“Laquazzean come from many different paths—some are born to others, like Thas was to another pair who were lost to the darkness. Still, some like me are made. They are basically more powerful than the gods of almost any civilization or Kind. Mother Nature is one, Father Time is another. The three Fates are some of the oldest that we know about.”
“Why you? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Of course not! I think that’s why we are here.” Aureliana laughed. “I’m not one hundred percent certain why I was chosen, Cassandra. I was told it was because of my bravery and my willingness to care for motherless children. But there are many such like me out there. I still do not know the full depth of the reasons I was chosen. I don’t believe it is my time to know. Yet. You were chosen for a specific reason, as well.”
“Me. But why?” She wasn’t anyone special, and she knew that. She was just a young woman who had an affinity for plants.
“Because of the sweetness of your soul, your love of all things that grow, and because of your humility. And because without those things to check him, Nalik would grow in strength too quickly and too deeply. Until the powers within him would eventually eat at his soul. And it would take far too many of us to stop him. Many worlds could be destroyed if he was left unfettered.” Aureliana led her toward a small cottage at the end of the lane. “This is where Phaenna lives. Come, I think she has been expecting us.”
Cass tried to process what she was hearing. But she couldn’t; she definitely didn’t understand. Aureliana pushed open the door and stepped inside. “It’s just as I remember. And she’s left some drinks for us on the table.”
“Where is she?” Who was this she? Phaenna wasn’t a name she recognized.
“I think she is busy right now.” Aureliana waved a hand and one of the drinks began to stir itself. She laughed. “I wondered if I’d be able to do that.”
She wasn’t the least bit nervous and if Cass hadn’t already known, liked, and trusted her, she would have been much more of a wreck than she was. “Aureliana, I really do not understand.”
“Sit. We will talk. Your future changes today.”
“How?”
“You will be as if my child, Cass. We will grow and learn together always. Until the time we are all called to fight this war. To defend those who cannot. You, me, Ren…Nalik. Others. There will be others who come to join us. From my Kind, yours. Kinds we know nothing about yet.”
“I…can’t. I can’t do it. I hate war, violence. Destruction. I can’t fight a war. I can’t.”
“And that soul is why you must. We, Ren and I, and the others to come, most of us will be warriors, fighters. We need those with hearts such as yours to remind us of what it is we battle for. One thing I have learned long ago, even before becoming one of the ascension is that there must be balance in all things. There can’t be winter without summer. Dark without light. Love without hate. Hurting without compassion.” Aureliana leveled a look at her. “Nalik without Cassandra.”
Cass shook her head. She understood what Aureliana was saying—in principle, anyway—but she still didn’t understand why her.
Aureliana could apparently read her mind. “I don’t think any of us will fully understand why us until it is time. A bit of a non-answer, but it’s all I got. You have some questions you’ll need to answer. But first there is something you will need to see.”
She sat her mug back on the table. “Drink. You’ll need to drink before we go. And we have a bit of time before, as well. Relax, Cassandra. All will be well. We’ll both understand—in time.”
Chapter 52
Cass drank the strange liquid, completely unsure what it was. It had a vague mint taste and wasn’t unpleasant. “What is this?”
“Some kind of magic potion, I guess. I haven’t figured it out. I think it has healing properties. I’ve had it before and so has Ren. You will drink it and be fine. The babe, too. We have to go for another walk.”
“Where to?”
Aureliana thought for a moment. “The past, I think.”
Not what she’d expected. “I want to go home.”
“You will. But this is for Nalik. Can you do it?”
Could she? She closed her eyes and thought of him for a moment. The way he’d kept her safe over the last few weeks. How he had looked strolling into Jushua’s camp wearing black and red, and carrying his sword. The way he had held her after they’d made love the first time. Cass stood. “I can.”
Aureliana hugged her in approval. “Then let’s go.”
Cass took the hand the other woman offered her and stood. “I’m ready.”
As soon as the words left her mouth the cottage around them spun, when it stopped they were outside somewhere. Aureliana pulled Cass up from where the younger woman had fallen. “You ok?”
“Warn me next time, please.” She was shaky and felt sick, but the only choice she had was to keep going, to see this whatever it was through. “Where are we?”
“South America. About seven hundred years ago, I think. We’re going over here.” Aureliana led Cass over a small hill. A village waited at the bottom. “They can’t hear us or anything, so we can walk right through the village with no problem.”
“Why are we here?”
“I think you are about to meet Nalik’s family.”
“I’ve met them, I think. Some of them.”
“His mother and father and cousin, maybe. And of course you’ve met me. We’re first cousins, Nal and I. He’s always been one of my favorites, you know. I’m glad I get to do this for him. Our mothers are sisters.” Aureliana walked up to a large adobe structure. “Here. This is our grandfather’s home. He was Equan before Nalik took over six hundred years ago. He hated Nal, I think. Because Nal was his heir and would be replacing him. Aodhan hadn’t been born yet. There’s about a hundred years between Nal and the others, you know.” Aureliana stepped inside, Cass followed.
