by Joe Ducie
“Exiled and alone...” I muttered. “Well, exiled no more.”
And we were all of us alone, clinging to a rock spinning through the star-strewn darkness and trying desperately to matter. To make some sort of everlasting mark, however true or awful that mark may be. Spinning endlessly alone—until we’re not alone, and we stumble into someone else trying to mark the chaos, and we cling tighter to that person than we ever have to the world itself. That spark in another, that resonation of the soul—a counterpoint in the dark—was more real and more important than the earth beneath our feet.
Annie and I had spun together across worlds and universes and dreams. But the chaos had swallowed her whole, absorbed her warmth, and scattered us apart as easily as we had spun, intoxicated, together.
She deserved a second chance, as did Clare, but one injustice at a time was the best I could do.
Some small amount of time, no more than a few minutes, marched idly past, and a touch of warmth and color returned to Annie’s skin. The blow to the head which had killed her faded away. Her eyes, which I had closed, fluttered, and her brow creased in a tiny frown against the early morning light.
“Declan?” Annie struggled to sit up, found she couldn’t, and fell back down into my arms. “Declan… what happened?”
“You bumped your head, sweet thing. But you’re okay now.”
“Oh…” Annie held her palm against her forehead. From what I remember of the experience, coming back to life hurt beyond words. “Oh my, that’s what happened. Why are we in the ocean?”
“Good question.” With a great deal of care, I stood and helped Annie to her feet. She managed it, keeping an arm slung around my shoulders. Two ragged immortals, now, barely able to stand. “Would you join me for breakfast, Annie?”
“I…” She frowned. “Did we win? We did, didn’t we?”
“Emissary’s dead. Rotting on the ocean floor. Scion is... gone. We won enough. For now.”
“Good.” Annie found her feet a little better. I held my forearm out for her to grasp. Her hand was warm against my arm. Warm and alive. She clung to it as if the world were not real, as though she were a traveler setting foot on distant shores after a long journey. “That’s good. In that case, I’m thinking bacon and egg muffins, and pancakes with syrup. Oh, and hash browns with coffee. Can we get that? Please?” Her stomach grumbled.
I found a smile after all, a little further down the road from tired and lonely. Sand crunched underfoot as we walked away from the sea. “Honey, you had me at bacon. But you’ll have to pay—a dragon ate my wallet.”
*~*~*~*
The End of
Book Two!
:)
Knight
Fall
The Reminiscent Exile: Book Three
Joe Ducie
OPENING SALVO – WORLD-WEARY ENOUGH TO FALL ASLEEP IN A NIGHTCLUB
Life is a dream for the wise,
a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich,
a tragedy for the poor.
— Sholom Aleichem
Chapter One
Broken Reason
Battered, bloody, and drenched from the rain, Emily Grace, the Immortal Queen of the Renegades, stood at my shop door. A white dress, speckled with crimson drops, clung to her body, and a sodden dark blue shawl covered her shoulders, strangling her neck like a scarf.
She offered me a pained smile, her sapphire eyes fighting tears, and took a single step over the threshold before collapsing into my arms. I caught her, mindful of her baby bump. The scent wafting up from her neck reminded me of ancient forests and creeks. A little river of blood ran down her throat, leaking from a cut hidden by the shawl.
“My life in your hands, Declan Hale,” she whispered, still smiling, and her eyelids fluttered closed.
“Em,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
Nope. She’d passed out.
I glanced out at Riverwood Plaza, but the small group of shops and apartments was dark and awash with fierce black raindrops the size of poker chips. I couldn’t see more of the plaza than drenched silhouettes.
Anyone—or anything—could have been hiding in the shadows. Renegade soldiers, Voidlings, assassins with a grudge… A sense of hooded eyes and unseen malice weighed on my shoulders. I slammed the door and flipped over the ‘Closed’ sign, which activated a bunch of invisible wards and enchantments against the night.
