Beyond The Veil: A Paranormal & Magical Romance Boxed Set

by Multiple Authors

  “I—I can't. Never learned the trick.”

  Her look turns to a glower, one that actually extends her browbones to prominence, instead of simply tensing muscles. “I wouldn't have released you without it. I'll have to have a word with Corrin, remind him of our standards.”

  I flush. “I don't wish to get anyone in trouble.”

  “But the education of the community is a precious trust, and one that is not served well by sending you out unprepared.”

  My throat clenches, to be so easily shut down, and to have Lorelei's speculation affirmed so callously.

  “Now, see—I've fought hard just to be here, possibly destroyed a mortal's life in the process—” Though it had only been an exaggeration to get her to listen, the words bring out a shudder as I realize their truth. Most mortals who find their way to the dreamlands never come back, though no one really watches to see what happens to them.

  “Fine. Speak as you can, then.” She moves the junk away from my visualization space, and I fight to shove everything into it. The nightmares, the struggles to focus, dreamscapes evading me, Han helping me track Iniga's substance, and the blackness in her eyes.

  It nudges something else in me, too. “I've got the seed, though; tell me who will be retrieving it.”

  The librarian snorts. “A bit late on that one, aren't you, child?”

  I glare as best I can. “What?”

  “You've been gone several months. And missed some seismic shifts. The elders are gone, and we've ceased our harvesting, except for recreation.”

  “What?”

  She pushes into my head with a power and grace that I envy, and resist. A visual blooms in my skull. Incubus and succubus alike crying out in pain, in agitation, as they witness proof of their elders' duplicity and role in their enslavement. A human woman, wan but forceful, exposing it as she flashes the only source who could be accepted without doubt, one of the elders' themselves. All because of an incubi child conceived without human seed. The memories are tainted from their presence in their host; most of it is stained with her apprehension and anxiety. It makes sense, though; those devoting themselves to the archives were the most public example of authority, with the elders' reclusiveness. If the incubi were inclined to bloody revolution, the librarians would be the surest targets.

  Joy blooms in me; I no longer have to accept names, offer my body to a purpose that eludes me, on my most primal level.

  “Your mission,” she reminds me, an appendage somewhere between a tail and a tentacle brushing her hair away from her face.

  I offer her the doll, and as her hand nears it, she pulls away again. I don't have to forge a telepathic link to understand that there's something personal and vulnerable preventing her from accepting it.

  “Ma'am?”

  Her eyes widen. “Where. And when.”

  I bristle at the command, but offer as many details as I can. With each one, her carriage stiffens.

  “Is she going to make it?” I can't find any other reason for her reaction; I must have exposed Iniga to too much of the elements, lost too much of her. Or maybe she was too far gone to begin with.

  Something in her guard cracks, and she takes a deep breath. “I've suspected this since the revelation. It's haunted me. But you've found her.”

  “What?”

  “I was young, still trying to pursue my own romantic life in between assignments. My consort, an incubi, long since flashed...he and I poured ourselves into hosts, a married couple, to share their experience. It was intoxicating, but...you've located our accidental child. She shouldn't still be alive a hundred years' after. She shouldn't have still been present enough for you to find. I suppose we have no knowledge on what a child born wholly of our blood could do, but—”

  A shiver passed through me. “This is over my head. You think she's okay?”

  “Okay, and—better. I don't know how much of the girl you knew will pull through, but she's made it this far, so I have no reason to expect her to wither away now.”

  She accepts the doll, finally, though the loss of Iniga's touch on my mind feels alien. My soul feels cleaner than it has since my rebirth, my thoughts ringing through with a clarity than unnerves me. Muffled pulses bleed into me from the doll in the older succubus's hands, and I gasp, to realize I need only push, and I could be in her head.

