Green: The Beginning and the End (23 page)

Billy lifted the blood journal. “My maker, Marsuuv, with the blackest heart compels you—bring Ba’al and I will speak for my lord.”

Ba’al was gone, Billy knew that. The guards yanked out their daggers and crouched, but they didn’t sound an alarm. “Back,” one cried in a hoarse voice.

Billy stopped no more than six feet from the guards and spread both arms wide. A surge of power swept over him with surprising force. More then adrenaline. There was a power in the air.

He tilted his chin up and spoke with as much authority as he could muster. When his voice came, it sounded like that of an old man, but it carried a power that shook his bones.

“I am born of Black; I am eaten with worms. My place is with my lover and my master, who waits for me in the twelfth forest with Teeleh. Any man who touches my servant will die.”

He could barely breathe, so powerful were his words. A wave of power rolled down his spine, and he knew, as he’d never known before, that he was close, so close to being home. The fact that home resembled hell more than any utopia hardly mattered.

He belonged. This was his destiny.

A cry and a
whoosh
of air startled him out of his reverie. Janae had taken the dagger from one guard and slashed his neck. She was now thrusting that same blade at the second guard, moving with unnatural speed. She, too, seemed empowered beyond herself.

She thrust the long dagger straight through his belly, pinning him to a beam. Janae held his body there for a moment, then released it and stepped back, panting.

“Okay, then,” Billy breathed. And for a long moment neither said anything else.

Janae absently wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing it with blood. She licked her lips and swallowed, eyes still on her handiwork, perhaps unaware of what she’d just tasted.

She finally faced him, eyes wide. “The twelfth forest?”

Billy swallowed. “Marsuuv’s forest. My forest. It’s where the dark priest has taken the lost books.”

Janae spun and started up the steps. “Then we have to go.”

“Wait.”

She didn’t wait. “We have to go now!”

“Wait!” he spat. “You need to cover up. We’ll dress in these priests’ clothes first.”

She turned and stared down at the bodies. After a moment she began to strip the clothes off the first guard she’d killed. The bloodier of the two.

They both dressed quickly and slid the daggers into their belts. With any luck they would pass through the city under cover of darkness and be free.

“How far?” she asked.

The Black Forest. “Three days. Maybe two if we don’t stop.”

“Then we can’t stop.”

He thought about objecting, thinking he should be rational. Better to be cautious and live than die rushing over a cliff. But he couldn’t deny his own desire.

“Agreed,” he said.

Janae suddenly turned to him, wrapped her arms around his body, pulled him tight, and kissed him on the lips. “Billy . . .” She kissed him hungrily, smearing the guard’s blood on his mouth, breathing through her nose. “Thank you, Billy.”

Her teeth bit into his lip, drawing blood. Strangely, he found it natural. This was how Shataiki mated, wasn’t it? He wasn’t sure of the mechanics, but he knew it had to do with the passing of blood. And this . . .

This small expression of affection was merely foreplay, he thought.

Then Janae pulled away and hurried up the steps, hiking her robe so as not to trip on the long garment, like a maiden rushing up the tower stairs to meet her prince.

30

His first reaction had been to deny what his eyes told him. The books were there on the table by the door, and the redheaded witch, who was one with Ba’al, was securely locked up. But then Billy was in the library, and in the books, and gone.

The lost books, vanished. He’d rushed to the table and slammed his hand down, as if by force he could bring them back. Slowly the bitter truth dried his mouth. His only way back was gone.

Following an urgent discussion, Kara and Monique appeared eager to reassure him. He was here for a purpose, Monique kept saying. It would work out, Kara agreed, but she wasn’t disappointed that they were together. He should embrace this turn of events for his own sake, she suggested. For the sake of the world.

Their words fell on deaf ears, because Thomas could only think about Chelise now. An hour later, unable to shake the haunting of her face, he’d asked to be alone so that he could clear his head.

He’d been separated from his lover many times, and though he always missed her, he’d never been cut off from her. There was always a path home into the arms of the one woman he’d come to depend on more than anything else in his world.

