Turning Point #2
He couldn’t stop spinning.
Raven squeezed his eyes shut and steadied his breath. He was somewhere between the worlds, between times. How could he feel anything when neither he nor anything around him was physical at the moment? Maybe this was some seventh sense of the soul to translate the body’s five senses and intuition’s sixth into something he could remember and relate to.
He opened his eyes and squeezed them shut yet again. Everything around him was spinning out of control. Or rather he was.
Stop trying to hold onto your physical senses, he told himself.
The nausea subsided. When he opened his eyes a third time, he was floating in blackness sprinkled with stars. Far beneath his feet was a planet with land masses and oceans. He had never seen the earth like this with its continents either broken or jumbled together. Earth’s inhabitants had lost most of its manmade satellites in The Shift, and no one had seen the aftermath from this point of view, except maybe Aoife’s armies, wherever she was.
He felt the push, presumably from Old Aryx’s handiwork, rather than a tug to a particular landmass. As he descended, he could see where the ocean had roared inward, swallowing up all of Florida and most of Georgia, almost to above Atlanta and almost to Huntsville, Alabama. The part that wasn’t covered by what had been the Atlantic Ocean was mostly brown and barren as if some almighty shovel had emptied it of anything green or anything built by man. Several years had passed and little to nothing had reseeded itself in what was called the Wave Zone because the cut had been so deep, and the plants that did grow were unknown. In the distance, in the direction he had once known as West, the Great Lakes opened into the Mississippi River, a great chasm of water splitting the continent. Farther west, the Rocky Mountains slid into the Pacific. Both coasts, all their large cities and all the people who had lived there, regardless of class or politics, slept beneath somber, gentle waves.
He plummeted downward with no control over his direction. Finally, he was able to slow his velocity as he moved toward what had once been the rolling hills of Virginia, now home to a remote outpost built by the priesthood before the turn of the twenty-first century. He plunged feet first through plumes of smoke that belched from one of the new volcanoes that towered over an uninhabitable Old Atlanta. The landscape below took form as he headed northward into the green. A smattering of trees stretched out into the darkness. He could see the arrangement of long shipping containers stacked on top of each other and crisscrossed into a rectangular fortress named “Three of Cups” in honor of the Tarot card that symbolized harmony. The bright colors of the shipping containers had been painted over in brown, gray, and green splotches as camouflage, masking the survivalist compound—Terre Vanderholt’s pre-apocalypse hobby—with the impression of a bush-covered patch of rocks. Under the red moon, several small bands of soldiers dipped in and out of the tree line.
Inside the steel walls of the compound, two bonfires burned in the center of each half, and at dead center loomed the large boulder of the courtyard. The crouched figure on the rock looked up at him as if she could see him.
A swarm of near-silent drones whished around him and out of sight. Reflexively, he swatted at the last one before remembering that he was, for the moment, non-corporeal. He could see his body below him, stretched out on the ground with his wrist pressed hard against The Book of Time, as if no time had passed at all since the demon had flung him away. With a slight popping sound in his ears, he melded with his body.
Raven lay gasping in the scorched grass even though he had done nothing to exert himself physically; he stared at the blank page where the sigil had been, the one that had sent him back in time to Lilah’s mother. The sigil under his wrist had faded entirely, as if nothing had ever adorned this page. He turned the page carefully. If he had had deep regard for The Book of Time before he had met his previous reincarnation, his appreciation was far greater now. This was a book that Old Aryx had used only once himself and that was to send his future incarnation back to the present. He’d had it bound in skin from his corpse, which made it extraordinarily special, even in Daeganean libraries. The book had been a gift across the ages. Its entire purpose had been to lead to this moment, to this night, in whatever timeline. Maybe in every timeline.
The alchemist had lived long enough to finish the book, but the remaining pages were limited. Maybe another five? Raven knew exactly what he needed to do to save Lilah, but how many trips through time would it take? He had to be careful. If he were sent back in time again, unwillingly, he wouldn’t be able to return on his own.
“Priest.”
Ears ringing, Raven lifted his head to look at her. Gray and silver spheres swirled around her head, more slowly than before. She squatted on the boulder, leaning forward, her palms flat on its surface and the long tangles of her hair covering her chest.
“You disappoint me, Priest. You cannot keep secrets from me. I told you, I see across all timelines. Do you think I would stop you from your plans? The priesthood owes me a body. You contracted with me on their behalf. I have given you prophesies. I have given you gifts. If I do not have a body, there is no balance. This body, or some other that I do not have to share. You should know as a follower of Daegan that energy must flow. You cannot accept what I give you without paying a price. I have upheld my end of the bargain. You must do the same.”
“The priesthood doesn’t need your gifts, and neither do I.” Raven knew the words were untrue as soon as he spoke them.
