The Unseen Threat
As the plane begins its descent into Orlando, the nearest large airport, I’m already missing Vail. The chilled mountain air, a refreshing contrast to the thick, cloying humidity of Florida, seems like a distant memory now. A part of me longs to be back in the mountains, away from the looming dread that has started gnawing at my insides.
I stare out the nearest window at the flat land below my plane and then at the sky where the barely disseminating full moon at sunrise has already dipped below in the western horizon. It should be a waxing crescent. At least, that’s the way I remember it.
I desperately want to be back in my rented rooms in Vail, staring out instead at a backdrop of mountains and eagerly waiting for my coming rendezvous with my sweet Shelby on the banks of a creek by a covered bridge. Our first meeting is so close, I can almost taste it, taste him, taste the wine on his lips and our first kiss.
Soon, so soon.
But here I am, back in Florida, headed to the county morgue within sight of the Florida University towers, no less. All because of a call from Raven Darbyshire, who is the current Last Priest of Daegan, and Terre’s mentee.
At least, Raven is one of the good guys. For all the power-hungry witches in our priesthood, we do have our fair share of earnest and compassionate members who just want the best for the human race and believe we can be our best selves even though most of the planet’s population will be devoured by earth and sea and fire in a few short years. The bane of our existence is knowing we can’t save everyone, and that most people wouldn’t want to be saved if they knew how life will change for them after The Shift.
We still try, though. Even the ones who get it wrong. Terre was one of the good guys, too—most of the time. Virgil definitely is. Raven, too, even though he bears the burden of being the Chosen One who will one day sacrifice himself to welcome back our God.
After an hour on I-75, my shuttle from the airport pulls up in front of the county morgue, its sun-bleached exterior as stark and lifeless as the bodies within. This place, with its sterility and the constant scent of death, brings back memories I’d rather forget. As the shuttle drives away, I feel an unexpected pang of loneliness. When you can remember your future, you live with the constant dull ache of grief and dig into each precious moment while you’re living it or else you sink into a bottomless despair. I’ve lost too many people in my lifetime, including people I’ve yet to meet.
I spot Raven on a bench near the entrance, his tall, muscular frame unmistakable. The soft gray of his shirt and jeans doesn’t quite hide the rigid bearing that seems as integral to him as his skin. He seems like a misplaced priest in his casual clothes, trying hard to fit into the world outside his sanctuary at the Darbyshire Memorial Scholar’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, where Terre worked for years. Except for the gleam of his aura and his thick brown topknot, I’m not sure I would recognize him from the times we’ve crossed paths, either in the past or future. He looks at me with a familiar warmth that eases my apprehension.
“Lady Jaryx.” He acknowledges me with a slight nod, his voice carrying a note of solemnity. He doesn’t use my popular call sign, Zephyr, chosen by my fellow Air Force pilots years ago as a play on my surname, but instead adds a far more informal, “Veronica.”
“Lord Aryx. Raven.” I respond in kind, returning his nod.
He’s one of the most physically attractive men I’ve ever seen or will ever see, and maybe that’s because of the God dormant in his seventh chakra, but there’s no chemistry between us. If Virgil is like a brother to me, then Raven is more like a son to me.
Or will be, in years to come.
If he’s aware today of the prophecy that Lady Jaryx, the reincarnated Wolf Queen of the Daeganeans a millennium ago, will one day lead humanity to salvation after The Shift, he doesn’t show it. In a few years, he’ll have to choose between Aoife and me. I know it. She knows it, too, but who else in the priesthood remembers that far into the future? The Gift of Knowing is still offered with Initiation, but Aoife tends to ban offering it to anyone who would accept, saying she herself remembers the future and that the respective candidate goes mad from the knowledge. I don’t know if she’s lying or protecting them or trying to keep inexperienced priests and priestesses from disloyalty. No way will Aoife share her future failure with anyone she’s uncertain will be loyal to her, and I know for a fact that every mention has been removed from the Daeganean libraries.
“How are you?” I ask Raven.
He answers with only the smallest nod, nothing more. Our interactions, brief and professional as they’ve been, are nevertheless tinged with an undercurrent of shared duty, both of us inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of Terre’s death. I’m certain this is harder for Raven. Terre may have been a father figure for all of us Daeganeans, but Raven is probably the only one of us who actually considered him a father.
