fervently for the god Amun to rise up and destroy them if they were not well behaved? It sickened him that half his people were wrapped up in this blind faith, this dark age of being oppressed by beliefs tempered into them by the fist of that zealot harpy who called herself a priestess. Why could they not see her for what she truly was?

He had asked himself these same questions over and over, incarnation after incarnation and still there was no answer.

Except …

“Docia!” he called out as he moved from the kitchen into the main body of the house. The house was all new to him, so he wasn’t exactly certain where he was going to find her. It was a great frustration for him, to feel like he wasn’t completely in charge of matters close to him. But, he counseled himself, patience and time would see him where he needed to be, would help give him the strength and fortifications he would need if …

“Docia!”

“What?! Quit hollering at me! Jeez.” Docia shot the command at him with all the exasperation a baby sister could muster, though she was well into her twenties, and her Bodywalker Tameri was almost as ancient as he was.

“I had a question for Tameri. She has told you that there are others like her who want to defect from the Templars?” At her nod he hurried on. “Just exactly how many Templars are we speaking about?”

Since Docia was also only three weeks into her Blending, she had to go quiet for a moment and access her Bodywalker’s memory. He watched as her face turned incredibly peaceful, so unlike the turbulent energy of his sister. He realized then that he had missed her terribly since she had done what he ought to have done from the start and had come out to New Mexico with Ramses. It tickled him, actually, that Ramses had, at one time, mistaken Tameri for Hatshepsut. True, these things were hard to discern at times, but the idea that his astounding and dynamic queen would choose someone like the adorable and slightly mousy persona of his sister … well, it wasn’t a likely fit. Of course he and Hatshepsut had once altered sexes, he resurrecting in the body of a female and she in a male, just to see what it would be like. The novelty had made them ravenous for each other and the experience of seeing things from the other’s perspective had been, in a word, wild. The sex alone had been outstanding. But he also remembered it as one of the most turbulent choices in their relationship.

God, he missed her. He craved her so terribly. Even now his body still ached with the arousal being close to Marissa had engendered. They must be together, he thought with no little amount of heat. Marissa and Hatshepsut must come together. It was the only solution he would be satisfied with. Yes, intelligent, curvy redheads were dying all the time, but he wanted this redhead and no other. This redhead had tormented Jackson with her very presence for so long … and there was a reason for that. She was very much a woman worth having. Now all he had to do was convince her of the same.

“There are at least thirty … but I sense there are quite a bit more, and that number will begin to grow once the news of my open defection to the Politic side filters through the ranks. That coupled with Odjit’s rather untimely death at the hands of a mortal male … it will do a lot toward making those who are on the fence take a hard look at their priestess. If she were the all-powerful creature and destined ruler she was supposed to be, if she were truly the daughter of the gods and blessed and protected by them because of her devotion, then she would be here now, wouldn’t she?

“But she’s dead. And honestly,” she said, “I don’t see Kamenwati taking the reins in her stead this time. There is talk, you know. He is … not quite right.”

“What does that mean, ‘not quite right’? Haven’t we thought that Kamen and Odjit were off their nuts for some time now?”

“No, that isn’t what I mean. I mean … we were in the Ether together and … touching his soul is like touching a great emptiness. I feel he is very lost, Jackson. I think he doesn’t know what to believe anymore, but habit has him clinging desperately to what he wants Odjit to be for him.”

“Perhaps it is time for him to come around and find faith in something new,” Jackson said thoughtfully. “If Kamenwati were to defect to the Politic … Docia, do you know what that could mean?”

“Duh. It could mean the end of this stupid war.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m not stupid you know. I wasn’t Blended just yesterday … unlike some—”

“Shush,” he said with a laugh as he grabbed hold of her and covered her mouth with his hand. “Insolent. Disrespectful.”

“Mmmk Mmu,” she said against his hand.

“What was that? I didn’t understand you.” And he didn’t lift his hand away either. She reached out and pinched him, making him laugh and letting her go.

“I said—”

“Uh-uh.” He held a finger to her lips. “I know exactly what you said. No need to repeat.” She grinned at him with satisfaction, folding her arms and looking like the victorious woman that she was. Damn her. She had always had him wrapped around her finger and that wasn’t likely to change, Templar Bodywalker inside of her notwithstanding.

Chapter Twelve

Awakening.

