TravelersKiss

by Sherri L. King

  “You have nothing to say that I want to hear,” she spat, using the trunk of a tree to climb drunkenly to her feet. It was no façade, her body felt as wrung out as an old wet rag.

  “I beg to differ.”

  “Beg all you want, I like the idea of you on your hands and knees.”

  His breath hitched. Raine’s cheeks immediately flamed as she replayed her words back in her mind. The heat in his bright eyes was intense enough to burn the clothes from her body—a notion he clearly would have taken a liking to. It was easy to forget that Daemon was a hot-blooded male, with carnal needs the same as any other. She was probably the only female interaction he’d had in ages—it wasn’t any wonder he would respond so easily to an overture, intentional or not. The cord between them thrummed. Her heart beat a furious rhythm and the danger in the air grew palpable.

  “If you like the idea of me on my hands and knees, then the reality should please you endlessly.” His voice, usually as tympanic as a metal drum, had gone deep, like the fur of a wolf’s hide.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, D, so get the predator out of your voice.” He had taken three steps closer to her. She took three quick steps back. “I mean it.” She held her hand out. “I’m not interested in you, in any way, shape or fashion, Daemon.” He was still advancing and Raine felt a real panic now. He was flooding their connection with sensual heat and she was not above feeling a responding echo of arousal—but she was smart enough to know it wasn’t real or genuine, this mimicry of emotion he was eliciting from her. “Stop it!”

  He froze, his eyes glittering like beaten gold catching the light of an afternoon sun. His head tilted sharply to the side as he regarded her, his gaze roving from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes and back, slower, until he was meeting her gaze again. Raine had never seen any being appear so utterly alien as he did then.

  “Grimm is dead,” he said with brutal finality. “Grimm is dead and you are very much alive.”

  If he had punched her in the stomach it would have hurt far less and the breath whooshed out of her the same as if he had. She winced and put her arms around herself protectively. When he moved forward this time, she didn’t bother telling him to stay away.

  She made him stay away.

  Raine let her pain transform into fury and allowed it to fill her whole being with fire.

  When Daemon took his next step, a flat shelf of slate shot up to his knees and he glanced down. Without pause, he walked through it, as a ghost might walk through a wall. When he took another step, a smooth sheaf of obsidian slid up from the ground and kept rising until it towered over them. A solid wall of black glass, eight feet high, stood as a barrier between them and this time when Daemon would have walked through it, Raine knew it would go on like this forever if she didn’t try something drastic.

  She flashed back to that chaotic time when Grimm brought her through the Gates into the Shikar realm. To that moment when she, in her panic and disorientation, reached out and took strength from some of the strongest sources close at hand. That day, Obsidian had died. Raine had killed him.

  Raine was neither human nor Shikar. She was something else.

  She could leech life from others. She was no different than a vampire in that respect.

  It had killed Obsidian to have all that power yanked unceremoniously from him, and it would no doubt affect Daemon if Raine did the same to him. It would not kill him—he was too strong for that—but it might slow him down.

  Raine went to a place inside herself that she had kept hidden away since that long-ago day, a forbidden slice of her soul kept cold, dampened and silenced for fear of the damage it would do if she let it loose. But she set it free now, flung the doors to its prison wide open.

  Hot, hot heat gathered at the base of her skull. She welcomed it.

  With the burn of rage came the swell of voices—voices she knew now belonged to the very last remnants of the Horde. A horrible wrath blossomed inside her, and with it, a swell of discordant music that was terrible and beautiful, unlike anything the human world had ever heard. A black and empty void opened inside her mind, in the center of her skull where once there had been a giant tooth embedded in her brain. It was bottomless, consuming, yawning wide and bellowing with ferocious anger.

  Raine was suddenly ravenous.

  Raine screamed as the thing inside her smiled and then swallowed.

  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 a vast corridor while the world sped away. Her extremities tingled with something like growing pains, as if her body were elongating. Her muscles moved sinuously beneath her skin. A ripple at her center spun out like the vibrations of sound working inside a speaker and she understood, finally, as she understood everything about music and its workings, that she was a transducer.

  If she were to have a Caste, this would be hers.

  As a transducer, Raine took the life energy from others and converted it so that it could be used to fuel other things, living or dead. Raine could take her own energy and use it on any cell or host and she could take it all back whenever she chose. The catch was that the energy was never the same once it had moved through her. Just as a microphone converted acoustic energy into electrical impulses, Raine could not take life and then return it without transforming the power she converted—as in the case of Obsidian. She had taken his life and then returned it, but he had not been restored unscathed.

  Neither was she immune from the effects of what she did. She grew strong on the lives she consumed. In that regard she was no different from the Daemons she had unwittingly helped construct from sundered flesh and bone. And when a particularly powerful life was consumed, the enervation of that life fed her like the intoxicating high of a potent drug. Like any drug, it could become addictive and so she must always be vigilant, else she turn into a tyrant like the one before her now.

