Blue Abyss: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 3 (The Timewalker Chronicles) (2 page)

He’d refused to help her hunt innocents, until she’d stuck a piece of her evil inside him so she could keep track of him. Hunt him. Drive him insane from the inside out…then he’d had no choice.

“Lucky bastard.” Gerrick grinned. The stubborn fool must be losing his mind. And yet, there was no need to argue, no need to admit to Gerrick how quickly Raiden would follow him into the eternal night. They’d fought side by side for more than fifty years, since the death of Raiden’s father and his great nephew had assumed the throne. Raiden had never trusted another living soul more. He owed the man whatever vow he could give.

“I give you my word, brother. I’ll protect it with my life.” However pitifully short a time that may be.

Raiden helped Gerrick to lift his hand and clasped his friend’s forearm just like he’d done thousands of times before. There was nothing left to say. Raiden simply waited. A handful of minutes passed in silent understanding before Gerrick quietly joined the ranks of loyal men, friends all, who had come to this primitive planet to die at a traitor’s hand.

Raiden dropped his chin to his chest, but refused the tears that burned behind his eyelids. He’d spent the last hour in hell, watching his men fall, one by one, while the bastard, Ryu, and his Triscani allies destroyed his ship and forced him to crash in water, his beautiful ship a casualty of Earth’s most infamous salt-water graveyard, swallowed whole by the blue abyss of the Atlantic’s legendary Bermuda Triangle.

But not before Ryu took the only escape pod to freedom, leaving Raiden to die like a dog deep below the water’s surface.

There was no one left alive to witness his pain, or his heart-rending failure. Even Gerrick was dead now. Just like the others. No healing unit could stop Triscani poison. He’d have to pray his Immortal blood was strong enough to overcome the poison, or for the miracle of a living healer. All but a handful of royal healers had disappeared when he’d been just a boy, gone after the Crux just like the rest of them. Everyone, just gone.

Raiden knew he wouldn’t last much longer like this. A day. Perhaps two. Then all of his sacrifices would be for naught. His men. His home. His ship.

Treason twisted his insides, gnawed at his heart with hundreds of tiny teeth. The betrayer would pay, in this life or the next. And his demon-spawned twin brother had escaped, was at this very moment free to return to their home world, to walk freely and sit at table with the current generation of Raiden’s family, who were all blissfully unaware of his brother’s evil duplicity. Hell, the bastard would go home and assume Raiden’s identity. They were identical, truly identical. No one, not even their own father, gods rest his soul, had been able to tell them apart.

Raiden had agreed to the Queen’s mission for reasons of his own. He’d come to Earth to find the Dark One, the Darkwalker Lord, a secretive being known on Itara as the Guardian of the Gates. The Dark One kept a lock on the Triscani hordes, on the Itaran’s most insidious secret…their own forbidden sons. He was the only hope Raiden had of ridding himself of the darkness he carried, of restoring his own besieged soul.

He hoped the Dark One could get the Queen bitch’s Remnant out of his system as well. If not, he’d have no choice but to ask the other male to end him when the time came. With her evil lurking inside him, he was too dangerous, too unstable to walk freely. She’d turned him into a ticking time bomb. And she didn’t even know about his other problem, his mother’s blood. Or perhaps she did know and that was why he and his brother had both been summoned and chosen for this mission in the first place. Perhaps the bitch was his great-great grandmother.

God, he hated all the Immortals. Hated the fact that, with his half-breed blood, he’d never be anything more than a pawn in their games. Hated that his mother had abandoned her twin sons within hours of their births. Hated the evil that crouched inside him like a dragon roaring and battling for freedom every moment of every day since he’d made his first ash kill.

He’d sucked the Tricani dry completely by accident. The power had risen under his flesh, felt like every individual blood cell in his body had suddenly exploded. The moment that Triscani Hunter had touched him, the power had flared to life. After that, who lived and who died had been a matter of will.

