Puzzled, Lee asked, “
Start
fighting? Eira, how old were you?”
“Forty-three.” Now the smile on Eira’s face didn’t look quite so sad and bitter. She actually looked like she was smirking a little. “Yes—forty-three, Lee. You were not the only one to come late into this life. Magick has always run strong in my family, but I hadn’t ever used mine in battle until then.” She gazed into Lee’s eyes, and as though she heard the question circling through Lee’s mind, Eira said, “That was sixty-six years ago.”
Lee blinked. A little dumbfounded, she sat back and stared at Eira. She did the math and then did it again. She squinted at the old woman. Yeah, she looked old now, but ten days ago, before the stroke hit? Lee had seen men and women not even out of their fifties that looked older than Eira had. “You’re telling me that you’re 109 years old?”
“If I see another month, it will be 110.” Eira chuckled. Her right eye gleamed with the same dry humor that had driven Lee insane just a couple of weeks ago. “Remember that next time you feel tempted to throttle me. I’m not just old, I’m practically ancient.”
Practically? Hell, Eira was ancient. One hundred and ten fricking years old . . . Lee couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it. Yeah, she knew people could be long-lived back home, but she hadn’t ever imagined that a woman who was as active as Eira could be so old. She’d seen a century come and go. It blew Lee’s mind even thinking of it. “I reckon retirement is out of the question.”
Eira frowned and repeated, “Retirement.”
“Never mind.” She looked back at the image. The woman portrayed looked so real. Unable to stop herself any longer, she touched it and gasped, startled at the lifelike feel. If light could be touched, it would feel like this—warm, almost soft—it felt alive. “Wow.”
She closed her hand into a fist, but her fingers still buzzed, kind of liked she’d gotten an electric shock. “She’s beautiful.” Lee wasn’t sure what else to say, but she had a feeling there was something Eira hadn’t told her yet.
“Hmmm. She was.” Eira held out a hand and Lee placed the little disc into it. The image never wavered. Eira rubbed her thumb down the side of it and the image winked out. But instead of putting the disc aside, Eira held it back out to Lee. “I want you to have this.”
Lee glanced at Kalen. He stood behind her silently and met her curious gaze with a shrug. Looking back at the old woman, Lee shook her head. “Why do you want me to have it? I don’t know her.”
Eira sighed. It was a sad, bereft sound. “No. You don’t. She died doing her damnedest to protect you.” Eira’s fingers shook, but she continued to hold the disc out. “Take it, Lee. Every child should at least know what her mother looked like.”
“My—my mother?”
“My mother.”
Kalen smiled. “You’ve said that a good fifteen times. Does it make that knowledge easier to believe?”
Still flabbergasted, Lee shook her head and muttered, “My mother.” She rubbed her forehead while she paced, but it didn’t do anything to ease the ache there. “That makes Eira . . .” She heard a laugh and looked up at Kalen. “This isn’t funny.”
“Considering that you keep repeating yourself, yeah it is. And you still haven’t been able to say it. She’s your great-grandmother. What’s so hard about saying that?” He came up behind her and laid his hands along her shoulders. When his thumbs dug into the tense muscles there, she moaned. Tension melted away, but her head continued to throb.
Too many thoughts whirling around in there. It was like she was standing in a crowded, smoke-filled bar, trying to listen to a conversation five feet away. Hardly anything made sense.
“She knew me.”
Kalen didn’t argue that. There had always been something about Lee that niggled at his brain, but it wasn’t until Eira mentioned Elina and Ana that Kalen actually pieced it together. He didn’t remember much about Ana. Until he’d seen her image on the emsphere, Kalen couldn’t have recalled what she looked like.
He knew she’d been grabbed in a raid and that she was one of the few women to ever escape the Warlords. She’d reappeared in the camp briefly, just for a few months and then she was gone again. He didn’t remember a child, but he’d been young himself. She could have either kept Lee out of sight, or perhaps she had still been carrying Lee when she disappeared.
Kalen barely remembered her. She’d been pretty, he remembered that. “She had a voice like an angel,” he murmured as another memory drifted through his mind.
Slowly, Lee turned, and when she looked up at him with stark eyes, Kalen cursed himself silently. As if she didn’t have enough open wounds right now, there he was rubbing salt in one of them. “You knew her?”
