Lover Arisen, page 21
“Since I came to Caldwell? Or over the course of my life?”
“Either. Both.” She pushed some flyaways out of her face. “I don’t know.”
“It’s what I do. I’ve got a knack for getting into places that people try to keep others out of, and I have to do something with what I take. I don’t need the shit.”
“So it’s a game to you?”
“It’s just a way to keep up my skills. And not everybody can have six fucking watches that are worth, collectively, more than a lot of people’s houses.” He shook his head. “Like I said, I am never going to apologize for what I’ve done.”
“And you’re not going to stop, are you.”
“Nope. The proceeds always go to places that need it more.”
He met her right in the eye, but not aggressively. More so that it was clear he was telling his truth, and she was free to judge.
“You know,” she said in a lowered voice, like all her CPD colleagues might be listening in on a wiretap, “I wouldn’t feel bad if I were you, either.”
Balz smiled a little. “Thanks for understanding.”
Her boss-voice came back online. “It’s still illegal. And assuming the things you take are insured, it’s not a victimless crime even if the owners get reimbursed.”
“Still not sorry.”
“It’s wrong.”
“I don’t care. It feeds people or animals who are hungry. It gives unfortunates a place to sleep when they have none. And it keeps those who are desperately afraid safe.”
“True virtue doesn’t come with an asterisk.”
“And thieves can have morals—hey, is this our first fight?”
She blinked—and then seemed to be trying not to smile. “I’d call it more of an argument than a fight.” Then her brows twitched into a frown. “And you’re seriously just going to let me go? What about your buddies?”
“Don’t worry about them. They won’t come after you. And neither will I, Erika. You can trust me on that.”
She opened her mouth, but he went back into her brain one final time. Leaving her memories alone, he instead gave her a gift: He inserted the very clear cognition that it was in her best interests to never, ever come near him or this garage, and never, ever do any further investigating into any part of what she had seen, heard, or done tonight…
Due to the trance he had to put her in, all she could do was stare up at him, her eyes fuzzy, her mouth slightly parted, her body poised.
It would have been the perfect time to kiss her.
But he’d already taken too much without her permission.
And everything ended between them right now.
Everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
And still Sahvage stared down the long white corridor at Rahvyn.
Whilst the Brothers around him displayed a masculine pattern of grieving, strong faces drawn tightly, eyes watering, but no tears falling, he faced her and locked her stare with his own, the demand not a call to action but a shout.
Opening up a communication link between them, she said unto his mind, You hated what I did to you.
He shook his head from side to side. Whether it was a denial or he was saying that none of that mattered, she was not sure—and meanwhile, on the other side of the closed door behind him, that mahmen’s weeping was a stain upon the air, seeping out and infecting all within its sorrowful earshot with a weighted sadness.
How could she not respond to such grieving?
Rahvyn’s body moved first, before her brain consciously instructed her legs to push her feet into the floor and her arms to steady her balance upon the bare, clean wall as she rose. On the vertical, she had an absurd notion to smooth out her clothes, and thus she did so, trying to ignore the red stains from where she had cradled Nate on the concrete outside of that club.
She walked forward in a daze.
Focusing only on Sahvage, the hall disappeared in her peripheral vision, and so too did the fighters who surrounded him. All was gone except for her dearest first cousin, the remnant of her family, the living, breathing symbol of what she had once been.
Before she had emerged from violence in her full power.
As she stopped in front of him, he said in a low voice, “You have to save him.”
Whether it was her arrival upon their midst or the intense words spoken by her cousin, one by one, the Brothers looked at her. Turned to her. Narrowed their eyes upon her.
“Save him,” Sahvage repeated as that crying continued inside the room.
Rahvyn lowered her head. She would have avoided this revelation as to herself if she could have—and knew once again that she should have left the night after she and Sahvage had been reunited. Once she had reassured him she lived, her reason for being in this place and time had been served.
“There is no going back,” she said quietly. “You know that yourself.”
“I don’t give a shit and neither will they. Just bring him back. If Nate is lost, we lose two others tonight.”
When Rahvyn looked at the door, the Brothers asked no questions and put up no argument, as if they didn’t need to understand to agree with what Sahvage was saying. But she knew without being told that she would be accountable unto them if things went badly.
And mayhap that was the point. This tragedy felt as though it was her fault, and she wanted to make amends. What she had to offer was not without strife, however, and she was not certain what would be harder to live with: Doing nothing… or doing what she could—
Once again, her body made the decision before her mind formed the thought to move. Her feet started forward, step, step, step. And as she passed through the throng of males, she was a willow tree to their towering pines, yet their deference was in the way they wordlessly parted for her.
Rahvyn watched her hand reach out and open the door.
