The Egg (Return of the Ancients Book 4)

by Carmen Caine

  He didn’t look well at all.

  Marquis and Blondie exchanged looks of concern, and then Blondie hopped down from the pastry case to block Jareth’s path.

  “Your body is destined to be mine,” the Mesmer whispered defiantly, sniffing Jareth’s feet and legs with the interest of a predator. His voice softened then, deepening into its most convincing as he added, “You stand at the door, lizardling. Do not hesitate. Accept us. We are your brothers.”

  Melody laughed outright, a low sound, dripping with scorn. “Jareth can never be yours to possess,” she said with caustic amusement. “You can never possess one of your own. He’s a true Mesmer as much as you are. And a Mesmer at my command.”

  “No!” both Jareth and Blondie screamed at the same time.

  “His body is mine!” Blondie screeched, looking very much like a rabid dog. “I will walk in the Body of Kings, and I will roam Earth once again as I was meant to!”

  “No,” Jareth choked under his breath, ignoring the frenzied Mesmer at his feet. “I am not your puppet, Melody.” He took a couple of steps closer to her before stopping as an expression of pure pain entered his dark eyes, eyes blazing with a raging fire.

  Melody didn’t seem too perturbed. “Are you not mine to dangle on a string?” she asked, her ruby red lips forming another smile. It was a disturbing smile. “Perhaps this will convince you.” Her voice reverberated through the coffee shop as she ordered, “Kill Rafael as I have programmed you to do. And kill him properly this time. Your first attempt was ludicrous. I will not tolerate any further mistakes.”

  I gasped. It made sense. I’d stumbled across Melody doing something to Jareth before, things he could never remember. She was controlling him.

  But how?

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Al wandering aimlessly in Melody’s direction. His usual alert blue eyes still disturbingly vacant. I wanted to tell him to get out of the way. I didn’t want him to get hurt. But my lips didn’t seem connected to my brain any longer. I could only keep my fingers crossed that everyone would continue to ignore him.

  Jareth’s right hand lifted and another knife appeared in it. A wicked-looking knife with a long, curved iron blade.

  “No!” he gasped in alarm, staring at his raised hand in horror. With his other hand, he clawed at his fingers, trying to free the knife. “I will not harm him. You won’t control me this time!”

  He winced and ground his teeth together, biting back a scream.

  Melody was torturing him.

  I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t move. None of us could. Well, technically, the Mesmers could, but they apparently had no interest in keeping Rafael alive, so they just stood by and watched, some grinning with amusement.

  “Do it,” Melody said calmly. “Otherwise you will die. It is your life or his now. I have activated your internal self-destruction system. You feel it now, don’t you?”

  Jareth closed his eyes and spoke, this time, his voice sounded weak, drained of all emotion and energy. “So be it, but I will not harm him. I will not allow you to control me. Not again.”

  Rafael moved beneath my hand still resting upon his chest, desperately battling to raise himself but he failed in the attempt. He did, however, manage to actually talk. “Stop this madness, Melody!” he gasped. “We will heal the darkness in your soul, find you the proper treatment—”

  Melody’s perfect mouth formed a small, surprised ‘o’ as she surveyed Rafael and interrupted, “Treatment? Am I ill, Rafael? If you wish to live, you should run. If you can. You know as well as I do that Jareth never misses.” She cocked a brow at Jareth then and her eyes hardened. “Do it, Jareth, and be quick. Why give your life up for him?”

  “No!” Jareth choked in a strangled voice, even as his hand rose once again, taking aim at Rafael.

  It was then, with that blank expression, Al woodenly lifted his cap from his head. All at once, his stilted mannerisms fell away, and in a flash, he tossed the Faraday cap over Melody’s blonde curls and slapped her across the back with one of his big hands.

  Caught off-guard, she lost her balance and pitched forward, landing on her knees.

  Al hadn’t been ensnared by the Mesmers after all.

  It all happened quickly.

  Melody’s control over Jareth vanished, along with the lethargy entrapping us all. As I realized that Melody had been hypnotizing us somehow, I saw the knife in Jareth’s hand disappear in a flash as he whirled upon the Mesmers, ordering them back.

