Devdan looked toward the direction of the conflict and then noticed the shadow of a rock near him. He began to step towards it, but Tsubame said, “It’s not going to work. There was a reason it was so easy for you to get here. I couldn’t have you interfering with the conflict and potentially forcing me to deal with you myself and forgo the feisty but helpless damsel female leader who cares for her people persona I’ve been careful to project to the world thus far.”
“A magical loop,” MaLeila said. She shouldn’t have been shocked. It was her favorite trick to keep her opponents trapped whether it was so they couldn’t get away or so that she could. Most sorcerers and sorceresses couldn’t create a magical loop though because it involved having the ability to warp space and distance, particular the tears in it and in the last nearly seven years MaLeila hadn’t come across any sorcerers who could create a magical loop. It was one of the many magical theories that Claude had left to her, a technique that Bastet and Devdan weren’t even sure that he could use. The only reason it hadn’t crossed her mind that Tsubame could was that the woman never had used it, and MaLeila continued to forget that the woman was only an alternate version of herself because despite the fact that she wasn’t hiding it anymore Tsubame continued to favor her disguise.
“But just because you can’t interfere doesn’t mean you aren’t free to see for yourself what the Thornes have decided to send to aid me,” Tsubame said as she started back into the compound. “There’s a great view from the roof. Come on. I’ll show you.”
Boxed in and with no way to escape, Devdan gave MaLeila one last glance and followed Tsubame into the compound. MaLeila hesitated before heading to the roof herself. There wasn’t much to see at first—until she got to the edge. The battle was now taking place in the heart of the city, closer and closer to the compound.
“What are those?” Devdan asked Tsubame, eyes narrowed as he watched the bloody fight below.
At first glance, MaLeila didn’t see what Devdan was talking about. They all looked like regular soldiers to her. Then she took a second glance, this time with not just her physical eye but her magical one. Their soldier outfits and their guns made then look like run of the mill soldiers, but there was something just something just off about the color of their skin and the nimbleness of their movements that made MaLeila take a closer look at them with her magical senses. She didn’t fully switch her vision over to see the ethereal world, but rather a double view that made everyone look like they were puppets with strings. Ethereally they looked like demons, but the demons possessing the human bodies didn’t have full control of the body, nor were they slowly rotting the body they possessed from the inside because of the body’s incompatibility with the energies that demons exuded. In fact, the bodies weren’t even fully possessed by the demons they hosted. If MaLeila had to describe the phenomenon, it was as though the original human souls had fused with the demonic energies.
“What are those?” MaLeila asked.
Tsubame didn’t answer, too engrossed with watching the conflict like it was a movie. She continued to do so even when the door behind them burst open and Bastet clambered onto the roof.
MaLeila began to call the woman’s name, but before she could there was a sharp rise in the temperature and from Bastet’s right hand bursts a flamethrower aimed directly at Tsubame. MaLeila had only begun to step back when she was pulled out the way and forced to the ground as the flamethrower widened across the roof before dispersing.
“I didn’t think you were interested in protecting me anymore,” MaLeila said dryly to Devdan.
“Old habits die hard,” the man grumbled as he turned to look at Bastet who was slowly turning about the roof looking for Tsubame who had disappeared. “What the fuck was that?”
“Sorry. I figured you’d both have enough sense to get out the way,” Bastet said.
Devdan rolled his eyes and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Change of plans,” Bastet replied. “We can’t leave without Tsubame. She may have just started World War III, but we’ll finish it a hell of a lot quicker if we capture her and deliver her to the Russians.”
“And on whose behalf are you working on by doing that? To be honest it sounds like something the Magic Council would order,” Tsubame said reappearing in the same spot she had vanished from as though she hadn’t vanished in the first place. “Tsk, tsk. It seems like all of you suffer from trying so hard to live up to someone else’s expectations of you that all of you are a slave to something or someone in your own way. Why try to stop this war when what I’m actually doing is liberating you?”
