Warrior from the Shadowland (4 page)

Deranged.

Wrong.

Nia
knew that they’d had a far better chance against the six Air Phases than they’d
have against Cross, if he turned the sword on them next.

Uriel
had killed two of the three men he’d been fighting.  The last one was
attempting to pin him to the floor when Cross came up behind him and stabbed
the attacker through the neck.  The guy’s eyes rolled back to stare at Cross in
a sort of dazed stupefaction as he slumped sideways.

Cross
actually smiled.  He twisted the blade in a practiced flourish and took the
Phase’s head clean off.

Ty
cringed.

Ignoring
Uriel, who was breathing hard from the battle, Cross calmly decapitated the
other two bodies.  Nia still couldn’t force herself to look away.  Besides the
Fall, very few things killed Elementals.  Beheadings were one of them.  It
should have made her sad to lose more Phases when the Elementals needed every
member of their species so desperately.  In her heart, though, Nia wasn’t sorry
to see such terrible men exterminated forever.  They would have killed her
twin, kidnapped her cousin, and probably destroyed the universe in the
process.  Their deaths weren’t going to keep her up at night.

Tharsis,
Ty, Uriel and Nia stayed perfectly still as Cross finished his grisly task. 
None of them were sure what to do next.

“Um.” 
Tharsis finally cleared his throat.  “Wow.  Nice work, crazy guy.”  He gave an
encouraging nod, his gaze still fixed on the body in front of him.

Cross
disregarded that.   Mercury colored eyes swung around to pin Nia.  “What the
fuck were you thinking?”  He demanded, harshly.  His voice was a shadow of
shadows, seeping out and chilling the air.  “Do you want to die, now?  Is that
it?”

Nia’s
eyes widened.  “Who, me?”  She actually glanced over her shoulder to see if
maybe his glower was directed at someone else.  She couldn’t imagine why he’d
look so angry with
her
.  She hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Yes,
fucking
you.” 
He stalked closer to her.  “What if I hadn’t gotten here
in time?  What if I hadn’t felt you, again?  Huh? 
Then
, where the hell
would you be?”

“Probably
trying to get back under that desk.”  Nia admitted, before she thought better
of it.  She had no clue what most of his rant meant, so anything she said could
set him off.  He was crazy.  It would undoubtedly be better to keep her mouth
shut, but Nia had never really excelled at doing that.

She
held her ground as Cross moved closer to her, once again struck by how lovely
he was for a lunatic.  His dark hair swept back to his shoulders, offsetting
the pale color of his skin.  There probably wasn’t a lot of sun in the
Shadowland for tanning.  For some reason the unexpected thought made her smile.

Cross
didn’t appreciate her small grin.  “You think this is fucking
funny
?” 
He sounded incensed.

“Stop
swearing at me.”  Her smile faded.  He still gripped the sword in his hand, but
Nia wasn’t about to let him just push her around.  “And stop trying to
intimidate me.  Just
stop
.”  She held up a hand in the universal “don’t
come any closer” signal.  “I mean it, Cross.  Don’t.”  There was so much power
clinging to him, she could feel it like an electrical charge.  No one should be
able hold so much energy and still function.

Unique.

Deadly.

Wrong.

Against
her will, Nia took a small step backwards.

Cross
froze.  His eyes flashed with an emotion Nia couldn’t quite identify; hope or
sorrow or something that vanished too fast for her to read.  “You know who I
am?”  He asked, in a softer tone.

“You’re
the only Shadow Phase left.”  Nia gestured to the silver streak at his temple. “Narrowing
it down wasn’t too hard.”  She felt a little more secure, now.  When she’d said
“stop,” Cross had halted on a dime.  That was a pretty clear indication of the
type of man he was.  He wasn’t going to hurt them.  “Everyone knows about you
and what you did after the Fall.”  He’d saved the universe.  Did he really
think any Phase,
anywhere
, hadn’t heard that story?

Cross
glanced away as if that wasn’t the answer he wanted.  He suddenly seemed to
realize that he was covered in blood, because he winced.  Avoiding Nia’s gaze,
he wiped his free hand down the side of his pant leg, trying to get it clean.

