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are telling the truth, and the beauty that others see in me is just a deception cast by Rabishu? After all this time, I’m beginning to see the real me.
    A seed of doubt was planted, joining the others in the garden of regret she’d been working on.
    Susannah sat on the bench until a polite guard informed her that the Louvre was closing. Turned out on the street, she couldn’t shake her gloomy thoughts.
    After Loon Lake, she had begun learning more about her situation. Researching intensively, she’d thrown herself into a study of ancient Sumer, wondering why she had never been curious before.
    The Sumerians had a complicated relationship with the gods they believed ran their world. The gods of Sumer were the Annunaki , a race of beings who had traveled to an Earth devoid of humans, from a place in the heavens called Nibiru . Anu was their leader, ruling over three hundred major gods and three hundred minor ones. Once on Earth, the minor gods refused to do the labor of maintaining the world, so they created humans to take over that work.
    Anu and his consort Antu had seven demon offspring, the Utukki . When Anu left Earth to travel again among the stars, he left the Utukki in the service of Nergal, Lord of the Underworld. The demons were given great powers to do Nergal’s work, powers that approached those of the gods, and they were fractious and hard to control. When Lord Nergal at last left for the stars, he charged the seven demons with continuing his works of evil in the Great Above, the realm of the humans—basically, he left them on autopilot. In the modern world, the demons were all that remained on Earth of the gods of Sumer.
    Anu, in his travels, heard that his demon offspring now worked with no one to oversee them, and he worried that they would take on too much control of the Great Above. So he placed rules on them, restricting the ways they could interact with humans and giving them each a fatal weakness. Anu wrote all of the demons’ vulnerabilities on an indestructible Tablet of the Overlord, in a language he created to be impossible for the demons to read.
    The location of the tablet was no secret, but the only way to read it was by using a translating lens created by Anu. He shattered the lens into seven shards and hid them in the Great Above, out of reach of his offspring. Each demon hoped to possess both the Tablet and the Lens, because then he would dominate the other six demons, literally holding their existence in his claws. Since they could only enter the Great Above under narrowly defined circumstances, the demons enlisted their surrogates, the Ageless humans, to search for the tablet and shards. Rabishu had instructed Susannah about the search, but hadn’t given her the reasons behind it.
    The demon who dominated Susannah was a child of an absent father. Like any misbehaving son in those circumstances, Rabishu pushed the limits of his power. While she now had a better understanding of Rabishu’s role in history, and the collective evil caused by the demon brothers, the knowledge of what she was up against drove her to tears.

Chapter Five
    O utside the Louvre, Susannah kicked her shoes off and began running, a blur of motion easily missed in a blink of an eye. Racing out into the lush countryside, she tried to leave her dark thoughts behind. Restless, she spent the summer traveling on foot.
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    2009-08-25 02:50

    M onths after her quick exit from Paris, Susannah was perched on a ledge overlooking a remote glacial lake in Switzerland. Her determination to end her slavery had settled over her like dust coating every surface of body and brain.
    “Rabishu,” she whispered to the wind. “Talk to me.”
    She repeated it for hours, waiting through the frigid night. Nothing happened. She tried again, day after day, varying her appeal, eventually ordering the demon into her presence. The store of food she’d brought with her ran out, but she stubbornly waited, expecting to be yanked into the