“Why?” The Hunter cocked an eyebrow. “From what I saw, that body had been there for centuries before we arrived. What difference could a few days make?”
“Because in a few days, the Withering will be upon us.” Her voice held an ominous note. “When it comes, the Elivasti and their master will seek to use the power stored within the Keeps. The moment the Keeps are activated, any of our kind still enclosed in those Chambers of Sustenance will die.”
Chapter Six
The Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, activated?”
“In the uppermost chamber of each Keep, the Serenii placed a control system that allows them to harness the power collected by the towers over the millennia that they have stood. Somehow, the towers absorb the light of the sun and turn it into magical energy, energy like that produced by the Scorchslayers.” She lifted the crossbow-looking weapon for emphasis. “Imagine that, but multiplied a hundred hundred times over.”
The Hunter didn’t need to imagine; he’d seen the effects of Serenii magick first-hand.
“But the Chambers of Sustenance are also linked to the tower, somehow.” Taiana frowned. “I do not fully understand the magick or science of it, but I do know that those locked in the Chambers serve as the housing for the power. The power flows through our bodies, sustaining us and, at the same time, feeding off of us.”
“So when these towers are activated, however that happens,” the Hunter reasoned, “the power is sucked from the bodies in the Chambers.”
“The small amount of power required to sustain life within the city does no harm to those locked in the Chambers, but on such a massive scale? Like a fire consumes kindling, the moment the Keeps are activated, their power will be consumed. That is why we need to free our brothers trapped there.” She shook her head. “The fate of that drained, withered husk we found would be a kindness by comparison.”
“But if the Chambers are, as you say, meant to sustain life, why did we find a corpse instead of a living, breathing person?”
“Because not all in the Chambers of Sustenance are Bucelarii,” Taiana replied in a heavy voice. “Many were once human, locked away centuries or millennia ago to serve as sustenance. Their bodies could not heal as ours did, and thus they succumbed to the force of the power coursing through them.”
The Hunter grimaced at the thought. Every time he changed his shape, it felt like lightning crackling through his flesh. That had paled in comparison to the enormous amount of power generated by the Elivasti Scorchslayers. The thought of that on a city-wide scale sent a shiver of fear down his spine.
A thought struck him. “But if there is so much power stored in these Keeps, why have they not been activated before now?” Everything he’d learned about the Sage and the Warmaster had led him to believe they both would have harnessed the power of Enarium to meet their own ends.
“Because the power can only be activated during the Er’hato Tashat,” Taiana explained. “The towers house the power, but it is the light of the Blood Sun that converts it into a form that can be utilized.” She hesitated. “And, because only those of Serenii blood can activate it.”
Dread sat like a stone in the Hunter’s gut. “The Elivasti?”
Please, he thought, let me be wrong.
Taiana nodded. “The blood of the Serenii runs in their veins. But it has been watered down by the ages, until only a fraction of their ancestors’ true power remains. To activate even a single control tower would require the blood of three or four Elivasti.”
Relief surged within the Hunter.
“But,” Taiana continued, “if the Sage were to find a Melechha, one of the purest Serenii blood, it would require only a few drops to activate the Serenii magick.”
The Hunter’s blood ran cold. Hailen. He felt the urge to vomit and the desire to hack his way through an army of Elivasti at once.
Hailen was Melechha, and the boy’s blood would provide the Sage everything he needed to harness the Serenii magick. And the Hunter had brought the boy right to the Sage’s doorstep. In trying to save Hailen from the Stone Guardians, he’d doomed the entire world. There was no doubt in the Hunter’s mind: the Sage would use Hailen’s blood to turn the power of Enarium to free Kharna from his prison.
“We need to find that boy, now.” His voice went hard, flat. “If we don’t…”
Taiana’s eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me, Drayvin?”
The Hunter hesitated. He wanted to trust her—he needed to know he could trust someone, and who better than the woman that had been his wife? At the same time, the fact that she was hiding something from him made him reluctant to tell her everything. And he couldn’t shake what he’d seen in his memories.
