The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3) Page 23

  Light blazed. There and gone again in a blink. And for a moment, nothing had changed. Then the wailing started. The wrenching sound of loss chilled my blood.

  “My child!?”

  The male vakaru to my right watched his child’s little hand, nestled in his, dissolve into smoke and shadow. He grabbed for his son, perhaps to stop what had already been done, but his arms sailed through the nothing space left behind, turning his child to dust.

  My thoughts stuttered.

  “No!” Kellee roared. From where I stood, I saw how his claws sprang free, how rage and fear and grief raced across his face, and how Oberon looked down on him as though nothing had changed.

  Oberon had come here to kill this world, to end his unseelie experiment the same way he wanted to end the human one. It wasn’t Kellee’s fault, but history remembered it this way.

  Oberon’s left hand shot out. He caught Kellee by the chin and jerked him to his feet. “You continue to defy me even as your people die.”

  “Don’t take them, don’t take my people. Not my vakaru!”

  Another flick of Oberon’s right hand. More light. More screams. But the vakaru ran. They burst apart, fleeing. There was nowhere to hide. Oberon’s ship likely had them all pinned in its sights. The blasts of light came from the world-eater in orbit. A click of his fingers and people died. It was so… easy.

  Kellee knew then that all was lost. “You are no god.” He swung for Oberon, but the prince brought his arm around, his fae marks blazing, and Kellee’s claws clashed against them as though striking a shield.

  Oberon’s thin lips curved into a sharp smile. “The vakaru die here today, but not you. You will forever be apart from them, forever alone, forever wishing you had saved your people.” The prince pulled Kellee close. “I admire you, Droch-fhoula. Without you, the vakaru would be beasts. You brought order to chaos, but they have served their purpose, and now all this must end. Everything but you.”

  Oberon flung Kellee down, lifted his hand again, and scanned the crowd of scattering vakaru. They gathered their children and clutched one another, sobbing, begging, pleading to their god, and Oberon watched and heard it all. The click of his fingers echoed in the silence that followed.

  Screams gone.

  Begging cut short.

  I blinked, and it was over. The shadow of Oberon’s enormous ship had vanished, as had the king.

  And Valand was empty but for a single vakaru abandoned in the plaza. He looked tiny, suddenly, in this big, empty world.

  “Kellee?”

  The name rippled far and wide, turning over and over and over, and the colors at the edges of my sight blurred, reminding me this was all happening somewhere else. Sometime else.

  He lay half-sprawled on the ground, his head down, claws out, bathed in Valand’s unforgiving light.

  He didn’t look like my Kellee. He looked like a wild, colorful, messy version of the dark, somber marshal I knew. Would this Kellee even know me?

  “Kellee…” I said, softer this time. He didn’t move, didn’t look up, but his shoulders heaved with the effort of keeping himself under control. I kneeled and reached out a hand toward his, acutely aware that a twitch was all it would take to slice me open. “Kellee, pl—”

  He snapped his head up, and for a second, the beast looked through his eyes. Then his focus softened, and the haunted look fell away. His appearance stuttered, flickering like the wraiths, so that my Kellee was back—long coat, pulled-back ponytail, and a few hundred years’ worth of anguish gathering in his eyes. “Kesh, you… you saw that?”

  I gripped his shoulder, sinking my fingers in. “Listen. Oberon was always going to kill your people that day. He came in a ship grown to kill worlds. It didn’t matter what you said or did. You couldn’t have saved any of them.”

  Kellee searched my eyes, his face a mixture of confusion and grief. I didn’t know what it was like to lose everything, but I knew Oberon. The king had come here to kill a world and cleanse Faerie of anything unseelie.

  Kellee gripped my arm, locking us together, his gaze fused with mine. “You’re here.”

  Had he thought I’d leave him? I mustered a small smile.

  He pulled me into his arms, clamping me so close I could feel his heart thumping and hear his breaths fluttering, but above it all, it was his trembling that had me gripping him so damn tightly. Kellee was never afraid, he never showed weakness, he didn’t falter, but now, in my arms, his tremors told me he was more real than I’d ever known him.

