Forsaken: The World of Nightwalkers by Jacquelyn Frank Page A

one of the safest and most ingenious places to hide a nik. The average Djynn would avoid this house of power like the plague. Djynn dislike confrontations.”
    “Oh. Wow,” Docia said, her eyes wide with wonder. “I didn’t realize she thought that much of us.”
    “Clearly she did,” Faith said, smiling when she saw the word “delighted” sear brilliantly across Docia’s scroll, which was what Night Angels called that inner spotlight they could see. The little Bodywalker was really quite sweet and a very unusual mixture of souls. The human soul was everything innocent, impulsive, and awkward, while the Bodywalker soul was sophisticated, worldly, and confident. Both were completely harmonious, however, when it came down to their love for the injured Bodywalker in the next room, and for the one that stepped up behind her and wrapped strong golden arms around her.
    Together Docia and Ram’s lights combined into something far too brilliant for her to look at directly. It was the brightest light she could ever remember seeing in her lifetime. The two left in the other bedroom came a close second. But she suspected it was only the weaker of the two because the male had been so brutally damaged. That left only the female trying to shine brightly for both of them. Faith found that profoundly saddening. A light so precious was on the brink of being extinguished. As it was, she knew she should never have let them believe there was a hope of saving him. It was the longest of long shots and it would need something in the nature of a string of miracles. But Faith had watched the imp cut those souls away from their anchor without a single taste of contemplation of its actions. It destroyed because it could. Its power was vast and frightening and it liked to let other lesser beings know that. And Apep considered all beings to be lesser beings. He was perfection in his own eyes. It followed suit, of course, that he should be worshipped for all that he was. That he had adorned himself with the body of a beautiful woman was simply yet another perversion it took delight in. When Faith had come upon the scene only an instant before the god had struck the Bodywalker down, she had known she was too late and had failed in her initial mission.
    So she had given herself a new mission. An impossible mission. One whose success would truly be a miraculous event.
    “I can use this to track the Djynn…but daylight is coming…” She pulled her bottom lip briefly between her teeth, worrying it a little. The idea of being out in the sunlight was abhorrent and terrifying to any of the Nightwalker races. Each of them grew weak in the face of it, in one fashion or another. Paralysis. Poisoning. Altering on a subatomic level. The debilitations ran the entire gamut, including the one she was most familiar with. “I won’t be able to start this journey until darkness falls.”
    “That’s too long,” Leo bit out as Docia gasped in dismay. He instinctively reached out as though to comfort her, but then drew back sharply before even touching her.
    Faith was fascinated by that reaction and by this man. His emotions and thoughts vacillated so sharply from one extreme to the next that it left her completely dizzy. It was as though he were a kid with a Christmas tree full of emotions and he went ripping madly from one to the next, trying each on for size before quickly discarding it and leaping to the next. She’d never seen anyone burn through so much emotion so quickly before. The words scrawled over his scroll in a beautifully haphazard script kept changing in brightness and intensity.
    What she had not explained to the mortal male was that everyone’s words looked different in style as well as brightness. When she had looked at Menes’s and Hatshepsut’s lights they had been worded in beautiful hieroglyphs. For the woman she now stood facing, it was an energetic boldface script. For the mortal it was like that of a left-handed, impatient