Reckoner Redeemed Read online

  “Trevarr!” She hated the way her voice lost its authority; she hated the fact that she hadn’t been able to let him go. She hated that she still needed him at all.

  And yet she couldn’t stop herself. “Come back. I didn’t mean to be... That is, I’m still learning the mendihar. You know that.”

  He did stop; he did turn. He did still look weary, still accompanied by the vaguely discernible glint of liquid glass. “I do know that.”

  But he offered no acquiescence, even as he came into her room—taking up the space as though he owned it. He touched her hair; he picked up her hand, running a thoughtful thumb along the skin over her slumbering mendihar.

  He said, “I wait only to see whether you learn it, or it learns you.”

  ===

  ...Remembered.

  ===

  Until this moment, she hadn’t truly understood his warning. It learns you. Or heard the unspoken warning behind it: and then uses you.

  Now that she did, she thought it might be too late.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 13

  A Tender Age to Die

  Rhonda Rose

  In some ways, my life was a perfect preparation for my death. As a governess, I was responsible for the comportment and education of my charges; I was expected to remain invisible in the process. Yet I was neither here nor there in the household—not upper staff, not lower staff.

  The same as now, with the distinct exception that I find and choose my own charges.

  It could be said that the most significant difference between then and now—aside from my completely unexpected second round of existence—is that as a spinster from a disgraced family, I held very little personal power. I had energy, I had dreams, I had the greatest intent, but I had no outlet in which to express these things.

  I also had the greatest astonishment when my train derailed and left me crushed in debris at the tender age of thirty-two.

  (My contemporaries felt I was beyond marriage, but let me assure you, I most certainly felt it was a tender age to die.)

  Before the train, I had very little personal power indeed. Afterward...

  It took me years to settle down.

  Perhaps in young Lisa McGarrity I recognized a kindred spirit, if one may be allowed a little post-living humor. Perhaps in Lisa McGarrity, I recognized a potential that I myself had never been allowed to achieve.

  Whatever the reason, it is true that I pushed her harder than most—instilling in her the deepest possible respect for her responsibilities, and for the consequence of her abilities misused or neglected.

  I never truly suspected there might be consequences for that. Or that I was, in my own way, robbing her of her potential. Not that relating to her power, which blossomed beneath my steady hand, but for the potential of who she could be as a fully rounded person.

  A person who did, after all, have the right to live her own life.

