The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  I’d seen snippets of Halow’s starscape. It was mostly black with scattered systems. But Valand… My saru heart swelled at the stunning sight. Tears were brewing in my eyes, and I had no idea why. I felt like a child seeing a galaxy of stars for the first time and didn’t know how to voice my wonder.

  I had my hand on the screen before I realized I’d moved. The ship thrummed beneath my touch. And beyond, Valand’s galaxy of color sparkled. My dark, brooding vakaru had come from here?

  “Kellee, it’s…” My glee turned cold at his expression. He stood there, wrapped in dark colors, like a thundercloud on a Summerlands day.

  “It’s dead,” he said.

  I pulled my hand back. How could something so beautiful be dead? Not all of it, surely. An entire star system couldn’t die, could it?

  He joined me at the screen. His ghostly reflection shimmered on its surface beside mine.

  “It looks exactly the same now as the day I left it all behind.”

  This was difficult for him. I wasn’t certain, but I suspected he hadn’t been back in a long time. Maybe not since Oberon had wiped out his people.

  “Which one is your home?” I murmured.

  Color danced in his dark eyes as he scanned the canvas of stars. “There. Named Valand, like the system it’s cradled in.” He tapped the screen and the ship helpfully ringed the planet in question, making it stand out from its neighbors. It had its own rings too, one made of golden dust and another of red, around a surface of greens.

  For a people made for war, their star system was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. But there was no pride in Kellee’s face, no wonderment, just cold, flat acceptance.

  The fae warcruiser sailed closer to Valand, probably the first fae ship to enter Valand’s space in centuries. I knew the fae had wiped out the vakaru, but why hadn’t the humans colonized Valand? Sjora had said Valand was slumbering, but what did that mean?

  “Where’s the fragment of polestar?”

  Kellee’s eyes clouded over. He turned away from the screen, leaving me alone on the viewing platform. “I’m not sure,” he said, leaving. “We’ll start at the capital city.”

  I considered going after him, but I knew better than to crowd Kellee when he didn’t want to talk. Instead, I faced the Valand system and wondered why Oberon would be so foolish as to destroy something so beautiful. It didn’t seem like something the king I knew would do. He adored beauty in all its forms. But I hadn’t seen what was left behind. Beauty sometimes hid an ugly core. Faerie was proof of that.

  The warcruiser settled into Valand’s orbit, and Kellee piloted our shuttle down into Valand’s atmosphere. Below, the land shone in a multitude of greens. No oceans that I could see. As we drew closer, the patches of green adopted solid rectangular shapes, reminding me of Sjora’s patchwork clothes, all stitched together with green thread.

  Closer and the patches became miles upon miles of interlinked walls surrounding enormous step pyramids that climbed skyward. Everywhere I looked, the ground had been shaped and molded into a vast metropolis built of green rock, like a jewel glittering green from every angle. Closer still and Kellee piloted the shuttle through valleys between towering pyramid peaks, making them look like manufactured mountains. I’d seen similar structures in Talen’s Old Earthen books, built as temples to the stars long before human tek had carried humankind to them.

  I peered out from the window, expecting to see other ships in the sky or movement in the crosshatched streets below, but nothing moved in the sky or on the ground.

  My companions’ faces all looked grim. Kellee, at the flight controls, was a simmering pot of silent emotion about to boil over. Talen sat at the back, eyes closed as though resting. Arran flicked his daggers through his fingers, his eyes darting over the abandoned city outside.

  Sirius was here, soaking up the shadows at the back. I’d insisted on him coming, much to everyone’s disagreement. Nobody wanted the guardian with us. By the guardian’s stoic look, he didn’t want to be here either, but leaving him on the ship with his loyal fae flight would have invited an insurrection. Better to get him off Shinj and distract him from his mission and his new arm. He’d twisted his cloak to his right so it hung over his arm, concealing it. He watched Valand’s green land scroll by just like the rest of us.

  Kellee set the shuttle down in the middle of an open plaza boxed in by high walls. A proud step pyramid loomed over one end.

  The shuttle doors hissed, equalizing the pressure, and the ramp descended.

