Scribblings

Fires of Fate: Long Lost - Chapter Two

2008-06-22T09:55:42Z

Title: Long Lost
Rating: 15-R
Spoilers: All prior stories; this is set approximately two months after the end of Chimera, but stands alone.
Summary: Lisa Ochai had to start a war to leave her soulmate fifteen hundred years ago. Since then, he has hunted her - and now he is back, and will destroy anyone she loves to make sure he is the only one in her life. Anyone she loves - everyone she loves.
Lyrics: Texas - Black Eyed Boy
Notes: Thanks to mybeta reader, the excellent MorbiDreamscape!

Long Lost Part Two

You call me superstitious
Tie me up with your deceit
I could never be malicious
Though I seem so bittersweet

The sky was clear and so bright she had to squint. Growing corn brushed her knees, itching. All around her, the fields stretched away in swathes of gold, broken by low stone walls that straggled across the hills. Far away, she could make out a cluster of buildings – low huts, a farmhouse, enough to tell her that Alex had never left Saxon Britain.

The last time she had dared to step into Alex’s mind, it had been a British fortress, high and isolated and threaded by winter winds. The change startled her.

Maybe it was all just another image, as disposable as his smiles. Another trick.

“You’ve redecorated,” she said flatly.

“It’s my soul, not real estate,” he answered, sounding amused.

She turned, and he was perched on a rickety stone wall. “I don’t see much difference. Either way, you could take a squalid hovel and spin it into a dream that someone would buy.”

“Ouch. Somehow I get the impression you aren’t pleased to see me.” The soft, slurring Cajun accent was new. So was his attire, which wouldn’t have looked out of place on the fashionable parts of MTV, but seemed discordant against the wild landscape.

“Really? What made you think that? Was it the fact I was begging my friend to let me leave? Or was it the huge – and pay attention, this term is literal – fuck-off war that I started to get away from you?”

Alex glanced away, his nonchalance apparently dented. She wasn’t fooled. The words hadn’t touched him in the slightest; he knew how to use vulnerability. It was part of his charm, a hint of softness under that dangerous veneer, a certain hesitancy in his manner that beguiled the unwary and led his enemies to underestimate him.

He used emotions as a sleight of hand, the sparkle on his amazing tricks. Distraction, misdirection, artifice. He was a magician of the highest order, the kind who didn’t even need mirrors or smoke.

“That was a long time ago, Lisanor.”

“Don’t use that name. That was someone else.”

“Really? She looked a lot like you,” he answered, and slid off the wall in a smooth motion. “Lisa, then. That’s the name you use now, isn’t it?”

The implication burned her. “I don’t just use it. It’s my name. It’s who I am.”

“And who is that?” he said softly, strolling towards her as someone else might approach a frightened animal. Eyes lowered, almost meek, each movement slow and careful.

She stepped back, not caring how he took it. “A better person than I ever was with you. Leave me alone, Alex.”

“No.”

The corn scratched her shins as she retreated, fists clenched at her sides. “I don’t want you.”

He lifted his eyes and the intensity there froze her - dark, heated, and so very knowing. “I don’t believe you.”

She could feel panic beginning to take her over. All the years spent running had taught her control over her own emotions and her own mind, but she knew just how powerful he was. If he wanted, he could pluck out her thoughts and examine them at his leisure.

And he would if she didn’t do as he wanted. This was just manoeuvring, an attempt to persuade her with words before force. Violence had always been his last resort, but he had used it nonetheless.

She was playing for time now, nothing else.

“I have another life,” she said. “It doesn’t involve you. It never will.”

His laughter was soft, but there was a bitter edge to it that puzzled her. “While I have the same life, and it is empty without you.”

“That was your choice.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “And I’m starting to think it was the wrong choice.”

“It’s too late for that,” she said coldly.

Strange how she had thought the past was dead, gathering dust in the pages of journals and textbooks. And yet those old emotions surfaced so easily – hurt, betrayal, fear – that she trembled with them.

“No.” His voice was a snarl. “I don’t believe that either.”

Green glimmered in his eyes, wolfish, and she saw the tension in his body, barely leashed.

“You promised me, Lisanor,” he whispered, and here, the words rumbled like thunder. All around them, the landscape was shifting, bleeding into stormy skies and ruined ground. The corn shrank beneath her feet until she stood on stones and weeds. “A fair chance for your heart, a fair chance for you. Who did you break that promise for?”

She tried hard to keep her mind empty, tried not to think of those she loved. There were so many of them, so many people he could hurt if he wanted.

Faces flashed before her in a dizzying parade – Cern and Vaje and Toya and Jepar and Cougar and Thom-

No, no, no...

His eyes were so cold. “I see,” he said slowly, and his tone chilled her.

“Don’t-”

Her pleas were cut off – back in the real world, she felt something tear his hands from her, and the link fractured like bone.

~*~

Disoriented, she opened her eyes and saw Jepar, who was peering at her anxiously. The alcohol on his breath did more to restore her wits than the tentative way he was patting her face.

“Don’t you dare go anywhere near her,” she heard Cougar say, his voice glacial.

She shoved Jepar aside. Cougar and Alex faced each other across the snow, threat in every line of the vanpire’s body, his eyes blazing gold and inhuman as the fangs that he bared at her soulmate.

Alex was breathing hard, flexing his hands as if claws might sprout from them at any minute. A slow smile crept across his face, amused, a little contemptuous. “I really don’t think you can stop me.”

“Want to bet?” Cougar drawled.

She shivered as Alex let his power roll over the air – force that crackled like the air before a storm, heavy on her skin, more than a mere werewolf should possess. But then, it had been a long time since Alex had been just a werewolf.

“Yes,” he said, and with that word, power pressed down on them. She heard Jepar gasp, heard the thud as he was slammed to the ground; Cougar was somehow upright, hunched against the sheer pressure bearing on him. “You aren’t anywhere near enough, cher.”

“But I am,” a new voice said, and suddenly the weight was gone.

Lisa stared, awed, as Chatoya moved between them, treading delicately and lightly through the snow on her bare feet, but there was nothing gentle about the black fire that hugged her body. If the witch felt the cold, it didn’t show. Her long black hair sheeted around her like a cloak, power billowing from her.

Alex tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowed. “How intriguing. A witch with dragon powers. You must tell me how you stole that spell from the Furies.”

“I didn’t have to,” Chatoya said coldly. “I run Pursang.”

They all knew the truth, but hearing it said so matter-of-factly gave Lisa chills.

A low sound rolled over the air, and it was a moment before she realised it was Alex laughing. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Usually it does,” Jepar muttered, sounding bemused.

“How far have you been, little girl?” he said scornfully, gaze raking up Chatoya’s body in a way that Lisa recognised. He had looked at the Saxons the same way, as if he could hardly believe their impudence in invading his country. “How much of Hades have you seen?”

Beside them, she saw Cougar stiffen. His eyes were fixed on Chatoya with something close to desperation.

“Nothing yet,” Chatoya answered.

Hades. It was Nightworld legend, but she had been born in the times when it wasn’t legend, when the Furies had sent their initiates into the underworld to drink of the rivers there and learn the secret of death. She’d thought it had been forgotten. But Chatoya hadn’t been at all surprised by the question.

Alex raised his eyebrows, ostensibly polite. “Nothing? I’ve felt the breath of Hades himself – I’ve walked into the heart of the underworld and lived to tell the tale, and you think you can frighten me because you stole power from a sleeping lizard?”

The witch held her ground. “I think if you dare come near Lisa again, I’ll kick your ass straight back into the underworld and you can give Hades a personal account of just what you did wrong.”

“Feisty,” Alex remarked. “But why don’t you go and look up Alexandros in your archives, cherie, and then if you still think you’ve got a hope in hell of harming me, you come and try your magic on me.”

Chatoya’s eyes widened. The name meant something to her, that was for sure.

“I thought so,” Alex said lightly, and he turned his attention to her. Lisa gazed back, suddenly unsure how safe she was, even in the midst of all her friends. “I’ll see you soon.”

Green swamped his eyes, feral, but something unmistakably human remained in them – a calculating intelligence overlaying the beast. He threw back his head and howled.

The sound vibrated like a war cry in the air, and as its echoes faded, he turned and walked away, feet kicking up the snow. To the casual onlooker, he might just have been a teenage boy slouching along the street.

Lisa thought she could hear that howl long after nothing remained of him but silence.

~*~

The trees bent over the house like clenched fingers. It lay in a pool of shadow, broken only by thin shafts of grey light that seeped through the leaves. Snow littered the ground in small patches, and occasional flakes fluttered down from the canopy, but it was otherwise untouched by the winter.

Alex raised a hand to knock only to see the door swing open.

The boy standing in the doorway was startling. His face was handsome, teetering on the edge of beauty, all sharp edges that were only balanced by a full mouth that curled with contempt. His hair was bright blue, and a match for his eyes, which regarded Alex with a detachment that suggested he was being valued, much as an item at auction.

Alex strongly resisted the urge to slap the little bastard, who had been useful so far, and put on his most irritating smile.

“Surprise.”

Blue Malefici, the vampire who ran Nightfire, the oldest of the Furies, raised his eyebrows. “Not exactly. Everyone within a hundred miles probably felt that show of power. I thought you were famous for your subtlety.”

“Among other things,” Alex said with a little purr. He let his eyes rove over the vampire, a slow, thorough examination. Very good-looking, but so emotionally repressed that he had to pity anyone foolish enough to get involved with him.

He thought he detected a flash of annoyance in the boy’s face. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“Not even close,” he said with a lazy smile. Her rejection rankled, more than he had thought it would. “But this is only the start. Do you have the records I asked for?”

“Do you have the knowledge I asked for?” Blue countered.

Alex tapped his temple. “Of course.”

It was, perhaps, not wise to tell Hades’ secrets to this one. Five rivers laced the underworld. Once the Furies had gone to each to drink and learn, if they survived. Now most of them went only to the first, a handful to the second, and only three people out of all the Furies had sampled the third. Blue Malefici was one of them.

Alex stood so far above them in power that he would have seemed a god if he was foolish enough to reveal the full range of his abilities. He wasn’t sure that giving Blue the same advantage was a wise idea.

But he needed the Furies to win Lisanor.

Nothing else mattered.

~*~

“Do you want to explain what the hell just happened?” Cougar demanded, his expression close to hostile.

She looked around at them all, the words stuck in her throat. Alisha had ushered them all inside, efficient, carefully not commenting on what had just happened. Jepar was huddled by the radiator. Cougar was rubbing at his neck and shoulders as if they ached, while Chatoya was busy rubbing her feet with a towel, grimacing. She might not have felt the cold while she was saturated with magic, but once it had vanished, she started hopping from foot to foot like a jumpy cat.

