Adam’s arms clamped tighter around her as he tried to drag her back to earth. Instead he was hauled into the air with her. Another electric jolt stormed through her body, and she convulsed. “Let me go! It’ll kill you too!”
“No!” Adam hung on as they rose higher. They were over the roofline of the porch now. “I’ll catch you!” His arms encircled her so tightly that she couldn’t even breathe.
Something cracked, accompanied by a hot lance of pain. A rib had given under his grip. Cheryl yelped, staring into her son’s turquoise eyes as the whirling pressure built inside her skull, a violent psychic storm.
Another rib cracked. Adam realized he was crushing her, and his tormented eyes widened.
He let go and fell.
She convulsed, trying to grab for him, but he was gone. No! We’ve got to be forty feet up! He’ll…
He’ll be fine, an alien mental voice said. It wasn’t a product of her own mind. He’s not human anymore.
Cheryl jerked in helpless terror as she realized she wasn’t alone in her head. Oh, shit…
Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.
Who the fuck are you?
You may call me Gaia.
In Greek mythology, Gaia had been the primordial goddess who had given birth to the gods. Gaia? What are you? What do you want? And get the fuck out of my head!
I can’t do that. If you and your people are to survive, I’m the only hope you have.
Against what? What the hell is going on?
The Hive is coming. They’re coming, and they’re going to kill every living thing on this planet. Your people will not be able to stop them. Even the Magekind will be helpless.
Magekind? What are you…
Horrific images stormed her consciousness.
Adam’s face, contorted in agony as he died -- as something killed him. Paul, roaring in defiance as he fought to defend their son, only to fall dead as the life was ripped out of him. Faces without number whirled like fall leaves past her mind’s eye, screaming in pain and terror.
Dying.
Greedy darkness swirled around them, delighting in their fear and anguish. Stripping the life from every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet. Gorging on the stolen energy of their victims.
Alien. Unspeakable. Unstoppable.
They devoured my people too, Gaia whispered. We discovered how to fight back too late. The Hive left Erruli a barren waste, just as they’ve wiped out so many other inhabited planets. But together, you and I can save this world. I can make you into the weapon I was. We can kill Hivemother. We can save your people as I was too late to save mine.
It was insane. She didn’t want to believe any of this, but the sheer weight of alien knowledge crushed her ability to doubt. Me? What can I do?
Learn to fight. Learn to channel the power I’ll give you. Otherwise Earth will end up like Erruli. You will end your life as I ended mine…
Abruptly Cheryl lay on her back in such pain, it was all she could do to breathe. Wherever she was, it wasn’t Earth. Two suns hung in the sky, one small and yellow near the horizon, the other a sullen crimson glow directly overhead, bigger than any noon sun she’d ever seen.
Christ, it was hot.
Two moons rose opposite the yellow sun, pale and ghostly against the violet sky.
The smell of rot hung in the air, gagging her with a suffocating reek that filled her nose and mouth. She lifted one hand to cover her mouth against the need to vomit.
She had six fingers.
Her skin was covered in a weird cross between feathers and scales. Whatever it was, it had an iridescent sheen.
I failed my people, Gaia said, mourning and rage in her unearthly voice. They all died. Everything on my world died to feed the Hive. But you and I can save your people and avenge mine.
This is insane!
Is it? You’ve always believed humanity wasn’t alone, always dreamed aliens would come to Earth in your lifetime. Well, here I am. And the ones who are coming next won’t be so easily vanquished as the idiot Fomorians. Ulf -- Paul -- won’t be able to save you. He’ll die like Adam. Like you and your neighbors and your country and your world. Unless you allow me to give you power. Unless you become my weapon.
This is impossible!
But as she tasted the reeking air of a long-dead planet, she knew it was true. Every word. The brutal reality of it burned her mind like a brand.
The words rolled from her that sealed her fate. I don’t want humanity to end up like this. I’ll help. Do it.
Yes! Gaia exploded over her consciousness in a hurricane of thought, of memories, of sheer power that threatened to shred her mind like wet toilet paper. Until pain turned to power, hot and intoxicating, making her heart pound and her body shudder.
