Timeless (36 page)

Damien looked as shaken as I felt. Lamia
turned slowly around, her arms outstretched as she came forward
into the grand foyer. I knew then what Damien had meant when he
said she wouldn’t let him go so long ago. She might have severely
punished him with torture for trying to escape with me, but she had
never planned to kill him. She wanted to take my place. She hadn’t
had the strength to kill me or change her shape when she’d first
come through. She had to use a stranger’s life force, to inhabit
his body to disguise herself as she approached us. And she needed
to know where we were headed.Then she could go after us later. She
was just waiting for the right time when she had regained her
power, a time when we’d be least likely to suspect her. Then she
could take her revenge, kill me again, and take my place with
Damien.

Not expecting to find me alive, she lunged
for me. I was quicker now and stronger. She no longer had my ring,
and she couldn’t control my power. I mentally cut loose the massive
chandelier overhead, which fell, splintering into a thousand pieces
between us. I’d had more practice using my power, and I was able to
block the crystals from shattering in our faces, concentrating my
effort on directing the splintering shards towards Lamia, now
buried under the tiny crystals, all individually stabbing her.

Damien and I looked at each other in relief,
but before we could investigate the rubble, she rose up, a
glittering figure seemingly impossible to kill. She came at me
again but turned at the last moment, lunging at Damien for a last
deadly embrace. I looked in horror at the tiny shards, all cutting
him at once. I immediately concentrated on pulling out each
crystal, but the damage had been done. She’d not yet reached his
face, but she was covering the rest of him with her body.

She must have had a death grip because Damien
couldn’t pull her off of him, and he was bleeding profusely. I had
to do something.I knew I’d never be able to overpower her
physically, so instead I decided to channel all of my energy into
using my power to break her hold.

I started to concentrate harder than I ever
had before. Standing several feet away, I channeled all of my
thoughts to uncurling her fingers, then worked on her arms and
legs. It took all of my mental efforts, but I could tell that her
hold lessened. Damien thrust her from him, and she staggered back,
falling again into the remains of the chandelier. I concentrated on
folding its arms around her, trapping her body, now weakened from
the loss of blood.

She began to convulse in a fit that caused
shards to fly everywhere, sending off a prism of colors as the sun
streamed down, catching the glass that still stuck into her. I
again created a protective shield over us, blocking the crystals
from penetrating our skin.

She suddenly shriveled, and like a chameleon,
revealed herself as an exotic serpent, with green, blue, yellow,
and orange hues. The colors grew in intensity, burning our eyes. We
heard a low moaning, then a low hissing voice. I was a woman, let
me have once more a woman's shape, and charming as before. Give me
my woman's form, and place me where he is!

I began to shake with the intensity of my
effort, not knowing how much longer I could last.

The moaning finally subsided, the voice
dissipating in a fume of silence. Writhing on the floor, she
disappeared into a mist.

We heard a noise from above and jumped, but
it was only Mrs. Arthur, the housekeeper, who’d come down to see if
we were alright. Having heard the noises from upstairs, she’d come
to investigate, a club in her hand.

“What happened here?” she asked, surveying
the broken glass.

I took several deep breaths. It took a few
moments to answer.

“Oh, just killing a snake,” I tried to say
nonchalantly, unsuccessfully keeping the tremor out of my
voice.

Then she saw Damien.

“Heaven help us! I’m calling 911,” she said,
bolting upstairs.

Damien’s voice stopped her.

“No, Mrs. Arthur, I’m fine,” he said.

We both looked at him in surprise. Blood
seemed to ooze from every pore of his body from the neck down.

“It’s like a thousand paper cuts, no more,”
he explained. “I’ve experienced worse.”

I shook my head in disbelief then remembered
the training he’d endured as a knife—the broken bones and gashing
wounds were all just part of a day’s workout. Many knights returned
from the field needing attention.And then there was the torture
Lamia had likely inflicted on him.

