Lucinda, Dangerously

by Sunny

  Myrddhin screamed and shrieked and then wailed, horrible sounds as he burned and sizzled where I touched him, clung to him.

  Dredging up every last power I had, I set us both aflame.

  TWENTY-THREE

  IT WAS A surprise to open my eyes and find myself still alive, so to speak.

  I heard the murmur of voices, not just one or two, but many. Several of those voices I recognized; they were familiar to me. But it was the gentle hands that held me, the hot splash of tears on my face, the raw, broken voice that murmured to me, “Please, Lucinda, please come back,” that pulled me out of the floating darkness I had been drifting in.

  I emerged from darkness and opened my eyes to even more darkness. But a dear, familiar kind: Talon’s sweet face. I was wearing his T-shirt, my head and chest cradled in his lap, the rest of me sprawled out naked along the ground. He was crying.

  Two tears plopped onto my face. Startling wetness that had me swatting at my cheek, where they were starting to slide down in slow, irritating crawls.

  “Tickles,” I mumbled. The word emerged in a weak, faint sound that surprised me. The effort it took to move my hand was both startling and alarming. I was incredibly weak. It brought out a flare of panic in me that increased with a loud drumming noise that sounded foreign and yet familiar at the same time. Even looking around and recognizing the faces around me—my brother, Halcyon; my father, Blaec; their men and mine, Ruric—and realizing that Talon and I were safe didn’t totally dispel the panic. The misty fog that surrounded us made me very uneasy for some reason. And the impressions of safe and not safe bombarded me with conflicting messages.

  “Why are you all staring at me,” I rasped. “Like I’ve come back from the dead or something.”

  Sitting up, I found, was quite an effort.

  “I think it’s the or something,” murmured a voice that jolted an odd flutter through my chest that coincided with that loud drumming sound again, a double assault. I twisted my head around to confirm that, yes indeed, it was Hari who had spoken. And standing next to him was—I blinked my eyes twice—a female Floradëur. A young girl—a young demon girl—stood next to her.

  The unlikelihood of seeing what I was seeing was enough to make me wonder if I was having an odd dream. But the pain squeezing my head and the nausea twisting my poor empty stomach dispelled that theory. I had never felt this lousy in my dreams. This had to be real.

  “Hari,” I croaked, feeling worry and relief at the sight of him but not knowing why. I leaned heavily back against Talon’s chest, the only reason why I was upright. Talon’s silent tears continued to drip down his face, wetting the back of me.

  “Don’t cry, Talon,” I muttered.

  Talon wrapped his slender arms around me, and buried his face in my hair, giving himself over to silent, soundless sobs. I didn’t know what else to do other than pat his arms awkwardly and make what I hoped were soothing sounds at him.

  “Hey, hey, it’s okay. I’m all right,” I murmured, all the while feeling quite dazed and confused. For the life—or rather afterlife—of me, I couldn’t remember what had happened.

  “You were gone,” Talon said, his voice thick.

  “What do you mean? What happened?” I asked because I really, really wanted to know, and memory was proving to be a real slippery bastard.

  “You destroyed him,” Talon said in an almost-whisper.

  “Who?”

  “Myrddhin.”

  That one name brought it all back, and had me stiffening, freezing against Talon. I unwrapped his arms and carefully turned around so I could see him. “Where?” I demanded.

  “There,” he pointed. The demons who were in the path of that pointed finger cleared back, allowing me to see a small pile of ashes a couple of body lengths away.

  “Myrddhin?” Hari repeated, sounding as shaken as my father looked. “The mad demon sorcerer I told you about?”

  They were the only ones who seemed to recognize his name—my father, Hari, and Ruric. The old guard, all that remained of them. The rest, including my brother and I, hadn’t been around a thousand years ago.

  That loud drumbeat came again.

  “What is that sound? Make it stop!” I cried, clutching my temples. “Holy Hell, my head hurts.”

  “We can’t make it stop,” my father said. “It’s your heart.”

  “What?”

