Purpose (7 page)

Hell. That’s what’s happening to you. It
could be your home. We hold your desires right here. You can have
it all with us. With them…nothing. With us, everything. Your
soul-mate. Your son. You don’t have to worry about having a
daughter with us. We’ll love you and worship you anyway. You can be
our queen. Your king is already here, waiting….

“Stop it!” I gasped aloud.

You know this is what you want.

“No!” I said, louder this time.

But the voice wouldn’t shut up. It kept
taunting. The evil blood—that of my sperm donor, Lucas, the
Daemoni’s most powerful warrior—coursed like an icy stream through
my veins. I could feel it trying to take over. I curled into a
ball, my hands still over my ears, my eyes squeezed shut, my body
shaking uncontrollably.

“No. No, no,
no
!”

Yes.

“This is not what I want!” An electric charge
filled the air. The hairs on my arms stood on end and I heard a
crackling sound around me. Again, the pendant heated against my
skin.

You know it is! Let go, Alexis. Let it all
go. Find comfort with us.

“No! Please, God,
help
me!”

The voice fell silent.

I trembled so hard, the bed shook under me.
My pulse thudded in my ears, but at least I heard nothing else. I
opened my eyes and remained in a ball, staring at nothing and
praying for the voice to stay away. The energy in the room settled,
as did the pounding in my chest. My blood finally warmed and the
shivering stopped.

But fear still wrapped itself around me.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. I was half Daemoni, but
not evil. Rina assessed me every time she saw me and said the evil
was repressed, virtually non-existent.
So what the hell just
happened?

Was the state of my mind bringing out the
worst of me? That was certainly possible, I supposed. I suddenly
remembered the lights in Dorian’s window—the two little fires. Had
those been my own eyes? I shuddered again.

This afternoon and evening with Dorian had
been good. Too good. Almost as if I’d swung into a maniacal state
from the chaos earlier in the day. And now I had to pay for it. The
conversation with Mom and Owen…the realization of just how bad
everything was…an Evil Alexis trying to push her way out…. I would
really lose it at this rate, if I hadn’t already. I just hoped the
good side would win, that Mom would lock me up before I did
anything…bad.

I couldn’t move. I felt drained of all
energy. I lay there, with the light still on, and squeezed my eyes
shut. I needed to see the beautiful face. I just wanted to go back
to the way things were, when I could count on the same dream,
seeing him every night. I had my miserable moments then, but I was
mostly just foggy and I missed the fog. If I never found Real
Alexis again, I preferred Foggy, who was a hundred times better
than all these other alter egos.

The memory-dream tried to replay but even my
subconscious mind couldn’t focus—couldn’t make his face clear. I
woke up at 3:39 sobbing and my body burning. It didn’t ache with
soreness from the running. It actually burned as the muscles
repaired themselves from the strain I’d put them through. When I
finally fell back to sleep, the memory-dream didn’t start again.
The slideshow on the mountain played instead…and every time
Tristan’s face started to surface, Owen’s pushed it away. And the
images of Owen weren’t really memories. They looked more
like…possibilities.
No, no, no! I’m not only forgetting… Oh,
hell no! He can’t be replaced!

Awake at 5:28. I lay in bed, though, the
aberration of last night still frightening me. The state of my mind
seemed to be deteriorating and the council’s demands had apparently
been too much for my fragile psyche. I felt even closer to the edge
of that abyss—my toes curling over its lip, my body leaning forward
for the fall. Only Dorian and that wispy thread, frayed and in
danger of snapping, kept me from the plunge. That tiny bit of
hope.

Please, baby, I need you. I need
you
, not anyone else. What if they…?
I couldn’t bear to
complete the thought…but then I couldn’t help it. Would they force
me to mate with someone else? Could I do that? Could I ever be able
to tuck this part of me away and force myself? I didn’t think so.
Not without undeniable proof that Tristan was…gone, really gone.
But what if proof never came? Time alone seemed to be enough proof
for the Amadis. When Rina joined our souls, though, during our
wedding ceremony, she said nothing and no one could ever sever our
union. Not distance, space or…time.