She’d put a dagger through his heart and turned him over to the Illusionist Clerics to have his memories erased. He could understand her reasoning—she’d done it to protect their child—but would she betray him again? Could he trust her with the truth of Hailen’s heritage?
He searched her gaze for any remnant of the woman he’d loved. A trace of her remained, buried down deep, somewhere behind the commanding, driven, hard-edged Taiana before him. Every instinct he’d developed over his decades as an assassin screamed at him not to trust her. He half-expected to hear the demon’s voice shrieking at him to kill her before she betrayed him again, yet only silence filled his head. Even Soulhunger had fallen quiet since killing the Elivasti.
The decision was his alone.
He glanced at Cerran, then back at Taiana. She seemed to understand his thought, for she turned to the red-bearded Bucelarii and held out the Scorchslayer. “Cerran, see if Arudan can tell you anything about this.”
“Like what?” Cerran cocked a bushy, fiery-colored eyebrow. “That it’s bloody powerful and can turn us into crispy little piles of dead?”
Taiana scowled. “These are Serenii runes.” She ran her finger along the marks carved into the weapon’s stock. “See if Arudan can figure out what they mean.”
“If it’s a bedtime story you’re wanting—” Cerran began.
“Enough.” Taiana cut him off with a slash of her hand. “Just do it. Maybe he can find something to shut off their power, disconnect them from whatever’s generating such terrible energy.” She thrust the weapon into the man’s hands with enough force to stagger him backward. “If nothing else, something we can use to shatter them. The battle with the purple-eyes would be much easier if we could even the odds.”
Cerran’s lips pressed into a pensive frown. After a moment, he nodded. “I’ll see what Baldie can do.”
Taiana scowled. “Don’t call him that.”
“What?” Cerran shrugged. “It’s as good a name as any.” With a mocking grin, he turned and strode into the room where Arudan sat staring with a vacant expression at the stone tablet that lay upside down in his lap.
“Come.” Taiana said, motioning for the Hunter to follow.
She led him up four flights of stairs and into the only room on the sixth floor. The chamber was spacious, yet had little in the way of decoration. Aside from the simple bed—little more than a full-sized straw tick mattress on a wooden box frame—the room held only a table with two chairs. The fading afternoon sunlight streamed through the three walls made of the transparent Serenii glass. The fourth wall had a door, which stood ajar to reveal a bathing chamber.
The Hunter had a strange feeling of déjà vu, of spending time in a room much like this one with the woman that stood before him. It brought a lump to his throat. So much had changed since that time. Would they ever have that life again?
Taiana closed the door behind them. “Now, Drayvin, what aren’t you telling me? Why are you so desperate to find this boy?”
The Hunter drew in a deep breath and pushed past his hesitation. If they were to have anything like what they once had together, he had to try to trust her.
“Hailen is…Melechha.”
Her eyebrows flew up. “What?” she snarled. “You brought a Melechha here, now?�
� Fire flashed in her eyes as she strode toward him and jabbed a finger into his chest for emphasis. “The Withering is just days away, and you thought that bringing a Serenii pureblood to Enarium was the smart way to go?”
“How was I supposed to know?” The Hunter met her anger with equal ferocity. “I had no idea what the twisted hell a Melechha was until a week ago, much less what in the Keeper’s name would happen if he ended up in the Lost bloody City of Enarium. Which, I might add, took a Watcher-damned lot of work to find, and nearly got me killed a dozen times in the process. Maybe, if I hadn’t had my fucking memory ripped away by the Illusionist Clerics, I might actually know a bit more of what’s going on here.”
The vitriol in those words surprised him almost as much as they shocked Taiana. He hadn’t realized how furious he was at her for her betrayal all those long centuries—millennia, perhaps—ago. Her face went white and the anger in her eyes intensified.
“And there it is!” She bared her teeth in a snarl. “I wondered how long it would take you to bring that up.”
