Chapter 20

Elex

The strange dream of standing with the three women, speaking words I didn't know how I knew, finally ended and darkness spread over us like a blanket.

The darkness was suddenly replaced with a light so blinding it made my eyes burn and tears stream down my face.

"I can send dreams, too,"a male voice snarled in my mind.

Skyla stood next to me, blood pouring from between her fingers.

"How could you, Kat?" she asked, her voice quiet as the blood streamed down her arms. "We're both Mageia. How could you kill your own blood?"

"Your fault," a familiar voice spoke. Mitera stood near my feet. She wore the dressing gown the King had gifted her, but blood poured from her body, staining the white satin a deep red.

I was on the ground, in some kind of box. I was unable to move. A coffin, I realized. The blood from her wounds rose higher and higher, slowly covering my body. The hot, viscous liquid moved along my skin, first seeping into my ears, then toward my mouth.

"All your fault, brother," Erix said as he stood over me, his bloated, pale flesh barely sticking to his bones as the blood began to fill my mouth and choke me.

I sat up, scrubbing at my lips, desperate to keep the blood out of my mouth and nose.

"Hey!" I heard a familiar voice beside me, and warm arms wrapped around me. I immediately began trying to fight my way free.

"K-kat! Elex! It's okay, it's me!" Helios said shaking me.

I froze at the unfamiliar use of my name, then slowly relaxed and gulped air into my lungs while trying to calm my racing heart.

Great. Just what I needed. More nightmare material.

"You okay?" Hel asked, concern written clearly on his face.

I nodded without looking at him, grabbing my pants and shirt and hastily pulling them on. I stood and combed my fingers through my hair in a vain attempt to tame it. Fuck, it had been a long time since I'd had a nightmare this bad.

"Don't do that," I heard Hel say behind me.

"Do what?" I asked automatically, casting around looking for my socks while avoiding his gaze.

He shot me a half-smile.

"That," he said. "Hiding in plain sight. Retreating behind your armor."

I stopped and shrugged, then sighed and sat back down on the bed.

"I—I have these nightmares, sometimes. People I've lost. My mom, my brother…" I paused and tried to calm myself again. "Skyla seems to have joined the lineup."

He wrapped his arms around me from behind, careful not to restrain me, just holding me. He treated me like I was something…precious. Something that deserved to be protected. He obviously did not know me.

"You saved my life," he said. "She would have killed me in order to get this, real or not," he said, tapping the medallion at his throat.

I nodded. Rationally, I knew I had done the right thing, but that didn't mean it hadn't left its mark. Just one more death to lay at the door of the Elusians.

"We should probably head back," I said after a minute, my voice thick.

I felt him sigh in disappointment and start to sit back on the bed. I turned around quickly and knelt, twining my hands back into his hair.

I leaned in slowly until our foreheads touched. Our breath mixed for a few moments before I was able to speak.

"I'm not trying to hide," I said, struggling to put what I was feeling into words. "It's just… I don't think I've ever been safe just being—me. It's hard to break the habit of—of hiding what's real."

He smiled slightly.

"I know a thing or two about hiding," he said, pushing his hair back from his scarred face. "Just know… you never have to hide with me."

He kissed me gently, then stood and pulled his own clothes on.

We headed back to the tunnels, pausing only to grab some fresh water from the fountain.

"So, is Betts going to be okay with this?" I asked, pointing back and forth between us.

"Betts? Why wouldn't she be?" he asked.

"I dunno. She seems like… like family, to you," I said.

"She is like family. Bratty sister family, to be specific," he said. "She's the younger sister of the man who—who would have been my Mageia, if he hadn't been killed during our Bonding ceremony."

I looked at him in horror. I'd come to understand something of what the Bond between a Soma and Mageia meant to him. A weird sense of deja vu washed over me. Had we had this conversation before?

"Fuck, Hel, I am so sorry," I began.

He didn't look at me.

