The Burn (19 page)

"Seth," she murmured.

The vision became clearer, its vibration thick in the air. She walked toward it, feeling its power reaching for her, Seth's voice threading on the harsh wind. In one flickering instant, she saw him standing in the thrashing storm, his hair and skin covered in the dust of the playa, his dark eyes searching for her.

* * *

Seth grimaced, hearing a change in the pitch of the blades. They were now spinning faster than he thought was possible, and winding ever higher, the nightmarish blur of their edges caught in the light shining into the shield.

He stayed in place, his hand on the slotted sheet metal as it kicked and shook, the flow of air growling through the cylinder. He could feel it coming apart, rattling toward destruction. A soft glow spread along the prop inside, arcs of energy dancing along the edges of his Rathvam name.

The engine blew, cracking its casing and tossing the pulleys from the axle. The sculpture spun faster.

The glow became a shaft of light, cutting downward from an unseen sky. Miranda appeared above him, floating in a gentler wind with the glare of the sun at her back. Her hair was a blaze of copper, her dress ethereal and weightless around her.

There were screams of excitement from the crowd.

Someone started to clap.

"Miranda," Seth murmured.

She was still a phantom, a vision trapped in another world. But he had her attention and that was all he needed.

"Come back to me," he implored, holding up his hand.

She looked down at him, the emotion raw in her eyes.

"I won't let you go," he told her. "I promise."

Miranda reached for him, her hand grasping onto his, warming under his fingers as they touched. He pulled her from her watery sky, drawing her into the cold and the wind, catching her as she fell against him.

They collapsed into the dust together.

Seth turned on his side, pulling her beneath him as the sculpture ripped itself apart. The prop wrenched free of the drive shaft and shredded the shield with a hollow metal screech, collapsing the machine and plowing it into the playa, its wind funnel dissipating in the storm.

The crowd clapped and cheered.

Seth tightened his grip on Miranda. Reaching up to her face, he brushed the wild strands of red hair from her cheek. She held onto him, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

"Welcome back," he whispered.

* * *

Miranda held onto Seth, unable to let him go. She lay beneath him, aware of the triumph in his dark eyes. His tanned complexion was dusted with playa silt, his hair thick and frosted with it. He held her tightly, his strong arms shielding her from the wind and the swirling blur of sand.

"How did you find me?" she asked.

He granted her a pained smile. "I wanted to."

She shook her head, reaching up to touch a purpling bruise at his temple. A brace was strapped around one of his wrists, other injuries evident in the way he held himself gingerly on his side. They had hurt him.

"What happened?"

"Nothing serious."

She grimaced, knowing that was a lie.

"I promised you that I wouldn't let go," he said. "Now I need you to promise me the same. Don't let go of me. Don't ditch me again for my own protection."

She looked up at him.

"We're in this together now," he said.

Pete appeared above them, leading Julie by the arm. "C'mon," he said quickly. "Shady characters around here in cloaks. Into the RV. Now."

M
iranda climbed into the RV, Seth following close behind her as she ducked through the narrow door. The air inside the cabin was and hushed and still. The storm lashed over the bulky vehicle, peppering the windshield with dry sand. Pete and Julie climbed into the cabin a moment later, one of them locking the door shut.

Shadows passed along the playa outside.

"Lights stay off," Pete said, drawing the Glock from the holster at his side. "Everyone keep down and keep quiet. We wait out the storm here."

"Pete," Miranda whispered.

"Don't," he said, a note of pure exhaustion in his tone. "I don't want to know, okay? I don't want it explained. What I saw out there… Not yet. Just give me a minute, okay, kiddo?"

She nodded, watching as he dropped down in the driver's seat of the RV and fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Placing it between his teeth, he focused on the storm through the window, allowing the cigarette to slant at an awkward angle from the crook of his lips.

He didn't light it. He didn't look back.

The Glock rested in his lap.

Julie sat down beside him and buried her head in her hands, the two of them lost in the same silence.

