“And are you prepared to die like this? Your body is put in the ground and yet here you remain, broodmare to the most disgusting, repulsive shadow man I can find for you?”
Turning her head slightly to the left, she examined his hard profile. Another woman would call him handsome, but all she could see were the currents of misery that filled his days and tainted his soul. “Your burdens have killed off any kindness you ever had, haven’t they?”
“Long ago, I learned to distinguish between ends and means. I will do whatever I have to do, to whomever I have to do it to. Especially you.”
Hadley threw her hands in the air. “There is nothing I can do for you. I can’t control my gift—it nearly kills me every time I use it and it’s usually more of a subconscious thing anyway.”
“I can’t get to Hadrian. I’m afraid he would best me if I tried, but I can hurt him more than you can imagine. He’s already lost Annabelle—unless of course he’s found her again.”
Hadley tried not to flinch as the image of Annabelle and Hadrian lost in each other’s embrace filled her with aching loneliness.
“I can’t fathom the pain he would feel to fail again, to lose you, which is what will happen if you don’t drink your Breathless.”
“And the only way you’ll give me the drug is if I heal your people. All of you?” He nodded and she swallowed hard. She wasn’t ready to give up on Hadrian. Just hours earlier she’d thought to sacrifice her happiness for Annabelle’s, but now something had shifted inside her.
He was hers. Right or wrong, she would fight for him.
To do that she would have to live. Hadrian had traveled here with an army to rescue her. The least she could do would be not to give up hope and to fight for both of them.
“What if I can’t do it? If I try and I’m unable to succeed?”
“If you fail there will be no Breathless.”
Hadley groaned. “So I won’t even get it for good measure?”
“If you fail, two-thirds of my people will be dead with no hope of renewal. I will accept nothing from you but absolute success.”
“You don’t think you’re being a little unfair here?”
Leon shrugged. “I know I’m being unfair.”
“If I agree to this, what assurances do I have that you will keep your word?”
Leon’s face split in an angry grin. “You think because I am a creature of the shadows, I am not to be trusted?”
Now he’d pissed her off. “Don’t you dare treat me as if I’m some kind of bigot. You’ve done nothing but abuse me for days. And now you want me to just accept your word as if you actually have some honor.”
She realized she was shouting but she wanted some kind of reassurance or she would halt this all right now and find another way out of this mess. Not that any ideas presented themselves to her at the moment.
“Contract.”
Hadley was confused—what did he mean? One moment later, a paper appeared before her eyes. It floated in the air in front of her. She reached out and grabbed it.
“This is a contract with my soul attached to it. As soon as you’ve looked at it, I will send it to the shadow people hall of chambers. There it will be filed. If I do not live up to my end of the bargain, this contract will activate and I will be sent immediately from here to the pits of the mines of Brenta, where I will remain for the rest of my days, soulless and alone.”
Well, that sounded fair. Hadley nodded and passed the contract to him. He seemed to blink and the paper vanished, presumably sent to the so-called hall of chambers.
“I’m going to do this. I have one request.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A request?”
“Whenever I’ve tried to do this in the past, or rather whenever it has happened to me without my consent, I’ve nearly died from it. This is larger than anything I’ve done thus far. Please, if I die, tell Hadrian that I loved him. I never said it when we were together. I felt as if everything was too soon, too fast, and I doubted myself… But I know that I do love him…and I want him to know it too.”
One tear slipped from her eye and she wiped it away. It was the only tear she would shed.
She walked to the window and pressed both palms against it. Having no idea whether she was doing any of this right, but going on instinct alone, she closed her eyes and let her mind wander.
At first nothing happened and she blew out an exasperated breath. She didn’t wonder where Leon was—she could still feel his presence on the other side of the room.
Hadrian. She wanted it to be Hadrian standing there, supporting her as she undertook this way-too-large experience.
Thinking of him gave her a feeling of strength. Her arms and legs started to tingle. She could feel the sickness that still lived inside these people. It had killed the women and slowly but surely it was destroying the men.
Leon had been right. She could fix this, and now that she knew it, she had to do it.
Call it a compulsion—she knew she had no choice. They needed her. She fell to her knees and pushed her power outward. Whoever needed it could have it—after all, it was hers to give.
Chapter Eighteen
It hadn’t even occurred to him that he would see her. Obviously it should have once he’d heard about the shadow people and their role in this mess. Annabelle, as alive as he was, standing in front of him, looking a lot less surprised to see him than he was to see her.
He reached out and cupped the side of her face just to make sure she was real and not some advanced state of delusion brought on by too much dimensional travel. She grinned but took a step back out of his reach.
“How are you, Hadrian?”
The way she said his name made his stomach clench. Annabelle had never been able to pronounce the “ay” in his name without it sounding nasal. In any one else it would have driven him crazy but in her he had found it endearing.
“I’m very surprised to see you. Glad that you are alive. I’m really not sure what to say. As Hadley would put it, I’m not sure what the protocol for this is.” His heart wrenched as he spoke of Hadley.
