He gave me a somber nod. “Take care, buddy.”
My stomach tightened, and I looked away.
Scud, what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I open my mouth and say something? Explain myself?
“We’ll talk about it,” Elise said, seemingly to Mathis, as she rose to show them to the door.
When they were gone, I buried my face in my hands, squeezing at my temples until the pain was sufficient to distract from my suddenly racing heart and frenetic breathing.
How in demon’s depths could they do this?
How could they be so damn incompetent as to lose Oasis and then turn around and somehow make me feel like it was my fault? Like I should be doing their job for them barely two cycles after they’d been trying to kill me and my friends?
It wasn’t fair.
I’d fought my fight. I’d bled for Enochia. Gotten good people killed.
I’d lost everything. Everything except Elise, I reminded myself as she walked back into the room. She sat beside me. Rested her head on my shoulder. For a long while, we sat there, lost in our own thoughts.
Eventually, she stirred and went to the kitchen cooler.
“You must be hungry,” she said, rummaging around. “I’ll make us something.”
I watched her through a haze of loud, guilty thoughts, all warring for position until I thought my head might simply burst.
“Lise,” I heard myself say.
She turned, still holding the cooler door open. Our eyes met and, for a moment, I lost myself in those royal blue depths. In that moment, the world condensed between us. Something snapped into focus. Something that’d been lost these past cycles.
My chair clattered to the floor behind me.
I didn’t stop when I reached her—just pinned her to the cooler door, one hand to her hip, the other cradling her cheek. Her eyes were wide at the sudden burst of life, her mouth half open in surprise.
I kissed her before either of us could think about it.
Her lips were stiff at first, hesitant, but I pushed on, driven by some wild thing inside of me whose awakening had surprised me just as much as it had clearly surprised her. We hung there for a moment, teetering awkwardly on the edge. Then she let out a delicious little sigh, and her lips grew about twenty degrees warmer as they gave way to mine.
The kiss deepened, stirring that frantic apparition inside me, crying for release. I reached for the hem of her shirt and started to pull it up. She drew a sharp breath and put a hand to my chest.
“Hal,” she said softly, searching my face. “I don’t really understand where this is coming from. Not that I’m complaining. I just need to—”
I slid a hand behind her neck and pulled her lips back to mine.
I didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to think. But a few seconds into the kiss, Elise pulled back again. “Talk to me, love. Please.”
Something flashed inside me—red-hot and wild and ugly.
I didn’t mean to do it. I might as well have been watching a vid from behind someone else’s eyes as my fist slammed to the counter top and I heard myself growl, “I don’t wanna talk, dammit!”
Then the scuddy bastard who’d just taken me for a rage-ride bailed from the driver’s seat and left me standing there, mouth agape. Elise was watching me with shocked eyes, searching my face as if it belonged to a stranger.
A thousand apologies raced through my mind, vying for control of my tongue. Somehow, none of them got it. We just stared at each other, shocked silence stretching the moment.
Then my stomach let forth a low, mournful rumble, and Elise’s expression shifted. For a moment, I thought we might both burst out laughing.
The moment passed.
I dropped my gaze to the floor, ashamed to meet her eyes. Ashamed of everything.
“I’m sorry, Lise.”
She found my hand silently. Gave it a squeeze.
I swallowed, fighting tears, muttered another apology, and turned to leave, unsure where it was I was even going.
She didn’t try to stop me.
3
Dirt
It was several Divinity blocks before I was capable of enough coherent thought to realize where my feet were carrying me. At that point, I woke my palmlight and flagged down an autoskimmer. Much of a relief as it had been to escape the confines of our tiny quarters and lose myself in the bustling crowd of the city, the experience quickly soured when I started noticing the looks.
They were little more than furtive glances, most of them, but they only seemed to increase in frequency the further I went. When I heard a mother whisper something about the Demon of Divinity to her child, that was enough. I gladly stepped out of the pedestrian lanes, boarded the autoskimmer, and took to the skies in the blessed quiet of the empty cab.
