by Aja James
He squeezed the hand he still held to comfort her. With his other hand, he gripped the cloak loosely around his naked body.
While he’d been confined to bed as his severely wounded body healed, he didn’t dwell much on clothing. Most of him was covered in bandages anyway. He’d asked Aella once or twice for trousers and a shirt, but not surprisingly, they didn’t keep men’s clothing in the all-women stronghold.
She did, however, borrow this hooded cloak for him. It was Dali’s. One of the few females in the tribe who had the height and width to equal a man, especially one as tall as Cloud. Aella had borrowed a tunic and trousers too, but the tunic was too narrow to fit Cloud’s shoulders and chest and the trousers were too short.
Now, in front of the Amazon queen, Cloud wished he’d had the foresight to dress for the occasion. He felt distinctly out of place—the only man (and an almost-naked one at that) amongst an all-female community.
“I have postponed coming to see you and your…chosen stud until he has recovered well enough to be presented,” Queen Hippolyte began, purposely emphasizing the word that made Aella involuntarily flinch.
Cloud frowned as well.
He knew that word’s meaning. Said by the queen, it sounded derogatory instead of the endearment Aella used with him.
“I see you have become quite attached to each other.”
The queen eyed their intertwined fingers significantly.
Aella pulled her hand away under the other woman’s scrutiny.
Cloud felt the loss of their connection immediately. It was almost like a physical blow. And even though Aella hadn’t moved from his side, he sensed her withdrawal and distance.
He felt it keenly, his heart clenching painfully in his chest.
“Have you come to an understanding, then?” Hippolyte demanded. “Has he agreed to the rules?”
“I…” Aella floundered and trailed off in response.
“Healer, translate my words to the Han warrior,” the queen commanded.
“Yes, Katiari,” the healer responded, stepping forward.
Hippolyte speared Cloud with her sharp, assessing gaze.
“You have enjoyed our hospitality and care only by virtue of your status with my First General,” she said.
The healer quickly translated.
Her Chinese wasn’t fluent, and the grammar was wrong, but Cloud got the gist.
“I am in your debt,” Cloud responded, which the healer immediately translated back to the queen.
She didn’t acknowledge his gratitude.
“You do not ask what status you have. I will clarify now.”
“My queen—” Aella tried to interject, but the queen commanded her into silence with a glare.
“You are here to stud for my finest warrior,” Hippolyte said bluntly. “It is your honor to be chosen amongst all the men of her acquaintance, across all the cultures we have encountered. Your role is to bed her, impregnate her, and in so doing, secure the future generations of Amazon warriors, should her child be female. If not, a courier will deliver any male offspring to you, wherever you may be. You are free to do with the child as you wish. It is not our concern.”
The healer was translating as fast as she could, stumbling over certain words. But even if she were perfectly fluent, Cloud would still have trouble following the conversation.
Stud?
Chosen?
Impregnate?
He’d looked between the queen and Aella as she spoke, but now he focused his attention solely on Aella.
Surely what the queen said wasn’t true. Surely she wasn’t simply using him for his seed. What happened after she was with child?
It sounded like…
“When the child has taken root and we can be certain of its strength, you will be free to return to your homeland with one of our best horses as your gift.”
The queen quirked her lips in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“An even exchange, no? A fine, hearty beast, the best of breed, for a stallion’s seed.”
“Please, Katiari…”
Aella’s voice was filled with panic and desperation, but Cloud noticed quite profoundly—she did not deny the queen’s words.
The leader of the Amazons rose from her seat, effectively silencing Aella’s protests.
She came to stand directly before Cloud and scrutinized him slowly from head to toe.
As one would do a piece of meat at the butcher’s stand.
“I commend your choice, First General,” she said as she continued to look over Cloud’s cloaked form.
“Pretty, but strong.”
She looked into Cloud’s fury-filled gaze.
“Defiant, too. He’s a proud, spirited stallion, isn’t he?”
Cloud ignored her and looked only at Aella.
“It’s not true,” he gritted through clenched teeth. “Tell me it’s not true.”
“I…I…” she bit her bottom lip and shook her head, unable to say anything, trying to convey with her eyes something he didn’t understand, or perhaps he didn’t want to.
“It is true, warrior,” Hippolyte said low, warning in her tone. “If it wasn’t, Aella would have broken our tribe’s foremost law: she brought a man into our midst. Her punishment would be exile. His punishment would be death. Be careful what you say. You are either her stud, for as long as required, or you are a dead man. Take your pick.”
Cloud faced the queen, addressing her head on.
“I am not a whore. I will not be used. I will never abandon my child. I will never leave my mate. If that makes me a dead man, then come and take me if you can.”
The two armed guards immediately drew their weapons, and Cloud widened his stance, preparing to fight.
Despite his wounds and his weakened body, he would not go down easily.
“Stop!” Aella shouted, inserting herself between Cloud, the queen and her guards.
Within seconds, more guards surrounded the yurt from the outside, their stomping feet and unsheathed weapons sounding in unison.
