The Reincarnationist

Chapter 29

Josh heard the gunshot. Saw the blood. Smelled the iron and smoke. He watched the man he recognized as the thief tumbling toward him, eyes wide with surprise, lips pulled back from his teeth in a silent scream.

The body fell on top of Josh, pushing him to the ground, spilling blood on him, wetting his clothes, the stink of it getting into his nose.

Hearing footsteps, Josh lifted his head and, in the distance, saw the back of a man, the shooter, retreating into the darkness, disappearing into the night.

What had happened? He couldn’t remember it all. Yes, yes, he could, he’d been running in the present and had run right into the past, his past. Or so it seemed.

Josh looked down at the body of a man who had wanted him dead, who was now dead himself, and then up, up at the sky. Up at the moon. Sixteen hundred years ago, the same moon might have been hanging just as low, illuminating these same marble buildings and making them gleam the same way. But then they were intact, not stumps. Stars shone for millions of years. It was the people-the transients, and the corruptibles and what they created-that changed.

Shaky, he rose to his feet and started to walk away from the man, away from the blood. He needed to get back to the hotel so he could call the police, tell them where they could find the body. But first he had to find a way out of the wreckage that stretched on and on, reminders of the people who’d lived and died and left nothing but this rubble-and their memories that lived like tapeworms inside him and the other poor suckers. He was, they all were, just hosts for uninvited guests. Wandering through the deserted, emptied-out world, all he could do was keep walking, shaky and stinking and bloody, until he could find the perimeter of this ancient wasteland.

He didn’t understand why he was still alive. Had the mastermind behind the robbery decided that the thief was the greater liability? Had the robber threatened his boss, blackmailed him, made new demands? Or did Josh know something that was important to the unraveling of the puzzle that surrounded the stones? If they really were the ancient memory tools, was he the one who could unlock their secret based on information hidden in his deeper memories? Was that why he’d been spared?

But what if the stones were never found? They’d been a last hope, a promise-albeit a far-fetched one-of a possible path to discoveries. If he could compile histories for Julius and Percy, and of the other ghosts he saw in flashes, he’d be able to do the necessary research to prove beyond any doubt that he’d lived those lives.

In the sky among the stars, Josh imagined he saw the emeralds, sapphires and that one ruby he’d glimpsed in Gabriella’s photographs. They gleamed and twinkled, teasing him about a quest that now seemed farther away than those pulsars and quasars.

No, he was being naive. They were merely gems men had imbued with mythical attributes: legends, not actual conduits. There was no way they could connect him to his previous incarnations-if there really were such things as previous incarnations

It was illogical and absurd. It was magical thinking. It had to be.

But then, why was it happening again? And it was-he could smell it.

Powerless to stop it, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. Josh had too many questions, and far too few answers.