TravelersKiss

by Sherri L. King

  Raine winced. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Luckily no.”

  “Was there any damage?”

  “Not structurally.” Emily shook her head. “Just a lot of rumbling. Probably some stuff fell off shelves but no big deal.” She took Raine’s arm. “The Shikars know it was you, it’s just they don’t know why the earthquakes have gotten so powerful all of a sudden and they’ll need to see you and know that you’re, you know, okay and everything.”

  Raine jerked out of Emily’s grasp, startled into speaking before she thought better of it. “Daemon called me Earthmover. Is that what he meant?”

  Emily hissed, “When did you see Daemon?”

  “Earlier tonight—hey, what time is it? Is it day or night?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Raine!” Emily exclaimed. “Are you telling me Daemon was here? He was actually here, in this apartment?”

  Raine hurried to intercept the anger brewing in her sister. “Not technically. He was in the bathroom mirror—”

  “Oh fuck me, are you insane? Did you talk to him? Don’t answer that. What did he say to you?” Emily’s cop voice slammed into Raine like a shot and she fired question after question at her. “Did you tell him anything—anything at all?”

  “No. Stop it, Em.” Raine blew out a frustrated breath. “Listen to me—”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have given you so much space.” Emily put her hand to her head as if to physically push back her fury. “Did anyone listen to me? No, of course not. Steffy said you needed more time to recover. Edge told me to be patient, that this time was different. And you see what happens—Daemon senses weakness and tracks you down. My God, Raine, you should have come to me the second you saw him. You shouldn’t have let that bastard open his fucking mouth, you should have just run screaming—”

  “Emily, I’m not a kid anymore, stop talking to me like I’m one!” The room echoed with her shout, the crystal walls ringing like gongs. Raine took a deep breath, her toes curling into the floor. “Please, I don’t want to fight.” She didn’t mention the very real threat of accidentally injuring her with a ceiling collapse if they continued like this. “Let’s just go find this Cinder dude and see if he can help me and then we can talk about Daemon and all that other stuff you mentioned.”

  Emily took Raine’s arm again. “Fine.”

  Raine studied her sister. “Who is Edge?”

  This question clearly startled Emily out of her rage. “Um, yeah, well. Some things you clearly don’t remember should be addressed now.” She blushed. “He’s uh, sort’ve my husband.” She laughed. “I guess.”

  “You guess?” Raine asked incredulously, a bark of mad laughter making her question her sanity for the millionth time. “You don’t know?”

  “The Shikars don’t have marriage ceremonies. They just shack up. It lasts forever, though, so that works out way better than the whole husband and wife deal.” Emily snickered. “Hang on to me a sec.”

  Raine wasn’t entirely unprepared for the wholly unique sensation of Traveling, she was just unprepared for her sister being the one to do the deed. It was weird. She liked it far better when Grimm did it.

  “What would Mom say about all this?” Raine extricated herself from Emily’s hold, prepared to assess their new surroundings.

  “She’d probably tell you to run for the hills,” Steffy said, coming at them at a brisk clip, strapping a wicked-looking gun to her thigh, her fire-engine-red hair almost too bright to look at, slicked back in a pixie cut away from her face. “Hi, Raine,” she said with a gamine grin that was almost a savage baring of her even white teeth. “Sorry to greet you like this but there’s some serious shit in motion up top and we don’t have a lot of time.”

  Emily’s entire body seemed to freeze, her features sharpening like a hound on the hunt. “What’s happened?”

  “You mean to ask what is going to happen.” A blond man entered the room. More like he consumed the room—the temperature rose several degrees and suddenly the space seemed infinitely smaller with him in it. He wore a black, skintight leather outfit that left nothing to the imagination. It was a twin to Steffy’s. They looked amazing together, standing close as if drawn by an invisible force. They were like two lithe ballet dancers, long limbed and graceful, perfectly matched, moving as a pair.

  Their eyes were exactly the same shade of gold, only there were little dancing flames hovering in front of his eyes.