My mind flitted aimlessly from one inconsequential thought to another as the city swept by below, every citizen I saw going about their business as if it were any other day. As if the world weren’t in danger of collapsing right around them.
The lucky bastards.
When we reached the southernmost edge of Divinity, the autoskimmer gave a light chirp, as if in indignation at having been forced it to leave the city limits. I pointedly ignored the inanimate console and stared instead at the rippling surface of the Red River below. It was only another ten minutes or so before my indignant autoskimmer and I were closing on the destination.
Bittersweet nostalgia crept in at the sight of the two great oaks atop the gentle hill where I’d spent so many evenings practicing with my abilities and contemplating the scudstorm that’d swept my life up whole. Beyond that were the crumbling ruins of the old temple hideout—the place Carlisle had sheltered me after I’d lost my parents to the raknoth. The place he’d trained me in the art of Shaping and helped me to find purpose again.
But where had that purpose gone?
We’d stood against the unfathomable odds. We’d done our best to stop the raknoth. And it had cost us everything.
All at once, I regretted having come here.
But the autoskimmer was already banking down for a landing in the tall grass not far from the ruins. I lingered in the cab and debated abandoning this mindless wandering and returning to Elise. Talking this thing out like a reasonable human being. She was there for me, I knew. Just like Johnny was. And Franco.
They were all there for me. And I couldn’t gropping stand it.
I couldn’t stand the way they looked at me, like some wounded animal who couldn’t take care of itself, who surely couldn’t do anything but lie around waiting to die. I couldn’t stand the thought that maybe they were right.
A pair of abrasive chirps from the console startled me from my ruminations. I looked around at our woodland surroundings, muttered a dark curse at the console, and climbed out of the autoskimmer. Probably, I should have set the vehicle on standby and eaten the extra fee to secure my return trip home. But I couldn’t seem to bring myself to do more than watch, almost daring the autoskimmer to follow its programming and return to the city for its next fare, leaving me to fend for myself with its perfectly robotic apathy.
It did.
I couldn’t really say why, but it felt good, watching that autoskimmer fly away, relishing the silence that fell in its absence. Right then, I couldn’t be troubled to care how I’d get back. Scud, maybe I’d just stay out here until someone came looking. I’d come out here to be alone. And alone, I was.
But for what?
I eyed the temple ruins for several minutes before finally deciding I wasn’t quite ready for those memories yet. Instead, I strolled aimlessly into the forest.
It was a cool afternoon. Not quite cold, but crisp. Refreshing. For a while, I tried my best to not think and simply enjoy it. After everything I’d been through, I probably should’ve been ecstatic just to be able to walk. Somehow, though, I didn’t feel the need to throw myself to my knees and shout praises and thanks be to Alpha. No. All I felt was guilt, out there on my sun-lit stroll while Oasis was
burning.
Slowly, though, the woods drew me in, soothing me with the soft give of dirt beneath my boots—the crack of the occasional twig underfoot, adding its short-lived voice to the peaceful chorus of forest life around me. A faint breeze tickled my cheeks, tinged with the scent of dirt and bark. Above all, I basked in the absence of people, and the absence of their demands and their problems.
What if I did just stay out here?
It was a ridiculous thought.
But what if I did?
Carlisle had been out here for years on his own. Of course, with the raknoth hunting him for his meddling and the Sanctum hunting him as they’d covertly hunted every Shaper alive for centuries, he’d had good reason to stay holed up out here, away from civilization. But my situation wasn’t so different, was it?
The raknoth wanted me dead. I had no doubt of that. Whether or not I was still in the Sanctum’s sights following my botched execution and my pardon from the Legion was less clear. My existence was almost certainly a thorn in their side, what with the wild rumors spreading about how the Demon of Divinity had defied gravity at the gallows and escaped death from right under the Sanctum’s righteous fist.
