Talisman

by Krystyne Price

  “Listen up, everyone!” he shouted, moving around the small cavern to wake those who’d fallen asleep. “Gather with me, fellow Zar.” Bijan moved to the center and motioned to all of them. “I know what we need to do.”

  Only a talisman could destroy other talismans. So first, they would have to steal one. Then, they would have to destroy the other three. Even as he began to weave his tale to the group, Bijan wondered if they’d ever be able to see it through.

  * * *

  “So what’s with the necklace, anyway, girl?”

  “What do you mean, Lou? It’s not like it’s new.”

  “I mean, goofball,” he said, waving a hand in the vague direction of her neck and chest, “like, why did it glow in the movie theater? Was it the demons that were on the screen? Was it scared?”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Ohh, oh, I get it,” Lou said, pulling into Kaia’s driveway.

  “You get what?” she asked, thumb and forefinger worrying the ragged gem.

  “It wasn’t your quartzy thingy that was scared, it was you!”

  She shot Lou a look, as her hand felt for the latch in the door. “Yes, I saw the necklace glow, it’s done it a couple times. I’m going to take it to a jeweller,” she responded, the words tumbling over each other into a loud mumble. “And no, I was not scared of some fake rubbery special effects man-made demon things!”

  Kaia reached out and slapped Lou’s arm. He made a fantastically girly face, hissed air in through his teeth and whined, “Owwwwwwww!” as he rubbed the area.

  She burst out laughing and opened the door. Kaia leaned back down once her purse was hiked over her shoulder. “Thanks, Lou-Lou.”

  “You’re welcome. I think,” he pouted, rubbing his arm and winking at her.

  Laughing, she shut the door and as was customary, let the headlights of his ostentatiously red 1962 Thunderbird convertible give her all the light she needed to unlock her front door, turn and toss him a wave, and enter her home. Only then did the engine rev and the headlights retreat, leaving her in a completely dark, way-too-huge and lonesome three-story house.

  The movie had been a nice distraction, she thought, but it hadn’t been enough. “I seriously need to move outta this place,” she said to the emptiness, letting her purse just drop to the floor. She reached to the right and turned the hall light on. Something in the front corner of the dining room, nearly out of sight, caught in her peripheral. She turned to look full-on and screamed, the necklace pulsating softly. For less than a hair’s breadth of a second, she was certain she’d seen someone.

  Half an hour later, a thorough search of the house from basement to attic, baseball bat in hand, yielded no intruders. None of her windows or doors were open or unlocked. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was missing. Shaking a bit, she set the bat down at the base of the front stairs and decided she was leaving every damn light she’d turned on in her search, on all night. Not that she’d get any sleep. And for that, she just happened to have a book.

  An hour later she slammed the book down in frustration and rose from the couch. Kaia felt jittery, and she hated feeling jittery. She looked at the clock and rolled her eyes. It was already after one in the morning and dammit, why was she still so wide awake? Her electric bill would be through the roof, was her next thought, and so she went to the kitchen, put her hand on the switch near basement door to get to flick off the kitchen light, and nearly fainted in fright.

  In that moment, she would later recall, she was sure her heart completely stopped beating. A blood-curdling scream tore through the house from just outside the back door and she whirled, having forgotten to breathe. She thought she saw a flash of something white or maybe it was blue, through the blue goose-patterned curtains that her mother had hung just weeks before her death.

  Finally she felt herself gasp for air and her entire body shook as slowly she crept across the kitchen and peered out the window. She flipped the back porch light on and realized at some point her heart had started beating again because it was threatening to pound right through her chest. And she was sure it was as loud outside as it was to her own ears.

  The back yard was empty. Floodlights bathed nearly the entire area in their far-too-white glow, and there wasn’t anything there. Not even a deer, or a possum, or a raccoon, or that stray cat that had once been the Nielsens’ pet before they’d moved and left it behind. Turning, she leaned back against the door and gave herself a few minutes to calm down. What the hell was going on? Was she losing her mind?

  Chapter Four

  He hadn’t seen it coming. He should have known better; he should have seen the whole thing so clearly, but he hadn’t. And for that, he chastised himself endlessly. How could he think he and the small band of Zar and Shin who’d once followed Kana could ever get past the Vloveks to destroy the four talismans they held? But worse, a hundred thousand times worse than his miscalculation on that front, was his surety that the Vloveks couldn’t get to the other dimension.

  No, he corrected the thought, no, the Vloveks themselves couldn’t. But they’d sent their sycophants. How had they discovered where she was? How had they found the way over? How had they been able to sing the portal into existence when only the High Wizard Zar knew that secret?

  It had to have been Kana merged with Mulmak, because that was really the only answer. Kana’s mind must have revealed his daughter’s whereabouts and must also have shown them how to get there because Kana knew the writing on the scroll that Bijan held safe in his own vest, and would know a way around the spell. That meant the scroll was now useless. No, of course the Vloveks themselves couldn’t go, and that meant Kana/Mulmak couldn’t go. But the sycophants.