"It's… okay. I lost Ri—His name was Orion, but everyone called him Ri—A long time ago," he said. "That's how I got these," he said, gesturing to the scars on his face.

"There was a missile attack in the middle of our Bonding ceremony. I was too distracted by my new senses to realize what was happening, until it was too late," he said.

"Still. That's horrible. I'm sorry you had to go through that," I said, laying one hand on his arm. Where I touched his skin my fingers sparked, like a welder dropping bits of burning solder.

We both jumped.

"What the fuck?" I said, shaking my hand.

Hel's eyes narrowed.

"Do it again," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"Touch me again," he insisted.

Hesitantly I reached out toward him, my fingers brushing over his arm.

Again, the sparks literally flew.

"What the hell is that?" I asked.

"This makes no sense," he said, shaking his head. "This shouldn't be happening."

"What shouldn't be happening," I demanded.

He grinned at me, confused but obviously delighted, too.

"I think it means you are a Tesseris Mageia," he said.

He looked down pointedly.

Beneath my feet the stone seemed to be flowing like liquid. I held one hand out, watching in amazement as little circles of Earth, Air, Fire and Water circled my fingers.

"But that's… impossible! We didn't—" I spluttered as he raised an eyebrow at me. "I mean, yeah, obviously, we did do that, but we didn't… we didn't Bond, did we?"

He shook his head.

"I don't know. There's an actual ritual for a Bonding. It doesn't just happen by accident," he said. "But we're both definitely showing signs of it."

A ghost of a memory teased at the edge of my mind. Something about three women.

He held his hands up. Rather than just nails lengthening, his hands began to shift and flow, fur flowing over them as they curled into paws. He halted the transformation at a point where they were somewhere halfway between human and animal.

I slid my fingers over the silky fur on his fingers. He laughed and pulled his hand back.

"Don't tell me," I laughed looking at him. "Your paws are ticklish?"

"Apparently," he said before throwing his arms around me, spinning me around.

"Maybe it's just the Goddess' way of showing you what we were supposed to be all along."

His words echoed in my head, bringing a strange sense of deja vu, but I dismissed it.

We dressed quickly to head back to the base. As we walked, Hel snagged my hand to hold it in his. The electrical snapping feeling was gone, but having him close caused a warm thrum in my magic. My senses were going crazy with all the input I was receiving from the various elements. I had no clue how he could possibly be handling an increase in his senses, if it was anything like this.

I watched him in delight. As we walked he played with his form. He switched from man to lion, to some kind of four-legged prey beast.

"Where do your clothes go?" I asked when he switched back to human and they reappeared.

He shrugged.

"Dunno," he said smiling. "It's magic."

He switched to the form of a wolf and I laughed at him as he "woofed" at me, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.

Suddenly his ears perked up and a growl escaped his throat. Suddenly, he was human again and wrapping his arms around me, forcing me back against a building.

"What-" I began, but he put his hand to his lips before pointing up. I watched for a minute before I finally saw it: miles above us was an air transport slowly moving across the sky. It was too far away to make out a logo, but I had no doubt it was Alexandrian. We stood frozen under the overhang until it passed.

"You heard that?" I asked in wonder. He nodded.

"Wow…" I said in astonishment. The transports were powered by Mageians. There were no motors to betray their passage.

"The Goddess seems to be giving us some amazing gifts," I said.

All thoughts of the Goddess fled as we approached the tunnel entrance to Hel's base. It didn't take Hel's enhanced sense to tell me something was wrong.

The entrance to the tunnels was through a dilapidated warehouse. It had had doors large enough for two of the automobiles Hel had told us about, but we had always used a small door to one side to enter and exit.

Now, all the doors hung open, and the smell of ozone and gunpowder was strong in the air.

Hel's face went white.

"Betts!" He said in alarm then took off toward the tunnels.

I raced after him, throwing a sound shield around us.

