Lost Grace (The Reminiscent Exile Book 4) Read online

She smiled sadly. “Not if I want a job in an hour, no.”

  Tal and Ethan hung back in the space between the fountain and the bookshop, giving Annie and I a chance to chat. There was far too much to be said.

  “Annie,” I began, “we should talk.”

  She nodded, black hair spilling over her shoulders, eyes not quite hostile but… guarded. She tapped her chest, her heart. “You should have told me about this a long time ago.”

  “How would you begin such a conversation? I…” I shook my head. “I had hoped you would never need to know, that you would be free of my world.”

  Annie sighed. “I’ve only known you a year and a bit,” she said, “but even I can see you’re kidding yourself.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “We’re not OK, Declan,” Annie said, then she stepped forward and gave me a quick hug. “But our hearts are in the right place.”

  She kissed me on the cheek.

  And my bookshop exploded.

  A great torrent of emerald-green flame burst outwards from the store, wrenching the front face of the building away entirely. A deadly rain of splintered wood and glass blasted outwards.

  I fell on my instincts and threw my arm up to conjure a shield—but Tal, sweet Tal, had always been faster. She and Ethan stood closer to the explosion, but Tal still managed to get a half-arc of invisible energy, a force field of Will, in between herself and the explosion. The shield arced back over her head, over to Annie and me.

  A storm of green flame and debris shot past us, tore into the fountain, and scattered across Riverwood Plaza. The dark restaurants across the plaza took the brunt of the fragments and wreckage, shattering windows and annihilating support pillars. For the space of about ten seconds, the whole plaza blazed and burned, tumbled and fell—the quiet of the early hours pierced beyond repair.

  The green flames receded back to the heart of the explosion, my poor old shop, as Tal and Ethan stumbled over to us. A thin sheen of sweat coated Tal’s face—the quick shield had cost her, but saved our lives.

  All around us, hundreds of books fell fiery from the sky amidst thousands upon thousands of torn pages. A blizzard of ruined, flame-scorched stories. We stood at the heart of that blizzard, in disbelief and, for me, raw fury.

  A figure stumbled from the burning façade of my bookshop, wrapped in a smouldering grey cloak, smoke and flame licking its edges. The figure staggered from the fire, hooded, small, clearly in pain, scrambling over piles of burnt books, through the thick scent of acrid scorched paper and the dispersion of all the carefully laid wards. Protections I had placed around my shop to prevent this from happening.

  The figure saw us, standing just thirty feet away around the rim of the fountain, and threw the hood back from her face.

  Tylia Vale, the beautiful, blue-skinned girl, one of the last of her alien race, my student in the Vale Celestia of Atlantis, stood before the devastating wall of green flames that had been my refuge, my home for the last seven years.

  She swayed, her eyes found mine, and she managed a small, pained smile. “Declan,” she rasped, “I found you.”

  Tylia fell forward onto her knees, scraping her palms on the ground, crying out as she pressed her arm against a burning book, and then fell back.

  I dashed across the plaza and caught her before her head could smack the cobblestones. Her eyes, glazed and confused, sought me out between the heat of the flame and the spiralling clouds of smoke.

  “Declan,” I heard Tal say, as if from a great distance. “That’s n—”

  Tylia’s soft blue hand came up to brush my cheek and in that moment her eyes changed—the whites flooded with blood, crimson-red, and the pupils disappeared entirely.

  I gasped as she grinned, a terrible grin, and her hand snaked behind my head and pulled my lips down to hers.

  A cold, dead tongue, what I imagined kissing a corpse would feel like, wormed into my mouth. A blistering cold swept my body, I froze, unable to break the embrace, and heard terrible laughter echoing in my head as something, some malevolent force I knew all too well, passed from Tylia’s mouth and into mine.

  A spear of ice thrust itself into the back of my throat and I broke away from Tylia with a cry for the ages, one that pierced the night in a vicious wail they would have heard back in Switzerland.

  A presence entered my mind, overwhelmed my mind, and I was sent raving into the back of my own consciousness. It felt, in a very real sense, that I was dragged screaming away from the controls of an immense, powerful battleship by a force of irresistible hate and power.

  “Boss,” Ethan said, first to reach me as I lay curled on the ground, on books and pages alight with flame. “Boss, you OK? You need to get up. Come on.”

  Ethan picked me up under my arms, hauled me to my feet. I watched his face come into focus, saw the concern in his eyes.

  And then I grasped his shoulder with one hand and used my other arm to close around his neck, so his head sat in the crook of my elbow. His eyes widened, I laughed—an awful, hollow sound—and tore his head from his neck in one vicious, all-powerful tug.

  ‘No!’ I screamed, though no words escaped my mouth. It was no longer my mouth.

  A gout of blood fountained up from the ragged stump of Ethan’s neck as his body fell away, still twitching. I held up his head against the night, against the flickering green flames, his eyes blinking their last, and laughed again—at Annie, at Tal, who stared at me from the marble fountain in disbelief and fear.

  Between us, Tylia Vale stirred on the cobblestones. Her eyes flew open, her normal eyes, and she scrambled back away from me, the monster shrouded in green flame, covered in the blood of his friends, holding up a severed head for the whole world to see.

