Breaking Away (The Man in the Shadows) (15 page)

She uncrossed her legs and leaned towards him. “What does that mean?”

A smile showing through his concern, he said simply, “I’m not sure.” He took her hand in his, the warmth radiating up her arm and into her chest. “What I do know is... What I believe to be true, isn’t true. What everyone
believes to be true, isn’t true. I don’t need a prerequisite to get through the door. Or more precisely, to get from my world...” he took his free hand and ran it over her glistening hair briefly before saying, “...to yours.”

“We aren’t limited, then.” Maika’s eyes widened when she said the words, realizing what this meant to her and James. She knew now that she was believed to be James’s only way back from Earth to Monde de Lumière. “So... if this is true, we can use your magic, the Magi that you were given, to teleport between our worlds!”

“As long as the High Lord doesn’t catch wind of it...”

They fell silent again, but this time they kept their hands clasped.
As long as the High Lord doesn’t find out,
repeated in James’s mind over and over, like a skipping record. He had a feeling that Lamin already knew where he had gone, and that Maika, the Corner Stone, was with him. He was doubtful that he could outsmart Lamin, the all-powerful, the Dark Lord, the direct descendant of the very creator of the Monde and all its people, but he had no choice but to try. Deep down, he had learned he didn’t want to die, that he had a higher purpose, and now that Maika came into his life, he felt...

“What should we do now?” His eyes meeting hers again, Maika could see that he was overcome with frustration; he looked run down and on the brink of defeat. “I think we’re at a stalemate...”

Compassion welling up in her heart, she got out of her chair, never letting go of his hand, and unhurriedly crawled over to him, her knees rubbing on the rough carpet of his office floor, producing a vague pain there that might turn into rug burn later, but she did not care. She felt purposeful, thrust into this strange world, yet feeling at home with James. When she got over to where he sat, she slowly, deliberately curled into a ball in his lap, her thin side nuzzled up against his chest, and cuddled up to him. She could feel his breath race in and out of his lungs. Placing her face in the crook of his neck, she wrapped both her arms around his shoulders in a large ‘O’ shape, fastening her hands together behind the nape of his neck. She pulled her knees up to her chest, placing her feet agilely on his thighs, like lightly landing sparrows. Maika didn’t kiss him, but just held onto him, and shared his in sadness. She bent her mind on it, and tried with all of her might to suck all the emotion out of him like a sponge. After a moment, she said, her breath hot on his neck, “We’ll get out of this. I know we will.”

James didn’t know how to react to this affection at first. Hesitantly, he brought his hands up from his sides, and touched the tips of his fingers to her back, as if he were afraid his touch would shatter her very being. The comfort she brought him, after all of these years of looking out for
her
, crushed him. He wasn’t alone, and he hadn’t been all along. Memories of Annika came rushing back, and he wrapped his arms around Maika’s waist, needing to hold her close. A silent tear ran down his face, as his jaw tightened, resolute. “Yes, we will, and I know how we’ll do it.”

He could feel her smile against his skin. “How?”

“He’s trying to push me out,” he stated, his eyes narrowing slyly. “We need to push
him
out.”

“Yes... but what if he knows about us? About the door?”

“There are no what ifs...” he trailed off, remembering a time in the distant past where he had not thought his decisions through, and sacrificed the lives of so many of his fellow soldiers in the process. He shivered at the thought, but grasped the fact that he was a different man now. After years of exile, of darkness, of apparent betrayal by the one man he trusted the most, he knew what he had to do, and who his true enemy was. “I can find out if he knows, using a spell of mine that tracks down certain elements in the environment... like a blood hound.”

Maika squeezed him tighter, and said, shocking even herself with the words, “Zareh. She’s here!”

***

His plan was working perfectly. He loved snatching up so many pawns with which he could play, like shooting fish in a barrel. Early on he recognized the potential in James, and knew immediately he needed to get rid of him by any means necessary. So, instead of being careless about it (like killing him, how obvious would that have been?), he merely interfered with how James’s life played out. Lamin played the role of fate, and James believed that the cards falling like they had was just that: fate. Lamin had to get into his head, to make James doubt himself, to make him think he had something to hide in order to keep his rank, his livelihood, and his love. It was perfect.

