Rumpel

I should have been there. I damn well should have bloody been there.

The raw fury I felt was nothing compared to the pain boiling me up alive. Seeing Shayera that way—broken, weeping, and clinging to the battered edges of her clothes with that bastard rutting over the top of her—hurt too badly to bear.

I choked on my breaths, fighting the urge to howl and rage and rampage through the hamlet, killing any and all men. No matter their innocence, all men were her enemy now. Even me.

How the hell could this have happened? I thought bitterly. Dropping my head into my hands, I leaned against the siding of her home, shuddering and fighting the beast within me. I couldn’t give into this mania, and I knew it.

I was hanging on by a thread.

I should have known, though. I’d felt the tremors, the disturbance in fate’s fingers, all night long. And then Giles had called for me because Euralis had been deadly sick. It was the time of the transformation, a kind of puberty for Demone males that forced a painful and terrible change upon us. Euralis had already experienced it once in his previous lifetime, and it’d been the very last thing on my mind. I hadn’t expected it to happen again, but I damned well should have.

I seethed.

When he got ill, my worrying about the strings of fate ceased. I’d been so sure the unease I’d been feeling the weeks leading up to it had been tied to that and nothing else, but it’d been Fate clearing the way, taking me out, keeping her family away, keeping her alone, and forcing her down her destined path.

I felt my face grow hot. When the male had touched her, I’d felt a ripple through my soul. Her emotions wracked me, tearing me asunder. Her adrenaline and her terror had nearly choked me. I’d tethered myself to Shayera forever many years ago, when she’d been only a baby. It’d been a way for me to be able to keep guard over her and to keep her safe in case everything else failed. The tethering didn’t come without cost, and even so, I’d almost been too late to save her.

Again, I saw the image of that male, rutting and sweating and kissing her neck with greedy sucking motions. What if he’d raped her? What if I’d gotten there just a second later? What then?

Grinding my teeth, I opened my eyes and looked wildly about for something— anything—to hurt. I spied a tree several yards away and ran to it. I growled, drew my arm back, and punched it with all my might. A mighty crack and groan splintered the air. The scent of my blood wafted under my nose, but only I noticed the gaping cut in my knuckles when I flexed my fist .

I shuddered. I should have been there. I should have known. Euralis should have been home by then, sleeping and healing, but the moment he’d learned of Shayera’s fate, he’d forced himself to go to her. In two days’ time, he’d be hale again and no longer weakened by the transformation. It would be as though nothing at all had ever happened to him. Shayera, would never be the same again.

I knew, though, what this would cost for him and the pain he’d feel. I’d seen the flash of agony in his eyes when he’d learned what had been done to her in his absence. Demone loved hard, with everything that was in us, so what’d been done to Shayera would be excruciating to him. He’d feel like a failure, just as I did. My heart ached at what had been done, which could never be undone. 

It’d taken hours of Prince and her family cuddling her before she’d calmed and quieted. I stood beneath her window, draped in shadow, feeling wild and desperate and aching to do something—anything—to make it right. But there was no making it right.

Once she finally fell asleep, I forced Prince away from her with a short, sharp whistle, undetectable to human ears. He needed to rest. He still needed to heal from his own trauma of the night past.

My son would never forgive himself for what had been done to her, and neither could I.

Alone and full of impotent rage, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that standing there and doing nothing was unacceptable too. There were words that needed saying and there was no one that could stop me from saying them.

I called Genesis to me with a snap of my fingers, and she arrived with a throaty, rumbling growl less than a minute later, after cutting through a travel tunnel like a hot knife through butter. Marching toward her, I patted her chrome tank just once. She purred for me. Sitting astride my silver steed, I was soon sailing across the navy-draped sky.

Once a true woman, she’d fallen in love with me eons ago and had asked me only one thing. All she wanted was to be my truest and most constant companion, no matter the price she’d pay.

