I glanced up and saw a face in the rearview mirror of the van. A hearty smile that I’d seen before.
Claire.
She was here.
I saw a glimmer in her eyes, and the smile widened, got crueler. She was trying to kill me.
I barely tightened my hold in time for the next psychic attack. It loosened my grip and my body swayed into the side of the van, hitting the white metal and rattling my teeth. After a moment the pain waned, and I looked up to see her again, the grin all that was visible in the mirror.
Yep. Definitely trying to kill me.
The smell of the tires burning rubber and the thousand tiny pains running across my body came to the fore of my mind as I felt the next attack coming. My fingertips felt attached to the handle only lightly, and as the spear of her attack hit my mind full force, I felt the grip loosen, the last digits falling free of the steel as I dropped toward the freeway–
Without my powers to save me from the painful death that waited below.
Chapter 17
Rome, Roman Empire
280 A.D.
Marius ate with wild abandon, fine foods of a sort he could never have previously imagined arrayed in front of him in amounts that would have seemed absurd to the villagers he’d grown up around. There was cheese and honey and meat—meat!—aplenty, and cooked in succulent ways with spices and flavors the likes of which he’d never even imagined. The smells filled his nose and the heat of them, fresh from the spits and fires and ovens, warmed his hands as he pushed morsel after morsel into his mouth.
“You are hungry, then?” Janus asked, but in a way that left no doubt, even to Marius, that he was not asking. “Have you eaten since you left home?”
“Scarcely,” Marius said, pushing more food into his mouth. The flavors were sumptuous, were incredible, were beyond anything he’d ever even considered before. They tasted like a skin of good goat’s milk on a hot day after tending the animals, sating him in a way that he couldn’t have imagined himself being sated.
“Ah, poor lad,” Janus said, and Marius looked up enough to see him … sympathetic? “Yes,” Janus said, as if answering his thoughts, “I do feel more than a bit sorry for you. You have had a difficult life, I would estimate, what with the … additional company … you have in your mind.”
Marius halted, letting a clump of meat fall from his outstretched hand onto the wooden table. He stopped chewing, swallowing what he’d eaten with great care. “How do you know … about …”
“About the voice in your head?” Janus asked, and he looked like he was surveying Marius. “I am what they call an empath. I can read the emotional states of people—their sorrow, anger, joy, and so on. You … you have not just the emotional weight of a single person hanging about you. You carry an additional burden, one filled with anger and sorrow and no joy, if I may say. Someone furious at being trapped in your body and being subverted to your will.” He looked at Marius carefully. “Who is this person? A brother? Close friend? A girl you knew in your village, perhaps?”
“My mother,” Marius said, not taking his eyes off of Janus. “Or at least she says she is.” He glanced around, waiting to see if anyone sprang from the shadows of the room. It had grown late, and there were flickering candles casting shadows around the manse. It had looked stately indeed when Janus had brought him here. When the woman named Diana had disappeared after their arrival, Marius had half expected Janus to kill him quietly.
“Goodness,” Janus said, stark surprise causing his eyebrows to rise. “And you do not recognize it as the voice of your mother?”
“She died giving birth to me,” Marius said slowly. “I never met her, but all the villagers say it is so. That she died in the last moments of labor. That she died from touching me.” He raised a hand, palm out, in front of him. “Anyone who touches me will die, they say. Two women tried to nurse me and ended up gravely ill before they determined how to feed me milk through a skin.”
“An incubus,” Janus said, leaning forward with interest. “And you manifested at birth, no less.”
“I do not understand what you are saying,” Marius said, leaning back in the chair. He felt the hard wood underneath his back, and realized that he was very tired.
“You are more than human,” Janus said, his face now shrouded. “There are many of us, those who have powers beyond those of normal people. You are one of us. We are comparatively few, and our powers tend to manifest, or appear, at around sixteen or seventeen years of age. Yours, which include the ability to drink the souls of those whom you touch, appear to have originated at your birth.” He leaned back in his chair, his thumb and forefinger stroking his bearded chin. “Unusual, but not unheard of.”