Chapter 1 #3
“I probably won’t remember any of this the next time we see each other.
I won’t remember you.” My chest tightens painfully, right over my heart, making my next words on the edge of breathless.
“I might not … I’m not certain the soul bonds outlast my death.
In theory, they should. But I’ve already lost Rought once, lost all three of my soul-bound mates once.
And if I die, I might never find them again. You again.”
“This … isn’t fucking funny, Zaya.” Reck clenches his teeth, tension etching through his jaw and neck. He grinds through his next words. “I’m not playing this fucking game.”
“All I’m saying is …” I falter for a moment as the energy from the portal shifts again. Perhaps as the anticipated arrival steps into it. That seething power skitters over me, intense and … so wrong. Just wrong, wrong. Muta cinches around my neck, keeping me anchored in the now.
I look back at Reck, urgency and an odd fear threading through me. A soul-wrenching anticipation that I’ve never felt before.
At least … not as an adult.
“I’d kiss me now,” I say, stopping myself halfway through reaching for Reck, my hand hovering between us. “We might never get another chance to say goodbye properly.”
Bellamy mutters under her breath. But the dire awry is gathering her own power, seemingly ignoring us, not offering an opinion.
Reck’s eyes widen, flicking to the portal, then across the berserkers lined up to guard it, then back to me. He blinks, taking in my features.
I watch as understanding, then terror fills his expression.
“Zaya … no …” he whispers.
The energy of the portal abruptly condenses, then snaps out into the parking lot.
A figure steps through that shadowed maw of churning energy. Despite the size of the portal, and even with the berserkers stepping through unhindered, the newcomer is so tall he’s forced to bend forward to make the passage.
A massive booted foot hits the pavement. Energy crackles outward from the footfall.
Regret aches through me as I turn away from the shifter who was supposed to be mine. Our souls tied together by the universe itself, then sundered by some yet-unknown means. “In the next life,” I murmur. “Maybe.”
Reck curls his hand around my bicep as if he has any ability to hold me back. Or even shield me.
He doesn’t.
The newcomer clears the portal with a second step, straightening.
He’s easily over seven and a half feet tall, dressed in the leathers of the Cataclysm MC — his motorcycle club, his pack.
I can see traces of the genetics he’s bequeathed to his children in his features.
Dark-olive skin, dark-brown hair graying at the temples, similar striking facial features.
But his energy is … wrong … as wrong as the portal whirling wide behind him.
A weird tension shifts through the berserker ranks.
Fear.
That realization reverberates through me, my own disconcertion pumping through my system. This feeling is … this feeling is somehow, impossibly so, the antithesis of a knowing. The opposite of fate. The opposition of life but without the clarity and finality of death.
I blink, and the Cataclysm’s visage morphs, as if I’m glimpsing his real face for a moment.
He’s not human.
He’s not wholly a shifter either.
Perhaps he’s more. Because he was once bonded to my aunt, the Conduit? But the Outcast didn’t feel this way …
I’ve also seen him before.
I never would have recognized him. Not in any photograph, at least. I hadn’t, in fact, in the three-decade-old photo of my aunt with her three soul-bound mates.
But I know. Face-to-face.
I know who he is. To me.
He smiles, sharp and utterly vicious, locking his red-rimmed eyes on me — no white at all visible around his almost-black irises.
“Little Zaya,” he croons with deadly intent. The soft southern tint to his accent is at complete odds with his malevolent energy. “I’ve missed you, darling girl.”
Remembered terror skitters up my spine, locking my limbs in place. Muta rears up on my shoulder, restricting my already shallow breathing in a chokehold.
Because the aspect of a death god trapped in the body of a bushmaster knows this adversary as well. Has almost died when faced with this creature, when trying to protect me from this creature.
Reck’s hand tightens on my arm bruisingly. “This wasn’t the deal,” he snarls at his utter terror of a father.
The Cataclysm’s attention flicks to his eldest son, sneering at him, then takes in Bellamy and the teens in the SUV with that same derision. He eyes Shaw’s and Wilson’s bodies with disinterest.
He shrugs, grinning as if it’s charm he wields rather than a power that’s … it’s …
It’s the antithesis of essence, I realize. Like some kind of otherworldly antimatter.
“It’s all the same deal,” the Cataclysm says.
Reck opens his mouth as if to retort or negotiate.
“You killed my mother,” I say first.
Though my insides are still frozen in remembered terror, my voice is steady, certain.