Lilah’s eyes burned a bright red, then yellow, but other than that, the demon inside her showed no signs of anger. “Were it not for my aid, verily the priesthood would have dwindled out of existence half a millennium ago. I am the one who has kept your treasured priesthood alive so you can await Daegan’s return.”
Raven smoothed down the next page. He had to find another turning point in Lilah’s life before the demon could stop him.
“Priest, your lack of faith in me wounds me. I will not stop you. I am your partner, not your enemy.”
Raven frowned at the page in front of him. It was blank except for two splotches of blood which had dried hundreds of years ago. The sigil that had sent him back to the present had faded to nothing beneath where old Aryx had carved it into his scrawny arm.
Damn, he thought. The old priest had thought of everything, including the order of the doorways through time. Raven turned the parchment a little harder than he meant to and felt the page rip before he heard it. Just a little tear, but enough to make his heart skip a beat.
The sigil on the next page oddly resembled the union of a poppy and a sword. He patted the blackened grass next to the book and found one of the hair-daggers he had left there. He clutched it and pressed his wrist against the sigil. He knew exactly what he had to do.
Raven kept his eyes open long enough to watch his body grow smaller in the distance as he shot straight up into the night sky. He shut his eyes tightly against the nausea. In some ways, he wasn’t as afraid now of the journey, having seen that he could navigate time and space without harm to himself. In other ways, the journey was even more frightening for the numerous possibilities of what he could change through either the smallest or the best intended actions.
He also knew that one misstep now, and he might be trapped in the past. He had no guarantee that he would find some other incarnation of himself with The Book of Time readily available to help him back through a doorway between the worlds. He wasn’t sure either if it was the book that pushed or pulled him or the connection to his physical body that he left behind, like a silver cord in astral travel. Maybe it was the binding of human remains of a man who’d been his incarnation in the Middle Ages. In any case, none of it really mattered if he couldn’t separate the demon from Lilah. He knew enough from reading what other priests had penned over the centuries that he could not exorcise this demon. His previous incarnation had a valid, binding contract, and the demon could not be cast out until that debt was paid. Raven would have to find some other way to save Lilah so that she could save the remnants of humanity in the next age. Without her, the prophecy was useless.
When he began to descend, Raven opened his eyes again. Already he was close enough to see the land mass below.
High jagged mountains, silver at first, then white capped. As he drew closer, a deep, silvery green painted the slopes. A ribbon of river. Red stripes of crops in a valley, then browner with treetops dotting the mountainside. A palette of greenish, grayish beige.
He groaned inwardly as his boots touched the ground. He wasn’t sure when he was, but he knew where. He glanced down at his body as it became corporeal, at the desert camouflage uniform he hadn’t worn in a decade. He didn’t know that Lilah had been here, too. Or when. If his intention had brought him here, then this place had held some kind of turning point in her life.
Afghanistan. There were beautiful parts of this country, but this wasn’t one of them. He knew by the smell if not by the dust that caked everything. All he knew was that he was somewhere in the past at a time before the pole shift when this country was still habitable.
He crouched behind the rocks as he watched the movement in the dusty valley below. There was almost nothing green in this valley. He counted three outbuildings and a few walls. A jeep beside the farthest wall. A utility truck on the other side of the wall. Fuel tanks. A generator.
Four headless bodies in the dirt.
Raven steadied his breathing. He had no weapons with him except the two tiny blades that kept his hair off his shoulders. He couldn’t manufacture anything more substantial out of energy. He knew that anything he did in this timeline could reflect across the ages, but he had no idea if an injury to this temporary pattern of molecules would also sustain an injury in the body he had left hunkered over The Book of Time. It wasn’t a chance he wanted to take.
He saw the movement then. A woman. Young. Long, dark hair flying out behind her, but the other side still pinned close to her head. Still in uniform. And running like hell.
She pirouetted in midstride, scanning the landscape frantically for safety. She seemed to spot something in the mountainside beneath him, changed direction, and headed into an opening in the rocks.
Choking on her dust, five men followed her at full speed. All of them disappeared below him.
Raven studied the encampment. Nothing moved. He picked a path down the mountainside. A cave? Tunnels? Was Lilah insane? Running into a hole in the rock with five men chasing after her? If she had thought she had no place to go out in the open, she had given herself no options at all by running into a dead end. Or at least he supposed it was a dead end. From where he crouched, he could see an opening though he couldn’t tell for sure if it was manmade or natural.
He inched closer to the opening. He knew better now than to follow her inside and do anything to change the outcome. Still, it was hard to stop himself from doing anything to help. That hole in the mountain was pitch dark; it also wasn’t tall enough to stand up inside nor wide enough for two people to pass.
Ah, hell. He slid the rest of the way down the rock face. It just wasn’t in him to stand by and let someone come to harm.
You’re reading Sleeping with Demons free, right here in the Library. Want a copy to keep on your Kindle or e-reader? Buy the e-book direct from me →
© 2020 Lorna Tedder. All rights reserved. Free to read here — please don’t repost elsewhere.