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Long Lost Part One

What a wicked game you play
To make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do
To make me dream of you

He had been a king last time he’d breathed winter air so bitter. His name still rang down the years like a funeral bell, but he was legend, half-forgotten, all idealised.

He had sent men into battle knowing they would not come back. Their lives had been payment, brief glittering coins that he had gambled with; he still could not say if he had won or he had lost. Either way, it had ended.

He’d do it all again if he had to. The price had been right.

The air was stifled, empty of anything except the weighty cold and his puffs of breath. He liked this bulky white world, buried, secret, waiting to be discovered.

In a landscape bleached of colour, mere chiaroscuro, he fit right in. Shadows seemed to pool about him, gathering in the supple, amused darkness of his eyes, waiting behind his teeth. Shadow clung to his hair too, a dark, mussed pelt that half-hid his sleepy stare – and half-revealed it as he moved, flash after flash of heat.

Only his smile was bright as snow, and far colder.

~*~

Lisa Ochai hummed a soft tune as she sketched, her attention only half on her work. The other half was on the topless shapeshifter who was drilling holes in the wall with exaggerated care. The smooth bronze shape of his body was disturbed only by the mass of scar tissue on his side, pale and gnarled as old roots. It didn’t detract from his appeal in the slightest.

And Vaje Chusson knew it. He paused to wipe his forehead and give her a wink.

"Shameless," she said sternly from where she sat, a small table steadying the sketchpad.

"Always," he informed her. "Must be the company I keep."

A screech from the door announced her housemate's entrance: Chatoya Irkil moved carefully with the heavy tray, even though she could have floated it in on a wisp of magic if she'd chosen to.

"There's nothing like a half-naked man in your living room," the witch proclaimed, flashing a merry smile. "Thank goodness eye-candy's calorie-free, or between you and Jepar, I'd be the size of a killer whale."

Vaje gave her a dry stare. "I'm not eye-candy. While I may be a fine specimen of manhood, I expect you to treat me like you treat any other work colleague."

Lisa had to fight to hide her frown. Most of the time she managed to forget that Vaje Chusson worked for one of the Furies, the three mercenary organisations of the Nightworld. He was atypical enough for it to be easy; unlike most of their handpicked elite, he’d come to them as an adult, and they couldn’t quite erase his humanity, even if they’d done a good job on his morals.

But if she could forget that Vaje was a Fury, she could never forget that Chatoya ran one of them.

She was afraid for her friend; afraid that Chatoya would be lost under the deceits and cruelty of the Furies. She was afraid that she would be killed; or that the witch would survive only by becoming one of them, her heart as dead and cold and secret as the moon.

And worse, Lisa was terrified that she wouldn’t know, that Chatoya would become as easy a liar as all the rest, her smile so dazzling that it would blind them to the uncaring, greedy thing that lay beneath it.

She had been fooled before. She would not let herself be fooled again, and she wouldn’t let the Furies have Toya.

“In that case,” Lisa remarked, “shouldn’t she be hexing you into oblivion right about now?”

“Good point,” he conceded. “On second thoughts, treat me like a valued friend who has an overwhelming need for caffeine.”

The witch looked amused. “What a coincidence. I just happen to have what Cougar insists on calling a sexy mocha for you.”

“A sexy mocha?” she said dubiously.

“It’s covered with whipped cream. Apparently that qualifies as sexy.”

Vaje nodded. “Yep. Can’t fault Redfern’s taste. Did you remember the sugar?" He sniffed the air. "I can smell lots of cream, but..."

Chatoya put the tray down with more of a thud than was necessary. "Vaje, if there was any more sugar in yours, the spoon wouldn't move. Why haven't all your teeth dropped out?"

Lisa had often wondered the same. No one could quite understand why Vaje, a bona fide carnivore, had an abiding obsession with caffeine and all things of a dubious sugary nature, but they had learned quickly not to get between him and his daily dose.

"Good genetics," he offered, slurping loudly. His eyes glittered over the mug, the same clear gold as olive oil and filled with mischief.

She and Chatoya swapped resigned glances. "It's so unfair," she muttered.

"Tell me about it," Chatoya grumbled, settling onto the sofa. "Why is it all the men we know can stuff their gaping maws full of food and never put on a pound?"

"Oi!" Vaje objected around his whipped cream moustache. "I do not have a gaping maw."

"Looks pretty more-ish to me," Lisa said, giving him a wink.

"Spare me," pleaded Chatoya. "I have to put up with enough drippiness from Jepar. Keep your happily-ever-after quiet."

It was hardly a happily-ever-after. She often wondered what she was doing, getting involved with another Fury. She wanted to believe that Vaje was exactly who he seemed, but she knew better, and there was always a part of her holding back, waiting for disappointment.

But she still bit back a smile, because it was a happy-for-now, and that was enough.

"Come on, Toya,” she cajoled. “'Tis the season to be jolly."

"And the weather outside is frightful," put in Vaje, gesturing to the bay windows fringed by piles of snow.

"Damn right." Chatoya gave a little shudder. "You might not feel the cold, but my nose nearly dropped off when I went to the shops."

As a vampire, she knew her friends envied her inability to feel cold, but Lisa longed for the steel grip of ice, just as in summer, she longed to feel the heat hammering on her skin. Sometimes, she wondered if the numbness had spread to her heart, if she was atrophying year by year. Then she would prod at her old pain to remind herself she still felt.

This winter, though, she had no need. It was too close a reminder of another, too raw.

But you're in Ryars Valley, she told herself, staring down at her hot chocolate and trying to brush away her unease. This is a winter with whipped cream and tinsel and hunky shapeshifters. What more could anyone want?

"Too hot?"

Toya's voice was warm, filled with more concern than the question warranted. She knew her too well.

"A little," she lied.

She switched the mug for her sketchpad. There was something soothing in watching the lines arch across the page, growing, merging, changing.

She carried on sketching as Toya and Vaje chatted, barely aware of the lines she left. Grey and shimmering, they began to form a picture from the scraps of a thought she didn't try to force.

Minutes passed, and the tension spilled out onto the paper, leaving her calm. She began to chat with them, attention only half on her work now.

"...and despite what Cougar says, those were not the original words of 'We Three Kings'," Chatoya said firmly. "I'm not letting him near the mulled wine again."

Lisa grinned, having been treated to one of Cougar Redfern's impromptu Christmas carols before. "At least you didn't get 'O Come All Ye Faithful'."

All of them collectively winced.

"Who's that?" asked Chatoya, leaning over with a light in her eyes. "I thought you were doing Jepar's Christmas present."

She was. The shapeshifter had once said that there were never enough pictures of the people you lost, so she had decided to do a watercolour of his dead sister.

Lisa glanced down, and froze.

She knew that face well: so well that she had drawn it without thought or sight, so well that even a thousand years had not faded him from her mind. Last time they had met, it had been to the sound of steel shrieking on steel, two still figures in the midst of a battlefield they had created.

The face of her soulmate.

Her soulmate, who had hunted her across continents and years, who had roused an army to pry the Saxons from Britain, who had ripped her from her land and her family. He had a thousand names, each married to a new tale as he flitted from place to place with ridiculous ease, but only one face, only this face.

The eye was drawn to his wide sardonic mouth, always smiling: he wore his smile like a mask, brilliant and blinding against the darkness of his dishevelled hair. Too few people ever looked past it to the eyes that were filled with lies except in those rare moments when he was undone, unravelling before her like a spider's web.

And if...if she had drawn him so carelessly, that could mean only one thing. Her heart quickened, but she forced her breaths to be even. Vaje would scent her fear like a blast of perfume, but he wouldn't find it half as sweet.

Alex was close. He had found her.

"It's no one," she answered quickly, flipping over the page. "A boy I saw in the street. He had an interesting face."

Vaje didn't look too pleased at that, but better his sullenness later than the truth now. "You must have been staring at him a while to sketch him that well."

Yes. She remembered times when she'd leaned over Alex and traced his face with her fingers, learning it as she had learned his language with its niggling irregularities.

"I just have a good memory for faces," she replied, careful.

"It used to drive me mad," put in Chatoya, riding to the rescue. "We'd go out shopping, and Lisa would spot someone 'interesting' and I'd be drinking coffee for the next hour while she sketched."

"Huh." Vaje didn't look convinced. "Well, I've done my manly duty for today. I promised that idiot Aspen that I'd help him wrap his presents, so..."

"Be nice," ordered Toya.

Privately, Lisa didn't see why anyone should be nice to Aspen Martin, who was pirouetting gracelessly on the line between sanity and madness. Her first meeting with him had been a bevy of racist comments with a few sneers about her species thrown in.

His next meeting had been with her fist.

"Be brief," she advised, and stood to give Vaje a kiss. "Dinner tonight?"

"If you promise I get all your attention."

"Of course." She knew it was a lie as she said it: her mind was on alert, waiting for the slightest trace of her soulmate's presence.

The door slammed with more force than was necessary. Before the echo had faded, she was on her feet, her pad clutched to her chest. The excuse sprang easily to her tongue, rolling out with a rueful smile.

“If I don’t want a side of sulking man with my dinner, I think I’d better make tonight special. Which means three hours of nail-painting, moisturising and primping.”

Chatoya laughed. “Pain is beauty. Need any help?”

They’d spent so much time giggling together over make-up and hair rollers, slathered in ridiculous products. She hadn’t known how much she’d miss that – miss all of them. “Not yet. Don’t worry, I’ll shriek like a diva if I do.”

“Good luck!”

She went up the stairs with exaggerated calm, but panic was an icy flood in her stomach. She knew what she had to do. She just hadn’t thought it would be so soon.

She wasn’t ready to leave.

But she had to. She couldn’t risk him finding her. She couldn’t risk what she might become.

That was the shameful truth. It wasn’t just him she feared: it was herself.

~*~

She was close. His pace picked up, and his heart with it until it was a drumroll in his chest, all anticipation and thunder.

He had searched across the world, braving desolate mountains in hope of snatching a glimpse of her eyes, slogged across the desert, seeing the curve of her cheek in the sloping dunes. In the rustling of the Balkan woods, he had heard the echo of her whisper, but found nothing of the woman: on the baking coast of the Mediterranean, all the heady heat of her arms, but not a trace of her presence.

She had always been his dream – a bright, bold creature who had seen through the endless masks he wore. He had followed even the merest whisper of her to its end, scoured dank corners and shades of hell in the hope she might be there. For centuries, she had eluded him.

But he had found her.

He wanted her to know him, wanted to bare his soul to her and snatch it away; to make her his and only his, to cradle her broken heart in his hands and possess her once more even if it meant that death and war must follow.

Because he’d do it all again if he had to. And this time, he couldn’t say what the end would be.

For love, and lack of love. For hope and lack of hope. For her...and for himself.

It was the predator's smile Alexandros wore, a perfect mask, hiding his intent in plain sight.

Lisanor was here. And so was he.

~*~

She moved as if in a trance; quick, methodical, ticking off the list in her mind. Panic nibbled away at her relentlessly, but Lisa had prepared herself as best she could. The bag was empty in her wardrobe, waiting to be filled with the things she couldn’t leave behind.

A few clothes. Money, ID, pencils and paper, credit cards and toiletries. She didn’t need anything else.

