by Terah Edun
In her mind, the protective instinct to get the others out was overwhelming even as she felt herself being carried further away from the blast point.
The same blast that would have incinerated them had they been standing where she had left them…in the center of the tent. She couldn’t prove they had been. She also couldn’t prove they hadn’t. Then she couldn’t even think of them anymore or anyone else except herself.
The only thing Sara Fairchild knew as the seconds passed was excruciating pain as her blistering skin bubbled and popped under the wave of heat.
She felt the tears on her cheeks not quite evaporating the moment they left her eye ducts, trailing down the slope of her cheekbones before they dissolved into mist.
Furious with herself even as the hot heat of a painful fire washed over her in a larger, blistering wave, she felt herself screaming all the while as her mind detached. It was somehow peaceful thinking about all the death and destruction she still wanted to render, and yet…would never be able to now.
Because she was dying. No one could survive a direct blast like this.
Not even her.
If she had been anything more than a shell of pain and misery, she would have been furiously plotting her revenge. But Sara Fairchild wasn’t immortal and she knew pain—so she succumbed to her wounds. As she drifted down into darkness, this time complete and total, she let the explosion that had nearly torn her head off do its work.
Between one blink and the next…she knew no more.
* * *
Rising to consciousness was a long, painful process. She knew that because it happened several times.
She felt her mind wake first. But it wasn’t the serene ambiance of a dream state. Oh, no, it was the screaming fury of pain all across her body. She was flat on her back, but her entire being felt like it was aflame. Her mind was being overloaded with the sensory pulses that were piling on more and more of the agony. Even still, she grimaced and tried to sit up. But as she did so, a starburst of pain washed over her, so furious that she sank into unconsciousness again in blessed relief.
The second time she woke up, she was more cautious. Her body was still alive with agony, but she decided to see if her other senses were awake, as well. Focusing on her fingertips, she flexed the tiniest of muscles. Even this was not without its problems, as she felt the flesh across her body cracking as her skin tensed and broke with the slightest of muscle movements. She realized then, with careful, slow movements of her eyes, that her entire body was covered in raw, oozing blisters and burns. Even some bruises, she guessed, from hitting the ground hard. She raised a shaking hand to touch a hematoma larger than her wrist on her upper arm, and felt a quick flash of searing pain lance through her mind the minute she grazed it lightly and it burst open, and then once more she was falling back into unconsciousness.
With a deep sigh, she awoke a third time. But this time she was smart. She didn’t move a muscle. She barely breathed. Instead, she took stock of her body and the pain. As she expected an overwhelming wave of agony to accompany her immediate wakening thoughts, Sara was pleasantly surprised to find herself only in moderate pain, and most of that was confined to her bandaged upper chest and her raw face, where her skin felt tense to the touch.
The first thing she noticed, aside from a body in pain, was that she was completely surrounded by earth—earth that was keeping her warm and dry. But that was the only good point she was about to concede. Otherwise, as she looked around, she had the feeling of being entombed alive.
Dirt and more dirt met her gaze.
She was in some kind of underground cave. Or maybe a peasant’s hovel. It was small enough that even sitting down she felt closed in, but she sensed that it was at least wide enough that, if she wanted, she could stretch her limbs out. But other than the feeling of empty air surrounding her, and the tactile touch of dirt against the back of her head and every point where her skin touched the ground, she couldn’t tell much.
As Sara prepared to rise and really take a look around, she heard a shuffling sound in the darkness. Automatically tense, she reached for her weapons belt at her waist and found it wasn’t there. Before she could react any further, someone said, “You’re not supposed to be awake yet. It seems I underestimated the strength of your battle magic to help you heal yourself of even calamitous wounds.”
Cautiously, Sara said out in the darkness, “My gifts don’t heal squat.”
Amusement ran through a voice as the man replied, “I beg to differ. They do more than just help you in a fight. Those gifts store energy for you to be able to boost your attacks in a fight, increase your metabolism so you are faster than ten warriors, and most curiously—help your body fight off grievous wounds when others would have succumbed to infection.”
Sara shifted as she said uncomfortably, “Who are you, and how do you know more about my own gifts than I do?”
A chuckle ran through the room but she still couldn’t see the occupant.
Instead she listened as he said, “I learned from the best.”
Then a cloud burst of dust appeared in her face and she was once more drifting into sleep.
When Sara woke a fourth and, hopefully, final time, she was pain free, felt refreshed, and was extremely pissed off.
Now she had a target to focus on, a person to blame for both nearly cooking her alive and forcing her into a healing sleep time and again, and she wasn’t going to let them get away with it. They might have nearly taken her life. They might have also saved her life. But more importantly, they had taken control away from her, and there was nothing that Sara couldn’t stand more than being helpless. She felt like grinding their bones beneath her feet, and as she sat up, she was prepared to do just that.
“My, my, somebody looks like they aren’t very happy,” said a young, strong voice. The same from before, but he sounded much closer now.