“Not the sort of thing you get over in a minute,” the Hunter snapped. “What you did to me—”
“Was necessary!” Taiana didn’t retreat from his anger. “I did what I had to do to protect our child.”
“I remember that.” The Hunter slammed a fist into his chest. “I also remember what it felt like to have a Watcher-damned knife driven into my heart. You may think it was necessary, but was there no other way?”
“With a bull-headed fool like you?” Taiana’s voice rose to a shout. “Never! I tried for weeks to convince you, but you were so insistent on doing things your way.”
Fury burned like an inferno in the Hunter’s gut. “And look how your way turned out!”
“At least I tried,” Taiana snapped. “I tried to do what was best for our daughter, even if—”
“Daughter?” The Hunter’s voice went dead quiet. “We…had a daughter?”
The fire drained from Taiana’s eyes, face, and voice. “She was perfect,” she whispered. “The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.” Her lips pulled upward into a smile that melted the Hunter’s heart. “She had your eyes, you know. And your strength of will.”
The Hunter could barely breathe. He had a daughter. A little girl, like Farida.
“What I did to you…I…” She let out a long, slow breath, and she refused to meet his gaze for a long moment. “You have every right to be angry.” Her anger was replaced by sorrow mingled with a hint of something else. Something that almost looked like shame. When she finally lifted her eyes, tears glimmered there. “I’m…sorry, Drayvin.”
In that moment, her mask of the hard, commanding woman cracked and he caught a glimpse of the true woman beneath. The woman from his memories, the woman he had loved his entire life even if he couldn’t remember her.
He crossed the room to her in two strides and swept her into his arms. She gripped him with crushing strength, but he didn’t care. After all this time, after countless years spent apart, they had been reunited. By the gods, fate, destiny—the name didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they were together.
His lips met hers in a passionate kiss, and fire blossomed through the Hunter’s veins at the familiar touch. A near-desperate frenzy consumed them as they tore at their clothing, aching to pull away anything that could get between them. The Hunter nearly ripped the straps of his leather armor in his effort to undress. An overwhelming, all-consuming need for her burned through every fiber of his being. It seemed an eternity before he finally stripped out of the armor, padding, tunic, and breeches, and turned to face her.
She stood before the bed, clad in nothing but her long, golden hair, which now hung free in curling tresses around her face. His eyes roamed every bit of her: her black eyes, so like his own, which reflected the passion burning within him; her delicate nose with its slight upturn at the end; her high cheekbones, full lips parted in anticipation; her long neck, muscled shoulders, and strong arms. His eyes dropped to her full breasts, firm stomach, and sleek hips, down to the small tuft of golden hair between her legs. His body responded with such force that it nearly brought him to his knees. He could wait no more.
He went to her, but she seemed to pull back from him, almost shy. He reached to take her hands in his, lifted them to his lips, and kissed them. She turned her wrists and ran fingers along his jaw, up the sides of his face, and into his hair.
“Let me look at you,” she whispered, and tilted his face up to her.
For a long moment, they remained like that. The Hunter stared into her midnight eyes, drinking in every detail of the face he barely remembered yet seemed to know so well. She ran her hands down the sides of his neck, across his chest, over his shoulders. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, just as he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Impossible as it might seem, she was real and standing in front of him.
His hands curled around the back of her head and slowly, gently, their lips met.
The kiss was shy, tentative at first. Thousands of years had passed since last they’d seen each other, yet the Hunter’s heart held the memory of the woman before him. He drowned in the sweet taste of her lips and the scent that had followed him for a lifetime. He wanted to luxuriate in the aroma of honey, cinnamon, jasmine, and berries for the rest of his life.
The kisses grew more passionate, and the fire once again burned through the Hunter’s veins. Taiana’s body melted into his, her arms wrapped around his shoulders and back to pull him closer. A tingle ran down his spine as he felt her warmth against him, the strength of her presence. This was the woman he remembered from his dreams, from a time long past. This was his wife, and his heart swelled with the memory of his love for her.