“Ah.” Annabelle nodded. “Then it is as I suspected and you two are in love.”
Two things surprised Hadrian about that last sentence. The first was that the guilt he would have guessed he would feel at those words did not surface, and the second was that Annabelle didn’t sound at all accusatory or upset by her statement.
“How did you know?” There was no point in sugarcoating it or trying to spare her feelings. This Annabelle he didn’t know. Poised, she stood a distance from him as if they were old friends running into each other at the park instead of lovers wrenched apart by death and dimensional distance.
“Once I realized she knew you, I recognized right away that you were her type. She was sure she’d find a way out of here. Even though it was remote, it occurred to me that she must have something to get back to that was very important. I’m glad to see my suspicions were not untrue and that you are in love with each other.” She paused, turning her head to the side. “Also, she turned three shades whiter when she met me— like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar.”
Hadrian’s heart raced and he noticed he was covered in a cool sweat. He really needed to find Hadley. “Do you know where she is?”
Annabelle shrugged, crossing to the center of the room to fold what looked like very bare and basic sleeping equipment. “I imagine she is wherever she is meant to be.”
Hadrian felt as if his eyes might cross from that answer. “What does that mean, Annabelle?”
“It means that when answers are not forthcoming, one has to make do with accepting the unknowable.”
This wasn’t the Annabelle he had known. She certainly hadn’t been spouting out nonsense guised as spiritual rhetoric, or he would have been done with her before they’d ever gotten started.
He moved to her and grabbed her arm. She felt cold to his touch, like chicken when you first pulled it out of the refrigerator before you’d wa
rmed it up. The sensation was disconcerting and he dropped her arm.
She smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “It doesn’t feel like real skin, right? That’s because it’s not. It’s just clothing created with metaphysics. My body died on Earth—this is just a manifestation of something the shadow king created so I could breed, cook and clean for the man who claimed me.”
Hadrian swallowed hard. “And have you bred?” It was a disgusting way to think of procreation and even though this new Annabelle was not the woman he’d loved, he hated to think of her having to endure that type of fate.
She nodded. “Once. His name is Matthew. They took my son ten years ago. He would be grown now. I fear I might not recognize him if I saw him on the street. Through various sources, I am told he trained to build sailing ships and now he is the chief apprentice to the top ship builder in the land. It’s rather impressive—his father was a low-level miner. I haven’t seen him in years.”
This whole place was so screwed up it now rivaled Earth for its inconsistencies and problems. In fact it was probably worse. Haven had troubles but parents were not forcibly separated from their children.
He wasn’t going to ask Annabelle how many times she’d been forced to “breed” before she’d actually conceived. That sort of discussion would fall under way too much information about her personal business. Besides, he still had to find Hadley—that was first and foremost—and fixing this business for Annabelle had to come second.
Hadley still had a warm body back on Haven that she could be restored to.
A shout behind him garnered his attention and Dragon plowed into the room. “We have company.”
Unsheathing his sword, Hadrian ran out of the tent prepared to fight and wanting to lead the action away from the women. His men stormed out of the tents they had searched, each as alert to the noises outside as he had been.
He nodded right and left and they spread out into attack formation. Their soon-tobe opponents needed a lesson in stealth. They made enough of a racket to wake the dead.
Hadrian quickly assessed them.
They held their swords sloppily but at least they had them, unlike the poor wretches he and his men had eliminated at the mine. A few of the group limped behind the others and Hadrian rolled his eyes. There was nothing more distressing than doing battle against an enemy made up of untrained youth, old men and the infirm. Was this all that was left of the shadow people?
Why didn’t the king send better enforcements than this? Or were they all out stealing innocent women and forcing them to mate?
The thought brought much-needed fury to his blood.
“Make it quick, gentlemen.” Hadrian gave his order loudly—he wanted the approaching attack to hear his confidence. Half of winning a battle was mentally psyching out the enemy. In previous encounters it had taken a lot more than boasting, but Hadrian supposed with this group it wouldn’t take much.
“Halt.” Dragon grabbed his arm.
“What?”
“Something is happening. Can’t you feel it?”
Hadrian had never been particularly attuned to his psychic nature, but he closed his eyes and tried for one second to feel what was so important that his brother had stopped his attack.
There was a ripple in the air but he wasn’t trained enough to know what it meant. He opened his eyes.
“What is it?”
Dragon’s eyes were huge, his pupils dilated. “I have no idea. I’ve never felt anything like this before in my life and I don’t mind telling you, little brother, that scares the hell out of me.”
A surge of energy knocked Hadrian onto his back. He felt paralyzed—his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. He knew this feeling. He’d experienced it once before when Hadley had healed the knife wound Dragon had inflicted on him. It had to be her. What in all the dimensions was she doing?
The energy that flowed over them was overpowering, all-consuming. It forced his eyes closed. Memories long forgotten flooded to the surface. He saw himself as a child, standing in front of his father as the patriarch of the family had taught him discipline with the crack of a whip.
