Michael slammed his fist on the table. “Stop it.”

Mary stood and listened to the echo of her chair as it clattered backward onto the floor.

“I’m going to take a few minutes,” she said. The words scraped her throat raw.

“Mary,” Michael said. He reached for her.

She threw up her stiffened hands as if to push away the news or keep Astra’s words from hitting her, but she couldn’t reverse time, or save any of the people, or erase anything that Astra had said. All she could do was stop from hearing more.

“Stop,” she said. “I’m going to take a few f**king minutes.”

He rose to his feet as she headed blindly for the door.

Astra said, “Let her go.”

“You had to push it, didn’t you?” Michael’s voice was savage. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

Mary didn’t wait to hear anymore. She wrenched the door open and ran outside. But she couldn’t run away from what was already inside her head.

 • • •

MANY LONG YEARS ago, Astra had made up a pretend mate who cared.

See, she said to her pretend mate. This is why I keep wondering if I have to kill them.

If they are not with me, they are against me in a thousand ways that matter. They distract me. They drain my energy. They keep me up late at night, sleepless with worry, when I should be working on other things. They present targets to the Deceiver for manipulation and corruption, and they might possibly turn into outright enemies.

She couldn’t kill them just because they drove her crazy, could she?

No, she could not. That was something the Deceiver would do. Not her. If that was her line in the sand, then so be it.

She and the Deceiver had once been young. Yes, she remembered the early days of their first life all too well. As all mated pairs of their kind, they had been born together, and they had known each other from early childhood.

Echoes of their raging fights still played in her memory. Even now sometimes in dreams they got in each other’s face and cut loose in screaming matches fit to wake the dead.

How many times had she told him? Ask, don’t take. Give back sometimes. When are you going to grow up? Why do you have to destroy everything you touch? The hell’s the matter with you?

She made Michael tell her the details of what had happened when they had gone after Jerry and the boy. Then, for a wonder, she got him to agree to let her talk to Mary alone.

She couldn’t believe he had given in. It wasn’t from anything clever she had done. He had flared and snorted like a highbred stallion gearing up for a kick-ass fight, just as she’d known he would, and utter exhaustion had seeped into her old bones. She wondered if she had the energy to take any more.

For a mercy, he had seen it in her face and curbed his temper. Much to her surprise she found herself out the door and looking for the other idiot.

Give back sometimes. Oh, Lord.

She found Mary kneeling in the vegetable garden, and she shuffled near to see what the young woman was doing. This far north, the growing season had not truly set in, but the land on the island loved to produce. Mary was weeding the garden in the early afternoon light.

The younger woman said, “It seems like the more I recover of my memories, the more I’ve been calling on God. I wasn’t a particularly religious or spiritual person before this week. Did our people believe in God?”

“Some did,” Astra grunted. She shrugged, though Mary didn’t see it. “Some didn’t. Maybe you’ve just had a bad time and need to hang on to something bigger than yourself.”

“Is that why you call on a Creator?”

“Guilty as charged,” she said.

Mary’s head came up and her red-rimmed eyes were hot. “I just want to know one thing. If God exists, how could he have created something like the Deceiver?”

Astra exhaled in a silent snort. This was why she was neither a philosopher nor a poet. She didn’t have the goddamn time. Acid corroded her words. “That is not a new or original question. Believe me, it has been asked countless times before.”

Mary’s expression hardened. “I don’t give a damn about new or original, or what somebody else has asked. These are my questions.”

Astra rubbed her face and sighed. “How we got placed in this universe is beside the point. The real questions are, what are we going to do about it? How do we live our lives? How do we die our deaths? We are all creators. We are responsible for creating our own identities, our own realities. You can’t blame the Deceiver on the Creator. He wasn’t victimized by an immutable nature that some deity inflicted on him. He didn’t have to become the person he became. He made choices. He and I could have balanced each other in half a dozen different ways. He could have been . . .” Her throat locked. She had to force herself to go on. “He could have been the highest Prince of our people. Instead he became our worst criminal.”

Mary ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Why didn’t we destroy him when we had him imprisoned?”

Astra’s gaze was steady. She said, “Because destroying him would have meant destroying me. Our ruling council decided instead to imprison him. From that point on, every murder, every atrocity he committed is on my shoulders as well as his.”

Mary’s hands fell away. “How can you say that? You just said he’s responsible for his own choices, his own crimes.”

“True, but we had already discovered the extent of his crimes at home,” Astra said. “And we had him imprisoned. Then we made a choice. We didn’t destroy him because I didn’t want to die, and the council didn’t want to kill me. We wimped out. I won’t make that mistake again. There have been too many Northside Restaurants, too many gas ovens and beheadings, and famines, and political assassinations and wars. This poor world has enough to deal with without the Deceiver adding to its burdens. You have to understand something. Destroying him is worth everything we’ve paid, everything that we will pay. Never forget, he is doing do everything in his power to destroy us too.”

Mary sat back on her heels, and her eyes went wide. “I thought when one twin died, the other one did too. Can he survive if you’re destroyed?”

“I think so. Probably,” Astra said. “He wants to badly enough. He did something to alter us when he escaped and came to this world. As a group, we all changed something of our nature when we followed him to become at least partly human. We are literally no longer the people we once were.”

She watched as Mary slowly shook her head, her gaze unfocused. “What really happened to Ariel and Uriel? He told me that he destroyed one, and the other just unraveled.”

“I think he was able to destroy them both, partly because one didn’t want to survive without the other. That mattered more to them than why we came here.” She paused, then repeated with slow emphasis, “It’s all about choices.”

“Whatever you’re trying to say to me now, I wish you would just say it.” Mary’s voice turned weary.