Except...

She hesitated, then grabbed the photo frame from her dresser, the one that had a crowded picture of them all. It would be smarter to leave them behind. She shouldn’t cling to her past. Wasn’t that what Alex himself had taught her?

Take nothing. Leave nothing. Mean nothing.

No. She was better than that.

Lisa rammed the silver frame into her bag face down so she wouldn’t have to look at it. Her chest was hitching, but she forced down slow breaths and checked her room one last time.

It was crowded, full of silly things she had accumulated. Half-read books and scattered jewellery and posters and pictures. She didn’t need any of it. She didn’t need the yellow walls or the cushions she’d picked with Jepar or the plants that Toya had coaxed into swirling shapes.

She slung the rucksack over her shoulder, and turned to go.

Then she heard the unmistakable crash of Cougar Redfern throwing open the front door as if there was an enthralled audience waiting for him beyond it. Voices poured in – Jepar chattering, Alisha chiding him, rustling bags and feet, and above it all a filthy rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.

She froze. She could have slipped by Toya, but one of them was bound to notice her. There would be questions, interruptions, time clawed away by their affection and their curiosity and she would have to lie to them. Better for it to be sudden as a knife in the dark.

Lisa swung open the window. It wasn’t too far, and the drainpipe was probably sturdy enough to hold her weight. It glittered with a thick coating of frost, but she had to risk it.

“No, she can’t miss this!” she heard an indignant Cougar say. The vampire sounded even louder than usual. “My homemade Christmas cocktails come but once a year. Whereas as Chusson-”

“Stop right there!” Chatoya yelped.

Lisa eased out of the window. Her grip felt distressingly fragile, but she shifted her weight onto the pipe, praying.

“Please,” added Alisha, sounding weary. “I don’t think I can take another single-entendre.”

“How about a double malt, then?” Cougar said chirpily. “JJ, your girlfriend’s glaring at me. Make her stop. Her eyes are all beady.”

“Alisha’s eyes are not beady,” Jepar slurred, his voice far too loud. “They’re beautiful shining pools of...of...shininess. Like this cocktail. Hey, Cougar, these are special. You can’t even taste the vodka. Or the rum. Or the whisky. It’s like fun in a glass.” He paused, then said wistfully, “All we need is Abba.”

“That’s exactly what we don’t need,” Alisha said with some alarm.

“Damn right,” agreed Cougar, who had the immune system of a vampire, and thus a truly gobsmacking ability to consume his own bodyweight in alcohol with very little consequence. “What we need is Lisa. She can’t stay upstairs while we’re all having fun. C’mon JJ, let’s go find her.”

“To the batmobile!” Jepar cried.

“Okay. You’ve had enough,” announced Cougar as their footsteps clattered up the stairs. She edged nervously down the drainpipe. Her foot slipped – she clutched the metal desperately, scrabbling for a hold. “I forgot you can’t hold your drink.”

“I’m a shapeshifter! Of course I can hold my drink-”

She heard the click of the door opening.

“I’m not talking about milk,” Cougar said. “God, it’s freezing in here.”

“The window’s open...” Jepar said, and panicked, she began to climb down as quickly as she could. They couldn’t catch her – she couldn’t bear to tell them, she couldn’t look them in the eyes and lie because she’d been stupid again, she’d done just what she’d sworn she wouldn’t. She’d learned to love them despite it all.

Her fingers slipped – she grabbed for purchase and found none and suddenly she was falling, falling, a faint scream escaping her.

She smacked onto the ground with bone-jolting thud, the packed snow hard as stone.

“Lisa!” a voice said incredulously. “Are you okay?”

She opened her eyes onto the pitiless grey sky and, leaning out from her window, a gawping Cougar Redfern, mouth a dark oval of shock.

Beside him, Jepar looked a little glazed. “Are you making snow angels?”

“Not exactly,” she moaned.

Cougar shimmied down the drainpipe with the insouciance of a career criminal. He lifted her up; she’d forgotten how gentle he could be when he wanted, brushing the snow out of her hair. Then his eyes settled on the rucksack, nestled in the snow.

She reached for it, but not quickly enough, and heard the buzz of the zip.

His voice was quiet, dangerous.

“Then what were you doing? Because it looks a hell of a lot like running away.”

She stared at him, unable to lie.

“I think you’d better explain, babe.”

Time was draining away like a fever. If she was going to go, it had to be now. She licked her lips, tasting that winter, ice and blood.

“My soulmate,” she said. Shock reflected in his eyes like the flash of a camera. “He’s found me.”

“Let me guess,” Cougar said. “He wants to kill you.”

“No,” she said, and the fear crashed in on her. “That would be better. He wants to own me. Body, heart and soul.”

Worse. Part of me wants him to.

“Please,” she said, voice rasping. “Let me go. I can’t lose anyone else. If he has to kill every one of you to get me, he will.”

“How do you know?”

She closed her eyes. She saw a battlefield, and smelt blood and ordure as men died for her.

A new voice answered – a light, amused voice that cut through her remaining composure like a machete.

“Because that’s what I did last time.”

She was turning, reeling, but for some reason her knees wouldn’t hold her and the world was running at the edges like a watercolour while he filled the centre of it, smiling and so close – how had Alex got so close without her seeing?

His hands closed around her wrists, and she felt the connection spring between them. The world slowed, time oozing by in inevitable increments.

She fought it – she fought it with every inch of her being, muscles straining, fighting to be separate, one and whole and unbroken. But the soulmate link filled her body until her bones groaned with the effort of resisting it. Breath hurt, her skin stung, she was fire and ice and lightning, enduring because all of that was better than what she would become.

He held on, and she held back, the pain beating down on her. Stalemate.

She glared at him, teeth bared. She could do this. She-

Something like amusement flashed in his eyes. Alex leaned forward and brushed the softest, slightest kiss on her mouth.

The link split her heart like lightning. Lisa thought she screamed as the soulmate bond crashed onto her, but if the sound lingered in that world where she had been free, she could no longer hear it.

She tumbled into his mind, and could only think dazedly that it all felt the same. It was as if the years had not passed at all.

It still hurt like hell.

I don’t want to fall in love
(This world is only going to break your heart)
With you

Long Lost Part Two

You call me superstitious
Tie me up with your deceit
I could never be malicious
Though I seem so bittersweet

The sky was clear and so bright she had to squint. Growing corn brushed her knees, itching. All around her, the fields stretched away in swathes of gold, broken by low stone walls that straggled across the hills. Far away, she could make out a cluster of buildings – low huts, a farmhouse, enough to tell her that Alex had never left Saxon Britain.

The last time she had dared to step into Alex’s mind, it had been a British fortress, high and isolated and threaded by winter winds. The change startled her.

Maybe it was all just another image, as disposable as his smiles. Another trick.

“You’ve redecorated,” she said flatly.

“It’s my soul, not real estate,” he answered, sounding amused.

She turned, and he was perched on a rickety stone wall. “I don’t see much difference. Either way, you could take a squalid hovel and spin it into a dream that someone would buy.”

“Ouch. Somehow I get the impression you aren’t pleased to see me.” The soft, slurring Cajun accent was new. So was his attire, which wouldn’t have looked out of place on the fashionable parts of MTV, but seemed discordant against the wild landscape.

“Really? What made you think that? Was it the fact I was begging my friend to let me leave? Or was it the huge – and pay attention, this term is literal – fuck-off war that I started to get away from you?”

Alex glanced away, his nonchalance apparently dented. She wasn’t fooled. The words hadn’t touched him in the slightest; he knew how to use vulnerability. It was part of his charm, a hint of softness under that dangerous veneer, a certain hesitancy in his manner that beguiled the unwary and led his enemies to underestimate him.

He used emotions as a sleight of hand, the sparkle on his amazing tricks. Distraction, misdirection, artifice. He was a magician of the highest order, the kind who didn’t even need mirrors or smoke.

“That was a long time ago, Lisanor.”

“Don’t use that name. That was someone else.”

“Really? She looked a lot like you,” he answered, and slid off the wall in a smooth motion. “Lisa, then. That’s the name you use now, isn’t it?”

The implication burned her. “I don’t just use it. It’s my name. It’s who I am.”

“And who is that?” he said softly, strolling towards her as someone else might approach a frightened animal. Eyes lowered, almost meek, each movement slow and careful.

She stepped back, not caring how he took it. “A better person than I ever was with you. Leave me alone, Alex.”

“No.”

The corn scratched her shins as she retreated, fists clenched at her sides. “I don’t want you.”

He lifted his eyes and the intensity there froze her - dark, heated, and so very knowing. “I don’t believe you.”

She could feel panic beginning to take her over. All the years spent running had taught her control over her own emotions and her own mind, but she knew just how powerful he was. If he wanted, he could pluck out her thoughts and examine them at his leisure.

And he would if she didn’t do as he wanted. This was just manoeuvring, an attempt to persuade her with words before force. Violence had always been his last resort, but he had used it nonetheless.

She was playing for time now, nothing else.

“I have another life,” she said. “It doesn’t involve you. It never will.”

His laughter was soft, but there was a bitter edge to it that puzzled her. “While I have the same life, and it is empty without you.”

“That was your choice.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “And I’m starting to think it was the wrong choice.”

“It’s too late for that,” she said coldly.

Strange how she had thought the past was dead, gathering dust in the pages of journals and textbooks. And yet those old emotions surfaced so easily – hurt, betrayal, fear – that she trembled with them.

“No.” His voice was a snarl. “I don’t believe that either.”

Green glimmered in his eyes, wolfish, and she saw the tension in his body, barely leashed.

“You promised me, Lisanor,” he whispered, and here, the words rumbled like thunder. All around them, the landscape was shifting, bleeding into stormy skies and ruined ground. The corn shrank beneath her feet until she stood on stones and weeds. “A fair chance for your heart, a fair chance for you. Who did you break that promise for?”

She tried hard to keep her mind empty, tried not to think of those she loved. There were so many of them, so many people he could hurt if he wanted.

Faces flashed before her in a dizzying parade – Cern and Vaje and Toya and Jepar and Cougar and Thom-

No, no, no...

His eyes were so cold. “I see,” he said slowly, and his tone chilled her.

“Don’t-”

Her pleas were cut off – back in the real world, she felt something tear his hands from her, and the link fractured like bone.

~*~

Disoriented, she opened her eyes and saw Jepar, who was peering at her anxiously. The alcohol on his breath did more to restore her wits than the tentative way he was patting her face.

“Don’t you dare go anywhere near her,” she heard Cougar say, his voice glacial.

She shoved Jepar aside. Cougar and Alex faced each other across the snow, threat in every line of the vanpire’s body, his eyes blazing gold and inhuman as the fangs that he bared at her soulmate.

Alex was breathing hard, flexing his hands as if claws might sprout from them at any minute. A slow smile crept across his face, amused, a little contemptuous. “I really don’t think you can stop me.”

“Want to bet?” Cougar drawled.

She shivered as Alex let his power roll over the air – force that crackled like the air before a storm, heavy on her skin, more than a mere werewolf should possess. But then, it had been a long time since Alex had been just a werewolf.

