Chapter 20 Kaenon
KAENON
The visions in my head have thickened with need.
I dream of prowling through a dark summer wood, my mouth watering when I catch the sweet fragrance of my mate.
I hunt her until she is pinned beneath me, her soft lips trailing up my neck before she gives me the stinging pleasure of her bite, claiming me as hers.
I worship her with kisses until she is gasping for air in the glow of the moonlight, the trees echoing with sighs of her pleasure.
I salivate for her scent.
Finally, the time has come for me to belong to another.
In most clans, shifters choose to resist their heated urges to mate until their fated one or ones are revealed to them. Our first pleasure comes from exploring what pleases our mates. While fae and other beings often ridiculed the custom, it was to show deep respect to our future fated ones.
I respected my future mate well, and now I’m eager to learn what brings her pleasure. True pleasure, not just this dreamy want within my own mind.
I wish to please her in every way, but first I must escape this darkness to reach her.
As another dream unfolds, I find myself holding my mate close as we lie together. Her face is tucked into my chest as she slumbers contentedly, wrapped in a soft blanket, as she allows me to bask in her complete trust. Desire for this kind of intimacy with her warms my bare chest.
I want every intimacy with her. Every moment and breath and smile.
Until all at once, the fae spell that dragged me into this sleep fades.
I wake to strange sounds blaring angrily above me. Red lights flash like blood fae spells across my vision. The scent of blood and burning tickles my nose, rousing the creatures beneath my skin.
Sitting up, I realize I am no longer in my sarcophagus. Instead, I lay on a strange bed wearing a thin paper gown. There is a peculiar band of fabric on one of my arms connected to an odd metal monster nearby, which beeps menacingly.
To my left is another bed, empty but for a splatter of blood.
Nivarrah’s work, I’m sure.
Fly to our mate, one of my beasts urges, awake now that I have regained consciousness. Quickly.
I slip off the table, removing the band from my arm as I study my surroundings.
This is a cold, soulless place filled with things I don’t understand.
My attention moves to a long metal table nearby, where several odd glowing squares sit beside stacks of scrolls.
A fae lies half-slumped in a chair beside the table, his white coat saturated with red that drips steadily onto the floor.
But beside him, on the metal table, sits the leather bracelet Athanis left with me.
“Praise to the gods,” I whisper, moving swiftly through the room toward it.
The moment I fasten it around my wrist, I see that a handful of fae surround me, their eyes wide as they gasp and speak to one another in their language I still don’t understand.
I only know they are spirits because I can see through their bodies slightly—and because one owns the face of the dead fae beside me.
The others also have blood-stained coats.
I am about to step through these dead beings when a familiar voice speaks nearby.
“See? Did I not tell you that you would behold me on the other side?”
“Athanis,” I gasp, turning to see that he waits in the corner of this strange flashing room.
My fae priest friend smiles at me, looking just as he did when he was slain. Another spirit says something to him. To my surprise, Athanis responds to them in their own language before he turns his attention back to me.
“I am glad to see you awake once more, my friend. Already, the fate I have foreseen for you is set in motion. But you must leave here quickly,” he adds, looking at the dead fae in the chair.
“For although her escape has blessed you with this chance to claim your sweeter fate, Nivarrah slayed nearly everyone within this facility before she fled. If other fae arrive soon to investigate, they may blame you.”
I look around once more. “How long did I slumber? What is this strange time and place?”
“There are many things I must explain to you, Kaen, but you must—”
“My mate,” I say as excitement over her fills me again, riling the beasts beneath my skin. “I saw my mate. Athanis, she is heavenly.”
Athanis huffs, looks skyward like he cannot believe how foolish I’m being, and motions impatiently at me. “Yes, yes—I can lead you to her. She is called Elise.”
Elise.
Elise, my beasts purr together.
I wish to bask in the simple pleasure of knowing her name longer, but if Athanis can take me to her, there is no time to waste.
I see that he is pointing at a metal door at the other end of this red-flashing room.
Moving carefully, I step over another fae body lying still upon the ground and crack open the door.
Peering down a long hall that also flashes red, I observe that Nivarrah has been here, too.
Three more fae lay on the cold floor, two with snapped necks, while the third is merely unconscious. I start to go in the direction Athanis tells me to, but the unconscious fae groans, waking to sit up against one of the walls. It is then that I notice her stomach is rounded with child.
She cradles her head as if it pains her, while one of her arms bleeds profusely. When she sees me, she screams, the scent of her fear souring the air around us.
“I won’t hurt you,” I try to promise her before remembering she doesn’t know my words.
