Kaelen gets to his feet, looking at the Moonstone carefully. “Why do you think we saw the Black Death?”
I purse my lips, thinking carefully before answering. “I’m not sure. Maybe the Dark Rider was the cause of it, just not that particular scene.”
“What do you mean?” Kaelen asks.
I tap my chin, trying to remember what I can of college history. “The reason the plague spread was because of rats and fleas . . . but if I remember right, the actual Black Death started in Asia and spread along trade routes. But it didn’t enter Europe until an army started catapulting its dead bodies into a city it was besieging. European traders fled the sea port, not knowing they carried a lot deadlier cargo than they had planned. Flinging your diseased dead into a city you’re attacking certainly sounds like a demonic tactic.”
“So you think by triggering that one event, he just stood back—”
“And let the dominoes fall,” I finish. “No need to see him there to know his hand in the process.”
Kaelen hums. “An interesting theory, but what if Hell had nothing to do with it? The riot, the burning, the killing . . . that wasn’t his doing. The disease, yes. But not the reaction.”
Kaelen dusts off his pants and offers me a hand. “Come, we have more to learn.”
“What do you mean? We need to get back,” I reply but stop when I realize the sun’s still high in the sky. “It felt like I’ve been out for hours.”
“It seems that time inside the Moonstone is not the same as outside the Moonstone. The only exhaustion is mental, not physical. So, what do you say? Shall we try and push our limits? Or are you . . . not mentally strong?”
I hear the light tease in his voice as he offers me his hand again, and I smirk, getting up. Tease me, Kaelen? I’ll show you just how mentally strong I can be, right before I make you cry like a little girl. “You never did five hours of class, an eight-hour shift at the coffee shop, and then jammed out a five-page paper in the hours before doing your biology lab final. A little time dilation ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
We link hands again and I reach for the stone. Dredging up the worst memories I can find, I pause before touching the stone. “You know this is going to suck.”
Kaelen nods. “I assume so.”
“The Dark Rider’s been one step ahead of us. It’s like when I was a cop, a detective. There were times, especially when we had to deal with some of the organized crime bosses, we’d showing up on scene afterward, and I could see his calling cards all over the place. The Dark Rider’s the same. He’s so arrogant and powerful, and he knows that we can’t really touch him the way he is. He’s in a fortress down there in Hell.”
“He knows no Fae can touch him, and humanity doesn’t understand what he is,” Kaelen agrees. “So you want to go back to the bad times?”
“We just need to keep trying,” I answer. “He needs to be lucky each time. We need to be lucky just once. One shot, and we can end his influence over history.”
Kaelen smiles. “Okay, then. Let’s go history hunting then.”
I touch the Moonstone again, my mind focusing on the worst incidents I can think of in history. This time, we flash back, and I find myself in a body that I’ve never expected before. “Uhm . . . Kaelen?”
Kaelen looks over at me, then snickers. “Well, well, well. You strike a handsome figure.”
I shift my hips, feeling my cock shift under my simple robe, and sigh. “And I thought boobs were a pain in the ass to run with.”
“Where are we?” Kaelen asks as he looks around. “It seems like the countryside.”
I nod but soon get my answer as I see the dust trail approaching. They’re on a road, but it doesn’t matter. An entire Legion of Roman soldiers creates a lot of dust. At the head is a short man, rather narrow-shouldered, but at the same time, he carries himself with a sort of haughty nobility, of someone born to command. With him are his personal guard and the standard bearers, their banners proud. Legio XIII, the Thirteenth.
Next to him, in a set of armor that certainly doesn’t fit in with the rest of the Romans, is a man in dark armor atop a pale horse. I gasp. “It’s him.”
The man at the front of the Roman column pauses as the road comes to a stop beside a shallow river. The Roman commander looks at the water with the same trepidation of a man looking like he’s about to jump the Grand Canyon before the figure in dark armor leans over and whispers in his ear. The Roman nods and leads his horse across the river.
“No!” I yell, realizing what I’m seeing, but before I can get even twenty yards, a pilum from one of the Roman scouts hits me in the chest, and the light flashes again.