Touched by her sincerity and honesty, I’d honored her request and had transformed her first into a wild silver mare. She’d been through multiple incarnations as time and technology progressed—once a steam locomotive, then a Model-T, then a mare—until finally she became a chromed-out motorcycle with the heart and soul of a warrior female.

Once, Shayera had thought Genesis’s captivity to be indicative of the type of cruel monster she thought I was, but through the years, she’d grown to love riding on the back of Genesis with me. And Genesis, a temperamental and violently jealous female, had formed a very strange sort of attachment to my bride. I never thought the day would come when Genesis would abide another female usurping her way into my heart. But to know Shayera had been to love her, and we’d all fallen under her spell.

Genesis didn’t want to leave the child behind. Genesis understood, in a way few others did in this new world, who the child really was and what she would one day mean to us again.

She rumbled angrily, trying in vain to turn us back and return to the child. Although Genesis appeared to be nothing more than chrome and steel, beneath the metal she had a heart and a soul that loved fiercely and loyally. Once Genesis gave her love, it was forever. She was just as much in my stead as she was in Shay’s.

“We can’t!” I growled, righting her handlebars yet again as she tried for the third time to turn around.

Her hind end came sharply up, nearly unseating me.

“Damn you, you crazy beast!” I snapped. “Do you think I don’t want to go back to her? Do you think I want to leave her there like that? Never think it! But I am bound to the fickle whims of fate, just as you are. She’s still a child! I cannot—I can’t—” My voice cracked.

That momentary flash of weakness finally seemed to settle her down. Instantly, she quieted, and the hum of her engine turned into a steady purr again. Her metal form vibrated beneath me. She was apologizing.

I swallowed hard, fighting the damned stupid tears that did nothing other than constantly remind me of how helpless I was. They served no purpose. They helped nothing. I was done crying, done with the damned bloody tears. I had to do something. 

How the hell did this happen? Why the hell hadn’t they been watching her more closely?

It’d been all Prince could do not to rip Betty and Gerard’s throats out for allowing Shayera to sneak off as she had. Prince no longer liked Betty’s brother, Kelly, and probably never would again. The beast finally had to be chained to Shayera’s bedpost just to ensure it wouldn’t attack him.

Prince’s disgust mirrored my own. I hated the man and doubted I’d ever forgive him. It shouldn’t have happened again, because the curse had been a direct result of Gerard’s past sins in the other timeline. Shayera shouldn’t have been cursed in this one. It didn’t need to happen. To hell what the Fates said.

Finally, I saw my destination, at the very edge of the Infinity Sea Cliffs, where rock and shale gave way to nothing but Seren’s waters below. The seas, made of strange shades of rainbow hues that day, were calm.

There was only one person in all of Kingdom that could fix this, that could remake Shayera, that could right this terrible wrong that’d been done to the girl. And it was Calypso, who was in some kind of mood. Whether good or bad, I wasn’t sure, but I also didn’t care.

I descended swiftly and landed on the edge of the cliffs, where I released the kickstand, got off Genesis, and walked out as far as I could. I continued until the tips of my toes had no ground beneath to support them. Once, I would have had enough magic in me to walk upon Calypso’s waters. But Ea Seko had stripped much of my power from me.

Cupping my hands, I cried out, “Calypso, temperamental goddess of all waters, I call to you now. I ask you to come, not to supplicate his god, but as a friend to a friend. As a—”

“A friend to a friend?” a sultry yet dulcet voice asked with a husky chuckle.

I twirled on my feet, momentarily caught off guard by the goddess’s exotically unusual, yet appealing beauty. She was a tall woman, taller even than I was, with a nest of writhing black and royal purple tentacles for hair that undulated as she walked. Her skin was the color of sea-foam, and her pure-black eyes were shaped like almonds. She had no pupils, but her irises gleamed like polished ebony.

Her foreign features made a pleasing whole, with stark slashes for cheekbones and full, pink, and pouting lips. On one bicep, she wore a golden cuff that looked like a snake eating its own tail. She wore a gown comprised of thousands of miniature abalone shells and mother-of-pearl studs in her ears. She was unlike anyone I’d ever seen before.