“Nivarrah’s reality-twisting magic and violence have terrified this poor mother-to-be,” Athanis sighs. “Now, quickly, Kaenon, you must—”
“One moment,” I tell him.
When I move toward the injured fae, she sobs and shakes her head, pleading in her language that I don’t understand. I check our surroundings quickly to make sure no one will attack while I am distracted, and then I rip a strip of cloth from one of the dead fae’s white coats.
The pregnant fae woman gasps, terrified as I crouch beside her with the strip of cloth. I hold it up and point at her arm to show my intent. She does not heal the way my kind does, and it is not good for her to lose this blood when she is with child.
She is still frightened, but doesn’t fight me as I tie the fabric tightly on her arm, two fingers above the injury. Hopefully, it will slow the bleeding until others arrive to help her.
The woman sniffles, tears on her cheeks as she speaks to me. “Th—thang-kyuh.”
Athanis is floating nearby. “That means she’s grateful.”
Smiling at the woman to show I understand, I leave her resting against the wall and slip through the bloodied doors that Athanis urges me toward.
My stomach sinks at the new view before me. This was once another laboratory room of some kind, before magic blasted holes in it. I am grateful to spy a hint of greenery through one of the larger holes ripped in the wall, which tells me this strange facility is surrounded by forest.
But this room is filled with several more bodies, and it is clear that Nivarrah turned them against one another with her magic.
Blood pools on the ground where one’s head has been smashed in by a metal rod in the hand of another.
One looks strangled to death, while another has been burned to ash by magic.
“Nivarrah is worse off now than she was when Thalo first took her into the laboratory at the king’s command,” Athanis sighs. “I shudder to think of the ways Veld may have tortured her mind while in that eternal suspension spell.”
Their bond is putrid, but during the time I knew Nivarrah, she became mad with determination to win his wandering attention back to her, however she could. But after so long inside her own sleeping mind with him and the damage Athanis suspects, perhaps she is finally sick of him.
The alarms chanting overhead are beginning to bother my strong hearing. My inner beasts dislike this metallic, cold place, which is so unlike our beautiful, natural world.
“It is irksome that Veld was not restrained here,” I frown. “Do you know where he is? He has taken an intolerable interest in my mate.”
“I only hope he will be found and sentenced according to their laws for whatever crimes he is no doubt committing,” Athanis mutters, waving off another one of the spirits who is trying to talk to him.
“Thanks to the experimentations on Veld, Thalo believed he was close to understanding how incubi can enter and wander Limbo. He believed he could grant that ability to all, given more time. I know he found that research valuable and believed preserving Veld was vital, but I disagreed with him then, as I do now. There is something amiss with that incubus which cannot be cured or altered. He is without feeling altogether and preys on others for his own monstrous amusement.”
“Hell-oh?”
I jolt at the sound and realize it is coming from a strange, thin little box on the ground beside one of the recently-killed fae.
“Bentli! Aryee-oos tilth err? Hell-oh!” it calls.
“Elise told me that magic square is called a cell phone,” Athanis says. “I admit, I still do not know its purpose.”
Even just hearing my mate’s name makes my heart swell with eagerness. I pick up the cell phone, squinting at the odd glow coming off one side. There are symbols on it I don’t understand, but I move it closer to my mouth and repeat after it.
“Hell-oh?”
“Hell-oh? Hoozthiss?”
“I’m looking for my mate,” I tell it in my own tongue, hoping this magic box may understand me. “Where is she?”
The magic box fills with the sound of panic before the glow goes dark with an audible click. Fascinated by the strange item, I set it back down on the floor and follow Athanis, slipping out through one of the holes of this destroyed, corpse-filled room.
All my inner beasts breathe a sigh of relief when my bare feet meet the cold soil of this forest. There is snow on the ground in patches, clinging to the trunks of some trees as the chill in the air dances over my skin.
I inhale deeply of this fresh smell, looking up to admire the green trees giving way to the gray, stormbound sky.
The sun hangs in the west behind the pregnant clouds, telling me morning is long since past.
What a gift, this glimpse of the sky I have missed so much.
And what a gift it is to be alive in this strange world, where my mate is.
“You were right,” I murmur, looking at my deceased friend. “Fate knew best.”
He smiles again. “It always does. Your mate is that way,” he adds, pointing in the direction of the slowly sinking sun.
Run. Find her, my inner beasts whisper, all just as thrilled as I am to be free at last.
Facing away from the facility still screeching with alarms, I break into a run, enjoying the spring wind upon my face.
Leaping high, I allow the shift to overtake me until the wings of my eagle beat with the sound of freedom.
Soon, I’m soaring high above the forest, my ghostly friend guiding me at my side.
The hunt for my mate has begun.