The Duelist 3, page 33
“What makes you think this Incarnate-person is Shay?” I asked.
“Remember the grave, Alex?” Amaya asked as she cupped the lava stone in her palms. “We could only get into the crypt with a strand of Shay’s hair.”
“And what is that?” Horus asked and gestured to the object in the oryx-woman’s hands.
“I wasn’t sure at first, but if Shay is the Incarnate, then the grave was the resting place of her last incarnation, and thereby, this is her heart,” she said while holding up the rock shot through with brilliant gold.
“Okay, Gella is dying, and he needs Shay to… cure him?” At this, I glanced at Madam Midgen. “Explain.”
“The Incarnate come with her own power,” Midgen said in her calypso-like accent. “With her tears, she can heal the dying, but only if her heart belongs to the one she cures.”
I thought it sounded an awful lot like the legendary phoenix mythos from my own world, but I had no time to wonder over the similarities.
“None of the legends talk about that stone,” Vel-Rala said. “But they do talk about her ability to cure her love.”
“For all we know, then, Vane is operating under the assumption he needs to triumph over Alex because he is currently married to Shay,” Jenner said.
“And what?” I challenged. “Gella gets rid of me and suddenly Shay will love him enough to cure his disease? Is he mental?”
“To his delusional mind, it might make sense,” Amaya chimed in with her voice that managed to sound both dreamy and skeptical at the same time. She twisted the feather around and around one finger in a move that would at first appear like a nervous fidget until her eyes flashed yet again. “His… spirit has saturated the essence of The Creature Igoric. Vain, vain, Vane. His illness distorts reality. His pride consumes and blinds him. He believes in his twisted mind that he is noble for saving Shale-Lea from you.”
“This guy really is crazy,” I said as the scope of this dude’s vileness really started to take shape. “Okay, so let’s say he’s using Shay to heal him, but we all know she can’t do that, especially because we still have her ‘heart,’ correct?”
“Not we, Alex, but you,” Amaya said and placed the lava stone in my palms where it glowed and pulsed warmly like a cozy and familiar house cat. “See? Even if Shale-Lea hasn’t fully realized who she is, her heart knows it was you who fought the Guardian and won the right to claim her. All Gella has realized by now is he is still missing something, and that something has to do with you.”
The longer I held… Shay’s precious heart in the palms of my hands, the more the yawning chasm of despair threatened to swallow me whole.
Shay was gone, and it fucking hurt down deep. Like a hollow-point, it found the one crack in the hard shell I had crafted around my heart like armor.
Zoie was the only thing that saved me from falling into a dark chasm of anger and hate which there was little to no return from.
Violence that dark had an event horizon just like an all-consuming black hole, and I knew once I crossed it, I couldn’t escape.
“My love,” Zoie murmured as her hands cupped the outsides of mine, and she plucked me straight from the brink just like that.
Shay’s heart thrummed and purred as if sensing Zoie’s presence along with mine, and it was such a shock of pure love and warmth that it chipped away the frost growing over my soul like springtime.
“It’s Shay, Zoie,” I choked out as we both held the beautiful heart in our hands. “We have to get her back.”
“We will, husband,” she said and held my gaze so tenderly with her steady ocean eyes. “Now, take a breath, and tell us what the plan is.”
I closed my eyes as her forehead touched mine and followed her example by breathing deeply, in and out, like the waves of the calming sea.
When I opened them again, I felt tempered and cooled like hot iron and deadly steel forged with purpose.
I welded my anger into a tool and let the pieces of what I knew fall together in the trappings of my mind.
“One thing is blatantly obvious,” I stated as I tucked the heart-stone safely away. “Gella Vane is expecting me on his doorstep for a Duel, and I shall not disappoint him.”
Chapter 23
Waiting.
Whap.
Always.
Whap.
Fucking.
Whap.
Waiting.
Alex-person is angry? Prosper beamed into my agitated thoughts with no warning and caused me to jump.