  Maybe I left her world too soon. Or maybe I simply didn’t leave it soon enough.

  ~~~~~

  Glyphs and Shackles and Chains

  Garrie left the extinguished trash and returned to her midnight-dim apartment, sweeping past the mountain biking gear to head for the couch, where it took her all of five minutes to fall asleep. Not even one of those twitchy heavy dozing sleeps, but hours of wow I needed that sleep.

  She woke in the early morning darkness, fiercely hugging a pillow and gripped with a once-familiar yearning she thought she’d long overcome. For comfort, for a maternal lap, for someone’s gentle hands, stroking through her hair.

  Little Lisa McGarrity, floundering through a life she couldn’t share and wishing that someone—someone living—could understand.

  Her parents had never understood. They’d seen her as a mediocre student, a loner, a young woman who hadn’t quite fit in anywhere. But they’d never known just why.

  Hey, I spent last night wrestling with a bad Bob, and I could really use a hug right now.

  Not likely.

  She’d once hoped she would find the right time, the right way, to tell her parents the complete truth of her life, a thing that wasn’t truly evident to her aunt even now. That hope had ended with the car accident—and even so, Garrie was everlastingly grateful that her parents had moved instantly beyond.

  And still, she longed. She missed. And Rhonda Rose—sensible, of proper comportment and behavior and power—had been many things, but corporeal had never been one of them.

  Trevarr, now...

  Trevarr was corporeal. Big honking fark, he was corporeal. And if he was also hard and difficult and dangerous rather than comforting, he nonetheless understood her life—even if he did manage to hide half of his own.

  I miss you.

  Garrie fell back asleep hugging the pillow and her longing equally close.

  She woke again an awareness of sensations that were too real to be a dream, too unlikely to be real. Underlying wood smoke and sometimes bitter ash, the tang of leather and sharp otherworldly spice. The sensation of a familiar touch, the hitch of familiar breath, the faintest hint of a raw and untamed energy too inexorable to be called a breeze. Tangible.

  “Trevarr,” she murmured—and instantly wished she hadn’t, fearful of losing the moment to reality.

  Reality said he wasn’t here...or that she wasn’t there.

  Reality said that looking too closely at this moment would break it.

  Screw reality.

  She’d already connected with him, hadn’t she? Already offered him what strength she could. And if this felt different, more dreamlike...

  Then she’d figure it out along the way. But she wouldn’t reject it or fear it. She’d farking well claim it.

  She threw wariness aside and immersed herself in the scent of him, the warmth of him, the familiar but never easy nature of their mingling energies. What she couldn’t quite see, she could feel—the hard lines of his torso, a familiar jaw, a tangle of the narrow, silvering braids buried within thick dark hair. A mouth that responded to hers so naturally, so unthinkingly perfect in its mixture of reverence and ferocity.

  Metal scraped stone, here in this not-dream, not reality. Something in between. “Atreya,” Trevarr said—but his voice held denial. Something in his presence shifted; anger surged to batter at her. “Be wary. Anjhela—”

  Anjhela. Had Sklayne said that name?

  His wariness grew. Who knew what trickery they’d already used on him, trying to extract her identity, her exact nature? Because now he sent out an inhumanly defiant snarl, a thing she felt reverberating in her own chest.

  Garrie pushed back against his defiance with the thing only she could offer. Her energies. Herself.

  A brush scrubbing her skin from the wrong side and against the grain—impossible to withstand, invoking restlessness and an inner roaring. A feather stroke of pleasure running straight down her spine, sparking every possible erogenous response.

  He drew a hard breath. A bellows-breeze of hot air stirred internal coals best left banked, heavy-lidded eyes lifting in query, pewter-bright around vertical cats-eye pupils.

  Shifting chain sounded the only warning; she found herself enveloped in a tangible embrace. She wrapped herself around him, kissing the familiar warmth of his mouth. Her knuckles scraped against the stone at his back; little curls of sensation sparked along her nerves.

  Just for that moment, she was completely secure in who she was and who he was and what they were together.

  And then a hot jagged barrier flared between them, lashing out punishment. Her inner eye imprinted with an indelible flash of strong silvered glyphs, cold, cruel metal, chains and rock and the descent of a gleaming, gloved hand. Garrie cringed, crying out as her sense of him faded. “No! Don’t go!”

  “Atreya.” Not so much a denial or a lingering call, but a statement. The one who holds my heart.

  “I’m looking!” she told him fiercely, her grasp of him, her sense of him, all but gone. “I’m looking for you!”

  “A
treya...”

  He became nothing but a whispered memory in her mind; nothing but a fading scent in the air, a lingering stroke down her back, the visceral echo of metal scraping stone.

  Garrie jerked upright in the darkness of the apartment—on her knees in the cushions, ready to strike out—to strike back at the wailing grief and fury of it all.

  That had been real, dammit! Real!

  She ran fingers over her lips, as if she could discern the touch of his mouth. Her knuckles stung, and she remembered abrasive rock.

  Glyphs and shackles and chains.

  She grasped at those fading moments, looking for details beyond the aching wonder of the connection. Heavy shackles. They dug into her back, bringing the faint scent of blood both old and new.

  She hadn’t dreamed that.

  Maybe the encounter hadn’t been quite solid. Quite of this world. But it had been real.

  She shoved the pillow aside with a violence it didn’t deserve. “Sklayne!” she shouted, and then again. “Sklayne!”

  She hadn’t truly expected him to respond. She definitely hadn’t expected him to tumble in with a blast of hyper-excited breezes, a poof! of sucking sound, and his not-cat form rolling ass-over-teakettle until he slapped up against a box of the colloidal silver and then recoiled with an impossibly Gumby-like snap.

  *HERE!*

  His shout seemed to startle him as much as it did her, for he snapped back from that, too—and then slapped randomly at the carpet with a staccato pattern of lightning fast claw-and-paw, as though he could recapture the sound and stuff it back away.

  And still, when he looked at her with his eyes saucer-wide in the not-cat face with its big tufted ears and dark little nose and whiskers standing straight out, he shouted again, just as loudly. *BUSY!* he said. *FARKING BUSY CAN’T CAN’T CAN’T...LEAVING!*

  And he did, just as he’d come, leaping out into mid-air to poof!

  Gone.

  Leaving the apartment in silence.

  Leaving Garrie in silence.

  She touched her mouth again.

  Then she leaned over to the satchel. She pulled out oskhila and ekhevia and kirkhirra, shoving them aside without her earlier reverence. She yanked out the sheathed knife and put it beside her leg. She fumbled past the shirt and the tightly folded leather duster.

  All to pull out that plastic egg.

  Caution finally caught up to her—she restrained herself into gentleness as she pried the egg apart and tipped the three burnished metal-and-gem storage devices out onto the trunk.

  She had a device for traveling. Oskhila.

  She had the world’s most powerful Danger-Danger-Danger alternative energy source.

  She had a sometimes companion who not only knew how it all worked, but could and did make occasional forays to Kehar.

  And now she knew, too deeply to deny, that Trevarr was there. That he lived, that he bore up, that he resisted and bled for it. That he did it for her, just as he’d let himself be captured for her.

  “Ohh, yeah,” she said under her breath. “I’m gonna be looking. Hard.”

