“See? Edible.” He took a second bite, and then his eyes bugged out and with an exaggerated spasm he slumped down with his face on the tray. His muscular forearms bracketed his head, both covered in mesmerizing, colorful designs that stretched from wrists all the way up past the sleeves of his plain threadbare t-shirt.
I lifted my eyebrows. He opened one eye, narrowed it at me, then sat up and finished chewing.
“No reaction, huh? Tough crowd.”
“You were faking, but nice try?” It was tough to be surprised when his intentions blazed in his aura clear as day—just as clear as the telltale orb of light inside his chest. His soul possessed a particular quality that gave him away as a member of the bloodline I’d taken it upon myself to watch over.
Still, I probably should have laughed. He’d just surprised me, and my interpersonal skills were still . . . well, rough would be an understatement. I knew how to act around family, but my family wasn’t exactly human. This cute, tattooed guy’s humor was new to me.
“I’ve seen you around the last two weeks. Are you a doctor?” he asked, apparently giving up on attempting to make me laugh. I kind of wished he’d try again so I could do it right the second time.
“No,” I said. “I think they eat in a separate cafeteria, anyway.” I waited and hoped he’d follow through on the recognition that always came when a new member of the bloodline finally registered what I was.
This particular man was someone I’d watched for the past two weeks, ever since his arrival with a sick elderly woman. Humans were fragile creatures, but her fragility had very little to do with her humanity or age and everything to do with why I couldn’t go home yet, even if I’d wanted to.
But so far I’d only watched him from a safe distance, protected by the bounds of human social customs—and the hospital's visitation policies. Now that he was talking to me, I was painfully aware of his attention. Until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed simple conversation, but more than that, I missed contact so much I ached for it.
He’d stopped eating and was now just staring at me. I took a bite of my sandwich and pretended not to notice. I knew better than to push, despite how giddy the sound of his voice made me. It would be easier if I let him start the conversation.
The bloodline were the only members of humanity who knew about my kind, and they’d only just discovered our existence. Despite the efforts the higher races had taken to clue them in, most of them still seemed pretty damn oblivious, or at least selectively blind. Another thing I’d learned about humanity was that they were incredibly adept at denial, even when they had more than enough evidence of the truth.
“Discovered” was probably a strong word, though; the bloodline had already been on the verge of discovering the higher races when we decided to pre-empt them by carrying out a ritual to send them a message. It basically amounted to, “We mean you no harm, but please keep our secret.” Even after three weeks, they were taking their time catching on.
I barely tasted the questionable food as I chewed and swallowed, hyperaware of the man as he stood up and moved to sit across from me. The quality of his aura had changed from a dim blue signifying weariness to a crackling violet warning of confrontation, yet softened by pink curiosity. My belly clenched and I found it hard to swallow.
“You’re like me, aren’t you?” he said in a low voice. “Or . . . are you one of them?”
My pulse raced as I set down my sandwich and lifted my gaze to meet his. Dark brows curved over his gray-green eyes and his skin was a tawny brown about a shade lighter than my own. His thick black hair fell almost to his shoulders, mussed like he worried his hands through it often. He raked fingers through it, confirming my observation. The Adam’s apple in his throat bobbed as he swallowed, and a piece of stone carved in the shape of a musical clef jiggled on its thong.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Am I like you, or like them?”
It wasn’t really a test. I genuinely wanted to know. I was technically human—both my biological parents were human, at any rate—but I’d been ripped from my mother’s womb shortly after conception, then grown in a tank and sustained with ancient nymphaea blood for the first five months of my existence.
Being so acutely conscious of every moment of my life, even from those first glimmers of awareness after conception, should have made it easier for me to understand my own nature . . . to know where I fit in. But it had only made it infinitely harder.
I wasn’t just human—the blood of the higher races that ran in my veins defined me as much as my humanity did—and part of the reason I’d run to begin with was to try to understand what I was. I couldn’t be everything; that was too damn confusing. But at the moment, I didn’t really feel like I belonged anywhere at all. Maybe his observation would help me understand.
He studied me for a moment longer, then shook his head and frowned. “I think you’re something else. But if you aren’t human, you have to be one of them, right? You just look so normal. I mean . . . you’re fucking gorgeous. They’re all beautiful, but, um, you look mostly human.”
I gave him a gentle smile and nodded, barely containing my elation at having this conversation at long last, and with a man as lovely to look at as he was. “I am mostly human. But out of curiosity, what do you see that suggests otherwise?”
His half-eaten sandwich lay forgotten on his tray, though he stared at it blindly for a second before looking at me again. The divine glow that tinged his aura flared, reminding me that though the bloodline was also mostly human, they carried faint genetic mutations that linked them to the higher races. More importantly, they were all carrying blood that linked them to a god. That divine link had been dormant until three weeks ago, the god at the other end of it on the mend after a particularly brutal attack. But he was at full power now, and so the bloodline was now at full awareness of the higher races.
My new friend seemed to struggle for words, and my heart went out to him. None of this could have been easy—first to discover out of the blue that humanity wasn’t the only race with advanced intellect on the planet, and then that whatever traits marked him and the rest of the bloodline as special also made them targets for some invisible threat. But I had to know what it was he saw that identified the higher races.
