Words That Bind

by Ash Krafton

  Burns dropped his chin, unable to look her in the eyes. “It will be quick.”

  “Oh.” She nodded, little more than a shudder. “Okay. Then just one small request.”

  “Anything,” he whispered, clasping her hands against his chest.

  Sorrow and regret soaked her like a winter chill, numbing her. “Forgive me?”

  Burns released her hands and stepped back. He pressed his fingers first to his lips, then to his heart in a tender salute. “I cannot.”

  Before she could protest he swung his arms together, clapping his hands with an ear-splitting smack. Her entire being imploded into a single spark of agony.

  Annihilation.

  For a brief singularity she fully comprehended the concept, a complete awareness of exactly what was occurring to her body. Atom by atom, she was deconstructed and dispersed, all in less time than it took to blink. Shattered, she plunged into a vast all-encompassing nothingness. Her last sentient moments were carved in pain before sound faded and light faded and she was swallowed by the Void.

  But not before she heard Sahir’s first scream.

  For him, annihilation would not be as quick.

  Chapter 34

  Tamarinda faded from sight, from reality itself. Burns had been forced to send the only woman he’d ever truly loved to that one terrible place from which a human could never return.

  His lover had sacrificed herself. He didn’t know why, exactly. He had an inkling: that purple-haired girl, somehow. He’d smelled the girl’s awful perfume on her. The perfume, and the smear of blood upon her cheek. That blood hadn’t belonged to Tamarinda.

  So. What was done was done and could not be undone. Al-Sahir hadn’t given her much of a choice. That conniving bastard had used her spellbinding against her as a means to his own end.

  Oh, yes. Burns brushed his hands and cracked his knuckles, pivoting to face the magician. This would, indeed, be his end.

  Burns lowered his head and smiled, wide, wider, his teeth tiger-sharp. He channeled his fury as the canyon channels the river, allowing it to course through him, filling him. It filled him with a fire that burned bluer and hotter than he’d ever burned. All the anger and frustration he’d endured over the millennia—if he saved it and stacked it and added it all up, it could not measure up to what he felt now.

  He’d been forced to fulfill the Forbidden Wish against his own woman.

  And this was the wretched man who had forced his hand.

  His human form shimmered, the flame inside consuming him. He allowed it to hurt, using the pain as fuel. The magician’s eyes were black pinpoints on white, mouth twisted in a grimace. No doubt he’d long imagined Burns strength and potential. His terror must be devouring him from within, imagining that power unfettered and turned upon him.

  Hmm. Burns nodded. Devoured. Good idea.

  He dropped and reformed, taking the shape of the tiger. Striped shadow, hunter of the night, he who met each danger with a sharp smile. It had been so long since those curved claws had the pleasure of tearing flesh and breaking bone.

  It had been far too long.

  He sprang, one heavy claw swiping outward, hooking into the magician’s arm and ripping. The magician’s mouth opened in a scream, a high-pitched wail. He could not run, he could not cower. No place to go.

  The wound wasn’t enough to cripple or maim. It was enough to bleed, and to cause pain, and to incite greater terror. One wound wouldn’t kill.

  A hundred wounds, well. That was different. And maybe after a hundred wounds, he would begin to feel a little better.

  He roared and pawed the ground, shaking his massive head. The magician held his arm and screamed, the smell of urine filling the hot, heavy air.

  Burns crouched, readying to spring. His woman, his hand. The line of Al-Sahiri Guardians would pay for what he had endured, on this night and every night that had ever led up to it. Those nights were as uncountable as the grains of sands that filled the Empty Quarter, where time itself cowered before the oppression of infinity.

  It would to be a long time before he began to feel better.

  Al-Sahir screamed, all humanity stripped from the sound.

  Burns smiled and ran his tongue across the tips of his fangs. It would be a very long time, indeed.

  Chapter 35

  The sands were vast and hot, golden brown sinews beneath a clear cobalt sky above. A directionless wind blew against her face, the scent of sand riding upon it. Tam twisted, scanning every direction but seeing nothing but sand.

