Forbidden (A New Adult Paranormal Romance) (32 page)

The Sporadean could only shake her head in despair.

“It doesn’t matter,” croaked the Raven. “This body is but a mirage anyway.”

Snow White worriedly ran her hands across the Raven’s torso and wings to feel for tender areas. A clump of feathers came off in her hand. The skin beneath where the Raven’s feathers had come off was human. The moment it came to contact with the air, it blistered. The Raven rolled upon her side, revealing a blanket of shed feathers on the floor. Her right wing was now a sparsely feathered arm.

Tears sprang to Snow White’s eyes despite herself. Without the Raven, none of them would have gotten this far.

“Stepmother,” she murmured, a stab of true pain in her breast. “Isobel.”

The floor was covered with black feathers as a naked Isobel finally writhed in pain. Her skin wore the blisters of exposure.

“The devil’s pact. It is being broken.” Isobel arched her back, and indeed, there was an awful snap, like a joint being popped out of its socket, followed by a sickening crack. Her hair rapidly whitened as fissures ran across her skin.

Snow White swung to Gnomica, who stared frantically back at her.

The cracks in Isobel’s once red lips widened. “I am no longer the most beautiful in the land. Neither of us is anymore. Oh,” she raised her fists to her face, “I must look hideous! I can’t bear for you to look at me!”

“Mother, it’s all right.”

“Let me go, Esmeralda,” Isobel said, clawing herself out of Snow White’s arms with unseemly vigor. Her hair was completely white now, and her face was that of a woman who had seen two centuries. She gazed down at her shrunken arms, her own wizened body which was starting to flake and her flapping breasts.

“Isobel,” Snow White cried in anguish, holding out her hand, “don't look down at yourself. Keep your eyes on me!”

“Don't touch me. Let me be.”

“Mother – ” Snow White leaped to her feet.

“Don’t come any closer.” Isobel teetered at the edge of the cave.

“No!”

For one crystalline, ephemeral moment, Isobel was silhouetted against the sky. Tears sprang into Snow White’s eyes as the furious winds buffeted her stepmother’s wispy body. Instead of falling into the rocky ground far, far below, Isobel disintegrated into fine dust that was whisked away by the howling wind.

Snow White could only stare, horror-struck. Her own skin sizzled with the rapid combustion of simultaneous excoriation and healing. Every part of her itched, but she still stood there, swaying. A gentle hand touched her shoulder. No, not a hand, but the serrated edge of an insect limb. Gnomica. Sisterly in her solidarity despite the language barrier.

The door opened. Aein took in Snow White’s ashen face and immediately ran to her. “What happened?”

Snow White could only tremble in his arms. No words were spoken as he cradled her, peering at the mount of feathers on the floor.

“You can’t stay here much longer,” Aein said. His concerned face wore the same honey-colored crusts, only they were in a more accelerated phase of healing. “As fast as you can heal, the air will strip your flesh from your bones. As for him,” he indicated Gustav, “you do understand that he will no longer be . . . ”

“Human,” she finished limply.

Aein nodded.

“From what I know about him, I don’t think he will mind that much.” She tried to smile, but the sides of her mouth hurt too much. At least Gustav was alive. She now understood the struggle Aein went through when he made the choice to save her.

“My mother now understands Thulrika and Dimynedon’s subterfuge. She is weeping at her throne. I have harnessed the MegaPods. Our armies will descend upon your world to stop the soldiers sent by Thulrika. I only hope it is not too late.” He lightly touched her face.

She caught his double meaning. “My face. It’s bad, isn’t it? I thought your blood will heal me.”

He shook his head. “Not completely. There will be scars. There are already scars.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She grabbed his hand. “Come. It’s time to stop a war.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Snow White rode on the back of a
Karskh. A broad-backed insectoid creature with a blue carapace as hard as iron plate, it was twice the size of an ordinary
Sporadean.
It boasted three pairs of wings. It gazed at her out of intelligent, resentful eyes.

“
It will not harm you,” Aein said. The soft, dewy skin of his face was mostly healed, and his complexion shone with a pinkness that called to mind a baby’s flesh. He was still in his human form, having not stepped into a cocoon since the day he arrived on Earth.

“
Is the Karskh from your world?”

“
It’s from one of our colonies.” Aein hesitated before adding, “A world our Judges found unworthy over a millennium ago. We made modifications to the species.”

Snow White eyed the modified
Karskh. This would be her people’s fate if she allowed Dimynedon to have his way. She clung to Aein’s waist as the
Karskh
flapped its heavy wings.

Behind them lay the main Wormhole of Mt. Nordstrom. The graceful peaks of the glacier-formed mountains made a ring around the lake, which now resembled a cauldron seething with splintered MegaPods. Snow White could see the Pass of Doubt, which trailed out of the caldera like the fluted leg of a keyhole. The army was visibly absent from the plains.

Snow White said restlessly, “Where are they?”

Aein did not reply. She could tell that he was every bit as troubled as she was. He surely did not wish to see his countrymen dead any more than she did her own, but neither did he wish to see them triumph. Aein struggled with an unenviable situation. At any rate, she loved him more for being so stoic about it.

