He understood, that was the bitch of it all. He understood. If he knew his fighting days were done and death was lurking at his door, he would still want to fight in whatever way he could. But it didn’t make it any easier to realize that he was going to have to let her go.
“I’m not quite ready to let you go, Eira.” He tried to smile down at her, but he just couldn’t.
Her fingers squeezed his, and Kalen couldn’t help but notice how much weaker even that simple gesture was. Her faded eyes were compassionate and she looked at him with gentle understanding as she whispered, “Is death anything any of us can truly prepare for, Kalen? It’s odd, you know— death is one of the few things guaranteed to any of us. But when it comes, it still shocks. It still startles. It still hurts. But I’m tired, Kalen. Try to understand that.”
Understand it? That wasn’t the problem. How could she not be tired, considering how long she’d been doing this? Kalen had been doing it twenty years and he was tired to the bone. Eira had been at it for more than sixty. So yes, he could understand it. The problem was accepting it.
Lee hadn’t ever been much for meditating until Eira forced her to learn. She wouldn’t admit it, but there was something very relaxing, very soothing about it. It made everything in the world fall away.
All that mattered was the beat of her heart. Each beat of her heart eased away just a little more of the tension that knotted her muscles. There was a soft, gentle breeze blowingthrough her hair, and she could feel each individual strand as it tickled her ears, her cheek, her neck.
She could hear leaves rustling, smell the warm scent of grass. A song. She could hear something calling to her, singing to her. Seductive and whispering of a power she couldn’t even begin to understand. She could just barely glimpse the power, huge and unending.
It whispered and sang and danced. It had a tribal beat, something sensual and scary at the same time. She wanted to reach for it. Wanted to dive into that power and bathe in it. But at the same time, she wanted to run away and hide.
There was a darkness to the power. It permeated the earth, spreading through it like a disease. It rumbled and shook and shuddered deep, deep inside the land. The unrest had yet to surface. And still the drums beat. The music of it pulsed through her veins, singing to her.
Lee sighed, unaware she had done so, as she continued to peer inside the dark, shadowy storm brewing deep below and far away. Very far away. An ugly, black maelstrom and at the heart of it was the source behind the storm.
The song had gotten louder, too. Much louder—wrapping around her.
Her eyes were closed, but it was like she could still see. Her vision was weird, though. Everything felt surreal. She never moved her hands, but she could see herself reaching out. Reaching, reaching . . . until her touch sank into the earth . . . reaching . . . reaching . . . She touched her hand to that black maelstrom.
Something moved behind her. It was the quietest of sounds, faint, almost too faint to hear, so soft she never should have been able to hear it over the tribal drumbeat of the other music. The new song echoed through her head like a symphony, a wild, exotic music, so lovely to the ear—and so out of place in the storm.
It jolted her out of the trance and she froze as she realized she wasn’t alone.
Even though she was still in the base camp, and thus relatively safe, terror flooded her veins. Instinctively, she tucked her body into a tight ball and rolled away. And instantly felt like a total fool.
It was Morne.
He wasn’t what she’d call harmless. Not with that fallen angel face and dark, penetrating eyes. But he wasn’t a threat to her, either. She didn’t understand why she was so sure, but nonetheless, she was. As she stood, she brushed the grass from her pants and slid a hand through her hair. And Morne watched everything she did with a strange smile.
“Your magick grows. You must use caution when you study the Veil. There are many dangers on that path.”
The guy had disturbing eyes, Lee decided as she stared at him and debated whether or not to say anything. It wasn’t like he’d asked a question. He’d done what fifty other people had done since she’d arrived in this weird, terrifying world—given her advice she hadn’t asked for. There was so much information flying through her head, and she couldn’t make sense of it all. Sometimes she felt like if she had to take anything else in, her head would explode.
Or she would. Not physically, but emotionally. Her patience was worn so thin, it was a wonder she could have a rational conversation without ranting like a maniac. She was so tired, so scared and so freaked out, and when she wasn’t trying to deal with all of the weirdness going on around her, she was trying to deal with the weirdness going on inside her.
