thirty-one
“You’re sure he’s gone?” Sulim asked her husband, who rustled through a stack of his father’s papers. Usually, she was not in here during the day, and she found it strange that Sonall had returned from the fields early to search for something. “He wasn’t even in his cottage?”
Sonall slapped a stack of papers on his father’s desk.
A maid entered to drop off some tea for them both before leaving again.
“Yeah,” he snapped. Any good feeling he had that morning was gone, much like his wife’s.
Both of us sleeping with other people, yet here we are, dealing with family matters.
Someone had disappeared last night, and nobody knew where he was.
Somehow, Sulim doubted that Marco hitched a teleportation ride to Qahrain to attend Graella’s wedding.
“Looks like he packed up and left late last night. Nobody knows where he’s gone.”
Sulim bit her lip. “There’s something I should tell you.”
Sonall braced against the desk and met her eyes, his blue ones reminding her of Jacelah’s.
“What?”
But before Sulim could find the words to tell him about Marco, a shrill scream echoed down the hall.
Sulim was the first to rush out, with Sonall right behind her. The two of them encountered an empty hallway, but another scream and a following crash brought their attention to the windows overlooking the backyard.
“What the…”
“Heary!” Sulim called the name of a maid who couldn’t have possibly heard her. Heary had been in the backyard doing the last of her chores before something struck her down to the ground. Sulim’s keen eyes saw blood beneath her.
Both Sulim and Sonall ran down the stairs, side-by-side, their footsteps completely in sync as they turned the corner into the main foyer.
They were soon face-to-face with a squad of black-clad mercenaries bursting through the front doors, weapons firing and calls for capitulation haunting Sulim’s ears before she even knew what was happening.
Like her husband, grabbing her arm and hauling her down another hallway toward Jacelah’s salon.
“The others…!”
He slammed open the salon door the moment they heard the leader of the gang calling for them to surrender, or else they would start shooting the help.
“I can only save one other person here,” Sonall grunted as he searched the walls for whatever hidden compartment his mother had shoved him and Graella into before. “And it’s going to be you.”
That was the last thing Sulim heard before the door was kicked open by a man twice their size. She screamed, Sonall snatching her close to him the moment she felt a sharp pain shoot up her spine, her legs go limp, and her whole body collapse with him onto the floor.
Mira… In that effervescent second that transpired, she was struck by the image of a woman who looked much like Mira, but with a callousness that suggested she had seen death a few dozen times before.
It was Sonall’s familiar body that Sulim smelled before the world went black, but it was some other woman’s kindly face that appeared to welcome her Home.
The whole of five hundred lives spun through her soul in that single second.
Mira teleported straight into a chaotic situation that already coated the grass in blood and infused the air with acridity.
Her sorcery was rusty, but her adrenaline carried her through the front yard, where she encountered the first of six mercenaries, this one apparently left to keep watch by the door.
Well, not for long. With a flick of her wrist and an angry grunt in her throat, Mira lifted that bastard off his feet and slammed him back to the ground until blood came out of his ears.
“Mira!” her mother’s voice echoed behind her, but nothing slowed her down as she marched into the house, searching for the next mercenary to incapacitate before they could do more damage. “Mira!”
She was soon joined by Kema, who surged forward with a shield erected before her.
It flickered as someone fired a laser in her direction.
Before the would-be julah killer knew what happened, Kema lowered her shield and mimicked choking the woman who soon grasped her own throat with her own hands—as if she could pull Kema’s sorcery off her skin.
That was the thing about mercenaries, Mira briefly recalled as she tried not to look at the bodies on the floor or hear the blood-curdling screams of panic in the air.
They would take a contract for just about anything, but all three tribes had a hard line about julah targets.
And they never went up against a julah. Because that was a suicide mission.
Six mercenaries up against four julah, two of whom were the most powerful on Yahzen? They didn’t stand a chance. Both Ramaron and Joiya knew how to suck the air out of someone’s throat and drop them dead on sight. Mira had seen it before, and she saw it again today.
Sulim!
That was who she searched for in the carnage.
