“The Temple of the Three Moons,” Braygen said. “This is the place most fiercely protected by the Tahiró.”
“Sandaris has no third moon,” Ashe muttered. “It was lost. Right, Jàden?”
“Sandaris is the third moon,” she whispered. Her moon, and one she still needed to abandon.
Disbelief flashed across Ashe’s eyes as she laid her hand over the panel, then hesitated. Frank had found her when she used the datapad. She searched the sky, unable to see much through the thick canopy.
She shouldn’t, but she had to know. Jàden pressed her palm to the panel and held her breath.
The light pad flashed blue.
She dropped the smashed unit and stepped back, searching the sky for any of Frank’s ships. The door shifted, air hissing at the seams, and slid silently open.
Thin lines of white light traced along dusty stone walls, weaving across the glass-like surface.
She trailed her fingers over the smoothness, stopping shy of the threaded web. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of spiders.” Braygen stepped into the corridor beside her, brushing his gloved hand across the wall to clear the surface.
“Spiders. Sahiranath.” Ashe muttered under his breath, obviously still not over their near miss with the shifters.
Light flicked on overhead, firemarks aglow inside hanging crescent lanterns. Energy flowed through the corridor, illuminating sections divided by stone columns arched high overhead.
Jàden breathed in the smell of sterile dust.
She’d waited so long to find Kale that stepping through the door from soft earth to stone floors seemed like entering an alien world.
She traced the thin lines of power woven through walls built to last several millennia. Her fingers stopped on illuminated words etched among the lines of power. Laoné lenä freon và naréa. Naréathana freon amshe faríoné. San ‘endlan và drér fré. Vó e vastana ara zenathar o.
“This can’t be right.” She brushed dust from the etchings, her brows pulled together in concentration. “Light does not exist without darkness. Darkness cannot breathe without light. Bond them to create shadow, who both divides and unites.”
She shook her head. “It uses two different meanings for light. The first refers to sunlight and moonlight, but the second—”
“Darkness cannot breathe without magic.” Braygen stepped close and leaned his forearm against the wall, reading over her shoulder.
Her cheeks warmed at his close proximity. “Even darkness is energy and fuels life.”
“The Tahiró believe it can be combined, bonded together from one person to another. They were the first to discover this place when they went hunting for the lost Guardian.” He met her gaze. “They were looking for you.”
“I’d love one day where someone’s not searching for me.” Jàden stepped away, pressing aside a curtain of web now that she knew it wouldn’t stick to her hand. Dust floated into the air. She stripped one web after another, clearing the enclosed space.
At the end of the hall, she brushed her fingers over a second steel door. To the left, a square of frosted plexiglass glowed against the wall.
“The last Tahiró to open this door died three hundred years ago.” Braygen laid his hand against the glowing panel. It buzzed red, and the door remained shut.
Jàden swallowed a lump in her throat.
Ashe unsheathed her dagger and nodded. “Do it. Let’s get this shit over with. I’m tired of searching for this asshole.”
She placed her palm against the light pad. White turned blue, and the door slid into the wall.
“I knew you were the one,” Braygen said.
“All right, Kale. Show me the way home.” She slipped inside, heart racing.
Illumination bled through the floor along trails of light like the gate rooms, curving in long arcs toward the center of the large chamber as she stepped inside.
Dozens of statues circled the outer wall, backlit to cast their features in stark relief.
“It’s a Guardian temple from the world before mine.”
Jàden frowned at the statues. She’d never believed in such deification, and Kale knew this. “Few sing to the old Guardians anymore, even in my world.”
“Why would someone build statues to the old Guardians?” Braygen asked.
“Someone must sing to them.” Her grandmother had, but only a few people she knew held onto the old beliefs.
“Ain’t nothin’ here but dusty old statues,” Ashe muttered. “Guardians abandoned Sandaris long ago.”
