I snorted to myself. Memories were fickle things. I remembered the feeling, the frustration, the sadness, but I couldn’t remember why. I had no context for the emotions. I couldn’t remember why the idea of being powerless drove me to do stupid things. Landus really hit it on the nose when he said I wasn’t human. I only wore a skin. The real me was not a good person.
Death didn’t scare me. Killing didn’t bother me. I was a selfish survivalist.
“Nyssa.” My name was gentle on Maura’s lips. She stood just inside the room, leaning against the wall.
“What?”
“You’ve been sitting here for three hours. Come take a break.”
“No thanks.”
She pushed off the wall and came closer. “I really do heavily suggest taking a break. And there isn’t much we can do right now. I have all my witches looking over the weapons, but we think the poison had already been cleaned off. We’re playing the research game right now and that takes time. Besides, I have some questions for you.” She tilted her head to the side. “That is if you’re still interested in knowing who you are.”
Damn. She knew where to hit to make it hurt.
I clenched my teeth, gritting against the turmoil Cecil made me feel, and slowly made my way out of the room.
“Don’t worry. We’re keeping a close eye on her so you’ll know immediately if there are any changes.”
Maura led me down a hallway and into the kitchen. The scent of herbs, blood, and cleaning supplies nearly overwhelmed me. My nose twitched with the odd mixture. I’d always associated herbs with healing so to have blood and pain mixed in with it was an unsettling contrast.
I sat down at the table as she went to work at making tea.
“Do you have hot chocolate instead?” I asked.
She paused for a moment before reaching up to a cupboard. “Yes.”
After a few moments, she sat across from me, passing me a mug of pure bliss. She watched as I took the first drink, closed my eyes, and went someplace far away.
It’s been a while my dear friend.
I took another sip.
Then Maura opened her mouth and ruined the peaceful moment.
“How old are you?”
I peeked my eyes open and took in her face. Her brown eyes were unblinking as she studied me, her magic nipping at the air around me, wanting to give me a read but not willing to cross that boundary again. I felt nothing but intelligence from her. I guessed if someone were to find who or what I was, she would be the one to do it.
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some kind of idea. Just take a guess.”
I tapped at the table for a few moments, trying to collect my thoughts. Trying to pull up my earliest memories was next to impossible. Up until a certain point, all I could draw from my brain were emotions overlapping all the fuzziness of what should be my memories. I remembered pain and sadness. So much sorrow that reached down into my soul. A moment of relief buried under hopelessness and sorrow. Determination. Then anger and frustration. Running and running. Then resolve. Fighting. So much fighting and surviving. And then I came to a point where I could remember. I had wandered the Woodlands, hunting and fighting. Surviving.
And then the day I finally won against him, I met Cecil. That day she dragged me away from the darkness I was buried in became the clearest memory I held. There was no age within me. Just timeless emotions.
I stopped tapping a tune out on the table and rubbed at my face. “At least over a hundred years old. When Cecil found me, I looked in history books in hopes of getting a sense of time and what happened. I do remember a small log cabin. Not even a road. We dressed simply, from wools and the skin of animals. I remember that. They stopped making clothes like what I remember a while back. Now it’s all this synthetic shit. I remember the Red Sky event, when the entire sky lit up for days.”
“That was over a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Yup.”
“So you either age slowly or you’re immortal?”
I looked down at my smooth hands. Long slender fingers. Soft. Warm. I had few scars, only three, but with the life I led, I should’ve had more.
“I don’t know. Probably. I was a child once, a long time ago. But the Woodlands forces you to grow up and mature quickly if you want to survive. Maybe I forced myself to get bigger? I just know I was a child and then one day I wasn’t. And not being a child made everything easier. Made fighting easier. And surviving.”
She took a moment to take in my words, probably trying to gleam the full story from the bare bones I gave her. I could see her trying to search for a story I had never planned on sharing with anyone. She finally gave up and continued.
“And gifts. What kind of abilities do you have?”
“I have the strength and healing capabilities of a shifter. Not their heightened senses. I’m extremely sensitive to energy, and to a certain extent, magic.”
She leaned forward, interested in something I said. “How sensitive?”
“To what?”
“Energy. How sensitive are you?”
I shrugged. “I told Landus about it earlier. If I get within a certain distance to a gate, I create a tether with them. When the gates go down, the tether breaks. I recognize energy signatures, like fingerprints to certain people.” I scratched my chin. “And I guess I can do that wind thing I did in your living room. That was the first time I did that though, as far as I remember.”
She nodded, not seeming bothered with me for destroying one of her rooms and nearly killing everyone.
“Why did you want to know?” I asked.
“Narrowing down the possibilities. Knowing how sensitive you are to energy is a huge plus. Not many beings have the kind of sensitivity that you have. I can use that information. And the incident in my living room will help.”
“Do you have any ideas right now?”
“A couple, but not much. I have some old journals I came across in our archives when you were off playing with the mages, but they are in Latin, and my Latin is a little rusty. It’ll take time to translate it.”
