Ripples Through Time

by Ripples Through Time (lit)

  “I want a trade,” Dexter said abruptly, shivering as though touched by a ghost at the demon’s words.

  There was a long, incredulous pause. “A trade?” Paimon repeated. “For what?”

  “Raven. I don’t know what, but I’ll do anything. Just release her from the pact, and I’m at your command.” Dexter drew in a deep breath and took a brave step forward. “Whatever you want. Whatever you feel is an adequate replacement for her debt. I—”

  He didn’t get any further. Paimon started to laugh.

  He laughed hard, his chuckles sounding like thunder. His body shook and the walls seemed to shake with him. In an instant the world blackened, and Nicholas couldn’t see or feel anything but the endless fall of his stomach. The realization that the secret cure for which he longed was nonexistent. This wasn’t something they could defeat—this simply was.

  Paimon couldn’t be bought off. Not when he had the thing he wanted.

  “You fool,” the Hell King rasped. “Do you really think I deceived her just for the joy of claiming her life? For the thrill of holding the strength of the Few in my hand? Her strength is nothing compared to the legions I have at my command. I could crush her, you, this town…hell, the whole miserable state with a blink if I so wished. And honestly, Dexter, for all the knowledge you possess, all the otherworldly smarts you have lying at your feet, I confess myself…disappointed.”

  Dexter didn’t move. Neither did Nicholas.

  “You are, after all, a Guardian, are you not? You know as well as I do that the power of the Few, or daimons, if you prefer…” Paimon snickered at the word. “The daimon’s power is connected through the generations. That is why the Few are the Few. They are linked at birth, joined the second they leave their mother’s womb. They feel each other even if they don’t know it. Their linked power is what weakens them, drains them, and stands to reason why they can’t interact. The reason your High Council keeps them apart. Delightful, isn’t it? And since they are linked by power, the removal of one creates a neat little domino effect. If the connection is broken in one, all will fall as a consequence. Should a warrior willingly sacrifice that power before death, it removes not only her daimon, but the line as a whole. A warrior’s power cannot be confiscated before death, not without her consent. Sweet Raven consented. And in doing so, she damned the world.”

  It was as though life itself was sucked from the room. If Dexter’s heart had a beat to it, Nicholas couldn’t hear it. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the shrieking in his head.

  “The…” Dexter swallowed very hard, and suddenly the silence around them shattered with the thundering of his chest and the heady rush of his pulse. Nicholas at once swam in human sensation. “The High Council wouldn’t allow—”

  “What the High Council doesn’t know won’t hurt them,” Paimon replied. Then he frowned theatrically. “Or rather it will, but by the time they realize it, it’ll already be over. Shame, isn’t it? As long as little Raven lives, as long as she pumps her human blood and beats her human heart and lives her little human life, our agreement holds higher value than all the other Few walking the earth, and all the Few yet to come. The line will cease to exist, I’m sorry to say.” A smile stretched his lipless mouth.

  “Good God…”

  “I suppose if one of you really wanted to, you could kill the girl to stop me,” Paimon postulated. “But somehow, I don’t think either of you have the gumption to make anything permanent. Not her precious brother…” He nodded to Dexter. “Which was why I chose you. You were perfect for her. The antithesis to Kenneth Mal, who would be cutting off her head right about now. And Nicolai…” He turned to Nicholas. “I suppose you might have it in you. Not that I advocate it by any means, but the betrayal on her face would almost be worth losing the world.” The Hell King fell silent for a few long, pensive seconds. “So there you have it, gentlemen. No, I am not interested in selling my acquisition. Dear Raven’s strength is not for sale.” He paused even as his body began to melt into the shadows playing against the wall. “You know, I believe the world will be the embodiment of the old cliché the devil’s playground by this time next week.” He winked. “Should be fun. Hope to see you there.”

  Then he was gone. Nicholas felt it. Felt the release of his bones and the liberation of his voice, well and good now without the hint of a leash. He felt it just as Paimon dematerialized, just as the cold abated and light entered the room again.