“Yes,” he said, and with that word, power pressed down on them. She heard Jepar gasp, heard the thud as he was slammed to the ground; Cougar was somehow upright, hunched against the sheer pressure bearing on him. “You aren’t anywhere near enough, cher.”

“But I am,” a new voice said, and suddenly the weight was gone.

Lisa stared, awed, as Chatoya moved between them, treading delicately and lightly through the snow on her bare feet, but there was nothing gentle about the black fire that hugged her body. If the witch felt the cold, it didn’t show. Her long black hair sheeted around her like a cloak, power billowing from her.

Alex tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowed. “How intriguing. A witch with dragon powers. You must tell me how you stole that spell from the Furies.”

“I didn’t have to,” Chatoya said coldly. “I run Pursang.”

They all knew the truth, but hearing it said so matter-of-factly gave Lisa chills.

A low sound rolled over the air, and it was a moment before she realised it was Alex laughing. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Usually it does,” Jepar muttered, sounding bemused.

“How far have you been, little girl?” he said scornfully, gaze raking up Chatoya’s body in a way that Lisa recognised. He had looked at the Saxons the same way, as if he could hardly believe their impudence in invading his country. “How much of Hades have you seen?”

Beside them, she saw Cougar stiffen. His eyes were fixed on Chatoya with something close to desperation.

“Nothing yet,” Chatoya answered.

Hades. It was Nightworld legend, but she had been born in the times when it wasn’t legend, when the Furies had sent their initiates into the underworld to drink of the rivers there and learn the secret of death. She’d thought it had been forgotten. But Chatoya hadn’t been at all surprised by the question.

Alex raised his eyebrows, ostensibly polite. “Nothing? I’ve felt the breath of Hades himself – I’ve walked into the heart of the underworld and lived to tell the tale, and you think you can frighten me because you stole power from a sleeping lizard?”

The witch held her ground. “I think if you dare come near Lisa again, I’ll kick your ass straight back into the underworld and you can give Hades a personal account of just what you did wrong.”

“Feisty,” Alex remarked. “But why don’t you go and look up Alexandros in your archives, cherie, and then if you still think you’ve got a hope in hell of harming me, you come and try your magic on me.”

Chatoya’s eyes widened. The name meant something to her, that was for sure.

“I thought so,” Alex said lightly, and he turned his attention to her. Lisa gazed back, suddenly unsure how safe she was, even in the midst of all her friends. “I’ll see you soon.”

Green swamped his eyes, feral, but something unmistakably human remained in them – a calculating intelligence overlaying the beast. He threw back his head and howled.

The sound vibrated like a war cry in the air, and as its echoes faded, he turned and walked away, feet kicking up the snow. To the casual onlooker, he might just have been a teenage boy slouching along the street.

Lisa thought she could hear that howl long after nothing remained of him but silence.

~*~

The trees bent over the house like clenched fingers. It lay in a pool of shadow, broken only by thin shafts of grey light that seeped through the leaves. Snow littered the ground in small patches, and occasional flakes fluttered down from the canopy, but it was otherwise untouched by the winter.

Alex raised a hand to knock only to see the door swing open.

The boy standing in the doorway was startling. His face was handsome, teetering on the edge of beauty, all sharp edges that were only balanced by a full mouth that curled with contempt. His hair was bright blue, and a match for his eyes, which regarded Alex with a detachment that suggested he was being valued, much as an item at auction.

Alex strongly resisted the urge to slap the little bastard, who had been useful so far, and put on his most irritating smile.

“Surprise.”

Blue Malefici, the vampire who ran Nightfire, the oldest of the Furies, raised his eyebrows. “Not exactly. Everyone within a hundred miles probably felt that show of power. I thought you were famous for your subtlety.”

“Among other things,” Alex said with a little purr. He let his eyes rove over the vampire, a slow, thorough examination. Very good-looking, but so emotionally repressed that he had to pity anyone foolish enough to get involved with him.

He thought he detected a flash of annoyance in the boy’s face. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“Not even close,” he said with a lazy smile. Her rejection rankled, more than he had thought it would. “But this is only the start. Do you have the records I asked for?”

“Do you have the knowledge I asked for?” Blue countered.

Alex tapped his temple. “Of course.”

It was, perhaps, not wise to tell Hades’ secrets to this one. Five rivers laced the underworld. Once the Furies had gone to each to drink and learn, if they survived. Now most of them went only to the first, a handful to the second, and only three people out of all the Furies had sampled the third. Blue Malefici was one of them.

Alex stood so far above them in power that he would have seemed a god if he was foolish enough to reveal the full range of his abilities. He wasn’t sure that giving Blue the same advantage was a wise idea.

But he needed the Furies to win Lisanor.

Nothing else mattered.

~*~

“Do you want to explain what the hell just happened?” Cougar demanded, his expression close to hostile.

She looked around at them all, the words stuck in her throat. Alisha had ushered them all inside, efficient, carefully not commenting on what had just happened. Jepar was huddled by the radiator. Cougar was rubbing at his neck and shoulders as if they ached, while Chatoya was busy rubbing her feet with a towel, grimacing. She might not have felt the cold while she was saturated with magic, but once it had vanished, she started hopping from foot to foot like a jumpy cat.

His outburst drew all their eyes to her. She didn’t know what to say. It was obvious that she had lied to them. They’d caught her trying to run away. They’d seen Alex, and they’d heard what he said.

“What is he?” Jepar asked finally. “That guy had more mojo than a voodoo convention.”

“That...” Once she had started, it became easier. “That was Alex. My soulmate.”

“See, this is the bit I’m confused about,” Cougar said coldly. “The bit where you forget to mention that you have a soulmate and he’s a maniac. Because it’s not as if we’re short on either round here. You’d think you might have found time to mention it between psychos.”

She swallowed. His hostility made it easier. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe because he used to run Nightfire,” Chatoya suggested quietly. She was pale, hands clasped so tight it must have hurt. “I can understand why you’d be ashamed of that.”

“That was part of it.” She found herself staring at the floor, not wanting to meet their eyes. But she owed them the truth. They had put themselves on the line for her. “But not all of it. It was a long time ago. A very long time ago.”

“So you’re not thirty,” Jepar said tentatively.

“No.” She met his eyes, the green of summer, and shorn of all their humour. “I don’t know exactly how old I am. But I was born around fifteen hundred years ago.”

The silence was absolute. None of them even moved.

Then Cougar said, “Say that number again.”

“I’m fifteen hundred years old, give or take,” she said quietly. “I was born in Africa, but I don’t know where. When I was young, the Romans conquered us, and I was taken into slavery. Alex was my owner. And then...one day I found out he was my soulmate.”

“Whoa...” Jepar breathed.

Of them all, only Alisha didn’t look shocked. There might even have been understanding in her cool blue eyes. After all, she had lived eight hundred years as an Old Soul, passing from life to life and death to death.

“He had me changed into a vampire,” Lisa continued, trying hard to forget that night, her fear and the feel of her chest hitching as she tried to breathe only to find that the air was no longer there. “We travelled everywhere – the Roman Empire was trying to hold onto its colonies, and he was one of its governors. At last we were sent to Britain to try and stop the rebellion there. He didn’t care – the Furies were bringing down the Empire. Everything he did was for show. There was...there was a woman. She told me about Alex – what he was. Things...things he had done. I left him.”

Sad how so much could be distilled into so few words; her life reduced down to a few core, terrible truths.

“But he chased me. I went to his enemies and begged them for shelter.” A disbelieving little laugh choked out of her. “And do you know, do you know what he did then?”

“Lise...” Chatoya said gently, reaching out. Her face was full of concern, horror in her eyes.

She had to get through this. “He raised an army to get me back. He was there for years and let the Saxons ravage the damn country, but he united fifteen warring tribes because he couldn’t bear the fact I’d left him. We fought. And he won – the Saxons surrendered, but I left him all the same. And now – now he’s a legend. They make these stupid films about him, they write about him as if he was some kind of hero, as if he did it to save someone. He wasn’t. He went to war because he was a jealous man, that was all.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” objected Jepar.

“It was,” she said tiredly. “I could have stopped it. I could have said yes, and gone back to him, and pretended for a while. But I didn’t. I let men die. I saw them ripped to pieces and I still didn’t stop it.”

I didn’t want to. I hated him. He lied to me, and I just wanted him to suffer – I wanted everyone to suffer because at least then I wouldn’t be alone.

She couldn’t bring herself to say those things to her friends. Nor could she tell them the whole truth – the poison, the massacres, the deeds that she had been complicit in.

By far the worst, the battlefield was stark in her mind, dark with blood, disfigured by the bodies sprawled upon it.

“I ran from him for hundreds of years. I always knew he was following me, and sometimes he came so close, but he only caught me once.” That time was blurred by fever and exhaustion. “He let me go. I still don’t know why. But he made me promise that when he f-found me again, I’d give him a fair chance. And now he has. I don’t know what to do.”

“So you went for climbing down the drainpipe,” Cougar said, some of the anger fading from him. The smile he offered her was grim, but filled her with relief nonetheless. “Not too smart, babe.”

She scrubbed at her face. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No wonder. You really started a war to get away from him?”

“I really did,” she said glumly.

“Then that’s a guy who really can’t take ‘no’, ‘hell no’ or ‘screaming Saxon army no’ for an answer,” the lamia declared. “I vote we skip the niceties and go straight for annihilating him with Toya’s scary dragon powers.”

“Seconded,” Alisha said, raising a finger.

“I’m not sure that’ll work,” Chatoya muttered. “If he’s been as far into Hades as he says...I don’t even know what kind of powers that would give you.”

“Then find someone who does,” suggested Cougar shortly. “One of your merry lunatics will know.”

“Actually...” The witch gave a little nod. “You’re right. Vaje used to work on the archives.”

“No.” The word flew from her. “I don’t want him to know.”

Chatoya looked taken aback. “Why not?”

Because what else is in those archives? What do they know about me, about what I did? For love, I told myself, and it was all lies.

She searched for an excuse that might be acceptable, but nothing sprang to mind. There was no reason for Vaje not to know. After all, he was about the best protection she could get aside from Chatoya.

“Because I lied to him too,” she said finally.

Jepar gave her a sweet grin. “I’m pretty sure he’s crazy enough about you to get over it.”

That startled her. She doubted Vaje was crazy about her; fond of her, attracted to her, a close friend, a lover – yes. But that was as far as it went. She didn’t kid herself about that. Nor did she mind.

“I guess,” she said finally.

“I have a question,” Alisha said. “You said Alex was a legend. He’s obviously not Alexander the Great-”

“Alexander the Great Pain in the Ass, maybe,” Lisa muttered.

“-then who is he?”

She supposed there was no harm in them knowing. The truth of the whole affair was long obscured by romantic interpretations of the legend. “He didn’t use that name in Britain. His formal name was Ambrosius Aurelianus in the Empire, but he was so fierce in battle that they called him ‘the bear’. Artos.”

“Still not ringing any bells,” Cougar said helpfully.

She had to smile. “Better known as King Arthur.”

The gobsmacked looks on their faces were all she could have hoped for.

Your black-eyed soul
You should know that there’s nowhere else to go
My black eyed boy,
You will find your own space and time

Long Lost Part Three

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sweep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

“Hang on,” Cougar said, sounding stunned. “He’s the legendary King Arthur?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.” The vampire was silent, taking it in, then he said, “What a let-down.”

