"Consumed, yes," she whispered, "but not claimed."
"But you are..." Healed was the word that first came to his mind. But it seemed pathetically inadequate. This was a miracle, her appearance before him. Her life.
With all the courage he had, he closed his hand gently around hers. He brought the tips of her fingers close to his nose, then to his lips. A smile now accompanied her tears, a desperate, almost pleading smile. When she brought her hand to the side of his face and he allowed her to cradle his cheek, it was as if some great tension left her.
"Is there a name for what you are?" he whispered.
"If there was not, could you love me now? Here? As we both are?"
He wanted to kiss her fingertips, gently. But he knew this would be the end of him. The end of any life he might have once described as level and sane. And so he did it.
And then his mouth was on hers, his hands traveling up and under her frilly, white gown. The feel of her silky flesh, the smell of her, the taste of her, the startling strength with which she pulled him to the floor, wrapped her legs around his waist as he tasted her, kneaded her, ravished her with kisses. Each touch, each taste, more than an expression of passion, a confirmation of her existence. Her miraculous resurrection.
Again and again, she said his name. And she did this after confessing to having no name of her own, and that made the love with which she said his all the more powerful.
Need there be a name for what they were to each other now? For what they had been for each other in Cairo? And if madness was required to enter this place of unbridled passion and dreams realized, then let there be madness now and forever.
43
She had not exhausted him. Instead, he carried her upstairs to one of the bedrooms, and there he began to make love to her again as the morning sunlight streamed through the lace curtains. The wallpaper seemed as vivid and bright as the day outside, more beautiful and welcoming than anything inside the dark estate where she'd been held prisoner.
He did not stop until he'd brought her to a climax that shook her to her bones.
In the breathless aftermath, as he gently smoothed her hair from her forehead, he began to tell her everything that happened the day before. The party and the great poisoning, the absurd explanation being offered by the investigators.
She said nothing in response. She didn't want to stop the flow of his words. They were so honest, so sincere, so carefully selected.
Her memories of their time together in Cairo were whole and untouched, and so she was reminded once again of why she had become so enamored of him in such a short time.
There was a nearness to him. Always. In every moment. A sense that he was utterly present. When he paused now and then to collect his thoughts, she did not feel as if his mind were slipping away to tend some calculations he wished to keep secret. He desired only to express himself as clearly as he could, and for her benefit. So that she could know him. So that she could know all he had been through since they'd parted.
Did this set him apart from all her past lovers, with their tilt towards perpetual distraction; a preoccupation with battles, with empires? She was losing her ability to remember.
But she could remember her brief time with him in Cairo, and in this moment, that was all that mattered. She could remember lying with him in that beautiful room at the Shepheard's Hotel. And how marvelous this was, to visit a memory vivid and pure, as so many others were being taken from her. Not just to visit it; but to live in it, to swim in it, to taste it. And now, as he had then, he treated her as if she were whole. As if she lacked for nothing, as if she was far from being the terrible, doomed creature Saqnos had described.
Nochtin. Could she imagine such a brutal word coming from Alex's lips? Perhaps, but she could not imagine him whispering it with the same hatred as her former captor.
He was explaining to her now that he had undergone a radical shift in his thinking, in his view of the world, all based on what he had witnessed on the lawn of this very estate. And on her miraculous return. And on the terrible, crushing grief he had felt after watching the flames claim her.
It was clear to her now that her reappearance, her resurrection, had somehow made it easier for him to accept what he'd witnessed the day before, outside this very house.
He spoke of it again now. This poisoning.
"Ashes, my darling. They turned to ash quite literally before our eyes." With a kind of dazed wonder, he said this. But again, she said nothing in response. She did not reveal to him that she had been on this very property before these events unfolded. That she had been perilously close to promising Julie Stratford she would never try to see him again, all in exchange for a dose of the elixir; a dose that might quiet her torment, stanch the outward flow of her own past. She told him none of this. Her silence seemed to cause him no strain, but for how much longer?
He had worked his way backwards in his story, it seemed. All the way to the explanations Ramses and Julie had given for her appearance in Cairo. Painful to hear herself described as a madwoman. But the rage she might once have felt over these words was not forthcoming. For it was possible she was becoming something far worse. Something that was neither immortal nor mortal. A foul thing raised from death.
Nochtin, she heard Saqnos growl. Nochtin...
Alex fell silent.
He caressed the side of her cheek. And only in the brief flare of his nostrils could she sense the tension in him, the expectation.
He had told her everything.
Now it was her turn.
"I am sick," she whispered. "I am sick, Lord Rutherford."