A Dark and Stormy Knight

by Bridget Essex

  I pinch the skin of my arm. Hard. And it hurts.

  Okay.

  This isn’t a dream.

  I step forward then, and I place my hand on Charaxus’ hand, the same one that’s gripping the doctor, her leather-gloved fingers making indents in his lab coat. When she glances my way, I shake my head warningly once, twice, and—surprising no one more than me—she releases the doctor, allowing her hands to fall to her sides, though they’re clenched into tight fists.

  “Lady, I don’t know anything,” the doctor mutters, and quick as a flash, he’s running past us, making his hurried escape through the automatic doors.

  “Zombies, huh?” asks the bandanna guy; he folds his arms over his expansive, plaid-covered chest. “I always figured that’s how we’d go. It’s 'cause of all them liberals, of course. Am I right?”

  I stare at the guy long and hard, and then I realize that, though I want to challenge his prejudices, now’s really not the time. “Come on,” I whisper to Charaxus, and then I’m tugging her after me, curling my fingers under one of the metal plates on her arm. With quick steps, I guide her through the doors and toward my car, which is still parked right in front of the hospital.

  Charaxus follows me, and she doesn’t protest until we’re outside of the hospital. Then she lifts her nose to the air, a worried expression crossing her face. “But something’s gone…” It seems as if Charaxus is about to say “wrong,” but she stops herself at the last moment. “Something’s…strange,” she begins again, and then she pauses on the sidewalk near my car, and with all of that metal and height and muscle, no amount of my tugging is going to move her.

  She looks down at me, seemingly exasperated: she breathes out a curt sigh. I watch her expectantly as more screams filter out of the hospital. I would, personally, like to get the hell out of Dodge. But I wait.

  Finally, Charaxus frowns deeply, and she says, “I do not know why the spell worked as it did. It was only supposed to heal me. Not all of the other people in there. And it was supposed to exhaust you.” She rakes her blue eyes over me, brow furrowed, her expression perplexed. “But you appear…well,” she settles on, her mouth drawn into a thin line as her eyes flash, and, again, her gaze roves over me.

  There’s a sizzling moment of connection as she searches my eyes…

  But that might just be the adrenaline coursing through my veins. It’s a little hard to figure out what I'm feeling right now.

  I open my mouth, and words start to spill out: “I’m well, yeah, but I am kind of tired. Well, exhausted. I did just lug you out of the river,” I smile weakly, but her expression remains still and severe. “Look,” I sigh, “I have no idea what just happened in there, but whatever it is, it spooked a doctor into running away. And there’s all sorts of screaming. Dead people coming back to life… And, I mean, you’re…apparently okay now. When you were dying before.” I blink and wave my arms in the air. “None of this makes sense.”

  “No,” she says, and she sighs again, arms crossed, her feet hip-width apart. It’s a strong stance, and with the wind blowing, cool and soft, through the streets, her hair moves, soft tendrils of black gusting over her shoulders.

  I shiver a little. “Okay, one of my top-ten fears is a zombie apocalypse. So...” I glance toward the hospital doors nervously. “Can we just go back home and figure stuff out there?”

  “Zombies?” Charaxus asks, her head angled to one side, but then her voice lowers. “…home?”

  “Yeah. My place. I live near the river, where I rescued you,” I say, pointing my chin in the general direction of the Ceres.

  “Oh. Yes, take me there,” she says, her voice sounding weary. “I need to go back there. I need to find it.”

  “Find what?” I ask, mystified.

  She lifts her chin, her eyes bright. “Something important.”

  “Okay, okay.” I place my hands at the small of her back and urge her to fold herself into my Beetle's passenger seat. “Sure. Don’t tell me,” I say in a soft huff to myself as I walk around behind the car.

  I glance back at the hospital through the automatic doors, and there’s a guy walking, dazed, out of the corridor leading into the surgery area. He’s wearing a hospital gown, and he’s close enough that I can see that there's something attached to the big toe of his bare foot…

  “Oh, my God,” I mutter to myself as I stare at the morgue tag.

