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“WHAT ARE THEY DOING up there?” Pellus asked as he paced in a circle.
“Are you serious, adept?” Remiel said. Pellus replied with a wry smile.
The commander has not had this laser-sharp look in her eye since Osmadiel’s death. I should be reassured.
“Tell me again, Three, please, what you know of the outcome,” Pellus said. “It is so strange, what I see and feel. The vortex of power surrounding Barakiel when he emerged from the falls was like nothing I have ever witnessed, not even when he and Zan bonded in Union. Their bonded energy appears as millions of tendrils of light to me, in the rich shades of wine and the evening sky, but now I also see bold strokes of black, sapphire, and white. They fall into each other, consume each other, birth each other. If I gaze too long I become dizzy. I cannot tell if what I see is a good thing, or bad.”
The healers laid their hands on Pellus to cease his pacing and smiled with such loveliness that even his anxious soul was soothed. “Barakiel is Balance. He is power beyond any we have felt. When we healed High Commander Lucifer before his rebellion, we felt something like this energy, but Barakiel possesses something— ” they looked around the lush basin before settling their eyes on the lower cascades, “else. A different power, integrated. Think of the Turning, positive to negative in a steady rhythm. But what if that rhythm beat so rapidly that it did not seem like a rhythm at all, but a circle? Even we do not fully understand this, Pellus, but he is not a Balanced system of Creation and Destruction. He is both simultaneously, a power realized deep within his nature, as if he has joined the Guardians but kept his physical form. We do not know how he journeyed so deep, but we were terrified to feel it.”
“He frightened you?” Pellus asked, the creases deepening on his forehead.
“Do not misunderstand us. We felt violence, hatred, and murderous intent, but also love. We did not think he would hurt us but we could never contain that power. We would lose ourselves.”
They cannot contain it? These ancient healers whose origins are lost to time? How can that be?
“Can Barakiel contain it?” Remiel asked.
“We cannot say,” the healers said, “but the energy radiating from that promontory is something beautiful.”
Remiel grinned and grasped Pellus’ shoulder. “He is back, adept. Perhaps better than ever. We will rescue Jeduthan. We will avenge the suffering warriors.”
“Balance willing, commander, but I am afraid the carnal indulgence of our friends up on that ledge is rather trying my patience, and I am not accustomed to witnessing energy I cannot comprehend. It has me quite agitated.”
“Warriors of the Rising can be single-minded when it comes to their passion,” Remiel said. “I would wager Barakiel had no other thought in his head, but they have to come up for air soon.” She patted Pellus on the back. “Your impatience is perfectly understandable. Shall I remind him of his duty?”
“No, it is all right, commander. Zan makes him stronger.”
His forbearance was soon rewarded when Barakiel leaped down from the promontory with Zan, the energy of their Union shining in the colors of wine and sunset. As Barakiel retrieved his robes, Pellus finally allowed a whiff of elation to pass through his worry. The warrior’s limp was gone, as were his scars, and he moved with fluid power. The sight of the bonded mates left Pellus speechless.
“Forgive my rudeness,” Barakiel said. “I was not rational. I needed Zan to accept what I felt, to give it back to me, so I could see it clearly, feel it without my thoughts crashing together. Zan and I, we are everything, Pellus, everything!” He picked Pellus up and spun him around. “I will fight, commander, I can fight!” He grasped Remiel’s shoulder so hard she winced. “No one will stop me. The Guardians speak to me. I am Lucifer, yet I am so much more than Lucifer. I always was, yet I was too foolish to see it. My love is Balance. Oh, Zan— ” He seized her and passionately kissed her. When he let her go a few moments later, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked around sheepishly.
“Are you a rational being again, honey? I think you regressed there for a moment.”
Barakiel’s laughter echoed through the basin, blending with the roar of the falls and the screams from the jungle that sought to answer him. Pellus felt the sound in his chest, saw its robust waves fly outward and rebound. Zan laughed with her mate, as did Remiel and the Three. Pellus was stunned by his urge to join them.
How can I laugh when Jeduthan suffers? But look at him! Perhaps she will not be suffering for long.
“And Three!” Barakiel glided to them, gathered their hands, and softly kissed them. He kneeled and looked up at them with eyes as bright as Creation. “It is impossible for me to express my gratitude, you know that.”
“We felt your gratitude, Barakiel. And so much more. You have become as the Guardians and we are amazed. Your time has come.”
