Talisman

by Krystyne Price

  His chest felt far too tight for him to breathe, but he took a deep breath anyway and in the blink of an eye, was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  Kaia awoke with the distinct feeling that she had a five-alarm hangover. Then suddenly it all came rushing back to her and she screeched, scrabbling across the mattress and clawing the quilt off her bed in an effort to make it to the floor. She whirled around, expecting to see him. Or them. Whatever ‘them’ had been.

  She frowned. Her bedroom was completely empty. The front door, it had been broken in, she remembered, and ran down the hall, taking the stairs two-at-a-time until she reached the foyer. Nothing. Rushing to the door, she inspected it, but it was perfectly fine and locked. She did a complete three-sixty, shaking her pounding head.

  “He was here,” she breathed, chest heaving like she’d just run a five-minute mile. “I know he was, and all those...those...things!”

  Managing to make it back to the stairs, Kaia sat down hard on the second one, running her hands through her hair to get it out of her face. Bijan, that was his name. She’d met him at Fox Tail, and then she’d woke up here and he was in bed with her.

  “Oh, please, God, tell me I didn’t sleep with a total stranger,” she groaned into her hands and then shot straight up to her feet as she remembered his eyes. They had been so strange, something she’d never seen before.

  “I will explain everything, but to hear it you need to trust me.”

  The creatures, because she could think of no other word to describe them, they were horrid-looking. Half-dead, almost, sort of grey with a hint of camouflage green and nothing else on them except what looked like decaying skin.

  She moved cautiously to the front door, unlocked it and opened it. There wasn’t anything outside, either, and she knew the fighting had started just a couple houses down. Yet people were walking their dogs, riding their bikes, kids playing kickball in the street. Perfectly, banally normal.

  Kaia slammed the door shut, locking it again. Instinctively she reached for her necklace, closing her fingers around the quartz. That’s when she realized it was no longer glowing. It had been almost blinding last night when Bijan was near, and when he’d touched it.

  Suddenly she felt dizzy. She recalled him reaching for gem, wrapping his hand around it as she was doing now. Kaia stumbled back toward the stairs, let go of the necklace and crawled back up them on all fours as the world around her spun mercilessly. Bijan had touched her quartz, and then his fingers had touched her skin, and she’d seen.

  It was the same type of thing she’d been having nightmares about; the dreams that had plagued her as a child, that had only just returned with a vengeance. She’d seen it all again when he had touched her. And he’d never answered her about who he was, simply that she needed to trust him to find out and yet they’d never gotten to that point, had they?

  So here she was, standing in her bedroom door and he was gone. They had walked back to her house, so she knew her car was still at the bar. Her keys were still in her pocket, as was her cell phone, all but one of her twenty dollar bills and her driver’s license.

  A loud pounding from the front door was followed by the doorbell ringing frantically. She cursed and made her way back down the steps, hoping she wouldn’t kill herself as another wave of dizziness hit her. Peeking through the light beige curtain covering the old door’s huge window, she saw it was someone that she really didn’t want to see right now.

  But he’d seen her, so she had no choice but to open the door for him. “Lou,” she started to say as he shoved his way past her.

  “No, honey, no freakin’ way,” he said, waving a hand at her. “Uh-uh, that is seriously not happening. You freaked me the hell out, what happened to you last night?”

  “Last night? Why, we didn’t have plans,” she replied, wishing like hell he’d tone it down.

  “No, but you had someone here.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “You saw him?”

  Lou had checked her kitchen, her dining room and her living room already. He was now back at the base of the stairs not two feet from her, hand on the curled wooden banister. “Saw him? Of course I saw him, up in your bedroom window! Jesus, Kaia, he looked like a goddamn vampire or something with those dark sunglasses and that hair like that, all...dark and shit.”

  “Funny, that’s what I said,” she mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where is he? Who is he?”

  “Christ, Lou. Jealous, much?”

