Love Beyond Lies

by Rebecca Royce

  Leonardo fisted his hands. “Don’t talk about Zane like that. He’s smarter than ten of you.”

  “My father made all of you. The Outsiders, right? You guys finally figured out that you all have a little demon in you. Zane did, right? When he broke into my father’s brain for half a moment. This was always a family fight. Who was stronger? Us? The real deal or his little pet creations?”

  Leonardo wanted to throw something. “You aren’t telling me anything.”

  “I just did. Figure it out. I can’t make this too easy. If my laying it out for you can’t get the job done, then you don’t deserve to be here. I’ll figure out how to get out of this dimension and screw you all. Maybe I’ll do that anyway.”

  The demon vanished and Leonardo groaned. He wasn’t any better off than when he’d come here and now the rage he worked so constantly hard to resist filled him. He wanted to kill Sebastian for sleeping with Alexa and if that made him some kind of caveman then so fucking be it.

  He wasn’t a hero. He never had been. He was a leader. And boy, was there a difference.

  Leonardo closed his eyes and started shouting. Nothing intelligible. He roared to the sun, to the moon they considered a goddess. Kal could hear her speak but she ignored Leonardo, always had.

  Put him in charge but give him no support. Why the hell not?

  Drew appeared and Leonardo almost groaned, but he resisted the urge. Gabriel would at least have had the good sense not to ask him what was wrong. Drew never did.

  “That bad with Sebastian?”

  He stared at his friend. “He used to have sex with my soul mate, who hates me. The fact that I have to deal with him at all in any capacity except to kill him is the most fucked up thing ever.”

  Drew nodded. “Nothing about this time around has been as it should be. What bothers you more? That she slept with someone other than you? Or that you saw it? Or that it was Sebastian?”

  “Why do I have to pick? Can’t all three things bother me at the same time? Can’t it also make me ill that I let her down? That I didn’t fight for her? Can’t I feel sick to my stomach over all of it?”

  His friend patted him on the back. “Dude, tonight, we are getting drunk. Big drunk. Then back to miserable shit tomorrow. We aren’t saving them tonight, if ever.”

  That sounded like a great idea. “After I figure out where to deposit Gia and Colin so that Sebastian can help them get rid of their problem. We need the shadow thing gone as soon as possible so it stops pulling on her power.”

  A cool breeze hit him in the face. It contrasted with the fire in the city. Drew looked up when he felt the sensation, closing his eyes for a second before he spoke. “Speaking of which— have you thought at all about Gia’s power? We hardly ever use her.”

  “Her ability to persuade? It never works on the supernatural. It’s always been very helpful to have her at full strength in order to power up the group. But her individual abilities? I guess I never give it any thought.”

  Drew raised his eyebrows. “Oh, she has more than persuasion. She must. We all have at least two powers and I don’t have persuasion. I have one from each of you. So which one is hers?”

  “The art? I mean, Eden can send her visions and she sketches them. She hears from the ancestors I think. That’s about it.”

  His fellow Outsider scrunched up his nose. “Nope. I’ve always wondered. What in the heck is Gia’s super power?”

  “She can put up with Colin?”

  They both grinned. Drew put his hand on his back and they both blipped out of there to home.

  Alexa

  In a million years of battle, Alexa had never trailed the Father demon from place to place like some kind of spy before. She’d always been better suited to killing them than following them around. But the demon currently destroying the Earth had to be watched and no one was doing that.

  The lack of foresight from her fellow Outsiders didn’t surprise her. They were remarkably stupid without her. Who was planning their missions? What was her soul mate even doing with them at this point? Did they play board games and surf the internet looking at cat videos?

  This. World. Was. Ending. And there would be no more for them. If—maybe when—this destroyed place ceased to be savable the Outsiders would lose the war. She didn’t even know what would happen then. Would they go back to the place where they were from? Would they cease to exist? Would they be trapped?