  “You can’t stay here… in the past.” Talen’s words came back to me. Don’t lose him to the past. And with it came the terrible knowledge that the Nightshade was waiting on the other side of all this. “Kellee, I need you with me. We need you with us.”

  “Why didn’t Oberon kill me?”

  I clutched Kellee’s face in both hands and held him still. “Marshal, we need you. You can make a difference. You told me if Oberon kills you, he wins. You’re wrong. He wins when you let him win. Don’t let him win. Come back with me. There are things happening outside of the past. I need you, Kellee. Halow needs you. This Messenger needs you.”

  The look in his eyes had my heart beating too fast, like he was seeing me anew, and it frightened me more than Oberon ever could. I knew who he wanted me to be, and I knew I’d let him down in the past. The unguarded hope in his eyes was real and raw, and he was laying all that hope on me.

  He touched my face and tilted his head, as though figuring something out. Frown lines creased his brow. “I don’t deserve you.”

  “No, you stupid, stubborn fool, you don’t. But I don’t deserve you either. So we’re even. Let’s find Arran and Sota and get out of here.”

  Kellee pulled away and looked around him. He scrambled to his feet, his frown deepening. “This isn’t now.”

  “No, you said Valand was timeless, and now we’re stuck in its past.” I shielded my eyes and saw a flying blur streaking toward me. The blur quickly became a ball of lethal tek. Sota whirred to a halt a few feet in front of me, guns armed.

  “Kesh, everything is an echo,” he said. “We’re here, but not here, and they are there and here. It’s confusing.”

  “It’s confusing for all of us.”

  Arran jogged up to us, daggers in his hands. “Anyone wanna tell me what’s going on? There was a ship… a fae. Was it Oberon? I saw people.”

  He had seen it all too.

  “Where are they?” Kellee whispered.

  “Who?” Arran asked.

  “The dead. They were right here…”

  I closed my eyes and felt the lashing barbs of the bond tugging me back. When I opened my eyes again, they looked to me for answers. “Talen has them.”

  Chapter 22

  Outside the pyramid, shimmering colors flickered whenever I tried to focus on them, but inside, all was still.

  “He was right here.” I stood at the plinth, saw my bright red blood staining its sides, blinked, then watched that blood fade away. The wound on my wrist had healed, leaving no trace behind. My human mind struggled to place the real and the unreal together. The present, the past, the future. The vakaru wraiths had pulled us into the past. But Talen… He was still in the present.

  “Talen’s here?” Arran asked.

  Was he Talen, or was he something else? “The Nightshade.”

  “He’s not the Nightshade,” Kellee dismissed, circling the plinth.

  “Then he’s something, Kellee. Something dark and powerful. Something the unseelie call the Nightshade.”

  “I thought he was light fae.” Arran reached to touch the claw marks that scored the walls and pulled his hand back when they appeared to move.

  “So did I.”

  “You asked him and he said no. He can’t lie.” Kellee stopped in the same place I’d last seen Talen—back in the present—and peered across the chamber at me.

  “Whatever his name is, it doesn’t matter right now. He’s out there and we’re here. He freed the fae on Hapters,
and I think he’s here for the vakaru wraiths.” He was collecting unseelie, resurrecting them or waking them, or something I couldn’t afford to think on while we were trapped in time.

  “You still feel him?” Kellee asked. He braced his hands on the plinth between us.

  I nodded. I felt him as though he were standing next to me. Listening. Watching. Like always.

  “Then he hasn’t left us.”

  “Yet,” Arran added.

  Kellee shot Arran a look. “He’s Talen. Whatever you both think, I’ve known him longer than your combined lifespans. Maybe if Kesh had stayed with him instead of running, we’d know what that reason was.”

  I swallowed. Maybe I should have stayed, but that hadn’t seemed like an option at the time. You don’t linger in a room with that kind of darkness and wait for it to swallow you. “How do we get back?”

  “Blood,” he growled. “With vakaru, it always comes back to blood.”

  I lifted my arm and regarded my smooth wrist.

  “Not yours.”

