Time
The Outsiders, Book One
Rebecca Royce
Published by Silver Publishing
Publisher of Erotic Romance
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Cover Artist: Reese Dante
Love Beyond Time © 2011 Rebecca Royce
ISBN # 9781920502034
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Dedication
To Liia Ann who rescued me even though she doesn't know
it. Much appreciation!
Love Beyond Time
Rebecca Royce
Prologue
Abraxas Moore stared one more time at the
unforgiving clouds forming above him. The weather would
soon become perilous, and he knew he had very little time
until they caught him. Even the Green Hills, the place that
had sheltered him and his kind for centuries—their home—
was no longer safe.
The rain that he was sure would start at any moment
would not be life renewing. It was not a sign of rebirth, and
he knew with a near perfect certainty it was not even
natural in its origins. Rather, it had been conjured by those
who sought to kill him as a means to draw him out into the
open. They hoped he would make a mistake and fail at his
task. Then they would be able to trap and kill him.
Most disturbing, however, was he knew they would
succeed in their task.
His role as leader of his people, not one he ever
truly sought, weighed heavily on him that night, and he
knew not even the love of his wife, Niki, would sustain him
through what was to come. The prophecy was no longer
something that would eventually happen, but was actually
occurring in front of his eyes.
Time had finally caught up with them.
After centuries of very little change, his people
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were facing almost immediate destruction, and it had fallen
to him to somehow find a way to help them survive what
would be certain annihilation.
Ironically, the storm that had come out of nowhere
this evening had been the final sign he needed to indicate
their impending doom. When an Outsider stopped being
able to predict the weather then it really was the end of the
world.
How would humanity last even another decade
without them around to silently keep the balance of
lightness and darkness in order? His people had thrived, for
centuries by walking the lines of grey that fell between the
two extremes of Good and Evil. They kept order and
balance in their little space in the universe.
They always had and he had hoped they always
would.
Oh sure, they may have slightly pushed things
towards the side of Good whenever possible. They were,
after all, not Gods or Deities who could see the fabric of
time and know the outcome of decisions they made before
they made them. They were humans—of a sort—with
another power, another layer, to their minds that allowed
them to see what most humans could not—all things were
connected.
Time, energy, life, and even death all flowed on the
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same strings of current, like a sound wave or an electrical
wire, and they had been used or manipulated by his people
since the dawn of time to keep things in order. This had
been their sacred duty since creation, and it was the
obligation they would all be forfeiting with their deaths in
no short amount of time.
Without them, it was likely there would be chaos.
Humanity would fall in this dimension. Chaos.
Enslavement. Famine. Death. Evil would finally win its
battle to control all things. Good would stand no chance of
prevailing because they wouldn't see the 'bad guys' coming
until it was too late to stop them.
His people had forgotten they were not Gods. He
was to blame for this, as he was to blame for so many other
mistakes over his short reign. If there was a way to fix
things, he would gladly do whatever it took to complete the
task. But alas, the chanting had stopped for him, and he
knew he was out of the precious currency known as time.
Even transporting backwards
into the past seemed
to be out of the question. It was as if a wall had been
erected to keep his kind from reaching back to that moment
when all things had gone awry.
He should have been paying better attention.
Clenching his fists at his side, Abraxas stomped
across the grass from his small cottage home towards the
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top of Windfelt Hill. What would the local population think
when the barriers fell and they suddenly realized they had
been living side by side with unknown people for
generations?
The wind blew, pushing his blond hair into his face
and since he couldn't see, it made it exceptionally hard to
proceed to his destination.
It was absolutely essential he get up the hill before
the sun went down and he was plunged into darkness. He
needed to place his ritual staff upon the hill and call to the
heavens for help. That is if they hadn't abandoned him and
could still hear his pleas for his people. Was anyone up
there still listening to the Outsiders or was it too late?
The grass chomped below his feet. It was still
winter, and spring hadn't made its first pushes to thaw out
his part of the world. Ice sat atop the grass, changing its
color from its natural green to a more transparent blue. It
crunched below his well-worn boots. Niki had started
mending them, begging him to actually acquire a new pair,
before she had taken off with their daughter to hide with
the others.
Perhaps he should have stopped her, but it had
seemed futile. Let them go. Let them all go and see if we
can hide the children was what he had ultimately decided.
Finally reaching his destination, Abraxas stopped to
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look around him. He had known the top of this hill
intimately since he was a child.
Windfelt Hill was the outer ring of their boundary.
To cross over the top of the barrier and over to the other
side was to cross into the land of humanity. No amount of
power, his or anyone else's, could shield his people for very
long from the humans if they crossed this hill, which was
why in the past only a select few were chosen to make the
trek.