Calypso’s form always changed, and her moods were as transient as her tides, never settling and constantly in a state of flux. Usually I felt something familiar about her, in either her eyes or her smile, but she was completely alien in this incarnation, almost as though she didn’t know who she was or who she wanted to be. Only recently had she begun to adopt a human figure once again. Her natural state was aqueous, and water was the form she still seemed most comfortable in.

It was lore that, of all those who’d loved and lost, none had lost more than Calypso. She knew nothing of the woman she’d once been, the goddess who’d learned to love the human realm more than her own and who’d developed a soul because of it.

Gods were capricious at the best of times and arrogant and uncaring at the worst. They lived for themselves and their own selfish vanities. Calypso and her husband Hades had been exceptions. Even so, as a great and powerful elemental force, she was not to be trifled with. Her temper was legendary, but she’d once had a good heart. I was counting on that heart still beating within her somewhere, even if it was buried deep within.

Her smile was little more than a leering smirk as she eyed me up and down. Thin rivulets of water ran from her neck down her arms and legs, creating tiny shimmering puddles, like oil slicks at her feet. “You are Rumpelstiltskin,” she said with authority. She didn’t frame it as a question.

I dipped my head.

“And why has the dark prince decided to grace me with his presence this day?” Her words were light, airy, and full of condescension.

I was a villain, it was true, in my past life and probably even in this one. Regardless of my motivations, I knew exactly who I was. In many ways, Calypso and I were the same.

She was an elemental, which meant she wasn’t a woman so much as a state of being. Physically, she was water that’d taken form. Elementals, even more than gods, operated on the most primordial levels possible. If they were angry, they’d wipe out a town without sparing a thought to life, limb, or the casualties incurred. If they were happy, the very waters of Seren would suddenly burst with life. At their cores, they were the most basic of emotions, raw and primal and, ironically enough, innocent in many ways because of it. They simply did not think in the same way their contemporaries did. There was only black or white in Calypso’s world, no shades of gray.

Calypso was merely the product of what she was, an elemental. She had both the temperament of the raging seas and the stillness of placid pools, and there was no predicting which of the two she would greet someone with at any given time, because she was one and both. I’d liked her in the other world, though in truth we hadn’t been the greatest of friends—we’d hardly known one another—but the few times our paths had crossed, I’d enjoyed her presence and had tolerated her in a way I rarely could with others.

There was nothing pretentious about her, and though she leered at me, I could sense that same steadfastness of character within her. It was always above board with her.

I wondered what she was going through, what she could remember, and whether she recalled her past life at all, including her love of Hades and his love for her and the family she, too, had once killed to protect. She and I were not so very different at our cores.

“Well?” She lifted a thin dark brow. “Have you come to waste my time? Because if so, I’ve got—”

Clenching my jaw, I tossed my hand out to stop her as she made to move past me. “Don’t go.”

“I’m not in the business of being summoned.”

I snorted. “Neither am I.”

Something dark glittered in her eyes. “And yet I came. Tell me why.”

I could give her the pat answer, which was curiosity or boredom—either of those would do. But it wasn’t true, not really. “Because you are seeking.”

It clearly wasn’t the answer she’d expected, because her exotic face contorted into a mask of fury as she hissed at me.

The waves at my back roared, sounding as though they’d begun to churn and whip with fury down below. My pulse jumped. I wasn’t immortal, not like a god. I was a Demone Prince and had my own dark powers, but even I was no match for an infuriated goddess. Still, I was foolish enough to press on.

Maybe I had a death wish. Maybe I was exhausted by all of this nonsense, a curse that made no sense, and the memories of all the lives, past and present, that’d been disrupted. My waking nightmares refused to quit because I knew too much. I was tired, and I was through pretending to be sane about any of this anymore.

So I stood tall, my shoulders back, my head held high, and my gaze locked on her serpent-like eyes. I nodded. “Aye, you’re seeking. You’re lost. You’re confused. And you’re angry. Deny it, goddess. Tell me I am wrong. But I am not wrong.” Rain pelted my face, my back, my neck.

