Empath Reborn

by J. A. Culican

  Throwing caution to the wind, I rush the last couple feet to Luka, stumbling and falling to my knees at his side. I can hardly believe my eyes. "Luka..."

  He stops frantically looking around when his gaze meets mine. Does he recognize me? Is it Luka in there? I reach out and take his hand in both of mine. I have to know if it's really still the Luka I knew and... and loved.

  He glances down, seeming surprised at the physical contact, then grins and lunges forward to wrap me in his arms.

  I squeak in happy surprise as we embrace, heedless of getting wet. It's him. He's alive. Eventually, I'm going to have to make a decision I don't want to make. Thoughts of Talon and my night together come to mind unbidden, but I shove them aside. Now isn't the time for those questions. For the moment, I’m just happy to see my Luka again.

  He lets out a sob and I pull away to look him in the eyes. He moves his mouth like he's trying to talk, but no sound comes out. Giving up, he wraps me in his arms again, squeezing like he'll never let me go.

  I have mixed feelings about that. By reflex I look over to Talon. He's openly watching us from where he’s still lying on the floor. His eyes are only half-open, but he's actually grinning at Luka. If he were as tough and hard as the man he likes to show the world, then he wouldn't be so happy to see my first love come back from the grave, no matter how close they once were. It's... impressive. Talon just might have a depth I haven't noticed before.

  The building abruptly bucks and tosses for a moment, knocking those thoughts out of my head and sending Glenn sprawling. He cries out Ida's name, and there's a crashing sound behind me. Ceiling panels are coming loose, one hanging by a single edge as another shatters on the floor near where Glenn and Ida crouch. He’s covering her protectively.

  "Dammit," he cries out. "We have to get out of here. The place is coming down around us."

  He's not kidding, either. Bits and pieces rain down from the ceiling, and the shaking is getting progressively worse. The floor bucks again, like an exclamation point on the end of his sentence, and it snaps me out of my shocked state.

  Fear replaces the surprise as the danger we're in finally registers.

  "I can't..." I manage to say before I cough and pant for air. My strength is still just about zero, and the increasing shaking is pushing every muscle in my weakened body to its limit. "I can't get up."

  Luka's muscles all tense up at once and he slides me off of him, then scrambles to his feet. He tries to say something to Glenn, but still nothing comes out. He puffs up in frustration, then points at himself and then to me. Then, with his other hand, he points at Glenn and then to Talon, who is clearly even worse off than I am.

  Talon risked his life for his friend, even knowing it would complicate things between us.

  No, there will be time enough for dealing with that later. First, survive. Then, deal with whatever this is I'm feeling. I reach up for Luka.

  He grabs my hands in his and easily lifts me, flinging me over his shoulder. When he turns toward the door, I see that Glenn is scooping Talon up in both arms to carry him like a groom carries a bride on their wedding night in all the movies.

  Ida shouts over the roar, "What about Luna?"

  Glenn snarls. "Leave her. She did this, so let her deal with it."

  That’s the best answer I could imagine, short of killing her ourselves. But that would have to wait.

  Luka leads the way, carrying me. Glenn and Talon are right behind us, and Meredith and Ida bring up the rear. Ida urges Glenn to go faster, but he shouts back that he can't go any faster with me and Luka in the way.

  I ignore their usual fighting and try to lift my head to see where we're going, but I can’t. Even with the danger we're still in, and my near-total helplessness, just about the only thing I can think about is how naked Luka is. It doesn’t help that it's pretty much all I can see from my position dangling over his shoulder.

  When we burst out through the front door, Luka leads us away from the building at a run. We're only half a block away when the lab's upper floors collapse inward, crushing the bottom floor. I don't think anyone's magic could be strong enough to have saved us from that. It was a close call—almost as close as Luka's bare abs, as my face bounces off his hip with every long stride he takes.