  The guy peers out through the automatic doors, his eyes wide, his mouth formed into an O of astonishment, while the people in the waiting room start to shriek and move away from him, knocking over chairs.

  “Oooookay,” I tell myself hoarsely, drawing in a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. Okay...” My hands are shaking as I open my car door and slam it, sitting down in the driver’s seat and stabbing the key into the ignition. “Buckle up,” I tell my armored co-pilot, and then I’m peeling out of the emergency room loop, tires screeching.

  “Buckle what?” asks the woman seated beside me, eyebrow raised.

  “Um...” At the stoplight, I reach across her, pulling out the seat belt from the passenger side and drawing it over her chest. It's only when I'm buckling it into place that I realize how close we are, our heads bent together, nearly touching. My cheeks flush.

  The light changes, and after a moment of driving, I risk a sidelong glance at her, but she’s already staring out the window, up at the few stars peeking through the cloud cover overhead.

  We might be in for another storm tonight.

  Chapter 5: Starry, Starry Night

  I pull into the parking lot of the Ceres and shut the car off before turning in my seat to face my passenger.

  “Okay,” I say, clearing my throat, voice low. “Who are you? I mean, really?”

  The woman I rescued, the woman I pulled from the Buffalo River, the woman wearing full, spiky armor turns to look at me, her pale face grave. There isn't enough light to fully illuminate her expression, but my vision has adjusted enough to see that her eyes are enormous in the dark, and I know she’s looking at me.

  “I am Charaxus,” she tells me in that low growl, “and I am the vice queen of Arktos, which is on Agrotera.”

  I’m silent for a long moment as I muddle through the unfamiliar words. “Agrotera,” I repeat. “It’s… You’re telling me that’s another world. That you’re from another world.” I’m hoping, desperately, that this is not what she’s telling me. It’s a thin hope…and it’s dashed in the next heartbeat.

  “Yes,” she replies simply, no hesitation.

  Another world.

  Another world.

  “How…” I begin, but then I start over, shaking my head. “Okay, what happened…” My voice cracks, though I'm trying to keep it calm and steady. “What happened at the hospital?” I lick my lips, shift my gaze. “What happened when you touched me? All those colors? And then—”

  “Mara.” Charaxus is silent for a full minute before she unbuckles her seat belt expertly and shifts her shoulders to look out the front window of the car. Her jaw is firm, set. “You were kind to save me from the river,” she says gravely, “but you need have nothing more to do with me. I will disappear, and you will never see me again.” She turns to look at me, her eyes softer now, and she breathes out into the stillness, a soft sigh. “Thank you, Mara, for your kindness.”

  We stare at one another in the cramped confines of my Beetle. The car is ready-made for intimate moments, but this moment in particular is so strange, so unexpected. Charaxus is close, right beside me, and after everything that we’ve gone through together, confronting death itself…

  I’m a little confused.

  Yeah, I’m attracted to her, and I think she might be attracted to me. The way she’s looking at me... The way her eyes trace the curve of my cheek, my chin, down to my shoulders, my breasts… She’s giving me the once over, and though her eyes are still soft, there’s a fire within them, burning low.

  “Wait,” I tell her, and I place my fingertips on the metal plate over her forearm.
She stares down at my fingers, and I stare too, because in that moment…

  There was a spark. Like, an honest-to-goodness, genuine spark. Like static shock. Like electricity.

  Overhead, lightning explodes.

  The stars are lost. Another storm is brewing.

  “What’s going on, Charaxus?” I ask her quietly, but her jaw is tight, and she’s glancing sidelong at the door, her brow furrowing as she stares at the door handle.

  I’m about to say something else, but then Charaxus is lifting her hand, is placing it against the car door as if she’s bracing herself for something, her palm flat, her eyes closed.

  And though she wasn’t touching the door’s handle at all…the door opens.

  I sit there, my mouth open as Charaxus pushes the door wide, and she steps out of my car, into the night, where ominous clouds build overhead and another rumble of thunder growls along the horizon.

  I grab my purse from the backseat, and then I’m vaulting out of the car and running after her. Charaxus has very long legs, so when she walks, she covers distances a basketball player would probably be jealous of. I race to catch up, and I manage to by the time we reach the edge of the river.