“You know Latin? Not many know that language anymore.”
She took a drink of her coffee. “No, not many do. My great-mama forced me to learn it from her. I tried to teach others but,” she shrugged, “people these days have short attention spans, and our spells no longer require the language.”
“Okay.” I really didn’t care.
She blinked a couple of times as if coming out of some sweet memories. “Anyways. The journals. They are in Latin, but the one who wrote them was a kind of... hunter. He was into all things mysterious, into everyone’s business, and kept detailed entries about those he met. If there are others out there like you, then he probably met them. I skimmed through a couple, and one of the journals is hopeful.”
“Out of all the journals that you need to translate, why does that one seem likely to give you answers?” I asked.
“I skimmed them searching for answers to the poison used on Cecil, and this one talked about energy and elements.” She shrugged. “I’ll find out more when I translate it. It’ll take me a couple of days, but hopefully we will get some answers. With the answers, we can help you so you don’t have another...control issue and possibly hurt those around you.”
I raised my hands. “Fine. Whatever.” I stood up, rinsed out my mug in the sink, and then left her behind to go back to Cecil and wait. I hated playing the waiting game.
Chapter Nineteen
I remember laughing. Me laughing. Not the bitter laugh I have now. Not the one I have at other people’s expense. I remember laughing because I was happy. Truly happy. And innocent.
—Nyssa’s Journal
I hopped through the gate, ignoring the energy nipping at my skin, and came out the other side in a field. Nothing. No men. No one hiding around, planning something diabolical. I walked around a bit, but this place seemed more like a place to get bonked than anything else—I could tell by the makesh
ift bed and spent condoms.
Maybe a hideout for some hanky-panky rape? Blood stains spoke a million words. I stared at the blood for a moment, my thoughts turning to darker memories I didn’t want to delve into. My lips curled back into a snarl, my nose twitching at the disgusting copper smell of blood filling the air.
My heart rate picked up and something in me rumbled with anger and pain.
“You can’t get away.”
“Go ahead, run faster.”
I shook my head of the memories. I wanted to remember my past, but some things really were better off forgotten.
Turning my back to the scene, I stalked back through the gate and checked the tether off, adding it to the other eleven gates that I had tried today without finding any clues. No we are planning to kill everyone plans. No Baron. No more mean guys. Even the gates weren’t as mean to me as the other ones. Unless I was angrier than I thought. That was possible.
“Shit,” I swore out loud and went to the next gate only a block away. I needed Cecil to wake the hell up already. I needed her to live, if not for her, then at least for me.
I visited two more gates, finding nothing, and decided to take a break at my favorite coffee shop.
Seriously. The little shop needed to be named number one already. Their hot chocolate was pure bliss in a cup, with a heavy dose of orgasmic. If I couldn’t get laid, then coming here was the next best option. For today, I just needed a pick-me-up. And maybe because I hadn’t been laid in a while, and the one guy I was interested in probably hated me. At least he was confused about me. Hell, I was confused about me. Maybe we could get into something if we just stopped pissing each other off.
Damn him. I rubbed at my face, hoping to wipe off that stupid memory with that stupidly gorgeous face and those stupidly intuitive eyes. Every time he looked at me, I felt like he saw me. Not just the outer me, but the real me, the woman locked inside, who fought each day to stay afloat in a world that didn’t make sense to her.
And all the emotions he made me feel. Like anger. I didn’t feel anger very often, but damn, he made my blood boil. For some reason, it hurt when he said I wasn’t very human. I’m pretty sure the words didn’t hurt me because I didn’t see the humans as all that special, but shit, that damn expression when he said it. That hurt. The last time I was offended by something someone said was when Cecil called me out on my overly aggressive behavior.
I had accidentally hurt her and she snapped out at me and hurt me back. I couldn’t even face her for half a week until she hunted me down and apologized. I even apologized too, and I didn’t do that very often. It seemed Cecil had taught me everything—how to laugh and find things entertaining, how to just go with it. Even how to be angry and I even cried once and she helped me through that. Stupid dog had to die in that stupid movie and for some reason I cried. I saw the separation between the dog and his owner. I saw how hard he fought to get back to his owner and in the end sacrificed himself to save a little girl, ending in him never seeing his owner again. That loneliness, that separation. I felt like I could relate to that. I cried all night, not really understanding why, and Cecil held me and didn’t say a damn thing. I still didn’t understand why that happened.
But Landus. He was doing the same thing. He was getting emotions out of me. I played at being human, but that wasn’t my true self. Despite my lack of memory or knowledge about myself, I had always known that I wasn’t a human. I looked like one of them, maybe even talked like one, but I could never be one of them. I couldn’t even act like a human properly. And having a shifter point that out to me sucked.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Landus said, settling down in the chair across from me.
Great, I was thinking about him so hard that I had summoned him. I’d have to tell Maura about that gift too.