  She shuddered. Some of the blackness that was always in her soul since Sebastian had fed off it, called to her. She wanted blood, but she wouldn’t drink any. No one was going to tell her what she would and wouldn’t do, particularly not Sebastian.

  In this case, her darkness was helpful. The Father would sense light. It was a good thing she didn’t have any.

  A sound caught her attention and she darted into an alley so she wouldn’t get caught. The Father must have heard it too because he turned around. They were both looking at the same thing. A little girl cried out in the middle of the street.

  Alexa didn’t really know children. She didn’t understand them. But this one was small. Tiny. Female. And scared.

  The Father looked human. He even had a corporeal form that he could keep all the time—unlike his son. With brown hair and green eyes, he could come across as friendly, maybe. He smiled at the little girl and started walking toward her.

  Oh no. That wasn’t going to happen. Alexa knew what demons did with people. They killed them or they fed off them. That child wasn’t going to be anyone’s meal.

  Giving up her subterfuge, Alexa ran forward and grabbed the child. The little girl struggled wildly, begging to be let go. Alexa was a stranger and life was burning everywhere. Who could blame the kid for screaming?

  The Father stopped moving. She should go. One of the powers she’d gotten from Sebastian during the time she’d consensually put herself at his mercy—without knowing what she’d been doing— was that she could transport now like Drew and Gabriel. Why wasn’t she going?

  Well, because there was something fascinating about this Father… about this demonic creator. Who was he? Why had he done this? Why did he bother? Boredom? Power? Evil? Was evil ever really the only reason for something, or was it just a way out? Sometimes people didn’t want to understand the fundamental reasons creatures did things when those things went against everything logical.

  Was this pure (so-called) evil in front of her?

  “Look what he did to you.” The Father had such a pleasant sounding voice. On Earth, if he’d really been human, he would have been someone like a television announcer. “He coated you in the very essence of him. It must be hard for you to stay away from me. Not to worry, you don’t have to. Suddenly, I find myself very interested in you, Alexa. Put down that child. Or feed from her. But come to me.” He extended his hand. “Come by my side. You can be one of us now.”

  She almost moved. For half a second she wasn’t sure she could resist the impulse, but then memories flooded her vision. She saw those lifetimes where she’d kept order in the universe against these things. She’d fought. She’d died. She’d loved. Leonardo’s face in the morning when he first woke up. The way he blinked awake, slowly.

  Alexa shuddered. Whatever she was… what she had become… what had been done to her… whatever choices she’d made that landed her here in this situation, she was not the sort of creature that belonged by his side.

  “No.” She blinked, pulling herself and the little girl out of sight of the demon. They’d go somewhere else. Alexa had no idea if anywhere was safe, but she would find a place for this little girl.

  One soul she could save, even if she wasn’t an Outsider anymore.

  Kal

  So much had changed since the last time Kal had been in the Outsider manor. This island—the place where he’d spent a huge portion of his childhood—held both good and terrible memories for him.

  He wandered around looking. Go look, Leonardo had told him. Go look and see if it’s solid enough to send Gia an
d Colin to meet with Sebastian there in order to deal with the shadow thing stalking Gia.

  He wasn’t an engineer or an architect. Gabriel, who had come with him, was a better choice to look at things and see. So why send Kal at all?

  Leonardo had his reasons for doing things and they weren’t always benevolent. Still, Kal knew Leonardo better than anyone else on earth did right now. Well, maybe Leonardo tied with Marina. Alexa should have been Leonardo’s person. But, in her stead they’d all have to make do.

  “What do you think?”

  Gabriel scowled, but that was his usual expression. “This is a big, old house that was magically constructed by that screwed-up father figure of yours while he ran around protecting you for years. I have no earthly idea if this fucking thing is going to fall over or not. When the wards fell, Sebastian destroyed it. And yet, the foundation still holds. The walls are up. Yeah, I guess it can do for a little while. I mean how long will Gia and Colin have to be here? A day? A week? Gods be damned, we can’t have them out of commission for very long.”