Lisa gave him a quiet, bitter smile. “You have no idea.”

“Is it all true?” Jepar piped up, green eyes bright like grass. There was eagerness in his face, and she remembered that he’d spent his summers in Britain, and had probably grown up with the legends. “Lancelot and Guinevere and Merlin and-”

She felt a lump rise in her throat at those old names. “Some of it. Lancelot was just a poet’s invention. But Guinevere was real, and so was Merlin.”

And how I miss them. Some are dead, and some are not, and some are probably somewhere in between. Alex bound us all with his endless games, whether we loved him or hated him.

“Are you in the legends?” Alisha said suddenly, her gaze shrewd. There wasn’t any of Jepar’s excitement in her face - more the curiosity of a historian. Lisa couldn’t help but resent her a little. Of all of them, the Old Soul should have understood. She had enough lives to know that there were some aspects of the past that should be left untouched.

“Yes,” she said reluctantly.

“Dare we ask?” Chatoya said softly, a smile crooking her mouth.

“Look up Lisanor,” she said, unwilling to reveal more than that. “I’m there.”

“I still can’t believe you saw it all,” Cougar remarked, his hazel eyes bemused, as if she had changed before him, unfolding like a flower. “I mean, it’s you, Lise, but it’s not. There’s this whole other person and we never even knew.”

She opened her mouth to apologise, but then stopped. It was pointless. She was sorry for all she had kept buried, entombed in her heart until she could almost convince herself that those memories were desiccated, dead things - but if Alex hadn’t found her, she would never have said a word.

“It’s still me,” she offered instead, meeting his eyes. “So I had a life before I met you all. It doesn’t change the one I’ve had with you.”

“Yeah, it does,” he said flatly. Lisa was startled to see disappointment in the vampire’s expression. His explosive anger, she could have brushed off, but that jolted her. “You lied. And you lied so well that none of us questioned a damn thing you said.”

“I had to-”

“No, you didn’t. You think we would have cared?”

Part of her cringed away. They might not have cared about some of it, but other parts – if they had known her then, Lisa doubted they would have liked her much. They would have found her besotted, loyal only to Alex, a thoughtless girl blinded by promises of love, who had been sly and ruthless in her pursuit of it.

“I...I couldn’t trust you at first,” she said simply. “And when I did, it was too late. I just wanted to forget about it all.”

“To forget about him, you mean,” Alisha corrected, her voice pleasant but clinical.

For a moment, Lisa wanted to strike her. Alex, she knew, would have. “Yes,” she said, through gritted teeth. “But I guess Alex didn’t forget about me.”

“Can’t blame him,” Jepar said with an attempt at cheer. “It’s almost flattering, if you think about it.”

Chatoya gave him an incredulous look. “No, it’s creepy. He’s been stalking her for hundreds of years. That’s not love. That’s obsession.”

“That’s thousands of dollars of business for a good shrink,” he argued. At the collective stares of everyone, the shapeshifter gave a shrug and his usual merry smile. “Just trying to see the bright side.”

“And on the dark side,” Cougar said, the tension obvious in every line of his body, “how likely is this to end in misery, pain, death or any combination of the above?”

There, at least, they deserved the truth in totality. “Very, unless I give him what he wants.”

“Let me guess, incredible nookie?”

She had to smile. “If only it was that easy.”

“You can be,” he quipped. His humour was always at its best when things were falling to pieces, but it was merely a shield for everything he wouldn’t say aloud. The tightness about his eyes contradicted his rakish smile. “You meant what you said outside? He wants to own you?”

“Yes.” And he could so easily. “Old habits die hard.”

“Oh, don’t worry, babe,” Cougar purred, his voice all silk and shadows. “We’ll help you kick him.”

She saw Merlin predicting the same thing, just as young and vibrant and arrogant. The two of them were briefly interchangeable, time a melting pot of now and then, and she had a terrible sense of foreboding.

War and magic had made no difference before. So many had been cut down, the harvest long and bloody, the reaper the only victor. In those fraught times, she had told herself such deeds need never be done again once that battle was over – but she had been wrong, she had been naïve, and she was afraid that the price would be just as high this time.

A lump rose in her throat, but when she blinked, it was only Cougar smiling his fierce, fake smile. Merlin lay where she had left him, a skeleton smeared with dirt.

She would find a way to stop this. Everything was different now; she was different. She was no longer alone and powerless – she was no longer crippled by her fear, no longer willing to be duped by soft lies.

“I can do it myself,” she said firmly, head held high.

Then she looked around, and it struck her hard how much she valued them, how easily she could lose them if she was not careful. They were not pawns in a game, but they would become so if she tried to keep them free of it all.

“But I wouldn’t mind some help,” she added.

~*~

Under the gathering darkness, Alex went out into the woods, chasing the wolf song he had heard earlier. Adrenaline still heaved in his veins – he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.

Sleep had always seemed just another sort of death to him, and so it never surprised him that his dreams were thick with it, a catalogue of war and plague, famine and murder. Although he had been raised in a culture that valued dreams as omens, he had found no answers in them, only himself.

No surprise then that he often dreamed of Hades, so he was glad of the escape tonight.

But whether it was just being so close to the Furies again, or whether it was Lisa and all that had brought him here, it crept unbidden into his waking thoughts.

He had been in the Furies for nearly a decade by the time he went there for the fifth time. This was the final test, and then he would stand equal among them, marked by each of the five rivers. Four, he knew: the Acheron, which had taught him the depths of despair. The Phlegethon, where he had burned and been burned. The Styx, in which he had seen the brutality of his hatred, and conquered it. The frozen Cocytus that he had broken with his bare hands to sip the icy waters beneath, tasting with it his fears.

Only the Lethe remained.

It was a whirlpool at the very heart of Hades, and the Mnemosyne too flowed into it, long ago swallowed by the voracious pull of the current; the river of memory and forgetting, it was the most powerful of the five, and the most deadly. It cut to the very core of what the Furies were and why they had endured so long.

One draught. One chance.

If he failed, he would not leave.

The way was narrow and treacherous, a slippery path through a gorge of ice. Strange yellow lights were entombed beneath the surface, throwing sinuous blue shadows across the passageway. Nor was that all they illuminated.

When he saw the first dark shape in the ice, it piqued his curiosity. He spent long seconds squinting at it before realisation struck him.

It was a person.

As he went on, he saw others, some pressed so close to the surface that he could have smashed into it and dragged them free. But they were long dead, skin pale and luminescent as calla lilies, lips the dark, smudged blue of inkstains. One was a beautiful girl suspended just above the ground, her dark hair fanned about her and her hands outstretched as if waiting for a blessing. Perhaps it was the flickering lights that gave her face eerie animation, but Alex could have sworn he saw her blink.

He didn’t look at them after that.

The cold ate through his skin, until he felt as slow and heavy as mercury. Alex began to think he would never reach the end – he would collapse to his knees, then to his hands, and the ice would creep over him too.

But he went on, looking no further than his next step. And when his foot found purchase on stone, Alex knew he would live at least a little longer.

Shaking with cold, he staggered out into a cavern that stretched away as far as he could see. Shadows lay around it like fuzz, the only light pale and greenish, emitted by the phosphorescent lichen that clung to the stalagmites. It reflected from the swirling water ahead, refracting onto the ceiling in tiny shards.

He went down to the whirlpool tentatively, the cold receding from his joints to leave only a lingering ache. The air was noisy with the crash and hiss of the water. It was eerie and magnificent and everything he had imagined.

The path was worn and ran past the whirlpool, down to a small bank. Here the river was fast but less treacherous, yet to become part of the vortex. He knelt down there, or rather, toppled down, his knees only too ready to give way.

He reached out to the water-

“So you made it.”

The voice was right beside his ear, and he started so hard he would have fallen in if firm hands hadn’t grabbed him and yanked him back onto the dubious safety of the bank.

Later, he realised she must have been concealed in shadow, waiting. Then he could only stare amazed into her familiar face, her grey eyes bright, clever and just a little amused. The great tumble of black hair was untamed as ever, and where he was gasping and exhausted, she seemed cool and fresh as a violet.

“Neve?”

“None other. Welcome to the end of hell.”

He looked out over the river. Beyond it was a great chasm, and in its centre a vast, shadowed pillar. Hades’ throne, the Furies named it, half in jest.

Death sits there, we kneel here, and only darkness divides us.

“Doesn’t look like the end to me,” he said, gesturing.

“It’s as far as we go.” Her smile was slow and confident. “Final test, Alex.”

“And you’re it?” he said dryly.

She stood back, tall and narrow as Hades’ throne. Death sat with her too – she had come to the Lethe some years ago. It had left her with an air of mystery, a certain light in those secretive eyes that named her unconquerable, indomitable. It drew men like moths.

“No. The river is the test, same as always. I just came to offer you a little help, if you want it.”

He frowned. “What kind of help?”

“That would be telling.”

“Yes. It would. Which is why I’m asking. After asking comes telling. Basic conversation, Neve.”

She laughed. It was as loud and rowdy as her voice was soft, and never ceased to startle him. “Yes or no, Alex? Do you want my help?”

Her offer was baffling. Everyone came to Hades alone.

You have only yourself in hell, the Furies were fond of saying. In Hades, you will find nothing more than yourself, nothing less than the truth.

A thought struck him. “Does everyone get this offer?”

Her smile had a hint of pride to it. “Yes.”

So it was a test.

No one spoke about the Lethe. He had known what to expect on every other visit. This time, he had come armed only with determination. No one who had been spoke of it. Only a handful of them existed, the true Furies, who had stood here before him and made the right choice.

He thought of all that had come before: despair, pain, hate, fear. He had battled them alone, and won. But the last river was different. The pool of forgetting and memory. What would he forget?

The way out, perhaps. Who he was.

They had sent someone he would trust. And this would be either proof of that trust or betrayal of it.

“Decide,” she said. “And drink.”

He met her eyes, steady, familiar.

You have only yourself in hell.

Not anymore.

“Help me,” he said, and leaned forward to drink.

~*~

He had lived. The choice had been right, and he had needed Neve that day. In the shadow of Hades’ throne, he had drunk the Lethe and lived and found power at his fingertips.

But it had not been his last visit to Hades. He had gone back, just once more, driven by hubris and the need to prove himself more fearless, better than all who had gone before him. He had gone beyond the Lethe, and as the Furies had promised, found nothing less than the truth.

It had brought him here, to this moment. He had been a beggar and a king, a victor and a victim, and somewhere between all of those things, a man in love.

But right now, he was a wolf and he was lonely.

They registered on his senses as dim glows, little more than fireflies in the immensity of the night. As he stepped into the clearing, they saw him, and froze.

He looked around at them and realised that this was not a wolf pack. This was a cluster of vagrants huddling together for the illusion of safety. They had built themselves a home of sorts here; a campfire crackled in the middle, surrounded by old picnic benches and rugs. A couple of tents were pitched in he corner, but he’d bet most of them slept in their fur.

A woman stood, her face wary. The firelight turned her red hair into an echo of itself and made strange lights shift in her eyes. Her voice was husky and hostile. “I hope you have a good reason for intruding.”