Miranda felt Seth's hand close on her arm.

"We need to talk," he murmured, his voice soft and warm against her ear. "Alone."

Miranda nodded, tearing her gaze from the others as Seth drew her toward the back of the RV. She followed him past the tiny bathroom where she'd watched him in the mirror, the memory of that moment now a thin reflection in the dark.

She paused inside the doorway to the bedroom, glancing over the crumpled sheets of the bed, the glow of moonlight playing in the dusty windows. Looking up at Seth, she caught the dark hint of recognition in his eyes, proof that the time they had spent here was still just as vivid for him.

Drawing close, he kissed her, the taste of dry sand and salt on his lips, his mouth flavored with welding smoke. She relaxed in his arms, savoring the warmth he offered, the familiarity of his touch.

He gently broke the kiss and looked down at her, his breath tight between his teeth. "Okay. What next?"

* * *

He watched her consider her answer, her gaze luminous under the thick sweep of her lashes. She looked like an angel with the moonlight at her back, the silken waves of her hair glowing past her shoulders, a soft blue translucence to her skin. For a man who found beauty in tarnished steel and rusted out plate, the rose petal blush of her lips and whisper of her breath was all it took to hold him spellbound.

"You have to leave this desert," she whispered.

"We've tried that before, remember?"

"I don't know what he'll do to you, why he wants you." She closed her eyes, as to block a memory that was too painful to bear. "But what he's done…"

"I know he killed Logan," Seth murmured.

"No.
He
didn't kill Logan. He didn't have to. He drew some monster from the walls to do it. I tried to fight the thing, but he's a ghost."

"You can't go back there."

"I am there. I belong to the Gate. I'm not human anymore. I don't belong here, with you. You have to accept that."

"I know what you are."

Miranda released a tense breath. "No, you don't. You think I'm still human somehow, but that's just what he wants you to think. That's the entire point of my human appearance. The other goddesses are just ghosts in the walls. They don't walk around like this. They don't talk. They don't breathe. They don't love…" Her voice trailed off. She dropped her gaze, as if she regretted saying the words.

"Miranda," he whispered.

"It's a trap I was created like this to bring you to him. You play some part in the Enlightenment, and time is running out. He's quietly awakened more of us, all but two goddesses now, and grown stronger every time, but he still needs you in order to make the whole thing work. Don't you see how risky it is for you to stay?"

"But if my name's really on one of those walls, there might not be anything either one of us can do about it anyway, right?"

"You still have a choice. He admitted as much. Your name may be in the Gate, but you've walked away from it, and from him, many times before."

"I've never seen him before."

"You've seen him before because you've somehow lived before, and you've always chosen to remain out of his grasp, as a human. But you're not exactly human, so you keep coming back as the same person, as the man you are now."

"What's 'not-exactly-human'?"

"I don't know. I don't know the history of the Gate, what your place is, or how you got here. I just know that you still have a choice and I don't."

"So I'm supposed to leave? And you're going to try and stop him. Just you?"

"I think I'm the only one who can."

"And if you can't?"

"They can't kill me."

"You're asking me to turn my back on you. How can I do that?"

"You have to," she insisted.

"I don't think so."

"Seth—"

"The Gate talks to me too, remember? I'm the only help you've got."

Her expression darkened. "You might have some kind of influence, but who knows how powerful the Necromancer is, and what he can do? We don't know anything about him."

Seth conceded that with a nod. He cut his gaze to the front of the RV, finding Julie's silhouette framed against the glow of the windshield. "Maybe its time we asked."

* * *

Julie looked frightened, sitting on the floor of the RV with her hands clasped around her knees, her pale eyes red-rimmed and glittering. "I don't remember the whole story. It never made much sense. We were talking about something, human destiny maybe, and he told me that he'd lived on Earth for over a thousand years. He was some kind of warlord in the Ukraine, back before it was the Ukraine."

Miranda shook her head, confused. "The Ukraine?"

