Lost (36 page)

Pal reached
back and slammed the claws on his left hand into my leg. At first I
didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a killing blow, and it didn't
change my desire to find a way for us to both walk away from this
fight.

I started to
readjust my hold on his left arm, and then stopped as fire entered my
bloodstream from the place where he'd just stabbed me. I screamed in
pain, but the agony wasn't enough to completely shut my mind down.

He'd violated
the code of the fight and used poison on me. I was as good as dead.

Pal tried to
break free of me, but I hadn't lost control of my voluntary muscles
yet and I wasn't going to let him win like this. My claws cut into
the side of his neck, and then the two of us collapsed to the sand
together.

The poison was
incredibly fast-acting. It had already reached my chest, burning my
heart at the same time that it consumed everything else from my
shoulders down, but the thing that really surprised me was the fact
that I was already hallucinating.

Set was moving
toward me, but that somehow paled in significance compared to the
soothing heat that was moving up my arms. I had a split second to
wonder why my venom-addled brain had picked a different kind of heat
as an escape from what I was going through and then Set reached me
and plunged his claws into my chest.

As the
blackness claimed me I wondered at the sheer scope of my foolishness.
In the end even Set had turned on me.

Isaac Nazir
The Lamia Enclave

Death wasn't
anything like I expected it to be. Despite my best efforts, I was
gradually pulled out of the quiet, numb void that had been cradling
me and into a different kind of darkness.

It was cold
here and hot, all at the same time, but the really terrifying thing
was the sheer amount of pain. Onyx's ability had been a constant,
all-consuming thing that had left no room for feeling anything other
than agony.

This was
different. It came in waves. I always hurt, but there were times when
the pain was small enough that I could still think. Those moments of
lucidity were few and far between though. Instead I spent most of my
time in such torment that I felt like I couldn't even breathe. Just
when I thought I'd taken all of the suffering I could endure, the
pain would ramp up even higher and I would find out that my capacity
to endure was somehow greater than I'd thought.

Knowing that
there was even more pain waiting for me made it even worse than what
I'd endured at Onyx's hands. There had been a limit to how long he
could hurt me before I would just finally die. There didn't seem to
be any such limit inside of my new existence. I was in some kind of
afterlife of suffering and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't
remember anything that I'd done that was bad enough to merit this.

I hadn't been
some kind of mass murderer. I hadn't molested children or robbed
anyone. It didn't seem right that my eternal reward was this, but
then again I couldn't seem to remember anything truly great that I'd
accomplished during my time on Earth. I'd been as strong and powerful
as any superhero, but somehow that hadn't been enough for me, not
when faced with villains every bit as strong and deadly as I was.

Maybe that was
the reason I was cast off into the blackness. All of the superheroes
I'd grown up reading about had been up against villains who were
their match in almost every way, but that hadn't stopped them from
trying to make the world a better place. I'd had the ability to make
a difference, a real difference, but I hadn't.

Maybe I'd
misunderstood all of the religions that I'd studied as little more
than an academic exercise. It wasn't just about doing no harm, that
wasn't enough to earn you nirvana or paradise. You had to accomplish
something worthwhile before you died.

It felt like
I'd been floating in the darkness for forever, but eventually I
realized that the lucid times were growing longer and more frequent.
They'd been filled with clips of violence that were only fractions of
a second long before, but now they became case studies in fighting. I
saw every possible way there was to throw a punch and learned what
made a good punch in almost any conceivable situation. The same with
the use of my claws, talons, and feet. It was like when professional
athletes watched themselves on slow-motion film.

There is a
limit to how much violence a human, or shape shifter, mind can watch
without becoming desensitized to it, and I passed that limit long
before the blackness finally let me go. It should have turned me into
some kind of psychopath, but it didn't. It didn't because somewhere
along the way I realized that I could feel someone's hand on my arm.

That contact
reminded me that there was more to existence than just violence.
Those long, gentle touches anchored me with the knowledge that
violence wasn't an end, it was a means. Violence was a way of dealing
with those who refused to honor the natural law that all sentient
beings had a right to survive and be free.

As time went
by, I worried that I'd lose contact with whoever was touching me,
that they would leave or I would lose the ability to feel, but that
wasn't what happened. The feeling that there was someone at my side
continued to get stronger until I finally felt the urge to open my
eyes.

I'd somehow
forgotten that I'd ever had eyes—that I hadn't been blind from
birth—but when I finally opened them I found that I was back on
my bed in my room in the enclave. That surprised me for some reason.
I'd somehow thought that Set and the others would just leave me there
in the sand where I'd fallen.

Even more
astonishing was the fact that I wasn't alone. I was sitting on the
far edge of my bed and Celeste was there with me, curled up next to
me with her hand on my arm. She looked terrible and perfect all at
the same time.

She looked like
she'd showered and changed her clothes recently, but she was
obviously exhausted. There were deep worry lines on her forehead that
hadn't been there before Pal had poisoned me, and she looked like
she'd aged more than a decade since then.

Jax was right.
It didn't matter how good a liar someone was, if you spent enough
time around them you could eventually put the pieces together and
start to see what they were like underneath all of the false
pretenses. Celeste was worried about me, she cared about me—much
more even than I'd realized.

That new
understanding of the depths of her feelings made me wonder how many
of her past actions would lend themselves to a new interpretation now
if I were to go back through them in my mind.

I resolved to
do that the first chance I got, but it would have to wait until after
I finished studying her. It was hard to say whether I was more
overcome by the fact that I was still alive, or if Celeste being at
my side was more shocking.