  In one swift motion, Rafael sprang to his feet and lunged towards Melody.

  I leapt up and grabbed Al, pulling him back as Jareth turned on the Fae Protectors and uttered one word in a voice as impossibly deep as Blondie’s had been, “Awake!”

  “No!” Melody was screaming, a genuine fear flickering in her eyes. “Kill him, Jareth. If you do not obey my command you will die! You cannot die! Not yet!”

  Blondie and the Mesmers began to back away as the Fae Protectors shook their heads, getting their bearings.

  Jareth turned to the Tulpa perched at the edge of the dark hole in the center of the room. “Go back where you belong, you hell-spawned creature!” he thundered.

  Immediately, the dark hole in the center of the room collapsed upon itself, pulling the Tulpa back into the yawning maw of darkness and swallowing it whole.

  The Mesmers wailed and hissed, and then with a growl, Blondie fled. The rest of the Mesmers followed, scrabbling up the walls to disappear back into the white ceiling tiles. They left Marquis standing there, alone, next to the pastry display. For being members of a ‘brotherhood’, they didn’t seem very loyal.

  I stood there, clenching Al’s hand tightly, too stunned to even blink.

  Surprisingly, we’d won.

  It was a reprieve, for however long it would last.

  But then Melody turned on Rafael and Al, her chin trembling in anger. “You fools! You’ve killed him. All those years of work. Lost! You have destroyed my weapon. You cut my communication with him at the most critical of times, and now it’s too late for me to stop the final sequence!”

  As Rafael’s brows knit into a frown, Jareth gave a gurgling scream.

  It was a horrible sound, a sound I’ll never forget.

  He stood there a moment, writhing in pain as dark scales consumed every inch of his flesh. And then the scales disappeared and he turned deathly white. He wavered a moment and then collapsed.

  Rafael was there to catch him as he fell, lowering him quickly to the floor as the Fae Protectors finally shook off the last effects of their Mesmer-induced sleep and began to move.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Melody and Marquis disappear in a cloud of mist, but none of it mattered right now.

  Jareth looked mortally ill. His breath came in short, shallow gasps.

  “What is it?” I heard myself ask as I dropped to my knees by Rafael’s side. “What did she do to him?”

  I’d seen Jareth go unconscious after Melody had touched him before, but nothing like this.

  “I don’t know,” Rafael said in a very low, very grim voice that made me very scared. There was an edginess about him that I’d never seen before as he placed a long finger against Jareth’s neck.

  I watched the firm line of Rafael’s jaw tighten as he crouched over Jareth’s unconscious body and cupped his hands together. A glowing ball of light appeared. With his brows drawn in concentration, he murmured soft words I couldn’t understand. The glowing ball grew, expanding to encompass Jareth’s prone form in a soft golden bubble.

  As Al knelt beside me, his brows knitting into a frown, I was dimly aware of the Fae Protectors forming a protective circle around us.

  The golden bubble surrounding Jareth popped.

  Rafael gasped, a huge intake of breath, and his gray eyes registered an alarm that filled me with fear.

  Holding my breath, I searched Jareth’s face.

  His dark lashes were closed. As I watched, his chest heaved with a shaking, soft sigh. Once. A
nd then stilled.

  I waited.

  We all waited.

  Thoughts raced in my head. Thoughts I didn’t want to acknowledge.

  In the distance, I heard the wail of a police siren.

  There was no denying that he looked dead. Briefly, I closed my eyes, not wanting to see his still form. He couldn’t really die, could he? Surely, the Fae had advanced technology to deal with such things.

  But one look at Rafael’s defeated and shocked expression and I knew.

  I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.

  Tears burnt my lashes. Everything was hopeless. I was never going to conquer my Blue Thread.

  Rafael had failed.

  Jareth had died.

  Jareth had really died.

  Chapter Two – Déjà Brew

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t shed the tears that threatened. I didn’t know how.

  I just listened to the sirens growing louder before they gradually receding in the distance and wondered what emergency they’d gone to.

  Rafael reached out and then his hand stilled, hovering over Jareth a moment before dropping to rest on the top of his dark head in a brotherly caress.

  The gesture spoke volumes. He really cared for Jareth. Deeply.

