The Reincarnationist

Then the question didn’t matter because beneath his hands, Julius felt his brother’s heart stop.

He felt his heart stop.

Julius beat Drago’s chest, pumping and trying, trying but failing to stimulate the beating. Bending down, he breathed into his brother’s mouth, forcing his own air down his throat, waiting for any sign of life.

Finally, his lips still on his brother’s lips, his arm around his brother’s neck, he wept, knowing he was wasting precious seconds but unable to stop. Now he didn’t have to choose between them—he could go to the woman who was waiting for him at the city gates.

He must go to her.

Trying not to attract attention, he abandoned Drago’s body, backed up, found the wall and started crawling. There was a break in the columns up ahead; if he could get to it undetected, he might make it out.

And then he heard a soldier shout for him to halt.

If he couldn’t save her, Julius would at least die trying, so, ignoring the order, he kept moving.

Outside, the air was thick with the black smoke that burned his lungs and stung his eyes. What were they incinerating now? No time to find out. Barely able to see what lay ahead of him, he kept running down the eerily quiet street. After the cacophony of the scene he’d just left, it was alarming to be able to hear his own footsteps. If someone was on the lookout the sound would give him away, but he needed to risk it.

Picturing her in the crypt, crouched in the weak light, counting the minutes, he worried that she would be anxious that he was late and torment herself that something had gone dangerously wrong. Her bravery had always been as steadfast as the stars; it was difficult even now to imagine her afraid. But this was a far different situation than anything she’d ever faced, and it was all his fault, all his shame. They’d risked too much for each other. He should have been stronger, should have resisted.

And now, because of him, everything they treasured, especially their lives, was at stake.

Tripping over the uneven, cracked surfaces, he stumbled. The muscles in his thighs and calves screamed, and every breath irritated his lungs so harshly he wanted to cry out. Tasting dirt and grit mixed with his salty sweat as it dripped down his face and wet his lips, he would have given anything for water—cold, sweet water from the spring, not this alkaline piss. His feet pounded the stones and more pain shot up through his legs, but still he ran.

Suddenly, raucous shouting and thundering footfalls filled the air. The ground reverberated, and from the intensity he knew the marauders were coming closer. He looked right, left. If he could find a sheltered alcove, he could flatten himself against the wall and pray they’d run past and miss him. As if that would help. He knew all about praying. He’d relied on it, believed in it. But the prayers he’d offered up might as well have been spit in the gutter for the good they’d done.

“The sodomite is getting away!”

“Scum of the earth.”

“Scared little pig.”

“Did you defecate yourself yet, little pig?”

They laughed, trying to outdo each other with slurs and accusations. Their chortles echoed in the hollow night, lingered on the hot wind, and then, mixed in with their jeers, another voice broke through.

“Josh?”

No, don’t listen. Keep going. Everything depends on getting to her in time.

A heavy fog was rolling in. He stumbled, then righted himself. He took the corner.

On both sides of him were identical colonnades with dozens of doors and recessed archways. He knew this place! He could hide here in plain sight and they would run by and—

“Josh?”

The voice sounded as if it was coming to him from a great blue-green distance, but he refused to stop for it.

She was waiting for him … to save her … to save their secrets … and treasures… .

“Josh?”

The voice was pulling him up, up through the murky, briny heaviness.

“Josh?”

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and took in the room, the equipment and his own battered body. Beyond the heart rate, blood oxygen and blood pressure monitor flashing its LED numbers, the IV drip and the EKG machine, he saw a woman’s worried face watching him. But it was the wrong face.

This wasn’t the woman he’d been running to save.

“Josh? Oh, thank God, Josh. We thought …”

He couldn’t be here now. He needed to go back.

The taste of sweat was still on his lips; his lungs still burned. He could hear them coming for him under the steady beat of the machines, but all he could think about was that somewhere she was alone, in the encroaching darkness, and yes, she was afraid, and yes, she was going to suffocate to death if he didn’t reach her. He closed his eyes against the onslaught of anguish. If he didn’t reach her, he would fail her. And something else, too. The treasures? No. Something more important, something just beyond his consciousness, what was it—

“Josh?”

Grief ripped through him like a knife slitting open his chest, exposing his heart to the raw, harsh reality of having lost her. This wasn’t possible. This wasn’t real. He’d been remembering the chase and the escape and the rescue as if they had happened to him. But they hadn’t. Of course they hadn’t.

He wasn’t Julius.

He was Josh Ryder. He was alive in the twenty-first century.

This scene belonged sixteen hundred years in the past.

Then why did he feel as if he’d lost everything that had ever mattered to him?

Chapter 2

Rome, Italy—the present Tuesday, 6:45 a.m.

Sixteen feet underground, the carbine lantern flickered, illuminating the ancient tomb’s south wall. Josh Ryder was astounded by what he saw. The flowers in the fresco were as fresh as if they’d been painted days before. Saffron, crimson, vermilion, orange, indigo, canary, violet and salmon blossoms all gathered in a bouquet, stunning against the Pompeii-red background. Beneath him, the floor shimmered with an elaborate mosaic maze done in silver, azure, green, turquoise and cobalt: a pool of watery tiles. Behind him, Professor Rudolfo continued explaining the importance of this late fourth-century tomb in his heavily accented English. At least seventy-five, he was still spry and energetic, with lively, coal-black eyes that sparkled with excitement as he talked about the excavation.

He’d been surprised to have a visitor at such an early hour, but when he heard Josh’s name, Rudolfo told the guard on duty that yes, it was fine, he was expecting Mr. Ryder later that morning with the other man from the Phoenix Foundation.

Josh had woken before dawn. He rarely slept well since his accident last year, but last night’s insomnia was more likely due to the time change—having just arrived in Rome that day from New York—or the excitement of being back in the city where so many of his memory lurches took place. Too restless to stay in the hotel, he grabbed his camera and went for a walk, not at all sure where he was going, But something happened while he was out.

Despite the darkness and his ignorance of the city’s layout, he proceeded as if the route had been mapped out for him. He knew the path, even if he had no idea of his final destination. Deserted avenues lined with expensive stores gave way to narrow streets and ancient buildings. The shadows became more sinister. But he kept going.

If he’d passed anyone else, he hadn’t noticed them. And even though it had seemed like a thirty-minute walk, it turned out to have taken more than two hours. Two hours spent in a semi-trance. He’d watched the night change from blue-gray to pale gray to a lemony-pink as the sun came up. He’d seen lush green hills develop the way the images in a photograph did in a chemical bath. From nothing to a shadow to a sense of a shape to a real form, but he didn’t know if he’d stopped to take any shots of the scenery. The whole episode was both disconcerting and astonishing when it turned out that, seemingly by chance, he’d stumbled onto the very site he and Malachai Samuels had been invited to view later that morning.

Or not by chance at all.

The professor didn’t ask why he was so early or question how he’d found the dig. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep, either. Come down, come down.”

Content to let the professor assume enthusiasm had brought him there at six-thirty in the morning, Josh breathed deeply and took a first tentative step down the ladder, refusing to allow his mind to dwell on the claustrophobia he’d suffered his whole life and which had intensified since the accident.

Strains of music from Madame Butterfly that had first caught Josh’s attention and then drawn him up this particular hill were louder now, and he concentrated on the heartbreaking aria as he descended into the dimly lit chamber.