Gnomica flew beside them, graceful and airy. She had been tasked with the generalship of this mission. She spoke several times into a brownish crystal the shape of a trapezoid.

“
It’s a communicator,” Aein explained, “as well as a map.”

“
Who’s she speaking to?”

“
Trying to, you mean. Thulrika.”

“
Any luck?”

He flashed a grim smile. “All we are getting is static. This means either the communicators have been destroyed, like mine was when I first entered – ”

“
Not by me,” Snow White said hastily.

“ –
by my passage into your world, or Thulrika has turned them off.”

“
So they truly have turned rogue.”

“
We have to bring them in to face court martial. If guilty, the penalty is execution.” He let the last word linger.

Instead of being vindicated, Snow White felt empty. This meant they would be even more desperate not to be caught. What did that bode for the upcoming capture?

As the hours passed, Snow White found ways to tell Gnomica apart from the others. Aein’s cousin possessed a light lavender tint on the topside of her wings and a slant to her robust, jewel-like eyes.
Yes, I can see why, as a boy growing up, he must have admired her.
Behind them flew seven
Sporadean
units, sent to hunt the ones who were misled into betraying the ancient laws.

“
We end this,” Gnomica, with Aein’s translation, announced firmly at the outset.

Snow White agreed, feeling an unexpected comradeship with her rival. She breathed in gulps of the cold, clean air above Lapland, so fresh it was ice upon her ravaged face. Patches of her skin glistened a pale pink on the path to healing. Aein was right. Much like a burn victim, there would be scars.

It was morning, and the sky was a sparkling blue. Such a contrast to what lay below.

Everywhere Snow White gazed, the ground was charred. Entire forests put to the torch. Billows of grey smoke trailed as red embers glowed in angry patches.

Snow White hesitated, then plowed on, aware of the aliens around her. “Is it your people who did this?”

“
No,” Aein replied. “Sporadeans
would never put to the torch the riches they crave.”

Then it must have been Kalle. Burning his way as his people retreated. Snow White could well imagine the very army she travelled with putting houses and fields of wheat, oats and barley to fire. Destroying the very riches the enemy craved.

Far below, a village in ruins stood as testament to the invasion. A little woebegone dog stood in the crumbled stonework and charred chimneys, barking at the sky. Snow White tightened her grip on Aein. No other life abounded. Had the villagers fled or were they all dead, prey to the bolts from the red
Sporadean
rods? They sped, passing blackened forests and plains. More deserted villages. More smoking fields of crops. More charred bodies of cattle and wildlife. The smell of soot. Over a mountain range where a river twisted, bleeding animal carcasses floated.

A man on a horse was making his way across the river. Snow White tapped Aein’s shoulder. “A survivor!”

The man saw them, panicked, and bolted his horse. The horse whinnied as it tried to ford the river, but slipped instead and was carried away with the current. The man flailed his arms and went under.

“
Oh no,” Snow White cried.

One of the
Sporadean
soldiers swooped down to hitch the man up from under his armpits. He gently laid the man down on the ground beside the river while Snow White, Aein and Gnomica descended.

“
We mean you no harm,” Snow White said. She knelt beside the man, who could not have been much older than she was. “Please, tell us what happened.”

The shivering man shook his head, his frightened eyes looking from her splotchy face and bald scalp to the others. He must have thought them all horrors. To Snow White’s surprise, Gnomica spoke to him in Finnish.

“
She learned it,” Aein said with a hint of pride. “She thought it would be the first human language she would speak.”

The man rattled something back.

Gnomica translated for everyone present, and Aein for Snow White: “When the monsters poured out of the lake, we were already warned. The King’s men rode through the towns and villages, and told us the monsters were afraid of fire. We burned every forest and field as we ran from our homes. The monsters destroyed our homes with cannons that punctured walls. Those who were not buried under the rubble fled to the fortress.”

“
Rova.” Snow White saw again Kalle’s castle with its battlements and walls. They were ten feet thick, if she remembered correctly. “They will make a stand there. If Lapland falls, Dimynedon will spread his wings to the south.”

To the lands beyond the Enchanted Forest.
My home.

They flew to Rova after rescuing the man’s horse. As they finally approached the fortress on the hill, Snow White heard the distant booming of walls being struck, as though thunder itself snaked through the city streets. The fields and houses outside the fortress were aflame. No human was in sight. Whether they were all dead or behind the castle’s walls, she had no way of knowing.

The fortress’s battlements were lined with flaring torches, all throwing out plumes of grey smoke. A rebel battalion of Sporadeans massed a distance away from the walls like landed creatures, even though they possessed flight. Several cannon-like weapons were mounted on tripods. The weapons were made from the same luminous material that formed the Hives’ walls.

“
What are those?” Snow White asked Aein.

“
A type of electromagnetic ballista.”

“
Electro what? Oh never mind. Why aren’t Dimynedon’s soldiers flying into the fortress?”

Aein pointed at a flotilla of balloons that blanketed the castle’s immediate airspace. “I am not sure what that is.”

Snow White wasn’t either. She gazed at the balloons. Unease prickled her newly grown skin. The balloons were each roughly the size of a small cottage, and tethered to the watchtowers by ropes. Each wore a pattern that would not have been out of place in one of the festive balls she had attended when she was a child.