Raven Grey, also known as Winter Raven and, conversely, Raven Winter, possessed a face he would never be able to erase from the insides of his eyelids and a spirit that had left an imprint he would never be able to wipe clean from his own. He’d loved her from the moment he’d gazed upon her in another man’s scrying bowl. He would love her until the terran realm crumbled and there were no souls remaining in Abaddon. And a day beyond that.
Yet, as the clock had struck midnight on the eve of his sovereignty over Hell, he had done something he knew he would regret with his entire being. He’d shoved Raven through a portal to some unknown place, casting her out of his reach even as all he’d wanted to do was pull her into his dark embrace to keep her there until the end of time.
It lasted seconds, this impossible task, and the moment the final chime had sounded, he’d begun searching for her once more. Letting her go was an exercise that ended in the blink of an eye, and yet it would forever remain unarguably the hardest thing he had ever done.
The second and third most difficult were both casting a certain spell. The same spell, each time.
This spell.
Decades ago, Drake had infiltrated his father’s quarters in the palace of Nisse and faced this same mirror. Only the most powerful looking glass would do, and of course Asmodeus owned it.
On that fateful day, he’d gazed into his reflection much as he did now, and before he could change his mind, he’d hastily spoken the powerful, impactful words that would forever change the shape and course of his destiny.
The spell found the break in a man’s soul, the fissure in a person’s spirit, and proceeded to split it wide open. In every being, there was a place where right met wrong and decisions were made. That place was not a single point, but a long and jagged chasm that separated good from evil. The chasm was one of the reasons people didn’t like to make moral choices, not naturally. It made them uncomfortable. It meant crossing a gaping hole and not falling in.
On the day he’d cast the spell, Drake gazed into his father’s mirror and grasped both sides of that chasm before he pulled it apart with all his will. His spirit had split in two. One half, the part of him that represented a darkness unequaled, remained in Abaddon to rule over one of its circles as the Assassin Lord: Darken.
The other half had been sling-shotted out of the Nine Circles and beyond the realms to find itself literally reborn in a world apart from this one.
Now, Drake gazed at his reflection in the vast, otherwise empty chamber that represented one tiny parcel of his immense Abaddonian reach. He was king now. The looking glass was his. Everything was his.
Everything but the one thing he actually wanted.
“She will be ours,” his reflection said. It spoke quickly now, as if hurrying to convince Drake before its time was out. “Soon. She’s in the terran realm. She has the Hunter’s Map. We’ll have her in our bed before the next moonrise.”
But Drake said nothing.
His reflection flinched. For Darken felt it coming then.
“Don’t do it, Drake.” The statement was made as a warning, but Drake heard the fear in his other half’s words. He knew it was also a plea.
“Oh, I think we’ll give it a try,” replied Drake through clenched white teeth. “One more time.”
Then he let loose with the final word of the spell he had been building up over the course of a year.
Chapter Eleven
There was an unevenness to the way the coverings warmed her. It wasn’t that she had a problem with the cold of the night; it was heat she abhorred. But at the moment, part of her body was warm, and part was cold, and it was that disparity that had her fussing beneath the sleeping blanket Grolsch had spared.
She’d told Loki to take the blanket, but he was the “big brother,” having been born a full minute before her, and he’d insisted she take it instead. Rather than argue, she’d just turned over on the ground and pulled the sheet to her chin.
Still, both men were out long before her, leaving her alone with the stretching darkness. Much to her chagrin, between the two hulking forms who lay beside her, the larger slept silently, while Loki’s snoring filled the camp with an irritating rumble. Under different circumstances, it would have made her smile. Or kick him. Or both.
But she was antsy. Sleep danced cruelly in the distance, faint and obscure and very much out of reach. After what felt like a good hour of struggle with her lack of drowsiness, Raven sat up with surrender. She took the blanket, got to her feet, and carefully laid it over Loki’s snoring form instead.