Upon his bed now laid the entranced body of Zareh. Lamin knew exactly how Zareh came to be, and he knew she wasn’t exactly ‘real’ in the literal sense of the term. He saw James conjure her up and control her spirit, her life force, as a means to an end: in order to make Maika happy. How ironic that a man such as James, a man who was being controlled like a joystick in the cockpit of an airplane, would do the exact same thing to an innocent girl. James wasn’t as honorable and honest as he led on, apparently. Now, he robbed James of this pawn in preparations for taking down the queen. Checkmate.

The way Zareh would fade in an out, Lamin recognized this action with great displeasure. This was her soul being pulled, back and forth, from one world to the other, in limbo. No soul should ever be in limbo, since this constant pulling never lets the soul rest or have a permanent home. Deep down, Zareh’s soul knew it was being used, and it was conflicted about whether it should stay on Earth or fly like the wind to Monde de Lumière, where it sadly had no urn of its own. Tragic really, for such a bright, strikingly beautiful girl. Pity Lamin had to use her like this, but James had forced his hand.

Ethan... now he was another story.

“Zareh, wake up, beautiful girl,” Lamin said, gazing at the woman asleep on his bed. He felt something towards her that he could not ever recall feeling. A happiness welled up in his head, and a feeling hit his stomach like he was going to be sick. Feeling that his soul was changing colors without his acknowledgement or permission he panicked, yet he was tranquil. He felt relaxed for the first time in centuries, and he had an unmistakable urge to take care of this girl; he wanted to lock the door to his personal chambers and forget about everything else. Throw it to the side of the road like so much trash for all he cared.

“Lamin!” A powerful voice propelled towards him with such force that he jumped a bit and chomped down on his tongue. In an instant, he felt his soul turn deadly black once more. “What is happening? I haven’t been able to get ahold of you for hours.”

“Oh, my love, I’m so sorry you’re feeling neglected.” Lamin rushed towards Greta as she tread across his bedroom carpet, but she pulled back as he reached out for her. “Some unexpected events have...”

“And you weren’t planning to clue me in on this?” she cut in, her words venomous. “We’re in this together, remember? You’d be the all powerful king, and I’d be your black queen...” Her words drifted off into the ether and she leaned to her left in slow motion, to see around Lamin’s shoulder... around to the bed before her. She raised an eyebrow as her gaze was lodged back on him like a hot iron brand. “Who is this?” she demanded.

“Oh, her, she is one of the unexpected events I was trying to tell you about,” he explained, hastily. “Before
someone
so rudely interrupted me.”

“Don’t you turn this around on me,” Greta hissed, pushing him out of the way. She made her way towards the bed, leaning over the girl as she came up on her. Studying her flawless skin and wonderfully curled locks, Greta muttered, “She’s quite a lovely specimen.”

“She is,” Lamin agreed, coming up behind her. He stealthily placed his hand on her lower back. This time she didn’t flinch or push him away. “She will play a key role in our... plot.”

There were key details about which Greta did not know. She did not understand that Lamin was the reason for James’s epic failure during that important mission in the northwest mountains all those years ago. He was the one who had slipped James the bad information, using a spy he had himself commissioned, bought out, chosen like a lobster from a tank. It was a risky maneuver, because if his spy had failed, Lamin may have been outed undeniably, but luckily for him, James took the bait without question. Lamin’s thought on the matter was this: James was a High General, a very high rank for someone of his youthful capability, and he would consider any means necessary to defeat the dreaded enemy. When James was presented with the solution that would, without a doubt, crush the barbaric orc hoards, one of two things could have possibly happened. First, he would have thought the solution was too easy and rejected it with a suspicious flip of the wrist. Second, he would jump on it, as it had been the only reasonable solution he had heard in weeks. With no other solutions to the problem, James chose door number two and jumped at the chance to kill off all the enemy troops in one fell swoop, and in doing so hoped to be carried home on the shoulders of his strong, brave battalion. Instead, Lamin sent James’s men to be slaughtered before his eyes, in a ‘no retreat’ situation.