Her feelings for Kalen. These strange new talents that seemed so out of control and so bizarre, but at the same time, still so natural. Then there was Morne, still standing there watching her with those intense black eyes.
“Are you going to tell me to—how do you phrase it . . . oh yes—shut my trap and keep my advice to myself?” Morne asked. A pale silver brow rose, and the smile on his face grew just a little.
Lee flushed. Okay, she had flown off the handle a few times lately. So what? She thought she was handling the situation pretty well. “What do you want?” Lee hadn’t talked to Morne once since the last time he’d forced her to drink that disgusting tea—and she’d spat it out at him. As she sat back down on the tree stump, she grinned. It had almost been worth the taste that time, just to see it dripping off his face.
After all the times he’d shoved that crap down her throat, it seemed only fair. He still hadn’t answered her. She watched from the corner of her eye as he circled around her. There was something very disconcerting about the way he watched her.
Morne crouched down in front of her. He wore his hair long, even longer than Kalen. It was even paler than her own—so pale a blond it appeared white in places. In contrast, his eyes looked black. Not dark brown, but a black so dark and deep the pupil was indiscernible from the iris. “You do not remember your magick, but your magick remembers you. It comes so easily to your call,” he said. “I have to wonder how your powers would have grown if your training had started when it should have.”
He reached out and touched his fingers to her face, tracing one roughened fingertip down her temple. “It glows inside of you. It surprises me that it managed to stay silent as long as it did.” As he trailed his finger along her skin, he left a hot path blazing.
Something stirred inside her. It wasn’t lust—not exactly, although Lee was acutely aware of the man in front of her. He was the picture of elegant masculine perfection, a contrast to Kalen’s rugged, dark appeal. Elegant, even though he wore the plain basic garb all the people here wore: that matte black tunic and pants that resembled the cargos that were popular at home, but here, they served a much more basic purpose than fashion. Each and every pocket and loop was used. She could see a variety of weapons, guns, some sort of laser thing, blades. That matte black tunic was in fact armor, just as Lee had suspected. She’d been told it was strong enough to protect the wearer from laser pulses and the more commonplace blades and firepower.
Soldier gear, all of it, but Morne managed to wear it the same way James Bond wore a tux. He moved with a sensual elegance and grace that Lee did find incredibly appealing. It was there and it was powerful.
But none of that mattered. It wasn’t her body that was reaching for him. It was something else, something deep inside her—the same thing that had reached for the blackness she’d sensed inside the Earth.
Morne’s hand fell and he rocked back on his heels, staring at her with appraising eyes. “Your power knows mine.”
Mouth dry, Lee tried to shrug it off. “So what? According to Kalen, I’ve been using my power, whatever the hell it is, since I was a kid. I’m assuming you’re not new to your power either and we’ve fought together before.”
But it was more than that. A lot more. Lee knew that without him saying
a word. “You and I rarely worked together. My . . . battle skills work better when I am alone. You had the luck of the saints avoiding serious injury and never needed my healing skills. Until recently. So it is not that we have meshed powers before. And I think you know that.” His voice was low and hypnotic.
She could feel it again—that weird sense of something unfurling inside her, reaching out. And this time, it reached for Morne, and she could feel his power reaching out in return. His hand came up, cupping her cheek and tipping her head back. His eyes weren’t black, she realized, staring into them. This close, she could see that they were blue. An impossibly dark blue, a blue darker than the midnight sky. His pupils flared, eclipsed, until even this close, his gaze appeared truly black.
She could hear the cadence of his heart beating, and it called to her like some sort of siren song. Lub dub. Lub dub. A heartbeat hadn’t ever sounded so hypnotic. Or so loud. The beat of their hearts melded, pulsating in tandem until individual beats were impossible to distinguish. Lee wanted to pull away, but she felt frozen in place and she couldn’t even blink.
