Twilight Fulfilled (13 page)

“Not good enough.” She faced front and began walking again.

S
oon enough she spotted her car right where she'd left it, in a conveniently located pull-off near a riverbank. The spot was intended for anglers in need of a place to leave their vehicles while they walked the river, fishing. But the season for fly-fishing had long since passed, and it didn't look as if another vehicle had been near the place. The tire marks in the gravel were the ones she'd put there herself when she'd left the car a few days earlier.

She hurried to it, her keen eyes scanning it for nicks or dings and finding none.

Utana came right along beside her, reaching for the passenger door. But she held up a hand, and said, “Wait. Don't touch it yet.”

Utana frowned, and she knew it was hard for him to take orders. Well, if he were going to ride with her, he'd better get used to it. They weren't in his den of fake devotees anymore. And yet she softened
her barked command. “It could be dangerous,” she explained.

He nodded, took two backward steps and stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching her as she inspected her beloved baby.

“What must I promise, Brigit—what would be…good enough, as you say, to make you tell me where the Chosens are imprisoned?” Utana asked.

She was momentarily confused as she moved slowly around her car, bending over to peer beneath the wheel wells, dropping down on all fours to inspect the undercarriage. Without pulling her head from beneath the car, she said, “I want you to promise me you won't kill them. Not any of them. Ever.”

He was silent, so she came out from under the car and rose up to look at him. He was standing a few feet from the hood. His head was tipped back, his eyes searching the sky. “How can I promise you that I will disobey the dictates of the gods?”

She rolled her eyes and crouched down again. “I don't believe the gods want you to murder innocent beings, Utana. And if they do, then they aren't gods at all. They're demons.”

“Brigit, take care, lest they unleash their wrath upon you as they did me.”

She popped up again. “No, you know what? I'm right about this, and you need to listen to me. Your gods, they must be good ones, to inspire such de
votion. And yet you're going around claiming that they've ordered the genocide of an entire species. I would think they'd be furious with you for that.”

He dropped his head and met her eyes, a frown marring his brow.

“What if it wasn't them?” Brigit asked.

He looked at her over the top of the car, blinking as if she were speaking words he had yet to learn. “What meaning has such a question? If not the gods, then who? Who sentenced me to centuries of living death and slowly growing madness?”

“Maybe no one did,” she said. “Maybe it was just an unforeseen side effect of an immortal being beheaded and cremated. Did you ever think of that? Maybe if that desert witch hadn't burned your body to try to free your soul five thousand years ago, you might have revived, healed, reattached your severed head and been fine?”

He considered it. She saw the wheels turning behind his eyes. “But the gods allowed it. They allowed my suffering.”

“The gods allow all kinds of misery, Utana. Innocent children get terrible diseases, or die of starvation or in senseless wars. Surely that doesn't mean the gods are punishing them. It might just be that…shit happens, Utana.”

She got slowly to her feet, moving closer to him. Maybe the healing touch of her hands had had some
impact after all. She'd never seen him thinking this deeply about the possibility that he had been wrong.

“Or maybe,” she went on, “just maybe, all of this is part of some greater plan. Maybe you didn't remain conscious all those years so that you could murder the children you created. Instead, maybe you were allowed to live on so that you could see the beautiful race that sprang from you. The wonderful, powerful, miraculous family that you fathered. Maybe the gods thought you deserved that chance, and that the centuries of suffering would be worth it to you.”

He shook his head slowly, turning away from her, as if her words were too much for him to process.

Sensing a powerful wavering in his stubborn beliefs, she hurried around the car and stood close to him, her legs almost touching his. Lifting a hand to his cheek, she made him look down and into her eyes. “Maybe it was the only way for you to be here now, Utana. With
me
.”

She hadn't planned that part. It had sort of burbled up out of her, along with an inexplicable rush of hot tears that welled up in her eyes despite her rapid blinking.