  He’d seen it with his own eyes as he and two fellow Zar had sneaked quietly into a Vlovek stronghold. He hadn’t been able to move, or speak, or hardly think at the sight of a portal being opened. And in that instant he knew where they were going and more importantly, why. He’d gotten the Zar out of there as fast as possible. They’d run and run and only when they were a safe distance from the danger had he stopped them and told them to return to the underground cavern, and to remain there for one whole day. If he didn’t come to them by then, they were to choose a new High Wizard and continue the quest to destroy the talismans.

  The truth was it would mean the deaths of every last one of them. Bijan was more powerful than several of them put together, but none of the other Zar knew about the girl. They all thought she’d been killed along with her mother. It was a secret Bijan had carried with him quietly, because if none of them knew then no Vlovek could get the secret out of them. But it was more than Kaia. It was the talisman she wore. Every time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing it and it would take nothing for the sycophants to see it and take it, and probably kill her in the process.

  He opened a portal and waited impatiently as it grew and grew before him. He was alone here, with nary a dead tree trunk to hide what he was doing, but he expected within a minute to be gone. He had to stop the sycophants; he had to protect the Nake. There was no choice. The Vloveks simply could not get their hands on it. It would be the end of everything he knew and loved.

  Once, he remembered as he waited and waited for the portal, he had asked Kana why they simply didn’t take what was left of their people to the Earth dimension, or perhaps to one of the other four that were all inhabitable. Why continue to fight so hard for a world that was now as dead as it was empty? They could find a place that was uninhabited, and start over. There were plenty of those places on Earth alone, were there not? They could live out their lives in peace and the Vloveks would have Shinzar as they wished, and couldn’t follow the Shinzarns, couldn’t hunt them anymore.

  Kana, whose wife was only a few weeks pregnant at the time, had smiled sadly at his idealistic pupil. “We cannot stay in Earth’s dimension forever, even if we go,” he replied, eyes holding a faraway look that told Bijan he’d thought about this many times before. “We can only last for two of our weeks,
at most, and then we would die.”

  “We could come back here to...do...whatever it is. To recharge,” Bijan had insisted. “And then go back.”

  “With the Vloveks controlling Shinzar? Where could all our people safely return to every two weeks? Eventually the Vloveks will catch on, and we will surely die. Either at their hands or within a dimension not our own.”

  It made Bijan wonder now, though, as the portal reached its zenith, how it was the girl had survived. Perhaps because she had been so young? Being three years of age when you could live to five hundred was so very young and tender and vulnerable an age to a Shinzarn. Maybe the girl had survived because of her extreme youth.

  Either way, it didn’t matter now. Bijan had a job to do, and he prayed as he dashed through the portal, that he wasn’t already too late. He nearly had been, he realized when he landed in her back yard and saw the sycophants at her door. They were trying to get in, but were confounded by the locks. Vlovek-possessed Shin didn’t know anything about door locks. There had never been locks on Shinzar, for all those minor inconveniences had always been handled magically by the Zar, and simply nonexistent for the lower-class Shin.

  It was so easy to just fling some well-placed bolts of Black Death at the three sycophants. Here, on Earth, it was a lot simpler to kill them. Much easier than when faced with scores of them at once, all backed by a Vlovek army. As one the three sycophants screamed into the night air before disintegrating into nothing but ash. He saw movement inside the kitchen and quickly cast the invisibility spell.

  Her face peered through the window and then suddenly a far-too-bright light blinded him. He’d not brought the sunglasses and winced. Biting on his finger to keep from crying out, he pivoted and crouched, facing away from the light and slapping a hand over his eyes. Damn these humans and their fake illuminations! The pain stabbed through his forehead and almost blocked out the telltale snick of a deadbolt being unlocked.

  He held his breath as he heard the door open. The invisibility spell, yes, he’d put that on himself. She wouldn’t be able to see him. He couldn’t do enough magic to create a new pair of sunglasses without giving himself away. The glow would not be hidden by the spell, and he cursed his lack of foresight, vowing that if he got out of this and back to Shinzar, he’d carry the damn sunglasses in his vest pocket from now on.

  Tuning down the pain sensations within his head, he let his sense of hearing heighten, forced it into overdrive. A step, she must have stepped out onto the wooden back porch that was barely wider than the door itself. Her breaths came quickly, and it wasn’t his imagination that he could hear her heart pounding like it might just explode from her chest at any moment. He cursed himself for his lack of foresight once again, only starting to breathe when he heard her step back inside, close the door and lock it behind her.

  Mercifully she turned the light off, and he blinked his eyes open, turning slowly and rising to his feet. He watched as one by one she extinguished the lights on the interior of the house. His sense of hearing was still heightened so he could follow her movements throughout the rooms and floors. He decided to check out the area and make sure there weren’t any other sycophants hanging around. Not that he’d be leaving here tonight. He still had twenty-four Shinzarn hours to spend, and he needed the alone time away from Vloveks, and away from all the Zar begging him to lead them to victory, to decide what in the name of the ancients to do.

