Maggie Shayne - Twilight Prophecy

“The book was pulled.” Frowning, James shot a look at Brigit. “Isn’t that what Will Waters was saying in the intro? That the government had banned it, called a halt to the release, confiscated every copy before it ever hit the bookstores?”

“Yeah, J.W., but you’ve gotta know when the author of a banned book is taken out on national TV, the public will start turning over every rock to find out what the book had to say,” Brigit said.

“And I have no doubt there are copies somewhere. And there are certainly people who know what was in those pages. His publisher, for one,” Rhiannon added.

“No doubt the DPI has already absconded with every computer that ever came within reach of the manuscript,” she went on. “But that won’t stop word from spreading. No, this cat is thoroughly out of the proverbial bag.”

“We need to know what’s in that book,” James said softly.

Rhiannon nodded. “I agree. But we also need to keep our focus here. Our main goal has to be to prevent the foretold annihilation of our race. And to do that, we need to understand the parts of that clay tablet that were incomplete, the missing pieces. And the other clay tablet in our possession, the one we’ve kept for centuries, never quite sure why.”

“I’d forgotten about that. Legend has it that clay tablet will one day save our race,” James said, recalling the tales told to him over and over throughout his childhood. The legends of his race, how they began, and the story of the tablet that must be protected. “Where is it?”

“Damien has it,” Rhiannon said. “I’ll get it from him. The prophecy suggests that all of this so-called Armageddon is heavily dependent upon the involvement of two things.”

“Yeah,” Brigit muttered. “Us.”

“And him,” Rhiannon said.

James frowned. “Him? Him, who? You mean Utanapishtim?”

“Precisely.” Rhiannon rose from the sofa, paced across the room, then turned and paced back again. “So what Folsom wrote in that book, and what the government intends to do about it, and whether it becomes public knowledge—all of that is on the back burner. Our first goals are these—we have to find and rescue the professor, so that she can help us locate and translate the rest of that prophecy. And we have to enlist the help of the very first immortal. The Ancient One. The Flood Survivor. The father of our race. Utanapishtim.”

“How the hell are we going to do that?” James asked. “A séance?”

“Of course!” Brigit said. “Aunt Rhi was a priestess of Isis—”

“Not was, is. And that’s high priestess,” Rhiannon corrected.

“Yeah, yeah,” Brigit said, no doubt pissing Rhiannon off again, James thought. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you know how to contact the dead and all that shit, right? Right? So is that it? Are we going to have a séance?”

“Not exactly,” Rhiannon said. “We don’t need to speak to the dead if Utanapishtim is alive.”

“But he’s not,” Brigit said. “He’s been dead for more than five thousand years, Aunt Rhi.”

“Yes, well, that’s where your brother comes in.”

Rhiannon speared James with her eyes, even as he felt his own widen. “You can’t mean … you want me to—”

“Raise him, J.W.”

He shot off the sofa as if it had electrocuted him. “I can’t!” The panther’s head came up, and she looked irritated at being disturbed from her nap by his sudden movement.

“How do you know?” Rhiannon asked him.

“For the love of—how could I not know?”

Rhiannon shrugged, graceful, sexy. “I’ve seen you raise the dead, J.W. You’ve been doing it since you were born. You started with your own sister, stillborn, blue, no heartbeat, not a breath of air in her lungs.” Rhiannon moved closer, reaching out and grabbing James’s forefinger, enclosing it in her fist. “You took hold of her just like this,” she said. “And she breathed, J.W. She breathed. You healed her. You brought her back to life.”

“I know. I know. And yeah, I’ve been successful a few other times since then, but only when the subject has just died. Never with anyone who’s been dead for long.”

“But have you tried?” Rhiannon asked.

“What, restoring life to a rotting corpse? Yeah, yeah, that’s how I spend my Halloweens. Are you fucking crazy?”

“So you’ve never tried, then,” Brigit said. She was rising now, too, growing excited, he thought, at this impossible, insane notion.

“No, I’ve never tried.”

Rhiannon nodded. “We’ll start small, say with someone a week dead. And we’ll build from there. We’ll need to find corpses in various stages of decomposition, of course, and—”

“Shit.” James’s stomach convulsed. He took an involuntary step backward. “No. No, this is sick.”

“Call it what you will. It’s necessary,” Rhiannon said.

“It’s to save our race,” Brigit added.

“No way. No way in hell.” James was shaking his head slowly in dawning horror. “And it won’t work. And even if it did, Utanapishtim isn’t going to be in some stage of decomposition. He’d be dust by now.”

Rhiannon shrugged. “Dust, bones, rotted flesh, all just different phases of the same basic components. If you can do it with one, you can do it with the others.”

“You’re out of your mind, Rhiannon.”

She lifted her perfectly arched brows and sent him a look that told him he was getting close to the danger zone.

And then Brigit’s hand landed on his shoulder. “J.W…. James. You’ve spent your entire life asking yourself, and the universe, why you were born with this power. Maybe this is it. Your answer. Maybe this is why. To save your family. Your people . There’s not much that could be bigger, more important, than that.

Is there?”

He stared at her. And he could barely believe that he was letting her talk him into it. Because she had a point. He had always wondered why. He’d always known he had this power for a reason, a big reason, and he’d been searching for it all his life.

Maybe this was it. And if there was any chance it was, then he couldn’t very well turn his back on it, now could he?

He lowered his eyes, released all his breath at once, swallowed hard and whispered, “All right. All right, I’ll … I’m in.”

“Good.” He heard the smile in Rhiannon’s voice, felt his sister’s arms close around him in a relieved hug.

“We’re going to have to get out of the city,” Rhiannon announced, moving quickly toward the nearest window, her cat at her heels. “We need someplace with privacy for these experiments. We’ll leave as soon as possible.”

“But, Rhiannon,” James said, lifting his head. “What about Lucy Lanfair?”

“Lucy … oh, the professor? Obviously we’re going to have to take her with us. We’ll pick her up on the way.” She glanced out the window. “But not tonight. It’s nearly dawn. I must rest. I suggest you do the same.”

Lucy opened her eyes and felt an odd, moist breeze on her face. Almost as if she were outside. She’d been sleeping very soundly and wondered what on earth had awakened her. Something had. And she was nowhere near ready to get up, not after …

No, she wouldn’t think about that. She needed to pull up the covers, roll onto her other side and …

Where were the covers?

Wait, where was the mattress? The bed? All she felt was sand and very finely ground pebbles.

Her eyes popped open, and the first thing they focused on was the giant orange curve of the sun, just beginning to rise over a distant horizon. She was … outdoors. On the shore of the ocean. She was grasping handfuls of sand and shells in search of blankets.

Waves whispered soothing sounds as they whooshed up over the sand, then burbled back out again. The wind smelled like seaweed and brine. She brushed off her hand, rubbing it against her shirt, then paused, because she was wearing clothes. A pair of jeans that were a size too big, and a white button-down shirt. A man’s shirt, she thought. Sitting up, she pushed a hand through her hair, which felt vaguely like a rat’s nest, and tried to remember how she’d ended up here. The last thing she remembered …