by Su Williams
“Come back, little fox,” William yelled from behind me. I’d made it about fifty yards. All William had to do was phase and he’d catch me in seconds. My heart leapt into my throat and urged me faster. My gaze darted all around me, like a flock of angry birds swarmed around my head, as I tried to find where he might materialize in my path. If he caught me, he’d drag me kicking and screaming back to the dark bakery…if he didn’t just snap my neck first. This is just too easy.
Havermale Island and then downtown lay across the two suspended bridges in front of me. The island held no hiding places, except maybe the Canada Pavilion; but it was usually locked up for the winter. If I could make it downtown, I just might be able to disappear in a dark alley, and there was sure to be people no matter how late it was. But downtown was a long run. Lots of space for William to catch me between here and there. I wound around the retaining wall and onto the gritty path down to the bridge. As I careened onto the North swinging bridge, my feet skidded in the sand and grated my hands as I sprawled on the cement. Geez! Stereotypical of every horror movie. Victim flees. Victim falls. Pursuer conquers. Well, not today. I shot a glance over my shoulder as I pushed myself off the ground. I hated this bridge. With the waters rushing below, it actually made it feel like it was moving; though this time of year, there were more rocks than water. I hurdled onto the bridge, willed myself to get across, to get away from the dark apparition that stalked me. Where are they? Why haven’t they found me yet? My head swam with exertion and motion sickness. I wobbled on my feet, and sprawled headlong in the midst of the bridge. Geez! Distressed damsel, much? I clutched the handrail to steady myself and pull myself back to my feet, but an ominous black cloud whirled and settled around me—I was having a Lord Voldemort moment. When Harry and his friends have battled the bad guys and his godfather is killed, he chases the bitch witch to exact his revenge. But along comes the antagonist, Lord Voldemort, in a whirring cyclone of black sand. The cloud solidified into the form of a man beside me. William. His icy hands curled around my wrists and jerked me to my feet.
William leaned into my face, his breath hot and corrupt, wreaking of something foul. I writhed in his clutches, but his strength surpassed anything I might muster. After a few moments of fruitless thrashing, I allowed myself to grow limp in his clutches; let my mind drift to Nick. “Yes,” William rasped, “that’s what I want. Show me the one who will draw out my prey.” He nuzzled my ear and forced sadistic images into my mind—the torturous brutality he’d perpetrate on Sabre, once he followed Nick to my rescue.
“No!” New heat fueled my body and I struggle against his iron grasp. I forced away all thoughts of Nick and Sabre—as if not presently thinking about them was a strong enough memory-camouflage for a Wraith as powerful as William. As if my feeble, budding—alleged—Caphar abilities had anything on this ancient. I ravaged my brain for memories to bury any thought of them, but my life had been so consumed by them of late, it was hard to find enough ammunition.
William cackled. “Pathetic,” he hissed in my ear. “I have more power in my little finger than both of your boys combined.”
“Yeah? Then why are they still alive after all these years?” The manacles of his fingers pressed the cool metal of my charm bracelet into my wrist.
Mom and Dad. Images of smiles and laughter stoked my heart, and calmed my raging fear. William shifted, momentarily confused. Like a meat grinder, he pressed into my brain, brutally pillaging my memories, scavenging for Sabre and Nick. Mom and Dad. That was it. Those memories were so passionately strong. Maybe those memories could shield and protect my guys. My guys, I smiled inwardly at the thought. No. No. Mom and Dad.
William shook with rage, but I resisted the crush of him in my head, and pulled on my most glorious and most painful memories. Everything that built me up, and broke me down. The joy. The grief. The smiles and the tears. The conflicting, passionate reminiscences filled me and spilled into his magic. His spell guttered and pitched, and he thrust his thoughts into my soul and savaged my mind. My world darkened with exhaustion and shredded recollections.
A brilliant blue-white light sparked to life back along the river walk. A second joined it. I stared, mesmerized by the radiant glow as my vision faded at the edges. Maybe I was going to die. Maybe this was that ethereal light that guides the dead to Heaven.
