The Keeper (The Endless Chronicles Book 1)

by Nikki Mccormack

  “Deynas, please don’t leave me.”

  There was something in her pleading tone that brought to mind the night Argus died. He steeled himself against the fresh ache breaking through him and walked away from her, heading down to get the last of his things from his hut. She didn’t follow him. When he came back up a short time later, she was nowhere around. That he had won the argument so easily was almost disappointing. Fighting it out a little longer would have delayed that moment of no turning back. It might have even drawn someone else out who could have talked sense into him.

  His gut writhed with a nest of nervous knots as he tucked the last few things into the hatch and stood staring at the collection of supplies.

  What would he do if Kochan did banish him?

  The master refused to speak more of Naago, but he’d sent wind spirits to several of the other tribes the day after the man left and had already received discouraging replies from most of them. The masters of those tribes were aware of no umahk-ra-uden within their villages and knew little of how the gift worked. It made no sense to wait on the responses from the last few tribes when he already knew of someone who could help him if he could just talk the stubborn bastard into it.

  He closed and locked the hatch, then climbed up on the flyer and buckled in. For what felt like hours, though he suspected it hadn’t been more than a few minutes, he stood staring down the road that curved down and out of sight toward the village.

  Could he really fly away from all this? Could he face the prospect of not be allowed to come back?

  Giving himself a little shake, he turned to the waiting night. When his goggles were in place, he turned the flyer on. It came to life with the soft purr of an affectionate kitten. He had considered taking a less attention grabbing craft, but the quiet engine reduced the risk of detection on the way out and the superior speed would allow him to outrun patrol flyers if they chose to question his unusual nocturnal outing. The latter wasn’t likely to be a problem though. He knew the patrol routes, so he knew how to avoid them.

  Keeping low so he barely cleared the stands on the other flyers, he accelerated toward the opposite cliff, away from the village, and dove over, letting the craft plummet down the side. At the last second, he pulled up and punched the throttle, speeding away from the village and keeping low over the dunes without dropping close enough to make the dust billow. By morning, he would be well out of patrol range.

  •

  “You think you’re ready to really fly, tenderfoot?”

  Deynas hesitated, staring at the insets where he would strap in his feet. He might be almost five years younger, but he stood several inches taller so Argus was up on a slightly elevated platform attached at the foot of the support stand just behind those insets.

  Did they truly expect him to stand so close in front of her?

  Swallowing his nerves, he climbed up and bent over to buckle his feet into the insets in front of her. When he stood straight, she attached his harness to hers and leaned in so that her lips were next to his ear. All thought of flying vanished, pushed out by indecent fantasies involving the body pressing up against his back. The uncomfortable stirring in his groin made him glad she wasn’t the one in front.

  “Are you blushing, Deynas?” Her breath caressed his skin.

  He was, fiercely. “No.”

  She only laughed and leaned back again. “Then what are you waiting for, tenderfoot. Get this thing off the ground.”

  By the time dawn spilled over the landscape, he was far enough from the village to drop down and skim the dunes, playing casually with the spraying of sand the way he and Argus had when they started flying individual crafts together. He’d graduated out of tandem flying very quickly and had almost regretted not having her body close behind him anymore, but being able to look over and see her dazzling smile as they raced through the sky had been worth the separation.

  Sand dolphins joined him, jumping up alongside the craft, their muscular bodies arcing through the air. He grinned and eased up on the throttle a little, encouraging them to stay and play. Argus would search them out during flight training and challenge him to mimic their movements.

  “Try it, Deynas. Learn from them. In the right hands, a flyer can be just as agile as a sand dolphin, though never as beautiful.”

  Hers had been the right hands and he wanted to argue that, with her on its back, the flyer was more beautiful than any sand dolphin, but he’d felt too much like a little boy reaching to catch a star. His doubts had kept the words locked inside.