In fact, it wasn’t until now, stranded, that he realized just how much he needed her. He glanced at the empty table again, dropped his head into both hands, and held back his emotion.

He’d once lost those he held closest, and the notion of suffering through it again was too much. What if he never saw her again? What if he’d been returned to this world to finish whatever business awaited him here? What if this was the end of the other world for him?

Panic crowded his mind.

The white bat’s order whispered to him.
Go to the place you came from. Make a way for the Circle to fulfill its hope
.
And return quickly before it’s too late. Do that and you might save your son.

The same could surely be said for Chelise. Images of his bride swelled in his mind’s eye.

He recalled the time she’d rushed out to meet him with Jake thrown over her shoulder like a bundle of firewood. “Look, Thomas!” She dropped their son onto his seat and stood back. “Show him, Jake. Show him what you can do.” Jake wobbled to his feet and began to walk. How the boy managed to stay upright was a mystery still, bobbing and weaving and crossing his feet like a drunken stork.

They’d danced late that night and exhausted themselves in passionate expressions of love. Thomas had always been the impulsive one, given to zeal over reason, but next to Chelise he was the calm leader. After all, he was more than ten years older and had commanded armies. It only made sense that he would begin to settle down.

He remembered the time he’d tasked his elder daughter, Marie, with teaching Chelise everything there was to know about hand-to-hand combat. Like in the days of old, their fighting arts resembled a choreographed dance, thrusting and sparring with ferocity, but always for the precision and beauty of it, not with Horde in mind.

After only a month, Chelise and Marie performed by the fire for the whole tribe to see. Marie’s skills were finely tuned, unmatched at the time. But Chelise . . .

His throat knotted, remembering: Her toned legs cutting through the air in an airborne roundhouse kick that showed her stunning grace. Landing nimbly on her feet, like a cat, then flipping into three consecutive back handsprings. The way her hair swirled around her face, her fiery green eyes, the cries from her throat. She reminded him of his first wife, and lying in bed that night, he’d wept.

Chelise had asked him what was wrong, and when he’d finally confessed, she’d wept with him. For him. He’d never thought of another woman, dead or alive, since.

How many times had Thomas walked through the meadow with Chelise, hand in hand, listening to her enthusiasm on whatever subject had ignited her that day? She’d never been shy of her passion, and if her aim was ever off, she would eventually acknowledge her overexuberance on the matter, though usually in soft, mumbled words.

“But don’t be mad,” she would say before kissing him. “I’m just learning.”

She’d been learning how to be the wife of Thomas of Hunter, supreme commander of the Forest Guard, for ten years now, but as he often told whoever was gathered about the fire, it was he, Thomas of Hunter, servant of Elyon, who was learning from Chelise.

Not that she wasn’t also teaching him other things, he would say with a grin. Who could light up a tent like Chelise? Who could lighten a load with a single giggle? Who else could master fighting techniques in only one month? Was there a more perfect vision of a bride in the whole of the Great Romance?

Then he would excuse himself to find his bride. They had unfinished business. Thomas and Chelise
always
had unfinished business. And at no time had he been so aware of just how unfinished their business was as now.

He remained alone in the library for an hour, allowing his self-pity to numb his mind. When no amount of focus presented an immediate solution, he headed out and found both Kara and Monique seated in the hall, waiting for him.

It was Kara’s idea to help settle him by taking him into the city. He rejected the idea of leaving the library, where the books would hopefully return. But after a moment of argument, he saw that Kara was right.

He had to clear his mind. Bathe. Get into some clean clothes.

He’d forgotten how luxurious hot running water could feel on the skin, and he let it wash away the lingering Horde stench until the water turned cold. To his surprise, Monique had held on to some of his clothes, among other memories. The jeans weren’t as loose as a tunic, but both Kara and Monique insisted they fit him perfectly.

The shirt fit tightly over his chest muscles; too tight, they agreed with sly smiles. Much too tight. Had he been doing pushups? No, hefting boulders.