  Arran tossed Kellee a dagger. He caught it, clamped it between his teeth, and rolled up his sleeve. Freeing the dagger, Kellee flexed his fingers, stretching the tendons in his forearm, increasing the blood flow. “It must be my sacrifice.” He pressed the blade into his forearm and pushed toward his palm, opening the vein in his wrist. Blood flowed freely over his hand and dripped from his fingers onto the plinth.

  “He showed you the truth, like you’ve been asking all along. Don’t run from him.” Kellee lifted his gaze and locked it on me, holding me in the moment as the air rippled, the walls bowed, and Kellee’s past shimmered out of sequence, peeling back to reveal the now.

  The sensation of the ground and walls tipping leveled out, and with it came the storm of snarling growls. I’d expected to find Talen in the pyramid with us, but we stood alone, and outside, the mass of noise swelled, crashing through the silence.

  Kellee dashed from the room. Sota shot over my head, and Arran and I followed.

  I didn’t know what we would find, but the sounds of tearing, of wet snarls and vicious yowls, sounded like animals in pain.

  Outside, the warcruiser hung in the sky, casting a shadow over the silent city, only now it was no longer silent. The walls, the plaza, they moved, painted in living shadow.

  Sota shot forward, high above the plaza, and zeroed in on the bright eye of the maelstrom: the shuttle and Talen. But this wasn’t my calm, composed Talen. He was something else. He blazed with a light almost too bright to look at for long. Silver eyes scored the dark waves churning around him, and twin shadows danced in the air behind him—his wings, made of smoke and glittering dust.

  Between him and us, the countless dark shapes of the vakaru swelled again and again, but each time, Talen’s light held them back.

  It wouldn’t last.

  There were too many, and as bright as he was, his light wouldn’t be enough.

  “We have to help him,” Kellee yelled over the thunderous noise. Claws glinting, he eyed the sea of vakaru, but there was no way through.

  If Talen was the Nightshade, shouldn’t he have been able to stop them? He wasn’t attacking at all. They slammed into his light over and over, wearing him down, and he did nothing.

  Kellee was right. We had to help him.

  I flicked my palm, activating the ocular link with Sota. Instantly, my vision flickered, seeing through the drone’s eye from above. Sota had a grid spread across the ocean of wraiths, each one marked with a red-dot target.

  “Help him,” I told my drone.

  Sota’s gun ports jolted open, and the drone opened fire, peppering the vakaru with searing precision blasts, tearing their shadowy form to pieces. The flanks surrounding Talen crumbled, and Talen straightened, widening his phantom wings. His gaze speared straight to me—through me—sinking a hook into my chest, around my heart, and yanked. I’d staggered and fallen to a knee before I had a chance to draw breath.

  “Kesh?” Arran was beside me, his hand on my shoulder, but I couldn’t look at him or anyone. I cut the link with Sota so only Talen occupied my thoughts. The vakaru boiled around him, slamming into his light and recoiling—a light now throbbing brighter. Its heat beat in time with my heart, and Talen’s power sang, bursting to life between us.

  If his words were true, if there was something hiding in me, some fragment of the polestar, then was this light… mine?

  I am yours, he had told me. Free me.

  He knew me. He always had. But I was only beginning to know him.

  “They’re retreating…” Arran said, his voice far away and getting more distant as I fell into my thoughts of Talen.

  Sota ceased firing.

  “Vakaru never retreat.” Kellee drifted forward, toward the ocean of ghosts. “They’re kneeling.”

  More light beat over Talen, sweeping up the enormous arched wings, igniting their smoky outlines on fire, and I felt it inside me, a power so great, so consuming, it might swallow me, this city, this entire world whole.

  I am not who I once was.

  Whatever he was or wasn’t, he was mine.

  His eyes pleaded with me to know him, to understand, pleaded with me not to be afraid. But I was afraid, and he was right. Nothing would ever be the same again. I pushed against the weight of power and stood to look Talen in the eye from across a sea of long dead vakaru.

  The rippling darkness stilled.

  Silence flooded back into the city.

  And just like that, Talen had an army of wraiths kneeling before him. And they weren’t alone.

  Kellee knelt too, his head bowed.

  Only Arran and I stood facing the dark-winged Nightshade, because despite his denials, he could be nothing else. And here, he was the god the vakaru had been waiting for, the unseelie myth and legend brought back with my help.