His outburst drew all their eyes to her. She didn’t know what to say. It was obvious that she had lied to them. They’d caught her trying to run away. They’d seen Alex, and they’d heard what he said.

“What is he?” Jepar asked finally. “That guy had more mojo than a voodoo convention.”

“That...” Once she had started, it became easier. “That was Alex. My soulmate.”

“See, this is the bit I’m confused about,” Cougar said coldly. “The bit where you forget to mention that you have a soulmate and he’s a maniac. Because it’s not as if we’re short on either round here. You’d think you might have found time to mention it between psychos.”

She swallowed. His hostility made it easier. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe because he used to run Nightfire,” Chatoya suggested quietly. She was pale, hands clasped so tight it must have hurt. “I can understand why you’d be ashamed of that.”

“That was part of it.” She found herself staring at the floor, not wanting to meet their eyes. But she owed them the truth. They had put themselves on the line for her. “But not all of it. It was a long time ago. A very long time ago.”

“So you’re not thirty,” Jepar said tentatively.

“No.” She met his eyes, the green of summer, and shorn of all their humour. “I don’t know exactly how old I am. But I was born around fifteen hundred years ago.”

The silence was absolute. None of them even moved.

Then Cougar said, “Say that number again.”

“I’m fifteen hundred years old, give or take,” she said quietly. “I was born in Africa, but I don’t know where. When I was young, the Romans conquered us, and I was taken into slavery. Alex was my owner. And then...one day I found out he was my soulmate.”

“Whoa...” Jepar breathed.

Of them all, only Alisha didn’t look shocked. There might even have been understanding in her cool blue eyes. After all, she had lived eight hundred years as an Old Soul, passing from life to life and death to death.

“He had me changed into a vampire,” Lisa continued, trying hard to forget that night, her fear and the feel of her chest hitching as she tried to breathe only to find that the air was no longer there. “We travelled everywhere – the Roman Empire was trying to hold onto its colonies, and he was one of its governors. At last we were sent to Britain to try and stop the rebellion there. He didn’t care – the Furies were bringing down the Empire. Everything he did was for show. There was...there was a woman. She told me about Alex – what he was. Things...things he had done. I left him.”

Sad how so much could be distilled into so few words; her life reduced down to a few core, terrible truths.

“But he chased me. I went to his enemies and begged them for shelter.” A disbelieving little laugh choked out of her. “And do you know, do you know what he did then?”

“Lise...” Chatoya said gently, reaching out. Her face was full of concern, horror in her eyes.

She had to get through this. “He raised an army to get me back. He was there for years and let the Saxons ravage the damn country, but he united fifteen warring tribes because he couldn’t bear the fact I’d left him. We fought. And he won – the Saxons surrendered, but I left him all the same. And now – now he’s a legend. They make these stupid films about him, they write about him as if he was some kind of hero, as if he did it to save someone. He wasn’t. He went to war because he was a jealous man, that was all.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” objected Jepar.

“It was,” she said tiredly. “I could have stopped it. I could have said yes, and gone back to him, and pretended for a while. But I didn’t. I let men die. I saw them ripped to pieces and I still didn’t stop it.”

I didn’t want to. I hated him. He lied to me, and I just wanted him to suffer – I wanted everyone to suffer because at least then I wouldn’t be alone.

She couldn’t bring herself to say those things to her friends. Nor could she tell them the whole truth – the poison, the massacres, the deeds that she had been complicit in.

By far the worst, the battlefield was stark in her mind, dark with blood, disfigured by the bodies sprawled upon it.

“I ran from him for hundreds of years. I always knew he was following me, and sometimes he came so close, but he only caught me once.” That time was blurred by fever and exhaustion. “He let me go. I still don’t know why. But he made me promise that when he f-found me again, I’d give him a fair chance. And now he has. I don’t know what to do.”

“So you went for climbing down the drainpipe,” Cougar said, some of the anger fading from him. The smile he offered her was grim, but filled her with relief nonetheless. “Not too smart, babe.”

She scrubbed at her face. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No wonder. You really started a war to get away from him?”

“I really did,” she said glumly.

“Then that’s a guy who really can’t take ‘no’, ‘hell no’ or ‘screaming Saxon army no’ for an answer,” the lamia declared. “I vote we skip the niceties and go straight for annihilating him with Toya’s scary dragon powers.”

“Seconded,” Alisha said, raising a finger.

“I’m not sure that’ll work,” Chatoya muttered. “If he’s been as far into Hades as he says...I don’t even know what kind of powers that would give you.”

“Then find someone who does,” suggested Cougar shortly. “One of your merry lunatics will know.”

“Actually...” The witch gave a little nod. “You’re right. Vaje used to work on the archives.”

“No.” The word flew from her. “I don’t want him to know.”

Chatoya looked taken aback. “Why not?”

Because what else is in those archives? What do they know about me, about what I did? For love, I told myself, and it was all lies.

She searched for an excuse that might be acceptable, but nothing sprang to mind. There was no reason for Vaje not to know. After all, he was about the best protection she could get aside from Chatoya.

“Because I lied to him too,” she said finally.

Jepar gave her a sweet grin. “I’m pretty sure he’s crazy enough about you to get over it.”

That startled her. She doubted Vaje was crazy about her; fond of her, attracted to her, a close friend, a lover – yes. But that was as far as it went. She didn’t kid herself about that. Nor did she mind.

“I guess,” she said finally.

“I have a question,” Alisha said. “You said Alex was a legend. He’s obviously not Alexander the Great-”

“Alexander the Great Pain in the Ass, maybe,” Lisa muttered.

“-then who is he?”

She supposed there was no harm in them knowing. The truth of the whole affair was long obscured by romantic interpretations of the legend. “He didn’t use that name in Britain. His formal name was Ambrosius Aurelianus in the Empire, but he was so fierce in battle that they called him ‘the bear’. Artos.”

“Still not ringing any bells,” Cougar said helpfully.

She had to smile. “Better known as King Arthur.”

The gobsmacked looks on their faces were all she could have hoped for.

Your black-eyed soul
You should know that there’s nowhere else to go
My black eyed boy,
You will find your own space and time

Long Lost Part Two

You call me superstitious
Tie me up with your deceit
I could never be malicious
Though I seem so bittersweet
- Black Eyed Boy, Texas

The sky was clear and so bright she had to squint. Growing corn brushed her knees, itching. All around her, the fields stretched away in swathes of gold, broken by low stone walls that straggled across the hills. Far away, she could make out a cluster of buildings – low huts, a farmhouse, enough to tell her that Alex had never left Saxon Britain.

The last time she had dared to step into Alex’s mind, it had been a British fortress, high and isolated and threaded by winter winds. The change startled her.

Maybe it was all just another image, as disposable as his smiles. Another trick.

“You’ve redecorated,” she said flatly.

“It’s my soul, not real estate,” he answered, sounding amused.

She turned, and he was perched on a rickety stone wall. “I don’t see much difference. Either way, you could take a squalid hovel and spin it into a dream that someone would buy.”

“Ouch. Somehow I get the impression you aren’t pleased to see me.” The soft, slurring Cajun accent was new. So was his attire, which wouldn’t have looked out of place on the fashionable parts of MTV, but seemed discordant against the wild landscape.

“Really? What made you think that? Was it the fact I was begging my friend to let me leave? Or was it the huge – and pay attention, this term is literal – fuck-off war that I started to get away from you?”

Alex glanced away, his nonchalance apparently dented. She wasn’t fooled. The words hadn’t touched him in the slightest; he knew how to use vulnerability. It was part of his charm, a hint of softness under that dangerous veneer, a certain hesitancy in his manner that beguiled the unwary and led his enemies to underestimate him.

He used emotions as a sleight of hand, the sparkle on his amazing tricks. Distraction, misdirection, artifice. He was a magician of the highest order, the kind who didn’t even need mirrors or smoke.

“That was a long time ago, Lisanor.”

“Don’t use that name. That was someone else.”

“Really? She looked a lot like you,” he answered, and slid off the wall in a smooth motion. “Lisa, then. That’s the name you use now, isn’t it?”

The implication burned her. “I don’t just use it. It’s my name. It’s who I am.”

“And who is that?” he said softly, strolling towards her as someone else might approach a frightened animal. Eyes lowered, almost meek, each movement slow and careful.

She stepped back, not caring how he took it. “A better person than I ever was with you. Leave me alone, Alex.”

“No.”

The corn scratched her shins as she retreated, fists clenched at her sides. “I don’t want you.”

He lifted his eyes and the intensity there froze her - dark, heated, and so very knowing. “I don’t believe you.”

She could feel panic beginning to take her over. All the years spent running had taught her control over her own emotions and her own mind, but she knew just how powerful he was. If he wanted, he could pluck out her thoughts and examine them at his leisure.

And he would if she didn’t do as he wanted. This was just manoeuvring, an attempt to persuade her with words before force. Violence had always been his last resort, but he had used it nonetheless.

She was playing for time now, nothing else.

“I have another life,” she said. “It doesn’t involve you. It never will.”

His laughter was soft, but there was a bitter edge to it that puzzled her. “While I have the same life, and it is empty without you.”

“That was your choice.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “And I’m starting to think it was the wrong choice.”

“It’s too late for that,” she said coldly.

Strange how she had thought the past was dead, gathering dust in the pages of journals and textbooks. And yet those old emotions surfaced so easily – hurt, betrayal, fear – that she trembled with them.

“No.” His voice was a snarl. “I don’t believe that either.”

Green glimmered in his eyes, wolfish, and she saw the tension in his body, barely leashed.

“You promised me, Lisanor,” he whispered, and here, the words rumbled like thunder. All around them, the landscape was shifting, bleeding into stormy skies and ruined ground. The corn shrank beneath her feet until she stood on stones and weeds. “A fair chance for your heart, a fair chance for you. Who did you break that promise for?”

She tried hard to keep her mind empty, tried not to think of those she loved. There were so many of them, so many people he could hurt if he wanted.

Faces flashed before her in a dizzying parade – Cern and Vaje and Toya and Jepar and Cougar and Thom-

No, no, no...

His eyes were so cold. “I see,” he said slowly, and his tone chilled her.

“Don’t-”

Her pleas were cut off – back in the real world, she felt something tear his hands from her, and the link fractured like bone.

~*~

Disoriented, she opened her eyes and saw Jepar, who was peering at her anxiously. The alcohol on his breath did more to restore her wits than the tentative way he was patting her face.

“Don’t you dare go anywhere near her,” she heard Cougar say, his voice glacial.

She shoved Jepar aside. Cougar and Alex faced each other across the snow, threat in every line of the vanpire’s body, his eyes blazing gold and inhuman as the fangs that he bared at her soulmate.

