White Fire: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 5 (23 page)

Two more young men stepped out, one a few years older, one a scrawny teenager who looked like he should be learning how to drive.

“Now, Katherine.”

Katherine squeezed Emma’s hand as she passed by and walked to stand beside Elijah. She focused on the Gate and the dark shadows Emma had seen rise from her skin began again. The dark raced toward Elijah’s portal and fused with it. The moment Katherine’s darkness touched the portal it changed shaped, grew larger and more solid, like a giant bubble of black night hovering over the beach. It spread into a rectangular shape, like a door, and settled onto the sand.

“Wow.” Emma leaned forward to see that the center of the shape had vanished, leaving a true Gate to the other side where she could now easily identify the anxious faces of the remaining forbidden sons. They ranged in age from infants to grown men. Of the few who were mature, fully adult males, there was no way for her to ascertain their age. The older boys carried the babies. None of them smiled. All were dressed in black. And anyone old enough to walk carried a blade.

“Come. Now.” Elijah stepped forward and they surged through the Gate like water. Emma tried to count. Forty-three? Plus or minus one. And she might have missed a baby or toddler if they were being carried.

Lost sons. heartbreaking faces tossed aside by their own people because their damn Queen was a power-hungry bitch.

Maybe burning her up would be a pleasure after all.

When the last male stepped through, Katherine closed the Gate and they all stood, milling about. Uncertain.

Katherine turned around and met Emma’s gaze. “Your turn.”

Heat rose in her gut, a fire like she’d never felt before. The males before here were all tainted, even the babies. Their dark power pulling the life force from someone close to them before they were old enough to know what was happening.

Emma stepped forward, her forearms and lower legs already lit up like the wick burning in an oil lamp. Her power was hungry to burn them. It wanted their darkness. Once she started, she wasn’t going to be able to stop.

“Have them get in a circle. They all have to be touching.”

Emma sank to her knees, too consumed with the flame’s demands to dedicate any thought to balance or holding her muscles upright. Elijah, Katherine and the older males guided the younger ones into concentric circles with Emma at their core.

When they were ready, smallest boys closest to her and the older men on the edges, Emma looked up into the face of a boy no more than four or five years old. He was staring at her, the light of the fire she carried casting odd shadows on his cute face. She wanted to hug him, the preschool-aged Immortal who’d already tasted death and rejection by his own mother.

No wonder these poor children went insane.

She felt a tear roll down her cheek, and the boy watched it with curiosity. He reached for it, but hesitated when the white fire leapt to encase her entire body. She smiled at him through the flames.

“It’s okay. You can touch me.”

He stepped forward and placed his tiny hand against her cheek, welded them together with power and fire. Emma swayed at the explosion of energy that poured through her body into the boy. The toddler was surprisingly strong as he caught her and held her upright on her knees. Her fire jumped to his small body, but he didn’t flinch or look away, he just stared into her eyes as the little boys on either side of him lit up as well.

The fire spread through the circles like it was chasing a trail of gasoline. None were left untouched. And they all stared at her as if their lives, their souls, depended on her to save them.

Emma hugged the boy to her as the others crowded closer to her heat, their bodies moving forward into a human bonfire of white light, and the power just kept coming, more and more heat swelled on the inside. The more they needed, the more she burned.

She couldn’t stop. Even when it started to hurt, to burn her flesh, she couldn’t stop it.

“Emma?!”

She heard Katherine’s voice as if she were at the other end of a very long tunnel. Elijah met her gaze from beyond the outer edges where he was safe from the flames. He bowed to her, deeply this time, his homage sincere, before he opened a portal for himself and left them to deal with the mess.

Emma tried to call out for Katherine, but found that her voice was locked down by a column of fire that erupted from her throat. She was burning from the inside out, and still these Darkwalkers needed more. So much evil. So much darkness.

“Emma?” Katherine yelled for her again, but she barely heard the woman. The flames burned hotter and higher. The fire covered the entire circle and rose above their heads twice the height of the tallest male.

“Emma!” Katherine sounded frantic, but Emma was beyond caring. She was the fire. She lived and breathed and consumed. She hungered.

She ached. She hurt. And she thought of one other who’d been touched by her flames, one who made her burn.

Ajax.

She held an image of him in her mind as the fire filled her completely. The power burst from her, impossible to contain or control. Her vision didn’t fade to black as she lost consciousness, it burned white.

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The dark head of a Triscani Hunter rolled to a stop at Ajax’s feet, but he ignored Raiden’s kill and battled the Hunter that stood before him. Their enemy had been coming through the portal two or three at a time. With ten Immortal males ready to either take their heads, turn them to ash, or both, all of their planning seemed a bit anticlimactic.

They could do this for hours, if necessary. Days.

He impaled the Triscani before him on his sword and lifted the body. Ajax held the Hunter suspended as Nicodemus came from behind his quarry and placed his hand on the Hunter’s torso. The Hunter dissolved around his sword, body blown away in the storm as two more stepped into view. Ajax envied the Darkwalker the soul stone Nicodemus and the others had buried in their flesh, their gift from the goddess. The Darkwalkers that the goddess had claimed as her own could hunt now, and kill, ash a hundred Triscani and never again fall to victim to the evil corruption that still tainted his own dark soul. And the goddess still refused him.

“What the hell is this, Nicodemus? A joke? It sure as hell isn’t a battle.”

Nicodemus stood, facing him as Aron walked to stand at Ajax’s side. The other four Darkwalkers dispatched their two newest arrivals behind Nicodemus, who didn’t even turn around to watch.

“No. We will face three or four hundred as soon as Katherine and Emma return.” Nicodemus grinned and his four men blocked out the rest of the Immortal warriors to surround the small portal. Apparently, they didn’t want to share.