“The
Shadow King?  Aren’t you supposed to be all
wrong
, now?”  Uriel inquired
with typical Wood Phase tact.  “Why are you helping us?”  He pulled himself to
his feet and eyed Cross like he was a volatile science experiment.  “Why are
you here, at all?”

“I’m
on vacation.”  Cross sneered.  He watched expressionlessly as Uriel and Tharsis
both moved closer to Nia.  “What’s your name?”  Blood dripped off the blade of
the sword and onto the floor.

“Well,
that’s Uriel.”  Nia explained when no one else seemed willing to answer.  “And
this is my brother, Tharsis.  And that’s my cousin Tritone.”  She pointed over
her shoulder. “She’s the one hiding in the doorway.”

Ty
bit her lower lip and regarded Cross warily.

If
Cross was impressed at meeting the infamous Queen of the Water House he didn’t
show it.  He met Nia’s eyes, again.  “Not
them
.  What is
your
name?”  His voice suggested that only a simpleton would have misunderstood his
question, even though he hadn’t been looking at her when he’d asked it.  “What
the hell do I care what the rest of ‘em are called?”

For
some reason, Ty’s mouth curved at that.

“Gee,
thanks.”  Tharsis muttered.

“Oh. 
Me?”  Nia ran a hand through her hair.  “Well, I’m Nia.”  She wasn’t used to
introducing herself to other Phases.  Pretty much everyone knew her from her
passionate, if inevitably losing, arguments at Council meetings.

“Nia.” 
Cross’s expression became something close to awe.

“Nia
is the princess of the Water House.”  Uriel told Cross, pointedly.  “She’s
not
wrong.  She’s normal.”

Cross
looked down at his palms again.  Blood still stained them.  He shoved his free
hand into his pocket, holding the sword with the other.  “She’s not normal.” 
He retorted, almost to himself.

Nia
wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“Should
we be –like-- escaping now?”  Tharsis wanted to know.  “’Cause, I don’t think
the humans will understand sword fights and headless guys in their office when
they come back from lunch.”  The Fall had made Tharsis immune to dead bodies. 
He absently nudged the torso in front of him with the toe of his black Converse
high top.  “Plus, the whole ‘happening in a serology lab thing’ is not gonna be
great if the humans start testing the blood of these guys.  Elemental DNA’s
bound to raise some red flags.”

Uriel
sighed.  “Humans.”  His tone said it all.

Cross
scowled over at Nia, seeming to remember that he was an arrogant madman.  “What
the hell are you even
doing
around humans?”

Nia
hesitated, not sure how much to tell Cross.  Not sure why he was in the human
realm, at all.  He may have sided with them during the Air House attack, but
everyone with a brain in their head hated the Air House.  Cross probably wasn’t
going to love the idea of accidently joining up with a rebellion.  He seemed
pretty touchy.  Besides, Nia didn’t want to get him in trouble with the
Council.  A Banishment sentence really wasn’t the best way to repay someone for
saving your life.

“We’re
on vacation.”  Ty put-in, seriously.

Cross
flashed her a quick glare.

Nia
turned to stare at her cousin in shock.  Ty didn’t joke with other Phases.  She
even kept Uriel at a polite distance.  Ty’s dry sense of humor only ever came
out around family.  It was bizarre.

Ty
raised a shoulder in a small shrug, a smile still curving the edges of her
mouth.

Nia
looked back at Cross and prepared to lie.  Nia was actually a fairly good liar,
which was why she was presently in the human realm and not staying safely in
the Water Palace like the Council thought.

When
she met Cross’s mercury eyes though, every “very reasonable explanation for all
of this” excuse went right out of her head.  She heard herself telling him the
truth.  “We’re searching the blood records.  Someone donated plasma and it was
used at this hospital.  Only the blood wasn’t completely human.”

She
didn’t go into detail about what they were hoping the other, non-human,
qualities in the blood
were
, of course.  Cross would think she was
nuts.  Job certainly had.  Because, Nia’s rebellion was searching for something
magical.  Something that could undo the Fall and restore what had been lost.

The
Quintessence.

To
most Elementals, she might as well have been hunting Big Foot.

