Beyond Secret Worlds: Ten Stories of Paranormal Fantasy and Romance

by Aimee Easterling

  There, we fell in love and moved here together.

  Blane lathers my long red hair and I lather his close-shorn brown locks. We slide our hands all over each other, enjoying the feel of supple flesh and taut muscle, curve to solid line, the sound of our breaths rising and falling in quickened harmony. In bed, we complete the blissful union. Once sworn enemies, we are now inseparable friends and lovers. How far we’ve come in these last three years.

  “You’re my favorite soul mate,” I tell him.

  “You’re my goddess and my sweetness,” he replies, kissing my forehead.

  This blue wave house is our sanctuary in a practically lawless land. I blow him another kiss when he suits up and heads into the blistering heat that is the Hotzone. Mirage trails of molten gold glitter around him as he walks to his flycar. He’s off to the docks, where he works loading cargo vessels, which carry Fireseed plants of many varieties, mostly bound to points south, but a very few to northern dominions. Since the Fireseed was discovered down here about fifteen years ago, the Hotzone is finally able to feed its starving people. We now have varieties that strengthen muscles, provide vitamins and even change people into half plant. We need plant properties to survive the heat and glean food from the sun.

  After all, Fireseed is part human.

  Businesses are opening and the sectors are trying to restore the laws and civil society they had before the droughts, before this land became a pack of rampaging, feral wolves, ready to kill for a morsel.

  But how does one put the genie back in the bottle? How does one inspire people to follow the rule of law when it’s become second nature to steal, blackmail, even murder? That’s why the prisons here are full and many who should be locked away roam freely.

  The wharf where Blane works lies just under the glass monstrosity of the Vegas-by-the-Sea jail. Why they built it over the city’s main docks is a mystery. Its maw overhangs, inflicting dreadful shadows of thieves and murderers pacing their cells. I can’t understand the whys and wherefores of the world. I’m better at healing injuries others have already inflicted.

  I head into my salon in the blue house. Cartons are stacked, ready to ship across the spreading metropolis to Caprice. She’s a healer, too, and owns a share of my business: Ruby’s Blue Magic. I sell relief and freedom from fear in my signature elixirs and potions I’ve devised since childhood. I sell hope.

  Paralyzing salve made from lizards for pain-free surgery.

  Healing balm from Wolf spiders and the veins of Fireseed plants.

  Divination powder from Fireseed pollen mixed with pulverized sea leather.

  Three inhales and a picture forms bright as starlight on a cloudless night.

  I glance around the room. This wave blue house we designed and built together five years ago on the shores still thrills me. Its teal curtains, flapping free in the sea breeze remind me how lucky we are to have escaped Skull’s Wrath. The school there, set in harsh desert was almost as ghastly as the Fireseed cult I ran from before it.

  My musing done, I secure the last elixir bottle in the carton and seal it. A noise behind me startles. Its as if tumbleweeds from Skull’s Wrath desert are scratching at the floorboards. There it is again, closer. I freeze, my hands gripping the table. Another shuffling, advancing. I locked the door after Blane. So, how...? I pick up an elixir bottle to hit the intruder, too late.

  Rough hands grab at me, one splayed across my mouth, the other firmly trapping my neck. The intruder’s body against my back is dense, strapping. I twist to no avail because he doesn’t ease off. Bending forward, I kick my right foot back as high as I can, aiming for his crotch. Not high enough. I miss and kick his thigh instead.

  In return, he tightens his grip on my neck so my words come out as a mangled squeak. “What do you want?”

  He shakes me like he might a bag of dried sea turnips. The bottle in my hand drops to the floor and shatters, slicing the tops of my bare feet.

  He loosens his stranglehold enough for me to repeat the question. “What do you want here?”

  Before he answers he binds my hands with heavy twine. Throws me down on a chair. I wince as bottle shards cut into the soles of my feet.

  At least I get a good look at him as he loosens the top of his burn suit and lets it hang. Something drops from it—a paper? I pretend not to have seen it. He’s got a bristling black beard, a barrel belly, sleeves of strange fish tattoos. His arms are as massive as Fireseed trunks.