Unsurprisingly, the Sanctum and their new High Cleric had yet to apologize for trying to hang me—yet to make any official statement at all, for that matter. I couldn’t imagine it would be good news when they did.
Public opinion, in the meanwhile, seemed about as mixed as it was incendiary. Despite our mutual agreement that no good could come of it, Elise and I hadn’t been able to completely ignore the flood of newsreel articles and vids touting me as everything from a Saint of Alpha himself, to a simple freak of nature, to a malicious shape-shifting alien, and finally to a nether-hopping Being of True Evil who required immediate and judicious execution. Again.
Suffice it to say, there were several good reasons I’d refrained from leaving the dull safety of our living quarters.
And now, in the midst of that scudstorm, the Legion decided to show up on my doorstep, asking me to dive back into their mess? Because it was their mess, wasn’t it?
I’d fought my best to stop the raknoth, even when the Legion had tried to stop me. I’d since told them everything I could about the raknoth—glossing over some of the weirder details, maybe, like Urth, the planet of humans I’d glimpsed in Al’Kundesha’s memories, and the borderline mystic origin of the sickness those humans had somehow wrought upon the raknoth, necessitating their need for human blood to survive. But I’d told the Legion everything I thought they’d believe. Certainly everything I thought could help them win the fight. And now I couldn’t even walk the streets without causing minor panic.
At what point did I get to say I’d done my job?
Once I’d lost the few people I had left?
Once I was dead?
“I didn’t ask for this,” I muttered at a particularly knobby tree.
The tree stared back in stoic silence, and I continued on.
I’d done my best, and it hadn’t been good enough. Not by a long shot. That’s all there was to it.
My dad, he’d been a hero.
Carlisle had been a hero.
Me? I was a seventeen year old kid who’d tried to beat the raknoth at their own game, and I’d gotten hundreds of good men and women killed. I wasn’t the man my dad had been. Couldn’t do the things Carlisle had been capable of. They were the ones Enochia needed. Not me.
But they were dead. And, by some sick joke of fate, I was alive.
Lost as I was in my thoughts, I was surprised to notice my wandering feet had brought me back around to the maze of ruins in front of the temple entrance. I sank to the smooth remains of some long-forgotten monument and must’ve spent a good half hour just sitting there, lost in memories of the place, good and bad. Dreading what painful recollections might await if I were to go inside.
I hadn’t been back here since before the White Tower—at first because the Legion had been holding us as polite prisoners at a remote outpost, then, I suppose, because I was scared to face the place when we’d been loosely cleared to resume our freedom. Of course, saying we were cleared might’ve been an overstatement.
Considering the targets on my head and the aid they’d just requested of me, I doubted whatever Legion eyes had been tasked with watching my movements would be receiving warm thanks when they reported I’d come out here without any discernible protection.
But grop them.
I looked back and forth between the gloomy, crumbling entrance of the temple and the warm, inviting swell of my old hilltop lookout, where I’d spent dozens of evenings contemplating the regal blaze of the Divinity skyline at sunset. It was the place where Elise had first told me she loved me.
Guilt poured into me, hot and sudden.
How in demon’s depths had I snapped at her like that?
Elise was the best part of my life—kind and loving, not to mention perfectly capable of crushing my danglers for treating her that way. I kind of wished she had.
What had I been thinking?
No matter how many ways I approached the question, I kept coming to the same embarrassing answer. I’d yelled at her because I was afraid. Afraid of what, I could barely say, but the fear was there—a cold, bottomless pit in my stomach, waiting for me to wander too close so it could trip me up and consume me whole.
I felt it coming again—the trill of incoherent panic sliding down my spine, disrupting thought and control, quickening my breath, crushing my blurry world down to a cage where I couldn’t seem to do anything but wring my sweaty hands. Even out in the open air, it was suffocating.
I closed my eyes, sinking into my extended senses. Other than Elise’s touch, it was the one thing I’d found to help. Retreating into the world around me.