  Chapter Five

  Kaia was well and truly scared out of her mind. She wasn’t about to call Lou, though. He’d just tell her she was nuts, really had been scared by that damn movie, and try to laugh it off as a joke. Lou had always been a good friend, but tonight she just didn’t feel like trying to get him to believe she was hearing or seeing things that weren’t there. And she really didn’t have many other friends to speak of. She’d always been hip-deep in the studies of ancient peoples and worlds, so fascinated by it, that even when not hitting the books for school her hours were spent learning from her parents, talking through endless hypotheses and discoveries and civilizations with them.

  The truth of it, really, was that she’d never felt like a part of anything going on around her. She had gone to a few parties in her high school years but hadn’t ever gotten drunk like her peers. Not for lack of trying, she thought, but she’d given up after eight shots of tequila had left her stone cold sober while everyone else was on the floor. She always wound up designated driver with a car that she never had gotten the puke smell out of.

  Her mind zapped back to the here and now as she flipped off the last first-floor light. Slowly she made her way up the stairs, wondering if it wouldn’t somehow just be easier to stay on the couch in the living room, but then thinking, what the hell difference would that make, anyway? Sighing loudly, she headed for the attic door, breathing a sigh of relief when she went to open it and didn’t hear yet another blood-curdling scream. She flipped the light switch off and then went to the master bedroom and two guest rooms and shut their lights off as well.

  Making a beeline for the bathroom, she thought about the call that could come tomorrow from the dean at the U of I, and so she had to get at least some sleep in case he wanted to meet with her. She popped one of her mom’s leftover sleeping pills, brushed her teeth and combed out her long, blonde hair. She hissed as the comb hit a tangle just under her left shoulder blade, and worried it out before continuing. Kaia then laid the comb down on the counter next to the sink and took a good look at herself in the mirror.

  Yep, she thought. Well and truly scared. She noted the wide eyes and the soft spot at her throat pulsating rapidly. Shitless, she added.

  She flicked off the bathroom light, made her way to bed, and turned off the small lamp on the end table as she snuggled under the covers. As though hauling them up to her chin would protect her from...she didn’t even know what. Her limbs started feeling heavy and her eyelids closed, and soon Kaia knew sleep would come. Her last thought was hoping she’d wake up in the morning, and as a final addendum to that she wondered what morbid subconscious realm that had come from.

  * * *

  He stood in the darkness near the back kitchen door. With a flick of his wrist and quietly spoken words, the deadbolt and doorknob locks gave way and the door swung silently open. He supposed he was glad she didn’t have a dog as he entered the dark kitchen and with another flick of his wrist, closed and locked the door behind him. Moving through the house with great stealth, he made his way up the front staircase and down the hall until he reached the room at the end.

  Bijan entered and moved to stand at her bedside. He could reach out and touch her, he was so close. For the first time he actually looked at her in the soft light of the Nake which pulsed to life and finally emitted a steady rose-white glow that bathed her in a light not unlike some Shinzarn sunsets he’d borne witness to. Her hair was splayed out on the pillow, only part of her left cheek visible. He noted the contours of her face and the soft, shining hair that so matched those of her mother, and the shape of her mouth that reminded him of Kana.

  She mumbled something in her sleep and rolled onto her back. He stood as a quiet sentinel, watching her sleep, realizing not for the first time that the Nake was in danger of being taken; and that as a result, Kaia herself was in danger. She had no idea. When was it now, how old was she? In only three Shinzarn years he’d seen at least twenty of hers, if not more. There had never been a way for him to focus on any given point, and that thought instantaneously brought him to the moment he understood that tonight he had been able to focus his destination with no degree of error.

  The thought jarred him and with a frown he thought back to when he’d opened the portal after seeing the sycophants do it at the stronghold. What had he been thinking about in that moment? In those seconds when the germination had begun, when the tiny spec of a new portal had appeared before him? He’d been thinking about the sycophants, about going directly to where he knew they were threatening Kaia and the Nake. His focal point had been
that specific moment, and with it he had landed in her back yard where they were stymied by the locks on her door.

  He snapped back to the present as Kaia moved again, the talisman now resting just above the swell of her breast. That Kana had been gone only three of his years, and yet that his daughter was already whatever age this was where she was an adult in Earth terms, was a difficult concept for him to grasp emotionally. Logically, yes, he understood the strange and inexplicable way that Time worked between their worlds. But this was nearly too much for him to handle, watching her stretch beneath the covers and then maniacally kick them off in the throes of some imagined world or other.

  His breath hitched in his throat. He had never noticed before, all those times when he’d seen her, how beautiful she truly was. Chastising his foolishness, he brought his mind back to the Nake, back to the fact that in attempting to steal the other four talismans from the Vloveks he and the Zar were failing miserably. He didn’t know how many Zar or Shin were still alive on Shinzar; he hadn’t had time to travel to the distant ends of the planet to find out. All he knew about were the Zar left in the vicinity of his cavern.

  Bijan’s first order of business, as he plotted the next steps in his mind, was to find out how many of his people remained. Perhaps with a larger army of Zar he could overtake the Vloveks. Even destroying one of the talismans they held would give the Shinzarns the upper hand. He would travel. He would get his answers and find out whether his plan stood a real chance. Bijan would leave something here on Earth, however. Something that would tell him when sycophants visited Kaia again.