Teskhamen embraced them both. And then he was gone. Simply gone. And they stood alone together on the sand as the wind swept in from the endless sparkling surf, and the vast sprawling city behind them slowly came to morning life.

The next night, Marius needed less than an hour to make all arrangements by phone with his mortal agents, and to ship their possessions and clothes, such as they were, to New York. They’d lodge at a small hotel uptown as they’d always done, where a suite of rooms had always been kept in readiness for them. And they would talk then, once they’d reached New York, about when to go to Benji and Armand and Louis and blessed Sybelle.

Daniel was powerfully excited that they were going. Daniel wanted to be with the others, Marius knew this, and he was happy for Daniel, but he himself was full of foreboding.

The encounter with Teskhamen had stimulated him, there was no doubt of that; he was in fact reeling from the shock.

Daniel could not grasp the extent of it. Yes, Daniel had been Born to Darkness in a time of myriad shocks. But, before that, Daniel had been born into a physical world of myriad changes and shocks. He had never known the dreary and weary mind-set of times past. He had never understood the inveterate pessimism and resignation into which most of the world’s teeming millions had been born and lived and died.

But Marius had known the millennia, and they had been millennia of suffering as well as joy, of darkness as well as light, in which radical change of any kind too often culminated in disappointment and defeat.

Teskhamen. Marius could scarce believe that he had seen him, spoken to him, that such a momentous thing had taken place—that old god of the grove alive now, articulate and eloquent, and pointing the way to the past and the future in the same breath. A great dark portion of Marius’s early history flamed into living color for him, and prompted him to search for a coherent thread to all of his life.

But there was the foreboding.

He could not stop thinking of all those long-ago interludes, when he had lain against the breast of Akasha—her caretaker, her keeper—listening to her heart and trying to fathom her thoughts. He had been inside her, this alien creature Amel. And Amel was inside of Marius now.

“Yes, I’m inside of you,” said the Voice to him. “I am you and you are me.”

There followed silence. Emptiness. And the lingering echo of a threat.

Chapter 14

Rhoshamandes and Benedict

“BE CALM,” he said. “Whatever you saw, whatever almost happened to you, you’re safe now. Be calm and talk to me. Tell me precisely what you saw.”

“Rhosh, it was unspeakable!” said Benedict.

Benedict sat at the desk with his head down on his folded arms, sobbing.