  “Cinder—”

  “You’re Cinder.” Raine interrupted Emily before she could finish.

  He gave her a short bow. “Your memory is already back?” He gave a puzzled smile. “That was really fast.”

  Raine shook her head. “I’m still working on that. Grimm thinks—”

  “Shut up,” Emily snapped. “Cinder, Steffy, will one of you please tell me what the fuck is happening up top?”

  “There is quite a large number of Daemons gathering outside a human city. We think they are just stragglers but…”

  Cinder’s words faded into the background and suddenly Raine was with the Daemons. She was looking out through their eyes…

  But she was also still in the room with Emily, Steffy and Cinder too.

  Somehow Raine was split between herself and the dozens of Daemons descending on the brightly lit, unsuspecting city below. Curious, unable to stop herself from prying, she opened her mind wide to listen to the voices of the Horde.

  Oh…hell.

  “They’re outside of Gainesville, Georgia,” she said out loud, voice steadier than she felt it ought to be considering the dread consuming her. “They’re going to attack the city and kill as many as they can before we stop them.” She felt an enormous tug on the bonds that connected her to the creatures and physically stumbled on her feet. With a grunt she managed to remain upright, but only just. She spoke through gritted teeth. “Damn it, they know I’m with them.” She was panting with the monumental effort it took to remain in two places at once.

  Being among the Daemons’ minds was like standing on the outskirts of a raging, black tornado. It was pure chaos. She didn’t belong there, and yet Raine knew that once upon a time they had welcomed her presence among them. Why was it so different now?

  She blinked, seeing two worlds at once—the world where she stood with Emily and the world where she fought for a grip inside the Daemons’ heads, looking at the distant twinkling lights of the city. This was madness. “They want the humans to see this fight. They want the humans to know everything.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The more Raine interacted with the Shikars and the Horde, the more her memories returned. Some of them were good. Most of them, regrettably, were not so great.

  The good stuff was easy to remember. Almost as soon as the warning left her mouth, three more warriors surged into the room. Edge was a smiling guy with the shiniest mahogany hair Raine had ever seen—Emily’s “sort’ve husband”. Cady was a petite woman with caramel skin and wide, soft lips that more often than not had a smart-aleck comment coming out of them—she immediately lightened the somber mood that had descended upon the room.

  “Seriously, Gigantor, if I had wanted a new set of dishes, I would have just asked for some. I didn’t need you getting all huffy at whatever, pitching a fit and breaking them with that earthquake of yours. I liked those dishes,” she said, breezing past Emily, putting her hands on her hips and looking up at Raine with a teasing glint in her eyes that took any edge off her teasing. “How you holding up, big ’un?”

  Raine assumed a faux scowl. “I don’t remember you. Actually, if I’m honest, I probably actively forgot you.”

  “Nope.” The smaller woman tsked. “I’m afraid it’s most likely brain damage. You’d have remembered me by now otherwise.” She held out her hand, holding up first five fingers, then three, then one, then five again. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Raine chuckled despite herself.

  The woman laughed. “I’m Cady. Don’t worry, you’ll remember everyth
ing eventually, you always do.” She flexed her arms comically. “Usually thanks to me in some way.”

  That was when he stepped in—the third warrior.

  His eyes were different from everyone else’s.

  They were all wrong.

  They were gray.

  Well, not entirely gray. They were too strange to be called by any one color. They appeared as a fog that had been laid out over the orange hue that the other Shikars shared and the irises were not entirely opaque, they were opalescent. He moved differently from the others as well, as if he had more joints in his bones and his muscles were made of liquid. His hair was as black as an onyxian cabochon, dipped in squid ink mixed with indigo, trapped within a bubble of jet glass. His skin was bronze, much like that of the other Shikar males she had seen, but there was a pallor beneath the dark patina of his flesh, as if he’d been starved of oxygen for a long period of time.

  With the unnerving certainty that preceded the recollection of lost memory, Raine knew that he had, in fact, suffered such trauma. He’d gone quite awhile without oxygen because he had, in fact, been dead.

