20 Shades of Shifters: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Demelza Carlton

  The next thing I remember was being rather forcefully stuffed into the back seat of a cab. Fortunately I didn’t have to do much thinking on the ride out to Campbelltown’s southern outskirts. I didn’t play along with Asena’s deception and used my normal voice whenever I had to answer a question, but truth be told I wasn’t paying any real attention. When we arrived it turned out we were actually riding with an entirely different driver.

  Asena paid him and then we stepped out at the foot of a long dirt driveway leading to a farmhouse surrounded by yellow grass fields and cows.

  “Where’d the creepy guy go?” I asked.

  Asena stared at me. “Are you serious?” she said. “You get out of the train looking like death warmed up, you puke all over the taxi, you don’t say a single thing to me for twenty minutes, then the first thing you care about is ‘What happened to the creeper’?”

  “I guess.”

  She frowned at me, her face clouding over, and I saw her fear, her worry and her concern as plain as day. “Libby, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Don’t call me Libby,” I said, suddenly scowling. “It’s Aurora.”

  “Fine. Aurora. Sorry. What’s wrong? Travel sick? Cats don’t generally like moving vehicles…”

  “I’m not a cat. Clinton’s a cat.” I felt anger growing within me, a dark feeling rising inexplicably from nowhere. My voice deepened into a throaty growl. “I’m so much more than that.”

  Asena took two steps backwards, holding her hands up defensively. “Aurora, listen to me, just calm down, okay? I don’t know what’s gotten into you but it’s freaking me out, so just take a breath and try to think rationally. Why are you angry?”

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know where this anger had come from; it had just bubbled up inside my heart like a boiling pot of water.

  “It’s…”

  I realised what it was and, with an effort, forced my eyes closed. Made myself calm. “It’s Ishan,” I said. “Something’s really, really wrong back in Canberra.”

  Asena regarded me warily. “You’re sensing this ‘trouble’ through your bond, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She grimaced. “Damn. Well, a bond can be a two-way link,” she said. “If Ishan’s angry, he might be in trouble. He might need that emotion to win.”

  The thought of Ishan fighting someone made my stomach turn. “We need to go back,” I implored. “We have to help him.”

  “We’re right here,” Asena said, pointing down the dusty road to the small farmhouse. “It’ll take us hours to get back. We might as well—”

  “We have to go back,” I said. “He’s in trouble. Big trouble. I can feel it.”

  Asena nodded understandingly. “And we will go back, but we can’t right now. A train will take hours.”

  “We’ll drive, then,” I said, “I can drive manual or automatic, no worries. We’ll just speed back, I don’t care—”

  “Aurora, we don’t even have a car.”

  “We’ll steal one. We can break a human in half before they even know what’s happening. We’ll head to the highway. You jump in front of the next car and when it stops, I’ll tear the driver apart.”

  Asena’s horrified reaction pulled me back to reality for a moment. I suddenly felt a wave of terrible guilt. That anger wasn’t me; it was pushed into my mind through the link with Ishan. Whatever he was going through, whatever he was feeling, involved very strong emotions.

  “If you want to get back to Canberra,” Asena said, “I promise you, I promise you on my blood, that I know a way to get back there faster than any car, and without committing murder and sparking a federal manhunt. It’s risky, but I promise you, we’ll try it.”

  I went to speak but Asena cut me off. “But you have to see Cinder first. No ifs, no buts.”

  Some part of me wanted to argue but I could see the resolution, the determination on her face.

  “Come with me, Asena.”

  Her expression was sad, pained. “You know I can’t. I couldn’t do that to him, not again.”

  I was wasting time. Without saying any more, I turned and sprinted down the driveway towards the farmhouse.

  21

  I ran right up to the door and, without further ado, threw it open. But despite my desire to press on to Cinder, when I saw what lay beyond I stopped and drank in the view.

  A wide, single room, in the style of a 1900s Australian farmhouse, was the entire of the ground floor of the house. The walls were papered in an off-white colour dotted with pink flowers of some variety I didn’t recognise. The floor was wood, painted a light green colour that was strange, clashing with the wallpaper. A couch, two covered chairs and a large wooden rocking chair facing away from me were the forepieces of the room, with a dining table and a dozen plain wooden chairs pressed up against the rear. Everything smelt of age and time, every piece of furniture covered in dust. A straight stairway ran its way up to the top floor.

  I stepped inside, warily, and the door slammed behind me, plunging me into darkness.

  “Good evening, Aurora.”

  My eyes almost instantly adjusted to the gloom, and the illumination from a few cracks in the walls gave me all the light I needed to see. A figure rose from the rocking chair, a grey-haired man with a stooped posture who slowly turned to face me.

  His eyes were empty sockets, but he smiled directly at me as though the missing organs didn’t bother him at all. “It’s good to meet the last, at last.”

  I forced the final remnants of the anger out of my mind, focusing on Cinder’s withered, ancient face. “You can see me?”

  “Oh, child,” said Cinder, ambling towards me, his feet scraping on the wooden floor, “when you’re as old as I am you do not need eyes to see. In fact, it makes it easier, for I already know what you look like, and although the details of your mundane and tragically short life escape me, the knowledge ultimately changes nothing. The moment you are born you take your first steps into the grave, and soon you will be dead and gone from this world.”

