Emerald Twilight: Bundled Edition

by Ashley, Celia

  Shutting down the vessel to its minimum, just enough power to open the hatch, everyone gathered the two containers of water they were to carry, together with cloth to wrap around the face against protection from blowing sand, and the towel-wrapped cache of weapons. The hatch was on the upper side of the ship, making debarkation difficult, but with mutual assistance they managed to reach the ground below.

  Hallie stood beneath the stars for a moment, her head to the wind, breathing deeply of the scent of the night. Burke stood close beside her, silent and watchful. Emil engaged in his own private and quiet commune with Calypso at a short distance. Bending, Hallie scooped a handful of sand up into her fist and let it run in a loose, blowing trail from the circle of her fingers back to the dune beneath their feet.

  “Home,” she said, grinning.

  “Uh-huh,” Burke murmured, his inflection warm.

  “But not for them,” she said, indicating the other two.

  “Close enough. I’m sure they’re happy to be anywhere but where they were.”

  Hallie turned to slip her arms around Burke’s waist. He pulled her close.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

  Burke was silent, his breath soft against her crown. Breaking their embrace, Hallie ran up the incline behind the ship, then back down again. “That way,” she said, pointing. “We head that way. There are lights in that direction.”

  Burke nodded. “Is there something we should do to cover the ship and our tracks?”

  “Don’t worry,” Hallie assured him. “The desert will do that for us long before the day breaks.”

  III.

  A DIFFERENT ANOMALY

  Burke stood beside Hallie in the starlight, silently waiting for the water transport that would take them from Oriana back to the mainland. Her hand was in his, small and strong and meant to be comforting, but he was numb, cold. In time, he knew, that would change. He was afraid of what he would feel when that moment came.

  For the first few days after their return to the Talian Peninsula, not far from the capital city, Burke had done his best to discover whether his daughter remained with the Sisters, to no avail. In the end there had been no choice but to travel to Oriana, as risky as the journey had been to undertake. Disguised as pilgrims he and Hallie had entered the sanctuary and eventually sought out Casara. Her enmity for him hadn’t altered, but she had been truthful. Such was her oath.

  Lese was with Sterne.

  Drawing a deep breath, Burke stared out over the choppy midnight-blue water, listening to the sound the lake waves made lapping against the banks of the island. He remembered the nights he had spent here, too many to count, bound to this place by the presence of his wife within, his dying wife, and the child she had borne him. The guilt he had felt at his prolonged absence prior to the news of her illness had nearly been his undoing. It was like he had said to Hallie. He needed to learn, to expand his ability to feel, to commit, to share. Could he change? He wanted to. For Hallie’s sake he wanted to and must.

  But right now all he could think about was getting Lese out of the hands of Hallie’s former bond-mate.

  “I hope Emil and Calypso are behaving themselves,” Hallie commented quietly in an attempt to talk about something, anything but what was uppermost in both of their minds.

  They had left the dancer and the gambler behind in their room in the city. Both had been invaluable in obtaining underground currency for the purposes of purchasing food and a room to hold them over until they made more permanent plans. Calypso’s island dancing was in high demand in certain of the local clubs. Although Burke had his own thoughts regarding the undertaking, the benefits to all of them couldn’t be denied. There had been no point in putting the two of them in further danger by bringing them to Oriana. As Hallie had pointed out, when news came to Arad of their escape it would be her and Burke he was looking for, not necessarily anyone else.

  “I’m sure they are,” he returned idly, watching the water as he tried not to think about his gentle, mute daughter under Sterne’s control. Tried not to think about how frightened she might be, how bewildered, tried not to let his mind travel further, to the implication of Sterne’s threat that day in his office.

  The enveloping ice of his control cracked a little. He clamped down hard on it.

  “We’ll get her back,” Hallie said. “We’ll get her away from him without confrontation, without any demands that he set the record straight or resign his office, as that will only make him retaliate. We’ll get your daughter back, Burke, and then we’ll go wherever you want, as far away from here as we can get, and make a home for her.”

