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Praise for the novels of
MAGGIE SHAYNE
“Shayne crafts a convincing world, tweaking vampire
legends just enough to draw fresh blood.”
—Publishers Weekly on Demon’s Kiss
“Maggie Shayne demonstrates an absolutely superb touch,
blending fantasy and romance into an outstanding
reading experience.”
—RT Book Reviews on Embrace the Twilight
“Maggie Shayne is better than chocolate. She
satisfies every wicked craving.”
—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Forster
“Maggie Shayne delivers sheer delight, and fans new and old
of her vampire series can rejoice.”
—RT Book Reviews on Twilight Hunger
“Maggie Shayne delivers romance with sweeping
intensity and bewitching passion.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz
Twilight Prophecy
Maggie
Shayne
MILLS & BOON
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To Sharyn Cerniglia, a woman who is so special, so beautiful
and so pure of spirit that her aura sparkles and shines with it.
Sharyn has shared many things with me, among them her wise
advice, her keen insights, her motivational pep talks, and the
source of her knowing, which has changed my life. But above
and beyond all of that she has given me her friendship, the
worth of which cannot be measured. Thank you, dear
Sharyn, for being my sister-friend.
1
James dressed in white. White lab coat, white scrubs, white cross-trainers. Sometimes he broke it up with a colored shirt, but for these visits, he mostly stuck with white. Made him fit in.
That was important to him. Fitting in. Though deep down, he knew he didn’t. Not anywhere. He was one of a kind. One of a pair, really, but even his twin was his opposite.
Fitting in here, though—or at least, projecting the appearance of doing so—was necessary. A matter of life and death, and maybe part of the elusive thing he’d been seeking his entire life: a reason for his existence.
He nodded in a friendly, confident way to the people he passed in the antiseptic, cluttered corridors of New York Hospital for Children. It was a busy place, even after visiting hours. As soon as he saw his chance, James ducked into one of the patient rooms.
And then he paused and went silent as he turned to look.
There, asleep in the bed, lay a little girl who slept with a knit hat pulled down over her head to cover the fact that she had no hair. No eyebrows, though that was harder to hide, despite the dimness of the room. There was a sickly sweet scent clinging to her, the scent of cancer. And while most human beings wouldn’t have been able to detect it, he could. He wasn’t entirely human, after all, much as he hated to admit that. Vampiric blood ran in his veins, heightening his senses well beyond the norm. So he smelled the cancer mingling with the stronger scents of antibiotics and the iodine concoction that stained her skin near every puncture wound. The little girl’s arms looked as if they’d been used for pincushions. It was barely 9:00 p.m. but she was asleep, her body exhausted. Her spirit worn down. Her name was Melinda. She was ten years old.
And she was terminal.
His eyes on the sleeping child, he moved closer to the bed. Watching her, keeping his steps silent, he reached out his open hands and laid them gently on the center of her chest, palms down, thumbs touching. He closed his eyes, and opened his heart.
“Doctor?” a woman asked.
James opened his eyes but didn’t move his hands. He hadn’t noticed the woman sitting beside the bed. Hadn’t even checked to be sure the room was empty. This little girl had been his entire focus. And he thought that for as long as he’d been sneaking in and out of hospital rooms by night, he really ought to know better.
He just got so caught up in his work….
“What are you doing?” the woman asked.
He smiled and met her eyes, willing the unnatural glow in his own to bank itself, to hide from her. “Just feeling her heartbeat.”
The woman—the little girl’s mother, if physical resemblance was anything to go by—lifted her brows. He saw her clearly, despite the darkness of the room. “Isn’t that what your stethoscope is for?”
“Do you mind if I finish?” He inserted authority into his tone this time. That was what a real doctor would do, after all. “You’re welcome to stay, but I do need silence.”
Frowning, Melinda’s mother rose from her chair to watch him. He kept his hands on the girl and felt them growing warmer, knew that soon he would give himself away. He had to distract her. “Would you mind getting me her chart? It’s over on her nightstand, I believe.”