Last month, all of his people, with the exception of
him, had opted to cross. His job wasn't done. He didn't have
the luxury of leaving. Not until he had exhausted every
option. If the Darkness knew where they were, then it was
time to be somewhere else. They had decided their strength
no longer held in numbers but in small hidden groups that
were far from each other, far from the hills and woods that
had hidden them and nourished them. It was their last
desperate attempt to keep this annihilation of their people at
bay and it made him crazier than he cared to dwell on that
the whole of their society had opted to run away than stay
and fight. Why was he the only one who could see it was
better to stay and fight than turn and run?
He wondered how they were all faring out there in
the world and once again he felt the pull to Niki and the
unrelenting desire to throw away all of his responsibilities
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and join her in her hiding place. So maybe he wasn't that
different from the others when it came down to it. He
wanted the family life too. Their daughter was a month
older and she aged without him there to watch her do it. A
lump formed in his throat and he swallowed it away. He
had thought they would never have children. They should
have been too old. One lone tear slipped from his left eye
and he brushed it away. She was growing up without him
and it truly made his insides burn.
The trees around him swayed from the wind of the
coming storm. Their emptiness, as they swayed in their
death-like dance, matched the rhythms of his own heart. He
wanted to sway like that, back and forth just floating in the
breeze. He didn't want to fight anymore, to stand straight
and rigid, it would be so much easier to just give in.
Shaking his head, he pushed away those thoughts. At this
moment, they would help nothing.
Thank you, old friends, he thought quietly, directing
his thoughts to the trees and the hill itself, for your years of
service to our people. You shaded us well. You kept our
boundaries hidden. Don't think that I will ever forget.
Lightning crackled in the sky, but still no rain fell,
and he could feel the threat of it in his every bone. He knew
he needed to hurry.
It wouldn't be long before it was too late to lend his
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people his final aid and help shield them from harm. He
would take the protective shields off of this land and send
them out into the universe to the Outsiders wherever they
hid. They could use that energy to protect themselves for as
long as it lasted.
Maybe it would only be a few months worth of
power but it would be better than nothing.
He slammed his staff, which to the uninformed
looked like a giant walking stick, into the ground next to
him. The Staff of Aknala had been handed down from one
leader to another for as long as his people had existed. It
would cease to exist this day, and once again, he questioned
himself.
Had he done enough to try to save them?
Now his efforts had become useless. His burden had
been tremendous, and though he had shouldered it, he had
not been powerful enough to stop what had been
prophesized. It was all coming true. There would be no
stopping the destruction now.
His people had counted on him, counted on his
powers being infinite. He had tried to tell them that it
wasn't the case, that he was as flawed as they were and only
a joint effort could undo what was about to strike them. But
they had rejected that plan and instead chosen to go into
hiding.
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Separated from each other, they were like lambs to
the slaughter. In their efforts to guard their children, they
would doom the prophesized infants to death and there
wasn't a thing he could do to stop it.
Unless…
The thought hit Abraxas so powerfully that for a
moment he could barely breathe or move from the shock of
it. His temples pounded with excitement as his blood
pulsed heavily in his veins. Were the heavens finally
speaking to him again? Was he being given intervention
when he needed it the most? With no other choice left to
him, he had to believe it was a message from the moon and
the sun.
He could keep the children alive and ensure that at
least one more generation would live to see adulthood. It
was too late to
help the entire clan. It would take too much
power and he did not have the strength left in him to handle
it all on his own. But he could send the children away. He
could hide them; direct all of his power to keeping them
hidden.
They had been the children that had been foretold
would defeat the growing Darkness. The clan was right.
There was nothing more important than saving the children.
But it wasn't in small groups that would quickly deplete his
power source. No, the safety would last longer if they were
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all together and only needed to be guarded in one location.
Eighteen children had been born three months
earlier, some too early and some strikingly late, but all of
them at the same exact time—ten past twelve, to shocked
and terrified parents. It had been the beginning of the Great
One's prophecy. On his death bed he had told them and
they had not believed. Some of them had called it the last
ravings of a dying man.
They had grown too complacent, too used to their
modern existence. Little by little, they had adapted their
ways to fit the ever-changing world. It had seemed the
smart thing to do. Asking a Warrior who returned from
battle to go back to living in a house with no air-
conditioning in the summer seemed akin to asking him to
return to the dark ages when he'd visited the Renaissance.
Certainly their enemies had used all of their modern
technologies to try to locate and destroy them. But the new
'toys,' as he liked to think of them, left them dependent and
had done something to the group's feeling of self-
sufficiently. Instead of being separate from the humans,
they had become part of them, at least when it came to their