  Alone. She was utterly and completely alone.

  One moment, she had been caught in a spark of screaming agony, a pain so complete that there had been no way to even comprehend it. The pain was a liquid that filled her to capacity, drowning any hope for relief. But it lasted a single moment, an eye blink compared to a lifetime.

  And then, there had been darkness. Nothing but void. She’d hung there, suspended in nothingness. Aware. No light, no sound, no sensory input at all. Just her consciousness. Alone in the void.

  But even that did not last forever. The darkness had thinned and melted away from a sunrise that revealed dunes and desert sky. Her body, intact. Her senses, returned. And her soul, emotion and logic and memory, complete.

  She began to walk, not knowing where she was, where she went. There was no sense of time, only a growing away from her previous life, for with each foot step, her earliest memories began to unravel and fade.

  There was no hunger, no thirst, no fear. Those things had been annihilated.

  Climbing a high dune, she scanned her surroundings from her new vantage. The sun had climbed to a noontime position and remained there, hung like a jewel. She shaded her eyes with one hand, squinting.

  Far off, Tam spied a set of long, white columns. Could it be? They must be—

  She recognized them from her dreams. They formed a gate, she knew now. A portal to her world. The Rub al Khali.

  From her world, she corrected. She’d just passed through them into the Void. This place didn’t exist. And the candlewick woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Was this some sort of afterlife? Had she been discarded, left to wander a sandy world outside of time? She turned away again and continued her solitary trek, scanning the shifting landscape before her. Nothing to do but wander, and think about the life she lived, and the events that had brought her here.

  She had sacrificed herself for the people she cared about. Self-preservation was an instinct, not an emotion, and she had always possessed a healthy sense of it. Before she met Burns, she never had a reason to allow anything to interfere with it. She came first. She’d always come first.

  But then he came along, and painted her life with the colors of emotions, freeing her from the spell that had kept her soul, his talisman, hidden. He was reunited with his talisman, and she was reunited with herself.

  And they were bound together, by magic and by a boundless love. But then, she had to make a drastic choice—

  Sahir would have killed Beth. Now, he could hurt no one. The girl was safe, thanks to her sacrifice. The hope remained that someday Beth would learn to harness the wild throng of emotions that drove her from one extreme to another. She desperately wanted Beth to find happiness and peace. If only she had a wish to spend on it…

  And another to spend on Burns, who she’d forced to do the one thing he never would have done.

  Peace. She prayed for peace, prayed that he would find it and prayed that he would allow it to make a home within him. Now that he was free of the talisman, he had a real chance.

  And if this was her afterlife, so be it. For a few brilliant weeks, she’d lived. She’d actually lived. The sacrifice was worth it and she’d make it again. For him, no price was great enough. If only she hadn’t had to hurt him. She’d had no choice.

  That was her only regret.

  Tam scanned the horizon, debating a change in direction. A thin line separated sand from sky. Upon that line, a whirlwind twisted and danced along the
horizon.

  It grew larger, speeding closer. When the wind shifted and blew against her face, the scent of cinnamon and patchouli flitted by.

  Her heart shifted, losing some of its burden, and she smiled.

  The whirlwind kicked up a plume around itself, the pitch of a tornado’s scream increasing. She glanced around at the featureless dunes surrounding her. No place to hide from a sandstorm.

  But this wasn’t a sandstorm, and she had no intention of hiding from it.

  The whirlwind spiraled to a spot a few yards from her and suddenly stopped. Sand fell to the ground like rain, revealing her lover.

  A column of fire danced before her a moment before settling into his familiar human shape, licks of flame upon his shoulders and chest. Dressed in a navy blue vest and black trousers, he wore fire like a horse wore a sheen of perspiration after a hard run.

  “Tamarinda Kerish. Good. You have arrived, looking no worse for the wear.” He gave her a once-over, making an approving sound deep in his throat. “Al-Sahir is dead. He seemed to have been consumed by his own remorse.”