Great first attempt.
For the rest of the day, we try again and again. Each time, we’re close, but not close enough. It’s like we end up in bodies that can see what’s happening, maybe even touch the actors in each atrocity, but we can’t stop that first domino from falling.
I should lose count, but I can’t forget the events.
The Final Solution.
Andersonville.
Los Conquistadores.
The Cultural Revolution.
My Lai.
Finally, after having my own intestines pulled out of my body and burned before my eyes while a screaming, red-faced man demands I repent in sixteenth-century Spain, I can take no more.
“Stop!” I sob, pressing my head to the stone floor of the chamber. My stomach hurts, and even though I know I’m not actually injured, my mind still demands that I feel the agony. “No more!”
Kaelen, who was eager to continue until the trip to Africa where he was impaled and set upright on a pole as a warning to others not to go against the Great King, nods shallowly. “No more.”
We both lay on the ground, pride forgotten as the horror creeps over us. I curl into a ball, weeping softly as the enormity of what I’ve just seen washes over me. Hours out here were weeks in the Moonstone, weeks of never-ending horror. I wish I could be numb to it all, but I can’t. It’s just so much.
“We . . . we were powerless,” I sob, chilled to my very core. “Each time.”
Kaelen nods, unable to get up either. It was true. And in most of them, I could see the Dark Rider or his Shadow, whispering in the right ears, making the right people do the wrong things.
Sometimes, the people were small. Why whisper in the Kaiser’s ear to start a war when you can convince a Serbian student to shoot someone? Why convince a King to commit genocide when you can have a writer pen a single story for fame?
Why lob a hand grenade when a whisper will get the job done just as effectively?
And in each time when we saw him, he would taunt me. Too often, his eyes would glow and he would toss that mocking salute toward my dying, impaled, or soon to be slaughtered body, that knowing smirk like he somehow knows who or what I am.
“Kaelen?” I ask, finally sitting up as my crying stops. When he doesn’t answer, I look over at him, worried. “Kaelen?”
“No matter what we do . . . he’s too powerful,” Kaelen whispers angrily. “He’s an unstoppable fire, evil personified.”
“We’ll find a way to stop him,” I reassure him hollowly. “We’ll figure it out.”
“There’s no way to stop him. Just to . . . to protect ourselves against him,” Kaelen says. “When a fire is out of control, you don’t put it out. You make a firebreak.”
I shake my head, getting slowly to my feet. “We’re not at that point yet. Come on, one more shot.”
“No . . . we both need to rest,” Kaelen says. “Think about what happened, try to develop a better plan. Next time, we need to get into the bodies of people who can actually do something about all this.”
I nod, too exhausted to argue. The moon is high in the sky by this point, and the night chill is already seeping in on me. While each visit to the Moonstone might take only a few minutes, the recovery time has eaten up the hours. “Fine. Let’s get some rest.”
I’m too tired to wonder what the
glow from the middle of Solaria is or to even ask about my Guardians as we make our way back toward the castle. All I can think of is sleep.
I pray I don’t dream.
Chapter 23
Tyler
For their entire time together, Tyler has wanted a night that on the surface is like this. He and Eve, in a fun setting, romance thick in the air and nothing to worry about except what they might want to do next. Even with his brothers present, it should be a scenario that leaves a smile on his face.
His deepest wish, the one he’s wanted more than anything, is the ‘romantic date.’ He’d used one of his infrequent trips to the human realm prior to meeting Eve to go to a bookstore. He’d gone to pick up a copy of the latest publicly-available medical books but for some reason started perusing the fiction books.
Some of the women had given him strange looks when he picked up the book he did, but the woman in a gown on the cover looked so much like the woman of his dreams he had to start reading. Besides, if anything, he could joke with Jacob about a book called Highland Heat.
