“Ew.”
“— the priest sent her soul to hell.”
“To punish her. And her father,” I said, knowing how men like that thought.
“Very likely. But obsession is a tricky thing. Her family took care of her catatonic body, but she was no longer the vibrant girl he remembered, the one he fell in love with, so for the first time, he opened the portal again and called out her name.”
I eased up in the chair, my curiosity growing. “What happened?”
“She woke up at home in her body, but according to his writings, she came back… different. He called her a berserker, most likely because she knew what he did to her and she screamed every time he came near.” He leaned in, his voice full of intrigue. “But she became quite famous for a gift she’d received thanks to her time in a hell dimension. The gift of sight.”
“Like psychic?”
“Indeed. She went by many names, but you know her as Joan of Arc.”
Astonishment sent a pulse of electricity over my skin.
“Read the history books. There’s a reason she refused to give out her real name to anyone ever again.” He straightened his shoulders and said, “Enough. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
He turned to give the box to one of his minions. In that instant, Dead Guy appeared beside me and whispered into my ear. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I have no choice but to leave you now.”
Alarm clutched around my heart. “You’re leaving me?”
“Be ready.” And then he was gone.
James turned back, took the pendant in both hands, pushed the latch on one side, then let it fall open in his palms. It was about that time I lost all control over my bodily functions.
“Be ready,” Dead Guy mouthed again from across the room.
I barely saw him. I was much more concerned with the lightning strikes that burst from the pendant. The ones that lit the entire warehouse, that branched out and crawled across the ceiling, leaving sparks and burn marks in their place. I winced as a hot wind rushed over my skin, causing it to bubble and crack, the acidic sand peeling away at the reddened layers.
And yet none of that concerned me. Lightning, hot wind, acidic sand blasting away at my skin – that part I could handle. It was the other part that had me doubling over.
James’s minions stepped back to a safe distance. All but one. Of course, he was the one with the knife.
James yelled over the noise, delighted with the events. “No human, unless gifted with sight, would ever have seen any of this! The priest could never have known the true power he’d held in the palm of his hands.” He watched the swirling clouds and the lightning bursts and laughed. “I never imagined it would be like this.”
Apparently the people inside the dimension screaming in terror did not compute. For me, it was agony. I didn’t just hear their screams. I felt them. I felt flesh rip and bones crunch. I smelled burned hair and rotting wounds. I tasted old blood and fresh bile. This was not a place built to hold human souls. These people were not sent there because of the choices they made while alive. They were sent there because an asshole of the worst kind decreed it so.
My hands gripped the chair so tight, my fingernails started breaking at the quick. The captives’ suffering sliced into me until my entire body felt like a mass of raw nerve endings. I had to get them out. I had to set them free.
I looked over at Dead Guy, my vision blurring and growing dark at the edges.
He was turned toward me and had hunkered down as though preparing for a race. “Now,” he mouthed. Then he took off.
He sprinted toward me, and suddenly I realized what he was going to do. He was going to cross. I didn’t feel it was the best time, but when several minions noticed and tried to tackle him, he dodged them. Zigzagged around them. Hurdled an arm here, a leg there, until with a last desperate glance, he dived inside me.
James looked on but seemed more confused than worried. And then it was silent.
The first thing I heard was a steady, solid tone that stretched on forever, and I knew the sound was not good. I looked over at a man in hospital scrubs. He sat on a stool, his shoulders shaking with grief.
Then I was in his arms and he was smiling down at me. Through the agony I felt to my core, through the utter sense of loss, he smiled.
“Looks like it’s just the three of us,” he said, and another bout of sorrow ripped through him. It shuddered through me as well.
It was Dead Guy. My father. And he sacrificed our time together to cross so that I could snap the fuck out of it. So that I would remember who I was. What I was. My life through his eyes rushed at me like a film on fast forward, including the wife he lost and the daughter he gained on one fateful night. He deluged me with memories of myself through his eyes, of all the things I did growing up, of all the abilities I had, of the good I did by helping him solve crimes – he’d been a detective – and put bad men behind bars. Of all the things he did wrong and a few he did very, very right.
He showed me the time he taught me to ride a bike, pretending I was doing it all on my own, holding a finger on the back of the seat for good measure as he ran beside me cheering me on.
He showed me the time he held me in his arms as I cried for hours because a little boy I’d befriended crossed through me, and I saw how his stepfather had killed him. I felt it. For weeks, I felt the sting of that man’s fists. The agony of his kicks. Together we put the man behind bars, but it had been a powerful lesson for my father. He saw what I went through when I helped him with his cases. He saw what the memories of others could do to me.
He showed me the regret he often felt at having married a woman who could not love me, no matter how hard she tried. Despite everything, I grew up okay. I wasn’t a perfect kid by a long shot, but he loved me beyond measure.
And then he was gone. He was killed, and he saw the celestial part of me for the first time. My light mesmerized him. It beamed out of me as though I were made of glass to become a blinding beacon of hope.
He’d had no idea. He knew I had gifts, but this was different. This was world changing.
He also saw what Reyes was. The darkness. The danger. But by then he knew enough about me and my world to see Reyes as a protector. A warrior who would give his life for me. A husband.
And he saw Beep coming from a light year away.
Beep.
I stilled, put the flashbacks on pause.
Beep. I had a baby. Reyes and I had a little girl, and she was made of stardust and light and warmth. Because of me, because of my light, because of who I was and what I was made of, we had to send her away to live with some very good people. There were beings after her, and my light would lead them straight to her.
He showed me crumbling when they took her away. He’d been there when I cracked. When my powers reached nuclear meltdown levels and I exploded and vanished, only to end up here, in Sleepy Hollow. And now I knew why.
Earl James Walker. Kuur. He’d found the god glass and he knew how to use it. With the intention of sailing to the other side of the world and dropping the box into the ocean there, the monks’ ships sank off the coast of what would become New York.
They rowed ashore with the box, traveled as far inland as they could before exhaustion and disease overtook them, then spent the next month burying it as far underground as they could in a little spot off the Hudson River.