doubt it has improved so soon. You just crave coffee right now.” She poured him a cup. “Can you hold it? Or should I hold it for you?”
“I think I can manage.”
She handed him the cup but held her hand hovering nearby. “Just in case you are not as strong as you think you are. I don’t know if your body can already heal fast, and after all that you have been through, I really don’t want you to get burned by hot coffee.”
“I’m sorry for giving you a scare.” He took a few grateful sips.
“Don’t apologize. You had no control over it.”
He handed her the cup back. “For now, it will do.” Scooting to the side, he patted the spot he’d vacated. “Come here. I need to hold you.”
Sari hesitated only for a moment before kicking her shoes off and climbing on the hospital bed.
“Fates, I missed that.” She laid her head on his chest and draped her arm over his middle. “You feel so good, so solid.”
“I missed it too.” He tightened his arm around her. “Sometimes I could hear you talking to me, but I couldn’t respond, and it was so damn frustrating.”
Sari looked up. “Did you hear others as well? Or just me?”
“I heard Steven and Bridget.”
He debated whether he should mention hearing Annani as well. He wasn’t sure if the conversation he’d heard had been real or imagined, but if it had been real, at some point they would need to talk about it.
“I think that I heard your mother and you talking, but I might have been dreaming. I had many strange dreams.”
“What did you hear?”
He would have preferred to wait with that, but perhaps it was better to find out for sure whether everything he’d experienced while unconscious had been real or imagined.
“I heard your mother telling you about her experience with someone who she thought was me in one of my previous incarnations. She called me Gudbrand.”
Sari’s body tensed against his. “It wasn’t you. We both need to remember that. Thousands of years have passed since that incident, and you probably reincarnated dozens of times since. You are not the same man. You are not Gudbrand. You are David.”
So it had all been real.
He let out a breath. More than the revelations about his past life, David was glad that his brother had really been there, talking to him and promising that they would meet again.
“I know that.”
“Good. I don’t want you to feel guilty for something that you didn’t do.”
“I dreamt about being Gudbrand. He was obsessed with her.”
Sari lifted her head and looked into his eyes. “Did he love her?”
“Gudbrand loved himself. What he felt for her had nothing to do with love.”
“Is that how you felt in the dream?”
“I got to know him pretty well during those dreams. Gudbrand was a selfish man with an overblown ego, and he blamed her for his obsession instead of taking personal responsibility for his actions. He suspected Ania of enchanting him to forsake everything and everyone to be with her, so she could suck all the vitality out of him. When he saw her skin glow, his suspicions were confirmed, and he lost it.”
“Did he really intend to kill her?”
David nodded. “I’m glad that she stopped him, and I don’t hold it against her.”
“Annani still feels incredibly guilty about it. She is not sure whether Gudbrand would have actually done it. She thinks that he might have been bluffing to get his brother to stand down.”
“Gudbrand was crazed, and he wanted to end her. She did the right thing by defending herself in the only way she could. Losing him only affected his family, but losing Annani would have impacted all of humanity. Imagine what would have happened to the world without her influence. The Dark Ages would have gone on forever, and Navuh would have ruled supreme over a miserable, enslaved earth population.”
Sari shivered. “I can’t even conceive of a world controlled by Doomers.”
“I can. North Korea would seem like a paradise compared to what Navuh would have done.”
56
Sari
They were both tiptoeing around the big elephant in the room, and even though Sari would have preferred not to bring it up, it was better to get it out into the open instead of obsessing over it and letting it grow into mammoth proportions.
“I have to admit that it weirds me out knowing my mother was Gudbrand’s lover, and that a tiny part of him still lives inside of you. But I’ll