Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL)

by Thea Harrison

  Chapter Twelve

  EXHAUSTED BY HER long-distance astral journey to talk to Mary, Astra rested on her narrow bed under a pile of every blanket in her bedroom, but she still couldn’t get warm. A deep chill had settled into her aching bones last winter, and it had never gone away. Despite all her best efforts, her body was wearing out. She knew part of the reason why was her spirit was as worn as her flesh.

  There used to be some things that mattered to her more than existence. Sometimes now it seemed neither existence nor those things mattered at all.

  Time and again the group had struggled, and for what? They died and they died, and now some of them were gone forever.

  Raphael and Gabriel. Ariel and Uriel. All destroyed beyond reclaiming.

  A tear rolled down her cheek, sliding down the furrows and creases of her face.

  A gentle tap sounded at her doorway. “Grandmother?”

  She wiped the tear away and turned her head. “What is it?”

  Jamie still refused to lift his head and look directly at her. “Your light was still on,” he said. “I wanted to ask you if you needed anything.”

  “No.” She needed nothing this kind child could give her. “How is your grandpa?”

  He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, and said hopefully, “He’s resting well. I think his color looks better.”

  “Good.” She said it like she believed that Jerry’s condition would improve, or like she cared anymore. Jerry wasn’t getting better, and she didn’t. He would be dead in a week, and she didn’t care about any of the people on this earth anymore. She wanted to go home. “Go to bed, boy,” she said in a rusty-sounding voice. “You’ll not be of any use to your grandpa if you don’t get some sleep.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He hesitated as if about to say something else but then, for a mercy, he kept silent and turned away.

  At last, filled with dread, she crept into sleep.

  She dreamed. She had known she would.

  She stood in a dry wasteland devoid of any green or growing thing. There was no wind, no day or night, just a vast barren grayness. Even when her dream self closed her eyes, she saw the image of the gray landscape. If she had been in control of the dream, she would have changed the landscape to add color and life, but she wasn’t in control. This wasn’t her dream.

  She waited in despair for what would happen next.

  A figure appeared and strolled toward her. It shone with a ferocious black light. In its hands it held an agonized slip of lavender mist.

  Old woman, the Deceiver said.

  She looked at the wind spirit he held and recognized it immediately. It was the one she had sent to help Mary. She said, This is unbelievably petty, even for you.

  I promised you a long time ago, the figure said. You remember, don’t you? I will destroy every creature that you hold dear, even down to the smallest one.

  Creator, have mercy, not for me but for your fragile child who is in such pain.

  Forgive, forgive.

  She didn’t bother to try to gather her strength. She had none, and she couldn’t have acted even if she had. Neither she nor the Deceiver could actually hurt or touch each other in this dream, for it was merely a sending, a message filled with events that had already occurred. He liked to show her his executions.

  The black radiant figure took the wind spirit in both hands and savaged it to shreds. The delicate creature had no defense. It made a muffled whimper as it was destroyed almost instantly.

  The Deceiver showed her its empty hands. Until next time, bitch.

  How many times must she be summoned to this killing field?

  The world wasn’t large enough to contain her grief.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHEN ALL WAS said and done, Michael found himself surprised that he was walking and talking with any semblance of coherency.

  He had prepared his entire life for this very encounter with Mary, and still the reality of coming face-to-face with her blew through all of his expectations. He had never quite found his equilibrium after her scream in the psychic realm, and internally he was still reeling.

  He had to get grounded and centered again, to reconnect with his sense of purpose. He knew how to do that when he was alone, but he didn’t know how to do it in her presence.

  When he had opened the door to her Toyota and looked upon her unconscious face for the first time, he felt as if he had been dealt a body blow.

  She was young, possibly as much as ten years younger than he, and she had fine-boned features and a honey-toned skin color that had turned pallid. Her face was lopsided with a swollen bruise that had begun to turn a dark purple. Her tawny hair was kinked with curls that were confined in a braid. She was dressed in nondescript, comfortable clothing.

  Her looks didn’t matter in the slightest. He knew she could have been old or young, or of any nationality, and before he had laid eyes on her, he would have said that he’d had no expectation or desire for her to be anything but what she was.

  But this . . .

  She was beautiful.

  He spiraled down into a place of astonished enchantment and did nothing to try to stop it. Instead he embraced his fall.

  He gently laid the tips of his fingers on her cheek, and the impact of that first touch sent him to his knees. She was warm, living and embodied, and it was such a goddamned miracle, his eyes flooded with moisture.

  He, who had experienced relatively few emotions in this life, was overcome with a feeling so powerful, it shook his body to the marrow. Blinking hard to clear his eyesight, he traced her soft, lush lips. The delicate warm brush of her breath on his hand thrilled him utterly.

  She was revolutionary, transformative. He had not known beauty before he looked at her. He had not known desire, until he touched her face.

  Connecting with her hemorrhaging energy shocked him back to the present, along with the realization of the real extremity of her situation. Then every emotion that had exploded into life inside of him seemed to redouble in reaction: rage and fear, hope and determination, and a wicked hate for the one who had damaged her.