The scene on the other side was a tableau of suffering around a dead body, the living leaning down, Nate lying prone and motionless and spotlit on the steel table. All of the tubes and wires from the transportation were still attached to him, but the machines had been silenced, no beeping, no flashing lights or patterns appearing on their screens. On the floor beneath where he lay, there were tufts of bloodstained gauze and plastic wrappers and puddles of blood.
The healers had tried valiantly to save him, she thought as she took in further details.
Nate’s lower body was draped with blue sheeting. His chest was stained with something orange along with dried blood. His eyes were closed and his mouth open, and his hair… looked as it had when he’d been alive.
The male with the spectacles and the white coat was the first to look at her, and he cleared his throat in an officious manner. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Murhder, Nate’s adoptive father, glanced over. Wiping his red eyes, he said hoarsely, “It’s all right. She’s a friend of his. Come here and say goodbye—”
His voice choked off at that point so he used his hands to motion her near, waving at her to close in.
The mahmen did not lift her head from her son. She just stood on the far side of Nate, her hands on his shoulder and upper arm, her tears falling onto his cooling skin.
“I am so sorry,” Rahvyn whispered.
“You did everything you could,” the sire said. “You called for help and gave him the best chance he had.”
“Will you allow me to revive him?”
At that, the mahmen raised her head, her face a vision of despair. “What?”
“Whatever is going on here?” the healer demanded. “Shall I call for security—”
“Shh,” Murhder cut in. “Sweetheart… he’s gone. It’s too late.”
“No, it’s not.” The Brother’s brows came down, but before he could argue and break the heart of his shellan even more, Rahvyn said quickly, “Will you allow me to help him.”
Murhder cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. If you’re not going to pay your respects to him, we’d like some privacy—”
The mahmen reached across the body of her dead son and grabbed at Rahvyn’s arm. “Yes, yes… yes.”
Her eyes were wide, and her whole body trembled—and Rahvyn was aware that she herself had been in the same state when she had stood over Sahvage’s arrow-strewn body.
“What can you do?” the female begged.
“I will bring him back for you,” Rahvyn whispered.
“Please, oh, God… I just need him alive.”
As the males started to raise protestations, she and the mahmen locked eyes—and then Rahvyn closed her lids.
Instantly, everything became so crystal clear to her senses that the smells of blood and fear and anguish were like shards of glass in her nose, and the glow of the ceiling lights and the chandelier over the table was a brilliant beam shining right in her face. She could hear the tense, shallow breathing of the mahmen as a scream, and the voices of the father and the healer as booming basses, and even a shuffle of clothing or shift of weight were loud as metal on metal.
There is no going back, she thought out at both of the parents.
“Please,” the mahmen begged. “Save him.”
With a heavy heart, Rahvyn called upon her—
The strobing of the room’s lighting fixtures registered through her closed eyes, and she had a dim thought that the blinking had not transpired the last time she had done this. The first time she had done this, rather. To Sahvage.
Then again, that had been centuries ago when it came to linear time. No electricity back in that castle. Candles only. And moonlight.
As the flickering intensified, the pulsing began. She could feel the energy emanating from her body in all directions, not just toward Nate—
Thump. Thump.
Thump.
At the sounds, she opened her lids. The three people who had been around the bedding table had been propelled back against the walls of the room and they were pinned in place by waves of magic that distorted the air, turning the oxygen that should have been invisible into something that was like water’s surface after a stone was thrown into a still pond.
Rahvyn moved without walking to the table, her body levitating and propelling itself upon her will unto Nate’s side. When she focused on his face, shadows were thrown as if a brilliant light was trained upon him, though it was not. There was no illumination, and yet the contrast doubled and redoubled until even the softest contours of his chin and cheeks, his hair and ears, were as if drawn in jet-black ink.
And then all color leached out of him and that which was around him. No more was the sheeting blue, nor his abdomen stained with orange and red, nor the wires red and blue and yellow that ran off the pads affixed to his chest. All was black, white, and shades of gray. His skin, too, became without a tint, that which had been graying now fully there. Thereafter, the distortion intensified and took on further characteristics. He became a leaded pencil rendering of himself, not only black and white, but no longer three-dimensional, all aspects of him flattening out into two.
In Rahvyn’s concentration and summoning of power, she lost track of that which surrounded her and him. Gone were the room, its equipment and its people, disappeared was that corridor and those males outside, null and void became the entirety of Caldwell… and then this New World… and finally the ocean she had crossed and the Old Country from whence they had all originated.
The rotation started slowly, she and Nate making a single turn. And another. And one more and one more after that. Speed began to gather next, the spinning increasing until they were a blur—and yet there was no breeze to riffle her hair or his. Faster, faster… faster still they went. Faster. Faster…
The momentum increased until the revolutions were at such a velocity that the center could not hold. As critical acceleration was reached, there was a great clapping, as if lightning struck a tree.