He swept her a mocking bow. From her stance to her words, everything about her screamed alpha. “Is the need for the company of my own kind enough?”

And then he dropped the shields he kept over his power, letting it prowl about them like another wolf, this one vast and intangible and hungry. Gasps, a cry, a girl wrapping her arms about herself and rocking as if that could help her.

The woman was the only one who didn’t react. “If it’s company you want, it’s bad manners to terrorise them.”

He liked her nerve. “You’re quite right, cherie.” He let his voice caress the last word, injecting a little heat without thinking. “My apologies.”

Alex pulled his power back under his skin and politely resurrected his shields. Then he waited while she watched him, head tilted to one side.

“I’ve never met a wolf with that much power,” she said mildly. “Who are you?”

“My name is Alex Morelli,” he offered, plucking a surname from his mind with ease. “I’m a traveller.”

“And how long have you been travelling?”

Interesting. He couldn’t scent a whiff of power from her either. He could have knocked down her shields and looked for himself, of course, but that would have been rude. And unnecessary. She was no spring chicken, that was for sure, but she was no threat to him.

“Long enough.”

Her half-smile said she didn’t appreciate the evasion but knew better than to enquire further. “And why did you decide to stop here?”

“I heard a song on the night, and I remembered how much I missed it.” And that was truth. He had been an incessant hunter for centuries. Always moving, never pausing, never running for the sake of it. His life had purpose, but nothing of friends, nothing of company. “I thought I might come and listen and rest a while.”

“He honest?”

The woman threw the question out, her eyes cutting to a boy perched on one of the benches.

With a shock, Alex recognised him from Lisanor’s mind, remembered the fury burning his chest as he snarled who did you break that promise for?

And she had thought of this boy, whoever he was. This gaunt, flimsy creature who registered so palely on Alex’s senses that he was barely a speck of dust caught in light. Alex studied him, bemused, ire turning over in his stomach. How did he know Lisa?

“He’s honest,” the boy said. His eyes were bleak, little interest in them as he looked at Alex. His hair was wavy, his face grimy.

“Then you can stay,” the woman declared. She came forward and offered Alex her hand. “Donna Ares. I look after this rabble.”

The warning was clear. It meant nothing. He could have killed them all here and now if he’d wanted, and the thorny jealousy in his heart urged him to. But Alex held back. “Then I’m honoured to be one of them, if only for a while.”

If only so I can find out who that boy is, and why he dares creep into my Lisa’s heart like a cancer.

~*~

With some measure of privacy, Lisa got ready for her date. It felt surreal, going through the motions when she knew that there would be nothing of romance left, only confessions hanging on the air while their food went cold.

She touched her face with make-up, gold eyeshadow and dark lipstick, shrugged into an orange top and jeans, and stared in the mirror. It all looked like a mask, hiding the truth – hiding Lisanor, who had gone into battle, who had intrigued with kings and slaves alike, who had dabbled in magic of the foulest, darkest sort.

A light knock made her turn from the mirror. Chatoya came in, bearing tea and a hopeful expression. She shut the door after her and went to sit on the bed.

“I just came to see if you’re okay,” she said.

“Not really,” Lisa said glumly. “My soulmate is a world-class stalker, my friends just found out I lied to them, and now I have to tell my boyfriend that I need him to research the soulmate he didn’t know I had so I can stop him trying to kill everyone around me. As far as bad days go, this even tops the day Jepar discovered disco.”

Chatoya covered her smile, but Lisa heard her snicker. “Hush. It was a revelation for him.”

“It was more Book of Revelations for the rest of us.” Lisa met her eyes. “I’m sorry, Toya. I wish I’d found a way to tell you.”

“You could have,” Chatoya said solemnly. “Honestly, don’t you think I would have understood? You’re not the only one who has a Fury for their fated other, you know.”

“I...I didn’t think you’d understand,” Lisa said quietly. “He’s not like Blue.”

“Who is?” Chatoya said wryly, “If he was a bigger ass, Jennifer Lopez would be out of a job. But...but...” She sighed, and seemed infinitely older, less the girl Lisa had met and more a young woman, saddened but still determined. “I know what it means to love someone like him. It’s crazy and it’s an endless fight, and half the time you hate them as much as you love them.”

Lisa couldn’t stop her brittle laughter. “I’m not being rude, Toya, but I don’t think you can understand.”

Chatoya raised her eyebrows. “Why not?”

“You love him. I know that. I don’t like it, but I know it. And I can just about deal with it because I know that you don’t let loving him stop you from fighting him.”

“Of course I don’t!” she said, a touch indignantly. “I can love him and still know that he’s wrong.”

“Then there’s the difference between us.” She let the words hang. Chatoya’s eyes widened, green and dark and round as fairy rings. “I didn’t care what Alex did. I loved him beyond reason, beyond right or wrong. As long as he was mine, I didn’t care what he did. I even helped him.”

The shame swept over her, hot and prickling.

“Lisa?” Chatoya said in a thin, puzzled voice. “What are you saying?”

She closed her eyes on her friend. “I murdered people. I killed them because Alex needed them dead, and I loved him.” The laugh choked her throat. “I loved him more than life itself. Their lives. All their lives.”

She heard a muted gasp, footsteps, and then air brushed her as the door opened. The last thing she heard was a slam before she was left alone, as she had always suspected she would be if they knew the truth.

Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
Once you go there was never, never an honest word
That was when I ruled the world

Scarlet starlet and she's in my bed
A candidate for my soul mate bled
Push the trigger and pull the thread
I've got to take it on the otherside

The light from the restaurant filtered from the windows, leaving soft gold pools on the street. Lisa stood outside, hesitating, sequinned bag clutched in her hands. She felt out of place in her heels and lurid top. The modern world seemed outlandish and flamboyant; in contrast she could not help but think of Guinevere, sweeping down the steps of Isca with her skin gold against russet wool, bare-footed, her smile all the adornment she needed.

She’d tamed a roomful of men close to violence with that smile. Everything she did was slow and calm, her hips rolling like breaking waves with every step, a lingering glance that said everything and nothing, her words measured.

Where Alex went, Guinevere followed. Only with him was her calm disrupted, conversations descended into a hiss of furious argument, her face livid and all the lovelier for it.

Lisa had always felt gauche beside her; now the mere memory of Guinevere was enough to diminish her, shrunk inside her skin to a girl who was uncertain again, her world toppled again.

She had never had that effortless confidence with men; there had been Alex, and in his absence, only the fear of his return. For fifteen hundred years she travelled alone, lost in crowds, passing the time in idle conversation that never moved beyond the safe and the impersonal.

Eventually, she stumbled into Ryars Valley. She fell in love, the unrequited kind. She reached out and was slapped back.

And then Vaje came along. Candid, passionate, tender, he’d offered nothing more than a good time, and that had been enough. Neither of them wanted to get too close, but somehow he hadn’t left Ryars Valley, and a fling had become a relationship.

A strange relationship, true, one more to do with friendship than love, quieter and warmer than she’d ever been used to, but a relationship all the same. And it hurt her to think that it might end tonight.

Guinevere would have known what to say; she would have swayed in, the perfect opening on her lips, using her beauty to frame her emotions as a jeweller might set a fine stone. But Lisa wasn't Guinevere and she didn’t know where to begin.

She thought she knew where it would all end though.

So it ended now, or it ended later. Lisa knew Alex would miss no opportunity for persuasion, and he certainly wouldn’t hesitate to use Vaje against her.

She had to get there first.

The thought pained her. Either Alex used Vaje, or she did. Was that all he was now? A piece on the board, this man who’d been so good to her, who’d wrestled her for the bill, who could order for her but never did so without glancing at her first?

No, he was more than that. He deserved better.

Unfortunately, all she could offer him was the truth, and hope he would understand.

~*~

The minute the door opened, Chatoya almost tumbled into Jepar’s arms.

“What’s wrong?” he said with some alarm, steadying her.

She took a deep breath and tried to organise her muddled thoughts. “Lisa...”

“Her soulmate?” he said, eyes blazing. “I’ll-”

“No.” She caught him before he could rush off in true heroic style, and almost certainly get pounded into something resembling mashed potato. “Not her soulmate. Lisa.”

He blinked. “What’s she done?”

“She killed someone.”

She waited for shock, for anger, for disbelief. All she got was a thoughtful stare, then Jepar said, “Oh,” as if it made perfect sense.

She’d told him she was dating Blue and he’d nearly had a heart attack. She told him one of his friends was a murderer, which was surely far worse, and all he could say was ‘Oh’?

“Are you in shock?” she said suspiciously.

“No.” He gave her a level look. “But I think you are.”

“Of course I am! She killed someone.”

“If you’re going to have this reaction every time you hear that, you’d better get a Valium prescription,” Jepar advised, a grin starting to hook up his mouth. “In case you’ve forgotten, you just inherited a couple of hundred assassins. I hear they’re big on killing. And you’re doing the extremely nasty with Blue Malefici. It’s a bit late to get the wobbles about murder, isn’t it?”

“That’s different!” she squeaked. “I already know they’re all murdering bastards! But...but it’s Lisa.”

He guided her into the living room as if he thought she might fall down. “She hasn’t killed anyone since we’ve known her,” he said with what he apparently thought was perfect logic.

Chatoya stared at his calm face, wondering if the world had gone mad. “But she did.”

“Did she tell you why?”

She tried to remember. Her mind was spinning. “Because Alex wanted her to. Because she loved him.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Lisa I know,” he murmured.

“No...”

“In fact, it sounds like she’s changed a lot.” He cocked his head, eyes gentle. “I’ve heard that can happen in a thousand years or so.”

She took in, and then his words registered. “Are you saying I’m overreacting?”

He gave her a faint grin. “I’m going to go with yes. You’re not thinking about this. Look at what Malefici made us do when he put his mind to it. He got me to give you dragon powers. He nearly got you to start a war. This Alex guy used to run Nightfire too.”

He was right. Of course he was right, and she was acting like a hysterical fool. She groaned. “It’s just...” She tried to gather the words. “Everything that’s happened...we’ve all changed so much. But Lisa hadn’t. She was still the same – she was still kind and fun and...and safe. And now she’s not who I thought-”

“I think she is,” Jepar said firmly. “I think she’s the same person we’ve always known. But I think she was a different person hundreds of years ago. You can’t judge her on the past, Toya. She’s never been anything but good to us.” His smile faded; he looked solemn, abruptly older. “We all make mistakes. D’you think all of us haven’t done things we’re ashamed of?”

She gazed at him, feeling the secrets hover between them like wasps. She had never known what had brought him here. Jepar never talked about it; she had learned not to ask. She had always accepted it, always known that something lay across him like a shadow.

And she thought of her own mistakes, of the things she had nearly done, and worse, the things she had done.

“I just wanted someone to be safe,” she croaked, and put her head in her hands.

She felt his weight as he sank onto the sofa beside her, and put a brotherly arm about her. “I know. But think how boring it’d be if we were.”

“I’d take boring.”

“Tough,” he said, and gave her a squeeze. “You’ve got exciting. Now come on, let’s think about how we can help Lisa fight her creepy werewolf stalker.”

She let him comfort her. And she thought of Lisa, and wondered who she had been, and what could possibly have changed her so much, but it seemed to her that she already knew the answer: her own transformation was answer enough, her old life discarded like a chrysalis.