“He is my stud. He is the sire I have chosen for my firstborn. We have already consummated the union. Even now, I could be with child.”
The healer had stopped translating, but the queen ordered her to do so.
With every word, Cloud’s heart burned and thrashed with agony.
He looked at Aella as she spoke, willing her to look back at him, give him some indication, any sign that it wasn’t true.
It was all lies!
He’d given everything of himself to her. There was no going back. But she…she gave him only her body, and only temporarily.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think.
All he did was feel. And all he felt was undiluted pain.
“He doesn’t want to be here any more,” Aella continued with hurried speech, as if she was afraid she wouldn’t be permitted to get all of her words out.
“He needs to leave. I have what I want.”
She held an arm tightly about her stomach, her other arm with hand extended to ward off the guards.
“Let him leave,” she urged, her eyes beseeching the queen.
“Please…mama…let him leave.” These last words were whispered.
“I will bear all punishment. I will choose another stud to replace him. Just please…let him leave.”
Hippolyte looked from Aella to Cloud, her expression impassive.
Finally, she said, “Very well. If the deed is done, and you have his seed, then no law has been broken.”
She flicked her head at one of the guards.
“Take him to his horse. Pack provisions for his journey and send him on his way. Do this now. He will depart post haste.”
“Give him my horse,” Aella said. “I want him to have it.”
Hippolyte gave a curt nod.
“So be it. Arpada, in my tent. Now.”
With that, she walked passed Cloud and out of the yurt, effectively dismissing both of them.
Aella bowe
d her head and began to follow, but Cloud caught her hand in a brutal grip.
“That’s it? You’re walking away?” he demanded, his heart thundering so loudly in his ears he could barely hear himself speak.
“Let go,” she said, tugging on her hand. “You have to go. We have to part ways here and now.”
He shook his head, holding on to her more tightly.
“Come with me. Leave with me. I…I love you. Aella…”
She yanked hard and freed her hand, which had gone icy cold in his grip.
“Just leave,” she whispered with a hard shake of her head.
To emphasize her meaning, she used both hands to shove at his chest.
In his weakened physical state and his anguished emotional implosion, he staggered a step back.
She shoved at him hard again with all her strength, putting several feet of distance between them.
“Go!” she shouted, her eyes blazing with unshed tears.
And then she whirled around, walked out of the yurt, and never looked back.
“Circe’s journal abruptly ends, likely with her untimely demise. I wonder what became of her… Obviously, the Tiger King escaped, as did the spawn. I have already put feelers out to track them down. I know the perfect agent to do the job…”
—From the secret journal of the Vampire Sorceress Circe, added notes in the margin by an unknown hand
Chapter Thirteen
“Sophie, are you okay?” Benji asked with a puzzled frown.
Sophia had been behaving strangely ever since they set foot in Sais.
Her body was there, but her mind seemed absent. She went along everywhere Gabriel and Inanna led them, but her feet moved by rote, as if on autopilot, while her head was somewhere else.
“Hmm?” she murmured absent-mindedly in response to Benji’s concern.
This had been her standard response for the past twelve hours. She never seemed to know what they were talking about, even when they aimed questions and comments directly at her.
“We can camp outside for the night or we can rent a room in one of the mud houses,” Gabriel said, joining the rest of their small group in a sparsely shaded patch beneath a gnarled acacia tree after rubbing down and watering the horses.
“What do you prefer, Sophia?”
“Hmm,” she said again.
“What’s wrong with Sophie, mom?” Benji asked, turning worried blue eyes to Inanna.
Inanna regarded the young queen harboring an old soul with similar concern.
“I think she’s remembering her past, Benji. I think being here, on the soil of her previous incarnation, is making her memories vie for attention versus present reality.”
Benji hopped up and down and waved a hand in front of Sophia’s face.
No reaction. Just blank, wide-eyed stare.
“I hope her memories are good ones,” Benji said, “but Sophie seems so sad…”
Ere reached out to hold her hand, but Sophia pulled away reflexively.
She didn’t want to be touched, not by anyone.
And especially not by him, though she couldn’t understand her body’s sudden aversion to her ex-teaching assistant.
She wandered a few yards away from the others so that she could breathe a little easier. They were suffocating her. The walls were closing in.
Sophia didn’t hear the words being spoken in the space she left behind. Not Inanna’s low, soothing voice, Gabriel’s deep tones, nor Ere’s occasional interjections.
She heard Benji’s bright, cheerful, little-boy chirping more prominently than the others, like a ray of sunshine in foggy darkness. But she didn’t pay attention to their meaning. She was too subsumed in a long buried past.
A past that haunted her almost every night in her dreams.
Or, rather, nightmares.
This was where he died.
Dalair.
This was where she watched him die by what seemed like a thousand cuts. One man facing one hundred warriors of the Goddess Neith in single combat, one after the other.
He’d defeated ninety-eight of them before he perished.