  He fought to keep his expression and manner neutral, to hide what went on inside of him and to give her as much room as he could to deal with her own reactions. The last thing he wanted to do was to escalate her before they were able to get help from Astra, and precipitate a crisis that neither one of them would be able to handle on their own.

  But he had not counted on how hard that would be, when the reality of his own reaction to her was so volcanic, it eroded his own reasoning and his control.

  And as it turned out, there was nothing he could do to stop her anyway.

  When Mary cried out and doubled over, Michael checked traffic, yanked the car onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes.

  Cars shot past, headlights blazing like comets. He turned to his passenger. Although the car was filled with night shadows, he could see quite clearly with his psychic senses. Mary’s spirit wound was bleeding bright, feverish gouts of energy.

  He tried to shift her. She was rigid, clamped in a fetal position. He twisted in his seat, got a firmer hold and hauled her toward him. Her skin felt burning hot and dry. Her spirit wound was affecting her physical body. He wondered how high her temperature had spiked. If it went too high for too long it would kill her.

  Stopping for any length of time on the side of a major highway was all but suicidal. He gave up on trying to conduct any risk assessment and instead focused on the problem at hand. Slipping one hand under Mary’s chin, he tried to turn her face up. She was locked in place, the tendons in her neck standing out against his palm. He didn’t want to force her head around in case he hurt her.

  Awkward in the cramped space, he wrapped his arms around her. He put one hand to her forehead and pushed his other hand under her arm, laying it against her sternum. Then he rested his cheek against the delicate protrusion of bone at the nape of her neck, closed his eyes and sent his awareness into her mind.

&n
bsp; The psychic landscape was the land of spirit, which lay interlocked with the physical world. The interior of the mind was quite a different matter. It was a small, private realm comprised of perception, memory, thought, emotion, dream images and imagination. After pushing into her mind, Michael paused to let her adjust to his intrusion while he attempted to get oriented.

  Tattered scraps of images drifted around him. He kept from focusing on any one image and allowed them to continue drifting, as he spent precious time forcing himself to settle into the calm, aware state of utter mindfulness. He could not help her if he was in a panic.

  When he was centered and still, he extended his senses throughout her mind.

  Turbulent emotion buffeted him. Trauma, shock, horror, fear. Incredulity. The sour taste of guilt.

  Why guilt?

  The question almost snared him, but at the last moment he let it go and let it wash through him. These were her surface emotions, connected to recent experiences and relatively shallow. He could not sense her active, aware presence in any of them.

  He reached deeper and sank into an agony so raw and acidic it burned. He had to force himself not to recoil but to push further until he could sense her presence.

  “Mary,” he said to her. MARY.

  He found her presence. An image slammed into him. This time he was unable to let it wash past. Since this was the image he had been searching for, the image that held her awareness, he embraced it and entered a scene.

  Mary sat in a room hewn out of rock. Intricate carvings, gilded with silver, covered every inch of the walls. The carvings flowed and looped together in never-ending spirals. On one wall two stylized and graceful, inhuman figures reached out to each other. Where they touched their hands melded together.

  Michael recognized the room. This was where they had died their first deaths and left their original home forever.

  Mary’s mental self-image was dressed as she was in the physical realm, in jeans and T-shirt. Her tangled hair, held back in a lopsided braid, looked dull and lifeless. She curled over her knees, head bent.

  He looked down at himself. He, too, had automatically replicated his own physical appearance down to his gun, which was nothing more than a useless image in this place. He walked over to kneel in front of her.

  This close he could see that her skin was as transparent as paper. She glowed like a Japanese lantern. The force of her emotion beat against his skin. He put a hand on her shoulder and despite the burning pain that shot through his fingers he gripped the slender bone and muscle in an unbreakable hold.

  “Mary,” he said again. He projected the full force of his urgency through the touch of his hand.

  She lifted her head. Her eyes shone from within. She uncurled her body.

  A jagged cut slashed down the front of her torso. It bled an ectoplasmic light. In her hands she cradled a crystal goblet etched with an inscription in a language that Earth had never seen. He recognized that goblet from ages past when he, along with a group of seven others, had drunk poisoned wine in one last deadly communion.

  His breath caught. He reached out and touched the goblet’s rim with a finger. She had remembered and re-created it with perfection, down to the slight nick on the bottom of the stem.

  Neither he nor Astra had expected her to be capable of anything like this. They had always assumed that if they found her again, retrieving her memories would be a slow and challenging process that might encompass lifetimes. Instead she was retrieving her memories all on her own by the side of a road.

  He touched her cheek. It was just as petal soft to his senses as it had been when he had physically touched her the first time.

  “Where are we?” she said. She sounded dazed. “How did we get here?”

  The question jarred him. He asked carefully, “Where do you think we are?”

