TravelersKiss

by Sherri L. King

  “And the Cankor worms?” Steffy had more reason than most to hate the worms. “What about them?”

  “Yeah, you can watch for those too, Steff. But the closer we get to the Leviathan, the less hungry the worms will be and the slower they’ll move. They’re just parasites that feed on the big behemoth, the main course,” Raine said, her attention returning to the army spreading out for a mile before them. “I intend on getting us as close as possible, but I’m not a strong Traveler by any means and it’s mostly guesswork so we’ll just have to see what happens. Besides, the Leviathan probably already knows we’re on our way, so we have to be extra vigilant once we’re on the ground.”

  “I trust you, brat, but I just can’t understand how you can know all of this.” Emily had fretted over this before. She hadn’t liked Raine’s reasons and she wouldn’t like them now.

  “Because the Horde knows, Em. I told you, we shared a single consciousness. Well, most of the time, when I was too weak to keep them out of my head. They’re like insects, like ants. They have a swarm intelligence—it works best when the group is together and they all share knowledge, what one learns, they all learn. They’re swarmed together now, which means the Leviathan has to guess something’s up, but she won’t know exactly what. It’s a survival mechanism, one they’ve perfected over millennia. So far as I know, I’m the only one who was ever able to hide anything from them besides Daemon himself.”

  Raine sent a query down through the hundreds of thousands of threads that connected her heart to her minions and a pounding hum vibrated through the air. They were ready.

  “Ugh, make them stop that, Raine.” Cady shuddered. “Son of a bitch, hijo de puta, it’s just too God damn creepy.”

  “It’s better than letting them snarl or growl, isn’t it?” Raine pointed out.

  “Blech.” Cady shook herself. “Sick!”

  “By Grimm, she is right,” Obsidian agreed. He looked down at the thread that connected him to Raine. “Remind me to thank you later for letting our bond lie dormant. I would hate to be a thrall, even to so gentle a mistress.”

  “Don’t mention it. Really, don’t.” Raine pulled a face, ill at ease. “I’d sever the tie if I thought it wouldn’t kill you.”

  “Que hostia, it would take more than that to kill my mate,” Cady scoffed but they all pointedly ignored the very naked fear in the proud woman’s voice.

  Raine bridged the gap and took the hand of the nearest Daemon in one of hers. The creature’s hand was oddly gentle, a stark contrast from times past. The gentleness was out of place, but it was proof of how strong Raine’s yoke held. The creature took the hand of another beside it, which joined hands with another and so on, until the entire army of half a million strong held each other thusly. She felt this physical connection resound within their spiritual ties, let it fill her head with noise that crashed against the sides of her skull in waves. When it subsided, Raine no longer existed as one person.

  Raine became the Horde.

  Grimm took her other hand. He was joining hands with the Shikars too, but they were Other, they were not Horde, and did not share in the splendor of their union so Raine did not pay them much heed. Raine cared for them with her other self of course, but with her Horde self she could not reach them. She knew they would play a part in what was to come, but she ignored them for the most part because they were Other and they were not part of the hive mind.

  The Horde suspected something was amiss, but they were not yet alarmed. They did not fear her. Raine was their Little Mother.

  Feed us. Make us strong again. Yesss, stay with us forever.

  Raine struggled to maintain her identity, her sense of self. Enveloped as she was in the mass of voices, in the dark waves of music her offspring made, it was hard enough not to burst into accompanying song, let alone keep her innermost thoughts a secret. Every ounce of concentration she possessed went into keeping her deepest mind locked away and safe from the Horde.

  This was why she had prepared her friends before bringing them here. She had known this would happen. Keeping her true motives hidden was paramount in this endeavor. So far as her offspring knew, she was taking them somewhere fruitful, a place where they could feast and grow strong. On what they would feast was of no consequence and wouldn’t matter even as they tore into the flesh of one of their own, but she must not allow them knowledge beforehand, lest the Leviathan glean it from their consciousness.

