Perhaps he would simply use the method where he craved using it most.

On himself.

“Listen, ya big hunk of ignoramus, if you don’t put me down right this minute I’m going to kick you in the balls again and this time your kids are going to be born with black eyes! You feeling me, mister?”

The loud pronouncement rang throughout the house, alerting Marissa instantly of her sister’s arrival. Marissa had been hiding from Jackson, keeping herself closed away in a sunroom just off the porch that wrapped around the entire house. She found that amusing, actually. What use would these people have for a sunroom? If the sun touched them …

She shuddered, thinking that he had actually had the gall to ask her if she wanted to be like him. To tell her that was his plan. Well he could just take his plan and shove it where he didn’t have to worry about the sunshine. She wanted no part of any of this. It infuriated her to think of how much he had screwed up her life and, by association, so many others. Leo Alvarez for one. Where was he? Was he even alive? If what Jackson had told her was true, then it wasn’t very likely. She had met the darkly mysterious man only a few weeks ago … well, she had seen him many times before that, meeting up with Jackson, sitting in his chair with his feet up, looking for all the world like he owned the entire precinct. She had actually met him when Docia had gone missing and had found him to be quite intimidating when the fate of someone he loved was in jeopardy.

Now Marissa came hurrying through the rooms, the clicking of her heels sounding loud on the tiled foyer floor. She saw Lina up in the air, way way up over the shoulder of the gigantic man who was holding her. He had an arm bound tightly around her legs at the knees, presumably to keep her from kicking him, and she was hanging head first down his back.

“I swear to god, I would bite you on your ass if I was close enough!” Then she muttered. “Probably chip a tooth on the damn thing. What the hell have you got in these jeans, a coupla boulders for ass cheeks?”

“Lina!”

Hearing her sister’s voice made Lina swing wildly around, pulling herself upright in an impressive show of abdominal muscles and grabbing Asikri by the hair to hold herself up so she could see Marissa rushing toward her.

“Holy Hannah! They got you too? What the hell—” She broke off when Jackson came into the room. Her eyes widened and she zeroed in on Marissa. “Never gonna happen, huh?”

“Lina will you be quiet?” Marissa hissed at her, working furiously to keep from blushing. So what? So she’d had a few illicit thoughts about a good-looking man. Big deal! An active imagination was perfectly normal. Sexual fantasies starring the good-looking man were also perfectly normal. The good-looking man himself? Not normal. Far from normal. Too damn not normal for her. “Will you put her down please?” she asked Asikri.

He growled, which she could only assume it was a reluctant assent. Without giving her time to plan any lethal strike on her way down, Asikri practically tossed Angelina onto her feet. Lina immediately ran up to hug her sister in a desperately tight embrace.

“He threw my phone away. A perfectly good iPhone!” she spat over her shoulder at him. “You own me a new phone! And I want a pink case to go with it! Pink camouflage!”

“There is no such thing as pink camouflage,” Asikri ground out. “Camouflage by nature of the word means an outfit worn to blend in to the surroundings. And unless you’re in a cotton candy factory, sweetheart, pink doesn’t blend into your surroundings!”

“Great. Not only is he rude, inconsiderate and a fine rendition of the incredible hulk, he has no imagination whatsoever!”

“Lina!”

Angelina started when Marissa’s tone came out sounding close to furious. Well, she was furious. This whole situation sucked and Lina being there only exacerbated her knowledge of it.

“Marissa what are we doing here?” Lina asked with a very pronounced pout.

“There’s … uh … been a development,” she said carefully, not certain how much she could or should tell Lina.

“Your sister witnessed a crime,” Jackson said, lying easily and using the cop voice that officers liked to adopt when they wanted to be seen as very official and very serious. “It involves some pretty bad people and when they find out what she knows and that she’s willing to testify to it, it will put you both in a lot of danger. So … we’re putting you both into witness protection.”

“Witness pro—Oh, hell no! Mari come on! I have a life! Shouldn’t this be my choice?”

“No,” Marissa said shortly

The finality of the word made Lina go absolutely silent. And that was a very, very peculiar thing for her. Marissa felt everyone looking at her, most especially Jackson. The Egyptian pharaoh. God, this sounded like such a joke! But she had seen firsthand that it wasn’t. And given that Jackson had just lied to her sister, it was very clear that he didn’t want her to know who and what this house was filled with. It would be interesting to see how they were going to manage to keep her very bright and very nosy sister in the dark. She should just tell them to give it up from the start.

“Come on,” she said, putting an arm around her sister’s shoulders and leading her away from the group. “It’s only temporary. It won’t be that bad. I need to know you’re safe though.”

“Tell me, what was it that you saw?”

Marissa lied by telling the truth. “I saw someone get killed.” Of course Jackson had been the one doing the killing, but understandably so.

“Oh honey, are you okay?” Lina asked with concern, wrapping her arm around Marissa and hugging her tight as they walked back to the sunroom. She’d love to see how they were going to explain the fact that no one was awake during daylight hours.

“I’m fine. It’s just this whole situation is … I’m just a little rattled,” she said truthfully.

“Does that have anything to do with Mr. Gorgeous in there?” Lina teased her, her trademark perceptiveness in full swing.

“I’m not even going to talk about that. Trust me, right now I’m so mad at him I could easily strap him down, pour honey on him, and stick him on an ant hill.”

“At least the first part of that sounds like fun,” she said with a giggle.

“You have a one-track mind!” Marissa groused.