“Yes. We must retrieve Zan’s protective suit and her weapon and journey to the Wasteland. We will reunite Pellus with his mate. But first, I want to eat. A lot.”
Flavor exploded in Barakiel’s mouth. To eat when famished was glorious. To be alive was glorious. Zan sat beside him, tucking into the well-prepared vegetarian food with a gusto nearly equal to his. The flush of her skin, the light of enjoyment in her eyes, her fine-boned hand as she pushed hair out of her face, overwhelmed him with love. He grabbed her and kissed her, getting the cornmeal-crust of the oyster mushroom he’d just eaten all over her face.
“Honey, please!”
Barakiel laughed and resumed stuffing his face. The others ate more delicately, all regarding him with bemused smiles. They had ordered food from a pricey vegetarian restaurant in Somerville and had taken it back to the suite in their luxurious Boston hotel, judging that his enthusiasm for his food might attract just a bit of attention. They were right, of course. It was bad enough that he’d terrified the hostess, striding up to her and announcing they would have two orders of every entrée on the menu. She’d stared up at him with her hands in front of her as if holding off some invisible onslaught, not least because he’d forgotten to modulate his voice, causing everyone in the restaurant to gawk at them. Zan had pivoted him back out to the street to let Pellus handle the transaction. He’d attracted just as much attention outside, especially because Zan quipped that the hostess acted like she’d just seen an alien. A bad joke, but he’d laughed uproariously anyway. Passersby all looked around wildly, then up at the sky, perhaps afraid more monsters would drop on their heads. At first, they did not comprehend that an individual could make such a sound, but eventually their eyes settled on him, including the eyes of a few of the black-clad heavily armed police officers that seemed to be everywhere in Boston and its suburbs.
I cannot repress my energy. We must get to the Wasteland.
A half-hour later, Barakiel was still eating. He consumed every speck of food in the room, drank a six-pack of beer in a few minutes, then a gallon of water in the next. He wiped his mouth and stared so intensely at his friends they all moved back.
“I am crazed, I know,” he said, laughter at their expressions bubbling up inside him. “It is a good thing, I assure you. I will slaughter a path through Abraxos’ traitorous warriors with no more effort than a belch.” He belched, long and loud.
“That was a little on the nose, Rainer, don’t you think?” Zan said.
“Ha! I will recover my class when I am not feeling so elemental. Indulge me.” He seized her, spun her around, and slathered her face with mad kisses. “Now all of you, get out. Go to your own rooms. Tomorrow morning, we leave for the Wasteland Dungeons.”
Remiel raised an eyebrow, not accustomed to taking orders from her warrior. She left, the others behind her.
“The commander and I need to talk,” Barakiel said to Zan. “My father was right when he said to me that Covalent like us do not take orders.” He moved to carry Zan into the bathroom. She stopped him.
“Hold on a second,” she said. “Now you’re agreeing with Lucifer? What the hell is going on? You were always so duty-bound.”
“I am still duty-bound, I assure you,” he said. “But I will take orders from no one. It would be absurd. Lucifer was driven mad by loneliness and resentment. The poison of Destruction left him an ugly, craven thing, but at the time of his rebellion against the Covalent Council, his theories were not entirely wrong.”
“Honey, you’re scaring me.”
Her words perplexed him.
Scaring her? I should not scare my mate.
“I will try to calm down, my love.” He kissed her tenderly, then drew his lips along her cheek, nuzzling his way to her ear. “To wash you will soothe me,” he whispered.
They went into the bathroom and took off their clothes. He drew her under the water, washing her with artful strokes. Pleasure replaced the doubt in her eyes but was chased away by a growl that rumbled out of his chest.
“What happened to you under that waterfall?” she asked, her voice small. Barakiel pushed his passion down and saw his behavior as she did.
I speak of the theories of her rapist. What a callous thing to do to her.
“My love, please forgive me,” he said. He moved her out of the spray and gently wiped the water from her face and hair. “I am a jumble of firing neurons, no better than a child, spewing words with no care as to their effect. Let me reflect, so I can better explain what has happened to me.” He finished soaping her body with such reverence that the question in her eyes faded away and she sighed with contentment.
When they had finished in the shower, Barakiel invited Zan to sit with him on the bed. He took her hands. “You know how much I feared I would become like my father. You know how I blame myself for my mother’s death. Union showed you the weakness in me.”
“Yes. It hurt me, the way you condemn yourself.”
