“Do this, or I come with you.”
I craned to see him.
For a serious man, always stoic in his delivery, his eyes today told a different story. Desperation reflected back at me. He locked onto me with dogged determination. “I’m not doing this without you.”
Of his meaning, there was no doubt. He would follow me to the grave.
“Then distract me. Tell me something good about her. Tell me about the moment you fell in love,” I whispered.
“You stopped me from killing a bug…”
I almost laughed but I had no strength. It came out as a strangled sigh.
“It wasn’t even a beautiful bug,” he continued. “It was the ugliest, most annoying thing I’d ever seen, but you protected it with fury. It was after… after the king had died. I’d been promoted up the ranks of the Royal Army and was tasked with increasing your personal security. Nobody wanted the job because they thought you’d killed your husband. You didn’t—we know that now, but then I was ambitious, egotistical, and didn’t give a shit whether you’d killed him or not. I’d blasted any opponent who dared to face me, and yet I still had the need to fight. I knew trouble was brewing between the worlds and wanted a piece of it. Roo? Are you listening?”
“Yes, keep going.”
“I found you in the royal garden, sitting on a bench, watching an empty playground. Your husband was gone. Your only son hated you for it, and you were alone. You should’ve been broken, but you were a delicate flower showing its framework of steel. When I came next to you, and swatted the bug sitting where I would, you blocked me… ‘It’s just a bug’ I’d said”—Cash laughed—“to which you replied ‘And you’re just a Seraphim, yet here we are, sharing the same air, made from the same stardust, the same energy.’ And then you looked at me with these big beautiful eyes full of defiance, and I fell in love.”
I blinked drowsily, letting the deep timbre of his voice soothe me. I laid my head back and closed my eyes. “Tell me more.”
“…I didn’t know then, that it was the moment I fell in love, but those words represented everything. You shielded the bug, picked it up and lectured me on keeping the Universe in balance. Its leg had been damaged from my haste. You took my hand, placed the bug on it and somehow healed it. I understood my purpose then: I was death, and you were life. The perfect balance. We could fix the Empire together.”
Marc cleared his throat and patted Cash’s arm, tube fitted. Dark, red liquid filtered from Cash’s wrist and through the clear tube to a bag where it gathered in size and would soon feed into me.
Cash squeezed my hand, eyes boring into mine. “No matter how divided we became, remember that, Roo. We’re two halves of the same whole, we will always find our way back to each other.”
“You’re not death, Cash,” I croaked. “I stared into Urser’s eyes today and saw myself reflected in them. I’m death.”
“No,” he insisted. “You aren’t. Believe me, Roo. You can’t be, because you’re the only thing keeping me in balance. You stop me from going dark.”
“It’s okay,” I sighed. “We’ll be okay.”
I blinked. My eyes burned. It took me a moment to realize my arm was burning too.
I thought I had experienced pain before, but nothing prepared me for this. It started as a warm, liquid trickle—the blood—and it sped from my arm straight to my heart, flammable and already in cinders. And then came the all-consuming agony as every pain receptor in my body ignited at once. Paralyzed with feeling, I could only look upon my companions, and hoped they understood the soundless cry for mercy in my eyes.
“Roo?” Cash was the first to notice something was wrong.
But his blood kept coming, flooding me with razors.
“Roo?” he asked again. “Are you okay?”
It felt like an eternity passed before he plucked out the intravenous line from his arm and slung his legs off the gurney to stand over me. “Something’s wrong.”
Marc was suddenly on the other side of me, touching my arm free of tubing. “She’s hot.”
“It wasn’t like this with me. Roo, are you in pain?” Cash asked.
I couldn’t answer.
“Her energy is fading,” Marc said, voice tight.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Enforcer, that it’s not working. Quick, put the tube back in your arm. She needs more blood.”
Cash hastily reconnected the tube to his intravenous needle and I tried to tell them, I really did, but the burning blood continued.
They argued then, but I don’t remember the words, only the thunderous inferno in my blood, turning everything white.
I screamed.
