Raine dropped to her knees by her sister, grateful to be off her feet—her long-neglected muscles were already screaming from the small effort it took to stay standing but a few brief moments. For the time being she brushed away the aching need to embrace her sister, instead studying the man’s still form with careful senses.
He had suffered, of that there could be no doubt.
He’s been torn from the inside out, was her first thought.
I did that, was her second. Without even touching him, I took this man’s life. I can tell.
There was a particularly nasty wound in his chest, a furrow that scarred a path from his sternum to his abdomen, veering to the side and down to his hip. It looked like something had been wrenched out from him, something vital. It was a mortal wound and mourning was already a plaintive song on the crowd’s voice, piercing her eardrums.
Guilt filled her with dread. I reached across worlds and stole this man’s life force. She knew it because she felt him swimming there inside her mind. In her fear and panic, it had all been instinctive. Raine had reached out to a source of strength and taken it in a moment of weakness. It made her sick to the very roots of her soul that she could do such a thing.
The world dimmed. Only a fierce determination kept her from letting go of consciousness—that was the coward’s way out. She must face her sin.
Was he truly dead? The distinction seemed to have some importance. If not, could she call him back and, if so, in what state might he return?
What a strange series of things to consider.
Raine imagined her thoughts were like fragments of confetti, falling through the breezeways of her forehead, but she didn’t think she was insane to be contemplating the possibility of returning life to a nearly lifeless body.
So long as he wasn’t completely dead, he shouldn’t come back a monster.
Right?
If you are careful, he won’t come back a monster no matter how dead he is.
That last idea thrilled her to her marrow, but it wasn’t her idea. It was a whisper that manifested from outside herself. It was spoken in a cool, calculated voice, a whisper sliding seductively through her mind.
Raine leaned over him and one perfect ruby droplet of blood slid down her nose to splash into the man’s wounded flesh. She delved deep inside her own thoughts. She listened with her entire being to something she wasn’t even sure existed…but felt must.
The Horde had believed in it, after all.
After what might have been less than two beats of a metronome, she felt as if something shifted and it was then she knew for certain. There it was, yes! It started as a vibration deep in her heart then clanged through her skull like a piano key banged out of tune. She held her breath, adjusted something inside her so that the note was perfect in its pitch.
The vibration burst free, sang its way out of her skin, moving the air as surely as a wind in spring. When it hit her ears it had transformed, it was a full, melodious chord.
When it moved to explore, Raine didn’t fight its whim. She felt the chord’s feedback through to her soul. She felt it reach for the man, find him and connect them as one, heart to heart. Between them the sound wave transformed, smoothing into a harmony that was uniquely theirs.
A thread shimmered into being, quivering through the air, clear but shimmery like water. It formed a cord wavering in the air to match the musical chord in her head. It trembled between them, growing. Every heartbeat that passed strengthened it.
No. This guy was not truly dead yet, she was relieved to note. In the parlance of Raine’s kind, there were many degrees of dead, and this man was very close to still being alive. He could be alive again if he wished—if Raine wished, she could even force the choice either way. The translucent cord shimmering between them conveyed this information to Raine and a whole lot more besides. She didn’t have to question it any more than she had to question the pumping of the blood through her veins. It was a reflexive, involuntary knowing—with an evolutionary purpose she didn’t have to understand to appreciate.
The vibrancy of his fading life force made her teeth ache. It hit her through their connection, flaying her like fingernails raking down the metal surface of a wrecked automobile door. It was at once a sensation that repelled and innervated and Raine fell into the energy she sipped from him like an alcoholic who had fallen off the wagon. The rush was immediate and intense—before she lost her head, she used the signature that was his alone to hone in on his spirit. It drew her like a magnet.
A film of gray slammed down over her eyes, an overlay of the Gray Land that allowed Raine to call on the fallen warrior’s spirit with an almost obscene ease.
Her words came so fast they sounded like the buzz of a flower fly. Do you want to live? She knew it was best to ask him, not to force the choice. She would be no better than a Daemon if she raised this poor man against his wishes.
The shade looked at her and nodded, but more than that, Raine felt a surge of heat and urgency through their connection. Oh yes, this warrior definitely wanted to live.
She dismissed his shade and the gray film disappeared instantly. Raine let it—the path to the Gray Land was meant to stay closed. There was always a risk that things could seep through if one wasn’t too careful. She pushed away the temptation to continue feeding from the warrior’s energy and reached her hand out to lay it over the spot where she’d spilled the drop of her blood.
Obsidian—
Her palm sank a little into the raw wound on Obsidian’s chest, but the gore didn’t disgust or repel her. Even the squelching, torn flesh under her palm wasn’t repugnant; it was necessary, actually, to facilitate what had to happen next.
Something akin to gluey, congealing ice oozed down her arm and out through her palm. A flash of white nearly blinded her and Raine understood that the “ice” hadn’t really been anything physical, it had been a magical force. Something conjured by sheer will and imagination. Whatever the Daemons fed on, this was it. It was colder than deep space, brighter than the sun, but no one around her seemed to notice it.