  The quiet hit me first. A silence so big and so complete I could almost touch it. The city air hung motionless and dry. Grit crunched under my boots and group’s boots behind me, the sound of our passing too loud in this abandoned place. The emerald pyramid climbed ever higher, turning us into small, inconsequential things.

  “It hasn’t changed in all these years,” Sirius remarked. His voice sailed on and on and on into the silence until the emptiness swallowed it down.

  Quiet washed in again. The paths underfoot would have flowed with people once. Houses and temples, streets and parks. Hundreds of thousands of vakaru. Mothers, fathers, children. Now gone.

  The creeping sensation of something watching us intensified, and the fine hairs at the back of my neck lifted. Despite the warmth, shivers rippled through me. I looked back at Sirius and saw a haunted look in his unguarded expression. Something terrible had happened here.

  Kellee marched far ahead, toward the terrace of steps leading up to the pyramid. Whatever he was going through, I had promised him he wasn’t alone.

  Talen drew up alongside me and bowed his head to whisper, “I cannot go with you.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” I asked, remembering Kellee’s method for pinning Talen down.

  “Won’t.” He lifted his gaze and fixed it on the distant Kellee. “Don’t lose him in the past.”

  I nodded and hurried to catch up with Kellee. Arran followed, but I waved him back and shook my head. His eyes narrowed, but he reluctantly nodded and hung back with Talen and Sirius.

  Sota came in next, humming too close to my shoulder. “I don’t like it here,” the drone rumbled. “My sensors itch. The silence is alive.”

  I knew how he felt. As beautiful as everything was, the silence was cloying. Nowhere was this quiet. This place wasn’t just empty, it was a vacuum. “Stay outside the temple. Keep an eye on the others.”

  He whirred. “I should come in with you. The marshal’s heart rate is elevated. He is angry.”

  “Yes, but not with me. Stay outside. I’ll be fine. He won’t hurt me.”

  I climbed the steps before Sota could argue that Kellee already had hurt me, multiple times. A huge stone doorway, three times my height, marked the entrance. I stepped through, feeling small compared to the grand columned entrance chamber. A path stretched dead-straight through various halls and chambers to the center of the pyramid, where light plunged in from above, highlighting a platform and an empty dais. Kellee stood in the spotlight, his face lifted to the light that couldn’t penetrate his shroud of darkness.

  I approached carefully, respectfully.

  He yanked the band from his ponytail and ran a hand through his hair, mussing it around his face only to rake it back and hold it there. The firm set of his jaw revealed how he kept his emotions locked down. I’d rarely seen him so still.

  Something had once rested on the dais. The entire central chamber had been built to house whatever had sat upon the stone plinth. A statue to a god, perhaps? Did the vakaru worship a god or gods? They were known as a violent race, but I’d seen no evidence of warfare so far, just astonishing engineering and architecture.

  Drifting out of the light, I wandered the chamber, eyeing jagged marks on the walls. The scratches weren’t part of the original design and looked chiseled into the stone. There was no rhyme or reason to them, and the more I looked for them, the more I found, until I realized they were everywhere. Always scratched in fives. I’d seen them before on the insid
e of Kellee’s cage on the warcruiser when Sjora had kept us both caged. I saw them in every one of the fae Kellee had killed. I pressed my hand to a patch of marks, fingers spread to match their pattern. Vakaru claw marks.

  What happened here? I ached to ask, the question right on the tip of my tongue, but Kellee still looked up into the beam of light, as though looking for answers too.

  A fight, a battle, or had they been trapped inside and tried to claw their way out?

  There was nothing here to answer why Oberon had killed them all. The vakaru had unseelie in them, but that couldn’t be the only reason the king had wanted them gone. There had to be more to it. I knew Oberon’s wrath was legendary, but had he feared the vakaru so much that he’d wiped them out? What was it about the vakaru—Oberon’s own creation—that had offended him so?

  “I still hear them.” Kellee’s voice filled the quiet, chasing it out of every corner and crevice. “Like it’s happening again.”