  “What you’re hearing is your heart,” Blaec explained again patiently. “Your heart is beating.”

  I just stared at him, understanding the words, but not truly comprehending them. Then I laughed. “Wow. I must have taken some blow to the head. I thought you just said my heart was beating.”

  My father’s face remained sober and serious. “I did.”

  It came again. Two tripping beats that I not only heard this time, I also felt them in my chest like the tiny kicks of an agitated sparrow.

  My hands flew up to press between my breasts. In that still, quivering silence, I waited for it to happen again. It took an unusually long time for it to do so.

  Baboom.

  Holy shit! My heart was beating!

  I must have paled or something because Ruric rumbled with alarm, “Don’t faint on us, Princess.”

  His words snapped me out of that momentary whirl of light-headedness. “I don’t faint,” I said, scowling.

  “Talon said you were gone.” Halcyon crouched down in front of me, his dark chocolate brown eyes, so like my own, fixed with piercing intensity on me.

  “What’s happening to me?” I asked, bewildered, confused, more than a little frightened.

  “According to Talon,” my brother said, “you deliberately set yourself and this other demon, Myrddhin, on fire. Hot enough to burn the both of you down to ashes.”

  “Must have been one hell of a fire,” I quipped, but it was done mostly on autopilot. I remembered it clearly now—the indescribably painful flames consuming my flesh. “But obviously only Myrddhin burned. I’m still here.”

  Blaec knelt beside Halcyon. “You were gone,” my father said, grasping my hand.

  “There was nothing left, Lucinda. Just ashes,” Talon said in a low voice behind me. “Our bond . . . it was gone. Nothing but a gaping hole. And then you came back—”

  “Well, that’s good to hear.”

  “—as a bird.”

  “A bird?” I twisted around to look at him.

  “This red and gold bird,” Talon said.

  “A phoenix,” Blaec said softly, “rising from the ashes. The other half of your bloodline. We arrived in time to see that part of it.”

  “A phoenix?” I squeaked.

  “You were reborn,” my father said, “into life.”

  “That’s . . . crazy.”

  Right on time, my heart sounded again. Baboom.

  “Obviously not,” returned my brother.

  It was too much: the odd flutter in my chest, the sound of blood rushing through my vessels, pumped out fast by the squeezing contractions of my heart.

  White light flashed my vision and I spun away into fractured darkness.

  I CAME TO again lying on the ground, in Talon’s lap, surrounded by the concerned faces of my father, brother, Ruric, and Hari, his two strange female companions, and an outer ring of demon guards.

  “Why am I still having the same dream?” I muttered, frowning.

  My brother laughed, a nervous, relieved sound.

  “Okay, now I know it’s definitely a dream,” I said.

  “Why? Just because I laughed?” Halcyon asked, helping me up enough to recline against Talon’s chest. It was much easier to do this time around.

  “You haven’t laughed in decades.” My brows creased. “No, centuries, I think!”

  “Well, it’s not every day my little sister comes back from the dead,” Halcyon said with dry humor.

  Right on cue, my heart kicked up again. Baboom.

  “Oh!” My hands flew to my chest as if to try to hide that unsettling sound. “It wasn’t a drea
m.”

  “Don’t faint on us again,” Halcyon said sternly.

  My hands dropped as I scowled at him. “Demons don’t faint.”

  “Lucinda, maybe you’re not just a demon anymore,” Halcyon said gently, no sign of levity at all in his face.

  I stared down at myself. “I still look like a demon, and smell like one.”

  “Demons have no scent,” Ruric said, frowning.

  “Exactly! Neither do I.”

  “But your heart beats,” Talon said in his soft voice.

  Wait for it . . . wait for it . . .

  Baboom.

  “It guess it does,” I reluctantly admitted, “but real slow.

  No more than four or five beats a minute. Much less than a human or even a Monère.” Human hearts ran at sixty beats or higher; Monères at half that rate. “I’m not sure if five beats per minute would even be considered technically alive. In human standards, at least.”