  She gestured with a listless hand and bent her gaze down to the goblet. “I’ve been dreaming of this place my whole life,” she said. “I never imagined that these creatures might be real. They were so alien and beautiful.”

  “Yes,” he said. He was uneasy with this new, foreign desire to be gentle, but he worked to keep his voice quiet as he knelt beside her. “We were.”

  They had been creatures of fire and light, a race of beings forever mated, each one having a twin of essential contrast and compatibility, yin and yang, a harmonic completion of universal balance.

  She frowned and rubbed her forehead with the back of one hand. “You were one of them?”

  “Yes.” He stroked her tangled hair. “We had to leave our physical bodies behind in order to come here to this world. We’re born to humans and we die like humans, and like humans, when we’re reborn we forget who we are. For a while. It’s actually a mercy, most of the time. It gives us a chance to rest in between awakenings.”

  “This happened a very long time ago, didn’t it?” She stared at him, but he knew she wasn’t seeing him. “A long, long time.”

  “Over six thousand years.”

  Sometimes the humans who were native to Earth had helped in their battles. Corrupted fragments of the resulting stories had survived and been embellished over the millennia. One of the most famous and inaccurate was the story of Satan’s fall from heaven and the group of rebellious angels that had followed him.

  They were no angels. They didn’t even make very good humans.

  She whispered, “Do you remember it?”

  He said, “I haven’t bothered to try recovering those first memories of Earth. I figured I would sometime if I needed to. But Astra remembers. She remembers everything. She has had to, in order to help the others of us remember.”

  She shivered. “How could she bear to do that?”

  He had often wondered that, how Astra could stand to remember every minute of their unending exile. “I don’t know. Maybe she can because she must.”

  “There were seven in my dream,” she said. The goblet image her mind had manufactured melted away with the change in her attention. She leaned forward to grip his arms. “Where are the others? You haven’t talked about them.”

  “They’re gone,” he said in a flat voice. He hated to witness the fresh horror and grief on her face. “There are only four of us left—you and I, Astra and the criminal. The Deceiver. He destroyed the others. And you’ve been missing for so goddamn long—”

  Her body stiffened and her gaze snapped into a sharp blue focus, locking with his. “Wait. You think I’m one of you, that I belong in your group?”

  His gut clenched, and he went to red alert. Carefully he took her by the shoulders. “Don’t you see that’s why you keep dreaming of this place?”

  Her body arced away from his touch. “Let me go. You’re wrong. This is a mistake. I’m not one of you. I can’t be one of you.”

  His fingers loosened immediately, and he let her go. She scrambled back until she hit the wall. Her face was filled with horror. “It’s all right,” he said. He held a hand to her, palm out. “You’re going to be all right.”

  She screamed at him, “I’m human!”

  “Of course you are,” he said. He fought his own sense of horror. This was beyond disastrous. None of them had ever recovered so much of their memories before without realizing their real identities. “You need to calm down. You’re safe.”

  “I’m safe until you decide to kill me?” she said, her voice hoarse. She pushed to her feet and turned to face the wall, looking up at the carving of the two inhuman figures, and she made an inarticulate sound that was so wounded and afraid, it scalded his senses.

  He straightened, keeping his movements slow. He kept his voice soft as he said, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not sorry,” she said in that stranger’s voice. She began to feel along the wall, running her fingers over the carvings as though reading Braille. As though the scene was a prison that she was trying to escape. “You meant it. Where is this place? How did you bring me here?”

  Step by step, with seeming effortl
essness, she peeled away all the layers of indifference that he had built up over the centuries until he felt raw with agony. Fighting every instinct he had to move forward, to take hold of her again in a grip so tight she would never get away from him again, he took a step back then another. Then he waited until she looked over her shoulder at him.

  He said, “You’ll have to figure that out on your own.”

  Fresh devastation flared in her eyes. Steeling himself against the expression, he turned away, unable to talk in this mental landscape and hold his energy separate from hers, unable to stand the sight of the unnatural gash down her psychic body.

  Exiting her mind with as much care as he could, he pulled his gun even as he opened his eyes to look around. They had been motionless for perhaps a half hour.

  When he had pulled to the shoulder of the road earlier, he had refrained from putting on the car’s hazard lights, hoping they would look like an abandoned vehicle to those passing by at high speed. Whether by luck or by his design, they had been left alone.

  Mary’s body rested against his chest. He had been quietly feeding her energy the whole time he had been in her mind. Despite her confusion and anguish, her body felt relaxed and more natural now, no longer feverish. She seemed to be asleep.

  In a stealthy movement he pressed his lips against her shoulder blade and rubbed his mouth lightly on the thin, warm cotton material of her T-shirt. Then he eased her over more to the passenger seat, tucked the jean jacket around her and buckled her seat belt into place. She sighed, shifted and went still.

  Cars and trucks shot by, providing quick flashes of illumination. The psychic landscape was restless with movement as whispers tickled the edges of his mind. Despite all his instincts screaming at him to get moving again, he took another stolen moment to lock in his memory the sight of the precious curve of her living cheek.