When it was over, she found herself hanging in mid-air. Below her, Adam, Paul, and people in gold armor fought the aliens. Somehow she knew only seconds had passed since Adam had fallen to the ground.
What you want to do now? Gaia asked.
Help Adam and Paul with the aliens.
His name isn’t Paul.
More merciless knowledge flooded her consciousness. For a moment she thought her mind was going to crack into shards of disbelief, strained beyond bearing.
She’d been in love with a Knight of the Round Table? Who was also a vampire?
She’d felt so betrayed the day he’d walked out on her. This was worse. He lied to me. He lied like a serial killer. For a decade.
Yes, said Gaia, sharing a whirling blur of what she’d seen from Ulf’s signet. But he did love you. Still loves you. He left only because you were a mortal -- and he wasn’t. But you aren’t mortal anymore. Do you want to show him what we can do?
She thought of the people the Fomorians had killed in Times Square. The funerals she’d watched on television, the tears she’d cried for the cops, the tourists, all the poor bastards who’d been butchered or burned to death. Oh, yeah. Let’s make them pay.
Even as she smiled in her sleep at how she’d terrorized the Fomorians, the memory began to fade, spinning away into nothing. Leaving behind the worst day of her life.
Cheryl pulled into the garage, weary to the bone. It was almost five in the morning. She’d worked well past her shift, thanks to a bus collision with a dozen injuries, many of them life threatening. But the dark blue 1992 Jaguar XJS sitting in the garage’s other bay made her smile. Paul was here. He’d called the hospital to tell her he was picking Adam up from the sitter.
But as she got out of her BMW, the sound of raised voices wiped the smile off her face. What the hell is Adam doing awake? He’s got school in the morning. She hurried to jerk open the door.
“Daddy, no, please! I’ll be good, I can get better grades…” The boy was sobbing so hard, she could barely understand him.
“Your grades are fine, son, there’s nothing wrong with your grades.” Christ, Paul was crying? Paul never cried.
“What’s going on?” she demanded, running down the hall into the den. “What happened?”
Paul stood in the middle of the room, his powerful arms encircling a pajama-clad Adam, who’d wrapped both fists into his blue dress shirt. The boy’s hair stood up in sweaty spikes, tears and snot running down his flushed face, his red eyes swollen.
“Mom!” the boy howled. “He’s leavin’!”
She stopped dead, her jaw dropping as her stunned brain screamed a denial. “But… but he just got here.” The words emerged, faint with shock and a hideous, dawning realization. No no no no. “You just got here. Where are you going? You never said anything…”
“Look at her. You can’t do this!” Adam yelled, dragging down on the shirt, almost climbing his father in his hysteria. “You can’t, you can’t, please, don’t do this to us, I’ll do anything, we’ll do anything… Please, Daddy…”
“You’re leaving us.” She couldn’t move. It felt as though her feet were sinking into the earth, as if she was being sucked into hell. “The
re’s someone else.”
“No!” Paul let go of Adam to free a shaking hand and reach toward her. His eyes looked impossibly wide, craters of pain in his handsome face. “It’s not that. I love you -- I’ll love you until the day I die. But I can’t stay. I can’t keep doing this to you. It’s killing you.”
“The only one killing us is you.” This is a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare.
“Daddy, please don’t go! Daddy, no!”
The anguish in her son’s wail ripped into Cheryl’s heart like a blade. It also triggered a wave of sheer betrayed rage such as she’d never felt in her life. Peeling her lips off her teeth, she charged across the room, drawing back a fist.
Paul closed his eyes in agony. Waiting to be hit as if he knew he deserved worse.
“Mom, no!” Adam threw himself at her so hard, he almost knocked her off her feet.
She dropped the fist to wrap herself around her child, glaring at the man she’d loved. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
* * *
“Hey… Hey, Cheryl…” a male voice said, deep and resonant. “Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”
She jerked, her eyes flying open as the dream spun away, leaving behind a familiar residue of despair and grief. Oh. That dream. She lay on her back, wondering where she was. And what was that on her chest?
