Crimson fingers stabbed the gray horizon ahead, drawing his gaze. They bled to orange and gold as the sun rose on a new day.
Ethan closed his eyes against the dazzling brilliance and savored the warm light fluttering across his skin. Relief stabbed through him, the emotion all too sharp and sweet; he was a free man once more. He turned to the older immortal.
‘I think it’s about time we introduced ourselves properly, don’t you think?’ he said in a voice ringing with gratitude.
The other man watched him silently.
Ethan extended a hand. ‘Ethan Storm. Professional thief.’
The immortal hesitated before shaking his hand. His grip was warm and strong. ‘Asgard Godard. Bastian Hunter.’
Chapter Four
April 2013. Bear River Mountains. Utah.
The nightmare started as it always did.
She was standing on a low hill and looking down at a bloodied battlefield. Hundreds of mangled corpses stretched out before her, a motionless tangle of severed heads, limbs, and torsos that turned the desert scarlet. Carrion birds circled in the reddening sky, their guttural cries echoing ominously against the neighboring sand dunes.
On the other side of the war zone, an immense army stood amassed before a burning fortress. Flames licked the rooftops of buildings and the base of the defensive wall around the fortified city. The giant, metal gates guarding the entrance to the stronghold lay open, their buckled, distorted forms silent witnesses to the ferocity of the recent conflict. The spiraling smoke wreathing the air had given birth to a shimmering black haze that darkened the horizon to the south. The shrill screams of women and children could still be heard in the distance.
Olivia was aware of movement behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw the second army gathered on the shallow elevation. Though substantial, it was but a fraction the size of the enemy’s factions facing them across the crimson arena of war.
She stood in the line of figures that headed the contingent of battle-weary, grim-faced men and women. They were dressed differently, with gilded armor and weapons that marked them as the commanders of the smaller force. She counted five on either side of her.
‘Are you ready, cousin?’ said someone on her right.
Olivia turned and saw a beautiful woman garbed in a gleaming breastplate overlying a short, chain mail dress. Leather elbow guards and greaves reinforced with polished bronze plates protected the figure’s slender, toned limbs. The woman had dyed her black hair red, the color matching the stains streaking her sweat-slicked skin and the two trident daggers clasped tightly in her hands. A broadsword was strapped to her back. Pale, gray eyes moved from the battleground ahead and focused on her face. The expression in the silver depths sent a shiver down Olivia’s spine.
‘Yes,’ she heard herself say in a confident voice she did not recognize.
She looked down and saw that she was clothed in a similar suit of armor. She was clutching the hilt of a bloodstained, double-edged blade between her fingers. A pair of sheathed daggers rested snuggly against her thighs.
‘Let’s go, sister,’ said someone on her left.
Olivia beheld a handsome man with blue eyes and a short beard standing next to her. His teeth flashed fiercely in the fading sunlight. Something twisted inside her chest at the sight, the feeling both joyous and melancholic. She nodded.
In the next moment, she was racing down the incline and onto the battlefield, the savage sound tearing from her throat mirrored by the hundred others around her as they charged the enemy rushing toward them. Then, she was inside the melee. And the cries of terror and pain started anew.
Olivia Ash sat up with a start, a silent scream choking her throat. She clasped the bed sheet to her breasts and squeezed her eyes shut. Blood roared in her head and her breaths came in short, sharp pants, the sounds filling her ears.
It was almost a minute before her racing pulse started to settle. The cotton nightdress she wore clung unpleasantly to her clammy skin, the silver crucifix on the chain around her neck cold against her flesh. Olivia blinked and looked blindly at the shards of moonlight streaking through the fluttering curtains opposite the metal bed.
Of all the nightmares that had plagued her since her eighteenth birthday, this was the worst. Whereas the others felt like she was an observer of distant events, a detached witness of things that seemed to barely touch upon her existence, she knew herself to be an active participant in this particular dream. She could feel the lives she had taken with her bare hands, the streams of human consciousness extinguished by her unrelenting, focused rage. So vivid were the images and the sensation of her blade piercing flesh, she was surprised she had never woken to a blood bath.
