Blue Abyss: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 3 (The Timewalker Chronicles) (5 page)

She shook her head in an effort to clear some of the noise. After the quiet of the dive, her eardrums felt like they were going to explode. Chancing one quick peek over her shoulder, she mouthed one word to Raiden before turning back around. “Go.”

Creepy Number One continued to face her, unmoving, simply observing her as she skirted the walls trying to keep his attention focused on her. She studied everything she could, looking for a control switch she could throw that would open the cave back up, or get them the hell out of here. She had her pistol, but something told her neither the gun’s steel darts nor her dive knife would be enough to slow these things down, let alone stop them. She palmed the weapons anyway, one finger wrapped around the trigger, and her other hand clenched around the knife handle.

Time. They needed time.

Anything useful would be good at this point. Even if it only gave them a few seconds head start.

The volume increased but she resisted the urge to cover her ears. The being closer to her raised his arm and the volume decreased to near silence.

Except it wasn’t quiet. Their bodies hummed with an eerie vibration that felt wrong to her, like a violin constantly missing its note. Just. Not. Right.

The sound of their bodies was much worse than the previous cacophony of human radio chatter.

“Where do you think you are taking our prisssoner?” The two creatures closed in on her, one in front, and one behind.

Mari frantically searched the screens, her mind racing to find something they might believe. But she’d always been a terrible liar. Terrible. Which was why, when someone asked her if she believed in aliens, she said “yes” no matter who did the asking or how much ridicule she knew her answer would bring. Terrible liar, obsessed with aliens. It was the double knock-out punch and the reason every boyfriend she’d ever had had dumped her. Rational men couldn’t deal with her personal brand of crazy, and she couldn’t deal with the obsessive natures of the conspiracy chasers who would. There was crazy…and then there was
crazy.

She was a freaking hypocrite and she knew it. Still, none of the men she met had ever been able to compete with Raiden in her mind. He’d been what she wanted, even when he wasn’t real…

Sadly, she didn’t even have to open her mouth and these things already knew she was lying. But she just needed to buy some time. She’d done it before, in her more successful dreams. She’d still died, but she was nothing if not an eternal optimist.

“To the ship.” Whose, she didn’t know. Surely they had a ship somewhere? And she hadn’t tried this line before in any of her dream world confrontations with them.

The one moving behind her chilled her spine. “We were not informed of this, Timewalker.”

They’d never called her that in any of her dreams before. Raiden gasped somewhere behind her. What the heck was a Timewalker and why did they think she was one?

“Silence.” The other moved forward until he towered above her. She forced her head way, way back, trying to make out a face. She couldn’t see beyond the shadows of his hood and cloak. If she hadn’t seen these creatures hundreds of times, had variations of this stupid conversation hundreds of times, she’d have been mindlessly screaming. Even with her knowledge, her practice, she barely held herself together.

“He would never send a free human to us, nor a Timewalker.”

The hair on the back of her neck buzzed to life as the cold, unknown energy of the one behind her got close enough to sniff her neck like a dog.

“He did send me. I am taking the prisoner to him personally.” Mari turned but the nasty behind her was fast, lightning fast. His black, clawed hands closed over her arms, sent a jolt of cold pain through her limbs like an electric current, one that held her in place, locked in the circuit of the creature’s cold stare.

“Why are you really here? How did you find us?” The thing in front of her moved closer and she struggled against the iron bands that secured her arms so she couldn’t raise her weapon and get off a shot.

A pinpoint of bright light appeared to her left, but the creatures didn’t seem to notice it. Instead, the one facing her raised his clawed fist above her as if to strike. His flesh darker than the creature who held her immobile, he looked made from obsidian. So black. So very hard.

“Release her!” Raiden came out of nowhere and grappled with the monster behind her. Her dive partner fired a steel dart into both creatures and threw his knife, imbedding it to the hilt in one of their backs. The creature let go of her arms and she fell to her knees on the cold stone floor.

Faster than her eyes could track, her dive partner was launched halfway across the room to collide with the cave walls. As he slid down she noticed that his neck was torqued at a weird angle and there was no life in his eyes. He was dead.

She heard her nightmare happen, heard Raiden’s battle cry as he attacked the beings again. There was no need to look when she knew the horror she’d see if she did…the monster nothing but ash and Raiden writhing on the ground in an agony of silence as his flesh turned black.

She’d failed. Just like last time, and what felt like a hundred times before that. He would turn into a monster, she would die in her sleep and wake gasping on her small bunk. She’d shiver and cry, and do it all again tomorrow night. And the next. And the freaking next.

If the thing in front of her had been blessed with a human face, she would’ve sworn he smiled right before he shoved his clawed appendage deep into her chest. The weapon shredded her flesh, cracked her ribs like toothpicks and pierced her still beating heart with black stone fingers as sharp as razor blades.

So cold.

She screamed. The blinding anguish paralyzed her and an oddly detached part of her brain painted the mental image of her dangling in midair with the creature’s hand buried in her chest. Human shish kabob. Numbness spread from the black ice inside her, a shard of deepest cold stealing all warmth, all hope. All life. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and stared up into the sightless mask of the monster towering over her as a heated balm spread over the skin of her chest and slid down inside her dive suit. Blood. More of her blood. Not much left now, but it was warm.

So warm...

Anger warred with apathy as she spied Raiden on the floor, thrashing like a wild animal as the darkness took over his body. Deep sadness weighed her down as she watched. God, she’d wanted it to be different this time. Just once, she wanted to save him…

A small light grew bigger to her left, large enough for angels to walk through.

This was new. Never seen that in the nightmare before. Of course, she’d never kissed him either.