  He wanted to lunge for the corner. He really did. He wanted to scream and roar and beat his chest and hide Raven so far away no demon would ever know where to find them. He wanted. He felt. He yearned.

  But the second his will was his own again, all he could do was crash to his knees.

  And weep.

  Chapter 25

  “Don’t bogart the whisky.”

  Dexter arched a brow. “It’s my whisky. I believe I’ll bogart as much as much as I please.”

  “I want to get so sloshed I can’t feel anymore.” Nicholas pressed his palm hard against his brow, a long shudder tearing down his back. “Till all of this becomes nothing more than a fuzzy memory.” He sighed and tried, to little avail, to hide how hard he trembled. “Think they make anything that strong?”

  Dexter smiled indulgently, poured a moderate amount of auburn-colored liquid into a tumbler and slid the serving down the length of his kitchen counter. “If they have, I haven’t found it yet,” he replied, taking a liberal swig directly from the bottle. A quiet minute passed between them. “Are you going to tell her?”

  There was no question to what Dexter referred, but neither wanted to say it.

  Nicholas tossed back his shot. Dexter refilled it. They drank.

  “It seems too impossible that I was relieved when she told me,” the Guardian mused. “I was afraid it would be her soul.”

  “Her soul?”

  “The price. I thought her soul was the price. Apparently, though, souls of the Few hold little to no value in hell dimensions.” Dexter sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I was so relieved when she told me the price was her strength. I thought…”

  “You thought the demon would smile and blink and be okay with something simple?” Nicholas drew in a breath. “This isn’t reincarnation, Dex. This isn’t just sticking my essence in a new body. Putting her soul in a new… It isn’t that. He took us right from where we were and shot us into the future.”

  “I understand. And I knew there would be repercussions beyond the obvious. Of course there would be. But…” Dexter sighed again and shook his head. “I don’t know what I thought. God, I don’t know, but I should have. The instant she told me, I should’ve known.”

  He had nothing to say to that, nothing which would provide comfort, anyway, thus Nicholas remained silent. Truly, he didn’t understand how the Guardian had missed it, either. He didn’t know how anyone so close to Raven could be so oblivious as to her origins to keep from connecting the dots and realizing the obvious conclusion.

  Raven’s death…and the domino effect it would have on the world.

  Nicholas scoffed. Bugger the world. He didn’t care. If Raven died, he died. It was as simple as that.

  If Paimon wouldn’t release Raven from her debt or accept a different payment in her stead, their options stood at a dismal two. Either the world turned into hell and Raven died, or Raven died so the world could live.

  Either way, Raven died. Either way, he lost her forever.

  She’d gambled herself for him.

  “Will the High Council try to kill her?” Nicholas asked solemnly.

  Dexter blinked and glanced up. “What?”

  “The High Council. They won’t see her as a person, will they? They’ll try to kill her so they can save the world.” His demon roared at the thought. “I tell you now, they try to touch her, and—”

  “The High Council doesn’t know, nor will they.” Dexter swallowed hard. “Whatever is decided will be decided by us. Your history and Raven’s was erased from histor
y books, Nicholas. The history didn’t reappear until her memories were restored. And even so, the passages allude to nothing of an unnatural trade.” Dexter snorted. “Paimon wanted the High Council left completely unaware of what had taken place.”

  The vampire swallowed hard. “Our history…it’s there now?”

  “It lists you as Raven’s killer.” Dexter held up a hand before Nicholas could object. “Kenneth Mal had nothing to do with that, though from what Raven has told me, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had. As it was, he was—”

  “—dead,” Nicholas agreed softly, his breath catching. “She…”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “She told you?”

  A sad, gentle smile stretched Dexter’s mouth, his eyes distancing with a sort of brotherly love that increased the vampire’s admiration for the Guardian by leaps and bounds. This was the sort of man she should have had all along, the kind of man who viewed Raven as a human first—a human with human thoughts, human feelings, and above all, human value. To him, she wasn’t a disposable weapon with arms and legs. She was his sister.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t have been a cakewalk in the eighteenth century, but Nicholas had the hunch that, had Dexter been alive, things would have turned out differently.