There was a man in there, and he looked a lot like Nalik. There was a boy, too, and Cass knew immediately that it was Nalik. The boy wore only a cloth around his hips. He was around nine or so, Cass guessed. His hair was filthy and his skin covered in bruises. Two women were in a nearby corner playing some sort of game. They were laughing and chatting. Cass studied them—she recognized Nalik’s mother.
“Mine, too.”
The boy was crying, saying something in another language. The grandfather didn’t seem to care—he reached out and struck Nalik across the cheek. Nalik landed near his mother and aunt. They looked at him with annoyance. The boy regained his footing and faced his grandfather, skinny shoulders back and chin high.
The grandfather spoke, and for some reason Cass could understand his words. “You will show no weakness, no kindness to the humans. They will turn on us all, do you understand? You will lead our people, yet you snivel over human friends. No more.”
The grandfather continued to hit him, again and again. His mother did nothing to help him. “Where is his father?”
“Outside with the other men and probably my father. They will not care what happens to Nalik.” Aureliana waved her hands and the adobe building spun like the cottage had. Once the space around them cleared Aureliana started walking again. “My grandfather owned him from the moment he declared Nal his heir. His parents wiped their hands of him then.”
“Yet they lived with him in Colorado.”
“Of course they did. Nalik had made his House beyond wealthy within one hundred years of becoming Equan. And my aunt loved status that being his mother brought her. They followed Nalik when he pulled half the Black House to the Northern continent four hundred years or so ago.”
“Why did he let them?”
“Because they had the one thing Nalik loved above all else. His young brother.”
They were in the American west, now, weren’t they? “Dardanos?”
“Yes. Just a camp then. Primitive to some, but Nal, Aodhan, and the others made it work. Rydere was dhar of this group by then. But he was y
oung, and many felt Nal should have been. But Nal was loyal to Rydere from the very beginning.”
There he was, in the midst of a group of people near the center of a town. They were laying stone of some sort. Nalik worked without a shirt, his tattoos catching her eye quickly. “What do those mean, on his skin?”
“He was chosen at the age of fifty to become a Predatoi. A demon hunter. Ironic, isn’t it?” They watched as Nalik, Aodhan, Cormac, Theo, and Rydere worked alongside some men, digging and rolling stones into place. “This is the main lobby of what would become the resort. It’s gone now, Cass. It caught fire a few minutes ago. But watch them. There’s Iavius. Before Kindara.”
What struck Cass the most was the way he wasn’t working as hard as the other men. “Why isn’t he working like the others?”
“Compared to Nalik and the other men, Iavius was…well…and do not ever tell Kindara this…Iavius was pampered and spoiled, even in the times in which they lived. And Nalik was just as responsible. Iavius had a good heart, but it took him a while to mature into a good man. He is very young here, less than one hundred I think. Kindara hadn’t joined the tribe, yet. She was still with her mother and father in Europe. She joins them two hundred years before Iavius dies, I think. I am on the next wagon train. It was the first time I met Nal, by the way. I had heard about him, and I was terrified. But he loved me too. Because I was family, and I was Aodhan’s. I’ll love him forever for that.”
The woods around them spun. This time Cass stayed on her feet. When the spinning stopped, Aureliana had Cass’s hand tightly in hers. “The next part will be hard, Cassandra. The hardest yet. I’ll hold your hand and help you through it.”
Cass nodded. Then her breath caught. She was face to face with a young girl, probably only four or five years younger than herself. She looked so much like Nalik and was beautiful.
“Erastine. His sister. She was seventeen here.”
She was in a cage, and there were cuts and bruises all over her mostly naked body. She gave her last breaths as they watched.
Others were watching too.
A man was laughing. Cass turned toward that man. She knew who she would see, and she wasn’t wrong. “He was so, so evil.”
“Every Kind has its evil. Every Kind. There must be people to stop them. That is Nalik screaming now. He knew when her spirit left her body. He was holding on for her sake, but now she is gone. Iavius is already dead. Kindara isn’t.” With just a wave of a hand they were at Kindara’s side. She was naked and bleeding, her belly rounded. There was wailing and screaming, banging and yelling coming from somewhere in another hall. But it didn’t matter. All of Cass’s attention was focused on Kindara.
She was praying, pleading to the goddess to save her babe and let Kindara die in his place.
The door burst open, and men rushed in. Cass jumped back as Cormac ran right through her. She could almost feel him passing through her spirit. He dropped to his sister’s side, as Barlaam started to heal her.
Nalik was there, too, and Cass cried out at what he looked like. How was he still alive? He was so thin she could count his vertebrate through his skin. He was covered with blood and bruises. His hair was singed around his head. “Nalik…”
She tried to step toward him but stopped. She could not comfort him here.
Kindara saw him and fought her own brother’s hands. “You! You should have died in his place! You had nothing to care about, but he had everything I will hate you for this until the day you die. May the goddess curse you for your sins! You should be dead.”
“And the goddess forsook my very pleas for that very thing. I am sorry, Kindara. So fucking sorry.”