  The Leviathan was craftier than all the others.

  The Leviathan was not like any other Daemon Raine had encountered. It wasn’t necessarily intelligent, but it was self-aware in ways the others were not and this made it far more dangerous. It was devious and it was after Raine, after her power, longing to enslave her and use her again, its hunger ceaseless, which made it an enemy she dare not underestimate. The hunger that drove it was fueled by a rage that overshadowed all others, its source a mystery Raine had never solved because every time she’d dared touch on that evil star in the tangled constellation of the Horde cosmos, she had been psychically seared into oblivion for unknowable amounts of time—perhaps days, maybe even weeks—the malevolence in the creature had been that great.

  But now Raine was no longer a captive. She was no longer drained of her strength, kept pliant and undernourished. Raine knew that now, even if the Leviathan sensed aught was amiss, it could not know the full extent of the danger it was in, because Raine did not wish it to know. Raine was the true mistress of this Horde. These were her children, whether she liked it or not.

  Grimm drew her attention, tightening his hand on hers. He inclined his head. It was time to go.

  Raine steeled herself. She sank deep into her consciousness, drawing at the great well of strength on offer from all the golems of flesh and bone that were gathered here. She really needed that strength to move their numbers for she was not of the Traveler Caste—she could only Travel in fits and spurts, but when she did it could often be spectacular.

  She needed it to be spectacular now.

  Raine glanced down at her feet, gathered her muscles—both physical and mental—and jumped.

  When Raine Traveled it was nothing like what others in the Caste went through. For them the journey was long and arduous, a burden and a weight so heavy it marked their souls and bled darkness out through their eyes. For Raine, each journey was faster than the one before, and with each jaunt her spirit flew higher, grew lighter—it hardly seemed fair, she knew, but it was the way she was made.

  Traveling looked to her like zooming straight up into the stratosphere. She saw the ground fall away faster than even her inhuman eyes could follow. She was cut free of the laws of gravity and the planet began spinning freely beneath her at its full rotational speed. She flew through space and dimensions, folding time itself, until she knew for certain with an innate sense that her destination lay below her, and only then did she descend at breakneck speed directly back down to the surface. She slammed into the ground so hard that her feet sank into solid granite a good four inches before she came to a stop.

  The method of moving from point A to point B was different for every Traveler, she knew, just as it was different for their passengers. But Grimm had once looked at her, his face agog, when she’d described her experiences with Traveling, so Raine knew she was far and away unique in the way she Traveled across worlds.

  How this journey had appeared to the eyes of her passengers, Raine couldn’t guess. But this was how Raine managed to pick up hundreds of thousands of bodies on one side of an alien planet and set them down on another side, in less time than it took to exhale a shallow breath.

  They landed on the shores of a great ocean, its black, glassy surface completely, eerily still. Raine let go of the creature’s hand and she was simply Raine again. She felt smaller, weaker, but it was a good feeling, one she welcomed. This was the way she should feel. She squeezed Grimm’s hand and leaned against him, catching her breath.

  Raine and her companions took a quick look around
, tactically sizing up the terrain. The landscape was barren but for a vast forest of lifeless trees with needle-sharp branches. The forestland didn’t even begin to encroach on the beach, but nevertheless the misshapen trees were so large that they appeared closer. The scale of things was off, the spatial distortions alarming. Stones that should have been no bigger than pebbles looked as large as boulders, thorns that should have been small as those on a rose bush were long as a knight’s lance. There were no birds in the sky, no breeze coming off the water. It was eerily still. Quiet. The air was particularly stale and there was a stagnation that could be felt in the eyes, ears and lungs.

  Bubbles appeared on the ocean’s surface and sound cut the silence like a vintage rusted blade.

  The stench of a charnel house hit them, far worse than the air at the Gates, which was the largest doorway between the Shikar realm and the realm of the Horde. Until now everyone had thought the Gates marked the most poisoned atmosphere in all known existence, but this was somehow far and away more toxic.