And Raiden had always been stubborn. The Hunter hadn’t stood a chance. Within moments, the powerful Hunter was nothing more than a pile of ash, and the Triscani Hunter’s evil soul had flowed into Raiden as naturally as breath, and stayed, cursing Raiden with both his power and his evil. He’d been the first, but not the last.

That was the day he’d realized what Immortal bloodline he carried, the full nature of his power, and the full extent of his problem. He was doomed. A forbidden son. He was destined to join the ranks of the Triscani scourge he’d spent a century battling.

He’d often wondered why their mother hadn’t just killed them. He and his brother were half-bloods, not full Immortal sons. She could have killed them both and no Immortal would have raised an eyebrow on their home world. He and his brother were abominations. Perhaps she’d hoped their father’s human blood, his human compassion, would be enough to save her boys.

She’d been wrong.

Raiden rose on shaky legs and stumbled to his quarters. Exhausted by the short trek, his legs collapsed and he sank onto his bunk. He no longer felt the need to hold his shoulders straight or have all the answers. Now he only had one question. Why? Why had his own brother doomed them all?

Raiden grabbed an overturned crystal goblet from the floor and hurled it against the far wall. The act tore open the knife wound in his shoulder. The splintering crystal was his world, nothing but tiny pieces and worthless shards that had once been brilliant with purpose. Fresh blood trickled down his back, what was left of his lifeblood weakly following the flow of its earlier river. Mortality loomed. He’d bled too much from his brother’s attack. Despite his mother’s bloodline, between the poison and his wounds…he might actually die down here.

Worse, he’d fail. He’d lose his soul forever, devoured by the evil lurking within him. He’d made his blood oath to the Queen and accepted her Remnant soul in the hopes that he’d find the Dark One while on Earth. Only the Darkwalker Lord could remove the Triscani’s parasitic stain from his soul. He hoped the male would provide him with a soul stone so that the evil spirits crouching inside him might be withdrawn and trapped.

Now both his brother’s attack on his ship and Gerrick’s secret mission had derailed his plans. Gerrick believed the Lost King was on Earth. If there was the smallest sliver of hope that the Lost King was here, Raiden couldn’t stop looking.

The Marked mates were already gone from Itara. The Timewalkers and Darkwalkers with them. Vanished. Raiden wouldn’t allow two civilizations to completely perish. Gerrick had given him another job to do. But this task wasn’t for duty or for his homeworld. It wasn’t for that bitch Queen. This was for Gerrick. He’d made a deathbed promise, a vow of honor, to the one true friend he’d ever had.

Death wasn’t an option.

He had a plan, a terrible, desperate plan.

Stasis. The ship’s energy cells had been damaged by Ryu’s explosives. They were failing. The ship would shut down completely in a few days’ time and he had no way to get out. He was too deep underwater to swim for the surface and he could float for days, hundreds of kilometers from land, bleeding and weak. Shark food.

He would shut down everything but the emergency beacon and one stasis capsule. He calculated that would buy him two Earth years on life support, give or take a few days.

His family would come looking for him. Someone from Itara would come looking for him. Someone would find him.

Surely, someone would find him.

He didn’t have a choice. If they didn’t find him alive? Well, they’d find him eventually, and he intended to make damn sure the traitor would be held accountable. Even dead, he would make his brother pay.

With his still functioning right arm, he lifted the data crystal off his bed. The tiny crystal contained his identification, ship logs, and mission information, including the name the Dark One used on Earth. Thank the gods some unknown instinct had kept him from divulging that name to his evil twin. This copy of the ship’s data log documented the battle, his crash, the deaths of his men, and all of Ryu’s machinations for his people to see. Proof. Even if he didn’t make it, once his family retrieved the data, justice would be served and his men would be avenged. Raiden’s human king could seek the Queen’s justice, death by Angel’s Fire. His great nephew was not Immortal, but the human king on Itara held much political power. The Itarans, the true Immortals, numbered fewer than ten thousand. The human population neared a billion.

If his king demanded justice, he would get it. The Queen would not want to deal with human riots or a war on her home world, not when the death of a single, half-blood traitor would stop it.

