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Rayen tried to move but Takoda anchored her in place with his hand on her shoulder. He said, “The shaman won’t harm you.”
She couldn’t decide if his hand was to comfort her or keep her from running. No one could reassure her right now, and with her level of adrenaline reaching a new high, she doubted anyone could prevent her from running, either.
Looking around, she saw the other three horsemen still mounted and waiting a hundred feet back.
Were they positioned in case she took off again?
Sweat ran down the side of her face and pooled at her neck. Her fingers fisted and she was alert to every sound as she turned back to the shaman.
“Do not fear me, Ashkii Dighin,” the shaman said in a voice gruff with age. “I only wish to speak with you.”
She found her voice. “How do you know who I am?”
“I have seen you in a hundred dreams. The last one was yesterday. That is why Takoda came for you.”
Could this man really have answers? Finally.
Could she trust any of this?
The spirits in her dream had also called her by that name, but this shaman couldn’t even see her.
The shaman must have taken her silence as disbelief. He asked, “Do you have the blue-green eyes of the sea?”
Hard to deny that with Takoda standing here. “Yes.”
“Do you have magic that comes from within?”
Takoda didn’t know about her powers, so he couldn’t have told anyone. Her palms dampened. Hope coursed through her at just how much this shaman did know, so she said, “Yes.”
“Do you come from another time?”
That caused the skin on her arms to prickle with warning. How should she answer that question? Instead, she asked, “Why would you think that?”
A smile formed on the elder’s lips. “This is the one, Takoda.”
“Wait a minute,” she complained. “I didn’t say I was from another time.”
Takoda said, “But neither did you deny it.”
This was getting stranger than being dropped at the Byzantine Institute and finding a laptop that opened a time portal to another world. The one her hand had gone into the monitor on.
Into. The. Monitor.
She’d survived that, plus time travel to the future and back. This shaman couldn’t be any scarier than facing monsters in the Sphere, so she admitted, “Yes, I’m not from this ... place.” She chickened out at the last minute when she was going to say not from this time in life.
No one reacted, so she added, “If you know so much about me, maybe you can tell me who exactly my family is, because I have no memory other than pieces that fall together sometimes.”
The elder nodded. He started chanting and opened his hand.
“No!” she shouted and raised her hands even though he couldn’t see her. Or could he? “Stop that.”
He paused his chanting and angled his head as if he could see her. “What is wrong, child?”
What wasn’t wrong?
She ran her palms over her wind-blown hair and dropped her hands. “I will tell you the truth and answer your questions if you promise to return me to the school by three-thirty this morning.” In the ensuing silence, she added, “And don’t use your magic to send me to another place.”
“I can not send you home, Rayen.”
She hadn’t really considered the possibility of going home until he said that, but the reminder that she had no way back to her family ripped a piece of her heart open.
Everyone belonged somewhere. Except her.
The only place she’d felt as though she belonged at all had been in the Sphere with the MystiKs.
And with Callan.
But that was temporary. Hoping for more was a fool’s dream.
“You do not have much time, Rayen,” the shaman warned.
“For what?” Everyone kept telling her what she could and could not do, and that time was running out, but none of that made sense to her.
“You have a destiny to fulfill.”
She kept hearing that, too. “To do what?”
“To save your people.”
Her eyes stung and her voice shook with emotion. “I can’t.”
Takoda had observed silently with his arms crossed. He asked, “Why do you say that when you have yet to hear what the shaman has to tell you?”
She was too weary to keep pretending that she was anything except what she was—a seventeen-year-old girl sent back in time and stripped of her family and her memories.
Lifting her hands to ask for a moment, she said, “This might be hard for you to believe, but I’m going to tell you the entire truth and hope that you will let me save the people that I can. I came awake in the desert just a few days ago with a beast chasing me that was capable of changing forms. It wasn’t a real living animal. It was a creation built for one purpose—to kill. I escaped it, but then I was arrested with other young people. The law enforcement called us runaways. They couldn’t find any identity for me here, because I haven’t been born yet in this time. I am from the future.”
The shaman had lowered his gourd and kept his cloudy-eyed attention on her, so she continued.