His snorted a bit, but sleep had him firmly in its grip. He rolled over to continue his see-saw noises, this time tucking his chin under the edge of the blanket.
Raven spared a glance at Grolsch. Once convinced she was truly alone in her wakefulness, she pulled on her armor and boots and tip-toed out of the camp.
The forest around her rested unnaturally, without the cricket and toad sounds that usually accompany a fall evening. Raven stood still just beyond the ruins, matching her surroundings in their stark quiet. Blackness stretched into the surrounding trees, deep and solid, a veil the night world could see out from but that no vision could pierce from the other side.
She watched this veil of black for a while. Then she hugged herself, and was preparing to return to the camp to retrieve and study the map, when a rustling in the bushes drew her up short. She froze, her eyes re-focusing on the underbrush around the camp.
The rustling came again. On instinct, she dropped to a crouch and readied her magic, sensing the familiar power settle into the palms of her hands, where it pulsed with potency. Her vision shifted, dividing itself into stark reds and grays, and she knew her eyes were changing into Abaddonian form to see more effectively in the dark.
She welcomed the shift, for the moment forgetting that it might expose her for who she was. She narrowed her gaze, peering hard into the bushes. The noise intensified, separating itself out into the sound of individual footfalls. They were coming fast and close together. Someone was approaching.
Suddenly, a small figure broke free from the underbrush and stumbled out into the clearing. The figure tripped hard, striking something Raven couldn’t see. The impact of his small body hitting the dirt was so hard, she could not only hear it, she almost felt it herself.
Life seemed to freeze, all sound and movement ceasing as the little boy, who was no older than six or seven, pushed himself to his knees. Some of the dust he’d kicked up in his tumble settled in the child’s jet-black hair.
His eyes were shut tight, and his white teeth were bared in a grimace of either pain or determination. Holes in his leather breeches revealed bleeding knees. Raven could see the sweat trickling from his hairline to threaten his eyes. She found herself holding her breath, as if anything she might do would scare him off.
The night stretched for a moment, waiting while the boy regained his feet and brushed himself off. He glanced over his shoulder, turning his face away from Raven’s sight. Something behind him was frightening him. She could see his muscles re-tense, coiling to spring once more into action.
Then he turned back toward the ruins, and his now-open eyes scanned his surroundings.
Those eyes.
Raven’s heart hitched painfully; she could actually feel it. It stopped in her chest, hiccupping into shock, then restarted a painful moment later to slam against her ribs with brute force.
Those eyes! They were like metal melted into swirls, like the glint of moonlight on a calm lake’s surface, like the lining of a storm just before it wrought holy terror upon everything and everyone in its unfortunate path.
They were Drake’s eyes. She would know them anywhere.
“Drake….” The name escaped her lips, a whisper of bewildered confusion. As soon as she’d spoken it, she feared the boy would hear her. She held her breath and crouched lower.
Fortunately for her, the boy seemed not to hear her at all. In fact, though his piercing silver gaze skirted directly ov
er her form as he scanned the clearing, he didn’t seem to see her either.
The boy’s head whipped back around to regard whatever was following him before he burst once more into action. He possessed the speed of a stag, with a grace unnatural for bruised and youthful legs. After a few long strides, he leapt over something Raven couldn’t see, and landed on a surface that was actually not there.
“What the –” she again whispered without meaning to.
He hovered in a crouched position at least eight feet off the ground, his silver-flash eyes keenly watching the forest. A moment later, a newcomer burst forth from that overgrown darkness, and Raven tried to shrink even lower. Her magic pulsed impatiently.
But the strangers didn’t see her either. Three of them came stumbling out of the underbrush, dragging half the forest along with them. They moved oafishly, so unlike the small boy they clearly pursued. An adult male lead two younger boys, perhaps in their early teens. All wore feverishly furious expressions, and the man carried a large, unsheathed dagger.