  ~~~~~

  No time for the Garrie! Much with the doing, the village Solchran nearly discovered, nearly exposed, nearly obliterated—

  Not by dullblood hunters, not by the many beasts of the highlands, but by the hard-searching eye of Ghehera, stabbing rays of perceptive darkness crawling across the skies so everyone would know: Ghehera hunts.

  Help to move the village, yes. No help for this. None of Sklayne’s busy, curious kind to be found.

  Only Sklayne. Me. Mighty.

  Maybe not this mighty.

  Ghehera’s creeping search reached the edge of the village and Sklayne made himself there, a mirror against which the seeking tendril might glance. The eye moved on in a sweep of dark energies and Sklayne leaped before it, hissing with frustration.

  Cannot be everywhere!

  Must!

  Another stab of intrusion, this one down at the village where Trevarr’s adopted people gathered in fear to point and crouch, as if either would do them any good. Sklayne flung himself out to interfere, forming the perfect mirror, leaving the eye none the wiser except then again and again and such persistence meant only that Ghehera had reason to believe its quarry found.

  If Ghehera found Solchran, they would find the sklarr creche all around it. Their nest, their ancestral home—and now their very existence made so inadvertently vulnerable by one of their own.

  Protect them ALL.

  Cannot be everywhere!

  Except...

  Can.

  He spun himself wide and far, thinner and thinner. Finer than silk, stronger than steel, nothing more than a mirroring film of energy stretched over his entire corner of the world.

  Bubble wrap.

  He set claws all along his edges, digging them into earth and stone. So fine a film, so invisible...redirecting every glance of the eye, absorbing every intrusion to the same exacting degree as would be done by the landscape had the village not been there at all.

  Endless glances, endless blows, endless hours...

  Until the sky was full of black reflected mist and the sun shone dull on the horizon. So fine a film, so invisible...

  But it was then a film that trembled. A claw that quivered. A stretch until breaking, quickly patched. A thinning...a thinning...

  Nothing here, Ghehera. Go. Go now. Look other places.

  ...A desperation. A floundering and snap lost his grip there and crack left a claw behind there and moan through the trees as he became too thin, too drained...