  He stopped about three metres in front of me. I held my nerve, standing just in front of the doorway out of here, my fists balled firmly by my sides.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I took the time to learn it.”

  “If that’s so,” I said, “but I’m also… how did you put it… about to be dead and gone from the world, then why bother?”

  “When watching a firework display,” Cinder said, “the eyes are drawn to the brightest explosion in the sky. And Aurora, your explosion is going to be bright indeed.” He paused for a moment. “If depressingly brief.”

  I was rapidly losing patience with him. Ishan was in danger. “Tell me what you told Ishan,” I said, “and be quick. I have to go.”

  “Always in a hurry are the mortals.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We tend to be. Anything is more valuable when it’s limited.”

  Cinder slumped his shoulders, shaking his wizened head. “How true that is,” he said, “but in some ways you should be grateful for this. Grateful that you keep, throughout your life, an appreciation of time.”

  “I suppose that’s good.” But Cinder, please. I need to know what you told Ishan.”

  “I will tell you,” he said, raising a thin, bony finger to his nose, “if you will indulge an old man.”

  Impatience pushed me to decline but instead I nodded. “Okay.”

  He turned, ever so slowly, and shuffled towards the stairway. He moved too slowly for me to follow, so instead I took a step when he’d shifted forward enough for me to do so.

  The minute or so it took for him to climb the stairs felt like an eternity, but as we slowly crept towards the top I felt my frustration evaporate.

  The top floor was bereft of furniture except a large double bed in the exact centre of the room. Every wall, even the ceiling in parts, was completely covered in paintings—extraordinarily lifelike paintings that ranged in size from half a metre high to nearly two metres. So
me were square, most rectangular, and one was even a pair of triangular ones laid together to form a square. Each was a depiction of a person, typically with dark skin and Indian features, looking towards the painter, all in exactly the same three-quarter portrait pose. Some were yellowed and faded, slowly being consumed by age, the brass frames clouded and tarnished, and the people in the portraits wore old-fashioned clothes: top hats and suits, or traditional Indian clothing.

  Only a single gap remained, a large rectangle two metres by four metres, although a single hook had been nailed into the wall in the upper centre of the square in clear anticipation of hanging one final picture there.

  “What are all these?” I asked, gazing around in bewilderment, studying the features of each of the people depicted. They were all my age, late teens or early twenties, with warm smiles. Their poses were exactly identical, as though they were fictional characters created from the painter’s imagination. “Who are these people?”

  “My students,” Cinder answered. “More or less. My visitors. Anyone who has come to me seeking my knowledge and my prophecy.”

  “Prophecy?”

  “Some call me a prophet,” Cinder wheezed, “although my predictions have sometimes been wrong. Foresight is a powerful gift, but it is unreliable. So many variables, so many elements that cannot be quantified or even defined.”

  Near the gap in the paintings my eye fell upon a familiar face. Asena, smiling just like all the others, her red hair falling down her shoulders. Right above the gap was Ishan, his dark skin perfectly mimicked in the painting of him. It was as though I were staring directly at him, and I drew comfort from his smile, identical as it was to the others, even as something in my subconscious tugged at me and reminded me that he was in distress.

  “There’s only one spot left,” I said. “And I don’t see me here.”

  “Ahh, yes,” said Cinder, turning his blind face towards the vacant spot. “After I receive a visit I paint the visitor, from my memories. In this way they are immortal too, in a sense. Whatever happens to their bodies in the outside, they will always remain here, living forever with me in this room.” He looked back at me, his empty eye sockets looking me over. “As will you.”

  “There’s only one gap,” I said. “And only one hook.”

  “That is because you will be the last visitor I ever have.”

  I frowned and put my hands on my hips. “You’re never taking visitors after me? Why?”

  “Oh, child, sometimes I forget that others cannot see as I do.” He gave me a wrinkled smile. “Aurora, an eclipse is coming.”

  “I know.” I felt, again, the tugging, nagging compulsion in my mind, to race back to Ishan and save him from whatever was causing him this distress. “So?”

  Cinder chuckled, a wheezing, crackling noise that sounded like someone ripping sheets of paper. “The moon is special to our people. Nobody knows why; those with a scientific bent suggest that our power is subtly tied to gravimetric forces which cause mutations in our DNA, forcing a dormant, recessive gene to manifest in strange, aberrant ways. Others are more mythological, suggesting that the moon itself is the fallen body of the first true Rakshasa, whose gift was to become an angel in the heavens, guarding the night as her father, the sun, guards the day.”

  I was reminded of just how much knowledge and varying viewpoints one could acquire in an infinite lifetime. “Um,” I said, “let’s go with option A for now, but what does this have to do with anything?”