  Talen lifted his hand and closed his fingers into a fist. He hadn’t blinked, hadn’t taken his eyes off me, but his gaze wasn’t a challenge. He was afraid. Not of the vakaru, but of… me.

  Above, the warcruiser filling the sky yawned backward, shrinking, until Valand’s light once more washed over the plaza, boiling the dark-loving vakaru away. But something told me they weren’t entirely gone. Just… somewhere else, ready for the one who controlled them to summon them.

  When the light hit Talen’s wings, they also simmered away to nothing. He blinked, the light sloughed off him, and he was just violet-eyed Talen again, the hair cascading around his shoulders the only testament to the wildness we had all witnessed.

  “Who is he?” Arran whispered.

  Kellee rose from his kneeling position. “Wrong question.” He started forward.

  My attention skipped from Talen to the marshal and the bond loosened, allowing me to breathe freely again. “What is he?” I whispered.

  Chapter 23

  Fear.

  I had always mastered it before. Mastered it like I’d mastered my time behind bars as the fae’s renowned gladiator. Fear had stalked me my entire life, but it had never won.

  On the warcruiser, I tucked myself into a corner of a makeshift “bar” Hulia had set up inside the ship’s belly, selling or trading the likes of water and some other concoction she had cooked up. Hulia had always been an opportunist with an eye on filling a need. Chairs and tables had grown in random places across the floor of what had once been a storage chamber. Hapters’s refugees kept to their half of the room, while the fae—the handful who deigned to make an appearance—adopted a table in the opposite corner. They didn’t so much as sit and enjoy themselves as glower. They were here for one purpose only: to watch their enemies closely.

  I was alone, lost in my thoughts while feeling the part inside me that belonged to someone I feared. Fear had me wanting to cut the bond out. Fear drove me inside my own thoughts, wanting to flee back to Oberon and pretend none of this had ever happened. But I hadn’t let fear rule me before and wasn’t about to let it now. I would confront Talen. Soon.

  I expected Arr
an, or Sota, to find me. Talen wouldn’t come where Sirius’s flight might observe him, and Kellee was probably with him. So when Sirius stalked through the bar, sending some of Hapters’s people scurrying, it was enough to stall my thoughts.

  “When do we leave?” The guardian loomed, tall, broad, and overbearing, even with the hacked-up hair and tek-arm hidden beneath his cloak. Or maybe it was because of his new look that he garnered terrified glances from not only Hapters’s people, but his flight as well.

  “Sit,” I told him.

  His auburn eyebrow arched.

  “Please.”

  The guardian arranged all his considerable presence into the chair, filling it with dark reds and earthy browns. I noticed how his cloak and leathers had frayed in places. The magic holding it together was weakening this far from Faerie. Or perhaps the tek grafted to his arm was eating at his prowess.

  “We’re going back to Hapters,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “Because Talen can deal with the unseelie problem and get those people their homes back.” I hadn’t yet asked Talen. But I would, and if he refused, well, then I would know whose side he was on.

  Sirius’s smile was razor thin. He leaned forward. “I was in the shuttle on Valand. I saw your fae control, contain, and then banish the vakaru wraiths. On Hapters, he freed the winged dark fae. What makes you think he’ll put them all back in their box for you? You are delusional if you think a sidhe lord of his caliber will answer to you, a saru.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Come with me now, calla.” Sirius reached out with his metal hand and settled it on mine in an oddly intimate gesture. The touch was cool and hard, utterly devoid of magic. “We must return to Faerie, to Oberon.”

  And leave Talen free to unleash all the unseelie for reasons I didn’t yet understand? How could I? “Where is Eledan?” I asked, prying my hand from beneath his.

  Sirius frowned at the change in subject. “The mad prince is contained.”

  “Oberon had me kill his brother to clear the path to the throne. I tricked Eledan and tore his heart out, but he still lives.” And he knows too much. He had sought the polestar for centuries when Faerie thought him dead. He had its pieces, but not me. Was I the last piece? There was so much I didn’t know, but I would know. From now on, my questions would be answered. But first, I needed to know Eledan was far, far away.