  He snorted as he took the steps up three-at-a-time. “I’m gay, Kaia, I’m not jealous of who you decide to sleep with.”

  “Then why the major freakout?” she enquired, genuinely curious as she slowly...ever so slowly...followed him up the stairs. Then, realizing what he’d said, she protested, “I did not sleep with him!”

  “Oh, really?” he asked, and she came upon him standing next to her bed. “Then you must’ve had one helluva nightmare.” This accusation was punctuated by him splaying his hands down toward her trashed bed.

  That’s when she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. “Are those...claw marks?” she asked, reaching down and touching a perfect three-line tear near the edge of the yellow fitted sheet.

  “Who was your date? Freddy Krueger?”

  Frustrated, Kaia turned around and sat down on the edge of the bed so hard it moved two inches toward the wall. “He wasn’t my date,” she said with a sigh. “I just...I’d had too much to drink and he walked me home.”

  “Walked you home. Into your room. Do you know I stayed parked outside until I realized he’d left because I was concerned about you?”

  “Very sweet, but what the hell were you doing over here anyway?”

  “I had a fight with Kevin,” Lou pouted, sitting down next to her. “I needed my best friend.”

  Her eyes went wide. “When did he leave?”

  “What?” He looked at her sideways. “Kevin didn’t leave.”

  “No, no, no,” she said, turning and laying a hand on his arm. “Bijan. You said you stayed outside until you realized he’d left.”

  “Bijan? Are you...what kind of name is Bijan? Cousin to Dijan mustard?”

  “It’s...I don’t know,” she replied, waving her hand in the air. “Exotic, I guess. How’d you know when he left, did you see him go?”

  “No,” Lou groused. “I only saw some weird pink glow, I figured it was some kind of new lamp you had or something, and then it went out and I didn’t see or hear anything else, and...well...” he faltered, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.

  “Well what?”

  “I let myself in the back door, went pussy-footing up the stairs and saw you in bed. Alone. Nobody else in the house. So I left.”

  “You snuck into my house? Cat burglar from hell.”

  “I was worried.”

  “I’m a big girl, Lou, just like you. I can take care of myself.”

  “Oh, ha freakin’ ha,” he grumbled, rising to his feet. “Seriously, though, you pick up your new condiment-named boyfriend in a bar last night or something?”

  Kaia let out a puff of air as she fell back onto the bed. “Or something,” she confirmed.

  “Listen--”

  “Lou, please, just...go away, all right? I mean, really and truly I do love you for being so worried, but please, I need to think, huh?”

  “Fine!” he shouted, but then leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the temple. “Damn heterosexual female.”

  She grinned. “Damn queen.”

  “Don’t you know it, baby,” he grinned and moments later walked out her front door.

  Kaia had almost convinced herself the whole thing had just been more nightmares. Until Lou. Because Lou had seen Bijan. He’d been real, and he’d been there. And Lou had seen her necklace glowing, too.

  She had to find out who Bijan was and where he’d gone.

  * * *

  He stumbled through what was left of the forest before f
alling to his knees. He was weak, and vulnerable. Not only had he spent what Kaia’s clocks had told him was twelve of her hours in the Earth dimension, but he’d expended way more energy than he’d expected to have to. All he had to do was find a safe place to rest until his body was strong again, and then he’d find his clan of Zar and show them the Nake.

  He smiled, reaching up to lay his palm against the vest. Bijan froze as his fingers felt the heat from his own body through the fabric. The vest was completely flat. He ripped the sunglasses from his face, tossing them to the dry ground as his tired fingers unlaced the vest. He reached into one of its inside pockets.

  The Nake was gone.

  Feeling the last vestiges of his strength drain away, Bijan fell forward onto his hands and then full-out into the dirt, face-down. His mind cried out in anguish that the one thing that spelled an end to the misery of his people, was gone. The last image he saw in his mind’s eye before he succumbed to darkness was Kaia’s golden hair.