“You have a no-track mind,” Lina countered. “Come on, Mari. If I have to be stuck here let’s make the most of it. At least, one of us should make the most of it.”

“Knock it off, Lina. I’m honestly not in the mood for jokes.”

She could tell her sister was biting her tongue to keep a sassy retort in check. It was reflective of her concern for her sister, as was her hug. “All right, I won’t tease anymore. Well, not much anyway.”

That made Marissa laugh. Honestly. Her sister absolutely couldn’t help herself.

They were just sitting down when someone cleared their throat behind them. Marissa turned to see Jackson waiting there with a man she hadn’t seen before.

“Angelina, this is Maxwell Turner. He’ll be watching over you throughout the day, and I’ll be taking care of you at night. I’m used to third shift and we tend to be nocturnal here. We’re like a house full of vampires,” he joked. He looked at Marissa as he said it. She had to admit, it was very clever. “You’ll be in the guest house at the back of the property. We’re not trying to keep you prisoner, but we don’t want you to tell anyone who you are or make any contact with your friends until we think it’s safe.”

“And what if it’s never safe?” Lina countered.

“I doubt it will come to that,” Jackson lied. She knew it was a lie, just as she had known all along that he had no intention of letting her go back to her life in Saugerties.

Well, if he thought that meant she was going to be forced to stay with him, he had another thing coming. She wasn’t going to destroy everything she had worked for because he had some half-baked notion she was going to play party hostess to his queen. No way.

Never gonna happen.

Chapter Thirteen

“It’ll be light soon. You think you’ve got this covered?” Jackson asked Max, who stood facing him, Ram, and Asikri. Max was one of the very few human mortals who knew exactly what his employers were. Throughout the years they had learned it was best to guard themselves while they slept. Not that Odjit and her kind could walk in daylight any more than they could, but she was not above using human assassins to come after them when they were most vulnerable. The house had sun-sensing glass in the windows that kept it dark during the day so they could defend themselves within the confines of their home. But of course, glass could easily break; it was best to have an alternate security force since the various Gargoyles sitting as sentries on the properties were as useless in daylight as the Bodywalkers, literally turned to stone at the touch of the sun.

But Maxwell was the son of a man whose family had been privy to the Bodywalker secret throughout the generations. His family had protected Menes and his loved ones through many centuries. It seemed strange sometimes that he knew more about Maxwell’s lineage than Maxwell himself did. But Max didn’t need to know where he had come from in order to do his job. And he was very good at his job.

“How hard can it be to keep a young lady entertained?” At Asikri’s snort of derision he said, “I’m thinking as long as I don’t throw her over my shoulder we should be fine.” He smirked at Asikri. “I’ll take her shopping on your credit card. It’ll keep her very happy for at least a few days. She’s damn pretty too. Maybe I’ll take her to Bermuda.”

“You’ll show some respect,” Asikri grumbled roughly.

“He’s right, Max,” Jackson said, although he was surprised Asikri had any opinion on the matter. Asikri tended to be the big grouchy type, never too pleased with what was going on around him and the tasks he was set to. Oh, he did everything efficiently, but Asikri and happiness were not words often used in the same sentence. Granted, there were reasons for that, but not necessarily reasons his friends agreed with. “Don’t do anything that will complicate things. It’s complicated enough on its own. Just keep her away from the main house during the day and keep her and her sister in your sights.”

“You don’t have to tell me how to do my job,” Max said, sounding a little affronted.

“No. Of course not,” Jackson conceded quickly. “I know you’ve been trained very well by your father and by Ram. He wouldn’t have you here in the house if you weren’t.”

“You know, it’s strange when I think of my great-granddad doing the job I’m now doing for you all those years ago,” Max said. “I find that to be weirder, believe it or not, than knowing who and what you are, sir. There’s a sort of eeriness to it.”

That made Jackson laugh. “You know, your granddad said something very similar to me when it was his turn to watch over us.” That gave Jackson pause as he remembered Menes’s memories and felt the things that Menes felt. It hadn’t been until he was propositioning Marissa that he had gotten an inkling of the grief that had led to Menes’s last death. It disturbed him, the idea that he could be so swept away by the emotions of his counterpart. How had Menes’s host felt about what was happening? How could he have possibly been in agreement with that course of action?

And yet, as the Blending took deeper root inside him, as Menes’s memories and personality became a part of him, it was as though the lines between them were starting to blur. He felt it most in moments like this, when he fully felt a memory, such as speaking with Max’s great-grandfather. And while Menes had instigated a lot of what had happened before with Marissa, he had been very present for all of it, and most definitely a part of the way he had taken command of her, touched her … wanted her until every cell was screaming for it.

But, of course, it was very likely that it would be a cold day in hell before that happened now. Being asked to die wasn’t exactly whispering sweet nothings into a girl’s ear.

No wait. Scratch that. A woman’s ear. Marissa was all woman. There was no mistaking her for anything else. She had no sweet girlish behaviors, no naiveté. And perhaps that was a part of the problem. She was jaded on some level she refused to show him. Oh, she was still a believer in romance and true love, but not for herself. She would believe it for anyone else, she would counsel accordingly, but something was holding her back from allowing herself to feel what she wanted to feel. There was something … some intangible thing …

“Jackson?”

Jackson started when he realized Ram was talking to him. He had completely tuned him and Max out. Looking more than a little sheepish, he apologized. That seemed to amuse Ram to no end.