William roared, his grip on me slackened, and he retreated from my mind, lacerating memories on his way out. The blue-white orbs, twin comets blazed across the water. William roared again as the lights collided with us. His body jerked away from me, but his iron manacles were melded around my wrists. A whirlwind of dark and light raged around me and my back was slammed against the bridge rails. The sound of cracking ribs swirled in my brain, but it didn’t hurt much—not yet. Thank God for endorphins—I’d be feeling this later—if I survived. The storm battered me, but in the midst, Nick’s warm touch grazed my heart, and just as I began to believe in my salvation, William’s body wrapped around mine and launched us over the rail.
Chapter 15 Perseverance
We hung suspended over the rocks, two of my worst nightmares rolled into one…falling from a great height and the deadly current of the infamous Spokane River. William’s fingers clawed into my calves and we swung like a pendulum. Sabre’s face hovered above me, and over his shoulder, Nick held fast to Sabre’s jacket and belt. The fear and grief in his eyes was almost as painful as William’s talons in my flesh.
“Emi! Hang on, honey!” Nick screamed down to me, and his words were met by cynical laughter from below. He eased his body against Sabre’s and the rail, and extended his hand toward me. But he was still miles away. He shifted his upper body over the rail to close the gap…And that’s when I saw it. The churning chaos that was Thomas scrambled around Nick and pitched his body over the rail.
“Nick!” The two collided with William in their fall, and his nails gouged furrows in my skin. Sabre grunted and his grasp slipped farther up my arms. Nick shifted into ethereal form and swirled away with Thomas. William continued to swing below me, and laugh as though this was some grand game. And he was winning.
“I’ll take her with me, James!” William raged. “A life for a life.”
“No! Take me. Let her alone,” Sabre bargained.
William chortled and his fingers slid another couple of inches down my legs. “Not a chance, James. I’ll have her. And then you and your little sidekick.”
“No!” Nick materialized at Sabre’s side and leaned over the rail to get a handhold on me; but, again he fingers were shy of the mark. My life was in Sabre’s hands. Oh, great. Just great.
“I’m sorry, Emari, this shouldn’t have involved you.” And a rarefied Sabre tear fell on my hand, hot and heavy. In my panicked, hysterical state, I imagined acidic vapors rising from my skin as the tear ate through the tissues.
“She has to die,” raged William.
“No!” Nick yelled and redoubled his efforts reach my hand.
I don’t want to die. If only Nick could phase down and get me, but he said they couldn’t hold corporeal bodies while in their ephemeral state.
“She has to die,” agreed Sabre, as if under compulsion. The vampire comparison might’ve amused me at any other time, but my life was hanging in Sabre’s hands over the rocky bed of the Spokane River. And his grip was slipping.
A light flashed on in Sabre’s eyes, an understanding of something that remained dark to the rest of us. “She has to die,” he whispered to himself. “That’s how it works. Death brings immortal life.…Emari? Do you trust me?” WTF? His eyes met mine, bored into me with a knowing look. Trust? Sabre? The words were not mutually synonymous. What the hell was he thinking? “Emari…please…” The tissues over my ribs stretched and tore. William’s weight jerked my body and I screamed as muscles in both of my arms ripped away from the tendons as the two men ripped my body apart. “Do you trust me?”
Panic widened in Nick’s eyes at his mentor’s words. “Sabre?”
Anoth
er rare tear shattered on my arm. “Emi,” Sabre moaned. “Please. Do you trust me?”
What Sabre had ever done, or thought he’d ever done, to garner any kind of trust was unfathomable. The man had stolen my memories to scare the hell out of me in the name of ‘science’ and stuffed my head full of memories that weren’t my own, sent me on a journey through someone else’s life, again in the name of ‘science.’ Although, it was a pretty cool life, being a rock star. Now, my life dangled over the jagged rocks of the riverbed, and Sabre begged my trust. As though my life depended on it. And for some reason I believed—maybe it did—that somehow he knew something I didn’t. Yet with Sabre, there was always a hidden agenda. Did he want me out of Nick’s life? Badly enough that he’d let me die? Or at least suffer mercilessly?
Nick scramble and stretched to reach me, to no avail. “Sabre…”
“Say it, Emari!” Sabre screamed into my face.
“Yes!”