Her chest heaved as she sucked in violent gulps of air. “What would you know of anger, legger? You think you understand that word? You think you know what it means to wake up each morning and want to kill something, hurt it, wound it until it screams and begs for you to stop, and yet still you cannot stop because there is a darkness, an emptiness that spreads like a disease inside your soul, deeper and wider each and every day?”

A crack of lightning tore the now blackened sky in two. The world was in chaos. The level of the water had risen, and it rushed past my ankles in a furious stream, making me fight just to keep my balance.

Calypso was transforming before me again, into a tower of water. Her appearance was crystalline and as hard-looking as a frozen block of arctic ice. But her eyes burned with fury as she snarled and hissed at me. Her tentacle hair waved like Medusa’s enchanted snakes about her head.

“You are magnificent,” I said, even in the face of my certain death and knowing that with a mere flick of her wrist she could end me. That was okay with me.

My words only enflamed her rage, and the water rose higher and higher. I’d watched this very thing happen to my Shayera just yesterday. I’d seen her struggle and fight to live. I’d almost been too late.

Unlike Shay, I stayed where I was. I didn’t try to rush off, didn’t beg or plead for my life. I stayed where I was, watching with a strange sort of fascination as the water reached my hips, my chest, my neck, before it was only moments away from engulfing me whole.

Calypso’s mask of death and fury stared at me. Her eyes gleamed like unholy flame.

I was sick to death of hanging on and fighting a battle that seemed all but lost. I didn’t fear death—not my own, anyway. Maybe Shayera was better off without me. I’d killed a man in front of her, ripping out his throat and feeling an impotence of rage burn through me because I’d wanted to do so much more. I’d wanted to rip him limb from limb, to cut off his testicles and penis and toss them to the wolves while he watched and begged and pleaded for mercy that I did not have to give. I wasn’t a good man.

Shayera was good, and she deserved better than me and what I could give her.

I remembered her then, not as the girl she was now, but as the woman in my heart and my dreams. Her soft smiles, her gentle words, and her ability to destroy me with only a few simple words made her the object of my deepest and darkest desires.

Just as the waves of madness licked at my nose, the waters suddenly parted, and I dropped to my knees, gasping, confused by what had just happened.

“You do know,” she whispered, and I was stunned that I could have so easily forgotten that Calypso was trying to kill me. I’d been lost in my memories, reliving a better time.

I’d embraced my death with the zealotry of a sycophant, wanting it, craving it. I shivered, knowing Shayera would have hated me for my weakness, and glanced up. Calypso was a woman again, but once more she was transformed. No more was she alien and foreign, or harsh and cruel. She was simply a woman with dark hair, dark, woebegone eyes, and full pink lips, turned down and quivering as though she fought back her own tears. She was nude, and her skin was a dusky-olive hue, with only her long hair to cover her private bits. She walked toward me, knelt, and placed both her hands on my shoulders.

I jerked away from her touch, causing her to toss her hands up and shake her head slowly.

“I won’t hurt you,” she whispered in a voice so low that only I could have heard it.

It wasn’t the fact that she’d tried to kill me that had made me flinch, it was the knowledge that deep down I still wanted her to. I hated my weakness and despised the shame I felt in knowing how much Shayera still needed a knight to fight for her, an advocate who would always keep her safe, no matter the cost, but that I grew more and more weary of the role.

Calypso’s eyes narrowed as she placed her hands on her knees and cocked her head, reminding me of an animal. “Why have you come to me, Dark Prince? What do you know of this darkness that lances my soul?”

I chuckled, and the sound was low and deep and filled with an endless sea of misery. I could not speak of the pain, because articulating it would reveal the limitless depths of my own. I’d already proven myself weak before her, and I had to regain my power somehow.

Shoving off the ground with legs that felt as unsteady as a newborn colt’s, I stood in my soaked clothes and swiped at my lips with the back of my wrist. “I came to beg a favor that I know you cannot give.”