His hand rose to push her hair away from her face, and his eyes plumbed hers so desperately that she could literally feel the yearning in him. The longing for her answers to make sense, to be believable to him. And she realized in that moment,
for the first time, that he wanted another way out of this. He wanted her to be right—or anyone to be right, besides him.

But would he tell her that? No, of course not, the stubborn jerk.

“I will consider your words, my beautiful Brigit.”

“I need you to do more than that,” she whispered. “I need you to promise me that you will not kill my people.”

“I will consider your words,” he repeated. “And this much I will promise. I will never harm you. You have rendered me incapable of that.” He lifted his eyes to the heavens, as if awaiting a bolt of lightning to come down and take him out. When it didn't, he seemed more emboldened. “And I find I wish to make yet another concession. I will not use this trap set by Nashmun and his people to kill the vahmpeers. I will…I will make a truce with them until this matter is settled and the Chosens are safe.”

She searched his face, seeing relief there. Just putting off the task seemed to take a load off his mind. “How do I know you won't turn the beam from your eyes upon them the moment the Chosen are free?”

He took a step back from her, made a fist and thumped it hard against his chest, right over his heart. “I vow to you, Brigit, I will aid your people in rescuing the Chosens. And I will do no harm to them. When the task is complete, we shall go our
separate ways, your people and me. And only when we meet again will I resume the sad mission my gods require of me. If, indeed, I determine that it is their command. I swear these things on the name of Inanna, who will strike me down should I break my vow to you. For you are so like her, you must surely be beloved of her.”

She was taken aback by that. “I'm…like Inanna? A goddess?”

He smiled only slightly, but the amusement in his eyes was impossible not to see. “So very like her. Warrior goddess, enchantress, her temper equaled only by her beauty.”

Brigit looked into his eyes and knew he wouldn't swear on Inanna unless he meant it. “I believe you.”

His eyes held hers, his hand gently moving through her hair. “You should always believe me, Brigit,” he said softly. “For to look upon your face, or into your eyes, and speak lies to you would be impossible for me.” Their bodies seemed to tug at one another until suddenly they were pressed together and he was bending to kiss her. His mouth caught her lips, moving over them. He kissed her long and slow and tenderly. And she melted inside.

When he lifted his head at last, she said, “All right. We'll do this together.” Her heart felt lighter, and she wondered if she could do it, could put aside what he had done, what he still might do, to her
people. Could she forget about all of that just for a little while during this…this truce?

She'd certainly managed to forget it last night. And whenever he kissed her. Or touched her. Or looked into her eyes.

“Tell me now, Brigit. What do you seek upon your…car?” He nodded at her T-Bird.

“Tracking devices or explosives, or anything they might have put on it, if they noticed it parked here and were suspicious.” Seeing his puzzled frown, she explained. “Tracking devices would enable them to follow us, to find us wherever we go.”

“Amazing.”

“Explosives would just blow us to bits—like a beam from your eye.”

“Ah, I see. And have you found any of these things?”

“No, I don't see anything.” She moved away from him again and took her keys from the hidden magnetic box underneath the rear license plate. Then she hit the button to open the hood. Quickly she moved to the front of the car and leaned in, looking over the spotless engine and again seeing nothing amiss.

She closed the hood, nodding. “I think it's safe. I don't feel as if anyone has tampered with it, and I don't see any evidence that they have, so…”

“So then we go.”

“Yes. We go.” She got behind the wheel. Reach
ing across, she first slid the passenger seat all the way back, then opened his door from the inside. Utana got in. Then she quickly started up the car, pulled a U-turn and drove on.

 

It was a huge relief to Utana to have put his merciless, cold-blooded mission aside for a time. He had no intention of breaking his word to Brigit, and was in fact grateful that he had a reason to hold off on carrying out the dictates of the gods.