Alex was breathing hard, flexing his hands as if claws might sprout from them at any minute. A slow smile crept across his face, amused, a little contemptuous. “I really don’t think you can stop me.”

“Want to bet?” Cougar drawled.

She shivered as Alex let his power roll over the air – force that crackled like the air before a storm, heavy on her skin, more than a mere werewolf should possess. But then, it had been a long time since Alex had been just a werewolf.

“Yes,” he said, and with that word, power pressed down on them. She heard Jepar gasp, heard the thud as he was slammed to the ground; Cougar was somehow upright, hunched against the sheer pressure bearing on him. “You aren’t anywhere near enough, cher.”

“But I am,” a new voice said, and suddenly the weight was gone.

Lisa stared, awed, as Chatoya moved between them, treading delicately and lightly through the snow on her bare feet, but there was nothing gentle about the black fire that hugged her body. If the witch felt the cold, it didn’t show. Her long black hair sheeted around her like a cloak, power billowing from her.

Alex tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowed. “How intriguing. A witch with dragon powers. You must tell me how you stole that spell from the Furies.”

“I didn’t have to,” Chatoya said coldly. “I run Pursang.”

They all knew the truth, but hearing it said so matter-of-factly gave Lisa chills.

A low sound rolled over the air, and it was a moment before she realised it was Alex laughing. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Usually it does,” Jepar muttered, sounding bemused.

“How far have you been, little girl?” he said scornfully, gaze raking up Chatoya’s body in a way that Lisa recognised. He had looked at the Saxons the same way, as if he could hardly believe their impudence in invading his country. “How much of Hades have you seen?”

Beside them, she saw Cougar stiffen. His eyes were fixed on Chatoya with something close to desperation.

“Nothing yet,” Chatoya answered.

Hades. It was Nightworld legend, but she had been born in the times when it wasn’t legend, when the Furies had sent their initiates into the underworld to drink of the rivers there and learn the secret of death. She’d thought it had been forgotten. But Chatoya hadn’t been at all surprised by the question.

Alex raised his eyebrows, ostensibly polite. “Nothing? I’ve felt the breath of Hades himself – I’ve walked into the heart of the underworld and lived to tell the tale, and you think you can frighten me because you stole power from a sleeping lizard?”

The witch held her ground. “I think if you dare come near Lisa again, I’ll kick your ass straight back into the underworld and you can give Hades a personal account of just what you did wrong.”

“Feisty,” Alex remarked. “But why don’t you go and look up Alexandros in your archives, cherie, and then if you still think you’ve got a hope in hell of harming me, you come and try your magic on me.”

Chatoya’s eyes widened. The name meant something to her, that was for sure.

“I thought so,” Alex said lightly, and he turned his attention to her. Lisa gazed back, suddenly unsure how safe she was, even in the midst of all her friends. “I’ll see you soon.”

Green swamped his eyes, feral, but something unmistakably human remained in them – a calculating intelligence overlaying the beast. He threw back his head and howled.

The sound vibrated like a war cry in the air, and as its echoes faded, he turned and walked away, feet kicking up the snow. To the casual onlooker, he might just have been a teenage boy slouching along the street.

Lisa thought she could hear that howl long after nothing remained of him but silence.

~*~

The trees bent over the house like clenched fingers. It lay in a pool of shadow, broken only by thin shafts of grey light that seeped through the leaves. Snow littered the ground in small patches, and occasional flakes fluttered down from the canopy, but it was otherwise untouched by the winter.

Alex raised a hand to knock only to see the door swing open.

The boy standing in the doorway was startling. His face was handsome, teetering on the edge of beauty, all sharp edges that were only balanced by a full mouth that curled with contempt. His hair was bright blue, and a match for his eyes, which regarded Alex with a detachment that suggested he was being valued, much as an item at auction.

Alex strongly resisted the urge to slap the little bastard, who had been useful so far, and put on his most irritating smile.

“Surprise.”

Blue Malefici, the vampire who ran Nightfire, the oldest of the Furies, raised his eyebrows. “Not exactly. Everyone within a hundred miles probably felt that show of power. I thought you were famous for your subtlety.”

“Among other things,” Alex said with a little purr. He let his eyes rove over the vampire, a slow, thorough examination. Very good-looking, but so emotionally repressed that he had to pity anyone foolish enough to get involved with him.

He thought he detected a flash of annoyance in the boy’s face. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“Not even close,” he said with a lazy smile. Her rejection rankled, more than he had thought it would. “But this is only the start. Do you have the records I asked for?”

“Do you have the knowledge I asked for?” Blue countered.

Alex tapped his temple. “Of course.”

It was, perhaps, not wise to tell Hades’ secrets to this one. Five rivers laced the underworld. Once the Furies had gone to each to drink and learn, if they survived. Now most of them went only to the first, a handful to the second, and only three people out of all the Furies had sampled the third. Blue Malefici was one of them.

Alex stood so far above them in power that he would have seemed a god if he was foolish enough to reveal the full range of his abilities. He wasn’t sure that giving Blue the same advantage was a wise idea.

But he needed the Furies to win Lisanor.

Nothing else mattered.

~*~

“Do you want to explain what the hell just happened?” Cougar demanded, his expression close to hostile.

She looked around at them all, the words stuck in her throat. Alisha had ushered them all inside, efficient, carefully not commenting on what had just happened. Jepar was huddled by the radiator. Cougar was rubbing at his neck and shoulders as if they ached, while Chatoya was busy rubbing her feet with a towel, grimacing. She might not have felt the cold while she was saturated with magic, but once it had vanished, she started hopping from foot to foot like a jumpy cat.

His outburst drew all their eyes to her. She didn’t know what to say. It was obvious that she had lied to them. They’d caught her trying to run away. They’d seen Alex, and they’d heard what he said.

“What is he?” Jepar asked finally. “That guy had more mojo than a voodoo convention.”

“That...” Once she had started, it became easier. “That was Alex. My soulmate.”

“See, this is the bit I’m confused about,” Cougar said coldly. “The bit where you forget to mention that you have a soulmate and he’s a maniac. Because it’s not as if we’re short on either round here. You’d think you might have found time to mention it between psychos.”

She swallowed. His hostility made it easier. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe because he used to run Nightfire,” Chatoya suggested quietly. She was pale, hands clasped so tight it must have hurt. “I can understand why you’d be ashamed of that.”

“That was part of it.” She found herself staring at the floor, not wanting to meet their eyes. But she owed them the truth. They had put themselves on the line for her. “But not all of it. It was a long time ago. A very long time ago.”

“So you’re not thirty,” Jepar said tentatively.

“No.” She met his eyes, the green of summer, and shorn of all their humour. “I don’t know exactly how old I am. But I was born around fifteen hundred years ago.”

The silence was absolute. None of them even moved.

Then Cougar said, “Say that number again.”

“I’m fifteen hundred years old, give or take,” she said quietly. “I was born in Africa, but I don’t know where. When I was young, the Romans conquered us, and I was taken into slavery. Alex was my owner. And then...one day I found out he was my soulmate.”

“Whoa...” Jepar breathed.

Of them all, only Alisha didn’t look shocked. There might even have been understanding in her cool blue eyes. After all, she had lived eight hundred years as an Old Soul, passing from life to life and death to death.

“He had me changed into a vampire,” Lisa continued, trying hard to forget that night, her fear and the feel of her chest hitching as she tried to breathe only to find that the air was no longer there. “We travelled everywhere – the Roman Empire was trying to hold onto its colonies, and he was one of its governors. At last we were sent to Britain to try and stop the rebellion there. He didn’t care – the Furies were bringing down the Empire. Everything he did was for show. There was...there was a woman. She told me about Alex – what he was. Things...things he had done. I left him.”

Sad how so much could be distilled into so few words; her life reduced down to a few core, terrible truths.

“But he chased me. I went to his enemies and begged them for shelter.” A disbelieving little laugh choked out of her. “And do you know, do you know what he did then?”

“Lise...” Chatoya said gently, reaching out. Her face was full of concern, horror in her eyes.

She had to get through this. “He raised an army to get me back. He was there for years and let the Saxons ravage the damn country, but he united fifteen warring tribes because he couldn’t bear the fact I’d left him. We fought. And he won – the Saxons surrendered, but I left him all the same. And now – now he’s a legend. They make these stupid films about him, they write about him as if he was some kind of hero, as if he did it to save someone. He wasn’t. He went to war because he was a jealous man, that was all.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” objected Jepar.

“It was,” she said tiredly. “I could have stopped it. I could have said yes, and gone back to him, and pretended for a while. But I didn’t. I let men die. I saw them ripped to pieces and I still didn’t stop it.”

I didn’t want to. I hated him. He lied to me, and I just wanted him to suffer – I wanted everyone to suffer because at least then I wouldn’t be alone.

She couldn’t bring herself to say those things to her friends. Nor could she tell them the whole truth – the poison, the massacres, the deeds that she had been complicit in.

By far the worst, the battlefield was stark in her mind, dark with blood, disfigured by the bodies sprawled upon it.

“I ran from him for hundreds of years. I always knew he was following me, and sometimes he came so close, but he only caught me once.” That time was blurred by fever and exhaustion. “He let me go. I still don’t know why. But he made me promise that when he f-found me again, I’d give him a fair chance. And now he has. I don’t know what to do.”

“So you went for climbing down the drainpipe,” Cougar said, some of the anger fading from him. The smile he offered her was grim, but filled her with relief nonetheless. “Not too smart, babe.”

She scrubbed at her face. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No wonder. You really started a war to get away from him?”

“I really did,” she said glumly.

“Then that’s a guy who really can’t take ‘no’, ‘hell no’ or ‘screaming Saxon army no’ for an answer,” the lamia declared. “I vote we skip the niceties and go straight for annihilating him with Toya’s scary dragon powers.”

“Seconded,” Alisha said, raising a finger.

“I’m not sure that’ll work,” Chatoya muttered. “If he’s been as far into Hades as he says...I don’t even know what kind of powers that would give you.”

“Then find someone who does,” suggested Cougar shortly. “One of your merry lunatics will know.”

“Actually...” The witch gave a little nod. “You’re right. Vaje used to work on the archives.”

“No.” The word flew from her. “I don’t want him to know.”

Chatoya looked taken aback. “Why not?”

Because what else is in those archives? What do they know about me, about what I did? For love, I told myself, and it was all lies.

She searched for an excuse that might be acceptable, but nothing sprang to mind. There was no reason for Vaje not to know. After all, he was about the best protection she could get aside from Chatoya.

“Because I lied to him too,” she said finally.