  “Obsidian.” Raine said his name out loud. When she heard it, spoken in her voice just so, she remembered meeting him for the first time and understood why seeing him was affecting her so powerfully.

  Offspring had a weird way of doing that to their progenitors.

  Raine slipped into the past with something like a swoon. She remembered…

  * * * * *

  Then…

  You will live.

  A migraine pressed in the center of her forehead, splitting her skull wide open. She breathed in and smelled blood, opened her mouth to gasp and tasted its iron rust. Raine was aware of a menacing presence in the chill, humid air, but she knew that if she looked for it, she would never be able to see it.

  The Leviathan hides inside minds. It burrows in the leaves of dreams, lurks in the hollow of your nightmares…

  The air began to vibrate with tension and all Raine’s torment, frustration and pain coalesced into an anger that burned inside her skin like fire, making her as hot as a sunspot. She raged, eager to let loose in a storm that would wreck the world and destroy the menace that trespassed against her—the Leviathan. Whatever the hell that meant.

  The hair on her arms stood up. The flesh of her scalp tingled unpleasantly.

  The heat of her migraine became the forge through which determination liquefied into the simpler but deadlier emotion of hate. With the birth of hate came a new level of pain and the only remedy for her suffering was to explode.

  Explode into lightning, setting fire to a world with no shortage of kindling to burn through. For one second she was the single light in the universe. Then a dozen embers sparked out from her center, giving birth to a dozen new fires, which in turn exploded, fueling a hundred others and so on. Raine herself was ignited.

  “Raine, be calm.” His voice was music in its purest form. Until he spoke she hadn’t been aware of the legion of voices chanting in her head, but now Raine heard them—there were so many they could not be counted by man or God—and the language they spoke was too ugly for the human ear, yet she understood it.

  Kill. Kill. Kill.

  Raine shied away from it, anathema that the mantra was, and turned back to his voice for solace. “Grimm.” His name was in her mouth like a prayer.

  “I am here.” He held her, his scent filling her head like a healing fog. “You have to pull yourself back. There is no way of knowing the damage you may do in this state. Find calm within yourself.”

  Calm? The rush of blood cleared her mind and the heat dissipated some. She was just Raine again. Terrified. Out of her mind with fear, but still alive. Still Raine.

  The chill of the air bit her skin. The weight of her blindness returned, her limbs no more useful than dead weights. Her headache was so that bad she was afraid her body would snap in two from the fresh agony. No one could survive this kind of pain and live.

  I still need you…you will live… Whose voice was that? It wasn’t Grimm’s. It didn’t matter; the words had the desired effect. They replaced her hate with something else, something far stronger. A desire to live. A will to survive.

  I choose to live. Raine felt empowered by this affirmation. I choose to live. She held to this, made it a mantra all her own.

  Grimm’s arms tightened, crushing the breath out of her, and Raine realized she’d spoken the words out loud. All of a sudden the world spun back and they came to a halt. They both went crashing down to earth in a tangle of limbs like two children thrown from a moving train that roared on past without them and Raine had the distinct impression that Grimm wasn’t one used to such an inelegant landing—he had obviously been put through a wringer thanks to her.

  Raine choked on a mouthful of dust, coughed and blinked furiously. Through a cloud of dirt and grit, she thought she could see shapes moving about. People.

  There were people everywhere.

  Some were standing, some had fallen as she and Grimm had fallen. Men and women—mostly men, she noted absently—not the monsters of her nightmares that she’d grown accustomed to seeing over the past…well, it had been a very long time since she’d seen anything but monsters. Through the groans and complaints of those disheveled men and women regaining their feet, she heard someone laugh.

  Raine coughed again and the laughter was broken—it was her own laughter clanging in her ears like a warped, dissonant bell. On the heels of that realization she laughed even harder. Half mad, half triumphant, she yelled to the heavens, throwing her head back to fully release her humorless mirth.

