you or threaten you with a psych hold?”
Tears, inexplicable and wild, leapt into her eyes, her heart racing once again as she realized just how right he was. She wished, oh how she wished, she could unsee what had been seen. She wanted to go back. She wanted to once again be ignorant that these deadly things truly existed in their world. She knew without a doubt that ignorance was bliss in this instance.
“Menes,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he whispered back She nervously licked her lipsvg., again ending with a warm wash of breath over her that caused her nipples to tighten painfully against the wall she was still leaning on. “And Jackson,” he added. “Two souls, one body. We call ourselves Bodywalkers. And you do not remember this, but you were there the moment I was reborn.”
She scoffed … well, half a scoff because he chose that moment to run the knuckles of his hand over her cheek and the sensation was ridiculously electrifying.
Why? Why, she demanded of herself, does his touch always seem so electrifying! It was just a touch!
“I don’t know what you’re …”
“Dream. Remember the dream you had when a blast of energy sent me crashing into a windshield. You cried over my body—”
“Oh my god! Oh my god, please shut up! Let me go!” She had already been trembling from head to toe, but now she was shaking because she was so incredulous and upset by his words … by the implication of his words. “It was just a dream! Just a—”
“If it were just a dream, then how would I know about it?” he asked, completely ignoring her request to be freed. “How would I know that you cried over me, dropping beautifully tender tears onto my face?”
Marissa’s chest ached, partly from the way her heart was racing and now also because the emotion she had felt from that dream came rushing back over her. She wanted to push it away. To run away. To be anywhere but there and feeling what she was being forced to feel.
“Please. Please,” she whispered. “Please stop.”
Then Jackson’s hands were on her shoulders, and she felt him stepping back half a step. The relief she should have felt didn’t come because her traitorous body whimpered like a child who’d just had its favorite teddy bear taken away. Jackson pulled her away from the wall, but only enough to turn her around, his hands sliding up, his thumbs touching the underside of her chin and tipping her head back so that she was coaxed to look up into his eyes.
“My people have lived among and within your people for centuries,” he said, the gentility of his voice reassuring and comforting in spite of her need to hold on to her panic and fear, because she knew that letting them go would mean acceptance and she did not, under any circumstances, want to accept what he was saying. “I will not claim we never harm anyone.”
“Ya think?” she bit out.
It made the right corner of his mouth curl into a smile that reached into the stunning blue of his eyes.
“Like any society we have our villainous element. If anyone can appreciate that it would be a psychiatrist who tries to ease the souls of officers who have become jaded and bitter when they see just how horrible humanity can get. But lawful Bodywalkers always ask for permission to reside in the bodies of their prospective hosts. The day Jackson’s life was being stripped from him, as you shed tears for him, he was in the Ether, meeting me, accepting my proposal of a newer, longer lifetime and a position in it that will influence the well-being of thousands of people, be they original humans with a single soul or those of us who have been given another chance at life. You were witness to all that led to that. The battle. My death. Your grief. And we could not let any of you go out in the world with knowledge of us once againag., putting us at risk, so your minds were nudged into believing it was nothing more than a dream.”
And she knew the very dream he was talking about because it had been the realest thing she’d ever experienced in her sleeping life. She had seen him go flying through the air, crashing back first into a windshield and then … dying.
She was shaking her head in negation even as his thumb came up to stroke the width of her