by Sam Cheever
A fire bolt hit the doorway just inches from my face and I realized I’d have to explore my psyche later. Much later.
Run! The thought wasn’t mine and I didn’t have time to figure out whose it was. The singed feeling on my cheek and the explosion in my ear jolted me out of my daze. I ran in the direction that would carry me away from Nille, but since the cavern was circular I really couldn’t get out of view.
He simply changed direction, still walking at a normal pace, though I knew he could probably cover the distance between us in a fraction of a second. He was secure, confidant, not at all worried about me. I hate that in an enemy. It always encourages me to excel.
As I ran around the edge of the cavern, jumping over the dead husks of bad guys from the various courts as I went, I probed the core of my power and tested it. Gone was my earlier reluctance to pull it out again. I was fighting for my life and even more than that. For all I knew I was fighting for the whole of humankind. It sure seemed like a lot of shit to dump on one, pissed off little Tweener. Hades, life just wasn’t fair.
I stopped when I’d put the length of the cavern between us and stood panting as my eyes sought Nille’s. He had stopped and was smiling at me. Apparently he’d tired of the cat and rodent game and was ready to nibble on my poor, rodent-sized body. I wasn’t going to let him have that nibble if I could stop it.
Although I wanted to run like hell from that place, retrieve Emo and return to my relatively quiet and marginally uneventful prior existence, I knew that option wasn’t open to me. But if I was gonna fight I needed to pick the right place. Something was drawing me back to that altar. While emotionally it was the last place I wanted to go, I figured there must be some reason I was being drawn to it so I gave in to the pull.
I narrowed my eyes at Nille and, surprisingly, I saw the beginnings of his movement toward me. I knew that within a breathlessly short period of time he’d be standing next to me and I reacted. I gathered my magic quickly and, with a whir of light and sound, I was suddenly teetering on the edge of the altar. I’m sure if I could have seen my face as I fought for my balance I would have laughed at the look of shock and surprise there. Apparently I had gained the ability to shimmer and spaceshift from Dialle. Again came the clench in my heart that I had to push away.
Nille was standing where I’d been when I looked up. His face was no longer smug. In fact, the pale blue eyes had narrowed to showcase his anger. Oh hell. Now I’d pissed off the boogeyman. I realized I still had my power gathered around me and I decided to expand it, use it as a protection as I’d done with Rayanne.
Across the room Nille tensed in the first movement of what I now recognized as a spaceshift and I poured everything into my protective bubble to hold him off. Almost immediately I felt him hit my protective wall and instinctively I closed my eyes. His brittle laughter pried them open.
“Your tiny powers are nothing to me, Astra.”
“Oh yeah. Have you seen the lovely Rayanne since she got on my bad side?”
A flash of anger colored the pale eyes before he could stop it. Then he shrugged and the cold smile he wore on his face widened. “Surely you don’t think she was as powerful as me?”
“As I. Always use good grammar when boasting about your ability to eat an enemy. They’ll take you more seriously.” I gave him a smile of my own and then shimmered to a spot just behind him.
As soon as my feet hit the ground I dropped the protective bubble and redirected the power to stab it into him like a psychic sword. It entered his back between the golden shoulder blades and cut a path through his flesh with a sizzle and a snap of bone. I saw it plow out of the front of his chest like a bolt of lightning. He cried out once and then I watched his body tense and my power was ejected from his body. It flew back toward me. I dove for the floor just as it whizzed over my head.
The moment I hit the pile of bodies beneath us, I rolled and flipped back onto my feet. His hand swiped at me but, remembering how he’d disintegrated the demon that had jumped on me earlier, I had a lot of incentive to avoid his touch. I sprang upward, achieving a surprising height of more than ten feet and landed again on the altar. I was instantly aware of a new tingling sensation rising up into my legs. Magic, like tiny explosions of vigor in my blood, burst through me and I suddenly felt jittery with power. I realized that the altar had somehow absorbed an incredible amount of energy and it was making itself available to me. I grinned. I’m not proud. I’ll take all the help I can get. Even from a rock.