“It must wake, Lelia,” Morne murmured. “There is not much time.”
Her tongue felt thick. She had to swallow to even speak. “Wake?”
“Not much time,” Morne repeated. His gaze dropped and she could feel him staring at her mouth. “So clean,” he whispered. “So untouched. Untainted. No wonder . . .”
His words ended abruptly and he pulled his hand back. When the contact broke, Lee felt like somebody had just thrown a bucket of water on her, waking her from a deep, confusing dream. When Morne spoke, his voice seemed to come from far off.
“Kalen.”
Lee blinked. He didn’t make any sense. None. “What?” She tried to ask, but she still couldn’t speak clearly. Her throat was too dry, too tight. Morne was gone—he wasn’t in front of her anymore, but he was still there. She could hear him talking.
She could still hear his heart. It no longer beat in rhythm with her own—no, his heartbeat was slow and steady while hers slammed away against her ribs in an erratic, unsteady tempo. She still couldn’t move. Lee whimpered, and this time, she actually heard herself make a sound.
Lee sucked a deep breath in, and slowly, some of the fog faded from her mind. Enough that she was aware of something other than the sound of her heart beating out of rhythm with Morne’s. It was Kalen’s voice. Harsh and angry. Lee swallowed and looked up to find Kalen in Morne’s face, his tanned face flushed even darker with fury.
He shouted something, but Morne just shook his head and smiled before he turned on his heel and walked off without looking back at Lee. Each step he took away from her seemed to clear her head, and by the time he was out of sight, Lee felt a little more like herself. She could think.
Lee could also hear, and that probably wasn’t a good thing, either, because for some reason, Kalen was pissed. She wasn’t quite sure why, but when she looked into his pewter gray eyes, there was no doubt about it. They glowed hot and bright, swirling from dark, thunderous gray to misty silver and back again. She hadn’t heard half of what he’d said, and nothing she had heard made sense. Slowly, she stood, her tense muscles uncurling. Sitting in one place for a couple of hours sure as hell made the body stiff.
“Would you quit yelling and tell me what in the hell the problem is?” she asked when he paused long enough to take a breath.
For a second, he looked a little startled. “What the problem is? What the problem is?” One hand shot out and fisted the neck of her tunic. He jerked and she flew forward, crashing into his body. “You spent the night in my bed. You’ve spent the past week in my bed. And I find you letting Morne put his hands all over you?”
Fury bubbled and spilled over, side by side with shock. She shoved at his chest and snarled at him. “You bastard. He didn’t have his hands all over me.” Had he? Hell, Lee couldn’t remember half of it. She remembered Morne slipping out of the woods. Approaching her. He had said some things, and like a forgotten song, his words lingered just beyond her grasp. But he hadn’t touched her, had he?
One side of her face burned. Itched. Vaguely, she remembered his hand there. Okay, maybe he had touched her. But just her face—that was it, she thought. And she couldn’t believe what Kalen was implying. He wasn’t really . . . But one look up at his face and she knew he was implying just that.
Lee twisted away from him. She struggled her way free from his arms and got loose, although she knew it was only because he let her go. They might insist she was some kind of warrior here, but she sure as hell didn’t feel like one. She knew the self-defense she’d learned through the Y—so what if it had seemed to come to her very easily? She’d gotten a brown belt in tae kwon do before she got bored and dropped out. But she didn’t think that compared to the kind of training these people had. Not just self-defense, but weaponry, battle tactics, subterfuge. Warrior stuff. And Kalen was about as hard core as it got, when it came to that warrior stuff. It didn’t make her feel any better to stand there and look at him and know that she couldn’t quite hold her own with him.
Shaken and hurt, Lee faced him with her hands bunched into fists to keep them from trembling. “You bastard,” she said, forcing the words through clenched teeth. There were others things she wanted to say to him, she knew it. But for the life of her she couldn’t form the words. So instead of saying anything, she just bent over and grabbed her gear from the ground. She jammed her arms into the cavinir jacket as she stomped away. The light, flexible armor molded to her skin, and instinctively, she wanted to jerk it off and toss it on the ground, stomp on it.
