by Nikki Landis
Standing my ground, I didn’t notice the death hounds approaching from behind me. They had tracked me down and were trying to ambush us from behind. Several werewolves gathered with them. I poured more dust into my hand and rose back up, several feet off the ground, so I wouldn’t be so vulnerable. As they got closer I threw some of the dust at them, smirking as it had a similar effect as on the harpy. They burned and exploded into clouds of black ash.
Dumb demons.
The animals that survived quickly ran off, the need to survive greater than the need to capture me. I was pretty impressed with this “magic” dust. It protected me better than a sword ever could. I was pretty sure that it could handle almost any creature. I don’t think Kellen noticed what happened. He was engaging several enemies at once, bashing with his shield and striking with his sword at the same time.
The feeling of being watched returned with a sudden vengeance and I looked up to see Domhnall watching me. His eyes were difficult to discern through the helmet. I heard him laugh sardonically and it made me shiver in pure terror. I screamed, unable to forget the premonition, unable to escape the overwhelming fear. He galloped toward me, his head lowered in determination.
Kellen backed up until he was a few feet in front of me, noticing the attention I was getting. I heard Seasnan yell, as he noticed too, and ran for Domhnall’s horse. He sliced the sword through the air as it met Domhnall’s blade. Soon they were fighting in hand to hand combat as Domhnall was forced from his mount, unable to continue his pursuit. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Shockingly, the Minotaur appeared abruptly in front of us at the same time. He swung the mighty mace at Kellen’s head and missed. Kellen raised the sword and skillfully sliced it through the air again and again, catching the Minotaur with small cuts here and there. They were swinging their weapons at each other with precision, both proven warriors. The demon must have latched onto the spirit of a soldier.
I became terrified as I watched both battles wage in front of me. Either of the Guardians could be killed. Both the Minotaur and Domhnall were skilled fighters, as good as Kellen and Seasnan, but not better. I tried not to scream and distract either of them. Seasnan was beating Domhnall, gaining the upper ground, so I returned my attention to Kellen.
The fight was close to evenly matched. They came at each other, back and forth, like a dance. The fight was so intense others stopped to watch. We were moving away from the rest of the battle, through the trees toward a steep cliff. Strike, deflect, and shove, then swing. I watched Kellen’s movements. He would win. He was magnificent.
I remembered the cliff from my journey across the portal. Oh God, I thought…my dream, both of my dreams. I remembered the dreams about falling. The premonition that I would jump over the cliff of my own volition. Shaking, I turned to Kellen. The fighting was covering a lot of ground and soon they were both right up to the cliff edge.
The Minotaur lunged at him, swinging the mace around within inches of his face. Kellen brought the heavy broadsword around and blocked it easily. Reaching up with his foot, he shoved the Minotaur backward, knocking it off balance. Rocks fell loose from the soil, tumbling to the ground far below. The drop was significant. Not survivable by any normal means.
Kellen saw his chance and brought the gleaming sword down on the creature’s right shoulder, slicing into it. The Minotaur cried out in pain, faltering, and tried to get up. Kellen brought the sword down again and hit the animal on the leg, rendering it useless. The huge Minotaur stumbled back toward the cliff edge where he lost his balance and fell.
Kellen turned and took a step toward me, his arm outstretched. I almost sighed in relief. Suddenly the Minotaur’s clawed hand reached up and grabbed his leg pulling him backward.
“Kellen!” I screamed. “No, oh please, NO!”
Not Kellen. No, my mind screamed it over and over again. I was running toward him but not fast enough. Too far away. I would never reach him in time. I saw his body fall over the side and the look of surprise mixed with horror.
For one brief moment my eyes scanned the tree line. A figure, tall and proud, darkly handsome, and with a long broadsword raised, emerged and ran toward me. I could not believe he had appeared out of nowhere. It did not matter. He was too late to help. Too late to do anything but watch me jump over the edge. Too late to see anything but my death.
Lord Baylor.
Bae.
Good bye. The word echoed in my head. I blew him a kiss as he shouted.
Everything went brighter around me like a deep golden haze. I felt my body expand, my chest spreading out, as if I had super strength, and I dove off the face of the cliff. Vaguely, I could hear Seasnan scream my name in the distance. All I cared about was Kellen. I could see him in front of me. He was hurtling quickly toward the ground. He would never survive the fall.
I threw my arms in front of me and lowered my head down to propel myself faster. I reached him about thirty feet from the ground. I wrapped my arms around his waist and tried to pull up. The momentum I was under was too fast to slow me down enough.
I crashed into a tree, throwing my body in front of his to take the brunt of the hit. We smacked into several branches and tumbled down to the ground. I managed to slow us down enough that the impact was rough but not hard.
Boom. The ground broke our fall. Dust filled the air. I landed just a foot apart from him. All of the breath was knocked out of my body. Empty. Void. Deflated. Like a basketball without air.
I couldn’t move. I was having trouble breathing.
Kellen reached over and threw his arms around me. He was kissing my hair and holding me close, shaking violently. Didn’t he realize that we just crashed to the ground?
