Timeless (Maiden Of Time Book 3)

by Crystal Collier

  “There is another way,” Alexia said.

  Soldiers charged. A tunnel of darkness roared up around them, sealing them into an onyx haze that emanated from the shore. Alexia shoved her attacker into the gloom. Amos stepped through the waves, waist deep, both arms lifted her direction, holding the soldiers within a midnight cloud.

  “We are all cleared out!” he shouted and turned his head toward a white silhouette on the shore. Long hair floated translucently behind the mist child, as if she were half in and half out of reality, ready to instantly appear on some foreign continent.

  “All?” Alexia called back, waving to him.

  Amos motioned her forward. “You are one mighty distraction.” He pointed to her baby girth. “But you are wasting precious time and energy.”

  A soldier stumbled out of the darkness and over the edge of the ship.

  “Final retreat!” Amos shouted.

  “Take him first,” Alexia called to the child of the mist. The Passionate needed their leader safe.

  Velia burst into nothingness and faded.

  War cries broke through the midnight pitch. Alexia hefted her dagger, the one that had slain numerous Soulless, the one that had stained her soul. But those creatures did not exist here. Only men whose souls were debatably tainted as darkly.

  Metal flashed toward her.

  She lifted her weapon.

  Steel clanged. Her muscles shook under her enemy’s blade. She shoved his weapon away, the brush of chilling mist the only evidence that her friend was being swept away to safety. And then the world blanched into whiteness, and she was hurling through nothingness, reminding herself not to breathe.

  Two

  Machines of War

  Wintry fingers loosened around Alexia’s arm.

  Haze pulled away, and she stumbled over uneven clods of dirt, weeds tickling her ankles. Decaying stones walled in an overgrown courtyard. Vines crawled over the ancient stones in the haze of pre-dawn, their majesty lost ages ago to war and decline. A stream gurgled nearby, hidden in a veil of trees.

  Velia gave her a nod. Even having spent nearly half a year with the woman, Alexia had a difficult time defining her mute friend’s features. She couldn’t decide if Velia was predominantly mist or corporeal.

  Amos stepped between them, facing the hazy woman. “Kindly retrieve the healer.”

  Velia gave a shallow bow and melted away.

  “The healer?” Alexia asked. They had access to a healer, like Kiren in the future, and they’d suffered all this time?

  “A hesitant ally.” He grimaced. “I daresay he will not be pleased in being brought here, but he is needed.” Amos patted her shoulder and turned to a boy of ten years who knelt on the ground, panting, with a gash across his chest. No child should witness the terrors of war and bear its mark. Yet this one had seen enough battle to turn him into a warrior at such a tender age.

  Like all of them.

  She touched her center. Like her child would.

  “Will the child be waybreakin’ today?” Regin halted next to her, sliding on a pair of leather gloves as he lifted an eyebrow at the hand on her womb. His black hair was slicked back with sweat from his exertions in the battle.

  His was one of the few faces Alexia had recognized after reaching this time. As she’d helped Amos gather in more of the Passionate, she’d come upon Regin in a Jewish stronghold, a secret weapon against the crusaders determined to control the holy city. She recalled meeting him in her own time and being warned of his mischief. No one could make him do something he didn’t want. They’d end up snoring in some public location, stripped down to their undergarments while he laughed and made his way across town. He was one of the first to join the Passionate after her arrival in this time—mostly because of his self-declared hatred for the monarchy, the Church, and anyone else who thought themselves mighty enough to dictate people’s existence.

  “Are you offering to make me sleep through the pain of birth?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “Be that what you wish, though missing the babe’s first wail would be a right shame.” He squirmed. “And I can’na abide gore. You’d be at nature’s mercy after I fainted like a wee lassie.”

  “Is that all it takes? A little blood and the unstoppable Regin falls unconscious himself?” She wiggled her fingers at him. “But you have fought through every battle with us.”

