And in my distraction, that warm sensation rolled back over me, this time like a waterfall.
I rolled my shoulders, shaking my head slowly at the familiar transition.
Much better, I thought to myself.
I knew I could join in that harmony of sound, creating a Song like the world hadn’t heard in millennia. But I no longer felt like Singing. It had been a long time since I had Sung…
My jaw clenched at even considering using my voice to build something beautiful.
Never again… I promised myself, and the tension evaporated like a puff of dandelion.
The woman – my woman, I decided hungrily – turned to face me, and my heart thundered louder than the first peal of thunder I had Sung at the creation of time itself.
She held a crackling white spear with two bands of shifting black rings on the haft, breaking it into thirds. I felt the dull throb of resistance growing in my mind but fought against it. Persistent host, this one was…
I studied the spear again, and the resistance intensified. Confusion even began to drift over me, an emotion I hadn’t felt in eons. Although impressed, I squashed the host’s resistance, growing annoyed.
I called out to the spear, demanding to know its story. It retaliated, refusing to answer my call, and I frowned harder. All I could tell was that it was powerful, had been broken, and then re-forged – although inexpertly.
The woman, as if suddenly noticing me, turned to face me directly, her shoulders squared, defiant, and uncompromising.
That blindfolded look struck out like an invisible wildfire.
I rocked back slightly, the alien sensation fleeing my mind.
I blinked rapidly, clenching my fists. I was me again. Nate Temple. Horseman of Hope, I thought to myself, mentally screaming the declaration as loud as I could. Whatever Callie had done with that look had sent the thing screaming from my mind.
I felt it circling me furiously, searching for another opening to invade, some chink in my mental armor that would allow it to take over again. It wasn’t happy that it had been knocked out of me. Wasn’t familiar with being knocked down.
Horseman of Hope. I’m the Horseman of Hope! I thought furiously, repeating it again and again in my mind. With a savage hiss, the entity left me, heading back to the columns.
Even thinking of it seemed to draw its attention, inviting it to enthrall me again, so I walled up my mind with a looped chant of Horseman of Hope, Horseman of Hope…
As a backup, I began flexing my claws – anything to help keep an anchor to reality.
Callie stared at me, not seeming to notice the mental assassin stalking me.
The way she faced me, assessing me up and down, let me know that despite the bandage over her eyes, or the silver tears on her cheeks, she could still see.
She took a hesitant step down the stairs, closer to me and the suite. Then another.
Like a mirror image, I advanced a step. Then another.
When she stopped, I stopped, wondering if she was also fighting some foreign entity in her mind. If so, I didn’t want to alarm it.
Callie took a last step down into the bedroom, and I mirrored her movement. She stared at me, sucking in a quick breath. Did that mean she recognized me, but was scared of my Horseman’s Mask? My wings? Or… Maybe this wasn’t Callie, but a mental invader like I’d been fighting.
She lifted a hand, even though she wasn’t close enough to touch me.
I smiled hopefully, mirroring the motion.
She looked slightly relieved, taking a step closer. If she was enthralled, she never would have looked at me with relief. Again, I mirrored her, taking a step closer.
She frowned, then, glancing down at her ankles. She grew suddenly tense, as if only just now seeing her own attire. Her own form.
“Who are you?” she asked in a cautious whisper, glancing back up at me. I clenched my claws again, reminding myself who I was, not giving that other entity a chance to swoop in. Because Callie didn’t seem to know me. More than anything, I’d needed Callie to know me. Even more than I needed the Mask to remind myself who I really was…
Callie abruptly shuddered, as if asking the question aloud had snapped her out of some daze.
I stared, hoping desperately… Then it hit me. She needed to see my face. I tore off my Mask flinging it onto the bed angrily, repeating a different mantra in my mind. Hope, hope, hope, hope, to remind myself who I was.
Because I wasn’t defined by the Mask. I was defined by the ideal behind the Mask.
