“Who would I tell? Besides, I barely follow what you’re saying. Are you telling me that you’re spies or something?
“Yes. We three, and several others besides.”
“Why so much secrecy? Why not just grab a newspaper or something? Why not just watch the news, or better yet, get an appointment with a local congressman to get your information?”
“We aren’t like you. We’re not human—you’ve already seen that. If we were to reveal ourselves so openly it would send a shockwave through your world. Chaos would ensue. We cannot have that. It is the safety of mankind that concerns us, so we must avoid detection at all costs, you understand.”
“This is the weirdest night of my life. Of course I don’t understand you. I’m too freaked out to make heads or tails of anything,” Steffy admitted. How could she? Her mind was in overdrive trying to process what it had already been forced to assimilate during the night.
“I have a feeling you will understand everything soon enough.” Desondra smiled. “Come. Sit with us. We have some cider to cool your parched throat if you like.”
How bizarre, yet homely this all seemed. But Steffy refused to be fooled. She daren’t drink or eat anything here in this enchanted place. “No thank you. I…I can’t stay. I’m looking for a way out of here,” she admitted.
The women exchanged meaningful glances and Steffy resolved to leave the room immediately. She turned and jumped with a choked cry. Somehow Desondra had left her seat and now stood before her, blocking her exit.
“How did you do that?”
Desondra smiled, her yellow-orange eyes burning with such innate cunning that Steffy almost feared her in that moment.
“Don’t be afraid. You won’t come to any harm here. We are your friends.”
Steffy tried to pass but Desondra stepped lithely in her path, blocking her once more.
“Let me pass.”
“I very much like your clothes, Steffy,” came Fauna’s voice from behind her. “How long did it take you to make them?”
Steffy never took her eyes from the formidable Desondra. “I didn’t make them. They were manufactured.”
“What does that mean?” Agate whispered the question to Fauna but Steffy heard it all the same.
“She bought it in a shop, pre-made,” Fauna answered.
“Let me pass,” Steffy gritted out once more.
Desondra sighed. “It won’t do you any good to leave this room. The only way back to your lands is with us—and we cannot help you without permission from our Council—or with a member of the Traveler Caste, and they are all out on patrols. They patrol every night now that we are in open war with the Daemons. Why do you want so badly to leave, anyway? Surely you have not been treated poorly?”
“I don’t want to be a prisoner here.”
“Is she a prisoner?” Agate of the endless questions.
“Who brought you here?” Desondra ignored her friend, concentrating fully on Steffy as they stood toe to toe before the door.
“I don’t know. Cinder told this guy to take me somewhere safe and here I am. But I don’t belong here. I don’t want to wait around. I want to leave.”
“Then The Traveler brought you. He will be back with the others—Cady’s team—when the dawn comes. Can you not wait until then? Will you not keep us company? Tell us stories of your world?”
Steffy’s mind raced for a way out of the strange situation in which she now found herself. Desondra seemed intent on keeping her here and though she seemed nice enough, she still made Steffy wary. Desondra, though pretty and soft-spoken, was clearly a force to be reckoned with. Steffy didn’t know what to do.
The door behind Desondra opened and a masculine voice broke the silence.
“She will have more time for stories later, Desondra. Thank you for keeping her safe and sound. Steffy will join me in the main room now.”
Steffy tried not to groan with the man’s words. It seemed she would have no say in anything that happened to her this night.
The man stepped into the light of the room and Steffy was afforded her first look at him. He was tall—did the men of this strange place ever not grow beyond six and a half feet? His hair was a shimmering platinum blond, not so pale as Cinder’s but almost. It fell down to his buttocks, tamed with a leather tie at his nape. His face was strong, leonine, with an untamed beauty that instantly conveyed strength and an iron will to any who looked upon it. He stood tall and proud in his dark brown shirt and pants, which left nothing of his bulging muscles and masculinity to the imagination.
But it was his eyes, a bright clear yellow, which were the most unsettling. His face and form looked no more than forty years old but his eyes told a different story entirely. Looking into them Steffy was swamped with the feeling of limitless, ancient age. Her head swam with the heady essence of his immortal spirit as it flooded around her. A new kind of fear possessed her. How could this man feel so old to her and yet look so young? It was impossible.
A look of puzzlement and curiosity filled the man’s eyes. It was as if he sensed her reaction to him and wondered at it.
“Come with me, Steffy.”
What choice did she have? The man gestured for her to precede him out into the corridor and she complied. He followed her, silent and studious of her every move. Steffy felt his gaze burning down upon her before he took her arm in a courtly gesture and led her down the corridor. Instinctively she sensed that there was no hope for escape from this man. She was trapped.
Who would save her now?
* * * * *
Now that Steffy wasn’t rushing through the corridors, trying her best to remain in shadow and secret, she could take more notice of the details of her surroundings. This place—whatever, wherever it was—was immense. As large as a city. Larger. The corridors were at least a hundred feet wide. The ceilings stood taller, even, than that. There were massive doors dotting either side of the passageway, and every several hundred feet or so there was an enormous intersection where the corridor would branch off into another one or into a large antechamber with blazing fireplaces and comfortable furnishings.