It was the way Bastet rolled her left shoulder back that gave away to MaLeila that Tsubame had struck a nerve with the woman. Tsubame seemed to know it too because she continued, “It’s because despite the fact that you left the service of the Magic Council a long time ago you’re still their bitch.”
Bastet sent the flamethrower again and this time Tsubame took out her fan and brought it down in an arch to create a strong dust of wind that fanned the flames away from her and back at Bastet, whom the flames did little damage against.
“I didn’t think you were as stubborn as Nika, but I guess you are which means I’m going to have to rough you up a bit before you come to your senses and listen to me,” Tsubame said.
The woman flew through the air at Bastet while bringing out her second fan. Bastet ran to meet the woman’s charge, charging up another flamethrower. Just as Tsubame brought her arms down in a crisscrossing motion, Bastet slid under Tsubame’s feet, got back to her feet, and sent the flamethrower at the woman’s back.
Tsubame simultaneously turned to face the flames, tossed one of fans in the air, catching it in the same hand as the other, and held her hand out to gather the flames in her hand into a tight ball. She glanced between it and Bastet twice before humming and tossing the ball into the air. Only when it began to fall to ground and the woman didn’t make a move to catch it did MaLeila figure out what the woman was doing.
“Fuck. She’s setting the mood,” MaLeila said, bringing up a shield just as the ball crashed into the roof.
The shield did little good besides protecting her and Devdan from the initial flames before the roof exploded and caved in. Even before the dust settled, MaLeila pushed a large piece of concrete off her back as she coughed up debris and waved smoke from the fire that was beginning to overtake the compound out her face. Instinctively, she began to call for her staff and only when she didn’t feel the cool metal in her hands did she remember that Tsubame destroyed it. She stood up looking around the debris for Tsubame, Bastet, and Devdan. Devdan burst forth from some rubble not too far away from her rubbing the right side of his chest. MaLeila narrowed her eyes in concern, but said nothing as she continued to look for Tsubame and Bastet. Another explosion rocked the compound and MaLeila began to climb over the rubble in the direction where she was sure she’d find Tsubame and Bastet.
She followed the noise to a collapsed wall and witnessed Tsubame and Bastet outside in the garden, Tsubame looking pristine as ever, as though she hadn’t been near the explosion, while Bastet was missing the heavy black jacket and tunic she had been wearing and was now only wearing a sports bra, her body covered in dust and smoke. In addition to all the flames and the smoke in the air, an electrical storm was cackling in the air above them.
MaLeila jumped out the window, manipulating the matter in the air so that it was closer together and slowed her descent to the ground and lessened her impact. A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky above Tsubame, while Bastet collected energy from the electrical storm and directed it to the ground to form a fissure. It travelled to where Tsubame was standing and collapsed the ground beneath her just as the bolt struck. The fissure and the bolt caused the ground beneath Tsubame to explode and for a moment, Tsubame was shielded from view. Everyone waited in tense anticipation of the woman reappearing. Then her silhouette flashed, like a trick of the light on a sunny day and then a red blue streak across the
grass, striking both Bastet down.
“You said you didn’t want to hurt them,” MaLeila yelled when the woman stopped not too far away from her.
“And that’s still true,” Tsubame replied.
“Then why are you fighting them?”
“I said I don’t want to. Not that I wouldn’t if I needed to. But Miss Samara I think the real question is why aren’t you fighting at all?”
The question struck something in MaLeila, something that she had been putting off under the pretense of continuing to watch things unfold. She tried to continue putting it off, by responding that Tsubame had destroyed her staff so how was she supposed to fight her.
As though reading her mind, Tsubame said first, “And don’t try putting this on your lack of a staff. If you really wanted to stop me, if you really wanted to fight against me, you would have. You want me to stop. Stop me. What’s holding you back?”