As a safety measure, once James took the bait, Lamin had to make sure that James’s mouth stayed shut about the whole thing; risk management. Lamin realized that James might figure out the entire ordeal was fake, and that he wasn’t really to blame for the military failure and the hundreds of soldier’s deaths at all. What better thing to use to manipulate a man, than his new bride? It might have been a little bit overkill, no pun intended, to assassinate his wife as soon as he came home from the slaughter of his entire regimen, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Lamin had invented an entire evil force to take responsibility of the killing of Annika, saying ‘We know what you did’ and ‘We’ll keep your secret, if you obey our orders.’ Which, as it turns out, were Lamin’s orders. It was just icing on the cake that James’s very own little sister wanted to see him fail, and thus Lamin used her to talk James into taking the more dire mission later on, for the sake of the Empire.

The secret mission that was concocted, formulated, and whipped up by High Lord Jamlamin Tarmikos himself.

There were no escaped souls to speak of; never had been, never will be. The entire premise of the Luminite Empire was mutual respect, admiration, and cooperation between, and for, all citizens. If one soul left, it would throw off the balance of life itself, and ultimate power to boot. Lamin picked an urn from the vast collection stored in his castle which contained a soul, opened the mystical door, and dumped it on the other side. Oops.

Taking Greta as his lover, he got her close enough to him to admit to her that he had ‘accidentally’ let a soul slip through the door.
How it happened wasn’t important,
he had confided in her,
but we need to send someone to go fetch it, and bring it back, before there are dire consequences for our world.
If the messenger happened to not come back from said mission, no skin off of his nose. Greta grudgingly agreed to that part, as well, but only because she was promised all of the power and prestige that had, up until that point in her life, been promised to James by fate. Plus, she had fallen in love with Lamin, and love makes people do stupid things.

Greta, still staring at the bed and at the girl in it, her jaw dropped. She turned quickly and looked up at Lamin, searching his face for the truth. “Is she from... the other side?”

Not needing to lie about this, he nodded. “Yes. But her soul, I do believe, is rightfully ours.”

Gasping, she grabbed his cloak and pulled him down to her level. Their noses almost touched, he tried to reel back in surprise, but her grasp was so strong that he whipped back towards her like a snapped rubber band. “What do you mean? I thought only
one
soul slipped through to the other side? This isn’t the Corner Stone, is it?”

Seeing he had no way to wiggle out of his elaborate fabrication, he explained, choking from her tight grasp of his clothing, “No, she’s not the Corner Stone. But she’s
linked
to the Corner Stone, and could lure it to us, if we use it correctly.” She let go of his collar then, throwing him back to his full height. “James abused his power,” Lamin gagged out, watching Greta’s eyes widen in horror. “He pieced her together from scratch for selfish reasons. Since she is made of
our
magic, she is OURS.”

***

“Hey, is there a party here tonight?”

“Maybe, what’s the password?”

The man and the woman looked at each other, stumped. The man answered, “I didn’t know there was a password. I heard from a friend that a killer party went on here two nights ago.”

“I can’t verify or deny that,” Bruce answered, wryly. In the thick darkness, he crossed his muscle bound arms over his massive chest, polished sunglasses hiding his eyes. All the couple could see were their reflections in the lenses. Skepticism had drawn their expressions inward timidly. “I need the password, or I need you to leave.”

The man looked at the woman again, both of his eyebrows raised up, not knowing what to do. “Should we just leave, Emily?”

She shrugged. “Zareh told me that Ethan said this was the best place to go...”

“Wait.” Bruce uncrossed his arms and took a few steps forward, crowding the couple. “Who told you about this place?”

Bruce’s deep voice intimidated the man, but Emily begged him, “Nick, tell him...”

Nick opened his mouth and no words came out, just a chattering of his teeth. After letting out a huff of breath, and then another, as if he wanted to be sick, he spit out, “Emily’s friend, Zareh told us. Zareh’s friend Ethan told her...”