“Are they? Mongrels, I mean?”

“Well, they’re not all angels, if that’s what you’re asking. Why? Do you think you have the right to make that judgment? Do you think I do?”

“No,” she said softly. “I don’t judge others. I’m just … I don’t know how to make choices for people I’ve never even met. It’s … paralyzing. You tell me to think one way, she tells me another. I barely know either of you. How do I know who’s telling me the truth?”

Vincent came up to her, turned her to face him, and tipped her chin up so she could see right into his eyes. It was strange, but it was almost as if their color had changed. She concentrated for a moment, trying to figure out why. They were still the same gold as before. Just somehow … different.

“As an American, you make choices every day for others by supporting your government and its excursions or military actions into other countries. When you buy coffee at the same café every morning, you are choosing to support that business. When you pass judgment on the girl your brother starts to date, you affect his life. When you work for your boss, you choose to support him in his endeavors, as well as everyone else his business touches. You make choices for others every day. The difference is that now you are beginning to realize it. And now you are beginning to own it.”

Docia saw the truth in what he was saying. Eerily so. She had always thought of herself as something of a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But if she looked at it his way, there wasn’t any such thing as a nobody. And she rather liked that perspective. She was also a little surprised to see the attitude coming from some-one of obvious importance, not to mention the sort of strength and prowess that could give him the tools to be a bully to those less powerful than he was.

“I’ll go with you … but I want a promise from you first.”

He rolled his eyes and she could tell by the tension in his body that he wasn’t as relaxed about their tenuous situation as he led her to believe. If she did decide to stay, she wondered if he really would sit back and let her. Luckily for him, she wasn’t comfortable taking that chance.

“What? Tell me what the tipping point is for you here. I can’t wait to hear it.”

“You know, there’s no need for sarcasm,” she said with a sniff. Then she turned dead serious, making sure he felt the strength of her conviction with every molecule in her body and both of her spirits. “We leave here and you bring me to my brother. Ram was right. There’s no way he’ll be satisfied without seeing me face-to-face. I should have known that. So you bring me to him so I can give him some peace of mind. Then I’ll go with you and learn how to be a Bodywalker. In fact, I’ll learn everything.”

She could tell by his hesitation that it was something of a dangerous promise. She wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was asking of him. But given that his other choice was lollygagging in this room waiting for other guards to show up, she fully expected him to cave.

He smiled at her, the left side of his lips curling up, and a peculiar light shone in his eyes.

“Deal,” he said.

And that was when she realized the light shining in his eyes was an enormous sense of pride.

In her.

Vincent tried not to be distracted by things when he was on a mission. He was actually quite proud of the way he was able to weed out all extraneous bullshit and focus on the task at hand. It was one of the qualities that had landed him on SEAL Team Six at a ridiculously young age.

But it was just as likely part of what had gotten him killed, too. Well, almost killed. He had since, with Ramses’s guidance and persona Blended onto his, learned a great deal about seeing the total picture, about processing things in one part of his brain while another part of it got on with the task at hand. So he wasn’t all that heavily critical as he found himself prodding inside his own body for the hundredth time since regaining consciousness, seeking out any sign … even so much as a glimmer … of Ramses’s presence within him. At first the vacancy had been almost crippling, insofar as it had been liberating for Vincent. Dealing with the world as himself, making all choices and decisions alone for the first time in so long, should have been refreshing and enjoyable.

But it was not. It was actually a little frightening, something he could admit to himself only because Ramses had taught him long ago that admitting fear was always the first step in defeating it. Ram had taught him that only a foolish man never felt fear. And considering his fearlessness and his overinflated sense of being a badass had nearly ended his life, it was a lesson that had been very much needed.

Not that he was paralyzed or anything. He wasn’t the type. But every so often he felt as if it were hard to breathe. Usually when he stood between two hallways and had to make the choice to go left or right. He’d been so used to a consensus on these decisions … making them on his own was the starkest feeling he had ever known, next to lying there bleeding and dying and watching a piece of scum shoot his sister and nephew in the head … and doing it only five feet away from him, just to be sure he saw every second of it.

What had been born of that was something he and Ram shared down to their mutual bones. Failure was not an option. He would not fail this nascent Body-walker, and he would not fail Ramses. And more than that, he wouldn’t fail the thousands of people waiting with bated breath for their pharaoh to be reborn.

Oh, and yeah, she really did have a nice ass.

Okay, so sue me, he thought as he put a hand on said ass and gave her a boost up a wall. It could have been worse. It could have been the way Ramses reacted to her. Though, he had to admit, there had been something very electric about the feel of her mouth against his. That was honestly the impetus behind giving her that little smack on the lips earlier. He’d wanted to demystify it for himself. Or maybe find a way to blame it on Ram’s presence inside of him. Because he, Vincent, had never felt anything like that storm of need and vibrant sensation before in his life. It had felt almost mystical. So of course it made sense to blame it on the only source of mysticism in his life.

But even that quick little smooch had been ridiculously stimulating. No Ram. No Hatshepsut. Just him and this poor kid who’d been thrown into a tempest. And if he was going to be really honest, the kiss hadn’t even been necessary. He’d been strung up behind her with a nice A-line view of her backside and her curiously stimulating little feet.

I mean, really! Who the hell has sexy feet?