Jepar gave her a sweet grin. “I’m pretty sure he’s crazy enough about you to get over it.”

That startled her. She doubted Vaje was crazy about her; fond of her, attracted to her, a close friend, a lover – yes. But that was as far as it went. She didn’t kid herself about that. Nor did she mind.

“I guess,” she said finally.

“I have a question,” Alisha said. “You said Alex was a legend. He’s obviously not Alexander the Great-”

“Alexander the Great Pain in the Ass, maybe,” Lisa muttered.

“-then who is he?”

She supposed there was no harm in them knowing. The truth of the whole affair was long obscured by romantic interpretations of the legend. “He didn’t use that name in Britain. His formal name was Ambrosius Aurelianus in the Empire, but he was so fierce in battle that they called him ‘the bear’. Artos.”

“Still not ringing any bells,” Cougar said helpfully.

She had to smile. “Better known as King Arthur.”

The gobsmacked looks on their faces were all she could have hoped for.

Your black-eyed soul
You should know that there’s nowhere else to go
My black eyed boy,
You will find your own space and time

~*~

Thanks for reading! Thoughts? Comments? Criticisms?

ki_scribbles @ 2008-06-06T23:50:00

2008-06-06T22:56:49Z

What better way t spend a Friday night?

Prologue - done (500)
Ch 1 - done (2500) - brief tidy-up, then ready
Ch 2 - (3600) - put my chapter split in the wrong place. Needs editing
Ch 3 - (1700) - midway through.

Random bits from throughout - 2000

Original work - and the beat goes on

2008-06-03T22:15:01Z

The last episode of Disc One of Bones. Manfriend tried to coax me out of it in favour of pizza (bah!), but I resisted his wily temptations.

Prologue - done (500)
Ch 1 - done (2500) - brief tidy-up, then ready
Ch 2 - (3600) - put my chapter split in the wrong place. Needs editing
Ch 3 - (300) - just started

Random bits from throughout - 2000

*wibbles* This kind of constantness is a little scary...

Original Work

2008-06-01T22:41:33Z

Another episode of Bones. And a nice way to end the weekend.

Prologue - done (500)
Ch 1 - done (2500) - editing needed on the second half
Ch 2 - (2800) - probably finished, needs editing

Random bits from throughout - 2000

I'm onto the fun stuff now. Chaos ahoy!

Fires of Fate: Long Lost - Chapter One

2008-05-23T01:27:15Z

Long Lost Part One

What a wicked game you play
To make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do
To make me dream of you

He had been a king last time he’d breathed winter air so bitter. His name still rang down the years like a funeral bell, but he was legend, half-forgotten, all idealised.

He had sent men into battle knowing they would not come back. Their lives had been payment, brief glittering coins that he had gambled with; he still could not say if he had won or he had lost. Either way, it had ended.

He’d do it all again if he had to. The price had been right.

The air was stifled, empty of anything except the weighty cold and his puffs of breath. He liked this bulky white world, buried, secret, waiting to be discovered.

In a landscape bleached of colour, mere chiaroscuro, he fit right in. Shadows seemed to pool about him, gathering in the supple, amused darkness of his eyes, waiting behind his teeth. Shadow clung to his hair too, a dark, mussed pelt that half-hid his sleepy stare – and half-revealed it as he moved, flash after flash of heat.

Only his smile was bright as snow, and far colder.

~*~

Lisa Ochai hummed a soft tune as she sketched, her attention only half on her work. The other half was on the topless shapeshifter who was drilling holes in the wall with exaggerated care. The smooth bronze shape of his body was disturbed only by the mass of scar tissue on his side, pale and gnarled as old roots. It didn’t detract from his appeal in the slightest.

And Vaje Chusson knew it. He paused to wipe his forehead and give her a wink.

"Shameless," she said sternly from where she sat, a small table steadying the sketchpad.

"Always," he informed her. "Must be the company I keep."

A screech from the door announced her housemate's entrance: Chatoya Irkil moved carefully with the heavy tray, even though she could have floated it in on a wisp of magic if she'd chosen to.

"There's nothing like a half-naked man in your living room," the witch proclaimed, flashing a merry smile. "Thank goodness eye-candy's calorie-free, or between you and Jepar, I'd be the size of a killer whale."

Vaje gave her a dry stare. "I'm not eye-candy. While I may be a fine specimen of manhood, I expect you to treat me like you treat any other work colleague."

Lisa had to fight to hide her frown. Most of the time she managed to forget that Vaje Chusson worked for one of the Furies, the three mercenary organisations of the Nightworld. He was atypical enough for it to be easy; unlike most of their handpicked elite, he’d come to them as an adult, and they couldn’t quite erase his humanity, even if they’d done a good job on his morals.

But if she could forget that Vaje was a Fury, she could never forget that Chatoya ran one of them.

She was afraid for her friend; afraid that Chatoya would be lost under the deceits and cruelty of the Furies. She was afraid that she would be killed; or that the witch would survive only by becoming one of them, her heart as dead and cold and secret as the moon.

And worse, Lisa was terrified that she wouldn’t know, that Chatoya would become as easy a liar as all the rest, her smile so dazzling that it would blind them to the uncaring, greedy thing that lay beneath it.

She had been fooled before. She would not let herself be fooled again, and she wouldn’t let the Furies have Toya.

“In that case,” Lisa remarked, “shouldn’t she be hexing you into oblivion right about now?”

“Good point,” he conceded. “On second thoughts, treat me like a valued friend who has an overwhelming need for caffeine.”

The witch looked amused. “What a coincidence. I just happen to have what Cougar insists on calling a sexy mocha for you.”

“A sexy mocha?” she said dubiously.

“It’s covered with whipped cream. Apparently that qualifies as sexy.”

Vaje nodded. “Yep. Can’t fault Redfern’s taste. Did you remember the sugar?" He sniffed the air. "I can smell lots of cream, but..."

Chatoya put the tray down with more of a thud than was necessary. "Vaje, if there was any more sugar in yours, the spoon wouldn't move. Why haven't all your teeth dropped out?"

Lisa had often wondered the same. No one could quite understand why Vaje, a bona fide carnivore, had an abiding obsession with caffeine and all things of a dubious sugary nature, but they had learned quickly not to get between him and his daily dose.

"Good genetics," he offered, slurping loudly. His eyes glittered over the mug, the same clear gold as olive oil and filled with mischief.

She and Chatoya swapped resigned glances. "It's so unfair," she muttered.

"Tell me about it," Chatoya grumbled, settling onto the sofa. "Why is it all the men we know can stuff their gaping maws full of food and never put on a pound?"

"Oi!" Vaje objected around his whipped cream moustache. "I do not have a gaping maw."

"Looks pretty more-ish to me," Lisa said, giving him a wink.

"Spare me," pleaded Chatoya. "I have to put up with enough drippiness from Jepar. Keep your happily-ever-after quiet."

It was hardly a happily-ever-after. She often wondered what she was doing, getting involved with another Fury. She wanted to believe that Vaje was exactly who he seemed, but she knew better, and there was always a part of her holding back, waiting for disappointment.

But she still bit back a smile, because it was a happy-for-now, and that was enough.

"Come on, Toya,” she cajoled. “'Tis the season to be jolly."

"And the weather outside is frightful," put in Vaje, gesturing to the bay windows fringed by piles of snow.

"Damn right." Chatoya gave a little shudder. "You might not feel the cold, but my nose nearly dropped off when I went to the shops."

As a vampire, she knew her friends envied her inability to feel cold, but Lisa longed for the steel grip of ice, just as in summer, she longed to feel the heat hammering on her skin. Sometimes, she wondered if the numbness had spread to her heart, if she was atrophying year by year. Then she would prod at her old pain to remind herself she still felt.

This winter, though, she had no need. It was too close a reminder of another, too raw.

But you're in Ryars Valley, she told herself, staring down at her hot chocolate and trying to brush away her unease. This is a winter with whipped cream and tinsel and hunky shapeshifters. What more could anyone want?

"Too hot?"

Toya's voice was warm, filled with more concern than the question warranted. She knew her too well.

"A little," she lied.

She switched the mug for her sketchpad. There was something soothing in watching the lines arch across the page, growing, merging, changing.

She carried on sketching as Toya and Vaje chatted, barely aware of the lines she left. Grey and shimmering, they began to form a picture from the scraps of a thought she didn't try to force.

Minutes passed, and the tension spilled out onto the paper, leaving her calm. She began to chat with them, attention only half on her work now.

"...and despite what Cougar says, those were not the original words of 'We Three Kings'," Chatoya said firmly. "I'm not letting him near the mulled wine again."

Lisa grinned, having been treated to one of Cougar Redfern's impromptu Christmas carols before. "At least you didn't get 'O Come All Ye Faithful'."

All of them collectively winced.

"Who's that?" asked Chatoya, leaning over with a light in her eyes. "I thought you were doing Jepar's Christmas present."

She was. The shapeshifter had once said that there were never enough pictures of the people you lost, so she had decided to do a watercolour of his dead sister.

Lisa glanced down, and froze.

She knew that face well: so well that she had drawn it without thought or sight, so well that even a thousand years had not faded him from her mind. Last time they had met, it had been to the sound of steel shrieking on steel, two still figures in the midst of a battlefield they had created.

The face of her soulmate.

Her soulmate, who had hunted her across continents and years, who had roused an army to pry the Saxons from Britain, who had ripped her from her land and her family. He had a thousand names, each married to a new tale as he flitted from place to place with ridiculous ease, but only one face, only this face.

The eye was drawn to his wide sardonic mouth, always smiling: he wore his smile like a mask, brilliant and blinding against the darkness of his dishevelled hair. Too few people ever looked past it to the eyes that were filled with lies except in those rare moments when he was undone, unravelling before her like a spider's web.

And if...if she had drawn him so carelessly, that could mean only one thing. Her heart quickened, but she forced her breaths to be even. Vaje would scent her fear like a blast of perfume, but he wouldn't find it half as sweet.

Alex was close. He had found her.

"It's no one," she answered quickly, flipping over the page. "A boy I saw in the street. He had an interesting face."

Vaje didn't look too pleased at that, but better his sullenness later than the truth now. "You must have been staring at him a while to sketch him that well."

Yes. She remembered times when she'd leaned over Alex and traced his face with her fingers, learning it as she had learned his language with its niggling irregularities.

"I just have a good memory for faces," she replied, careful.

"It used to drive me mad," put in Chatoya, riding to the rescue. "We'd go out shopping, and Lisa would spot someone 'interesting' and I'd be drinking coffee for the next hour while she sketched."

"Huh." Vaje didn't look convinced. "Well, I've done my manly duty for today. I promised that idiot Aspen that I'd help him wrap his presents, so..."