“Gah,” I said and looked down at what I was doing with my hands. Apparently, I’d been trying to tie Prosper’s tack, and I was whipping the strap around a little too forcefully as I secured it to the harness. “Sorry, buddy. I wasn’t paying attention, and I guess I was broadcasting a little too loudly, huh?”
The proud canterfly whistled and turned his head up and away.
“Aw, c’mon, don’t be like that, man,” I groaned and tried to brush his flank with a stiff-bristled brush, but he side-stepped away.
“Hee-oo!” he snorted.
“What happened?” Zoie asked as she came in with a small basket that smelled exactly like Arvid’s hearty stew. “I’m barely gone, and I come back to you two squabbling.”
“Who says we’re squabbling-- hey!” Prosper danced away again when I tried to approach him. “What’s with you?”
“Why are you talking to him like that?” Zoie asked but not in an accusing way, and I glanced at her curious expression.
“Like what?” I asked. “I always talk to him this way.”
“Well… not anymore, right?” she ventured.
“What do you mean?” I asked as I tried to grab Prosper’s bit, but the difficult ass turned around in his stall and nearly knocked me over with his rear end. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“It’s… just something Amaya mentioned,” Zoie said with an amused chuckle in her voice that she failed to restrain, and I mock-glared at her. “She just said something about how you and Prosper have strengthened your bond and can now communicate spirit to spirit. I just wondered why you have now reverted back to communicating with him out loud.”
“Oh,” I realized. “I… didn’t know I was using poor etiquette.”
Sorry, buddy. I’m still new at this, and my mind is all over the place.
Why we wait, Alex-person? Prosper turned around like all was forgiven, and it hit me that he was just as anxious to go get Shay, basically his handler-mommy, back from Vane like I was. Prosper is ready to fight now!
“We have to wait because…” I stopped and started again. We need to give our reinforcements a head start by at least an hour… hand-length? Whatever.
‘Forcements? The butterfly-pegasus cocked his head, and his wavy antennae perked just like the ears of a German Shepherd.
Yeah, like Mec and Redburn and Ambassador Sskern. They need time to rally the troops. I huffed as the impatience I felt rebounded off the bond with Prosper, and we both spent a moment in a feedback loop of impotent rage.
We don’t need ‘forcements!
That’s what I wanted to say! I scoffed mentally.
No need ‘troops!’ We fight fearsome enough for ten persons!
Damn straight!
“Alex,” Zoie said and snapped me out of my compounding frustration when she caressed my jaw and tried to smooth the deep frown on my brow.
“I know, I know,” I sighed as I patted Prosper to get him to settle. “It really is the best course of action to wait for Mel and Bodin to get back with word from our friends, but it’s hard to just sit here and twiddle my thumbs.”
“You’ll not convince me you flying off by yourself without even Horus and Victory by your side as your Second is a smart idea,” Zoie chuckled and took the brush out of my hands and replaced it with the basket. “Especially since Jenner seems to think Vane was constantly expanding something he called his Minion Army.”
“Has Jenner discovered anything else from the archive stones?” I asked.
“Not yet.” She shrugged. “Tovish recorded a lot of Vane’s notes, which apparently became more obsessive and indecipherable the deeper he delved into the dark magicks. The good news is he’s pretty sure the Council will be on your side even if you stray from the parameters of the Duelist Rite.”
“You mean they won’t throw me in prison if I kill the fucker on sight without even waiting for him to accept the challenge?” I growled sarcastically. “How nice of them.”
“I know,” she said with an exasperated roll of her eyes.
“I still feel like this is taking too long,” I complained and cracked my neck back and forth to dispel some of my pent-up energy.
“Not too much longer now,” my cat-wife soothed. “It is only until the sun is one-hand and three-finger-lengths from the horizon.”
“You still have to explain to me how you tell time with the sun like that,” I said.
“I will teach you,” she promised as she rummaged in the basket, produced one of those purple carrot-like ash roots, and offered it to Prosper, who basically inhaled it like a pig.