Chapter 18
I didn’t remember much in the days that followed, except the discarnate voices, the mind numbing pain, the white noise. Time passed in fractured pieces. Together with vague memories and Cash’s recounting of events, I managed to gather a semblance of what happened.
My initial screaming had lasted hours and only abated when Lena turned up. She’d cursed their ignorance and, with Jesop’s alchemic help, replaced the IV of Cash’s blood with something else they’d concocted.
Then I disappeared. Literally. Cash had come back to the surgical room to sit with me and found my bed empty. There had been only one way out of that room and I hadn’t left through the door. Nobody knew where I went, and I didn’t remember myself, but two days later they found me lying in the mud, naked and shivering, on the floor of the village square, right near the stall I’d purchased my clothes from. The same village Urser’s soldiers had murdered. I was clutching the wooden carving of the macaw in my white knuckled fist. The rain poured down, soaking my body and everything around me. I do remember something about that moment: the cool water helped my suffering as though it were a friend, trying to wash my tears away with theirs. Cash had gathered me in his arms and took me to Marc’s bungalow where he cleaned me, placed me in the white linen bed, and drew the mosquito nets in a waterfall.
I remembered Lena examining me as though I watched through two parts of myself. The one that screamed in silent agony, and the one that watched unfeeling and hollow from a distance. That part—the cold, detached part—was trying desperately to preserve a sense of sentience from the torment clouding my consciousness. The clarity never lasted long. Moments, flickers, and then I was back to the blanket of agony.
“What’s happening to her?” Cash had asked at one point, taking a seat on the bed next to me. He shifted a stray hair from my cheek and gazed at me with pained eyes. I remembered thinking he looked tired and scruffy. His beard had grown and his clothes were crumpled. He had a twitch in one red-rimmed eye.
To them, I stared at the ceiling, catatonic. To me, I held on by a thread. The flames, the fire, the burning inside still consumed all feeling and emotion in my body, leaving a raw husk of consciousness to exist in nothing but the moment, flitting between what happened in front of my eyes and what happened elsewhere—where the whispers told me to look. Pleas for help and cries for recognition called to me from every living thing. Not just the life-force in my immediate vicinity, somehow I felt it everywhere and it felt me.
Lena’s hands flowed over my form, sensing with chi, as she replied to Cash, “You weren’t supposed to give her such a large dose of your blood in one sitting. It’s a progressive process. You may not remember when you converted because your injuries were extensive, but small doses of the queen’s blood were administered over a period of time on an alternate cycle with another formula. Breaking up the conversion helped the mind cope with the transformation. And when you were done with the transfusions, you had your ancient memories to draw on. They told you how to use your abilities. The queen is a child in this sense. She remembers nothing of her previous life and we’ve just unlocked her soul’s full potential. Her body and mind are overwhelmed with her new strength. You threw her in the deep end and expected her to swim when she’s still learning to walk.”
“This is my fault.�
� He scrubbed his face, voice cracking.
“And mine,” Marc said, stepping into the room, hesitant.
I remembered furniture crashing, then. Vases, chairs, knick-knacks, whatever Cash could get his hands on, he threw at Marc. Most of all, I remembered not being able to care, only to watch it unfold as the voices of pain drew me deeper into them.
The second time I disappeared, they found me in a clearing not far from Marc’s bungalow. It rained still. Cash said I had tried to burrow myself into the soggy mud. I tried to get into the earth. But it was the spark of life beneath me I wanted. It called to me, it was in pain, like me. I wanted to get down to the core, to somehow find the source of the suffering, but it was too much. I knew it was my fault. I brought the pain. I brought these people to the planet.
I brought Urser.
When we got back to the bungalow, once again, Cash washed me. This time, he forwent the bed and took me outside to sit. I supposed he thought I kept gravitating to the earth, so being outdoors would help. It did, I guess, because for a moment, I sat there. Until I tried to drown myself in the pool to block out the noise.
And so it went on for weeks, as did the relentless rain. I would disappear and turn up nearby in the forest, outside the bungalow, or in the village. I remembered little, except Cash’s steady presence throughout it all. And then finally, he gave up.