  Presently, as she siphoned the life force of Daemon himself, she felt that thrill as never before and with it came a glimpse of herself and her place in this long, drawn-out war between Daemon and his twin, Tryton. Whether because she was privy to a shadow of his thoughts through their cord or through the power she was drinking from him in greedy gulps, Raine couldn’t have said, but in that moment she thought she knew exactly where she stood.

  And where Daemon wanted her to stand.

  With one last thin cry, Raine broke away and set them both free. They were breathing hard. The only sound in the wood came from their bellowing lungs. She couldn’t meet his gaze, though she felt him willing her to. Did he know? Did he sense what she had seen in his mind? She hoped not. Dear God, she hoped not.

  You are as strong as I predicted you would be. Your majesty does not disappoint, Earthmover. Daemon’s words moved in her mind like the strains of an electric cello.

  There was something indefinably melancholic in his tone, an undercurrent of not quite sadness but something very close to it. It resonated with the pain Raine was feeling, with the yearning for something she knew was lost—even if he didn’t—and Raine vowed never to listen to cello music alone in the dark again, ever.

  “Grimm’s not dead,” she said softly, and then in a stronger voice. “He isn’t, D.”

  “We all saw him fall, Raine.” Was that empathy in his voice, or the illusion of the emotion lesser mortals might feel in such circumstances? “Everyone witnessed it. He fell under her blow and you disappeared for days. When you returned from your oubliette, the others gave you wide berth in the foolish hope that you might heal and return to them, but you can’t and you won’t. This they cannot see, and they will never understand you now. Only I understand you, Raine—only I can see your pain and empathize with your loss.”

  He fell under her blow, huh? You think you’re so crafty, don’t you? You’re a fool and a liar, even to yourself. Raine was very careful to keep her thoughts hidden, letting all her favorite songs play over her inner dialogue, one a
fter another in an endless loop to keep him from reading her too easily. “You’re wrong,” she told him.

  He frowned. “We are two of a kind, you and I, in so many ways.” He had managed to close the gap between them and began to circle her like a shark with blood scent in its nose. “When first I heard the whispers among my golems, I took little note of what you were, but after a time I listened—how could I not? When they stole you away and set you up as their queen in their hideaway, I pondered what it meant that a human girl could possibly hold them and keep them for so long.

  “Whereupon I felt your power in the cave, when you moved through Grimm like a current of lightning and into me, I knew what you were. At last I understood everything and my way forward became clear. For the first time in millennia, I knew there was a path left open to me. A pathway to redemption. I knew, too, that you would be the one to show me the way.”

  Raine was growing dizzy watching him stalk in circles, so she simply held her gaze fixed forward on the middle distance, on the darkness of the trees.

  This seemed to perturb him. He stopped in front of her and she was forced to look at him. “Raine, do you not wish to usher in a new and better future, after all the suffering you have endured? Do you not want to end this infernal, bloody struggle, not just for our people but for all?”

  “You know I do. Please get to the point.” What he really wanted was no great secret to her now, but she needed to hear him ask for it all the same.

  Daemon reached out and took one of her hands in his. He studied her palm as if he could see something written there and it took every ounce of Raine’s willpower not to yank her hand away. After a pause, he lifted her hand and put it against his cheek. His eyes were closed. His face relaxed, he looked almost human. “Raine.” The cello strings of his voice broke over her name.

  Something twisted inside Raine like a serrated knife. It would be unwise to let her guard down around this creature even for a second. He was a tragic figure, yes, one long suffering. But he was also the maestro of mayhem and mischief, the choreographer of destruction and doom throughout time immemorial. She had to remember this when dealing with him, no matter how much empathy he might wring from her.

  “What do you really want me for, Daemon?” Her voice, when it came, was an accompanying melody to his. “What could you possibly need from me?”

  “The strength to move forward. The power to do what must be done.” His eyes opened and met hers dead on. “Raine, I want you to help me kill my mate.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Raine had expected him to ask her to restore Litha, the woman from the legend, who he had loved and then unwittingly destroyed. She’d seen the idea swimming in his own mind, read it flitting through his thoughts for heaven’s sake!

  She knew the stories, had learned the Shikars’ version and the one that the Daemons knew, plucked from their incomplete, fragmented, inherited memories. But she also knew another version, a piece of the story that neither group was privy to.

  Litha still lived. She was the Leviathan.

  Daemon had resurrected Litha and then had been forced to strike down the monstrosity that had arisen in her place, this much was all true and told in every version Raine had heard. But what was not known, what Daemon had kept buried deep inside himself, was that he had failed to destroy Litha’s heart.

  This was the first law when dealing with one of the resurrected dead—destroy the heart. And Daemon had failed to do it.

  Daemon had not known. How could he? Litha was his first golem. And so Litha was afforded the opportunity to arise once again. While Daemon and Tryton battled and tore apart the ancient world, Litha quickly hid away. In secret she grew strong, hunting at night on human prey, hiding away during the day, away from the killing sun.

  Thus were born some of the earliest legends of the vampire, and the human world shook aghast while the killings grew more gruesome, more savage. Already driven mad with grief, Daemon had gone to earth, to sleep and forget. He’d hoped against hope that he might die. But when the earth whispered to him of disquieting chaos rippling through the world above, he began to understand that all his troubles would not be so easily solved by his self-imposed exile.