  He bowed his head and stepped back from the plinth. When he looked up, molten gold ringed the edges of his dark pupils, making his eyes shine. “We built these pyramids higher and higher, thinking we could reach the stars. We built them for the fae. We built this entire world for the fae. Because we loved them.” He snickered a dry, ugly laugh. “I know you understand that.”

  “I do,” I whispered.

  “The fae we served were like the stars. We thought they were gods. We thought…” He laughed. “Oberon was a god. We worshiped him and bled for him and would have brought all the worlds in all the systems to their knees for him.”

  I knew exactly how that felt. I may not have lived for as long as he had, but I had loved the fae just as fiercely, loved Oberon as though it were a madness. I would have done anything for him to see me, for him to love me in return. I had done anything.

  “Then the humans fought back and we went to war,” Kellee continued. “We killed them in the hundreds of thousands. We tore through the humans, tore them open and drank from their veins until we were mad with bloodlust.” His grimace twitched and the golden ring in his eyes darkened, bleeding red. I could imagine the sight, the ferocious loyalty of the vakaru and how powerful a weapon they must have been.

  Kellee dropped his hand from his hair so the locks fell, obscuring his face. “Humans who looked like us, talked like us. They had built machines, and we tore those down. They’d built spacefaring tek that carried them through the stars, just like the fae, and we… I…” he corrected, again, and wet his lips. “I started seeing them differently. These humans… they weren’t gods, but they were clever, and powerful, and they didn’t want to fight us. We knew it.” He circled the empty plinth and the column of light. “In the beginning, it didn’t matter. Our love for the fae blinded us to everything else, and then the humans came here and brought their tek with them, not to make war, but to make peace. The fools.” His smile almost returned. “There was one human…”

  He pressed his lips together, but not before I saw them quiver. My marshal was slowly, carefully coming undone, and all I could do was watch as his layers peeled away. “…one brave woman.” Kellee’s dangerous glare speared me, issuing a challenge: Stay. Listen. Do not run. “She walked through our number, through a city full of monsters, unarmed, her chin held high like none of us could touch her. She wore a gown of green silk laced with glittering tek. I had never seen anything so foolish or so beautiful. Any one of us could have torn her down, but something about her… The vakaru watched her approach. She walked right up to me, her eyes full of fierce determination, but no fear. Despite all the things we had done, all the humans we had slaughtered, she did not fear us.”

  Kellee closed his eyes, either to hold back the memories or to see them clearly. The pain on his face was too raw, too real. I hated to see him hurting, but a large part of me wanted more. He was talking, telling me who he was like never before. He never showed his feelings, not really. He was always guarded, always in control. But here, now, he was revealing everything.

  “She looked me in the eyes.” He opened his. They glittered with unshed tears. The next words he pushed out in a hiss. “I had a choice, she said.” His breath hitched, lodging in his throat. “My people need not kill for the fae. We need not bow to them or live by their rules. We did not have to be their slaves. We could be free to choose our own path, a vakaru path.”

  Kellee threw his head up, freeing the tears. They slid quietly from the corners of his eyes, wetting his face. He wiped them away. “I… made the wrong choice,” he whispered, losing his voice.

  A knot formed in my throat. Mistakes, I knew those all too well.

  “I killed her, right here.” He looked down, his eyes alive with the past. When he looked up, right at me, his upper lip pulled back, revealing growing fangs. “I killed her for your king.” He pointed, his fingers tipped with growing black claws. “I killed her because Oberon would reward me. Because I adored my god. I loved him, like you still love him.” Kellee swayed on his feet and I stepped forward, but his glare held me back, and when he next spoke, the sadness and pain and sorrow made him seem so small, made him seem like just a man with the weight of a billion lives on his soul. “And he murdered my entire people because I’d invited a human here. Because I’d let her in. Because I’d listened to her. I begged him. I got down on my knees right outside, with tens of thousands of proud eyes on me, and I begged him to hear my pleas. I begged him to kill me for my mistake—not my people, not my vakaru.” He smiled but it was an anguished grin. “I knew then, before he decided, I’d made the wrong choice. I knew it was all a lie. The fae and their magic and their pretty words. They were lies, all of it. And he knew they were lies too. So he killed them, Kesh. Every. Single. One.”