Nodding, though still obviously suspicious of him, she moved to the nightstand. And James let the power he’d felt rising up in him continue to move through him, into his hands and into the child. A soft golden-yellow glow emanated from his palms for a long moment, and he let it, not stopping even when he knew the mother was turning back toward him. Even when he knew from her sharp gasp, that she’d seen.
The power would flow as long as it needed to. Sometimes it took a second, sometimes a minute. But only it knew when it was finished.
“What is that?” the woman asked. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Shh,” he whispered. “Just a moment, please.”
“A moment my ass. Who are you? Why haven’t I seen you before? What’s your name?”
The light beamed brighter.
“God, what is that?” And then she was striding to the door, flinging it open. “Help! Someone help me, there’s a stranger in here and he’s—”
He lost her words in the softness of the hum that filled his head. It was a vibration, a harmonic tone that made his entire body vibrate in resonance with it, and it felt like … well, he couldn’t describe what it felt like. Never had been able to. But he thought it must be what it felt like for one’s soul to leave one’s body at death and to emerge into oneness with the universe. It felt like bliss and perfection and wonder and ecstasy.
The glow died. His hands cooled. A nurse came running, and the room’s lights came on. Blinding and harsh. As he lifted his head and finally refocused on the here and now, he became aware of several people standing in the doorway, frozen in that suspended moment before action set in.
But his main focus was on the little girl. Her eyes were open and staring into his, and she knew. He knew she knew. The exchange between them was real and utterly silent, overloaded with meaning. She might not be able to describe it or explain it or even understand it, but on a soul-deep level she knew what had just happened between them. He smiled warmly and gave a nod of affirmation, and he saw the relief, and then the joy, in her eyes.
She smiled back at him, and then someone was grabbing him, pulling his arms behind his back and holding them there, while another someone snatched the name badge from the lapel of his white coat and said, “Call the police.”
“The police are already here,” said a familiar—and welcome—female voice. “He’s been lurking around here for a while,” the uniformed “officer” explained. “Someone already called it in.” She took hold of his arm. “Come on, buddy. Let’s you and me have a little talk in private.”
“I want to know what this was all about,” the mother demanded.
“Can I see some ID?” one of the nurses said at the same time, addressing his captor.
“Yeah, yeah,” Brigit said, her impatience palpable. “How about I get him out of the poor kid’s room first, huh? I’ll need to question each of you just as soon as I have him securely tucked away in the backseat of my car. Do not go anywhere.”
She moved behind James as she spoke, and he felt metal on his wrists, then heard the telltale click of handcuffs snapping tight. She certainly was pouring it on. She took him by an elbow and turned to lead him out of Melinda’s room. As the door swung closed behind him, a tiny, beautiful voice said, “It’s okay, Mamma. I think he was a angel. Not the kind that comes to take you away. The kind that comes to make you better.”
He smiled as he heard those words. Yes. This was his purpose. It was the only thing that gave him any pleasure at all in this isolated, lonely life of his: using his healing gift to save the innocent.
Then his captor shoved him into the elevator, and they rode in silence to the ground floor. He looked her up and down. Her Goldilocks curls were bundled up tight, and her pale blue eyes, with their ebony rings, refused to meet his. When the elevator doors opened, she escorted him unceremoniously outside to her waiting car—a baby-blue, fiftieth anniversary edition Thunderbird—where she opened the passenger door.
He got in. She went around, got behind the wheel and started the engine. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a key. “Turn toward the door,” she ordered.
James turned toward the side window, so his back and cuffed wrists faced her. She inserted the key, twisted it and the cuffs sprang free. But even as he brought his hands around in front of him, he saw one of the nurses from Melinda’s room coming through the hospital doors, frowning as she moved toward the car.
“Incoming,” he muttered.
And then the nurse had rounded the car and was tapping on Brigit’s window.
Brigit rolled it down in the middle of the nurse’s “I knew it! You’re not a cop at all, you’re—”
Brigit released a growl like that of a panther about to strike. Not human, that sound. It sent chills up even James’s spine. He knew she’d exposed her fangs, and probably showed her glowing eyes, as well.
The nurse backed away so fast she fell on her ass, and then Brigit hit the gas and they pulled away, tires squealing before catching pavement and launching the T-Bird into motion.
“That was unnecessary.”