“But how?” Mrs. Arthur asked, clearly
perplexed at how one snake could wreak this much havoc.

“A minor technical malfunction,” I hastily
explained.

“We’ll have to have the home inspected again,
then. We can’t go round having chandeliers swinging and dropping
down on us, now can we?” she said. “The next thing you know, it
will be the wainscoting popping off the walls! Old houses! Who says
they’re charming when you think about all the maintenance,” she
said as she climbed the stairs again.

We breathed a sigh of relief.

She stopped and turned, a thoughtful look on
her face.

“That snake wouldn’t happen to be a colorful
one, now, would it?” she asked.

We both nodded, wondering how she would have
known that Lamia was a snake.

“I thought so. I’d just gone to get this club
after I spotted that large pretty one downstairs. Nasty things,
snakes,” she said. “ This one looked to be poisonous.”

Damien and I looked at each other.

“She was,” we both said in unison.

****

Later that evening, we lay curled up together
on one of Damien’s large couches. Damien had needed lots of
bandages, but the shards hadn’t penetrated too deeply. So he hadn’t
downplayed his injuries, as I at first had thought. He really had
only gotten a thousand small scratches—enough to draw blood and
look horrible at first but easily cleaned up. The worst part was
where they re-opened his earlier wounds. Fortunately, however, I’d
prevented most of the damage by removing the shards so quickly.

Damien started laughing.

“What is it?” I asked. I couldn’t believe he
could laugh at anything just now.

“I was just thinking…If one good thing has
come out of this, it’s that I doubt they’ll make you take the swim
test now,” he said, chuckling.

I laughed.

“I think a swim test is the least of my
worries,” I said, reflecting on the traumas I’d experienced in this
life and my past one. “But I’ve decided something,” I told him.

“What’s that?” he asked, stroking my
hair.
“Maybe it really is time that I learned to swim,” I said.

Damien reached over to hold my hand.

“I hope it’s really over now,” I said,
relieved that the swim test was the only concern I faced now that
Lamia was dead, Ben was safe, and Damien was here with me.

Despite all the bandages, he took me into his
arms, resting his head on mine.

“Whatever happens, Emmeline, you’re not by
yourself anymore,” he said, kissing the top of my head.

I nodded. I knew what he meant—no more trying
to fight alone. Whatever the future or the past held for us, we’d
face it together.I looked up into his face and smiled, thinking of
T. S. Eliot’s timeless lines, which I’d read in my English
class:

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

I reached over to stroke his beautiful face.
No matter what happened, nothing would ever part us again.

Epilogue

What we call the beginning is often the
end

And to make an end is to make a
beginning.

The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

I stood looking into the water at my
reflection. It was now or never.

Lunging forward, I felt the cool water all
around me, covering my head, and I started to panic. A hand reached
over to help me if I needed it. Relief flooded me.

I gasped for air as I broke the surface.

“Great job,” Damien said, his hair glistening
in the sunlight. I smiled at him, the intense fear subsiding.

“You were down twenty seconds, I think,” he
said, a large smile radiating from his handsome face.

“Really?”

“What does your watch say?” he asked Annie,
who stood by the pool, a stopwatch in her hand.

“Eighteen seconds,” she said proudly.

Damien took me by the hand, and we went under
again. He shoved at me playfully, and I shoved back, keeping my
hands cupped as I treaded the water.

I didn’t know how to swim yet, but I knew it
was a beginning.

We broke the surface again, and Annie yelled,
“Thirty seconds!”

The third time down, Damien caught me to him
by the waist, kissing me. When we broke the surface, Annie was
clapping.

“A full minute!” she screamed, clapping and
jumping up and down.

I looked over to Damien’s proud face, love
shining in his eyes, and my heart melted.

It was a start.

The End

About the Author: Amanda Paris and has
written the literary vampire mashup, Heathcliff, Vampire of
Wuthering Heights. She has published Timeless on amazon.com under
the pen name Emma Eliot.You can write her at
[email protected] and visit her website:
https://sites.google.com/site/amandapariswrites/.