“The Guardians aren’t divine. They’re ordinary, terrified people who stood out against their nature in one courageous act that defined history.” But Jàden tracked the light through the floor as if a fiery gate orb might suddenly appear.
The energy came together as a large circle with flames around the edges.
“Stay back.”
She held her arm out to keep them at bay.
Rock burst through the center, building itself like nanotech into a tree trunk as branches stretched toward a high, domed ceiling. Three symbols glowed against the trunk: the horse, the wolf and the zankata.
Jàden shuddered. That kind of tech could only be found in one place.
As if Sandaris heard her, its gentle heart thrummed alongside hers. How had Kale gotten hold of alien tech?
Flecks of dust shook from the ceiling as the walls groaned with the grinding of internal mechanics. Three pillars rose in a circle around the trunk, two of the stones crude and rugged, waiting for a sculptor to chisel them to perfection.
The third lifted in front of Jàden, ground stretching into a long body covered by a Guild uniform, a zankata surrounded by flames on her left shoulder. One arm reached forward, palm turned skyward as three swirls of light lifted away.
“Oh, shit,” Ashe said. “It’s—”
“Me,” she whispered.
The statue’s long hair pulled back in a single tail. The Guardian statue’s narrow features and thin nose were unmistakable, bangs fringed across the forehead in a style Jàden hadn’t worn for nearly four thousand years.
“Herana,” Braygen said. “Guardian of Lost Souls.”
Ashe touched her shoulder, turning Jàden so she had to meet his gaze. “We need the captain here. Don’t you dare leave this village until I find him. Understand?”
It was crazy for him to leave. “You’re still sick, and you have no weapons.”
“I am the weapon.” He slapped his chest. “And this is not my world, Jàden. This is yours.”
Ashe had never shown an ounce of fear in all the time she’d known him, but something about this place left a deep worry in his eyes. Maybe he felt safer with Jon and his brothers around, she couldn’t honestly say. Only that the set of his jaw told her one thing—he wouldn’t change his mind.
“Be safe.” Hugging him tight, she kissed his cheek. “I’m staying. I have to find Kale and finish this.”
Braygen stripped the bow and quiver from his back and tossed them to Ashe. “Take my saddle and any supplies you need. Tell Alida what you’ve seen. She’ll go with you.”
Ashe slung the quiver on his shoulder and leaned his forehead against hers. “As a brother to his sister, I will come back.”
Jàden swallowed a lump in her throat as he stormed out of the room. “Can I see your datapad?”
As Braygen handed her the device, she zoomed out the map to try to get a better view of her location. Northern side of the Dark Isle while the Ironstar Tower—the beginning of her nightmare—was still far to the south.
“This isn’t the beginning,” she muttered. “It can’t be.”
She glanced at the other two unformed rocks—two more Guardians. Frank and Bradshaw searched for another Flame while they held her captive, but they never found anyone like her.
Except who was the third rock?
Shield glass stretched across the front of ea
ch. She pressed her palm against the screen embedded in her statue. If Frank already knew where she was from touching the light pad, she didn’t have much time left.
“Here goes nothing,” she said.
A trail of light bled across the screen, illuminating Kale as he rubbed his short hair. He’d lost weight, his cheeks hollow. A cigarette smoldered between his lips, the smoke curling across his cheek.
“Kale.” She traced the worry lines on his face. “What happened to you?”
He’d searched for her, that much she knew, but this man was broken, devastated. When he finally met her gaze, there were tears in his eyes.
“I’m going to die, Jàden. I don’t want to, but it’s the only way.
“Enforcers are closing in. I’ve lost everything—my command, my home. But losing you, that’s the pain that eats away at me every day.”
Grieving him and letting go had been hard, but seeing him now, so broken, sliced her to the core.
“Do you remember what I told you? About courage and fear?” He shifted to the side to reveal large statues circling the chamber behind him. “This is where we started. Do you remember?”
“No, I…” Jàden glanced around the cavern. She’d never seen this place.