Much appreciate, filly-Zoie! ‘Shroots is Prosper’s favorite! the Goodest Boy beamed through the bond, and it made me laugh out loud.
“He says ‘thank you,’ and that these are his favorite, as if that wasn’t obvious,” I snorted.
“Of course, I know they’re his favorite,” she cooed as she scrubbed his flank with both hands and then turned to me. “Come. We have done what we can for now. Let us build up our energy before we face battle.”
Her eyes smoldered into mine in that old familiar way, and I instantly read between the lines and knew what “build up our energy” really meant.
Goddess, how did she always know just what I needed?
If I couldn’t slake my urge to destroy Gella Vane right this second, then a quick roll in the hay was just what the doctor ordered.
Literally, as Zoie beckoned me toward the ladder to the hay-loft of the barn.
“Mr. Alex!” Jenner’s voice piped from behind me, and I hung my head with a sigh.
“I’ll take this,” my cat-wife purred as she took our packaged supper from me. “Don’t keep me waiting too long, husband.”
“I won’t,” I vowed as she disappeared up the ladder, and then I turned to face my trusty koala-butler. “Tell me something useful, Mr. Jenner. Can we leave yet?”
“The brothers still have not returned with our allies’ confirmation yet,” he said. “But I believe I have uncovered more about Vane’s plan based on the erratic journal entries he had a habit of keeping before the insanity took over.”
“Tell me,” I said intently as I felt the grasping need for as much information I could glean in the hopes it would help.
“He talks a lot about replacing the waters from his own fountain with the Ocean Mercedes,” the koala-man said as he slipped into his infamous lecture-mode.
“Isn’t that hella Against The Rules?” I arched my eyebrows.
“Oh, very much so,” Jenner said with a little rock up on his feet. “To tamper with the Sacred Ocean of Tears is all kinds of sacrilege.”
“Ocean of Tears…” I mused as I recalled some of my Aventollian History. “Zoie told me the Ocean was formed when the Goddess wept so much for her people it created the seas. And the Incarnate can heal with her tears, right? Don’t tell me that’s just a big fat coincidence.”
“You are definitely on the right track to the same conclusions I was,” Jenner said with a proud grin. “Now, because the legends of the Incarnate have become romanticized through the ages, there is not enough information to prove it, but Gella was convinced the Incarnate was the manifestation of the Goddess herself coming down among us. He believed if he could harvest some of the Ocean, this would be enough to get whomever he thought was the Incarnate to Manifest her powers.”
“Hang on, you make it sound like he’s tried this before Shay,” I said.
“Indeed.” Jenner scowled as his eyes flickered back and forth in that teleprompter way when he was reading off his photographic memory. “There were at least two other Fledglings he attempted this on before he got to Miss Shay. To summarize, with each failed experiment, he adapted his theory. The last coherent outline of his plan includes contaminating the Great Tithe Pool in the Sun Temple during a Red Moon, having his own fountains Blessed by a Deaconess, and then lure you and Shay there during the Ceremony.”
“It worked,” I remarked. “We were all there in that very water, but nothing happened, so what gives?”
“Maybe it was another failed test?” Jenner offered.
“No…” I said as I cast my mind back to the day of the Ceremony and of the weird interaction I had with the man. “I mean yes, I think he was testing for something, and it both succeeded and failed at the same time.”
“What do you mean?” he questioned and leaned forward as if willing his oversized ears not to miss a single thing.
“After the Ceremony, Gella came up to Shay and me as she was showing me how the waters healed the cut on her finger.” My mind raced ahead a thousand miles an hour as I recalled that unsettling tete-a-tete with the owl-man. “He grabbed her hand and called her healed wound ‘interesting.’ He then invited us to stay for additional ‘hospitalities,’ or something, but Mec interrupted for me and told him we had business.”