  He shuddered. “Aye.” He tapped the side of his head. “Gravy. I picture…it as me mum’s gut-gouging gravy. Used to sneak it to the dogs while she served me da.” He fastened a cloth about his mouth and nose with a nod to a line of prostrate bodies. “We be testin’ me mettle today.”

  Her stomach clenched. “Are any dead?”

  “Aye.” He turned. Amos and two others bandaged cuts while whispering prayers for the wounded. “Favian took a blow to the skull while shieldin’ the littlins.” They both bowed their heads. “Julene received a blade to the gut before Mae could act.”

  Alexia’s head snapped up. “Little Julene?”

  Regin nodded.

  A child, not yet four years of age, taken. Her stomach roiled. Tears wetted her cheeks, the kind that came far too easily these days. It was hard enough to bring one of the Passionate through childbirth without losing either mother or child, but for one to fall at sword point…

  It must be destroying Mae that she couldn’t stop it.

  Alexia searched the group for her friend and found the woman in the distance, head bowed, arms wrapped around her frail form. Despite her gentle nature, Mae craved death. It was her gift, and her curse. Metal could stop the Passionate from using their abilities, causing a nauseating illness and an inability to focus. It didn’t work on Alexia because she was half human, but she’d seen its results. Iron to stop them. Gold to kill.

  They’d found a gold cuff in the wreckage of one rescue, and Mae wore it around her wrist at all times. Any other Passionate would be dead, but not Mae. She was too strong. The gold stopped her from draining all life out of the world around her, but it also repelled the Passionate. Not Alexia. She had been helping Mae learn how to control her gift, just as Mae would one day do for her. Most people gave Mae a wide berth…other than Regin. Perhaps he empathized, because he couldn’t touch others without putting them to sleep.

  Regin approached Mae, his voice a soothing murmur. She looked up, her ice-blue eyes both seeing and beautiful. The woman Alexia had left in the future was blind and one of the dearest people she knew. And Kiren had trusted her entirely.

  “The wounded are stable.”

  Alexia jumped at Amos’s baritone. It was nothing like the wheezing rasp she recalled from the future. When he was Soulless. He stood half a head taller than her, his gaze fixed on the distraught Mae and commiserating Regin.

  “Gather Deamus for me?” He pointed to the man crouched beneath the trees. “I will talk those two down from the hill. It is time we counseled.”

  “I wish you safety.”

  He gave her a smile. “Safer for me than for you.”

  She shook her head. Amos was a conscientious leader who governed by counseling with the most powerful of the Passionate in all major decisions. He had accepted her upon meeting, and over the months, she’d become his lieutenant.

  Deamus knelt in the shadows, clutching scrolls to his chest and panting as if he couldn’t catch his breath. Alexia dropped down next to him. The man was awkwardly skinny with a very prominent nose and a quick smile she had instantly liked. He wasn’t like the others. Beauty had very little place in him, except for in his soul, and like her, he loved the written word.

  She leaned in to catch his gaze as he scoured the ground. “Have you lost something?”

  He jolted like he hadn’t seen her. Likely, he hadn’t. “The magnifiers.” His accent had struck her as strange when they first met, slightly guttural, clipping the e’s.

  He’d lost his spectacles. She hadn’t told him yet that spectacles were an invention of a later age. They’d had some difficulty fashioning
them out of leather and window shards to her clumsy instructions—with many failures—but the spectacles had made all the difference to her fumbling friend. She pulled them from on top of his head and handed them over.

  He blew out a breath. “You rescue me again.”

  “Beware, Deamus. Much more of this and we shall have to call you a damsel in distress.”

  He chuckled and sat back, spilling the four scrolls he’d been clutching, then fumbled to gather them up.

  She snatched the last one for him. “And what are these?”

  He grinned a tuck-lipped, closed-mouth smile, making his cheeks bulge, a child who had done something naughty. “The knight’s instructions for our capture.”

  “And how did you come about them?”

  His grin widened and he waved her closer. She leaned. He whispered, “I snuck into the ship before we ran away.”