I drank in
every square centimeter of her features and marveled at the fact that
she could look so different and still be gorgeous. Her brow furrowed
in concern, and I found myself reaching over to smooth away the
wrinkles without thinking.

Amazingly, it
didn't hurt when I moved, and even more amazing, Celeste didn't wake
up when I touched her. Instead she relaxed so completely that the
wrinkles smoothed away. She instantly looked nineteen again.

Satisfied that
I hadn't robbed her of the sleep that she so obviously needed, I
relaxed back onto my back and took a few deep, experimental breaths.
Everything seemed to be working correctly. The massive hole that I'd
been expecting to find on the right side of my abdomen wasn't there;
I seemed to be fully healed and rested.

As much as I
wanted to stay there with Celeste forever, I knew that the world
wasn't going to just stop turning while we rested. I needed to find
Set and find out how long I'd been out.

I started to
move off of the bed, trying not to disturb Celeste, but as soon as I
tried to slide my arm out from under her hand I got an unexpected
response. She grabbed hold of my arm with all of her strength and
then a second later her beautiful gray eyes popped open. She looked
at me with a sleepy kind of astonishment.

"Isaac. I
just dreamed that someone was trying to take you away from me."

"No, I'm
still here. You can go back to sleep and we can talk later if you
want."

"Screw
that. How are you feeling?"

She was
entirely awake now. She sat up on the bed and tugged at her top to
get it back situated like she wanted it.

"On the
whole, surprisingly good. What did I miss out on?"

"Pal
poisoned you, but you killed him before his venom started throwing
you into convulsions. Set ran over to you and injected you with some
kind of anti-venom, but I'm pretty sure none of the lamias expected
that to work."

I rubbed my
forehead as I tried to get past the memories of fighting that had
been a recurring theme while I'd been unconscious. It was hard to
pierce the veil of darkness, but I remembered at least some of what
had happened.

"I thought
he was trying to pump even more poison into my system."

"Nope. The
consorts produce an anti-venom in the glands that drain into their
pinkie fingers. He stabbed you, but that was just so that he could
deliver the anti-venom as quickly as possible into the area directly
around your heart. He saved your life."

I nodded. "I
should have known that he had my best interests at heart. He's always
come through for me."

"Yeah. He
and I have spent some time talking over the last few days. I can see
why you're so attached to him."

I started to
nod, but then the full implication of what she'd just said sank in.
"Wait, how long have I been unconscious?"

"I'm not
sure, more than a week, maybe nine days now."

She said it
with such casualness that I knew she was lying to me. She knew
exactly how long I'd been asleep for, she was just hoping that I
wouldn't know what it meant.

"I thought
you said you didn't want to lie to me."

One instant she
was sitting on my bed facing me, completely collected and calm, and
in the next she crumbled into my arms.

"You're
right, I just didn't want you to feel guilty too. Onyx has been
killing my people for days, but I didn't know what to do. Set has
been administering the anti-venom to you at least a couple of times
per day. I was going to just go back by myself to stop Onyx from
hurting my friends, but Set told me that any males left here without
a queen would be killed. I begged him to make an exception for you.
He seemed genuinely sad, he even went to his queen to see if she
would overrule tradition, but she refused and he wasn't willing to
dishonor himself, even for you."

"You
stayed for me."

She wiped away
tears with the back of her hand and then nodded. "I don't know
what I was thinking. I know that you don't love me, that you can't
love me as long as I'm willing to surrender your friends to save my
own, but I couldn't bring myself to let you die."

The magnitude
of her sacrifice was almost incomprehensible to me. She'd sacrificed
everything she was, everything she had, in an effort to protect the
submissives in the New Orleans pack. She could have fled just like
Ash had, but she hadn't. She'd stayed because they were
her
people
. They were hers in a way that most people didn't
understand, but I understood. In a way she was saying that I was hers
too. She probably didn't even understand that yet herself, but after
all this time I knew her at least that well. She'd stayed for me
because she loved me, but even more than that, she'd stayed because I
was hers.

While I was
thinking all of the ramifications of what she'd gone through, she
continued on.

"Even now
I can't bring myself to go back there. You're safe now, we could all
leave. The three of you could make a clean getaway and I could go
back to save whomever is left, but the thought of meeting their eyes
and having to tell them that I sacrificed their friends to keep them
alive makes me want to curl up on the floor and die.

"I can't
believe that I've done this, but by the same measure, I couldn't make
myself leave. Every moment that passed I considered leaving, but I
couldn't do it. I kept thinking that you could wake up at any point.
I kept hoping that you'd wake up in time for me to get back, and then
suddenly I realized that it was too late, Onyx had surely killed his
first victim.

"And then
it was too late to do anything about whomever was dead, there was
just you here and another twenty-four hours spent hoping you'd wake
up before it was too late for me to return and prevent any more
deaths."

I pulled her in
tight against my chest and hugged her. "I'm sorry, Celeste. I'm
glad to be alive, but I'm sorry to have put you through that."

"It's not
your fault. You were right, you know. Every step you took was the
right one to have taken. I can see that now. I wish that you'd just
killed Pal without giving him a chance to poison you, but you were
right to fight him, right to save Set and the rest of the enclave by
extension. You seem to always do the right thing. I wish I was like
that.

"No,
that's not right. I wish I could want to be like that, but the price
is too high for me. There was never any other way to save my friends
other than what I did."

I lifted her
chin so that she would have to meet my eyes. "We are like two
sides of the same coin. I never thought that I had any choices. You
always saw nothing but choices. I never took enough responsibility,
you always took too much. I'm glad I met you, Celeste Hunt. There
were things that I needed to learn from you."