She glanced his way, fangs still visible, eyes still aglow. “Says who?”
“Says me. And will you put those damned things away?”
She shrugged, but relaxed enough to let the razor-sharp incisors retract. Her eyes returned to their normal striking ice-blue shade. “So are you done bitching now? Ready to throw in a ‘Hi, sis. Thanks for saving my ass back there. Great to see you again.’?”
He sighed, shaking his head. “It is good to see you again, little sister. How are you?”
“I’m good. So far. And you?”
“Fine.”
“Typical. One-word answers always were your thing. And I see you’re still trying out ways to use your gift. You decide to eradicate death altogether now, or just for those you deem too young to die?”
He lowered his head. “I didn’t need your help, you know. I do this sort of thing all the time.”
“I know you do. Unlike you, big brother, I care enough to keep track of my kin.”
He closed his eyes. “I’d see you more often if you didn’t give me this lecture every single freaking time.”
“What lecture? The one about abandoning your family? About turning your back on what you truly are, J.W.?”
“It’s James.”
“It’s J.W. It’s always been J.W., and it’ll always be J.W.”
“And I didn’t abandon my family or turn my back on what I am.”
“No? When’s the last time you exposed your fangs, J.W.? When’s the last time you tasted human blood?”
The last time.? It had been when he and his sister—his twin—had been adolescents, and their honorary “aunt” Rhiannon had insisted they imbibe. From a glass, not a warm pulsing throat, and still it had repulsed him.
“You’re lying to yourself,” Brigit said. “It was delicious. It set your soul on fire and left you craving more, and you know it as well as I do.”
He was startled, but only briefly. “I’m not used to being around someone who can read my every thought.”
“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”
“Look, I admit, the blood was … appealing. That’s what repulsed me. I don’t want to be … that way. And I’m not denying who I am, I’m choosing who I want to be, even while trying to discover why I’m here, why I was given this power.” He turned his palms up and stared at them, as he had so often throughout his life. “Power over life and death.”
“You’ve always been so sure there’s a reason,” she said softly.
“I know there is, Brigit.”
She nodded. “Well, I hate to admit this, bro, but you’re right. There is a reason. And I have recently discovered what it is.”
He stared at his beautiful twin, his opposite in almost every way. And yet they were the only two of their kind. He was certain she was kidding at first, because she had always teased and taunted him about his yearning for meaning, his quest for understanding. His innate sense of goodness and morality. But she didn’t laugh or even smile at him this time. And her face was stone serious.
“You think you know why we were born?”
“Yeah. And it’s not to run along the seashore revivifying dead starfish and tossing them back into the waves like you did when we were kids, or to cure little girls with cancer.” She licked her lips and shot him a quick look. “That’s what you did, just now, isn’t it? Cured her?”
He felt warm all over, and his smile was genuine. “Yeah. She’s gonna be just fine.”
Brigit’s lips curved upward, too, before she bit back the smile and put her trademark stern expression back in place. She was a hard-ass. Or at least she liked people to think she was. They’d played these roles all their lives, and he often wondered why she’d taken to hers as easily as he had taken to his.
His was easy. He was the good twin. The healer. The golden child.
Hers was a harder role to embrace. She was the bad twin. The destroyer, in a manner of speaking. And yet she’d never once complained about the label, even mostly seemed to try to live up to the tag—or rather, live down to it.
“Well?” he asked at length. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I think I have to show you.” She nodded at a magazine that was rolled up and tucked into the cup holder between them.
He sighed, about to argue with her, but when he met her eyes, he found her mind open, as well. Nothing hidden, no barriers, which was a very rare thing for his sister. He narrowed his eyes and felt only sincerity coming from her. No pretense, no hidden motives.
“The end of the world is coming, bro. It’s coming—and we’re the only ones who can prevent it. That’s why we were born. To save our entire race. Read the article while I drive. The page is folded over. I just hope we’re not already too late.”
“Too late?”
“I think it’s going to start tonight,” she told him.
He shook his head, still not following. “You think what’s going to start tonight?”
Brigit licked her scarlet-stained lips and sighed. “Armageddon. At least for our kind, and maybe for theirs, too.”
