A dark place, a racing heart, a sweating brow, a feverish skirmish, and a foe bent on taking her down – that and the sound of her ancient name was enough to send Danielle into a mini-regression of carefully trained physical rage. As one of the strongest mercenaries of her day, Sulim was expected and required to be a formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat.
And she was. That Danielle kept her body in prime athletic condition for the military helped in reliving these memories.
She slammed her foot into Miranda’s shoulder and knocked her off balance again. In that small window of time, Danielle pinned her to the ground, hard enough to give Miranda a good old-fashioned knock-out.
Danielle checked for a pulse. Color came back to Miranda’s face. Although freed from Nerilis’s control, she was still unresponsive.
“Miranda?” Danielle tapped her cheek with her fingers.
Nerilis lowered his arm.
“Watch out!”
An opaque wall came to claim both her and Miranda’s unconscious body. Danielle flung herself down upon Miranda as the sorcerer’s force plowed into the them like a blast of typhoon wind. Devon called out from miles away.
“God…” Danielle said, her hands wadding Miranda’s blouse within their fists. “Just kill us already if you’re going to! Enough with this fucking around!”
It always ended the same way, didn’t it? Nerilis played with them before going for the kill, like a ruthless cat watching the world burn.
“The Relic,” he said. “Where is it?”
“We don’t have it!” Danielle said.
Nerilis pulled out a tiny case from the folds of his jacket and revealed the locket Danielle once gave the woman she loved. It glowed like the butterflies around them.
“One of you has it!” he declared. “See the swarm of butterflies gathering to fly away to the Void? Aren’t they lovely? They say that butterflies are departed souls.”
“I don’t have it!” Danielle continued to insist. “And neither does…”
Devon couldn’t give her the confirmation she sought, his guilty demeanor haunting them as he produced the shrunken Relic and the Third Piece from his pocket, much to Danielle’s horror. “You have no idea what I had to do to get these.”
“Devon!” Danielle shifted her body toward him, hand still clutching Miranda’s. “Why…”
“Give them to me.” Nerilis lowered the force of gravity around Devon’s body. “I’ll make your death swift if you comply.”
“Stop this nonsense!”
Three heads turned toward the black maw producing the golden butterflies. The hobbling figure of an old man with his cane came for them, one wavering step at a time.
Nerilis raised his fist, a tiny torrent of butterflies exploding against his moving knuckles. “What are you doing here? Get out!”
Marlow came to a stop as soon as he was a mere shout away. “You know I’m not good at taking orders.”
Nerilis threw his fist down in a huff, summoning a wave of energy behind him. It decimated a group of butterflies. “How dare you act so mighty. You never change!”
While heated banter erupted between them, Devon crawled his weary body over to Danielle and the woman still tucked beneath her body. “Why did you take them?” Danielle asked.
“Because I had to have something to barter with,” he explained. “To save you.”
“But we’ll die…”
“I couldn’t stand the thought of you being trapped in the Process.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” he said, taking her free hand. “I’ve got them now.”
Danielle squeezed his hand. “Whatever you do, don’t…”
“Give me the Relic!” Nerilis lunged at them. Before they had the chance to roll out of the way, they were frozen in place by the strongest wave of power to yet emanate from a sorcerer’s hand. Whimpers filled the air when he snatched the Relic and Third Piece from Devon’s possession. This was the closest either of them had come to the rogue julah in their current lives. The intense memories he brought with his aura infused Danielle and Devon with a gauntlet of terrors, some lived, some imagined, but all real. Danielle wanted to vomit before her body was overwhelmed with a forced regression. Devon cried the kind of tears that only appeared when grief and mourning mounted the mind.
“I’m telling you to stop this!” Marlow pushed against the winds driving him back. The more power Nerilis let loose in the dark, ominous cavern between worlds, the more an old sorcerer fought with his cane and aging body. “What do you really achieve by destroying Earth? Pissing off the authority? Time to grow up!”
With the Relic and Third Piece in his possession, Nerilis stood before his old comrade with a fixated expression piercing through Marlow’s haggard face. “You idiot!” he spat. “Even after all this time, you still refuse to see the truth? How wretched are you? You dare call yourself a priest? Your presence is proof that you are not strong enough to accept such a responsibility!”
Marlow shook his head. “What happened to you? To us?”
A new surge of butterflies danced around their forms like bees on flowers. “My eyes were opened, Ramaron,” Nerilis said, responding in kind to his old companion’s soft-spoken words. “Opened to what truly happens when we die.”
“That is enough for you to destroy as much as you have? All those planets, all those faces… all those lives? And you swear that you sleep well at night?”
Nerilis shook his hand at Marlow, as if that were the best way to keep the other sorcerer away from him. In his other hand remained the artifacts that were, until recently, in Marlow’s possession. He pulled the other Relic and spread both before him, their vibrant colors reflecting the light shining around them now that they were together.
Cheap, tawdry chimes. That’s what they were.
Danielle took her partner’s hand again. “I can’t fight him,” she admitted. “We’re too weak against that man. We’re going to die again.”
