The Pale Waters (#1 Reclaimed Souls) (9 page)

I suck in my breath and notice Galeni smile
maliciously. The woman is poison through and through.

Gryan lifts the weapon, poised to strike
both of us, when, just as the metal rod is directly behind its
master in mid-swing, I remember the rock. I push Roland off me,
flick the heavy stone from my hand, and it crashes into Gryan’s
face. It’s a beautiful image as his head snaps backward, the large
metal rod tilts sideways, and his bear-sized body slumps. His young
wife yelps and quickly runs in the opposite direction into one of
the larger shoppes. I hear several of the children clap.

The crowd titters excitedly as the bully
falls. His loin skirt flaps up, he is naked underneath, and I
finally understand how Gryan was able to convince three women to
marry him.

The metal rod slips from his grip, clatters
to the ground haphazardly, bounces sporadically with life, and it
unexpectedly strikes Roland’s calf. Several spikes embed themselves
into his flesh.

Unknowingly, I had pushed him into the path
of the weapon.

EIGHTEEN

I DON’T KNOW HOW ROLAND MANAGES it, but nary
a sound escapes his lips after he says, “I knew you were trying to
kill me.”

I hear a quick intake of air through his
gorgeous lips, a long, low hiss, and then silence. If I had thought
at all in that moment, I should have realized that Roland was
joking, that he is used to pain; probably lives with it everyday,
and that he would be fine.

But guilt has a way of finding those with
secrets.

Regret wraps me like an infested blanket.
Dark. Dirty. Shame. All of this will get back to my mentor, the
Grandfather. How I behaved. What I did. Any show of emotion. I
can’t act too concerned for Roland’s safety.

A few yards away from us, young children
kick Gryan’s unconscious form. Most everyone else has left, their
wanton appetites satisfied for the moment. As I stare at the fallen
guard, I know that the man, when he wakes, will do everything in
his power to make my life hell.

As I return my attention to Roland, in a low
voice I say, “I’m not trying to kill you. When I do, you won’t see
it coming.”

He grunts, his eyes turn cold, and his
nostrils flare. Then he tries to get up.

“Don’t be stupid, feller,” Dorni says to
Roland. I pull away as she hurries to his side, inspects the spikes
that pierced his brown fabriskin robe, pants, and into the side of
his calf muscle. He groans as her hands pull away with blood on it.
“Not too bad,” she mutters, “but only if there ain’t poison on ta
points. Wouldn’t put it past Gryan ta do somethin’ like dat.”

“Poison?” Roland asks.

Dorni shifts her intelligent eyes on me. Her
threadbare, wrinkled eyebrows arch. The old woman wants to know how
I feel about this.
It’s complicated
cannot even begin to
explain things. She nods at me, understanding me, I suppose.

“I told you not to touch anything,” I tell
him admonishingly, louder, in case others are listening in.

He shakes his head in disbelief. “Seriously?
You must have been looking elsewhere. It touched
me
after
you
threw me aside.”

In the distance, the city’s bell tower clock
strikes the hour. Three hours until showtime.
Or Else.
We
need to get back to the Palace Skyscraper. Plus, I don’t want to be
here when Gryan wakes up.

“Needin’ yer help for dis part, Rahda,”
Dorni says matter-of-fact like, almost as if she were asking me to
help set a dining room table. Her hands are poised under Roland’s
leg. “Pull da rod straight up, now, or he be missin’ sum of da leg
otherwise.”

“Uh,” Roland says, his face green. “Let’s
think about this, first. Dorni, perhaps
you
should pull up.
You seem like you know your way around something like this.”

“Rather it be Rahda’s fault if it be goin’
wrong,” Dorni replies.

“She’s right,” I say and Roland looks at me
sharply. “Besides, we need to get back. It’s a waste of time
arguing about it.”

I move to his feet and position my hands in
between the visible spikes and hooks and wait for Dorni’s
command.

“Now.”

I lift the rod up. I try not to think about
how soon this will become a new set of scars for Roland, or how it
will bind his memory to me for as long as he lives, and how it’s
entirely my fault. His hooded face winces and fresh blood gushes
from his calf.