They remained locked in that embrace for a minute, an hour, an eternity—the Hunter would never know. He held her close, afraid that if he released her, she would disappear into the mists of his past. Yet there she was, and nothing could change the perfection of that moment.
She broke off the kiss, her breath coming hard. He felt her heart hammering against his chest, the excited rhythm matching his own. He lifted her into his arms and lay her down on the bed. He brushed her lips with his own, trailed down her neck, and covered every bit of her soft, smooth skin with gentle kisses. He had spent a lifetime apart from her; he wanted to take his time to explore her body.
Her moans grew louder and her breath came faster, her fingers entwined in his hair. Finally, she lifted his face up to hers and pulled him on top of her, and he complied. His body ached to feel her as he had all those years ago. This was the memory that had kept him alive for hundreds of years, even if he could not remember it. This longing for her touch, the warmth of her soft flesh, was all he had ever wanted.
Her legs wrapped around his waist and pulled him toward her. The world around him seemed to fade, forgotten. In those heart-pounding, time-shattering minutes, nothing else mattered but the woman beneath him. The woman he had crossed a world to see. His wife, the mother of his child.
The world could end tomorrow, but for now, nothing would tear him from her side. She was his world, and he wanted nothing more than to feel their bodies joined together in a fiery passion that not even a thousand years apart could dim.
Chapter Seven
They lay in bed together, the sheets tangled around them, the sound of their gasping filling the room. Blood pounded in the Hunter’s ears, and the fire in his veins had yet to dim as he stared into the black eyes and perfect face a hand’s breadth from his own. He knew this bliss couldn’t last forever, but perhaps it would endure for just a while longer.
Taiana seemed disinclined to speak as well, as if she too understood that even a single word could shatter the fragile moment. She entwined the fingers of her right hand in his as her left index finger traced the scars etched into his chest. Her touch sent little waves of pleasure through the Hunter, and he could feel his body stirring in response. She raised an eyebrow and smiled coyly, and a matching grin wreath
ed the Hunter’s face.
It felt…perfect. There was no throbbing presence in his mind, no insistent voice driving him to kill. In that moment, he had peace, silence.
That realization puzzled him. The voice of his inner demon had fallen silent since his arrival in Enarium, and even Soulhunger hadn’t spoken to him. The shrieking, pleading, demanding, begging had simply faded.
What had changed? Not even the Serenii temples in Kara-ket had silenced the voices completely. Something about Enarium itself, perhaps?
A hint of hope surged within him. Perhaps here, he could be rid of the voice. Enarium offered so much more than just a chance of defeating the Sage. She was here, right beside him. If he could find a cure for Hailen’s Irrsinnon, he could be free of the burden of concern for the boy. Once the Sage was defeated and Kharna imprisoned for good, perhaps they could make a life here together. A life much like the one they once had, before she betrayed him for the sake of their child.
Our child. Our daughter. The thought still brought a lump to his throat. He hadn’t been present to see the child born or grow. What fate had befallen the life he had helped bring into this world? The sadness in Taiana’s eyes made him dread asking the question he desperately wanted to. Though he hated to shatter their peaceful moment, he had to know.
“Where…is she?”
Taiana stiffened, and her grip on his fingers tightened until his bones creaked. “He took her,” she growled. “The bastard ripped her from my arms before he locked me away!”
“Who?” Rage turned the Hunter’s blood to ice. “Tell me who did it so I can hunt them down and tear them to pieces.”
“The Warmaster.” Fresh tears slid from Taiana’s eyes, but beneath the sorrow simmered anger as hot and bright as the sun. “He took her from my arms and made me watch as he locked her away in a Chamber of Sustenance, then did the same to me.”
Acid rose to the Hunter’s throat. Our child, locked in a Chamber of Sustenance. The same Chambers that harnessed the power of the sun, and which would turn their occupants to ash the moment the Keeps were activated. No wonder she was so driven in her desire to open the Chambers.
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