Before she could sink on top of Miranda’s body with a sob in her throat, Devon pulled her into his arms and held her with weak constitution. “I don’t know what’s going on or what’s going to happen,” he began, “but you’re not going to die alone.”
“Answer my question, Nerilis,” Marlow said. “How do you sleep at night?”
The Relics were the final barrier between the two men. Marlow dared not step any farther into their glowing boundaries. Nerilis also stood back from their pulsating glow. “I haven’t slept a full night in nearly two thousand years,” he said. “I was haunted before I started this crusade, since that first night I slept as a priest and saw the Void with my own mind’s eye. She guided me, Ramaron. Just as I desired. She in her love for life… she guided me across the realm of the Void, and all I could feel was its vast, aching emptiness. The inherent guilt I felt, knowing that I was alive, and all those other people in the universe were alive and sucking the Void dry. That was the world she inherited. Queen of Emptiness.”
Marlow scoffed. “You would dare launch this crusade without me.”
“You would have condemned it.”
“I must admit, that in this past millennium of chasing you across the universe like a fool, I have felt nothing but pity for you. There was once a time when you and I would speak for hours about our roles in the worlds of the sentient, and this… you would not even tell me about.”
“For what it’s worth, we were not on the best of speaking terms when I began this.”
“Even the Head Priest such as yourself could make time for a wanderer like me. We chose different paths in the end, but we have the same desires.”
“Desires… like your perverse desires?”
“I admit that I have loved many in my long years.” That was not a twinkle in Marlow’s wrinkled eyes. “And by loved, I mean as we both imply. But you know as well as I do that there are two kinds of powerful love, and I believe we both felt the strongest, unprecedented kind for her. Yet I would hope that you d
o not resent me and what we had once.”
Nerilis held his haughty shoulders high into the air and pointed his chin toward the blackened sky. “In the end, it does not matter what sins we commit or what we may have once experienced together, secluded in our private world that was intruded upon by a selfless woman. What does matter is bigger than all of us, even our precious egos. I cannot pretend to be a savior, only the tool necessary to bring back balance to existence.”
“Such boastful words!” Marlow lamented. “You truly think of yourself as some martyr, don’t you? But that’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? Used to be that you let others use you for their own ends while you pathetically complained about it for eons. Then you thought you could help me see my errors by sacrificing the sanctity of your untarnished image. And then what, Nerilis? You think that because you’re the one ‘gifted’ with this vision of an empty Void, it is your mission to fulfill it? Damn that! I won’t begin to pretend that I know your mind. I won’t even question your true motives anymore. I won’t even ask why you so blindly bring back bodies that deserve to be born on their own accord. You once accused me of meddling with the affairs of life by putting two souls into the Process. I fail to see how you are any different.”
Devon latched onto Danielle’s arm. “We’ve got to do something. Come on!” When Danielle did not budge, he repeated, “Come on!”
Danielle’s face fell like a bucket of bricks as the body in her arms whimpered in pain. “You do something. You wouldn’t let me die alone, so I won’t let her die alone.”
He covered her hand holding Miranda’s head. “We don’t have much time.”
“And what do you propose we do?” Danielle snapped. “Save the world? There’s nothing we can do now. Even if you ran up there and tried to take those Relics back, what would you do? The only way to keep him from destroying them is to destroy them yourself! Do you want Earth’s demise weighing on your shoulders in your next life?”
He frowned. “That’s exactly what you would have said back then, too.”
“I’m not a savior, and neither are you!”
“Then what about her?” He pointed at Miranda’s limp body. “What is she?”
Danielle shook her head. “She’s just unfortunate.”
Devon held her close to him in preparation for a swift death… his hands came into constant contact with Miranda’s blouse and were drenched in the scent of her musky perfume.
“Close your eyes,” he said, and buried his head in the crook of Danielle’s neck. “This isn’t something you want to take straight into your next life.”
A tear ran down Danielle’s frightened face. He brushed it away, fingers grazing her nose as she inhaled the perfume, its scent taking her back into the depths of her forgotten memories.
It came in a flash. It did not leave as easily.
***
I walk down a street in plain clothes, my firearm holstered and my eyes searching the busy walkway. I always check for danger. It’s my job.
For a moment, I’m disoriented.
The memory crashed through Danielle’s skull. Why was she in this street? Unarmored in a turtleneck and common trousers? Even her head was exposed. Dangerous.
“Where are we going?” I ask the swarm of people around us, most of whom push past me. “Shouldn’t we head back to the embassy?”
The woman I follow stops in front of a stall of goods. She turns, her hat pulled down low and a veil shrouding her face so neither I nor anyone else can identify her. “Lighten up, Sulim,” she says with a friendly smile. “We’re just having a little fun. It’s okay to have fun, you know. It’s not every day we get to be in such a vibrant place together… alone…”
“I don’t know why I had to come with you.”
“Because you’re my bodyguard, and where I go outside of my room, you go.” She pries on the end of a periwinkle scarf and holds it against my face. “Doesn’t that look lovely?”
I bat her hand away and take another step back. “I don’t like fancy.”
“I do.” Cairn tilts her head up and grins at the sparkling jewelry and colorful silks lining the nearest stall. “I find that I appreciate finer things, because I never had them before.”