As we rounded the corner, we saw two guards in black armor at the front door. Alexandrians, and at least one of the, was Elusian.

I felt him attempt to Suppress my power as we came around the corner. The pain and nausea barely had time to register before he was on the ground, Hel's claws driven through his throat. He hadn't been expecting a Soma.

I snapped an Air shield at the other guard, intending to knock him unconscious, only to feel a sudden surge of power. Instead of encircling him and allowing me to cut off his air supply, the shield snapped clean through his neck, leaving a cauterized stump as his head rolled away.

I looked down at my hands, shaking in awe and fear, the elemental circles whizzing faster and faster. What the hell had happened to me?

Hel didn't pause, only headed to the door of the tunnel.

"Hel! Stop!" I called out when he sprang toward the door, rebounding off the shield I placed over the door. He began attacking the shield with his claws as if it were something he could kill.

"Hel! Helios!" I yelled finally, and he turned to look at me. My gentle lover of the night before was gone, in his place… was a Beast.

His ears were long and tufted, his teeth elongated. The nails he had sported before were replaced by claws that were inches long.

"Let. Me. Through." He snarled, his words garbled by his rage and transfigured face.

I nodded.

"I will. Of course I will, but we just can't go running in without a plan, without knowing what's going on," I said. "You won't be any good to anyone—to Betts—to me, if you get yourself killed."

"You're my Bonded now, right?" I asked him, laying a hand on his arm. He growled.

"You die, I die too," I said. "We need to be smart about this."

For a tense moment I thought he was going to ignore me and fling himself at the shield again. His chest was heaving, his eyes wide, but slowly the silver in them receded and it seemed my words were reaching him.

"Let me do a little recon," I said. "Protect me for a few minutes."

I sat down to drop into a trance, not looking to see if he was staying. I trusted him to protect me. I paused for a moment when I realized I did trust him to protect me. Just like he was trusting me to find our friends.

I fell into a trance faster than I ever had before. I suspected that with a little effort and practice now I would have been able to trance and walk at the same time, but I didn't want to risk it right now.

I sent my awareness sweeping through the tunnel system ahead of us. The image lit up in my head, but it was so different from what I normally saw.

The faerie fire that usually outlined any voids where air gathered was there, but there was also so much more. I could sense the water in the aquifer beneath us. I felt the stone under my feet, the sublevels that sank beneath us, farther even than Hel had ever explored. Within the tunnels I was familiar with, I could see vague humanoid shapes moving, something glowing and pulsing through them. There were a few shapeless piles of cooling fluid scattered through the tunnels.

It took me a minute to realize those pulses were people. I was looking at their hearts pumping and pushing blood through their bodies. The cooling piles were dead bodies. Air, Earth, Fire and Water. Goddess. What was this?

Trying not to get distracted, I tried to count intruders. It was harder than I expected. It was hard to discern who was who. Everyone looked the same with this vision. I focused my thoughts, trying to figure out how many invaders were below. After a few minutes, I had to give up. They all looked the same to me. I pulled myself back to my body and got to my feet.

"Go on, I'll protect you," I heard Hel say, his harsh panting the only noise in the room.

I looked at him, confused.

"I already tranced," I said. His eyes widened.

"I've never seen you do it that quickly before," he said. "What did you find?"

"There's about thirty of them, I think," I began. "They've got everyone in the barracks. There are a couple scattered throughout the complex, mostly in pairs, but they have our people in the barracks. I don't know how many Elusians they have with them, but it must be a lot," I said. "To control this large a group of Mageians."

"How many do you think you can take out?" he asked.

"I…don't know for sure," I said. "You saw that guard?" I asked, nodding towards the now-headless corpse.

Hel nodded.

"I didn't mean to cut his head off. I was just trying to knock him out," I said.

Hel grinned wolfishly at me.

"So you're telling me you don't know your own strength?" he asked.

I shrugged.

"Guess it's as good a time as any to find out," I said.