Over the past three weeks since I’d left home, I’d learned to be cautious when I interacted with the bloodline. We may have been a little heavy-handed with the cautionary aspect of the spell we cast on them to protect our secrets. They avoided talking to anyone about us as a result, even each other, and were downright terrified of any of the higher races they came into contact with. Somehow I managed to fly under the radar. The higher races barely paid any attention to me when I came across them, and the bloodline just gave me odd looks, as if they wanted to say hello but were afraid of looking dumb.
This man was clearly willing to risk looking like an idiot to get it out, and I’d be damned if I was going to discourage him from talking.
“It’s all right,” I finally said, reaching across the table and squeezing his hand. His head jerked up as though I’d just shocked him and he stared at me. His hand tightened into a fist beneath my fingers and the intricate design on his forearm flexed. What looked like scales inked into his arm faded from deep red to bright turquoise.
“Fuck, you are one of them,” he breathed. He relaxed his hand and spread his fingers out, then turned it over beneath mine until our palms touched. I got a view of the rest of his tattoo of a huge fish swimming amid stylized blue-green waves. Warmth radiated from his skin along with a spark of something more that made my breath catch.
The increased intimacy made me want to pull away, but he seemed on the verge of a revelation, so I left my hand in his grasp. Taking a deep breath, he said, “It’s like you all resonate at a different frequency than the rest of us. Like the sunlight bounces off your skin differently, and sound waves travel around your bodies differently. But until a few weeks ago, I just didn’t have the senses that co
uld see and hear you properly.”
Glancing up at the abrasive fluorescent lights, he chuckled. “Guess nobody’s immune to crap lighting though, huh? It took me a few minutes to be able to tell after you sat down, but now . . .”
He slid his palm along mine. An electric charge passed through my hand into his skin. I pulled my hand back and rested it under the table on my lap, uncomfortable with the rising need that simple touch had elicited. I didn’t need my dragon or my nymphaea nature waking up with this enticing stranger. Or at all, for that matter. There was too much at stake.
“What’s your name?” he blurted, his eyes now bright with curiosity, the floodgates having opened up after our touch. “What kind are you? The message said there were four . . . ah . . . races? Are you a dra—”
He clamped his mouth shut and glanced around. The parking lot beyond the windows was nearly empty and the cafeteria was dead, aside from one lonely cashier reading a book near the self-serve stations across the room. At this time of night, the place was a graveyard.
“No, I’m not a dragon,” I said. “Not exactly. My name’s Deva Rainsong. I’m sort of an ambassador from all four races.”
That sounded plausible; he didn’t need to know that what I was, while it had a name, wasn’t exactly definable. I was a chimera, a hybrid of not only the four higher races, but human too. And I was the only one of my kind.
He also didn’t need to know that I had effectively run away from home and was absolutely lost when it came to understanding my own nature.
“Day-va,” he said, smiling as he drew out my name. “I’m Bodhi.”
“I’m happy to meet you, Bodhi,” I said, smiling slightly, but too apprehensive to make it stick. Thanks to his rippling aura and a particular quality to his words, I could sense he was about to ask me something and I wasn’t going to have a good answer for him, which killed me.
“You guys have . . . abilities, right? Mystical powers?” He lowered his voice again as he shoved his tray aside and leaned closer to me. The desperation that had lain dormant during our interaction thus far flared to life, crackling though his aura.
I had to suppress a sigh because I knew what was coming.
“We do, to varying degrees,” I said. I was using at least two of them already to interpret his true desires. Not only did my dragon nature give me the ability to read his aura for secrets about his state of mind, but I had the innate ability to hear the truth in people’s spoken words—a trait I’d inherited from my turul side.
“My grandma’s sick. The doctors don’t have a clue what it is, but it started the same day the message came. It has to be linked. There must be something you can do.”
“I can try,” I said with a nod.
Swallowing a knot of helplessness, I stood. While I did have some abilities, those I was born with were woefully inadequate to do fuck-all for his grandmother. I hadn’t spent the last three weeks in hospitals for my health, after all, or for the health of the victims I’d observed. Bodhi’s grandma was not the first to fall prey to some mysterious creature that only seemed interested in members of the bloodline, and chances were that Bodhi himself would eventually become a target. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
But I could sure as hell try, and him inviting me to actually see his grandmother was the first break I’d had since this all began.
He grabbed both our trays and dumped the remnants of our midnight lunches in the trash, stacked the trays on top, then held the door open for me to follow.
“It’s this way,” he said, leading the way across a courtyard through another set of doors with an elevator on the other side. I could’ve found the way in my sleep.
When his grandmother had arrived, I was already here, having just watched a man fall into a coma as his soul fell to the beasts that had come for the bloodline. Before him, all the victims had died before I could see what had happened to them, but over the last few weeks they seemed to last longer, though I was beginning to lose hope that I’d be able to figure out how to actually heal them.
The two most recent victims were afflicted by a weakening of spirit that drained their will until they were nothing but feeble husks. The doctors had conducted every test imaginable, but they couldn’t see what I could.
