being oppressed by beliefs tempered into them by the fist of that zealot harpy who called herself a priestess. Why could they not see her for what she truly was?
He had asked himself these questions over and over, incarnation after incarnation and still there was no answer.
Except …
“Docia!” he called out as he moved from the kitchen into the main body of the house. The house was all new to him, so he wasn’t exactly certain where he was going to find her. It was a great frustration for him, to feel like he wasn’t completely in charge of matters close to him. But, he counseled himself, patience and time would see him where he needed to be, would help give him the strength and fortifications he would need if …
“Docia!”
“What?! Quit hollering at me! Jeez.” Docia shot the command at him with all the exasperation a baby sister could muster, though she was well into her twenties, and her Bodywalker Tameri was almost as ancient as he was.
“I had a question for Tameri. She has told you that there are others like her who want to defect from the Templars?” At her nod he hurried on. “Just exactly how many Templars are we speaking about?”
Since Docia was also only three weeks into her Blending, she had to go quiet for a moment and access her Bodywalker’s memory. He watched as her face turned incredibly peaceful, so unlike the turbulent energy of his sister. He realized then that he had missed her terribly since she had done what he ought to have done from the start and had come out to New Mexico with Ramses. It tickled him, actually, that Ramses had, earwww.ballantinebooks.comesihlyly on in their Blending, mistaken Tameri for Hatshepsut. True, these things were hard to discern at times, but the idea that his astounding and dynamic queen would choose someone like the adorable and slightly mousy persona of his sister … well, it wasn’t a likely fit. Of course he and Hatshepsut had once altered sexes, he resurrecting in the body of a female and she in a male, just to see what it would be like. The novelty had made them ravenous for each other and the experience of seeing things from the other’s perspective had been, in a word, wild. The sex alone had been outstanding. But he also remembered it as one of the most turbulent choices in their relationship.
God, he missed her. He craved her so terribly. Even now his body still ached with the arousal being close to Marissa had engendered. They must be together, he thought with no little amount of heat. Marissa and Hatshepsut must come together. It was the only solution he would be satisfied with. Yes, intelligent, curvy redheads were dying all the time, but he wanted this redhead and no other. This redhead had tormented Jackson with her very presence for so long … and there was a reason for near you when
CHAPTER TWELVE
Awakening.
There it was, a small papyrus scroll, probably the most ancient piece of written history in the archive he was presently sitting in. Perhaps even the most ancient of all their written prayers, spells, and other such literature in any of their archives anywhere on Earth; and to be sure, there were quite a few, Kamenwati thought as he held open the reedy paper with the barest tips of his fingers, not wanting anything—such as bacteria or the natural oils of his skin—to come into contact with it. Something this frail and old should not even be touched at all, Kamen thought with a grimace. The Bodywalkers, both Politic and Templar, agreed on one thing, and that was that their history should be preserved at all costs and with all the respect it deserved. To that end there were a dozen of archives dotted across the world. The methods used to preserve what was in them outshone those of any antiquities museum. Light, temperature, limited contact. There had once been a single tremendous library, but after the great London fire had come within a hairsbreadth of claiming all they had collected, they had broken them down into twelve locations. And when the war had begun between the Templars and the Politic, there had been a huge series of battles over each and every one until all of the spoils were captured and relocated into secrecy, each keeping the other from accessing whatever parts of the archive they had wrested away.
It had hurt the Templars the