  “She’s told me many things,” Dexter said gently. “When she couldn’t talk to you, she talked to me.”

  A dark shiver ran over him. “I wasted so much time,” Nicholas murmured, closing his eyes as a powerful wave of self-hatred washing over his tired body. “I should’ve known her immediately.”

  “Paimon decreed it otherwise. You broke through. That much is a victory.”

  “I just found her again. This can’t…” He swallowed hard. “This can’t be it. I can’t lose her. I can’t.”

  “I was determined to find a loophole,” Dexter murmured, taking another swig of the whisky. “I was so certain there was one. Otherwise…God, why go to the trouble?”

  Nicholas glanced up. “What?”

  “There’s something we’re missing. There has to be.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Paimon had nothing to personally gain from keeping you and Raven apart,” Dexter explained. “And yet, he went to such lengths. He put you in the arms of another woman.” Nicholas winced. Dexter ignored him, too engrossed in his revelation. “He ensured Raven had a good, secure upbringing…the best to his ability without bending the sacred decree of freewill. And he ensured I was her Guardian.”

  Nicholas nodded slowly, his brain hurting to piece together fact with knowledge, which proved difficult as his thoughts were muddied with grief-stricken outrage. It probably didn’t help that he was planning on drinking Dexter under the table either. “Doesn’t make sense,” he agreed, though he had the hunch he just spoke to avoid the finality of silence.

  Not that it worked.

  Nicholas sighed heavily. Every fiber in his body commanded him to go upstairs and bury himself in Raven’s arms. She’d traveled centuries, defied logic and reason, and she’d done so with the same sweet innocence with which she’d regarded everything she approached. If only he could run back to her—blink himself three centuries in the past and stop her before she made the fool’s bargain. Beg her not to bring him back only to kill him all over again.

  “We are all fools in love,” Dexter said bitterly.

  Nicholas glanced up. “What?”

  “The bastard.”

  The vampire frowned in confusion but didn’t say anything.

  “That’s what I said,” Dexter continued, meeting Nicholas’s inquisitive eyes. “Earlier tonight, before I tried summoning Paimon, before you came downstairs, the bastard threw it back at me.”

  The implication left Nicholas’s insides frozen. “He’s been lurking?”

  “No, he’s not. Paimon’s not of this world. There’s a reason he has to be summoned. He needs human blood to ground him.”

  “Then how’d he manage to drop in without the fancy words and all?”

  Dexter frowned thoughtfully. “To make us believe he doesn’t need it. I think he wants us to think he’s lurking, to keep us from trying to find an answer. If we think he’s listening, we’ll be discouraged from trying to find an alternative solution for the knowledge that he’ll know what we’re doing and will stop it. He said he likes to keep close before collecting what he is owed, but he can’t keep close. He’s a thing of Hell. If he had the sort of power to keep constant vigilance on human dealings, the world would be lost in never-ending chaos.”

  “More so than it already is, you mean.”

  “Yes, more than anything we could ever imagine.”

  Nicholas’s eyes darkened, his mind slowly prying open doors that wanted to stay closed. “All right,” he said slowly. “The price is in the bag, yeah?”

  Dexter nodded, though his expression was dark with confusion.

  “Why even pretend to lurk? What’s this bastard figure he has to gain from making ominous visits? He’s learned I can’t lose her…that I…” Nicholas’s voice crackled, and his eyes misted again. He couldn’t let his thoughts take that path. He couldn’t. If he started thinking about the weight of everything in the balance—the girl he loved whose body would be ripped in half in less than a week’s time—he would shatter with grief. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t concede the battle just yet.

  He couldn’t give up when the next few days meant everything.

  “He wants us to choose,” Dexter said slowly. “He put out an impossible solution. Kill Raven or the world dies.”

  “I don’t get that.”