  It falls into place that my dreams, my limitation, were from working around Iniga's presence in my heart. She'd nearly consumed me, driven me insane, trying to find some way of pushing past her own hell. And without her, saying goodbye to that connection, it will give me a chance to see how this life works around me, not around us. Still, I worry that Iniga is more a part of me, than my own person.

  My resentment, my anxieties about my role; how much of that was me? My inability to relate to others of my blood—how much of that identity will be lost? Will it be worse if it remains, if I discover that even without a passenger, I'm a shit succubus? Who am I?

  And, if I no longer have a purpose to pursue, what's left for me?

  My mind's empty, my soul cold. A vessel after pouring the liquid out.

  What's left of me?

  “You've done something altruistic,” the librarian says, no doubt attributing my silence to the news of the elders and of Iniga's origins. “I don't know if she will pull through, and if I am unable to know her as she was in mortality, I will still relish the chance to know my child. She's been eaten away pretty thoroughly; I'm honestly shocked there's this much of her left. And I think it may be some time before I can rid myself of guilt for not learning of her existence sooner. But that's something to be done in isolation. You may go. I'll—I'll send for you when she's up for company. Give it a century or two.”

  I can't make myself leave. The moment I leave this room, I step into something entirely new, entirely different, but even less wanted. Couldn't I have just offered Iniga my flesh, flashed my soul?

  “I—what now?”

  “What your conscience dictates, I guess.” Her impatience comes through loud and clear, like a belt across my posterior. I try to clear my mind, try to decide. She has better things to do than waste time with my stupid neuroses.

  I don't have to focus very hard to realize the one thing I have to do, before all else. I have to know whether I led my old companion, still nameless, to his death.

  Chapter Fifteen: Catch And Release

  The way back is much more difficult; under other circumstances I'd have a connection to draw on, but the trek has eroded me, and it feels like every third thought in my head is covered in fog. I can't grasp the particulars of hardly anything. It takes me three tries to find a fissure and shove myself through it. I know the tricks, but my reflexes don't follow, and the threads holding the realities separate twitch away from my grasp.

  I can't remember his name; really, the details of his face are blurry. His voice is familiar, but I can't actually remember his words.

  It disturbs me that I remember his dick more plainly than whatever the hell possessed me to get on his dick in the first place.

  But as I walk, I start finding things that call to me. A pen, a pocket knife, a handful of Christmas ornaments; they're little things, but something in them feels familiar to me, and my best guess is that, after spending so much time sharing headspace, I've picked some of him up passively.

  Another set of footprints is ahead of me, and the uneven gait puts me off. There's far worse than illusory predators here, and from the looks of it, I'm stalking one of them.

  I've never socialized much, never spent much time with our cousins. But I've heard the rumors, of carrion crow Reapers who grew addicted to life, who murdered dreamers and took over their flesh to stay out there longer. Corpse-riders. It's the reason Reapers' excursions are so heavily watched.

  It should make me feel better, that whatever the hell I am is still better than that. That at least I have some chance to overcome my blocks and hangups, instead of being confined to a life of restriction, only let loose to po
ssess a corpse and hunt someone down.

  There's little pieces of tissue and skin caught on branches along the trail, and from the flesh, it's old, barely holding itself together. It'll need new flesh, soon.

  I accelerate, the ground painful beneath my toes. I break into a run, noting a dark spot on the horizon.

  It stops moving as I approach, cocks ears covered in graying fur at me. “Well, well, well, sister. What brings you out to these reaches?”

  “Looking for a friend.” I fight to put a description together, and then finally shove the memories forward, into the creature's head.

  “Morsel like that, is worth quite a lot around here. Why would I send him your way if I saw him?” The coyote pauses to pant, playing aloof.

  I reach into his head with a strength I didn't know I owned, and yank on several of his nerve endings. Then, I pinch hard on his motion center, and his limbs start to seize. “Because you know it's your life if he's not alive when I find him.”

  He sighs, a short canine whuff that sprays snot into the ground between us. “Has to be like that, eh? Cunt.”

