The thought was a very sad one. She suddenly felt a heavy, exhaustive weight on her chest. She couldn’t figure out if it was just an empathetic feeling or if the woman inside her was reacting to the truth of the observation.

“The world is always changing, always renewing itself in spellbinding ways. And when we die, we are secluded from it for a hundred years and know nothing of it when we are reborn and Blended with our new original. Only their familiarity with the ways of the world make it anything resembling bearable. It’s part of the reason why it will take so long for your carbon to assimilate herself with you.”

Docia gave off a wicked shudder. “Let’s not use the word assimilate, shall we? I just had flashbacks to Star Trek and the Borg, and even now I’m imagining tubes, machinery, and lasers popping out of all my body parts.” Again, she shuddered. It wasn’t such a far-off concept, she was realizing. There might not be biomechanical bits and bobs involved, but for all intents and purposes, she realized, she was being assimilated into the strange cult of Bodywalkers. Her life, as he had been trying to explain, would never be the same again.

His perplexed expression told her that the pop culture reference had been lost on him. She wondered then how old he was, how long he had been in this particular original.

“How long since the last time you had to find a new original?” she asked him. It had to be relatively recent if he was lost on a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference. And shouldn’t his original, Vincent, be able to identify the markers even if Ram couldn’t? Of course, she was assuming everyone in the world knew about … “Captain Jean-Luc Picard or even Seven of Nine from the later series Voyager? What about Neo from The Matrix? Luke Skywalker? Any of this ringing a bell with you?”

“Vincent wasn’t the type to dwell on items of pop culture. He and I are very similar in that we are very serious about very specific things and very rarely drift from that focus. Vincent and I have been Blended for thirty years now.”

“So … you really are sixty-eight,” she murmured.

“A great many of us are going to be emerging in the next short while,” he informed her solemnly. “There was an incident about a century ago that decimated a large portion of the Bodywalker society.”

“An incident?” she repeated just as carefully as he had. “As in a war?” she said intuitively with a sudden frown, her fingers lifting nervously to the fresh map of stitches on her head. “Since you are resistant to age and disease by the sound of it, it’s the only thing outside of natural disaster that usually causes massive deaths.”

“Yes. A war. Several of us died in the five years leading up to the last devastating battle, but most died in the final week. Our king and queen were among them.”

“Queen.” Her eyes suddenly expanded in her own head. “Wait a minute. There’s a king? And I’m … you’re expecting me to rule a whole bunch of—”

“He has not returned as yet, as far as we can tell. That is a worry for later,” he instructed her. “And the woman inside of you knows everything you will need to know in order to fulfill the role of a queen. Try not to panic.”

“Ha! Easy for you to say. You’re the carbon here. You’ve done this before! I’ve only had one life and, to be really friggin’ honest about it, I’ve kind of been screwing it up, professionally speaking.”

“I doubt that very much,” he said kindly. Well, maybe not kindly. He wasn’t patronizing her. He honestly didn’t think she was the professional retard that she was.

“Pfft. You haven’t seen me try to type a letter,” she mumbled. “So, what was this war about, anyway?”

He reached out to touch her elbow and indicated a stone chair, the arms and legs of which formed a curved X, the upper cup of the X holding a soft velvet cushion of shining gold. She sat down, settling in for what promised to be a good story. The understanding made her both a little excited and a little nauseated. What the hell had she gotten herself into?

“It was a civil war,” he said simply. “A war as old as our people, and as old as time in almost all civilizations. The war between those in government seat, the Politic, and those in the temples, the Templars.”

“Church and state,” she said grimly. “We have a version of that problem, only … nothing we’re on the brink of war for.”

“You would be, in this instance, and on many occasions in the history of the world you were. But this isn’t a matter of freedom to practice religion, for we Body-walkers all believe in the same gods. And we have also learned to accept that our original halves may not always agree with us, if they have been brought up strongly otherwise. However, the very nature of learning of our existence often challenges many belief systems. And when they know what we know, when they see the Ether … minds often are changed.”

Docia nodded, swallowing hard as she recalled her own experience. “I can see how that would be. But if the war isn’t about intolerance, then what is it about?”

“The Politic does not seek to know the hearts and minds of its people, or to rule its beliefs. Quite the opposite. However, the priests and priestesses, the Templars, they believe it is they who should be ruling the Body-walkers in all other matters, as well as in religion. They believe they who are closest to the gods would make the truest of statesmen. They do not acknowledge the laws of ascension as was agreed upon many thousands of years ago. They do not acknowledge the body Politic or the blood and spirit of the greatest king and queen ever to rule in Egypt.”

“And they are?”

“Menes, the great unifier of Egypt. In his reign he was able to bring upper and lower Egypt together by both war and diplomacy, proving himself capable of both. And then there is Hatshepsut. It was rare for a woman to rule all of Egypt in her time, and yet she did so with strength and fortitude, also unifying many nations into Egypt, expanding trade routes that made the kingdom flourish. She was pharaoh in her own right, long before Cleopatra’s time.”

Docia narrowed her eyes on him, suddenly rising back to her feet as she took in his powerful build and bearing.

“Ram,” she said softly. “Holy hell, is that short for Ramses?”

“Indeed it is,” he said with a brusque nod.