What soulmates we have, she thought. Destined to love us, and destined to hurt us. Such are the Furies - such is Fate.

~*~

In the clearing, the rumble of voices was low and constant. Alex insinuated himself into one of the smaller groups, close to the boy who knew Lisa, flashing an inviting smile at the girl sat smoking on the very fringe.

She stared back flatly. Her smeared eyeliner made her eyes huge bruises in the evening light, her mouth set sullenly about the cigarette. “Not interested.”

“In what?” he enquired breezily. He reached into the power he’d gained from the Lethe and let it spread above them all, a net as thin and fine as hair. Memory and forgetting. Two abilities that struck to the core of what it meant to live, to think, to experience.

“Anything you think you might get.” Her cynical expression said she’d seen it all, and he was not on her ‘fifty things to do before you die’ list.

His net caught her hostility; it fluttered about him, prickly as thistles. “So polite conversation’s out then?”

She blew a cloud of smoke at him, and he endured it, recognising it as a test, another way of marking territory. “Conversation, you can have.”

“And a name, perhaps?”

“Felicity. My friends call me Flick.” Just in case there was any doubt, she flicked her copper hair from her eyes to nail him with a hard stare. “You aren’t one of them.”

“Agreed,” he said lazily. That tough veneer was very intriguing. He had little doubt it was only surface deep; the knuckles of her hand were white as the cigarette. “Did you know that your name means ‘lucky’?”

She gave a bark of a laugh. “So I’m told.” She gestured to the campsite, the grubby sleeping bags, the bags of junk food, the dwindling fire. “Look at all this luck I’ve had.”

“I thought it wasn’t so bad.” This from the boy Lisa knew; where Felicity was all tension and energy, he felt as hollow as a reed. “Isn’t that what you keep telling me?”

“It isn’t compared to where you’d be otherwise,” the girl said tersely. “Alex, meet Cern. He’s an idiot.”

“Thanks,” said Cern.

His face was different to the one that Alex had glimpsed in Lisa’s mind; he compared the two, curious, and one seemed the skeleton beneath the other – as if unhappiness had melted away the flesh and the life from his features. There was no vibrancy in his voice, and only tiredness in his eyes.

“Pleasure,” snapped Felicity.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” Alex hinted.

Cern gave him a tight smile. His voice was harsh. “Me too.”

“She couldn’t have survived,” Felicity said as if it was an old argument.

Cern closed his eyes, fingers rubbing at his brow. He seemed translucent, bones and regret and the faint blue tracery of veins. “No one gave her the chance.”

“Yeah, they did.” Ash flaked to the floor as Felicty pointed her cigarette at him. “She nearly killed you.”

“She loved me.” His voice was a little more than a whisper.

“I’m not denying that,” Felicity said flatly. “She’d have loved you while she tore you piece from piece, loved you with your blood on her hands, loved you up to the damn moment you died. You don’t get it, do you? It doesn’t matter that she loved you. It wouldn’t have stopped her.”

Cern was breathing hard, teeth half-bared. “You don’t know-”

“She knew. She chose to die.”

“Amazing how many people choose to die when Malefici gets involved,” Cern snapped. “No one gave her a chance, no one gave us a chance – if I’d had time, if they’d let me...”

Her laugh was a bark, warning as much as mockery. “You still think love conquers all?”

“Yes!” Cern spat, and Alex was ambushed by the grief that poured from him, spreading out along the web of power like a flood, dark and voracious and terrifying in its intensity.

And at its centre, a memory so strong it blazed with intensity: a girl with pale green eyes and a shock of blond hair marred only by a streak of livid red. Her lips were parted, slack, astonished; the moment of recognition, of innocence.

Alex recognised her. He’d seen her portrait in Nightfire’s archives, faded by light and time. And he’d seen her face above him, teeth stained with his blood. She was one of theirs, an early – and regrettable – creation of the Furies.

Jallakri ap Ganra. A werewolf who gave herself to death, mistaking it for love, and came back a monster.

Alex had encountered her once. It gave him only satisfaction to know she was dead. A poor excuse for life, that one, and this boy a fool if he thought love could have saved her.

“Then there’s no hope for you,” Felicity said bluntly.

Cern stood, quivering. “That’s what you thought about her,” he said, and his face with alight with fierce anger. “And you’re wrong.”

He was gone in an instant, slight and silent as a ghost.

~*~

He was sat in a table at the corner, bronze in the candlelight, a handsome man frowning at a menu. He looked up at the click of her heels; a slow, sure smile spread over him, and Vaje Chusson stood up before she could tell him not to.

“You’re late,” he accused, amusement in his voice. “But probably worth the wait.”

“Probably?”

“Depends on the quality of your conversation, doesn’t it, lass?”

She struggled to produce a smile, and the result must have looked feigned, because he raised an eyebrow.

“I know that look. Confess. Who or what is bothering you?”

“Who and what,” she said, and sat, ignoring his frown as he did the same. In the intimate setting, he was uncomfortably close, their feet brushing under the table. “I have to tell you something.”

“Oh?” His eyes had grown distant, cold. He looked that way when he was with Chatoya, discussing Pursang. “I get the feeling I’m not going to like it.”

“No,” she agreed, and stretched out to touch his hand. He was motionless as marble, eyes never shifting from her face, jaw grim. “I...told you I was thirty.”

“How old are you?” His voice was emotionless, the words fired at her like bullets.

“Over fifteen hundred years old.”

“Hell of a lie.”

The waiter came and poured water for them. They sat in tense silence until he had gone.

“There’s more,” she said. “I have a soulmate.”

A muscle flickered in his cheek. “Do you now.”

“His name is Alexandros.”

That broke his mask; his eyes widened, shocked, and he sputtered, “Alexandros of Nightfire? Ambrosius Aurelianus?”

“Yes.”

He let out a low whistle. “Jesus. Then that makes you...”

She looked straight at him. She had seen so many emotions in his eyes: laughter, affection, astonishment, anger. But he’d never looked at her as he did now, as if she were a stranger, and a dangerous one at that. “It makes me the woman who left him.”

“Lisanor,” he mused. “No wonder your face looked so familiar when we met. I’ve seen your picture in the vaults. The woman who lost the battle and won the war.”

“It doesn’t feel that way now. Alex has found me. He wants me back.”

His eyes were puzzled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is.”

“He’s your soulmate,” he said, voice rough, bewildered. It sounded much like pain, but she couldn’t understand why. “You loved him once, didn’t you?”

“I learned not to love him,” she said. “I got smarter.”

The candles lent new softness to his face, casting him in gold and brown. “What do you need me for?”

“Help me,” she implored, and clutched at his arm, trying to reach past his shock, past the distance he had put between them. “I need to know what he’s capable of. He went to the Lethe in Hades – I need to know what that means. Toya said you used to work on the archives...”

“I did. But...that’s all myth. No one really knows now.”

“I have to fight him,” she whispered. “I can’t be his again.”

“I can look, but all I can give you are educated guesses.”

“That’ll do. Anything will do.” Everything in his manner had subtly changed, and it took her a moment to understand. All the affection was gone from him – his kindness was impersonal, that of a good man, and nothing more.

The words slipped from her before she even knew they were on her tongue. “What about us?”

Something flickered through his eyes. His voice was calm. “What about us?”

“You...me...”

“It was only for a while. I’d say you’ve got bigger things to worry about.” He drew back from her, and she was startled at how much it hurt. “You have a soulmate. You don’t need me confusing things.”

She wanted to protest, but he had abandoned her so easily that she left mute, robbed of words as easily as she was robbed of him. Had it really meant so little? Was that all it had been, a good time, temporary as the ever-changing moon?

“I’ve lost my appetite,” he said gruffly. “I think we’d better leave. If I’m going to pull together any information quickly, I’d better head off tonight. It’s a long drive back to the archives.”

This morning he had kissed her awake, and tomorrow, he would be gone, vanishing as easily as a footprint in the sand.

“Vaje...”

He stood quickly, as if he was eager to be gone. “It’s something to tell the lads, isn’t it?” he said. “The woman who broke Britain let me into her life for a little while.”

Was that all she was? A story?

He didn’t kiss her goodbye. He left her in the restaurant, and it seemed to her that he fled, driven away by the horrors of her past, by the vast, monstrous shadow of Alexandros and Lisanor and the last desperate days of the Britons.

~*~

“Sorry you had to see that,” muttered Felicity. “Old argument. He’s an idiot.”

Alex watched the woods where the boy had vanished. “What happened, if you don't mind me asking?”

She snorted. “Well, you’ve heard most of it. He met his soulmate. Turned out to be this – this monster that the Furies made to kill halfbreeds. And Cern, well, he’s about as much of a mongrel as they come. Bit of witch, bit of wolf, even a bit of vampire way back in the family crypt. Good with spells, but a lousy shifter. She attacked him, then her conscience attacked her, and she left him just about alive. She couldn’t live with herself, so she asked the Furies to kill her. They did. We all lived happily ever after, except Cern, who thinks he could have snuggled her inner psycho into submission or something.”

“And he blames you?”

She took a drag, eyes half-closed. “Sometimes. Mostly he blames his friends, because they let her die. Smartest thing they ever did, if you ask me, but Cern doesn’t see it that way. He won’t talk to most of them. Came to us instead.” She opened her eyes and they were cynical, hard as pebbles. “His soulmate was a werewolf too. He thinks that he’s somehow closer to her. Bullshit, of course, but you can’t tell him that.”

He filed away the information. Intriguing, and perhaps useful. It didn’t explain why this boy haunted Lisanor so, but some of his jealousy had faded. If love it was, it was one-sided and hopeless. Perhaps it was merely friendship. Either way, he would tolerate it unless Cern proved some sort of threat.

“You seem determined to try,” he remarked.

There was a long pause. “He frightens me,” she said at last. “He doesn’t live for anything except grief. I know where that goes. I’ve seen it before. I don’t want to see it again.”

“A friend?” he guessed, soft.

The bleakness in her face touched him. “My sister. She was sweet, so good, you know. And she just...she got lost somewhere along the way. She forgot how to be happy. And then she forgot why she wanted to live.” She gazed out into the darkness. “I miss her.”

The memory rose up like smoke, hazy, fractured. Alex saw her only in glimpses; a shy smile, long eyelashes, bitten nails and clattering bracelets.

“I can hardly remember her face now,” Felicity said slowly. “I don’t have any photos.”

The concept was alien to him. Since he drank of the Lethe, he could forget nothing. Every memory he had was as finely delineated as calligraphy, names and faces an endless litany. Sometimes he thought it would be a mercy to forget. Sometimes he closed his eyes only to see the dead, peaceful beneath the bloodstains, silent, united in their stillness where he was ever moving, ever lonely.

He hesitated, then pity decided him. “Perhaps I could help.”

Her stare sharpened, edged with suspicion. “What do you mean?”

“I have a gift,” he said. “A small thing, but...but useful. I never forget a face. If you let me, I can find your memories of her. I can’t help you to remember, but I know a girl who can draw. She could put a picture together for you, so you won’t forget her.”