Despite the bone-grinding pain of his left shoulder wound, he winced as the microbots that held the crystal together burrowed under the skin just behind his ear. They found his skull and attached themselves to the bone with microscopic drill hooks. No one was getting that data crystal off him without the proper codes, even if they removed his head. The bots could function for centuries, first off his body heat, then by breaking down his tissue. Decomposition would supply them with all the power they’d need.

Done. He hid Gerrick’s precious soul stone in his quarters and then used the walls for support as he forced his legs to carry him to the stasis chamber. He’d thrown everything he had at the Triscani ship that attacked them in Earth’s low orbit, but the scaly bastards had taken them by surprise. He’d lost the battle and run the ship out of power during the fight. He had to shut everything down. Everything.

He passed the healer’s room and swore an oath to avenge his men…even if he had to come back as a phantom to see it done.

Raiden gritted his teeth and swallowed the rage and pain threatening to choke him. Emotion was a luxury he couldn’t afford right now. When Ryu was dead, when the Triscani sabotaging this planet were all dead, when he’d kept his promise to Gerrick and delivered the stone to the Dark One, then he would grieve. Until then, his friends would be the fire in his gut that kept him moving, that kept him alive, that kept him fighting.

The empty bed in the stasis chamber looked cold, hard, and uninviting, but Raiden lay down with nothing but hope and his precious knives for company. He ordered the ship to shut down all systems but two, this chamber and the beacon. Someone would find him. They had to. He couldn’t afford to think otherwise.

Yes, they’d find him. Then he’d be freed. He’d heal. He’d keep his vow to Gerrick, and he’d hunt the bastard betrayers down one by one.

The clear cover lowered and sealed him inside with a popping noise. The beat of his heart slowed to a barely perceptible rhythm. Thoughts became like slow-moving slugs in his mind and cold numbness flooded his system. The injection ports tunneled beneath his collar bone to pump necessary chemicals and nutrients into his body as he slept, their normally sharp bite no more than a mild nuisance to his senses. The lights in the room outside his chamber flickered off. Raiden lay in complete darkness, fighting the pull of oblivion, knowing this might be his final moment, his final decision.

Two Earthen years.

Someone would find him…or he’d die.

So be it.

Chapter One

Present Day.

Challenger Bank, Northern Tip of the Bermuda Triangle, fifty meters below the water’s surface…

Something urged her on, called to her…something she couldn’t explain and had given up fighting. Lust? Love? A dark dream? A two-year double date with bat-shit crazy and stone-cold obsession?

Did it matter anymore, what she called him? She didn’t know his name. Might never know his name.

Marina Lucia Jean-Mennette squinted through the dive mask to check her gauges. Fifty-one meters deep, plenty of oxygen. Diluent tank full. Computer working perfectly. Scrubber working. Gas mix perfect. Backup, open circuit tank checked, full, and strapped to her side in case she needed it…in case anyone needed it. She had plenty of time to explore. And she would use every minute of air she could scrape together because she’d finally tracked him down…

He
was down here, somewhere, the lost warrior that haunted her dreams. He was down here with the monsters, and she had to find him.

Mari swam the distance to the cave wall in seconds and reached out with her gloved fingertips to trace the outline of a symbol she’d seen a hundred times.

Madre de Dios
. Her mother’s favorite saying hummed through her head over and over until she’d swear she could actually hear her mother’s panicked voice. She’d found this place. Finally. Her dreams come to life. Heart racing, her stomach threatened to heave-ho the protein bar and yogurt she’d had for breakfast.

She waved off her dive partner, just a few feet behind her in the prior cave. He hadn’t turned the corner yet, hadn’t seen the man-made walls of this cave, or the strange markings etched into the smooth limestone.

Warned off, he waited, asking her with his fingers if she was okay.

She gave the okay signal, and held up her hand for him to stay outside the cave. Lucky for her, he didn’t argue this time. He’d give her five minutes, maybe ten, before he tied off his extra tanks and came looking for her. Problem with these older military guys was what she called the Hero Complex.