“Cannot?” There was a growl to her tone.

I chuckled, hearing the hubris of the goddess in that one word. It was an arrogance I understood too well. “Poor choice of words. Will not.”

Her lashes fluttered and a gentle smirk graced her lips. “Tell me anyhow. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

Dusting off my clothes that would never again see the light of day once I returned home, I shook my head. “I wish to reverse a curse placed on a friend of mine by one of your sirens.”

“Oh”—she wagged her fingers—“that.”

I sniffed and shrugged. She sounded oddly disappointed in me, but I couldn’t say I really blamed her. It’d always been a terrible sort of let down for me when an applicant came to me with the same requests day in and day out.

Without asking me who, when, or even where she snapped her fingers, and before me stood a water siren, looking shocked, dazed, and bewildered. She wore lowered brows and pinched lines around her eyes. Then she glanced up and sucked in a sharp breath before dropping to her knees and dipping her head. “Goddess!” she cried in a quivering voice.

I stared down at her brown head of hair, feeling dead and empty and cold inside. Visions of me gouging out her eyes, cutting off her tongue, or even simply reaching my hand into her chest and ripping her heart out assaulted my mind. This was the siren that had cursed my Shayera.

I felt Calypso’s hard stare and I glanced up.

“Well?” she said.

I knew what she was asking. She wanted to know what I wanted her to do with the siren. Do I want to kill her? Torture her? Make her weep, cry, and beg for mercy of the kind she’d not shown my Carrots?  My hands trembled as fire raged through my veins. I did want to hurt her, cruelly and most viciously. I wanted to demand she take away the curse she’d placed on my female.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. I wasn’t in the business of hurting women. It was my line in the sand. It was the one absolute that I’d stuck by even at the pinnacle of my worst. But the hurt was unyielding, punishing, and brutal to bear. My nostrils flared.

“Killing her will not break the curse, Dark Prince,” Calypso said in a husky tone.

The siren cried out, dropping her head to the ground and covering herself with her arms. She didn’t try to bolt, although surrounded by water as we were, she could have attempted it. But there was no outrunning the mother of life. She’d have been a fool to try.

I cut my eyes toward the goddess. “No. She can’t. But you can. You are a goddess, you can—”

She held up her fingers, causing my mouth to snap shut as though squeezed by invisible hands, trapping the words on my tongue. “Everyone suffers in life, Dark One. Or don’t you know this?”

I ground my back teeth together.

“If you are asking me to break a curse, then you must know that a siren’s curse can only be cast if a truly heinous sin has been committed against her. If the curse was cast then your friend perpetuated a crime that demands justice.”

The siren began to sob.

Calypso flicked her wrist and the invisible bonds that’d held my mouth shut were lifted. I took a deep breath that shook with terror. Her powers were immense and awe-inspiring, but I wouldn’t back down. “She is a child.”

She snorted. “And that gives her a pass, does it? Don’t be a fool, Rumpelstiltskin. You care for this child?”

I dipped my head once.

“Growing does not come without pain. The hardest and best lessons learned are the ones that nearly kill us in the learning of it. The child will remain as she is.”

My breaths became forceful and choppy. Even if Ea Seko hadn’t stripped me of so much power, I still wouldn’t have been strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with Calypso, and yet I found myself taking an incremental step toward her.

Her response was to toss her head back and laugh. “You do amuse me, legger. No, I will not strip the curse. But I can perhaps ease your burden even a little.”

Then she snapped her fingers, and the siren’s crying instantly ceased. She wilted to the earth, lifeless and limp, and a puddle of water formed beneath her unmoving form.

It took a second for my mind to process what I’d just witnessed. “You killed her,” I said, softly at first. But the moment I heard myself say it the horror of it consumed me.

I understood then what I’d refused to see when she’d been sobbing before me. Much as I hated to admit it, Shayera had sinned against the siren by attempting to steal her soul orb. Shay hadn’t known what she was doing—she was only a child—and yet it wouldn’t have absolved that most terrible of crimes if she’d managed to pull it off. The harm that would have been done to the siren would have been immeasurable. It seemed understandable that her reaction had been what it had been.