He was counting on Lisanor’s goodness, on her need to help others. Merlin would be stark in her memories still, surely. And even if she knew it for an excuse to be near her, it wouldn’t matter. She would do it, knowing the value of memory, knowing how soon it withered into tatters.

“Sounds a strange sort of gift,” she said shortly. “For a wolf.”

“Not for a Fury,” he said, and she blanched. “Former. I quit.”

“You don’t quit ‘em,” she said in a voice rough as gravel. “No one does.”

“I did,” he said. “Over a thousand years ago. They knew more than murder in those days. They knew enough to let me go in peace.”

Her breath whistled, high and fearful. “Who are you?”

“My name is Alex, like I told you. Do you really think it’s wise to know any more?”

“No...” she whispered. “No. I don’t think I want your help either.”

He reached out, and laid a hand on hers. She twitched, but didn’t draw away. Perhaps fear held her. “No price,” he said quietly. “I promise.”

Her eyes were wide, frozen on him.

“I’ll show her to you, just for a moment. Then you can decide whether you want my help or not. I know what it is to carry your dead with you, and I can at least give you back her face.”

Her longing spiralled up around him like a cool wind, carrying her broken memories; flash of fingers applying blusher, of skipping feet, of eyes as grey and dark as iron. It outweighed her fear of him – it outweighed everything.

She made a small sound in her throat. Alex gently touched his fingers to her temple, to the pulse that raced there. If she’d drawn back, he would have let her; hurting her would gain him nothing.

But she stayed still, her eyes subsumed by yearning. He reached into her mind, chasing down those shattered images. He saw nothing else; he wanted to see nothing else. All he needed was this one memory, as a gift, as a lure, as a penance.

He saw...

Karen...

An open hand, pills scattered about it. Foam had dried about her mouth, thin and white. Her hair was neatly plaited, her make-up pristine on her discoloured, swollen skin. The smell was horrific; she had marinated in the summer heat for nearly three days, the car an oven discarded by the lake where they’d come when they were children.

That hadn’t been so long ago – two summers, three summers, playing in the boats, glancing at the boys while their parents pretended ignorance and practiced caution.

Karen! he heard her cry. Karen, why did you leave me on my own?

An open hand. Pills. Foam. Plaits and lipstick and rot.

The image barred his way like a guard. No wonder her memories were disintegrating as Flick tried to remember the living girl and forget the dead one, tried to separate the two like an egg, not understanding that they were indivisible.

An open hand, fingers like an undone plait. Pills as white as foam, lipstick coating her rotting flesh-

But this wasn’t his nightmare; Alex shoved past it, walking back through time, resurrection trailing in his wake.

An open hand, stretching for a frisbee. Foam on her lip as she guzzled a milkshake, leaving a livid pink mark on the glass. Slowly, he took each aspect of that dreadful memory, and found life in it, found something sweeter than sorrow.

It’s the great secret, the one we never tell you. There is life even in death, though we name it memory, and think it only a poor shadow.

Lipstick smeared on Karen’s laughing mouth as she applied it for the first time; she twirled through the garden, squealing when she trod on a rotten plum and scraping it off with little yelps. Two little girls crammed in the back of a car, opening the windows to blast the heat away, a car full of motion and noise, more than a self-selected coffin for a girl who had run out of hope.

He rebuilt her, took her from her sad limp shell and made her real again. And at last Karen Serafine stood before him, a memory as brilliant as the North Star.

He cupped her in his hands, careful as if she were a flower. And then he stepped out of Felicity’s mind. He was back in the woods, sat at a rickety picnic table.

Felicity’s eyes were wet. “I saw her,” she said. “For a moment, I saw her...but she’s gone.”

“I can show her to you again,” he said.

She swallowed, and then nodded.

He took her hand, laying his web of power over her, but this time, it wasn’t set to catch something, but to free it. He spilled the memory of Karen into it, bright-shining, lovely, for their eyes only.

“Over there,” he said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear, and looked pointedly into the trees.

She followed his gaze, and gave a soft, long gasp. “Oh, Karen...”

She clutched his hand as her sister appeared from the shadows, spinning from them like a top, head thrown back to the sky. Her laughter cascaded over them, and she whirled past them, plaits swinging, all around the clearing and the oblivious wolves.

“Can’t they see her?” Felicity whispered.

“No. She’s just for us.”

Karen had gone full circle, and she stopped, laid a hand on a tree and looked at them. Her smile was shy and sweet, her eyes vast with mystery. Something in her face reminded him of Lisanor, left him breathless with sudden pain and sudden love.

She stepped back into the shadows, and faded away.

Alex knew he would carry her face with him forever, just as he bore all the others. That was the price of the Lethe – that he remembered the dead, all the dead, where others forgot.

“Thank you,” Felicity said, her voice thick. “You can’t know what it means to see her...to be able to remember her like that.”

Her eyeliner had run. He reached up and brushed it away with his finger, and found he was trembling.

“Maybe I can.”

“You’re not like any of the Furies I’ve met,” she said, wonder in her gaze.

He had to smile. “I should hope not, cherie.”

“You said – you said I could have a picture.”

He supposed the small victory should have been gratifying. Instead, he felt sad, old, lost. “Yes. I’ll make sure you get it.”

“If you need anything in return-”

That was his opening; in days gone, he’d have eased in smooth as a snake, without a trace of guilt. Now he looked at her earnest face, damp with tears, and felt a wrench. But he couldn’t pass up on it. It was too important. “I could use a friend with some local knowledge,” he said.

She smiled. “Then you’d better call me Flick.”

I heard your voice through a photograph
I thought it up, it brought up the past
Once you know you can never go back
I've got to take it on the otherside

Long Lost Part Five

You promised that you’d not abandon me
And kissed my fears away
But I woke up to that day

Her high heels clattered on the kitchen floor as she wrenched them off. She couldn’t remember the walk back; she felt numb as she tuched the blisters on her feet. The twinge of pain was distant, as everything was.

Whatever she had expected, this hadn’t been it. Lisa had been prepared for anger, for disappointment, even for hate. She had not been prepared for indifference. That Vaje was even capable of it stunned her, and made her think that she had misread him terribly.

Just another Fury, playing yet another game.

And if she was still so easily fooled, how could she hope to fight Alex?

Vaje was gone. Chatoya was gone. How long before the rest of them followed?

In a daze, trying not to think about either of them, she did humdrum things that kept her hands busy and her mind from probing too deeply. She emptied the dishwasher, cleaned the sides, put the kettle on-

And then she realised that she’d brought out two mugs, and one of them was layered with sugar.

She didn’t know how long she stood there, stupidly staring at it. The rattle of keys in the door jolted her; she looked up, hoping beyond hope.

When Chatoya came in, shivering, nose red from the cold, it was a bitter disappointment.

“Lisa?” With one quick glance, the witch took her in: the glitzy top, make-up, the pair of mugs. “I wasn’t expecting you two back this early.” She took a quick breath. “But it’s good that you are. I...I...”

Lisa stared at her. She didn’t think she could take any further condemnation. But she couldn’t seem to walk away; she couldn’t seem to pierce the layer of cold and apathy that encased her.

“I want to apologise,” Chatoya said in a rush, green eyes wide and worried. “I just completely overreacted. You needed my help, and I freaked out. It doesn’t matter what you did then. You’re my friend, and...and if it wasn’t for you, I don’t know what I’d be. No, well, I do...I’d be possessed by a genocidal dragon, and I’d be a murderer, and I’d be lost.”

Chatoya was wringing her hands, but her dignity was otherwise unassailable; she didn’t spare herself, she didn’t look away or soften her words.

“Running out like that was... gods, appalling. And thoughtless. You’d never have done that to me and I’m ashamed of myself. It was unforgivable. But...but...” Her smile was watery. “All the same, I hope you can forgive me. I’m sorry.”

Slowly the words filtered through. And she could feel her patina of calm crumbling; one of them had come back. Her hands trembled; the mug slipped through her fingers and crashed onto the floor in a mess of pottery and sugar and coffee grinds.

“He left.” The words were a croak, because she had to force them out. “He left me.”

“Wh...” And Chatoya looked at the mugs, and looked at Lisa’s discarded shoes, the matching pair a sure sign she was no Cinderella, and said quietly, “No.”

Her legs went; she felt as if she was just water, boneless, shapeless, bound by gravity and physics and nothing as trivial as love or fidelity or strength. She staggered, and caught herself on the side, trembling.

“He left me, Toya.” She didn’t cry. Her voice was disbelieving, quiet, drained. “He didn’t even kiss me goodbye. He just...he just went.”

“Oh, Lisa,” Chatoya breathed, and trod over the broken mug. Lisa sank into her hug, needing human contact, needing not to be alone. “Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like Vaje.”

“He said...he said I didn’t need him confusing things. I was – I was a story to tell his friends. A good story, that’s all.”

“He said what?” The outrage in her voice was reassuring. “He might be a Fury, but he’ll learn the meaning of the word when I catch up with him. I’ll go completely Cougar on him.”

Lisa gave a choked giggle, feeling steadier. The hurt was there, raw as a burn, but seeing Chatoya there eased it. She took a deep breath, stepped back and swallowed down the lump in her throat. “No. It’s all right.”

“It is not all right!” Her mouth was a grim line. “I’ll-”

“No. You won’t.” She struggled for meaning, for the truth. “Toya, I know the Furies. You can’t let your personal life affect how you run Pursang, because they will know that I matter, and they will know that all of the others matter, and then they will use us to hurt you. I knew what I was getting into. Alex...Alex at least taught me that.”

It didn’t matter that she had thought Vaje was different. It didn’t matter that part of her wanted him to suffer. She had to protect Chatoya as best she could.

“If you’re sure...”

“I am.”

Chatoya sighed. “All right. I won’t mention it to Vaje. It’s between you and him.”

No. Whatever had been between them was gone – nothing, fog fading in sunlight, the ragged space of something broken.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Now.” Chatoya gave her a wry grin. “I happen to know the best way to get over a man too stupid to know what a mistake he’s just made.”

Something eased in her. There was no awkwardness in Chatoya’s manner, no sign that this was an act.

“What does it involve?”

“Tea, chocolate, ice-cream, facials and the world’s funniest movie.”

She had to smile. “Well...when you put it like that...”

~*~

It had begun to snow. Vaje walked in it grimly, shrugging on regret with his coat and keeping his head down. He felt the weight of his life – six hundred years, aging every day inside his skin while his body was static and changeless. It seemed to him that he should have seen it all by now; the days should have rolled off him like water, such small scenes mere cameos, but he could not get Lisa out of his head.

Too many damn regrets.

When he saw the phone booth, the need to speak overwhelmed him. He dropped in some change and called a familiar number.

It rang for minutes. He was patient, knowing her ways. At last she picked it up, but said nothing.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Vaje. Why are you calling me so late?” Her voice was cool. Faith Tacarnan wasn’t moved by much these days; even old friends would receive nothing more than a thin veneer of civility.

“Thought I might come and visit you.”

Silence. The snow batted at the glass, the world a whirl of grey and he at its centre, huddled in the booth.

“What’s wrong?” she said, her voice gentler. “You only come to me when you need to lick your wounds.”

“Guess I’ve got some wounds, then.”

“I thought you were doing well there,” she said. “Ingratiating yourself with our new mistress. Lance said you’d even found a woman who could take you on.”