Aoife included.
“Before we head inside, I need to tell you what happened.” The unflinching look in Raven’s eyes punctuates his words. I can’t help but mirror his intensity, signaling him to continue. “And, Veronica, I need to ask you something.”
My mouth feels dry. “Um, sure. Anything you need.”
But what exactly does Raven need from me? I’m a recruiter, not a crime investigator. Unless he’s thoroughly researched the legend of Jaryx and has access to resources I don’t know about, he doesn’t know yet that I’ll one day be the Ranking High Priestess.
He must sense my apprehension, because he quickly adds, “I’m here in Florida as a representative for Terre’s family and his estate, so this isn’t common knowledge.”
“Meaning, no one else in the priesthood knows?” Terre’s surviving family is a daughter he wasn’t allowed to acknowledge and no one else. “Not even Aoife?”
“Aoife sent me here, but I’ve already overstepped my authority. She’s not aware that I’m investigating. She’s told me not to. Only to be discreet, give Terre a proper funeral that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and bury him somewhere that the woman who calls herself Drusilla St. Augustine can visit his grave. No one else knows. Not through mundane means, anyway. I have no doubt Aoife and others have been scrying, consulting demons—whatever their specialty—to garner info.”
I almost laugh at his list of divination techniques but clear my throat instead.
Raven glances up at me, dead serious. “But I need to know. Not just for the priesthood but for myself. No matter how much I believe he’ll reincarnate, and we’ll meet again, I’m still feeling the sting of losing the man who helped me find my path in life. I have to do this for Terre.”
Understanding his pain, I nod. Aoife could turn this whole town upside down to find answers, but she’s not interested. She can scan across lifetimes as well as I can, though for her, it’s a gift of her Initiation into the order, and for me, I was born to it.
Raven pushes a trickle of perspiration from his forehead into his hairline without looking at me. “The police have made no progress on their investigation, and it doesn’t help that in the middle of the autopsy, someone assaulted the medical examiner. We’re not sure if anything’s missing.”
“Someone did what?”
“You know the local rumor mill every time something inexplicable happens. They automatically assume a bunch of college kids are practicing Satanic rituals. If the two detectives investigating Terre’s murder knew he was carrying a precious artifact to the local Daeganean library when he was murdered, and that it’s still missing—and what it is—they’d immediately write it all off as the work of devil worshippers, and we’d never get answers. Which is why I needed to talk to you, Veronica, face to face.”
I slowly lift my eyes and sigh, feeling the weight of his gaze. I bite back a desperate plea for understanding and run a hand through my hair as I try to sort out how much I should tell him.
“You want to know what I remember,” I say quietly.
“Yes,” he replies, his voice low but firm. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”
I hesitate, trying and failing to come up with an answer that won’t cause even more pain. “Raven, it’s not that simple.”
“You could have stopped it. If you’d warned him, he might still be alive.”
“No. Oh, no, honey. I know you’re hurting, but it just doesn’t work that way. I can’t stop what’s already happened, even if it hasn’t happened yet in his timeline. I’m not a god and I don’t carry one in my crown chakra like you do. I’m just a seer who remembers stuff as if I’ve already lived it. You had the option at Initiation to have this gift—curse—but you chose not to. You opted to rely on your intuitive and psychic talents rather than knowing your whole life and death because it’s easier not to know what grief lies ahead. I didn’t get a choice. It’s all I’ve ever known.”
Raven lowers his gaze and speaks in a low, contrite tone. He clasps his hands together and takes a deep breath before continuing. “I’m sorry. Anything you can tell me will help…please.”
“Okay.” I settle in beside him on the bench. “It’s not that I know everything in my future or someone else’s future. It’s that I have memories of the future as if they’ve already occurred. If you think back over the last ten years, Raven, you have things that you remember because they stood out somehow, boosted by your senses or the importance of the event. But you don’t remember what you never were exposed to, or maybe something that happened when you were drunk—”
“I don’t get drunk—”
“You know what I mean. If I were to spend the last few years of my lifespan battling dementia, I wouldn’t remember the details of my life then, so I wouldn’t be able to remember that future now.”
