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What it was was a bit scary. She had listened to the whole exchange almost as if from inside her body while someone else took it over. She had contributed things to it, things from her memory and personality that had been needed to help her be as convincing as possible to her brother, but the smooth lies and explanations that had come so quickly and believably, those had come from something else, some other person inside of her. For all intents and purposes, she’d just been hijacked.

“That was your Bodywalker, Docia,” Ram said softly near her ear, “and my queen.”

Jackson hung up the phone and stared at it as if it might grow teeth. Then he looked up at Leo and the room full of people, including two detectives, Dr. Hot-body Anderson, and Lieutenant Avery Landon, who had also heard the phone conversation when he had immediately switched to speakerphone out of instinct. The more people who heard the conversation, the more brains involved, the more opportunities there would be to take notice of details that Jackson alone might miss. They hadn’t had a chance to tap his phone yet in order to tape incoming calls, so it was the best they had in a pinch.

“Well, that’s a relief,” the junior detective said.

“Are you serious?” Jackson and Leo bit off at the same time.

“You heard the girl. I have to agree that she sounded fine,” the senior detective said. “Sounds like she just wanted some time on her own. Clearly what happened on the street was completely unrelated to your sister.”

“Clearly?” Jackson snapped. “Really? You know my sister so well that it was
perfectly
clear to you?”

“Sergeant Waverly … ,” Dr. Bitch-Who-Had-Led-Him-to-Believe-His-Sister-Was-Dead started to say.

“You shut up,” he snapped, pointing a finger— and all
the rest of himself, for that matter— in her face. “Every time you have something to say to or about me, the whole world goes to shit.”

She bristled, of course. Who wouldn’t with that much male aggressiveness pouring out at her?

“I wasn’t the one on the banks of the Hudson River taking your sister’s pulse,” she said in hard, punctuated words. Then she disappointed him by drawing her temper back down. She was even more attractive when she was putting him in his place, and a sadistic side of him liked to see it. “And she did not sound stressed or as though she was lying. There were no markers I heard that would immediately cause concern for worry—”

“And how long, exactly, have you known my sister?” he demanded of her.

“Well, I—”

“Not at all, right? So how the hell do you know anything about it? You are just as clueless now as you were when you walked me into that office and told me she was dead.” Okay, so maybe some small part of Jackson knew he was being irrational and completely unfair, but it was a
very
small part.

“I don’t know how much I can possibly apologize for that, Sergeant Waverly! I was only acting on orders and information given to me by someone else.” She took a calming breath. If Jackson weren’t so worried about Docia right then, he’d have been utterly turned on. Oh, hell. Maybe he was anyway. She was standing up to him as though she weren’t the least bit afraid of him, standing up for herself because she was right. In the end, Jackson knew it wasn’t her fault that someone down the chain of command had screwed the pooch. But she was the one who had been in front of his face that day, and she was the one in front of his face right now. He just wasn’t done dealing with her or the fallout of how he had felt in those horrible, horrible minutes. Two hun
dred and seven of them, to be precise. And now Docia was in danger again, her life hanging in the balance, and she was going in the opposite direction, trying to make everyone else there think she was fine when she most certainly was not fine.

“Fine,” he growled at her. “Did you hear it? How many times she said it? ‘I’m fine.’ Everything’s fine. If you knew a single damn thing about Docia, you’d know how she turns phrases, and she most certainly doesn’t say she is ‘fine,’ and even if she did, she most certainly wouldn’t repeat it eight times in a single conversation. Docia is one of those quirky people who likes to say the same thing in different ways instead of sounding like a repetitious parrot.”

Marissa and the rest of the room, sans Leo, looked at him as if he were in serious need of an intervention. Perhaps a vacation. A long one. On some secluded farmhouse in the mountains staffed with lots of doctors and nurses.

“Leo, help me out here,” he said through his teeth.

“Right as rain,” Leo said softly, his rich voice starting low and slowly growing in power. “Super-duper. A-okay. Five by five. Happy as a pig in shit. All in one piece. Okie-dokie. Running on all four cylinders. Peachy keen. It’s all good. Marvelous. Splendiferous. Super-frigging-califragilisticexspialidocious!
Do you. Get. The picture?
” He was staring down Landon. “She would have said ‘safe as houses,’ not just ‘safe.’ She would have been profuse in her apologies. And Docia … as weird as she is … she uses all of what we’re telling you to cover up her awkwardness. To pretend she isn’t as shy as she is. She’s not assertive, she just throws a storm of words at people so that they think that she is. God. You guys have all eaten in her kitchen, helped her around the house … Christ. Farley, you even tried to date her once, didn’t you?”

The junior detective paled as though someone had
sucked all the iron out of his blood. He stuttered, looking at Jackson.

“I— I … n-no, I— I w-w-w-w-w … no, Jackson. I never—”

“Relax, Farley,” Jackson said forgivingly. The detective sighed in relief. Jackson smiled. “I’ll kill you later.”

“I … w-well, they have a— a point,” Farley said in a choke of words. Jackson didn’t care if he was switching sides to suck up to him in hopes he wouldn’t kill him for trying to date Docia. Every cop there knew he had outright promised to kill any cop who tried to date his sister. He didn’t want the life of a cop’s wife for her. She deserved to be happy and safe and not worrying if her husband was going to come home at night. Bad enough she worried about him.

“I’m not going to devote time and resources to finding a woman who just said she doesn’t want to be found,” Landon said shortly.