The more I thought about everything, the less
any of it made sense. Rina said we were
made
for each other.
The Angels had specifically created our souls to unite with each
other. How could there ever be anyone else? Such an idea went
against everything the Amadis had been banking on since I was born.
Were they wrong? Were our souls not really one?

Physical pain shot through my chest, taking
my breath away.

The pain answered my questions. Of course we
were meant for each other. Of course our souls were united. There
could never be anyone else. So…what on earth went wrong? Why was I
here, alone with no daughter and a son who supposedly shouldn’t
exist? Why did I feel like I was losing our connection, my love’s
memory? Why was all of this happening?

Nothing made sense and I would drive myself
even more insane trying to figure it all out, so I stopped trying.
At least for now. I literally rolled out of bed, nearly falling to
the floor. I glanced at the bag containing my new running clothes
and shoes, untouched since I bought them. They held no interest for
me now.
What a waste of money.
I knew that urge to run was a
fluke. Yesterday’s strange burst of energy had dissipated, but my
mind felt wide awake.

So I trudged into my office, turned my laptop
on and plopped into my chair to wait for it to boot up. As soon as
it did, my email opened. I didn’t want to even look at my inbox. No
one emailed me but my agent and my editor at the publishing company
and right now, their emails would only be complaints or demands for
new chapters. Chapters I still didn’t have. I moved the mouse to
click the X and close the email program, when something caught my
eye. A new message from Rina.

Very strange
. I couldn’t remember ever
receiving an email from Rina. She wasn’t exactly the technological
type. I knew she used email out of necessity with Mom, but only
rarely. So this must be important. I double-clicked the
message.

“Alexis, I understand it is difficult for you
to try to move on and I truly wish your situation was different. I
wish I could make it better for you, but, unfortunately, there is
nothing I can do. I do hope I can help you get past this, though,
because it is in the best interests of the Amadis and humankind. I
believe the attached video may help you let go of your past and
accept your future.”

I stared at the message for several minutes,
trying to understand it. The words didn’t sound like Rina’s and I
just couldn’t believe she would actually deliver such a message in
an email. This was all out of character.
It must be really
bad.
A lump grew in my throat with this realization. Whatever
the video showed, it was something she couldn’t tell me on the
phone or even deliver through Mom. So bad, neither of them could
even voice it. I instantly knew I didn’t want to watch the video.
Yet, acting on its own accord, my trembling hand moved the mouse to
the file and double-clicked.

Ian, the ugly Irish ogre who’d dropped the
bomb on me about the Amadis plan for my marriage, appeared on the
screen. He stood in a darkened room, a spotlight trained on him,
wearing black leather pants, a black trench coat and no shirt. His
red hair provided the only real color to the scene. His lips pulled
back, exposing his crooked teeth, whether in a grin or a snarl, I
couldn’t tell.

“We know ya want to go to the media,” he said
in his Irish accent, “to protect your lil lassie’s reputation. But
ya might want to think twice ‘bout that. If you do, if you
acknowledge Seth’s existence in any way, heads will roll.”

He cackled his disgusting laugh as the
recording cut to another scene. This one had all the appearances of
a group of terrorists with a hostage, just like those seen in the
early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several men
dressed in Middle Eastern tunics, sabres hanging from their leather
belts, stood in a circle around someone unseen. Those in front of
the camera moved to the side. My breath caught.

“Oh,
no
,” I gasped.

The shirtless hostage knelt on his knees, a
burlap sack over his head. One of the terrorists—a Daemoni, I
assumed—held his sabre to the hostage’s neck. I had no way of
knowing for sure without seeing the face, but the build seemed
close to right, too close, from what I could remember. And then I
saw it. My hands flew to my mouth. The blood drained from my head,
coagulating into a ball in the pit of my stomach.

Just below the curve of the knife, on the
hostage’s chest, barely visible over his heart, a darker
pigmentation against the rest of his pale skin. When our souls were
joined in marriage, it had burned bright red. The Amadis mark.
Choking, gasping sounds gnarled in my throat, the scream unable to
pass the huge lump.

