Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(67)

Murhder, Nate’s adoptive father, glanced over. Wiping his red eyes, he said hoarsely, “It’s all right. She’s a friend of his. Come here and say goodbye—”

His voice choked off at that point so he used his hands to motion her near, waving at her to close in.

The mahmen did not lift her head from her son. She just stood on the far side of Nate, her hands on his shoulder and upper arm, her tears falling onto his cooling skin.

“I am so sorry,” Rahvyn whispered.

“You did everything you could,” the sire said. “You called for help and gave him the best chance he had.”

“Will you allow me to revive him?”

At that, the mahmen raised her head, her face a vision of despair. “What?”

“Whatever is going on here?” the healer demanded. “Shall I call for security—”

“Shh,” Murhder cut in. “Sweetheart… he’s gone. It’s too late.”

“No, it’s not.” The Brother’s brows came down, but before he could argue and break the heart of his shellan even more, Rahvyn said quickly, “Will you allow me to help him.”

Murhder cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. If you’re not going to pay your respects to him, we’d like some privacy—”

The mahmen reached across the body of her dead son and grabbed at Rahvyn’s arm. “Yes, yes… yes.”

Her eyes were wide, and her whole body trembled—and Rahvyn was aware that she herself had been in the same state when she had stood over Sahvage’s arrow-strewn body.

“What can you do?” the female begged.

“I will bring him back for you,” Rahvyn whispered.

“Please, oh, God… I just need him alive.”

As the males started to raise protestations, she and the mahmen locked eyes—and then Rahvyn closed her lids.

Instantly, everything became so crystal clear to her senses that the smells of blood and fear and anguish were like shards of glass in her nose, and the glow of the ceiling lights and the chandelier over the table was a brilliant beam shining right in her face. She could hear the tense, shallow breathing of the mahmen as a scream, and the voices of the father and the healer as booming basses, and even a shuffle of clothing or shift of weight were loud as metal on metal.

There is no going back, she thought out at both of the parents.

“Please,” the mahmen begged. “Save him.”

With a heavy heart, Rahvyn called upon her—

The strobing of the room’s lighting fixtures registered through her closed eyes, and she had a dim thought that the blinking had not transpired the last time she had done this. The first time she had done this, rather. To Sahvage.

Then again, that had been centuries ago when it came to linear time. No electricity back in that castle. Candles only. And moonlight.

As the flickering intensified, the pulsing began. She could feel the energy emanating from her body in all directions, not just toward Nate—

Thump. Thump.

Thump.

At the sounds, she opened her lids. The three people who had been around the bedding table had been propelled back against the walls of the room and they were pinned in place by waves of magic that distorted the air, turning the oxygen that should have been invisible into something that was like water’s surface after a stone was thrown into a still pond.

Rahvyn moved without walking to the table, her body levitating and propelling itself upon her will unto Nate’s side. When she focused on his face, shadows were thrown as if a brilliant light was trained upon him, though it was not. There was no illumination, and yet the contrast doubled and redoubled until even the softest contours of his chin and cheeks, his hair and ears, were as if drawn in jet-black ink.

And then all color leached out of him and that which was around him. No more was the sheeting blue, nor his abdomen stained with orange and red, nor the wires red and blue and yellow that ran off the pads affixed to his chest. All was black, white, and shades of gray. His skin, too, became without a tint, that which had been graying now fully there. Thereafter, the distortion intensified and took on further characteristics. He became a leaded pencil rendering of himself, not only black and white, but no longer three-dimensional, all aspects of him flattening out into two.

In Rahvyn’s concentration and summoning of power, she lost track of that which surrounded her and him. Gone were the room, its equipment and its people, disappeared was that corridor and those males outside, null and void became the entirety of Caldwell… and then this New World… and finally the ocean she had crossed and the Old Country from whence they had all originated.

The rotation started slowly, she and Nate making a single turn. And another. And one more and one more after that. Speed began to gather next, the spinning increasing until they were a blur—and yet there was no breeze to riffle her hair or his. Faster, faster… faster still they went. Faster. Faster…

The momentum increased until the revolutions were at such a velocity that the center could not hold. As critical acceleration was reached, there was a great clapping, as if lightning struck a tree.

Upon the sound, they broke free of the spinning and floated in a void. The state of transcendence was an impossibility to describe, and yet an undeniable experience as all opposites became one: both static and spinning, one dimension and yet three, time stopping and also racing, the two of them weightless and more dense than the earth.