  Burke breathed in and out, tightening his grip on Hallie’s fingers. The natural thing would be for Hallie to return to her family. She said she didn’t want to put her clan in jeopardy. There was more to it than that. Sterne had made certain Hallie’s family believed his accusations, accusations validated by Burke’s own testimony, making it impossible for her to return to her family estate with Burke and protest to any innocence. Yet, she refused to go there without him.

  Hallie had lost so much in the execution of his pact with Sterne. Although she no longer blamed him, believing he’d had no choice but to follow through, Burke had had a choice. Unfortunately, it was a decision he should have made years before he ever walked into the office for that damnable assignation.

  There was no going back. Only forward.

  Releasing Hallie’s hand, he pulled her close. The wind off the lake was chill, raising a rill of hair along his forearms under the loose sleeves of his pilfered tunic. He felt like crying. He, who had probably not cried since he was six or seven years old. He wanted to hold Hallie close and weep like a lost soul for all of his errors, all the people gone from his life. He wanted to weep for Hallie, for the harm he had caused her and the love she felt for him, for her innocence and her strength and her courage.

  “Burke…”

  “Shh,” he said, afraid of words. There could be no words, not right now. He was too weak, too vulnerable. He needed his own strength back. In a minute, in a minute it would return…

  “Lese needs you. More than I do. More than anyone has in your lifetime.”

  A muffled sound escaped him, not a sob, please not a sob, and then he buried his face against Hallie’s dyed, windblown hair. He could still smell the chemicals in it.

  He took another breath, and then another, understanding as he did so that he had a new strength beside him, within his embrace. He recognized her vulnerability and compassion, her determination and selflessness, her startling grace of spirit. Hallie had given him this gift of herself. It would, indeed, remain to be seen if he became a better man for it.

  The water transport arrived and he offered Hallie his arm to assist her in getting onto it. They walked to the back, unmolested by any authority, two out of many who had made the pilgrimage that day. Both a little hollow-eyed, the guard might assume, as a result of their experience, but otherwise unremarked.

  * * *

  When they’d exited the desert, Hallie had dismantled the weapons she’d fashioned on Zebulon. The crystal shards she’d put into a drawstring bag which she wore on a long thong around her throat. She counted them a talisman of sorts, against harm. Sitting in the dark next to the bed she lifted the bag from the table and opened it, releasing the blue-white light into the shadowed room. It meant something. It had to mean something. What?

  Watching the glow fall across Burke’s sleeping form, she studied the highlights to the structure of flesh and muscle, the movement of every breath drawn, the way the light dipped into the dark stubble of his scarred jaw, the deep hollows beneath the wing of each brow, gliding along the slope of his closed eyelids. His face was rugged, handsome, marked by the life he had led. She looked at his hands, his fingers, the construction of his wrists, his forearms, the soft black hairs curved against his skin. Leaning forward she placed her lips very lightly to the blue veins where his pulse beat, then sat back again, p
ushing her damp hair from her brow.

  She had washed the temporary coloring from her hair. Though dulled somewhat by the chemical dye, the blue family mark was evident once again. She would not face Arad and not have him know her right away. Let him see immediately who it was who had come to deal with him.

  Quietly she stood, fitting the thong over her head and tucking the bag holding the crystals into the front of her flowing blouse. She drew a deep breath and then another, recalling the way Burke had touched her tonight, the driving need, the desperation that shattered all restraint except those he placed on her, wrestling her down as he sought release from the waking nightmare dogging his every thought. She had responded in kind, demanding and insatiable, wanting to forget everything else and remember only him. After, she had risen from the bed while he slept to prepare herself for the task ahead. She couldn’t let him do it. He would kill Arad, she knew he would, if his daughter had come to any harm at her former husband’s hands.

