The warm feeling peaked and then exited his body through his hands in short bursts. He could feel the familiar bitter taste on the tip of his tongue, widening to fill his mouth. It lasted only a few moments. Then the warmth faded and the bitterness disappeared. He released his grip on Logan Tom and gently laid him down again.
When he straightened, the Knight of the Word was looking up at him. “You’re back,” the other whispered.
“So are you,” Hawk answered, smiling.
Gathered close around the hay wagon the Ghosts stared wordlessly, eyes wide, except for Catalya, who was standing well back from the others where they couldn’t see that she was crying.
SEVEN
L OGAN TOM could not remember all the details. Whether it was the intensity of his battle with Krilka Koos or his shock at being stabbed with a viper-prick or something else entirely, he had lost bits and pieces of what had happened just before he lapsed into his coma. Hawk’s gypsy morph magic had been enough to bring him back to consciousness, but not enough to restore his memory.
Given what he could recollect, he decided it might be just as well.
Because what he did remember haunted him in a way that nothing had since the death of Michael. It had taken him years to come to terms with that experience, and in truth it was just weeks ago, while on his way west to find the gypsy morph, that he had finally done so. There in that mountain pass amid the spirits of the dead, he had put the ghosts of his old life to rest and banished at last the terrible sense of guilt and failure they had fostered in him.
Now it seemed he might have awakened to an entirely new form of haunting.
It wasn’t the events themselves that were troubling. He understood that he couldn’t expect to control events any more than he could control the rising and setting of the sun. He had responded to them in the best way he knew how, and by doing so had saved his life. He did not regret any part of that. Nor did he feel any particular regret for what he had done to Krilka Koos, a dangerous and messianic madman who would have killed others if he had not been defeated and disabled. Krilka Koos had courted his fate and had found it.
No, it wasn’t in the events themselves. It was in his response to them. Not in how he had reacted to them physically, but in how he had responded emotionally. The former was over and done with in moments, but the latter lingered on. Emotional response was an after effect of every battle, every violent encounter, and over the years he had learned to recognize it and live with it. Every time he attacked and destroyed a slave camp and the children on which the demons had experimented, he lived with the pain and the sense of horror and guilt for weeks afterward. Sometimes months. If he was brutally honest, he would admit to himself that he was living with it still.
It was so here, but in a different way. Doing battle with Krilka Koos had awakened something new. He didn’t feel pain or horror or guilt about what he had done to the rogue Knight of the Word. But in the course of his struggle he had lost control of himself. This wasn’t new; it had happened before. In the bloodlust of battle, losing control was almost a given. If you weren’t madder and more reckless than those you fought to defeat, you were probably going to die. Michael had taught him that, and Michael had been right.
But this time something new had happened. This time he had enjoyed it. He had reveled in it. And now, in the aftermath, he was eager for a return of the feelings it had generated.
How much worse, he wondered, could it be than this? His unwanted fascination with and desire for a resurgence of those feelings of power and freedom was terrifying. It suggested the onset of a steady disregard of the moral compass that had guided him all these years. He had always worried that someday the power of the black staff of his office, the magic that defined the Knights of the Word, would prove too much for him. The simple fact that there seemed to be almost no boundaries to its limits save those placed on it by the strength of commitment and sense of right and wrong of the user had troubled him from the beginning. But he had been confident that he could handle it, still a young man who believed in himself completely. He understood the risks, but he was more than willing to accept them for a chance to strike back at the demons and once-men responsible for the loss of his family and his childhood. Revenge was a powerful motivator, and it gave him a reason to embrace a power he might otherwise have shunned.