  “Where’s the pollen?” he growls. “Where’s your stash of Fireseed pollen?”

  “Who and what’s it for?” I ask brazenly.

  He slaps me. “None of your business. Just tell me where it is.”

  He towers over me with his nostrils flaring and lines of sweat sliding down his temples onto his filthy black shirt. It’s a thick fabric unlike the styles here, which are colorful and light. The red marks on his face and arms are burns. This means he’s either too poor to have had a treatment, or he’s a foreigner. And since when did we have any foreigners who came down here to the Hotzone voluntarily? Every soul north of the wall stays north and god knows we can’t get past it to get up there. It’s guarded by robo bots and who knows what else. Plus I’ve heard tales it’s miles high.

  “Which district are you from?” I’m already bracing for a second slap.

  “None of your business,” he repeats and roots around in my cabinets and drawers, tearing open the cartons I just finished carefully sealing. That does it.

  “Please, untie me. I’ll give you a bag of pollen. You’ll never find it otherwise.”

  He scowls at me, unconvinced because he keeps on thrusting open cabinets and spilling out more precious vials.

  “Stop it!” I yell. “You’re wasting supplies. They go to needy people down here. It’s a very selfish thing you’re doing.”

  He stomps over, brandishes a knife and waves it in front of me. It glints blue in the morning sun of the windowpane and, for a moment I’m sure he’ll swipe the blade straight across my face. Instead, he leans over, cuts me loose and returns it to his pocket.

  I won’t run. Won’t let my terror get the best of me. So many are still wild with fear even here in Vegas-by-the-Sea, where we have it better than any other part of the Hotzone.

  I refuse to become insane.

  Scurrying to the back of the room I kneel down, lift up a flap of carpet then a floor board and extract a small, but brimming bag of red pollen. I take a pinch of the divining powder from the tiny cup next to it and sniff it quickly. I will need extra help in visioning today. My eyes are drawn to the item he dropped on the floor.

  A crumpled slip of paper just under the table.

  I can only hope the intruder leaves here without seeing it, so if I don’t return Blane is given a clue as to who took me. I stand, approach the man and present the pollen bag, yet hold it out of his reach. “Do you know how to administer it?”

  “Sniff it up,” he grumbles. “I’m no fool. I read the broadsides.”

  “Is it for you, or...?”

  For a hair’s breadth of time sadness clouds him. I know the look. I’ve been weighted by sorrow, too, like heavy irons. “I won’t tell a soul. Whatever, whoever you are. I hold no allegiance to the sector.” I pause to study any slight changes in his expression, but he’s donned an absolute poker face. “Look,” I insist, “I’m a healer, only loyal to my clients. Your name?”

  “Merken,” he says as he takes the pollen bag.

  “Merken.” I echo, nodding. “Take me to your person.” I’m stepping out on a limb here, but my intuition tells me it’s not for him. We hybrids have this sixth sense, and as a practicing healer I’ve honed my muscle for it to a fine flexing. I smell his rotted sea onion tension. I taste his acrid desperation. Enhanced by my divining powder, these impressions pour into me like sour juice. The only question is, if he takes me there, will he kill me afterward to hide his tracks?

  I picture myself in bed with Blane only an hour ago, his strong arms braced on either s
ide of my hips, his handsome features radiating love and heat. I picture him coming home to an empty house and sitting by the window all night, worrying, worrying. I wish I could take back my offer. It’s too late though.

  Merken refastens his burn suit, wraps his solid hand around my arm and hauls me up, directs me to put on my burn suit, head out my front door. In his vehicle, he places a cloth bag over my head. This scares me more than anything. I’m claustrophobic. My breathing comes in anxious gasps.

  “I can’t let you see where I’m going. You understand,” he says.

  He’s trying to save my life. This touches me.

  But I screw up my dumb luck with my next impulsive question. “Your accent isn’t local. Where are you from, Merken?”

  His energy shifts again. With my question, he’s locked himself inside his own box of fear.