  Lese needed Burke. He was her father. Hallie was nothing to the child. If retribution was to be made, Hallie would be the one to exact it. She would be robbing Burke of vindication, but she would be giving him back what he needed most. She prayed there would be no reason, no necessity for the measure which had been haunting her since they left Oriana, but if there was… well there was no imprisonment to concern her. The penalty for assault, let alone murder, of a High Official was death within the fortnight of conviction.

  Closing her eyes, she squeezed her lids tight to hold the threatening tears at bay. I love you, Burke. How had that happened? She was as surprised by her emotion now as she had been when she first recognized the sentiment. Even so, she felt completed by the knowledge of it in some elemental fashion, as if her life before had not been fully realized.

  Part of her wanted very badly to lie down beside him once more, to touch him, to arouse him into heated fervor again, but she only opened her eyes to look at him through the blur of unshed tears. She didn’t even dare kiss him in farewell for fear he would wake up.

  Gathering up a dark cloak from the chair, she folded it over her arm and slipped from the chamber, moving swiftly to the main door. No sound came from the chamber Emil and Calypso shared. Draping the lightweight cloak over her shoulders, pulling the hood over her tri-colored hair, Hallie stepped out into the night.

  The new rooms they had taken were within sight of the Quadrate, but still some distance away in a section of the city Hallie had not frequented as Arad’s bond-wife. Earlier that day she and Burke had scouted the area immediately surrounding the governmental apartments where she had resided with her husband, looking for a way to get in undetected. They wouldn’t be permitted through the front door, even if any authority had not begun searching for them. Security was high. Despite that, Burke would have exercised force in order to gain entry if Hallie hadn’t talked him out of it. She understood his anxiety, his desperation to obtain immediate results, but she also understood that they had to wait. That she had to wait.

  She knew Arad. Arad was not a patient man. If he planned to hurt Burke’s daughter he would have done so already. Though it sickened her to address the matter so coldly, she knew this to be so. A half a day longer was not going to make a difference except in terms of her ability to get inside.

  Walking swiftly through the nighttime streets, Hallie avoided the inebriated patrons exiting the chattering doors of the establishments she passed. She brushed past offers of a drink, a meal and more. Willing women abounded, leaning against door jambs and wearing the ankle bracelets of their trade. A great many of the street level pyraxzine bars had been deliberately disabled in order to provide shadowed areas in which to indulge. Ignoring the obvious sounds, Hallie pressed on, alerted to her proximity to the Quadrate by the sudden lack of humanity. At this hour, those who lived within the perimeter of the Quadrate were in their quarters. Practicing their own forms of entertainment, she reflected in a bitter turn.

  “Arad,” she whispered aloud as she strode along the lighted walkway, “I could walk away from what you did to me, maybe even what you did to Burke, but most definitely not to his daughter, so help me…”

  And maybe, just maybe, she was wrong about the extent of his cruelty. Maybe she alone had been the catalyst for that streak in him but to something inherent in her personality, her demeanor, her behavior, their interaction. But she couldn’t take the chance. Now was the time, now before Burke awakened as he usually did in the darkness before dawn and noted she was gone. Before he had the opportunity for vengeance and his daughter was lost to him and him to her.

  Standing outside the apartment building without Burke’s steadying presence at her side, Hallie felt her courage falter. After all she had been through to get here to this place in time she was afraid to face the man she’d been bonded to for more than ten years. Blowing a breath out, Hallie dismissed her uncertainty and moved on in search of the one weakness in security she thought she remembered. She had complained of it, more than once, and could only hope Arad had truly been ignoring her remarks and not just denying her concerns.

  Standing in the blackness, Hallie controlled her breathing, the back of her skull pressed to the sand strewn wall. She had to be patient, wait for the final interval of the twenty-seventh hour of the day, the time of regeneration when all systems went to auxiliary power while the arial panels were renewed. She would know the moment when it came because the sounds of the city would alter—slightly but undeniably to one who had long been a light sleeper—and the huge timepiece on the tower in the square would begin a fraction in advance with a humming of its mechanism before the signal tolled the new day.