  A dolphin twisted alongside him as it leapt through the air and he mimicked it, doing a barrel roll in the valley between two dunes. There was something about the creatures, in their unassuming beauty and the joy they took in these simple games, that lifted his mood. He jumped with them, bringing the ship up and down in graceful arcs that he pulled up just before the nose tipped the sand.

  After a time, the dolphins turned off deeper into the dunes and he continued alone, his better mood departing with them. He forced himself to continue through the day and up until dusk, by which time his eyes were struggling to stay open and his speed and balance had both grown erratic. Then he found a place well away from the main road to make camp before his weariness could plant him and the craft nose down in the sand.

  He slept in some the next morning. The closer he got to the city, the less he could afford to be tired and inattentive. When he felt suitably refreshed, he took off again, angling toward the road that would take him to the massive black tower looming ahead. At the speed he was traveling, he would reach the city before evening.

  By late afternoon, he could see the varied service and pleasure craft flying amidst the towering buildings of the New city at the top of the massive structure. Rather than use the crowded ground level entrances, he ascended and got into the queue to enter through a portal at the uppermost level of the Old city. He hadn’t been Endless long enough to wear any braids in his hair, but even without them, it seemed best to avoid the tighter security of the New city higher up and there were no legal entrances into the Undercity from the outside.

  The winged demon tucked into the box at the entrance barely looked at him when it asked his business. He claimed to be a tourist coming from Ginakwa, the city to the north that supplied water to the tower city through a run of three massive pipes stretched across the desert like a leash. The portal iris opened and the demon waved Deynas through with a clawed hand the size of his head. Once through the portal, he found it hard not to stare.

  When the city had belonged to the Endless tribes, there had been few demons in the Old and New city levels. Some gained entrance, if they proved trustworthy in their dealings, and spirits and gods often moved freely through the city levels. Now the Old city looked much like the Undercity, with demons of all types walking the streets among the human inhabitants, most of whom looked nervous, darting glances over their shoulders as if they expected an assault to come at every corner or from within every doorway. Even with bright lighting powered by the many generators within the tower, it felt like there were more deep shadows in the streets than when he had called the city home. More trash as well. A lot more.

  Deynas could almost feel sorry for the people there, but those not of the Endless tribes, men and women who didn’t have the blood of The Undying in their lines, had turned the tribes away when the demons overran the city, locking them out of their homes and businesses. They deserved their unhappiness.

  He schooled the contempt from his expression and cruised slowly through the city, watching the signs like a tourist would in case the locals or, worse yet, the city enforcers, took an interest in him.

  A howler, one of the big dog-like beasts the demons used to sound alerts in the city, lifted its long head when he passed, gazing at him through myriad amber eyes. It lost interest after a few seconds and returned to resting at the end of the chain that bound it to one of the massive steel columns supporting the levels of the city.

  He made his way d
own the ramps leading deeper into the Old city. On the lowest two levels above the Undercity, he spotted a few shifty looking shops in the darker streets, places that likely dealt in drugs or illegal remedies. He also saw demon and crossbreed whores walking openly in the streets among those of the impoverished who were fortunate enough to afford life in the bottom of the Old city. In the deepest darkest reaches of the Undercity, one could always buy any kind of pleasure or punishment they were brave enough to seek out. Now that element was seeping upward, as if the Undercity overflowed its boundaries.

  The scant number of human prostitutes who had peddled their flesh on low levels of the Old city when the Endless tribes had kept the demon element restricted below had vanished. Only a truly desperate woman would dare sell herself when possible customers included the most base and degenerate varieties of demon. Human flesh was never meant to stand up to the depravities such creatures enjoyed. Not all demons were that way, of course, but he didn’t see any down here he would care to meet alone in the dark.

  Dropping down into the Undercity was easy. Any adult could go down at their own risk. It had always been that way. Children going down and anyone coming up had to go through a checkpoint, though the guards weren’t taking their job too seriously given the state of the streets above.