“We’re one-quarter human, Brigit. Their kind is also our kind.”
“Fuck their kind.” Her eyes flashed.
“Either way,” she went on. This might be it for everyone. Unless we do something about it.” She looked at her watch. “In the next forty-five minutes, as a matter of fact.”
“And where, exactly, is Armageddon going to break out in forty-five minutes?”
“Manhattan,” she said. “At a taping of the Will Waters Show.” She looked his way again and caught him staring at her as if she’d been speaking in tongues. “Will you just read the damned article? And buckle up. We’ve got to move.”
Frowning, he buckled, then opened the copy of J.A.N.E.S. Magazine to an article about a recently translated Sumerian clay tablet, written by someone by the name of Professor Lucy Lanfair. He found himself stuck on the tiny head shot of the professor herself, almost unable to tear his eyes away to read the piece that had his sister so wound up. It seemed as if the professor’s brown eyes were staring straight off the page and directly into his soul.
Brigit pressed harder on the accelerator, and the car’s powerful engine roared like a vampire about to feed.
2
Lester Folsom wasn’t enjoying life anymore, and he was more than ready to leave it behind. But he wasn’t willing to take his secrets to the grave with him. Those secrets were worth money. A fortune. And hell, he’d risked his life often enough while learning them that he figured he’d earned the right to spill his guts and reap the benefits before he checked out for good. So he’d spent the past year doing exactly that.
He was old and tired, and he was damned achy. And it had happened all at once, too. None of this gradual decline one tended to expect from old age. Not with him. One week he was feeling normal, and the next, he noticed that it hurt to lift his arms up over his head. The balls and sockets in his shoulders felt as if they’d run out of lubrication, stiff and tight. And he felt something similar in his knees and wrists and even his ankles now and then. It had happened right about the same time his eyesight had gone to hell. And it had all been downhill from there. His hair had thinned, and what remained had gone silver. His back had grown progressively more stooped, his skin more papery, with every passing year.
The beginning of his end, as nearly as he could pinpoint it, had been fifteen years ago, right after he’d retired from government work. His pension was a good one. But not as good as the advance River House Publishing had given him for his tell-all book. That money had allowed him spend the past twelve months on a private island in the Caribbean, basking and writing. Reliving it all, and yes, occasionally jumping out of his skin at bumps in the night. But they’d all been false alarms.
They wouldn’t be, after tonight. If his former employer didn’t get him, the subjects of his life’s work would. Either way, he was history. And that was fine.
He’d had that year in the tropical sun. Sandy beaches and warm saltwater made bifocals and arthritis a whole lot more bearable. And now the year was over. The book would hit the stands one month from today. He figured he’d be dead shortly thereafter. But he was ready. His affairs were all in order.
“Five minutes, Mr. Folsom,” a woman’s voice said.
He glanced up at the redheaded producer who’d poked her head through the door into the greenroom. It wasn’t green at all. Go figure. “I’ll be ready,” he replied.
And then she opened the door a bit farther and allowed another woman to enter. “You’ll go on right after Mr. Folsom,” the redhead told her.
“Thanks, Kelly.”
Kelly. That was the young redhead’s name. You’d think he could have remembered that from twenty minutes ago, when she’d first introduced herself. Didn’t much matter, he supposed. She was gone now.
The newcomer—he immediately labeled her an introverted intellectual—nodded hello, then looked around the room, just the way he had, taking in the table with its offerings of coffee, tea, cream and sugar, and its spartan selection of fruit and pastries. There was a television mounted high in one corner, tuned to the show on which they were both soon going to appear, but he had turned down the volume, bored by the host’s opening segment.
The woman finished her scan of the room and looked his way instead, then lowered her eyes when he met them. Pretty eyes. Brown and flighty, like a doe’s eyes, but hidden behind a pair of tortoiseshell-framed glasses.
“Well,” he said, to break the ice, “it seems Kelly isn’t much for introductions, so we’ll have to do it ourselves. I’m Lester Folsom, here to plug a book.”
She smiled at him, finally meeting his gaze. “Professor Lucy Lanfair,” she said, moving closer, extending a slender hand. It was not a delicate, pampered looking hand, but a working one. He liked that. She had mink-brown hair that matched her eyes, but she kept it all twisted up into a knot at the back of her head.