Using a quick invocation, I levitated Emily through the warren of towering books under gently glowing chandeliers, to my small writing alcove built into a window box overlooking Riverwood Plaza. Her perfume mingled with the heady scent of vanilla and old leather books. I laid her down on the couch there and cast a few diagnostic enchantments. White light, the fires at the heart of creation, danced within and around my fingertips.
She was alive—hurt, but alive.
A vicious crack of thunder punctured the world outside, and a flash of lightning shocked the plaza. In the shadows and rain, I thought I glimpsed elongated and tortured faces, screaming or laughing.
Just in your head… I told myself but didn’t quite believe.
I picked up my phone, checked the time—just after two in the morning—and called Sophie, because I sure couldn’t patch Em up. The phone rang a half dozen times before she answered, mumbling a sleepy hello.
“’Phie, it’s Declan. I need you at the shop right now. Someone you need to heal.”
She yawned down the line. “Should I bring Ethan?”
“Sure, bring him along. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what’s going on. Just be quick, okay? And careful. Use the back door. Bye.”
I ended the call and tossed the phone aside. Sophie was one of the best healers I’d ever known, and she was only getting better. I wasn’t even close to her skill level, but there were still one or two tricks I could play with until she arrived. I got down on my knees in front of Emily, between her and the coffee table, and gently placed my hand on her neck. Her skin was chilled, wet from the rain and the blood, but I could feel her breathing.
Smoky, ethereal light spun from my palm and between my fingers. I used a minor healing enchantment to seal the cut on her throat. Then I set to work on the bruises on her face, her split lip, her blackened eye, and the myriad shallow cuts covering her arms and hands.
Someone had carved a deliberate and wicked crescent moon into her left breast.
Anger began to swirl in my gut, making my heart race. Whoever did this has made an enemy tonight. I would spend considerable effort tracking them down and making them suffer. That kind of travesty could only be justly repaid in kind, and I was never averse to a bit of late-night wet work.
I was mindful not to use Willful enchantments around the swell of Emily’s belly and the baby. The kid was about ready to pop out of her any day now, but soaking him or her in Willful light, however well intentioned, could lead to complications.
I simply wasn’t skilled enough in healing to handle that. I needed Sophie.
As I worked, I couldn’t help but let out a wry chuckle at the thought of saving Emily’s life, not even half a year since she had stabbed me, cast me from a tower a mile above the old lost city of Atlantis, and killed me among the shards of the Infernal Clock. Funny old life, but it just wasn’t in me to let her suffer—the fact that she had shown up on my door in this state made me guess she knew that much about me, and probably a great deal more. For as long as I’d known her, Emily had always been a half-dozen steps ahead of the game. Something in her resonated in me, and I was drawn, circling ever closer to a flame she surely fanned often.
“Declan…” she muttered, eyes closed and a small frown creasing her brow. She gasped but didn’t wake, and then smiled. “A scar on my heart… to keep the Everlasting apart.”
With most of her cuts and bruises healed to the best of my Willful ability, I sat back on the coffee table, knocking aside a stack of pages from my endless, never-finished novel. Staring down at Emily, I rested my elbows on my knees and held my hands, soak
ed in her blood, over the dark jarrah wood floor. Small drops dripped from the tips of my fingers.
“What are you doing here, Em?” I asked softly.
It felt like the first move in a new game. Broken quill, but I was far too tired and far too sober for any such nonsense.
*~*~*~*
Sophie and her boyfriend, Ethan, arrived not a quarter of an hour later, letting themselves in through the back with their key—a heavy, ornate key tuned to bypass the wards and enchantments protecting my shop and what little shreds of sanity I had left against the Void. Broken quill, but I hated the Void, the dark, empty space between universes. After being pulled from bed at hours far too untoward, my friends looked tired in their hastily assembled jeans and T-shirts, which were sodden from the storm.
Emily was still unconscious, and I hadn’t moved from the coffee table. Her blood had dried on my hands, and Sophie—after a moment of sheer shock at seeing just who her patient was—shoved me aside, her hands already alight with silver smoke, and delved into the Immortal Queen.
I moved around the table and stood next to Ethan Reilly, my wayward apprentice.