COMING SOON….

SHATTERED

Prologue

They came, their dark eyes boring holes into
me as they approached. The life force seemed to drain from my body,
which lay immobile, my arms and legs paralyzed by my side. My
spirit drew to the whirling vortex beyond death as I shattered into
a thousand pieces, a ball of heat breaking apart. Was I human
anymore or part of some cosmic sphere awaiting rebirth?

The high priestess loomed over me, the dagger
poised above my heart. The darkest one—whose eyes I remembered from
long ago— held up her hands to scatter my remains. Then the burning
started from the inside out and everything became red…

Chapter One

“Camelot”

If ever I would leave you,

How could it be in spring-time?

Knowing how in spring I'm bewitched by you
so?

Oh, no! not in spring-time!

Summer, winter or fall!

No, never could I leave you at all!

Alan Jay Lerner, “If Ever I Would Leave
You”

They pulled me between them, almost ripping
the fabric of the dress. Annie looked nervously in my direction,
remembering, as I did, what had happened this time last year. I
whispered for Ben to let me go, but he did so only reluctantly.

“Cut!” Mr. Ormond shook his head at us.
“That’s not in the script; you won’t fight over her until
later!”

He walked up to the stage, his hands
gesticulating wildly.

I took a deep breath and exited stage right,
glad not to feel the pressure of their hands on my arms or the
weight of Ben’s accusing eyes. This wasn’t going well.

Ms. St. Clair, you really need to do a better
job of looking at the audience. We need to feel the conflict you’re
experiencing between your loyalty to the king and your undeniable
love for his best knight,” Mr. Ormond was explaining. “You must
show how aware you are of the pain you’re inflicting, the
betrayal.”

But I was all too aware of how I could cause
pain. I groaned. I wanted to avoid this and had promised myself
that I would never cause them to fight over me again. I was never
supposed to play this role, I muttered under my breath.

Ms. May, who’d volunteered to help us in
rehearsals, stepped in.

“Why don’t we take a break, John? We’ve been
at it for two hours now, and I think they could use a rest.”

Mr. Ormond shot her a look. If I must, it
signaled.

“Alright, folks, take five,” he said,
frustrated with us.

I felt relief. It was the night before the
big show, which the senior class was putting on as their “creative
project” for the year. This year, we’d decided to perform the
musical Camelot.

Correction. Angela Rossi, the senior class
president, had chosen our class project. She thought it was
romantic for her to play Guinevere, to have the two hottest guys in
school fight over her in front of everyone. They just happened to
be Ben and Damien, who hadn’t wanted to star as Lancelot, a poor
excuse for a knight, he’d argued. We’d watched the 1967 Lerner and
Lowe musical together, amused at the hokey songs, costumes, makeup,
and acting. But he didn’t have much of a choice. As Class
President, Angela could force any student to participate in the
project. The power had definitely gone to her head.

She’d cast Ben as King Arthur, but there’d
been no real question about who would play the French knight who
had stolen Guinevere away from the king. Only one student had the
looks, personality, and strange accent to do Lancelot’s role
justice—Damien. And both guys had more than decent singing voices,
which couldn’t be said for Angela, who’d taken a starring role.

Rehearsals had started just after Christmas.
I was grateful that Angela hated me, relieved I wouldn’t have to
play even a minor role, but all of my friends had been upset that I
didn’t have to suffer onstage with the rest of them. Annie had been
cast as a lady-in-waiting to Guinevere, while Zack had been cast as
Mordred, the nemesis of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table, which consisted of a spray-painted piece of cardboard we’d
cut into a circle and propped on several cinderblocks. A less
likely villain was not to be found, but Zack agreed to take the
part, probably after more than a little prodding from Angela. And
since I’d taken up sewing in earnest over the last year, I was in
charge of costumes, which suited me just fine. After the past year,
I didn’t crave attention and certainly didn’t want to act or sing
in front of an audience.