Now that she could hear him more clearly, she could tell that his voice was vibrant and spelled trouble. She thought she recognized it, but every time her mind latched onto a memory, it disappeared like a wisp of smoke. Leaving her more confused than before. So she elected to just focus on the present and the physical. Especially right now. Whipping her head back and forth, Sara tried to find the source of the words that sent a spark of recognition through her gut, although she couldn’t precisely spell out why. And besides, she still couldn’t see anybody.
As she struggled to locate them, she noticed shadowy vapors in the air in front of her. Maybe concealing her speaker. It was certainly taking up a large enough area to do so. Reaching out to touch the shadows with a shaking hand, Sara felt her flesh pass through the mist. She felt herself waving her fingers on the edge of her outstretched arm, but couldn’t see the digits themselves through the mist. Pulling her hand back uneasily, she confirmed her arm was still whole. But she just couldn’t see anything that was basically in front of her face.
As the person shifted behind the shadowy veil and spoke, she tried to pinpoint his location by voice alone. But his words echoed off the rounded walls surrounding them until she couldn’t tell if he was standing to her left or right, front or off to the side. It was very annoying.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” he said.
“Who’s there?” she asked. “Show yourself!”
And he did. Before her, in an instant, he appeared. Sara was so surprised that she stayed leaning against the wall and blinked.
Tense but willing to play this out, at least until she knew where she was, she asked again, “Who are you?”
She wasn’t quite sure what was going on here, if she was with a friend or foe, in a makeshift infirmary or a prison, but the least she could do was get all her facts together before rushing to judgment. She eyed the man crouching a few feet away from her with distaste. He didn’t look the least bit concerned that he had kidnapped her. Instead, he was lazily lounging about and eyeing her with interest.
Even though she recognized him, his face was like a mirage from a distan
t memory. Not quite close enough for her grab hold of and remember.
Taking his moody silence as a refusal to consent, Sara took stock of everything she’d noticed in the minutes she’d been awake. Her head hurt like the dickens. Her ribs were sore, but at least they didn’t throb. She was underground somewhere, and worst of all—she couldn’t move anything below her navel.
With a horrified glance, she confirmed what she had known from the moment she had regained consciousness. But she wasn’t chained down or shackled like she had guessed. She just couldn’t move, which threw that ‘completely healthy’ feeling right out the window.
Her legs weren’t responding.
Her efforts to shift her butt only made her frustrated.
Her feet wouldn’t even jerk in a feeble kick.
She had only her hands and her wits in what looked like a dank cave, with a random man who could just as well be a prisoner as well as her jailer.
Lips pursed bitterly, Sara understood then that she’d better figure out which quickly. As they studied each other, she furtively felt around the ground in the shadows for weapons. She was hoping that she had dropped her sword nearby, or her knives, or even a random cutlass that had somehow made the journey with her.
But no such luck.
With only the strongest effort was she able to hold back the curse when she realized she was weaponless, unarmed…and vulnerable.
Still, Sara was nothing if not prepared. She may have been almost stripped of her physical ability to react, but no one had ever accused her of cowardice. She saw a knife. Not on her person, but his. Darting forward, she grabbed it quick as a flash with one of her working hands, yanked up, and slammed down.
For the first time that she could remember since she’d met him, he reacted.
Just not in the way she’d expected. Which preferably would have been with howls of pain and conceding her superior. As she tried to use her strong forearms to pull her torso up and get the upper hand, even as her legs flopped around uselessly in the dirt, he used his magic to push her and her blade away with pure mist and shadows.
As she sat up on her elbows and watched him astonished, she recognized that his veil trick from before wasn’t just a parlous illusion, it actually had practical usage. And just when her legs weren’t working, darn it.
Taking a gamble, Sara opened her senses—the magical ones. Even if she didn’t have the power at the moment to attack, physically or otherwise, she could at least assess. And what she found was troubling. He was gifted, but it was an odd gift. One that shifted and twisted just like the shadows he commanded.
She could have bluffed or threatened him, but it was clear as day to her and him that something was still wrong with her lower half. So she backed off with as much dignity as she could…and he let her.
As he watched her do so with a wryly amused expression, she was partly offended and partly grateful that she managed to land in a pit with a man who thought someone trying to stab him was amusing.
But she had the sinking feeling that finding some common ground with a man like him, who found imprisonment funny, was going to be daunting, but she had to try.
“Did you bring me here?” she asked quietly as she maneuvered herself back against the wall. Hoping for an answer, not really expecting one.
He shrugged. “You could say that. I have a few questions for you.”
She paused. “I don’t think I want to answer anything you have to ask.”
He raised his eyebrows and said candidly, “How do you know if you don’t listen?”
She was silent as she noticed something was happening to him. It was subtle but it was there. Shadows would fall across his face and parts of his body would disappear. Not in any discernible pattern. Almost as if the shadows were calling him home and releasing him seconds later. She didn’t know what to make of it.
The only things she could pinpoint for certain were the sound of his voice, the color of his brown eyes, and the overall youthfulness of the features she could see—the quick flashes of supple skin as his hands danced in the air emphasizing his words, or the straight angle of his body, even as he sat perched on the floor for so long without complaint.
