The Cloud of Darkness (The Ingenairii Series Book 11) (12 page)

Alec looked at the eager expression on her face, then shook his head, and focused his attention inward, as he began the process of using his ingenaire energy to recast his body.  He felt his skin alter, and his legs shorten, as well as the unpleasant moment of his internal organs jostling into new positions relative to one another.

And then the transformation was done.

“You are an attractive lacerta male,” Kecil said appraisingly, as she slowly circled him, examining him critically, then coming to a stop in front of him.  Her hands reached up, and gently stroked his cheeks, then slipped across the lipless mouth and held him motionless as she slowly rose on her toes and placed her own human lips upon his mouth for a lingering moment.

“I apologize for being so forward,” she said in a husky voice a moment later as she stepped back from him.

Alec began the immediate transformation of his body back to his human form.

“I am not offended,” he told her with a smile.  “But I am slightly tired again after using my energy a bit.  Let’s just go to dinner, shall we?” he suggested.

Alec made a mental note to not appear before Kecil as a lacerta again.

They left the third floor, and exchanged smiles with their hostesses as they exited the building.

“A long time ago,” Alec remembered, “there were some very fine restaurants near the palace.  It’s a bit of a walk from here, but let’s go and have a nice meal.  I think you’ll enjoy the human food they have,” he promised.  They walked down a wide boulevard as the sun began to set in the west, but Alec abruptly stopped at a corner, and stared at a building.

“Is the food service near here?” Kecil asked.

“No,” Alec said.  “I was just remembering a battle I fought here,” he brushed the question aside, as he looked at the building that had once been the command center of the rebels who had fought against Caitlen.  He had led a force of loyal forces that had stormed the command center and wrought havoc among the leaders of the rebel forces in the capital city.

He had exerted his abilities to the fullest, using his Warrior powers and his Traveler powers to achieve success, but at the end of the exhausting foray, when he had been ready to pass out from the effort he’d exerted, he’d been criticized and belittled by the xenophobic leaders of Caitlen’s army.

Alec shook his head.  “The palace is further west, and the restaurants should be near there,” he finally spoke up.  Perhaps the journey to the heart of the city, the city where he had lived and ruled with his wife the empress for so long, was not a good idea, he thought to himself as they resumed walking.  There might be more memories ready to come back to life, even though the battles in the city had been fought three centuries earlier, and Caitlen’s reign had ended well more than two hundred years earlier.

“That must be the palace,” Kecil said minutes later as they walked with the crowd in the mild early evening air.  Alec nodded silently in agreement, recognizing that even though there were many obvious changes, he still recognized the building structure.

There was no point in pretending it wasn’t a part of his past, he decided. 

“See that tower?” he pointed towards the left.  “That’s where the empress used to appear to the crowds to announce the start of the spring loving, the big celebration that the whole city embraced.”

“And that statute,” he walked her over to a statute of a man placing his hands on an elderly man.  “That’s me, a long time ago, healing a citizen.  I used to do it regularly, just like I’m going to do it from the mission for a few days,” he explained.

“It does look like you,” Kecil marveled, as she studied the cast bronze, “as far as I can tell one human’s features from another’s.”

“I fought against demons, and I fought against Hellmann, and I healed the people of the city – plus I was married to the empress,” Alec recollected his long-ago life fondly, “so they decided I was worth a statute.”

“That fellow put up a pretty good fountain,” a passerby interjected as he walked past the pair at the statute.

“What does he mean?” Kecil asked.

“I forgot about that,” Alec mused.  “I was in a battle here in the city, and when I absorbed the power of my opponents, it created an explosion, that created a fountain of water.

“I haven’t thought of Abelard and Isial in centuries,” he spoke to himself more than to Kecil, recollecting the first two of the Ajacii he had encountered.

“We can go see the fountain after dinner,” he told Kecil, ready to move past the topic.  “The water is good.

“Now, let’s go to the restaurant,” he tugged her hand and they resumed motion.

They found a number of eating establishments, and selected the one that had the spiciest aromas.  They sat at a table, and Kecil reveled in the delicious foods, while Alec carefully sampled and ate from a variety of dishes, then handed those he didn’t enjoy across the table to his companion.

He studied her silently as he chewed on his dinner.  He didn’t want to become attached to the girl.  The memory of Andi still permeated his soul, and he felt the emptiness of Andi’s voice not commenting on his thoughts.  He had been so tied to Andi that any other relationship would feel shallow by comparison.  And this girl was so young, she would not be able to appreciate many of the observations he made about the actions of others.

He was alone.  There was no one else who was a virtual immortal.

There was no one else who could share the memories of any of the formative eras of his life; there were no others who he could talk to about Bethany and Cassie and Appel and Kinsey.  No one left who had experienced the war between the Dominion and Michian.  There were no people in the Avonellene Empire who remembered the turmoil of the great rebellion against Caitlen.   There were perhaps some lokasennii he had met, but it was impossible to imagine that Ailse might still be grandasteur.  But, he reflected with suddenly rising excitement, there was still Hope, the grandasteusse he had traveled with across the caravan road.

Hope was quite likely to be alive, either still in Woven possibly, or back in Warm Springs among the lokasennii.  He would have every probability in the world of seeing the girl, the girl who would be a mature lokasennii woman more than a century and a half after the last time he had seen her.