  “Hey, where are you going?” I call after her as she aims right for the escarpment.

  “Home,” she snaps back over her shoulder. “I must go home.”

  “But you can't just—” I begin, and then my words are cut off when I run into Charaxus. Literally. She suddenly froze in place, and because I wasn’t looking where I was going, I ran into her, slamming into her metal-clad back. She hardly seems to feel the impact: she’s too tall and muscular to budge an inch, and with the laws of physics working like they do, that means I start to fall backward. I’m falling a little like a cartoon character who just ran into a brick wall, arms flailing at my sides.

  But Charaxus turns, and with a single, graceful movement—a pivot on the balls of her feet, wrapping an arm around my waist with a gentleness and strength that leaves me breathless—she catches me.

  I still can't breathe as I stare up at her; the moment stands, suspended. She holds me in her arms, gazing at me with eyes so blue that they seem to glow in the dark.

  We remain this way as her lips, so subtly, turn up at the corners.

  “You find it hard to believe that I’m from another world?” she asks, and her voice is surprisingly soft as she helps me stand upright.

  Flustered, shaky on my feet, I draw in a deep breath—and then I opt for honesty. “Yes,” I tell her. “It can't be true.”

  “Why not?”

  “People appearing from other worlds...” I gesture helplessly. “That only happens in stories. Not in real life.”

  She arches a brow. “But your mind does not know how to explain what you've experienced. What you saw when I, and the others—including the deceased—were healed.” She indicates the hole in her leather shirt.

  The light is dim, but Charaxus has such pale skin she could probably be seen glowing from outer space. So it’s fairly easy to see her skin through the hole in her shirt and—wait. Does she have a six-pack? Like, the kind of abs you only see in fitness magazines?

  That’s…pretty damn hot.

  I wrench my gaze away, force myself to meet her eyes. She’s standing there with her arms crossed, and she almost looks smug, her small smile slanted after she caught me staring.

  “My mind,” I say, clearing my throat, “has no idea who you are or what you’re doing here. I saved your life, and then…” I rock back on my heels a little, frowning. “It’s just been a weird night,” I finish, breathing out.

  “For you,” she murmurs, one dark brow raised, “and me, too.” She turns on her heel again, and she stalks the rest of the way to the edge of the escarpment and the metal wall lining the river.

  “Okay. So you’re from another world,” I say flatly, not a question. I stand there, trying to breathe evenly—trying and failing—before I follow after her again. I want her to turn around and yell, “Just kidding!” with a mischievous grin. I want cameramen to pop up out from the shadows. I want Charaxus to tell me that they’ve been filming a pilot for a new fantasy/reality show, and I’ve been duped into believing (with super-fancy, state-of-the-art special effects) that magic is real, that this woman is a vice queen—whatever the hell that is—from another world.

  But that’s not what happens at all.

  Instead, Charaxus turns to face me, and I stop running just in time to avoid colliding with her chest plate. We stare at one another. My breathing is labored, my legs are weak, and, suddenly, a couple of things happen all at once.

  One: Again, I feel as if I’ve met her before. There's this nagging feeling in my heart that she’s familiar to me, that I know her from somewhere...but where?

  Two: She reaches for me. I stand there, perfectly still, as she reaches up with her gloved hand and brushes her leather-clad fingers over the outside of my right ear, the soft shush of her caress enough to make me shiver. It’s such a surprising gesture, and such an intimate one, that I stand speechless as she caresses me.

  But just as quickly, her warm fingers leave my skin, and now she’s holding something up in front of her right eye.

  It’s a small glittering star, as silver as the real ones far, far above our heads, hiding on the other side of the cloud cover.

  “What—” I begin, but she shakes her head, holds the star out to me, and I let her drop it into my palm. I stare down at the glittering thing, a little spellbound.

  “I took it from your ear,” she tells me companionably, and then, when I wrinkle my brow at her, she shakes her head a little ruefully. “I used to do that trick for…for my little brother,” she says, her jaw tight. “It amazed him. It was the first magic I ever learned.” She rakes her fingers back through her hair as she shakes her head, sighs. “I wanted to prove myself to you,” she says then, and her words come out frustrated.