I looked up at Calypso, feeling cold and dead inside. “You killed her.”

She shrugged. “Isn’t that what you wanted? You came here seeking vengeance, and I granted it to you.”

“Not this.”

She scoffed, causing her hair to undulate like tentacles around her slim frame. “Vengeance always comes with a price, Dark Prince. You wanted her dead. I heard your thoughts. I saw the cruel and barbaric images. You should be rejoicing, I made it simple for you.”

“You aren’t who you used to be, Calypso. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

She lifted her hand, looking as though she meant to strike me. A flash of lightning curled menacingly through the dark gray sky. I never flinched or recoiled.

Coming here had been a terrible and grave mistake. I was a killer, and I couldn’t throw stones. But it was one thing to feel something and another to act upon the terrible thoughts.

Deep down I’d known that fate would hound Shayera, and that one way or another she could no more outrun her terrible destiny anymore than we’d been able to outrun the curse. But I’d come anyway.

In the end, I was just as much to blame for what had been done to this siren as Shayera was for what had been done to her.

“Leave my side,” the goddess hissed, “and never return.”

Fat, punishing drops of ice-cold rain pelted my naked face. But I ignored it, staring at her for several long seconds and wanting to say so much more but knowing that ultimately my words would fall on deaf ears.

I walked past her. Genesis rumbled to life at my approach. I didn’t look back as I straddled my bike.

It seemed no matter what I did I screwed up everything I touched.

~*~

Calypso

I STARED AT THE WATER that was once a siren and felt a tugging in the deepest part of my soul.

Walking toward the figure, I whispered, “Animas,” and immediately life flowed back into the water. The siren gasped, sat up, and stared at me with tears still shimmering wetly in her long lashes. Her hands wrapped around her throat and I heard her thoughts as clearly as though they were my own. Why had she been returned to the living? How had she incurred her goddess’s wrath?

“Never curse a child again,” I told her and then gestured toward Seren, telling her without words to leave my side.

“Yes... Yes, my Goddess.”

The siren scrambled to her feet and in seconds had sailed over the cliff’s edge and into the waters we called home.

I stood upon that cliff, feeling alone but contemplative.

The Dark Prince suffered. I’d felt it keenly, through the very marrow of my soul. Clutching at my chest, I stared toward a sky that held no answers for me. It never gave me what I needed.

I wasn’t even sure what it was I needed, other than I felt sometimes as though I’d lost the very best parts of myself and was nothing more than a shell, full of pain, misery, and blackness.

I stood there for what felt an eternity before I began to get the sensation that I was being watched. It was a prickling on the back of my neck that made me turn, and when I did I saw a man, or at least the shadow of one.

He was tall and powerfully built, and he stared at me with electric-blue eyes. I’d never seen that shadow man before, but I recognized him all the same. “You’ve been watching me,” I said.

The shadow said nothing, only continued to stare.

I narrowed my eyes. “Do I know you?”

I didn’t think the shadow would answer, but finally it spoke to me. “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

I gasped, though I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t know how the tears had begun to fall down my cheeks, either. I lifted my hand, wanting to say... Something. Anything.

But from one blink to the next, the shadowman had left and my heart felt fractured and splintered into a thousand tiny slivers of woe.

~*~

LETTER TO SHAY

My greatest fear has been realized today. You have been cursed again, Shayera. And I was too late to save you. What good am I to this world if the one thing that matters most I cannot protect?

I went to see a goddess.

I thought I went to ask her to fix you. To recreate you. Make you anew. But as I stood there with water swirling about my face, inches away from death, I knew why I’d really gone. To have her take the decision out of my hands. To end me. To take away this pain once and for all.

I shouldn’t return for you. I should walk away. Let you live your life.

I should do a great many things, I imagine.

And yet I never seem to keep any of my promises.