by Tricia Barr
She turned around to the back seat to face him. “Skylar, earlier when we were tied up, you—you spoke to my thoughts?” It came out as a question, as if she was asking if it had really happened that way, as if she was no longer sure his mouth had been covered.
“I learned that skill by accident in one of my past lives,” he said, nodding. “I only discovered it in one life, and then never again.”
“Wait, Phoenyx heard your thoughts?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes, apparently I can not only hear the thoughts of others, I can also push my thoughts into other people’s minds.”
“That’s fantastic!” Sebastian said. “That would have come in handy a lot when we were growing up. We could have had whole conversations without anyone ever hearing.”
Skylar smiled at the thought.
“Do it to me!” Sebastian said eagerly. There was a pause during which the two stared at each other, and then Sebastian laughed, which made Skylar laugh.
Phoenyx smiled and shook her head.
The sky was almost fully lit as the village came within sight. She wasn’t sure what to expect when they arrived, and she was more frustrated that they had to deal with this than nervous about what they might face. A few crooked armed guards? Her fire was making her so haughty she could just shrug off the threat.
They drove through the sleepy village, past shabby dwellings, and stopped at a house that was a bit nicer and bigger than the ones around it.
“Ok, so what’s our plan here?” Sebastian asked in a hushed voice. “How many of them are there?”
“There are 3 men inside,” Skylar said, mentally scanning the shack’s façade. “And they heard the jeep, so they know that their friend is here.”
“That’s perfect,” Ayanna said. “I say we avoid any further violence and send our thief in to get the stone.”
“What about the other stolen artifacts?” Phoenyx argued. “We can’t let them keep it all. And they know the location of the tomb so they’re just going to go back and get the rest.”
“So violence it is then,” Sebastian said.
“Not necessarily,” said Skylar. “Let’s just wait for the thief to return with the stone and we can plan from there how to get everything back to the tomb.”
Phoenyx and Ayanna nodded in agreement, although Phoenyx was feeling anxious about the amount of time it would take to get everything back to the tomb. This was already their second day and they didn’t even have one stone fragment in their possession, let alone any sort of clue as to where the other two might be. Her heartbeat was a ticking clock inside her chest.
They all hopped out of the jeep and Phoenyx sent the thief in to retrieve the stone. They waited outside, still and listening, for him to come out. After a few minutes, there were raised voices, and then some knocks, and then silence.
“The other men were suspicious of our friend’s strange behavior, they think he’s turned on them, so they knocked him out and are coming outside!” Skylar’s quick mental message came on the wind, right before three men came barging out of the shack.
Everything that followed happened very quickly.
The men spotted the four strangers beside the jeep and drew their guns. Without any outward clues from Skylar, the men were yanked violently off the ground and held weightlessly, helplessly, in the air around them. They jerked and squirmed against the telekinetic tentacles that held them aloft, cursing all the while. As Phoenyx moved toward them to give them her magic touch, a gunshot sounded and a female voice cried out. Phoenyx turned in the direction of the cry to see Ayanna crumpling to her knees and an armed assailant being flung backward as his gun slipped out of his hands and landed in the sand.
Phoenyx and Sebastian rushed to Ayanna.
“Ayanna! Did you get shot?” Phoenyx asked.
“Where did you get hit?” Sebastian asked, carefully scanning her body with his open hands.
“Ack! Just the shoulder,” Ayanna grunted, gritting her teeth and squeezing her eyes shut. Her right hand was dripping blood as it covered her left shoulder.
“Oh god!” Phoenyx gasped. “Where did that guy come from?”
“A few houses down,” Skylar said without taking his focus off the floating men. “I didn’t know they had another member. I’m sorry, Ayanna!”
“S’okay,” Ayanna said, looking up at him with one eye open. “If any of us had to get hit, at least it was the one who can’t die.” She laughed, panting through the pain.
