Forsaken

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “So many horrors,” she said on a sudden, soft breath, her fingers reaching to touch his whisker-rough jaw. He should have been repulsed, offended by the uninvited touch as well as the observation, just as he had been offended by Kamen’s.

  But he wasn’t. Instead he stared down into those chartreuse eyes and knew without a doubt that she was seeing a part of him that had witnessed those horrors. Whether it was just a word in his light or the emotions his memories carried, he did not know, but he didn’t doubt for a second that, in that moment, she truly understood him. Something not even Docia or Jackson could claim. For years now he had been showing them only select parts of himself. He had been preserving Docia’s innocence, because he had needed her quirky uniqueness to stay just as unblemished as ever…and not burdened with the memories he could not share. And Jackson…he and Jackson came from two sides of the same coin. The greater good being both of their goals, but Leo was willing to cross the line to see to it. Jackson stayed in the lines, following the laws he believed in. They had agreed to disagree on their methods toward the same goal, and had silently agreed that Leo shouldn’t tell Jackson, a cop, anything he would have to, in good conscience, seek justice for.

  Leo had never told Jackson that it had killed him a little every day that he had no one to truly turn to and be himself with. That even when he was with them, eating with them, laughing with them…he was still very much alone and out in the cold.

  “You…” she began, but then seemed to think better on it and pressed her lips together. They were so sensual, those lips of hers. He had no idea why he found her mouth so intriguing, but the feeling was one of the best experiences he’d had since Chatha gutted him.

  The thought put a damper on his appreciation of her, reminding him sternly that she was just another creature he didn’t understand. And she was a woman to boot. That was like…double jeopardy or something.

  He turned his eyes and body away from the Night Angel. Damn it, why is it so hard to move away? It must be because of what that Templar prick has done to me. He still couldn’t feel his usual strength, still felt significantly weakened.

  But he’d rather be dropped into a vat of hissing scorpions before he’d admit it.

  They all, en masse, moved out of the room. All but Marissa. Ram led the way to their rooms where Docia had hurried off to. Leo, still holding the Angel’s arm, motioned for her to precede him. She looked for a moment like he was a vat of hissing scorpions, but then moved cautiously away from him. She kept her eyes turned down as she walked and brushed a hand in a caress over her right ear. It was a habit, he realized. She was tucking back a strand of hair, even though there wasn’t a single one that had escaped the severity of her twist. She probably wore her hair down under normal circumstances.

  They all descended on Ram and Docia’s suite of rooms. Leo was happy to see Kamen follow them, rather than staying behind with an incapacitated Jackson. Leo was certainly not convinced this wasn’t exactly the kind of opportunity the Templar might be waiting for, if his defection were nothing but a ruse.

  Leo gently shifted his hold of the Angel’s arm to the midpoint of her biceps, and held her back from entering the rooms along with everyone else.

  “Can I ask a favor?” he said when she looked at him inquisitively.

  “You may ask anything you like. However, it does not follow that you will be answered.”

  Point taken.

  “When you look at Kamen’s…uh…light thing…what words do you see?”

  She lifted a curious brow. “Why would you wish to know that?”

  “Just…just answer the question,” he said, trying to keep his irritability to a minimum, seeing as how he was asking her for help.

  “Turmoil. Hatred. Loathing.” She raised her brow farther. “Do you wish to know more? Or does it matter what is the brightest versus what is worn down?”

  “I think you told me all I needed to know,” Leo said through tight teeth.

  “I do not think that is correct.”

  He frowned, trying hard not to let knee-jerk anger cloud his judgment. “Why is that?”

  “Because all of those words are turned inward.”

  He blinked. “Okay, I give up. What does that mean?”

  “Self. Self-loathing. Self-hatred. Turmoil and guilt…all pointed into him. He is not the demon you are looking for.” She leaned in a little closer. “Your demon is also turned inward.”

  Then she pulled away and moved into the next room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Here it is!” Docia cried in triumph after having gone through every single drawer, throwing things helter-skelter over both shoulders until she came up with a long, purple scarf, shimmering with intricate silver embroidery.

  “Excellent,” Faith said, reaching to take the accessory into her hands, her fingertips feeling the silk and the weight of the silver in the thread.

  “This is a nik.” Faith knew this because she could feel the power within it and it surprised the hell out of her. “Djynn rarely give away their niknaks.” Catching Leo’s puzzled expression, she explained, “Djynn do not have power for themselves, per se. They have the ability to use the power they can derive from various niks—which hold magical properties. The moment a Djynn touches a nik, it becomes theirs and the power within it is now theirs to use.”

  “So you mean…they have to hold a nik to use its power?” Leo asked.

  “No, no matter what, from the moment they’ve touched a nik, the magic is theirs, and only theirs, to draw from at any given moment whether in contact with it or not. Until another Djynn comes along and touches the nik, which transfers ownership of the nik, in effect stealing it out from under the Djynn that owned it. Djynn have great hoards of niks they hide all over the world.” Faith ran the scarf through her hands. “This is an incredibly powerful nik. I’m quite amazed,” she said to Docia. “You must have made quite an impression on her in order for her to entrust you with the care of such a powerful nik.”