Enormous blue eyes in an inky face appeared above her. Her head snapped up and she realized a black house cat perched on her chest. She blinked at him, dazed, wondering where he’d come from. Automatically, she lifted a hand to stroke silky black fur. “I didn’t know Ulf had a cat,” she said.
“He doesn’t,” the cat replied, in a James Earl Jones kind of voice that reverberated in her chest.
It was only then that she spotted the silver stripes on his legs and haunches. Gaia’s memories disgorged a name. “Oh, yeah. Hi, Smoke.”
Glancing around warily, she saw she was still in Ulf’s guest room. Judging from the light blazing through stained-glass windows, the sun was up. “What are you doing here?”
“We’ve come to talk to you.” Another voice, this one coming from the man who lounged in the armchair in the corner. He was ridiculously handsome, of course, as all the Magekind were, but his hair was a deep cobalt blue, and his eyes were an inhuman crimson.
Oh, God. It’s Kel. She remembered the argument Ulf had used in his attempt to convince her to talk to him. “Because the alternative is we get Smoke or Kel to question you. They can get the knowledge out of your head whether you want to tell us or not.”
Chapter Five
This was bad. Kel’s other form was a dragon, and the seven-pound cat on Cheryl’s chest turned into an eight-hundred-pound Mageverse tiger. Among other things. She eyed Smoke warily. “So how worried should I be that you two show up when Adam and Ulf are in the Daysleep? Just what is the magical equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition?”
“Don’t worry, we’re a lot more subtle than that,” the cat said.
When she stiffened, Kel rolled his eyes. “Oh, calm down, child. We have no intention of hurting you.”
“People keep telling me that. I keep not believing them.” Cheryl picked up the cat as if he was the house pet he appeared and slid off the bed, automatically cuddling him in her arms. She’d always loved cats.
Kel tensed, and those red eyes took on a menacing glint. “Put Smoke down.”
She froze, then slowly lowered the cat the floor. “I wouldn’t hurt him.”
“Of course not,” Smoke said. He was evidently playing Good Cop in today’s festivities. “Let’s take a walk.” He turned and trotted toward the door.
Cheryl swallowed, straightened her long shirt, and followed his inky tail. Every muscle in her back tensed as Kel rose and strode after her. Her mind babbled, Forty feet of fire breathing lizard, forty feet of fire breathing lizard…
It took all her self-control not to look over her shoulder.
* * *
Cheryl looked down at the intricate magic circle and took an involuntary step back. “Oh, hell no.”
“It’s not going to hurt you,” Smoke told her, his tone patient.
“Yeah, calling bullshit,” she muttered, eying the symbols painted on the floor. Her Gaia memories identified them as a mix of Sidhe, Magekind and draconic sigils. Gaia, what kind of spell is that?
No answer. Hell, her head almost echoed. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought the goddess/ghost/weapon had gone off to haunt some other poor bitch, leaving Cheryl to face the Magekind Inquisition all by herself. Thanks a lot.
She glanced around, automatically looking for an escape. They’d conducted her to the Majae’s Hall, an immense gothic stone pile of a building where the witches kept their magical libraries and labs. This one was located deep below ground. Which wasn’t ominous at all.
As if Smoke and Kel didn’t have her thoroughly outgunned all by themselves, they’d been joined by Morgana le Fay and Eva Roman, Smoke’s wife. Apparently the kitty’s third form was a hot Sidhe warrior.
Cheryl eyed Eva warily. The pretty, brown-eyed brunette had manifested a pair of ghostly stag horns with little sparks leaping between the tines. Which was even more weird when you considered Eva was a werewolf. A decade ago, during the battle with a werewolf sorcerer named Warlock, she’d merged with Zephyr, a powerful elemental who inhabited the body of a stag. Then Warlock ate him, and Eva had merged with Zephyr’s vengeful ghost, gaining both horns and impressive powers.
