Daughter of Gods and Shadows (7 page)

His lips parted to say something, but the one on the floor screamed out. “Let my brother go!”

She turned to look at him, and in her mind's eye an image began to take shape. It was … dust. Simple dust. And his skin gradually began to turn red. “What's happening?” he cried. What are you— Fuck! Oh … fuck!” Piercing screams erupted from him as he watched in horror; his hands begin to wither, his fingernails melted like wax, and the skin on his hands and arms peeled away from muscles and tendons. Even his clothes began to fall away as he looked up at her, screaming in agony and horror as it happened, until finally his screams faded and there was nothing left but bone and ash. In seconds, he was gone.

Eden swallowed the lump in her throat, and a wave of nausea overwhelmed her. She blinked at what was left of that man lying on the ground and stumbled backward knowing that she had done this, only … she had no idea how.

“Mkombozi?”

That word, the sound of the Ancient's voice forced her to turn back to him. The other man, the brother of the one she'd turned to ash, lay crumpled on the floor at the giant's feet.

“It is you,” he said, taking a step toward her.

It was … her! It is her!

“Oh!” She gagged, and covered her mouth with her hand to keep from vomiting.

Eden took a step toward him too, but then … she wasn't ready!

“No!” she shouted, holding up her hand to him. “I can't!”

She ran toward the exit and up the stairs out into the street and gulped in buckets of air. Is this how it was going to be? Is this what it meant to be Mkombozi? “
She was a warrior,
” Khale had told her. Mkombozi was a telepath who could kill with a thought.

“One day you'll see for yourself what she was capable of, Eden,” Khale had said. “Even without the Omens, the Redeemer was dangerous.”

Mkombozi was no warrior. She was a killer. Eden had just … killed.

 

SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

It was not Mkombozi's body, but it was her essence. It was her, and he was not going to let this one deny him. Prophet, the Guardian, chased her out into the city and saw her running half a block from the subway entrance. He chased her down and grabbed hold of her arm.

“It is you!” he said, turning her to look into his eyes.

But fear stared back at him, fear and confusion.

“Let go of me!” she demanded, jerking out of his grasp.

She was crying. It was her—Mkombozi. It had to be, because no human could do what she had just done to the man in the station.

“Don't you know me?” he asked angrily. “If you are her, then you should know me.”

The human shook her head and started to run again. Just as he had started to run after her, a small woman with large glasses stepped in front of him.

“Not now, Guardian.” It was Khale.

He shoved her out of his way and went after Mkombozi. Seconds later, a bull appeared in front of him. Again, it was Khale.

“I won't let you stop me,” he warned her.

“They see you, Guardian, and they see you talking to yourself.”

She was referring to the humans who had stopped and stared quizzically at him. Their eyes were masked to the form of the talking animal, but they couldn't deny the images of him.

“I don't give a damn,” he snapped, charging toward the bull.

Khale lowered her massive head, charged toward him, and in mid-stride changed her form into a condor, grabbing him with her talons and carrying him away. He tried to will his own wings to extend, but she held him so that he couldn't get them to release.

They flew for miles before she finally dropped him into a wide open field in the middle of nowhere and shifted back into the form of the small woman.

“You're a fucking idiot!” she shouted, stalking around him.

“You have no right to keep me from her, Shifter!” he growled. “I'm her Guardian.”

“You
were
Mkombozi's Guardian, yes. But this one—Eden—doesn't know you, Tukufu. She is afraid of you.”

“If she is the reborn, then there's no way in hell she can be afraid of me. She knows me the way I know her.”

“Did she look as if she knew you?” Khale challenged.

He'd waited too long for this. She was there, right there, in his grasp, his purpose, the one he had been waiting for all these many, many years, and Khale was blocking him.

“She will know me, Khale,” he said, forcing his anger to subside. “But she can't if you keep her from me.”

The Shifter reigned in her frustration. “She is not one of us, Guardian,” she explained. “Yes, she is Mkombozi in essence, but even that is something she still hasn't come to accept yet. We frighten her. I've tried to prepare her as best I could, but there is something about her that resists her destiny. She can't, or won't, accept who she is, and because of that, she won't accept any of us.”

He raked his hands through his hair in frustration. “So, what's that supposed to fuckin' mean? That we wait another four thousand years for her to come around?”

“None of us has that long, Tukufu,” she said gravely. “The Demon is back. And this war has started already even though no one seems to know it. This world is changing because he's changing it. Humans go on living their lives, while he slowly destroys them. They can't see it.”

Prophet studied her. “How do you know this?”

“This mysterious disease infecting humans,” she began to explain, “this flu that they've been reporting, isn't what they think it is.”

He shrugged. “Humans get the flu. They get sick.”

“Not like this,” she said gravely. “A doctor, an Ancient, told me that this is unlike anything he's ever seen in human history. People have been on the brink of death with this disease, only to miraculously recover. In some cases, some have even died and come back to life.”

He had heard that Sakarabru was back. Ancients everywhere seemed to be preparing for the worst, gathering together again into their colonies, reaching out to one another again to reform old alliances.

“Then we're wasting time,” he told Khale. “We can't wait for her to accept me, or any of us. Which is why you need to let me go after her. I can tell her what she needs to know, teach her the things she needs to learn.”

“It's not that easy,” Khale reasoned. “She's not willing to accept any part of this, not the fact that she is Mkombozi, not you or even me. And she wants nothing to do with the Omens. The bonds have to be made, or this time Sakarabru will succeed.”

“So what are you saying? I should back off and let her come into her own when she's ready? If what I'm hearing is true, then she has to be made ready.”