He almost wished he could say yes. He could see the need in her eyes, but he wouldn’t lie to her about it. “No. Not really. I was just a kid when she left here. But I remember her voice.”
“Do I look like her?” Lee asked hesitantly. She reached into her pocket for the emsphere, but she didn’t turn it on. Her hand shook a little, and when she fisted it around the disc, it shook.
Gently, Kalen smoothed his hands up and down her arms. “I think you’ve got her smile,” he whispered softly. Then he grinned down at her. “Eira’s smile. I can see that now. Her smile, her attitude—her temper.”
As he’d expected, Lee’s soft blue eyes flashed. She started to snarl at him, but the look faded before it had completely formed. “Her temper,” Lee said as a sad, wistful smile appeared on her face. “Why didn’t she tell me before?”
“Don’t you think you were dealing with enough?” He nuzzled her neck and eased her body back against his. He rubbed a hand up and down her back, and when she took a deep breath, he could feel it shuddering through her. Distantly, he was aware of the chaotic rumble of her thoughts, and once more, he found himself wishing he could do something to make all of this easier on her.
There was nothing to be done, though, beyond what he was already doing. Hold her when she needed it, listen when she talked. “You’ve left your world behind—your home. You come to a strange place where you don’t feel you know anybody or anything, right in the middle of a war. How much more do you want to have dropped on you like that?”
“Learning I had a grandmother—or great-grandmother— might have helped. Might have made it a little easier.” She sighed and snuggled closer to him. Kalen wrapped his arms around her. Lee sighed and rubbed her cheek against his chest.
“Easy isn’t going to prepare you for what is coming, Lee.”
Lee stiffened and pushed away from him. She shot him a narrow look from under the fringe of her bangs before moving away. Jamming her hands into the pockets of the cavinir jacket, she started to pace, long, restless strides that took her back and forth across the small room. “That’s part of the problem. I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be preparing for or why I’m supposedly so important. Nobody will give me any kind of answer.”
He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. His instinctive response was to tell her that he didn’t know much more than she did, at least about what lay before them. But he suspected Lee didn’t need his uncertainty piled on top of her own. Stalling, he moved to the small trunk that served as a table by his cot. Locked inside there was a bottle of sharn, homemade whiskey that packed one hell of a punch. He thumbed the locking mechanism. There was a faint hum as it read his DNA signature and then it unlocked.
He splashed the pale gold liquor into a glass and held it out to Lee. She took it, sniffed. “Whoa. What’s this for, intoxicating the wyrms?” Lee swirled it around in the glass and stared. “I’m not much of a drinker. Hate feeling out of control . . . but right now? Right now, I think it’s just what the doctor ordered.” She sniffed again and then took a small sip.
She started coughing, and he watched over the rim of his own drink as she finally managed to wheeze in a breath. Lee blinked away the tears stinging her eyes and then took another sip. She managed to get it down without choking this time, and afterward she shot him a grin. “If this stuff doesn’t kill me, I could get used to it.”
“Good stuff. Getting harder to come by, so enjoy it.” He swirled his own glass, watched it slosh around. “Nobody here is any more prepared for what’s coming than you are, Lee. You’ve been thrust into the middle of this mess for a reason. I don’t know what that reason is, but I do know there is one.”
She gave him a dour smile. “All things for a reason . . . yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve pretty much always believed that, but it sure as hell doesn’t seem like much of a help right now.” She took another drink, a bigger one, and then grinned at him. “This helps.”
“Slow down with it. It packs a punch,” he advised. She started toward him and he grinned as she stumbled a little. The glass fell from her hand and Kalen cocked a brow. “I didn’t realize . . .” He stared at her, concerned. This wasn’t the liquor. “Lee, what is it?”
In the span of a couple of heartbeats, she had turned as pale as death and her eyes had darkened to the color of the midnight sky. She pressed her hand to her belly and looked toward him. It didn’t seem like she really saw him; her eyes were tracking blindly and her voice was hollow as she murmured, “Something’s wrong.”
The words had no sooner left her mouth than the world exploded. Or at least that was how it felt. The ground rumbled and pitched beneath their feet, and distantly he could hear screams and crashing going on outside his unit. Lee fell to the floor, landing on her hands and knees, and continued to stare toward him out of darkened eyes.