“And a mutilated body just happened to show up on her street the same time she disappears?” Leo scoffed. “Screw this, Jacks. I’ll help you find her, and I promise you it’ll be twice as fast as anything these stiffs can manage.” He grabbed for the midnight-blue leather jacket he’d slung off the corner of a nearby chair and marched out of the room without so much as looking back. Jackson was overwhelmed with the desperation that was bleeding into him.

“I’m asking for you to help me do this. You’re my brothers. If
you
told me this, I’d take you at your word. I’d do whatever you needed to put your mind at rest. All I want to do is find her and lay eyes on her. If she turns up
fine
and I’ve wasted your time … I’ll work the equipment cage for a week.”

“Make it two and you have a deal,” Landon said, the smirk in his eyes telling Jackson he probably would have helped him without the offer. But his boss could never
get anyone to work the cage without bitching about it or fighting him tooth and nail, and he wasn’t about to lose an advantage like this.

“I’ll make it three if you find her in under an hour,” Jackson countered.

“Two is sufficient. You have a dog to train, Waverly. So let’s do this. Want to go at your witness again?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the man-child who was sitting at Jackson’s desk pretending to be a cop and entertaining the rest of the bullpen with his antics.

“I have a better idea. Didn’t the town mount traffic cameras on 9W? If these ‘friends’ of hers had wanted to get out of there fast, they would have driven north on 9W and through town toward I-87.”

With the Esopous River on the west side and the Hudson on the east, Saugerties was literally cut off in any other direction, save north and south, and there was only one main drag to be found.

“Agreed. The only other way out of town is south on 9W and that would be way too slow for anyone in a hurry. Either way, north or south, they still have to pass a mounted camera. Of course, if they’ve hit I-87, and considering the time window they’ve had, they can now be anywhere between here and eighty miles from here.”

“Let’s get the feed from those cameras. Maybe it caught the car. And even if we can’t figure it out from those cameras, every single exit off of I-87 is a toll exit and you can bet they went through one of them and got their picture taken.”

Landon smiled and nodded.

“Looks like I’m going to have to rework the schedule for the next two weeks.”

“So, I was wondering, how long have you been around? Bodywalkers, I mean,” Docia asked carefully,
trying to figure out if it was okay to ask questions. They had seemed very forthcoming so far, so why not? Didn’t she have a right to ask about the thing that was inside her?

Oh jeez. She suddenly had a violent fear that something was going to come bursting out of her chest and fall wriggling to the floor. She laid a hand on her chest and tried to take soft, steady breaths. Nothing of what she had learned of them had suggested the Bodywalker inside her had any desire to leave. Or that it even could. By the sound of it, her hitchhiking Bodywalker was very much dependent on her. But what was the Blending? And … at some point was this strong, dominant female presence inside of her going to take her over completely?

“Thousands of years. We predate Christianity. By quite a bit,” Ram said, resting a hand on the small of her back and guiding her a little deeper into the house. It was clear as they went that the Bodywalkers did not lack wealth. Or taste, for that matter. Every room they passed or entered was more magnificent than the last. There was a tremendous collection of antiques throughout. Conspicuously placed in the hall in a glass and gold-etched cabinet mounted on the wall was a beautiful Egyptian crook and flail, the accoutrements of Egyptian royalty. The cobalt-blue inlay and gold that striped them looked as perfect and splendid as it no doubt had when some distant pharaoh had handled them. If it had looked a little more worn, she would have wondered why it wasn’t in a museum somewhere. But its clean condition told her it was most likely a replica and not the actual item.

At least, she
thought
…

“Thousands of years?” she echoed as he led her to a pair of enormous doors. It was as if they were made of obsidian stone, only in hundreds of crafted pieces, each
shape laid into the door like a stained-glass window, where the individual pieces might not make much sense but a true artist could shape them into something beautiful that told a story. Here the image was of a sun, raised high in the upper right-hand corner of the right door, its strong rays streaming down across both heavy doors until they touched the bottom of the left-hand door.

The raised curves and shapes of the stone begged her fingers to touch them, but Ram was already pushing through the doors, their heavy size and weight seemingly nothing to him. She could see the flex of muscle in his forearms as he grabbed the long vertical handles, also made of black stone, two bands of gold on each at top and bottom and the metal mounts equally golden. It was clear they had cost a fortune to make, and as those doors swung open she quickly came to realize that they were a minor detail in comparison with the room they guarded.

It was what she imagined walking onto the set of
The Ten Commandments
might have felt like. That the theme was ancient Egyptian would have been obvious to any idiot. The quantity of stone in the room was astounding. Walls. Floors. Ceiling. Beams and columns. And every inch of every surface was either carved or painted with bright, colorful pictures laid out in rows and rows, around and around the room, reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, only it was hieroglyphs as if they had evolved over time with modern paints and medium, modern artist flairs and training. Docia stopped, feeling breathless and overwhelmed as the enormous room surrounded her. There was a fall of water at the far end directly across from the doors, but the water was running down a channel in the far wall and was diverted through a series of other channels down to the floor, where it ran all the way around the room in a collection of canals covered in beautifully etched frosted glass.

There wasn’t a single surface she could see that wasn’t covered or carved in a breathtaking pictoral impression or story.

“Thousands of years,” she squeaked out. “Holy shitcakes. You’re from …” She pointed wordlessly at the walls.

“Ancient Egypt. In those ancient times, as you may know, we practiced complex burial ceremonies.” He shut the door tightly behind them. That was when she noticed the infusion of soft, smoky musk and a layer of other scents. Golden burners hung in dozens of places, and several of them were smoking in delicate curls of fragrance. “We worshipped our pantheon of gods, had our deep belief in the nature of the afterlife and how best to bring the mortal world and our possessions with us. We were very material … and very arrogant to believe that we as mortals could in any way dictate to death.