The blood that already stained his hands was a burden that was rapidly becoming too heavy to bear. He had killed many. Granted, he had come to believe that at least one of Brigit's claims was utterly true: that his sanity had been eroded by five thousand years of living death. He'd been buried alive, trapped with the ashen remnants of his physical body inside a limestone statue, unable to see or to feel, but conscious.

And only later, thousands of maddening years later, when the statue had been unearthed by modern man, had he discovered that he could still
hear
.

And he'd heard so much.

People had come and gone in the various museums where the statue had eventually ended up on display. He'd heard their conversations, their arguments, their whispered confessions to one another. He'd been moved from nation to nation, had listened
to people speaking in tongues he had never heard before. And he had absorbed the languages, one and all, learned them, listened and tried to make sense of every word and line that was spoken. Gods knew he'd had little else to fill the void of time.

But the nights, oh, the endless, soundless nights. Those were the worst times of all, with their echoes of all the silent years before the statue had been unearthed. For at night the museums were devoid of visitors, enshrouded in deathly silence, with no possible way to measure or sense the passage of time. And no way to know when the words would return, or if they would return at all.

Sometimes the occasional click-clack of what he later realized were the security guard's slow, measured steps would remind him that he was not alone in the universe. Other times, nothing would.

During those endless times madness had taken him over, though he hadn't realized it then, when the only thoughts in his mind had been prayers. He'd begged his gods to release him from the pit, his black prison of eternal darkness. He'd promised over and over that he would do whatever they asked of him, if only they would grant him the unthinkable bliss of release.

And so they had.

He had emerged enraged, wild. Senseless, really. Only moments after he had been reawakened, he had heard the one called Lucy relating the words of
someone else, someone who had written, perhaps upon one of the ancient tablets of his own time, that he had been cursed by the gods for sharing his immortal gift with King Gilgamesh long ago. And later he'd absorbed the information contained on the tiny device in her bag—in a book called
The Truth
—which claimed the vahmpeers were little more than soulless beasts with an insatiable thirst for the blood of man, beasts that killed at will without remorse. He had learned that this race of blood drinkers had sprung from Gilgamesh himself. Gilgamesh, whose immortality had been bestowed upon him by Utana, in direct opposition to what he knew the gods had commanded.

He had come to believe that only by undoing the sin he'd committed then—the sin of sharing immortality with King Gilgamesh, who'd shared it with others, who'd shared it with others, on down through the ages, creating a race of immortal night-walkers—only by undoing that sin, could he ever be pardoned. And so, from the moment of his resurrection, he'd held only one goal in mind: to kill the vahmpeers and thereby redeem himself in the eyes of his gods.

What he had since learned about the vahmpeer race made him very sorry that he had acted in haste. And now he wondered, what if Brigit were right, and it was all a mistake? What if he had misunderstood what the gods required of him? What if ev
erything he had done to the vahmpeers had been for no reason whatsoever?

Had he slaughtered innocents?

Had he murdered his own children due to nothing more than a mistake?

Had he annihilated Brigit's friends and beloved ones…for nothing?

The notion churned in his belly, clawed at his heart. How, for the love of the gods, could he live with himself if that turned out to be true?

And yet, he prayed that it was. For even though he could not undo the harm he'd already wrought, at least he would not have to wreak any more. And in truth, he was unsure whether he were capable of any more killing. Even if the gods insisted upon it, he might very well be unequal to the task. To murder the people Brigit so loved, when he felt compelled to protect them instead—he did not know if he could do it. And therefore he might be doomed to return to his living death—perhaps at any moment, should the gods realize how shaky his resolve had become.

He tried to soothe himself by watching the scenery as they drove along what Brigit told him was a “highway,” and by marveling at all they passed. A great city, with buildings as tall as ziggurat pyramids and monuments that stabbed into the sky. How they made them to stand so tall was beyond him. The ziggurats had been wider at the base, nar
rowing in steps toward the
cella
at the very top, where the gods resided. Some of these buildings they passed by were the same width at the bottom as at the top. How did they not tip over?