Angels? Hmmm. A dying girl could hope, right?

The light flickered. Or was it her eyes failing? She couldn’t bear the thought, or the sight of the faceless creature standing over her for another moment. Murdered by aliens.

This was so not how she’d planned on going.

Raiden. She whimpered with the gut-clenching ache in her soul at the thought of the man she would leave behind, the man she’d failed. His scent, his kiss, lingered on her lips, a sweet torment she knew she’d repeat tomorrow night, and the next.

She’d have to watch him die again. And now she knew his name. His taste.

And she had to leave him alone with the monsters.

Chapter Two

Celestina opened her eyes with a gasp of horror and clutched her chest where the Triscani’s freakish claws had sliced through flesh and bone to her heart. Well, not her heart, the human, Marina’s, but she’d felt it all the same. Her gaze darted around her tiny living space, the space she’d occupied on the Archiver’s ship for centuries, and searched every shadow for one of the Triscani Hunters. She rolled onto her side and sighed.

Alone, as always.

Longing threatened to crush her soul but she brutally pushed it away. There was no time for weakness, or want. No time for regrets. No time to mourn the past. No time.

The thought would’ve made her laugh, if she weren’t doubled over in pain from her lingering vision. The human female. Something wasn’t right…

Perhaps she should log her vision into the ship’s systems, should report the girl’s death to the Archivers so they could formulate a plan and recruit a Timewalker to travel through time and save her.

Except she couldn’t. Not anymore. In her original vision, the woman found the cave, went inside, and discovered the male and the maps, dates, and vital information that Celestina needed to win this war. Those Triscani were not supposed to be there. The human woman, Marina, was not destined to die in that cave. And neither was the forbidden son she’d awakened.

But reality had changed, the future had been altered, and there could be only one explanation, there was a traitor on board the ship, someone who had full access to her reports. That narrowed it down to one of the twelve on the Archiver council, or to the other Seer. Either possibility would spell disaster for Earth, and for her plans.

Still shaking, Celestina slid off her padded reclining chair and hurried to the data station. She quickly signed in and pulled up her vision journal. The ship’s systems kept track of everything. It would show her who had logged into her records.

The entry she sought regarding Marina’s dive was gone. Erased. Didn’t exist.

To suspect was one thing, but knowing there was a traitor on board made her limbs numb and her head too heavy to hold up. Gods, she had fought so hard, had sacrificed so much to save their world and to save the Earth. She had paid for her mistakes a hundredfold. For over seven hundred years she’d been stuck in this brutal time loop, fighting the Triscani, trying to ensure humanity’s survival. To ensure the survival of her people. To absolve herself of her sins.

This was too much. And heaven help her, she didn’t know who the traitor was. The Archiver Council was made up of six men and six women, all sacred beings. All trusted. All above reproach or suspicion. They could all open the time portals, but as far as she knew, on this ship, only she and Helene, the other Seer, could walk the strands. Most Seers on Itara had a three- to four-day window in time where could see into a probable future. Celestina used her skill to try to head off the Triscani attacks.

But Celestina was different. More powerful. More dangerous. Celestina saw things she could neither understand or explain, often decades into the future.. She was famous on Itara, and had been since she was a small child, nearly two thousand years ago. Even after all this time on Earth stuck on this ship, neither she, Helene, nor the Archiver council had discovered what the Triscani objective was. It appeared, generally, that they simply wanted to murder as many humans as possible. And sometimes, despite her and Helene’s best efforts, and the efforts of the Timewalkers sent to stop them, that was exactly what they did, by the millions. Bubonic plague. Influenza. World wars and famines.

But that had all changed a few months ago. First, the Timewalker Alexa had thwarted them in Texas and prevented the release of the Red Death. Then, the scourge had changed tactics completely, confusing her further. The Triscani attack on Chicago was too concentrated, too small. They were hunting
someone
or
something
, and Celestina had spent most of the last few weeks in a trance trying to figure out what, or who, they were after.

She’d had no luck. But she now knew there was a betrayer on the council, someone who had seen her vision log and taken action to kill the Timewalker descendant, Marina, before she could heal the Itaran male dying of Triscani poison.

But who would try to stop Marina? And, even more importantly, why? Who was Raiden? As a Forbidden Son, he had to be born of the Itaran Queen’s lineage. But who was his mother? Why was he on Earth? And why did the Triscani want him?

Celestina rested her cold forehead against the even colder glass of the vid screen. She ordered her pounding heart to cease its overzealous attempts to leap straight out of her chest.

The girl must live and she must save the man in stasis. Earth’s survival depended on it. She had a day or two at most before Marina made that dive. She’d have to watch the human, and be ready. She didn’t have the luxury of using Helene’s skill with looking into the past. If she waited for that, Marina would already be dead.

No. She’d have to wait, time everything perfectly, and take Marina at the moment of her future death. Celestina didn’t bother trying to analyze the certainty that clutched her, that made her palms sweat and her temples ache. The knowing was part of her gift and she’d long ago learned to trust it.

Among these people she was a Seer, an orchid in a hot house, coddled, patronized, and feared. Celestina could easily see three or four days ahead, into the most probable future. Her counterpart, Helene, looked into the past, identified the Timewalkers who were destined to die, who could be taken and reassigned without disrupting the present.

Helene had been building genealogy charts, lists of Timewalker candidates, for centuries. Still, there weren’t enough Timewalkers to do everything that needed to be done, nor enough Archivers to move them around in time. It was up to Celestina to report the future, and up to the council on board the ship to decide if or when they would intervene.

No one on board touched the Seers, even after seven hundred years in close quarters. She understood. She avoided Helene like the plague. She had too many secrets to risk Helene’s touch.