I was vaguely aware of a pale, fragile corpse lying across one end of the altar. My senses recognized her before my eyes did. Like the other royals I’d seen, Queen Kaline’s body appeared to have been sucked completely dry. I felt a stab of pain looking at her, but I didn’t have time to think about what it all meant.
Nille strode toward the altar, his golden, muscular arms lifted above his head. The blue of his chilling eyes throbbed with power and something else. I didn’t stay around to find out what he had in mind. I shimmered away and ended up on the ledge above his head with the angels. For a moment Nille lost track of me. I watched his throbbing, blue eyes ripping the cavern apart looking for poor little ol’ me. I shivered. It wouldn’t be good when he found me. He looked royally torqued.
I shrank back into the shadows to think. I knew I had maybe seconds, not much more. For the first time I realized the ledge was littered with bodies in addition to the wide-eyed angels.
Myra and the other angels stood in a semicircle around a dark mound that had probably once been alive. A jolt of cold dread speared through me as I caught Myra’s eye and I knew. It was Dialle. And the angels were standing over him protectively.
My eyes swung to Nille and he was no longer standing where I’d left him. Cold, raw fear crept through my chest but I knew what I had to do. Running to Dialle, I knelt down beside him. He was lying on his side, crumpled like a broken rag doll. He wasn’t moving even a little bit but something about his face gave me hope. I touched his neck and felt nothing. I dropped my face to his and said a silent prayer that I would feel breath upon my cheeks. Nothing.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nille shimmer to a spot about ten feet away. Almost instinctively, the angels closed ranks around us and began to swell with light. A warm nimbus emanated from the encircled angels and vibrated against my skin. The circle of light was filled with an energy that was pure power. I realized they had covered us with protection. My eyes flew to Myra’s and she frowned.
“For the moment he will not breach our protective wall. The goodness within it would burn his skin like acid. But he is powerful, Astra. He will not be stopped for long.”
“What should I do?”
Myra shrugged. “That is for you and Dialle to determine.”
It was my turn to frown. Dialle was dead. Wasn’t he? In desperation I reached up and touched the mating mark at my throat. It began to throb as I touched it. Almost immediately I felt a shift in my mental drawers. The merest whisper only. He was so weak. Guilt washed over me. I’d let him down when he’d needed me. And now he was dead or dying.
Tears ran down my cheeks as I dropped to the ground and placed my forehead against his, thinking his name with everything I had in me. Dialle! I need your help to fight Nille. Don’t leave me…please!
Nothing. I stayed there, pleading with him mentally and then I sat up in desperation and cried openly. I felt the angels’ eyes on me but I couldn’t look up at them. It was over. I’d failed. Nille would win.
My hand reached out and brushed a long tangle of silky hair from Dialle’s face. He was terrifyingly pale. He looked like a cold, porcelain statue on that dirt floor. So beautiful. So perfect. So cold to the touch.
My hand stopped in mid-caress as I saw, for the first time, the mark on his neck that matched mine. I stared at the pale, red teardrop and my heart started to pump again.
I felt adrenaline like fire course through my veins. My fingers were drawn to touch it. I reached out, placing the tips of two of my f
ingers against the mark and felt it immediately warm under my touch.
My mental drawers shifted and static poured through my mind. Somewhere in the midst of the static was a weak voice. Dialle’s voice. I strained to understand it. It sounded like he was telling me to touch the mark he’d made on my own neck. I shook my head. Somehow I knew that, if I did, my life would change forever. I resisted until I felt him slipping away again and then I panicked. My eyes dropped to the hand that still clutched the knife in my lap and I forced my fingers to unwrap from the warm metal. Although I knew the thing was worthless against my current foe, years of dependence on physical weapons made me incredibly reluctant to give one up when I found myself in a dangerous spot. But I dropped it because I had to.