Something akin to grief, or reluctance, flashed across his face, but the decision was made. His hands eased their grip and a stricken sob escaped his hard heart as his fingers trembled away from mine. The Wraith’s weight dragged on my body and we plummeted. I watched the anguish as Sabre’s brown eyes drifted away in the darkness and breathed in relief that the pain was gone. I could hear Nick shouting my name, saw vague images of Sabre grappling with him, trying to keep him from plunging headlong after me.
“It’s the only way!” Sabre screeched back at him, subduing him. “She has to die!”
Relief quickly vanished into terror. I was falling. Fast. This was gonna hurt. William’s body evaporated into a cloud of black mist and disintegrated beneath me just as my body impacted the rocks. It only hurt, though excruciatingly, for a moment, as my body collided with the river bed. My heart had shattered with grief at the death of my parents; but now, as my bones crumbled within me, I truly knew the meaning of pain.
The late winter chill seeped into my skin and supplanted the heat of my body. It trickled out of my pores and dissolved into the hard, jagged rocks beneath me. Two glowing lights materialized into Nick and Sabre, who fell to their knees at my side. Tiny wisps of air jerked from my lungs, but breathing seemed so pointless. No breath, less pain. Nick clasped my hand, though I couldn’t feel it—my fingers already turned to ice. Crazed tears dropped like rain from his inky eyes. He lifted my hand and pressed it to his trembling lips. The world darkened and I closed my eyes.
“Emi! Please! Come back.” His voice broke.
“Nick…” Sabre whispered. Nick’s throat rumbled in warning.
I opened my eyes to Nick’s sight. He gazed, lost and damaged, down at my body laying on the snow-dusted river bed; my body so broken I was a pile of discarded rags. My hair stuck to rivulets of crimson that drained from my ears, nose and uncountable contusions. My body was as frozen and still as the rocks beneath me. My mouth locked open in a soundless scream. I couldn’t speak a word, not even the words I yearned for him to hear. He lifted his eyes to show me the frosty night. Lights from the Flour Mill sparkled and danced with moonbeams across the ripples on the water. The cloying smell of sand and dried algae drifted into my brain. I closed my eyes to his sight.
“Emi. Don’t leave me.” His strained voice, barely audible. My heart heard his words, his pain, his sorrow and constricted in my chest—the only real pain my body registered was his.
Please don’t cry. I’m happy.
“Please…” He imprisoned my hand against his chest that heaved with racking sobs.
The deep, numbing freeze inside me trickled out onto the rocks with the flow of my blood. My adrenalin/endorphin high clouded my thoughts, inebriated my brain, my body hardened and turned to lead. In my numbness, I groped for a memory; the last words I wanted his heart to hear from mine. Five little words that took all my effort to corral and stitch together in one cohesive thought. But he had to know. I closed my eyes to concentrate, mustered the energy to thrust the words out where his broken heart could find them.
Goodbye, Nick. I love you.
Chapter 16 Mad World
Sabre
Nickolas’ body rippled in and out of phase. Tremors of grief and rage pulsed through him; the sound that ripped from his throat was ineffable, and echoed off the high river walls as though the canyon of a great river.
“No. No.” Denial was fast and unyielding. I grabbed Nick’s shoulder, but he shrugged me off. His fingers slid to the girl’s neck, hopeful for a pulse, but found none. Impulsively, he placed his hands one atop the other, laced his fingers together, and began compressions on her already-crushed chest. He cringed, whimpered as a child at the sound of further-breaking bones and withdrew his hands in panic. “Emi…” He prayed her name.
I hated him at that moment. Hated and loved him both, as he sobbed over her. Her body lay shattered at his feet, along with the love he’d pledged to her. I envied him for his love for her, her love for him. And I hated him for his weakness as far as she was concerned. My beloved son and brother, for whom I wanted nothing more than everything and the best. And I loved her, for herself and for loving him and giving him his heart back that for decades I’d feared buried in the cold earth with his lost family. Afraid he would become too much like me; cold, dark , hard and alone—teetering on the edge of darkness and light.
“How could you do this to me?” he asked, though I doubted he’d wait for my explanation. But he needed to ask it anyway. He’d never hear, never listen. Not now. Not like this.
