The Immortal Queen Tsubame: Ascension
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Authors: H.D. Strozier
The Immortal Queen Tsubame Book 2
Ascension
Text Copyright © 2016 H.D. Strozier
All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
MaLeila didn’t know how long she concentrated, but by the time she was done, the edges of her dark brown hair—so dark that it looked black and pulled back into two French braids with the ends tossed over her shoulder—curled from the sweat that had gathered on her milk chocolate brown skin from the exertion of magical energy. What MaLeila was sure of was that the chains which were only visible when she tapped into her ethereal sight to see the world that transcended the material world but that existed in a cohesive harmony with it and forcibly bound Devdan and Bastet to her were gone, replaced by a wispy silver thread connecting her to Bastet and an even more pulsing mangled red thread to Devdan. They were both faint, Bastet’s hardly visible which was why it took so long for MaLeila to find it, so thin that once she did find it she only grasped it enough to confirm who it belonged to and feel the auras that she had become so familiar with that now she felt as though she was no longer whole without it.
Even worse than that though was that she couldn’t determine from the barely there strands if the two were alright, not to mention she didn’t know what the red strand meant for her and Devdan, when all the other strands that connected her to people, even Bastet, were silver wisps.
“You’re going to make yourself sick with worry at this rate.”
MaLeila turned to Nika whom she hadn’t even noticed enter the room. It was almost comforting to see Nika, Bastet’s doppelganger or alternate or whatever. But even though she looked like Bastet it was still different and not just because of her long hair and softer feminine features. Nika wasn’t her Bastet.
“Considering you all kidnapped me and the last thing I remember is Devdan bleeding to death on the ground, excuse me if I really don’t give a shit at this point,” MaLeila snapped.
“I’m not the one you should be angry with in that regard. It’s my brother you should be pissed off at. He’s the one who fucked you, led you to Tsubame, shot Devdan, kidnapped you, and is avoiding you,” Nika said bluntly as she fell in a chair in the corner with a cigarette. “But relax. Devdan’s fine. I’m sure. If he can take a hundred strikes with a whip, a bullet is nothing.”
She had heard Devdan say something along those lines before when he had been stabbed in the side by a magical dagger. In an effort to ease her concern he muttered, “Doesn’t hurt any worse that being lashed with a whip a hundred times.”
“I guess so,” MaLeila admitted and then asked, “How long has it been?”
“A couple of days,” Nika said. “Hakim’s spell really did a doozy on you.”
MaLeila blinked. “Hakim?”
Nika rolled her eyes and said, “Right. I forgot you know him as Marcel.”
“Hakim? That’s his real name?”
“No. But that’s the name I’m guessing he’s gone by since he burned down his master’s plantation after the man killed his mother in a fit of jealous rage. He was Hakim when I met him. He’s gone by a million other names since then, but Hakim is what we call him.”
“We?”
“Me and Tsubame,” Nika replied.
“He burned down his master’s plantation?”
Nika laughed. “Yeah he did. Fairly large estate too. All anyone could talk about for months afterward was about that fire and how it didn’t go out until the entire place was burned to the ground and ever soul unfortunate enough not to be able to escape burned down with it.”
It genuinely was a question of curiosity, but already MaLeila was cataloguing the differences between Marcel and Devdan, in a much different way than she had when she thought they were two different people and she was trying to see if it was worth waiting for Devdan to come around and start a relationship with her. Now, in some way that MaLeila hadn’t figured out yet but had an idea, they were essentially the same person yet different. And Nika’s explanation was one of the differences. From the little she knew about Devdan before he was released from his seal, she was certain that he hadn’t burned down his master’s plantation. In fact he had been sold and Claude Thorne, the most powerful sorcerer in the western world at that time, recognized his magic potential and bought him.
“For someone who’s supposedly kidnapped, you seem pretty at ease though,” Nika said.
That was because MaLeila didn’t really feel like she was being held captive or that she was in any danger. She’s been held captive and kidnapped before and so far, this kidnapping was the best one by hundreds of degrees.
“Tsubame said she didn’t want to hurt me.”
“And what makes you believe her?”
“She hasn’t lied to me yet.”
“That’s true. Tsubame makes it a habit not to lie. She may leave things out. She may let you make assumptions, but a liar. That’s something she’s not,” Nika admitted.
“Where are they anyway? Tsubame and Marcel. Where are we in general?”
“Tsubame managed to bring us all back to Fathi’s compound… well it’s more like her compound now. The man’s dead,” Nika said. “As for where those two are, I imagine Tsubame’s trying to quell my brother’s anger at her for putting him and you in this position?”
“What position?”
“Making you think he used you. He didn’t, if you must know. He honestly had no clue Tsubame might be interested in you, alternate self or not. Hell, Tsubame didn’t even know she was interested in you until recently and when she decided that, she took advantage of what was in front of her. Nothing new and Hakim knows that’s how Tsubame operates but he’s angry all the same. It’s peculiar really,” Nika added as she stared at MaLeila. The woman’s eyes then shifted to the door, as though she expected someone to walk in or like she suspected someone was on the other side of the door listening.
“What’s peculiar?”
“My brother’s fascination with you…” Nika trailed off and before MaLeila could ask what she meant, the woman continued, “It can’t be because you remind him of Tsubame at your age because at your age Tsubame was much feistier than you and that’s saying something since I know you are a feisty. But it can’t be your innocence either, because that wouldn’t make you any different from his previous lovers.”
“Previous lovers?” MaLeila asked.
“Don’t act shocked. The man’s centuries old. I wouldn’t go as far as calling him a womanizer, but he’s had his fair share of women. Especially when he and Tsubame are at odds for whatever reason. How long have you all been together anyway?”
“Since November.”