“We have to stop the bleeding,” Phoenyx said, hands fluttering around nervously, unsure what to do.
“You have to get the bullet out first,” Ayanna said, and Phoenyx’s heart thudded.
Sebastian looked at Ayanna for a moment. Then he exhaled and rubbed his hands together and said, “Hold your breath.” Then he braced her shoulder with one hand and dexterously pushed his index finger and thumb into her wound to dig out the bullet.
Phoenyx felt her stomach turn as Ayanna groaned, and she had to look away or she would throw up. It was over in seconds and Phoenyx heard Ayanna exhale heavily and begin to pant.
“Now we need a rag to seal it,” Sebastion said.
“No. Phoenyx,” Ayanna said. “Use your fire to cauterize it.”
Of course, Phoenyx thought. She put her hands over Ayanna’s bloody shoulder and, after sharing a look of reassurance with Ayanna, seared the wounded flesh shut. Phoenyx removed her hands and appraised her wounded friend.
“Thank you both,” Ayanna said. “I know that wasn’t easy.”
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Sebastian asked.
“No, I’m fine now,” she said, shakily getting to her feet and letting her left shoulder sort of hang as she did so. “It will heal quickly, even faster now that Phoenyx cauterized it. Let’s finish this.”
Phoenyx stood up and approached the floating men, suddenly blinded by the rising sun’s first light. It was day now. They couldn’t risk moving any of this during daylight, someone official might see and ruin everything. She had spent too many lives acquiring these things for someone else to come in and take them from her.
She walked past the floating men and inside the shack to the fallen thief. The stone fragment was on the floor a few inches from his open hand. She picked it up and put it in her pocket, looking around the room at everything that had been removed. She had a new plan.
“Skylar, move them so that I can touch them all at once,” Phoenyx instructed as she walked out of the shack.
An invisible force manipulated the three floating men and the one who shot Ayanna like puppets, pulling them together so that each pair was holding hands and stretching them out in Phoenyx’s direction. With both hands, she grasped the two pairs of locked hands and pushed her will into them.
“When night falls, you will return every last artifact that you stole to the tomb,” she pronounced. “You won’t tell anyone about them, you won’t show them to anyone, and you will die to protect them. Once everything is back in its proper place, you will close the tomb and never return. And if any damage comes to a single one of these objects, know that nothing will save you from my wrath.”
She removed her hands and they all dropped to the sand. The men scrambled to get on their feet and scurried back into the shack.
“Well, now that that’s dealt with,” Phoenyx said, holding up the stone, “let’s get moving.”
“Where are we going?” Ayanna asked, still a bit breathy.
“I can answer that,” Sebastian said, as if suddenly remembering something. Everyone looked at him expectantly. “I remembered where I hid my stone fragment, I dreamt about it last night. With all the commotion I almost forgot all about it.”
“You know where the next piece is? Where?” Phoenyx asked eagerly.
“Let’s get to town first, and talk about it over breakfast,” Sebastian said. “It’s kind of a long story, and I’m starving.”
Phoenyx frowned and followed the others in the direction of the ferry.
Sebastian�
��s Dream
The year was 1782 and Captain Marcus Flinn was sitting in a pub, enjoying a mug of ale as he watched a few of his men make asses of themselves over some pretty faces. He was a few sips shy of joining them. There was, in fact, a girl on the other side of the pub who had been staring at him for some time. She was very pretty, honey curls spilling over her bare shoulders, breasts blooming over the top of her corset. It had been months since they had been at port, and his bedpost was hankering for another notch. At the ripe age of twenty-seven, with his jet black hair and baby blue eyes, he was a very desirable man and he knew it.
But before he could get up, the girl left her seat and approached him.
“Evening, sailor,” she said as she took the seat across the table from him.
“Ah, not just a sailor, love,” he said, trying not to slur his words. “Captain.” He winked flirtatiously.
“Oh, captain,” she said. She looked at his clothes. “Those don’t look like the colors of the Royal Navy.”