I moved my fingers to hover over the mark on my neck. It was throbbing wildly now. I wasn’t sure I could touch it. Somehow I knew it would close the connection between Dialle and me and permanently bind us. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But my choices had been taken away from me. So I closed my eyes and touched the mark.
Power exploded between us. Dialle’s body surged into a sitting position and one of his hands closed painfully around my wrist, holding us together. His eyes shot open and I was suddenly looking into a pool of ocean blue that registered calm despite the violence of our joining. His sensual mouth opened enough so that I could see the tip of his tongue playing at the sharp, white teeth. His face held the look of a man near orgasm. I’m sure mine held the look of somebody who needed to change her underwear.
The magic wound through us and around us with ravenous energy, locking us together physically as well as mentally. Pictures flew through my mind of things I’d never seen, never experienced. I felt our minds merging and wondered at the thoughts we shared. Would Dialle view the outlines of my life as I seemed to be viewing his?
The power, incredibly, was growing. I felt as if a million volts of electricity poured through my veins. I was burning up from the inside. My skin felt as if it were being ripped off of my body one small, horrifically painful piece at a time.
Somehow Dialle and I had become entwined the full length of our bodies. My arms were wrapped around him, his around me. Each of us had one leg wrapped around the other’s body so that we formed a perfect path for the energy to flow through. Our foreheads touched and I could feel his heated breath against my lips. Our skin felt seared together. I don’t think we could have separated if we’d wanted to. And, although the joining was painful, I really didn’t want to. The force of our joining was almost sexual, like nothing I’d ever felt before.
As the path formed and the bond was completed, our bodies flew off the ground and hung in the air, twisting manically while the power tossed us around. It plowed through us as if we had somehow created a pathway from the spiritual world to the physical world, allowing it to enter and fill that dim, blood-soaked cavern. It drove back the circle of angels. It drove everything on the ledge away. On some level I became aware that the cavern walls were quaking with it. The ledge was breaking away and falling into the cavern below.
A sudden, hot, bright light filled the cavern and I realized the power had drilled a hole through the miles of rock above our heads and I was looking at the sun, feeling it burn the top of my head. It was crazy. It was wonderful. It was impossible.
Little by little, inch by inch the power eased away from us. Slowly Dialle and I floated toward the floor, still wrapped tightly together. As our feet neared the floor his lips met mine and a new kind of explosion ripped through us. Every pore on my body, every sense I owned, every muscle fiber I had, responded to his hungry kiss. If the power hadn’t convinced me that Dialle and I were joined for good, that kiss certainly would have done it.
We may have stayed that way for hours, days, weeks. I don’t know. I only know that when we surfaced we were surrounded by whirring, shimmery things and the cavern was bathed in a soft, golden light that had nothing to do with the encroaching sun.
I pulled away from him guiltily, suddenly ashamed and embarrassed. Suddenly I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere but in that cavern. Not a new feeling for me I know but this time it was for totally different reasons.
Dialle was watching me with a knowing look that made me want to hide. I tried not to look directly at him and ended up searching for my angel instead.
She floated down beside me, her usual scowl firmly in place. “You rang?”
“What about Nille?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He shimmered away when you and Dialle channeled the power.”
It was my turn to scowl. “He’s gone? Where?”
Dialle’s voice pulled my gaze reluctantly toward his. My heart leapt in my chest as my brain finally registered the blue eyes. “He has not left. He is all around us.”
“What the hell does that mean? Why do you dark world types always talk like you’re stuck in the middle of a bad western wearing eagle feathers on your foreheads…”
I didn’t get much further than that. As I’d been indulging in my screaming tantrum—stress always makes me irrationally cranky—I had been dimly aware of a rumbling sound growing nearer. It seemed to be coming from beneath the cavern floor. Gradually the rumbling moved from the center of the Earth and emerged through cracks in the dirt and rock floor beneath our feet. The ground started to shift and break apart. Myra and Dialle each grabbed one of my hands and we were suddenly airborne. We shot upward at an impossible rate of speed. Even at that pace I felt the hole in the cavern closing rapidly around us. The light of the sun was being reduced by half with every advancing second. Throwing a panicked look upward, I realized we weren’t going to make it out in time. We were going to be buried alive.