  * * *

  Hallie had cut herself, but not too badly. It wouldn’t do to leave a trail of blood from point of entry to the very portal of the official apartments of the Revered Arad Sterne. Hallie stayed in the shadows studying the long, softly illuminated corridor. She knew the concealment of every coordinated Eye. Having walked this corridor with frequent occasion for solitude and solace, she had learned how to avoid their detection. In times of Gathering an honor guard would have been stationed outside. As she expected, the post was empty.

  Steeling herself, Hallie followed the remembered path to the trisected panel of the door. On the chance that Arad had not yet been alerted to their escape and believed he would never lay eyes on her again, she tapped in the numeric entry. He hadn’t changed the code. The panels slid open without sound.

  Hallie hesitated only a moment, then slipped inside, closing the doors behind her. Permitting her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she listened hard for any sign her entry had been detected, or even that Arad was up and restless and moving about the apartment. She doubted it. Conscience was not something that troubled him, nor the decisions in his life. He’d always slept soundly and was probably even more content now he had rid himself of her.

  Moving with care, Hallie made her way through the apartment to her old rooms, the most likely place to start looking for Lese, she decided. If she could steal away with her into the night there might possibly be no confrontation at all. She and Lese would go straight back to Burke and the three of them—the five of them, if that was what they all wanted—could run as fast and as far as possible and deal with the consequences of reality when a comfortable distance existed between them and the highest official in the entirety of the Talian Peninsula.

  In the meantime, she had broken into that official’s home, never mind that she had once been his wife. She was a refugee of a prison break, a convicted adulteress, a criminal. Or so Talian Law would view it. Extenuating circumstances were not about to be considered.

  Hallie started. Had she heard something? Gaze darting around the shadowed living area, she saw movement, too shallow in appearance to be anything but a trick of the eye. No bulk. Definitely not the bulk of a man Arad’s size.

  Continuing to the corridor opposite, she made her way to her former bedchamber. The door stood wide. With eyes used to the dark she ascertained immed
iately the bed was empty. She checked the closet, rifling through garments she recognized by scent more than anything, and wondered why he had not yet troubled to remove them. Exiting the closet she caught a shifting of black against black in the corner and dropped into a defensive stance. Nothing there. Did she dare to whisper Lese’s name? No, the girl was mute. But was she deaf, as well? Burke had never said.

  Her heart increased its pace, blood drumming in her ears, nearly preventing her from hearing other sounds she so desperately needed to pick up. Concentrating a moment, she tried to imagine where the little girl might be, filled with a dawning horror. Lese could not—could not—be in Arad’s side of the apartment with him. Hallie was capable of imagining many cruelties of which Arad might be capable, but that? Would he truly molest a child as Burke feared? Deep inside she had not believed it could be so. The harm she had convinced herself he might inflict on Burke’s daughter had been of a totally different sort. Brutish, yes, and horrifying to a child, but this? She wanted to vomit.

  And yet, hadn’t she come prepared to end Arad’s life, if need be, rather than have Burke do it in rage and retaliation? No, not kill him, only do what she must to take back Burke’s daughter. Her growing nerves disoriented her. Her stomach turned over, her sight reeled. For an instant she thought she might lose consciousness and reached to support herself on the back of a chair.

  Something touched her hand, light and swift. Hallie jerked back.

  “Lese?”

  No. What she briefly saw was too substantial for a child, and yet not substantial at all, a thing of shadow.

  Unnerved, not caring now what noise she made, Hallie ran across the textured carpet of the living square, throwing open Arad’s door. She reached for the controls to the knee-level lumi-discs, but never got there. She knew the room was empty without any illumination, knew from the ringing hollowness of vacancy. They were gone from the apartment and she had no way of knowing where.