He took her hand, more relieved than he wanted to admit that it was warm to the touch. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Likewise.” She withdrew her hand, wiping it on her brown tweed skirt. “Sorry about the sweaty palms. I’m a nervous wreck. I’ve never been on TV before.”
“Nothing to be nervous about,” he assured her. “You look very nice, if that’s any comfort to you.”
“I’ve never been too concerned with how I look, but thank you very much. I appreciate it.”
A woman who didn’t care about looks. Well, now, that was interesting. “What is it you’ve come to talk about?” he asked.
She sank into a chair kitty-corner from his and unrolled the magazine she’d been clutching in one hand. “A rather startling new translation of a four-thousand, five-hundred-year-old clay tablet.”
He lifted his brows, his attention truly caught now. “Sumerian?”
“Yes!” She sounded surprised. “How did you know?”
“Not many other cultures had a written language in twenty-five hundred BCE. May I?” He nodded at the magazine, and she handed it to him. The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, J.A.N.E.S. for short, had a classic image of a ziggurat tower on the front, beneath which the headline screamed, New Translation Suggests Another Doomsday Prophecy for Mankind. He glanced from it to her. “This is your piece?” When she nodded, he said, “You made the cover. Impressive.”
“Yes, of a scholarly journal with a readership of about three thousand. Still, it’s nice to get the recognition. Though I could do without the sensationalism. What the prophecy predicts is meaningless.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure about that.” He shifted his gaze to the book he carried with him everywhere he went. “And you should be grateful for the sensationalism. You might not have gotten any coverage at all without it.”
“No, I guess not.”
“So, you’re a translator?” he asked, as he flipped pages to find her story.
“And an archaeologist, and a professor at Binghamton University,” she said softly.
Not bragging, just particular about getting her facts straight, he thought. She was a pretty thing. A bit skinnier than he liked, but women had been curvier in his day. She dressed down, though. Probably to be taken more seriously in her career. Pencil skirt, simple white blouse with a thin, cream-colored button-down sweater over it. Very plain.
“And now an author to boot,” he added.
“It’s mandatory in my field. ‘Publish or perish’ is more than just a figure of speech.”
Or in his own case, publish and perish, he thought. He found her article and, without time to read it all, skimmed ahead to the actual translation. Within the first few lines, he was riveted.
The offspring of the Old One,
All the children of the Ancient One,
Of Utanapishtim,
In a stroke, are no more.
In the light of his eyes, they are no more
To the last, to the very last,
Unless Utanapishtim himself … (Segment Missing)
“As I say, it’s not what it says that’s so interesting,” the skinny professor said, her voice breaking into his reading. “It’s that the Sumerians simply were not known to prophecy. But—”
He held up a hand to stop her distracting chatter as his eyes sped over the lines.
When light meets shadow,
When darkness is well-lit,
When the hidden are revealed,
War erupts.
Like a lion, it devours.
Like a tigress, without mercy, it destroys.
For the end is upon them,
The end of their kind,
The end of their race,
The race that sprang from his veins.
The door opened, and the redhead—Kelly—poked her head in again. “Time to go on, Mr. Folsom.”
“One moment!” he barked, startling both women. He had to finish reading. He could not stop there. He had to know.
Only the Old One … (Segment Missing)
The Flood-Survivor
The Ancient One
Utanapishtim
The Two must bring about … (Segment Missing)
The Two who are opposite
And yet the same,
One light, one dark,
One the destroyer.
One the salvation
“The twins,” he whispered. “This is about the legendary mongrel twins.”
“Excuse me?” Professor Lanfair asked.
“Mr. Folsom,” Kelly said. “We have to go.”
Ignoring them both, he flipped the page, but there was no more. Lifting his head, he speared the professor with his eyes. “That’s it? That’s all? They printed all of it?”
“Yes. At least, that’s all so far. There are still hundreds of broken pieces of clay tablets from that particular dig site in storage. There may be more to this tablet, but at the moment—”
“Mr. Folsom!” Kelly was not taking no for an answer.