  Kellee lifted his head, and the vakaru peered into my soul. Sharp intelligence glittered in its glare. It was a terrible, powerful creature. A born killer. But proud and strong and honorable.

  My unseelie monster, my Kellee. It hadn’t been his fault. Oberon hadn’t killed them because of Kellee’s choice. Oberon had created the vakaru. He knew they were unseelie—he had made them that way. Oberon had destroyed them because he feared them.

  “It’s not your fault.” I held my hands out, showing the vakaru I was unarmed and no threat. “The unseelie—”

  The wildness snuffed out of Kellee’s eyes and he barked a bitter laugh, because the words were pathetic and could do nothing to change the ancient past. His ancient past.

  “And here you are…” He smiled, and it broke my heart wide open to see the sorrow in his smile. “Centuries later. The Messenger with a choice. I see that brave woman I killed in you. I see her every time I look at you. I see myself in you too, a stubborn war chief who believes he can save his people. I see my past in your eyes and my mistakes. You have the same choice I did, and damn you, Kesh, if I don’t see you making the same mistakes… knowing you’ll do exactly the same as I did. He’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy everything you know, everything you love, because it’s what he does—what they do. You have to see past everything they made you. You have to be better than them. You have to choose for you, nobody else, not even your king.”

  I hadn’t known Kellee at all. But now?

  “I know you think you understand, but you don’t. You want to, and I believe that, but until you stand in front of Oberon and deny his power over you, you’re still his. Until that moment, you’ll always be his.”

  I understood why Kellee looked at me the way he did, why he fought me, why he lifted me up and then pushed me down again. I saw it all in his eyes. Saw the hope, the fear, the terrible knowledge that his world could come crashing down again, and I wanted so badly to make the right choice. For him. For me. For a race long dead and those still fighting today.

  He and I were the same. The fae had made us, we loved them, we’d die for them, we’d kill for them. Until there was nothing left. Until we had climbed a mountain of bones to reach the stars, only to realize their light had died long ago.

  “Tha
nk you,” I said. No other words were necessary. And in that moment—as I looked at the last vakaru, his eyes ablaze with fire, his claws sharp, and tears streaming down his face—I knew I’d made my choice and it would be the right one.

  He nodded sharply and wiped a hand across his face, sweeping away those tears. “Faerie be damned.” He dropped his head, but the empty plinth caught his eye once more. With a sudden roar, all his emotion broke over him. He slashed at the plinth. Rock split and crumbled, tumbling to the floor, where it shattered into rubble.

  Sota whooshed in, gun ports open and trained on Kellee’s back. I shot out a hand, warning the drone off, but Kellee dropped to his knees, spent and empty. A gentle rumbling upset the quiet, and miraculously, the fallen stone shook and trembled, debris bouncing and shooting off the floor, back into its original positions, remaking itself before my eyes.

  Magic.

  He had told me Valand was immortal. But it was more than that. The silent city was trapped in a single moment. Never permitted to change. And it would stay that way, forever. Oberon had done more than wipe out Kellee’s people. He’d stopped the passage of time on Valand entirely.

  Kellee rose to his feet, and I saw a man who’d been staring down the barrel of a gun for centuries. Because he was trapped in the same moment, cursed to live with the belief that his choice had killed the vakaru, cursed to be alone with that knowledge for all eternity. This planet, this system, was a tombstone.

  I locked my jaw, swallowed the painful knot in my throat, and blinked back the unshed tears, because my pain, my sympathy, solved nothing. But I could make changes. Just like a single kiss gifted to a fae pilot who had wanted to feel one last time, just like a starfruit given to take away the agony, or just like a boy’s hand in mine as we reached through our bars, change happened one small step at a time. Kellee and I could make a difference.

  “We’ll make it right, Kellee.”

  I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. He breathed hard, staring at the remade plinth, seeing and hearing the past all around him. Then, with a growl, he cleared his throat and turned to me, pinning on his lopsided lawman smile that touched his gold-rimmed green eyes. “Let’s go find this polestar.”