Rakshasa Book I, Part #4: Shadowfall (3 page)

“I know,” I said, relaxing my grip slightly and pulling my head back, keeping my face close to his. I kissed his lips, gently, feeling their cool flesh brush over mine. “You’re freezing…”

“Our dreams become colder and it’s harder for us to join,” Ishan said, his hands slowly rubbing up my goosebumps covered back, “whatever’s driving us apart is growing in power. A storm’s coming, and it’s coming for me.”

I shook my head wildly, as though protesting his very words. “No! Nothing can drive us apart, Ishan. No. Nothing.
Nothing
. I won’t let it.”

Ishan turned from me, gesturing out to the frozen wasteland. “Does this look like a happy dream landscape to you?”

I dug my nails into his skin, forcing him to look back at me. “I don’t care,” I said, slowly dragging my hands down his chest. “What’s around us, what’s in our dreams, isn’t important. It’s what we have together, that’s all that matters. That’s all I want. This place can burn to ashes for all I care, all I need is you.”

Ishan’s hands slipped around my middle, holding me tight. “I know,” he said, “and I’m holding on with all my strength. But I’m not sure it’ll be enough.”

“It has to be.” I gripped him so tight I was sure I was hurting him. “It
has
to be. I need you to be with me, Ishan. There’s a piece of me that’s
us
now, and that part is right in the centre of my heart. If you take that piece out, then there’s nothing left but a dead hunk of muscle. I can’t be without you.”

“Stop,” he said, “I can’t bear to think about it anymore.” He leaned forward, bringing his lips to mine, and I kissed him back. Eagerly, needfully, pressing my bare chest to his.

Around us the snow melted in a small circle and we sank, gracefully, into the void until our feet touched the dead, brown ground beneath. As I wiggled my toes against the rotting grass the colour returned to it, flowing back into each stem as though a painter were dragging his brush through it.

“I want to say something,” said Ishan, “but I can’t.” His hand slowly ran up my back, his strong fingers tracing their way up my spine, feeling along my body. The circle of dry ground beneath us slowly expanded, the circumference widening as warmth returned to our bodies.

“Say it,” I said, kissing his cheek, then brushing my own against his. “Say it, I want to hear it.”

“I can’t,” Ishan said again. “It’s too strong. It means too much, and I can’t bear to tell you.”

I shuffled my feet closer, touching my toes to his, dragging my toenails across his soft skin. “I don’t care,” I said, “I
want
to hear you say it.”

“Another place,” he answered, his fingers wandering up to my lower back and rubbing in a small circle, “another time. A better time.”

“People say that they’ll do this and that in the future, or that the time’s not right. But in my experience… the time’s never perfect. You just have to make do with the present, and that’s the funny thing about the present. It’s usually the right time to say whatever’s on your mind.”

I locked eyes with him, staring directly into his bright blue eyes, and painted on his face I saw an expression of sadness and regret. Like a light flicking on in my mind I suddenly knew what he was going to say. The ice below us crept back towards our feet.

“You’re not really coming to Campbelltown, are you?”

Ishan hesitated, then shook his head. “I’m not, no.”

I kept his body to mine, even as the cold began to creep up my ankle, the colour draining from the grass below and the snow returning to cover it as the enormity of what took place slowly began to sink in.

“You lied to me.”

“I needed to,” Ishan said, a thin film of ice slowly creeping up his chest. “I’ve… already been to see Cinder. I went after I began to suspect. He told me everything.”

“
Everything
?” I gave Ishan a rough shake, staring wide eyed at the man I loved, unable to fight the burning, stinging pain in my chest, like a raw wound being scrubbed with a metal wire brush. “Everything about what? Ishan, what did he tell you?”

“He told me about the eclipse. About our bond. About what it all means. Why the shadow falls over everything in our dreams, and why I have to do this.”

“Do what?” I stared at him, unblinkingly, right into his eyes as the snow poured in between us, filling up the cleavage of my breasts and burying me up to my shoulders in icy powder. “What is ‘this’? What have you done?”

