Chapter Thirty-five
“Come to me, little flame,” said the dark voice.
Pi awoke in a fire world, the small elemental confused. The fire bed he’d gone to sleep in felt different now. This… wasn’t his normal fire. This was wrong. Fire wasn’t supposed to burn.
There was something he needed to remember… something about shadows maybe….
But when he did remember only a moment later, it was already too late. The tiny elemental who had been friend and messenger to Kings and Queens, slowly stopped flickering and went completely still. There, at the center of a fire bed of blue conflagration, the elemental swayed like inanimate seaweed in the ocean’s dark.
As if exposed to the shifting filter of a camera’s lens, the elemental’s flame slowly turned from orange-red to a blue so deep, it was black at its core. The light from within it went out.
“That’s done,” said the voice. “Now dark flame, you will deliver a message for me.”
Pi was no longer Pi. But the dark flame served another purpose in its undead existence, and when its new master finished delivering his orders, Pi faded away to do his job.
The man who had so easily killed the elemental rose to his full height and gazed steadily into the dark blue flames of the shadow fire.
“I’m guessing the fire is cold, and that was what did the little guy in?” asked a woman from behind him.
“On the contrary,” the man replied easily, quietly. “Darkfire is very, very hot. It has to keep an entire Shadow Realm from freezing, after all.” He shook his head. “The fire destroyed him nearly at once. He was burned alive in his own element.”
He knew all about the Darkfire that kept the Shadow Realm from destruction. It was how he’d known to steal a bit of it now for his purposes. It was one of the few things that could kill an elemental. Contrary to logic, water did nothing to fire elementals. Neither did cold nor wind nor even earth. They might temporarily snuff it out, but the end result was akin to transporting them against their will. They would only re-form somewhere more fitting. No natural element could alter another; they were separate, but eternal. It took the unnatural to do what he’d done.
He turned to face his companions. There were two.
One was a tall man with black hair and black eyes, a strong jaw, five-o-clock shadow, and an expensive dark suit. The other was an adorable petite blonde woman with shoulder-length curls and honey colored eyes. Freckles dotted her nose and cheeks.
The woman smiled proudly at him from where she sat nearby on the arm of the leather couch in the hotel sitting room. “Now we wait,” she said.
The tall dark man in the suit, whose ancient name was Ahriman but who’d been known by his enemies as the Entity, addressed them both as he moved to join the woman and slipped an arm around her tiny waist. He placed a gentle kiss on her forehead and then turned his attention on him. “On another note, it looks as though fate has dealt you a healthy hand in your second incarnation. I’m impressed.”
The woman chuckled. Her name had always been Amunet. That was the thing about these two Travelers. Their names never changed. They were simply that old, that powerful. They had long ago learned to control what species of form they were reborn into, and now names held little meaning for them as well. The only reason Amunet’s sister’s name had ever changed when she was reformed was because the old witch liked trying new things.
“It’s our second son’s spirit shining through,” Amunet said proudly, beaming. She looked over at him as well. “We chose well in you.”
The man who had once been Arach the king of dragons, then the Traitor, then the Nomad vampire, pondered that. He felt strange in this second incarnation, truth be told. There was very real, very ancient power swimming primordially through his body. And there were even physical details that were identical to his last transformation. But some things felt very different, too.
There were thoughts and memories swimming through the seas of his mind that fought to rise to the surface. He caught vague impressions of them, dark leviathans beneath the water’s surface. But he couldn’t quite force them to emerge.
Not that it bothered him enough to stop him from doing his job.
Amunet shook her head, grinning appreciatively. “Ahriman is right. You should have no troubles finding a worthy mate dressed in that skin.” She tilted her head to the side and asked, “What is your vessel’s name this time around?”
In response, the man smiled a brilliant white smile that was just as sharp and deadly as it had always been. “Abel,” he replied coolly. And that was the strangest thing of all. Because despite his past incarnations, he could swear that’s what his name had always been.