But one look at the datapad’s map, and it all came rushing back.
They’d been caught in a dust storm in this area, Kale’s ship grounded for fear the sand would clog the turbines. He’d kissed her for the first time that day.
She pressed a hand to her mouth. “I remember.”
“Everything you see in this place I built for you. It’s a safe house, with enough food, water and power inside to keep you alive for three years. This bunker is secure. My father can’t trace you here. Time enough for you to learn how to fly.”
“No, Kale.” She passed the datapad back to Braygen. “Don’t say goodbye.”
“I have no doubt hypersleep fucked your head up really bad.” His expression flickered between pain, distress and anger, but beneath it all, a hollowness lurked. As if he’d lost hope.
She caressed her thumb across Kale’s digital cheek.
The way he held his cigarette reminded her so much of Jon her chest ached. You’ve never smoked a day in your life.
“I want you off this ship. Off Sandaris, just like we always talked about. Even if you have to leave me behind.” Uncertainty flickered across his distraught hazel eyes.
“My father”—Kale lit a second cigarette, the first one still smoldering in his grasp—“he had the answer all along. There’s a way to survive, to balance your power. I should have seen it sooner.”
Pain pulled at his features as he tried to hold himself together. “There’s another Flame. He and Bradshaw want to unite you and the other. But he’s not really after you.”
For a moment, she thought Kale might break down into tears, something she’d never seen him do. Some of this she already knew, but a sense lingered in her gut that he was circling around to something worse.
“The spark he seeks isn’t what’s generated by this union. It’s what the spark creates—a third Flame so strong this person can draw from both energy sources as one.”
“A third Flame.” Jàden didn’t like the sound of this at all, and by the distress in Kale’s body language, he hadn’t finished.
“You have to unite the Flames, or you’ll die. But if you do, who knows where you’ll end up. My father’s planning to go through the moon’s gate into the otherspace, and you can’t let him.”
Jàden shook her head, desperate to turn away and cover her ears. This is what they all feared, her and the others who had seen the moon’s inner gate.
“There isn’t much time.” He wiped a tear from his cheek. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, baby. I knew my father was a cold-hearted asshole, but I had no idea what a monster lived inside him.”
Regret lay raw in his eyes. “I love you with every piece of my heart. Stay alive, and we’ll be together soon.”
The bands of light disappeared, and the glass smoked over.
Jàden stared at the empty transmission panel. “Kale? No no no. Come back!”
His brokenness cut her to the core.
Braygen wrapped his arms around her.
“I’m not leaving you.” Anger flowed into her veins at what Frank had done. Kale might as well have been in a cage for all the horrors etched on his face. Her hands shook harder as she curled them into fists.
She shrugged off Braygen and punched the glass, pain shooting up her arm. Blood beaded on her scraped knuckles as she stormed toward the door.
Braygen caught her arm. “Where are you going?”
Shoving him away, she slapped her palm against the lightpad. “I’m going to kill Frank Kale.”
No matter what Evardo said, Frank wasn’t in the right to keep her here. And she wasn’t going to let anyone else suffer.
She would find Frank.
And then unleash the Flame’s fury until all that remained of him was ash.
Late afternoon turned to evening as she closed the outer door to the Temple of the Three Moons. “What I wouldn’t give for a gun right now.”
The gentleness in Braygen’s eyes turned sharp. “I meant what I said before. My life is yours. Tell me what to do.”
“But why? You know nothing about me.”
He sighed deeply, almost as if choosing his words. “That man you saw in there—the day he died is the same day I was born. When I woke from hypersleep, I was still clutching a picture of you.”
Braygen touched her cheek. “I wanted to be the hero that found you and stopped the war.”
Jàden’s chest gripped so tight she couldn’t breathe as she noted just how much Braygen looked like Kale. His hair was darker and his eyes gray, but he had the same gentleness and tall, lean build.