“You tell the world anything, we show them
this,” Ian spoke in a voiceover.

“Alexis!” a voice screamed. A very familiar
voice. One I had heard only in my dreams for over seven years. It
careened into a wail of tortured agony.

Then the Daemoni with the sabre jerked his
arm. The camera’s view dropped, but unlike the news producers who
cut away from the gore at this point, it angled in on the burlap
sack, now rolling on the floor in a pool of blood.

I felt completely numb. I sat completely
still, only my finger moving on the mouse to click the Play button
over and over and over again. My brain refused to register what I
saw as I watched it replay, as if I watched some amateur video
staged in Hollywood, fake blood and all. But slowly, the reality of
it slithered its way into my mind. And all I could think was,
It’s not him.

“Mom?” Dorian asked, running into my office
sometime later and making me jump.

I slammed the laptop shut. I couldn’t let him
see that. He couldn’t know about the video at all. Because it
wasn’t real. And that hostage wasn’t his father.

I opened my arms and he climbed into my lap.
I held him tightly against my chest, the pressure of his body like
a catalyst to keep me breathing.

“Alexis,” Mom called from down the hall. I
could tell she rushed toward us with each syllable sounding closer.
“Rina’s email account’s been hacked. Don’t open—”

She cut herself off as she charged into my
office and saw me. Something on my face must have told her I’d seen
the video because her own face crumpled with what should have been
my pain. I simply shook my head. She pulled in a deep breath and
rearranged her expression.

“Come on, Dorian, honey, Uncle Owen’s making
you breakfast,” Mom said. My arms fell numbly to my sides as she
pulled Dorian off my lap. He ran off for the kitchen.

“It’s not him,” I whispered.

Mom closed the door, came over to me and
swiveled my chair around to face her. She squatted in front of me,
her hands on my knees.

“Honey—” she started.

“It’s not him,” I repeated, louder now.

“We don’t know—”

“I said it’s not him!” I threw my hands to my
face. My body began trembling again. My head shook back and forth.
“It’s not him. I don’t know how I know. I just do. It’s
not
him, Mom. It can’t be!”

She rubbed her hands against my thighs. “I
know, honey. I mean…I don’t know. I just know what you’re feeling.
I know it’s hard to believe.”

“I don’t
believe
. I know!” I cried
into my hands. “Don’t you? Can’t you feel the truth?”

She sighed. “You know I haven’t been able to
feel anything at all. And we haven’t been able to find anything.
We’ve tried to send soldiers in, but, if the Daemoni do still have
him, we have no idea where.”

I stopped shaking as I listened. She’d never
given me so many details.

“They lie so much, we never know what to
believe. And Rina’s heard nothing from her other sources about any
of this.” She sighed again. “And this video…we’ve never been able
to figure out if it’s him or not. Our people examined every frame
and couldn’t determine if it was even real, let alone who the
hostage was.”

I dropped my hands from my face. “What do you
mean? You’ve seen this
before
? You’ve known about this?”

She grimaced. “Yes, honey. We’ve had this
video for a few years.”

“A few
years
?” My jaw dropped with
disbelief.

“When the media did that whole character
bashing about your having Dorian so young and out of wedlock, we
were going to make an official statement. But then the Daemoni sent
this video, threatening to send it to the media worldwide if we
said anything at all. We decided it best for you and Dorian that we
just keep quiet. Ignore the rumors and let them run their course.”
She paused, then added quietly, “No one wanted you to see
this.”

“Until now.”

“We don’t know who sent it or why.”

“It’s obvious why! The council wants me to
move on and they thought this would convince me. Well, they’re
wrong. It doesn’t mean a damn thing to me!”

The next thing I knew, I sat at the head of
my bed, my arms wrapped around our wedding picture and my knees
drawn up in a ball. I didn’t remember if I had walked here
purposely or had fled to the refuge of my room. I didn’t even know
how long I’d been sitting here, rocking back and forth, whispering,
“No, no, no.”