MaLeila knew the answer the instant Tsubame asked the question, but couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. But now she understood why Tsubame was fighting; why she was still here when she had already accomplished what she needed and it would be so easy for her to escape; seemingly wasting her time holding back in a fight she could easily win. Back at the airport, Tsubame had been waiting for MaLeila, Bastet, and Devdan to shatter before sweeping her away so that she could privately tempt MaLeila with the world. And now, Tsubame was bidding her time for the answer to that proposal. An answer MaLeila already had but was afraid to give.
“You can stop this whenever you want.” Tsubame held MaLeila’s gaze as she tossed her fan in the air and opened it back up again before tossing it in the air like a boomerang to intersect the ring of golden magic daggers headed in her direction courtesy of a once again standing, albeit bleeding, Bastet.
Her fan missed one though and the golden dagger headed straight toward her. In the second between it connecting with her, Tsubame only looked at as though she had time to contemplate what she might do with it. As the dagger was about to hit her, a shadow rose in front of her and absorbed the dagger.
“Do you have to be so fucking reckless?” Marcel said appearing next to the woman. MaLeila felt like she should have known. Tsubame probably had known.
“I would have been fine. I was just going to make things a little more interesting for myself,” Tsubame said with a shrug and then turned to MaLeila. “Alas, now I’m bored. And I wouldn’t want to hurt someone too badly in my boredom. So are you ready now?”
“If you’re going to leave, she’s certainly not going with you,” Bastet said from where she was standing.
“Is that the belief you’re clinging to because you want so much for her to stay with you, that you don’t want to believe that this time Miss Samara doesn’t need your saving and never really has?” Tsubame said to Bastet. She turned her attention back to MaLeila and said, “Don’t be afraid to give into the desire that whispers into your heart every night to be the most supreme, to have everyone answer to you because they couldn’t stop you if they tried. Don’t be afraid to give into your birthright because you’re trying so hard to prove that you aren’t anything like Claude Thorne. Admittedly, he had the same drive, tried so hard to be a good upstanding human being just like you try so hard to be. Knew what he was capable of and yet resisted it. And because of that it twisted him and the perversion of the slave trade only made that corruption so much worse. Isn’t that right Devdan?”
So mesmerized by Tsubame’s words MaLeila had been that she hadn’t seen Devdan had make his way to where they were finally. He was still holding his chest and MaLeila guessed that was the reason for his delay.
“You’ve said enough,” Devdan replied.
“No. I want to know what she’s talking about. I want to know the big secret,” MaLeila said turning her gaze to meet Devdan’s.
She thought with the bind broken their relationship would be different, but she was still as acutely aware of him as she had always been, the energy and tension in the room rising as their natural link, unconfined by Claude’s forced binding flared as if trying to bring them together even though they were again facing off against each other. He felt it too. MaLeila could tell by the way he tried to magically withdraw himself from her, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it. And like always when he didn’t want to acknowledge their connection, he diverted attention away from it.
“I don’t know what she’s—“
“Stop lying to me,” MaLeila cut in.
“Don’t be so hard on him,” Tsubame said with a laugh. “I don’t think he even knows. Everyone in the world, this universe and my own, held the man in such reverence when they would have been sickened if they knew the depths of his madness and perversity. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that you’ve been going about not being like him the wrong way. And though you don’t understand it now, you’ll thank me later. Don’t say I didn’t try to let you come to your own decision though. Hakim.”
A fine mist began to form in the air, increasing the shadows around them. MaLeila braced herself for what Marcel was about to do when she felt Devdan’s arm hook around her waist and pull her to him; her face buried in his chest; the smell of him like rain and the crisp air of winter in Georgia invading her senses and taking her back to one of the first times he held her like this. They were locked in a janitor’s closet to hide from a wizard who managed to transport them to a mirror dimension of her school on a physical plane that existed almost directly on top of their own plane. It was only the fact that she’d left her homework for the next period that he’d been there in the first place to drop it off when the wizard attacked. She hadn’t been fond of him back then, was still cautious of his presence when he was around still, but all the same she felt safer with the man who seemed like he was still trying to decide if he wanted to kill her than the wizard that certainly was trying to kill her or worse.
