Clawing Back from Chaos: Book 9 in the Cat Among Dragons Series (A Cat Among Dragons)

by Alma Boykin

  Meanwhile, Rahoul Khan crouched beside Rachel’s bed-nest, heartsick. His friend stared at the dim ceiling, unresponsive to voices or touch, and unable to hold off the darkness. When he took her hand and extended his own Gift, Rahoul could vaguely “see” the wall she’d built in her mind. Behind it, he dimly sensed Rachel’s guilt, remorse, and anguish, as the woman relived all the times that she’d killed, all the deaths she felt she had caused, and all that she’d suffered over the centuries. He wondered if even Joschka’s cue would break through the swirling memories to reach her core, to the heart of the generous, clever, wise-ass, courageous friend he so valued and trusted. Joschka believed that it could and Rahoul was determined to try. “Rakoji?” he asked quietly. She blinked. “Rakoji da Kavalle, can you hear me?” Khan ventured in Trader.

  The deathly-pale face turned towards him, the first sign of a response she’d given in days. “I can’t fight anymore,” she whispered. “I should have died. They’re too strong; I can’t hold them back much longer, sir. Give me mercy, Colonel. Please give me mercy!”

  “What do you mean, Rakoji?” Khan took her head in his hands. He had a sickening feeling that he knew exactly what she wanted of him, but asked anyway. “Do you want me to call Father Mikael?”

  Her head shook ever so slightly. “Kill me, sir,” she begged. “Please, kill me before the shadows take you too. I should have died years ago.”

  “Rakoji, I can’t do that.” He tried to conceal his horror that she would even make that request. “There’s still time, Rada! Fight through to me—as long as you live there’s hope!”

  “I’m sorry sir, but you’re wrong. I’m already in Hell, Colonel. It’s where I belong—I was damned at my birth. There’s nothing but darkness . . .” Her voice trailed off and she tried to turn away again.

  “Dammit, Rachel, no!” Khan released her long enough to go over beside the fireplace and open the hidden second door to her quarters. He came back, knelt, and worked his arms under the slender form, somehow managing to lift her out of her bed-nest. She’d never been that heavy, and without as much effort as he’d anticipated, Rahoul carried her down the pitch-black stairs, fumbled with the outside door, and took her into the warm spring afternoon. He caught sight of someone out of the corner of his eye, but they vanished, and he concentrated on getting Rachel as far as the stone bench at the end of the rose garden.

  “Look around, Rakoji, and see what’s real,” he ordered, holding her head up. The silvery-grey eye squinted at the brightness, blinked, and tried to focus. “None of this would be here if it weren’t for you. The shadows didn’t bring this beauty into the world—you did.”

  “So? A hundred roses don’t balance hundreds of lives.” She tried to lift trembling hands. “Can’t you see the blood, Colonel? I need to die, sir! Why won’t you let me atone?”

  Now or never, he thought. “Because someone already has atoned for you, and for all of us, Rakoji. Someone who loves you and everyone else more than we can imagine and who doesn’t want you to suffer like this.” Rahoul fished a compact item out of his pocket. “Joschka sent these as a reminder of that, and so you’d have them for Easter.” He wrapped a string of age-smoothed wooden beads around her icy hand.

  Rachel blinked and fingered the rosary, shaking her head. “I’ve killed too many, caused too many deaths and too much pain. There’s no forgiveness anymore.” She tried to push the beads off her fingers, but her friend stopped her.

  “Rakoji, ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’,” he quoted. “You have, I have, so has Panpit, so have we all. Every one of us. And God forgives all of us! And if He can, He who knows everything we’ve ever done, surely you can forgive yourself?”

  The woman’s head dipped until all Rahoul could see was her brown-black hair. “I’m expendable. I should have died. It would have been better,” she repeated hoarsely, but at least she no longer rejected the beads.

  “And if you had? Who would have showed us how to save the hostages on the Gerzall da Kavalle?” Rahoul asked. He heard footsteps and saw General McKendrick and some other people approaching. “Tell her why she should not have died that September,” Rahoul half-ordered, half-begged.