“Boss,” he said, stifling a yawn. “What kind of time you call this?”
“Do you know who she is?” I gestured to Emily. Her feet, encased in a pair of thin leather sandals, pressed against the arm of my couch. The toenail on her big toe had been torn away—a wound I had missed.
Tortured, most definitely. By someone or something rather adept.
Ethan shrugged. “She’s from the realms of Forget, I take it?”
“Yes.” I chucked. “Oh yes. Her name—what I know her by, at least—is Emily Grace. She’s the leader of the Renegades. Their Immortal Queen.”
“Oh dear,” Ethan said. “The one that knifed you good and proper and booted you from Atlantis. Shouldn’t you be, you know, arresting her?”
I ran a bloody hand back through my hair and sighed. As of two and a half months ago, my exile of five years had been rescinded for services rendered to the crown, and I was officially a Knight Infernal again—in name, at least, at the lowly rank of Guardian.
None of the ruling class or my old comrades had seen fit to welcome me back to Ascension City just yet. For good reason, I suppose. I was loved and hated by the populations of a hundred worlds. Mostly hated. Perhaps more so than the Renegades during the height of the Tome Wars.
The Knights and the Renegades did not get along, but we hadn’t really been in a state of open war for the best part of six years. My doing, my fault… mostly. Although I hadn’t been back to Forget and Ascension City since my reinstatement, I’d heard rumors that my pardon had stirred a lot of resentment among the Renegades, even caused a few minor conflicts in the outer territories. Understandable, given the sordid reasons for my exile in the first place and the manner in which I’d been dragged back into action twice this last year.
Oh, yes, and perhaps because you killed their king not too long ago, nattered an annoying voice in the back of my mind. Emily’s husband.
“Arrest her? I’d much rather go for a drink,” I told Ethan, fiddling with the strap of the patch I wore over my blind left eye. “How is she, Sophie?”
Sophie frowned and flicked her auburn ponytail over her shoulder. The glow of her hands, pressed against Emily’s baby bump, flickered and died. “Well enough, as far as I can tell. I think she’s just exhausted. There’s no internal damage that I could find. And I think…” She bit her lip. “I think the baby’s okay. I’ve never really delved into someone who’s pregnant before. It’s… intense. Two heartbeats.”
“Thank you for coming.” I released a long sigh and held up my bloodstained hands. “Can you hang around while I go clean up?”
“Sure. Did she say anything to you about why she’s here?” ’Phie licked her lips. “This feels dangerous.”
Already walking over to the spiral staircase that led up to the second floor and the washroom, I cast a quick look over my shoulder. “Nothing that made any sense. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Chapter Two
Storm Sense
When I went back downstairs, the wind howling through Riverwood Plaza shook the storefront of my shop and rattled the windows. Rain slammed into the glass, and thunder rumbled overhead.
Ethan was staring out of the window in my writing alcove, an arm resting lightly around Sophie’s shoulders. Worry masked his face by the light of the chandeliers.
“Everything okay, sunshine?” I asked.
“Thought I… saw something.” He shook his head. “Wild storm out there.”
I moved behind the counter, past the dusty ill-used cash register, and rested my arms on the old mahogany. “What did you see?”
Ethan shrugged and offered me a sheepish grin. “Faces… faces in the rain.”
I nodded, reached below the counter, and retrieved my sleek single-barreled shotgun. The metal of the silver barrel gleamed in the half-light, reflecting the evanescent glow from above. The heavy weapon carried a strong, reassuring aroma of gun oil.
“Mate, what the hell?” Ethan spluttered.
Sophie looked at me and raised a single eyebrow. “You’ve gone robust.”
I gave them both a wink and punched the sale key on the old register. The cash drawer sprang open on rusty hinges, and where the notes and coins belonged were a variety of colorful and, in some cases, otherworldly shotgun shells. I settled on the cache of clear crystal shells, loaded with a mix of star iron, magnesium, and tiny rune-inscribed ball bearings. The fancy shells cost a pretty penny in raw materials, but damned if they didn’t punch a hole the size of a basketball in anything unfortunate enough to stray in front of the gun’s business end.