  She laughed with him. They might finally discover who was behind all of these attacks and how to stop them. “Bring these. We are to counsel.”

  The scrolls tumbled from his arms, and he scurried after them again. Alexia pushed off the ground and followed him until he stood, dwarfing her like a parent with a child. He had been the first, the very first of the Passionate she encountered after arriving in this world. Amos accepted him because he came with Alexia, but Deamus’s clumsy antics left their leader huffing. She found them endearing.

  They joined four others, Amos, Regin, Mae, and Lucian—a man of the orient. Regin waved Alexia to a seat. Deamus crouched and carefully placed his parchments on the ground, tucking his spectacles into place and conscientiously ignoring them as he opened the first scroll.

  “No more of this.” Tears had cut clean lines down Mae’s dirty face. “They are weaker than us. I could have stopped them, all of them. There was no need to…” She covered her face.

  Alexia placed a hand on Mae’s back, and her friend tensed. The gold bangle staved Mae’s hunger, but it couldn’t stop her conscience. Alexia knew how her friend suffered under the weight of guilt, how every life she’d consumed hung on her heart. Given the choice, Alexia would never add to that burden.

  “And where would it end?” Lucian asked, his voice lilting under his strange accent which cut out l’s, n’s. “More would come in their place. Should we destroy the whole human family?”

  Alexia swallowed hard. Lucian had a gift of premonition. He couldn’t see all things, but he caught glimpses of things to come and had steered them away from several tragedies.

  “We cannot kill all the humans,” Amos grunted, as if that ever was an option.

  “Mayhaps just the ones killin’ us?” Regin injected, the bandana tied over his mouth and nose muffling his words.

  Deamus gasped. He leapt to his feet and held up one of the scrolls, spectacles teetering on his nose bridge as he reread the parchment. He turned the paper, waving it slowly so everyone could see the words. Except no one other than Alexia could read them. She grabbed the communiqué. The slowness with which she read shamed her, but not only was this language newer to her, it was written in a curled script that made it difficult to decipher one letter from the next.

  “You see it?” Deamus asked, looking directly at her.

  Her cheeks flamed and she read faster, but the words swimming before her didn’t make sense. “I do not understand. If what I am reading is accurate, we have a traitor in our midst?”

  Regin growled through his handkerchief. “That be how they found us—on the island, in the desert, at the caves…”

  Deamus turned the parchment back around, cradling it like a baby as he read on silently.

  Regin cleared his throat. “Methinks it may be time for war.”

  Alexia stared at the man. Regin had been peaceful these many months, a man who would rather lull someone into submission than by force. If he was turning toward this idea… She bowed her head. “Let us not fight the wrong war.”

  “What war should we be fighting,” Lucian faced her, “if not the one for survival?”

  It was time. She exhaled a heavy breath. “I have been with you longer than I had desired, too long I fear. I had hoped to prevent what is coming without revealing or involving all of you, but it cannot be prevented. You have been patient with me as I withheld my origin and purpose, but I believe it is time to share.” She braced herself and lifted her chin. “I am here to stop the Soulless.”

  Three

  Travelers

  Five sets of eyes burned into Alexia, their confusion bubbling to the surface, ready to boil over and bombard her in a firestorm of questions.

  Alexia lifted her hand, offering her palm. “Allow me to show you.” It was possible to open one’s memories to another of the Passionate through physical contact, to share one’s experiences without uttering a word.

  Looks were exchanged and hands reached for Alexia’s extended one. Even Deamus abandoned his scrolls. A shudder ran up her arm as person after person touched her open palm, their energy shocking her own, evidence they belonged to the same bloodline. She opened her mind, allowing all of them in through the physical connection. She showed them a condensed truth while omitting faces and details lest the knowledge should upset the future:

  Herself in the year 1768, sixteen and oblivious to the Passionate, a baron’s daughter with no hope of a decent marriage other than to increase some gentleman’s fortune. The night a child of the Passionate, Bellezza, murdered Alexia’s neighbor. How she caught a glimpse of the blue-eyed man who haunted her dreams, and how he returned to kidnap the vicious child. Alexia followed the breadcrumbs and discovered haunted House of Stark. She learned of her half-blood heritage and saved the leader of the Passionate while barely escaping the Soulless: undying monsters who lived only in the darkness and ached to consume her kind. They had once been Passionate, but their essence had been robbed, leaving them hungry to replace it and unable to quench their hunger. They attacked the Passionate on moonless nights, draining them of their vitality, but no matter what they took, it was never enough. Worse yet, every Passionate soul they consumed also became Soulless.