Only I didn’t make it that far before a pair of terrible crimson eyes flared to life in the darkness of my mind, waiting for me.
“You have failed, Haldin,” an airy voice whispered. “You have saved nothing.”
I snapped my eyes open with a gasp, panting, heart thundering.
Around me, the ruins were serene—smooth stone baking in the gentle afternoon sun, soft breeze drifting in, pleasantly cool on my sweat-streaked back and forehead.
I checked the cloaking pendant at my chest, just to be sure.
Active.
Which meant that couldn’t have been a real projection just now—unless I happened to be missing a telepath sitting within ten yards of me.
Which also meant that it had all been in my head.
I buried my face in my hands, leaving my eyes open this time as I moved through a deep breathing exercise.
What the hell was happening to me?
I pushed the question away, focusing on the breathing. When things felt sufficiently under control, I stood, eager to busy myself with something. Anything other than sitting here, thinking myself into oblivion.
I considered calling a ride or starting the trek back to Divinity. Considered the temple entrance again. Something weighed at the back of my mind. Some sense of lingering importance, pulling me toward the temple like the faintest tug of gravity.
Had I come here for a reason? Something beyond my conscious awareness?
Probably not. Probably, I’d come here out of some desperate hope that I’d find Carlisle and my parents and everyone else, somehow miraculously alive and well, ready to all band together and save Enochia, praise be to Alpha.
Probably, I was wasting my time.
But here I was.
So I stood, brushed myself off, and headed for the temple to find out.
4
Ghosts
Whatever I’d been hoping to find in our old hideout, the dark, dusty silence quickly convinced me it wasn’t there. No Carlisle, waiting for me with a masterly smile and a dazzling story of how he’d escaped the blast after all. No bright display messages declaring, Attention: answers RIGHT HERE.
Nothing but the barebones accommodations that had served as both home
and operations room for the better part of mine and Carlisle’s stint as the premiere enemies of Enochia.
I wandered about the room, aimlessly picking at this and that. I checked the node at Carlisle’s desk and found nothing of obvious interest. Thinking about my talk with Glenbark, I begrudgingly perused the trinkets on Carlisle’s workbench and was surprised to come up with a pair of cloaking pendants. Extras, I assumed, from the batch he’d made to cloak our band of merry terrorists before the White Tower.
I tucked the pendants into a pocket. They weren’t much—certainly not enough to counter the telepathic threat the raknoth posed to the Legion—but I was sure they’d be helpful. More helpful than anything else I was going to find here, it seemed.
After a few more minutes of absentminded tinkering, I sank to the edge of my old cot, once again feeling foolish for having come here at all. For having allowed myself to hope for anything other than an empty nest, stale fab mix, and nostalgic memories of my first days with Carlisle.
How was it that I felt wistful for the days when it had only been my parents’ murders I had to mourn?
I flopped down on the cot with a heavy sigh, feeling guilty for even thinking it, and frowned when something hard and flat dug into the back of my head through the pillow linen. I started to shift the pillow, and froze, sudden, desperate hope flooding back in.
I sat back up, heart thumping in my throat, and ripped off the pillow linen. A small lightsteel disk fell into my palm, plain and seemingly benign.
A holodisk.
For a long moment, all I could do was stare at the tiny object.
It could be nothing. Probably was. I activated it anyway, and felt my insides leap at the sight of the single file waiting there—audio only. I thumbed the translucent icon… and gasped at the sound of Carlisle’s voice.
“Hal…”
Hal…
I’m afraid I don’t quite know where to begin—nor, I suppose, where it is I’m headed with this message. Suffice it to say, if you’re hearing this, there’s a strong chance I’m either dead or irrevocably indisposed. Of course, it’s also possible we both make it through what’s about to happen and you find this disk before I have a chance to grab it. What an embarrassment that would be.
Demons of Divinity Page 3