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“It’s safe?”
“Would I allow you to enter it without first warning you if it wasn’t safe?” he asked.
She wanted to smile but couldn’t find the lightness of spirit to allow her lips to make the move to do so.
“Do you know, I remember getting in the car with Claire, and I remember driving out here. I remember being so determined to be a rebel. To do all the things our friends were doing so we wouldn’t be considered weak.”
“You could never have been weak.” The confidence that rang in his voice wrapped around her and gave her strength.
“Before the wreck, Claire and I were in our first months of becoming a pain in the ass for our parents. After we awoke in the hospital, it was as though our entire personalities had changed. Even our friends remarked that we were so radically different that it was as though they didn’t even know us.”
She and Claire had also been concerned because it was as though they didn’t really know those who had been their closest friends.
“And it could be explained away the same as the reason for the plastic surgeries and the differences in your features,” he pointed out.
“Because of the wreck.” Inhaling deeply she stepped forward, lowered her head and moved inside the remnants of the sweat lodge.
Reality was like a mirrored mirage that began to shimmer around her. The past and the present were slamming together, attempting to merge and to separate as hazy images flashed before her and then escaped just as quickly.
She and Claire were laid out on the ground, bloodied, broken. There was a sense of urgency in the men who filled the small lodge and stroked the fire hotter, brighter, as the sizzle of water and the scent of herbs filled her senses.
But she wasn’t lying out on the floor. She was watching—herself?
The murmur of voices whispered past her ear, and shadowed images moved about the lodge. Breathing roughly, she felt her senses being bombarded by memories that weren’t memories, but rather misty threads of information that made such little sense. Clenching her fists, she fought to keep her mind open, to hold her fear back.
There was something there, information she needed. Liza could feel it drifting through her mind, just out of reach.
“What the hell happened? Ah God, Liza!” She swung around, expecting to see her father.
His voice was so angry, so agonized and filled with horror.
But he wasn’t there.
Stygian stood watching her silently, his gaze intent, his expressi
on somber.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, turning back, the wispy images of a past that made no sense rushing over her again.
The two girls, she and Claire, were laid out on one side of the fire. On the other side—she could feel herself trembling as the memory rushed over her—were two other girls.
Claire turned to look at her—the Claire that wasn’t broken and bloody—“I’ll never see him again,” she whispered as a tear fell down her cheek. Linking her fingers with her, Liza tried to give her friend comfort where only confusion and fear existed. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” Liza whispered. “Perhaps it’s the only thing that will keep us alive.”
The memories, hazy and fragile as they were, drifted away. But she wasn’t left with nothing to fill the place of where the memory had been. It remained there, a part of her now, pulled from the deepest reaches of her subconscious and now a part of her conscious memories.
She wasn’t Liza Johnson. Liza Johnson had died that night and Honor Roberts had taken her place.
She didn’t have the memories, yet. She had no idea how to help Jonas Wyatt, but what she did have was Orrin Martinez’s promise.
“One day, named for that which few men know—Honor—One day, you will realize, child, you have lived up to all the dreams your father had when he gave you a name of such distinction. Know now, your heart and your soul resonate with it, and into this new life you will take with you the knowledge that will ease the burden of loss for the parents who had such hope, and one day, you will fill the heart and the soul of one who never truly believed he had such.”
Stygian.
She filled his heart and soul, just as he filled hers. But there were so many other dreams, and so many others who were a part of her. And admitting to who, to what she was—
What she was—
Oh God, oh God—
