Blessed (28 page)

Hundreds of thousands of tiny, razor sharp crystals drifted on the air throughout the room. Ardra sat in the middle of the green haze and pushed the energy around with relative ease. This was yet another maneuver that Kaiser would never have thought of himself. He was becoming more and more impressed with the quick work that the girl was making of learning techniques that many before her had spent generations developing and passing down through their bloodlines. Before his very eyes, she was transforming into the warrior that the world needed her to be.

The cloud began to swirl around her. Lazy at first, then slowly gaining speed. Before long, it was a swirling vortex of tiny little razor blades. He was glad that they had had the foresight to clear the furniture from the living room after she had snapped the coffee table in half with a well placed tentacle.

As the haze swirled faster and faster, the air around her began to swirl with it, catching her ponytail and blowing it around her head and into her face. She didn’t bother closing her eyes anymore and had a look of pure joy on her face as she urged the energy to swirl faster and faster. Kaiser made sure to stay well outside of her shredding radius. He could see what it was doing to the hardwood and had no desire to learn what it felt like to be skinned alive.

Suddenly, every single crystal that had been whirling around the room came screeching to a halt. Ardra calmly let them drop to the floor and disperse. As the green crystals dropped to the ground, they lost density and turned into a green haze that spread across the floor before thinning and dispersing all together. Ardra took a long, calming breath before proclaiming, “I’m hungry!”

Finally!
Kaiser thought,
I thought you were just going to keep going and going like that bunny on TV. I’m hungry too! Now that you mention it, I’ve
been
hungry for about two hours. Can I eat too?

Ardra laughed at him and brushed his head lovingly as she passed saying, “Of course you can. You’ve worked just as hard as I have! Not to mention I interrupted your nap earlier! You must be tired too! All you ever do is eat and sleep, and you haven’t done either since that news broadcast!”

Kaiser suddenly had the urge to yawn and curl up on the floor for a nap. He allowed himself the yawn, but stretched and focused his mind on the food that Ardra was poring into his dish. There was no time for sleeping. He could feel Chaos getting closer with each passing hour and as long as Ardra had the energy to keep training, he was going to be there to push her.

He lowered his head into his bowl and noisily wolfed down its contents while Ardra absently considered her apple. After several minutes of silence, she asked, “So, what happens after I beat Chaos? I mean, there’s gotta more than one of his kind out there, right? I can’t see the source of all evil only having one minion.”

Kaiser tipped his head to one side and stopped chewing as he thought about it.

You know, I never really thought about it. I think it’s something we’ll just have to play by ear. And I happen to have some good ears, so we should be fine.
He didn’t want her worrying about those things. She had one goal to focus on: Survival.

“You sure it’s still going to be
we
when all of this is over? You won’t have to go anywhere? You don’t have any other charges that you need to care for?”

The question stopped his head halfway to the dish and he actually sat down to really think about it. It wasn’t something he had let himself think about and now that he
was
thinking about it, he didn’t like the idea of having to leave Ardra. He had been there with the girl through some very trying times and watched her quickly transform from the carefree young lady she had been, into a force to be reckoned with. He couldn’t say that he was happy that the change had needed to happen, but now there was just something about her. Something that demanded the attention of everyone in the room. Something that said, “Try it. I dare you.”

He shook his head as he lowered it into his dish and thought,
It will still be we if I have anything to say about it.

That seemed to satisfy her and she finally bit into the apple that she’d been holding in front of her face. She continued to methodically devour the apple in silence as he munched on his kibble; both preoccupied with their own internal dialogues.

She chomped off the last bite of her apple and tossed the core in the garbage before bounding up the stairs and into the bathroom. Moments later, he heard the water kick on in the shower. He snatched up the last few kibbles with his tongue and wondered absently what it was like to take a shower. The thought was fleeting and he turned in a circle before lying down on the floor. He wasn’t entirely fond of the idea of being all soaking wet, but he wasn’t completely opposed to it either.

He slipped easily into a dream of him and Ardra back in the garden, the fountain gurgling happily a few feet away from their intertwined bodies.

He pulled himself from his reverie just in time to avoid running into the large buck that had found his way onto the highway. He had been running through his combat drills that he had made up for himself along the way and had let himself slip a little too far into his own head. He mentally chastised himself and divvied up a little more of his consciousness to the task of avoiding physical harm.