Uriel
and Tharsis winced in unison.  “Nia, you’re not hooked up to a lie detector.”  Thar
hissed.  “You could maybe fudge a little bit here, huh?”

Cross’s
eyebrows shot up.  “Humans and Elementals can’t interbreed, if that’s what
you’re thinking.”

“I’ve
never been comfortable with that theory…”  Ty began, musingly

“Nia.” 
Uriel interrupted in a calm sort of voice.  “Whose blood is that on your arm?”

Cross
swore savagely in Elemental.

Nia
winced.  She’d forgotten about the cut on her shoulder, but now she felt the
pain of it rush in.  “Oh, great.”  She looked down at the throbbing wound and said
the only think that came to mind.  “And now, my favorite blouse is ruined.”

Pain is my
element, as hate is thine

Percy
Shelly- “Prometheus Unbound”

Chason,
of the Magnet House was a mean son of a bitch and his need for vengeance was the
stuff of Homeric legend.  His hatred was so vast and unquenchable that it left
no room for any other considerations.  It overrode everything else in the
universe.  His festering, burning, aching desire to strike back at his enemies
consumed every moment of his life.

His
hatred
was
his life and it would be his death, as well.

Because,
Chason planned to destroy the world.

It
wasn’t that he
wanted
to end the world, exactly.  Truthfully, Chason
didn’t give a fuck about the world anymore, so he had no real feelings about
whether it should survive or not.  It was of no real consequence in his
single-minded quest for revenge.

Collateral
damage in his war.

Chason’s
real goal was to bring down the Air House.  To kill Parald, Parald’s
second-in-command, Gion, and every other Air Phase in existence.  To blow every
damn one of them into oblivion and smile while it happened.

Admittedly,
if the Air House fell, it did mean the collapse of the universe.

Chason
was insane, not stupid.  He knew that the other Houses couldn’t exist without
Air
,
for God sake.  It was one of the largest, most important pillars of Elemental
life.  Chason knew that if Parald and all his minions died, they’d drag the
rest of existence down with them.  He knew that it would finally finish what
the Fall had started.  It would wipeout everything with a quick whimper,
shrinking the universe down like the little black dot that appeared in the
center of old TV sets after you switched them off.  Chason knew
all
of
that.

He
just didn’t care.

Not
at all.

Because,
he’d trade everything, in every realm, in every time period that had ever
existed, for the satisfaction of seeing Parald dead.  Nothing else mattered to
him.  Not a tiny bit.

Chason
had conceived of several simpler plans to get rid of Parald.  After all, it
wasn’t
just
the collapse of the Air House that could end the world.  Any
important House tumbling would trigger the dystopia.  And there were a lot of
Houses with far fewer Phases left than the Air House.  Five in Wood House. 
Three in the Water House.  Two in the Crystal House.  The Shadow House only had
one. 
One
.  And everyone knew Cross was unstable from holding the
Shadows all by himself, so he’d be such an easy target.

Yes,
Chason had worked it all out in his own fracturing mind.  How, with a few quick
deaths of some random Phases, he could end the world and take Parald to hell
with him.  If there’d even
be
a hell after the apocalypse.  Chason
actually wasn’t sure about that.  But, so long as the Air House collapsed, he
supposed it didn’t matter.

Killing
Parald in such an easy way wasn’t good enough, though.  Just beheading all the
Time Phases, for example, then waiting for the Air House to crumple along with
everything else as a natural consequence of the past and future colliding.  It
was just so…
impersonal
.  So quick and distant and unsatisfying.

Chason
wanted Parald to
see
his death coming.  To experience it like an
inescapable wave of despair and lost dreams.  To know that there was absolutely
nothing he could do to ever stop it and that Chason, of the Magnet House had
been the one to set it loose on him. 

In
short, he wanted Parald to experience exactly what Chason had felt when he’d
watched his Match die in the Fall.

Watching
her life drain away, leaving nothing but an empty shell and the broken promises
of a stolen future.  And Chason wasn’t alone.  He had a small army of Phases
who had lost too much to ever go back.  People who wanted revenge more than the
continuation of pain and grief.  Who were willing to destroy
everything
just so they took Parald down, too.