“She’s Caphar…” I began and his body rippled in and out of phase. “What if death is the catalyst?”
“What if? You gambled her life on ‘what if?’” he raged.
It was no use. He would not hear me. His whole world was focused on the small crumpled heap before him. I mumbled a warning to him, but he scowled at me and, quite literally, growled. He shrugged off my attempts to assist. “Nickolas. We must move her.” My words finally penetrated the armor of his grief.
“Don’t touch her. Don’t you touch her,” Nick seethed. “You’ve done enough.”
“I certainly hope so,” I muttered, but Nick disregarded me as he scooped the girl’s shattered body into his arms. “This way.” I took his elbow but he shied from my touch. I knew he didn’t understand. I would have to make him understand. And with everything in me; love, hate, hope, I prayed—if God still listened to the likes of me—that I was right.
As we approached the head of the path, we were met by a man in rumpled pajamas, who had witnessed some of our commotion. Agitation pitched his voice loud, and it echoed off the walls of the brick condos the hovered over the river.
“What are you doing?” He gripped Nick’s arm trying to stop him. “I called 9-1-1 when she fell. You shouldn’t have moved her. They can get Life Flight to transport her.” He was frantic, only desiring to help. Finally, Nick’s eyes met mine, so sad, so tired, so broken, it hurt me to witness. His plea screamed into my mind. I placed my hand on the man’s arm, and dove swiftly into his head. I found the memories, pulsing a bright frenzied red, and extricated them. Then, after inducing sleep, I eased his body to the ground to sit against the wall. He’d awaken presently, when paramedics arrived at the scene, confused and wondering why he’d chosen here to fall asleep. There was no more time to conjure anything better. Already, the sirens blared in the distance.
Upon reaching the car, Nick slid the rumpled form of the girl into the rear seat and climbed in after her.
“Where…” I began.
“Home.”
He was silent, cradling the poor, limp body of his beloved in his arms. I wondered if thoughts of Felicia crowded his mind, in remembrance of his other lost love; or if all his passions were consumed with his love for Emari. My own thoughts drifted to my Sarah Rose but their edge was still too cruel, even after two centuries, and I quickly chased away the ghosts. I could claim the loss of but one love, and that so long ago. But Nick had the blood of his loves upon his hands, now twice. How could my single loss and a
nguish compare? And how could he not hate me ever more if I was wrong?
Why, Sabre? The crushing of his heart accompanied the words into my head. I closed my eyes, and released the weight with a measured breath.
“William said, ‘She has to die.’ At that moment, I knew…” But his hatred, that coursed through the vehicle in palpable waves, silenced me. Of course. Had I allowed William’s mind contortions to sway me?
We argued, when he wasn’t seething in silence or scorching a hole in the back of my head with his glare. He’d said to take her home so I headed for our house. But that wasn’t his intention. He wanted her in her home. Not ours. When she woke up—if she woke up, he wanted her in familiar surroundings so she wouldn’t be frightened. I thought it best to go to our home. It was more secluded, less chance of company coming by while we had a corpse on display inside. And though I didn’t tell him, easier to dispose of her if she didn’t awaken. In the end, I relented. He would just take her there himself if I didn’t.
This night felt like the darkest night of my life. The light that surrounded her home seemed lit by the faintest of candles. Nick fished her keys out of his pocket and I extracted the alarm code from his memory. He cringed at my touch. Once inside, he shuffled to her bedroom as though he was barely able to lift her tiny body, and placed her on the bed like brittle china. Her bed became a funeral pyre where his rage at me consumed the air. He tucked a soft blanket around her like a small child, then, as he’d done after our battle there with Thomas, he lovingly washed the blood from her wounds.
Her pup smelled the death as it saturated us all, and skittered and bolted, content to remain in his crate. The poor creature balked at my touch, and I set upon a desperate campaign to win his affections, as it seemed that was all I could possess. When not coaxing the dog, I wandered the house, touching her things, memoryprinting her life.
“You could leave,” Nick barked after my third circuit of the house, his first words to me in hours. I could leave. But I couldn’t. He refused to look me directly in the face and his grief and anger were palpable.