Once the gun was loaded with eight rounds, I pumped one into the chamber and loaded the pockets of my waistcoat with a few extra shells, three on each side, standing to attention like good little soldiers.
“So what’s out there?” Sophie asked calmly. She looked down at Emily, still unconscious but frowning, as if she were having bad dreams. “Is it whatever did this?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Faces in the rain… Stinks of the Void, doesn’t it?” I chuckled and held up one of the clear shells. “Nasty mix of alien elements and Infernal rune-encrusted bearings. Vrail sent me the design a few months ago, after what happened with Scion. Thought maybe Detective Brie would like something with a bit more kick to it than her service firearm, seeing how she’s insisting on hanging around.”
A not altogether unpleasant situation, as Annie Brie was all kinds of lovely, but it was hard to smile when our current friendship was based on a rather significant… omission of truth. Annie had died mere months ago, facing down Scion with me on Diablo Beach, and I’d brought her back to life with a petal of the Infernal Clock. A method of resurrection that offered certain protections and, in ways I didn’t understand, immortality. Not invulnerability, however.
Funnily enough, I had Emily to thank for that petal.
I had not yet told Annie I’d brought her back to life—she assumed she was just knocked out. Yet by doing so, I had tied her harder to the realms of Forget and the malevolent old gods, the Everlasting, than ever. Fair to say, I sensed such a revelation would not go over too well.
Thinking on Annie made something in my mind spin toward Joondalup, about fifteen minutes down the road. I felt a surge of… warmth… rush through me and knew that Annie was working late at the police station, as clearly as if she’d called to tell me. That knowing came from some connection through the petals of the Infernal Clock, the broken immortality that we both shared, and I got the feeling Annie often had glimpses of me, as well. We each knew where the other was, if we concentrated hard enough.
It had been a few weeks since I last saw my young detective. Safe to guess she was avoiding me, but that couldn’t last, not with our newfound connection. Her desire for answers would eventually outweigh fear of those same answers.
I missed her. Funny, in a tragic kind of way, how quickly someone
could come into my life and completely fill an unfathomable need. A need I had not really desired since the night I forfeited my shadow.
“So magic shotguns, is it?” Ethan clapped his hands together, pulling me from my thoughts, the sense of knowing where Annie was vanished for the moment. “Sure, why not? You got a spare?”
“You two stay here with Emily,” I said calmly and lifted the shotgun to rest on my shoulder. The wind still whipped the rain against my windows, and a feeling that may have been an anxious sort of dread gripped my heart. “I’ll go see what all the ruckus is outside. Faces in the rain, huh…”
I moved across the shop, through the book-strewn labyrinth of shelves, and paused before the front door. Steeling my resolve—a wearied kind of indifference, really—I flipped over the ward sign, grasped the handle, and stepped out into the wild night, making sure to reset the wards behind me.
The downpour soaked me in the first half dozen steps I took away from the relative safety of my shop. My fine leather shoes submerged in a flow of water about a quarter foot deep that ran down the plaza toward Sugar Lane.
I held the shotgun at the ready, barrel pointed just below the horizon, finger to the side of the trigger, and meandered over to the wide-rimmed marble fountain in the heart of Riverwood Plaza, putting myself at ease on the rim of the fountain and on display for anything that wanted to try its luck and take a bite.
The night was cold—colder than cold, heading toward freezing. In a few hours, dawn would break. Something told me I was going to be worlds away before then—call it intuition, but I’d played the game before. I shivered and watched my breath shimmer on the air, dance in the rain.
And all at once, the streetlamps went out, plunging Riverwood Plaza into darkness.
Well, that’s an easy trick…
I snapped my fingers, and a burst of sunlight exploded from my palm, coalescing into a sphere of pure, white energy. Bait for the hook. I cast the sphere into the air, high above the fountain, and caught sight of a thousand tormented faces, screeching like bats on the wind, before something slick and black—tentacles of dark, seething oil—swallowed my light whole.