He left me in the clearing in front of Marc’s bungalow. Instead of taking me away, washing me, and setting me in the safety of the house, he laid down next to me. His large body sank into the mud with me and he slung a heavy arm over my body, burrowing his face into my neck. It was one of the first coherent memories I had. For some time I laid there with Cash’s warm body next to mine. The pitter-patter of rain on the forest leaves gave me a sliver of solace. The sun rose and set, and through it all, he stayed. Others tried to take us away, but Cash wouldn’t let them. He refused to eat. Lena came to replenish our fluids, but the truth was I didn’t need it. I took my sustenance from nature, from the very energy surrounding me. We stayed until plants grew around us, entwining our legs, blooming pillows under our heads. Finally, someone could sense the planet’s longing and every life form wanted to get closer to me. A gray monkey hopped down from the tree and hovered nearby, curiously chittering. Soon, more animals joined. Birds. Bats. Crawling things.
The monkey came to my face and picked at my hair. Something snapped inside Cash and he plied his warm body away from mine. He ripped the vines tangling our bodies. He tore them into tiny pieces and threw them at the animals. The monkey screeched, sharp teeth chattering like pincers. Cash roared back with the ferocity of a lion and the little animal escaped up the tree. Cash raged at the trees, punched them, shook them. He found an axe in the garden shed cleaved through trunks with the focus of a madman. Thunderous rumbles shook the earth as each tree fell. Animals protested. The cacophony of life interrupted echoed inside me, pulsing the pain, making it worse.
But I said nothing.
So he kept building. He moved each trunk around me to make a shelter, stacking them feverishly. On and on he went, chopping trees, ignoring the damage he caused until I could take it no more.
“Stop,” I whispered one morning. “You’re hurting it.” My first words in weeks, almost too quiet to be heard under the static of the rain, and the ruckus around me, but he heard. My hunter.
He straightened from his task, tying logs with the very vines that kept entwining around my body. The makeshift hut was three courses high already. When he heard me, his eyes were wild and reflected the morning light. He vaulted the logs and landed next to me. His t-shirt clung to his thin body, ripped, battered and stained.
“Roo? Where does it hurt? Tell me.” He called out for Lena, for Jesop, anyone still near.
“Not me. The trees. You’re hurting them. I feel it.”
His laugh was manic, a mix of exhaustion, hysterics and something else I couldn’t place. He shook his head, briefly squeezing his eyes shut. “You’re worried about the tree’s pain. Of course you are.” His head dropped to my chest, heavy and warm, and he gathered me close to him. His body shook and shuddered. Laughing or crying.
“How about this pain?” He kissed me, desperate and deep. It wasn’t fueled by desire or want, but raw unfettered need. A need that coursed through our connection. It pushed at me, hot and demanding. I felt the twisting ache in his essence as it poured in an avalanche. He was right. He hurt. So much. His pain was different to the rest—to what I felt from the earth beneath me. Compared to him, the world was hollow, and distant. He was a shot to my heart. It sparked and I gasped.
“I don’t fucking care about the world,” he said. “Just you. And I’ll keep chopping down trees until you make me stop because at least I can do that. If nothing else, I can build a shelter over your head. I told you once, you’re the one who keeps me in balance. Without you, I’m nothing.”
He stood, rubbed his palms on his pants. I must have made a conflicted sound because he leaned down and said, “You don’t like it? Stop me.”
Turns out, I did stop Cash. Not immediately, but eventually. In the time it took me to move, he’d built the hut up to five courses high around me. There was no ceiling, and the rain fell on my face, but his words echoed in my head with every swing of the axe.
You don’t like it? Stop me.
With every felled tree, every echo of the earth’s pain, I knew his was greater. He needed me. The world needed me. We needed each other. Another spark ignited and soon, my desire was strong enough to drown out my agony. I rose, staggered, leaned on the log wall and stumbled toward him as he hacked another tree to death.
I emerged from the hut and, looking back now, I realized he sensed me coming. He must have. But he ignored me until I placed my hand on his forearm just as he retracted for another swing, ready to chop.
“Stop,” I said.