“I’m trying to say that we’re still making choices right now that will affect the outcome of this struggle.” Passion made Astra’s voice shrill. “We need all of our dedication focused on winning this battle. Remember the sacrifice you made when you chose to come to this world. That sacrifice is still relevant and necessary. Destroying the Deceiver is not just worth my life. It’s worth all of our lives.”

“Don’t preach at me anymore right now, damn it.” The younger woman dashed the back of her hand across her eyes. “You’ve done nothing but push at me since we’ve become reacquainted. I don’t want to hear platitudes about making choices or making sacrifices, or about living or dying well, or reasons why we came here. I’ve already lost the life I had. I just lost someone that I loved very much. And as you pointed out in excruciating detail, I’ve lost count of how many people have died just in this week alone.”

“Kinda makes you want to run away from it all, doesn’t it?” Astra said.

She had gone probing for a nerve and found one.

Astra’s shoulders sagged when Mary’s gaze fell away. Even now, Astra thought, after all this time and all that has happened, Mary cannot wholly commit to this battle. How many more Justins will it take to end this? How many more blood-filled decades would they have to witness or sacrifices would Astra have to endure?

Sadly, she bent over Mary’s kneeling figure and reached out a hand.

“Astra,” Michael said from behind her.

She looked over her shoulder, then straightened.

Michael stood a good fifteen feet away from her, and in one hand he held his gun.

 • • •

WHEN ASTRA HAD gone outside to talk to Mary, Michael had prowled the confines of the cabin while he wondered how long he should let them to talk.

The tired expression on Astra’s face had been enough for him to step aside and let her go out to Mary. But the decision left him feeling uneasy.

And so he prowled.

Why was he so uneasy?

Possible answers came quickly. He was losing his perspective. After lifetimes of increasing self-isolation, he had allowed someone inside his fortress. He had become invested. In some ways, it was easier when everything was pastel. One could make hard decisions without having one’s thinking skewed by fear, grief and pain. Just look at how those emotions tore at Mary.

He paced the length and breadth of the cabin while his patience grew thin. He looked out at the women in the garden and studied them with a scowl. What were they saying to each other?

Astra’s posture was eloquent with emotion. Tension vibrated from Mary’s kneeling figure.

Mary, who had confessed that Astra scared her.

Astra, who had said yesterday that she didn’t have time to mother-hen them. Yet she had been so quick to follow Mary outside.

Danger breathed gently on his internal antenna.

He never questioned his instincts. Questioning took time that could all too often turn fatal. Instead he lunged for his gun and sprinted outside.

He stood on the balls of his feet with the gun held at his side, the muzzle pointing to the ground. He kept far enough away that Astra couldn’t reach him, and he noted with icy precision just how easily she could put her hand on Mary’s shoulder.

“Astra,” he said.

She turned and straightened. She caught sight of the gun and disappointment deepened the lines on her face. Like he gave a flying f**k.

Back away from her, he warned her telepathically. Now.

Michael, Astra said. This isn’t going to work. We have too much at stake. Let’s diffuse the situation while we still can. Let me send her on to her next life. It would be peaceful. You can follow her if you like. We can start fresh in your next life and we’ll fight the Deceiver as a united force. I swear she won’t feel any fear or pain.

I would, he said. He raised his gun.

Mary didn’t notice the razor’s edge she walked. Astra’s body blocked Michael from her line of sight, and she was still focused on their previous conversation.

Mary said, “Why is it such a crime to want to run away from this nightmare? It’s a reasonable reaction when you don’t have a death wish. You’re not just prepared to die, Astra—you want to. Well, I don’t, and I’m still here. That counts for something, damn it.”

“It counts for a hell of a lot,” Michael said. “Especially when what you want more than anything in the world is to spend a summer on the beach.” His swordsman’s gaze slashed with Astra’s.

After a moment, Astra’s gaze dropped. “Of course it does.” She looked shaken. She rubbed at her face. “I’m sorry. Don’t mind me. I’m just so tired.”

“That kind of tired can make an ugly situation worse.” Michael bit out the words.

“Don’t push it,” Astra gritted. “I said I’m sorry.”

Mary stood to brush the dirt off the knees of her sweatpants. Michael noted she still didn’t seem to notice the strain between him and Astra. Her face tilted up to the northern sky. She took a few heedless steps forward.

“What’s that?” In a voice that had gone small and scared, she repeated, “What is that?”

He looked up. A bare rocky patch of ground broke the line of trees, through which one could catch a glimpse of the silvery Lake. The sky was sunny and cloudless, but the northern horizon was covered in a sulfurous black haze.

Michael sent his attention winging north. Astra was already ahead of him, her expression stricken, straining.

Astra breathed, “The Upper Peninsula is on fire.”

Chapter Twenty-five

WILDFIRES ARE THE very definition of running amok. They can move at incredible speeds as they consume everything in their path.

The evening before, he had radioed his people from the grounded helicopter, then walked along the southern coast of the U.P. He called lightning down several more times to be sure the fire took hold. It roared into gorgeous, ravenous life.

Its birth was helped by the fact that the main strength of last night’s storm had struck along the shores of the Lower Peninsula. The Upper Peninsula had received a mere sprinkle of rain, and that had come after a long, dry spring.

As a consequence, the land was dry as a bone. A steady northeasterly breeze blew off the Lake and provided a perfect fan for the growing flames.

What a prodigious bonfire he would have.

He continued along the shore and called his creatures to come to the holocaust, until trees exploded from the brilliant heat of leaping red flames while black-winged shadows danced in the psychic realm.

He had come to this earth to start a new life. They just had to come after him, didn’t they? Every time he tried to build something, create his own empire, reach for a new beginning, either she or one of her group was there to get in his way. He had never been able to escape her presence, not once in his excessively long life. He was always aware she lay in wait for him somewhere.