His mother’s worn face when, after weeks on her own, she’d shown the slightest hint of weakness from not knowing where her husband had been for months at a time or if he was still alive and returning to them.
Dragon’s eyes rimmed in red, lines of fear stark in his face as he’d stared bravely at his parents while they turned their backs to leave him in Astor. His gaze moving to Hadrian’s with accusatory daggers, blaming him for having the audacity to be born a Warrior. His twelve-year-old self knowing that when next he saw his brother, things would never be the same.
The life-draining feeling that death after death and failure after failure experienced during his years on Earth had all but destroyed him, until Hadley had looked up at him from under her glasses and thanked him for bringing them to her despite her fear of him.
Two seconds later, she had called him a pirate and restarted the heart he thought had ceased long ago to beat.
Hadrian wrenched his eyes open. He had told her to stay out of his emotional baggage. It was too much for her to take on and he wouldn’t have her harmed in any way. Using every bit of force he could muster, he pulled his head up to look around. Everyone was either doubled over or flat on their backs.
He didn’t know how Hadley was doing this but he was sure it had to be killing her.
Annabelle stumbled out of the tent, shrieking like a banshee.
Her skin, the color of a tomato, pulsated. He couldn’t touch her, but Hadrian would have bet anything that her outsides would no longer feel cold. The same surge of energy that had brought up his old memories and banished the negativity contained in them had given Annabelle back her live body. It appeared that live tissue was reanimating Annabelle’s previously dull shell.
All of this made sense—Hadley could heal. It was what she did, and somehow she was fixing the entire dimension. He couldn’t let this continue.
If Annabelle could walk around, so could he. He pulled himself to his knees.
Crawling like a baby, he made his way to Dragon. His brother writhed on the ground, his hands on his face.
“Dragon.” Hadrian shook him twice. “This is Hadley, this is what she does. Get hold of yourself.”
Dragon moaned. “How can she have this much power?”
“You said it yourself. She is the most powerful person born of our realm in a thousand years. Get yourself together. I need you to track the energy.”
“Track the energy, yes, that sounds like a smart idea.”
Hadrian rolled his eyes. “Can you do it?”
“If you help me up.”
After he’d gotten Dragon into a sitting position, his brother shook his head to clear it, like a wet dog. “I need to concentrate.”
“So concentrate.”
Dragon glared at him and Hadrian tried not to smile. In that one look, he had seemed more lucid. One thing he could count on, Dragon would always get it together to be angry with him no matter what the circumstances were.
“I’ve got the direction.” His voice was two tones lower. “That way.” Dragon pointed to the sky in an easterly direction.
“We need to get there.” Hadrian silently wished he had his mutated powers back and he could just levitate and go after her.
“I think I can help with that.”
Dragon blinked twice and changed into an actual giant lizard. Hadrian smiled. It was a good thing he hadn’t argued about his older brother accompanying them. Turned out he couldn’t have done any of this without him.
Hadrian climbed on top of him. He really did feel like a lizard. How far did this change go? Did his brother still think like a person or was he now deducing things like an animal? Come to think of it, what was the level of intelligence of a dragon?
Truthfully, Hadrian had no idea.
The flight was bumpy, not smooth as it would have been on one of his birds. It was also possible that Dragon was just no
t that good at flying. Hadrian shrugged. As long as it got him to Hadley, he would take as much jostling as need be.
A black cloud surrounded them and rain poured down on his head. Where had this weather come from? As they moved forward, the rain got worse until lightning bore down on them.
There was no way any of this was natural. They must be getting close. Someone didn’t want them getting to Hadley, which only made Hadrian feel more determined. He looked down at his brother, who was getting just as fatigued as he was, if not more so.
Dragon wasn’t in love with Hadley. It was possible his brother wasn’t as dedicated to this rescue mission as he was. He wished they could talk so Hadrian could convince him to stay the course. Looking down at the giant flying lizard that he shared DNA with changed his mind. Eyes squinted, he saw his own feelings reflected back at him. His brother was not a coward and he would not turn back now.
Hadrian took a deep breath. There wasn’t an act of nature that would keep Hadrian from Hadley. Lightning struck and Dragon jerked quickly to the right to avoid being hit. Hadrian held on tight but nearly fell off. Dragon roared.
The deafening crack of thunder rang in his ears. Whoever was doing this to them was a dead man.
The clouds abruptly cleared and looming on the horizon was a dark blue castle. At some point it must have been beautiful and majestic, but now it was decrepit and dead looking. Hadrian had no doubt that was where Hadley was being held.
A white cloud of mist formed around the outside the building and with a blinding yellow light it changed in front of his eyes. The blue stones lost their worn look and glowed as though they were brand new.
“Dragon, if you can hear me in there, she’s fixing the landscape. I hope we’re not too late.”
Fire spat from his brother’s mouth, burning orange in the night sky.
He would not fail Hadley. She was his life and he would reclaim her. Anyone who got in his way would regret it.
Chapter Nineteen
Hadley heaved into the toilet, but she had long ago emptied the contents of her stomach.