A sigh left her lips when her heartbeat finally slowed to a normal rhythm. The abbess would no doubt pick up on the fact that she had had yet another restless night. The elderly nun had uncannily shrewd powers of observation when it came to her oldest ward; after all, she had known Olivia from her infancy.
She reached for the carafe on the nightstand with trembling fingers and poured herself a glass of water. The liquid sloshed around as she raised it to her lips. She had just taken her first sip when a faint sound reached her ears. Her hand stilled. She looked up. The noise came again.
Olivia’s brow furrowed. She hesitated, put the glass down, and slipped out from under the covers. She padded barefoot to the window.
The abbey where she had lived all of her life was located on two hundred acres of rolling farmland and forest at the head of a valley deep in the Bear River Mountains. It overlooked Logan Canyon to the west and was surrounded by the Wasatch Range stretching out toward Idaho to the north. On a clear day, Bear Lake was visible from the summit of the ridge to the east. The only way to reach the isolated estate, home to the community of sixty souls who formed the cloistered Benedictine order of The Eternal Life, was with a four-wheel drive, up a steep, winding dirt road.
Her room was in a corner of the attic of the main house. Whereas the nuns and novices shared the dormitories and rooms on the first and second floors of the old Victorian mansion, Olivia had been given sole occupancy of the chamber under the pitched eaves for as long as she could recall. With its exposed beams and the commanding views it offered from its dual aspect windows, it was her favorite place in the whole abbey.
Tendrils of unease rose within her as she stared out across the moonlit landscape. The wind had fallen and a heavy hush shrouded the abbey grounds and surrounding evergreen forests. Beyond the trees to the south lay the fields and farm where they grew crops and tended to animals that provided for their self-sustained existence. Not a single breeze stirred the branches and leaves in the orchard next to the manor house. Even the owls had fallen silent.
Olivia had never seen the place so still. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath.
A familiar feeling suddenly blasted through her consciousness. She gasped. The hairs rose on her arms.
No, not this again!
Panic churned her stomach as the unwelcome precognitive aura prickled her skin and drenched her body in a cold sweat.
It had been six months, two weeks, and three days since the last “incident.”
Olivia had but a handful of seconds to steel herself before the visions swept over her with the force of a storm. She backed away from the window and started to hyperventilate while a barrage of horrific images flashed through her mind. She was barely aware of the backs of her thighs striking the metal footboard of the bed. She closed her eyes tightly and willed the vivid pictures away, her nails digging into her palms. They continued unabated, each more shocking than the previous. A kaleidoscope of figures with frightened expressions danced across her sight.
Olivia froze when she finally registered what she was seeing. A whimper escaped her throat. Tears blossomed from beneath her eyelids and spilled unbidden down her cheeks.
The faces were those of the nuns in the abbey.
They are going to die. They are all goin
g to die this very night!
Gunshots shattered the silence.
Olivia jumped, eyes slamming open. It was starting.
She fell back heavily on the mattress. Her breath hitched rapidly in her throat as she listened to the volley of blasts from the floors below. The screaming began a second later. Unable to stop the violent snapshots and sounds of death overwhelming her senses, she keened and rocked on the bed, her hands pressed hard against her ears and her chin tucked against her chest.
In her mind, she saw the nuns fall one after the other, women she had known her entire life looking bewildered and helpless in the face of an invisible enemy who showed them no mercy, terror painting their final moments crimson.
Her head snapped up when an achingly-familiar figure suddenly came into focus. Mother Margaret Edwards, the abbess of the order, stood on the doorstep of her cottage. She raised her hands in a placatory gesture while she addressed two men clad in dark uniforms.
