Shadows of the Night (Kingdom Key Book 2)

by TylerRose.

  “Turmoil brings my package?”

  “Tyler. Sign here, please,” she replied, turning the vidpad around and offering up the pointed stylus used for signatures.

  “Turmoil hides itself in the structure of work.”

  “Okay, would not sign,” Tyler said, and wrote that. “Would you happen to know the general direction of the Temple of the Immaculate?”

  “So Turmoil can fill it with discord and regrets? No, no, no. When Turmoil realizes its regrets are for things beyond its control and lets them go, Turmoil’s peace will allow the Temple of the Immaculate to reveal itself.”

  “No. Not things beyond my control. Things that were entirely within my control until I trusted the enemy I did not know was the enemy.”

  “Which took those things out of your control,” the Emerite said, maintaining her calm. “Once you give others control over you, it is all the harder to get it back.”

  “No kidding. Enjoy your package.”

  Tyler teleported back to Voran and sent Julian a message that she was done for the day. She was too annoyed to deal with more people. Sitting on the bench in the yard, facing the back wall, she tried to be at peace, tried to let go of the negative energies around her. She was Turmoil, had been Turmoil for the majority of her life. There was no changing that, not for a long time. So long as truths were hidden and she was denied her real future, she would never find peace.

  Hands over her face, rubbing her eyes, when she opened them again, Solomon was standing about ten feet back.

  “Rough week, dear?”

  A hard flick of her hands with a push of psychokinesis, the tips were off her fingernails. She launched herself at him. Slicing wherever she touched, jabbing with hands turned to deadly snakes through Chen’s teaching, she drove him backwards and off-balance. About to issue the final strike to the throat that would kill him, he fled by teleportation.

  “Tyler?!” Saber running across the lawn. “Was that him?”

  “Yes,” she said in a furious growl, then shouted “Fucking coward!”

  She became aware of pain in her fingertips, and looked to see she’d lost two of her razor tips, the top layer of nails ripping off with them. She might have been bleeding or that might have been his blood. Walking back to the bench, they did not see the razors on the ground. Attempting to teleport them to her hand did not work.

  “Let’s go take care of those,” Saber said, indicating her fingers.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I did not say you are not, Lar Tyler; but we need to tend the broken nails and see if you are bleeding.”

  Turned out Saber was rather skilled at taking care of busted fingers. She sucked air between her teeth and grunted with the searing, throbbing pain of water on raw nail bed as he used the bottle of sterilized water to rinse the blood off and see what was hers and what wasn’t.

  “If you bled, you’re not anymore. Can you usually save a nail that has separated from the bed?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, picking up her nail scissors to start cutting off the middle fingernail.

  She took it as far as she could easily manage, which was about halfway up the bed, and then worked on the other. The damaged fingertips had turned pink, were swelling from the trauma of the fight. She had a hard time holding the scissors in her left hand.

  “Let me. Now I know why Gar Mankell had dozens of little slice-scabs all over his shoulders,” he said, holding the fingertip firmly and starting his cut.

  Next he brushed blood from the underside of the undamaged nails with her small brush, working from one to the next. He took the antiseptic spray from the first aid kit in his sack and let out short jets to the undersides of all of her nails and the two bare nail beds.

  “Sorry,” he grimaced when she flinched with the jolt of pain. “It hurts, but it works. “Where’s your protective tips?”

  With a thought, they appeared on the side of the sink. He put them on the eight remaining nails for her.

  “Do you think you got your, ahem, point?...across?” he asked.

  “I don’t think he’ll be coming around again for a while.”

  “Is it like Osan? You want me to camp in your room tonight?”

  “No. There are teleport traps around the building. I just hadn’t turned them on yet. I’d just gotten home.”

  “Might I suggest a new security protocol? That the traps always be on and whoever needs to come in should call first so they can be taken down for transport and then put right back up.”

  “That’s all fine, Saber, but I’m not going to live my life shut up in this house and my back yard. I’m going to work and that takes me all over the quadrant.”

  “You don’t need to work and I know it.”

  “How do you know it?” she asked, concerned someone had been looking into her finances.

  “You are First Daughter of Voran. The Emperor pays your expenses.”

  “Oh that. Do you think for one second I’m going to allow myself to be indebted to him for anything? For my own sanity, I have to have something to do,” she said.

  He gave her a doubting expression.

  “Think about it. If Mankell had me, what would I be? His arm ornament. His Gar Hall decoration. His bed warmer. That’s it. If Shestna had me, what would I be? His arm ornament. His bed warmer. I’m nothing but a trophy. They want to keep me like a damn pet. They all do. When I give them a hard smack over it, they get contrite and do some sucking up until they think they’ve appeased me. But they don’t learn. They go right back to it again in a couple days. I cannot live my every day like that. I want a man who truly sees me as an equal.”

