by Jayde Brooks
When Eden was a child, Rose was her refuge and her teacher. As Eden grew older, Rose became her anchor in a life that seemed to become more confusing with each passing year. Rose had tried to make Eden understand what was happening to her. She’d hoped that Eden would somehow embrace her so-called destiny, but she might as well have asked Eden to take a running leap over the moon.
* * *
They only wanted the pretty ones. This one was pretty. Very pretty. Tall and shapely; she wore her hair long. Both of them liked long hair on a woman. She wore her jeans tight. Nice. She was young too, with smooth skin, soft-looking and brown. And she had a beautiful mouth. It was hard not to be impressed by the shape of it, with lips that looked pillow-soft. One of them liked to kiss and would kiss her. The other didn’t care for kissing at all, but still … she had a nice mouth.
All the girls were careless. That’s one of the things they all had in common. They felt safe in their own skin, believed that nothing or no one could hurt them. It was obvious in how they walked and carried themselves, confidently and without concern or worry. They all knew how beautiful they were, but none of them believed that their beauty could be that thing that trapped them and condemned them.
Neither man—brothers—ever had to talk about the things they did. They never had to plan or discuss their intentions with the women. They were twins, after all, and knew each other’s thoughts and needs intimately. When they spotted a woman, if they were together, they’d both fall into their roles quite naturally to make the magic happen.
This woman caught the train at three o’clock in the morning into Brooklyn after leaving the bar where she worked. She walked the same path to the same subway station and stood in the same spot on the platform waiting for the same train, and when it came, she’d get on and sit in the same seat. One of the brothers followed her down into that train station; the other was already there, waiting. Except for the three of them, the platform was empty.
The anticipation was nearly as gratifying as the act itself. It was about more than just the sex. It was about the element of surprise, of catching the cocky bitch off guard and proving to her once and for all that she wasn’t invincible or too damn beautiful to be touched. It was as much about the power, the control of taking what they wanted without having to wait for permission. It was about the adrenaline coursing through the three of them, the woman in fighting for her virtue and even her life, and the two brothers, fighting back, knowing that they were stronger and that they outnumbered her and that they could have her simply because.
Like so many of the others, she paid more attention to that damn iPhone than she did to her surroundings, and before she could brace herself, the brother who’d followed her in from the street wrapped one muscled arm around her small waist and cupped her mouth with his other hand a split second before she could scream. The other brother grabbed her feet, and together, while she struggled, they carried her kicking and squirming into the janitorial closet. Broom handles! One of them imagined the things that could be done to a woman with broom handles, and he salivated.
They were so much alike and yet so different. One of the brothers, the one cupping her mouth, loved to cause them pain. How many different ways could he make her cry, suffer, bleed. But the other was the opposite. He was the one who hated to see them cry, the one who loved them and wanted to make love to them to make them forget about the pain and the suffering. He wanted them to want him, to need him, and to be thankful for him.
“Be still!” the one covering her mouth growled, backing into that small closet with her. “Stop it, or I’ll snap your fuckin’ neck!”
He pressed his hard cock, thickened, against her spine, letting her know what was waiting for her. The other brother let go of her legs but pushed himself close to her and squeezed between her thighs before she could kick at him.
“Shhhhh,” he said, stroking her lovely face. Tears and fear filled her eyes. It broke his heart.
“Do it!” his brother commanded from over her shoulder. “Get her jeans off!”
The one in front of her nodded. His hands raked down her shirt and over firm breasts. Nipples tickled his palms. They were rock hard. She was afraid. They were hard because she was afraid, but he would lick them and taste them and make her forget how afraid she was.
“It’s all right,” he said, soothingly, but she was getting to be too much. Waiting for her was getting to be too much, and he had to have her. That was the rule. He’d get to have her first, and make love to her while his brother watched. And then, when he finished, he’d hand her over to him. “It’s all right, sweetheart. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
“Hurry up!” his brother growled.
He unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and then started to undo hers.
* * *
This wasn’t happening! It wasn’t real!
“I won’t hurt you.” The man stepped away from her and began to unzip her jeans.
“Hurry the fuck up, man!” The other one holding her from behind demanded.
She was being raped. This was really happening! Eden squeezed her eyes shut.
Stop them! Her voice commanded in her head. Her fear was overwhelmed by anger. How dare they put their filthy hands on her! And anger became swallowed by blood, red rage!
Fuckin’ punish them!
Their ignorance will be their death!
Eden reached for the hand covering her mouth and relished the satisfying sensation of bones crushing in her grasp. The man holding her from behind screamed in agony, but Eden shut him up quickly with a jerk of her head, slamming it so hard into his mouth that she heard his jaw break. He released his grip on her, and Eden dropped hard to the floor on her back.
Movements clicked away in her mind like seconds on a clock, deliberate and methodical, coming to her so naturally that she felt as if she were putting on a performance.
“Hold her! Dammit!” The other man had no choice but to let her go, too, and when he did, Eden kicked him hard in his groin with the heel of her shoe and met him in the face with another kick when he doubled over in pain.