  “Well, I…really?” Docia was flabbergasted. “I-I didn’t even know it was a nik!”

  “Well, that would have defeated the purpose of hiding it in a safe place. If you knew what it was, it would have made you too aware of it and might have caused you to give away its location to a rival Djynn by accident. If it were an ordinary scarf in your estimation, you wouldn’t have done anything to draw attention to it. And besides, this house is probably one of the safest and most ingenious places to hide a nik. The average Djynn would avoid this house of power like the plague. Djynn dislike confrontations.”

  “Oh. Wow,” Docia said, her eyes wide with wonder. “I didn’t realize she thought that much of us.”

  “Clearly she did,” Faith said, smiling when she saw the word “delighted” sear brilliantly across Docia’s scroll, which was what Night Angels called that inner spotlight they could see. The little Bodywalker was really quite sweet and a very unusual mixture of souls. The human soul was everything innocent, impulsive, and awkward, while the Bodywalker soul was sophisticated, worldly, and confident. Both were completely harmonious, however, when it came down to their love for the injured Bodywalker in the next room, and for the one that stepped up behind her and wrapped strong golden arms around her.

  Together Docia and Ram’s lights combined into something far too brilliant for her to look at directly. It was the brightest light she could ever remember seeing in her lifetime. The two left in the other bedroom came a close second. But she suspected it was only the weaker of the two because the male had been so brutally damaged. That left only the female trying to shine brightly for both of them. Faith found that profoundly saddening. A light so precious was on the brink of being extinguished. As it was, she knew she should never have let them believe there was a hope of saving him. It was the longest of long shots and it would need something in the nature of a string of miracles. But Faith had watched the imp cut those souls away from their anchor without a single taste of contemplation of its actions. It destroy
ed because it could. Its power was vast and frightening and it liked to let other lesser beings know that. And Apep considered all beings to be lesser beings. He was perfection in his own eyes. It followed suit, of course, that he should be worshipped for all that he was. That he had adorned himself with the body of a beautiful woman was simply yet another perversion it took delight in. When Faith had come upon the scene only an instant before the god had struck the Bodywalker down, she had known she was too late and had failed in her initial mission.

  So she had given herself a new mission. An impossible mission. One whose success would truly be a miraculous event.

  “I can use this to track the Djynn…but daylight is coming…” She pulled her bottom lip briefly between her teeth, worrying it a little. The idea of being out in the sunlight was abhorrent and terrifying to any of the Nightwalker races. Each of them grew weak in the face of it, in one fashion or another. Paralysis. Poisoning. Altering on a subatomic level. The debilitations ran the entire gamut, including the one she was most familiar with. “I won’t be able to start this journey until darkness falls.”

  “That’s too long,” Leo bit out as Docia gasped in dismay. He instinctively reached out as though to comfort her, but then drew back sharply before even touching her.

  Faith was fascinated by that reaction and by this man. His emotions and thoughts vacillated so sharply from one extreme to the next that it left her completely dizzy. It was as though he were a kid with a Christmas tree full of emotions and he went ripping madly from one to the next, trying each on for size before quickly discarding it and leaping to the next. She’d never seen anyone burn through so much emotion so quickly before. The words scrawled over his scroll in a beautifully haphazard script kept changing in brightness and intensity.

  What she had not explained to the mortal male was that everyone’s words looked different in style as well as brightness. When she had looked at Menes’s and Hatshepsut’s lights they had been worded in beautiful hieroglyphs. For the woman she now stood facing, it was an energetic boldface script. For the mortal it was like that of a left-handed, impatient script, beautiful in its maleness and vivacity. The type of script she saw told her almost as much as the word itself did. Her own was a graceful Asian-styled calligraphy.

  The human would be surprised, she knew, to learn just how similar his script was to the Bodywalker he loathed, the one standing on her opposite side. Although one was a little more patient and paid more attention to detail, both men’s emotions were volatile, especially with regards to their feelings toward themselves.

  She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with emotions that fell away like so many shedding hairs; the next discarded before the first had even hit the ground. It had to be simply exhausting. God knows she was worn out just watching them do it.

  Faith drew her attention away from everyone else and focused on the nik in her hands. It was a very powerful nik. She could sense it, feel it in the weight of the metal fused to the silken threads that made it glint and shine in the light. Since it was so clearly owned by the Djynn in question, she would very easily be able to track her using it. The trick was whether she could do it without tipping her off. If a Djynn thought it was being hunted it would run and hide and use magic to keep others as far away as it deemed necessary. As it stood right now, the Djynn’s defenses were not up and Faith could very strongly feel the direction she needed to go in.

  “Sunlight weakens us,” she explained to the human patiently. “In some cases it can kill us.”

  “Us?” he echoed, hissing hard on the “s.” “I am not an ‘us.’ Daylight does nothing more to me than give me a nice tan. So tell me how to find this thing and I’ll have it here by nightfall.”

  Docia gasped, her eyes widening before they went wet with hurt and shocked pain. She had felt his derision and prejudice to her core, had known instinctively that he lumped her in with the “its” of his world. A dehumanized thing that he wanted no part of.

