I am trying to follow his words, but am lost in the images he sends me...white stone cities rising and crumbling to dust, chanting seers in caves high in the mountains, the strange, water-like Elaerian with giant glowing eyes and beautiful laughing faces.
We believe a third Displacement is coming, he sends.
Red starbursts color my light veins, changing them to a deeper scarlet. The diner starts to shimmer like smoke, then fade...
...When fingers abruptly clasp my light wrist.
He enfolds my body with his, and in no time at all, he is all I feel. The diner reemerges, the blobs of human light, the plastic cat crouching by the cash register on the counter.
Even after it all comes back, he doesn’t let go of me.
What happened? he asks.
You’re kidding, right? How would I know?
Emotions change your frequency. He is upset, which startles me. You must be calm when you are in the Barrier, Esteemed Bridge! Calm!
I’m sorry, I say, more out of confusion than knowing why.
Do not be sorry...do as I say!
His fear still sparks through my light body. I send calm to him, somehow...I can tell it startles him, but it affects him, too, enough that he lets me in. Eventually, I feel his light growing still once more. I can feel him controlling it again, however he controlled such things.
Dangerous how? I ask him then.
He sighs, but he still doesn’t pull away from me.
The Rooks are looking for you, he tells me. They would send many seers after us. More than I could handle.
So they really want me dead? These Rooks?
He hesitates. Yes. He pauses. ...Or with them.
With them? I think about this, remembering Terian’s words. And that would be bad?
We should not talk about this here, Allie.
I look around the diner, then ask anyway. So what is a Rook exactly? Just a renegade seer? Not one of the Seven? Or do they hunt humans?
He looks at me, his light once more a pale blue.
They are the enemy, he sends simply.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
6
TERIAN
The corpse of a man who died in his early twenties lay with artistic precision on a stainless steel table.
Clear tubes protruded from his throat, from veins in his arms, legs, his stomach. He was additionally fitted with several color-coded sets of electrodes that dotted patches of his bare skin, a computerized headband and the more conventional saline I.V. The organic-looking headband with its soft, skin-like texture blinked rhythmically, the only light not coming from one of the four monitors that dominated the walls of the bone-white room.
A technician adjusted settings on a rolling console beside the steel table, utilizing a standard interface and keyboard that projected data and findings to one of those thin screens that covered a portion of the organic-coated wall. Fluid coursing through the clear tubes disappeared into the same wall, changing color subtly soon after each adjustment the technician made. Temple electrodes on the corpse’s head flashed a dark blue once the fluid stabilized, signaling that another piece of the organic end of the transfer had been completed.
Fogged pupils stared blindly at the ceiling, irises and whites the same milky gray. As the tubes carried the genetic virus to their host, the eyes changed to an opaque yellow, the color of daffodils...or strong urine, the technician thought.
Over time, that yellow began to brighten.
The skin looked different as well, not flushing with life exactly, not yet, but somehow less...dead. That much took twelve hours.
It would have taken longer, but the body had been prepped well in advance.
Day one came and went. The technician’s boss came to the room, several hours past the first signs of change. An older woman, she checked the readouts on the monitor, made more and infinitely more subtle adjustments before nodding a stiff approval to the junior tech, who watched her every move in undisguised tension.
“Now,” the woman doctor said. She had the barest hint of a German accent. “Now, we wait.”
Terian lay entirely still.
His new body’s only hint at motion lived in an elusive attempt to focus his eyes.
New eyes...to him at least...they looked out from the foreign planes of an unfamiliar face. His face, although he hadn’t gotten a good look at it, yet. Terian gazed up at a flat, dead ceiling, wishing he’d thought to have them enhance the view. Bone-colored, white with just the barest depth of yellow, the dull shimmers of the organics weren’t enough to distract him.
He would have them put a fifth monitor there, for next time.
The basics of his probable situation filtered into his awareness.
A period of adjustment always awaited him on the other side; he should be used to it by now, but the very nature of the change made familiarity with its workings impossible, at least in those first, virginal moments. To ease his confusion, Terian had imparted a program into the transfer process itself that reminded him of the fact of his death and rebirth, even before bringing him fully awake. The disorientation would not desist entirely until that process was complete, however—which, despite its temporal insignificance, took no small amount of time to Terian’s subjective mind.