"Be nice," ordered Toya.

Privately, Lisa didn't see why anyone should be nice to Aspen Martin, who was pirouetting gracelessly on the line between sanity and madness. Her first meeting with him had been a bevy of racist comments with a few sneers about her species thrown in.

His next meeting had been with her fist.

"Be brief," she advised, and stood to give Vaje a kiss. "Dinner tonight?"

"If you promise I get all your attention."

"Of course." She knew it was a lie as she said it: her mind was on alert, waiting for the slightest trace of her soulmate's presence.

The door slammed with more force than was necessary. Before the echo had faded, she was on her feet, her pad clutched to her chest. The excuse sprang easily to her tongue, rolling out with a rueful smile.

“If I don’t want a side of sulking man with my dinner, I think I’d better make tonight special. Which means three hours of nail-painting, moisturising and primping.”

Chatoya laughed. “Pain is beauty. Need any help?”

They’d spent so much time giggling together over make-up and hair rollers, slathered in ridiculous products. She hadn’t known how much she’d miss that – miss all of them. “Not yet. Don’t worry, I’ll shriek like a diva if I do.”

“Good luck!”

She went up the stairs with exaggerated calm, but panic was an icy flood in her stomach. She knew what she had to do. She just hadn’t thought it would be so soon.

She wasn’t ready to leave.

But she had to. She couldn’t risk him finding her. She couldn’t risk what she might become.

That was the shameful truth. It wasn’t just him she feared: it was herself.

~*~

She was close. His pace picked up, and his heart with it until it was a drumroll in his chest, all anticipation and thunder.

He had searched across the world, braving desolate mountains in hope of snatching a glimpse of her eyes, slogged across the desert, seeing the curve of her cheek in the sloping dunes. In the rustling of the Balkan woods, he had heard the echo of her whisper, but found nothing of the woman: on the baking coast of the Mediterranean, all the heady heat of her arms, but not a trace of her presence.

She had always been his dream – a bright, bold creature who had seen through the endless masks he wore. He had followed even the merest whisper of her to its end, scoured dank corners and shades of hell in the hope she might be there. For centuries, she had eluded him.

But he had found her.

He wanted her to know him, wanted to bare his soul to her and snatch it away; to make her his and only his, to cradle her broken heart in his hands and possess her once more even if it meant that death and war must follow.

Because he’d do it all again if he had to. And this time, he couldn’t say what the end would be.

For love, and lack of love. For hope and lack of hope. For her...and for himself.

It was the predator's smile Alexandros wore, a perfect mask, hiding his intent in plain sight.

Lisanor was here. And so was he.

~*~

She moved as if in a trance; quick, methodical, ticking off the list in her mind. Panic nibbled away at her relentlessly, but Lisa had prepared herself as best she could. The bag was empty in her wardrobe, waiting to be filled with the things she couldn’t leave behind.

A few clothes. Money, ID, pencils and paper, credit cards and toiletries. She didn’t need anything else.

Except...

She hesitated, then grabbed the photo frame from her dresser, the one that had a crowded picture of them all. It would be smarter to leave them behind. She shouldn’t cling to her past. Wasn’t that what Alex himself had taught her?

Take nothing. Leave nothing. Mean nothing.

No. She was better than that.

Lisa rammed the silver frame into her bag face down so she wouldn’t have to look at it. Her chest was hitching, but she forced down slow breaths and checked her room one last time.

It was crowded, full of silly things she had accumulated. Half-read books and scattered jewellery and posters and pictures. She didn’t need any of it. She didn’t need the yellow walls or the cushions she’d picked with Jepar or the plants that Toya had coaxed into swirling shapes.

She slung the rucksack over her shoulder, and turned to go.

Then she heard the unmistakable crash of Cougar Redfern throwing open the front door as if there was an enthralled audience waiting for him beyond it. Voices poured in – Jepar chattering, Alisha chiding him, rustling bags and feet, and above it all a filthy rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.

She froze. She could have slipped by Toya, but one of them was bound to notice her. There would be questions, interruptions, time clawed away by their affection and their curiosity and she would have to lie to them. Better for it to be sudden as a knife in the dark.

Lisa swung open the window. It wasn’t too far, and the drainpipe was probably sturdy enough to hold her weight. It glittered with a thick coating of frost, but she had to risk it.

“No, she can’t miss this!” she heard an indignant Cougar say. The vampire sounded even louder than usual. “My homemade Christmas cocktails come but once a year. Whereas as Chusson-”

“Stop right there!” Chatoya yelped.

Lisa eased out of the window. Her grip felt distressingly fragile, but she shifted her weight onto the pipe, praying.

“Please,” added Alisha, sounding weary. “I don’t think I can take another single-entendre.”

“How about a double malt, then?” Cougar said chirpily. “JJ, your girlfriend’s glaring at me. Make her stop. Her eyes are all beady.”

“Alisha’s eyes are not beady,” Jepar slurred, his voice far too loud. “They’re beautiful shining pools of...of...shininess. Like this cocktail. Hey, Cougar, these are special. You can’t even taste the vodka. Or the rum. Or the whisky. It’s like fun in a glass.” He paused, then said wistfully, “All we need is Abba.”

“That’s exactly what we don’t need,” Alisha said with some alarm.

“Damn right,” agreed Cougar, who had the immune system of a vampire, and thus a truly gobsmacking ability to consume his own bodyweight in alcohol with very little consequence. “What we need is Lisa. She can’t stay upstairs while we’re all having fun. C’mon JJ, let’s go find her.”

“To the batmobile!” Jepar cried.

“Okay. You’ve had enough,” announced Cougar as their footsteps clattered up the stairs. She edged nervously down the drainpipe. Her foot slipped – she clutched the metal desperately, scrabbling for a hold. “I forgot you can’t hold your drink.”

“I’m a shapeshifter! Of course I can hold my drink-”

She heard the click of the door opening.

“I’m not talking about milk,” Cougar said. “God, it’s freezing in here.”

“The window’s open...” Jepar said, and panicked, she began to climb down as quickly as she could. They couldn’t catch her – she couldn’t bear to tell them, she couldn’t look them in the eyes and lie because she’d been stupid again, she’d done just what she’d sworn she wouldn’t. She’d learned to love them despite it all.

Her fingers slipped – she grabbed for purchase and found none and suddenly she was falling, falling, a faint scream escaping her.

She smacked onto the ground with bone-jolting thud, the packed snow hard as stone.

“Lisa!” a voice said incredulously. “Are you okay?”

She opened her eyes onto the pitiless grey sky and, leaning out from her window, a gawping Cougar Redfern, mouth a dark oval of shock.

Beside him, Jepar looked a little glazed. “Are you making snow angels?”

“Not exactly,” she moaned.

Cougar shimmied down the drainpipe with the insouciance of a career criminal. He lifted her up; she’d forgotten how gentle he could be when he wanted, brushing the snow out of her hair. Then his eyes settled on the rucksack, nestled in the snow.

She reached for it, but not quickly enough, and heard the buzz of the zip.

His voice was quiet, dangerous.

“Then what were you doing? Because it looks a hell of a lot like running away.”

She stared at him, unable to lie.

“I think you’d better explain, babe.”

Time was draining away like a fever. If she was going to go, it had to be now. She licked her lips, tasting that winter, ice and blood.

“My soulmate,” she said. Shock reflected in his eyes like the flash of a camera. “He’s found me.”

“Let me guess,” Cougar said. “He wants to kill you.”

“No,” she said, and the fear crashed in on her. “That would be better. He wants to own me. Body, heart and soul.”

Worse. Part of me wants him to.

“Please,” she said, voice rasping. “Let me go. I can’t lose anyone else. If he has to kill every one of you to get me, he will.”

“How do you know?”

She closed her eyes. She saw a battlefield, and smelt blood and ordure as men died for her.

A new voice answered – a light, amused voice that cut through her remaining composure like a machete.

“Because that’s what I did last time.”

She was turning, reeling, but for some reason her knees wouldn’t hold her and the world was running at the edges like a watercolour while he filled the centre of it, smiling and so close – how had Alex got so close without her seeing?

His hands closed around her wrists, and she felt the connection spring between them. The world slowed, time oozing by in inevitable increments.

She fought it – she fought it with every inch of her being, muscles straining, fighting to be separate, one and whole and unbroken. But the soulmate link filled her body until her bones groaned with the effort of resisting it. Breath hurt, her skin stung, she was fire and ice and lightning, enduring because all of that was better than what she would become.

He held on, and she held back, the pain beating down on her. Stalemate.

She glared at him, teeth bared. She could do this. She-

Something like amusement flashed in his eyes. Alex leaned forward and brushed the softest, slightest kiss on her mouth.

The link split her heart like lightning. Lisa thought she screamed as the soulmate bond crashed onto her, but if the sound lingered in that world where she had been free, she could no longer hear it.

She tumbled into his mind, and could only think dazedly that it all felt the same. It was as if the years had not passed at all.

It still hurt like hell.

I don’t want to fall in love
(This world is only going to break your heart)
With you

~*~

Thanks for reading. Any comments & criticisms would be much adored!
- Ki

Fires of Fate: Long Lost - Prologue

2008-05-09T21:56:36Z

Title: Long Lost
Rating: 15-R
Spoilers: All prior stories; this is set approximately two months after the end of Chimera, but stands alone.
Summary: Lisa Ochai had to start a war to leave her soulmate fifteen hundred years ago. Since then, he has hunted her - and now he is back, and will destroy anyone she loves to make sure he is the only one in her life. Anyone she loves - everyone she loves.

Happy days! I hope you enjoy...

Long Lost - Prologue

Still a little bit of your song in my ear
Still a little bit of your words I long to hear
You step a little closer to me...
So close that I can't see what's going on

Britain circa 500AD – The Dark Ages

How brutal love was.

The scent of blood blew across the killing ground, thick and wanton, invading her breath, swarming through her mind like the flies that were already beginning to gather on the still bodies. Her stomach lurched but she swallowed until the nausea was reduced to a wavering presence.

He was waiting for her as she had known he would be, regardless of the outcome of this war they had caused. She hadn't thought she would feel so torn, so uncertain. Sunlight made an idol of him, cupping his face and figure with golden fingers.

The aftermath of a battle was always ugly and this one was no exception. She moved among the dead, taking in the carelessly sprawled bodies, the empty, open faces, lime-wood shields splintering under her feet, the grass slick with blood. Her back was straight and her stare unflinching as though she were a princess, gazing down into the flat eyes of those who could not look back.

Beside her, her escort clanked and held their iron-tipped spears ready, a golden convoy, too bright against her dark skin and hair. None of them wanted to be here, but none were prepared to refuse their warlord.