I toss the metal rod aside—it’s heavier than
I imagined—and it clangs against the alleyway rocks. The sound
scares the children, and they scuttle away. We are now alone in the
alley, save Gryan on the ground, though I am not fooled by
appearances. No doubt there are dozens of eyes watching us right
now. Sometimes, a few well-placed words to the right person will
earn them a few coins. It’s how it’s done in these parts.

I shake the old, familiar thoughts from my
head and focus on the scene before me.

To gain better access to his leg, Dorni
tears the bottom of his soaked trousers up to his knee. She reaches
deep into her robe’s pockets, pulls out a waxy, folded packet, and
sprinkles dark powder all over his leg and the blood, and then her
gnarly fingers rub the rest of it into five round, bedallion-sized
gashes.

“Dear Goddess, woman,” Roland hisses, his
body tense, every muscle rigid. His hard eyes bore into me.

I admire his bravery in withstanding the
pain, but I know I’ll pay for this later. Maybe not today or
tomorrow, but someday soon.

“Da bleedin’ be stopp’d now, an’ da leg
numb.” She puts the waxy packet away. “Best ye be gettin’ gone from
here. Take dis.” She places my ruined fabriskin robe in my hands,
and I feel around for The Pale Waters vial as well as the jarred
Charm. It’s still there. I calculate how much time I have to
produce a working prototype and I feel confident that it will work
as I planned. I’m so lost in my concentration that I nearly forget
about Roland.

He refuses to look at me as I help him to
his feet. He fixes his hood and the rest of the robe to cover his
bloody leg and hops around briefly before putting weight on his
left foot.

“This is brilliant, madam,” he tells Dorni
kindly, walking around like a brand new man. “The injury is
completely numb, but not the entire leg. How long will the medicine
last?”

“Til nightfall.”

He kisses her cheek. “Thank you, Dorni. One
day I will repay your kindness.”

She blushes instantly.

“Off with ye, now, b’fore other trouble
comes ‘long. I will see to Gryan.” I watch as her eyes narrow and
darken as she glances at the Grandfather’s guard before she looks
at me. “Be careful, luv,” she repeats before she gently touches my
arm, looks at Roland with curious eyes, and then disappears inside
her shoppe.

We leave the alley, back through the
finger-bone curtains, and enter the Palace Skyscraper’s recognized
city borders. Several male citizens are singing tales of lost love
to passing women. Roland’s earlier admirer is gone.

“What’s the Charm for?” he asks.

“The prototype.”

“What else did she give you?”

My fingers wrap around the vial containing
The Pale Waters. I still can’t believe Dorni gave them to me. Why
would she give me the most powerful, the rarest element on the
continent without asking for payment? Those blessed stones are
rumored to have been used in everything from power ceremonies and
soul-transformation rituals to poisons and love potions, to
destroying the continent.

“She gave me medicine,” I answer.

“I see. Will the Charm work?”

We are across from the Palace
Skyscraper.

“Yes, I think so.”

I cross the street without him just to piss
him off, but he catches up to me in a matter of seconds and rounds
the back of the Palace Skyscraper with me. The back door unlocks
automatically as we approach it. Once we are indoors, he pins me
against the warm door.

His breath is hot, his scent
intoxicating—even intermingled with the coppery smell of blood—and
his weight is delicious against me. He is angry and aroused
and
angry about being aroused.

“I expect you in my apartments at
four-thirty,” he growls.

He pushes himself away from me instantly,
pivots, and disappears around a corner long before I am able to
recover from his nearness.

NINETEEN

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO find the lab from here.
I come across plenty of signs, but they appear to be for the
service robots
and not humans. I am reminded that I should
have read that booklet of instructions Cat Evinas told me about
when she showed me to my rooms.

Not that Roland really gave me much time
alone in my room last night to actually
read
anything other
than his smoldering body language.

I turn corners. Walk through an equal number
of bright hallways and pitch-black hallways. One has such a steep
incline that, at one point, I’m certain that I am on the third
floor instead of the first. I encounter stairs that lead to solid
walls.

I discover auditoriums, movie theaters, an
indoor swimming pool, wide open spaces that seem to serve no
purpose whatsoever, and several more bridges that connect over
large cracks in the floor.

