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

  “Why isn’t Talen here?” Arran asked from his rock perch. He picked at his loaf and eyed me cautiously.

  It was a good question. One I couldn’t answer.

  I finished my oatcake, brushed my hands together, and looked up at the darkening, greenish sky. Talen should have spotted Sirius’s arrival. At the very least, he should have picked us up right after. And now, here we were, a day in, about to find the yard and fix up a ship because my fae pilot hadn’t come.

  “He’ll come if he can.” Maybe he left, the little voice of doubt mumbled at the back of my thoughts.

  Talen had talked about going back to Faerie. He had also mentioned not being ready, but that was then and this was now. There wasn’t much, if anything, that could slow a warcruiser. So where was he?

  Kellee looked at me, brow tight. He knew something had changed between Talen and me, and the look he gave me had me wondering if he believed I’d pushed Talen away. A few weeks ago, he had walked in on the end of a discussion Talen and I were having—one where things had gotten heated right before I demanded Talen tell me his real name. Something had passed between them in that moment. A warning, a threat, maybe both. They’d been “friends” long before I showed up and upset everything.

  I wished I had all the answers, but with every passing hour, the only answer was the one I didn’t want to reveal.

  “I’m not ready to give up on him yet.”

  He left us, my internal voice said, mocking my words.

  Kellee knew it too. He scanned the plains again, perhaps looking for more than the fae who hunted us. The breeze teased through his hair, playing with errant curls.

  Arran jumped down from his rock and dusted his hands free of crumbs. “Then let’s get another ship in the air, right?” He beamed at me and started forward. “Sitting around won’t save our ass—”

  The ground crumbled beneath his boots. Between one step and the next, the earth opened up and swallowed him whole.

  Blink. Gone.

  I lunged.

  “Careful,” Kellee threw an arm out to stop me from following Arran into the growing hole in front of us.

  “Arran!” I freed my whip and approached the brittle edge, toeing my boot ahead to test my weight.

  “…I’m okay,” his spluttering voice echoed from deep inside.

  I peered into the hole. Hapters’s twin moons lit Arran’s face and shoulders. Complete darkness coated the rest of him. I tossed my whip over the edge and dangled the tail down. Arran jumped, but the whip wasn’t long enough. I lay on the ground, sprawling wide to spread my weight, and leaned farther in. Arran jumped again, grabbing for the whip.

  I lurched forward—falling.

  I reached at nothing—and then jolted to a halt as Kellee’s firm hands locked around my ankles.

  “And where do you think you’re going?” He hauled me backward. Gravel burned into my hip and stomach where my clothes rode up.

  A crack sounded. More earth fell away beneath me. I twisted back on myself, saw Kellee lift an arm, and snapped the whip at him, looping its tail around his wrist. The tail snagged. The ground fell, and I fell with it.

  My arm snapped taut, yanking me to a halt in mid-air.

  I hit the wall and coughed dust and grit.

  “You okay?” Arran called up.

  “Uh-huh.” My right shoulder strained, muscles screaming, but my grip on the whip held.

  Kellee started reeling me in.

  “Wait!” Drop into the darkness with Arran or let Kellee haul me up?

  “Kesh,” Kellee growled, “you’re not getting any lighter.”

  “Let go.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” I looked down at Arran’s expectant face below. “Is there a tunnel, a way out?” I asked him.

  He squinted into the shadows to his left. “Maybe, something… it’s too dark—”

  “There aren’t any tunnels on Hapters, Kesh,” Kellee said.

  “Let me down,” I called.

  “No,” he grumbled back.

  “Let me go, Kellee.”

  “You don’t need—” Arran started.

  “Kellee, let me go.”

  Kellee was perfectly equipped to survive on his own. But Arran… Arran who had lost his memories… Arran who I had left once before. I couldn’t leave him in the dark again. “Get to the yard and see if there’s a chain or rope. Arran and I will be fine.”

  Kellee grumbled a string of colorful curses and then the whip dropped, and so did I.

