Authors: Lynn Viehl
“It’s been a long time.” He smiled at her. “I took your advice and showed my mother those bruises, and she never let me go back there. She also wouldn’t let my dad see me again until he quit working for Mr. King.”
“I never would have gotten out of there without your help,” she said seriously. “Not now, and certainly not when I was a kid.”
He shrugged. “You’d have found your way. You were always strong. My employer is going to have a few words with you later about your reckless and foolhardy actions, by the way.”
“Yeah, I imagine he is.” She stared at the door. “I’ve got to have a little talk with someone myself.”
Rowan was working on her fourth coffee and seventh package of peanut butter crackers when the surgeon came in to talk to her.
“She came through the procedure just fine,” he told her. “She lost a lot of blood, of course, but fortunately the bullet just missed her kidney. She’ll be in recovery for a while, and then we’re going to move her to the pediatric surgical ward. Because of her unusual . . . condition, I’m going to keep her sedated for twenty-four hours. You should go home, get some rest.”
Rowan thanked him, and went with Findley to find Paracelsus and Dansant. The two men stood deep in conversation at the other end of the hall, but as soon as Dansant saw Rowan he broke off and came to her.
“She’s going to be okay.” She related what the doctor had told her to both men, and added, “I want to be back here tomorrow when she wakes up.”
“Findley and I will go back to the hotel to make some additional arrangements,” Paracelsus said. “I have the entire floor, so you’re welcome to join us.”
“Rowan will be staying with me,” Dansant said, and took her arm. “You have my contact information, Samuel. Call if you need anything.”
When Paracelsus and Findley left, Rowan turned to Dansant. “Samuel?”
He led her to the elevator. “That is his name.”
She waited until they were inside the elevator before she asked, “What’s yours?”
“Mine was lost to me,” Dansant admitted, “and Sean does not remember his birth name.”
“Speaking of Sean,” she said, folding her arms, “does he know you’re a shape-shifter, and you’ve been pretending to be him?”
“I
am
Sean, Rowan.” “You do a flawless impression of him,” she conceded, “but you forget, I’ve watched you change.”
“I did not change myself into Sean Meriden’s form.” The elevator opened. “Sean Meriden and I are the same man. Or, rather, we share the same body.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” She folded her arms. “I’m a shifter, Dansant. I know how it works. You’re good, maybe as good as I am, but there is no way in hell both of you share one body. It doesn’t even look like the same body.”
He muttered something in French and waved for a cab. “I will tell you after we go to my apartment. It is a long story.”
“Honey, it always is.” She climbed in the cab.
Dansant’s apartment was like something out of an architect’s wet dream, all clean lines and avant-garde style, and would have seemed almost sterile if not for the paintings on the walls.
“Friends of yours?” she asked as she eyed one portrait of a blond fallen-angel with vivid green eyes.
“I don’t know. I dream of their faces, and I paint what I remember.” He brought her a glass of wine and gestured for her to sit on the squiggle of cushions that served as his couch. “I don’t remember my life before Sean, Rowan, so I probably have as many questions as you do.”
She hmphed. “I doubt that.”
He glanced at the windows. “I have only an hour left before I change places with him. We have no memory of each other’s activities, so it would be best if you stayed close, so you could reassure him.” At her blank look, he added, “The last thing Sean will remember is being in King’s suite and your father pointing a gun at him.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She took a swallow of her wine before she felt ridiculous again. “How can you be two different men?”
Dansant tugged back her sleeve to reveal part of the dragon tattoo on her forearm. “I do not know for sure, but I think in much the same way you can be any woman.” He pulled back his left sleeve, and revealed on the inside of his forearm a mirror image of the S-shaped dragon tat Sean had. The only difference was that Dansant’s dragon was inked in blue with red eyes.
“Just because you both have this yin-yang dragon tat on your arms doesn’t make you Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” she argued. “It’s not even on the same arm.”
“Nonetheless, Sean and I bear identical marks, just as we share the same form.” He spread his hands. “For this part of every night, that is me.”
“Shifting doesn’t work like that. I know. I pull the thoughts from someone and use it to create the dreamveil,” she said. “I know you’re not Sean Meriden pretending to be an executive chef. You’re a completely different person. A separate person.”
Dansant nodded.
Rowan had seen a lot of weird things in her life, but nothing like this. “So how could you and Sean end up sharing the same body?”
“I have only theories, not facts,” he admitted, “but over the years Sean and I have come to some logical conclusions. It begins in Nice, with a man named Nathan Frame, who was married to the daughter of a chef.”
Dansant told her the story of the accident, and the few fragments of memory Sean had retained of Nathan’s past before he had come to France.
“When Gisele was taken, she was put in a van filled with test tubes and biological samples. These were things taken from other people these men tortured. When the accident happened, Nathan ran into the fire to try to save Gisele. Then the van exploded and he was very badly burned. That must have been when one of the specimens entered his body, through his wounds, for pieces of the test tubes were found embedded in them. After two weeks in the hospital, he died of his injuries.”
Her throat tightened. “No, he didn’t.”