  We're alive, thank goodness, even though it means I'll soon have to actually deal with Luka and Talon. I'm not looking forward to that. I thought I put Luka behind me, but now that he's back from the dead, I'm so confused. I guess I hadn’t put him far enough behind me.

  At least Luna got what she had coming. Crushed by the same lab she put Luka's corpse in, because of her own demolitions. The irony is delicious.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Something isn't right. As we run down the street, it dawns on me that I can't hear the usual hum of people and ball-cars. No one walks along golden sidewalks, no families play in the front yards of jewel-encrusted manors. The only sound is a dull roar, and the only clue to the cause is a flickering yellow light that seems to come from everywhere at once.

  Fire. The realization hits me like a brick—Mortals Landing has multiple pyres rising into the sky. The only buildings I can see burning from my dangling position are a small-ish skyscraper and a domed building that looks like every government building ever made.

  It seems that Luna was selective in her destruction rather than just trying to destroy the whole thing. That’s good and bad, though. It doesn’t bode well for what’s coming next.

  Glenn shouts for us to stop, and when Luka halts, he says, "We need to find out what's going on. And Luka, you're gorgeous and all, but I'm tired of staring at your butt. We need to get you clothes if we want to blend in, and I'm sure Ela would appreciate not having your back side at eye level."

  I'm not sure whether I do or don't agree with that, but I do agree we need to find him clothes. "We should get inside the nearest mansion," I say, pleased at how much stronger my voice has become. I feel better in general, actually, although that's a relative term. I still doubt I could stand on my own.

  Luka moves his mouth, but when nothing comes out, he closes it and frowns. Then, he turns up a walkway and heads toward a silver mini-mansion. When we get to the ornate double-doors, he knocks loudly. There's no answer. He knocks again. When there’s still, there's no response, he shrugs and kicks one door near the knob, but it doesn't budge. He staggers back, his face twisting in pain.

  Glenn sets Talon down gently on a swinging bench, then reaches into one pocket to pull out a rolled-up bit of leather. Unrolling it, he displays a small collection of what look like knitting needles, and takes out two. How on earth can he pick the lock on a door with no lock? He touches both needles to the door, about six inches apart, and there's a faint glow that starts at the needle tips, then spreads in a line that quickly connects the two. The line travels through the knobs and latches.

  After a moment, there's an audible click, and one door pops open a couple inches.

  Luka, still carrying me, kicks it wide open, and we rush inside, followed a moment later by Glenn and Talon. Ida slams it shut behind her.

  To our surprise, the home is not vacant. A wide-eyed woman sits on a couch with two small children, and a man stands beside her. He glares at us but doesn't approach. His eyes lock on Talon, and his hostile expression vanishes.

  "The prince," he says in almost a whisper.

  Yay! A fan. We’re going to be safe here.

  Louder, the man says, "You have to leave. Right now.”

  “Um, what?” I manage to ask. I guess I read the situation wrong.

  “If they find you here with us, I don't know what they'll do. It won’t be good, though."

  "Who is ‘they?’" Talon asks, then coughs, the effort too much for him.

  The man shakes his head, pursing his lips. “You have to go. Please, go.”

  The woman glares at him and then says to us, "Mortals Landing has been conquered, Prince. You need to leave, but only so you can go rally our guardians."


  Glenn, Ida, and Talon all start talking at once until the man holds up both hands and shouts, "Quiet, please. We don't know much more than you do, I'm sure. Dawson came with Shades and Wraiths working together. Other Shades popped up in groups all over the disk, and they took over what they need to control Mortals Landing."

  Glenn stares at him, dumbfounded. I realize I'm doing the same and snap my mouth shut hard enough to make my teeth click.

  Talon half-whispers, "That's not possible."

  It shouldn't be possible, but neither should bringing back the dead. All I want is time to get reacquainted with Luka and figure things out, and dammit all, we're stuck in another horrible situation.

  The woman shakes her head slowly and looks down at her hands, fidgeting them in her lap. "It is possible. I never thought so either, but it has happened.”

