Dark Possession - Aja James Page 0,62

taken her one last time, pouring all of the feeling that was left in him into her. Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly. He gave everything he had.

And when he was done, that very night, he finally, once and for all, walked away.

He hadn’t known where he was headed, and he hadn’t cared. The farther he trekked, the longer he lived without her, the heavier his body became, and the more his legs and feet dragged. His powers, too, declined from lack of use. And even more from lack of heart and soul.

Dark Mates were not meant to survive without each other. The dissolution of the Bond could end in death or insanity. He did not know how Ashlu fared without him, and for once he didn’t care. All he knew was that his own body was breaking down, his Elemental Gift seeping out of his fingertips like the rest of his strength.

Until one day, in a faraway land that would become the kingdom of Egypt, he fell to his knees upon the hot desert dunes. He closed his eyes and slowed his breath. Day after day, night after night, he waited for his immortal body to shut down. Slowly, he sank deeper into the sands, which filled his body the way air once did.

And Prince Hulaal, “Precious Stone,” turned into something akin to his namesake, buried leagues deep under the earth.

Then, a millennium later, in the year thirteen twenty-five B.C., a young queen’s tears trickled into the sands that sifted into the earth in which he’d entombed himself.

And he reawakened at last.

The human woman had been grieving her murdered husband in the secrecy of darkness. Enemies surrounded her from every corner; she didn’t know what to do. She thought, in fact, that she wouldn’t even survive the night.

He’d risen from the quick sands like a god, and to her wide, frightened, awe-struck eyes, perhaps he was exactly that.

She’d been praying for a savior, she told him in her strange foreign tongue. She needed him, as no one ever had before.

So he answered her prayers.

The young queen’s name was Nefertari.

From that point on, he assumed the role of her dead husband, yet no one dared to gainsay him despite his much altered appearance from the slain pharaoh. He was inhumanly tall and muscular, where Nefertari’s husband was small and thin. He was perfection incarnate, his body seemingly carved from stone, where the real king had been far from handsome, his frame weak and hunched.

The resourceful queen declared that Ra had come to earth as her husband in the empire’s time of need, strengthening his physique, gifting him with godly magnificence. Thus, he became known for a few brief human years as the Ozymandias in Greek, “Chosen of Ra.” And later, when historians recorded his military campaigns that stretched the empire of Egypt to the farthest corners of earth, he was called “Ramses the Great.”

In truth, Ramses had stayed with and protected Queen Nefertari for but a handful of years. Only long enough to eliminate all of her internal spies and enemies and build the empire’s strength. They’d agreed from the start that he would leave when the dust settled and her husband’s throne was secure, when she found another man strong enough to take his place, building on the foundation he left.

They’d agreed, but she still pleaded for him to stay. The beautiful young queen had fallen in love with him, she confessed.

But Ramses’ heart could no longer be reached; it remained an unfeeling, heavy stone within his chest.

And so it stayed ever since. Right to this day, in modern America.

But something had changed.

Ramses inhaled deeply and clenched his jaw involuntarily.

His red-headed little librarian had cried herself to sleep.

He’d watched her on the video screen, had zoomed in on her sex-flushed cheek and seen the wetness clumping her feathery eyelashes, making dark crescents on the silky skin. Tear after tear, she silently cried, the crystalline liquid sliding over the curves of her face to plop from her chin into the long pillow she hugged to her body like a life raft.

She looked like a lonely, neglected child, cuddled into such a small forlorn ball in the middle of the gigantic bed. The occasional sniffles and oddly adorable hiccups didn’t help.

Ramses felt like the worst sort of ogre to have caused her unhappiness.

She wasn’t the first female to cry because of him. Not by a long shot. But she was the first female whose tears actually affected him. Ashlu had never