“Rhiannon, thank you. My beloved, you saved me.”
Silence.
I couldn’t answer him.
Pain.
Sudden searing excruciating blinding pain.
I could feel the shocking pain spreading through my body into every crevice. I started shaking and couldn’t stop. Heat was spreading through my body at an alarming rate. It burned like acid through my limbs and torso, liquid searing flame, raging needles of white hot heat.
I moaned with the effort it took to take a breath. It felt like a thousand knives were stabbing me simultaneously in the chest. The pain was so intense I had to fight to stay awake. I cried out with the searing agony of it. It blanched my brain, ripping away all thought, until I all I wanted to do was give up.
“Rhiannon!” Kellen screamed at me.
He laid me gently against the ground.
“Help! Someone help!” He cried.
“Kellen, it hurts. Kellen, ahhhhhhhh!”
I couldn’t stop screaming. The pain was overwhelming. I closed my eyes as it spread rapidly like snake venom, burning and twisting as it coursed through my veins, overtaking the nerves until they were scorched and bleeding. Singed.
A cloud of billowing black was moving its way toward me at a disturbing speed. It threatened to cover me completely. I wasn’t going to be able to stay conscious much longer. I had to force my eyes open again.
I raised my shaking hand up to his face. He took it gently in his and kissed it, clutching it to the breast of his armor. I needed to tell him one more time. He needed to know. I choked the words out.
“Kellen…I love you.”
I barely got it out before another spasm of pain rocked through my body, excruciating in intensity, it nearly caused me to stop breathing altogether. I screamed again, this time ending in a small gurgle. I saw the horror in his eyes as he heard it too.
“Rhiannon, I love you too. Stay with me. Don’t go!”
He sounded urgent. His voice full of torture and anguish...and fear. I didn’t want to leave him. I didn’t want to be alone. I felt my eyes start to roll back in my head as my vision blurred in front of me until I couldn’t see anything anymore except his shadow. The lack of oxygen was robbing my body.
Help…
“Rhiannon!”
&
nbsp; Suddenly the pain started to subside. A horrifying numbness was starting to creep its way through my body. Starting at my limbs, it moved quickly in to my core. I was left feeling drained and weak. I had to fight even harder so the coming blackness wouldn’t engulf me. I tried to move or speak but I couldn’t.
“Rhia, baby, can you hear me? Rhiannon!”
I closed my eyes again, unable to fight it anymore. The blackness finally reached me. It sucked everything away. Nothing. There was nothing.
The last thing I heard was his voice.
“Rhiannon! No, wake up! Come back to me! No, please God, NO! Rhiannon!”
Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed the next chapter of Rhiannon’s story please leave a review to help others decide on the book.
Keep reading for a sample of Nikki Landis’ The Gift, the first book in a new series.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Also by Nikki Landis
Freedom Fighters Series:
Book 1
Refugee Road on Amazon
Book 2
Midnight Surrender on Amazon
Crimson Dawn (Book 3)
Coming late 2016
Into the Sunrise (Book 4)
Coming 2017
Fight for Light Novels:
Book 1
The Guardian on Amazon
Book 2
The Harbinger on Amazon
Book 3
The Meridian on Amazon
The Imposition (Book 4)
Coming November 2016
The Revenant (Book 5)
Coming December 2016
The Covenant (Book 6)
Coming 2017
The Awakening (Book 7)
Coming 2017
The Reckoning (Book 8)
Coming 2017
The Malevolent (Book 9)
Coming 2017
The NightWalkers Saga:
Book 1
Dark Promise on Amazon
Dark Vengeance (Book 2)
Coming late 2016
Dark Persuasion (Book 3)
Coming 2017
The Transitions Novels:
The Gift (Book 1)
October 2016
Keep reading for a sample of The Gift by Nikki Landis.
The Gift Sample
Love is the greatest emotion in the universe. Enduring and irrational, love speaks to the soul, enveloping and consuming in entirety. Sometimes it grabs hold of a person’s aura and sinks its teeth in, so strong, and so deep, that nothing can pry it loose. Entrenched. Persistent. Unyielding. The poor soul whose heart is ensnared never has a chance. The fight is already lost.
A heart captured.
For all eternity.
It is perhaps these hearts, these forlorn and forsaken hearts, disconnected in obscurity, that linger the longest in death. If you listen, if you pay attention, if your heart is open enough, you can feel their presence. Even if only for a few fleeting seconds. They beckon you. There is no mistaking that call. Perhaps that is why I feel them. Why I can see them. Why I endeavor to help them.
I suffer no delusions of grandeur. I am not unique by any standards. I am not special. But I do have a gift. I see the dead. Or rather, I see their souls. Caught in the in between, the veil that separates life from death, these lost souls roam the earth. Seeking. Hurting. Longing. They linger in shadow and hide in mystery. Only those who are especially attuned to their frequency can ever offer any kind of hope.
I am a medium. A clairvoyant. A crosser of sorts. My job, my gift, my ability, is to help those unfortunate souls pass into the next phase. Some call it the light. Some call it heaven. Some have no idea that anything exists beyond the physical realm we reside in each day. But it is real.