Blood dripped freely down her nose and she tilted her face so that it fell into Obsidian’s body, mingling with his. She knew the Daemons had needed her blood to reanimate the dead just as much as they’d needed psychic energy.
All of a sudden the world fell upside down and she was pulled through the cord binding them, sucked down into Obsidian, and then she was looking out from Obsidian’s eyes. She was seeing her face looking down at him. Her gaunt, waxen face was covered in blood; that red, ragged hole in her head was just awful. And her eyes…
Oh fuck. Raine wanted to scream, scream, scream—but before she could the world righted itself and she was back inside her own head, back where she belonged with the image of those eyes—her eyes—all wrong in her face staring down. She scrambled for something to distract her and focused all her fear and confusion on commanding life back into Obsidian.
Raine was so preoccupied that she didn’t see Emily pull back. She only barely heard her sibling’s incredulous cry when Emily finally realized who had come to kneel next to her.
Raine became aware of the thrumming of the fallen man’s heart as it sputtered beneath her hand, answering the call of her will. Obeying her command to live and accepting her gift of a second chance at what had been so cruelly ripped from him.
By me, she thought. I did this to him somehow.
The heartbeat tripped then found an even tempo. Tripped again and continued beating—the tempo matching the rhythm of Raine’s own pulse exactly. It crashed through her head, the wave of it slamming into the recesses of her mind, and in the aftermath there was a calm that had not been there before. Obsidian shuddered beneath her hand, she felt him lurch and immediately jerked away from him, sensing her touch was not a comfortable thing.
The shining cord between them shrank, became thinner, but it didn’t disappear.
It never would.
“Raine? Raine!” Emily shrieked and threw her arms around Raine in
such a way that their bodies collided with bruising force. “Oh my God, is it really you?” Emily was sobbing wet, hot tears into her neck. She rambled, wordless exclamations of joy and disbelief.
Raine winced as her many aching parts screamed a protest. “Em. Stop. It hurts.” Her words were still painfully hard to enunciate, her tongue numb around the edges. But Emily wasn’t listening anyway. She was hanging on for dear life, as if by sheer brawn she could keep Raine from being ripped from her sight, from the world, ever again.
“Sid!” A new voice pierced through the crowd and clanged in Raine’s head. A petite, curvaceous woman with long hair the same rich hue of molasses pushed her way into the crowd. She was very, very pregnant but nonetheless wildly threw herself on Obsidian’s chest—it was, Raine realized, fully healed now, though still marred by lots of blood. Sid’s hands came up and took the woman’s shoulders gently. He sat upright, eyes squinting against the light.
The woman gasped. “Oh baby, your eyes.”
He shook his head. The woman seemed on the verge of saying something before changing her mind. Instead she clutched him to her. “It doesn’t matter. They said you were struck down and I knew you were dead, but you’re not. You’re okay. Nothing else matters so long as you’re okay now.”
“I am fine, woman, as you see.” His voice was raspy but hale for a man who had actually been dead but moments before. “The reports of my demise were exaggerated.”
Emily still had Raine in a crushing hug, her tears soaking Raine’s throat and breasts, making her skin slick, but Raine felt a little like a balloon, floating above it all. Clarity rode in by degrees and with it, an onslaught of detail she’d missed until now came into sharp focus. She noticed the large crowd of people, the vast underground tunnel demarcated by the ruins of some great, vast wall that flanked her.
Beyond it all lay…Raine didn’t want to see that. She slammed back into her own head and her senses reeled, hammering at the seams of her abused skull. A chill wind raised goose pimples on her skin.
Oh dear.
Raine paled, glancing down in mortification. She was practically naked. Her clothes were no more than mummified rags, remnants that covered nothing and hung in spider-web tatters from her limbs, stained reddish brown and smelling of iron and old, stale air. Suddenly she was glad that Emily held her so tightly, shielding her naked flesh from view.
Raine glanced over her sister’s shoulder at Obsidian and the woman holding him. Was that a corona of flame atop the lady’s head? Raine blinked in disbelief, but the incredible vision didn’t go away.
Well. Stranger things had happened today.
When Raine blinked it seemed a thunderclap resounded through the air and Obsidian’s face turned at once toward her, as if Raine had called his name, commanding his attention. His woman looked at her too and it seemed the temperature in the air rose several degrees.
The lady’s beauty might have seemed subtle at first glance, but it blossomed and bloomed the longer Raine studied her. Aside from the dancing flames above her head—what the hell kind of hallucination was that, Raine wondered distractedly—the woman was exotic, lush and wholly feminine.
She made Raine feel clumsy and mannish by comparison. Heck, there was no comparison, and her amazing, golden eyes saw far too much. They made Raine want to run and hide—this woman could see through a lie with eyes like that.
“You saved his life, didn’t you?” the woman asked at last, releasing Obsidian with her voice from whatever spell had bound him. He turned his face away from Raine and buried it in his woman’s neck. The woman’s voice was shaken. “At what cost to him?”
“I-I’m not sure,” Raine rasped. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”
Emily eased back away from Raine, a question writ on her face. “Raine?” She darted a look between the two women.
Raine heard the words as if they’d been shouted from a far distance. She didn’t respond. She didn’t know what to say. Raine tore her gaze away.