  That was true. Kal wandered forward. “Once upon a time we had a housekeeper here. Her name was Dot.”

  “You had a housekeeper? For real? I was scrounging for food in a fucking garbage can. You had a housekeeper.”

  Kal shook his head. “My childhood wasn’t exactly roses, toys, and flowers. Dot was with us because Sebastian’s early minions killed her family. Veli sort of collected her. Then Marina bespelled her to forget us. It was safer for her.”

  “What happened to her?” Gabriel scrunched up his face. “Your housekeeper Dot?”

  Kal really didn’t know. “I don’t have the slightest idea. Should I?”

  “Well, we’ve all been a little busy. I don’t even know how much Christophe is speaking to his parents or Jason to his for that matter. All the rest of us were without relations. Or at least any we want to see. I think that might be a good thing. No one to be thinking about outside of the fight.”

  Kal sunk down to the floor, touching the wood. “Yes. But for whom do we fight if we have forgotten them? If we haven’t thought about the people who need us, then why are we doing this at all?”

  Gabriel snorted. “Is that some kind of point? Should I feel fucking moved? I fight because I agreed to a million years ago. I fight because it got me Lorraine. I fight because I love her. I fight because it’s all I know how to do anymore.”

  Was that true? Was that all any of them knew how to do anymore? No, it wasn’t. “You know how to love. You love that woman with all of your heart as I do Isabelle. More every day I am with her. More for knowing her very few flaws. More because of them, not less.”

  “This is poetic. Should we go?” Gabriel ran a hand through his hair. “If I’m going to do sappy, I’m going to do it with my girl. Not with you. No offense, brother.”

  He wasn’t offended. This wasn’t like Kal either. Why was he getting nostalgic? Most of his memories here were horrible. Veli had been a terrible parent. He’d hated Kal’s real parents, treated Kal like dirt because of it. Then of course Kal had brought Isabelle home and that had been a beautiful day.

  Beneath his fingers on the wood, the earth shifted. That was right. This place was powerful. This was where the moon had spoken to him, where he had thought perhaps he could shift into being a wolf. It was all so distant…

  But...

  He whirled around. Standing there, non-corporeal but there, was Veli. The man was dead and had been since Leonardo had been forced to kill him. Gabriel pointed at the image. “Who the fuck is that?”

  “Gabriel, this is Veli. Veli, Gabriel.”

  Veli nodded to him. “Your parents loved you very much.”

  “That’s nice. What are we doing with a ghost here? Why is your foster father haunting us?”

  Veli shook his head. “You came home. So, it’s time. You always knew Kalmari. You always knew it would be here. This safe haven I made for you. All battles begin and end here.”

  That was true.

  Kal turned to Gabriel. “Gia and Colin. They’ll come here. It’ll be fine.” Knowing there wouldn’t be much time he stared at the still-there Veli. “I’ve asked myself on dark nights when I let memory visit me for a while if I am who I am because of you, or despite you. Maybe you had nothing to do with shaping me at all. I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m an Outsider, but not just an Outsider. I’m an elite. The eighteen of us were chosen for this destiny. No, scratch that. We stood up and volunteered. So did you hate me because you hated my parents, or did you hate me because for whatever reason looking at me always reminded you that you didn’t?”

  Veli’s smile was slow. “Now there’s the backbone you’ll need to get through the next days. Don’t ever forgive me, Kal. It’s not your style.”

  And with that the ghost of Veli Destrand was gone.

  Gabriel cleared his throat. “Do you need a minute or something?”

  Kal grinned. “No way, man. I’ve never felt better. Let’s go tell Leonardo. We know where Colin and Gia need to go and where the big battle will be. Leave it to Veli. I bet he broke all kinds of rules doing this. He was such an asshole but he didn’t like to lose. Probably doesn’t want to get blamed if we fail at this. If we were weak because he was a lousy parent, it would haunt him for eternity.”

  “This is such fucked up shit.”