I was conscious of silvered forms shooting past us and felt a moment of anger as I assumed they were scurrying through the hole before us, leaving us to be buried alive. But as we neared the quickly narrowing hole I realized that the angels had formed a tight circle at the opening and were holding it open with a ring of power.
We barely made it through the quickly narrowing hole before it exploded inward. The implosion sucked two of the angels into the hole, covering them with tons of rock and dirt.
Myra cried out and looked toward the imploding Earth beneath us with a look of such pain on her face. I followed her gaze and saw a familiar form disappearing into the crumbling Earth. I sucked in a horrified breath. I suddenly knew that I would go to my grave picturing Prevara’s terrified face as she was sucked away. Killed saving me. Shit. I wasn’t worth it.
I closed my eyes as my feet came to ground far away from the spot where the Earth still clashed and screamed and sank away. I felt Myra’s hand drop from mine and I turned to her. “I’m sorry, angel.”
She threw me a scowl that was even more intense than her usual and shimmered away. I recognized the scowl for what it was. A coping mechanism, an attempt not to show me how upset she was. I sighed, fighting tears myself.
Dialle grabbed my hand and pulled. My nerves had melded together into one, big, raw thing and as he pulled at me I snapped. I yanked my hand away and screamed. “Leave me the hell alone. I’m sick of you pushy, frunking devils. I’m going to see if I can help.” With that I turned and headed back toward the cave, where I hoped Emo was still among the living. Maybe the angels could be saved. Maybe I could dig my way through…
I didn’t get far. Suddenly Dialle was standing in front of me, blocking my escape. I scowled up at him. “Get thee to Hades and bathe in fire.” When I’m upset I revert to Tweenspeak, which isn’t the most gentle of languages.
Dialle’s face was a calm, golden mask. He simply stared at me until I screamed in frustration and gave in. “What do you want from me?”
“Our work is not done. Nille lives.”
“I thought you wanted him alive. What was that you said while I was in the cavern—Prince Nille must not be sacrificed?”
He inclined his head, spreading glossy black strands of dusty silk across broad shoulders. “That is true. If Nerul had co
mpleted the ceremony Nille’s power would have been increased tenfold. That would have been bad.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “No shit. Talk about your average galactic-sized understatement.”
The calm mask didn’t alter. “As you have seen, he is already too powerful.”
I felt the hair on my entire body stand up on end. “Too powerful? Are you telling me he can’t be stopped?”
Dialle grinned at last. I tried not to notice the effect it had on my stomach. “There is one way.”
I threw my hands up between us, palms outward and shook my head. “No. Don’t tell me. Really, I want to guess. Let’s see…I’m sure that I’ll have to have sex with a man-sized worm or something.” As Dialle’s grin widened I felt a cold sweat break out on my face. “I was just kidding. Don’t smile at me like that. Oh shit, you dark world types suck. I’m not dating some slimy worm, I don’t care if it does save the world!”
He grabbed one of my hands and turned away, bringing me with him. “Come. There isn’t much time.”
I let him drag me away, what else could I do? “Ok, but we have to get Emo on the way.”
Dialle simply nodded. “He’s already been taken care of.”
My heart kicked up about a thousand beats. Horrified, I couldn’t help asking, “What the hell do you mean…” But I wasn’t to be allowed to finish the question. The air changed around me and the world shifted into fast forward. And then the universe went completely mute and numb.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Into the Beast’s Lair
Alas our lady did go hence, into the devil’s lair,
And found the future in its depths, let’s hope she prospers there!
We landed in a familiar room, surrounded by a familiar crowd. Déjà vu hit me right between the eyes and my instincts told me to run like hell. But Dialle kept a firm grip on my hand and, as he pulled me toward the curved table at the front of the huge room, the crowd of lesser devils and demons split away from us and, incredibly, they bowed us through.