  I landed in a crouch, minor pain jarring through my thighs.

  Kellee’s thunderous face appeared in the circle of light above. “Wait there.” He pointed a finger at me, and then at Arran. “Do anything foolish and I’ll leave the both of you here.” And then he was gone.

  I coiled my whip, clipped it back to my belt, and turned to face Arran. He blinked as though he couldn’t understand why I’d dropped into a hole beside him. I couldn’t tell him the truth, but as his throat bobbed, I wondered if he knew anyway.

  I plastered a bright smile on my face. “Everything will be fine.”

  My eyes soon adjusted to the thick darkness, revealing an oval tunnel mouth. The small amount of light pouring in from above shimmered over curved, smooth walls that beckoned me forward.

  I braced a hand against the tunnel’s edge and peered deeper inside. “No tunnels, huh, Marshal Kellee?” My voice carried far into the dark. For once, Kellee was wrong. This sure looked like a tunnel.

  A beam of light plunged into the tunnel.

  I frowned at the small tek flashlight in Arran’s hand. He shrugged. “The people back in the village didn’t need it.”

  He had stolen it from the settlement. I opened my mouth to complain and then remembered the brooch tucked in my pocket. Aeon and I had stolen from the fae daily. The winner had been the one with the shiniest of trinkets. I usually won.

  I entered the tunnel.

  “Kellee said to wait.” Arran swept the flashlight beam ahead of me, slicing across the back of my legs and sending my shadow dancing against the curved tunnel walls.

  “Kellee says a lot of things.”

  The walls looked a lot like the smooth, iridescent warcruiser tunnels. I didn’t see any obvious chisel or machine marks. Had they been grown instead of cut out by human hands?

  “We might as well take a look while we’re stuck down here,” I added. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  A crooked smile brightened his face as he walked alongside me. “I keep it behind my survival instincts.”

  Arran kept the flashlight beam high, illuminating the tunnels as far as each turn allowed. We hadn’t come across any junctions, so there was no chance of getting lost. Once we had explored inside, we’d turn around and head right back to Kellee. He didn’t need to know we had ventured into the tunnel without him. No harm done.

  “You and Kellee are pretty tight,” Arran said, building up to a bigger question.

  “Something like that.”

  “You know him well?”

  “I think so. Sometimes. Why?”

  “Do you think Kellee’s behavior was strange back at that village?” In the moving light, his eyes sparkled and shadows strayed across his face, making him difficult to read.

  “Strange how?” The long tunnel pulled our voices into the dark and swallowed them down.

  “He burned the whole place, destroying all the evidence, revealing our location.”

  Evidence? Did Arran think Kellee was guilty of something? “He burned it because we didn’t have time to bury them. What would you have him do, leave them there like that?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  We walked on, the silence suddenly heavy.

  “Kellee has seen more death than you and me combined but that doesn’t make him immune to it.” Sometimes, I think it makes him more vulnerable…

  “It’s just…”

  I stopped and faced Arran. “Look, Kellee wasn’t about to leave those bodies to
rot in the heat. That’s not his way. It was a risk, but we were already moving on and he knew there weren’t any fae nearby.”

  Arran pointed the flashlight down, drawing long shadows with it.

  “There’s something not right about him,” he admitted, his frown cutting deeper.

  If he knew Kellee was unseelie, Arran would either run, or knowing Arran as I was beginning to, he would probably attack the marshal, thinking he had something to prove. Kellee would not react well.

  The look on Arran’s face, crowded with shadows, held its own kind of threat. It was easy to dismiss Arran as harmless, but he could kill as efficiently as me and had done many times in the past. He’d forgotten it, but the skills were still there, buried but real. The last thing I needed was the two of them clashing.

  “Kellee is… complicated, but his heart is in the right place.”

  “It takes more than heart to make a man and Kellee isn’t a man. There’s too much you’re not telling me.”

  Aeon had always been observant. Little escaped his keen eyes and quick mind. Arran had been watching Kellee closely, reading everything between what Kellee said and didn’t say. I would have to tell Arran the truth eventually, before he came to his own conclusions.