And after many more encounters of the same nature, MaLeila had gone back and forth between feeling protected and in danger around the man to always feeling protected but between loving and hating him. The love giving way to hate after every hurtful comment, every time he shut her out, pushed her away, and toyed with her emotions and the hate giving way to love as soon as he contradicted his words by sweeping in to protect her anyway, almost killing himself on many occasions from the effort. The binding had changed nothing it seemed, neither for better nor for worse. And it was because nothing had changed that MaLeila came to decision.
“We can’t keep doing this,” MaLeila whispered, knowing he’d hear it even with all the noise around them.
“I keep telling myself that,” he admitted.
“Then let me go. It’s time to stop protecting me, Devdan.” Before he could respond MaLeila continued, “But I know you can’t help it. So I’ll make it easy for us.”
She felt the man tense slightly around her as she pressed the cool metal of his own gun to his back.
“Let me go, Devdan.”
“You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you killed me,” Devdan said knowingly.
“I wouldn’t have to. At this range, the bullet would kill us both.”
His grip around her relaxed as the realization dawned on him. He kept his arms around her for a little while longer before he finally let her go completely and MaLeila stepped back from him, far enough that he couldn’t easily grab her again, but close enough for her to be able to hand him back his gun.
“Before you decide to hate me and close your heart up even more so that the next girl has an even worse time trying to melt that steel, keep in mind that you broke my heart first, okay?” MaLeila said as he grabbed the gun from her.
MaLeila let the gun go and turned her back to him before walking over to Tsubame.
“I’m ready now,” she said.
“It’s a shame. I was hoping Devdan and Bastet would be coming with you,” Tsubame stated as the mist began to collect even thicker obscuring the compound, Devdan, Bastet, everything from MaLeila�
�s sight.
7
Tsubame had taken them to some reclusive temple in the mountains to serve as their temporary sanctuary. Nika dropped MaLeila off in a room with large open windows and a sublime view of the mountain before leaving MaLeila to her own devices.
The room was fully furnished with a bed and drawers filled with clothing and attached to the room was a bathroom with black stone floors and walls that matched the rest of the temple but MaLeila still recognized as a recent addition. At some point either Tsubame, Nika, or Marcel had been here to prepare this place for them. It may have been what Tsubame had sent Marcel away to do after their date in the city right before it was ravished by the rebel’s attack.
That evening, only a day ago yet still seeming so long because so much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, brought a smile to her face. Though he was hesitant sometimes, Marcel held nothing back from her as he told her about how their Civil War had gone; from how while never being involved in the abolitionist movement, he had given a helping hand to runaways who crossed paths with him, even once guiding a group all the way to Canada; how initially he had been a neutral party in the war because while slavery had been the focal issue it certainly hadn’t been a war between two sides of the country with different morals regarding the people they held captive even though the abolitionists took advantage of the war to get slavery abolished; how he had gotten involved for all the wrong reasons when a pyromaniac sorcerer from the confederate army who infiltrated the union army set his house in Atlanta on fire and in the ensuing fight between the two, burned down the entire city Marcel called home in effort to incite more anger and drive for the confederates to beat the union army.
“I still wasn’t on the union’s side. I still didn’t think by the north winning they would end slavery for good, but I had a vendetta to settle.”
And it was as he was regaling her with stories about his involvement in the Civil War, always being mostly truthful even if he became hesitant when he didn’t think she’d like what he told her, that MaLeila realized that her attraction to him wasn’t because he reminded her of Devdan but because where it counted, Marcel didn’t. That thought in mind, MaLeila rid herself of her clothing and put the shower to good use to rid herself of the debris and grime from a few hours before.
The Immortal Queen Tsubame: Ascension Page 6
