“Hush, beloved. We are in danger. Cry out and you warn them.”
Ianira’s gaze ripped away from Jenna’s, met her husband’s. “Marcus . . .” It was the sound of a drowning soul clinging to a storm-battered, rocky shore. His arms went around her. The former Roman slave lifted her trembling figure, held her close. Jenna had to turn aside. The sight of such intimacy tore through her, a bitter reminder of the emptiness of her own life before Carl, an emptiness which had brought her, shaking and sick in her heart, into the Temple in the first place. The Temple, where she’d found real friendship for the first time in her life, friendship and Carl . . . The loss tore through her, still too new and raw to endure. Across the hotel room, Marcus was speaking, voice low, the words in some language other than English or the Latin he’d used earlier. Greek, probably, since Ianira had come to the station from Athens.
Someone touched Jenna’s arm. She glanced up and found Noah watching her. “Yeah?” she asked, voice roughened, uncertain.
“She’s asked for you.”
Jenna’s pulse banged unpleasantly in the back of her throat as she crouched down at the edge of the hotel bed. Ianira’s dark, unearthly gaze shook her so deeply she couldn’t even dredge up a greeting. When the prophetess lifted a hand, Jenna very nearly flinched back. Then Ianira touched Jenna’s brow, slowly. “Why do you Seek,” she murmured, “when you already know the answers in your heart?”
The room closed in around Jenna, dizzy and strange, as though voices whispered to her from out of a shimmering haze, voices whose whispered words she could not quite hear. From the depths of the blackness which filled her mind, a blackness which had swallowed nearly all of her childhood—which was far better forgotten than relived in aching emptiness again and again—a single image blazed in Jenna’s mind. A woman’s smiling face . . . arms held out to her . . . closing around her with a sense of safety and shelter she had not felt since her mother’s death, so many years ago, now, it was blurred in her memory. What this sudden memory meant, Jenna wasn’t sure, but it left her gasping and sick on her knees, so violently shaken she couldn’t even wipe her burning eyes.
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