When the task is complete, we shall go our separate ways, your people and me. And only when we meet again will I resume the sad mission my gods require of me. If, indeed, I determine that it is their command. I swear these things on the name of Inanna, who will strike me down should I break my vow to you. For you are so like her, you must surely be beloved of her.”
She was taken aback by that. “I’m…like Inanna? A goddess?”
He smiled only slightly, but the amusement in his eyes was impossible not to see. “So very like her. Warrior goddess, enchantress, her temper equaled only by her beauty.”
Brigit looked into his eyes and knew he wouldn’t swear on Inanna unless he meant it. “I believe you.”
His eyes held hers, his hand gently moving through her hair. “You should always believe me, Brigit,” he said softly. “For to look upon your face, or into your eyes, and speak lies to you would be impossible for me.” Their bodies seemed to tug at one another until suddenly they were pressed together and he was bending to kiss her. His mouth caught her lips, moving over them. He kissed her long and slow and tenderly. And she melted inside.
When he lifted his head at last, she said, “All right. We’ll do this together.” Her heart felt lighter, and she wondered if she could do it, could put aside what he had done, what he still might do, to her people. Could she forget about all of that just for a little while during this…this truce?
She’d certainly managed to forget it last night. And whenever he kissed her. Or touched her. Or looked into her eyes.
“Tell me now, Brigit. What do you seek upon your…car?” He nodded at her T-Bird.
“Tracking devices or explosives, or anything they might have put on it, if they noticed it parked here and were suspicious.” Seeing his puzzled frown, she explained. “Tracking devices would enable them to follow us, to find us wherever we go.”
“Amazing.”
“Explosives would just blow us to bits—like a beam from your eye.”
“Ah, I see. And have you found any of these things?”
“No, I don’t see anything.” She moved away from him again and took her keys from the hidden magnetic box underneath the rear license plate. Then she hit the button to open the hood. Quickly she moved to the front of the car and leaned in, looking over the spotless engine and again seeing nothing amiss.
She closed the hood, nodding. “I think it’s safe. I don’t feel as if anyone has tampered with it, and I don’t see any evidence that they have, so…”
“So then we go.”
“Yes. We go.” She got behind the wheel. Reaching across, she first slid the passenger seat all the way back, then opened his door from the inside. Utana got in. Then she quickly started up the car, pulled a U-turn and drove on.
It was a huge relief to Utana to have put his merciless, cold-blooded mission aside for a time. He had no intention of breaking his word to Brigit, and was in fact grateful that he had a reason to hold off on carrying out the dictates of the gods.
The blood that already stained his hands was a burden that was rapidly becoming too heavy to bear. He had killed many. Granted, he had come to believe that at least one of Brigit’s claims was utterly true: that his sanity had been eroded by five thousand years of living death. He’d been buried alive, trapped with the ashen remnants of his physical body inside a limestone statue, unable to see or to feel, but conscious.
And only later, thousands of maddening years later, when the statue had been unearthed by modern man, had he discovered that he could still hear.
And he’d heard so much.
People had come and gone in the various museums where the statue had eventually ended up on display. He’d heard their conversations, their arguments, their whispered confessions to one another. He’d been moved from nation to nation, had listened to people speaking in tongues he had never heard before. And he had absorbed the languages, one and all, learned them, listened and tried to make sense of every word and line that was spoken. Gods knew he’d had little else to fill the void of time.
But the nights, oh, the endless, soundless nights. Those were the worst times of all, with their echoes of all the silent years before the statue