And tripped into another amber gaze.
And another.
There were so many people gathered around her now, she couldn’t count them all. Almost everyone around her had the same golden eyes.
Staring at her.
Raine’s face felt stiff. Her skin was a mask over her muscle and bone. Why were they looking at her like that? As if she were an apparition or a freak, a curiosity? Embarrassed further, she wished desperately for clothes—at the very least she would hide her nudity from them.
Raine turned her head, glancing over her shoulder to meet Grimm’s quiet gaze. Behind him were other men with eyes similar to his, though there were glinting facets to his eyes that none of the others possessed. All the men, both the ones with gold eyes and the ones with black eyes, shared a similar bronze or golden-bronze skin tone. Were they all related somehow, she wondered? They were all very, very tall.
It was a wholly unique experience for Raine, who had been tall and lanky since puberty, to feel small in a crowd of people.
Aside from these shared features, each had distinct facial structures, musculature and hair. Almost everyone had long hair, though some had wavy locks while others had stick-straight hair that shone like glass. No one had hair like Grimm’s. Now that he was standing, it hung to his waist, straight and thick, parted to the side in a careless but classical style. In this lighting his hair was dark, but in the strands there lived the lowlights of a garnet hue, setting him uniquely apart from everyone else.
His gaze awaited hers when she looked up into his starlight once more.
Everything about him set him apart from the group. His tall, erect stance, shoulders square and broad, tapered waist, lean hips—exuding so much more strength than the forms around him. He wore a voluminous ebony cloak over a plain tunic and straight-cut pants of the same jet color, clothing that should have played down his muscles but didn’t. He was densely built, large in scale—not just tall, though he was, very—but big. At the same time, he was whipcord lean from head to toe, his sharp nose and cheekbones cutting, his long-fingered hands barely peeking out from the sleeves of his tunic, graceful in their repose, but Raine had no doubt they could be deadly. He made every other man present look like a boy.
She wanted to look at him forever.
To swoon into him and become a part of him.
To end herself in him.
Egad, she had to get a hold of herself. Now was not the time to moon over the guy. Raine dragged her eyes away from him and regrouped her thoughts.
She was so flustered that she wasn’t prepared to see Daemon himself standing in front of her.
Oh shit.
“Run!” She shoved Emily aside and acted reflexively, defensively, without hesitating.
Raine darted to the side, averting any direct grab Daemon might attempt, and slid like she would have in softball, going low, grabbing at his ankle to unbalance him.
He was ill prepared, for one who had come for a fight.
With a shout of surprise, he stumbled back.
Knowing full well he was wily, completely aware that she had little time to press any advantage and that Daemon would undoubtedly win the fight in the end—the dude was like a million years old, no way was she going to be able to kick his butt—Raine was no less determined to inflict at least a little damage on him. She gathered a fist full of loose dirt, threw it in his face and launched herself at him. He yelled something. She ignored it and yanked his hair with one hand while slamming the other up into his nose with the hard heel of her palm.
No one from the crowd was bothering to come to her aid. She couldn’t help but feel a little rejected.
Hot, hot heat gathered at the base of her skull. With the burn of rage came the swell of voices. Raine was on top of him now. He had gone limp underneath her, and she had her knees on the ground under his shoulders. Something horrible grew inside her. Something black and empty, bottomless and growing deeper, yawning wide. She was suddenly ravenous.
Ravenous for the l
ife that fueled this abominable fiend, the source of all her misery…
Raine screamed as the thing inside her opened its mouth and tried to swallow.
Daemon cried out with her.
Blackness narrowed her vision to a pinpoint of light and everything shrank to a miniscule size, as if she were pulled backward down the length of vast hallways. Spatial distortion made the world snap like a rubber band, there was a pop in her ears and the next thing she knew, Grimm was shouting in her ear.
“Stop it, Raine, you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s not Daemon, that’s Tryton. That’s Daemon’s twin brother!”
Daemon’s twin? Oh.
Raine blinked. Grimm gripped her tighter. He pressed his mouth against her ear and repeated the same words over and over again.
“Stop this at once. You are not a psychic leech, you are not like that horde of abominations, and you do not feast on life, Raine. Stop. Stop!”
Stop…
* * * * *
Now…
“Stop it Raine!” Cady’s voice gave her a start. She snapped her fingers in front of Raine’s face. “Stop staring off into space. This is the here and now, be in it with us, all right?”
Raine gasped, as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time. She might have been; there was no way for her to know. Her memories slid back where they belonged and she looked down at her chest, fully prepared to see the cord connecting her to Obsidian shimmering on the air between them. She reached out to touch it, but hesitated.
“The cord will not break unless you wish it,” he said, watching her with his strange eyes—eyes pulled straight from the Gray Land, eyes she had created. “You can touch it if you like.”
“How did you…?” She shook her head to clear it of the fog. “Did you read my mind?”
“He didn’t have to.” Cady smiled. “Your thoughts are pretty easy to read on your face right now.”
Raine reflexively smoothed her features into a mask and lowered her hand. “Does everything I’ve resurrected share a similar connection to me—one I can break, just like that?” She snapped her fingers.
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