  “But you’re not human,” said the High Lord, “or just demon anymore.” Taking my hand, he pressed it tenderly against the side of his face. “Whatever you are, I’m glad you’re still with us.”

  “Father . . .” It still was an odd pleasure to call him that. To know that the title was true. “You don’t really believe what you said . . . about me being reborn. That’s simply a fairy tale.”

  “An old legend,” Blaec corrected, “not a fairy tale. Just because a gift or ability has become lost to us does not mean it did not once exist.”

  “But . . . my phoenix blood . . . I’m only a half-blood.”

  “You are only half-dragon blood, and yet you can take dragon form” was his response—logically illogical reasoning that I could not argue with.

  I glanced around and counted all the oddities present here. Two Floradëurs—count them, two!—and one very rare demon young. And yet all eyes were fixed on me.

  Even among freaks, I was the greatest freak show here. Nice to know.

  My heart thumped again.

  I pushed onto my feet, feeling too vulnerable sitting on the ground with all those demon eyes fixed on me. There was uneasiness and confusion in many of those eyes. My heartbeat proclaimed me prey and yet my appearance declared me demon, hunter.

  Standing, I was able to see Talon’s face. He was still crying, his face so sad. “Talon, what’s wrong?”

  “You’re here, you’re still with us,” he said, a quaver in the sweet melody of his voice. “But I don’t feel you anymore. I don’t hear you.”

  He was mourning, I realized. I had shut myself completely off from him when I let that tumultuous heat rise up in me and overtake me, desperately hoping and praying that in destroying my enemy, in destroying myself, I was not killing the two others bound to me.

  I lifted that block now in my mind. Reached down the familiar pathway and touched Talon’s mind. I’m here. I’m still here.

  Talon’s knees buckled as joy flooded his mind. Lucinda! he cried as I caught him against me. “I thought our bond was broken,” he said in a broken voice.

  “No, just closed off, shut down tight. Not broken. If it was in my power to do so, it would have happened. I certainly tried hard enough.”

  I never want our bond broken, even at the risk of death, he said.

  Wiping the tears from his face, his greatest fear relieved, Talon turned and looked curiously at the other Floradëur. “Who are you?” he asked, voicing the question I had been wondering for some time now.

  The dark female had been observing us with a strange, keen intensity, very reserved and contained until Talon asked her that question.

  Now her face twisted as strong emotion gripped her. “I am Sarai. Your mother.”

  Strange expressions flitted across Talon’s face and then hers as he walked to her. It took me a moment to realize they were speaking to each other, mind-to-mind, but on a different channel, one I could not hear. The two of them drifted slightly apart from the others, lost in their silent conversation.

  Hari took the opportunity to make his own report and recount what had happened to him. How the young demon girl, Brielle was her name, had rescued him, and how Sarai—Talon’s mother!—had healed him by bonding with him. “She was too weak and I was too injured to save me any other way.”

  “You bonded,” I said with something like wonder. “The three of you?”

  “No, just Sarai and I.”

  “And Brielle?”

  “Brielle is under my protection,” Hari said in answer to my question. His declaration drew a startled look from the young demon girl. From everybody, actually.

  “Many miracles have happened today,” Blaec murmured. And I didn’t know if he was commenting on the demon-Floradëur bonding, only the second one to occur in his long existence, or the astonishing responsibility Hari had just taken on. Then there was, of course, me. The new me that felt so shaky and vulnerable with all those male eyes on me and so few clothes on my body; it was not a safe pairing. I felt like prey, in more ways that one, not just my beating heart, but me as a woman surrounded by too many males. I absolutely hated that new fear and did my best to suppress it, but it remained a shivery, ghostly feeling along my spine.

  “There is still a lot that needs to be done to clean up this mess,” I announced briskly. “For one thing, we have to destroy the tree.”

  “What tree?” asked Blaec.

  “The Tree of Death. It was what nourished Myrddhin this whole time while he was in that hibernating sleep-state until we accidentally woke him up.”

  I explained as we walked, and every one gazed uneasily at the pervasive misty fog, spooked now that they knew the white mist surrounding us was really demon spirits chained to this land somehow, maybe through the tree.