I braced myself when we exited the elevator by the fifth-floor nurses’ station. The beasts were there, lurking in the shadows.
I glared at the creatures I’d taken to calling “soul hounds” as we passed through the door into Bodhi’s grandmother’s room. They were pair of shimmering, violet mirages that vanished when I looked directly at them, and inexplicably perked up whenever I arrived. One had a silver blaze down its face and the other had glowing, booted paws.
Both shadowy heads followed my passage. It was as if they were just biding their time until the woman died, but I’d be damned if I was going to let that happen.
The hounds spent their evenings pacing between the two victims, their foxlike ruffs shimmering with pale cascades of power from the energy they drained. Everything I’d tried to get them to leave only seemed to encourage them.
At least it wasn’t a constant thing. They’d arrive in the dead of night when the hospital was quietest, their dim glows gradually brightening as they absorbed power from the souls of the afflicted, and they’d leave at daybreak. I had no idea where they went. They seemed completely disinterested in the normal humans who staffed the hospital; the only people they cared about were the pair whose life forces reached out with a shimmering magical tether to each of the hounds.
What would happen if and when one of the victims died, I had no idea—I’d only felt the prior deaths, not witnessed them—but I suspected they would move onto someone else in the bloodline, judging from how they sniffed around the family members who came and went, including Bodhi and a woman who I believed was his mother.
Bodhi’s grandmother would be the first I’d actually see in person. I’d tried and failed on several occasions to talk my way in before.
The night nurse eyeballed me as I strolled by, and I gave her an exaggeratedly sweet smile when Bodhi opened his grandmother’s door and motioned for me to enter. Hopefully I could learn something new from actually examining one of the victims.
2
Deva
The sleeping woman had almost no aura, but when we entered, she astounded me by opening her eyes and smiling. Bodhi immediately went to her side and clasped her outstretched hand, lifting it to his lips.
“Grandma, this is Deva Rainsong. She might be able to help. Deva, this is my grandmother, Susannah Dylan.”
The door opened and closed again behind us while I was still recovering from the shock of her actually being conscious. I turned to see a strikingly lovely woman enter, her black hair cropped close to her scalp and her complexion the same warm brown as Susannah’s and a little darker than Bodhi’s. She reminded me a little of my own mother in her coloring and confident bearing. Her face was weary, but her gray-green eyes sharp.
“Bodhi,” she said, “Mom needs her rest.”
“I’ll rest when I’m dead, Maddie. Let me spend time with my grandson while I still draw breath.”
Susannah pushed herself up to a seated position, surprising me with her alertness. She had been attacked by a soul hound three weeks ago just like the other victim I’d tried to see, but the other one, an older man, had fallen into a coma within a day and had yet to be revived. I’d fully expected her to be unconscious too.
“Why don’t you bring your guitar over and play for me, Bodhi?” Susannah said. “Do you like music, Miss Deva?”
“I love music,” I said, already enamored of this woman.
“It’s after midnight, Mom. I’m sure the hospital would rather we not make a ruckus,” Maddie said, walking over and adjusting Susannah’s pillows.
“Pshaw, we’re in the ICU. Everyone else here is in a coma, and the people who aren’t probably wish they were so they’d avoid the boredom.”
She motioned
to Bodhi, who obediently opened up a guitar case and pulled out a lovely mahogany-colored guitar. He sat down and quietly tuned it, then started playing a sweet ballad that had me completely enthralled.
It was a song I’d heard repeated on the human radio stations and filtering through the hospital elevator’s speakers, but it had never sounded quite the way it did coming from him. I mouthed the words to myself and tapped my foot to the beat.
I felt two sets of eyes on me and stilled, turning to see both Bodhi’s mother and grandmother watching me with interest.
“You want to sing, girl, you sing,” Susannah said.
I shook my head, my face heating. “I don’t sing.”
Bodhi’s grandmother tutted. “With a name like Deva Rainsong, that is a crying shame.”
Maddie shook her head, and a second later opened her mouth, closed her eyes, and added her own rich, melodic voice.
The music wasn’t loud, but the effect was impossible to ignore. Susannah’s aura brightened, and within the center of her chest a new light flared and began to glow. I studied the familiar shape of her soul, my adrenaline spiking at the chance to finally get a closer look at it. It was egg-shaped, about the size of a fist, and pulsed with the cadence of the music her daughter sang to beside her. Only there were very visible punctures of darkness along the sides that looked like . . . teeth marks?
I turned at the warbling growl that came from the corner of the room. One of the soul hounds stood there, hackles raised. It was upset, and I could see why—the tether that linked it to the glowing orb in Susannah’s abdomen had weakened with the strengthening of her aura. Her soul was absorbing strength and energy from the music, which in turn fortified her aura like a shield.
I held up my hand to them and made a shushing motion, curious what would happen if the music stopped. Bodhi’s hand stilled on the strings and the three of them quieted. The soul hound settled as well, its tether to Susannah flaring again. She slumped back against her pillows looking depleted, and for good reason; the beast was literally draining her soul.
Fate's Fools Box Set Page 9