The armor seemed alive at times, too alien for words, yet another reminder that she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Too damned far from home, and she didn’t even have a cute little dog in a basket to cuddle and take comfort from. No ruby slippers either.
Stuck here. Even though she was outside, it suddenly felt like everything was closing in on her. Lee couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. She was too hot. Hot, irritable, confused—and scared. She’d felt something rumbling in the earth, and she’d felt the echo of power whispering to her when Morne touched her. Something familiar and terrifying all at once.
She started to head toward the small unit she shared with Kalen, but instead, her feet took another path. Retreating to the space she shared with Kalen wasn’t the answer. She needed someplace a little more neutral than that, although there wasn’t much neutral ground to be found here. And nothing that was hers.
Lee was almost shocked to find herself standing at the medicon. Eira lay inside, and oddly enough, Lee didn’t feel any of the resentment she’d felt every other time she’d been in Eira’s presence.
She felt—comforted, even though the sight of the old woman was enough to make her pause. Lee had seen stroke victims before, not often, but enough to recognize that that was what had happened. Half of Eira’s body seemed to work as it should. She could move her right hand and right leg, but she couldn’t even hold a brush in her left hand.
As advanced as the technology seemed in this war-torn world, they couldn’t undo the damage when part of the brain died.
“Something troubles you.”
Lee jerked at the harsh sound of Eira’s voice. Her words were slurred and she talked a little louder than necessary. It was like each word had to be ripped from her throat, and it gave her voice a guttural tone.
Her one good eye focused on Lee’s face, bright as a bird’s and full of curiosity. Eira patted the bed beside her and said, “Come. Sit.”
For a second or two, Lee considered leaving. But she really didn’t have anywhere else to go, and for some reason, talking with Eira felt—right. More, it felt like something Lee could call her own. Nobody had forced her here. She hadn’t come to train, and she hadn’t even come out of duty to check on the old woman.
So instead of leaving, she edged her way around the narrow cubicle that passed as a room and settled her hip on the edge of the bed. Concern welled inside as she studi
ed Eira’s face.
A graying brow lifted. “What do you see when you look at me? A weak, sick old woman?”
With a sad smile, Lee shook her head. “A stubborn, strong one. A weak woman would have already died.”
Eira closed her eyes, but the corner of her mouth tugged up, pleased. “Strength, it’s something you need here.”
Lee shrugged. “I don’t know. I think strength would come in handy everywhere. Although it’s a bit more crucial here.”
They fell silent for a time. Eira spoke first. “Will you tell me what bothers you?” she asked. She spoke with odd little stops and starts, each word stilted.
Swallowing around the knot in her throat, Lee said, “Kalen. Morne. Everything.” She looked down and saw Eira’s hand close to hers. Cautious, she closed her hand around the other woman’s. When Eira squeezed her hand lightly, Lee found it a little easier to speak, but it wasn’t the issue with Kalen that came to mind.
“Can you draw power from the gates?”
Now, that seemed to surprise the old woman. Her lid flickered. Then she squinted, studying Lee’s face with shrewd eyes. “You saw them?”
“Yes.”
Eira’s face relaxed a little and she murmured, “Good. Good . . . So you saw the gates and the power there. A great deal of power.”
That was an understatement. The one brief glimpse she’d caught before Morne’s intrusion had been like staring at a tidal wave. Immense and unending. “I felt it.” She licked her lips and tried to puzzle her way through the thoughts jumbling in her head. There was something important about that power. She had sensed it, felt it. “The power at the gates—where does it come from?”
Eira smiled. “From life, Lee. Life is power. It sinks into the earth, all around us, and it waits.”
“Why is there so much at the gates?”
Through the Veil Page 17