Two Worlds of Oblivion

by Angelina J. Steffort

  As if he had waited for a command, Neelis stepped in and flexed his arms. “On my command.” And the shifters stepped forward, shoving Corey aside as they grabbed for the iron bars. “One, two.” Jemin and Heck stepped back. “Three.” Seri, who had taken position right before Jemin’s eyes, winked at him before she threw herself backward, pulling at the door alongside her father and three other shifters. It looked absurd, but the door screeched and wailed under the force of their hands. The lock didn’t break, though, and Jemin’s patience was coming to an end.

  “Corey, Wil,” he called over the groans of strain from the shifters, “Go find Maray. Get her out of the dungeons before anyone can hurt her.”

  Wil understood first and nodded. It was the gesture of a brother in arms who would do anything to protect the loved ones of a brother in need. He grabbed Corey’s hand and pulled her forward while asking Jemin, “Which way did they take her?”

  Jemin pointed at the door to the right, and before Jemin could thank them, they were on their way. It pained him to see them leave. It was he who ought to have been protecting Maray—as his duty as a guard but also as a duty to his heart. He clenched his fists, ready to hit the wall again, and ground his teeth as a burst of pain emanated from the cuts on his knuckles.

  “Again!” Neelis commanded in the background, and the ceased sounds of five shifters fighting a magically sealed lock rejoined the soundtrack of his despair. In the cell next to his, Laura was struggling with tears as Gerwin rushed after Corey and Wil to rescue their daughter.

  Jemin took a deep breath. “They should all go,” he said to Laura. “It doesn’t matter what happens to us if Maray isn’t safe.”

  Maray

  A throbbing pain in Maray’s head prevented her from any clear thoughts, and yet, it was obvious something was wrong. Her mouth tasted like iron and copper, and her eyelids were not cooperating. Whispers in the background made her believe she was actually awake; they were hushed murmurs more than whispers, one of them deep and the other one a tenor… Goran and Pete.

  She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but she could feel a hand on her forehead; a soothing sensation reminding her of her mother when she’d been sick as a child. Her eyes blinked at the memory of comfort, and what she found behind the dark veil made her wish she had never even tried—

  “Good morning,” her own voice—much older but still hers—said in a tone that wasn’t caring. Rhia’s face, now looking closer to ninety than to her actual age, was hovering right over Maray’s, her deep blue eyes icy and full of victory.

  In an appropriate response, Maray’s body shrank into the cushions beneath her, arms and legs attempting to pull inward so she could curl away from her evil grandmother, but she stopped mid-motion as something cut into her ankles and wrists. She gasped in pain. Rhia had strapped her onto the Cornay-bed; the bed Maray now feared would be the last thing she’d ever see. And despite Rhia’s foul breath on her face, her slowly decaying skin, and the knowledge that she would eventually stick those tubes into her arms and gradually drain her blood, the thing she worried about most wasn’t that her own life was about to end but that she would never get to meet the people of Allinan, her people—that she would never see Jemin again and be able to tell him how much she loved him. Her chest tightened.

  “She’s awake,” Goran noted somewhere at the back of the room. There was a clinking of chains, and Pete’s head appeared in Maray’s peripheral vision.

  “Shut up over there,” Rhia barked un-royally, making Pete duck down again. Then, the queen turned back to her as if nothing had happened. “Can you believe those clowns? Disobeying my orders in an attempt to help you escape…” She theatrically shook her head. “I am still debating whether to kill them now or leave them as a dinner for my demons for later.”

  Maray turned her head as far as she could to the side where she had noticed Pete’s head and found the two guards locked in shackles and attached to one and the same chain, which was fastened at the stone wall. They glanced back at her with fear-filled eyes, their hands holding on to each other. They had to be scared out of their minds with the evil queen showing up and aging before their eyes—turning more into a real-life zombie than the image of youth she used to display for her court—and knowing there was no way out for either of them. Maray felt a pang of sympathy for them. They had disobeyed Rhia for her. Again, someone was risking their lives for her and were paying for it. When was it going to end?