  “They see you as a goddess.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” she denied. “I’m nineteen years old and I’m as human as you are. Well…as humanoid. I don’t believe for one minute all this crap about me being some goddess about to explode out into the galaxy. I have not seen one shred of real evidence.”

  “Are you kidding me right now? Tyler! Look at what you can do. Take all of your abilities together and look at it. Sure, a few people can teleport short distances. But can they teleport from Gamma quadrant to Alpha quadrant? Can they do that and create things out of thin air? Can they create things out of nothing and choke someone to death with a thought? Can they teleport great distances, create things out of nothing, choke someone to death with a thought and see things happening thousands of miles away as if they were standing witness to the event?”

  He grasped her wrists a little too tightly, eyes hardening, imploring her to see what he saw.

  “That is why they must possess you or die trying, every last one of them. To hold a goddess is to hold the keys to their own immortality. To partake of her life, for a single day, is to walk hand in hand with the divine, the only thing greater than their kings that can be touched with their own hands. No man can resist that. Do you truly not see what you are?”

  She stared back at him equally hard. “Can you not see how terrifying a future that is? Would you want it? Why would anyone want it? Live forever? For what? With a thousand enemies plotting my downfall and waiting for me to fuck up every single day? I already have that, it seems, and it’s fucking exhausting. I used to look up at the sky and long to be up there, doing something that mattered. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have stayed home! Go take care of Mariah. I’ll be back in a couple days.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, backing away as she abruptly stood to walk away.

  “No one’s fucking business.”

  She teleported.

  Hand running through his hair, he released his own tension. Even goddesses had their troubles.

  Tyler arrived in the candle niche of a church. Not one she had been to before, but still a church of Immaculate something. With damaged fingers throbbing, she set to lighting every candle in the bank. Twenty across and fifteen rows high. She started at the top left and worked down, using a thin taper candle. At the bottom, over one row, she worked from the bottom upwards. Row after
row, clearing her mind.

  She’d not done this since the day before going to Shestna’s home for a visit. That seemed like a lifetime ago when it really had been only a few weeks.

  Every candle lit, welcoming the warmth, she stood there a moment to breathe the light fragrance of clean wax. Without thinking about it, she began to perform the motions of a Chi-calming exercise Chen had taught her. Over and over, one move flowing into the next, she expelled the Universe for a while.

  Finally exhausted, some fifty repetitions later, she sat on the floor with her legs squared one atop the other. Arms draped over her knees, she worked to empty her mind and absorb the warmth. Eyes closed, she was still as a statue except for breathing, meditating as Chen had tried to teach her.

  The calm Hades had helped her find was gone. She had to work hard to get it back, slogging through the haze of doubts and regrets, separating out all the noise from everyone and everything within her expanding psychic range.

  “Why do you not call the name of Sanctuary?” she heard behind her. “You bear the ring.”

  “I never think to,” she admitted. “I just need quiet, and to be warm for a while. I am cold. I need the Universe to shut up.”

  “You try hard to hide from the Universe, hiding in plain sight. When you have an upheaval, the Universe finds you and clamors for your attention. It takes time to quiet again.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” she muttered. “Please leave me alone.”

  “As you need, Immaculate.” He started to turn.

  “Wait.”

  Silence as he stopped.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “You are in the Temple of the Immaculate on Ercoli,” he informed her.

  “I was told I could not find it if I was in turmoil.”

  “Turmoil is one thing. A moment of intense need is quite another.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I am the current Custodian of this particular temple.”

  “How many Custodians of this temple have there been?”

  “The Immaculate asks interesting questions for someone who does not believe she is the Immaculate,” he said.

  “Just answer me.”

  “We stopped keeping track of how many Custodians there have been. We have been tending this particular temple for over four thousand years. Other temples are not so old.”

  “Like the churches on Earth. Some of those are only two or three hundred years old. Or less.”

  “That is the truth,” the Custodian said.

  “Always men. Priests and monks. Why?”

  “Because the Immaculate is female. Any of us could be called to serve and service the Immaculate, to help her create life. Because the crystal energy you have known from the man Jerome aligns best with male energy. Females may be friends and companions but only men can be lovers and protectors of the Immaculate.”

  “What about Starbird?” Tyler asked. “She had the crystal power, inherited from her father at conception.”

  “Does she still live?”

  No, Tyler answered herself silently.

  “Nails was one of them, wasn’t he?” she asked.

  “I do not know that name. But some of our number go by many names depending on where they are and who they are with. If he protected you, raised or taught you; if he groomed you for your future, then probably.”

  Nails had done all of those things, in a manner of speaking.

  “Others died on Earth fighting Adamantine, didn’t they?” she asked.

  “They did. However, our number have died off, been replenished, died off, in perpetuity, since the first time you were given a body to live in some ten thousand years ago,” the Custodian said. “No one lives forever except those who are in the final pentagram to take the Immaculate to her concluding evolution.”

  “The Widenings…they are evolutions,” she said.

  “They are.”