  Alexia paused, allowing the council to digest what they’d been shown. Then she plunged on:

  She had fallen in love, followed by a war with the Soulless, her wedding, the near demise of the Passionate, the child growing in her womb and the hope of preventing the Soulless from coming into existence. Starting with her journey to this time…where she would disappear from existence—probably from dying in childbirth.

  “You are from the future.” Amos stumbled back from her.

  She nodded. “Five hundred years.”

  Lucian’s eyes narrowed. “You do more than move very, very quickly.”

  “I control time.” Alexia spread her hands in apology. “Though I fear I may have come to the wrong moment to prevent the Soulless from becoming.”

  “We will not let you die,” Mae vowed.

  Deamus sagged to his knees, reaching for his precious scrolls.

  Regin tugged his kerchief down. “Be my understandin’ addled, or can you change the past? Any past?”

  She shook her head. “I have failed before, and succeeded, though I have never undertaken such an important endeavor. And in such a state.” She indicated her womb. “Changing things is dangerous, but the Soulless must never be born.”

  In the silence, they listened to children chattering and the murmur of loved ones. If she failed, those voices would fall into hungry hisses and eternally tortured souls. Her fist tightened.

  Amos crossed his arms. “What can we do?”

  “I have been searching for a way to stop it, but I do not even know the precise moment the Soulless will be created.”

  They all turned on Lucian. He grunted and took Alexia’s hand, focused on the distance, the color fading from his face, lips falling lax. “I see vibrant hues, giant white walls, a crystal palace, lands of fire and lands of ice…”

  Paper crinkled.

  Deamus’s chest rose and fell in quick succession. His
mouth opened and closed, then opened again in a mumble.

  “What is it you have to say? Speak up,” Mae encouraged.

  The gangly man tucked his spectacles in a pocket, gaze down. “You, you, none of you would…no. It is not…”

  “Deamus,” Alexia said, and he focused on her. “Tell me.”

  “I-I-I thought you came from there. I thought you were here to free me and that we would return…”

  New understanding dawned on her as she recalled the moment they’d met:

  Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. The willow tree before her trembled as if the ground were shaking, but Alexia felt no tremors. Warmth pressed against her chest. Warmth, suddenly fire.

  She grabbed the chain around her neck and pulled the pendant away. The charm glowed yellow, purifying to white.

  The tree shuddered and bent, like a ribbon collapsing to the ground. She jumped back. It writhed, a branchy snake, and shrank inward. The largest two branches melted into arms. Lumps across the trunk diminished into a robed torso, a long torso. Wild leaves feathered down into strands of dark hair as long as her own.

  The medallion cooled to a dull gray, buzzing with energy.

  Alexia tucked the necklace beneath her tunic. Kiren had always kept it concealed, and she thought that a good practice, except when it attempted to cook her. The pendant quivered against her as if it might burst from the power stored within, vibrating like it had before she drained it with her jump through centuries.

  The man’s chest heaved. He braced an elbow on the ground, hair obscuring his face. He lifted a hand, turned it before his face, and laughed. His shoulders froze. A shudder passed through him, and the color bled out of his hair until it was dark blonde. He turned to her, eyes wide. He was a younger man—not many years older than herself. His eyebrows lifted, and his mouth popped open in a vulnerable, almost comical grin. “You freed me!”

  She conscientiously placed a hand over her hidden necklace. “Why were you a, a tree?”