Dansant nodded. “In the moments after his death, I came to consciousness in his body. At the same time, his body spontaneously healed and changed shape into mine. I was not hurt or burned, and I knew I could not stay in the hospital and be discovered as I was, so I escaped and hid myself. Then, sometime after midnight, I lost consciousness. My body shifted again, this time into Sean’s form, with his mind and personality.”
“So Sean is Nathan.”
Dansant shook his head. “Neither of us is Nathan Frame, although we both have some of his knowledge and characteristics. I acquired his cooking skills and love for fine cuisine. Sean inherited his mechanical talents and his fighting abilities. We both have some skill with weapons.”
“Was Sean burned when you changed into him?”
“Fortunately, no. The first shift had healed him as well.” He sighed. “I am not Sean, and I am not aware of him. Upon my second awakening, when the sun set the next night, I woke to find myself standing on the docks looking at a boat. I was thirty miles from where I had gone to my rest and I could not remember how I had come to be there. My clothes were torn at the seams, as if a larger man had tried to wear them. Fortunately that portion of the docks was deserted at the time, and no one saw us change.”
“So sunset triggers the change from Sean to you, and you don’t change back until after midnight,” she said, to be sure she had it straight. “You have no memory of what he does while he controls the body, and it’s the same for him. When you’re awake, he’s asleep.”
He nodded. “We seem to have divided the best of Nathan Frame between the two of us, although physically neither of us bears any resemblance to him. Sean has a few fragments of his memory, but I have none at all. What we do have of Nathan’s original form are these.” He touched the tat on his arm. “According to his medical file, Nathan also had a taijitu on each arm. One scarlet, one blue. Those, too, were divided between us.”
She considered how a man’s life and experiences could be split in half, and how much grief the division must have caused Meriden and Dansant. “How do you know all this about each other? If your minds are separated, and you’re never aware of each other, how can you communicate at all?”
He smiled a little. “At first we tried to leave messages with other people, but over time we have learned that they sometimes changed the message or even forgot them. Then we wrote notes and left them in our pockets, but
mon frère
does not always have the patience to write. When we came to America, Sean hired a twenty-four-hour answering service for his garage. It was my idea to call it and leave messages for him, and set up an account for myself so he could do the same. We have to be guarded in what we say, of course, but it has proven to be most effective.”
Rowan chuckled. “You should really try e-mail.” Her smile faded as she studied his face. “You really don’t remember who you were before all this happened to you and Sean?”
“I wish I did, but no. My memory begins the night I woke in the hospital.” He grimaced. “There are some clues about the sort of man I was. I speak many languages, some that are very old and no longer used, but French is the most familiar. I know how to handle weapons, especially blades, very well. As you have seen, I paint portraits and landscapes. They are people and places I have never seen, but still I know them.” He touched his chest. “Here, inside, I feel them.”
“Do you remember dying?”
“
Non
. I only remember waking. I had thought perhaps my first body must have been destroyed by the men who took Nathan’s wife, but then that woman came to me, the night you and I went to the opera. She called me Michael and kissed me.” He gave her a troubled look. “I was looking for you, so I did not pay much attention to her.” He nodded toward the portrait. “That is the same woman.”
“Michael is a pretty common name, but at least we know what he looks like,” Rowan pointed out. “When it’s Sean’s turn to have the body, he can start hunting him down for you.”
“
Non, ma mûre
. If the man I was lives, I have no wish to meet him.”
“Why not?”
“He cannot know he was born again in another body. He has his life and his woman.” He ran his hand over her curls. “I have mine.”
“For eight hours a day.” Now she shook her head. “How can you live like this? You didn’t even get half days.”
He gave her a wry look. “Regrettably I was never consulted. But it is not so bad as you think. You sleep every night, and you do not resent the hours away from the world. When Meriden takes my body, it is much the same for me.”
“Jesus, that’s another thing.” She twined her fingers in his. “Neither of you really ever sleeps, do you?”
“Sean does.” He shrugged. “I do not seem to require it.”
She tucked a long strand of his hair behind his ear. “Aren’t you afraid when he takes over that you might not come back the next night?”
He considered that for a moment. “I have always felt that it is Sean’s body, not mine. I am grateful for my life, but I live it through his flesh.” He sighed. “After the accident, neither of us could accept it at first. Sean was too damaged in spirit, and I could not bear the thought that I had only existed as bits of skin and blood and bone. We still struggle with it, and we often resent each other. For example, he will not like that I was the one to tell you about us.”
“I’m not afraid of Sean.” She kept hold of his hand. “I’m in love with him.”
His mouth tightened. “I know.”
“I’m also in love with you.” As he stared at her, she leaned in and brushed her lips against his. “Whatever problems you have with each other, you’re both going to have to deal with that.”
He looked stunned and pleased, and threaded his fingers through her curls. “You would choose both of us?”
“You might be two different guys, but you have the same heart. Literally and metaphorically speaking.” She pulled him over on top of her. “I don’t care if you change into one man or two or nine. I want you. I want Sean. I want us.”
Dansant braced himself on his forearms. “Do you.” He settled himself between her legs, rocking his hips a little so that his erection stroked her gently. “I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you.”
“Same here.” She reached down in between them, unzipping his fly and pushing her hand inside.
“Rowan.” He caught his breath. “Sean is your lover. He may not accept this. I love you, but I do not want him hurt. He is my brother.”