It was to another warlord she went now, treading through carnage to see him for the last time.

We are both still living, you and I. We would not fight with something so cheap and endless as words, so we danced with swords and spears, we threw armies into our battle and we made death our advocate.

Here is the parting of our ways – in the parted flesh of our dead, because we could make no peace.

All I did, I did for love and lack of love.

The wounded thrashed and twitched, words burbling between their lips, prayers, pleas, nonsense. Her attendees peeled away from her then, casting a cursory eye over their wounds and trickling water into their mouths. Those who screamed and sobbed were silenced with a quick knife.

She walked on, her feet daubed with blood and dew, the hem of her dress drifting through the mud, a dark goddess to the smoky sight of the dying.

Here and there, she glimpsed a face she knew, pale and baffled among the sea of slaughter. She wanted to walk on, to turn away, gods, how she yearned to, but...

All I did, I did for love and lack of love...and you have given your life for my lack.

She bent down to those familiar faces, stooping in the dirt to clutch their hand and speak stupid, meaningless words that were meant to be comfort. There was no one to comfort her, to speak sweet lies and hide these horrors from her.

This cannot happen again. I cannot stay here...or there will be war and love and no difference between the two. It will never end, it can never end.

At last, she reached him. He had no guard, nothing except a short Roman sword that hung at his side. It was the only hint that he'd ever had another life, away from Britain and her cold stony shores.

Somehow, he had become a man loved by his people, but no longer by her. His carefree smile was in place, hiding whatever lay behind those obscure, watchful eyes.

"Warlord," she said, stopping well short of him. She didn't want to be too close: she didn't dare to be snared by the silken brush of his hand, to be drugged and drunken on the seduction he wielded so effortlessly.

He answered her in Latin – she knew how he despised Englisc, considering it crude and dissonant.

"Lady." The sarcasm on the word sliced her, but she could not show it. "Radiant as ever."

She would not bother with fake courtesies. "Are you pleased with your handiwork?"

Darkness in his eyes, and clenched behind his wicked smile. "How bitter you are. You began this, Lisanor. I just finished it. Let's end this foolishness."

"The folly was all yours." It was over, truly over – this was not the man she had loved; this stranger was a warrior, a man of sharp words and casual passions. "Winning a battle will not win me."

His frown did nothing to lift the amusement from his eyes. "It was all for you, Lisanor, all of this – do you think I care whether Aelle thieves a few more fields? Let the Bretwalda have his sticks and stones...but he cannot have what is mine."

"I am yours no longer," she hissed, all the venom and anguish of the years exploding from her, needing to hurt him, to make him feel the betrayal that bled her dry even now. "I will never be yours again – even if the seas boil dry and every single star falls screaming from the sky, I will never be owned again."

"Was it so terrible to belong to me, as I belonged to you?" he snarled back, a wild light leaping into those shadowed eyes, the first hints of his wolfish nature creeping out. "Was I wrong to think you the better part of my soul? When you wept in the nights, did I mistake pain for joy? I have loved you, Lisanor, and I would love you again."

Lies and lies, superbly manufactured. Had it always come so easy to him? A dreadful sadness sank through her like lead weights because even knowing the depth of his deception, part of her wanted to believe him still, to follow his vision as so many others had.

"You have lied to me, and you will do so again. Aelle has never made me weep," she answered, but that was not the truth. Aelle did not frighten her as this volatile warlord did – there was no wolf simmering within his pale skin, waiting to burst forth in clawing rage. There was no coldness in Aelle, no detachment or slow, merciless amusement.

And it had not been Aelle who ripped her from her family and sold her into slavery. That was what she would not say: that was what she had never been supposed to find out. Aelle had not masqueraded as her saviour, her sacred lover; Aelle had no lies, only bluff truths and warm, rowdy temper.

She squeezed shut her eyes, trying to crush tears into dust.

All those lies – lies about soulmates, lies about himself, but worst of all, lies of love, sickly honeyed words that had never meant a thing. And even now, he played the game, played her like a harp, plucking her heartstrings, picking out her pain with such finesse it almost seemed lovely.

"Will his death make you weep?" he enquired, a deadly huskiness creeping into his voice, the first words of the wolf. "I doubt it, somehow. You don't love him, Lisanor – you can't throw me aside so easily. Your heart just isn't that fickle. But will you let him die for you?"

She had known this would be his ultimatum.

"I don't love him. But that will make it all the easier to leave him."

Triumph seeped through his eyes.

"And leaving you..." she continued, "...why, that will be even easier a second time."

The sword was flashing in his hand before she could move, but quick as he was, her guards were faster – one of them dragged her back as a ring of bristling spearheads ringed the warlord.

Fury had dashed the triumph from him. His lips skinned back, and the rumbling snarl that came from him was nothing human, but he didn't move. Those spears might not kill him outright, but one of her guards was hefting an axe with a coldness to his eyes that met and matched the warlord's rage.

"I will find you," he swore, his voice echoing with hints of moonlit nights and howls, maybe with something of yearning too. "If it takes a thousand years I will find you."

"You won't." Unexpected pity and all-too-expected grief stung her.

"Does love mean nothing to you?" he shouted, shaking within the confines of his iron cage. "Do I mean nothing?"

She met his eyes for the last time, remembering when she thought she saw the end of her days in them.

"You mean everything," she answered. "But even if it takes a thousand years, I will forget you."

She turned on her heel, crossing her arms across her chest to conceal her trembling hands. The years ahead would be filled with travelling, with fleeing his hot and hungry clutches, with suspicion and the gnawing loss of him, with the dull ache of betrayal. She knew that already.

And knowing, she did all she did for love and lack of love. She would learn to forget and maybe, maybe to find a truer love, though she thought that she would never again feel that same wildness, that howling passion.

And she knew that through all the years, his promise, his threat would follow her. One day he would find her, and then...

Fleeing that first love, fleeing that barren battlefield, she shivered.

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall

Thank you for reading! Comments, thought and criticisms would be much adored.

Ripples Part Twenty Four

2008-04-24T15:02:17Z

The twenty-fourth and final part is up here.

And now for a triumphant dance!

Much love
Ki

Easter Eggs '07: The Space Between

2008-01-09T18:46:56Z

Title: The Space Between
For: Ahtanama
Links to: Shimmer, A Fine and Private Place
Disclaimer: The Nightworld is the property of the awesome L.J. Smith All concepts and / or characters you recognise from the books belong to her: everything else is created by me.
Notes: Ahtanama asked for Toya, Josh and that handfasting...

The poem “I Am Not I” is written by Juan Ramon Jimenez.

The Space Between

I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see
Who at times I manage to visit,
At other times I forget.

“Ow!” He pulled her hair harder, and she squealed loudly enough to bring her mother running in from the garden.

“Joshua Irkil.”

Her voice was fierce, cracking like thunder. Delighted, Chatoya mustered tears and let them drizzle down her face.

Josh let go instantly, and tucked his hands behind his back. “Wasn’t doin’ anyfing.”

“It’s a little late for that excuse,” Beverly Irkil told him. She gathered up Chatoya, who burrowed into her arms. Their mother always smelled all green and sweet, and her hands stroked Chatoya’s hair absently. “Now what happened?”

He screwed up his face. “She started it. She took my candy.”

“Did not!” she announced, ignoring the fact her mouth was still tingling from the cool bite of the mint. “Mommy, he hitted me!”

“I saw.” Her mother hoisted her up so Chatoya couldn’t avoid her eyes which were always kind, but straight and true as an arrow. It felt like her mother could look right into her and see all the lies. Practice, however, had taught Chatoya that wasn‘t so. “Is that true, Toya? Did you take Josh’s sweets?”

“She di-iiiid,” he insisted pitifully.

Chatoya squeezed out more tears and sniffled. Her face felt hot and shiny. “No.”

“Hmm. I’ll know if you’re lying to me, young lady.”

Given that she had yet to be caught, Chatoya didn’t take much notice of that. “Cross my heart!”

Josh screeched, genuinely outraged. “Liar!”

“Hmm.” Her mother rubbed her fingers together; something herbal filled the air. And then little green lights danced in the air. “Well, one of you isn’t telling the truth. Toya, for the last time, did you take your brother’s candy?”

“No…” She sneezed suddenly and the air popped.

“I thought so.” Her mother sounded amused, if anything. “Your father did say he thought you’d become a little…adventurous with the truth. That’s two punishments then, Toya. One for stealing and one for lying.”

Her stomach sank. She’d never been caught before. The tears began to flow again, real this time.

“I’m going to dock your pocket money until you’ve paid Josh back for his sweets. And for lying…hmmm…” Her mother tapped a long finger on her mouth.

Josh took advantage of her distraction to pull a triumphant gargoyle face.

“Ah,” her mother said with deep satisfaction. “Yes, I think this will teach you how seriously your father and I take lying, Chatoya. Every time you lie to us – and this goes for you too Josh – your father and I will start teaching you magic one week later than we intended. We were going to start on your seventh birthday-”

Chatoya wailed. It was worse than she’d thought. “Not fair!”

“Entirely fair,” corrected her mother. “So Josh, as long as you behave yourself, we’ll start teaching you when you’re seven. Toya, you’ll have to wait another week.”

A whole week. That was forever and ever and ever, and Josh would never let her forget it.

“And Josh, say sorry to your sister for pulling her hair.”

Aglow with smugness, he managed a creditable apology. Chatoya only cried harder because her horrible, horrible twin had won.

~*~

“Come on!”

She and Josh swapped understanding glances and pounded on their parents’ door. At eight, they were exactly the same height, tall for their age, though he was already stronger and much more liable to win their tussles unless she fought dirty.

There was something that might have been her father groaning in dismay.

“I hear them!” she hissed. “C’mon, louder!”

They both battered away the door until it swung open and Josh nearly fell over their father, bleary-eyed and staring in disbelief. “Kids, it’s…it’s…Bev, what time is it?”

“Four a.m.,” came their mother’s sleepy voice.

“But it’s our eighth birthday!” Josh said loudly enough to make sure they weren’t going back to sleep any time soon. Chatoya approved.

“You promised,” she pointed out, just as loudly. “You said you’d teach us magic!”

“When did our children turn into seagulls?” muttered their father. “Not now. It’s too early.”

“Da-aaaaad,” they whined in perfect chorus. “We’ve waited a whole year!” she added.

He peered down. “You wouldn’t have had to wait if you hadn’t decided to turn into compulsive liars for the better part of summer.”

Chatoya wasn’t sure what compulsive meant, but she couldn’t really argue about the liar part.