I follow the slow, gurgling sounds of the
flowing black water river that threads throughout the Palace that,
literally on the topmost floor, connects the Palace Skyscraper into
the tall mountains behind it. At some point in the far-ago past,
Roland’s family apparently expanded the Palace into the mountains,
carving into it to selfishly redirect the waterfall from its
natural location.

The water is a soothing sound, but it
doesn’t lead me to the lab. Eventually, I find the elevator lifts,
go down several floors, wind through familiar, though confusing
tunnels and pathways, and finally encounter the raised under-lit
catlike hallway.

As I near my lab door, I smile as it unlocks
and opens silently and then closes behind me. The room is bright,
which is how I like it, but it feels plain and devoid without
Roland in it with me.

He fires my blood, stirs my senses, and
heightens my awareness of him completely. I still have a difficult
time believing that I’m here. That I’m near Roland. That I’ve
kissed and tasted and felt him. And other than his dark, brooding
side, he’s everything I dreamt of over the years. His piercing
eyes. His intoxicating pull. His apparent attraction to me, which
seems both truthful and strategic, like he’s positioning himself to
win a battle that I might be the key for.

I suppose I am the key to Roland’s personal
battle.

He wants freedom from his scars, from his
past, from his father’s barbaric legacy. I pull out the vial that
contains The Pale Waters and place it on the lab table. The three
small stones are rather innocent looking; plain, even. If I
encountered them scattered amongst regular stones and rocks, I
wouldn’t have a clue that they were
more
than rocks, that a
thousand years ago, after molten lava cooled and formed its first
igneous rocks that developed under the Feeble Princess burial lake,
that these rocks inherited the characteristics of its namesake.
Pale, smooth, and faultless; much like the Feeble Princess herself.
But on the inside, she was a chameleon—able to change herself into
anything she wanted—volatile, a warrior, helpless, poisonous,
erotic, exotic, and utterly desirable to her subjects, her
servants, and her enemies, even when they knew she would be their
downfall.

This is her legend. Her power. And the
stones formed under her burial lake supposedly possessed elements
of her soul. It’s rather elemental, yet mythical, when I think
about it.

I wonder if I can use them for the
prototype. Maybe the stones contain the Feeble Princess’ chameleon
powers. I want to exploit the ability that made her helpless
subjects see her differently than what she was in reality.

If I use it, maybe everyone will see Roland
differently, too.

***

I make a fresh prototype with the previous
ingredients, minus
my
blood, and add Roland’s Charm. It
sizzles in the tube.

Placing protective goggles on my face, I
find a granite mortar from a cabinet, remove one milky-white stone,
and slowly crush it with the mortar’s matching pestle. A captured
scent of jasmine, vanilla, a strong sulfur, and something else I
cannot identify is released once in power form.

It has a profound affect on me.

I feel soft, sexy, desirable. I could seduce
any
one
or any
thing
at the snap of my fingers. I have
the notion that if I were to suddenly jump from a tall window, I’d
be invincible.

The real me smiles. The Feeble Princess is
good. Damn good.

But I’m stronger, and I understand what’s
happening. Scientifically speaking, I’m pleased to discover that
her chameleon ability isn’t trapped in the fumes. This capability
will be in physical form, amongst the stone’s alabaster dust.
Though whether it needs to be ingested or not will begin with a few
serious risks on my part.

I scoop some of it up, place it evenly on a
glass slide, and study it through the microscope. I expect all of
the grains to be pale white, but through the microscope, they are a
myriad of colors, ranging from onyx black, amber orange, blood red,
cyan blue, rose pink, sparkling silvers, and cloud white, all
intermixed. I surmised, previously, that there would be various
shades of white, ivory, and other pale pigments, but not black. Not
blue. Certainly not blood red.

I look up from the microscope and observe
the grains still left in the mortar.

White. Not even a slight deviation. I wonder
that if because I
expect
to see white, that I see white, but
when I inspect it under the microscope, the grains reveal their
true colors. I think for a moment, pondering what would happen if I
separate the different colors, but then I shake my head. That would
take hours. Days, even. I don’t have the luxury of time at the
moment.