The Akasha Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set: The Complete Emily Adams Series

by Natalie Wright

  Ciardha reached for the woman’s flawless face, and he ran a finger around the red mark that he’d made on her cheek. Her skin was smooth and warm beneath his touch.

  “Do you live to serve me?”

  “Yes, Daniel,” she said.

  Ciardha’s hand slid quickly from her cheek to her throat. He squeezed, and as he did, he felt the heat from his loins grow more intense as he watched her face grow red from the pressure he applied to her throat.

  “I gave you permission to use that name but once. You will call me master.”

  “Yes, Master,” she rasped. “Please, Master. I beg of you. Release me. Please. I’m going to pass out.”

  “Begging is very unbecoming.” Ciardha watched her eyes grow wide with fear and surprise.

  Ciardha squeezed harder and watched as she gasped for air and clutched at his hand, trying to free her airway from the pressure. Within a few minutes Ciardha felt her cease to fight as she passed out and slumped to the floor.

  “Dorcha, come to me,” Ciardha said.

  Dorcha emerged from the shadowed corner. Her black wisp pulsed with excitement.

  “Do not allow yourself attachment to this body that I gift you, Dorcha. It is but a temporary home. In this human form I will move among them and gather around me an army of bodies robbed of my sister’s Lucent Energy. With my Dark Energy legion, it will take very little time to turn this floating rock completely Dark. And when I have devoured the last of the Lucent Energy here, we shall move to the next Lucent planet and do the same. Now merge with this human before it revives and attempts to fight you.”

  The wisp hovered by the woman’s torso briefly, then disappeared. Within a few minutes, the woman coughed, and her hand instinctively reached for her sore neck. She rubbed at it lightly.

  Dorcha opened the mouth of her host body and attempted to speak the first words she would say since her creation many millennia ago. But though she moved her lips and tongue in an effort at speech, no words came from her mouth. She was without a voice.

  “Do not pout, Dorcha. You did not think that I would allow you to keep that annoying voice, did you?”

  Without speech or even the whinny that she previously possessed, Dorcha could only sit in silence at her master’s feet. Her neck still throbbed with pain.

  “You exist for one purpose, Dorcha. As we journey amongst these beings, do not forget your place.

  Ciardha knelt and ran his finger across Dorcha’s brow. Beneath her brow, the eyes that a few minutes before had been icy blue had become a black void, evidence of Dorcha’s residence inside. Ciardha traced the outline of her lips.

  “You exist solely to serve me,” he said. Ciardha crushed his lips against Dorcha’s full ones. He parted her lips with his tongue and darted it into her mouth. Ciardha felt the heat of Dorcha’s body rise to meet his own.

  He trailed a finger down Dorcha’s neck and across her chest. He pulled away from their kiss and watched Dorcha’s newly black eyes grow wide, her lips parted slightly, and he felt her shiver as his finger traced a circle around her small breast.

  “These human bodies are good for only one thing,” Ciardha said. He lifted Dorcha’s long but lean body into his arms and laid her on the sleeping platform. Ciardha kept Dorcha in the room for many hours as he taught her the pleasure, and pain, of her new body.

  4. Hand Me a Tinfoil Hat

  Jake

  The door opened, and Greta pushed her way in. At first, I saw no one else, just perfect, pouty-lipped Greta.

  Doesn’t she grasp that there’s a hell-storm going on out there?

  Most people looked like they were about to throw up out of fear. Others looked like they’d just as soon kill you as look at you. People’s eyes were haloed in dark circles, evidence of lack of sleep from worry that at any minute, someone was going to break into your house and slit your throat so they could take your junk and sell it for drugs. Or maybe kill you for no reason other than they’d got a taste for killing and thought it was fun. BA, if you saw a shifty-eyed person, you’d figure them for crazy and paranoid and maybe offer them a tinfoil hat to protect them from the rays that were ‘after them’.

  But after? Crazed-looking, dirty, shifty-eyed people were everywhere. And they weren’t paranoid. There really were people out to get them, and evil energy waves really did pelt down on their psyches.