She stood up and looked down at both of them, one gushing blood from his nose and mouth, the other with tears in his eyes, cupping his balls in both hands, and writhing on the floor, glaring up at her.
They looked small and weak. Eden opened the door and stepped over the one sobbing on the floor.
“No!” He reached out and grabbed her by the ankle.
“Mashbah!” she growled, jerking away from him and kicking him in the face. The word meant something along the same lines as “fucker.”
She grabbed him by the hair and dragged him out of the small room and into the open, then dropped him like the sack of shit he was on the concrete floor. Eden knelt down next to him to get a closer look at how helpless this mashbah—“fucker”—really was.
“You’re so fuckin’ small,” she said, awed by how frail and helpless he truly was. He was inferior to her on so many levels that it was almost painful to look at him. He was an insect, something to be crushed underfoot and not even worth the effort of consideration, no matter how slight.
She was so focused on this one that she forgot about the other one, creeping up behind her, until she heard the sound of him gasping. Eden stood up and turned around. The other man was fighting for air as his feet dangled at least a foot off the ground. An Ancient, one unlike any she had ever seen before, held him by the throat and stared past the gasping would-be rapist at her with eyes the color of mercury.
Eden’s heart pounded. She had never seen— But he was familiar! Oh God! She knew this one! How?
His lips parted to say something, but the one on the floor screamed out. “Let my brother go!”
She turned to look at him, and in her mind’s eye an image began to take shape. It was … dust. Simple dust. And his skin gradually began to turn red. “What’s happening?” he cried. What are you— Fuck! Oh … fuck!” Piercing screams erupted from him as he watched in horror; his hands
begin to wither, his fingernails melted like wax, and the skin on his hands and arms peeled away from muscles and tendons. Even his clothes began to fall away as he looked up at her, screaming in agony and horror as it happened, until finally his screams faded and there was nothing left but bone and ash. In seconds, he was gone.
Eden swallowed the lump in her throat, and a wave of nausea overwhelmed her. She blinked at what was left of that man lying on the ground and stumbled backward knowing that she had done this, only … she had no idea how.
“Mkombozi?”
That word, the sound of the Ancient’s voice forced her to turn back to him. The other man, the brother of the one she’d turned to ash, lay crumpled on the floor at the giant’s feet.
“It is you,” he said, taking a step toward her.
It was … her! It is her!
“Oh!” She gagged, and covered her mouth with her hand to keep from vomiting.
Eden took a step toward him too, but then … she wasn’t ready!
“No!” she shouted, holding up her hand to him. “I can’t!”
She ran toward the exit and up the stairs out into the street and gulped in buckets of air. Is this how it was going to be? Is this what it meant to be Mkombozi? “She was a warrior,” Khale had told her. Mkombozi was a telepath who could kill with a thought.
“One day you’ll see for yourself what she was capable of, Eden,” Khale had said. “Even without the Omens, the Redeemer was dangerous.”
Mkombozi was no warrior. She was a killer. Eden had just … killed.
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
It was not Mkombozi’s body, but it was her essence. It was her, and he was not going to let this one deny him. Prophet, the Guardian, chased her out into the city and saw her running half a block from the subway entrance. He chased her down and grabbed hold of her arm.
“It is you!” he said, turning her to look into his eyes.
But fear stared back at him, fear and confusion.
“Let go of me!” she demanded, jerking out of his grasp.
She was crying. It was her—Mkombozi. It had to be, because no human could do what she had just done to the man in the station.
“Don’t you know me?” he asked angrily. “If you are her, then you should know me.”
The human shook her head and started to run again. Just as he had started to run after her, a small woman with large glasses stepped in front of him.
“Not now, Guardian.” It was Khale.
He shoved her out of his way and went after Mkombozi. Seconds later, a bull appeared in front of him. Again, it was Khale.
“I won’t let you stop me,” he warned her.
“They see you, Guardian, and they see you talking to yourself.”
She was referring to the humans who had stopped and stared quizzically at him. Their eyes were masked to the form of the talking animal, but they couldn’t deny the images of him.
“I don’t give a damn,” he snapped, charging toward the bull.
Khale lowered her massive head, charged toward him, and in mid-stride changed her form into a condor, grabbing him with her talons and carrying him away. He tried to will his own wings to extend, but she held him so that he couldn’t get them to release.
They flew for miles before she finally dropped him into a wide open field in the middle of nowhere and shifted back into the form of the small woman.
“You’re a fucking idiot!” she shouted, stalking around him.
“You have no right to keep me from her, Shifter!” he growled. “I’m her Guardian.”
“You were Mkombozi’s Guardian, yes. But this one—Eden—doesn’t know you, Tukufu. She is afraid of you.”
“If she is the reborn, then there’s no way in hell she can be afraid of me. She knows me the way I know her.”
“Did she look as if she knew you?” Khale challenged.
He’d waited too long for this. She was there, right there, in his grasp, his purpose, the one he had been waiting for all these many, many years, and Khale was blocking him.
“She will know me, Khale,” he said, forcing his anger to subside. “But she can’t if you keep her from me.”