  “I’m only curious.” I try my Doctor Ruby tack. “I can more easily help you, and um... yours if I know what sector you live in. Which genetics you contain. Which variety of Fireseed you ingest on a regular basis.”

  His sudden acceleration of the flycar is jarring. “Shut up,” he warns.

  My claustrophobia returns with a vengeance. I slump over and hug myself. Try not to scream. Finally, he lowers the vehicle and lands. I hear him shuffle around and the clump of his boots on solid ground. Then, my door snaps open. He guides me along a hard-packed path. After five minutes or so, the air abruptly cools and I feel a sense of enclosure surround me. Darkness. Are we in a house? I heard no door sounds.

  He places me on a seat and pulls off my hood, the top of my burn suit. We are, indeed, in a cavern of some sort, and there’s a small figure to my left under covers on a makeshift cot. All manner of tubes and vials surround the bed. I reach over to lower the covers. “May I?”

  When he nods despair makes his face droop again.

  It’s a girl—maybe twelve—and she’s barely breathing. There’s a tube shoved down one of her nostrils and more sunk into her arms. Sophisticated machines beep and buzz. Where did Merken get these?

  Her face is raw, with grayish spines growing out of a cheek and one of her nostrils. Gingerly, I touch the one on her cheek. It’s hard and unforgiving like a petrified cactus, bending and snarling and snaking back into itself. Similar in feel to the coral leathers we haul up from the acidic depths of the Pacific. But those I use for healing salves, while these... are clearly killing the girl.

  Though I’ve tried these last three years to block out the memory, I’ve seen growths of this type before. On a man I admired. Varik was a doctor who flew down from the north to help us all, who died from his own disfigurement he couldn’t slow. But the strain of Fireseed, which transmitted his disorder, has been outlawed for years. I shudder.

  “Can you help her?” asks Merkin. “Can the pollen help her?”

  “The pollen is only for the uninfected.” I stare up at him. “You need to tell me where you came from. It’s the only way I can try to save her. I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen these... these growths for years. And even then, they weren’t as hard or as twisted. Our transmission in the Hotzone to hybrid plant-human is safe. We’ve outlawed the old ways where people developed these woody spines. So, tell me where are you from?”

  Merken turns his wide head away from me, stares at a matrix of tubes containing green ooze.

  “Tell her,” the girl whispers so faintly it may have been the cavern wind. “Tell her, father,” she murmurs louder.

  “Tell me what?” I lean over her, my ear to her mouth.

  “We came from—”

  “Up north,” Merkin finishes. “From Ocean Dominion.”

  Mixed emotions flood in—nostalgia for Varik whose home was Ocean Dominion, rage toward the northerners who’ve maintained the wall and still prevent us from free travel, but most of all an overwhelming curiosity for why these people would venture to the Hotzone when everything they need is up north.

  “You have doctors up there, better medical equipment than any we have.” I pause to nod toward Merken’s beeping machines.

  “We have no one who understands this pox.” Merken points to his daughter’s ruined face. “And other Northern Dominion people suffer this disease, many, many more. No one here suffers this?”

  “Not any more, as I explained.”

  “We are dying in scores up north. The Fireseed shipments come from your people.” Merken glares at me. “What are you feeding us?”

  “What? Why kidnap me, haul me off, only to make these wild accusations? I don’t grow the Fireseed. I don’t package it. Nor do I ship it. Besides, your claims are ludicrous. There must be another reason for this. It could as easily be the fault of northerners. Improper seeding of the crops, impure fertilization.” I lift my hands in frustration. “But it’s not my area of expertise so what do you want with me?”

  Scanning the darkened interior I see the walls are made of sand, so tightly packed they’ve turned into sandstone. This could be the end of a tunnel. It hits me. This hole in the ground could run for hundreds, thousands of miles. We’ve tried to dig tunnels to escape up north. Caught and killed is always the end game. Apparently though, northerners can get away with it. No one would dream they’d want entry down here.

  Merken’s voice is more agreeable when he answers me. “We’ve heard of you up north. Your reputation for healing and mediumship precede you. My claims are far from ludicrous though.”