There it was, a small papyrus scroll, probably the most ancient piece of written history in the archive he was presently sitting in. Perhaps even the most ancient of all their written prayers, spells, and other such literature in any of their archives anywhere on Earth; and to be sure, there were quite a few, Kamenwati thought as he held open the reedy paper with the barest tips of his fingers, not wanting anything—such as bacteria or the natural oils of his skin—to come into contact with it. Something this frail and old should not even be touched at all, Kamen thought with a grimace. The Bodywalkers, both Politic and Templar, agreed on one thing, and that was that their history should be preserved at all costs and with all the respect it deserved. To that end there were a dozen of archives dotted across the world. The methods used to preserve what was in them outshone those of any antiquities museum. Light, temperature, limited contact. There had once been a single tremendous library, but after the great London fire had come within a hairsbreadth of claiming all they had collected, they had broken them down into twelve locations. And when the war had begun between the Templars and the Politic, there had been a huge series of battles over each and every one until all of the spoils were captured and relocated into secrecy, each keeping the other from accessing whatever parts of the archive they had wrested away.

It had hurt the Templars the most, however, when the Politic had ended up with just under seventy-five percent of the ancient written material, because much of their power came from the incantations and prayer spells such as the one he held so gingerly. Maybe if they had the larger majority of the works they would have gained the upper hand in this blasphemous war.

But there was no point in wasting so much time thinking about what might have been. He must now focus on what was.

It was perhaps preposterous to think a spell from ancient Egyptian times could have any kind of hand in reviving Odjit. It was more likely that Selena, Odjit’s host, had suffered such severe brain damage from the dramatic loss of blood that had occurred when that lowborn mortal beast had nearly decapitated her. That was a physical result, not a magical one. And this spell seemed to be meant to awaken someone from a spell of sleeping or perhaps even paralysis. A useful spell to have regardless of what it did for Odjit, but it was still very much worth trying for her benefit.

He carefully returned the small scroll to its airtight container then rose to make his way back to his mistress’s side. Of course he made a small detour, stopping in to see what Chatha was up to. To his momentary pique, Kamen saw that the human male was no longer strapped down to the floor. All that was left of his having been there was a very wide lake of blood that was slowly making its way to the drain in the center of the floor. There was a reason Odjit called this her wetworks room.

After a moment he realized that the pat pat pat sound of dripping blood was not that of the fluid draining away. He saw the droplets hitting the wet floor and looked up.

Apparently Chatha had grown bored of doing his bloodletting exercises on the floor. He had the human hung up by his ankles, ropes binding his arms down fast to his body in such a thick nonstop coil it was reminiscent of mummification bandaging. The mortal was unconscious, probably on the cusp of death yet again, while Chatha experimented on him for fascination’s sake. To Kamen’s sudden disgust, he realized Chatha had sewn the human’s lips shut.

“Too loud,” Chatha said by way of explanation as he gave the hanging man a push, sending him spinning and swinging, blood spattering everywhere. Kamen had to step back to avoid becoming part of the bath. “Is it time yet?” Chatha’s eyes were feverish with the question. But Kamen knew Chatha was having far more fun toying with the man.

Kamen’s fury toward the insolent creature had eased somewhat, but he was still not satisfied. He could not be satisfied as long as his mistress lay still as death and trapped in an oblivion worse than the Ether.

And that was what was at the crux of this whole agonizing ordeal. At some point he was going to have to decide whether he should keep waiting, keep trying to bring her back to him … or take the life of her host and send Odjit back into the Ether for another hundred years so that she could then be reborn.

He must delay that choice as long as he could. He knew that if he were forced to push her back to the Ether, it would mean the end for him in this lifetime. Even with her there it had been an effort to keep a grasp on this existence. Had he not loathed having Odjit face the Politic alone, he wouldn’t even have bothered with leaving the Ether in the first place.

“Do whatever you will,” he said with a dismissive gesture. “Keep him or kill him, it no longer matters to me. He will suffer in the afterlife for what he has done—far worse than anything you have subjected him to.”

Chatha’s face widened into a beatific smile, all dimples and innocence, his eyes squinting shut. If those eyes had remained open, Kamen knew, there would be nothing innocent within them. The soul of the Down’s male was completely subjugated, no doubt scarred into paralysis as the psychopathic monster dwelling inside of him showed him horrors his innocent mind and soul would never have dreamed of, never mind committing them with his own hand.

That left a sour taste in Kamenwati’s mouth. On one hand he had to admire the wolf hiding in the innocent sheep’s clothing. It was a stroke of brilliance that allowed him almost carte blanche entry into places and into peoples’ trust that would normally not be so easy to access. On the other … Chatha was as evil an entity as anything he had ever seen. If there were a way to destroy his soul forever, Kamen would very much be inclined to see it done. And then he would see it done to Menes, an act that would end the war in a single stroke. Without Menes to flock to, the Politic would swiftly unravel … just as the Templars tended to unravel whenever Kamen and Odjit were killed and sent into the Ether. But to do so with permanence … to make a spirit rest once and for all in the afterlife …