“I know, Zan, and you supported me in the best way possible. You allowed me my misery, but when Lucifer had nearly succeeded in using my recriminations to drive me mad, you were there, in my mind.”
“What did I say?”
“You called me an asshole. You told me to get over myself.”
“So supportive!” Zan laughed and patted him on the back. “That helped you?”
“Yes, my love. It saved me. A mess of contradictions conspired to save me. You know, my father called me a craven little simp when he saw that I mourned for all he had lost, the pain I caused him. He was right!”
“Hey now,” Zan said. “Compassion is not a weakness, Rainer!”
“No, it is not. But it was for me because it was bound to my guilt. I let my guilt define me. I turned to my hatred as a force, but I did not accept it. I viewed it as something alien to me, something that made me like Lucifer rather than what thrives at my center, unique to me. You must know this, Zan. In Union, you pushed me toward a journey that continued under that waterfall, when the Sylvan Three filled me to the brim with the power of Creation.” Barakiel rose from the bed to pace across the room, the clarity of his thoughts like diamonds forming in the dark.
“Beneath the water, cradled by a roar so loud that it became silence, the Three bathed me in their gift long enough for me to realize I had caused my own loss of Balance, and that I was preventing them from restoring me. I was terrified of the Destruction within me, the terrible power that found its home in me when I took my father’s head. Before that act, I had used my strength to keep the elemental forces at bay, instead of letting them flow through me with abandon. My whole life! All my guilt, my fear. Self-imposed weakness!” He snatched Zan from the bed, held her to his chest, and kissed her savagely. “And you! You would not let me remain in that weakness! Somehow, for all that I am like my father, I am more. I am Lucifer, but I am also my mother. I am Yahoel. And I am you. I am hatred and love. I am violence and tenderness. I am callousness and compassion. I am Balance.”
Zan put her hands on his chest and pushed back to inspect him, her lovely sapphire eyes catching the sunset light that poured through the large window. She pressed her palm to feel the thumping of his heart. She remained that way for a few minutes, as if she was meditating. “I feel it,” she finally said. “You’ll save Jeduthan. Nothing will stop you.”
“Nothing will stop me.”
They fell to grope each other on the bed, and then share their bodies for hours with desperate love. Both of them knew they would rather die than fail to reunite Jeduthan with Pellus. Finally, they slept, enclosed in dreams of their touch. Come the morning, they loved each other once more, basking in the serene energy of their Union, so deep it remained a mystery even to Barakiel, who saw things so clearly now. He knew that loving Zan was the best thing he could do to ensure that no warrior could withstand his power. He hoped his friends, waiting in adjacent rooms, understood.
After their sweaty joy, they washed and dressed. As Zan flitted about the room retrieving her things, the diffuse morning light through the sheer inner curtains cast her in a soft glow. She was so beautiful that Barakiel almost drew her into bed again, but they had already begged enough indulgence from Pellus. The time had come for the Wasteland. Barakiel satisfied himself with a kiss and embrace, but a loud crash interrupted their tenderness. Two Covalent warriors had burst into the suite. Others crowded the hall.
“What in all the realms?” Barakiel said. He seized the heavy nightstand and ran at them, desperate to keep them away from Zan. He bashed the first warrior with the nightstand, which had little effect as it splintered other than to misdirect her sword. Barakiel punched her in the face. As she careened into the wall, he grabbed her sword by the blade and yanked, hardly noticing as it sliced his hand. With a grin, he flipped the weapon and eviscerated the still punch-drunk warrior. He turned to the next, evading a forward thrust with a skip step while he flung a framed picture from the wall at a third warrior rushing him from the other side.
I wonder if Pellus has concealed this mess, or if we can expect a S.W.A.T. team.
By this time, Zan had grabbed her handgun—they’d left her blaster and his sword in the RV—and circled the warriors. From the cover of a wardrobe, she fired. The Covalent were hardly affected by the bullets, but the gunfire made them hesitate, having never encountered it before.
Time enough.
Barakiel stepped back, raised his dead enemy’s sword over his head, then brought it down and forward and up and down in arcs so furious his adversaries had no chance to block his attacks. One head, then another, then another, and another, fell to the pale green carpet as the flashing blade painted abstracts of blood on the tasteful ecru walls.
“A pulse or two, please, commander.”
Pellus and Remiel had been discussing their plan to attack the Wasteland Dungeons in light of Barakiel’s restored vigor when he held up his hand. Strong vibrations along the floor demanded his attention. Something was not right. He heard the footsteps, a heavy thudding. He adjusted his vision to penetrate the walls, into the hallway. Moving bundles of atoms with unmistakable energy signatures. Covalent warriors. With his heart in his throat, he dropped a curtain of refracted light over their approach.