He nodded, closing the magazine and handing it back to the doe-eyed bookworm. “It’s not a doomsday prophecy at all, Professor Lanfair. Not for humankind, anyway. This is about them.”
“About whom?”
He sighed, glanced at the redhead and then leaned close to the professor and whispered in her ear, “About the race no one believes exists—the very one my book is about to expose on national television tonight.” A sudden chill raced up his spine, and he glanced at the TV screen in the corner again, then narrowed his eyes and looked more closely. As the camera panned over the studio audience, he spotted a dark-suited man standing near the back, and then another near the exit. Both wore tinted glasses in the dim studio. His mouth went dry.
But he couldn’t back down now. He had to see this through. Returning his attention to the pretty professor who had stumbled upon what might be the key to everything, he pressed his personal copy of his soon-to-be-released book into her hands. “You’d better hold on to this. Don’t let anyone know you have it, and don’t let it out of your grip. No matter what.”
“I don’t under—”
“I’m about to tell the world that vampires really do exist, and that our government has known about it for the better part of a century. The darkness, my dear girl, is about to be well-lit. The hidden is about to be revealed. And there are those who don’t want that to happen. But the proof—” he tapped the book’s cover with a forefinger “—the proof is in there.”
Then he straightened away from her, nodded at the television set and said, “Turn up the volume and pay attention, Professor. Somehow, this involves you, too.” Then he walked out the door, letting it swing closed behind him.
He followed the youthful and impatient producer, who all but trotted down one long corridor after another. It was all he could do to keep up, and he was literally out of breath by the time she pushed open a pair of double doors and held one with her back while ushering him through. “Take your time crossing the stage,” she told him in a whisper. “Wave hello to the audience. And watch those cables on the floor.”
Will Waters, twenty-five-year news veteran, retired network anchor and current host of the nation’s top-rated prime-time news magazine, rose to his feet and extended a hand in Les’s direction. “Please welcome Lester Folsom to the show.”
Struggling to catch his breath, Les lifted his chin and began walking forward, his pounding heartbeat barely audible to his own ears due to the live studio audience’s obedience to the glowing “applause” sign. Silently, he wished he hadn’t missed Will Waters’s entire introduction. But he could guess at what it had entailed. The true contents of his book had not been revealed to anyone besides the publisher, only the barest of hints had been released to the press. That he had worked for a top-secret sub-division of the CIA for more than twenty years, a sub-division known as the Division of Paranormal Investigations, or DPI. And that his book would reveal the existence of things formerly believed to live only in the realms of fiction. Just what sorts of things—that was what he would talk about tonight. If those fellows in the back of the audience let him get that far, anyway. He’d have to get straight to the point with Will Waters. No time for small talk.
He stepped over a pair of heavy cables that snaked across the floor and made his way to the host, one of the most beloved newsmen in the world. Will Waters extended a hand.
And just as Lester Folsom closed his own hand around it, he felt something like a sledgehammer pound into his chest. And then again. And again.
It was only as he sank to the floor that the accompanying sounds—Pop! Pop! Pop!—registered in his brain. Not hammer blows. Gunshots. Bullets. They felt nothing like he’d expected. And vaguely, he became aware that the famous veteran newsman was on the floor beside him, jerking spasmodically as he bled out. Collateral damage. That was what those suits would call it.
As the light of this world began to fade and the light of another appeared on a distant horizon, Lester thought that they had got to him even faster than he had anticipated.
He’d done the right thing, though. And despite this sloppy effort at containment, there was no way they could keep his secrets quiet now. He’d opened Pandora’s Box, then made a graceless but timely exit before the havoc he’d unleashed could play out. From the sounds of the skinny professor’s prophecy, it wasn’t going to be pretty. He hoped she would survive, now that she was the only one with the proof.
The light on the distant horizon grew brighter. He could see it clearly even without his glasses. And then his shoulders stopped aching at last.
When the crazy old man left the greenroom, Lucy finally allowed the amused smile she’d been holding back with all her might to take possession of her face. She even laughed a little, quickly clapping her hand over her mouth in case he might hear beyond the heavy door. That would just be cruel. But really, vampires? Lester Folsom was obviously suffering from some sort of delusional break with reality.