  “There’s a lot I’m not telling you.” I started forward again. “Just stay on Kellee’s good side. We’ll talk more once we’re off Hapters. He’s not a bad guy, Arran. That’s all you need to know.” Kellee would probably disagree with me, but he was wrong about that too.

  The flashlight beam swept ahead and plunged into the dark. The tunnel walls suddenly opened, vanishing behind curtains of blackness.

  I stepped up to the yawning space. Silence loomed, so thick and loud it hunched over us like something alive, waiting to gulp us down.

  Arran took a few careful steps into the gloom. His flashlight halo landed on something upright, flat, and solid. He pulled back, and the beam expanded like a widening eye, highlighting more of the black slab of stone. I approached, noticing how specks of silver shimmered like fish scales beneath the stone’s surface. The wall of rock barring our way had been polished smooth and appeared to block the tunnel.

  Arran swept the beam higher and higher to where the smooth stone met rough walls. He reached out a hand and wiped off a layer of surface dust, revealing more of the shimmering surface beneath.

  I hadn’t seen much of Hapters, but this stone didn’t look like the indigenous rocks we had passed. I knew exactly where stone like this came from. I’d seen them capping the arches of Faerie’s long bridges, seen pebbles made of the same material glitter along Faerie’s meandering pathways.

  Arran swept his hand farther along the stone and stopped.

  Metal letters glittered vertically along a floor-to-ceiling crack.

  Fae letters.

  He snatched his hand back, looking to me for answers.

  I wordlessly held out my hand for the flashlight, and when he handed it over, I ran the beam over the wording. The swirling fae writing had been chiseled into the rock and poured with metal, probably molten iron, before the slab was put in place.

  Slowly, word by word, the light revealed its secret.

  Time, our prison,

  Dark, our sentence,

  Light, our freedom.

  I handed the flashlight back.

  “What is it?” Arran whispered.

  A chill trickled down my spine and my breath puffed out in visible clouds. A fae warning, poured with iron and buried on a nowhere planet far away from Faerie. It made no sense.

  “Didn’t I say not to do anything stupid?”

  I jumped and whirled to find Kellee’s outline upsetting the dark.

  The marshal’s eyes glowed golden, like the glow from two distant stars. Arran splashed the flashlight beam across Kellee’s face. The marshal flinched away, but not before I saw the dangerous glare he cast Arran’s way. He lunged, too quick for Arran to react, and snatched the flashlight from his hand. Then he marched back the way we’d come.

  “Do you know what it is?” I asked Kellee, trying to keep in step with him as his long legs ate up the strides.

  “Poetic fae nonsense. Leave it alone. We have enough problems with the fae on our tails and you two go hunting for more trouble.”

  “What’s fae language doing this deep in Halow?” Arran asked, trailing close behind me.

  “Who knows?” Kellee answered. “Who cares? It’s been here at least a thousand years. Let it rest.”

  Arran caught my eye, his frustration clear. Kellee knew more. A lot more. But by his sharp stride and sharper words, he was in no mood for questions.

  A rope dangled into the tunnel from above. By the time Arran clambered out of the hole behind me, Kellee was a few hundred yards away and showed no signs of waiting for us to catch up.

  “This is karushit,” Arran snarled, brushing dust off his clothes and ruffling grit loose from his hair. “He knows exactly what that is back there. You need to get answers out of him, Kesh.”

  “I know. I will.” I wasn’t sure how to go about that. I’d spent most of my time avoiding Kellee’s questions, not trying to turn those questions on him. If Kellee didn’t want to play Q&A, nothing would change his mind.

  “If you don’t, I will.” Arran started forward, following Kellee’s tracks in the dust. He was capable of facing off with Kellee. But for all his bravado, Arran was mortal, and Kellee wasn’t.