  “Is Shestna one of your number?”

  “Not officially, but he understands how to be if you would let him.”

  “What about Mankell?” she asked.

  “Not officially, but he might be able to step into a spot in the pentagon if you accepted him.”

  Pentagram or Pentagon. Meaning there needed to be five, regardless what she chose to call it. She was supposed to have a team of five men to make this work.

  “Do I pick them?” she asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, you may pick a few of them. Others are destined to occupy their spaces but you have to find them,” he told her.

  Find them.

  “How can I find them if they are already dead?” she asked. “I can go back in time to when they were alive and fix it.”

  “Perhaps that might accomplish your goal. Or perhaps you could try a thousand times and not succeed because they are not really the ones. There are ones and there are right ones. They look the same. They taste the same. They love the same…but they are not the same. Side by side, a breath apart. One you see. One you cannot yet see because those eyes are yet closed.”

  “What if I don’t want to be what people think I am supposed to be?” she asked.

  “Then do nothing. Do not look for your Pentagon. Do not right any of the wrongs. Let the galaxy continue as it has and cannot help but do, under the usurped influence of others.”

  No more words for a long moment as she thought questions she feared the answers to. No more words while she doubted herself and everyone and everything.

  “What if I do want it?” she asked in a much smaller voice.

  She actually felt him lift with hope. Felt his inward breath and straightening of his spine and soul as if she’d taken the breath and sat up taller herself.

  “Then you must be prepared to give up everyone and everything you know. Everyone and everything you love. The path to omniscience will cost you profoundly, mind and soul. It will cost you things you cannot guess at and things you can never have again.”

  “If it costs me everything, then what do I gain?” she asked.

  “Everything.”

  “That’s not in the least bit helpful. I lose everything and I gain everything. It cannot be both.”

  “It can. You lose everything here. Everything in this life. Everything in this galaxy. You gain everything in your new life after final evolution, everything you are building in your own galaxy. You’re already making it. Julian asked you…‘What would you fill it with?’ did he not? You are building it even now while we speak and you are disbelieving. The Yang in you is your creative, driving force, and it is busily creating everything you will have after you have given up everything you do have.”

  He walked away, leaving her there to think on it. She didn’t need long. Standing, extinguishing the bank of candles with a single gesture, she teleported back to her home.

  Chapter Eight

  In the protected walkway, she changed out a hard bench for a more comfortable upholstered seat and put an ornate writing table in front of it. Sitting to check the width, she brought her current journal to her hands along with a pen and her cigarettes, lighter, pipe and an ashtray.

  “May I serve, Mistress?” a Neverseen asked.

  “Hot tea, please,” Tyler said, already opening the book and putting her forehead in her hand.

  Saber looked out of Mariah’s room to see her in this position of focus. She’d only been gone a few hours. He came to sit on a nearby bench to be present but not intrusive. A cup of tea and a small pot appeared on the table to her left, and sat there for hours while she wrote page after page after page in her journal.

  When she finally came up for air and looked around, the sun had gone down Her tea was stone cold but she sipped it anyway. A rain was starting to fall.

  “How is Mariah?”

  “Asleep,” Saber replied. “The doctor gave her some pills to help her be drowsy enough to fall asleep. Not many. Maybe five. They’re not strong enough to hurt her if she took them all at once. She’d just sleep for a day.”
/>   “Okay. Did you two eat?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  She watched the rain and smoked her pipe. Pentagon. A pentagon has a leading point. If she should have been on Earth to fight, perhaps Jerome was supposed to be that point. He was still alive. She could offer him and the woman with him a safe place here in her own home and they could see what might happen. To do that, she had to be removed from the jurisdiction of the Congress.

  She took out her phone and called Shestna, leaving a message asking if he would come to supper. She called Julian next, getting his message box again.

  “It’s Tyler. I quit the Congress. I won’t go back to work.”

  Phone in her back pocket, she stood at the edge of the covered walkway and watched the rain, arms wrapped around to hold herself.

  “What do you need?” Saber asked. “It kills me to see you so obviously troubled. What can I do?”

  “You are here for Mariah, not me. Go take care of her,” she replied.

  He went into the nearest bedroom as Julian appeared in front of her. Stepping under the roof when he realized he was getting rained on, he gave her a smirk.

  “You did that on purpose,” he complained.

  “Me? Why would I intentionally get you soaking wet?” she teased.

  “How many times are you going to quit before it’s the last time you quit?” he asked instead of falling for the bait.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What changed this time?”

  “Solomon was here a little while ago. I hurt him a good one. After that, I went to light candles and be alone somewhere. It was the Temple of the Immaculate on Ercoli,” she said.

  “You found it? So soon?” he asked.

  “A pentagon has five points,” she said, ignoring his question. “One out front to both lead and protect. Is that who Nails was?”

  “No. Someone else occupies that place through the official channels that set up on Earth. We are rather a rogue group. You must know that.”