Hope.
At a faint breeze, I glanced down to see I was suddenly bare-chested, wearing only a kilt of braided white and silver leather strips. I knew I hadn’t been wearing that before… My entire body had been that quartz-like stone. But now… I was flesh and bone.
“Callie…” I whispered anxiously. “What are you doing here?” And before I consciously thought about it, I was sprinting towards her. The marble floor crunched under my feet, shattering upon contact, as I reached out a hand to grab her and protect her from whatever lived here, those mental invaders.
Everything froze in mid-step, and even the flames in the fireplace halted. As if I was now staring at a room-sized snapshot of what I had just experienced. Between my outstretched hand and Callie – only a few feet away – was what looked like a glass wall, casting back a reflection of my anguished face.
Callie seemed to notice her own appearance for the first time. She let out a gasp, reaching up to touch her cheeks, wiping at the silver tears. After a few moments, she shook her head stubbornly and stared through her reflection, slowly reaching out her hand to touch the glass keeping us apart. Our fingers touched the glass at the same time and it imploded in on itself in a cascade of shards. The debris evaporated almost instantly, as if it had been imagined.
And – like time had spun back – we were on opposite sides of the bedroom again, staring at each other from the top steps.
I shook my head, realizing I wore the Mask again. I snarled, yanking it off furiously.
Callie was facing me openly, her lips plump and inflamed as she licked them absently, her tongue touching the silver tears.
She reached up to her blindfold and tore it off as violently as I had my Mask, letting it flutter to the ground beside her. In an instant, her outfit also changed.
She wore a white diaphanous silk skirt, almost transparent, and fluttering faintly in the unseen breeze. And like me, her chest was bare. Her eyes were pools of liquid silver, and the molten chrome tears dripped down her cheeks a little faster without the bandage. She lifted both hands to her cheeks, touching the silver tears with her fingers, and then stared down at her chrome fingertips.
I watched as several tears fell from her jawline to her breasts, splashing over them like silver paint, and I heard myself growling hungrily as I devoured her with my eyes. She looked up, noticing my reaction, and grinned in appreciation. She took her own time in gobbling up her own eyeful of my body, and I found myself panting in response.
On some unspoken cue, we both began walking towards each other. She arched her shoulders defiantly, clenching her fists at her sides, as if daring the scene to freeze again, daring anything to keep us apart. I clenched my jaws, feeling the same desire to destroy anything standing between us.
She strode with the confidence of a warrior queen, and my respect for her trebled with each step. Like two animals, we stalked closer, waiting for some obstacle.
We stopped, both our shoulders tight, only inches apart. And we locked eyes as the tips of her breasts touched my heaving chest. She stiffened at the same time as I did, like some electric current had zapped us upon contact, and the shudder of her body only made me wilder as her breasts quivered against my chest.
Unable to take it any longer, I slowly lifted my shaking hands to her cheeks. Nothing was going to stop me from holding her in this place. I would burn the universe to ashes, first.
In response, Callie set her hands on my chest, leaving smudged silver hand-p
rints over my body, as if she had needed to confirm that I, too, was real.
I gripped her face and leaned closer, my breath low, shallow, and rapid as I stared into those infinite pools of chrome.
Blue and green pockets of light suddenly bloomed around us, limning us in a cool, soothing light. Then they began to rotate, spinning in bobbing circles around us like reflections from a disco ball. She squeezed her fingers into my chest possessively, refusing to let me slip away. She stared back at me, gritting her teeth. Mine, the look said.
I couldn’t tell if she was claiming me or challenging me, but I was pretty sure I was giving her the same look. A wild tension, unrestrained and nuclear, stormed between us as the fireflies whirled faster and faster, our hair whipping back and forth at the steadily increasing vortex of power they left in their wake.
“What is this?” she whispered raggedly, digging her fingers tighter into my chest.