He slowed the bike from jet engine to race car speeds and probed the surrounding country. It was still the same desolate waste land that it had been last time he had checked. The only life he could sense within a mile or so of himself was that of the native wildlife; lots of deer, skunk, rabbits and mice.

Once he was sure that the road in front of him was mostly free of obstruction, he accelerated once again and let the bike carry him away. He did better at keeping his mind on the road this time, and still had the mental capacity to plan for the assault he would make on the last of the Druids when he reached his destination. He grew more confident with each passing mile as outcome after outcome rolled through his head and he analyzed the best way to handle each one. Every time, making sure that his mission on this god-forsaken plane was a success.

From out of nowhere, a bright green wolf slammed into his chest, catching him off guard and sending him flying. The bike drove out from under him and continued to drive itself down the highway for several hundred yards before evaporating into the night. His instincts took over, leaving him no time to think. Black tendrils snaked their way out from his body and lashed at the air around him, hissing as they sliced through the empty space in search of their mark.

The wolf had vanished and he could sense no other life forms out of the ordinary. The nearest human presence that he felt was still a good distance off to the north and its mind was completely calm. Sleeping.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he rolled to the left a split second before the paws came in contact with his back. His right shoulder blade collided with the left shoulder of the animal and spun him around. The wolf landed gracefully on the asphalt and darted off to the east of the highway. He wasn’t about to let it out of his sight again and gave chase.

The rocks and sage brush made navigating the terrain in the dark quite the task, so he allowed himself to phase enough that he could glide along behind the animal without risk of tripping and losing sight of it. It was fast. Almost too fast.

Abruptly, the wolf stopped and evaporated into thin air. Green whisps of energy hung in the air for the briefest of moments before completely fading out of sight. Chaos phased back to a completely solid state and felt around him for some sign of life. Again, he felt nothing but the animals that lived in the barren wasteland of central Utah.

He cursed under his breath and phased almost to the point of returning to the Astral plane and willed himself back to the highway in an instant. When he was solid again, he checked his surroundings once more before summoning his bike again. As he settled on top of it, it roared to life and the tires squealed as he throttled the bike north, drawing ever closer to his final destination.

After the bike had been out of sight for fifteen minutes or so, he dropped the shield that had been protecting him from the creature’s detection. He released the wolf from the ring and barked out his instructions. “Go warn the others. Our numbers are too few to do any real damage, but we may be able to give her a little bit of extra time.”

As the green form sped to a blur and disappeared over a hill to the north, the man said a simple prayer, “Please guide Ardra to victory.”

She was feeling surprisingly spry after her shower and couldn’t help but laugh quietly to herself when she came down the stairs and saw Kaiser asleep on the kitchen floor two feet from his food dish. She allowed herself a moment to think back to when he had first become part of her family. She found it funny that she had wanted nothing to do with the poor guy back then, and now she couldn’t see herself without him.

Sure, it might be the fact that her grandmothers were the only family she had left. It might be the fact that, as much as she hated to admit it, she needed a friend in all of this and she couldn’t bring herself to endanger Piper. Kaiser was already in it. Besides, even if she told him that she was going to go it alone, she had a sneaking suspicion that he would just ignore her anyway.

She plopped herself down on the couch in the living room and let her mind wander. She had spent so much of the day being completely focused on what she was doing that she felt she had earned a break. The shower had done wonders for her aching back and stiff muscles and now the relaxation on the couch was quickly lulling her back into a light slumber. She told herself that if Chaos was close enough to pose a threat, she would feel it and so would Kaiser. The sad attempt at mollification calmed her brain and allowed her to doze off and get the rest that her body was suddenly craving like oxygen.

She was pulled quickly into the all too familiar dream. The darkness was inside of her, all around her, on her skin and in the air. Fighting to get in and fighting to get out all at the same time. She was once again being torn in two and powerless to stop it. She could feel the warmth seeping out of her as more black tentacles wrapped themselves around her, pushed their way into her, snaked their way to her very core. There was no hope of containing so much darkness. There was no hope of saving the man whose shocking blue eyes were staring back at her from the mass of tangled black snakes.

Instead of the dream ending the way it always did, she was gently pulled from her slumber by a soft nudge on her cheek. The wet nose was followed with a quick lick from a long, slimy, warm tongue.

She gazed into those familiar blue eyes for several long seconds, not missing the blatant concern that shone through bright and clear.

Was it that dream again? You were tossing and turning pretty badly.

She didn’t want to scare him or show him any weakness, but she didn’t want to lie to him either. She decided on something in between.