Nalik stood and walked out of the room, head high and back as straight as possible. Cass followed him, angrier at Kindara than she had ever been anyone in her life.
Nalik made it down the hall one stumbling step at a time. Others were there. Someone shouted his name, but Nalik didn’t turn around.
He just kept walking.
Thirty feet outside the door he collapsed into Theo’s arms. Theo and Aodhan carried him away.
Chapter 53
Cass fell down and cried into her hands. Aureliana picked her up. Cass looked at her. “Why did you show me this?”
“Because there is one more thing you have to see. Brace yourself; you’re about to get a view from the driver’s seat.” The world spun again. This time Cass recognized where they landed. “We’re in his head, kiddo. Enjoy this rare opportunity. There have been a few times I’d have loved to jump inside Ren’s head to figure him out.”
There she was. Cass easily recognized herself, standing just on the edge of the goldfish pond. It was her first night there—she recognized the dress she was wearing. She’d ruined it that night, grinding soil into the skirt.
Nalik had been the one watching her that night, wasn’t he? She’d felt someone with her, and had known that despite what her sister and the others had said at dinner, she was perfectly safe in the gardens. Because he watched.
And that he had been Nalik. She’d never put it together before; had almost forgotten it.
“Just watch what happens and listen to what he thinks and feels.”
The humming drew him to the grotto first. The sound was beautiful, and Nalik Black wasn’t used to beautiful things. Not anymore. The last thirty years had been filled with the dark, the ugly, and the most rotten that either his Kind or human could devise.
Cass hurt for what he was feeling in that moment.
He could feel the filth on his soul from what he’d been doing for the last few months. He’d poured over every file and scrap of information he could find in the remains of that bastard Leo Taniss’s laboratory searching for the files that contained information about him.
He’d found nothing. Nothing that pertained to his family or those he knew at all. And that more than the royal summons from a man he’d once considered one of his closest friends was what had brought him back to the place that had been his home for so many years.
Until thirty years ago.
Now he just returned to Dardanos when he had to. An Equan had obligations to his family House, after all. And there was nothing stronger than loyalty to the Black name. It had been beaten into him at a very young age that he would bear responsibility for every Dardaptoan who carried the Black name or wore the scarf color of his House. He carried their safety, and until he stepped down from his duties as Equan he would continue to meet his obligations.
Once he was dead that burden would pass to his next heir—whoever that currently was. Since his brother’s death thirty years ago, Nalik didn’t know who had taken that place.
And he hadn’t asked.
Let the unlucky bastard deal with the fall out of Nalik’s death on his own. It wouldn’t be his concern, after that, would it?
He pushed the hateful thought aside, berating himself. He was their leader, he had to prepare the next to take his place.
It was the way it should be done. The way his grandfather should have trained him up in the ways of the Dardaptoan people when it became clear to the prognosticators that Nalik would be leading a new branch of Blacks to the New World so many centuries ago.
Instead he’d been beaten bloody more times than he could count, while the older male had sought to train him to protect their people. Every time the youth Nalik had fallen to the ground the senior Nalik had whipped him harder.
An Equan had to be strong, had to fight every adversity and adversary to lead.
It was only when young Nalik had picked up the sword and learned the art that was warfare had his grandfather been satisfied.
Nalik had learned his lessons well.
No matter how much he wanted to die, he wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Until his House was in order.
He followed the humming to the grotto his sister had loved so much as a child. How many times in her short seventeen years had he sat on the rocks and watched over her as she had swam and played in the pool?
He could still hear her laughter on the night wind.
?? Had had a beautiful laugh, so full of love. He and his brother had sought to protect that laugh, that heart of great beauty and hope.
And because of his failure to protect them all she was gone. Bled to death on the floor of Taniss’s slaughterhouse, at Nalik’s feet. While he’d been helpless to protect her. His hand—the one not scarred and branded with Taniss’s inventory number—dropped to the handle of his grandfather’s sword.
He smelled Taniss blood. His heightened senses, strong before Taniss’s vile experiments, had only grown more powerful with whatever it was Taniss had done to him—had him picking out multiple strains of the bastard’s blood in the very place he’d least expected it. Taniss blood—and most of it female.
Damn them all.
He struggled with the urge to find those females and wipe them from this place. It was a simple matter of killing a female of any Kind, especially human. If he had been a different kind of male he would have. And felt completely justified. Erastine’s face swam in his mind. She had been so young.
It took a moment for the fog to clear from his mind; at least enough for him to see the young girl kneeling by the flowers. She wore dark clothing, and that hid her some. But he should have seen her. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, her hair long and so dark even he could not see the true color of it in the night.
She was thin, fragile. Beautiful. And not much older than his sister had been at her death.
The humming was coming from her. He fought the urge to step closer, to touch her.
To see if she was real.
He heard rustling in the bushes and he forced himself not to pull his sword. He recognized the scent of the male now. Heard the soft sounds of a woman being loved by her mate.
And he smelled even more Taniss blood.
Aodhan’s mate was a Taniss, too, then. Damn him. Damn them both. Taniss.
Out Of The Darkness Page 21