Those words pierced him. “Things change.”

“Oh,” she said, the sound soft and sad. “Is that it? Did you mend your heart just in time to break it again?”

The sympathy in her voice undid him; he felt his calm unravelling until he was nothing but knots and fraying ends, nothing but this. “No fool like an old fool.”

“What happened?”

“She found her soulmate.”

“And left you?”

“No.” He tried hard not to think of Lisa; disobedient memories came fluttering down with the snow, translucent and transient. “I left her. I couldn’t...I couldn’t stand in the way.”

Another face replaced her: this one as much a relic as the temples in far-off lands. Red hair, grey eyes, a laugh as raucous as a jackdaw. He had lived so long without Elise that he’d thought he might forget her, but it didn’t happen. She had been his soulmate, and his wife, and his first love. His life with her had been savage, an existence marred by prejudice and hatred, but amidst the maelstrom, he had found in her an oasis, a vast and silent space containing only the two of them and love.

He never thought of his son. It hurt too much.

They had died. One of Nightfire’s monsters had come for his son, and Elise had stood in its way. It killed her; it killed his child. And he had been too late.

He knew what it was to lose your soulmate. And he knew what it was to find them – to feel that the pilgrimage was at an end, that the miracle had come, that the world was radiant and personal.

He could not be the one to stand between Lisa and Alexandros. How could he deny her what he had yearned for?

The war was legend. A war forged in the heart; not the first, not the last. Only love could birth animosity so visceral and so lasting. He had seen the story play itself out a hundred times. He knew its end, knew its twists, knew that hate was only the distorted shadow of something far greater, as terrible and brilliant as the stars themselves.

He could not bear to see it once more.

“Not everyone loves their soulmate,” Faith said. Her voice was quiet, but firm.

“Not everyone. But Lisanor and Alexandros?”

Her gasp crackled down the line. “All I did,” she quoted softly, “I did for love, and lack of love.”

He closed his eyes. “Yes.”

Her voice was kind. “Stay as long as you want.”

He put down the receiver. The cold air burned his throat, and he let it freeze him through and through. He had survived the centuries before he came here, and he would survive the years that came. He had stayed knowing that death was indiscriminate, hunched at the heart of everything like gravity.

It came each night when the light vanished – it snuffed out candles, squashed mosquitoes, killed conversations. It was more than ashes to ashes and dust to dust. You could die of embarrassment or laughter; and equally, once lost, innocence could not be resurrected like Lazarus from the tomb. Every second that passed was a death, every silence a wake for the conversations gone.

It was a harsh truth, and a simple one.

Everything died. The Furies had taught him that. A matched pair of graves in a dingy graveyard had taught him that. A candlelit confession in a restaurant had taught him that.

Everything. Even hope.

~*~

You carry your dead in your bones. One day you’ll wake up and find that’s all that’s left under your skin, the dead and the dying, and you caught between them.

Alex twisted uneasily. Whether it was calling back Flick’s sister, or merely his proximity to Lisanor, memories crawled over him like woodlice. Even in wolf form, he couldn’t get comfortable. Around him, the Pack were sprawled, some human and some wolf, all caught in some stage of sleep.

You carry your dead in your bones.

He didn’t want to think about Morgan le Fey, crouched and mad, her fabled beauty smeared with dirt and blood. The woods were too much like her ramshackle bower, cobbled together from fallen trees and driftwood. Too close. Too alive. Even the wind in the trees seemed an echo of her whispers, half-prophecy, half-gibberish.

One day you’ll wake up and find that’s all that’s left under your skin, the dead and the dying and you caught between them.

Too many of both were embedded in his memories like splinters. Merlin and Galahad. Tristan, poor Tristan shrieking on the cliff. Morgan herself, torn between her twin natures and destroyed by the dichotomy.

He got up, careful not to disturb Flick. She was a small heap of fur, nose buried firmly in her tail, twitching with wolf dreams. For all her weary air, there was something unspoilt about her, a kind of quiet strength. On a whim, he left a net of power about her so that no one would disrupt her sleep.

One or two of the others eyed him but made no comment as he stole out into the woods.

His human form slipped off him like oil. It felt good to be on four feet, the night opening up before him in a great wave of sound and scent and texture. For long moments, he ran for nothing more than the joy of it.

Things were simpler here. Emotions were the dream of the human huddled at the back of his mind. He was instinct, a composite of the world around him and the world inside him, hunter and hunting ground. Wolves didn’t mourn a woman so extraordinary that it had seemed trivial to fling a nation at her in warfare. Wolves didn’t regret. They knew nothing of dark choices made in dark caves, nothing but this: the soft night, the pack and the moon high above like a fang.

He ran until he ached, and then because he could not run forever, he changed back.

He was Alexandros again, with all that meant. He remembered, because he could not forget. He carried his dead in his bones.

When he got back to the Pack’s territory, he shuffled back into his clothes. Being a werewolf had many benefits, but public nudity wasn’t one of them. Frankly, after the first time he’d woken up in someone’s doorway (a drunken night – far too much shoddy Roman wine that an upcoming Senator had provided at an otherwise desperately dull soiree), he’d discovered that there was no deed so great, no speech so eloquent that it could ever erase people’s memories of him edging down the streets of Rome with nothing to hide his shame but an urn he’d stolen from someone’s porch.

Of course, he had been young and foolish then, long before the Furies claimed him as their own. No one but Neve even knew about that story. Except Lisanor. There was nothing – almost nothing – she had not known about him.

“Good run?”

He glanced over at the question.

Cern was sitting against a tree. There wasn’t a hint of sleep in his eyes. His hands fell loosely between his bent legs, but his foot was tapping quickly, as if he couldn’t keep still.

“Good enough. Don’t you sleep?”

“Not really. I suppose Flick told you all about me. Aside from the fact I’m an idiot.”

“A little about you.” But not enough to explain how Lisa knew him, or why she thought of him with such affection. He wasn’t the kind of person she was drawn to. She loved conflict, humour, vibrancy. Merlin had been like that, quick-fire and reckless. Tristan...well, Tristan let his heart lead him, and it led him right into a cold sword on a blustery cliff. “She said your soulmate died.”

His throat flickered as he swallowed. “My soulmate was murdered.”

“More an execution than a murder, I heard,” Alex said, needling him just a little.

“It was a crime. It was murder.” His eyes were black as tar. “They tried her and they convicted her on nothing but their own bloody prejudice.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. He remembered Jallakri’s face, snarling, inhuman, her eyes as empty as her conscience. “And several gory deaths...?”

“Those weren’t her fault.”

“No? Whose were they?”

“Nightfire’s. They made her.”

“And perhaps they made a mistake,” Alex murmured. A mistake he had tried to eradicate, with no success. All he had to show for it was a neat set of scars in his upper arm, raised bumps in the shape of her teeth.

“No. The only mistake was killing her.”

He shrugged. “What’s done is done. You can’t bring back the dead.”

Something flickered in Cern’s face – something fierce and devoted and familiar. “So they say.”

He couldn’t explain why he felt uneasy. “Meaning what?”

“Love conquers all,” Cern said, and his voice was dreamy, ardent. “Isn’t that what they say?”

Omnia vincit amor.

Yes, they said that, and you brought it into your language and lost the meaning with it. Love conquers all, you say, as if that’s something to be proud of. You’ve made it sweet and soppy and trite, but it’s none of those things.

Love conquers all. It is an invader, a barbarian rampaging through us. It is a force of violence and of destruction. It doesn’t negotiate, it doesn’t reason. It conquersall: thought, sense, hope, trust. This isn’t the love of red, red roses and chaste Hollywood kisses. This is the love that thinks you better dead than someone else’s – this is the love of fist meeting flesh, of fingers on throats, the love of crumpled cars and divorce courts, the love that is so close to obsession that the difference is only in the eye of the beholder.

Love the tyrant. Love the butcher. Blood on the floor and words in the books. This is where the stories came from – the times when love conquered all, and the world screamed with the horror of it.

And who would know that better than I?

“I doubt that love can conquer death,” he answered.

Cern’s smile flashed, jagged, unsettling. “So does everyone else.”

“But not you?” Alex asked, and now he let his powers roll out. Light as smoke, he slid into Cern’s mind, forgotten as soon as he was noticed, the Lethe thick in his veins.

The memory was so strong he nearly choked on it. Woods lush and green with summer, high heat and the scent of leaves. He recognised the witch who ran Pursang, glimmering with power, her face full of anger, saying, Fireblade – you remember him, the terrifying legend who’s real, by the way – raised his wife Ryar from the dead, and I got possessed by Bhari – you know, the other terrifying legend who massacred her own people and just happens to have a magical connection to Fireblade and Ryar. And goodness me, what else happened in the midst of all that tedium? Blue tried to use us all to bring back the Burning Days by sacrificing Cougar, who’d been tortured by one of Blue’s mad minions, and three other victims, and oh yes, Lisa nearly got fried by Fireblade, but don’t worry, Cern, our bloody perfect little lives rushed in and saved us and we all sat down for tea and crumpets afterwards!

Interesting times here, Alex thought with some wonder, but why does that intrigue Cern so?

It cut off. And began again, the witch in livid motion, hands raised and hair wild, the same words: Fireblade – you remember him, the terrifying legend who’s real, by the way – raised his wife Ryar from the dead...

And again. Again. Until it was distilled down to one burning thought.

Raised from the dead.

“What do I know?” Cern said quietly, but there seemed a kind of secret delight to him. The shadows fell oddly on his face, blotting out everything but the sheen on his lips. “I’m just an idiot.”

All the while, the memory sang on like a siren.

Alex withdrew, disturbed. He knew that spell. He had been there when Merlin crafted it, had seen the consequences of it – and had ultimately been the one to fling it into a deep vault with a cautionary tale attached.

Someone had been foolish enough to ignore it.

Raised from the dead.

His only reassurance was that Cern had nowhere near enough power to cast it successfully. He might dream it, he might hunger for it, but even if he found the scroll in his hands and the will to do what was necessary, he would go no further.

He could not help but pity the witch. If it had been love he felt for Jallakri, strange and deadly as she had been, it had fermented into something far more toxic: it was obsession that reached into the grave, through the dirt and the worms, to drag back the mouldering bones.

Perhaps he could even understand that need. Fifteen hundred years ago he had made a decision that he had regretted ever since. It had lost him Lisanor, and that had been no surprise, but now the time had come for change. He was weary of the promise he had made in Hades. Once, he had thought it outweighed the promises he made to her; he was no longer sure.

He knew obsession. But he knew death far better, and knew what disaster awaited Cern. Merlin was testament to that.

“Leave the dead in Hades and your memories, where they belong,” he said flatly. Thoughts of Merlin crowded into his mind, sharp, flitting things. He turned away, wanting to lose himself in sleep; he needed the illusion of oblivion, if only for a few hours.

It seemed to him that he heard Morgan le Fey laughing, because the joke was on him.

You carry your dead in your bones.

He wasn’t the only one. Cern’s whisper was slight enough that it barely stirred the air, but his hands ground into the earth as if he would tear his desires from it.

“That isn’t enough.”

Alex did not hear.

I miss...
God, I miss
Waking up beside you