Trying to focus on what she did know, Sara asked, “What precisely do you intend to do with me? Ransom me to my leadership? Kill me?”
“Oh, I get it. You get to ask questions, Sara, but I don’t?” he said.
“And how do you know my name?” Sara asked, suddenly concerned. “You’re awfully familiar with me for someone I’ve never seen before in my life.”
He held up two fingers. “One, you’re wrong about that, and two, me knowing your name is the least of your concerns right now.”
Deciding he was right, even if she may not have wanted to know what he did consider her foremost concerns, Sara kept gorging ahead with questions. It was the only weapon she had in her arsenal right now anyway.
“Where are we?” she asked tautly.
If her voice was edging into anger, she could be forgiven.
For a moment he studied her facial reactions. Whatever response he found, pushed him to say, “Sara Fairchild, the brave warrior must be feeling pretty helpless now.”
“I’ll show you helpless,” she griped at him from her position stuck against the wall.
He just laughed.
As she watched this stranger chuckle at her expense, perversely she almost felt grateful. Here was someone who wouldn’t look at her like she was a gaping wound of raw emotions. She loved Ezekiel in her own way, but being coddled was not precisely in her nature. Now she could lash out physically in the way her emotions demanded.
Though for a moment, she thought it was too bad that she’d have to find a way out of this and kill this stranger in retaliation.
He almost seemed…fun.
6
As they sized each other up once more, she waited for him to speak.
“You certainly have the same set of brass balls from when you tackled me. Even if you don’t remember it,” he said to her with some personal amusement.
Sara’s lip twitched before she responded, “Why don’t you come closer, and I’ll show just how brassy I can be?”
He shook his head sadly as he replied, “I think I’ll stay right here. After all, from everything I’ve heard and seen, your comrades were certainly right about you.”
Sara stiffened. Not in offense, but in wariness. Who had he been talking to, and what had they convinced him to do to her on their behalf? Sara had so many enemies that she couldn’t be certain if this was part of the overall plot against the empire. Or just a grudge against her.
“Anyway,” the man said skeptically. “Perhaps it’s time we actually got to the reason I brought you here.”
“Yes, let’s” Sara said dryly while nervous sweat began to inch done her back.
She was expecting torture, perhaps even a beating. But instead she saw more magic.
He stood up and the entire ceiling that she could see rose with him.
It was so smoothly done that had she blinked, she would have missed the transformation, though obviously not the effect.
“How did the earth just move?” she demanded.
“It didn’t move, necessarily, it just realigned itself to my height.”
Sara stared at him with narrowed eyes. “And what does that mean?”
He reached out a hand to her with a confident smile. “Why don’t you take my hand and see?”
She looked up at his outstretched hand dubiously and then at the eager look of anticipation on his face, which meant that whatever he wanted, she didn’t want.
As she shifted with uncertainty, she admitted reluctantly, “Standing isn’t exactly in the cards right now.”
He shrugged and then crouched back done in front of her.
“Alright,” he said easily. “That should rectify itself soon enough. Of course, I’ll be gone by then, but don’t worry, you aren’t paralyzed for life.”
She blinked and thought, Well
my boy, perhaps you should have kept that little tidbit to yourself.
Now she had even more reason to prepare to attack and kill him. But he didn’t look concerned, which baffled her. Honestly and truly.
Then she had less time to think about her attack before she felt a sharp twist at her navel, the only warning that he was pulling on magic and a lot of it, before her world turned upside down. From one moment to the next, the dark, depressing dome of earth above was gone. In its place, bright sky and, surrounding them, bodies.
She barely had time to process what she was seeing before Ezekiel came running up to her. Sara practically yanked the stranger off his feet as she reached out in shock, unable to grab the scholar, gripping him instead. Realizing too late what she did, she let go in disgust. But it didn’t stop the scholar from passing her by.
“Ezekiel!” she yelled in desperation, but he didn’t even look her way or notice her outstretched hand. It was in that moment Sara felt a curious sense of déjà vu. As if she had gone through this scenario once before. If only she could remember when.
Whatever secrets her memory was holding, would be divulged however and the ghostly visage of Ezekiel Crane disappeared seconds later leaving her staring back at the man, not the mage, who Sara was coming to realize was more than just a jailer.
“What do you want with me?” Sara asked sharply. “And what did you just do with my friend?”
“Gave you a vision of them?” he responded. “They look a bit frantic.”
She glared at him. “Don’t get cute,” Sara snarled. “I may be an invalid, but I’m not without resources, and tearing your balls out with my teeth might just be up my alley today.”
For the first time, he actually looked impressed by her threats. He took a step back and said, “Your friends were as they always were. Busy being led around like sheep by the Imperial Armed Forces.”
Sara filed away a note that he seemed to particularly dislike the empress’s elite, which gave her a hint about whom he worked for. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to believe he was a Kade soldier, but so far, aside from some rather impressive parlor tricks, he had only shown himself to be a second-rate mage. One that she could have bested in minutes if she didn’t happen to be having her worst day ever.