Two hours later, he’d walked out with five books by the same author along with his medical text. It’s his guilty pleasure, so-called romance books, because there’s nothing complicated in them. The men are always the confident leaders he wished to be, the women always head over heels for the men regardless of whether they were nice guys or Alpha assholes. Problems there are always solvable, and the depth of the passion between the characters was what he’d always yearned for before he met Eve and found something that made the most torrid of his books feel like a pale ghost of an afterimage.
So for this night to be a ‘date’ with Eve, he tried. He doesn’t want to ruin her night, even though as it’s continued, things have gotten stranger and stranger.
It’s like Eve just isn’t herself. She’s a touch too giggly, a touch too sarcastic, and when she makes biting remarks, it’s too often the kind that are painfully aimed at Tyler and his brothers. If she were angry at them, that would be one thing. Tyler’s learned how to deal with that. He can be the same way with his brothers. When you’re pissed, you sometimes unleash that anger in directions it doesn’t always deserve to go.
But she’s also been very touchy. The first time Eve took Tyler’s hand and held it during a walk to gather firewood on the trip to the Vale, he thought he was going to explode in happiness.
Now, Eve’s not holding hands. She’s grabbed and groped just about everything else. Noah’s arms, Jacob’s butt, Cole’s abs, his chest, and all of them have had to move out of the way as she seems to want to caress their cocks right here in public.
Tyler has no problem with expressing his love and desire for Eve. From the first time they lay together and he felt the touch of her soul with his, the first tendrils of connection that would become their Link, he saw a beauty of spirit that captured his heart utterly and completely. In fact, it was hard for him to not declare his love for her after that first night.
But tonight just doesn’t feel right. The groping, the greedy hands, they’re making him feel dirty, and Eve’s never made him feel dirty or degraded. Even when his tongue pleased her after one of his brothers would fill her with their cum, she’d never degraded him, never made him feel like a so-called ‘cuck.’ She’s understood him, that he is totally devoted to making her life as filled with pleasure as it can be, and that he’ll give every last drop of his being to protecting her, keeping her safe, and making the realms a place that can reflect that.
Until tonight, she’s loved him and accepted him because every moment, every beat of his heart is for her, to protect, love, and please her.
Tonight, though . . . tonight, Tyler just wants to go back to the barracks. It is only his loyalty to Eve and his brothers that has kept him here as she’s dragged them by booth after booth, game after endless game that always seems to have, not the advertised romantic feeling that the Nine Brothers Festival is supposedly famous for, but a dirty sexual edge to it. It hasn’t been a romantic lark in paradise. It’s been wallowing in a brothel.
“So, what’s next?” Eve asks, jolting him from his thoughts as she looks around. “Ooh, look at that.”
In the area in front of them were two platforms surrounded by hay. Standing on the platforms were two men, each of them armed with what looked like training weapons, going at each other.
“Looks like the stupidest thing I’ve seen since basic training,” Jacob gripes, as one man swings on the other. His attack is just barely blocked, and it’s obvious both of the Fae on the platform are not all that skilled. “And a good way to break your arm.”
“Just because you can’t jump around like a flea doesn’t mean it’s not fun,” Eve replies, smirking. “I think it’s sexy as fuck. Look, the girl they’re competing for?”
Tyler looks, and at the base of the podiums is a girl. She’s watching the two, and in his eyes, he’s not sure she’s turned on. It looks more like she’s scared out of her mind. “I see her.”
“Do you know the story of The Duel?” Eve asks, smiling wistfully. “It’s an old Solarian story, one that my body servant told me to pass the time while I was stuck in my room. A few thousand years ago, a beautiful Fae girl was the daughter of the greatest swordsman in the kingdom. Her father was arrogant and said that the only person worthy of his incomparable daughter would be the finest swordsman in the kingdom. So he set up a tournament.”
“A tournament?” Cole asks, and Tyler glances over. Cole shrugs, and he can read his expression. Maybe by getting the story out of her, they could get her off this idea.
Eve nods, excited. “He opened up the tournament to every swordsman in the kingdom. The girl’s beauty was so great, her purity and grace so renowned, that it attracted dozens of the best. Even a prince, they say, although he doesn’t figure into this at all. Instead, it came down to two men. One of them had been the father’s student for over a hundred years, a Captain of the Solarian Guard and already a noble. The other . . . just a boy.”
