I walked for a long time, oblivious to everything but my thoughts, until I realized something felt wrong. The back of my neck tingled. I looked up, suddenly aware of my surroundings. The nine-to-fivers were long gone, leaving the dark downtown streets nearly empty. Only a few people were still out and hurrying about their business, bundled against the cool night. No one stood out, but I knew the tingling on my skin wasn’t something I should ignore when I was out alone at night. Almost of their own accord, my feet moved faster across the cobbled street, away from the uncomfortable feeling of being watched.
The anxious feeling followed me. I paused and searched the street again. A homeless man snored loudly, curled on the cobblestone entrance to Macy’s. A laughing couple ducked into the entrance to the T, no doubt catching one of the last subway trains for the night. No one else was there, which also meant there was no one to call for help.
I’d learned a long time ago to trust my gut. Something felt wrong, and I needed to get off the street.
I picked up my pace. A gap between two buildings lay about fifty feet ahead. I crossed the street and sprinted for the opening. After crouching behind a garbage can, I set my backpack on the ground and pulled out my knife. It’d been a while since I’d had to defend myself, but Ripper and I could handle any trouble.
As I hid out of sight, I counted to ten in my head. Right on cue, a tall man in jeans and a puffy down jacket rounded the corner and walked briskly past the alley. He took two more steps, paused, and doubled back. He scanned up and down the street. Looking. Stalking.
I grimaced. If I were smart, I would stay hidden until he walked away. But I’d never claimed to be particularly intelligent. And I didn’t back away from a fight. I wanted to know why this creep was following me. And next time, I wanted him to think twice before he stalked some other girl.
The younger me would have jumped him with the knife right then, but I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if the man had really followed me, or if I was in the middle of a complete mental breakdown. I wasn’t exactly thinking straight at the moment. The guy could have just been lost and not following me at all.
He paused in front of the alleyway and peered into the dark, right at my hiding spot. “Hello, kitten.”
My stomach twisted. I should have listened to my gut. Now my moment of surprise was gone. Trapped in the dead-end alley without an escape route, I stood and gripped Ripper at my side. I didn’t wave the knife at the man like an idiot. Instead, I held it loosely in my hand, ready to strike. If he didn’t see it coming, all the better.
“Why are you following me?” I demanded.
The man stepped forward into the light of a streetlamp, which illuminated his pale hair. A slow smile spread across his face, but it didn’t reach his cold blue eyes.
My knees locked. He had the same blond hair and ice-blue eyes. He was my nightmare come to life—Marcel’s murderer.
When I spoke, my voice came out shaky. “Who are you?”
He stepped closer, completely blocking the entrance to the alley. The whites of his eyes shifted to yellow—like a wolf’s—transforming his entire face from human to predator.
I stumbled backward, holding my knife up between us. “What are you?”
Ripper was a big knife and terrible for throwing. I had good aim, but the chances I could hit the blond man with the seven-inch field knife were next to nothing.
Light flared around him, the street lit with an unearthly glow. He lunged.
I didn’t have time to act on anything but reflex and slashed Ripper blindly.
The blond dodged and lunged again, grabbing my arm. I pulled back, but he didn’t resist as hard as I expected, and I tripped over the uneven, cobbled brick. Flailing, we both landed in a heap of limbs.
My knife struck home, sinking into his neck. I scrambled away on my heels and hands, staring at the blade buried deep in his flesh.
He pulled Ripper out of his neck and threw it on the ground with a clank of metal. Dark blood gushed from the wound and soaked into his collar. I’d hit an artery—he was a dead man.
Holy hell, I just killed him. I’d seen some brutal street fights, but I’d never killed anyone before. I staggered backward in shock.
The man grasped his neck. Red light edged in black flared around him then solidified into a complex pattern of glowing threads, just like Marcel’s memory. The man lowered his hand, revealing perfect, unscarred skin. The blood was the only evidence that I had just stabbed him in the neck. The wound was gone.