Between Kel, Smoke, Morgana, and Eva, Cheryl was beginning to feel like Custer at the Little Big Horn. So no, she wasn’t stepping into that fricking circle.
“Look, it really isn’t going to hurt you,” Morgana said, as if speaking to a recalcitrant toddler who didn’t want to eat her vegetables. The note of condescension made Cheryl long to give her a ringing slap. “The circle is designed to bypass whatever spells Gaia may have cast on you. It will merely allow you to speak the truth.”
Like what Gaia told me about the…
For a moment, it was right on the tip of her tongue. Then… nothing.
Realization hit. Oh, crap, she blanked my memory. Why did she do that? What’s she hiding? What are we hiding? “In other words, it’ll pry me open like an oyster.” Cheryl folded her arms and glowered. “Sorry, not in the mood to get shucked.”
“You’re assuming you have a choice,” Morgana said in a silken voice.
Cheryl eyed the witch. “You know, I’ve never particularly liked being bullied.”
“Then don’t make it necessary to bully you.”
“Okay, that’s it. Coming up,” Smoke said from Cheryl’s feet, and leaped.
Cheryl caught the cat automatically, as he must have known she would. Something about his warm, furry weight made her want to pet him. Forget it, I’m not that…
He started rumbling a comforting vibration, and she found herself cuddling him. “Purring? Really? That’s dirty pool, you manipulative little flea farm.”
Huge blue eyes gazed into hers, hypnotic and earnest. “You keep saying you know us. If that’s true, you know we’re not the bad guys.”
“I also know magic doesn’t always act the way you expect. Remember Cherise Myers? She died of anaphylactic shock before you could figure out the Magekind were allergic to werewolf bites.”
Cheryl thought Morgana flinched a little. “Merlin designed that reaction to protect his werewolves from us. This spell is nothing like that.”
“Look,” Smoke put in, “I’m not going to let her do anything nasty. If you cooperate, we can get this over with and you can go back to Earth.”
He sounded like he meant it. And an eight-hundred-pound magical tiger would make a formidable protector, even against the Magekind’s answer to Lucretia Borgia.
But he could also overpower Cheryl. Hell, they had enough magical firepower in the room to do whatever they wanted to her. Back home, she could hold her own, but here… She just wished she knew what the hell kind of game Gaia was playing. The spirit had kno
wn this was coming, or she wouldn’t have made Cheryl forget… whatever the fuck she’d forgotten. There were some big holes in her memory. Not good.
Unfortunately, they could put her in their circle any time they wanted, and there was nothing she could do about it. “Okay, Goddamnit.” Cheryl dropped the cat on the floor and stepped over him into the circle, ignoring his injured sniff. “Ask your questions. Not that I…” The words choked off as an iron vise clamped down over her skull. Her legs buckled and she crashed to her knees. She barely felt herself hit the stone floor.
“Cheryl!” Smoke’s alarmed voice seemed to come from miles away.
“She’s fine.” Morgana sounded just as thin and distant. “Let’s just get this over with. No matter what that creature has compelled her to believe, the circle will get the truth.”
Silence fell, seeming to thrum. She swayed forward to brace her palms on the floor, feeling as if her brain was suffocating in layers of cotton.
“What’s all that… crystal inside your body?” Morgana asked.
“Crystal?” Cheryl stared down at a weird draconic glyph. It glowed against the dark granite of the stone floor, its iridescent colors shifting. She wondered vaguely what it meant.
“Crystal webbing surrounds your bones and muscles. It even has tendrils throughout your brain. What is it?”
She didn’t want to answer, but Morgana’s question seemed to dig into her mind. Cheryl set her teeth as the pressure turned crushing. She fought a scream…
The word clawed its way free while she was distracted by the pain. “Circuitry.”
“Circuitry?” Smoke sounded puzzled. “Like a computer?”
“Our magic… isn’t like yours.” Now that the dam had broken, the words kept flowing, bypassing her will even as she strained to silence them. “We can’t just strike a pose and point.”
“There’s quite a bit more to using Magekind magic than that,” said Morgana, sounding offended.
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