“That’s because they’re not,” he replied, smiling devilishly.
“So, pirate then?” she said with an understanding nod.
“Yo-ho-ho,” he teased. “Would you like to see what a pirate captain’s chambers look like? I’ll give you the grand tour.”
The girl rolled her eyes and sighed. “So…you haven’t found her yet.”
He furrowed his brow, perplexed. “Her?” he asked, wondering what form of flirting this was. “Found who?”
She looked him straight in the eyes, dead serious. “The girl with the orange hair, the one from your dreams.”
As he looked at her and the words she said worked their way through his drunken mind, his smiled slowly faded, all desire for fun dissipating.
The girl with the orange hair. The image of her from his dream just last night sprang to mind clear as day through his inebriated haze. He had dreamt of this girl his whole life, and he had always been certain that that’s all she was: a dream. He had never spoken of this to anyone. How did this strange girl know?
“I can help you find her,” the girl said. “I can show you who she is and why you have been haunted by dreams of her your entire life.”
He just sat there, almost numb, vacantly hearing his men shouting and hooting a few tables over.
“Or you can continue to live like them,” she said, nodding her head in their direction. “You can spend the rest of your days soaking yourself in alcohol and wasting your life away with thousands of women in your bed, everyone but the one you want.”
He looked at his men, at the girls they’d no doubt bed tonight, and an emptiness consumed him. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out to her. “Show me. I want to know.”
They left the pub and, ironically, went to his ship and into his chambers. The girl touched him with a strange form of magic, and after a grueling few hours of head rushing mania, he could remember everything. Ayanna went from being a stranger in a pub to his best and oldest friend in what seemed like a heartbeat. And the beautiful enigmatic redhead who haunted his dreams was real. She was his lover and soul mate, and she was out there somewhere. The thought that he might not see her in this life deeply saddened him, but the knowledge that he would surely see her in many for the rest of eternity gave him greater purpose than he had ever known in his life as a pirate. His bedpost would never get another notch in this life unless he found her.
He and Ayanna talked now as friends, and the memories in his head became clearer and more connected.
“I’m so glad I found you,” Ayanna said. “Naturally, you would be a pirate. It was bound to happen at least once. Ironic that with all the jewels you deal with, there is only one that has any real worth.”
With a jolt, Marcus remembered. Their several thousand year quest was to find the fragments of the stone that would give them eternal life. It had been millennia since they had found the first and only piece in Egypt, but he could still remember exactly how uniquely beautiful it was, and it struck him—he had seen its match not a month ago.
“The stone!” he exclaimed. “I found the second piece!”
“You did!?” Ayanna clamored in excitement. “Where is it?”
Marcus paused, then frowned deeply. “That’s the difficult part; I sold it. Traded it to a fellow in the Royal Navy for his continued ‘failure’ to catch me.”
Ayanna’s excitement quickly sputtered, and they sat in silent thought together. “Well then,” she said, “I guess we will just have to do what pirates do best—steal it back.”
The next morning, they left Port Royal and set sail for England. Marcus happened to know that this particular Navy general was throwing a ball in honor of his daughter’s coming out in just over a month’s time. That would be the ideal circumstance to get into his home and find the stone.
At first, the crew was put off having a woman on board, but it didn’t take long for them to accept her as one of their own. After the first time someone made a pass at her and she knocked him out, the men grew to respect her—more or less—not to mention she was stronger than half the crew and was able to do a three-man job completely on her own. She was a fun and apt addition to the crew.
The journey across the Atlantic would take over a month for any other ship, but Marcus’s control over water gave him exceptionally smooth sailing. That was one of the reasons he was never caught. If any Navy ships gave him chase, he would manipulate the tides to act as a barrier around his ship while jostling the opposing vessels. They arrived at Portsmouth a few days before the ball, anchoring their ship in a hidden cove off the coast, as Portsmouth was a Naval harbor and any pirate would be a fool to actually make port there. They used the extra days to procure proper attire for the ball. Ayanna was a great help there, selecting the right clothes for each member of the crew. With a jacket, a comb and a pair of gloves, she could turn a swine into a prince. It was incredible.