  Deynas struggled to keep judgment from his face as he pulled up next to a guard box. The guard, this one human with a girth so great he almost didn’t fit in the confines of the box, turned his glazed eyes to Deynas. He sat chewing, staring in silence until he spit a blue substance on the ground, just missing the wing of the red flyer.

  “Need somethin’?”

  The man smelled like soured milk. Deynas swallowed against the press of nausea in the back of his throat.

  “I had hoped to find lodging with secure storage for my flyer.”

  The guard smirked at the fancy craft. “Yer goin’ down?”

  Deynas nodded.

  “Best ye’ll do is Kato’s hotel next to The Firelight. He’ll make ye pay fer it though.”

  “Right.” Deynas grimaced. He didn’t have a lot of currency, but he’d worry about those details later. There were some things in the hatch he could trade if the need arose. Ideally, he wouldn’t stay long enough for the need to arise.

  The big man chuckled. “Spent all yer money on yer toy, did ye?”

  Deynas didn’t answer. He sped away from the box and plunged into the heart of the Undercity.

  The streets here were always dark, the lights far overhead coated over with years of grime that no one cared to clean up, creating an unending state of deep dusk that favored its unsavory inhabitants. At one time, those inhabitants had at least been monitored and held to some degree of accountability. Now, although he spotted two greater demon enforcers, he saw no evidence that they had any interest in anything beyond the pair of crossbreed whores they were fondling alongside one of the shabbier gambling dens.

  He kept his speed up and avoided eye contact, making a quick run for the hotel. He’d never spent much time in the Undercity, but he knew its layout. Every child in the tribes studied maps of the city levels before they were old enough to begin training as Endless. When the Endless still lived in the city, The Firelight had been one of the few gambling dens frequented by residents from the Old and New city levels. He could only hope it retained some of that dubious prestige.

  The Firelight came into view, impossible to miss for the clever trickery that made its black metal walls look like they were perpetually on fire. The smell of molten metal filled the air along with a slight undertone of sulfur. The den hadn’t lost its dramatic flair and, judging from the more affluent looking crowd in front of the building, it still had a draw that reached beyond the denizens of the Undercity.

  He angled in to the valet round before the hotel next to The Firelight, a little surprised to find that it was still in operation. Such amenities seemed out of place down in the darkest part of the city.

  Two men and a young crossbreed were on duty at the stand. The men hung back and let the crossbreed approach. Other than his eyes, in which even the whites were inky black, the youth looked almost human and, when Deynas stepped down from the craft, he turned out to be several inches shorter, unusual for a crossbreed.

  Deynas hesitated a moment. He didn’t really want to stay in the city, especially down here, but it seemed unlikely that he would find Naago fast enough to leave before nightfall.

  He retrieved a pack from the hatch then handed the crossbreed the key. The youth inserted the key into a short metal tube then pressed the pointed tip of the tube to the inside of his arm. An encoded mark appeared there at the end of a long row of several similar marks running up to his elbow. He then pointed the tip at Deynas who held out his wrist so the youth could print a matching mark there. There was a tiny spark of pain, almost more like a sharp itch, with the printing. The crossbreed broke off the marking tip and handed it to Deynas. He slipped it into a pocket. No one without that mark would be able to open the tube and access the key. The mark itself would fade away within a week and need to be renewed if he was still here. He didn’t intend to stay half that long.

  He left the flyer in the youth’s care along with a tip of three stones, then entered through the door one of the men held open for him.

  The inside of the hotel looked and smelled like the outside of The Firelight. Imaged fire flickered upon the interior walls and the polished black stone floor tiles reflected the flames. The overall effect made him a touch dizzy as he walked to the front desk. A crossbreed woman stood watching him from behind the desk, her plump lips painted a deep crimson and her very full breasts pushed up by a corset that didn’t entirely cover her red nipples. When she smiled the corners of her mouth angled up, creating a peculiar symmetry with her sharply angled eyes and the pointed ears that peeked out through a luscious mane of raven hair.