Such was the room to which the blond-haired man led her to now.
“Please. Sit. You have had a trying night, lady.” His voice and words were so courtly…and Steffy was struck again by how incredibly old this man felt to her.
Steffy gladly sank into the deeply piled leather chair to which he gestured. At least she hoped it was leather…and not something more sinister like human skin. She almost laughed at how dark her imaginings had become over the course of the past hour. Though these people were strange and not a little intimidating, surely they weren’t evil.
She hoped.
The man studied her intently for a long moment. His yellow eyes were surprisingly courteous in their perusal, if a little too thorough in their regard.
“You’re very young under all that face paint,” were his first words to break the silence between them.
Steffy bristled, though why, she couldn’t have said. She was young and looked even younger. But to hear him say it…one would think he was disapproving of that. “I’m twenty-four.”
“Your hair is dyed like that on purpose?”
His words were spoken so tentatively that Steffy was hard put to take offense. She fingered a thick, wavy lock of bright pink hair, which curled around her chin. It had been so long since she’d let her hair revert back to its natural brown that she almost couldn’t remember exactly what shade it had been. Now her hair was black with pink chunks throughout. She’d been planning on coloring it the next day to something more adventurous. Toxic green perhaps. It was a good thing he hadn’t met her after that particular dye job.
“Of course. Don’t you like it?” she teased with a grin.
The man smiled, startling her. He was beautiful when he smiled. “If you like it then it is as it should be.”
“Nice comeback. You’re pretty smooth.”
“In my position one would have to be. S
o. Your name is Steffy?”
“Yes. How did you find that out? Did you listen at the keyhole of Desondra’s room?”
“I have my ways—though I’m not above stooping so low as to drop at the eaves. Actually, Desondra told me.” He tapped his head. “Telepathically.” He winked devilishly at her wide-eyed expression. The rogue. “I am The Elder, Tryton.”
“The Elder? That sounds like a title. Are you someone special then? Someone of rank? A leader?”
“If my people would have a leader, then I would be he. But I am called The Elder because I am mature, and because I am a member of the Council, a ruling body that keeps order here.”
“And where is here?” She didn’t expect him to answer.
“Home. This is where the Shikar live when they are not at the Gates or in the Territories, fighting the Daemon threat.” His features shadowed then, as if with pain.
Steffy chose her words carefully. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What am I doing here? How did I come to be here? What were those…things…that I saw tonight?”
Tryton sighed. “You have been unlucky in your adventures tonight. You have seen much. The Traveler—the one who brought you here tonight—could perhaps take the memory of it from you. I’m not sure. Even I do not know all that he is capable of at this point.” He laughed softly, self deprecatingly, when he saw her look of puzzlement. “I wish that you had come to us otherwise, but…so be it. I will explain as best I can.”
Steffy waited.
“You are a human. Homo sapiens, in the Latin vernacular. You live on the surface of this planet, with only the pursuit of the advancement of your species through technology as a common goal among you. Your lives are short—on the average seventy years or so. Am I accurate thus far?”
Steffy could only nod. She felt more than a little alarmed with the direction this bizarre conversation seemed to be taking them.
“Good. Cady has been teaching me what I have not yet learned—through negligence, I admit—about your kind.”
“My kind? So it is true. You’re an alien or something. You’re not…”
“Human? But of course you realize? I am definitely not a human being. No one here is.” His eyes glowed in the dim light cast from the floating sconces and the fire that cheerily burned in the fireplace. Steffy trembled as he continued. “I am not like you. But I am not an alien or a monster—please be at ease on that account. I am, in truth, a native of this planet, though of an entirely different species from you. We are known as the Shikar.”
“I don’t believe you. I can’t. It’s not possible that a species so like us has lived undetected in our world. It’s impossible,” she said flatly.
Tryton sighed wearily and sat in a chair opposite her. “I’m sorry, but your disbelief doesn’t make it any less true, what I say. Our kind has existed here, in secret, since the early days of mankind. The Shikars are an older race than humans. Far older. Once, we lived above ground, but those days are past.” His eyes dimmed, as if in contemplation over some long forgotten memory that still haunted him. “We retreated to this place long ago.” He fell silent.
“How old are you?” she was moved to ask.
Tryton seemed to start from his inner musings. He sent her a rakish grin. “How old do I look to your human eyes?”
Steffy chose her words carefully. “You look to be in your late thirties. At a stretch, perhaps early forties.” She fell silent for a moment, wondering if she should continue. The hell with it; she was never one to bite her tongue, even if it was in her own best interest to do so. “But you’re not that young,” she added at last.
“How do you mean?” He seemed very interested in her answer and she grew antsy under the probing look he gave her.
“I can see it in your eyes. You are as old as this place.” She gestured to their surroundings. “Older.” She shuddered.
“My people would tell you that I am roughly two thousand years old.”
Steffy flinched at the idea of such an age but realized even that number didn’t…feel…as old as he felt to her.
“Your people would be wrong. You’re older than that. By far, I think.” She was certain of it.