“What happened?” Tyler asks, and Eve looks at him, smiling.
“The boy happened to be a servant in the father’s house. He was a lowborn boy, hardly noticeable to anyone in the house except the girl. You see, while her father didn’t know it, the girl and the boy had been lovers for almost a decade. He loved her with all his heart, and his desire had led him to train in secret. The girl’s father had banned any of the servants from learning the sword, so he trained with a broomstick in his room. When the tournament started, the others tried to ban him, but he pointed out that the father had opened the tournament to all, by his honor.”
“Ballsy,” Jacob says, respect in his voice, but Eve’s looking at Tyler, her eyes sparkling as she continues.
“He fought, armorless and with only a cheap training sword, all the way to the finals, where he faced the Captain of the Guard. The boy knew he could never take the Captain in a normal fight . . . so he taunted him into The Duel. Standing atop two cider barrels, they couldn’t move, they couldn’t run and jump like the Captain was trained to do. It was a match of tight moves, the sort of moves that a boy with just a broomstick might be able to practice in his room late at night.”
“So how does the story end?” Tyler asks, and Eve shrugs.
“My body servant never told me. She said that at this game, the idea is the winner gets the girl, although of course, people do it for other reasons.” She looks around at the four of them, lifting an eyebrow. “So . . . who’s going to fight for me?”
Silence greets her, and she crosses her arms, looking upset. “Really? None of you? Noah? Jacob?”
“I like jumping around too much,” Jacob says, holding his hands up. “And I’m a knife fighter, anyway.”
“Cole?”
Cole shakes his head. “My sword is not for entertainment, Eve. You know that.”
Eve pouts, her lip poking out. “You guys are no fun. Come on, Tyler, let me at least feel like someone in this group’s willing to fight for me.”
&n
bsp; Tyler sighs, nodding. “Okay, but who would I duel against?”
“Why, me, silly,” Eve says, her mood immediately brightening. “Come on, did you think I’ve been sitting in my room just making doilies or something? And it’s been too long since I practiced for real.”
The platform’s open, and before Tyler can object, Eve climbs onto the padded area, grabbing one of the swords from the weapons rack and whipping it back and forth.
Tyler glances at his brothers, then at Eve. “Eve . . . come on, this is—”
“Come on, Tyler, stop being such a little baby,” Eve says, rolling her eyes. “It’s not like we’re going to actually whack the crap out of each other, and they’re dulled edges anyway.”
Tyler reluctantly goes over and picks out his own sword, a blunt-tipped hand and a half that, while heavy, is about as sharp as a butter knife. Still, Tyler knows from his own training that even a dulled sword could be dangerous if it hits the wrong places.
But Eve looks so eager, so Tyler gets up on the platform across from her. It’s a little bigger than the top of a cider barrel, but not much, and he salutes her with his blade before taking a standard defensive stance. “On you, Eve.”
The first swings are wide, nothing hard, and Tyler blocks them easily, getting into it a little as Eve grins. She’s so beautiful like this, smiling and free, and their playacted fight evolves, more complex movements that have Tyler searching deeper into his limited swordsman’s repertoire. While he can use a sword, as all Guardsmen do, his skill is nowhere near what Cole or even Jacob could muster, and Eve has been trained by the two of them.
Sweat’s glowing on her skin as the lights from around the festival twinkle around them, and Tyler finds himself having fun. “Not bad, Princess.”
Eve grins, nodding. “Not so bad yourself. Looks like we’ve only got a minute or two left. What do you say? One more go-around?”
Tyler nods, readying himself. “A little more fun.”
Tyler prepares himself for another playful swing, but Eve’s attack is fierce and sharp, a quick thrust to his chest that he barely has a chance to deflect before Eve reverses and whips her body around, the blade aimed right for his head.
Guardians of Moonlight: A Reverse Harem Fantasy Romance (Guardians of the Fae Book 3) Page 15