It had taken hours.
She’d watched it all unfold in excruciating front-row detail with her parents, the Egyptian King and Queen, a visiting ally and the head priestess for the Goddess Neith.
She’d been immobilized somehow, her body controlled by someone else, without visible physical restraints.
So, all she could do was sit there and watch as her one True Love fought on her behalf to save her, sacrificing himself in her stead.
Right here.
She looked down at the ground she stood upon.
Visions of blood and gore-soaked sands shifted and blurred before her eyes.
There used to be a temple where she stood. It was on a mildly sloped hill with a small lake adjacent to it.
There was nothing there now, just sand and dust and scattered patches of prickly weed. There was no opulent palace behind the temple, none of the lush greenery Sophia recalled from her previous life.
The world had obviously moved on, the past dead and buried.
But she had not.
She was still stuck in those moments when Dalair breathed his last as a human.
There was nothing she could do. Paralyzed as she’d been, she couldn’t even call out to him, not that she would have risked distracting him from the death matches.
But she would have shouted her love for him in the end before he could no longer hear. She would have erased all doubt he might have had. That she knew he had. That she had put there herself to protect him.
She’d done what she thought best to protect the ones she loved. But in the end, she protected no one, including herself.
Instead, she destroyed the better part of two ancient civilizations when Dalair’s death unleashed the darkness within her.
Tens of thousands perished. Just like that.
Some deaths were fast. One moment, a woman would be walking, and the next she stopped. Some deaths were prolonged, a slow withering away into nothingness.
The effect had been worse than most of the historically documented plagues and massacres. Written books would tell you that a number of events conflated during that time to create the perfect storm that ravaged the Persian and Egyptian civilizations.
Droughts, famine, disease, war. Those were the typical culprits. And no one who knew any better, no eye-witnesses, had survived to tell about it.
The history books lied.
Now that she was Awakened, Sophia knew her “Gift.” It wasn’t just about being able to see Pure souls. That wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
She could communicate with and influence all souls.
She could inspire and uplift them like she did during the Great War, when Pure Ones finally overthrew Dark Ones’ rule after millennia of oppression, as the first Pure queen, Ninti.
Or, she could snuff them out like candles and suck all the energy out of living beings as she did when Dalair died.
Hers was a terrible, awful, capricious power. And each time she unleashed it, masses of people were impacted.
She’d died both times she’d used her power, or rather, in the second instance during ancient Persia, when her powers escaped her control. She hadn’t known what she was capable of both times. This was the only incarnation in which she’d been Awakened with memories of her past lives.
It astounded and frightened her that, even as a human, she’d left so much devastation in ancient Persia and Egypt. The Darkness within her seemed stronger than the Light.
Even now, she could feel herself unraveling, triggered by her abduction, her time with Dalair, and most importantly, the loss of him yet again, after finally realizing who he was and what he meant to her. The only thing that kept her hanging onto sanity by a spider-thin thread was that he was still alive.
She could feel his life force, just like she could feel every life force through the connection to their souls if she concentrated on it. It was so faint,
the pulses from his spirit. As if she were trying to reach him through fathoms-deep water covered by miles-thick ice.
But it was there. Just a flicker.
Sometimes, the signatures of his soul flared brighter, hotter. But most of the time, she wouldn’t have known he was still with the living if she didn’t concentrate with all her strength.
Where was he? Her Dalair.
How was he?
Though this was a question she tried to avoid asking herself, because how could he be when he was trapped behind enemy lines, by all reports turned into one of Medusa’s mindless soldiers. Even her new leader of soldiers.
What that must do to him!
Sophia knew better than anyone the kind of male Dalair was. Selfless, noble, honest, and good. He was a protector, not a destroyer. If he had any consciousness of what he was being made to do for their worst enemy, how he must rail and suffer inside!
“Sophia, we are gathering for supper,” a low voice sounded near her. “There is a village square two miles from here. We can eat and restock provisions there.”
It was Ere who’d come to retrieve her from her self-imposed isolation.
“Sophia…”
She turned toward him and tried to focus on his face, even though visions of Dalair’s bloody last stand still occupied her thoughts, the sounds of gruesome battle echoing in her ears.
Ere’s almost too-handsome face sharpened into focus slowly, feature by feature.
She could hardly believe that she used to think he looked like Dalair in the beginning. Both men were dark haired and tall, but that was the only similarity they shared. Everything else was different.
Nevertheless, Ere seemed so familiar to her somehow. She’d liked him right away when they first met. She’d even had a girlish crush on him, even as she continued to struggle with her feelings for Dalair.
His wit, mannerisms, intelligence and personality all pulled her in. Every time she was with him, she felt like she was reacquainting herself with a long-lost friend.
And then there was the mystery of Ere’s own soul, with colors that kept changing, sometimes blazing hot, other times icy cold.
She couldn’t figure him out.
“Sophia…” he said her name again, but didn’t reach out to touch her, as if he knew she didn’t want the contact.