  Talon asks, “How bad is the fighting? It should be raging all over the city, but I don’t hear much out there.”

  There is pity in her eyes when she replies, “Other than a few explosions and a few fights we could hear through our yard cameras' audio, it seems like theirs was a quiet conquest. It all happened so fast, and now, it’s all but over."

  "Damn," mutters Glenn, "how long were we in that lab?"

  I have no idea, so I don’t answer him. Long enough, apparently.

  Talon motions for Glenn to put him down on the love seat. With his eyes closed, he says, "Dawson had to already be invading when they tried to get us to join them. This means Luna would have set off those charges with or without us there."

  "So what now, Prince?" Glenn has an edge to his voice he often gets with Talon even though they're friends. Maybe he just has an issue with authority figures—he seems the type.

  With no hint of having noticed, however, Talon replies, "Should we go find Birka? She'll be directing the defense of Mortals Landing, and she'll need every hand she can get."

  We all look around at each other, but no one offers any better ideas. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  In the silence that follows, Luka grabs the husband and heads upstairs, while Ida and Meredith work with me to get my strength back, and Glenn does the same with Talon. They get water, hold us up, anything they can think of.

  I draw the line when Meredith starts bending and straightening my leg like an exercise machine, which gets a laugh and lightens the mood. I know it won’t last, but it feels good to be safe for a moment.

  Ten minutes later, I feel strong enough to walk without being carried, though only slowly. Talon looks like he's doing even better than I am, but he's built big, which gives him a lot of personal energy and helps him to recover it faster than I do.

  As I practice walking, I'm eager to get going and impatient for Luka to return. And yet, in the back of my mind, there’s a tingle that gives me a sense of foreboding. When I try to summon a vision to explain it, though, nothing comes. Maybe it's my imagination, or just the pressure getting to me, but I can't help feeling that something bad is about to happen.

  As soon as I feel up to it, we gather some food, a backpack, and a few weapons the homeowners are happy to part with if it'll get us out of their house. We also accept a couple first-aid kits for minor injuries.

  Once the woman shows us out through a back door, she scurries back inside as fast as she can. I don't really blame her, though—we're probably the most wanted people on the planet.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I'm not sure how far we've walked since leaving the manor and our unwilling hosts, but Talon and I are both still moving slower than the others. Every time they have to stop to wait for us to catch up, Glenn taps his foot impatiently and Luka looks back and forth between me and Talon like he’s trying to figure out what there is between us.

  The Wraith prince, however, is too exhausted to keep up, much less to get into a rooster fight over who "gets" me. For that, I'm thankful, but I know he's recovering fast. Soon, he'll want to put a fence between me and Luka, no matter what he said about just wanting me to be happy. I'm sure he does, and I'm starting to believe he’d actually accept it. Still, I don't believe for one moment that he can resist marking his territory in some way, with the three of us all together.

  As we rest for a moment, I start thinking about Dawson, that twisted little idiot. He has Shades doing his fighting. Traitor... The thought hits me, startling in its ferocity. I think I might need to take a step back for some perspective. I'm starting to think I'm one of the Wraiths, not simply someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught up in affairs way beyond anything I could have imagined before meeting Luka.

  I don’t think I could ever be one of "them," whether Wraith or Shade. I need to stop trying to join their madness. My Roma family and our little wandering caravan are the only people I’m truly a part of.

  Except that I've already joined in, for all practical purposes. Now, my fate is intertwined with theirs in one way or another, no matter what I’d prefer. Part of me wishes Luka never found me on that bus, but things are what they are and I'm not going to waste time pining for what might have been had he not seen me.

  "Let's deal with what is," I mutter aloud, without realizing it.

  "What?" Talon looks over at me and the quiet conversation he was having with Glenn fades out.