"That's what he said."

"What was the Gate doing there?"

"The Gate has been almost everywhere. It's had different names."

"Yeah, okay, but the
Ukraine
?"

"There were caves there, priests, it was supposed to be hidden." Julie rubbed the corners of her eyes, looking away into the darkness. "The Necromancer knew where it was, but he also knew that he didn't want to take on the Master of the Gate himself, because whoever spills the blood of a master is damned for eternity, so he convinced the Khagan to do it for him."

"The Khagan," Miranda hissed.

"A Ukrainian King. The Necromancer tricked him, told him that the Gate would make him even more powerful. The Khagan tried to take it from the priests but the Master of the Gate fought him. There was a war and most of the Gate was destroyed. All the original goddesses were lost, as well as the Master himself. The Khagan, who was responsible for shedding the sacred blood of a master, was damned forever, his soul enslaved in the walls of the Gate. The Necromancer then seized control, after the fighting was done and there was no one left."

"Jesus," Miranda whispered. "But how could the goddesses have been destroyed? The Rathvam aren't living beings."

"You really don't get it, do you?"

"What?"

Julie shook her head. "All this stuff I'm telling you, you're supposed to already know it. Miranda, you can ask any question from Rathvam, you can see anything that happened with the collective memory of the Gate."

"Let's just assume I haven't gotten that far yet."

"Yeah, well—" Julie struggled with that. "Then it's complicated. I never understood what he was talking about. That's why he talked to me, you know? He liked reliving it with someone who couldn't follow along."

"Just tell us what he said."

"Sure," Julie muttered in frustration. "Okay, picture that we live in much larger world. Much, much larger."

"Okay."

"And in this world, humans aren't the top of the food chain. They aren't the most highly evolved. They aren't the ones with the most control over their environment. In this, much larger world, humans are like birds or butterflies. We're bright little things that live and die in the lower dimensions. We pass in and out, over and over again. We're the ones who live a thousand lives. The gods are different species altogether, far more evolved than us. The gods live in the highest dimensions, above all universes and all worlds. The gods never die."

Miranda nodded, feeling an uncomfortable recognition.

Julie tightened her arms around herself. "The Gate allows humans to pass into the highest dimension and return, like SCUBA divers in deep, deep water. Only problem is that the humans that go higher don't come back the same. They evolve in the presence of the Divine. They become something that doesn't belong in one world or the other."

"The middle species," Miranda murmured.

"Ghosts, trapped in the Gate. Your souls power it. Your names are the language, its past and it future. You're part of the metal, part of the machine."

"So when part of the machine is destroyed…"

"Exactly," Julie said. "The Rathvam are destroyed with it, at least those released by the damage. They become lost energy."

Miranda dropped her gaze. "So all of the women the Necromancer took from the playa were replacements for the goddesses that were lost, chosen because our souls have the right kind of energy, because we can merge with the Gate."

"And because each of you has a defining trait, one of the recognized traits of humanity as seen from above. Passion, Empathy, Creation, War, Tyranny, Impermanence and Excess…"

"What about Seth? What place does he have in the 'sequence'?"

Julie frowned, looking back at him. "I don't know."

"The Necromancer never said?"

The younger woman looked at her, her delicate features pinched. "No. Just that we couldn't let him go. Then, we he said that Seth had to die…I couldn't take it anymore, you know? I don't want him to die. He's only here because there's some kind of connection, because he loves you."

Miranda frowned, the truth of that statement resounding much louder than the words had been spoken. She met Seth's gaze, noticing that he didn't shy away from them.

"We're all looking for that, aren't we?" Julie murmured, lost in her own misery. "No matter how strong we are, we're always looking for someone to decide that they love us for whoever, or whatever, we are. I always knew that the Necromancer didn't love me. But in the beginning I thought he was capable of it, if only he realized how devoted I was, how dedicated to the cause. But he never really saw me. And why would he? I'm beneath him, not Rathvam, just human like everyone else."