by Nunn, PL
She knew not exactly where she was going, and yet seemed to have purpose in her wondering. She found a roofless building, low in the pit of the vale, where the water level was almost to the knees if one did not walk along the neat, unintended pathway of fallen stone supports. She moved along the zigzagging pier and watched the eddies in the brown water. She found a perch at the doorless entrance and peered into the gutted structure. Like a magnet, her gaze was drawn to Dusk, even though it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the utter likeness of his color to that of the gray wall he crouched against. A stone column thrice the width of a man had fallen aslant against one wall and provided something of a shelter from the rain. Under it was an indention in the wall that might once have been a cubby for sleeping, or an oblong alcove for an icon or idol.
Irony rose within her. Suddenly and for no particular reason she could fathom, she could read his misery as plain as her own. There was grief and loneliness and an all-consuming hopelessness. And an awareness of her. Him being aware of her, being aware of him. She laughed in tired, frustrated amusement, feeling cruel and selfish. The dagger in the heart of all his trouble. That was her. His downfall and Alex’s torment. What had she become?
“What are you doing out here in this? There are dryer shelters.”
He said nothing, peering at her from under his hood. She felt bad for the lightness of her tone, when he looked so grim. For a long moment she met his stare.
She did not want to cause him hurt. She could not bear the thought. There was something rather maternal she felt for him, if one could set aside the pure lust that he also occasionally triggered.
But that was not what he felt for her.
She was suddenly very certain that what he felt for her was overwhelming and all consuming and for him, totally, irrationally bewildering. She laughed again in shock, at the surety of this emotion.
“What are you doing to me?” she asked in amazement. “Have you developed magic suddenly?”
“I?” She got a reaction from him.
“Not so drastic I think,” he murmured.
“Only a soul.”
She drew her brows, all the humor leaving her. “What?”
“Leave me alone, Lady. Please.”
“No,” she whispered, probing with her power and finding no more than she ever had in him, and yet knowing with something deeper that there was more to him than there had been. And it felt familiar.
“What do you mean, ‘Only a soul’? How?”
He sighed. “Alex.”
Understanding did not come. “Alex?”
“The soul was his doing, Lady. Whether a gift or a punishment I’ve yet to decide.”
In pure shock, she stepped down into the water. Her ankle turned and she lost balance. He was off his stone haven in an instant, faster than Phoebe might ever hope to be, his hand under her elbow.
“Stay out of the water. It is faster than it looks,” he warned. She leaned against him, grateful for the excuse at contact. The thing inside her pounded at the closeness.
The thing she had discovered in this world to be the center of her power, the core of her being. Aloe said it was her soul.
She felt weak kneed. “Could you please,” she whispered, “take me back to my shelter?”
He did not want to. He wanted to stay and curl up in the ramshackle privacy he had found, but of course, he could not deny her. They did not talk the entire way.
She kept the tremor in her walk, and he kept a supportive arm about her. She felt somewhat guilty at the charade. But not too much. He saw her to her hide-covered bed, and she kept her fingers wrapped around his when he would have made to leave.
“Tell me what happened.” It was a whispered request. He blinked at her for a long moment, then slowly sank to his knees before her. He looked stricken. Far away from her.
“I feared that having a soul would make me more responsible for the lives I took than being without one. One tends to relate the presence of a conscience to that of a soul. I think, in general, this is a misconception, for it has made me no more or less than I was before.”
“An overrated possession?” she whispered, arching a brow, half smiling at his serious face. He looked up at her with enormous dark eyes. Confused eyes. What she knew. What she was sure of in the deepest part of her being, he only guessed at. But of course she had had a soul all her life, he had possessed one for less than an hour.
“What happened?” she repeated.
“He gave me my soul.” He half laughed. “Forced it on me. I did not wish it. I suspect he did not leave you pleased.”
“We left matters unresolved,” she agreed. “How did he come to have your soul, Dusk? I thought it safe in Azeral’s keeping.”
He turned away from her. This was not a thing he wished to discuss, that was clear. She could not leave it be.
“He asked it of Azeral, I think. For revenge perhaps.”
“Revenge?” she broke in. “Whatever for?”
There was something in his look, when he glanced over his shoulder at her, that suggested she was being supremely dense. She lifted her chin at the implication.
“What think you, Lady? For lying with you.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” he repeated with something akin to disgust. “And he was not in the wrong.”
“Oh, I beg to differ. He was certainly occupying himself with that sidhe – “
“Victoria!” he cut her off. “Do you wish to argue this point or listen to what I have to say?”
She pouted, but inclined her head silently.
“He may have started out to hurt me, but then I believe he thought to make better use of me to humor you.”
And rather suddenly it clicked. What Alex had said to her before he had taken his leave. The pendant he had dangled before her, offering her, claiming to gift her with, yet having to give to another.
The pendant had been the artifact that housed Dusk’s soul. Alex had come here hoping to use Dusk against her, and ended with giving the battle up altogether by giving away what he thought his only leverage against her. His enemy in the war for her heart.