  Yes. Yes, it was.

  Isabelle

  Sitting in her bedroom, Isabelle felt the tug to travel through time. It happened, lately. A lot. She’d been resisting it. People needed her help here. She sighed. Who wanted her attention? She let herself vanish into somewhere else for just a bit.

  This was what she’d been meant to do.

  Four

  Colin

  Now

  He’d hoped after they’d left this place to never come back again. It wasn’t that he disliked the mansion on the abandoned island all that much. But here was where they’d constantly battled Sebastian, and the memory wearied him. Now, they were actually in the run-down place waiting for the demon to get there so he could help them. Life really didn’t make sense.

  They weren’t going to trust Sebastian, but hopefully his information would be useful. That was what Leonardo had told them.

  Gia wandered around the upstairs floors, poking her head into rooms and picking up discarded items that had been left in haste when the rest of the Outsiders had fled for their lives. Colin had been among them.

  “I used to stare at this house in the distance and wonder what was going on in here.” She strolled down the hall toward where Marina had lived before she and Drew got together.

  “As you happen to be one of us, and I was here, I think it might have been nice, or even useful, if you had hopped a boat and come on over.”

  He knew even as he spoke he was poking the bear in terms of Gia’s temper and what was bound to happen with the statement he made. Still, he wasn’t going to bite his tongue.

  She sighed. “Well, first of all I was waiting for you to get your memories back.”

  That wasn’t a good enough explanation. “Lots of the others got together with no memories. In fact, only Zane and Raquel had any recollection of their past lives when they re-met. We would have felt the tug.”

  Gia threw her hands in the air. “By the universe, you seem bound and determined to be constantly pissed off at me. I was right across the water. You could have come and found me. It’s not like you were out looking. I was waiting over there, fully aware I was the only one who knew what the heck was going on. And you were here, sitting on your hands, not exactly searching for me. I was easy to find! Zane stumbled upon me and I had to act clueless, like I didn’t know who he was.”

  Colin sank down to the floor. “You knew who I was, and moreover you knew where I was, and yet you didn’t come.”

  She sighed. “Do you think that I didn’t come because I didn’t want to? With only the ancestors to guide me, I had to do what they said. They told me to go to Maine, work at that bar. I did
it. Zane came. I thought perhaps that was my role for a while, to shelter him while he figured out his stuff. Then they told me to run, so I did that, too. It turned out I got caught anyway by the shadow, but whatever.”

  He’d really had enough. Twenty-four hours back together and they’d hardly spoken without arguing. They’d even spent the night in different rooms. Did she even want him this time around or was she done?

  Colin grabbed her arm, drawing her toward him as he rose to his full height. He kissed her, hard. With all that had happened, he’d not done what he wanted to do more than anything, which was to kiss the heck out of Gia. She had always been his whole world.

  She gasped against him and then with a laugh, kissed him back, just as hard. He closed his eyes. This was his woman, she always had been. He didn’t know how it could be because their bodies changed based on the dimensions they were in, but somehow Gia always smelled like cherries—or whatever the equivalent was on the world they inhabited.

  Gods, he had missed her.

  She grabbed onto his shirt. He was never going to understand why she didn’t find him or why she decided not to seek him out. As much as she was his soul mate, Gia remained a mystery to him. But she was his mystery.

  His love moaned. “Colin.”

  “Isn’t this cute?”

  They pulled apart and Colin wished he had the ability to kill the demon by himself. How and when they ended their foe differed in every life. In the last one they’d dusted him but he’d still been corporeal. Before the scribe died, Sebastian couldn’t be gotten rid of, really. Now they were stuck with him non corporeal and Colin didn’t really know how they were going to manage this at all.

  But in any case, there was Sebastian.

  “Demon.”

  “Colin.” Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Can you two keep your hands off each other long enough for you to deal with this? Oh, that’s right. You two never really get anywhere. She’s too good for you. You know it, Colin, and she knows it deep inside of her, too.”