Twilight Prophecy by MAGGIE SHAYNE Page A

don’t need to speak to the dead if Utanapishtim is alive.”
    “But he’s not,” Brigit said. “He’s been dead for more than five thousand years, Aunt Rhi.”
    “Yes, well, that’s where your brother comes in.”
    Rhiannon speared James with her eyes, even as he felt his own widen. “You can’t mean…you want me to—”
    “Raise him, J.W.”
    He shot off the sofa as if it had electrocuted him. “I can’t!” The panther’s head came up, and she looked irritated at being disturbed from her nap by his sudden movement.
    “How do you know?” Rhiannon asked him.
    “For the love of—how could I not know?”
    Rhiannon shrugged, graceful, sexy. “I’ve seen you raise the dead, J.W. You’ve been doing it since you were born. You started with your own sister, stillborn, blue, no heartbeat, not a breath of air in her lungs.” Rhiannon moved closer, reaching out and grabbing James’s forefinger, enclosing it in her fist. “You took hold of her just like this,” she said. “And she breathed, J.W. She breathed. You healed her. You brought her back to life.”
    “I know. I know. And yeah, I’ve been successful a few other times since then, but only when the subject has just died. Never with anyone who’s been dead for long.”
    “But have you tried?” Rhiannon asked.
    “What, restoring life to a rotting corpse? Yeah, yeah, that’s how I spend my Halloweens. Are you fucking crazy?”
    “So you’ve never tried, then,” Brigit said. She was rising now, too, growing excited, he thought, at this impossible, insane notion.
    “No, I’ve never tried.”
    Rhiannon nodded. “We’ll start small, say with someone a week dead. And we’ll build from there. We’ll need to find corpses in various stages of decomposition, of course, and—”
    “Shit.” James’s stomach convulsed. He took an involuntary step backward. “No. No, this is sick.”
    “Call it what you will. It’s necessary,” Rhiannon said.
    “It’s to save our race,” Brigit added.
    “No way. No way in hell.” James was shaking his head slowly in dawning horror. “And it won’t work. And even if it did, Utanapishtim isn’t going to be in some stage of decomposition. He’d be dust by now.”
    Rhiannon shrugged. “Dust, bones, rotted flesh, all just different phases of the same basic components. If you can do it with one, you can do it with the others.”
    “You’re out of your mind, Rhiannon.”
    She lifted her perfectly arched brows and sent him a look that told him he was getting close to the danger zone.
    And then Brigit’s hand landed on his shoulder. “J.W.… James. You’ve spent your entire life asking yourself, and the universe, why you were born with this power. Maybe this is it. Your answer. Maybe this is why. To save your family. Your people . There’s not much that could be bigger, more important, than that. Is there?”
    He stared at her. And he could barely believe that he was letting her talk him into it. Because she had a point. He had always wondered why. He’d always known he had this power for a reason, a big reason, and he’d been searching for it all his life.
    Maybe this was it. And if there was any chance it was, then he couldn’t very well turn his back on it, now could he?
    He lowered his eyes, released all his breath at once, swallowed hard and whispered, “All right. All right, I’ll…I’m in.”
    “Good.” He heard the smile in Rhiannon’s voice, felt his sister’s arms close around him in a relieved hug.
    “We’re going to have to get out of the city,” Rhiannon announced, moving quickly toward the nearest window, her cat at her heels. “We need someplace with privacy for these experiments. We’ll leave as soon as possible.”
    “But, Rhiannon,” James said, lifting his head. “What about Lucy Lanfair?”
    “Lucy…oh, the professor? Obviously we’re going to have to take her with us. We’ll pick her up on the way.” She glanced out the window. “But not tonight. It’s