ill. The world was spinning, and I lowered my head, willing everything to settle back to its rightful order. I didn't need to hear Seth next describe Josephine. I could've done it down to the last curl.
"Do you love her?" Hugh asked Seth.
"Yes. But she doesn't love me back."
"What happens to her?"
"I don't know. I ask her to marry me, but she says she won't. That she can't. She tells me to find someone else, but there is no one else. How can there be?"
Hugh had no answer for that, but he had his rhythm now. He kept repeating the pattern, pushing Seth back further and further through impossible memories, always crossing that black wall, always asking Seth's name and location, where he was, and if there was a woman who'd broken his heart.
"My name is Robert. I live in Philadelphia, the first of my family born in the New World. We run a newspaper, and I love a woman who works for us. Her name is Abigail, and I think she loves me too . . . but she disappears one night without a word."
"My name is Niccol貌. I'm an artist in Florence. It's 1497 . . . and there's this woman . . . this amazing woman. Her name is Bianca, but . . . she betrays me."
"My name is Andrew. I'm a priest in southern England. There's a woman named Cecily, but I can't allow myself to love her, not even when the plague takes me. . . ."
On and on it went, and with each step Hugh helped Seth take back, part of my heart broke. All of this was impossible. Seth couldn't have lived all these lives and times he was describing - and not just because of the obvious problems of life and death as we knew them. Seth wasn't just describing his lives.
He was describing mine.
I had lived every one of these lives that Seth described. I had been Suzette, Josephine, Abigail, Bianca, Cecily . . . They were all identities I'd assumed, people I'd become when Hell had transferred me to new places over the centuries. I would reinvent myself, take on a new name, appearance, and vocation. For every one of my identities Seth mentioned, I had lived a dozen more. But the ones he talked about . . . the ones he claimed to know as well, they were the ones that stuck out to me. Because although I'd had countless lovers, in countless places, there were a handful who had struck some part of my soul, a handful whom I had truly loved, despite the impossibility of our situations.
And Seth was touching upon every one of them, checking them off like items on a grocery list. Only, he wasn't just talking about these men I'd loved. He was talking about being them. Whereas I had created these lives, he was acting as though he'd been born into them, born as these lovers I'd had, only to die and be reborn again in some other place with me. . . .
It was impossible.
It was terrifying.
And eventually, it stopped.
"That's it," said Seth at last. "I can't go back further."
"You know you can," said Hugh. "You've done it before. Are you at the blackness again?"
"Yes . . . but it's different than before. It's not like the others. It's more solid. Harder to cross. Impossible to cross."
"Not impossible," said Hugh. "You've already proven that. Cross back to the next life."
"I can't."
The thing was, I was beginning to agree with Seth. I didn't think there was anything else he could go back to, not if he was paralleling my lives. I'd jumped ahead of him at one point and made some educated guesses on what he would say, and I'd been right each time. I knew how many great loves I'd had as a succubus, and there were none left. Before Seth, there had been eight.
"Push through," urged Hugh.
"I can't," said Seth. "They won't let me. I'm not supposed to remember."
"Remember what?"
"That life. The first life."
"Why not?"
"It's part of the bargain. My bargain. No, wait. Not mine. Hers, I think. I'm not supposed to remember her. But how can I not?"
It was another of those rhetorical questions, and Hugh looked to Roman and me for help. The imp had been confident there for a while, once the lives began rolling off so easily, but this was something different. Seth wasn't making a lot of sense, not that this had all been particularly crystal