  For all that he tried not to notice, her shapely body and scant attire caused a stirring in his groin and he had to work hard to keep his focus on her eyes. She flicked her long tail up onto the desk and his gaze inadvertently shifted to follow the movement, catching on her breasts on the way back up. He forced his attention to her face.

  She laughed, a deep throaty sound that whispered of secret pleasures and sweat soaked bodies. “Can I help you?” Her hands dropped to her hips leaving the front of her body open for full viewing.

  “I… ah.”

  He set a hand on the desk to give himself a sense of stability. The women in the village weren’t like this. Knowing she was probably paid to dress and behave that way didn’t make it any less distracting.

  She leaned her elbows on the desk, squeezing her breasts forward between her arms so that they threatened to pop free of the corset, and ran a finger over the back of his hand, the pointed nail brushing the skin in a light caress.

  “We’ve got rooms. They come with and without company, though most come faster with.”

  He cleared his throat. “Let’s start without.”

  She pushed her lip out in a spectacular pout and stood up straight. “You’re no fun.”

  He smiled despite himself. “Sorry. This trip isn’t for pleasure.”

  When she walked to the back of the booth to get a room key, he tried hard not to watch the way her hips swayed or to stare at her pert ass as her tail moved up, lifting the edge of the short skirt to reveal more smooth flesh. She turned suddenly and he snapped his gaze up, but not before she noticed and grinned. Swaying her hips provocatively, she walked back and leaned on the desk again. She dangled the room key between them, licking her crimson lips and making a show of looking him over.

  “You look a little feverish, Love. You sure you don’t need someone to take care of you?”

  He took the key. “Maybe later.” He turned and started to walk away.

  “You know where to find me,” she called after him.

  Deynas stopped. She had his heart racing and he did feel a bit feverish, more than a bit actually, but this was bus
iness. Business that she just might be able to help him with. He steeled his nerves and walked back.

  She was still leaning on the desk. Her eyes sparked with a gleam of victory. “Change your mind?”

  The obstinate willpower that should have kept him from giving in to such temptation was beginning to desert him. “You are persistent.”

  “And very flexible.” She reached out one finger, tracing his jaw with a soft caress, the fingernail just barely touching the skin to hint at a possibility for more aggressive pleasures.

  Business. He gave himself a mental kick. “I don’t doubt that, but I came back to ask you a question. Do you know a man by the name of Naago?”

  He didn’t really expect her to have any information. If he were to be honest, he’d asked mostly because he wanted to look a minute longer, since she didn’t seem to mind him doing so. She seemed to enjoy it in fact.

  The fond smile that touched her lips then was strikingly sincere and even more disconcerting for that. “Now that’s a man who knows how to please a woman. If you’re that good, I might consider coming up once for free.”

  So Naago’s city life wasn’t all suffering and misery. “I think he might have a few more years of experience.”

  “Never hurts to practice.” She gave him a playful wink.

  He inhaled, trying to clear his head and noticed the dusky sweet fragrance of her under the other smells in the room. That didn’t help in the least. What would it be like to bed a crossbreed like her, someone schooled in the arts of pleasure?

  “Is he around here?”

  “Not right now, but he keeps a room upstairs. He’s never away for long.” She batted her thick lashes, giving him a seductive smile. “If you’re going to wait, why wait alone?”

  He searched for the words to turn her down again, his vocabulary failing him.

  One arm came toward him suddenly and she slipped her fingers into his hair, pulling him closer. She leaned further over the counter, her peeking nipples brushing the smooth surface. Her lips closed on his and her tongue dove into his mouth. Searing lust and the passionate promise in her kiss hammered down the last traces of resistance. He slid a hand around the back of her neck and kissed her back hard. She tasted faintly of cinnamon and chocolate and the deeper he kissed her the more he wanted to taste.