  “A dead Commander wouldn’t have reminded me that there are far more important things than tinsel and guests at Christmas,” the Scotsman said.

  “And she couldn’t teach us how to stop an ifreet on foreign soil,” ben David added.

  De Alba continued forward and rested a hand on Rachel’s shoulder, “Or shown us how to block and corrupt invaders’ communications.”

  “And she couldn’t have brought Joschka back and protected the lives of those around him,” Rahoul whispered in Trader.

  As her friends watched, Rachel shook her head and attempted to speak. Rahoul felt the battle in her head and heart as she struggled, torn with paralyzing guilt but wanting to believe what the he and the others were saying. If only she’d lower her shields, she’d realize what was real! He projected as much encouragement as he could. Please God he prayed, please help us reach her.

  A long shadow appeared and Sgt. Lee knelt down at Rachel’s side. “And a dead Commander Na Gael wouldn’t have offered her life to save my squad’s and my own.” He took her other hand. “Thank you.”

  “Lower your shields, Rachel, and feel,” Rahoul suggested.

  The woman shook her head weakly. “I can’t. The ghosts will take you.”

  “No, they won’t,” McKendrick rumbled. “Because we won’t let them.”

  Rahoul whispered in Trader, “Rakoji, open the walls. Please? If not for us, for Joschka?” It was his final card.

  The tide turned. Rachel hesitantly thinned the walls around her heart and mind, and as he propped her up, Rahoul saw the despair weakening, the self-loathing and hatred starting to crack apart as Rachel felt her fellow soldiers’ fear and concern for her, and their respect, friendship, support, and love. “It was like a plant responding to sunlight,” Rahoul would later tell Joschka in a very private conference.

  Too weak to hold her head up any longer, Rachel let it sink to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she rasped quietly through a parched throat. “Forgive me?”

  McKendrick shook his head. “There’s nothing to forgive, Commander. You are sick. Now you need to let us help you get better.” The others voiced their agreement, and Rachel swallowed hard. “Sergeant Lee, go ask the cooks to send something to the lab,” the general ordered. “Something with meat in it that she can swallow easily.” That drew a faint smile from his advisor and uncomfortable looks from Lee and Khan.

  Lee shuddered as he stood up. “That would be a meatshake, sir.” And he hurried off, smiling broadly.

  “I wish he hadn’t mentioned those,” Khan sighed, as he and Maria helped Rachel sit upright and stabilized her.

  “But I like meatshakes,” a little voice said.

  “Which proves once again that your wiring is quite different from ours,” Khan said with a smile, teasing her.

  “But your heart and soul are the same, and that’s what matters,” McKendrick said firmly. After Khan and de Alba had Rachel securely propped up, her commanding officer demanded, “Commander Na Gael, what happened?”

  Rachel closed her eye but started talking. “I always get a little depressed in the spring as my access to Logres’s power fades away. I suppose I overreacted to some things I heard,” she said.

  “Overreaction doesn’t send people past barking, Rachel,” the general informed her. “What happened? And we know what Major O’Neil said.”

  Lee returned, carrying two bottles of water. Rachel accepted one and, with some help, drank half of it before speaking again. “I don’t know how many people I’ve killed at this point in my lifestream, General. Several hundred at the very least. And I’m responsible for other deaths, too, because of things I’ve done and not done.” She started trembling, and Khan and de Alba supported more of her weight. “They all came back, sir. And I realized that even though I pray and hope tha
t God has forgiven me, I’m still damned.”

  “You cannot know that, Commander,” McKendrick growled. “Only He knows that—we cannot. You may also be among the Elect. But we cannot know,” he stated firmly. “Either way.”

  Rachel hung her head. “Then the ghosts came back. I could have saved General Johnny, but I didn’t go see him and so he died. I should have died, like Major O’Neil said. It would have been better for everyone . . .” her words trailed off amid a chorus of angry denials.