  Rafael looked up at the Fae Protectors, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. With the muscle on his jaw clenched so tight he could barely speak, he ordered, “Take him back to Avalon. At once.”

  Two of the Protectors responded with their three-fingered salute, and bending down, each placed a hand on Jareth’s shoulder. An instant later, they were gone.

  I could only stare at where Jareth had been, unable to really feel anything.

  Pulling me to my feet, Rafael spun slowly on his heel and surveyed the damaged coffee shop.

  The customers were still catatonic. Without Jareth to wake them up, I didn’t see any hope for them. I knew Blondie wasn’t about to come back and restore them to consciousness out of the goodness of his little chupacabra heart. I wasn’t even sure that the chupacabra bodies even had hearts.

  “Restore this place,” Rafael ordered the remaining Protectors as his arm locked protectively around my shoulders.

  Immediately, the Protectors fanned out as Al joined us, tall and very bald in his army fatigues.

  We didn’t speak. We couldn’t. We just watched as the Fae spoke unintelligible words into their trions and sparks of light filled the room like magical fairy dust. I suppose that is truly what it was and that stories about sparkly pixie dust actually derived from the Fae’s control over light.

  The glass, every shard and speck of it, flew back to where it had originated from in a slow-motion reversal of the explosion. We watched all the pieces knit themselves back into whole plate glass windows, dishes, and mirrors. And the Fae Protectors didn’t stop there. Some began to rejuvenate the coffee in the paper cups, rewarming and frothing the foam in the lattes. A couple of them stooped to stand the barista who’d fainted back up again in front of her espresso machine.

  It was then that I saw my friend, Ellison. I looked at his brown, close-cropped hair and into his even darker, unseeing eyes. It was soul-wrenching to see him like that. Frozen. Suspended. And it was then that I began to panic. Really panic. How were we going to wake him up? Was he going to die, too?

  I scanned everyone in the room. Each of these people had lives. People who loved them.

  Something moved outside.

  Looking through the large glass windows, I spied Samantha pulling up in a sleek black car. I watched, numb, as she hopped out, wearing a long gray trench coat, and a blue beret perched on top of her shoulder-length blonde hair. Stepping up to a window, she rapped on the glass and shading her eyes, briefly peered inside as her thin lips creased into a disapproving frown.

  “What are we going to do?” I heard my gargled whisper.

  “There is nothing to do,” Rafael admitted tersely.

  With a slight impatient gesture, Samantha turned away to retrieve an armful of pink cake boxes from the trunk of the car. Balancing the boxes so high that she couldn’t see around them, she headed for the coffee shop’s front door.

  Nudging the door open with her hip, I heard her peppery voice command, “Give me a hand here, will you, Sydney?”

  I don’t know why she always picked me. And somehow, my feet obeyed her, even as my stunned brain remained frozen.

  I’d taken about half a dozen steps before sounds registered in my hazy thoughts. The gasps of the Fae Protectors. The clinking of mugs. Several gargled screams followed quickly by nervous laughs.

  I stopped, dead in my tracks and my mouth fell open. Turning a full 360 degrees, my eyes took a rapid circuit of the room.

  The customers were suddenly awake.

  Next to me, a portly man moaned to his companion how every diet he’d tried was doomed to fail. A grade-schooler was begging in a wheedling tone for his mom to buy him a new game for his phone. A woman who had been pointing to the pastry case, on the verge of screaming in terror, shook her head instead and stared at her piping hot latte, perplexed.

  “Take the top three boxes, Sydney,” Samantha instructed briskly.

  I jerked around and took my assigned boxes, too stunned to do anything else.

  Samantha’s sharp eyes swept me from head-to-toe. “Be quick, Sydney,” she said pointedly, her tone taking on a crisp edge. “We don’t have all day.”

  I followed her back to the pastry case to where Rafael and the Fae Protectors looked just as shocked and confused as I was.

  “Didn’t see you guys come in,” Ellison was telling them from behind the counter. “Poof! It’s like you just appeared out of thin air.” He stood there, holding a coffee mug with his lips twisted into a slightly bewildered, lopsided grin.

  A couple of the Protectors gave fake laughs. They’d have been better off remaining silent. The laughs only underlined the awkwardness growing more pronounced by the minute.