“Then the tithe pool did work, so that must mean the only reason he kidnapped Shay now was to actually lure you into the Duel because you slipped away the first time,” Jenner said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s not completely delusional like we first thought,” the koala-man surmised. “He knows Shay can only summon the healing waters when you are there. I always wondered how you managed to escape the Ceremony with minimal wounds. Normally, Ashers have a hard time walking or wearing their boots after wearing the shackles for so long, but you carried on like it never even bothered you.”
“Yeah, that’s because she healed me without noticing, and I thought it was just an Aventoll Thing, so I never brought it up,” I said. “I brushed it off, but something about Vane immediately struck me as creepy then, and now it just makes so much sense in a sickening way.”
“The good news is your instincts were correct that Vane will be waiting for you to make the next move, and this illumination confirms it,” he concluded.
“Argh, that only makes me want to leave even more!” I said through my gritted teeth.
“I know, lad,” Jenner sighed. “Take heart he will wait for you to come to him before he enacts the rest of his plans, whatever they may be. You will have no problem holding him off just enough until the cavalry shows up to make him pay.”
“I’m not waiting a second longer than I have to, Mr. Jenner,” I warned. “I’ve put this action off long enough, and I’ve made up my mind that after I confer with Zoie one last time, I’m leaving no matter what. The brothers have until then, and Victory or not, Horus will just have to catch up to me later.”
“I understand, Mr. Alex, and I will not try to sway you otherwise,” he said. “Go, be with your wife. I’ll make sure folks stay clear of the barn for a while.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Jenner nodded, patted my knee, and then bustled out of the barn in order to see to other preparations.
I sighed and tangled my hands in my hair as I tried to get a grip on myself.
Sure, I knew more about what the psycho was up to, but it didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it just made me feel like a rocket stuck on its launchpad as it tore itself to smithereens.
“My love.” Zoie’s hands came up to grip my wrists and gently untangled my fingers from their abuse of my scalp.
I opened my eyes and wondered when it was that I closed them, or when it was that she came down from the loft.
“Help me forget,” I pleaded as I stared into her sapphire eyes. “Just for a little while. Please?”
Instead of saying anything, my beautiful cat-wife kissed me on my lips. The sensation was like the first gasp of air after drowning, and I felt her affection soak into me like the desert after a long-awaited storm.
“Baby,” I breathed when we broke for air, and she tangled her hands in my hair.
“It’s getting longer,” she purred, and her sapphire eyes dilated with arousal. “I like it.”
“Oh, well, okay if you li--” My words were swallowed as my passionate cat-wife devoured my mouth in another kiss, and I clutched her hips as she began to gyrate slowly against me.
My blood zinged through my veins like champagne, and I already felt drunk off her. Her taste was as sweet as it was tart, like ripened raspberries, and she added a sharp little nip to my lower lip here and there that sent tingles down my spine.
It felt like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
She pushed on my chest until I got the hint and let her push me to the storage area in the back corner of the barn.
“What are you-- oof!” I grunted as my knees hit the back of something lumpy, and I landed on a pallet of what appeared to be flour sacks. Then I gasped when she nibbled at the pulse point under my jaw and down to my clavicle.
“Hello,” she purred and crawled over me to straddle my waist.
“Hi,” I whispered and then frowned when I examined the cut on her cheek that curved down from the outer corner of her eye like a teardrop. “I’m glad you’re okay, by the way. I’m sorry I haven’t-- ”
“Shh, none of that,” Zoie murmured, and she kissed and licked her way into my mouth as her hands found my belt and tugged the obstacle free. “Don’t think. Just feel.”
My heart rate skyrocketed when her nimble fingers unlaced the front of my pants, so I decided to up the ante by sitting up and practically tearing off the armored skirt she was so fond of.
Her hands then reached for my tunic, and I let her strip it off me while I whisked off her simple black shirt as well.
“Goddess, you’re so beautiful, kitten,” I murmured and admired the way her milky skin glistened in the late golden light streaming in through the barn’s rafters. Everything about her made my breath catch, from her stark ebony hair, to her rose-colored nipples, and even down to the way she sat so demurely in my lap.