The evening of the ball, Marcus cautioned his men on manners. England wasn’t like the Caribbean: the women here were much more modest, there was a higher emphasis on grammar, and men were expected to be respectable. His men must play a certain part in order to attend a coming out ball. Ayanna had little faith in their ability to do so, but Marcus simply could not deny them a proper party, so he would just have to risk it.
He and Ayanna walked into the estate arm in arm. While Marcus, unlike his crew, did not need classing up, having Ayanna on his arm really made him look good. She was wearing one of the finest gowns he had ever seen, and she was a magician with all that hair, fashioning it up in a way that made her look like a queen. She could be Marie Antoinette, and the eyes of everyone, men and women alike, were on her, and by association, him.
“So what is your plan here?” she asked him, coyly nodding at passersby.
“Use you as my lucky charm,” Marcus answered, guiding her through the crowd. “General Copeland has a weakness for pretty faces, hence this extravagant gala for his daughter. You help me sweet talk him and once I get him to let slip where the stone is, I’ll steal it while you distract him.”
“Lovely,” Ayanna said, playing her part perfectly as she curtsied for a prominent couple who complimented her.
They followed the crowd through the middle of the house and outside onto the courtyard, where the majority of the ball was taking place. Lights were strung up everywhere, a small orchestra was playing music that filled the courtyard, and dancing couples filled the center of the large patio.
He spotted General Copeland across the courtyard, talking to a few of his guests and not too shyly nursing a glass of wine. Marcus and Ayanna glided over to him. He saw them coming and became very uncomfortable at the sight of Marcus, his stance fidgeting and his eyes bouncing from side to side—heaven forbid a pirate should be at his daughter’s debut—but the vision of loveliness that was Ayanna quickly distracted him.
“Quite a lovely event you’ve put together, General,” Marcus said.
“Thank you, you are too kind,” the general
said curtly, his focus on Ayanna.
“May I introduce you to my date, Miss Ayanna.” Marcus gestured at her with a displaying wave of his hand. She curtsied as though she had been raised with a silver spoon in her mouth, and the general melted.
“Pleasure to meet you,” the general gushed. “Tell me, Ayanna, have you had the pleasure of a dance yet this evening?” He held his hand out toward the dance floor.
Ayanna graciously accepted and let him lead her into the dancing crowd. They returned at the end of a song, laughing. Ayanna was talking him up perfectly, and the wine he had been drinking all night wasn’t hurting to loosen him up.
“Isn’t she a fine gem,” Marcus said.
“Oh, General, speaking of gems,” Ayanna said, following Marcus’s lead, “Marcus told me of a rather spectacular jewel that he gave you not too long ago, a stone with every color of the rainbow. I have never seen such a thing. Would you do me the honor of showing it to me?”
“In fact, my dear, everyone will see it tonight,” the general replied. “I had it put into a necklace that I’m going to give to my daughter in honor of her debut. I’m sure she will want to flaunt it to the world. If you’ll excuse me, I should fetch it and make the announcement.” They exchanged polite nods and the general left.
Marcus and Ayanna frowned at each other.
“Well, it’s not ideal, but at least we know where it is, or where it’s going to be,” Marcus said.
“If this is the girl’s coming out party, she’s likely not been around many men,” Ayanna said. “It should be nothing for you to do the sweet talking and get that necklace off of her.”
“That’s a good point,” Marcus said. “But I’ll still need you to distract the general. He won’t take kindly to seeing a pirate with his daughter.”
Ayanna nodded.
Moments later, the music silenced and the general brought his daughter to the front of the courtyard. She was a sweetly pretty blond with shy blue eyes.