  “But that’s just a simple trick,” I tell her, my voice hollow as my fingers curl over the glittery star in my palm, feeling the sharpness against my skin. “Anyone can do that. Use a little misdirection, slide the star out of your sleeve…or glove,” I say, waving to her hand. “My grandfather used to do this trick when I was a kid. He’d take coins out of my ears, make me laugh.” I lick my lips, swallow. “It’s not real magic,” I say flatly.

  Charaxus raises a brow, says nothing in reply. When the silence has gone on almost too long, she lifts her chin, her eyes sparkling in the dark as she holds my gaze. “Look in your hand, Mara,” she whispers to me then.

  I lift up my hand, uncurl my fingers. The same glittery star is still lying in my palm.

  But as I watch…it becomes something else.

  That tiny, glitter-covered star starts to ascend from my hand. I stare at it, my mouth open, because the star rises until it’s about six inches above my hand. I don’t move a muscle: I stand there, transfixed, staring at the star hovering in midair.

  Slowly, the star stands up straight on its two little star legs, and it begins to rotate as if it’s in a display case at a Swarovski store, sparkling like crazy. And then it begins to glow.

  It looks as if it's about to catch fire.

  The star spins, glows, hovers above my palm... And then it begins to ascend until it’s about ten feet above our heads.

  Quickly, brightly, it shoots up into the sky: a reverse shooting star aiming for the heavens.

  I gape as the star hits the cloud cover overhead. And instantly, everywhere, there is a shower of stars—little shooting stars sprinkling down over us. They float to the ground softly, slowly, almost like snowflakes, trailing light behind them until they hit the ground… And one by one, they each wink out and disappear.

  All of the light is gone, the star is gone, and through the afterlight streaking my vision, I stare up at Charaxus…enchanted.

  “I am who I say I am,” she tells me simply, her eyes hooded, her mouth downturned. For a long moment, she says nothing more. And then she murmurs
to me, her voice low, smooth: “Do you believe me?”

  “Yes,” I whisper. I don’t even think about it; I give her the word immediately.

  Yes. Yes, I believe her.

  We’re standing close together. If I reached up, I could brush the black hair out of her eye again, could trail my fingers over her face. Why am I thinking this? Why is this feeling stirring inside of me, so deep, so primal?

  I haven’t felt like this in a long time.

  Something is waking up inside of me. And, if I’m honest, it’s been waking up for hours. Ever since I rescued her from the river.

  I was attracted to Charaxus from the first moment I saw her. And now, standing so near to her…

  No, I need to focus. She's from another world. I need to understand what that means. My whole universe has to reshape itself around this new piece of information.

  But I stare up at her, and I see the curve of her cheek, her jaw, her mouth...and I just want to kiss her.

  I want to kiss her fiercely.

  So, for a long minute, two minutes, three minutes...neither of us says a word. We stare at one another beneath the afterlight of the falling stars. Charaxus’ mouth is open, and as she leans toward me, I’m surprised (or am I?) that she’s curling her gloved fingers around my wrist gently, as if she’s touching something fragile…or as if she’s uncertain as to whether she should be doing this. The leather warms my skin, and my heart rate skyrockets, and then she’s leaning toward me, her eyes sparking with something raw, real: every bone in my body responds to her, every muscle, every tendon, every drop of blood racing through me…

  But at that moment, when I think our mouths are about to meet, when I think we’re about to share the most mind-blowing kiss of my life…the expectation crumbles away into nothingness. Charaxus shifts uncomfortably on her heels, releases my wrist, and she gazes away from me, working her jaw as if she’s suddenly uncomfortable with the tension radiating between us. She takes a single step back, and the spell that was spun just a moment ago is broken.

  What...happened?

  “I should not have wasted my energy. I have nothing to prove to you,” Charaxus murmurs, her voice stiff. “I must… I must go,” she tells me, and then she’s turning, and within a few short steps, I realize that she’s begun to climb down the metal ladder, aiming for the cold waters of the Buffalo River.