Hers to Claim (30 page)

A profound silence followed her words and
, after a long moment, Adonia allowed her gaze to wander the faces of those surrounding her. Their images became blurred as tears filled her eyes, a reaction to the poignant exchange of embraces, kisses and emotionally wrought looks between Ari, Doral, Fleur, Eric and Sophi.

Hel pulled her to his side and wiped her tears away with gentle fingers.
Leaning down, he whispered in her ear. “Am I imagining things or does Eric DeStroia glow?”

She clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle a surprised
catch of laughter. Adonia thought of Sophi’s dignified husband and smiled softly before pressing a kiss to his lips and murmuring, “It is a residual effect from a previous communion with our Great Mother. He hates it. It would be wonderful if you could simply ignore it.” She wasn’t sure how to interpret Hel’s grunt.

Her attention was diverted from Hel when
Ari sighed and reluctantly disentangled himself from the embrace of Doral and Fleur. “I suggest that all of us rest, marshal our energies and come together in the morning to perform the Great Rite in a common ceremony, each of us with our established partners. It is easiest to access the metaphysical world and our Great Mother through this rite.”

“I agree,” Hel said. “I’ll have
the satellite chambers in Torre Bianca prepared for the three of you and Ducca DeStroia and his wife.”

With a weary smile
, Hel’s gaze stopped on Ramsey and Steffania. “My best of friends, I cannot, in good conscience, ask you and your lady join us in this rite, but will you again guard the door to the tower? I hope you’ll not be challenged but these times are uncertain and it’s critical we not be disturbed for what could very well be days.”

At Ram’s curt nod, Hel turned to back to Ari. “Please avail yourself of all Nyth Uchel has to offer. I’m sure you
’ll want to see your children and their nurses settled in.” At the word ‘children,’ Hel’s face relaxed. Adonia saw the yearning in it, and he dropped a lingering caress over her abdomen. “I should like to meet them if there’s time,” he said.

“We
’ll make time, now, Prince DeHelios,” Fleur responded. “But be forewarned, they have no sense of restraint or due dignity and have never met anyone they didn’t instantly consider a playmate. You’ll be immediately drafted into whatever game occupies them at the moment.”

As
Adonia and Fleur looked on in the nursery, Prince DeHelios, descendant of mighty kings, sovereign-head of the fabled Nyth Uchel, spent a carefree hour as the trusty steed of a four-year old as they battled a terrible
fell
wolf, capably played by the High Lord of Verdantia.

A sense of desolation and loss, emptiness and despair, beset Hel. He stood in an empty void, face-to-face with the scavenger-picked corpses of all those he had loved. The empty eye sockets and desiccated facial features of his mother and sister-in-law mocked him while the rotting flesh of his father and brother clambered up from where they had been struck down, hissing, “You should have died with us. You don’t deserve to live.”

He stood in the nursery staring
, as the tiny bodies of his children floated eye-level, looks of accusation written on their faces. Blood from the gaping slashes in their throats still glistened on their clothing; their heads tilted askew on their necks from the ferocity of the Haarb’s blows. “Why did you let them kill us, Daddy? Why didn’t you protect us?” Hel cried out in anguish and reached for them but his fingertips slid through empty air, and they slowly faded from sight, replaced by the snarling cadaver of his lady wife. With a strangled sob, he jerked upright. He was in his bedchamber in Nyth Uchel. “It’s a dream. It’s only a dream.”

Next to him, Adonia stirred and propped up. She was wide awake. He must have worn his tortured emotions on his face for she threw the covers back and wrapped herself around him. “Night terrors?” she murmured into his neck.

He swallowed heavily and tried to discipline his breathing, to still his thundering heart. “Yes. A dream that used to haunt me regularly. I thought I was free from it. I’ve not had it since returning to Nyth Uchel.”

“My prince, think of my love for you. Think of our babe. Our Mother’s enemy seeks ways to undermine you. Don’t allow it a foothold.”

Hel closed his eyes and let the warmth of Nia’s embrace and strength of her love wash through him. He thought of the promise of their unborn child. “You have named me your lodestar, Nia. You are my light as well.”