“Oh, Alex,” she whispered. If only he knew, it was not her heart that was in question. She pressed her palms into her eyes, content for the moment to listen to the sound of her breath and the insistent patter of rain on stone. God, she wanted to see the sun shine so badly it hurt.
“He’s honorable, you know,” she said, needing to concrete that notion for herself more than Dusk.
“I know.” He leaned against her bed, resting his cheek on the covered edge. A tendril of hair snaked across the bridge of his nose to curl under his eye. She wanted to brush it back, but the hurt in her heart kept her from touching him .
“I love him.” Her voice was small, quivering. It sounded unsure to her own ears.
“I know.” He seemed more certain than she. She delved deeper into that part of her that strove for connection with him and knew that he was. Knew that he accepted the fact that her heart belonged to Alex and always had.
A overwhelming fondness welled up within her for him. How very odd that she could declare her love for one man and want more than anything else to take another into her arms. How very odd that her heart and her soul could hold two very different desires.
And whether he knew it or not, Dusk held the strings to her soul, just as she held the strings to his. Soul matched. How incredibly ironic that Azeral sent the one being in all his world to bring her to him that was the counterpart to her own budding soul. It was relieving to know that there had been something more at work than an overactive libido in her attraction to him. Even more ironic, that if not for Alex’s jealousy and anger, she might never have known.
She laughed, feeling powerful and secure in her newfound declarations. She reached out and wiped back the offending strand of his hair, ran her fingers through the half dry fall of locks. “I love you, too.”
He shivered, as though that were too much to believe. She tightene
d her fingers in his hair and bent to be on a level with him.
“Look inside, Dusk,” she suggested. “Look within your newfound soul and tell me what you sense if you don’t believe my words.”
He was afraid. Afraid of having a soul and of examining it too closely. He was full of superstition and lore and the implications of an assassin’s deeds on an infant soul. One would almost suppose he had religion from the moralistic dilemma he was putting himself in. One wondered if the four deities of this world, Mother Earth, Father Sky and their son and daughter, Fire and Water, decreed values similar to her one God. She made a note to further her discussion with Aloe on the faith of this land.
She pressed her lips to his forehead and asked softly. “Do you understand?”
Bewildered, he shook his head, catching her wrist and imprisoning it between them. His fingers were long and supple. She liked the feel of his strength against her. She slid down from her vantage and settled on the floor beside him. She leaned forward and contradicted him.
“You do.”
“You confuse me,” he accused, as though he thought she did it apurpose.
Her lips tilted up in a smile and she purred. “I know.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, then moved towards her. She met him halfway, a soft brush of lips, before he released her hands and pulled her against him. His clothes were damp and dark from the shadow of the room, as was his hair. She breathed in the musty smell of them, the more woodsy scent of his hair. She laid her cheek against the cool skin of his neck.
It soothed the churning center of her power, of her self, being there. He made the power in her sing, because he made her soul sing. She felt strong enough to push away the storms by herself, yet all she wanted to do was rest in his arms.
A quick movement of his head startled her out of her comfort. His body tensed. She looked up, found his gaze directed doorward and turned her own that way. Alex paused there, one hand on the stone frame, expression hidden by shadow. One heartbeat longer and he whirled without a word and disappeared back into the dismal afternoon. “God,” she breathed, her heart lurching. She sent a mental query after him, but his defenses were sealed up tight. All she got was a thin peal of hurt that he had left behind before his flight. Damn him for bad timing anyway. She balled a fist and thumped Dusk on the chest in frustration. He endured it, fine brows drawn with worry.
“Do what you must,” he told her, setting her away from him. She breathed a curse and climbed to her feet.
Back into the rain she went, running this time, looking frantically down the aisle before her building. His shielding was good. She could not get a peep of him. She went with her gut instinct and ran left. Splashing down the narrow corridor, she looked down each ally and each bisecting path. She had a feeling she ought to turn down a main thoroughfare and did so. She caught sight of him not long after and called out his name. He stiffened, casting a harsh glance over his shoulder at her and kept walking. She trotted to catch up with him.
“Would you wait?” she cried in exasperation.
“Why?” he sniffed, offended.
She hissed through her teeth at him.
“What did you want?”
“Nothing that can’t wait,” he said airily. “Go back to what you were doing.”
“I wasn’t ‘doing’ anything,” she snapped, irritation starting to win out.
He stopped walking and spun to glare at her. “Really? Forgive me for jumping to conclusions then. God knows your actions are not to be questioned.”
“Alex, stop it!” Hitting him would have released a great deal of her frustration. It might have dulled some of the dangerous glitter of accusation from his eyes. She settled for snapping, “Don’t be a hypocrite. Neither one of us is exactly pristine.”
“Victoria –” He trailed off, gnashing his teeth. She thought he might not have minded hitting her either. There was that kind of utter frustration on his face. He started walking again. She followed.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, trying to be reasonable.
He stifled a laugh without looking back at her. “You don’t want to hurt me – but you’re going to do it anyway.”