I stared like an idiot, transfixed on the glowing threads fading around him and the impossibly healed skin above his collar. The man rose to his feet and snarled like an animal. His teeth elongated into fangs as I watched.
I scrambled deeper into the dead-end alley. He stalked forward with bared teeth and murder in his yellow eyes.
My back hit the rough brick wall at the end of the alley. I was trapped, weaponless. Crouching, I pulled myself together and prepared to put up a fight before he took me down. I wasn’t going to die cowering in an alley.
“Titus!”
My attacker—Titus—whirled on his heel toward the head of the narrow alley, where a newcomer stood in the shadows. With dark hair and clothing, he blended into the night except for the gleaming sword in his hand. He twisted his wrist, warming the muscles in a slow, casual way.
A blaze of light swallowed Titus again, and a sword appeared in his hand. Without warning, the two men ran at each other as I stared in open-mouthed shock. I couldn’t keep up with this nightmare.
Titus’s blade slashed through the air. The newcomer pivoted backward and spun, avoiding the weapon’s sharp edge by inches. He swung his blade toward Titus’s chest in the same movement, but Titus deflected the blow easily.
I flinched at the incredible noise of metal on metal. Now I know I’m crazy. Sword fights didn’t happen in real life. I rubbed my eyes, but the surreal scene continued.
The newcomer tried to spear Titus through the chest with an impossibly fast lunge. Titus twisted to the side, but a well-timed kick from the other man caught him in the gut, and Titus crashed into the hard brick wall ten feet in front of me.
“No follow-through,” the newcomer taunted.
Titus roared and swung his sword like an axe over his head. He swung again and again with powerful blows that crashed against the newcomer’s blade and pushed them deeper into the alley, closer and closer to me. Metal rang as they fought, deafening me.
Someone was going to hear them and call the cops.
The newcomer went on the offensive. His strikes were fast and hard, and each one forced Titus to give up the ground he’d just gained. Titus grunted, yelled, and fought each blow, but he couldn’t stop the newcomer’s lightning-fast strikes. Within a minute, they were both back in the street.
With my eyes glued to the fight, I slid closer to the opening of the alley, ready to make a run for it as soon as I had an opening.
“You’re their pawn,” Titus called. “You always have been!”
The newcomer responded with a series of blows that drove them farther into the street. Titus blocked each one until the last one caught him on the arm. Blood flowed.
I moved slowly out of the alley and into the open street, edging my way directly behind the fighters. My heart beat hard in my chest. I had a clear exit, but I froze, afraid any movement would draw their attention to me. The light around Titus intensified, like a bloody spotlight shining in his aura. Dark energy sizzled from him, and goose bumps rose across my skin.
Titus threw out his free hand, and a massive ball of energy flew straight toward the newcomer’s chest.
The other man dove out of the way, but I had nowhere to go. The ball of energy hit me in the chest. I flew off my feet and landed hard in the middle of the street, sliding on my backside across the ground.
A million pricks of sizzling energy burned across my skin as I lay in a heap, gasping for breath. Everything hurt. It felt as if I’d been hit with a two-by-four. My ears rang
. Streetlights swayed in time with the pounding in my head.
Clashing metal rattled through the fog in my brain. After a minute, I forced myself up onto my elbows and blinked through the mental haze. The men fought in the street, circling and striking at expert speeds, ignoring me on the ground a dozen yards away.
By the time my vision cleared, the newcomer glowed with a radiant golden light, contrasting with the darker power from Titus. I shook my head, wondering if I had a concussion.
Run, idiot. I pushed myself unsteadily to my feet and ran for my life.
FIVE MINUTES OF SCARED-as-hell sprinting later, I threw myself through the front door of the Boston Women and Children’s Shelter and slammed the deadbolt home. Father Mike often left it open past curfew on cold nights, but a little extra security was in order.