“Neither have I… but you don’t see me petting silk and wearing diamonds.”
“Because you’re not the same woman as me, obviously.” Cairn holds up a pair of dangly earrings to a mirror; dissatisfied, she puts them back down. “You could calm down, though. Nobody knows I’m here. I’m in bigger danger of being mugged than assassinated.”
“Danger is danger, right? And I’m your bodyguard, right?” I’ve been given special permissions on this political trip to Terra III. Local law enforcement has given me license to attack on sight anyone I deem a physical danger to Cairn, the chief of my mercenary tribe. I don’t want to have to do it.
“Do you think we should get souvenirs?” Cairn continues to muse. “I have no idea what to bring back to the men. I think red light women would be illegal.”
She jests, yet I can’t hold back a sneer. How can she still talk so candidly about that side of our society? “Barnaba likes dark chocolate. I see Giselle get it for him all the time on his birthday. Hunter would like books? Sonall would like…” I cut myself off.
“Yes?” Cairn says over her shoulder. “What would he like?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve worked with the man for how many years, and you don’t know what he likes?”
My cheeks grow hot. All I know about Sonall is that he’s constantly surrounded by drunk women and gambling his pay. He never reads books. He never eats the same sweets. “Sonall likes sex. And dice.”
Cairn laughs. “So do I, but I’m not getting him that.” She considers a row of trinkets. “Maybe we’ll forget souvenirs.”
“Can we go back, then? I want to take a nap.”
“But we have so much free time until dinner with the ambassador.” Disappointment shrouds her veiled eyes. “And you want to sleep?”
“I don’t sleep well at night in that room. It’s too exposed.”
“Were you this way even before you became a mercenary?”
“Overprotective and prone to paranoia? Probably. I don’t really remember.”
“So you stay up all night in case somebody breaks into our room and tries to kill me?”
“Not intentionally, no. I toss and turn and piss on myself for not getting any sleep. Meanwhile, you sleep like a princess. Or something.”
Cairn shrugs. “I guess that explains why I’m happy and you’re grumpy.” She leans in and lowers her voice so only I can hear her in this crowd. “That also explains why you crawl into bed as soon as we’re finished with diplomacy, and don’t even react to me touching you. We’re practically on vacation in the Federation and you spend your whole time sleeping.”
I shake her off me. “You can take care of yourself when you’re awake. It’s pretty much the only time I get to sleep. It’s like shifts.”
A new smile blossoms beneath Cairn’s veil. “I just had the greatest image of you standing next to my bed and staring at the window… as if to say, ‘Come for her, I dare you!’”
I cross my arms. “Why are you always making fun of me?”
Cairn nods to the blue ring I wear on my right hand. “You’re still wearing that? It’s so ridiculously tacky. We really should get a new ring while we’re here. Nothing overly indulgent, of course, that would draw too much attention… but at least something that’s a pretty stone.”
“No.” I curl my hand. “I like this ring. It fits perfectly.”
“Eh…” Cairn holds out the palm of her right hand. “Let me wear it, then.”
I gaze into the twinkling eyes behind the gauze of the veil. “No way. Why are you being so childish today? And you’re the one always calling me ridiculous…”
She pulls my hand, admiring the cheap ring on my finger. “People would get suspicious if you wore it on the other hand.”
&nb
sp; “That would be impractical.”
“What? Wearing it there? Or the suspicion? Either one is fair-game where we’re from. A mercenary with an engagement ring… who knew we could get married?”
“It’s not an engagement ring.”
“So says you.”
Cairn tugs my ring with her fingers. I try to jerk away, but am met with her firm resistance. We struggle until she yanks it off my hand. She puts it on her own with a triumphant smirk on her face.
“Be careful with it,” I mutter.
“I wouldn’t dream of hurting something that means so much to you.” She catches the frustration on my face. “Fine. Let’s go back. You can have your nap.”
She holds out her ringed hand and waits for me to take it. I’m stunned by what she’s done with it.
“You put it on your left hand?”
“Why not?”
“Why would you?”
She squeezes my hand and pulls me closer as we walk against the flow of foot traffic. “Maybe I want people to get the wrong idea.”
The musk from Cairn’s perfume assaulted Sulim’s senses until she jerked herself awake again, a thousand years later in another dying body.
***
“Are you all right?” Devon said. “What happened?”
She opened her eyes and shoved Devon aside. In a regressive fit, she lunged toward the altercating sorcerers with panicked shouts behind her.
Her speed was so great from memory-propelled adrenaline that Danielle slammed by Nerilis and snatched the ring before he saw her coming. His curses followed her into the depths of the surrounding darkness.
Danielle could no longer be seen, although her voice echoed in the apocalyptic chamber.
“This isn’t yours!”
While Nerilis was sufficiently distracted, Devon leaped to his feet and snatched the locket before sprinting off in the other direction.
Nerilis threw his arms out, every ounce of his power draining through his veins and pulsating out of his palms to strike the mercenaries dead. Marlow smacked his cane against the ground and counteracted the leaping Shadows before they had the chance to hit their targets.
Rebirth (Cross Book 1) Page 51