“They dropped me at that private school where I met two students. The three of us accidentally found a portal to the future. We landed in a place called the Sphere where other young people known as MystiKs are imprisoned by SEOH, a man who is the leader of all the TecKnati in their world. I found out that I am a C’raydonian, that—”
Rattling erupted from the gourd, and the shaman stabbed it toward the sky. He stared up and chanted softly.
Words froze in her throat.
Did he see someone up there like she sometimes saw her old ghost man, Acheii?
She was terrified that she’d say the wrong thing and he’d flash her out of here to another place in time. He’d said he couldn’t send her home, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t send her further back in time.
After several long seconds of the elder shaking his gourd and singing a chant to the heavens, he calmed down and lowered the gourd to his side, where it quieted.
He said, “You are the one.”
Clearly, what she’d just shared had not influenced his thinking one bit.
Trying again, she said, “I really think you have the wrong person. My people are C’raydonians and while they are descendants of the Navajo, their group broke off to live in solitude. They were killed almost a hundred years from now, wiped out completely by a virus. I’m the only one left.”
The MystiKs believed the TecKnati had brought the deadly K-Virus back from space explorations. After the virus killed much of the world, pockets of reclusive people from spiritualists to dedicated scientists and researchers who hadn’t been infected came together in ten cities in this place called North America. From what she’d learned, the C’raydonians hadn’t been so fortunate, and the virus ran rampant through their population.
Any who didn’t die outright had been hunted to extinction.
Both the MystiKs and TecKnati had killed C’raydonians to protect their fragile populations—the ones who had not been infected—but it seemed the TecKnati leader had taken a special interest in wiping out C’raydonians.
“You have a destiny that you cannot avoid,” the shaman repeated. The man was still stuck on one track.
“If I listen to what you have to tell me, will you answer some questions then let me go?” she asked, just as determined to gain what she needed.
The elder’s reply was to raise that blasted gourd again and begin chanting. They were getting nowhere.
She decided to let him move ahead with his ceremony in hopes that once he finished, she could leave. But if a cyclone blew up out of that fire, she wasn’t sticking around.
The shaman sprinkled crystalized grains over the fire that poofed and shot a flame high in the air, then died down. She wasn’t sure he was still with them when he began talking in a strange tongue to no one in particular.
Then he spoke words she understood.
“The future is in the past ... One will seek and all will forfeit.”
Her blood turned to ice. She’d heard those phrases in the Sphere.
The shaman continued, “When three become one ... the end has begun. The gateway will open ... a path will close.”
Her ghost grandfather, Acheii, had said that to her.
As if she’d called him, Acheii appeared next to the shaman, who smiled and angled his head toward the ghost. Was he acknowledging the specter? The shaman continued speaking. “A friend enters as enemy ... an enemy departs as friend.”
These were words from the Damian Prophecy the MystiKs spoke of during her last trip to the Sphere.
She’d heard only bits and pieces of the prophecy. This man’s version might differ from the one she’d heard before. She repeated the shaman’s ramblings in her mind, determined to remember every word to share with the MystiKs.
If she ever saw them again.
She started to speak.
Acheii raised his hand, palm out, and shook his head at her.
The shaman chanted another few seconds, then lifted his blind gaze to the sky again as he spoke. “Day of birth as Red Moon rises ... Night of end when last moon sets. Three must unite ... for the scales to right. The last will lead when others cede.”
He dropped his chin and those empty eyes stared at her. Through her. She couldn’t breathe, waiting for his next words.
“All turn to the outcast. The past speaks to alter the present ... a bond of two will set us free.”
All turn to the outcast echoed in her mind.
She trembled at the push of power that rushed around her.
Was she the outcast?
Acheii gave the shaman a nod of approval and vanished.
The night was deathly silent, and the flame flickered gently.
Takoda didn’t speak or move an inch. They waited on the shaman’s next words. He frowned and angled his head as if listening to some voice she couldn’t hear. He nodded and seemed to listen again, then his hands trembled, and his mouth opened in shock.
When the shaman’s frightened face turned to her, he said, “Go now, Rayen, or you will miss the window you must pass through. If Callan dies, all is lost.”
“How do you know about—” She stopped in mid sentence when what he’d said hit her. He was allowing her to leave.
No, the shaman had ordered her to go and whatever he’d been listening to had frightened him.
Her skin chilled at realizing the prophecy was more than a bunch of words in the future. She was tied to it.
And so was Callan ... if he lived.