My fingers were slick with the silvery tears dripping from her eyes, but I cupped her jaws, my fingers gripping the sides of her neck below her ears, and my thumbs tracing slow circles through the chrome tears painting her cheeks.
I held her in the palms of my hands while she clutched my heart and soul.
And the world raged around us in a vortex of light.
Neither of us cared about that at the moment.
“A tale of two cities…” I whispered back, smiling harshly as my gaze flicked beyond her shoulder at the chaos, storms, war, and fallen kingdoms beyond the balcony. I’d seen different depictions of that war-torn scene, but never in such… captivating company.
As if my words had been a Catalyst, fire suddenly rolled over us, immolating the entire world in green and blue flame.
Silver and gold flame.
White and black flame.
Chapter 26
I woke up with a groan – an Apocalyptic set of blue balls threatening to obliterate me. I’d relived my strange dream with Callie, which was surprising. Those in the supposed know said it was impossible to have the same dream twice.
Which meant they were either wrong, or I’d just proven that my dream was not just a dream.
Which was both exciting and terrifying. Because that meant that strange sinister presence fighting to take over my mind from the dream was…
Real.
As if I hadn’t had enough to worry about.
I stared up at a familiar ceiling full of painted stars, planets, constellations and other space-themed swirls of color and darkness. I stared at it, surprised to find myself smiling, despite the re-dream. I hadn’t been in this room in years.
My old room from my childhood.
My parents had redecorated the room itself but had never wanted to paint over the ceiling. Too many fond memories of us lying on my bed together before bed, pointing out galaxies, constellations, and laughing about which planet we would like to live on some day. You couldn’t just paint over memories like that.
I glanced to my right and saw a few of my old comic posters, probably worth a few bucks now that they were adapting everything into movies. My parents had kept staples of my childhood décor and made the rest of the room work around it. To be honest, I hadn’t been back here since my college days, opening the door once or twice to look in and have a good laugh with my new love interest, Othello.
With a grimace at the thought, I slowly sat up. I didn’t have any romantic interest in Othello but seeing her naked recently felt like salt in old wounds. Just a reminder that she had moved on and I was still kind of floundering in bachelorhood.
I stared down at the floorboards, and carefully placed my foot on the third plank out of habit. I grinned, shaking my head at the muscle memory. The first two planks creaked, but the third one was safe. I knew that fact like every child learns the secrets of their home, if they live in one place long enough. How to sneak out, or at least how to sneak down to the kitchen for a late-night snack, when the parents were sleeping.
For fun, I pressed down on the third board, and only heard a faint creak. Then I pressed down on the first two and winced at the familiar groan and strain – which in the middle of the night, might as well have been an alarm.
“It only creaks now because you weigh more,” a familiar voice said from a chair in the corner.
I jolted instinctively at the sound, turning to see Gunnar sitting on the old gaming couch on the opposite wall – where we had stayed up countless nights watching movies, playing video games, or hatching some plan. “You’ve put on more weight than I have, chubs,” I told him.
He nodded, but his smile was forced. Judging from the look in his eye, I decided I wasn’t going to tell him about my dream. The first person to hear about that would be Callie. Period. And even that made me feel anxious. Maybe her take on the dream was a little different than mine.
“We called Darling and Dear, found out how to free Carl,” Gunnar said, as if struggling to make small talk.
“Oh,” I said distractedly. “That’s good. Thanks.”
I rubbed my temples absently, sensing a faint throb. I pulled my fingers away, checking for dried blood but didn’t find any. Was that from my dream, or last night? I frowned, realizing I couldn’t remember how I had gotten here. And trying to recall it was making my head throb more insistently.
I looked up at Gunnar. “What happened? Was I hit in the head?”
Gunnar watched me with his one eye, debating how much to tell me. “We don’t know. You must have been, because you weren’t making any sense. What do you remember?”
I thought back on it and winced, my headache coming back in a thunderous warning. I could remember speaking with Anubis… but that was it, unless I wanted to entice my migraine. “It’s a little fuzzy,” I lied.
