“Like I said, your modern definition of love pales in comparison to mine. Love, real love, when you cherish the soul of another above your own, whether it’s family, friend, or lover, that bond is difficult to sever. It’s why my brother never gave up trying to bring me back. When he failed after hundreds of attempts, he finally understood that my body was the key. Cleopatra’s ankh necklace couldn’t produce a new one, so he had to find a body for me.”
“I really don’t want to know how he did that because I’m guessing I wouldn’t like that story. But, he did choose nicely.” She supplied a weak smile.
I understood that Theodora was trying to make light, but the displaced soul, the young man who used to own this shell, had his life torn away. It was one more pebble on the heaping pile of guilt that comprised my existence.
“The necklace stopped me from aging past a certain point and kept me from dying from that day forward,” I added.
“Wow. That’s a very impressive necklace. Are you wearing it now?”
“No. King made sure it wasn’t easy to remove; I had to pay a very high price to have it taken off.” The Incan chalice I stole from my brother was intended to bring back Mia’s dead brother. Unfortunately, I needed something to barter with so I could get help finding Theodora. I also needed help removing that necklace—otherwise, my body would just keep coming back.
“So you said that you and I met a second time. Where? When?” she asked.
I could tell from the twinkle in her eyes she was expecting a romantic story of two lost souls searching for one another. But nothing could be further from the truth.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MACK
1512
We were savages. No question about it. My brother, King, was building his empire of power and honing his abilities to walk among the living while he searched for the Artifact—the stone he needed to break his own curse and get his life back. As for myself, I had been resurrected but was going out of my mind after wandering the earth as a tormented soul for more than two thousand years.
Nothing made sense to me except pain and killing. It was why, after I slaughtered his entire household of servants—thirty-three maids of all ages, the youngest sixteen, along with forty-nine guards—my brother had to do something. Not that he cared about my killing his staff. He was more concerned about my drawing the wrong type of attention.
“You need time to get this out of your system, Callias,” King said, pacing the length of his lavish study at his French villa in Marseille that overlooked the ocean. “Meanwhile, I will deal with the cleanup and take care of the local authorities.”
I sat on the cream-colored silk couch next to the fire, dripping with blood. Hell no. I didn’t care about the couch. All I could hear were the screams of my victims and the voice in my head telling me to do it again.
“What have you done to me, Draco?” I growled in agony.
“Shut your mouth, brother. Let me think.”
I stood up, ready to make him my next victim. “Why did you bring me back?” I couldn’t believe what I’d done. The absolute horror of it all. Nevertheless, those brief moments of peace I’d experienced after taking each life had felt like a small piece of sanity. Heaven. Calm. Bliss.
“Must you ask?” He casually tugged on the sleeve of his white blousy shirt. The people of these times dressed so oddly, the men in velvety tunics gathered at the waist and the women in their giant skirts. These were not the free-flowing gowns of my time.
“It was wrong, Draco. Wrong when I took your head. Wrong when I died. Wrong when you brought me back to life.” Though I knew he’d resurrected me for purely selfish reasons, so no, I didn’t have to ask why he’d done it. Nevertheless, “Nothing good will ever come of you or me.”
“I said be quiet,” he barked.
“Or what? You’ll slay me?”
He shook his head and began mumbling. “Never. We are twins, one soul divided into two bodies.”
It was what he believed at the time. Later, we’d evolve. Though we were connected, we were two different souls, two different bodies, one original set of DNA. But science was just as much a mystery to us back then as it was to anyone.
“I’m sending you to find the Artifact,” he said. “You’ll pick up the trail where you last saw it and see where it leads you.”
For all I knew, the Artifact was back in Greece. My guards had shown up right before I’d died, and I’d asked them to take it to Mia.
“How do you propose I get back to…to…the place I died?” Memories of óolal flashed through my mind. I couldn’t quite make sense of them.
“I have given money to a Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, a Spaniard who has been charged with establishing a settlement on an island called Caobana, not too far from where you perished. You will sail with him.”
“He works for you?” I asked.