  I tighten my mental pressure, and he sways.

  “Passed him a few days back. He's around here somewhere. Not alone, though. I left when the smell got bad.”

  I freeze, recognizing what that likely means.

  “Look for the fields; you won't find him in the woods.”

  I take off running, elongating my legs and shaping myself canine, to gain speed. To my surprise, the coyote follows. I fucking hate the spirits who lived in the dreamscapes. I have no clue what game he's playing, but I can't trust it's parallel to mine. And who knows what kind of conniving that stupid accent might conceal.

  Han:

  No matter how many times I throw my attacker off me, he comes back. His flesh rips under my hands, coming apart between my fingers, and his clothes seem to be half rotted. But he can't seem to feel the pain, and I'm running out of energy to struggle. I got a lucky strike a few minutes back that broke two fingers in the hand holding the knife, but he hasn't dropped it. I'm dead unless I can get it away from him.

  I see my moment, dart forward as quickly as I can, and lash out at his hand, but he's faster. His knife bites into my shoulder and my arm dangles limply. I don't even want to know what kind of infection I'll get from it.

  I try to keep my other hand between us as he lunges again and throws me down. His arm falls across my windpipe, and he readies the blade.

  Then, his weight flies off me and into the ground ten feet away. The coyote is back, and wrestling him down. “You know how to reap?” he calls over his shoulder, and I'm swamped in confusion, until I see his companion. I recognize Aletta's face, though she still wears a dog's paws and is barely standing upright, her body rippling as the bits of canine bleed back into woman.

  “No, but I'm sure as fuck gonna give it a try. Just let me get a bead on this so I know where to come back to.”

  “Don't you trust me?” He sinks teeth into my attacker's spinal cord, and I bite back nausea, both from my own infirmity and also from the smell of blood.

  “Who are you?” Aletta turns to me. I'm surprised how much the question hurts.

  “What?”

  “I've lost myself. I need whatever we shared together to find you again.”

  “Oh.” That still doesn't make sense to me. She seems to be running out of patience, though. She kneels by me, hauling me close, and kisses me. My skull aches, then expands, as her consciousness unfurls within me, picking through mine as though banging at the base of a mountain to start an avalanche.

  The kiss awakens so much, every kiss prior, every cuddle. Her lips shaping my name.

  She pulls back. “Good enough.” She turns to the coyote and the corpse, finally looking like the woman I've grown to care for, and presses her hand into one of the rents in the body's flesh.

  Then she's gone, the translucent presence is gone, and it's just me and a coyote, backing away from a mostly-decayed corpse.

  Aletta:

  I've never done this, but I carried Iniga, so I know I can. I push my mind into the rogue corpse-rider, latch on tight, and drag it out and between worlds with me. It struggles, barely even human anymore: just memories of hunger, sex, pain, and a desire to feel them all again. I don't bother sheltering it, simply let the world tear at it until it stops struggling, and then I leave it in Limbo's outer wastes. Probably one of the Hub's Reapers will want to talk to me about it later—somehow I still remember them, the enforcers and bounty hunters who guide our dealings with the other demons. In painful detail, not phased the least by my trek through the Wastes. Just the thought makes me shiver, remembering how easily and cruelly they torture and kill their marks. The corpse-riders are awful, but the active Reapers are worse.

  I tug hard on my bond with Han until I find my direction.

  His memories fit into the holes in my head, returning pieces of myself that I've lost. The warmth in the way he remembers me, even our fight, stirs butterflies to a frenzy, inside me.

  I don't think I can go back to being isolated, but I know I have no place in his life. I'll return him home, pay my debt to him. But when I kissed him, I found so much more than what I wanted, saw the rest of his life without me, and it only serves to remind me how different we are, how much I've grown past the woman he thought I was, the young woman I died as.

  The coyote notices me before Han does.

  “All set here, brother. You can skedaddle,” I dismiss him; I still don't trust him.

