Forbidden (A New Adult Paranormal Romance) (30 page)

“You’re in no position to go anywhere,” she said.

“It’s our only chance. The Hive armies are coming.”

“Tell us how to fight them.”

He was about to, but memories of his home and the conflicting emotions that came along with them floored him. He saw Gnomica, she of the resplendent wings, leading the Hive armies as a unit. His mother, her abdomen hanging in folds, showering him with looks of love as he tried to make his one wing flutter. “You can do it, little one,” she said, fanning her wings in encouragement. “One wingbeat more . . . you can do it.”

The tortured landscapes of Spora captured on his crystals in his room – red, blighted, scorched and parched, but still possessing a wondrous and eerie beauty.

His tongue faltered, and when Snow White saw the look that passed across his face, her own features became sad.

“But of course, I can’t force you to betray your home and people. So you will forgive me if I must do everything for mine.” Her eyes moistened as she turned away. “Kalle! Nevue!”

Footsteps came running up. Aein turned to see scuffed boots approaching.

Nevue knelt by his side. “Aein, you’re injured. Is there any way you can heal yourself?”

The gleaming tip of a sword scored the ground on Aein’s other side. Despite the screaming of the nerve fibers in his neck, he made his head turn.

“I’m sorry for doubting you,” Kalle said in a gruff tone.

“Leave him to me,” Snow White said. “Everyone, please listen very carefully to what I have to say. Aein’s people will be coming from there.” She pointed to the lake. Her hand shook.

“We are ready,” Kalle affirmed. “We have been ready the moment you came to us with this news.”

It has begun, Aein thought despairingly. Perhaps it’s best that she goes with the King of this land. He can give her everything I can’t, if he survives this war.

Snow White’s fists were balled. “Remember what we talked about, Kalle. Fire destroys them, but they heal swiftly.”

Numbness began to spread throughout Aein’s flesh. It was almost pleasurable. He wondered how the history books would paint him: Traitor of the Blighted Lands, or the Crippled Prince who held to the Old, Outdated Laws.

A roaring swept from the lake again.

“God,” Kalle breathed, “what is that?”

Aein made himself turn again. A terrifying sight met his beleaguered eyes. Across the wide expanse of the lake, Megapods – luminous, beautiful, and already starting to crack along their seams – began to surface. There must have been over fifty of them. On the other side of the Wormhole which lay beneath the waters, he knew there were more.

“I must make haste and alert the army.” Kalle shot Aein a warning glance, then ran off to his horse.

“We’ll be spreading the word in all directions,” Nevue said. “Ghost, we’re going to need some Finnish speaking help.”

Ghost nodded.

“We’ll begin by warning those of us still stuck in the Pass,” Ravanne added grimly. “This time, I’m not going to let a little unfinished business stop me.”

They sprinted after Kalle’s galloping horse into the Pass. Now only Snow White, Gustav and Aein were left.

“Help me up,” Aein begged. He could feel his human body knitting, but the worst of the pain was far from over.

“You can’t even walk!” Distress was etched on Snow White’s features.

“I have a plan. And it involves that thing.” He weakly pointed at Awl’s flying vehicle.

#

In the flying boat, Snow White and Aein sat in the back while Gustav navigated up front. The interior of the vessel had cushioned seats and portholes. Gustav manned a set of controls that were strange to Aein: a curved stick that stuck out of a bevel in the floor, some strange clocks on a board of instruments. Gustav took all this in experimental stride, and after a few bumps, shudders and harrowing plunges from the sky that he managed to arrest, it became smooth sailing.

Chiva’s advice rang clearly in Aein’s head:
Sometimes, there is a back way.

They were heading towards that back way now.

Gustav’s magic map guided them through the stars and the sun that peeked out the day after. They had been travelling for a whole day already, inching closer to the Enchanted Forest. The flying vessel was not fast enough for Aein, but he was surprised that it even existed, for he had not known the humans were capable of flight. Perhaps Awl built it. He had always been an inventor, that Awl.

The anger rose above the slow simmer of his blood again. Heartbreak turned into calculated resolve. He would avenge Awl and his brothers.

He tried flexing his human arm. The bone inside had knitted, but the healing process was still far from complete. The torn tissues needed to bridge. More new flesh needed to be formed to fill the hollows. At least, he could now walk with a limp. But if he were to meet Dimynedon in a grudge match now, there would be no prizes for guessing whose limbs would be lopped off.

He took in Snow White’s smudged face, so earnest and worried. “When we arrive at the cave,” he said, “you do know that you are not coming with me, right?”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Snow White, this is no jesting matter.”

“I know this is no jesting matter,” she exploded. “Have I ever jested in anything I do? My world is at war and you’re suggesting that I’m jesting?” She sucked in her abdomen. He wondered if the altitude was affecting her mood.

What Kalle and the Bambenga must be going through was topmost in their minds. Aein imagined the grounded Lapp cavalry firing pitch-soaked, flaming arrows into the airborne Sporadean army. The thought of his fellow Sporadeans dying by the dozens chilled him.

“Can this thing fly any faster?” he asked Gustav.

“If you both are done arguing,” Gustav replied, “you would have seen on the map that we’re arriving at the cave.”

Relief coursed through Aein. He tried to catch Snow White’s gaze, but she was looking out of a porthole. Her mouth was set in a grim line.

The flying boat descended into a thicket of trees. It was twilight, and Aein could scarcely recognize one tree from another. But Gustav insisted that this was the place.

“The map has never malfunctioned.”

Leaves and branches scraped the outside of the wooden vessel. Aein wondered if its fragile wings would hold.

“Are you sure this particular Wormhole leads to where you mentioned?” Snow White asked Aein.

“I came through it. The Wormholes are specific to places they open to. The largest of them all is the one we left behind in Lapland.”