  “If Paimon collects Raven’s power—”

  “She and all the others kick it. I get that. I just don’t understand why.” Nicholas shook his head hard, blinking his eyes closed to fight off an incursion of tears. “If she learns that, you know what she’s gonna ask me to do, don’t you?”

  Dexter’s face drained of color. “It’s something we should consider.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Nicholas, I—”

  “Don’t!” he roared, knocking the tumbler to the floor. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to talk about killing her as though it’s an option.”

  The Guardian drew in a sharp breath. “If Paimon collects her power—”

  A shrill laugh tore through his lips. “Yeah. I got the memo, Dexter. Like a string of Christmas lights, yeah? Take Raven out and the whole line bites the dust. Can you imagine how much I care?”

  “Without the Few as the Earth’s protector, everything falls to chaos,” Dexter said softly, his voice tempered though torn in that gray area between hysterics and reason.

  “If Raven dies, I die, and I don’t give a flying fuck about the rest of you.”

  “You would give up so easily?”

  Nicholas scoffed again. “Easily?” he repeated. “I’ve already died once for her. I died so she wouldn’t. Now we’re here, and you’re telling me that once she’s gone, Earth becomes a demonic romp room and the ones who don’t die will suffer. Sounds a lot like Hell. But I gotta tell you, if I’m gonna be in Hell, I want the real thing. Not some pansy-ass knock-off.” He shrugged. “Nothing to keep me here, near as I can figure it.”

  There was a long pause. “Nicholas,” Dexter said softly. “She wouldn’t want to be the reason the world ends.”

  “And she’s not gonna be.”

  “Nicholas—”

  “You’re really doing it, aren’t you? You’re telling me I should kill the woman I love—”

  “For the benefit of—”

  The fuzzy feelings Nicholas had entertained for the Guardian just minutes before evaporated, and the demon tore forward with fury. He felt his fangs descend, a monster’s growl ripping through the air. “You gormless, yellow-bellied bastard,” he roared. “If you come near her, I’ll—”

  And then Dexter burst into tears.

  Nicholas didn’t know why it took him by such surprise. It wasn’t as though he knew the plonker well e
nough to peg his every emotion, but hard, bone-crushing sobs were possibly the last thing he expected. Yet here he was, standing awkwardly with his fangs itching for something to chew on, and his target had melted without forewarning.

  “I-I-I can’t…” Dexter sputtered, his face falling into his hands. “I can’t…”

  Nicholas exhaled slowly, his anger subsiding. “Dexter…”

  “I can’t, but she…”

  “I can’t either.”

  “If we don’t, the world ends.”

  “My world’s ending anyway. I don’t give a toss about what’s left over.” A meaningful beat passed. “Do you?”

  A heartbreaking laugh wracked Dexter’s shoulders. “Honestly?” he repeated, speaking into his hands. “No.”

  Nicholas offered a half-smile. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “There has to be a way. The world is not based on absolutes. There are always loopholes. Always.” Dexter wiped his nose miserably, his red-rimmed eyes slowly trailing upward. “There’s something we’re missing.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Well, it’s as true now as it was five minutes ago. Paimon went to so much trouble to keep you apart. He failed, obviously, but he did try. You with Octavia, and Raven without the misery of her apparent assface of a former Guardian.” The worry lines in his face deepened with thought. “There’s something about your proximity to each other that has him concerned.”

  Nicholas swallowed hard but forced himself not to jump. “How do you figure?” he asked cautiously.

  “He came to her only after she remembered. He told her the timing wasn’t what he wanted, but he was left without option.” There was a beat. “Because of you.”

  Dexter met his eyes again, and logic faded away. The room fell silent once more, the air growing so thick Nicholas nearly choked. The Guardian spoke without words and the message nearly deafened. And in that fraction of a second, they understood each other.

  “It’s never worked,” Nicholas said. “Never.”

  “I know.”

  “The Few can’t survive a turning.”

  “I know.”

  “It’ll kill her.”