He slumped, axe heavy in his hands. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Chapter 19
A few months later, I was back at the refuge in Budapest, meditating in my room. I found it helped block the noise I heard from all living things. The hum and the whispers, the constant buzz. The collar they’d put around my neck also helped, but I preferred not to think about it. It reminded me too much of the collar from when they suspected me of witchcraft. A clasp at the back emitted an electromagnetic field that transmitted through the thin wire surrounding my neck, essentially disrupting the frequency of life-force before I sensed it. It also temporarily blocked my powers. This new collar was an invention from the surviving members of Cetus House. Cash was the one who suggested the upgrade, pointing out the similarities of my abilities and witchcraft. Wearing it didn’t bring me as much peace as they’d hoped.
With my eyes closed and breath steady, I emptied my mind of all thought except awareness of my body. My heavy limbs sank into the soft cotton of the bed, my lungs lifted in rhythmic patterns and my heartbeat pulsed gently in my ears. The noise around me drifted away until the beat and my breath was all I could hear.
Months had passed since Wren and Lincoln died, yet my emotions were still raw. My power stemmed from a connection with all living things and there was much about it that I had to learn. Staying in the confines of Jacine’s medieval castle was the safest place for me while I climbed my way back to normalcy.
Normal. I almost snorted at the thought. The action made me realize I’d pulled myself out of the calming depths of meditation. I was so far past normal it wasn’t funny.
The door opened, rousing me further.
“I was down in town this morning,” Cash said, striding in, excitement animating his features. “Oh, sorry. You’re meditating. I’ll come back later.”
“No, it’s okay.” I sat up, blinking the peace from my eyes to watch him walk over with a brown bottle in his hands. He’d put his weight back on but retained the scruffy hair and short beard he’d adopted in the jungle. He wore jeans and a simple long-sleeved black t-shirt that clung to his sculptured torso, a
sight I’d never get tired of. I leveled a languid smile at him to which he caught and hesitated. We hadn’t been together in months and every time I saw his sexy face, my body wanted him with an intensity I’d never felt before. It was as though with my conversion to Seraphim, came muscle memory of our centuries together and I wanted a taste. But, for all of my effort, he would stop my wanton ways before we got too far because his hidden essence could topple me—even with me being at full power now. We couldn’t risk overwhelming my new but damaged and delicate sensitivities. My new priority had been working with healers to desensitize myself to every spark of life around me.
“Tell me,” I said. “What have you found?”
“So, I remembered something from one of my past lives,” he continued. “I followed the memory, and found this.”
“What is it?”
“Look.” He held it out, flashing a grin. I dragged my eyes from his adorable face to investigate the bottle.
“It looks like a bottle of wine to me.”
“Not just any wine.” He sat next to me, shoulder to shoulder, and rubbed a thumb across the grubby label. “Read it.”
I squinted at the faded words. “Chateau Margaux. Okay. What does that mean? Is it old?”
“It’s virtually ancient. Once, I worked as a gravedigger and buried it with some old rich guy. Bottled in 1787. The last known bottle of Chateau Margaux was knocked over by a waiter at an auction a few years back. That makes this the last bottle in existence.”
“You robbed a grave? Gross.”
He shrugged. “Nobody was using it. You wouldn’t believe its value today. Half a million dollars.”
“Still gross. Eww. You want to sell it?”
“I want to drink it. At our wedding.”
“You’re so weird.” I laughed, but my heart cartwheeled. It was the first time we’d mentioned the ‘w’ word since I’d converted and this was his way of being romantic. So much had happened and I wasn’t sure what was up or down. I knew we loved each other, but Urser was missing and silent, as though waiting for me. It made me suspicious. Everything he did was for a reason, and he usually had me eating out of the palm of his hand. A curl of anger unfurled in my gut. Eve and the entire trip to South America had been carefully orchestrated by him. It made me think, what else had been his doing? Wren’s death? Lincoln’s? Had he dangled Eve in front of me knowing I would do anything, including use all of my reserves, to end her? Probably. He wanted my blood to open the gate.
The Game of Gods: Series Box Set Page 85