I pause, mentally wading through those memories of me at ninety, pressing a cup of gentle poison to my lips to wash away my pain, Shelby’s hand in mine, and hundreds of my followers crowding around me to sing me to sleep. They know they’ll wait for my next incarnation to rejoin them, maybe the next week or maybe—like last time—after a millennium. Maybe once again, Lady Jaryx will be utterly forgotten by the priesthood until my next incarnation.
“No dementia ahead for me,” I continue. “Not in this lifetime. Even though the memories from my older years are fuzzier, I distinctly remember the last moments of this lifetime, right until the moment I close my eyes as a revered and beloved old woman, and I see the bloom of colors all around me as my soul leaves my body.”
Raven stares at me, the strangest look on his face, then shakes his head as if to shake away his own vision.
“All right, Veronica. I think I understand. I remember certain things that stand out in my past, and you remember certain things that stand out in the past and future. Is there any chance you remember who killed Terre?”
My memories have been starting to come back to me over the past day, but they’re still inexplicably patchy. At the moment, I remember everything that happened right after Terre’s death.
My trip to Vail to make first contact with Terre’s prospective parents.
My frequent visits to their condo over the next two weeks to convince them we were there to guide them and that a liaison—one of our elderly priestesses—would be assigned to work with them regularly to give their child the best of everything. Terre, in any form, is Daeganean royalty.
I vividly recall taking a break on the day of the full moon to wander the alpine gardens, down by the covered bridge. And those nights that followed under the full moon, shielding our eyes from its brightness to count the stars and make wishes that came true.
“I don’t remember…exactly. There was a lot going on in my personal life during the time the investigation was wrapping up and all that kind of eclipsed what was happening with the murder investigation.”
I don’t tell Raven that I was busy falling in love with a tourist in Vail while recruiting Terre’s future parents. Or that Shelby’s expected reassignment to Florida was about to fall through and land him in Colorado for longer than he’d planned, so I voluntarily spent more time than usual visiting my latest recruit. I also don’t tell Raven that I can remember every curve and bulge of Shelby’s body when I touched him for the first time.
Blushing at the memory, I cough to cover my embarrassment. “I do remember Terre being bludgeoned to death on the university campus while couriering a book of dangerous rituals to the library that Drusilla St. Augustine ran for the priesthood before Florida started to sink. She and Terre had been close a long time ago. I remember watching his funeral from a distance with Virgil in a godawfully creepy thunderstorm where the sun kept shining through. All those memories have been reinforced by an additional layer of identical memories as I’ve watched them play out again over the last few weeks.”
Raven shakes off my prediction about Florida. I know better than to talk in public about future catastrophes, but it just slipped out.
“But do you remember who killed Terre?” Frustrated, he says it slowly, as if I cannot understand the question.
That part is foggy. In fact, it was never clear because my focus was on how my naked body fit so nicely against that of the love of my life, the man I’d waited forty-five years to meet. The last thing on my mind in those first sweet sessions of lovemaking was a grisly murder.
“Mmmm, sorry, Raven. I don’t think I ever knew. I vaguely remember hearing that it was an outsider. Nothing at all to do with the priesthood. They did catch him later, I think, but it was someone tracking Terre because of the artifact. Not even for what it could do—kill millions or bring a single person back from the dead—but because it was valuable on the antiquities market. That’s all: it was about money. Terre died for abso-fucking-lutely nothing.”
“And the person who interrupted the autopsy? Same?”
All I can do is shake my head. “That never happened.”
“You mean, you never heard about it.”
“No.” I clutch my medallion. “I mean it never happened.”
Terre’s future mother isn’t pregnant, the moon isn’t where it’s supposed to be, and Raven never called me back to Florida to meet with the forensics team.
“This conversation, Raven. The one we’re having right now outside this building on this bench.” I stab the boards between us with my index finger. “This is the first time we’ve had this conversation. I would remember if we’d talked about this in the past. But I have no memory of it whatsoever because it’s never happened before.”
“I wonder—” He jerks his head up, squinting at me as if he can see my soul. “I can’t remember the future like you can, Veronica, but I can see flashes of it, and I don’t like what I see.”
“The end of the world as we know it?”
“Sooner than that. I can see your future, Veronica. Only glimpses, but I’m convinced it’s true. And you’re not some old lady going gently into that good night. You’re younger, like you are now. Even—oh!—the same length of hair.” His gaze lands on my recently trimmed fringe. “I don’t know who it is, or how, or where, but you never see it coming.”
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