  Jemin’s face appeared in her mind as if he was mocking her. Were he there with her right now, he would tell her that she had to get used to it, that she was royalty, and she had to be protected, that he would always protect her. And she would tell him how she didn’t want anyone to risk their life for her, and he would give her a serious look that would say more than any spoken word that he couldn’t care less about his own life if it meant he was saving hers. Maray swallowed a lump in her throat and returned her attention to the grandmother who had gotten up from the bed and was now reaching for something behind the bed. Maray could only guess they were needles and tubes, and her arms and legs began tearing at the leather straps with new urgency but to no avail. When finally the leather was cutting into her skin, she stopped. She needed a plan… some distraction to buy more time until she could gain enough strength to conjure a fire, some little flames at least to burn off the restraints from her wrists—

  “How exactly does this work?” she asked, readying herself to find Rhia with medical equipment in hand beside her any second. “Do you drink my blood? Like a vampire?” Maray was surprised as dark humor surfaced in her voice. It was a tone she wasn’t used to… maybe from Jemin’s mouth, but hers…?

  “Don’t be silly,” Rhia spoke from behind her, a metallic laugh accompanying her words. “Why would I drink your blood?”

  Maray suppressed the increasing nausea that came with the sound of her grandmother’s voice. “What then? You inject yourself like Feris did with Langley and LeBronn? Where is Feris, anyway?”

  Rhia’s face appeared upside down above Maray as the queen bent forward to bestow her with a frown that made part of her skin come off on the forehead. “How sad a gifted girl like you has no idea whatsoever about the possibilities of her magic.” Fake compassion graded deep lines into her cheeks as he twisted her mouth. “A Yutu transformation is easy compared to the binding spell I’ll need.”

  Binding spell. Maray had seen that somewhere or heard about it… she couldn’t remember. Maybe Corey had brought it up before…

  “And as for Feris…” Rhia raised one thinning eyebrow as she continued to answer Maray’s questions as if she were talking to a little girl. “Rest assured that I have taken every precaution to make sure your blood gets used properly. It would be such a waste… and Feris is the most powerful warlock there is. Plus, he has every incentive to finish the task—”

  For a brief second, Maray was about to laugh at Rhia. Corey was stronger than Feris. She had seen the warlock girl—the devil-child as people called the likes of her—perform magic Feris had forbidden of her in order to protect her… Did Rhia have leverage over Feris? Was she threatening Corey to make sure Feris was going to continue helping her?

  “You will never get away with this,” Maray spat, unsure whether she was speaking about Rhia’s killing her or her new hypothesis of her threatening Corey and forcing Feris’ hand.

  “Don’t be a fool.” Rhia laughed in her face. “I always get away. Should I spell it out? Always.” Maray thought of Jemin’s father and how Rhia had made him a traitor. How she had forced her own daughter to leave the realm in order to be with the man she loved. Rhia’s eyes glimmered dangerously at her, her laugh now switched into a dead-serious expression. “The reason, child, I have no problem informing you about my plans—and letting those two useless bags of flesh and bones witness our conversation—” She glanced to the other end of the room where Pete and Goran were both looking less and less like the fearless guards who were going to help her get out of
there but more like two boys who were awaiting their punishment from a governess they feared and admired at the same time. “—is that there won’t be much more time for either of you to repeat my words to anyone.”

  Goosebumps rose on Maray’s skin—not the good kind. Rhia wasn’t planning to keep her prisoner for long. Unlike her mother, who she’d locked up for a while like a living blood bag, Maray was going to die more quickly.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like I am the villain. Your blood has magic. I’m not going to waste a drop of it. The full dosage will be enough to make it happen…” Rhia finally stepped around the bed and came into full view again. In her hands, she was carrying a fresh set of needles like Maray knew from the other world’s hospitals and the tubes she had seen attached to her mother a couple of weeks ago. She shrank further back into the pillows, imagining there might be a way out.

  “Make what happen?” Maray asked, voice still surprisingly stable even with her heart racing at a speed that led her to believe that she might die of what she’d saved Goran from long before Rhia would ever have a chance to prick her open.

  Rhia’s metallic laugh escaped her mouth, making even more loose skin drop. She was like an ancient, human snake, skinning herself into a zombie—or a demon… was that what an undisguised demon looked like. She had discussed with her parents the possibility of Rhia having become a demon herself when she had opened the rift between dimensions. It might actually be true.