Olivia felt the blood drain from her face. Oh God! No, not this, please not thi—
In her vision, the abbess jerked as if she had hiccuped. A dark hole appeared in the middle of her forehead, an unsightly blemish on her pale skin. A trickle of blood bloomed from the gunshot wound and ran down the bridge of her nose, a scarlet line between her staring eyes. She folded gently to the floor.
Agony filled Olivia’s heart and squeezed the air out of her lungs. The images subsided.
She rose and ran to the window.
Votive candles flickered behind the stained-glass windows of the chapel to the right of the mansion. Next to it, the abbess was opening the door of her cottage. Her white nightdress glowed in the night as she faced the men who appeared before her. She took a step back and lifted her hands. Her lips moved, forming words Olivia could not hear.
‘No! Get away from her!’ screamed Olivia.
She leaned out of the opening and reached blindly toward the woman who had been a mother to her through all the years of her existence.
The first man raised his gun and shot the elderly nun in the head.
Olivia stopped breathing. A buzzing noise filled her ears.
The second man turned and looked in her direction. He grabbed his companion’s shoulder and gestured urgently toward the mansion.
There was a noise right outside her room. The door slammed open at the same time that a scrambling sound came from the rooftop.
Olivia remained rooted to the spot, her brain still trying to process the unthinkable event she had just witnessed. She watched, trance-like, as three figures in blood-splattered, olive army fatigues stormed her bedroom and headed toward her.
The man in the lead grabbed her arm, pulled her across the floor, and threw her down onto the bed. Air left her lungs in a shocked gasp that jolted her back to the reality of the moment.
Something cold and hard touched her brow. Mind-numbing fear gripped Olivia as she stared past the barrel of a gun to the man holding the weapon to her head. The assassin’s eyes were dark and fathomless, his face a passionless mask. He climbed on the bed and straddled her body, his fingers closing in a vice-like grip around her throat. His companions grabbed her feet and hands, and pinned her to the mattress.
Bile flooded the back of Olivia’s mouth when they tore the nightdress off her body. She choked on a scream. The men holding her limbs ignored the sound and started to run their fingers roughly over her slender form and her plain cotton underwear. Their leader cocked the gun and pushed the mouth of the barrel into her skin. The hand around her neck tightened.
The buzzing noise returned as her oxygen-deprived brain started to falter. Black spots dotted Olivia’s vision. She was faintly aware of the men squeezing and pawing at her flesh.
An unfamiliar emotion suddenly stabbed through her fading consciousness, white-hot and as incandescent as a ray of sunlight. Olivia blinked at the alien sensation. It took a few seconds for her to realize that this feeling was anger.
It grew until it flooded her entire being, making her blood sing with fury and sharpening her dimming senses as effectively as a bucket of icy water would have done. The blackness receded. Her fingers curled into fists.
Olivia scowled. I will not die here!
She started to struggle against her assailants with every fiber of her being, her body arching off the bed while grunts of effort rasped through her windpipe.
‘There, on her hand!’ one of the men exclaimed.
He yanked her right wrist back sharply and forced her fingers open, making her wince. The lead assassin went still. A triumphant expression blazed on his face as he studied the birthmark on her palm.
His icy gaze shifted to her eyes. ‘Found you, little girl.’
His fingers relaxed around her throat. Olivia coughed and wheezed as air filled her starving lungs. She glanced at the flesh-colored gloves on the nightstand, the ones that usually covered her hands and hid the unearthly blemish on her skin. The sound of distant shots reached her dimly above the rush of blood in her ears. They had come from elsewhere in the mansion.
The man above her stiffened. He looked toward the open doorway of the bedroom. ‘That wasn’t one of ours.’
He climbed off the bed, his gun in hand. His subordinates released her and reached for their own weapons.
A muffled thud drew everyone’s eyes to the ceiling. A tile tumbled past the window and clattered down the slope of the gambrel roof before clanging against the guttering. Someone cursed outside.
A shadow eclipsed the ambient moonlight as a man sailed feet first through the opening and landed heavily on the wooden floorboards in a low crouch.