Everyone goes still around me, including the berserkers.
Even at nine years old, I knew I had to box away the memories threatening to unfold before me now. Now when it really isn’t the proper moment to recall my mother sending Muta to me, of her having my father’s combat mage — Tau — seal us within an armoire with only a keyhole to peer through.
Not the time to remember watching as my mother fought against a foe so much larger than her, bringing him to his knees, but then …
She knew she was going to die, had foreseen it. Yet she still stood between me and him.
No one stands between us now. No one can stand between us. Not without me losing more people I love.
The Cataclysm splays his hands, conciliatory yet utterly mocking.
His long fingers are claw tipped, the nail beds blackened.
“An unfortunate accident. Certainly not my intent.” He takes a step forward, head lowering, gaze riveted on me.
Nothing human in his face or gestures now.
“But it drew me to you, and for that I’m … thankful.”
His words are in complete contrast with his mannerisms.
“What the fuck, Zaya?” Reck mutters, thrown yet still vicious. “Your mother?” He sucks in a harsh breath. “But … if you … if he —”
“Yes, son of mine,” the Cataclysm says, still pretending at being a person. “It was such a thrill when you told me of your beloved Zaya … of your soul-bound mate … and how your and your brothers’ places were at her side. My little Zaya. I’d been looking for you.”
“Ever since you killed my mother,” I say, still quiet but not at all shaky. The remembered terror is slowly distilling through my bloodstream.
Though his grip on my arm is harsh, Reck sways on his feet as if he’s pieced something life altering together. Something of our shared past has just clicked together for him?
The Cataclysm bares his teeth in a mockery of a smile, showing off elongated canines. His red-hued eyes are fixed on Reck, almost greedily. “What did you say to me? Oh, yes. ‘You can’t touch us anymore.’ And then you tried to hide behind Disa when I called you on your bluff.” He laughs gratingly.
Tainted energy skitters over me, roiling through my stomach so harshly that I actually struggle to not outwardly react.
“It should … have … I didn’t … know …” Reck stutters, squeezing his eyes shut, then sighing in realization. “You were Disa’s rejected soul-bound mate.”
“Disa was nothing,” the Cataclysm spits viciously.
“A vessel. A simple, broken, and badly-pieced-back-together shell. It’s the Conduit that matters.
The Conduit that you’ve failed, twice now, to protect.
Such potential you had with that magnificent beast. Yet you went totally fucking pathetic, panting after a violet-eyed girl whose destiny was to be the epicenter of the fucking universe.
With or without you to anchor her.” His attention and vicious grin shifts to me. “This universe, at least.”
The berserkers stiffen like dogs picking up a whistle — a command — at a frequency the rest of us can’t hear. Energy shifts through their ranks. They quiver with it, salivate with it.
The time for revelations and reflections has passed.
“Kill them all,” the Cataclysm says. “They’ve become more annoying than worthy. Except for the youngest. My other precious girl will come home with us, Zaya. That will make you happy, won’t it, darling?”
I raise my hands, reaching for the threads of fate interwoven all around me, around us.
Reck loses his hold on my arm, either by choice or because he can’t hold me while I wield the power bequeathed to me by my aunt’s death. The power of the Conduit. The power, as is becoming clear, that the Cataclysm is willing to murder his own children to obtain, even if he can’t wield it directly.
All six berserkers lunge across the parking lot toward us. The Cataclysm smirks knowingly. At me.
A grid of all our fates, all of our life force, snaps out before and around me in a web of multicolored threads, intertwined and tangled.
Bellamy releases all the power she’s been building — without actually cutting herself. So she can listen and learn. It explodes in a roughly hewn, powerful but unfocused push.
That push catches all six berserkers, throwing them backward in a wide arc. Two of them slam into Bellamy’s sedan, shoving it all the way back into the small outpost building and crushing the car. Two berserkers tumble out of the parking lot and into the arid landscape beyond.
Moving impossibly fast for his size, the Cataclysm steps to the side to avoid getting hit by two more flying bodies. Those berserkers tumble through the open portal behind him.
They scream in agony as they pass through … or perhaps as they completely dissolve into that gaping maw of foreign energy.
Unfortunately, Bellamy’s wild casting also catches Reck, shoving him as he scrambles to stay upright a few feet away from the SUV.
The SUV rocks, skidding sideways behind us.
Bellamy drops to the pavement, clearly unconscious. Possibly dead.