They held each other until the soft half-light turned to true dawn—unwilling to sleep for reasons neither wished to discuss.

~~~

When Hel had gone to wake the others, he’d found the three members of the Second Tetriarch not in their bedchamber but in the nursery, awake and entwined in each other in silence, watching their children sleep. “It is time,” he murmured and the three of them rose and followed him
noiselessly out of the nursery.

It was a solemn, lonely procession that slipped away silently to Torre Bianca at the break of dawn. Hel gripped Nia’s hand tightly
, unwilling to lose the warmth of her living touch for even a moment. He noticed that Eric did the same with Sophi, and the queen held each of her consorts by the hand. Even Ramsey had pulled his wife into his side with an arm slung over her shoulder.

As they reached Torre Bianca, Ramsey and Steffania fell to the sides and took positions at the ground floor entrance to the white tower. It had been agreed that the purpose for this communal working of the Great Rite would be withheld from the town’s population to avoid widespread panic. Only select retainers, Bernard and a few others, were told of its significance.

The members of the Second Tetriarch and then Adonia and Sophi filed through the tower doorway and Hel heard Steffania’s low murmur of, “Her light be with you.”

The last to enter, Hel and Eric paused and exchanged a warrior’s clasp
of muscled forearm with Ramsey and a nod of acknowledgement with Steffania.

DeKieran gazed steadily at both of them. “My vixen and I will hold this entrance until you emerge.” His mouth twisted wryly. “Don’t make us wait too long.”

Hel gave a dry laugh. “We shall try to be brief.” And then he closed the door on Ramsey’s humorless grin and barred it behind him.

The group ascended in the mechanical lifts and grouped briefly on the upper landing. Ari paused for a moment, and his
somber gaze swept their group. “As we agreed—though it cost us our lives—we must prevail. We attack as one blade, one thrust, but for Adonia. You are to be the last to engage the darkness. Do as Queen Isolde instructed and wait until you see no other hope. If you see us fall, summon our forbearers to the attack.” He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “For our people. For Her,” he said soberly.

“For our people. For
 Her,” their low chorus of voices echoed. 

Steely purpose filled Hel. They would succeed. They had to. He rejected any other outcome. Hel escorted the Second Tetriarch to their ritual chamber and then Eric and Sophi. When he closed the great arched door to the Chambre Cristalle behind him, he turned to Adonia. “Ready?” At her nod, he picked up the twin to the goblet Nia held, swallowed the contents and then disrobed.
 

Hel hoped that Nia was spared the bleak foreboding that continued to attack him—initial probes from their enemy meant to weaken him, he was certain. He could read nothing from her face or manner but confidence and love. As the
cinnagin
swirled through their system, he swept her nude body into his arms and laid her gently on the diamantorre slab. “I’ve given this some thought and I’m not going to bind you.” At her questioning look, a poignant sorrow made inroads into his cold determination. “I don’t know if I will be able to untie you, Nia. I cannot stand the thought of you surviving me, only to suffer a death of thirst or starvation bound to the dais.”

She returned his solemn gaze. “Ramsey and Steffania would free me.”

“If they lived. It is too uncertain for you and our child, Beauty.”

“We will succeed.” As he watched, Nia’s lips curved in a smile of limitless devotion and her lovely eyes shown with love. “Beyond death, my prince.”

Armored and strengthened by her confidence and love, he began.

It seemed the scorching heat of arousal tortured him endlessly, as sunk in Nia’s hot depths, he struggled to concentrate on the words of the rite. Decades of self-discipline and years of ignoring the complaints of his body served him though, as through the endless hours of erotic agony he held firm and finally reached the shattering culmination that catapulted him into the metaphysical world.

For the first time in his life, he wanted to turn tail and flee—anything to escape the roiling void that blackened the surface of their Great Mother with an inky cloud of pustulence, extinguishing Her golden light, suffocating Her life. Tendrils of desolate blackness stretched from Her into the aetheric plane like skeletal talons and impaled upon each talon writhed a sphere of golden light being slowly drawn into the central mass. Hel could name them: Ari, Fleur, Doral, Eric and Sophi. By the Goddess, the golden spheres looked so small and the evil they fought so infinite. Despair permeated his being. How could they prevail against this enemy? There was no possible hope. The dark was too vast, and they were too few. He gave a moment of agonized regret for his beloved Nia and their unborn child.

W
ith a battle cry of, “Verdantia!” that resounded across the metaphysical plane, he plummeted toward Her
surface and into the abyss.

Pain almost beyond endurance pierced him. An enormous force slammed him onto an arid, forsaken
plane of bleached bones and ruined buildings where red winds of acid-filled clouds flayed the skin from his body and carried his tortured screams swirling into the distance. The bodies of Haarb, their intestines trailing like viscous ropes from their gaping abdomens taunted him, brandishing the lifeless corpses of his son and daughter impaled on their swords, and in his pain and despair, he forgot. He forgot who he was. He forgot 
why
he was. He forgot that existence had ever held anything but anguish and hopelessness, and the howling wind seemed to fill with the gloating overtones of triumph.

In the eternity of his suffering, for the merest instant his despair receded, and a word flared in his mind like the flicker of a star in the deepest night.
 
Nia.
 Hel recognized the power in that word 
Nia.
 The longer he held the word in his mind, the brighter the starlight glowed on the shadowed desolate plane, and Hel clung to that word as if it held his immortal soul.