  He sensed, too, that he was not alone in his skin…

  So Daemon listened to the murmurs of the planet. He heard the rumors of a bloodthirsty monster that only hunted at night. Fear was moving through the Persian Empire and no one could stop it. Even in his madness he could guess what had happened.

  Daemon was forced to confront yet another monstrous incarnation of his lover…but this time he was unable or unwilling to end her. In a moment of weakness, he floundered and made a choice. One that would ripple down through the ages, affecting the lives of millions of people, both Shikar and human.

  He banished the monster Litha to the Wastes, where she festered and grew strong.

  Raine had fully expected Daemon to ask her to restore Litha, which was impossible. Litha’s spirit, all that had made her human and unique, had long since crossed the Gray Land into what waited beyond for her. But this…this unexpected request…she had no idea how to react to this.

  “Daemon.” She swallowed, her mouth gone dry. “What—”

  His hand was suddenly crushing hers in its grip. “I know what you thought I would ask of you. It is true I once loved Litha with a strength that almost broke the world. But truth to tell it has been so long since she was mine that I have forgotten what she even looked like…” His voice grew wistful. “I would give much to see her again, it is true, and there was a time not long ago I would have asked you to return her to me. But very recently I’ve come to understand that there is no bringing her back. Her spirit was shattered and if any of it exists, it could never be made whole again. I expect much of you, but not that much.” He loosened his grip on her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm as if in apology and then released her. “We have to put the beast down.”

  “If you wanted her dead, why didn’t you just let us do that on the beach?” she shouted, pushed into a livid rage. “You swatted our army like it was nothing. You ruined everything—”

  “Which should exemplify how easily Litha—your Leviathan—would have ended them.” He interjected calmly. Too calmly in the face of her anger, which only incensed her more. “It was a futile endeavor, Raine, doomed from the start. Deep down you must have known it, as I’m certain Grimm knew. I intervened with an opportunity that could have saved his life if you’d only—”

  “He’s not dead!” she screamed. She reared back her hand and punched him in the face.

  He didn’t acknowledge her blow. If he felt it, he gave no indication of pain. Raine wanted to see him falter, wanted to see him cry out. He wasn’t human, she got that, but he had to feel something.

  Daemon straightened to his full height. “You are as much a fool as I once was, to think he lives after what we both saw. I would not have you go through what I endured with the loss of my love. Raine, I ask that you help me end Litha. What comes after is entirely up to you, but I urge you to caution. Take your lessons from my mistakes, lest you make blunders that repeat history and sentence us to further centuries of strife.”

  “What do you offer me? You said you would reimburse me.”

  “You agree then?” His eyes lit up like fire.

  She longed to gouge them out of his face. “No, I just want to hear what you think is a fair price for my soul.”

  His features darkened and Raine remembered at once that this was not a creature one could toy with. Fear danced along her nerves like stabbing needles dipping in Habanero pepper juice. It was painful and it burned.

  Apparently he reined in his anger because when he spoke there was no trace of emotion. “I will make you a Shikar.”

  She let his words sink in.

  Could he actually do as he said?

  Did she even care?

  “Have you nothing to say, Earthmover?”

  Raine glared at him. This had not gone at all as she
’d wished, but at least she had something he wanted. She could work with that. “I need time to think about it.”

  The earth began to stir beneath his feet, but he didn’t move. He gave a short bow, a pale lock of hair falling over his eye when he looked up at her. “I will give you one night before I come for your answer.” The ground undulated and folded beneath him, swallowing him, and he was gone, leaving her alone in the forest.

  Well, not completely alone.

  One night, Raine. Make your decision. His voice was inside her mind as well as without, vibrating cello strings that were far less metallic than when she’d first heard him speak all those years ago. Raine liked his voice even less now that it was warmer, now that he looked upon her with such heat in his gold-coin eyes that she felt it simmer through the onyxian cord that connected them. But she didn’t hate him.

  It bothered her that she didn’t hate him. That she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. She despised him. Feared him, yes. But more than that? No. What did that say about her? Did it even mean anything? Raine was afraid to know the answers.

  Why had Daemon changed his mind? When she’d been in his thoughts, Raine knew he’d had every intention of making her hunt for Litha’s soul and restore her to life. What had changed in him so quickly?

  She glanced around at the place where her world—her life—had ended. It was pointless, running in circles, but what else could she do? Raine concentrated with all her might on an image of Grimm’s bedroom and jumped.

  When she would have landed, Raine sank down through the crust of the Earth…and down…and down. Hitting bottom at long last, she opened her eyes, not having realized she’d closed them in the first place.

  “You are getting rather skilled at Traveling, Nightingale.”

  With a cry, Raine launched herself at Grimm, gripping fistfuls of his hair, kissing his face and throat in a paroxysm of relief. “I knew you weren’t lost to me, Grimm. I knew it.”

  Grimm’s hands cradled her face and stilled her. His features were grave, his eyes deepening pools of starlight. “But I am, Raine. I am lost and you must let me go. Not just for your sake or mine. For the sake of the world and all who live there.”