  I wished I could make tinfoil hats for all of their heads. I wished I could find a way to protect them from the constant toxic rain of Dark Energy that poured down on them. But even if I could make enough shiny hats, I knew it wouldn’t work. I doubted there was any external thing we could do to rid ourselves of Ciardha.

  There was bouncy Greta in the doorway. And then I saw that she trailed behind Greta.

  She didn’t look fresh and dewy and bouncy. No, Emily had the same dark circles under her eyes that I’d seen on countless faces of late (and the face that greeted me in the mirror each morning). The dark circles revealed that she’d had many a sleepless night too.

  Good! She should. This whole nightmare is all her fault. I’m glad she can’t sleep. I hope she doesn’t sleep until this whole thing is over. If it’s ever over.

  I tried to talk myself into wishing her the worst, but those thoughts were lies I told to harden my heart to her. Don’t let her in. She’ll hurt you like she did before.

  My hands were folded together in front of me, resting on the long, hard plastic table. I could feel the sweat pool on my palms. I decided to put my hands on my thighs, where my jeans would at least soak up most of the sweat.

  Why are you so nervous? She’s the one that should be nervous, not you.

  I should have stood. It would have been the courteous thing to do. But I wasn’t feeling courteous, and I wasn’t about to do anything that would be construed as if I cared.

  I avoided eye contact with all but a few people. But I chanced it and looked into her eyes. They weren’t crazy and darting, but they weren’t bright, shining orbs like Greta’s either.

  No, Emily’s eyes were the same deep pools of emerald green, shot through with flecks of gold as they’d always been. But her eyes looked older. Tired and careworn. If you saw only her eyes, you’d think she was a woman at least twice her actual age of seventeen Earth years.

  Her hair was pulled back in a straight ponytail, and she didn’t wear a hint of makeup. Her cheekbones were prominent, her collarbones visible beneath her grey T-shirt. She was gaunt.

  So she’s not eating either. She kind of looks like dog puke.

  I should have felt some smug satisfaction at seeing the misery written over her entire being. I hated her, right? I’d tried to hate her anyway, for the better part of the last year. So I should have felt glad for her misery.

  I should have, but I didn’t. Instead, I felt queasy and ill at ease. A part of me that I’d worked hard to bury wanted to go to her and enfold her in my arms. I wanted to stroke her hair and let her cry out her fear, worry and sorrow on my shoulder. I’d welcome the wet stain of tears on my shirt.

  It took everything I had left in me not to go to her.

  No! I won’t give in to this. She’s no good. She’s no good for me.

  The moment passed. I felt a sigh of relief and a pang of hurt fill me.

  They each took a chair across from me. Greta broke the awkward silence. “I’m glad you kept our appointment.”

  I looked at my watch and feigned like I had somewhere to be.

  “I don’t have all night. What do you want?”

  I didn’t enjoy being an asshole, but I found that the more I practiced, the better at it I became.

  “Your help,” Greta said.

  “Help with what?”

  Greta rolled her clear blue eyes at me. “Don’t play games. You know what we need your help with.”

  “I told her a year ago, I’m done. You’re on your own.”

  “And look how well that’s worked out for us,” Greta said.

  “She’s got the magic. You’ve got … well
, beauty and gumption, anyway. I don’t see what I can add to the equation.”

  “We need your ideas. I need your … I need you,” Emily said. I saw the tears well in her eyes.

  Don’t give in to her. Don’t let her tears fool you.

  “You need me, huh? But those tears are for Owen, aren’t they?”

  Greta rolled her eyes, and Emily sighed.

  “For Owen? Yes, they’re for Owen because I as good as killed him. I’m responsible for his death, Jake. I didn’t love Owen, but he didn’t deserve to die. Like the rest of us, he was a victim of Ciardha’s twisted game. I’ve got his blood on my hands, and I can’t get it out, no matter what I do. So yes, I cry for him. Every damned day.”

  She held her hands out, palms up as if to show me the bloodstains. I saw no visible stains, but her face wore the tired signs of grief and guilt.