Khale wanted to believe that Mkombozi was so brave and fearless, but nothing could've been farther from the truth. How many times had Mkombozi admitted to Tukufu when the two of them had been alone that she just wanted to leave the Omens and the Demon behind and live out her life with him? Mkombozi had never been fearless, but she was devoted to her mother and her destiny. The Ancients needed her and were counting on her to do what no one else could do. Without her, Sakarabru would rule Theia, and her people would suffer a fate that would make them welcome death if he did.

“I can do that. I've done it before.”

“And you will again,” Khale said, coming over to him and placing a comforting hand on his arm. “The Omens destroyed my daughter, Guardian,” she admitted sadly. “I watched them consume her and erase every good and wonderful thing about her and was powerless to stop it.”

“We both were,” he said.

Khale was thoughtful before continuing, but he could almost read her mind and knew where this was going. “I don't know what they will do to Eden.”

Eden. Her name was Eden.

“Truthfully, I don't even know if she'll survive the bonding process. She is not as strong as we are, physically. And she wants nothing to do with them or us. But I would hate to see them do to her what they did to Mkombozi.”

The truth was, Mkombozi/Eden's sole purpose for being was to bond with the Omens so that the Demon could finally and ultimately be defeated to the point that he couldn't come back. Even Mkombozi had fallen short because Khale was forced to destroy her before the last molecule of the Demon could be obliterated. As long as any part of him survived, the possibility remained that he could return. If Eden survived the bonds, she would have to survive her battle with the Demon and then her battle with the Omens, which became more powerful the longer they were bonded to the Redeemer.

“Andromeda should tell us how to destroy them after the Redeemer-Eden kills Sakarabru,” he said, stating the obvious. “The Seer was the one who created them.”

“The Redeemer must destroy the Demon.” Khale smiled. “And the last of the Demon must die.”

He looked confused. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That no part of him shall remain,” Khale said. “But you know how Ancients are. Full of drama and fuckin' riddles.”

The last of the Demon were the Omens. Eden was born to die. She had to destroy a Demon, hopefully not a world, but when she had done what she was born to do, somehow, someway, she was going to die. So why the hell was he so anxious to get to her, if she was nothing more than a sacrificial lamb? Because lamb or not, she was his—his Purpose. She was his reason for breathing. If death was her fate, then it was his as well.

“I'll give you a week, Shifter,” he suddenly said. “One week to let her know I'm coming, and then not even you will be able to keep me from her.”

Prophet willed his wings to expand, spread them wide, and disappeared into the dark sky.

 

FREE FALLING

Two men were dead because of her. Eden had literally killed one of them with her thought, and the surveillance footage of the attempted sexual assault against her was all over the news. Eden walked into Patmos, the bar where she worked as a bartender. Ben, the bartender who had been waiting on Eden to take the next shift, was already there, and he glared at her when he saw her coming through the front door. She was late—again.

“Excuse me,” she said, winding her way through the crowd. It was just after eight on a Thursday, and the place was packed already. She happened to glance up at one of the televisions mounted behind the bar—and stopped dead in her tracks as she watched the grainy footage on the news from a surveillance camera in the subway station where those men died. Her face couldn't be seen in that footage. The camera was behind her, but there was no mistaking the dark blue jacket she wore, her walk, or her locks.

The blurred images showed a woman being picked up and carried into a broom closet, and then moments later, that same woman dragged a man across the floor.

Eden stood there in shock, watching that woman—watching her—do things that couldn't possibly be done.

“Eden!” her boss, Tawny, stomped toward her. “You're late again!” she said, angrily. “Put your things away and relieve Ben. His shift ended half an hour ago.”

Eden couldn't speak. Tawny's hard stare left Eden and trailed to the television screen. She stared at it, confused, and then stared back at Eden. “Eden?”

She knew. That footage had no doubt been played over and over again, and by morning, people would have it memorized, and anyone who knew her would see that she was that woman. Eden jerked away from Tawny and left Patmos knowing that she could never come back.

Snow was just starting to fall when Eden ran out of the bar. She made a mental note to go someplace where it never snowed, someplace with a beach and palm trees and with no Internet or cell phone service.

She had killed a man and
he
had killed the other. The Guardian. Eden knew who he was the moment she saw him, even though she'd never laid eyes on him in her life. She'd felt him and remembered things about him that she couldn't have possibly known. Tukufu was his name. The moment she saw him she could feel what he felt—relief, that he'd finally found her. She was his Beloved and nothing would keep him from her now that he'd found her again. He was real, and she felt things for him that didn't make sense.

“Mkombozi!”

Eden stopped when she heard someone behind her call out that name. A thick lump swelled in her throat, and her heart thumped even harder in her chest.

“That's not what they call you now. Is it?”

Eden turned slowly, dreading the person talking to her. If it knew her by that name, then it was one of them. This one had swamp-water-colored eyes, clay-brown skin, stood about four feet tall, had a wide tree stump for a head, with no neck to speak of. It wore a fashionable, high-end designer coat, had squeezed its massively wide feet into a pair of gold Jimmy Choo stilettos and carried a twenty-five-thousand-dollar Hermès bag on its arm. Diamond earrings dangled from its mangled ear lobes.

People passed right by it without stopping and staring. None of them saw what Eden saw.

“Images of you are on every news channel,” it said, stepping toward her. “I don't want to believe it's you, but I know it is.”

Eden backed away. “It's not me,” she managed to say, shaking her head in disbelief that it was actually speaking to her.

“You're afraid,” that thing said, frowning, sounding almost surprised. “Aren't you always?” This thing looked disappointed. “You need to get over it.”

The voice coming from it was downright intoxicating. It was comforting, reassuring, seductive, but it looked like a troll and smelled like rotting meat.

“They want you,” it said, taking another step toward her. “They won't let you run.”

They? The police?
“They can't catch me if they can't find me,” she said anxiously.

Was it smiling?

“He's bringing one to you now, Redeemer.”