“What do you mean, as soon as they return? Where are they?”

“With my brother, Elijah.”

“The Triscani commander?” Aron lifted his sword and held it at Nicodemus’s chest.

“Yes.”

“Where. Are. They?” Ajax was tempted to take the Immortal’s head, but the tip of Aron’s sword settled at Nicodemus’s neck and held Ajax in check. The Darkwalker didn’t even flinch.

“I do not know. Katherine summoned the Gate.”

Aron scowled. “Does Teagh know about this?”

“No. Nor is it any concern of yours. They are safe with my brother.”

“Katherine is his Marked Mate.” Ajax felt his dark power build and wondered if the soul stone in Nicodemus’s shoulder would prevent him from turning the asshole to ash.

“Yes. But Emma is not yours.”

Ajax growled at him but Nicodemus vanished through a portal and reappeared beside his men on the other side of the circle. Aron lowered his sword and turned to look at him. It had been centuries seen he’d seen his own face talking to him, and the novelty of talking to his identical twin brother still shocked his system every time.

“How long were you King on Itara? Before you came back through time?”

“Six months.” Ajax considered his answer. It was laughable. It had taken him decades to gather the allies and power needed to assume the throne, and only six months to lose everything.

“Do you remember what it was like, to be King?” Aron ignored the giant drops of rain that fell on both of them, soaking them to the bone. The discomfort was nothing compared to the hell they had both survived.

“Yes. Hours of arguments and meetings. Always watching my back, always preparing for war.” Ajax thought back to those times, when the true nature of the Itaran’s ruling circles had become clear. There was a very delicate balance of power in place among the maternal females, and he’d upset that balance. “The former Queen and her daughters sent assassins after me, forced me to ash several, tried to get me to turn.”

“Why go back?” Aron’s serious gaze allowed him to hide nothing. This was his twin, his genetic double. The same power and will flowed through both of them in equal measure. If anyone could understood Ajax’s desire to rule, it would be his brother.

“Because they’re evil.” They both knew he spoke of the current Queen and her daughters. “And they need to be stopped.”

“Yes.” Aron agreed, but didn’t let Ajax off the hook. “But soon, Emma will kill the Queen. She’ll be dead.”

“There are more in line, waiting to take her place.”

Aron grabbed his shoulder and squeezed. “We’ve paid our dues, brother. Centuries of torture and darkness. Endless nights without hope. But we didn’t break. We survived.” Ajax shook him a bit. “Don’t let fear break you now.”

“What are you talking about?” Ajax spoke quietly, despite the raging wind, sure that his brother’s Immortal ears would hear him.

“Emma.” Aron let go of his shoulder and turned to check on his Marked Mate, Zoey, where they both knew the females were hidden behind a car. Except Aron’s Mate wasn’t, she had her head draped in a piece of black plastic and she was taking pictures of the battle. The site made Aron laugh before he turned back to Ajax.

“Two days, Ajax. That’s how long it took Zoey to break me. I survived the Triscani for seven hundred years, and she utterly destroyed me in two days.” He paused, and his gaze grew serious once more. “But she remade me, too. Stronger than I was before.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I’ve seen you with Emma.”

“The Itarans would never accept her as their Queen. She’d be dead in a week.”

Aron shook his head, a wry grin on his face. “The Timewalkers are stronger than you think.”

Aron left him to walk toward the portal as three more Triscani appeared, right on schedule, every two minutes.

How long had Emma been gone? He watched the warriors dispatch the Triscani with ease and turned his back on the battle. He needed to know.

Ajax walked over to the car where the females were hiding to find Mari hunched low to the ground next to Zoey’s legs. That crazy female was still busy taking pictures. Mari was peeking around the edge of the car with her palm facing out. Her hand glowed, and he knew Mari had been assigned the job of striking any Triscani runners with Angel’s Fire.

“How long have Emma and Katherine been gone?” He addressed both of them, but it was Mari who answered.

“About twenty minutes.”

He wanted to curse, but Raiden’s Mate didn’t deserve his ire, Emma did, for leaving without telling anyone. He was sure Teagh would have a few choice words for Katherine when she returned as well.

He was debating what to do when the storm ceased instantly, the area all around them lit from above as an eerie silence preceded the sound of a ship’s engine, a sound he’d not heard in centuries.

Ajax looked to the sky and saw an Itaran ship descend to the ground. It was small, not a war ship, but oblong and silver, about the size of one of the human’s capital buildings. It would house and support no more than fifty soldiers and support crew, not the thousands that served on Itaran’s battle vessels.

He stared in disbelief as he recognized the emblem on its side. His emblem. This was his ship, the ship he’d evacuated his entire Archiver council onto during the last battle, the battle when he’d lost Angeline and become lost to the darkness within him. This was the ship that had taken them all back through the wormhole, the ship that had come from the future and landed seven hundred years in the past in Earth’s timeline.

This ship had been Bran and Celestina’s home for the last seven centuries. The Archiver ship, and the Seers, Archivers and their skeleton crew had been fighting Droghan and the Triscani for centuries. Alone.

It touched down and the doors opened. Eleven males followed Helene down the ramp and approached him. There had been twelve Archivers on his council, but Bran was already fighting. Celestina was nowhere to be seen. He’d given up trying to keep track of that female.

Mari rose to her feet beside him as another thirty soldiers, male and female, the ship’s crew, followed the Archivers and they all came to a stop before him and bowed with their swords at their hips and fire in their eyes. They were more than ready to get off that damn ship, and he couldn’t say he blamed them one bit.

Helene was covered in battle gear, but it was not the typical black the males all wore. It was a deep blood red. She looked like a goddess prepared for blood sport, a sword at her side as she spoke for the lot. “My Lord, we’ve come to fight the Triscani at your side.”