  I’m impressed. This Merken thug is actually rather eloquent. So, first impressions deceive. I can’t deny a warming rush of pride that somehow I’m famous up north of the wall. Or infamous. But Merken’s other assertions?

  “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. We only send up Fireseed to augment your crops. Not to be competitive, but we’re one hundred percent more generous than you northerners. After all, you were the rich ones. We had nothing until Fireseed.” The bite in my voice has agitated his daughter. Her breathing, which was already in shallow fits and starts, grows more irregular.

  “We’ll talk later,” I whisper, turning to concentrate on my young patient. I place my hands on her collarbones and close my eyes. Divine her energies and synch my green soul to hers. Her eyes flutter open for a moment. Emerald eyes, so pretty, like the color of Fireseed sap but more intense.

  “What?” Merken leans toward us in his chair, his large body intimidating, radiating the dense heat of meaty human flesh unchanged into part plant. “What do you see?”

  “Shh. I need quiet,” I scold and sink back into deep concentration.

  The core grew many months ago, and sprouted five more growths. Not like a tumor at all. More like gnarled roots. It started in her collarbone, just under my left hand, the energies tell me. I see the girl walk more slowly, crookedly as the branches spread. But the cause eludes me. The cause? My mind repeats as if that will bring on a sudden insight.

  I also see her bedroom, and it makes me illogically happy we share a love of blue curtains. I envision the girl opening her portal curtains and gazing outside, to the deep ocean waters off her island shore. I’m hit with pangs of jealousy that she gets to enjoy such island splendor. I’ve heard in Ocean Dominion, dozens of islands float freely with no anchor. Shaking off my bitterness, I sink deeper into the visions.

  Try as I might, I cannot determine the source of transmission. The energy I sense around the source of her problem is murky, like being submerged in brackish runoff. I move my sensing to home in on a remedy. Weed killer, spouts my inner voice and repeats it like a mantra.

  Weed killer, weed killer, weed killer.

  If I can divine a formula to kill off the unwanted root, perhaps her organs will regenerate.

  But none of this is possible if I can’t find a surgeon to remove her corroded organs, leaking poison and feeding the spiny weeds. The parts of her that can be removed without killing her, that is.

  “What did you find?” Merken asks.

  I shake my head to ward him off and complete my visioning journey. In it, I sense Blane pacing i
n our blue house. Intense panic makes me tremble; his I assume. I detect Caprice, wondering when her orders will arrive, and I even travel to the docks, see the fearful shadows that creep across them from above. The prisoners are patrolling their cells—back and forth, back and forth, which match Blane’s own pacing in the blue house.

  Sitting up, I take my hands off the girl and face Merken. “We must get your daughter to my house without anyone seeing us. I need to find a surgeon immediately who can work on her before I do.”

  “Operate?” His eyes widen in alarm. I explain in brief what must be done. He nods and gestures to my feet. “What about your cuts?” He hands me a roll of gauze.

  I realize he’s referring to the gashes made when he pushed the bottle from my hand earlier. I’ve been so absorbed in divining I didn’t feel my feet throbbing until now. Quickly, I clean and bind my own wounds.

  Then I catch Merken’s gaze and hold it to deliver the next part of my message. “Our mission must be carried out with extreme stealth. People here will have no sympathy for the plight of rich, northern dwellers. You need to know I may not be able to save your daughter. She’s in very bad shape.” I place my hands on his larger ones. “But I will try my best, I promise you that. What is her name? It will help if I know it.”

  “Erzabet.”

  “Erzabet.” With that the pact is sealed.

  ***

  “Ruby! Sweetheart, where are you?” Blane calls as he paces the blue house. He throws open the closet doors, slides the shower curtain to one side, and checks the sealed-in porch where he and Ruby take their morning coffee.

  It’s dark outside. Blane finished his work at the docks hours ago yet Ruby is still gone. His arms ache from wanting to hold her, ask how her day went. Tell her how his went: a mountain of Fireseed bales to load on the Vegas Queen, and a verbal shit-storm from his boss, Arkin: “Don’t mix up the Fireseed bales. Load them faster, morons! What am I paying you for? You’re moving like a lizard on Oblivion!”