  Nothing here. Nothing here.

  But Ghehera was gone. And Sklayne drooped over the landscape, limp shreds of what he’d been, cohesion forgotten. Attempts to gather himself...

  Failed.

  Woe.

  Could not gather.

  But Trevarr had taught him persistence, a thing not of sklarr nature. If he could not gather, he would roll.

  Sklayne found an edge, limp claws still caught in earth. Tugged, with no more strength than an eddying breeze. A claw twitched back, taking hold of his own essence. The beginning. Do it. A tiny effort, a ripple of movement. Do it more.

  One edge, then another...a slow motion roll toward the center, until he finally met up with all his pieces and used that faintest of momentum to fold in on himself and swallow, tumbling through to a world that suddenly, stupidly, felt safer than his own.

  To the power lines.

  Did it.

  Sklayne rode the lines with an exhausted ennui. He rode them unable to actively siphon stolen energy—able only to float and absorb and survive.

  He understood, now, the vulnerability of his own kind.

  Trevarr had always protected him from this willingness to go too far, to make himself too thin. He’d been protected from being alone. But on this day, his cousins had dispersed in a flash of impulse, gamboling off into the dark fog to chase down snacks and leap among the heavy drooping limbs of the forest.

  They hadn’t meant to leave him alone in the face of danger. They just didn’t know any better.

  Because they’d never been bonded.

  Treyyy.

  Not that he missed Trevarr. He was too much his own being for that. Yes he was. He simply knew theirs to be a partnership that worked. Yes he did.

  Sick. Feeble. Not even able to be not-cat. Just a floating collection of barely cohesive energies riding the power lines. Not being missed by the Garrie, who had no bond to him, no invisible always thread and so no idea of his sick.

  Do not need the Garrie!

  He was unlike any of his kind. Do not need! He had grown, he had learned, he had survived, and he would now survive even this black weakness. Do not need!

  But the Garrie needed him, whether she knew it or not. The Garrie had her own ways, small person of much power, but she was a protector, not a hunter.

  And not nearly enough of those protector ways would keep her safe from the unkind eye of Ghehera.

/>   ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 14

  Kehar: A Spark

  Ghehera had not found the village of Solchran.

  They had been so sure of their ability to do so, and yet they had not. And while this task had not been Anjhela’s job nor her responsibility, somehow...

  Somehow, it was.

  Anjhela stalked through the black stone of the lower hallway, her back straight by nature and straighter by nurture, her awareness of the deeply gouged glyphs and weighty overhead rock subsumed by her awareness of change.

  A shift in power. A shift in favor.

  Because she had not yet broken Trevarr. She had nearly destroyed him, but that wasn’t at all the same thing.

  Too many mudbloods dared to glance her way before scurrying aside. The mendihar vibrated beneath her skin, challenging her as it had not done for years. Even the lumes remained steady, failing to flicker in their awareness of her presence.

  She didn’t hesitate at the heavy door to the main consolation chamber, but slapped her hand against the latch plate, slamming it with a surge of personal power. Her power.

  The ’bloods in her peripheral vision shrank away, suddenly wiser. The latch gave way with a crack, its component parts clattering to the ground as the door opened.

  Anjhela stalked into the room with every bit of her usual predatory grace. “Do you even know what you’ve done?”

  He leaned against rock with his hands in his lap, the manacles with their silvered glyphs weighing them down. His hair still fell in uncharacteristic disarray, but his face showed little of its recent bruising and his injured leg lay less awkwardly before him, no longer propped so much as simply in repose.

  But of all that, it was his eyes that caught her attention, inspiring a trickle of fear so unfamiliar it took her a moment to recognize it. It took another moment yet to recognize why, especially against the backdrop of his carefully neutral response to her—his inscrutable expression, his passive posture and acknowledgment of her prowess.

  But his eyes...

  They held a spark. An awareness. Not so much hope as...