  “Some call it super-dimensional-power; some call it omnipotence.” With a swift flick of her hand, she extracted the unusually thick needle from the packaging and lowered it toward Maray’s arm. “Call it whatever you like. You won’t be around long enough to see what your blood can actually do.”

  Rhia set down the tube on the edge of the bed and grabbed Mara’s forearm with her free hand, readying herself to stick the needle into one of the veins which, judging by Maray’s frantic pulse, must have been quivering in a relief-like network along her arms.

  “Don’t touch her,” Goran yelled from the back of the room, but Rhia didn’t even look up, too content with what she was doing and knowing that her true enemies were locked up in cells. There was nothing much anyone could do to help Maray. Even if Scott came back in time to free Laura, Jemin, and Heck, they would never make it in time to save her. In an uncoordinated attempt, Maray ripped her arm out of Rhia’s grasp, catching her by surprise, and gaining a moment to take a deep breath as a reward before Rhia caught her again, and this time, her fingernails—claws rather than the elegant manicured nails one would expect on a queen’s hand—dug deeply into Maray’s flesh, forcing a scream of pain from her lips. Maray’s eyes squeezed shut in an attempt to tune out the sensation. Then followed the inevitable piercing of her skin somewhere on the inside of her arm. Maray didn’t even care for the exact location because the pain that followed that short moment where the needle entered her vein was nearly unbearable.

  She could hear Rhia’s voice behind a building wall of agony. Brick by brick, it grew higher, and as she managed to blink her eyes open and glance at her arm, she found a stream of crimson flowing from her arm through the tube and out of sight. And out of sight faded the rest of the room as her vision blurred, and she felt light-headed just a second before she lost consciousness with a last glimpse of Rhia’s victorious glare.

  Jemin

  The iron bars squealed under five pairs of hands as if they were being tortured. What at first had sounded like a ludicrous idea was now, after six or seven attempts, paying off. The gap between two of the bars was getting bigger.

  “You can do this,” Laura cheered, excited for the first time since they had given up on the enchanted door.

  Jemin’s memory had given them an idea. Langley had told him that he had ripped iron chains out of the dungeon walls after he’d become a shifter. Since the door had been fortified with magic, the next best thing to iron chains were the iron bars of the cells. Now the five shifters were pulling on two of the bars vertically, separating them further and further from each other as the seconds passed. It would only take a couple more moments and Jemin would be able to slip through and follow Corey, Wil, and Gerwin… and rip Rhia’s head off himself.

  “All right.” Seri winked at Jemin a moment later when she wrenched the one bar aside together with her father. “Out, boys.”

  Heck was already passing through, patting Seri’s shoulder as he slipped out the narrow gap easily. “Thank God, I am taking such good care of my shape.” He grinned at her—an authentic grin for once—and an expression Jemin hadn’t seen on Seri since before she had gone missing crossed her face. It was the playful twinkle of her black eyes when she was intrigued with something. Heck noticed. “Don’t worry,” he laughed, obviously surprised by her reaction. “I’m getting this back to you in one piece.” And with a wave of his hands at his own body and a boyish grin only Heck could pull off, he was out before Neelis could bite off his head.

  Jemin followed, curving through the opening, careful not to hit his injured hand in the process.

  “Thank you,” he said and turned from Neelis to the rest of the shifters, “all of you. Without your help we would have never gotten out.”

  It hurt to admit it so openly, but it was the truth. He, Jemin Boyd, alone wasn’t enough to protect Maray. His impulsive behavior in the meeting had cost him his chance to plan a calculated attack on Rhia and a safe rescue of Maray. He couldn’t allow that to happen again… But for now, he had to right his wrong and make sure the Princess—his Princess—got out of Rhia’s claws unharmed. “Get Princess Laura out and back to the safe house,” he instructed before he turned, and was about to take off in the direction the guards had taken Maray but stopped before he had set a foot. “Do you happen to have spare weapons?”

  Without a further word, Neelis reached for his belt and extracted his saber to hand it to Jemin. “Here. You’ll need this more than I do.”

  Jemin hesitated. “I don’t want to leave you defenseless,” he objected, itching to grab the weapon and run but also bound by his honor to never leave anyone unprotected.