  I knew some of the demon guards didn’t believe me, until we arrived. The sight of the tree itself and the ghastly heads it fed upon shocked them all. More than a few ended up retching into the bushes.

  “Sweet Goddess, that’s evil,” Hari said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “We have to destroy it.”

  “Will that free all the ghosts?”

  “I don’t know, we’ll have to see. I hope and pray that it does.”

  The tree was eerily still as we surrounded it. An odd thing to say about a tree; you expect them to be still, after all, but I’d seen this thing in action. I just didn’t know how much of what it had done before it was still capable of doing, now that Myrddhin was gone.

  “Careful,” I warned. “It’s not like other trees.”

  “That we can see,” a warrior muttered. He was of darker countenance than the other guards standing near Halcyon—a captain by his insignia ranking.

  “What do you wish us to do?” Halcyon asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess hack it down, pull it up by the roots, and burn it all. But treat it as you would any other armed opponent.”

  “A tree?” the captain asked.

  “It was capable of moving before, almost like a sentient creature.”

  Even after all the unusual things he had seen today, I had the distinct feeling the good captain didn’t quite believe me. But at a nod from Halcyon, he turned and gave orders to his men. “Red and yellow team, stand guard. Blue team, you heard the Princess. Take the tree down but proceed with caution.”

  There was palpable tension as the eight warriors in the blue team approached. One of them leaped up and chopped down a thick branch with his sword. It dropped with a heavy thunk to the ground. Bloodred sap spilled out but nothing else stirred. A second warrior hacked off another heavy limb, this one housing two heads. The second branch dropped down, and the two heads bumped and rolled across the ground like ghastly coconuts. Disgusting, but nothing alarming.

  Everybody relaxed; all but me. And in that unguarded moment, the tree moved, lightning fast, impaling six of the guards. Sharp branches stabbed through their bodies, skewering them, lifting them up into the air. The remaining two warriors were lashed around their necks by supple limbs, while more branches twined like rope
around their arms and feet. In one concerted pulling move, arms and legs were torn from torsos, and the two demons’ heads were yanked off their bodies. Agile tree tips stabbed into the open necks of the dismembered heads like dark, sucking fingers that quickly swelled with repulsive thickness as they began draining the still-moving heads. The faces of the beheaded demons twisted with horrible spasms, their jaws opening in silent screams while the other six impaled guards hacked at the attacking branches with swords and claws, desperately trying to free themselves and escape the gruesome fate of their comrades.

  “Mierde!” the captain whispered beside me.

  Ruric and Hari launched themselves at the whirling, writhing tree like two missiles, one heavy and thick, the other slender and thin, approaching from opposite sides with drawn swords, Hari snatching a weapon from another guard. I had never seen them work in tandem before. It was an odd pairing but one smoothly honed by many centuries of fighting together. The tree stabbed viciously at them and had those limbs hacked off for its trouble as the two of them battled their way closer to the trunk, slashing at the whirling branches that speared down at them, attacking from above.

  It was what was belowground that tripped them up, literally. Roots exploded up from the ground like long brown fingers and wrapped around their ankles. Ruric, with his heavier bulk and weight, was able to stay on his feet, slicing at the entrapping roots with the claw of his free hand. Hari, though, was lighter and less fortunate. The tugging roots pulled him to the ground and tree limbs swung down and wrapped around his neck and arms like ropes, lifting him up. The yellow team rushed in at the captain’s shouted command, and I started to move. But I would have been too late, for all of my preternatural demon speed. It was another who saved him.

  A black form morphed up out of the ground below Hari, and with a whirl of clawed talons, the Floradëur cut through the thick branches wrapped around Hari’s arms and neck. He tumbled to the ground with the Floradëur, and rolled both of them away, dodging the branches spearing furiously down at them until they rolled beyond the tree’s range. At first I thought it was Talon who had cut Hari free, but he was still standing next to me. Then I realized it had been Sarai—Hari’s bondmate.