Gustav beamed. “I would really, really like to explore the other Wormholes. Awl came through one in Indukush, you said?”

“Yes. And there is one in the Americas where Vajal was sent to, as well as one in Afrique. That is why my brothers were sent to your world long before me, so that they can make the long trek before reaching our rendezvous. Being the youngest and most inexperienced, I was given the easiest and shortest task.”

“Wow.” Gustav couldn’t stop grinning from the implications. “Just, wow.”

“But once we find the cave,” Aein directed this at Snow White, “you must let me go alone.”

“Hey, I didn’t fly you all the way here to be cast aside like a coach driver.” Gustav pouted.

“You do not understand. I do not believe you can both survive the atmosphere of Spora, let alone the Wormhole.” Aein wasn’t sure he could survive the Wormhole either. He was counting on the protective pod he left behind in the cave, the one which cocooned him when he had first entered.
Please don’t let the insects have eaten it all up.

“How do you know that?” Snow White said. “You survived our world. What’s to stop us from doing the same in yours?”

“It is not the same thing. It is not something you survive by sheer willpower.”

“How do you know that?” Snow White repeated. “Have your scientists ever experimented? Have you read their journals and see their logs?”

Aein was at a loss. He was saved from having to answer when the vessel slowed down to a hover. Outside, the portholes showed that they were in a clearing, but instead of the little rocky outcrop that shielded the cave, a shimmering pond lay. The waters eddied and bubbled as though a fire were lit under it. Aein recognized the rainbow luminescence of a Wormhole.

“The Wormhole has enlarged,” he said worriedly. “It has consumed the cave and its environs.”

“What does that mean?” Gustav asked.

Aein shook his head. He didn’t know enough about Wormhole technology to speculate. How he wished now he had studied more texts and asked more questions of the scientists, but no, he had been all over the language, culture and forests. More anthropology than physics. He regretted it now.

Where was his cocoon? Drowned within the waters? The gnawing fear that he was about to fail assaulted him again like an old enemy.

“Please land us,” he instructed Gustav.

A sudden gust of wind slammed against the vessel, sending them hurtling against the wall. Gustav was knocked off his driver’s perch. The wind struck the vessel again with a loud thud, and Aein realized it was no wind. Forcing himself up with every single muscle protesting, he hobbled to a porthole.

“What is it?” Snow White’s eyes were wide.

Aein watched in disbelief as a huge black bird, larger than the size of two men bound together, flung itself against the vessel. He caught the glint of a vicious eye ringed by a corona of dirty yellow before something black and feathery slammed against the porthole, dashing its glass into splinters.

A high-pitched voice rang out. “Snow White! Show yourself.”

Snow White paled as she clasped the ledge of a porthole. “Oh my God.”

“Friend of yours?” Gustav said.

“I – I don’t know,” she said, making for the door. She was about to wrench the handle open when Aein threw himself against the door to stop her.

“That thing isn’t friendly,” he cautioned.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. Her expression was one Aein hadn’t seen before – a mixture of fear and resigned determination.

“Here it comes.” Gustav dove for cover.

A force, the biggest one of them all, juddered the vessel so mightily that Aein could hear the bows breaking and wood beams slipping from their seams. The vessel listed to one side, and then plunged, snapping boughs along the way. More glass shards clattered against floors, walls, and everything else. Before Aein could cover Snow White and Gustav’s splaying forms with his own, the vessel splashed into the live waters of the pond he now knew as the Wormhole.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They were in the Wormhole, Snow White knew, as light of such radiance and hues consumed her. The Wormhole Aein said should not be breached without a protective pod.

She scarcely had time to cry out or register any form of emotion when the vessel’s walls vanished around her. Whether it had disintegrated in the Wormhole’s energy or otherwise, she couldn’t tell. She floated in an infinitesimal funnel of light, as though she were hovering in the midst of an Aurora, buoyed by electromagnetic winds. She could not feel her limbs or the wind on her face. Everything was soundless where she expected there to be sound. She suspected that she herself had been transformed into light, and the experience was beautiful, and yet frightening, like what death must feel like.

Was she dead then? Aein and Gustav spiraled away from her. She called out to them, but her throat issued only a croak.

Then what looked like slivers of a massive broken mirror came hurtling towards her. Without gravity, she was helpless to run or claw away. She could only scream mutely as a large fragment struck her.

A flash of light. She was in the interior of a cave. Brownish crystals of all shapes and sizes filled brightly lit nooks and cubby holes in the walls. Snow White glimpsed images in those crystals – entire scenes frozen in time and space. A Sporadean male sat on a stone ledge, gazing at the crystals with rapt attention. She noted the withered wing on his back. She realized with a start that this was Aein.

Aein! So this was what he looked like. Snow White was neither shocked nor repulsed. In fact, she found a comeliness in Aein’s abdominal muscles and his multifaceted, multi-reflective eyes. He was encased in a red integument that looked hardier than an elephant’s hide. And of course, there was the acid test – could she love this being when he was in his own skin?

Uncertainty simmered within her. Perhaps love was too abstract an emotion. She certainly loved Aein’s soul in whatever form it flew, but could she lie with this alien creature, he who had six limbs? Could she press her mouth to his mandibles, made so clearly for rending? She pictured herself lying down with him, skin against skin, carapace to carapace.

She blinked. Their prison of flesh melted away and she saw his white, shining spirit, as wondrous as any angel’s. Her heart soared.

Aein. My love. May I always see you as you truly are.

The image splintered. The enormous raven which she knew from her dream as her stepmother loomed before her. The Raven’s beak held a mirror shard that was shaped like a lightning bolt. Before Snow White could veer away, the great bird opened its beak. The jagged shard catapulted forward and struck her in the face.