She traded resigned glances with Josh. It was time for the ultimate in persuasion. In unison, and in horrible clashing discord, they started a long and breathless chorus of “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease…”

It took a mere twenty minutes for their father to crumple under such cunning torture, and only another seven minutes before their mother buckled beneath their hyperactive falsettos. Soon they were gathered around the kitchen table with a candle and a crumpled spell in front of them and two drowsy parents clutching coffee as if it were a lifebelt.

So, at eight years old, Chatoya learned her first spell. Josh was there to learn it at the same time. Later, neither could say who spoke it first; it didn’t really matter.

~*~

She frowned at her hand, ordering it not to tremble…closer…nearly…

“Hey, sis-!”

The eyeliner skidded straight into her eye; she squawked, and when Josh shot over to see what was wrong, she gave him a hefty swat on the legs. “Knock, you idiot!”

“You’ve been such a charmer since you got hormones,” he pointed out. The rebuke might have had more affect if his voice hadn’t cracked midway through and set his dry tenor into an alarming soprano. “Psst – eyeliner goes on your eye not in it.”

“Where you get these revelations?” she muttered through gritted teeth. Her brother seemed like an alien being lately.

No longer her best friend, her co-conspirator, her alibi, they had split apart lately. She didn’t really know the friends he hung about with a school, and he seemed to think hers were boring or vapid or just plain silly. She didn’t care about cars or computers or basketball, and he didn’t seem to care about anything else – except, perhaps, magic.

There, at least, they could find some agreement.

“Let me have a look.”

Reluctantly, she opened her sore, watering eye to see a blurry giant wobbling in front of her. He felt around the socket gingerly, then the comforting touch of his magic wrapped around her like a blanket. Swelling shrank, her skin flexed and then settled back into place. She didn’t have his fine touch with healing yet, but she was slaving away every night to try and catch up. It galled her that he should be winning their unofficial race.

“Can you see me clearly? Is it better?”

“Aren’t the two mutually exclusive?” she grumbled. She peered up at him, the face so very similar to her own. “What did you want?”

“Mom sent me to tell you you’ve got two minutes.”

“Two…is that it?” she squeaked, and hastily swabbed on emerald-green eyeshadow. “Grab my bag!”

“It’s only-” Josh yelped as she barged him out the way to seize her kitten heels. “-a dance,” he finished.

“It’s not only a dance,” she informed him, sneaking one last peek in the mirror. Anxiety seized her. Was she pretty? Was the dress too long? Did her hair look okay like that – oh, she should have put it up, it would have looked better… “It’s my first dance.”

“It’s mine too,” Josh said levelly, “but you don’t see me shoulder-charging you out of the way. Besides, what so special about it? Gods, we see everyone at school every day. It’s not like there’s going to be anyone different there.”

She hoped she wasn’t blushing. No, there wouldn’t be anyone new, but Kieran Tomlinson was bound to be there, and she was sure he had looked right at her in history on Wednesday. Daydreams flitted through her head – she’d walk in, and he’d look so surprised, amazed at how stunning she looked, and he’d ask her to dance in front of everyone – shyly, awed by her…

None of these were thoughts she would share with Josh. He’d only snigger and make stupid jokes.

“You’re just a killjoy,” she said, and shot out of the room at her mother’s shout. “Are you coming, or not?”

Rolling his eyes, Josh followed her.

~*~

His knock was perfunctory, then Josh strolled in. “Hey, Toya, have you got your algebra textbook? I left mine at...” His voice trailed off.

Quickly, she finished cuffing at her eyes, but knew it was too late. “On the table,” she said gruffly, hoping he would just leave it be.

“What is going on with you?” he said, exasperation and concern mixing in his voice. “You’ve been like a wet weekend ever since the dance.”

“Nothing.”

Humiliation was crunched up tight inside her like tin foil. She didn’t want to think about it; she couldn’t seem to think about anything else. She concentrated on forcing back more tears, her eyes already red and itching.

“Something,” he said sharply. “What’s going on, sis? Has someone been saying stuff about you?”

She flinched. He knew her too well.

“Who?” demanded Josh, angry.

“It’s nothing, okay.” She could feel her willpower crumbling, fresh tears sliding down her face in hot trails. “It’s stupid.”

“Doesn’t look stupid to me,” he said quietly. “Looks like it hurts.”

The gentleness in his voice undid her. “There…there was this guy I kind of liked.”

“Was there?” He sounded astounded, as if it was inconceivable that his sister should take any interest in boys. “You kept that quiet.”

She hunched in on herself. “You’d have teased me.”

“Well...yes,” he said reasonably. “But that’s my brotherly duty. Just like your sisterly duty is to make incredibly loud, disparaging remarks about me at lunch, particularly when cute girls are nearby. That doesn’t mean I actually mean any of it. So who was this guy you kind of liked?”

“K-kieran Tomlinson.”

He grimaced. “Him?” It clicked. “Oh. That’s why you were all glammed up for the dance.”

She nodded dumbly, then the words burst from her, painful, horrible. “I just w-wanted him to look at me. I th-thought…”

She dissolved into sobs, helpless with the misery and the shame of it all. Josh patted her warily, as if she were a suspect package he was checking for explosives.

“He went outside. And I went out to ask him to dance,” she explained, heartsick. “He…”

“He…?” Josh prompted as she fell silent.

“He said he didn’t dance with ugly girls,” she whispered.

“He said WHAT?”

“And then he told all his friends,” she said in a small, thin voice. “I could see them all laughing at me.”

“I’ll pound him into chutney,” vowed Josh solemnly. “No, wait. I’ll hex him. You won’t be able to see him for boils.” He paused. “Not that that would make much difference. He’s got a face like a bucketful of frogs anyway.”

None of this was any comfort. “I’m ugly,” she said sadly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Josh said with the grave assurance of a boy who had a giggling girlfriend that hung on his every word.

It felt like a slap. “It’s not ridiculous!” she cried. “Boys look at Stacey, and Anna, and Hayley’s already kissed five boys and I’m going to be alone forever!”

Lost in self-pity and the awful, incomparable wretchedness of being a fourteen-year old girl, she didn’t see him look at her with something between surprise and pity.

“First off, guys look at Stacey because she wears skirts that are two inches long. Yes – most of them are looking at her ass. But you know what? They ain’t saying it’s a pretty sight. Anna...Toya, it’s not a good thing to be known as the BMX girl.” At her blank look, he elaborated, “You know, the town bike? Everyone gets a ride.”

She giggled, then hiccupped as her tears met her laughter.

“And I happen to know that Hayley lied about three of those guys, and I wouldn’t put money on the other two existing. So seriously, sis, less of the woe-is-me malarkey, okay? Of course you won’t be alone,” he said and gave her a brief, let’s-never-mention-this-soppy-moment-again hug. “You’ve got me to look after you, haven’t you? I’m not going anywhere until you’ve got handfasted, promise.”

He was quite sincere. And it surprised her to realize that for all his mockery and his jokes, her twin really did care about her. Still more surprising was how comforted she felt.

Chatoya sniffled, and strove for sarcasm. “Great. You’re really a replacement for a boyfriend.”

“I have friends,” he pointed out. “Friends who happen to think my sister is kind of cute, though I don’t see it myself.”

“Do they?” she said, startled.

Josh sighed. “Unfortunately – no, don’t ask me who. I’m not telling you. I wouldn’t trust any of my friends to date my little sister.”

“Little!” she squeaked.

“Hey, I was born first.”

“By fifty minutes.”

“I bet you anything that’s fifty minutes Mom thanks me for.”

As the conversation descended into sibling bickering, her tears dried, evaporated, drifted into the air with their words, until only a thin gleam of salt lay on her cheeks to be washed away later. And under her skin, under his, a promise that could not be so easily erased: and the quiet, unending comfort of each other, twins who had never known separation.

The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk when I am indoors
The one who will remain standing when I die.

~*~

I'd love to hear what you thought.

Easter Eggs '07: Changeling

2008-01-09T18:44:53Z

Title: Changeling
For: Madison
Links to: Chimera
Disclaimer: The Nightworld is the property of the awesome L.J. Smith All concepts and / or characters you recognise from the books belong to her: everything else is created by me.
Notes: Madison requested a story where Toya nad Sandrine met, post-Chimera. Lyrics belong to Garbage.

Changeling

I’ll tell you something
I am a wolf but I like to wear sheep’s clothing

The file was thick, packed with paper and photographs, and Chatoya leafed through it slowly. The name was printed in black copperplate on a label that someone had spilt tea on. From the dog-eared state of the paperwork, it had been thoroughly perused. That wasn’t surprising.

After all, Aspen and Therese would want to know all they could about the human who had somehow survived amid their ranks.

Sandrine Sarasen, she thought. A mystery to everyone.

She had been sat at the small table for hours now. The entrance to the library was tucked between a tattoo parlour and a Chinese, and no one could suspect that behind the begrimed, flaking door lay a treasure trove that men would – and had – killed for.

Anyone could access the common files – details of well-known assassinations, long, dry political commentaries in every language that spanned thousands of years, textbooks and encyclopedias. Several people were in the rooms beyond, poring over knowledge.

But the vault where she sat contained the personal files of every member of the Furies since they first began. It had been guarded by so many spells that it had taken her an hour just to pass through them.

Only three people had access to it. She had the dubious fortune to be one of them.

Of all the lives she had flicked through today, this one was by far the most interesting. Not because it belonged to the only human in the Furies, though that added a certain intrigue. No. It was the personal accounts that fascinated her so. Each file had a number of these, taken from various witnesses of that Fury’s life with or without consent.

And most of those in Sandrine’s file had come from Blue.

It startled her. She had had no idea how close the two of them were. Sandrine was perhaps the only person who’d known the child before he molded himself into the monster. It could not be mere coincidence that she had followed in his footsteps. He had left some dark impression on her, a bloody handprint on her heart that had pulled her after him.

So she bent over the flowing writing, the ache in her back forgotten as for the first time, she read the story of his life in his own words.

~*~

The morning found her rubbing at her spine as she waited outside Sandrine Sarasen’s apartment. Her mind was abuzz with questions and unease, and there was only one person who could lay those to rest.

The door opened. She stared at the girl who had been the instrument of her downfall, and could not help but wonder what had drawn Blue to her. She was terribly gaunt, and in their sunken sockets, her eyes had no spark. Her hair was lank, pulled back into a careless knot, but then she gave Chatoya a brittle smile.

“I thought you’d turn up eventually,” Sandrine said with a certain satisfaction. Intelligence gleamed in her eyes, and she had the brief, narrow look of a hawk waiting to strike. As an afterthought, she added, “Pursanguia.”

She gestured Chatoya in.

“I suppose a lot of them have come to see you,” Chatoya said, perching on a rickety chair. “Did they learn anything?”