  Raine, who had spent the better part of a decade trapped in the Wastes, an environment not dissimilar to that of the Gates though less fatal, could hardly breathe in this corruption. She found it easier to simply hold her breath and wondered if the Shikars had adapted any such abilities because those would certainly come in handy here.

  Until now Raine had hated being a freak, but for the first time she found herself grateful to be something different. She wasn’t a Shikar, but neither was she human. Her abnormalities were often uncomfortable for her, but right now they suited the situation perfectly. “If you can, try holding your breath,” she instructed her friends. “It helps.”

  Edge doubled over, his face gone pale. Emily grabbed him, but he retched and flung her off violently. Raine went to him and laid her hand on his shoulder—she knew at once he was not like the others. Edge was all movement, all speed. His metabolism was faster than the others, just as Steffy’s was. But unlike Steffy, who was a hybrid now—part human, part Shikar—he burned through energy so quickly that this poisoned plane leeched him of his strength faster than the others. Emily couldn’t help him, but Raine could.

  Behind her, the sea began to froth and foam. When the others made concerned noises, she spared the water a quick glance but no more.

  Raine concentrated on Edge, envisioning a light in her mind. It started small but grew until it was the size of a plum. She imagined it rolling out of her ear, down her arm and into her hand. Her palm grew warm where the plum-sized glow fell. Edge’s shoulder turned icy under her touch. Raine opened her eyes and imagined she could see the light inside him now, spreading throughout his body.

  Edge straightened, his color returning. He cleared his voice. “I won’t ask how you did that.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “My apologies.” He chuckled. “You surprised me. I surprised me, I had no idea I was so weak. By Grimm, what a sad state it is to find that I would falter before the battle even started. Thank you, Raine. I feel much better.”

  “You’re not weak, Edge,” she said. “It’s because you emanate strength like heat that you felt sick—but try to pull it back, okay?”

  Edge nodded with a frown. “Why not Cinder or Cady?”

  “They are all about control, they have to be—it’s part of their Caste.” The wind was picking up. Raine raised her voice to be heard over it. “You have control, but your power hums under your skin.” She looked at Steffy. “You’ll want to watch it too, I think.”

  Steffy gave her a thumbs-up.

  There was a rush of wind, whipping Raine’s hair about her face, tugging at her clothes. Sand scored her flesh wherever it was exposed, drawing blood until Raine looked as if she’d been dusted in ruby glitter. She turned just in time to see the edge of the sea draw soundlessly back away from the beach, leaving a shelf of mud exposed in its absence.

  A great, ghastly belch rent the air.

  The earth moved under their feet.

  Grimm was the only one who did not stumble.

  An immense wave, a tsunami of mind-altering proportions, of a scale no earthly ocean could sustain, took shape and roared toward the shore. However, it wasn’t the wall of water that concerned Raine presently.

  The Leviathan rose behind it, an undulating Olympus Mons, rife with rot and decay.

  Stunned exclamations flew out of her companions’ mouths and Raine knew nothing she had said to prepare them had been enough.

  Even Raine wasn’t prepared for what she was seeing.

  Her mind splintered.

  This was the monster that had skirted the edge of every nightmare Raine suffered during her imprisonment, but more than that it was the root of all of their pain. Shikar and human, even the resurrected Daemons, none of them would be here if not for the Leviathan. This was the oldest of the old, the very first creature Lord Daemon had resurrected from the dead, the one and only reason the Horde war had begun.

  And no one had ever suspected what dwelled here.

  Not Tryton.

  Not Grimm.

  None on the Shikar Council knew.

  More than once Raine had questioned her own sanity regarding this monstrosity’s existence. Only Lord Daemon had known for certain all this time and he had told no one.

  Raine tested the tension of a rope that tugged at her tightly bottled fears. There was a reason those fears were sealed away in a bottle, a stopper affixed through years of diligent meditation and discipline. She didn’t dare give in to fear now.