  “Bullshit, Commander,” Lee snarled, surprising everyone. “You couldn’t have known. And maybe it was simply his time, even if you had gone to see him. Maybe he would have been run over by a lorry as he left the hospital!” Rachel gaped at the lean NCO.

  “And it is not better if you die,” Moshe spoke up as Maria nodded. “You don’t have any family or friends listed in your contact form, Commander. But what about us?” The young officer waved at the soldiers surrounding the Wanderer. “We are your family, all of us! We’d miss you and we worry about you. You take care of us—we look after you. That’s how it works, no matter what some bloody idiot spouts off with!” McKendrick cleared his throat and the black-haired man flinched a bit. “Sorry sir.”

  «This is what Joschka and I tried to tell you at Klarbach and on that night in September,» Rahoul sent. «Now will you believe us?»

  “Yes,” she whispered. He felt her rallying, and raising her shields just enough to keep from being overwhelmed, and he did the same.

  “Rachel, if you ever, ever start having difficulties again, you will talk to someone and get help,” McKendrick ordered. “Is that clear?” He accepted her nod of assent. “Now, you need to get back indoors before Dr. Albioni has a heart attack at finding you missing. Give me a hand, Khan.” The Scotsman picked up his advisor, easily carrying her back through the garden to the lab. Moshe held the door open, and Maria helped the very weak Commander get up the stairs and into a chair. Rahoul made the extreme sacrifice of bringing a meatshake up to his friend’s quarters, holding the concoction at arm’s length. His commanding officer had taken one look at the mess in the glass and fled, faintly green.

  Rachel sniffed it and perked up a whisker-bit. “Liver! I really like the liver ones.” She took a large slurp as Rahoul and Maria looked away.

  “Well, sir, the more liver she eats, the less we have to,” the communications officer pointed out.

  “That’s true,” he agreed, turning back in time to see Rachel neatly licking as much as she could reach off the inside of the now-empty glass. She smiled, then yawned, already starting to drop off to sleep. Maria took the glass away before it could fall, and the two of them carried the Wanderer back to her bed-nest.

  As soon as he could, Rahoul phoned Joschka von Hohen-Drachenburg. “Yes, sir. Your cue let us break through to her.” A question and Khan said, “Very close. Dr. Albioni says that if she’d gone another twelve hours, her kidneys would have failed, and her heart not long after.” He nodded. “It will be several weeks before she’s back to normal physically, and probably longer before her mental state recovers, but then this has been coming for how long?” A murmur at the other end of the line. “At least that long, my lord General.”

  Joschka asked a question as Rahoul shook his head over the sorrow of it all. “Yes, sir. She had it on her hand when she fell asleep. It helped a lot, sir. Thank you.” Another pause. “Ah, I think it would be better for you to tell her directly, sir. She’ll be answering her phone again as soon as General McKendrick gives it back to her. He has it so she can sleep.” As they spoke, the South Asian officer decided that it was a good thing for Edward O’Neil’s physical safety that the Graf-General was unable to leave Austria just then. If he ever learned who had driven his oldest friend into perdition . . .

  After Khan rang off, Joschka got up from his desk, walked through the quiet darkness of night at Schloß Hohen-Drachenburg, and slipped into the chapel. The graying man bowed to the Presence, then lit a candle and knelt in front of an image of Our Lady of Sorrows. “Ave Maria gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus . . .” he began, as he’d promised to do if his friend survived, slowly counting off the decades on a borrowed rosary.

  Two men in khaki uniforms stood beside the laboratory’s windows watching a small woman as she waged merciless battle with the weeds that had invaded the rose garden.

  The older man, a stocky redhead, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The heavier material of his new bifocals dug, and he still was not used to it. “What do you think?”

  Rahoul considered the matter. “I think she’s recovering as fast as we could hope, sir.” That the woman was even capable of resuming her duties already astounded him, but then the South Asian officer knew just how ruthlessly self-disciplined his friend and advisor could be.

