“Maybe you’re right.” He didn’t sound convinced.

She gave him a stern glance over the rim of the sunglasses. “We did the best we could with the information we had. It wasn’t a mistake for me to help you just now either. You were suffering, and I couldn’t stand the thought of doing nothing when I have the capacity to help. More than that, I need you to get better as fast as you can. I know I’m outmatched right now. If something else were to happen while you are incapacitated, I couldn’t handle it by myself. I haven’t recovered enough of my memories yet. I’m feeling stretched thin as it is.”

He mulled over that while he drank his Gatorade and shifted the pillow to a more comfortable spot. When next he spoke, he seemed to be making a non sequitur. “I didn’t care about anyone when I was a kid. Not my parents, not my so-called friends. Nothing seemed quite real.”

She frowned. “How did you and Astra meet?”

“She found me when I was eight. Even at that early age, I had already started to do crazier things in an effort to feel something other than anger.” He stretched his injured leg and winced. “Astra was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. She was real like nothing else had been. Of course now I understand why, and what that meant.”

She drove with care as she listened. Her heart ached as he spoke with such matter-of-fact calm. “Do you have any idea how many lives you’ve lived since—over the last nine hundred years?”

Since you killed me, and I stopped reincarnating. Those had been the first words that came to mind, but she couldn’t bear to say them. She might never be able to say them out loud. The memories were too raw. They lay between them like a shadow.

“A few. I connected with two others from our group, Ariel and Uriel, just before they were destroyed. Astra and I found each other in other lifetimes.” He looked out his window. “I haven’t bothered to try to recover much of those memories. They seemed pretty meaningless.”

She gripped the steering wheel. She tried to imagine how he had lived, how he must have recovered his sense of identity time and again, only to realize after searching that she wasn’t anywhere to be found, neither alive nor destroyed but lost somewhere in limbo. That all he could do was fight and wait—and wait—and wait. In all that time, the only person who had been anything like a kindred spirit, the only person he could rely on, had been Astra.

She took a deep breath. “Astra doesn’t trust me.”

“Probably not.” He finished the second bottle of Gatorade.

“I don’t blame her.” She glanced at him sideways. “As damaged as I was—and by the Deceiver, no less—I wouldn’t trust me either if I were her.”

“Don’t take it personally. Astra doesn’t trust anybody, not even me,” Michael said. He punched the pillow and eased his head onto it. “Maybe especially not me.”

“Why especially not you?” Her anger was quick to flare again on his behalf.

One corner of his mouth quirked up. “She had her reasons. Remember, she met and trained me when I was a young and budding criminal.”

She asked, “Do you trust her?”

“I trust her to do anything and everything she can to destroy the Deceiver. So yes, in a way I do. For certain things.”

She nodded although his eyes were closed. After a few minutes, she said in a soft voice, “I’m sorry I got mad.”

She thought he might have fallen asleep until he replied, “You weren’t really mad. You’ve just been scared and upset. You’ve had—”

“—a rough day,” she finished with him. Although it wasn’t really funny, they both chuckled and tension eased from the car. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

He laid his arm along the back of the seat and settled his hand, large and warm and heavy, at the nape of her neck. She startled at his touch and forced herself to relax. A complex set of emotions surged in reaction. Primary among them was a deep sense of comfort.

“I was there. I know what the dragon did for you,” he said. “You were injured, your spirit somehow bent, and now that’s gone. I trust you.”

She blinked. “I didn’t know I needed to hear that, but I did. Thank you. I trust you too. Michael?”

“Yeah.”

His voice was sleepy. She hated to say what she was going to say next, but it had been bothering her ever since she woke up.

“I think the Deceiver has to have ties to the police,” she said. “Don’t you? I can’t think of any other way those two drones could have tracked me to South Bend to try to kidnap me. Nobody knew where I was going when I left my house. Hell, even I didn’t know—most of what I did was on impulse. Maybe he could have found me through his abilities alone, but I don’t think they could have. Could they?” She hesitated, then finished, “You see, I’ve been worrying about this car. He had to have gotten a good look at it, along with its license plate.”

A pause. He released a heavy, exasperated sigh. “Where the f**k is my brain?”

She lifted a shoulder and gave him a wry look. “It’s with the rest of your body, which is seriously injured and exhausted.”

The glance he gave her said quite clearly that he didn’t consider that an excuse. “I know for a fact he’s got ties to the police, and to the FBI, and other organizations. And of course he would have noticed the make and model of this car, along with the license plates. I’ll try to counteract that.”

“By doing what?”

“I can project a kind of null space around us so that people will tend not to notice us.”

She blinked. “A null space?”

“It’s a kind of energy—a spell if you like—that encourages the mind to look elsewhere. But it doesn’t really turn us invisible, so to be on the safe side, we still need to ditch this car and get a new one. Do you know how to get to Petoskey?”

She nodded. “I’ve been there before. The route I took was Highway 131 until it reaches 31, which follows the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Is that okay?”

He grunted. “That’ll do. Wake me before we get there. We’ll need to change vehicles before we go through town.”

“Okay.” She blew out a breath. “Can you at least try to rest while you do that null space thingy?”

He nodded and settled back into his seat. She listened as his breathing deepened, but his hand never moved from her neck and she could tell that he wasn’t quite asleep.

Then she sensed something coming from him, a strange kind of subtle energy. She meant to focus on it, but then her thoughts slid away to something else and she forgot.

They continued to travel north in heavy traffic. People were getting a head start on Memorial Day weekend. She hoped it would make them even harder to spot.

The orderly procession along the highway produced an illusion of normality, and the late afternoon sunshine made her sleepy. She sipped her black cherry Gatorade and chewed her lip as she thought through what she and Michael had discussed.