Upon the sound, they broke free of the spinning and floated in a void. The state of transcendence was an impossibility to describe, and yet an undeniable experience as all opposites became one: both static and spinning, one dimension and yet three, time stopping and also racing, the two of them weightless and more dense than the earth.
Life and death, together. Coexisting. The line that separated the two states of mortality no boundary at all, the distinction disappearing.
Such that Rahvyn could merge the incompatible through her will—
Upon the table that existed and was not existent, Nate’s mouth opened wide and he drew in a tremendous breath that was loud as a yell, silent as a feather landing.
With a lurch, his torso bolted up, his eyes peeled wide, and his hands went to his stomach where he had been shot. As he breathed with desperate, hungry draws, his lungs inflated him out of his two dimensional state, the contours of him reemerging and pulling free of the flatness, the color coming back not just to his face and skin, but all that was around him.
Rahvyn watched, right by his side and from a vast distance away, as he struggled with the divide he now straddled.
And could never leave.
Both alive and dead.
Forevermore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As Erika tore off from the garage, she was running away, running as fast as she could, running for her life.
As her heart pounded and her throat burned, her shoes slapped against the pavement. With a set of car keys in one hand and a—
No, wait, she had guns in both her hands and a key fob hanging off her pinkie. Whatever, like it mattered. The only thing she cared about was getting to the silver Honda that she had to get to because if she didn’t get to the silver Honda she was never, ever going to be safe, ever again. Silver Honda was base. Silver Honda was panic room. Silver Honda was savior—
She ran faster, even though she had less than a block to go, her goal so close as her jacket flapped and her hair stripped back from her face in her self-created windstorm. And still she ran. Until it felt like the silver Honda was just getting farther and farther away.
Finally. With heaving breath, she fumbled with the key fob, hitting every button there was on it as she juggled the guns—until the trunk popped at the same time the doors unlocked. She left the back open as she threw herself behind the wheel. Slamming the driver’s door, she was more with the slapping and flapping while trying not to shoot the dashboard or herself—where was the lock button!
When there was a thunck of those latches engaging, she felt a split second of relief. It didn’t last. As she glanced out the driver’s side window, the sight of the grungy building she had come out of filled her with a terror so intense it was as if a dagger was at her throat—
Between one blink and the next, she saw Balthazar putting a sharp blade up to his neck. His mouth was moving, he was yelling, his eyes were vibrant with anger… as he confronted that brunette, the one from down under the bridge the night before, the one who had been the old man in the bookshop before she had been herself.
And then Balthazar was bleeding heavily. He was falling to his knees, and bleeding down the front of his chest…
Erika looked at the guns in her hands. Felt the weight of the clips in her pockets. Remembered the way a man she shouldn’t know had looked into her eyes as if he saw all parts of her soul.
Please let me go.
At her request, he had set her free with her memories, but the liberation was only physical. Mentally, she was trapped by what she had seen tonight, what she knew now, what she could not believe. And meanwhile, he was still in the chaos with the brunette, with those shadows, with those other fighters.
“I gotta go,” she said to the windshield. “I’ve got to leave.”
When she went to punch her foot into the brake, she was too far back to reach the pedal. She put the guns on the passenger seat and reached between her legs to find the pull bar for the seat. Scooching up, she tried again with the footwork and was able to start the engine.
Gripping the wheel, she looked forward over the Honda’s hood… but could not go forward.
Turned out she wasn’t as free as she’d thought. Not as free as Balthazar had promised.
Stuck—
One look back over her shoulder at that garage, which was disguised as just another rundown, nothing-special in the rundown, nothing-special neighborhood, and a wave of terror mobilized her.
Freshly gripped with panic, she stomped on the clutch, threw the old-fashioned gearshift into drive, and punched the gas—
As she swung out of the parallel parking spot, she caught a glimpse of the door she’d come out of. It was just closing. Balthazar had kept his word and watched her to make sure she got to the car safely.
Just like he had protected her before.
Leaving him seemed wrong, but the fear inside her was so powerful, she had no choice but to give in to it and flee the garage, flee him and his world.
As she shot down Shore Avenue, she had no idea where she was going. Or where she was except for, well, down on the shores of the Hudson River, traveling deeper into downtown. Which was the wrong way. She should go home.
That was what she had to do. She needed an on-ramp to the Northway, so she could head in the opposite direction than she was going now.
She needed to go back to her apartment… which wasn’t actually an apartment, but a townhouse that she had not properly claimed as her home because there had been no home for her, not since she was sixteen.
Her place. That was right. Even though she was no more safe there than anywhere else, she was like someone in the hospital with a dreaded disease, whose only thought was that if they could just get back to their own bed, everything would be okay.
It was a foolish belief.
But an undeniable one.
* * *
Standing over the Book, Devina read the spell that had been created for her and her alone for the third time. Which was what the spell informed her she was supposed to do. Three times with the reading, like it was worried that she’d be so excited, she couldn’t concentrate.