Demon take you, Abraxos. How did you find us?
He didn’t sense an adept, but one was surely there. He had no time to search.
“Commander, five Covalent warriors are nearly upon us.”
A crash interrupted his sentence. Remiel cocked her head and leaped to the other side of the room to grab her sword. The deafening staccato of gunfire erupted next door. With a sharp intake of breath, Pellus added a sound dampener to his concealment curtain as Remiel ran out of the room. Before Pellus followed, he placed a barrier in front of the Sylvan Three’s door.
I do not want them rushing out into a dangerous situation.
“Thank the Guardians you killed them,” he heard Remiel say.
“It wasn’t difficult,” Barakiel replied.
In the hallway, Pellus stepped around the ruined door and over two corpses stacked against the frame to enter the suite. He nodded at Barakiel then focused on the dead Covalent, only vaguely aware of his friends conversing. When the bodies were dust, he raised his eyes.
“I can understand why you fired at them, Zan,” he said, “but I wish you had not. I blocked the sound, but people must have heard the first few shots. We must leave immediately.”
“Where are the Three?” Barakiel asked.
“In their room. I constructed a barrier in front of their door, as well as this one. Better to have the humans encounter mysteriously blocked doors than burst in here. I will conceal us and we can exit by the stairwell. Balance willing, we will have a little time before the hotel checks the registration for this suite.”
“We will,” Zan said. “Both hotel security and law enforcement’s first priority will be to make sure there’s no one running around this hotel with a gun.”
“Good.” Pellus pulled a few thousand dollars in cash from his shoulder bag and threw it on the blood-spattered bed. “Retrieve your things and let us go.”
A few moments later, the warriors leaped from stairwell landing to landing with Zan in Barakiel’s arms, Remiel carrying the Sylvan Three, and Pellus doing his best to keep up. When a handful of black-clad, heavy-vested police came charging up from the lower floors, the Covalent ducked into a hallway until the humans had passed, then resumed their mad dash to the parking garage.
As soon as they were out on the street in the RV, Pellus expelled a long breath. He looked around for Zan’s laptop, detected it in a drawer, and pushed past Remiel to remove it, begging her pardon. The Sylvan Three had crammed themselves around the small beige table. When he set the laptop next to them, one grabbed his hand.
“She will endure, adept. She is strong in your love.”
“Thank you, Three, I, uh, yes she is.” He made his way to Zan and Barakiel at the front, not wishing the healers to see his emotion. He steadied himself with a hand on the back of the driver’s seat.
“I need to get online, Zan, to wipe our information from the hotel’s computer system.”
“You can do it while we drive. I have mobile wifi.”
“I have never used that,” Pellus said.
“Okay, let me put a few more blocks between us and the hotel and I’ll pull over and set it up for you. Rainer can drive.”
“Please, drive like you are sane, Barakiel.” Pellus scowled at him. “We do not want to attract the attention of the police.”
“For you, I will control myself,” he said. “But I should let you know, I signed the hotel paperwork in my own name. And they have the license plate number of the RV.”
“I was afraid of that. I will make the license plates appear as a different number, and the RV as a different color.” He gazed up at the ceiling for a few moments. “There. Perhaps we will manage to get out of this state without someone trying to arrest us, and I will consider how to deal with the police records next.”
“Don’t worry, Pellus,” Zan said. “We’ll abandon the RV and get our asses to the Wasteland.”
“Unfortunately, we cannot go to the Wasteland until we ascertain how Abraxos—or more precisely, his adept—was able to find us,” Remiel called from the back.
“We cannot risk revealing the location of the hidden base,” Pellus said, slumping against the seat. “Or even that we are in the Wasteland at all. We do not want to alert them before we attack.”
Jeduthan, beloved, please hold on. We must be sure we can reach you.
Barakiel rose. He gently prodded Pellus to take his place in the passenger seat before he said, “The solution is simple, my crestfallen friend. We let Abraxos find us again. I slaughter the warriors while you capture the adept. None of them are even remotely your match, certainly not in the Earthly Realm.”
“What if the adept refuses to tell us what we want to know?”
“Oh, the adept will tell us,” Barakiel said with a chilling smile. “I do not think any are so loyal to the usurper that they will forfeit their life.”