  With my free hand, I conjured a spear of dark metal from the air—something far beyond my abilities—and thrust the bitter point into the cobblestones, shattering rock, creating a pike upon which to mount my awful trophy.

  I placed Ethan’s head upon the tip of the spear and laughed again, feeding the flames.

  Tal moved first. She fell to the ground and grasped the nearest burning book—run, I thought, you have to run. She didn’t need telling. Tal was a Knight Infernal, trained alongside the best of us. To me, she had always been the best of us.

  “Annie!” Tal shouted. “Hold on to me!”

  Annie didn’t disobey the command. She stared at me terrified, one hand resting uselessly on the handle of her revolver. She didn’t understand, not yet.

  With the burning book in one hand, her free hand grasping Tylia’s burnt arm, and Annie holding her shoulder, Tal Levy used the book to open a ‘way across the Story Thread, to the world contained within the book—one of the first tricks they taught a knight at the Infernal Academy. Like so much ash on the wind, my friends disappeared, faded from reality, travelling god knew how far across the Story Thread.

  Tal knew what I knew—anywhere was better than Riverwood Plaza in that moment.

  I laughed again, laughter escaped my throat, but I didn’t make the sound.

  Sauntering, at ease with nowhere to be, I walked over to the space my friends had occupied just moments ago, sniffing the air, kicking aside burning books. Here I paused a moment before leaning forward and considering the reflective water of the fountains. Lit by the emerald green flames from behind, I could see my face well in the water. Very well.

  My eyes were twin orbs of deepest, darkest heart’s blood. Pure crimson and malice. They stared back at me alien and hostile—and in triumph.

  “Hello, Declan,” Lord Oblivion of the Everlasting said, and I watched my mouth work and form the words, heard my own voice ring back at me. “What’s new with you?”

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked, raging, screaming, against the cage in my mind. The Everlasting had possessed me, as I had feared. Possessed me! I couldn’t budge, not an inch. I was locked in bands harder than star iron. I felt Oblivion’s amusement and my struggle and redoubled my efforts. ‘RELEASE ME!’

>   “Dominion, territory, control,” Oblivion said and ran his/my hand back through his/my hair. “A little blackberry farm in the country where I can grow old in peace. Oh, really, Declan, is that what you thought would happen? That you deserved anything close to such harmony?”

  ‘Get out of my thoughts!’

  Lord Oblivion grinned, my teeth bloodstained and awful, stretched from ear to ear in the waters of the fountain. “What do I want, you ask? First and foremost, I am here to extend you an invitation.”

  ‘To what?’ I snarled, doing the mental equivalent of hurling my shoulder into the locked door.

  “My sisters’ funeral,” Lord Oblivion whispered.

  That stopped my struggling for a moment.

  ‘You killed Astoria,’ I said.

  “And you Ashaya with the blight in your heart.”

  ‘Can’t help but feel I won’t be welcome at such a memorial.’

  Lord Oblivion laughed, harsh and bitter. “You have no say in the matter. We will attend, Declan Hale, an event that hasn’t occurred since before time was new. You’re my plus-one. I fear we will cause quite the sensation.”

  I felt the heat of a million burning books scorch my back, a cleansing fire for my oft corrupted soul. ‘And then?’

  “I will use you as my vessel to destroy the Knights Infernal and claim the Story Thread for my own.”

  With a tremendous roar heard by none, I hurled myself against the shackles in my mind, hard enough to shock and jar limbs I no longer had, a body I couldn’t see nor feel. I was a ghost, adrift in an Everlasting prison. I reached for my Will and found nothing. I grasped, scrambled for the edges of the bonds that held me, clawed at locks I couldn’t see or touch.

  The Everlasting laughed and turned from the fountain. My vision swayed, I was merely along for the ride, as Lord Oblivion stepped sideways into the Void and cast us together, master and puppet, across the ragged edge of the Story Thread.

  We were off to start a war.

  *~*~*~*

  The End of Book Four

  Declan Hale will return in:

  ELDER SHADOW

  The Reminiscent Exile #5

  Coming November, 2017

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  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE FIRST RESOLVE

  CHAPTER ONE - BY ANY OTHER NAME

  REMINISCENCE THE FIRST

  CHAPTER TWO - ANNIE’S CONCERN

  CHAPTER THREE - ROAD’S FIRE

  CHAPTER FOUR - THE TWILIGHT HOUR

  REMINISCENCE THE SECOND

  THE SECOND RESOLVE

  CHAPTER FIVE - ATTACK ON THE ATLAS LEXICON

  CHAPTER SIX - DREAD ASH ON THE WIND

  CHAPTER SEVEN - ACROSS THE SQUARE

  CHAPTER EIGHT - THE VALE CRYSTALIS

  REMINISCENCE THE THIRD

  CHAPTER NINE - BAT COUNTRY

  CHAPTER TEN - THEY COME TO HAUNT ME

  THE THIRD RESOLVE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE CAVE OF BLUNDERS

  CHAPTER TWELVE - THE OLDER I AM, THE WISER I’M NOT

  REMINISCENCE THE FOURTH

  THE FINAL RESOLVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - UPON THE LILAC PRECIPICE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - LIKE RAIN ON A SUNNY DAY

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

  THE REMINISCENT EXILE BOOK FIVE

  AUTHOR'S LINKS