It would be a relief to see a friend alive.  He thought of Caitlen, the wife he had done so much for in the beginning, to help her win and keep her throne.  She had wanted so desperately to be a good ruler, and she had been one – determinedly – throughout her reign.  Jeswyne had been a good ruler as well, but only because she had felt it was her obligation to her family name, and the legacy she felt upon her shoulders.  While Bethany had been a great ruler as well, holding the Dominion together through a generation of war – and she had done it for him, in his absence – an obligation he had thrust upon her.  They all had meant so much to him; they had helped him define himself as a person and a man, beyond the greater definitions that John Mark and God had thrust upon him.  But all those women had lived their lives and affected him, and then they had passed to the other side.

“You’re so quiet,” Kecil spoke up, interrupting the gloomy introspection that he had sunk into.  She reached across the table, and wrapped her hand around his.  “What are you thinking?”

Without meaning to, Alec let his emotions and his memories flow with his Spiritual powers, and they delivered to Kecil his sense of loss and loneliness.

He saw her face grow blank then tears began to drop down her cheeks.

“How can you stand to carry those feelings around?” she asked.

Alec removed his hand from hers.  “I’m sorry,” he told her.  “I didn’t intend to do that to you.”

“I thought I had troubles,” Kecil said.  “But your heart is so bruised.”

“I’m just feeling sorry for myself at the moment,” Alec replied.  “There is a great deal of love and happiness inside me.  I can live forever on the happiness I’ve already found in life.”

Before either of them could say anything further, there was a sudden shout, and then a scream at a location in the rear of the restaurant, several rows behind Alec.

He saw Kecil’s eyes shift from his face to the scene beyond, and then he turned and saw for himself that a pair of armed men were confronting a couple sitting at a table.  Alec thought for a moment about the time when he had been in a restaurant with Caitlen, while they had been on the run together, in Valeriane, and thieves had attempted to rob the entire restaurant.  He had tried to fight them all, and suffered as a result.

Alec stood up, and one of the armed men looked at him.  “You sit down and stay out of this,” he warned.

“Alec, don’t do anything dangerous,” he heard Kecil warn from his own table.

“I’ve learned a few things over the years,” he answered.  “This won’t be dangerous for me,” he assured her.

“What is going on here?” he spoke to the tense situation at the table, as he began to walk towards it.

“I told you to stay out of this!” one of the bandits said in a snarling tone.

“You’d be better off leaving these people alone,” Alec said calmly.

The second bandit suddenly pulled his knife from his belt and hurled it at Alec, who calmly caught it in the air, his Warrior abilities engaged.

The room grew momentarily silent in response to the unexpected action.

“Leave them alone, and leave,” Alec repeated.

“She’s my wife!” the first bandit replied.

Alec looked at the man, unshaven, bleary-eyed and muscular, then looked at the woman, who along with her dinner companion was sleek and elegant.

“Is that true, my lady?” Alec asked.

“No, I never asked him,” the woman said in a low voice.

Alec switched from Warrior energy to Spiritual energy, to better detect the flow of emotions in the seemingly tangled affair.

“What is the truth of the matter?” Alec asked the woman.

She was embarrassed, he could feel.  She broadcast the emotion strongly, while the muscular man was outraged, honestly outraged, and the woman’s companion was simply indignant.

“I’ve never seen him before,” she answered.  It was a lie Alec could tell, and he held up his hand to forestall the protest that was on the lips of her seemingly spurned former lover.

“I would ask for you to tell me the truth, or I will walk away from this and let actions run their course,” he chided the woman.

“It is the truth!” she cried, trying to hold to her falsehood.

Alec lowered the captive knife he still held, then tossed it gently back to the man who had hurled it at him.  “I am done here,” he said, as the surprised man caught the weapon.

“No! Wait!” the woman spoke in terror, recognizing that her best hope for protection was about to walk away.

“We were a couple,” she admitted, once again barely audible.  “But I never asked him to marry me,” she insisted.

“She might as well have,” the spurned lover spoke passionately.  “We lived together, loved together,” he pled his case, looking from the woman to Alec.  He was sincere, and despite the violence of his method in approaching the woman with the restaurant confrontation, Alec instinctively felt sympathy for him.

“I have moved on,” the woman said simply, no longer trying to deny the past relationship.

“You should leave,” Alec told the man who had started the confrontation.   “This is no way to win back her love.”

“Thank you, sir,” the woman’s companion at the table spoke for the first time, a man who appeared to be older than either the woman or her former companion.

“You would be wise to leave as well,” Alec spoke directly to him.  “She does not love you.  I expect she’ll leave you for someone else at the time she chooses, just as she left him,” Alec warned.

“That is not true!” the woman gasped.

“I expect it is,” Alec mildly rebutted.  “But I’m not going to worry about it; this man has been warned.

“Now, will you please leave?” he addressed the assailant again.

“Not unless you think you can make me,” the man replied, as Alec felt his emotions shift across a spectrum of frustration, resignation, and combativeness.

“I can make you, but I’d prefer you go peacefully,” Alec tried to reason with him.

“I’ll go when I want to go,” stubbornness set in, though there was no longer any inclination towards violence, Alec was pleased to note.  He decided to switch to the use of Air energies, and created a layer of air that lifted the two men’s feet off the floor, as they gasped aloud and shouted.  Alec stepped over and gently pushed each, sending them floating towards the door, until they each grabbed ahold of nearby tables, making others shriek.

Alec used his powers to raise the men towards the ceiling, then set them in further motion, floating to the doorway and out into the street, where he gently deposited them as he followed them out through the rising babble of the astonished diners inside the restaurant.

“You’re not a bad person,” Alec told the foiled assailant as the two men’s feet touched the ground once again.

“You’re using magical powers!  That’s forbidden in the Avonellene Empire!” the woman who he had started to assist had followed him out into the street and accused him shrilly.