The
Reprisal: Dedicated to wiping out the universe, one Air Phase at a time.

Job
had tried to talk Chason and his followers out of their vengeance so many times
the words had lost all meaning.  What did Job know?  Job didn’t even have a
Match.  He’d
never
had a Match. 
Nothing
got taken from him
in
the Fall.  The bastard had existed, stoic and alone, for a millennium.

He
didn’t
know
what it meant to lose the best part of you.  The empty
caverns that it opened up inside of you and the utter fucking solitude of it. 
A Phase-Match created one larger symbiotic entity out of two people, connecting
them as the universe was interconnected.  When Mara died, Chason had lost half
everything he was and all of his soul.

She’d
been so young and so beautiful.  Tall and slender with a shock of deep purple
hair at her temple that marked her as part of the Magnet House.  She’d been the
light in his world and her death had been like someone turning out the sun. 
Nothing could ever bring Mara back.  Chason accepted that, just as he accepted
that he wasn’t the Match that she’d left behind, anymore.  Mara wouldn’t
recognize him for the bitter, consumed man that he’d become.  Nobility and
honor had once meant everything to Chason.  In his heart, he knew his sweet,
forgiving Match would never want him to burn the universe to ashes to get revenge
on Parald.

But,
Chason didn’t have a heart anymore.

So,
he didn’t care about that, either.

Tritone,
Queen of the Water House was the key to his plan.  Many Phases in the Reprisal
would’ve gladly killed her on sight, sometimes as quickly as they would have
killed Parald.  Chason didn’t waste any of his precious hatred on Ty, though. 
He needed it all for Air House.  Besides, Chason didn’t blame Ty for the Fall
like so many others did.  He actually thought she’d shown real smarts.

What
woman in her right mind
would’ve
agreed to Phaze with Parald?

And
Ty had only been ninety-three, the year that Elementals came of age, when she’d
defied him.  When she’d resisted Parald and, some insisted, Gaia herself and
flatly refused to accept the Phazing.  Still a baby, she’d stood in front of
the Council and renouncing her Match to all the Houses.

It
was Chason’s equivalent of remembering a happy Christmas morning.

In
retrospect, he got a sadistic glee out of replaying the event in his mind again
and again.  He didn’t focus on how Ty’s actions had triggered Parald’s wrath
and, with it, the Fall.  Instead, Chason enjoyed the absolute agony on Parald’s
face.  His desperate arguments to the Council, trying to force Ty to stay with
him.  His screaming rage when Job had enforced the law and refused Parald’s
pleas.  The quiet triumph that lit Ty’s face as the other Air Phases dragged
Parald from the hall.

Gion,
Parald’s second-in-command, had been the last Air Phase to leave.  Even he’d
paused at the door to look back at Ty in something like shock.  She stood in
the center of the room, dressed in the turquoise robes of her House.  The robes
that her mother and her mother’s mother and so on back into the recesses of
time had worn to the ceremony to accept their Phase-Matches.

Only
Ty had told Parald “no.”  Her actions meant that neither she nor Parald would
have a Match or children or Phaze.  Most Phases would prefer death.  The Hall
had been utterly silent for a long moment, as everyone tried to absorb what had
just happened.

And
then Ty smiled.

Chason
actually admired the girl for that.  No matter what Parald had done afterwards,
on that day Tritone, of the Water House kicked his skinny, blond ass.

No,
Chason had no particular anger towards Ty.  But, he was still going to use her
to get to Parald.  Ty was Parald’s great obsession and biggest weak spot.  If
the Reprisal could get their hands on her, they could stake her out like a goat
and lure Parald right to them.  Ty would probably be killed in the process, but
then she’d only die when the end of the world came anyway.

Collateral
damage.

Chason
had been planning it all for months.  Now, though, he wasn’t sure they
shouldn’t reconsider some of the details.  Because, rumors were stirring.  The
Reprisal gathered gossip and tales from all the Houses.  Chason’s army came
from all over the Elemental world.  And whispers were reaching him, stories
that the unpredictable Queen of the Water House was about to pull another
rabbit out of her hat.

The
Quintessence.