  Plopping her boxes down onto the counter before Ellison, Samantha retorted with a brusque, “Nonsense, Ellison. See to your customers now, will you? Hop to.”

  Dusting her hands, she turned to survey the coffee shop with a critical eye.

  I held my breath as I stood behind her, still holding onto the pink cake boxes.

  None of us moved.

  Finally, Samantha’s penetrating eyes pierced mine. “Sydney, can you explain what is going on?”

  I swallowed. Even though the customers had magically woken up the moment she’d arrived, how could I tell her the truth? Samantha was one tough cookie, but I didn’t think she could handle the entire group of Mesmers and Melody. Especially since I wasn’t even certain she was actually responsible for everyone’s spontaneous recovery.

  “Uh, well…” was all I managed to get out.

  She waited about two seconds. Patience wasn’t her strong suit. “Where’s Jareth?” she asked sternly, her shoulders rigid. “I was very clear with him that the filming couldn’t start until next week.”.”

  It took me a moment to recall that Jareth had covered for the Fae Protectors before by telling her they were actors for his new music video. But any sigh of relief I might have wanted to utter was completely stifled as she repeated the question.

  Raising a brow, she searched the surrounding tables. “Where is Jareth?”

  Jareth.

  A wave of grief rose to encompass me.

  “The actors are simply gaining familiarity with their surroundings,” Rafael’s smooth voice inserted itself in an explanation. He was a master at deflecting conversations. “But there doesn’t appear to be enough room for them to stay long. They’ll be on their way. Your coffee shop is only growing more popular by the day.”

  Samantha sent him a long, considering look before gracing him with a microscopic nod, but she wasn’t deterred so easily. Pursing her lips, her eyes zeroed back to mine. “I’ll find Jareth later. You look sick, Sydney. Are you ill?”

  I didn’t trust my voice to soun
d normal, so I just nodded.

  Al stepped forward then. “She called me,” he boomed in his loud, comforting voice. Somehow, just hearing him made me feel that all would be right in the world. Eventually. His brows furrowed in the typical Al-manner as he added, “I’ve come to take her home, Sam.”

  In spite of everything that was happening, I blinked in surprise at that. Sam? Samantha didn’t seem to mind. She sent Al her version of a smile, the slight crinkling around the edges of her eyes. I guess Al was the only person in the world who could get away with calling her “Sam”.

  “Yes, you do that,” she said, adopting a tone of professional detachment. “Get that kid some fluids and vitamins. Also, take a bottle of that organic, fresh-squeezed orange juice home with you and blend it with some spinach or kale. Be quick, Al. Preventing illness by being proactive is key. And remember, food is medicine. Move now, Sydney. Time to leave!”

  It was funny. Samantha didn’t give me the warm and fuzzies. Warm and fuzzy wasn't her style. But I knew she genuinely cared and probably even deeper than most. She was like a fierce lioness, one you could count on to defend you to the death.

  “Go, Sydney,” she ordered as she turned her attention back to her cake boxes. “I need you here and healthy to handle Jareth when the filming starts.”

  At the mention of his name, I turned away. And looked straight into Ellison’s shrewd eyes. Eyes that were narrowed in suspicion.

  Setting his coffee mug down, he placed both hands down on the countertop between us, and asked in a quiet voice, so quiet that I could hardly hear it, “What happened?”

  “Happened?” I asked, clearing my throat. I was a terrible liar.

  “I thought…” he hesitated before giving a strange laugh as he looked down at the coffee mug. “Déjà brew! Somehow, I feel like I’ve seen this coffee before.”

  “Really?” I asked carefully. “Well, you do make a lot of lattes.” I tried to force a laugh at his joke, but it was so obvious there wasn’t even one iota of amusement in it that it only heightened his suspicions.

  Running a hand over his inch-long brown hair, he pointed to the corner table and the mirror that had started the whole mess. “Weren’t you sitting over there, eating lunch?” he asked. “One second, you’re sitting there talking to yourself in the mirror and your bracelet is glowing. Weren’t people just popping in here out of thin air? And the next, you’re standing here with all these actors like nothing happened. How did you do that?”