My knees gave, and I landed on the floor, gasping for breath. Safely inside and under the harsh fluorescent lights, I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed. I couldn’t believe an actual sword fight had just happened in the streets of Boston. So much for the police cutting down on crime. Like a bad dream, I wondered if I had imagined it all—animal eyes and sharp teeth included—until I looked at my right hand coated in Titus’s dried blood.
I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on breathing until my thoughts found some kind of order. I’d lost Ripper. Obviously, getting away with my life had been top priority, but losing my knife really sucked. And it would become an even bigger problem if one of those guys ended up facedown on the sidewalk, leaving a body and my knife. My fingerprints were all over it, and I had a record. I did not need cops asking me questions about dead guys with swords.
I didn’t know who the men were or why they’d been fighting each other. It seemed as though the newcomer had tried to protect me. But for all I knew, he’d fought Titus for the privilege of killing me first. The whole situation was too messed up to make any sense.
The charm! I searched my pockets and sighed in relief as I pulled it out of my jeans. The evidence of the connection to Marcel felt comfortably solid in my palm. My head ached with all the crazy, and I hugged my knees to my chest.
It took tremendous force of will to drag myself through the shelter instead of straight onto an unoccupied cot, but I needed to talk to Father Mike. During daylight hours, he would have been serving food from the kitchen or talking with the regulars. But given the late hour, I headed for the small office he’d converted from a storage closet.
I found him hunched over a box of donated clothes. The room was just large enough to fit a desk, a single chair, and cleaning supplies stacked haphazardly along the walls. Seeing him immediately calmed me. I’d spent countless hours in the shelter, a lot of them in his office when I’d gotten caught doing something particularly stupid. He must not have had a current problem child because a thin layer of dust coated the floorboards and the single shelf in the corner. The mop and I had been well-acquainted in my day.
As much as he was a paternal figure in my life, he didn’t look that old. With dark-brown hair and brown eyes, he had pale skin like me, and his only wrinkles were laugh lines. He could have easily passed for early thirties. Over the past ten years, he looked as if he hadn’t aged at all.
As if I were fifteen all over again, I hesitated in the doorway, hoping he could solve all my problems. “Father?”
He looked up with a friendly grin that died as soon as he saw my expression. “What’s wrong?”
“I...” Maybe I should have waited until the sun rose. Perhaps this whole thing was an elaborate hoax or another nightmare. I sighed. It was too late for that—whatever the hell was happening to me was real. The blood was evidence of that, and the energy that had hit me in the chest was definitely real enough. I was in deep shit, and I needed help. Father Mike had always been there for me before. I decided to tell him what had happened even if it made me sound crazy.
He rose from the floor, his full attention on me. “What happened?”
I didn’t even know where to start. And I really didn’t want him to have me committed. “Someone followed me. He should be dead—then his neck healed—and the blood...” I needed to slow down and sound less crazy. “I had these nightmares, but I think they’re real. And now I have someone else’s memories.” I still wasn’t making sense. Maybe I was in shock. I flipped my bloody palm over and back again, staring at the dried patches of red.
Father Mike grabbed my shoulder in a grip too tight to be comforting. The pressure pulled me back to the ground, as did his worried gaze. “What do you remember?”
A dark-haired woman with tears streaming down her face stands in front of me. "When you remember where home is, we’ll be here for you.”
She disappears, and I’m in the middle of a field of grain, surrounded by jagged brown mountains. The sun warms my face as I wipe sweat from my brow with the long sleeve of my shirt. I'm exhausted, but the effort feels good, productive.
I blink, and I’m in a room full of weapons. The smell of metal and oil fills my nostrils, the familiar warmth of exertion pulsing in my chest. My fingers ache to reach out and grab one of the knives.
Then I’m suddenly crouching, hiding in a building, peering through a crack in a plank-board wall to the pasture outside. I stare at a woman who is surrounded by wild white magic. It storms around her, billowing her hair. Her arms rise in front of her as if to stop—
“Stop!” I gasped. Panting, I pushed down Marcel’s memories. It was too much.
Father Mike’s eyes were wide. “Maeve?”