  Chapter Ten

  The night was silent around her, save for the background noise of insects buzzing as always they did. She shone the flashlight up the path before her. She’d been here before; her parents had brought her when she was twelve, deciding it was time to show her the place she’d been found eight years prior by two hikers.

  It was the Black Hawk Forest Nature Preserve in Illinois, and tonight she’d gotten in by parking on the Woodley Road cul-de-sac and walking through one of the homes’ back yards directly into the woods. With the help of the GPS feature on her phone, she slowly made her way through its expanse toward the mapped location she had programmed into it.

  She recalled when her mom had explained it to her, Dad filling in little details here and there. But even for them it’d been sketchy, knowing only what they’d been told by the State of Illinois Child Services social worker who’d handled their adoption of Kaia.

  All anyone knew was that in the middle of a hot summer morning, two hikers had heard a strange noise off the path that wound its way through the woods. Following it, they had stumbled upon a small blonde girl curled into the fetal position in a catatonic state. She’d been wearing a cloth jumper that was dirty and ripped, and so it had been thrown away. She was also wearing the necklace.

  One more look at her phone told her she was nearly at the place she’d been found. Kaia honestly didn’t know why she’d even come here tonight. It’d been a spur-of-the-moment decision after an entire day spent going back to the bar to get her car and finding out from the bartender that he didn’t have a clue who the dark-haired guy was that she’d left with. And also that the bartender claimed not to remember what had or hadn’t happened within the bar before Bijan and Kaia left together.

  After that, she’d done some research on the internet, but hadn’t been able to find anything out about a guy with a one-word exotic name. Nothing made sense to her, so then she’d gone off on the tangent of trying to identify the images she’d seen, or the language she had heard that was so very strange that she couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what it was. The only thing that had rung true with her was that the words had sounded a lot like ancient languages she did know.

  Sure, spoken languages were all different with their own quirks and sounds and pronunciations and completely separate rules and inflections. But in a way her mother had taught her to hear, they also all sounded the same, and could be easily distinguished from more modern languages like American English or even Chinese.

  That’s what the words had sounded like, something forgotten from long ago. But trying to locate them phonetically had gotten her nowhere. Somehow, this all had something to do with her past. She wasn’t quite sure how she knew that, but she just kept seeing herself as a little girl held and carried by two men, one of whom she now recognized was Bijan. The thing that got her, that she couldn’t explain away, was how it was possible that Bijan looked exactly the same when she’d met him the night before as he did in her dreams, and in the visions she’d had while he was there.

  She was now going back to the beginning because really, it was all Kaia had left. Half an hour before sunset she’d thrown some mace, her cellphone and her wallet into the passenger seat of her car and took off. It was only an hour-and-a-half drive to the preserve. Then a few minutes to find the cul-de-sac showing on her GPS, and then she was in.

  Shining her flashlight around, it suddenly occurred to Kaia that she should be scared shitless right about now. Here she was in the middle of a two hundred-plus acre forest just before eleven at night, surrounded by darkness and all manner of other things she had no hope of being able to see with or without the flashlight.

  And yet she wasn’t afraid at all. With every step she took through the tree branches and dead pine needles, she was vaguely aware of the fact that her quartz had begun to pulse its faint pink glow. With every breath she felt strangely like she really knew where she was going on her own even without the phone in her hand showing a red dot straight ahead.

  When Kaia broke through the trees into a small clearing no more than eight feet in circumference, she was struck by how familiar it seemed. Tree stumps dotted the prairie grass along with wildflowers that were closed up tight for night. Moving to the middle of the clearing, to the largest stump big enough for her to sit on, Kaia stared down at it for a few seconds as a memory came flooding back.

  The man’s face was kind and full of love as he removed something from his robe. She saw him tie it around her neck and listened as he began speaking to her. He placed kisses upon her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, her hair. She clung to his neck as a shadow passed overhead.

