so had been misinterpreted. Utana was instead the means of their destruction.
And he’d exploded forth from oblivion in a flash that seemed as if it must have been second only to the Big Bang itself. The moment of creation.
Sensation had bombarded Utana like needles shot from a cannon and embedding themselves in every inch of his skin. Every touch had stabbed his nerve endings. Every pinprick of light had been blinding. The most subtle of smells had been overwhelming, and the slightest sound deafening, almost too painful to bear. He’d wanted only release.
“He was out of his mind,” Brigit whispered. Or she tried to. What came out sounded like babble to her. “He didn’t even know how to be human anymore.”
Rhiannon’s voice called to her, the words still unintelligible but their meaning clear: come back.
Brigit tried to say “not yet,” but again only a slurred, meaningless noise emerged. But she ignored that, seeking Utana again, searching, trying to experience him as he was now.
Peaceful. Silent. Asleep, resting, dreaming…of her. She saw a vision, of the two of them entwined, not entirely in physical form. The top halves of them seemed normal—torsos, arms, heads and faces, eyes locked on one another. Lips melded in an endless kiss. But the bottom halves of their bodies were smoke and glitter, green and gold, or those were the closest colors she could name. In truth, they were colors that didn’t exist in this world. Colors humans could not perceive. The colors of pure spirit.
“Come back to me, little one,” Rhiannon called. “You’re floating too far away. Come back.”
Brigit felt the most incredible sensation in her heart. It seemed to be expanding, so big it might burst, as her spirit settled at last into its temporal home. She felt tiny again, but reassured that the larger part of her was still there, and that she was still a part of it. A very small part of it, but still… She opened her eyes, and the room slowly came back into focus.
“I really do love him,” she whispered. “And what’s more, he loves me back.” Blinking, she whispered, “I felt it. I saw it. It’s real.”
Utana came awake to pain, hot, searing pain, and the stench of his own burning flesh. An anguished scream was driven from the depths of his soul as his eyes flew open wide. Through a red haze of agony and wisps of smoke rising up from his own skin, his vision swam, cleared, swam again. Men were around him. Nashmun, his so-called vizier, stood only an arm’s length away, holding a red-hot poker in his fist. And smiling. The scar on his face made the grin look demonic.
Utana lunged toward him, but his arms were brought up short, wrenching his shoulders as iron rang against iron. Chains. He was in chains. Upright, with shackles at his wrists and ankles, and a foot of iron chain from each embedded in the stonelike wall at his back.
“What meaning is this, Nashmun!” he demanded, his mastery of the language faltering under duress.
His vizier’s smile died, and his eyes went as cold as twin granite stones. “It means you should have done what you were told to do to begin with, Utana. You were resurrected for a reason, after all. We brought you back to do a job.”
Utana’s eyes narrowed. He called on his inner power, intending to send its deadly beam to this man and end his reign of terror once and for all time. Nashmun was not worthy to live. Nothing happened.
“It’s the drug. The liquid we injected into you,” Nashmun told him, gloating and pleased. “It will inhibit your powers for as long as I need them inhibited. You can’t hurt me, Utana. You’re helpless.”
“I am never helpless.”
“You are now. And we are not going to give you a choice. You’re going to do the job we brought you back to do,” Nashmun told him again.
“Why you say you raised me?” Utana licked his lips and tried to clear his mind of the fog that kept overwhelming him. “You did not. James of the Vahmpeers, he is the one. He awakened me.” He thought of James—Brigit’s beloved brother—who had raised him from ash. He had insisted Utana must save his people. Instead, Utana had tried to annihilate them. How James must hate him for that.
“James Poe, the male half of the mongrel twins, did exactly what we wanted him to do,” Nashmun said. “Don’t you see, Utana? We’ve been planning all of