  The colossus overtook the tsunami, breaking through it, destroying it. Its body was many-limbed, an amorphous shape that supported an unevenly divided nine tentacles that stretched out for a mile in opposite directions. Suckers the size of skyscrapers throbbed along the length of each, the skin looked like that of a rotted cadaver’s left long in a cesspool that had been boiling under a summer sun. Craters that were the behemoth’s eyes wept pus, rivulets of congealing yolks running down a face that had no real discernible features. Twenty-three tusks, each yellowed or blackened by long decay, jutted out of the apparition’s mouth in place of teeth. They were dull in the ashen light and spewed forth a geyser of water, glimmering with a sheen akin to that of an oil slick.

  Raine felt the Leviathan probe her mind. Her magic didn’t create the Leviathan or sustain it, thus no shimmering cord existed between them. Nevertheless, the Leviathan had tasted Raine’s power through whatever ties it shared with the Horde and it had thirsted for more ever since Raine’s escape. Its hunger lashed at her now, striking her like a psychic whip, drawing forth agonizing pain. It sought to form a link, to siphon energy from Raine, and it took all her willpower to block the connection from being formed.

  The surface of the world quaked again and the Leviathan picked up speed. Tentacles flew at them, one landing not a hundred yards away, scouring a canyon into the ocean floor. Boulders the size of SUVs soared through the air.

  “Watch it!” Grimm grabbed Raine under her arms just as she was about to fall under the weight of a descending mass of rock and mud and Traveled with her out of the immediate danger zone.

  She reeled drunkenly, the pain she’d felt at the Leviathan’s probing gone now. They were in a tightly packed crowd of Daemons, which was safer than just about anywhere else, she guessed. It was pure insanity, but true all the same—they were beyond the reach of the behemoth for now.

  Grimm shook her. “You have to focus, Raine. We need you.”

  Raine nodded. She knew what was at stake and Grimm was right, her friends needed her to be her strongest and she wasn’t even focused enough to concentrate on Traveling. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” She didn’t know if she was trying to reassure him or herself.

  The army pressed in on her. They all wanted a piece of her strength. She looked from one to the next, some big, some small, all of them hideously deformed in ways she couldn’t process all at once. These creatures were her legacy. If she didn’t use them now then it was a waste. All those human deaths were on he
r conscience, and it was a heavy burden but one she carried partly out of choice. Every person who had died, every single soul that had passed through the mouth of a Daemon, had passed into and through Raine too. She knew every single victim by name. They deserved to be remembered, they deserved to be legends, not monsters. The people were gone but they wouldn’t be forgotten, not by Raine.

  Let this grand battle be their epitaph.

  The power that the creatures so lusted for filled her with heat in a magnitude she had never before allowed. It spilled out of her, gushed out of her. The Daemons’ cries filled the air, the volume deafening.

  The ground split, swallowing some of them, but Raine kept her balance, sending out that radiant heat in waves.

  A scream that was louder than any sound Raine had dared imagine rent the air. Her eardrums burst and blood ran down the sides of her neck, but she continued to feed the Daemons her power, making them stronger than ever before.

  Raine sent her army charging down the beach. They were the largest gathering of foot soldiers in history and the world of the Wastes trembled with their might. The army roared, its cries moving across the land like a swarm as they charged, picking up speed, closing in on the Leviathan, tooth and claw poised to devour. Wave after wave, they ran fleet-footed across the broken shore.

  And exploded every one, simultaneously, into dust.

  They all just disappeared.

  Poof and they were gone.

  Chapter Twenty

  Seven days ago…

  As the dirt that was her army rained down through the air, every thread tying Raine to her creations was abruptly and brutally severed. Raine screamed as a rush of energy slammed back into her like the charge of iron tanks, one after another, over and over, drowning her in her own stolen life force as it was returned all at once. It was the most horrible feeling she could ever have imagined.