Tears burned down her cheek as she grabbed his wrist, desperate to know the truth. “Are you Kale?”
An engine boomed past the village so low it rattled the Veradóran’s central mother tree. Branches cracked and shook, leaves raining over the valley.
Between slots in the canopy, an obsidian ship zipped toward the eastern horizon. It could only be one thing—a Raith fighter. And she knew without question who sat in the cockpit. “Frank.”
CHAPTER 48
The Jungle
“Captain, over here!”
Jon wrangled his horse around, the devouring darkness a heavy shadow looming over his shoulders. The closer he got to Jàden, the stronger her energy flowed through him, but he still couldn’t shake the nausea as the invader’s magic. He trotted through the flooded woods to a mud-churned road.
Malcolm picked up a broken arrow shaft, green feathers on the end. “Someone took a hit.”
Jon growled and forced himself to focus on the trail. They’d trusted Jàden’s messenger hoping to catch up to her before Éli did, but this was the first sign of anything beyond wild jungle. He couldn’t be sure anymore Jàden had gone in this direction. “Come on, Ashe. Show us where you are.”
As a wave of dizziness hit him again, Jon rubbed his eyes to force back the blurriness. If he could just get close to her again, maybe her softness would breathe so strong through his skin again that he could fight off this other power.
Opening his mouth to shout an order toward his men, his eye caught another zankata painting, this one streaked with rain and losing form.
“Kale,” he muttered, clenching his fist around the reins. Wherever that asshole was, Jàden was sure to follow. “This way!”
“Son, you sure about this?” Malcolm followed but kept glancing over his shoulder as if he wasn’t certain. It made the most sense. Jàden had been bent on following that lover of hers since day one.
Jon’s instincts told him to follow.
“Them shifters have her, the ones from the coast.”
They tracked for more than an hour before Andrew shouted ahead.
“Here, Captain.”
Tracks appeared in the mud as if horses rose from nothing.
Jon dropped to the ground, tracing his fingers across a set of larger hoofprints surrounded by smaller ones. “It’s them. Maybe a day.”
Ashe and Jàden shouldn’t be so far ahead, but as he climbed onto his horse, Jon dug his heels in. “We ride hard.”
Pushing the horses as hard as he dared, they rode until Shelora’s bright moon was high in the sky. They stopped long enough to let the horses rest, but Jon could barely sleep, his mind racing. He wasn’t giving up his wife without a fight, but the darkness seeped into his bones, oily and rotten, making his body ache all over.
Andrew crouched in front of him, his features rigid. “Tell me you’d fight this hard to find Ashe.”
“Every damn time.” He lit a cigarette, sweat beading along his brow. “For you, for Ashe, for any one of you boys. You’re all the family I got.”
He’d craved a companion like Jàden his whole life though. Someone gentle and warm who could take away the world’s cold cruelty just by slipping their hand in his. Jon would never tell his men, but given the choice, he’d choose her every time. He only hoped it never came to that.
“We’ll find him,” Jon said.
Jon led his men down a narrow path that looked more like a game trail, but it was getting harder to follow in the growing storm.
He turned to Malcolm. “Get up here, old man.”
Malcolm would have to discern the rest, but before the old man reached his side, a figure crouched on the path ahead, an arrow pointed in their direction.
Jon held up a hand to stop his men.
“Shifters,” Malcolm muttered. He’d barely said more than a few words since Felaren, but the guilt lay stark in his eyes.
“No sudden movements.” Jon kept his hands where they could be seen. If one shifter was on the path, half a dozen likely followed in the trees. He didn’t want any trouble, he just needed to find his wife.
The figure’s head lifted. “Andrew?”
“Ashe.” Digging his heels into his horse, mania gripped Jon with a desperate need to find Jàden. If Ashe was here, she had to be close. “Jàden!”
Grabbing him by the shirt, Ashe yanked him off his horse, Jon hitting the ground hard. Pain shot into Jon’s shoulder.
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