“No buts,” she stated. “I don’t want you hurt, and I’m sorry you are. And you are the one that is going to have to work it out, because you are the one who is making the problem.”
He stopped again, this time in shock.
Gaping at her, he demanded. “What are you babbling about? I am not making this problem.”
“Oh yes you are. You’re the one who can’t deal – “
“Can’t deal?” he cut her off in something akin to hysterical amusement.
“Can’t deal with my fiancée being intimate with someone else? God! I’m just unreasonable!!”
“Alex, stop it. Things are different now. You know they are.”
“Yes, you made that perfectly clear.”
“You don’t understand everything that’s happening?”
“I don’t understand anything that’s happening.”
“Damn it, stop being unreasonable!”
He opened his mouth to retort, then snapped it shut. Suddenly he grabbed her arm and dragged her to the side of the path into the shelter of a building. A small green lizard that had been sheltering there itself scampered up the side of the moss covered stone.
“What is there to be reasonable about, Vicky?” he demanded. “Reason left a long time ago. What does it matter, really? We’re going to die in this valley or directly outside of it in short enough time.”
“That’s not true,” she cried. “This rain can’t last forever.” But inside she knee how hopeless a thought that was. It did not need to last forever, just long enough to make this valley unlivable. Two or three days at the most and they would have no choice but to move to higher ground.
Alex shook his head in disgust. He pushed away from the wall and stomped off through the rain and standing water.
She could not help but follow, feeling sick and so very weary of fighting. But pride and anger made her hard even when part of her wanted to crumble.
A group of sidhe moved down the ancient street towards them. Hunters by the looks of them and the weaponry they carried. Alex moved to the side of the narrow thoroughfare to let them pass. She followed suit. Their eyes flickered over the both of them. Their faces were taught.
Their expressions guarded, but not so versatile as to hide the accusation. It hurt.
She had come to respect these people and craved acceptance from them. She doubted they would ever see her as they once had after this. If they survived.
“It’s our fault,” Alex told her, water dripping from his lashes as he stared after the sidhe. “They are going to die and it’s because of you and me.”
She shook her head mournfully. “No. Azeral is to blame for this.”
“He started it. But it’s us he’s after.
You, really. He’ll crush these people to get at you.”
Rather suddenly she found she did not wish to talk with him any more. He hit at the core of her guilt. “I didn’t know,” she cried. “How was I to guess he would pursue me so single-mindedly?”
“Once he has you, he won’t need me,” Alex told her. “And even if he does, I doubt my welcome will be as sweet. Not after what I did to escape him. I don’t want to see him take this vale. I do not want him to get his hands on me again.”
“You think I do?” she practically screamed at him. “You tell me what I can do to change anything?”
He stared at her. “You can leave this vale.”
She blinked, not sure she had heard him right. “Leave? Walk into this hands?”
He laughed. “No, walk through his fingers and leave the hunt nothing to gain by laying siege to this vale.”
She felt weak kneed. “Impossible,” she breathed, putting a hand out to a rain slick wall. A floating branch scraped her ankle and she side stepped closer to Alex.
His eyes were shining.
; “No. Just hard. But magic can shield.
Magic can shield damn good if it’s strong enough and between the two of us – “ He trailed off invitingly.
“That’s why you came to me,” she breathed. “To suggest this? My God, you go to all this trouble getting here and now you want to leave?”
“It’s a losing battle,” he stated, then waved a hand about him in frustration.
“The whole damn thing. I don’t know what to expect anymore. From you. From the world. But I do know that the Seelies are about to get crushed and we might be able to stop it.”
“Where would we go?” she whispered. “Where they could not find us?”
He smiled at her. A humorless, cold smile. “Let’s say I happened to overhear of a place that the hunt will shy from like the plague. Somewhere maybe two or three days travel from here that we could lay low in until they passed on.”
“Lay low?” Suddenly she was felt lost. He was asking her to trust in him on the heels of raging against her. She could not be sure of his purposes. She had told him she was not the woman he knew, but the same surely held truth for him. “I don’t understand you.” Softly spoken.
He stared at her for a long moment, then threw out his hands in exasperation.
“Would it make you feel better if I threw out every scrap of pride I have? How low do I have to grovel for you Victoria? How much do I have to give to make up for what I did? I want you safe and I don’t think it’s going to happen here.”
For a long moment she met his eyes.
The blue was almost gray in the late afternoon mist. A chill passed her. A cold, hard fear. She looked past him to the towering walls of the valley that rose on all sides. The things the forest hid were the stuff nightmares were made of. The minions of her enemies. An army that was solely intent on hunting her down. She shivered and hugged her arms about herself.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I ran before and look what happened.”
He took a half step towards her, then hesitated. He wanted to touch her. She could see it in his face, the division of emotion. He was hurt by her, disappointed in her, he wanted desperately to resent her, but he could not stop caring. He could not stop what she did to his emotions, how she tangled his thoughts. His face turned hard and stony, as he pinned the emotions down. He straightened his spine and coldly stated.