They stood at the edge of the woods and searched the ruins with impatience, their gazes passing over Raven just as the boy’s had. It was then Raven fully realized it wasn’t that the boy and his hunters couldn’t see her. It was that, as far as they were concerned, she was not even there. She did not exist. Not here, in this place.
“Drake!” the man bellowed, his features twisting into an expression of seeded loathing.
Raven’s heart threw a fit again. Drake…. Gods, it really is him. That boy with the silver eyes did not only look like Drake. He was Drake.
When he was a little boy.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t see her in this place, she realized, it was that they couldn’t see her in this time. She was seeing the past.
I must be dreaming. She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to her in the first place. She was probably still under that stupid uneven blanket, dreaming about Drake. It had been so long since she’d dreamed. Dreams didn’t come in the InBetween.
In her dream, she was either magically witnessing something that had actually happened to Drake in the past, or more likely, she was dreaming something that her mind decided to make up about Drake’s past. She felt trepidation toward both possibilities.
Raven took a shaky breath and decided to keep watching. What harm could befall you in a dream?
“You little scrap of soiled leather! I’ll find you! Do you hear me?” The man bellowed venomously into the clearing. He turned to his companions, who stared at him with a mixture of shared hatred and a touch of fear for their elder. They shrugged helplessly.
The man whacked the nearest boy on the head hard enough to send him sprawling to the ground, then turned his rage-filled gaze to the clearing once more. “If you don’t come out right now, then when I find you, Drake, not if, when I find you,” he hissed, somehow knowing that his fiercely whispered words would be heard by the young ears of his target. “I’ll only let you live long enough to see me eat your dog.” The man grinned then, revealing dirty teeth and a whole lot of bad intention. “Cut him up and throw him in a stew. Then, if you beg real nice, I’ll let you join him in the pot.”
Raven glanced up at the young boy who still crouched on the ghost of a wall ten yards from where she hid in the shadows. His posture had changed. It was a little straighter now, and his fingers clutched at the edge of the invisible wall as he leaned forward. His eyes flashed with uncertainty.
It must have been winter in the past, wherever this had occurred, for it began spitting snow then. The flakes were large and glowed bluish white with a dreamy, time-induced magic.
“But if you come to me right now, boy, I’ll spare the dog.”
Drake fidgeted. Raven saw his fingers clench and unclench on the stone ledge. He was thinking of turning himself in. For his dog, she thought, and it was odd to think of Drake of Tanith owning a dog, much less to think of him as a child who owned a dog.
Don’t do it, she thought helplessly. But there was a sense of doom about the scene now, a sense of something-bad-has-already-happened. And it was with sinking resignation that Raven watched the boy finally stand, giving up his position.
His movement of course won the instant attention of the older man. The man slapped one of the boys on the head, gaining his attention before he gestured with his scruffy chin at the raven-haired boy now standing in full sight.
“That’s a good boy,” he said, his voice slithering across the clearing. Then, to the other two, he said, “Go get ‘im.”
Chapter Twelve
The older boys scurried to the phantom edifice that Raven could now tell had been a crumbling wall. It was not a part of the more solid ruins around her. It was more akin to an echo or after-image, the kind one would experience when closing their eyes after a bright flash.
Drake watched them come, his small, skinny body managing some semblance of grand stature despite his youth and the cruel fate awaiting him. His silver eyes shifted like building storms, stark and unforgettable.
“Get down from there, you worthless….” One of the boys, the one who’d been slapped hard enough to send him sprawling moments earlier, was now taking his revenge out on Drake. He grabbed the smaller boy’s arm and yanked him down from the wall without a care for how he’d fall. Whatever words he muttered following that were lost in the scramble as Drake caught himself on unnaturally agile legs, and the boys shoved him to the ground anyway, out of frustrated spite.
Shortly thereafter, the older man was before him, and Drake was held so securely between the other two, Raven wondered if his arms were pulling from their sockets.