Olivia gaped.
The stranger rose to his feet. Teeth gleamed in the gloom. ‘Good evening, assholes.’
His voice skittered down her spine and raised goosebumps on her exposed skin. Olivia was suddenly conscious of her near nakedness. She grabbed the bed sheet and held it protectively against her body. A precognitive tremor rippled through her mind as she stared at the stranger. His gaze flicked briefly to her.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the man who had held the gun to her head, his tone unruffled.
‘I’m your worst nightmare,’ the stranger replied.
The assassin cocked his head to the side. His lips parted in a mocking smile. ‘I don’t have nightmares.’
He raised his gun. His companions followed suit.
Olivia whimpered and hunched over, hands rising to cover her ears as she pressed her eyes shut. In the breathless moment that ensued, she heard a series of faint crunching noises. She blinked and peered up when gunfire failed to erupt across the room.
The stranger at the window was grinning. The curtains fluttered behind him. A shaft of moonlight danced across his face, highlighting his steel-blue eyes and strong jawline.
One of her assailants dropped his gun, the weapon clattering noisily onto the floorboards. ‘What the—?’
The gun was a twisted mass of metal. She looked at the other men’s firearms. Their weapons were in a similar state.
Recognition flashed across the face of the lead assassin. ‘The Elemental!’
He drew a long, curved dagger from a sheath at his hip. His men yanked similar blades from their uniforms.
There was a slick noise of metal sliding against leather as the blue-eyed stranger pulled a pair of short swords from under his jacket. The smile slipped from his face. He rushed the three assassins.
Olivia scuttled back against the metal headboard, heart thudding wildly as she watched the four figures clash.
The stranger blocked the attacks to his head and body, the swords blurring in his grip. A fist glanced off his jaw. He ducked and twisted, his movements fast and fluid. One of her assailants cried out and dropped his blade, his hands rising to the deep slash across his gut. Blood spurted from between his fingers. Another whimpered and gripped the wound carving his leg from thigh to knee.
Her rescuer slipped under a high-kick aimed at his head by the leader of the assassins, spun his
swords as he came up, and stabbed her injured assailants in the chest, a frown of concentration darkening his face. He was too late to avoid the knee thrust to the small of his back. A harsh grunt left his lips and he sagged on one knee.
The dark-eyed assassin smiled savagely and brought his dagger around toward the stranger’s neck in a double-handed chopping motion. Olivia lurched forward, a cry of warning on her lips.
There was a sharp clang. The assassin bared his teeth; Olivia’s rescuer had trapped the dagger between his swords and stopped the blade a mere inch before it kissed his skin. Veins bulged on the assassin’s face and neck as he strained against his opponent. The blue-eyed stranger dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way of the falling knife.
The assassin attacked, body whirling in a series of rapid kicks and jabs while he thrust and slashed with the dagger. The stranger danced nimbly across the floor and shifted the swords to deflect the flurry of blows and strikes.
Olivia stared at the fighting men, mouth dry and body frozen to the bed. She gasped when the assassin slipped past her rescuer’s defense and struck him hard in the mouth. The blue-eyed stranger staggered back against a dresser.
‘No!’ she shouted as the assassin raised his arm, the dagger glinting in the moonlight.
Shadows shifted to the right. Olivia turned and beheld a frightening figure with a beard looming in the doorway of her bedroom. Aquamarine eyes met hers for a fleeting second. Even through the paralyzing fear gripping her senses, she saw shock reverberate through the stranger’s gaze. He raised a long-barreled revolver and fired a single shot.
The bullet struck the assassin in the chest, the impact lifting him off his feet before slamming him down onto his back. He slid across the polished floorboards and rocked to a standstill beneath the window at the opposite end of the bed.
Olivia’s rescuer slowly straightened and wiped his bloodied lip with the back of his hand.
‘What took you so long, old man?’ he asked the bearded figure.
Legacy Page 4