I know it is real. I know beyond this life, when we shed our mortal flesh, the soul endures. It matters not if we are good or bad, if we are religious or unholy, if we help or hurt others because the body does not get to decide its fate. No, the spirit decides our fate. The soul. So simple. So easy. And yet so many deny the truth.
I have seen the impossible. I have reached out to the other realm, the beyond, and seen its splendor. It has cast its glorious brilliance upon my face. I have witnessed the joy and felt the spreading warmth as it tingled and danced upon my skin. I have been touched, however minimal, by a profoundly eternal and everlasting peace.
That peace has descended upon me, shattering my doubts and fears until they no longer exist. I can only hope that someday I will experience it for myself in complete freedom and utter delight. My soul will pass on…and I will be free.
I do not fear death. Nothing about death is scary, except perhaps the way in which your physical body dies. But we do not cease to exist. Oh no.
We only move on. To other experiences, to another dimension, to an eternal and final place where life continues beyond our comprehension. I know this. I yearn for it. I await that fateful day when I join the souls that have passed before me. Only then will I know true rest, the fulfillment of a life’s worth.
Peace is a fleeting concept in this world. It comes and goes, washing back and forth upon the tide of life. In our broken and imperfect forms here on this earth, we never quite grasp its fullness. Peace eludes us. Perhaps in our sinful bodies life cannot breathe that richness, or mold that sincere notion, unable to penetrate into an aging and broken body.
We are fallible. Beyond repair. Beautiful but not fully developed.
Until our last breath, when all is decided, in the blink of an eye.
All life is precious. If you believe, if you allow yourself to open up to the possibility, an acceptance of the truth is easy to comprehend. Life is precious because it is fleeting. Our time is limited. We do not know the day or the hour. No prediction or crystal ball will provide the date of our death. Nothing we can do will change that, and certainly nothing that we can say.
I have found that people often think erroneously regarding death. They bargain. They resist. They sometimes lie, to themselves, and to those that they love. They seek the unattainable. But the soul is smart. The soul always succumbs to the call.
Once you pass on, once your temporal body is gone, the flesh discarded, that is when your spirit succumbs to the inevitable truth. No one can deny it. No one ever has.
No matter how strong you are in life, in death you are always the inner soul that remains leftover. A shimmering light that reflects your aura. That small still voice, that little intimate part that hovers inside, ready and willing to break free.
This is where push comes to shove. Where the ultimate choice and sacrifice is revealed. One selection that decides the future. Decides everything. Will you cross that barrier into the beyond or will you linger and begin to decay, forever forgotten and discarded? Will you follow those who have gone before or fight the inevitable truth?
Souls are both light and dark. Not necessarily good or evil. That concept is decidedly human. Totally wrong and without substantial evidence. Religion teaches us that we can choose right or wrong and that is entirely correct but true evil is very rare.
The soul, the spirit, reflects the decisions we made in our earthly body. While on this earth we can choose the fruits of the spirit or deny them. We can be kind or mean, generous or selfish. Truthful or deceiving. Loving or hateful.
No evidence is brought forth of our corruption or our acquiescence. It is entirely entombed within us. We do not see it. We are unable to reach inside and touch it. But we feel it. We know, deep inside, in the recesses of our inner being, that we consist of light and dark.
All souls consist of both light and darkness. If we did not, we would be perfect, without sin, and therefore totally self-reliant. We would not need forgiveness. We would love with all of our hearts. There would be no crime. No
hatred. No self-loathing. No one would hurt anyone else and no one would ever take their own life.
There would never be a need for heaven or hell. No need to cross over. No point in choosing right from wrong. Balance would always reign. And no one would ever need the touch or whisper of love because the hole in our beings would already be filled.
That hole, the one that exists in us all, most definitely is real. We are engineered to need community, to seek companionship, and to search for the fundamental truth.
We are lacking. Always less than our potential. Never fully reaching the goal. We cannot. It is not our destiny nor is it in our nature. We are made lonely and alone in order to obtain the ultimate conclusion, the hope that all life is precious, and to share in the unending and ultimate joy that awaits us at the final end of our long and arduous journey.
This is my burden. My crutch. I live with the knowledge. I know the truth.
I accept it.
Embrace it.
I have to believe it.
Everything I am, all that I have experienced, my fundamental and basic structure, my entire life, is based upon these principles. They guide me. Lead me. Challenge and equip me. Without these truths I am nothing. I do not exist.
I am who I am.
I have the gift.
My eyes raised slowly until they touched upon the low hanging moon in the endless sky. A full moon. Beautiful. Bright. Round. It lay, hovering, just above the horizon, in perfect reflection of the liquid silver surface of the water below it. I stood transfixed, in awe of its grace and luminous power.
My toes sank into the coarse sand beneath me. Each grain a rough and uneven part of a greater whole. Like souls. I crouched until my knees bent almost outward, dropping my hand onto the ground. Whoosh. I was caught off guard but not off balance.