  I followed Arran, feeling like I was losing my grip on everything. Sirius had taken Hulia, Talen was AWOL, something had killed the farmers and drained them of life in the hours we had been hiding, and now it turned out the fae had been here before—a long time ago—and Kellee knew a lot more than he was letting on. Add to all that the magic-infused tek in my pocket, and Hapters was turning out to be a whole lot more than a backwater planet.

  Time, our prison,

  Dark, our sentence,

  Light, our freedom.

  What exactly was going on here?

  Chapter 4

  Metal fencing as high as Calicto’s towering container stacks encircled a mile-long stretch of landing area. Rusted spacefaring vessels lined its outer edges like enormous decaying carcasses. Their metal and tek remains stretched far into the distance. Salvage yard was one name for it. Tek necropolis was another. Did all the scrapped ships in Halow come here to die?

  Kellee shoved his way through a door in the fence and Arran set about looking for a ship in a good state of repair, while Kellee found discarded panels and drums to barricade the door behind us.

  A watchtower loomed over rows of storage and maintenance hangars. Rags had snagged in its scaffolding and flapped in the breeze like the white flag back at the settlement, only these strips looked black like bird wings. Only there weren’t any birds on Hapters. No critters at all. Was that normal?

  I climbed the exterior steel stairs to the tower and stood at the windows, awed by the vastness of Hapters’s plains stretching for miles in every direction. The landing strip and yard were the largest human-made structures around and easily seen, but at least we were behind steel walls. Anything coming in from the sky we would spot in good time to take shelter.

  “Talen, you should be here by now…” Higher, where tiny stars fought their way through Hapters’s light, I searched for any sign of the warcruiser, but found none.

  Arran caught my eye below, weaving between the smaller ships. The marshal had taken himself off somewhere, telling nobody where, as usual.

  Repair a ship, get off Hapters, find Talen, save Hulia, and turn all this around. One thing at a time. That was the easiest way. Just one step built on another and another until I was in control again.

  I watched the cloudless sky as unease crawled up my spine. Something was very wrong on this planet. Despite the lack of people—driven off when the fae came—the quiet and the vast openness had my inked marks itching. I hadn’t seen a single animal since fleeing the main colony. Not even a fly. Had the fae wiped Hapters clean of all life in preparat
ion for their arrival or had it always been like this?

  “Thinking hard again?”

  I did my best not to show my alarm and stopped my hand from going for my whip. Damn that marshal and his creepy stalking.

  Kellee filled the watchtower doorway, sleeves rolled up, his forearm braced on the frame like he’d been there all along. How had he climbed the metal stairs without me hearing? The vakaru was damn unnerving. His lips twitched around the hint of a wicked smile. He knew he’d startled me. Again.

  “I need to put a bell on you,” I grumbled, turning my back on him to watch the long view to nowhere. He stayed put in the doorway, and my gaze soon wandered back to him, drawn by his innate magnetism.

  He drifted into the watchtower and perused the consoles of equipment—all dead. I’d already tried all the buttons, but I let him take a second shot. He found a flare gun I’d spotted and lifted it from its drawer to examine it. Satisfied, he returned it and continued his appraisal of the tower. A muscle fluttered in his cheek. He admired the panels but his mind was elsewhere. I wasn’t the only one wrestling with my thoughts.

  “You know Hapters well.” It was a statement, not a question.

  He jabbed at a few buttons. None responded. “I’ve picked up a few things over the years.”

  “Like what?”

  His cheek twitched again. He looked out of the windows, scanning the long orange-kissed horizon. “Like how it rarely rains here but there are springs and rivers all over. Like how the crops grow when the smartest minds agree they shouldn’t. There are no pests, no vermin, yet life keeps on going here, against all the odds.”

  Outside, the cooler, darker hours were waning again, giving way to brighter, hotter daylight. Under the approaching glare, Hapters’s burned fields still looked ablaze.

  “I knew Hapters was Faerie touched but I didn’t know—I don’t know how deep it goes.”

  My heart raced, instincts sensing I was close to something—someone dangerous and important, something of Kellee’s past. “Did you have a life here?” I asked quietly, wary of getting too close.