  “A solar eclipse, when the moon blocks out the sun, is called an ‘occlusion’. Early religions gave these events great power because they, on some primal level, understood the power of the sun and the moon. They were referred to as the occult.” Cinder smiled a toothless smile. “Or perhaps these were merely primitive superstitions, based on flawed logic and irrational thinking, but it is of no concern. One thing is certain: the occlusion of our sun causes the pool of the Rakshasa’s power to run empty.” He lowered his tone meaningfully, tilting his head forward. “Your ‘friend’ with many names, Jacques, The Champawat Tiger, Eclipse… the last of these is the most telling.”

  I grit my teeth, trying to keep a sudden surge of anger in check. The mere mention of his name caused a wave of hate to course through me, a powerful emotion that I could barely contain.

  “Eclipse.” It was more than a name to me. My dreams were interrupted by an eclipse, every time.

  “I am unsurprised,” said Cinder, “because he has one more name that he keeps secret. Keeps safe, locked away in the fortress that is his mind, never to be revealed. This name reveals much.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The name he was given at birth,” Cinder said. “Divakar, which means ‘the sun’ in Sanskrit.”

  “I’m… not sure I follow. He’s the sun?”

  Cinder tapped the side of his head. “In his mind. In the legends, the moon was the first true Rakshasa. Envious, the sun, her father, killed her in a rage, hoping to steal her gifts. For a time he succeeded, until her body grew and formed the moon to block the sun. Seeing his power destroyed, he reconciled with her; he joined her in the sky, keeping most of his power, but sharing some with the moon, too. In his mind, Eclipse sees himself as the sun, the sole guardian of the power of the Rakshasa, since he—like the Rakshasa-father of legend—wishes to have the Rakshasa’s power for himself, believing only he can be an effective… custodian of its gifts.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what?”

  Cinder gave me a small, sad smile. “In my visions of the future, he succeeds.”

  “We can’t have that.” I shook my head, over and over, as though denying the words he was saying. “No. No. Eclipse can’t become the most powerful, the only, one of us. It just can’t happen.”

  “I’ve been wrong before,” Cinder said, although his tone left little doubt that he was certain.

  “What was the vision?” I demanded. “Tell me what you saw.”

  Cinder inhaled, then gently clasped his hands over his empty eyes.

  The huntsmen gather in the sunbaked land,

  as the moon moves to embrace her father,

  one in true love’s thrall must die,

  or the power of the Rakshasa,

  once shared among the tigerhearted,

  shall pool in the hands of one.

  When the moon crosses the sun,

  all shall come to its end.

  Cinder removed his hands, letting them fall back down by his sides. “I leave no more room for paintings because I know that he will succeed.”

  One in true love’s thrall must die. The words tumbled over in my head, bouncing and bubbling around inside my thoughts as though they were trying to escape.

  “It’s pretty vague,” I commented, biting down on my lower lip, trying to find something to discredit what Cinder was telling me. “I’m sorry. It’s poetic, but I don’t believe in prophecies or any of that stuff.”

  “Then let me show you.” Cinder reached for my hand and, without thinking, I took it. A sudden flash leapt into my mind, an image, a vision of my own.

  I saw through Ishan’s eyes as he faced the Champawat Tiger, surrounded by the wind power generators near Lake George, where he had taken Katelyn. Behind him stood a line of huntsmen, men with rifles and shotguns raised, pointing directly at Ishan’s heart. The wind whipped the grass around, and the loud whine of the generators and chop-chop of the propellers created a thumping rhythm like a beating heart.

  The crack of a shotgun ended it all and I felt myself falling. Suddenly I was back at Cinder’s farmhouse.

  I somehow kept my balance, feeling a sudden pain in my chest, deeper and more raw than anything I’d ever felt before; more than simply an emotional response, it was physical agony, sending rivers of pain flowing through my entire body. I felt cold, colder than death, and I gasped, clutching my heart.

  “I’m sorry, child,” said Cinder, the regret in his tone sincere. “I know your pain, of a love interrupted by death… and now yo
u know mine, of seeing upcoming loss and being unable to avoid it.”

  I gasped for breath, crying, the tears forming twin streams down my face as they flowed down towards my chin.

  I refused to accept it.

  Epilogue

  The Faster Way Home

  I ran out of Cinder’s house as fast as my legs would carry me. Down the stairs and to the door, then out into the suddenly bright light, the dry red earth of the driveway crunching underneath my shoes.

  I didn’t stop. I ran out to the fence, where Asena stood, clutching her phone in both hands.

  “Are you okay?” she said as I drew close. I knew I must have looked a sight, but I didn’t care.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  “What did Cinder say?”

  I snarled in aggravation, a decidedly bestial sound, and I felt my canine teeth elongate out from my jaw. “I’ll tell you on the way, but we need to go. Now! The faster way home. What is it?”

  Asena held up her phone. The maps app was open, plotting a route back to Canberra.

  By walking.

  “Are you fucking mental?”

  “Nope. We run,” she said. “Between the railroad and the highway. There’s almost no cars there, and plenty of dips and valleys for us to hide in. If we time it right, there’s a pretty good chance we won’t be seen by anyone. Pretty good.”

  I stared dumbly at her. “That’s your master plan? Run faster than a car?”

  “Yep.”

  I felt like I was going insane. Every second we spent here talking nonsense was another second that Ishan was in danger, but some part of me made me ask. “How?”