  “Defenseless?” Neelis grinned and unzipped his jacket, exposing a row of knives and smaller blades attached to the inside. “Besides, we have a set of weapons that you boys could only dream of.” He flashed his teeth, and Jemin was reminded of the view of Langley’s frightening mouth when he had attacked. Armed to the teeth, literally, the shifters were prepared whether or not they carried any blades.

  Convinced, Jemin took the saber and inclined his head in a gesture of gratitude.

  One of the shifters who had already moved to Laura’s cell grabbed their short sword and threw it at Heck who caught it in surprise. “Thanks.”

  “For Sander’s son—anything.” Neelis smiled then beckoned his head at Laura. “We’ll get her out; then we’ll be right behind you,” he reassured Jemin then took position at an iron bar that was far enough from the cell door to be unaffected by whatever magic was protecting it.

  Their exchange was disturbed by the sound of footsteps echoing through the hallway. Maybe five men or more.

  “You need to get out, quick,” Laura urged. So far she had been patiently waiting for the shifters to get Jemin and Heck out of their cell. She had insisted they free the boys first so they could go and save Maray.

  Jemin glanced at her, debating whether or not he could risk that the Crown Princess of Allinan might fall back into the hands of the queen.

  “What are you waiting for?” Laura waved her hand in dismissal, and Jemin—heart split—headed off after Heck, who hadn’t needed as much convincing.

  “Catch them!” The menacing voice followed Jemin into the hallway, and he glanced back to find a familiar face chasing after him—the guy he’d knocked out when he had rescued Laura a couple of weeks ago. He picked up his pace and caught up with Heck. Why hadn’t he just killed the man back then? All he would have had to do was stick the tip of his sword through the bars first. Instead, he’d chosen the ‘hu
mane’ way and simply smashed the hilt of his sword into the guy’s face. Now, he was paying the price of sweet revenge. He ground his teeth and stopped, turning around on the spot. Heck followed his lead the second he noticed. It was only one man, and they were unlikely to outrun him. And even if they did, he would catch up with them the moment they slowed down when they found Maray. It would be easier to take care of him now than to bring him along like a watchdog who’d alert anyone they had to sneak up on.

  The guard held his sword raised before his chest, the right height to push it into Jemin’s heart. Beside him, Heck’s arm twitched as he readied himself for the fight. Jemin knew all of Heck’s movements by heart after a year of patrolling the border, and his posture automatically adjusted to mirror Heck’s so they became a united front. His pulse was faster than normal when anticipating the first impact of a weapon on his, but it wasn’t because of fear or strain. Physically, he was all right—besides the annoying ache in his knuckles. Neelis’ saber, and the fact that he had never before held it in his hands, didn’t have an impact on his heart rate either. It was that Maray was in danger, and every second he spent waiting was a second he wasted when it came to saving her. There was no time to pay attention to the noise of the fight coming from the room where the shifters were still breaking Laura out.

  Jemin glanced to the side, indicating with a lift of his elbow that he wasn’t going to anticipate the impact much longer but that he was about to take action. Heck understood and nodded, pulling the sword the shifter had given him closer toward him while Jemin counted the seconds until it was time to launch himself into the air. Only a few more steps…

  With a push that reminded him that his training as a guard of dimensions had prepared him for more than a simple underground two-on-one fight in the dungeons, he leapt toward the furious guard and let the saber batter down onto him. The man blocked the blow before Jemin could bring the saber close enough to scratch his skin. Jemin landed and spun around before the man had a chance to turn because Heck kept him busy on the other side. It was easy. One step forward, and the saber at the end of Jemin’s outstretched arm sank into the man’s side, cutting through the Thaotine armor enough to leave a blood-red trace on the blade. Jemin cursed as the impact hurt on his injured hand, and Heck looked up from the fight to check with a glance if Jemin had been hit while the man between them gasped and turned to jab at Jemin with his own sword. But Heck was faster. With a swift movement, he stabbed right into the open armor, and before the guard could even touch Jemin, he paused mid-motion and gurgled up a bloody foam then stumbled, Heck’s sword still sticking out of his side, face-first to the ground.