His expression was so sad, so happy, so tragic and so joyous I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but the dread in my gut grew ever stronger. The panic, the fear, the doubt filling my body and burning me from the inside. I felt like I’d swallowed acid.

“Aurora… the Champawat tiger will never stop until we’re all dead. His power grows daily, and his strength is too much for us to bear.” The ice began to grow over his face and head, entombing him, and I could feel its frigid carpet creeping over my upper body. “But I’ve discovered a weakness. A vulnerability. I’ve discovered a way to kill him to keep you safe.”

My jaw could barely move and my whole body was numb. Snow flurried in from above, burying us in a white blanket that slowly darkened as the light from the surface grew fainter. The weight of the snow pressed onto my back, making breathing difficult, crushing us together. “What weakness, Ishan?”

But his mumbled whisper was impossible to hear over the growing wall of ice between us, and I only caught the last few words of his sentence.

“I’m sorry, Aurora. I’m so sorry.”

Chapter IV

Numb

I felt a nudge to my shoulder that jolted me awake.

“Hey,” said Asena, “we’re here.”

I stumbled out of the train in a daze, trying to digest what had happened in my dream. Asena put her hand over my shoulder.

“You okay?” she asked. “You seem kind of pale.”

I mutely nodded, looking around the train station platform in bewilderment, suddenly totally lost. I felt as though I was still in a dream, as though the real world was just a muted, dull ghost of its true self. The bustle of people exiting the train and jostling around the platform, the groan of the train as it relaxed itself after its journey, the squealing of small children excited to no longer be confined to a seat. I was indifferent to it all.

We walked a short distance, down some stairs and into a tunnel under the nearby road, and then Asena lead me over to the cab rank. A Lebonese looking man with bronzed skin and a wide, genuine smile opened the door for us and Asena slid into the front. I just stood there, looking at the taxi with its engine running, the white paint gleaming in the sun. I watched her get seated, clipping on her seat belt and engaging the driver in what I presumed to be a discussion about our destination.

And then I vomited all over the front passenger side door.

“Holy shit, Libby!” Asena threw open her puke-splattered door, unbelting herself and jumping out of her seat with speed and agility that would have raised a few eyebrows. I didn’t even think about it and just stared at her as she stood in front of me, eyes wide with shock. “Are you okay?”

“Hey, what the hell did you do to my car, mate?!” came a shout from the driver. “She puked on my door!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Asena, twisting around to see him and fishing in her purse, “Here, here’s a hundred. I’m
so
sorry. She’s just gotten off a train and she’s not well.”

The taxi driver shot me a dark scowl. “Train, sure. Whatever. Listen, tell that alco bitch not to drink so much,” he snarled, then reached over and slammed the door. The hybrid’s engines whined as it took off, tyres squealing as it left us at the taxi rank.

“Libby, hey, just sit down, okay?”

I let her guide me, slumping onto a wooden bench. Asena snapped her fingers in front of my face.

“Oi. Oi! Wake up!”

It’s not that I couldn’t hear her, or see her, it was just that I didn’t care.

Asena leaned in close to me, speaking softly—barely above a whisper. Even my sensitive hearing barely caught it. “Libby, okay, we need to get you somewhere quiet. People are staring. Your skin…”

I looked down at my arm. From my elbow to my fingertips, the pattern of tiger stripes had mysteriously appeared, as though I’d had tattoos put all along my body.

I recognised those signs. Ishan had spontaneously developed similar ones, in the brown and white of the Rewa, on his body when he’d fought the Champawat Tiger in my apartment… and I’d had these orange ones before, in my dreams. Never in real life.

“Hey mate, what happened?” asked a passerby, a portly man covered in sweat and wearing an uncomfortably pervy smile, “is she drunk?”

Asena shook her head, not even looking at the man, crouched in front of me as I stared blankly at her, her eyes locked onto mine.