Not that they’d be very sexy after this little escape. She was barefoot in the snow, her shoes lost somewhere … and dawn was going to break any minute now. He had no choice but to force her to run through woods and bracken, her exposed feet set up to take the worst of it.

But they couldn’t be caught out in the daylight. Not in this weather. Even if by some miracle the sun didn’t kill them, a Bodywalker was capable of freezing to death on the forest floor. There was no healing from being a solid block of ice for several hours. The only thing working in their favor was that there was no chance in hell Odjit would risk her precious little life running after them, and her minions would be just as susceptible as the rest of them. Even the Gargoyles that served her needed to be back at their touchstones and turned to stone before dawn struck … or else they risked a kind of madness that went far beyond the power-mongering lunacy of the Templar bitch.

And she wasn’t the worst of it. If she had been reborn, then that meant the Templar high priest wasn’t too far behind … if he had not yet been born already. And as bad as she would be when she finally reached full strength, he was worse. And the two of them in tandem …

He had neglected to tell Docia some of these details, knowing that Ramses’s wisdom about not overwhelming her with everything at once had been well-founded, not just with her, but with others in the past as well.

Strange, but with the amount of light filling the gray, pre-dawn sky, he ought to have begun to feel the strange tingling sensation in his extremities that was a precursor to the Rapture, the paralysis that crippled a Body-walker caught in the sun. He knew instantly it had something to do with this Suspension Odjit had inflicted on them, but the knowledge gave him little comfort, even though it might mean they could make it much farther than he might have anticipated. Nothing that reminded him Ramses was not with him could make him comfortable.

But he pushed it aside, his practiced eye tracking the woods and the sun’s cresting point, his ears seeking the sound of traffic or water to bring it all together. Running along the road might be dangerous, but they needed to get indoors somewhere, quickly. Since the Suspension had not been fully cast, there was no telling when Ramses would return, and with him the weakness of the Rapture. Perhaps Docia would not fall victim to it as severely, because she was not yet Blended, but she would not be safe continuing on without him. She had no idea how to survive against these people, and her desire to return to her brother proved it. No doubt the Templars already knew everything about her previous life and would be watching her brother, anticipating reacquiring her there at some point. It was common for confused newly fledged Bodywalkers to try to cling to their old lives, the things they knew and loved.

But it was best not only for her but for them that she keep her contact with them to a minimum … or better yet, severed all ties completely.

“My God, it’s so cold,” she gasped, stumbling to a stop and wrapping her arms around herself, dancing in the snow from one foot to the other as if it would give relief to her stinging, aching feet. The pain she was in was so strong, he could practically feel it crackling along the edges of his awareness, and he hated himself for having to do this to her, for forcing her to suffer like this. It was, after all, his fault. He should never have left the house with her. He should never have trusted anyone else with her safety. Even if it was Hexus, one of Stohn’s most trusted soldiers, it had not been Hexus’s duty. His duty was to serve and protect Windham House and anyone his domini ordered him to protect, true, but Vincent’s duty to protect her superseded Kasimir’s authority. He should have gone with his instincts.

Their instincts. His and Ram’s.

He stilled. There it was. The first sign. The moment he stopped thinking of Ram’s goals as his own, the moment he forgot to separate the two except as an afterthought, that was the moment he knew Ramses was coming back. And right on the back of it was the start of that tingling sensation, the warning along the edges of his skin that the sun was touching it and that the Rapture was imminent.

He drew breath to speak, then smelled it. Wood fire. They were far enough from the old Spanish church where Odjit and her followers had been holed up, so it wasn’t originating from there. He had to assume it was from somewhere else, a dwelling of some sort.

“Come on,” he encouraged her, reaching out to her.

She didn’t even hesitate to put her hand in his, and for some reason that made him smile inside. That she took a step into the snow readily told him just what a trouper she really was. And despite Asikri’s judgment of her as a whiner, he knew she was anything but. Nor was she the coward he had accused her of being in order to get a rise out of her. She honestly had to be one of the bravest of creatures, in his opinion, to keep adapting so quickly to her precipitously changing situation again and again. A lesser person would have just collapsed into a ball … would have stayed in the nice warm church, no matter what it might mean.

He yanked on her given hand, whipping her up hard against his body, grinning down at her when she gasped with surprise. Then she groaned, a surprisingly sexy little sound, followed by an equally sexy little wriggle into the warmth of his body. He wished he had the luxury of time to enjoy it, but he did not. Instead, he scooped her up in his arms and began to double-time it through the woods in the direction of the smell of smoke.

She burrowed her ice-cold nose and face against his neck, under his hair, her hot breath gasping out against him in puffs and shivery words.

“Y-you’re so w-warm!” she groaned.

“You will be, too, in a minute,” he promised her, although he wasn’t as confident as he sounded. His lips were going numb, and it wasn’t from the cold. In fact, he was feeling less and less cold by the second, which meant he was feeling less and less, period. He wasn’t prone to panic, knowing it was the fastest way to get himself killed, not to mention her, but he’d be lying if he were to say he was perfectly calm about it.

When his foot hit the gravel driveway leading up to a pointy little A-frame house nestled into the woods on one side and the edge of a cliff on the other, he wanted to shout with triumph. But he didn’t want her to think he hadn’t had it all under control all along. Sunrise had broken about twenty minutes ago, and there was no time for celebrations.