  He poked at an incisor with a delicate flick of his pinkie finger. “Or perhaps a tiger. One cannot say.”

  She wanted to run to him, touch him, prove to herself he was real.

  But a heaviness still remained in her heart, holding her back. Her core was still cold and numb, the sorrow and regret of her final moments. His last words had been engraved into her soul.

  He’d said he could not forgive her. Her soul was all that truly still existed, and the words glowed like fresh scars.

  Her hands knotted to keep them still, she shuffled her foot in the sand. “I died—but I’m not dead. How can this be?”

  He shrugged. “The laws of Death, of course. A person dying in an extreme state of sin can be…reborn. A second chance.”

  “Extreme state of sin?” She snorted, rolling her eyes. Was he kidding? “Hardly!”

  He waved a finger, lowering his brows in consternation. “Ah, but extreme is subject to interpretation. You did die unforgiven.”

  “By God?”

  With a mighty gesture he puffed his broad chest and crossed his arms again, flexing his muscle and looking every bit like a fearsome demon. He shook his head, bits of flame dripping. “By me.”

  Didn’t she just sacrifice her own life to free him from the slavery of his talisman? If she hadn’t seen him broadside a hundred times already, she just might have been terrified. “What did I do to you?”

  “Have you forgotten? You commanded me to kill you!” He threw his hands up into the air, looking every bit as the temperamental Burns who had once paced her office floor and set the room on fire to prove his silly point. “I would never kill my beloved if I had a choice and I am thoroughly traumatized by the entire event. I am still very angry with you and I certainly have not forgiven you.”

  His beloved. He called her his beloved.

  She dipped her head to hide her smile. Oh, that Burns. Using the backs of her fingers, she rubbed the smile off her mouth and tried to sound contrite. “I have wronged you, Beloved. There is no depth to my wretched state of sin.”

  “Exactly. Rotten sinner.” He sniffed and lifted his chin, looking down his nose at her. “I am merciless but lucky for you, God is not. Now I suppose that in order to give you another chance at redemption, you will have to be reborn as djinni.”

  Reborn…as djinni?

  His grand show had diminished. Burns still stood with his arms crossed, but only did it now to show off his thickly muscled arms and shoulders. His eyes twinkled with suppressed mirth, not fierce anger.

  She ran her eyes down the length of his body, recalling something he’d once said to her.

  If only I could love you the way flame was meant to be loved.

  He caught her looking and licked his lips, slowly.

  A blush heated her cheeks. It was all too easy to imagine what he was thinking because her own thoughts had galloped there already. She played along and wrung her hands, feigning penitence.

  “Then I accept my fate. But…” She peered up at him from under her dark lashes. “Will you stay with me?”

  “It is my curse.” The corner of his mouth twitched and his voice softened. “And my blessing.”

  He extended his hand. “My mother was a wise, wise woman. You remind me of something she told me when I was very young. He whose heart is aroused by love will never die. We have all of forever. Enough time for you to make it up to me.”

  She smiled and slipped her hand into his, feeling the last vestiges of the chill melt away from her naked soul. “I love you.”

  “I know.” He gathered her up against his chest. “I always knew.”

  When the flames came, there was no pain; only the stinging sensation of rebirth and absolute joy so intense that it transcended human description. Here in the Void, she had no body to lose.

  She had only a life to gain.

  A word about the author...

  Ash Krafton is a writer of all things spec fic. She believes spectacular endings make the best beginnings... Why not? One billion black holes can’t be wrong.

  Words That Bind is her first full-length paranormal romance and is part of the Faery Rose line at The Wild Rose Press, Inc. Her urban fantasy novelette Stranger at the Hell Gate is also available with the Black Rose line of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Ash resides with her family in a rural town in the heart of the Pennsylvania anthracite coal region. She’ll never leave, either, because coal is just another example of a spectacular ending waiting for a brilliant beginning. (It’s kinda fitting.) And because, like a black hole, once you’re in...you can never get out.

  Visit her at:

  http://ashkrafton.com

  Thank you for purchasing

  this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.