The Deceiver could have been in touch with his various police contacts by cell within minutes of leaving the cabin. It was logical to assume he had, so she had to believe they were now fugitives from the police. Did he have enough political clout to get the authorities to put an APB out on them?

He aspired to take the Presidency, so if she were a betting fool, she would bet yes, he did have that kind of clout. Their continued freedom might hinge on whether or not a police cruiser sighted their vehicle, which was why Michael couldn’t let himself fully relax.

She gritted her teeth and put it out of her mind. There was nothing she could do about it. She had to concentrate on handling the challenges right in front of her. She just hoped that the null space that Michael was projecting . . . that strange energy coming from his lax body . . .

Her mind slid away again. What was she thinking? She just hoped the heavy traffic helped to camouflage them somewhat from their pursuers.

How had the Deceiver found Michael’s cabin? What had given them away? Would they ever find out? If they didn’t know how they had been discovered, how could they prevent it from happening again? How could they ever stop moving, even when they reached Astra?

Despair threatened to engulf her. They were already tired and wounded, and now they were fighting to meet up with an old woman who looked like she was at death’s door. What if all three of them became fugitives?

She realized this was the first time she’d had to think in private since she had escaped from her would-be kidnappers a few days ago in northern Indiana. First she had been too shocked to absorb the enormity of what was happening. Then Michael had found her, and events had hurtled forward at a breakneck pace.

A few days ago, she had been a different person, a person who questioned herself but did not think to question the reality she lived in. That Mary Byrne had suffered from disturbing dreams and the stress of knowing that in some fugitive, mysterious way she did not fit into her life.

That Mary had argued with her ex-husband and worried about losing her own sanity. She had bought a chocolate shake and had left town for an afternoon’s outing. When her concept of reality had undertaken a radical, irreversible shift, so too had her sense of self, and that Mary Byrne had died.

As she had described once to Michael, she felt like she had lived in some kind of painting all her life. The painting had so much color and detail, it seemed as if it should have made sense, should have been real. But then somebody either smashed the frame or she had fallen out, and she couldn’t go back to live there any longer. The painting was two-dimensional, and she didn’t fit, but she barely understood this new reality either, or how to survive in it.

Or maybe she, like the painting, had been a two-dimensional creation, more illusion and memory and the reflection of other people’s expectations than reality. Some aspects of her core nature lingered. She had an innate gentleness, her moral code, her artistic appreciation and healing abilities, but all her illusions had burned away. Michael had described her as being “bent.” She thought of herself as crippled, not quite twisted into an aberrant existence, quietly subsisting as a shadow of her true self.

She thought of the shabby little house she had rented, her ivory tower, now burned to the ground by the Deceiver. All of the minutiae that had comprised her earlier human life, the mementoes and photographs from her family, her quilts and paintings and clothes, had been destroyed.

It would be a lie to say she didn’t feel a twinge of loss, because she did, but she realized that the loss of her home would have hit her former self, the shadow Mary, much harder. She had lost a home but had regained her health and sense of identity, along with a strange heritage that might be terrible, but it was also powerful and real, and it was hers.

They could never go home again. (And she realized, even as she thought it, after all this time she still called the other alien place “home.”) So gradually through the millennia they became more humanlike.

The times they forgot who they once were, they dreamed of human things, desires and ambitions, of satisfying work, a loving marriage, raising children and living peaceful lives. But even while they dreamed, they were troubled because they knew somewhere in their hearts that those dreams weren’t real. Then they woke again and realized who they were. But they still remembered they had dreamed.

Then she thought, No.

In that line of thinking, she was inventing a community that did not exist. Perhaps it had at one point in the distant past. But of the original seven who had pursued the Deceiver to Earth, four of them were gone forever. Astra never forgot who she was, and the Deceiver stole human lives in order to remember his past.

And Michael had just admitted that nothing had seemed real before he met Astra. His sense of unreality had to stem in part from her long disappearance, but she couldn’t have been the only reason. He must feel that way in part because he didn’t feel human.

So she was talking only about herself.

She was the one who dreamed those human dreams. She kept going back in memory to her life nine hundred years ago, because she remembered living for too brief a time in a way that allowed her to celebrate and explore the two aspects of her identity, both the alien and the human, with people who loved and accepted her. Their lives had been gracious gifts imbued with hearth and magic and mystery. They had understood that about themselves, about each other and their world.

She realized how much she missed those people. They had been her family, and they had died so long ago she didn’t even know where their graves were.

An ache settled deep under her ribs. She rubbed her face. Then she set the thought of them aside as gently as if she had been handling an old, fragile photo album and concentrated on moving toward her future.

Chapter Five

THE HIGHWAY UNFURLED in a long, winding ribbon that lay across a rolling wooded landscape, like an endless snake that encircled the world. The wooded landscape was interspersed with patches of sunlit farmland filled with fruit orchards and fields of golden grain dotted with giant bales of hay.

It wasn’t long before Mary held on to the steering wheel and her concentration as she fought a combination of hunger and exhaustion. Every dip and curve in the road felt exaggerated. Dizziness was never far away. She kept her silence and kept driving.

Every mile she drove gave Michael a chance for more rest. She wanted to give him all the recovery time she could. She had no illusions about herself. She had gotten very lucky in her morning confrontation with the Deceiver. Michael was far more valuable in a fight.

Finally she came upon a stretch of landscape she recognized. The highway was dotted with intermittent clusters of neighborhoods, restaurants, various strip malls and antique stores. She guessed they were a half hour away from downtown Petoskey. She placed a reluctant hand on Michael’s knee.