  She should feel guilty. All of it was her fault. Owen’s death, Brighid’s imprisonment, and the hell that had befallen all of us.

  A part of me knew that even if it was her fault, it wasn’t like she meant for any of it to happen. Owen had been under a spell, and Ciardha’s Dark Energy had influenced Emily and provoked her to make bad choices. The part of me that could see these things wanted to take those long, thin hands into mine and make her perceived bloodstains go away.

  But that was the old me. The new me didn’t want to give in to her obvious plea for forgiveness. The new me wasn’t sure I could believe her. Maybe she had changed, and maybe she told me the truth. Or maybe it was a pack of lies. Maybe she was lonely and, with Owen dead, she was looking for someone who would allow her pity party and tell her it wasn’t her fault and make her feel all better.

  It is her fault.

  Greta met my silence with a glare so icy it nearly froze me. Greta could glare at me all she wanted. I risked my life every day just by leaving the house. I was impervious to her bitchy looks.

  Emily broke the silence. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not. It doesn’t matter whether you hate me or not. This isn’t about me.”

  “Then what is it about? Why are you here?”

  “Because I can’t – we can’t – solve this alone. None of us can. Greta hates my guts too. But she came to me because she realized the truth. We’ve got to stick together. We’re the only ones that know what happened. And if we work together, we might be able to figure out how to stop the spread of the darkness. But we’ve got to work fast. We’re losing the battle.”

  She was right about that. Anyone who’d been paying any attention at all knew that. It was like with each passing day, there was an exponential increase in the hate and bad juju in the world.

  I didn’t want to admit it to them, but since we’d come back from the Umbra Perdita, I’d done what I could to solve the Ciardha conundrum on my own, but I’d failed. I’d studied what few texts remained of ancient Celtic myth and mysticism. There was precious little out there, and what there was had proven unhelpful. I meditated, did yoga, and tried to center myself the way I’d seen Emily do when she opened the portals or phase shifted. I even tried to open a portal at the cemetery myself, hoping to go back to the Umbra Perdita on my own and get Fanny out of there. But after a couple of hours of meditation, the only thing I had to show for it was a cold, sore butt.

  But Emily had the torc. I didn’t. She was the holder of the only power that could possibly defeat Ciardha. I hated that my fate and the fate of all those that I loved was in the hands of the woman I tried so hard to detest.

  “You come to me for help. But what have you done? Do you even have an idea of how you’re going to fix things?”

  Greta furtively looked behind her at the door, then over to the windows. She spoke in a low, hushed tone. “We’ll get a group started.”

  “A ‘group’. What kind of group?”

  “We’ll gather others together. Others that are still of the light.”

  “How do you know they’re of the light? You can’t trust anything that anyone says these days.”

  “We can tell,” Greta said.

  “Oh, you can. You two are so high and mighty, you can tell the dark ones from the light ones?” I filled my voice with as much acid as I could muster.

  “Don’t try to be an ass, Jake. It doesn’t suit you,” Greta said.

  “We can both still see auras,” Emily said.

  “How? I can’t see them anymore.”

  “We don’t know why or how, but for some reason when we came back from the Umbra Perdita, we can still see them.”

  “Yeah, so we really can tell the dark ones from the light ones,” said Greta.

  I wasn’t sure I believed them. Why would they still have that ability but not me? It didn’t make any sense. But why would they lie to me about it?

  “If you can still see auras, tell me. What does my aura look like? Am I filled with Dark Energy or Lucent?”

  They both sat silently and regarded me. They shared a look with each other that I couldn’t read.

  “Well? What do you see?”

  “Your aura is dark green, and bright. You are Lucent. For now.”

  “For now. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Emily didn’t respond, but continued to silently regard me. Her face wore a sad look.

  “Well?”

  “It means that you’re still Lucent, but your aura has some dark spots. It means that if you don’t get your head out of your ass and put aside the petty grudge you’re holding onto, you’re going to turn,” said Greta.