“Nothing I didn’t want them to know.”

Sandrine still moved like a ballerina. Even Nightfire could not entirely eradicate her past; the gestures were fine and precise, her poise absolute. She slipped onto a chair opposite, her back straight, her limbs fluid. Yet it was all made mockery by her dead eyes. Her motions were pure beauty, her heart misshapen and hollow.

What did he do to divide you so?

“You,” Chatoya asked delicately. “Or him?”

Her eyes were hard and astute. “I doubt very much Blue cares what they know, or think they know. It would only hurt him if he let it, and he chooses his pain carefully.” She paused. “With the notable exception of yourself.”

“I didn’t have any choice either.”

“I don’t doubt it. Fate’s a whore. She screws us all from time to time and then has the gall to make us pay for it.” Her voice was blunt and uncaring. Maybe that was how she reconciled herself to her life: part of the price. “Having Blue as your soulmate…eventually, you’ll pay with your life.”

She winced. Such certainty was depressing, although on the bright side, she didn’t doubt her secret was safe with Sandrine. Her fanatic loyalty to Blue ensured that. “I might amaze you all and die of old age.”

“Name me one person Blue knows who died of old age.”

She opened her mouth to reply – then a thought struck her, and she changed what she was going to say. “You’re more qualified to answer that than me. You’ve known him since he was a child.”

“I knew him when he was young,” Sandrine said as if correcting her. “And I suppose you want to know the same things they all did. What was he like, what did he say, how did his family treat him, who were his friends, his enemies…why should I tell you what I didn’t tell anyone else?”

Chatoya saw nothing she could relate to in that stern, bare face. “Because I don’t want to know any of that.”

Those dusty eyes searched her as if Sandrine thought she could find a lie there. “Then what are you after?”

“I want to know why you joined the Furies.”

“I’m sure it’s all in my file.”

“Everything in your file was put together by Blue,” she said sharply. “And if you know him half as well as you hint at, you’re clever enough not to give him the whole truth.”

Her pale lips were pressed together. She was rigid, Chatoya realized, all her lissome grace gone. When she spoke, harshness made her loud. “Don’t you understand yet? It doesn’t matter how clever you are, or how brave or how lucky. If Blue wants something from you, he will have it. If he has to rip you apart to get it, he will.”

“You’re preaching to the converted here.”

Abrupt calm came over her. “Yes. I suppose I am. He broke you too, didn’t he?”

She bridled at the words. Part of her did not want to admit that there was truth to them, but she had lost the game she played with Blue, and nearly lost herself with it. It was her fortune that he had decided on a rematch. “If you want to put it like that.”

“And here we both are. Why did you survive, I wonder?”

“I was stubborn,” she said dryly, then said something she suspected might be only partially true. “And he needed me.”

Sandrine raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

Every day I wake up as if today will be the day he is gone again. “Absolutely.”

“You’re a good liar,” the human remarked. “And I think you even believe some of what you’re saying. It takes a will of iron to lie to yourself like that.”

“I imagine you’d know,” Chatoya countered sharply, irked by Sandrine’s insolence. “What did it take you to become a Fury?”

Her laughter was soft and bitter. “You’d don’t give up, do you? I suppose I should have expected that.” Her gaze swept Chatoya, shrewd, making some judgment. “They don’t think you’ll live long, you know.”

“I expect they thought the same about you.”

Her mouth curved. “Of course. Is that why you came here? To pick up survival tips?”

“No,” she said honestly. “I’m curious. You’re the only other person my soulmate has left alive. There’s a reason why, but I doubt you know it. But if you tell me why you came to the Furies, maybe I can tell you why he let you live.”

There. Curiosity flared in her expression before Sandrine controlled herself. Something human remained beneath that deathly mask. “Why should I care?”

She was tried of these games. Chatoya got to her feet and made for the door. “Very well. Enjoy your lack of care and your life in Nightfire.”

Hand on the handle, she had the door ajar-

“It was never about the Furies.” Sandrine’s voice was almost dreamy. Slowly, Chatoya turned, and saw the human wore a small, ironic smile. “It wasn’t even about Blue. It was about the Satiari enclave and what I became there. It was about what I lost.”

~*~

She used words sparsely, but the picture she painted for Chatoya was quite clear; of a girl in the precarious place between childhood and adulthood hurled into a world of careless cruelty and cold, feudal rule.

“Most of the slaves there had never known the outside world. They’d been bred like cattle and they were never encouraged to be much more than that. They lived knowing they were dispensable. They died in the proof of it.”

Her voice was quite dispassionate. Her hands were folded in her lap, limp as a shot dove.

“They lived and died in that place. They didn’t even get the dignity of a burial – they just had pits, open things where they threw the bodies. At first, I didn’t understand why they didn’t try to escape. There were so many more of them and they could have found weapons if they’d wanted to.” A wry smile twisted her lips. “And then I realized that they didn’t want to. They just accepted it. I...wasn’t very good at that. I suppose it was inevitable that Blue would notice me. In that respect, we were two of a kind.”

She paused, and her flat gaze met Chatoya’s. “Or so I thought. So he let me think.”

“What was he like then?” she said, drawn despite herself. Cougar would say little on the subject and she hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to ask Blue himself.

“Shorter.” Sandrine pursed her lips. “Younger.”

“I meant-”

“I know what you meant.” Her voice was acid, and Chatoya realized it was the first real emotion she had seen from this odd human. “He was Blue. He was a misfit, and he was sharp and cruel and often quite horrible.”

She reached out, and a bony hand clasped Chatoya’s wrist. Her instinct was to jerk back – but Sandrine was surprisingly strong. Then an image rose in her mind, forming slowly, as if it took her great effort to do so.

Even daubed in old memories, he was still striking. That boy was far from the man she knew; his emaciation was clear in the hollows of his face which had an odd, vulnerable cast to it that she didn’t quite recognize. The power in his gaze was raw, tinged with anger, but there was no denying the controlled glimmer of his smile – or the promise of what he would become.

Sandrine let go. Her voice when she spoke was quite soft. “He was my first friend there.”

“Friend? Blue?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t really know how to be kind, but he knew how to be cruel enough to everyone else to keep me safe. I was the first human he’d ever really talked to – maybe the first person. I intrigued him, I think, and later, he decided to use me in his plans so he had to keep me safe.”

Her head turned fractionally, as if she sought to hide some flash of feeling.

“And then he made you his scapegoat,” Chatoya finished softly.

“Me and Cougar. I used to wonder...” She stopped abruptly. Then she took a quick, harsh breath and said, “I used to wonder why me. Why not just Cougar? Blue didn’t need to take me along that night – there was no reason for it, no reason at all.”

“Were you friends with Cougar too?” she said.

Sandrine was silent. Then she said, “He was so human. Not like Blue at all. He was...he was just a boy. I could talk to him.” Her smile was mirthless. “I kissed him. Or he kissed me. Teenage fumbles, you know.”

Ah. The mystery was solved. “Did Blue know?”

“Probably. I can’t imagine why he’d care, though.” Sandrine frowned at her. “He wasn’t interested in things like that. Until you.”

Something of a mixed blessing, that.

“Wait...” Sandrine said slowly. “You think that’s why he betrayed me, don’t you? Because of a kiss?”

“No,” she answered, memories clustering in her head. A lake glittering under a sky, the leafy cage of a glen, the rumpled square of her bed – and amidst them all, Blue. “Because you were his in some way, but you chose Cougar. The kiss didn’t matter, it only mattered that you were there at all with him.”

Sandrine gave a stuttering little laugh. “I don’t believe it. It’s so...”

“Childish?” she suggested softly.

“Yes.”

“But he was a child. He never had anything of his own – you were probably his first possession. And you went instead to his brother.” It was startling to think of him as so volatile, and yet she felt that it was the truth. “So he decided he didn’t want you anymore.”

“Maybe,” Sandrine said slowly. “He did change after that. And the night he left – the night he killed Carinna...it was the look in his eyes when I found him. He was so strange, so...inhuman. It was the first time I truly saw what he was – what he would become.”

Strange. It sounded like awe in her voice.

“What?” prompted Chatoya gently.

Sandrine raised her eyes and for a moment, they seemed clear and bright and young. Her smile was lovely, washing away the marks the Furies had left.

“Great,” she breathed.

I am surrounded by mad people.

“Great.,” she echoed flatly. “He framed you for murder, threw you to his family who shut you in a dungeon and tortured you, and you seriously think that’s an indicator of greatness?”

Sandrine gazed at her with something close to pity. “I hated him at first. I don’t know how long I was down there in the dark – weeks, I think. Maybe longer. I made the mistake everyone makes with him. They think it’s personal – and eventually I came to see that it wasn’t. It was just that I was useful to him in a certain place at a certain time, and if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone different. Once you get past that…” Her lips creased into a small smile. “You can’t help but admire him. And if you were me, you would want to make yourself in his image too.”

Chatoya stared at her, dumbfounded. “Is that why you joined the Furies?”

“Yes. The enclave forged me, but the Furies tempered me.” There was only satisfaction in her voice, as if that was somehow a good thing. “You can’t tell me you would act differently.”

“I can.”

“Yes,” she murmured dreamily. “That’s your weakness.”

“Not worshipping the ground his cloven hooves clip-clop along?”

Her smile stretched, a tight white line. “Not realizing just how dangerous he is.” In her voice was a queer, lilting cadence. “Oh, you think you do, so you let him creep closer and closer and closer to you. You let yourself love him because you think you aren’t kidding yourself.”

Hearing the words so loud, so bold, made her feel uneasy. “I’m not. I know what he is.”

Sandrine laughed. It had the scuttling, dry sound of a scorpion clattering through a tomb. “No, you don’t. You’re no different from me when I was a fool who thought she knew him.”

“You’re wrong,” Chatoya said coldly. She rose from her seat. She couldn’t no longer bear to be in the room with this – this thing that the Furies and Blue had made, this shadow they had cast between them that wore human form but was filled only with weightless dark, no substance but death, no will but theirs. “I may not know him, but it’s entirely different.”

Sandrine let her get to the door before she threw out her challenge.

“How?”

Chatoya paused, turned, gave her one last, level stare. This was what she would not become. This was the price of failure. “I know how dangerous he is. I know in ways that you can’t imagine – but I’m not you. I’m not any of his kills. And that’s why he’s far more dangerous to me than he was to you.” She roused a sad smile. “Pity me if you still can, because I’m his soulmate – I’m not just another face in his plans, no matter that I wish I was, and it is always going to be personal.”

The door clicked shut behind her.

She was halfway down the stairs by the time Sandrine, unheard, unimagined, said to her empty room, from her empty heart, “I thought that too.”

~*~

Thanks for reading.