The Paradise Gate

Ch.7 No More Yielding

Lycinder wandered the darkened halls of the quiet house, alone with his thoughts for the first time since he'd crossed the veil. He looked down at his hands, flexed his fists, and extended and retracted his claws; it was good to be flesh again. The opportunity to cross, that music, it had come so quickly and unexpectedly that he hadn't given it even a moment's thought. He hadn't needed to.

He feared nothing on this side of the aethral veil, so he'd given little consideration to the deal he'd just struck with his new mistress. In the end, it mattered not who she was, what had happened to her, or what her petty human desires might be; he would use this opportunity to reacclimate himself to the world and then sweep in like a hurricane, snap a few necks, and claim her soul in a blink.

What he would do with his prize, however, was another matter.

Arched brows furrowed in thought, Lycinder glided soundlessly down the hall to find a door to the back garden. He blended into the shadows and then became one, himself. Sliding up a drainpipe, he made his way back to the little hidden egress window Dalli had showed him earlier, and slipped inside his lady's workshop.

A pair of wide, amethyst eyes glowed from the shifting black mass of shadow that was only identifiable when it crossed the beams of moonlight describing window panes on the hardwood floor.

He returned to his body and examined Dalli's scribbled notes, trying to make sense of the equations. There were ways to call the various creatures of the Aethral Realms, but what Dalli had done was different...

Lycinder grimaced, annoyed that he couldn't find anything in her notes to give him any clues. What he could read of them, anyway: it wasn't that the mathematics were beyond him, but her handwriting was simply awful. It began legibly, but quickly deteriorated into scribbles like she couldn't get the characters down fast enough.

Irritating though it was to puzzle out, this brought a smile to his face as he shook his head at her cramped, spidery scratchings. He couldn't have said why.

Lycinder moved on to the mess of instruments and equipment on the long library tables that looked like the aftermath of an earthquake in a mad scientist's laboratory. He picked up jars and vials of liquid, holding them to the light and removing their stoppers to sniff their contents, but nothing struck him as unusual.

He wondered what Dalli had done with the little vial he'd seen her replace into her handbasket when they left the tower. Yes, perhaps the most efficient way to figure out exactly how she'd summoned him would be to get his hands on that basket...

Suddenly, a spike of cold, unadulterated terror gripped him so strongly that he nearly dropped the vial in his hand.

He couldn't breathe!

Shaking hands managed to get the vial back to the tabletop without cracking it, but the fear only built higher and higher. A cold sweat broke across his brow and his stomach roiled like it wanted to escape his body. Wide-eyed, throat-closing panic had Lycinder utterly paralyzed.

That is, until he remembered that he didn't need to breathe. And that he didn't get cold sweats or nausea, either; his body wouldn't do anything he didn't order it to do. Order. Now it became clear to him: Dalli was in danger. He was feeling her panic through the piece of him that was now a part of her.

Why hadn't she called him? No matter, this was half the purpose of their bond; if she couldn't call for him, her soul would.

Listening to the part of himself that she held, he used it to narrow in on her location and, quicker than thought, he was incorporeal and slipping two stories below.