~~~

Adonia surrendered utterly to the fires raging within her. Awareness of time fled before the all-consuming erotic heat of Hel’s body working its magickal torture on her. When climax detonated within her, her consciousness burst into awareness on an aetheric plane much changed from when she’d journeyed there last.

She barely contained her cry of despair as she realized the roiling blackness consuming the aetheric
plane blotted out the light of their Great Mother. The diseased, tornadic whirlwind on the surface of Her obliterated all illumination but six small specks, specks that Adonia realized to her horror were her beloved Hel, Sophi, Eric, and the Second Tetriarch.

One by one, the blackness ate away at the golden spheres until all light was extinguished
, and she knew with certainty that she had witnessed the deaths of those she loved. She felt the tearing pain as first Ari, then Fleur, then Doral, Eric and Sophi fell. Finally, with a scream of inconsolable grief that echoed throughout the darkness, Adonia felt the rending of her soul as Hel vanished. It seemed the black boiled up in greedy exaltation, and pain and despair, the like of which she’d never known, eviscerated her metaphysical being. She almost succumbed, throwing herself into the black void, wanting nothing more than to join her beloved. But she held to the greater goal. 
He
 would not have acted so selfishly. In this, she could serve her prince as he would have wanted.

“Beyond death, my love, and in death I will join you. But first, I have a duty.”

Adonia assembled her shattered heart and set aside her crippling sorrow, and sent a call into the aetheric plane. “By the shared blood of the raven, I call you, Isolde DeCorvus, First Queen of Verdantia, and with you, your consorts, Federago DeHelios and Agentio DeLorcha. I summon you to this plane and bind you to my will.”

We answer your summons, Lady Raven. What is your will?

Adonia felt the distinct presence of Federago. “Help me summon those noble kings and queens who followed you. We go to war against the Great Deceiver.”

Call these names, daughter of my blood, and they will come.

And so, crying out the names that Queen Isolde gave her, Adonia began the roll-call of the mighty kings and queens of Nyth Uchel. Adonia had no room for more emotion. Hel’s death, and that of the others, had stripped her of the ability for anything but heart-rending grief. Had she been able to feel, she would have been awestruck as each majestic personage appeared until the assembled host resembled a multitude of flaming suns gone nova.

For Her! For Verdantia!

In response to the battle cry from a voice she recognized as Federago, the assembly swelled into eye-searing radiance and streaked into the center of the roiling black invasion—and was consumed. As blackness swallowed their last hope, Adonia surrendered to the grief ravaging her heart. She had one final task to perform to honor her prince. Holding the thought of her beloved Hel in her mind, knowing with surety that she went to her death, she arrowed into the midst of the dark void and engaged the Great Deceiver in combat. As she lanced into the heart of the ravening darkness, the familiar assault of hopelessness and despair began.

Once more she lived the moments of her greatest heartbreak
, but this time, her enemy had a weapon of stunning power—Hel’s death, Sophi’s death, Fleur’s death. Adonia watched and felt their life force being eaten alive and torn from her heart over and over again until the pain of their loss consumed her, and yet, she held fixed on her lodestar. 
I am the beloved of the light-bringer.
 The Great Deceiver could do its worst to her, but it could not corrupt that eternal truth. She seized and held that thought until she felt herself slipping into the great void and consciousness left her.