Her body started to spasm. He tried to get to her, but the shaking and trembling of the ground made the progress slow. She started to puke, and even after she’d emptied her stomach, Lee continued to wretch and shudder. “Something’s wrong . . . ,” she moaned. “Everything feels—”
The spasms wrapped hold of her and choked off her words. Her face went red, darkened to an alarming shade of purple, and then she slumped. Kalen crawled his way to her, all but digging his hands into the floor as it shuddered and pitched under him. Terror wrapped him in its cold, slippery grasp, and even when he pulled Lee into his arms and felt the pulse at her neck, it wouldn’t let go.
“Lee!”
She moaned but didn’t open her eyes. Her lips moved, and he had to bend over to hear her. “Something’s wrong . . .”
Not something. Everything.
Nearly twenty hours later, Kalen stood surveying the wreckage that had been his home for the past three years. The base camp had been one of the most secure in the Roinan territory. Probably one of the most secure camps in the west.
Now it was little more than rubble. He had no idea how many bodies were trapped under the mess of collapsed housing units and common areas. So far, the uninjured survivors numbered nineteen hundred. Nearly twenty-five hundred had been reported as injured, and the rest were either dead or unaccounted for.
Not even twenty-four hours ago there had been 6,963 refugees, soldiers, medics and scouts living in the base camp. The outlying areas had probably another four thousand in various outposts and temp shelters. Kalen had no idea how hard those areas had been hit, but if it was anything like this . . .
“Damn it all to hell,” he swore. He didn’t want to think in such terms, but the pragmatist in him already knew they’d lost possibly a third of their people.
“It’s ready.”
Kalen looked past Dais to the huge barricade that had been erected just outside the perimeter. It was actually a series of barricades, four of them, with the largest one on the inside. The barricades were crude and there was no guarantee they’d be effective, but night was coming and the camp was vulnerable.
Too vulnerable and Kalen knew it. Off in the distance, the gate was open. God and saints alone knew what was going to come pouring through it, but Kalen had a bad feeling that their time had about run out. Power had been forced into the gate, and the backlash from the power surge had caused the earthquakes. That much power was because somebody on the other side had forced the gate to open, and it was the largest damned opening he’d ever sensed. It wasn’t going to be a quick in-and-out job, either. This was no simple raid. Hell, the raids alone were bad enough.
This was going to be an all-out invasion. There was also a telltale rumble in the earth that had started just a couple of hours ago. Wyrms. They hadn’t arrived yet, but they would probably come when the rest of the demon bastards appeared.
Shooting a gaze skyward, he muttered, “A break would be nice.”
A break. Some luck. A miracle. Kalen wasn’t picky, but they were in serious trouble. Night coming, wyrms in the area—at least two—and a horde of demons just waiting for sunset. The Sirvani hadn’t appeared yet, but Kalen wasn’t surprised. The Sirvani would let the demons go through, and whoever lived through the demon attacks would be considered fit for capture. Strength, stamina and the ability to evade death by demon hand made for excellent slaves.
Short-term goals were to live through the night, and in the morning any and all able-bodied families were leaving. Right now, they were all preparing for the journey, packing what could be carried and leaving everything else behind. Morne was hand-selecting the warriors that would travel with the families to provide for their safety, while Dais rallied the rest of the troops and did a recon of the areas closest to the camp, searching for survivors that might have been outside the walls when the quake hit.
Kalen had activated the emergency systems and sent out a broadcast detailing the earthquake, an approximate guess at the loss of life and a request for whatever assistance could be spared. Healers had already been selected for the journey. What remained of them anyway. One of the quakes had left the medicon in ruins. Some of the healers and techs had been pulled alive from the wreckage, but none of the patients trapped inside had survived. Including Eira.
Once the families were gone, the heavy artillery would be fired up. Sooner if they had to, but Kalen didn’t want to entice the wyrms until absolutely necessary. The laser cannons were only the beginning. Underneath the base, they had stores upon stores of weapons, the best technology their world could boast. They had been hoarding it like a kid hoarded sweets, and now it was party time. Most of the underground storage facilities had survived the quakes. The ones that had collapsed were in the process of being dug out.