“Landus. This doesn’t seem like your spot.” I took a sip of my hot chocolate, not letting his presence ruin the little moment. In my mind, I was making love to the drink. And somehow Landus was butting in on my fantasy. Damn. I needed to get my libido in check. Sleep with someone. I eyed Landus slowly, taking in his casual look, the sleeves on his thin sweater rolled up to his elbows to show off his forearms. My stomach heated as my mind went into the gutter and got stuck there.
“I saw you through the window,” Landus said, helping to get my mind to my unfortunate reality. “You looked like you were thinking really hard. What’s on your mind?”
I eyed him. He watched every little movement, trailing across my lips as I took a sip of my drink, observed my hands as I placed the cup back down. Peering into my eyes as I watched him. That pressure I felt when I first met him flared up once again, and I found it difficult to not reach over and touch him. How would he feel above me? Or below me? Hell, even behind me? Shit.
When he smirked, I shook my head and ignored him. Apparently he was right there with me on my fantasies.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted out, and it took me a good ten seconds to realize he’d apologized to me. Did Alphas even know how to apologize? Wouldn’t that be considered beneath them to admit to making a mistake?
“For what?”
“Making assumptions about you yesterday. I know so little about you, and that annoys me. I’m used to knowing everything. If there’s a mystery before me, I make sure it doesn’t stay like that. You are an unknown and I’ve done my background check on you, and normally at this point, I would know what kind of underwear you liked to wear but hell, I still know nothing about you except that you came from the Woodlands six years ago, you have amazing instincts, and you fight like a trained killer. You are also an art enthusiast.”
“Does that make you nervous?”
“What?”
“Me being a trained killer?”
He shrugged. “I’m a trained hunter. And we’ve all killed. We don’t become this powerful without having to fight off we lost against them, we wouldn’t be here. I’ve heard your ass-kicking stories from Slade too. You’ve been through some impressive shit with him.”
“We’re a good team. He’s one of the few I would take through a risky gate with me. I know he has my back.”
“I have your back too,” he said in a low and careful voice.
We fell into silence as I tried to understand his words. In the short amount of time we’d been working together, he had had my back. If I’d forced the issue and went through the gate yesterday, he probably would have swallowed his anger and made sure I was okay. And I knew he could hold his own. He had held his own for this long.
“I’m obsessed with hot chocolate,” I blurted out.
“Okay.”
“You said you wanted to know more about me,” I explained. “Well, I’m obsessed with hot chocolate. I love to run. I can go for miles. Hell, I can run for days and still want to keep going. I do love getting into fights. They make me feel alive, but you’ve already smelled that about me.” I smirked. “I guess I can admit that I do search for trouble, but I consider the people I’m with. I wouldn’t put someone who wouldn’t be able to protect themselves into a dangerous situation.”
He smiled. “I guess I should take it as a compliment then that you’re willing to go into danger with me around.”
“You know how to take care of yourself.”
“Thank you.”
I nodded in acceptance. “There are very few people I care anything about. Mainly Cecil and Slade.”
“Not me.”
“Maybe. Like we’ve established, it has only been a few days. I trust Slade to have my back, and I trust Cecil to keep me emotionally sane. What people find frightening, I want to laugh at. I probably only fear one thing in Terra Firma so everything else is just entertaining.”
“I’m guessing you don’t fear me. What is your fear?”
I shook my head. “That is something you don’t need to know. And if some day I have to face that fear, then we are all screwed anyway. I’ve only cried once that I know of. My past is a haze of emotions strung together without any solid memor
ies to go with them. Cecil found me half dead in the Woodlands, dragged me out, patched me up, and helped me be as ‘human’ as possible.” I shrugged. “There really isn’t much to me. I’m upfront. I don’t bullshit. And I really want Baron dead for what happened to Cecil. I’ll do anything to see him dead. Is that enough information?”
Landus leaned back and took a sip of whatever hot drink he’d bought. “For now.”
“There really isn’t much.”
“Oh, but there is so much more to you, and I’m not talking about the missing memories or your time in the Woodlands. I’m talking about you, the woman inside this hard exterior. Those thoughts that are always going through your head and putting weird expressions on your face. The reasons that drive you to be who you are, to be such a hard ass, to feel the need that you have to fight to survive here in the human world. What makes you tick, what makes you smile or laugh, and I mean that out of delight. What makes you truly happy? I want those kinds of answers.”
“You sound like an interested prospect.”
“Maybe. But I also like puzzles and right now you are the ultimate puzzle. Don’t worry, I’ll slowly put all your pieces together to get the whole picture, and I have to admit, I’m excited to see the whole product when I’m done.” His voice dropped. “No rush, either. We have all the time in the world.”
At this point we were both leaning forward, only inches from each other. His energy caressed my skin in gentle strokes and that something in me was roaring to get out, almost painfully. I wanted to respond to him, to drink in his taste, to feel him against me.
My phone rang, and the moment shattered. I took in a deep breath as if I had been holding my breath for the last ten minutes and sat back, answering the phone.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Nyssa? This is Jordie.”
“Oh, hey. What can I do for you?”
Emergence Page 17