According
to legend, the Quintessence was magic.  Pure rule-the-universe, genie-in-a-lamp,
magic
.  The Quintessence wasn’t exactly an Elemental, but it wasn’t
not
an Elemental, either.  It was the center of the compass.  The “everything else”
that assisted the Elementals in making up the universe.  The ether.  The spaces
in between.  The life of the stars.  The Quintessence was Divine in the truest
sense of the word.

Chason
was a realist by nature.  He’d never believed in that bedtime story.  He’d
never even seen that Bruce Willis movie, because the fabled “fifth element”
didn’t exist.  Unless you took into consideration that there were a lot more
Elements to nature than the idiotic Greeks bothered to count.

As
a Magnet Phase, Chason had always been annoyed at the smug superiority of the
first four Houses.  Why were they special?  Look where they’d gotten things:

The
Air House had murdered too many Phases to count.

The
Water House was at least partially responsible for the slaughter.

The
Fire House was populated by a bunch of lunatics, fluctuating between total
apathy and explosive rage.

And
the Earth House was headed by a smug bastard who tried to rule the other Phases
like a high school principal.

The
world was better off gone than with any of those assholes in charge, anyway.

Chason
had tried to put the Quintessence out of his mind.  But, again and again, his
thoughts had traveled back to the stories that he heard about its
capabilities.  It was Divine.  Not bound by the laws of nature, but bigger. 
More powerful.  He began to fantasize that it was a huge purple amethyst set
into a ring or a broach or something that glowed with magic.  A physical
manifestation of ultimate power.

And
then a little voice in his head had breathed, “What if it could destroy Parald
by giving him the Fall?”

Chason
had had a transcendent experience at the very idea.  Parald’s immunity to the
Fall had been so unfair that there were simply no words for it.  Such a slap in
the face that all of Chason’s previously held beliefs about good and evil,
punishment and karma, right and wrong had been blown to smithereens.  If Parald
was allowed to escape the Fall, then there was no God, no Gaia, no saving
grace. 
Nothing
.

It
was as simple as that.

Mara
died while Parald lived?

No
goodness or light in the universe would have allowed a travesty of justice on
that scale.  He wasn’t sure about Hell, but Chason knew that any ideas about
Heaven were pure bullshit.

So,
if he wanted justice, he’d have to mete it out himself.  Parald should die by
the Fall.  There was no way for Chason to make that happen by himself.  There
hadn’t been a case of the Fall in two years now, since the survivors were all
immune.  But, if Chason had the Quintessence he could do
anything
.

In
the small piece of his missing heart where his Match still lived, he knew that
there was an inherent flaw in his thinking.  Logically, he couldn’t deny the
existence of anything Good and then search for a substance fabled for its
Divinity.

But
Chason didn’t care about logic.

If
the stories were true, he could finally,
finally
, have the vengeance he
longed for and in the most poetic way possible.  The thought tantalized him. 
It was a dream dangling just out of reach and the Water House was the key to
grabbing it.

Nia
had been talking to Job for weeks now about something secret and it was clear
from her shouting that things were not going well behind closed doors.  Now,
the Water House had been spotted in the human realm, searching for something. 
Chason knew Nia.  She was the real power in the Water House, no matter who wore
the crown.

If
Ty thought that she could find the Quintessence, Nia would go for it, with or
without Job’s backing.  The Water Phases always went their own way; whether
that meant renouncing Matches or setting off on some mythic quest.  They were
emotional and stubborn and impetuous.

Chason
admired them for their innocent faith.  He’d believed in truth, justice and the
American Way once himself.  But, he was a lot wiser, now.  And he’d wring the Water
House dry if it got him one inch closer to his goal.

Chason
stared out of the window in his fortress for a long moment.  The Magnet Kingdom
had always been hard and grey.  The buildings were created from pure metals and
magnetized rocks, for the most part.  Yet, it stayed quieter than other places
in the Elemental realm, despite all the amplifying surfaces.  Chason’s father
Berke, the former Magnet King, hadn’t been a man of frivolity.  Magnet Phases
were expected spend their time on industrious activities for the betterment of
all, not on laughter or friendly conversation.