The Shifter reigned in her frustration. “She is not one of us, Guardian,” she explained. “Yes, she is Mkombozi in essence, but even that is something she still hasn’t come to accept yet. We frighten her. I’ve tried to prepare her as best I could, but there is something about her that resists her destiny. She can’t, or won’t, accept who she is, and because of that, she won’t accept any of us.”
He raked his hands through his hair in frustration. “So, what’s that supposed to fuckin’ mean? That we wait another four thousand years for her to come around?”
“None of us has that long, Tukufu,” she said gravely. “The Demon is back. And this war has started already even though no one seems to know it. This world is changing because he’s changing it. Humans go on living their lives, while he slowly destroys them. They can’t see it.”
Prophet studied her. “How do you know this?”
“This mysterious disease infecting humans,” she began to explain, “this flu that they’ve been reporting, isn’t what they think it is.”
He shrugged. “Humans get the flu. They get sick.”
“Not like this,” she said gravely. “A doctor, an Ancient, told me that this is unlike anything he’s ever seen in human history. People have been on the brink of death with this disease, only to miraculously recover. In some cases, some have even died and come back to life.”
He had heard that Sakarabru was back. Ancients everywhere seemed to be preparing for the worst, gathering together again into their colonies, reaching out to one another again to reform old alliances.
“Then we’re wasting time,” he told Khale. “We can’t wait for her to accept me, or any of us. Which is why you need to let me go after her. I can tell her what she needs to know, teach her the things she needs to learn.”
“It’s not that easy,” Khale reasoned. “She’s not willing to accept any part of this, not the fact that she is Mkombozi, not you or even me. And she wants nothing to do with the Omens. The bonds have to be made, or this time Sakarabru will succeed.”
“So what are you saying? I should back off and let her come into her own when she’s ready? If what I’m hearing is true, then she has to be made ready.”
Khale wanted to believe that Mkombozi was so brave and fearless, but nothing could’ve been farther from the truth. How many times had Mkombozi admitted to Tukufu when the two of them had been alone that she just wanted to leave the Omens and the Demon behind and live out her life with him? Mkombozi had never been fearless, but she was devoted to her mother and her destiny. The Ancients needed her and were counting on her to do what no one else could do. Without her, Sakarabru would rule Theia, and her people would suffer a fate that would make them welcome death if he did.
“I can do that. I’ve done it before.”
“And you will again,” Khale said, coming over to him and placing a comforting hand on his arm. “The Omens destroyed my daughter, Guardian,” she admitted sadly. “I watched them consume her and erase every good and wonderful thing about her and was powerless to stop it.”
“We both were,” he said.
Khale was thoughtful before continuing, but he could almost read her mind and knew where this was going. “I don’t know what they will do to Eden.”
Eden. Her name was Eden.
“Truthfully, I don’t even know if she’ll survive the bonding process. She is not as strong as we are, physically. And she wants nothing to do with them or us. But I would hate to see them do to her what they did to Mkombozi.”
The truth was, Mkombozi/Eden’s sole purpose for being was to bond with the Omens so that the Demon could finally and ultimately be defeated to the point that he couldn’t come back. Even Mkombozi had fallen short because Khale was forced to destroy her before the last molecule of the Demon could be obliterated. As long as any part of him sur
vived, the possibility remained that he could return. If Eden survived the bonds, she would have to survive her battle with the Demon and then her battle with the Omens, which became more powerful the longer they were bonded to the Redeemer.
“Andromeda should tell us how to destroy them after the Redeemer-Eden kills Sakarabru,” he said, stating the obvious. “The Seer was the one who created them.”
“The Redeemer must destroy the Demon.” Khale smiled. “And the last of the Demon must die.”
He looked confused. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“That no part of him shall remain,” Khale said. “But you know how Ancients are. Full of drama and fuckin’ riddles.”
The last of the Demon were the Omens. Eden was born to die. She had to destroy a Demon, hopefully not a world, but when she had done what she was born to do, somehow, someway, she was going to die. So why the hell was he so anxious to get to her, if she was nothing more than a sacrificial lamb? Because lamb or not, she was his—his Purpose. She was his reason for breathing. If death was her fate, then it was his as well.
“I’ll give you a week, Shifter,” he suddenly said. “One week to let her know I’m coming, and then not even you will be able to keep me from her.”
Prophet willed his wings to expand, spread them wide, and disappeared into the dark sky.
FREE FALLING
Two men were dead because of her. Eden had literally killed one of them with her thought, and the surveillance footage of the attempted sexual assault against her was all over the news. Eden walked into Patmos, the bar where she worked as a bartender. Ben, the bartender who had been waiting on Eden to take the next shift, was already there, and he glared at her when he saw her coming through the front door. She was late—again.
“Excuse me,” she said, winding her way through the crowd. It was just after eight on a Thursday, and the place was packed already. She happened to glance up at one of the televisions mounted behind the bar—and stopped dead in her tracks as she watched the grainy footage on the news from a surveillance camera in the subway station where those men died. Her face couldn’t be seen in that footage. The camera was behind her, but there was no mistaking the dark blue jacket she wore, her walk, or her locks.