“Eight months or so then? It’s definitely not your innocence. If that were it, he would have been done with you a long time ago and he wouldn’t have waited so long to have sex with you,” Nika said and then she shrugged. “For what it’s worth, whatever you have with my brother is real enough to him even if I can’t figure out the reason. But I will warn you of one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s always going to choose Tsubame.”
MaLeila narrowed her eyes at Nika and asked, “What do you mean by that?”
“It means what it means. He may love you in his own way. He may fuck you and whisper sweet nothings in your ear and dote on you, but in the end he’ll always choose Tsubame first and that’s despite all the fucked up issues they have between each other. That’s where his loyalty will always lie. The question is, can you deal with that? None of his other lovers were able to,” Nika added.
At this point, MaLeila wasn’t sure she’d be able to deal with Marcel at all, regardless of his relationship with Tsubame, not when she wasn’t sure the relationship had even been real to begin with. When she didn’t answer, Nika gave her a pointed look and said, “There’s food on the stand next to you. You should eat, get some real natural rest while I go check to make sure Tsubame and my brother haven’t killed each other yet.”
That said, Nika left the room. When she did, MaLeila went over to the covered bowl where there was some kind of spiced vegetables with rice and meat. She didn’t hesitate to eat it since she was pretty sure Tsubame didn’t want her dead and going hungry wouldn’t help her accomplish anything. What she didn’t do was go to sleep because any time spent sleeping was an opportunity that was potentially missed to find out what was going on, where she was, if she needed to escape, and a chance to escape if it presented itself.
While she waited she took a bath in the small connected bathroom and thought about the binding, that no matter what kind of pulling and yanking on it she had done with her magic over the months since she found out how Devdan and Bastet were forcibly bound to her it wouldn’t break. And the only book she had with her was Claude’s book of magical theories, which while helpful in all forms of advanced magics, many of which were invented by the man himself, there was little on things as basic as binding spells.
She had just gotten her clothes back on and was trying to go back over everything she knew about binding spells in her head when the door opened and Marcel entered the room. He entered the room as she had known him for the past eight months. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Blonde stubble growing out from where he hadn’t shaved. As he looked at her, he idly pulled his shirt away from his sweaty skin.
Finally he said, “And I didn’t think there was any heat worse than the heat out in the cotton field. If Tsubame doesn’t put a cooling spell on this place, I will.”
“I already did in here,” MaLeila admitted.
“No wonder it’s so much cooler,” Marcel said as he walked into the room and lied a fuchsia dress on the bed, the same one that Tsubame tried to give MaLeila little more than a week or so ago.
MaLeila spared it a glance and then looked at Marcel, lips pressed together, eyes narrowing slightly in anger, not at all fretful of him because if he had wanted to hurt her, he could have done that a long time ago.
“MaLeila,” he began.
“No. We won’t talk like this,” MaLeila said.
“Talk like what?”
“With you in this disguise. I want to talk to you as the real you,” MaLeila demanded coolly.
The Marcel she had gotten accustomed to probably would have grinned and come back at her with some quick witted quip, but today he nodded, almost shyly if MaLeila had to put words to it, and let the disguise go. It was much less dramatic than when Tsubame first revealed it. MaLeila essentially blinked and then gone was the blue eyes, the blonde hair and replacing it was the golden pecan brown skin, the dark wavy hair though much longer than what she was used to, the grey eyes. MaLeila felt the same way she felt when she was looking at Nika, like she should be comfortable around this person because she knew this person, yet things that MaLeila couldn’t quite put her finger on were different.
Though she had witnessed it before, seeing him like this, someone she had known so intimately in so many ways took her breath away.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” MaLeila muttered, not exactly sure how to feel so she decided to take her approach from a more analytical one. “Which name do you prefer to go by?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nika called you Hakim.”
He shrugged. “That’s usually the name I go by when I’m not in disguise. I use Marcel when I’m in my other disguise.”
“You used it before?”
“Used it? It was practically who I was for a long time, who I had to be anyway.”
“Why is that?”
“It wasn’t exactly safe to be a “nigger,” especially a free one in the United States, in the 1800’s. And once they let all the slaves go it damn sure wasn’t. I didn’t really start even using this form again until the 1960’s… 1970’s. Still wasn’t exactly safe, but it was easier to walk around as myself without having to risk a lynch mob coming after me and having to kill them all.”
MaLeila hoped she wasn’t betraying her curiosity, but she couldn’t help it as she realized that Marcel had never been imprisoned in a seal by Claude. She wondered if he had sought protection by going to the Magic Council too. By the sounds of it, he hadn’t.
“You can call me either one.”
But not Devdan was the statement implied in that sentence by specifying she could call him either Hakim or Marcel. Not that MaLeila would have called him that, but it did make her wonder why he seemed to have an aversion to that name.
“I’ll keep calling you Marcel.”
“I thought you would,” Marcel said and then looked at the fuchsia dress that he’d lied on the bed. “Tsubame wants to talk to you, but she wants me to help get you into that first. It’s harder to get on than it looks.”
“I’m fine in this,” MaLeila lied. Honestly, she wanted more than anything to get out her old dirty clothes, but the last thing she wanted to do was put on something that belonged to Tsubame. It was like she was giving into the woman or something.
“Tsubame wants you to put it on.”
“She’s not my master.”
“Tsubame is no one’s master. But you still don’t say no to her. She has a way of getting people to do what she wants and it doesn’t involve threatening people either,” Marcel pointed out.
MaLeila sighed. From what she’d seen of Tsubame, that was true. She made her way over to the side of the bed where the dress was, her back turned to Marcel as she started to take off her top. Regardless of where they stood, she had slept with him before so there was no point in being modest about her body in front of him. She had lifted the hem of her shirt halfway before she felt Marcel’s hands, this time brown rather than the pale hands she was accustomed to, over hers.