“Guess what, Drake?” the man drawled. He raised his right hand, the one brandishing the knife, and Raven’s gut went cold. “I left out a little detail.” He chuckled darkly, and his expression became hateful again. “I lied.”
Young Drake, for his part, looked anything but surprised. He simply gazed up at the larger man with quicksilver secrets in his eyes.
“When Celessia adopted you,” the man went on, “it was with the promise that she would do right by me every night so long as you lived.” He licked his lips, perhaps in memory. “I wouldn’t have taken you in otherwise. But the things that woman would do for me when I threatened you….” The man’s dark, beady eyes became hungry.
Raven felt a queasiness join the cold in her stomach.
“Even gave you her name, she did. ‘Cuz I sure as hell wasn’t gonna to give you mine, Tanith.” He spat his wife’s last name with obvious distaste, and an even more obvious loathing. “But now she’s gone. And as far as I’m concerned, you and that fucking rat you call a pet are too.”
He drew the dagger back – and Raven was up and running. She raced in slow motion, though; the entire scene had somehow lowered the mechanisms of time. She was two running steps away from the group when Drake ducked low and to one side.
The sudden movement knocked the boy holding his left arm off-balance. Drake kept moving, using that leverage against his opponent, swinging back in the opposite direction so the same boy was again caught off guard and this time toppled backward.
The man’s blade continued to come down, but missed Drake’s head and neck, slicing instead into the flesh of Drake’s arm and the leg of the boy who still held him. The second boy bellowed in shock and pain and let Drake go, freeing him completely.
Drake, did not flinch in pain, nor did he slow. With a forward lunge, he angled his small, pointed shoulder into the grown man’s gut. The impact visibly knocked the wind from the man’s lungs, forcing him to stumble back a few paces.
Raven halted in the midst of it all, standing beside the struggle like a helpless on-looker.
The unforeseen attack from Drake loosened the man’s grip upon the blade. Drake spun and grasped the large knife, using one hand to grab the hilt, and the other to squeeze the man’s wrist in just the right place, forcing him to let it go.
Within seconds, the tables had been turned, and Drake of Tanith was the one
brandishing the weapon. Raven stood wide-eyed and breathless, watching and waiting.
“Stupid lad,” the man hissed in slow warning. On the sidelines, the older boys lurked, unfurling, drawing closer, nursing wounds. Their eyes were filled with moon-reflected malice. “Stupid, stupid boy.” The man shook his head. “To hell with you. I’ll boil the rat alive now. And you won’t be around to hear him cry.”
He looked like he would bid the child good riddance then, his features held such disgust. But Drake regarded him in strong silence for a moment, and something in his own unworldly eyes flickered.
And just like that, fate stepped in to weave a new destiny.
Drake surged forward, the blade held before him with pointed and forceful intent. The man had no time to react; the attack was utterly unexpected. His surprise showed in his slack-jawed expression as the blade pierced the thin material of his work shirt and sank deep into the fatted flesh beneath.
Raven inhaled sharply, her mind numb-washing over what she was seeing. Those mechanisms of time that had slowed down before now came to an absolute halt. Bits of dust and phantom flakes of snow froze in the air.
The moment came – and went. The gears in the watch of time ground, skipped, and began running again with a new fury.
Raven stumbled back, unconsciously moving away from the action as Drake withdrew the dagger, then swung to his right, slicing across the throat of the boy who’d just let him go. Without stopping, and without paying heed to the spray of blood that coated his side and back, he turned to his left, lunged forward again, and pierced the second boy through the chest.
But that blade didn’t stop. Drake seemed caught up in something bigger than him, something perhaps he could not control.
Or maybe that was only what Raven wished, as with a drowning sensation, she watched the small boy of no older than seven years spin one final time. The blade flashed, coated pink in the ghost light, and sliced deep and true. It disappeared through his adoptive father’s neck and came out the other side.
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