“Umm … which one? There were …”

“The second. Ramses the Second.” He shrugged, as if he hadn’t built half the statuary in Egypt, most of it bearing his likeness. His original likeness. She stared at his face, wondering what he had looked like when he had been the original. She suddenly felt breathless and light-headed. She was standing in front of Ramses the frickin’ Second!

“Hey, wait a minute … weren’t you the one who resisted the whole freeing of the Hebrew slaves thing?”

He grimaced. “Details of that situation have been greatly … misrepresented,” he said, sounding put-upon and pained.

“So, no locusts?”

“Docia, I am not interested in discussing the past. It is gone from the world now. There are more important things in the immediate present we should be focused on.”

“What about the fiery hail?”

“Docia,” he warned.

She bit her bottom lip to keep from giggling at his expense.

“Oh, c’mon. Did the Red Sea part even just a little bit?” She held up her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

He huffed out a sigh and rubbed a pair of fingers against his right temple as if he had a headache. But despite her teasing and her rudimentary knowledge of Charlton Heston’s portrayal of the past, she did know that history looked upon Ramses II as the greatest architect and the most significant pharaoh of all time.

And yet … she realized then that somewhere along the way he had ceded his authority to another … to someone he had looked on as more powerful and more worthy than he. There was a distinct lack of arrogance in an act like that. Provided it had been a peaceful and willing surrender.…

War. Was the war that had killed all those Body-walkers a century ago still ongoing? The Bodywalkers had decimated themselves … had they learned anything from it?

“Are you still at war?” she asked, her voice sounding very small and squeaky.

“Things have been quiet … but the instigators of the last altercation, as far as we know, have not yet been resurrected into new originals. They died in tandem with our king and queen, who sacrificed themselves to see to it those Templars’ influence and seditious voices were dragged back to the Ether. It was their hope that a hundred years of cooling their heels would calm them down a little … and would keep the unsuspecting human race safe for a while longer.”

“Safe?” she echoed.

“Mmm.” He frowned. “Part of the Templar belief is the subjugation of what they look on as the inferior human race, not to mention the subjugation of the originals who host them.”

“Oh,” she said, the word coming out meekly. She didn’t need a lengthy explanation. She could well imagine what that meant. Docia put a hand to her stomach, rubbing it anxiously as nerves and fear clenched. A Bodywalker had the power to subjugate the soul of its original host.

“God, what the heck have I done? What in hell is inside of me?”

Ram didn’t blame her for her anxiety. There was much to be worried about. The internal squabbles of Bodywalker politics were nothing compared with the malevolence of the other Nightwalkers lurking out there, the other breeds lashed down to the night like the Bodywalkers. There were creatures out there that would tear her apart as soon as they got a whiff of the Body-walker inside of her.

But she was overwhelmed as it was. She hardly needed more horror stories, and as long as she remained in the compound she would be safe from those other threats, so he saw no need to burden her with it all at once. He wanted to give her a little time to adjust first.

He had held off touching her all this time, even though he’d had urges to do so in order to give her comfort or the strength of support. He was unable to reconcile the way she made him react on such a strangely visceral level. But if touching her was disturbing, not touching her was proving to be frustrating and painful. He turned away from her, paced a couple of steps, running a hand through the thick waves of his hair in a gesture habitual of Vincent far more than of Ram, a bit of minutia she would not be aware of.

You need to relax, he heard Vincent say in a rare aside as himself rather than the Blended voice they had long spoken with in thought and deed these past years. She’s just a girl.

Not just a girl. A queen. She may have been just a girl before, but now she was Hatshepsut, the greatest queen of all time, a dominant, strident personality … and the eternal mate to his king, the one and only man he could have ever stomached ceding authority to. The man who deserved it based solely on his strength and wicked intellect. For as great as Ramses had been in his time, Menes had been greater. Ramses had existed and worked off the backbone of the dynasties before him that had forged the way. Menes had been the core of that backbone. She would see that one day very soon. And, just as she had many times before, she would fall in love with Menes for it.

Ram turned to say something to her, and Docia was there, so suddenly, beneath his chin, bumping against his body. He instinctively reached out a hand to steady her, drawing her close, though by accident or on purpose, he wasn’t certain. Her hair brushed beneath his nose and he could smell her, a sandy sweetness of musky incense from the meditation room. She was overly warm, his hands burning once more as they slid over her back. He knew the sensation would last for hours after he let her go, just as it had last time, but he couldn’t make himself lift his hands away from her. He couldn’t seem to force himself to step back. Couldn’t make himself understand that she was destined for another man and forbidden to him.

He couldn’t do that because electricity began to thump through his body everywhere they connected. It tingled and sparkled along all the surfaces of his skin, almost ticklish at first, but it quickly evolved into something much less innocent, something deep and sinful … something that made his blood burn.

And he knew she felt it, too. He could tell by the delicate little gasp that erupted from her pillowy lips, by the warm blush that flew like wings up very fair cheeks, beneath what remained of her bruises. She looked up at him then, her mink-brown eyes widening.

“Who are you in there?” he asked with sudden, breathless heat. He knew who she was. But he had worked side by side with his queen over many ages, and never had he allowed himself to feel … never had he truly felt anything like what he was feeling whenever this woman drew close to him. They had to be wrong, he thought a bit wildly. He would never betray Menes or her in such ways! And so the demanding question burst out of him, and he found himself giving her a small, jolting shake … as if he could rattle her around a bit and rush her carbon to the surface.