  “Not even a bloody thank-you? Well, there's a fine how-do-you-do.”

  I call “Thank you,” at his hindquarters as he lopes away, and I bend to seize Han's arm, pull him up to me. “We'll want to get away from here before anyone comes to check that out.”

  He smiles at me, holds his arm against him to keep my hand in place. “I knew you'd come back.” Only then does he realize both hands are free. “Where's the doll?”

  “I let her go.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It's what had to happen. I hope it's good.” I don't know where to set about explaining, so I focus on feeding steady streams of images to him, to make the attempt.

  His eyes are wide, and he has no clue what to make of the unorthodox communication method. “You are amazing.”

  I sigh, sadly. “I'm glad someone sees it that way.” A few of my more agitated thoughts leak through, and he flinches. To distract myself, and to see if I can, I force my mind through the landscape ahead, seize a point, and yank it toward us. The ground shifts under our feet it remakes itself to become the new spot. The threads here are perfect for a gate. As we steady ourselves, at the edge of this reality. I probe for the waking world, and pause. “Your stop's just past here.”

  He stares at me hesitantly, and I can't bear to break our final moment together with something so trite as a goodbye.

  Han:

  She's been terse and concealing something, I can tell that much. I hadn't wanted to press it because I thought it would take us longer to get this far. My hand tightens on her arm, and she turns to me. There's that delicate touch in my mind, and I grasp for some kind of ability to cling to that too, beg her not to withdraw, not to stop leaking recollections from worlds unique and alien, pushing me outside my skepticism.

  She shuts her eyes, and though I can't see what she's doing, I feel it, a pull in my gut. When I open my eyes, we're standing in a hospital room, looking at my own body in a hospital bed. Medical staff walk through us as they inject something into an IV drip, fight to hold me in the bed despite my convulsions.

  The very thought makes me queasy, brings remembered pain of watching Aletta do the same.

  “Will I see you again?” I steel myself to admit that I want that. For how alien she is, I still want to see more of the shy but vivacious creature who taught me ballet moves.

  She sighs. “I don't know.”

  I gather her into my arms, look for the words to convince her. But she's already in my head, and
has to know they're there. She hesitates in my embrace, and then puts those soft palms on my chest and shoves me back. I trip over myself, and both halves of me stick to each other, reconnecting. I open bleary eyes, reach for Aletta, but she's nowhere.

  Just more nurses shoving my hands into painful restraints, and monitoring my heartrate.

  Chapter Sixteen: A New Beginning

  Aletta:

  Vanya—the librarian; she finally offered me her name—stands next to me. “You know I can't let you in there; they're too volatile, and we can't risk one of them attaching itself to you.”

  I nod. “I just wanted to know she's okay.”

  “She seems to be about as okay as the rest of them. You know it can take a century or more for a new one to stop shrilling in pain.”

  I remember that stage well, and shrink in on myself. I can almost hear the cries coming through the walls, even one that sounds like Iniga, though it warbles strangely.

  “And how are you? Recovering and growing, now that you two aren't tethered?”

  “Seem to be. I've had a lot more confidence in my abilities, and done a lot that I never could before.”

  “There a ‘but’ in that?”

  “Maybe. I still, I don't know. I don't feel I belong here. Even without feeling crippled or hamstrung, I just don't see my rebirth as a blessing. I've...resolved...some things, but I still don't feel capable of moving forward. And the longer I'm here, the more the isolation cuts to me, and the less whole I feel.

  “Iniga—she belongs here. Or at least to have the chance to belong here. But I'm a mistake. I always was.”

  I hesitate, and then ask Vanya for one last favor. “Can I take one of the blanks home?”

  She stares at me, gauging whether it's better to talk or to acquiesce. “If that's what you want.”

  I accept the book she offers, feeling it almost hum against my flesh, begging to be filled with presence. I weave my body open and then shut around it, concealing it from prying or judging eyes.