  She was alive. She had survived the horror and come out the other side. She was free!

  That was when the scent of panic hit her, the mélange of anguish and fear. She bit off her laughter with an audible snap of her teeth.

  “Obsidian! Sid?” A shrill cry pierced Raine’s dizzy euphoria. “Oh my God, he’s not breathing.”

  “No, he can’t be dead,” cried another voice, a man’s voice, full of raw grief.

  “Someone find Cady,” Emily ordered. “She went with the families when the alarms sounded. Hurry, there isn’t much time!”

  Crashing down to reality, to pain and to ruin, Raine blinked and saw the world around her, clearly, for the first time in far too long. It was just as confusing as her nightmares; only she knew that this time what she was seeing was real. It was too ugly and yet too beautiful. Too complex and yet simple. Reality was far more contradictory of itself than dreams.

  “Em?” she croaked out from behind dry, torn lips. Her tongue was a chalk mound in her mouth. “Em-Em?” The wisp of her papery voice didn’t carry over the din. There was a flurry of movement, but Raine saw her sister clearly even in the midst of a crowd of giant men, all of them bent over the prone figure of someone sprawled on the ground. Emily shone like a beacon of hope.

  She wet her lips, tasted dried blood and tried to stand, but found herself caged in the hard arms of a giant panther of a man—Grimm still held her. Her eyes darted up to his face, but his features were lost in the folds of a black shroud and long, tangled locks of dark hair. He seemed dazed but conscious, shifting as she shifted, moving to allow her breathing space, but not freeing her from his desperate grip as they rocked, tangled on the ground.

  “Lemme go.” The words came out slurred, the effort of speaking hurting her throat, as if she were coming down with strep. “Gerroff.” Get off, she’d meant to say with her thick tongue, pushing at his arms ineffectively. “Argh!”

  He tossed his head, throwing back the hair and cloth covering his face. He sat up with her but didn’t let go. “Lemme go, Grimm,” she demanded again, her voice a rasp, like sandpaper on ice.

  His eyes found hers and she forgot how to breathe. Wow. He was so much more devastatingly virile in person, he really, really was.

  Raine’s heart leapt in her chest like a kangaroo and she gasped, pulling back sharply, breaking his hold on her by sheer force of will. His
hands fell by his sides and she stumbled to her feet, reeling drunkenly.

  The world tilted sharply and she pushed aside the heart-stopping, impossible beauty of his starlit eyes while she struggled to keep her balance. A hot, sticky pain made her wince. She tentatively touched her throbbing forehead and pulled her fingers back wet with blood…she didn’t want to think about this ragged, open hole in her skin. Not just now, maybe not ever.

  Grimm was at her side, steadying her. She hadn’t sensed his movement, but he was on his feet now too, his body crowding close to hers. In a gesture that was as protective as it was possessive, he rested his hand beneath her elbow. As she found her balance, he very slightly bowed his head and gallantly released her, but not before his fingers stroked a long, slow line down her arm to her wrist.

  The skin of his fingertips flayed her like electric wire set to bare flesh.

  “Sid, c’mon, don’t do this, man.” Emily’s voice grabbed her again and Raine gravitated toward it. She tripped the distance separating her from her sister, her feet too stupid to remember how to walk properly. There was a desperate need inside Raine, a yearning to touch her sibling that made her whole body ache and tremble. She was frantic. Raine needed to feel the warmth of Emily’s skin, look in her sister’s eyes and affirm that the nightmare was over and that it could never start over again.

  Emily knelt by the prone man alongside many people crowding around him. She was holding one of his wrists while she checked for a pulse in his neck with her other hand. Her face wore a stricken look of desperation.

  Raine would do anything to wipe the anguish from her sibling’s lovely face.

  Anything.

  Was it too late to save the dead man, if Raine wished his death undone?

  It had been so long since anything had made any rational sense in Raine’s mind that she didn’t waste time wondering what to do, or how to go about doing it. She simply followed her instincts.