  I hadn't meant to say anything, but now I'm on the spot, so I may as well say what’s on my mind. "The only information we have is that Dawson brought the Shades in, and he’s used them and his Wraith followers to take over the best spots for controlling the city.”

  Talon cocks his head to one side. “Where are you going with this? What’s your point?”

  “My point is, what would Birka do if she woke up one day and found herself the ruler of nothing important and lots of scared, angry people?"

  Everyone goes silent. After a moment, Talon says slowly, "She'd probably... throw open the armories all over the city? She’d take refuge in the manor, I think. She has everything there she'd need to get the city’s defenses organized before the Shades could get through the manor’s defenses.”

  That’s what I’d expected to hear. “So I was thinking that, if we get there fast enough, we can join up with her and help her kick the bastards off our disk."

  Luka says, "Then what are we doing sitting around here? Talon, get us there the fastest way you know."

  My heart sings to hear Luka speaking again. I'd almost forgotten how warm and strong his voice is.

  "Us? You're joining us?" Talon asks.

  “Yes, I’m joining the Wraiths. My leaders murdered me for trying to keep them from killing innocent people for no reason. You were right about the Shades when you left. I'm sorry I didn't believe you."

  Talon smiles wanly. "As Mirela said, 'let's deal with what is.' Welcome to the Wraiths, old friend, though you picked a hell of a time to join up.”

  He turns to the rest of us and squares his shoulders. “Okay, everyone. Get ready to move out. We're taking a path only a dozen people even know about. Under the circumstances, I’ll even skip the blindfolds."

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Talon sets a brisk pace, though it's easy for everyone but me to keep up. They didn't have the life energy sucked out of them by Dawson's weird-science machine. I manage to keep up, too, but before long, I'm panting.

  Talon’s path takes us mostly through sewer lines at first, but then we wind through hidden and warded openings that end up dumping us out in a long, straight tunnel. The rest of the trip is spent going single-file.

  It seems like we've gone miles before the tunnel begins to noticeably incline toward the surface, and by now, I'm struggling to catch my breath. At the same time, though, I've been feeling my strength return as we go, and Talon's pace has picked up, too. He has to be feeling at least as weak as I do considering what we went through.

  Just when I lose track of how long we've been walking up the low incline, lost in thought, Talon stops. He looks up toward the tunnel ceiling.

  Glenn asks, “Why are
we stopping here? The tunnel has to hit the surface soon, right?”

  "There's a portal up there. It’s not the magic kind—it's mechanical, if you can believe that." He gets Glenn to hoist him up and reaches for the tunnel roof, but instead of stopping, his hand seems to pass right through it.

  "It’s like a mirror trick," he says, and starts climbing up through the hole I can’t see.

  I shrug and step into Glenn’s hands, and he lifts me up. When my head passes through the ceiling, that’s where I see how it's done. The surfaces are polished to a brilliant reflection and angled to reflect another part of the tunnel’s ceiling. It's an optical illusion. No magic will ever detect that.

  As the others come up, I look around. We’re in a small chamber with a few stairs leading up to a hatch in one corner. The room is barely big enough to hold us all, but Talon doesn’t open it yet.

  Once we’re all in the chamber, he says, “This opens into a maintenance shed near Birka’s manor. It hasn’t ever been used, though, so no one should be around it."

  I guess we'll figure things out as we go. He must have some strategy in mind—he usually plans everything he does, even on a normal day.

  When we get through the hatch, I see it’s well-disguised on the other side. We end up inside a shed full of empty shelves and open, bare cabinets, along with old, dusty tools and equipment that look like it’s never been used.

  Also, the shed has windows, but they're painted black from the inside. Wow, how useful. "So, uh... What now? We can't even see outside."

  He grins and presses something beneath a worktable. From the underside of the seemingly empty row of cabinets, four thin monitors slide down and click into place as they light up. Each of them shows four camera views in a grid. On the worktable itself, the central portion flips over, revealing a keyboard and the weirdest mouse I've ever seen.