  McKendrick put his glasses back on. “I concur. It’s a damn shame she won’t talk to people, Rahoul.” They turned to go, and Rahoul opened the door for his superior. “So much of this could have been prevented if she’d just talked to someone.”

  The object of their concern and ire sat back with an oof and regarded the pile of wilting weeds with a sense of pleasure. The garden had lapsed during Rachel’s descent into madness, and now she had to undo the neglect. Part of her still flinched from the memories of what had happened, but the Wanderer forced herself to study them and learn. She and the people around her had been blessed to have no invasions or challenges during her incapacitation. Their good fortune couldn’t last much longer. She still was not sure that the humans truly needed her help anymore, except perhaps in an on-call capacity, but they obviously disagreed with her assessment.

  At least they’d stopped hovering! The first few days after Rahoul and the others had dragged her back from the abyss, she hadn’t been able to sneeze without someone trying to wipe her nose. Well, perhaps it hadn’t been that bad, she allowed, as she hooked one end of her walking stick under the basket’s handle and dragged the beast over to the compost bin, but almost that bad. Rachel understood why the humans wouldn’t leave her alone, but it had grated to have her sanctum disturbed. Things had improved greatly over the past fortnight, and she’d been left to herself all this afternoon. She grinned—that no one wanted to find themselves coerced into hand weeding flowerbeds had something to do with her blissful solitude.

  “Caw, caw!”

  Or almost solitude, she sighed, looking over to see Knox watching from a tree branch. General McKendrick’s alter ego knew better than to approach within her pouncing range and maintained a healthy respect for her aim with acorns. That was about the only thing he respected, and in some ways Rachel would rather have stayed with the mischievous raven than go inside for supper. But duty called.

  She cleaned up, and after a bit of hesitation put on something other than her usual half-mourning. At first she’d worn gray uniforms as a way of honoring and remembering her service with Ingwe Adamski and the Adamantine Division. Then, after Anna’s death, she’d adopted the Terran humans’ tradition of wearing gray as a sign of perpetual mourning. Several hundred years later, she wore gray out of habit more than anything. But not tonight, she decided. Before supper tonight there would be a ceremony and she wanted to show her associates her delight with things. Rachel fished around until she found a light blue-green Azdhagi outfit that she’d been issued for a diplomatic event held in the Imperial public gardens in the middle of Drakon IV’s miserably humid summer.

  Meanwhile, Rahoul adjusted his semi-dress uniform and wondered yet again why one couldn’t count wearing the thing as a church penance. But no. He gave himself one last check in the mirror, then went to the main briefing theater.

  The official change-of-command would take place in two weeks, Rachel mused, as she made her way into her usual place, lurking in the back of the audience. “Ah, no, Commander,” Major Maria de Alba y Rodriguez informed the advisor. “You are sitting with the rest of the staff. General McKendrick’s orders,” the Spaniard said, pointing
down the steps. “We need to fill in the row.”

  Rachel counted noses, and indeed came up one short. One she was delighted not to have to be polite to. Or more to the point, one she wouldn’t have to feel a number of other people forcing themselves to be polite to. A large percentage of the British branch membership had decided that “Oatmeal” O’Neil had deliberately pushed Rachel to the breaking point and beyond, and only military discipline and Rachel’s recovery had prevented bad things from happening to the man. She didn’t inquire what had become of the missing party, either. Instead she took a place at the end of the front row of seats.

  The briefing went as briefings usually did when there were no pending threats or missions. Rachel’s mind drifted a little, then snapped back to the current here and now when McKendrick called “Colonel Rahoul Peter Khan, step forward. Commander Na Gael, if you will join me, please.” The Wanderer worked to maintain an appropriately serious and dignified demeanor as she walked up the low steps and took her place at the Scottish general’s shoulder. McKendrick read the usual words and Moshe ben David handed him a box containing the third diamond that, when added to Rahoul’s current pair, would show his new rank of Brigadier General. The redhead turned and smiled at Rachel. “If you will help me do the honors?” She smothered the urge to say something that would make Rahoul and McKendrick both blush, opting instead for a modicum of self-restraint.