  The other man spoke, his voice full of concern, and she knew it was Bijan. That meant...the man holding her now...

  “Father?” Kaia whispered aloud and the insects became silent.

  The man’s hand clasped the necklace and Kaia could feel tears running down her tiny cheeks as he began to chant. The necklace glowed, it pulsed, becoming brighter and brighter until it surrounded her. And that was the last thing she knew.

  Reopening her eyes now, Kaia shone the flashlight around but saw nothing. Sinking down onto the stump, she slouched forward, flashlight dropping to the ground. Burying her face in her arm, she felt the first sob shake her body before she’d even uttered a sound.

  * * *

  Bijan awoke to a sound that made fear creep up his spine. He opened his eyes and lifted his head off the dirt just enough to note a pair of feet in his line of sight. Then there was a voice that was at once terrifying and sickeningly familiar. He broke out in a cold sweat, making him shiver as he rose to a sitting position.

  There he was, standing before him. He looked like Kana. He even stood like Kana. But his eyes glowed and his voice was coarse, speaking the language of the demons. Bijan stilled, forcing himself to look away because if you didn’t look them in the eyes, they couldn’t possess you.

  A loud noise from behind made Bijan jump to his feet and whirl on a member of Kana/Mulmak’s legion who was rushing him full-steam. Rising into the air twisting at a dizzying speed, Bijan threw out a white-hot bolt of magic followed by another and then a bright yellow one. The demon screamed in agony and fell to the ground, before turning into a pile of ash that blew away on an unseen wind.

  Kana/Mulmak screeched something as the remaining three of his legion came after Bijan, and suddenly they stopped dead in their tracks. Slowly Bijan turned to face the former Shinzarn who had once been the most powerful in existence. This time their eyes met, and for a fraction of a second Bijan felt paralyzed, bile rising into his throat.

  Then the moment was gone and with a great thundering cry, Kana/Mulmak and the rest of the Vloveks took off into the sky. Bijan watched with incredulity. Why hadn’t they just killed him? Why would Kana possessed by Mulmak just let him go? They could’ve ended him before he regained consciousness; there was no reason for what had just happened.

  Bijan happened to look down. As the cacophony faded into the darkened-reddish hues of n
ight on Shinzar, he stooped to pick up something. It was a scroll. And when Bijan unfurled it, he knew what it was. Sparing one more look of disbelief into the area of the sky where Kana had disappeared, Bijan couldn’t help the sting of tears that filled his eyes.

  Kana was still in there. Somehow, somewhere within the monstrosity he’d become, his mentor was still there.

  Bijan looked back down at the scroll before rolling it up and placing it within the scroll pocket inside his vest. Then he tied the vest back up bottom-to-top, raised his hands and began to hum. Only this time, there was a harmony of three slightly different notes, rather than the standard four.

  With the parchment, Kana had shown him how to return to Earth’s dimension faster than thirty-nine hours from the last time a portal was opened. Bijan couldn’t fathom Mulmak allowing whatever portion of Kana still remained to do this. But whatever the reasons had been, now Bijan knew the secret. Above all else, he had to protect the Nake and Kaia. And Kana had just given him the gift that would allow him to do so.

  * * *

  Kaia knew she’d been out there longer than she should’ve been when a soft rain began to fall. The forecast, she recalled dully from web pages where it had been displayed as she’d spent the day doing fruitless searches, had called for rain starting near dawn. She was all cried out and pretty much just sitting there on that same stump, her ass completely numb, trying to decide whether further wallowing in self-pity and confusion would get her anywhere.

  She was going to get wet no matter how quickly she made it back to her car, that much she knew. But she rose to her feet anyway, deciding that heading back was probably her only option. Obviously there was nothing left for her in this clearing. Nothing but vague impressions, faces of people she knew but didn’t really know. Feelings welling up inside her that made no sense; soft words, commanding words, spoken in a language she couldn’t hope to comprehend.

  And Bijan.