Among the bodies slumped up against the wall and writhing on the ground—maid and ranch hand alike—there was no sign of Sulim or even Sonall.
Mira prayed that neither was around, or that they had made it to safety.
There would be time later to take stock of who had been killed or injured.
Mira didn’t even think about the coordinated attacks between here and Qahrain. She was only focused on Sulim.
“Sulim!” she called, her mother right behind her. “Ma!”
They came upon a male mercenary pushed up against one of the younger maids.
Mira ran on ahead while tossing her arms to the side, thrusting the mercenary against the other wall and giving the shaken maid the chance to escape.
She ran straight for Ramaron, who passed her off to Kema and chased after Mira and Joiya.
“Sulim!”
As the seconds wore on and more mercenaries were dropped by the team of julah who only feared each other, Mira grew more worried.
Where the hell is she! To that end, where was Sonall?
Mercenaries usually weren’t this sloppy.
They got in, they started killing and pillaging, and they got out once they had control of the situation. Well, there would be no control now.
“Mira!”
She stopped halfway down the hall leading to Jacelah’s salon, where the door was ajar. Joiya was behind her, white as a sheet when she held her hand out to her daughter.
“Mira, no.”
She turned around, determined to go inside; her mother raised both hands—suddenly, Mira couldn’t move.
She’s trapped me! Mira was strong, but her mother was stronger, and stepping forward was like trudging through the deepest bowels of her nightmares. Even the Void was weaker.
“Don’t!”
Mira gritted her teeth and forced her foot forward.
It lifted—heavy. It dropped—light. Although two invisible ropes held her by the shoulders and threatened to pull her back, she knew she had to push forward.
If there was ever a time to disobey her mother’s wishes, it was now, when eternal love was on the line.
Sulim… my soulmate… I barely know her still…
The girl she saw at her door that first night on Gardiah Estate. The young woman who glanced at her when everyone else was busy. The beautiful lady who kissed her in a barn, as if there was nothing else to live for—she would give all of this up to be with some disappointment like Mira Dunsman.
“Sulim!” Despite her mother’s sorceric hold on her, Mira could still speak, even though it felt like she screamed from underwater. “I’m here!”
She reached the door. Joiya released her, dropping to her knees in despair.
Mira burst through, nearly tripping on Sonall’s foot as it lay lifelessly in front of her.
The recent burn of a laser; the sweet scent of alcohol on a murderer’s breath; the wedding portrait, askew; the man in the portrait, lying in a pool of his own blood with his lifeless eyes gazing toward the window; the carpet covered in more blood than one body could hold; blood, expanding,
dripping, congealing around the raised legs of Jacelah’s couches; the fresh rust of more blood; Mira’s shoes soaked in human blood.
The woman in the wedding portrait, flung over the man’s body with a large, bloody welt on her back.
Her blond hair hung limp from her head, face buried in the man’s chest.
Mira screamed so loudly that she could no longer hear a thing.
She dove into the bloody carpet and yanked Sulim off Sonall, turning her onto her laser-shot back and gazing into the blue face and the empty hazel eyes that had once been full of mischief and love.
The primal words falling from Mira’s lips were neither Basic nor Julah.
They evoked the Harmony that cursed the Void, the energy vibrating around her, one of wrong place, wrong time, wrong life, as she shook Sulim’s cooling body and begged her to come back to.
She pressed a hand on Sulim’s chest. No heartbeat.
She kissed her blue lips. No breath. With more commotion behind her, all Mira knew was that she only had a few precious minutes to save Sulim’s life.
“Ma!” She turned to the woman who now stood in the doorway, her hair a mess around her face and her jaw slackened open in shock.
The usually optimistic and confident Lady Joiya could barely hold herself up as she slid down the door and stained the bottom of her Temple dress in terrible red blood.
“Do something!” She begged like a child. “Ma!”
“My heart…” She watched as Mira shook Sulim again, urging her to take a breath, to cry in pain, anything. “I can do many things, but I cannot bring back the dead.”
Of all the screams to shatter the house that day, it was Mira’s that brought down the beams and darkened the sky.