“If you two need a lift back to my place,” said the large man, “I can arrange that. I’m always happy to help out pretty ladies who’ve had a little too much. They ride for free.”

Normally weirdo guys hitting on me would creep me out, but as it was I was barely listening to what they said. I was staring at my hands, at the growing stain of tiger stripes blooming along them.

Asena rolled her eyes at me, then stood up and faced the stranger. “Thanks,” said Asena, but not in her normal voice; instead it was the booming, deep voice of a man, rich with bass and tainted with testosterone. “We’re on our way to Mardi Gras and I guess we kind of over indulged, honey.” She gave a wide, eager smile. “So pretty ‘girls’ ride for free, huh?”

*****

The next thing I remember was being rather forcefully stuffed into the back seat of a cab. Fortunately I didn’t have to do much thinking on the ride out to Campbelltown’s southern outskirts. I didn’t play along with Asena’s deception and used my normal voice whenever I had to answer a question, but truth be told I wasn’t paying any attention. When we arrived it turned out we were actually riding with an entirely different driver.

Asena paid him and then we stepped out, at the foot of a long dirt driveway leading to a farmhouse surrounded by yellow grass fields and cows.

“Where’d the creepy guy go?” I asked.

Asena stared at me. “Are you serious?” she said, “You get out of the train looking like death warmed up, you puke all over the taxi, you don’t say a single thing to me for twenty minutes, then the first thing you care about is ‘what happened to the creeper’?”

“I guess.”

She frowned at me, her face clouding over, and I saw her fear, her worry and her concern as plain as day. “Libby, what the hell’s
wrong
with you?”

“Don’t call me Libby,” I said, suddenly scowling, “it’s
Aurora
.”

“Fine. Aurora. Sorry. What’s wrong? Travel sick? Cats don’t generally like moving vehicles…”

“I’m not a
cat
. Clinton’s a
cat
.” I felt anger growing within me, a dark feeling rising inexplicably from nowhere. My voice deepened into a throaty growl. “I’m so much more than that.”

Asena took two steps backwards, holding her hands up defensively. “Aurora, listen to me, just calm down, okay? I don’t know what’s gotten into you but it’s freaking me out, so just take a breath and try to think rationally. Why are you angry?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know where this anger came from, it just bubbled up inside my heart like a boiling pot of water.

“It’s…”

I realised what it was and, with an effort, forced my eyes closed. Made myself calm. “It’s Ishan,” I said, “something’s really, really wrong back in Canberra.”

Asena regarded me warily. “You’re sensing this ‘trouble’ through your bond, right?”

“Yeah.”

She grimaced. “Damn. Well, a bond can be a two way link,” she said, “if Ishan’s angry, he might be in trouble. He might need that emotion to win.”

The thought of Ishan fighting someone made my stomach turn. “We need to go back,” I implored, “we have to help him.”

“We’re
right here
,” Asena said, pointing down the dusty road to the small farmhouse, “it’ll take us hours to get back, we might as well—”

“We
have
to go back,” I said, “he’s in trouble. Big trouble. I can
feel
it.”

Asena nodded understandingly. “And we will go back, but we can’t now, a train will take hours.”

“We’ll drive then,” I said, “I can drive manual or automatic, no worries. We’ll just speed back, I don’t care—”

“Aurora, we don’t even have a car.”

“We’ll steal one. We can break a human in half before they even know what’s happening. We’ll head to the highway. You jump in front of the next car and when it stops, I’ll tear the driver apart.”

Asena’s horrified reaction pulled me back to reality for a moment. I suddenly felt a wave of terrible guilt. That anger wasn’t me; it was pushed into my mind through the link with Ishan. Whatever he was going through, whatever he was feeling, were strong emotions.

“If you want to get back to Canberra,” Asena said, “I promise you, I
promise
you on my blood, that I know a way to get back there faster than any car, and
without
committing murder and sparking a federal manhunt. It’s risky, but I promise you, we’ll try it.”