He sat in the back of a Mercedes with Kara and Monique, and the driver drove them through Bangkok. They made five stops; at each one, more memories flooded his mind. The smells of frying pork rolls; the sound of a thousand cars diving for the same intersection, with blaring horns; the taste of a Cadbury milk-chocolate bar.

And albinos. Everywhere he looked, hundreds, thousands of albinos of every imaginable race. The world had truly become a melting pot in his absence. The word
albino
meant something entirely different here, but he’d embraced the meaning used in his world.

As he saw the city, however, the realization that he was a stranger here became more and more obvious to him. The sights and smells and sounds were familiar, but they no longer felt welcoming.

He belonged in a desert spotted by forests under Horde rule. He belonged in the Circle, rallying the followers of Elyon when the clarity of their purpose waned.

He belonged in the arms of Chelise.

“Take me back,” Thomas finally begged. “It’s too much.”

Monique ordered the driver home. Thomas fell into bed without bothering to change, begged Elyon to save him, and dropped into the embrace of his second lover. Dreams.

But even as he dreamed of his true home, he knew the visions were only imaginations of the mind. Fanciful thinking liberated by REM sleep. Not the reality-shifting dreams that had first taken him to the future so many years ago.

He rose with the new day, showered long again, dressed in the black slacks and white shirt Monique had laid out, pulled on what he’d been told were a pair of fashionable black shoes, and emerged from his guest quarters with a determination to embrace the reality handed to him.

Monique and Kara assured him that he was looking a thousand percent better. The comment only made him think of Chelise. What would she say to these ridiculous duds? Then again, she might find them alluring and insist he wear them at the celebration that very night.

“We have something you should see,” Monique said as the servants cleared the table of breakfast. “It might give you new insight.”

Half an hour later, he peered into the microscope in the underground lab. “Larvae?” His breathing thickened at the sight of microscopic worms. “This is incredible.”

“They cause the scabbing disease. Any ideas where they come from?”

Thomas straightened. “Teeleh. It’s said that the Shataiki come from larvae, or some say worms. But . . .” He bowed for another look. Tiny white larvae wiggled in and out of the flesh sample, feeding on it. This was the root cause of the Horde’s skin disease.

“Elyon’s water must kill them,” he said.

Kara cleared her throat. “So Qurong, who was just here, was covered in these things?”

“Being covered in microscopic organisms is nothing new,” Monique said. “We all live with constant, unseen companions.”

“But this . . .” Kara said, “these worms are evil incarnate. Evil made visible, not unseen, like here.”

She might as well have hit him with a hammer. He’d been overlooking the most obvious connection between the present and the future, but here under the microscope it became as clear as spring water.

“The difference between our worlds is plain,” he said, grappling with how to make what was plain also understandable—a monumental task at times. “It’s right here in front of us all!”

“What is?”

“Evil! The worms! Teeleh.”

“And?”

“And?” Thomas absently turned his hands into fists and shook them as if to seize the point. “You see how obvious the truth is when you see it with your own eyes? So many people doubt evil exists as a force beyond just the mind!”

“Not all, but—”

“‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ isn’t that what we once said? You forget about evil until it visits your doorstep.”

“Yes. What are you driving at?”

Wasn’t it obvious? No. Which only reinforced his point.

“The primary difference between my world and yours is the nature of the spiritual reality, yes? There, the spiritual has a physical form, so we can actually see it. The scabbing disease is actually Shataiki larvae, infesting the skin and the mind. I’m sure you’ll find these in the Scabs’ brains as well. Elyon has placed his power in his waters—again, that’s a physical incarnation. Do you follow?”

“Yes. We’ve already talked about all that.”

“But my point is the converse: Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. It takes certain instruments to see what is real.” He motioned to the microscope. “We become so used to the familiar that we begin to doubt the unfamiliar, until our eyes are opened and we
see
. One second it’s Horde flesh, the next a breeding ground for Shataiki larvae.”

“Makes sense,” Kara said. “It’s not a new idea.”

“Nothing is new,” he said. “But it’s a reminder. Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

They stared at each other, and Kara finally nodded. “So then maybe this is it. This is your message to your world.”