Gunnar, knowing me too well, frowned, leaning forward. “Try,” he said, and it wasn’t a request.
I sighed. It wasn’t that I wanted to lie or keep things from him, but I knew explaining what I did remember wouldn’t make much sense and would apparently bring me closer to a debilitating migraine, which I didn’t have time for. Still, I’d promised to keep him in the loop.
So, I told him about my quick jaunt to Hell, how I’d been abducted in front of Raego and his two guards. And I didn’t hold anything back as I hit the point in the story where Anubis ejected me from Hell.
I climbed out of bed. “And then I saw…” I struggled to remember the next part, my headache rolling over the back of my neck and shoulders with a vengeance. “And then I was… back,” I mumbled, trying to mask my sudden headache with a walk over to the window that we had used to sneak out of the house as children.
Gunnar was silent for a time, digesting my story. The doorknob jiggled, and I turned to see Gunnar already pounding towards it in a dead sprint like he was protecting me from an assassin. He slammed a shoulder into the door, eliciting a surprised shout from the other side. Gunnar had a fire-poker in one hand, and he simply stabbed it through the edge of the door and deep into the trim, effectively deadbolting the entrance. He studied his handiwork, his back to me. His shoulders rose up and down, fists flexing open and closed at his sides as he panted.
I frowned, trying to make out the argued protests from the other side, but a hushed conversation ensued, and the sounds quickly cut off.
“I usually just yell through the door for Dean to come back later…” I said. Gunnar grunted in response, not turning to look at me. “Do I need to use the window escape?” I asked.
“You’re safe. No one will interrupt us.”
“I meant to escape from you, Gunnar. You seem a little… on edge.”
He stiffened as if I had struck him. Then he took a deep breath and slowly turned to face me. His lone eye was bloodshot. I hadn’t noticed that from across the room.
“What’s going on, Gunnar?” I asked carefully.
“Long night,” he replied, closing his eye for a moment.
“What did I do?” I asked uncertainly. Had I done something terrible after returning from Hell? I couldn
’t remember. Every time I tried, that headache came back. I tried again anyway, gritting my teeth over the pain. I remembered running into… someone. A big person. I let out a shaky breath, abandoning the attempt. That was it. Had the big person tried to attack me? Had I killed someone? I opened my mouth, taking a step closer.
Gunnar waved a hand dismissively, seeing the concern in my eyes. If anything, it seemed to deflate his own concern. Marginally. “It’s okay. We stopped you. But I need to know what you remember. This is important.”
They had… stopped me? That sounded all sorts of bad. “Why do I feel like I’m being interrogated?”
He smirked crookedly. “Because I used to be an FBI Agent, and I’m interrogating you. Idiot.” And even though he was attempting to make light of it, there was a sense of seriousness about his words. This was an interrogation. Just a friendly one.
“I…” the headache came back sharper this time, and I fell to my knees, groaning. Gunnar was there in an instant, propping me up.
Which was when I made my move.
I rammed my shoulder into his neck, knocking him on his ass. I reached out for my magic, wanting something to restrain him before he used his superior muscles to throw me around like a rag doll. And that’s when I realized I couldn’t touch my magic.
I glanced down to see a wooden bracelet on my wrist, and I snarled like a wild animal, trying to break through it with my Fae Magic – like a dog willing to chew off his leg to escape a beartrap. “Never—” I cut off, gasping involuntarily as a sharp flash of pain abruptly arced up my neck.
Gunnar began to struggle, preparing to toss me off of him. I blinked through stars in my vision, spotting the tattoo on his wrist. I took a gamble, panting through my pain. I flung out my hand – the one with the Temple Crest branded into the palm – and slapped it over his tattoo. “Family,” I hissed.
Gunnar went entirely still, gritting his teeth, but obeying me.
Horseman Page 15