  Leo realized his blunder a second or two too late. By the time he thought to apologize she had turned away from him, and buried her face into the chest of her mate. Ram’s big hands engulfed her with a comforting hug, rubbing her back gently as she began to weep. It had been one hurt too many in too short a period of time, and she dissolved into tears under the stress of it all. Ram’s touches and soothing words were all sweetness and comfort, but the blazing look he leveled at Leo should have set the mortal man on fire. At least he had the decency to look and feel regretful. But he didn’t try to verbally apologize. He made himself listen to Docia’s pain and flagellated himself with the sound of it.

  “I doubt you could ever find a Djynn on your own,” Faith said to him, drawing his attention. “They cannot be tracked by mortal means.”

  “Anything can be tracked.”

  “True,” she acquiesced. “But unless you know of a way to track smoke and energy, your problem remains the same. You will need my help to find her. Hunting for her in daylight presents its own problems, but since time is of the essence we have little choice. Perhaps the nearness of her nik will entice her into using her magic to make it possible for her to contact us in spite of the sun. I know there are Templar spells that can create this possibility, perhaps there are Djynn abilities as well.”

  He stewed in those thoughts for a moment.

  “So what is it with sunlight and you Night Angels anyway?” he asked. “Does it paralyze you like it does these people?”

  The way he said “these people” was yet another nail of pain driven into Docia’s light. He had to know how much he was hurting her, so why did he persist? His scroll read of a deep love of Docia, one that was a lifetime written into his heart. How was it possible for him to keep hurting her even though it hurt him to know he was doing so? To feel he was doing so. Everything about him was a wash of contradictory emotions and agendas. She sincerely felt sorry for him, because he was well and truly lost in the miasma of these feelings. He needed an anchor in this storm of emotion, and he needed one fast, or he would lose himself, drown himself in them completely.

  She didn’t particularly care for humans. Their minds were so small…so unwilling. Unwilling to learn, unwilling to adapt. Not that she hated them, but she didn’t understand them. She didn’t understand why everything in their eyes had to be so defined. Spelled out. Understood. For her it was the magic of the unexplainable that was so delightful. For instance, the conundrum of emotion, prejudice and love that this man was. It was tragic and beautiful and indefinable.

  “If you had a vulnerability, would you wish to announce it to the world? Or do you wish to know so you can find some sort of equal footing with me?” She stepped toward him and heard him draw in his breath as she came close enough to say softly. “Will it make you happy if you know exactly how to kill me?”

  “It might,” he said sharply. But even as he spoke reactively, she felt him floundering, felt him question his own motives, saw him scrawl the word “bastard” across his light.

  “Then I will help you, by all means.” She left his side, crossed the suite of rooms to the balcony doors just outside the sitting room. “Step back,” she instructed Docia and Ram, and they, as well as Kamen, hastened to do so.

  The polarized glass had blocked the rising sun so thoroughly that it had seemed to be night until she opened the door and let the newly risen sunlight in. Docia and Ram pressed even farther back, no doubt feeling the numbing edges of the paralysis the light brought to them, as well as the accompanying fear that came with it. Deservedly so. Who would want to be caught frozen and helpless in the cold light of day? Certainly not her.

  But for these purposes, she had very little choice beyond exposing her vulnerabilities to these strangers. Especially this one particular stranger. This was meant to help him feel equalized, meant to quell the fear she knew was fueling his suspicions of her. Of them all.

  She turned her face into the sun, felt it cascading over her, the feeling like a million pricking needles alo
ng the underside of her skin. Under the light her beautiful black skin lightened to a charcoal color, then lightened again to a silvery gray. The effect continued, making her the very lightest shade of pearlescent gray before progressing into the colorless realm of white. Not human white, but the white of a human without pigmentation. The white of an albino. The blue beauty of her energy wings seemed to shrivel up until it was nothingness. The warm yellow-gold of her eyes washed away, leaving very normal looking irises…except for the fact that they held no pigmentation save the tender tinge of pink from the blood vessels running through them. With her white hair and brows, the effect was complete.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man called Leo uttered. His eyes raked over her from head to toe, stopping baldly at the barely pink crests of her nipples and the nakedness of her sex, its pinkness also showing clearly what the beautiful black of her skin had hidden away.

  “There now. Does this please you?” She stepped up to him, the warmth of the sunshine burning against her right cheek. “Does this comfort you?”

  He didn’t deny that it did and she saw the word “human” draw itself into his light.

  She said on a soft breath, “You can believe that if it gives you comfort. If it allows for us to work together. But with this human guise comes limitations you will not find so very pleasing. I cannot access my wings, so I cannot fly. I cannot access the power I used to protect you less than an hour ago. The repulsion force field. Suffice it to say, this will allow us to work in daylight together and will, perhaps, quiet your unrest about my appearance, but we’re in for a hell of a time if we run into trouble.”

  Faith reached out and caught the door, slamming it shut in order to protect the other people in the room. There was white-hot fear written in each of their lights. She could not understand how the mortal could ever find any kind of satisfaction in something so terrifying to another. Especially to ones he professed to love.