  “It will eat at you, Jake. For your own sake – and your family – take care of yourself.”

  Black spots? Me? I felt fine. I meditated daily. I bet she didn’t do that. I prayed daily. I bet she didn’t do that either.

  “Oh, so I’m the one with blemishes in my aura. How convenient. And what about you two? I suppose your auras are perfectly bright and beautiful.”

  “Greta’s is. Mine’s about like yours,” Emily said.

  That shut me up.

  “She’s got gunk clogging up her works too,” Greta said. “And time’s running out, for both of you. So you better wise up and help each other or …”

  Neither of us said anything. Part of me wanted to laugh out loud. How is it that Greta lectures us? If I could have left my body and hovered above that scene as an observer, that may have been the funniest damned thing I’d ever seen.

  But I couldn’t leave me. I’d tried my hardest. I was stuck in that Jake body with that Jake brain and fought against myself every day. I fought against my urge to run through my neighborhood and follow the sidewalk that led to her house. It was a trail I knew well. Only one point two miles. I’d walked it many times. It would be so easy.

  Up the sidewalk, a few steps, across the wooden porch painted gunmetal grey, and into the door with hinges that groaned when you pushed it open. Down the hall and into the kitchen, where I’d find her sitting on a barstool at the breakfast bar, her right leg curled up under her, her left hand twirling strands of her long, red hair around her finger as she held a pencil in her right, doing some bit of homework.

  It would be so easy to stand next to her, my presence daring her to stand and face me. So easy to grab her around the waist and pull her to me. She’d be pleasantly surprised by the unforeseen strength of my arms, solid and firm from my yoga practice. Easy to encircle her waist and draw her close. She’d feel my breath on her face and my heat pass into her. No effort at all to bend my head a few inches and press my lips to hers.

  That would have been easy.

  To resist her was hard. How could I resist her if I was near her? It had only worked for a year because I’d found ways to avoid her.

  I’d had enough credits and had passed the tests required to graduate before our junior year even started. But I’d opted to stay in high school so I could be near her. Then all the shit went down with the Umbra Perdita. Turns out my plan to stay in high school to be near her wasn’t such a brilliant plan.

  When we got back, I
wasted no time. I submitted my application to graduate high school, and I was out of there. I got a job at a grocery store to earn some dough and enrolled in community college to get some credits. My hope was to get a scholarship and eventually graduate from University of Illinois.

  Mostly, though, I lay low and tried to avoid her and the dark ones as well. And I’d done a good job of it. This was the first time I’d seen her in almost a year.

  “What’ll it be, Jake?” Greta asked.

  Good question.

  Maybe I wanted her to beg, to plead, to cry and tell me again that she’d been wrong. She’d done that, but it had been last year when we first came out of the portal. Maybe I needed to hear it again. Maybe I’d be able to hear in her voice and her words whether she told the truth or only what she knew I wanted to hear.

  “I may join you. I may not. But before I decide, I want to know one thing. From you, Emily. Tell me the truth. Why did you choose Owen over me?”

  Greta rolled her eyes again and let out a loud breath of impatience.

  Emily stood, and her tall frame towered over me. Her green eyes were ablaze, the worry that had glazed them over when she had first walked in was gone. Those fiery emeralds bore into me, and for a minute, I thought she was going to reach across that table, yank me up by my collar, and bitch slap me.

  “I’m only going to answer this one more time. If you don’t believe me, well, that’s not my problem, it’s yours. I chose to go to Owen first for the same reason you said we should go to Fanny first. Or have you conveniently forgotten that? I knew Owen didn’t have a chance of saving himself, but I knew that you did. It was a choice based on logic. Your logic. My mistake was that I didn’t make the choice from my heart. My heart was yours, not Owen’s. That’s the truth.

  “I’ve got a job to do, and it doesn’t include groveling at your feet. So you can believe me nor not, but I’m not going to kiss your ass for the rest of whatever is left of our lives and try to convince you. Are you going to get over yourself, man up, and join us in the fight against that asshole? Or are you going to die being pissed at me?”