The foreign memories pounded inside my skull, trying to escape. My control slipped with each episode, and I almost couldn’t breathe. "I’m seeing things I don't remember."
The father grabbed my hand. His brow pinched in concern as he waited for me to explain. I focused on his face, while Marcel’s memories rammed against my brain.
My voice came out hoarse as I whispered, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This is really happening, but it can’t be real.”
He guided me to the hard plastic chair. “Do you remember anything else? Any other memories?”
The air in the windowless office felt too heavy. I couldn’t get enough oxygen in my lungs, but childlike hope flared hot in my chest. Father Mike believed me. He would help me.
“The blond man—I think his name is Titus—he showed up, and another guy fought him. With swords. Did I mention the swords? And he hit me with magic.” A hysterical laugh slipped out before I could swallow it down. “Please don’t have me committed. I know magic isn’t real—I swear I’m not crazy.” I stared up at him. “Am I crazy?”
With a concerned glance at me, the father started opening drawers in his desk, tossing papers out of his way as he searched through them. His frantic behavior dashed my fragile hope back into confusion.
“You’re not crazy. But I’m about to shatter your world view. I’m sorry we don’t have time to take this slowly.” He opened a drawer, slammed it closed, then yanked open the next one. “You’ll just have to believe me when I tell you magic is real. The people you saw were from another realm called Aeterna, where the magic is deeper.”
“What?” My brain couldn’t process what he was telling me, as if his sentences were somehow in the wrong order. I understood the individual words, but the meaning didn’t make sense. “What are you saying?”
He threw a sympathetic look my way and grabbed a backpack from one of the donation boxes. “They’re a civilization of magic users who split from this realm two centuries ago. The history between our people dates back beyond that, but we keep ourselves separate because of the magic.”
He paused his frantic movements for a moment, and I stared at him in blank surprise. “What exactly are you saying? Magic is real?”
“How can I explain? Magic exists, but it’s only accessible in certain places in this world, and to certain people who are sensitive to it. There’s the surface realm—Earth—where the Mundanes live.” He gestured at the room around us. “No magic. Or very little anyw
ay. But there are also pockets of magic that overlap this realm. The deeper the pocket, the stronger the magic. Aeterna is a realm in the center of this world, and it’s full of people who use magic every day.”
“You’re saying there’s another place deeper inside Earth that’s full of magic?” The words coming out of my mouth were making my brain hurt. I fully expected someone to jump out and tell me I was being punked.
“It’s more like...” He held up his hands, palms facing each other. “The realms are parallel. There are lots of realms in this planet, and they exist in tandem with each other. Magic is simply the energy found in all life —it’s a symbiotic relationship.”
I glanced around the room, looking for something normal to keep me afloat, and found a tower of tissue boxes stacked in the corner. Somehow, I was reacting more calmly to this crazy information than I had any reason to, maybe because I’d already experienced the magic throwing me flat on my ass. Or maybe after spending several days questioning my own sanity, any explanation was a relief.
He started stuffing things into the backpack. “Life energy—magic, as it’s more commonly known here—is created from all life,” he continued. “Every living thing gives off some amount of energy, and all that is stored in the very core of Earth. It’s the source of all magic.”
“I think my brain might explode.” I slumped in the chair. It hurt my sense of reality to think about magic as more than a Vegas side act, but I couldn’t deny what I had just experienced. I’d seen the magic energy with my own eyes.
I pushed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets. A headache was starting behind my skull. The pressure of Marcel’s memories pushed in on me, threatening to take control again. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? I don’t understand why any of this is happening.”
Father Mike stopped his mad rush around the room and sat on the corner of the desk nearest me. He squeezed my shoulder, and a soft, sympathetic frown curved his lips. “The man you described—Titus—is the leader of a group of radicals who kill people to take their life energy. He hopes to amass enough power from their deaths to control this realm—the whole Mundane world. They call themselves the Brotherhood.”
Fate Forged Page 2