“And what would you know of it?” He seemed dangerous then, his countenance taking on a fierce look of…self-preservation?
“I can feel the age in you. I don’t know how or why. But when I feel this way I’m inclined to follow my instincts. They’ve rarely steered me wrong. And my feelings—my instincts—tell me that you are very…very old.”
“Perhaps your eyes are not so human, after all,” he whispered roughly, and looked at her even more piercingly than before.
The silence stretched between, longer than before. Weightier.
“Humans are a strange breed and a puzzling one. You have your weaknesses—sometimes too many—but you also have your strengths. Strengths that are not unlike ours.”
“You’re losing me again.”
He raked his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. You’ve managed to surprise me Steffy, that’s all. I am not often surprised.” He sent her an odd look, one she couldn’t easily interpret. “I’m too old to be surprised much anymore.” He chuckled. “All right then. I will begin at the beginning.”
As Tryton’s voice murmured on over the course of the next hour Steffy’s eyes grew wider. Her mind and heart quailed at the possibilities of much of what was revealed to her. She sensed that what Tryton told her was the truth, though she would have had it otherwise. The path of her life was altered forever. She was no longer bored or curious or excited. She was something that she had never really, truly been in the course of her life.
She was terrified.
* * * * *
Steffy lightly dozed on the chair before the roaring fire. Tryton had left her to dwell on all that he had revealed during their lengthy conversation and she was grateful for the privacy. Her mind was in a state of sensory overload. She was in shock. It was a very near thing to keep her mind and body from shutting down completely. Her surroundings had long since taken on a surreal quality that left her nearly numb—and yet still not nearly enough so. She was feeling too much. The music in her head was a desperate wail—the expressed sound of the loss of her ignorance of the world in which she lived.
There were monsters in the night. And they had a taste for the flesh of gifted humans—like herself. Tryton had hit her with the news she had suspected without acknowledging all of her life—news that she was still loath to accept. She was touched. Psychic. More specifically, she was precognitive—at least a little—thus explaining her gift for easily orchestrating pre-recorded musical beats and her luck at never getting caught during her life as a car thief. Little things, but telling things nonetheless, when coupled with Tryton’s revelations.
It also explained how she’d known when her dearest friend was going to die.
Steffy tossed on the chair and sought the blessed twilight of her doze again, but the memories came as they willed, flitting through her mind ruthlessly. Only now the memories were more frightening than ever after Tryton had told her, albeit unknowingly, that she was to blame for her friend’s death.
Raine hadn’t heeded her when Steffy had warned her not to drive through the freak snowstorm. There hadn’t been a forecast for snow that day—and definitely not one for the blizzard that Steffy had sensed would blow through with a fury. But the storm had come. It had taken everyone by surprise…including Raine, who had been caught behind the wheel when it had come upon her. Her car had veered off the roadway, rolled down an embankment into a wooded stretch of land and injured her to the point of death.
But she hadn’t died. Not right away.
According to the search teams, Raine had managed to pull herself, injured and bleeding, from the wreckage. She had wandered in the midst of the blizzard, leaving a blood trail that went on for nearly three miles. She’d been strong despite her wounds to have traveled so far in the white haze, to have lingered for so long. But the blizz
ard had been brutal and merciless. It had taken Raine in the end, into winter’s cold and unforgiving heart, where she dwelled still, and would forevermore.
Steffy shuddered and tossed again.
If only Raine had listened to her. If only Steffy had fought harder to keep her friend off the road. If only she had known that what she had feared would truly come to pass through this negligence. It was her fault that Raine had gone, because she hadn’t impressed upon her friend the importance of staying put. Steffy should have found a way—moved heaven and earth at the least—to stop events from unfolding as they had.
Steffy had called Raine at work, warned her not to leave, that the storm was coming and would take her with it before it blew itself out if she drove home through it. But Raine had laughed, carefree as always, teasing her friend about her portents of doom. She had promised to be careful for Steffy’s sake…but Steffy had known that once Raine settled behind the wheel of her car there would be nothing to stop the fate that awaited her friend.
Steffy had rushed to the wreckage. She had gone out into the blizzard, knowing full well what she would face in the fury of that storm, with the hopes of intervening to save the life of her friend. But she had failed. Raine had already walked into her death before Steffy had arrived at the scene. She had failed her friend, at the cost of Raine’s life.
She had seen the wreck in her mind as it had happened—though at the time she had stupidly hoped it was just her vivid imagination that had played it out for her to witness. Tryton had set her right on that score—her gift had given her that vision. It had been a true one.
The sight of the accident would haunt her until the end of her days.
Steffy had never before or since had such a vivid vision, as Tryton had called it. She never wanted to again. Never. Tryton had said she was gifted…Steffy believed that, if anything, she was cursed. And now she was made to wonder if every human was cursed. Humans lived life in ignorance, never knowing or suspecting that in the shadows of the night there dwelled monsters that would feed on them like cattle. And the saviors who would protect the humans from their fate…Steffy wasn’t certain that they weren’t to be just as feared as the monsters. They loathed humans for their sloth and their greed. And, perhaps, a little for their fragility.
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