“You don’t remember your own face.” She breathed, shock flooding her.
“No.” Hunter’s response was soft, his gaze bereft. “I could try to blame Nadia’s god for that curse, but the truth is that I cursed myself. I have been so many people over the millennia that at some point, I could not exactly recall my own face, or the details of my body. After a time, it became simply easier to be a persona, rather than trying to be myself and failing.”
Layla couldn’t imagine anything more horrible. To lose one’s identity so completely; to never be able to come back from the masquerades. Something inside her screamed, feeling that pain. Feeling the madness and sorrow of losing oneself so utterly. “My god. Has no one ever been able to help you recall your own true image?”
“No.” Hunter spoke softly, the saddest smile Layla had ever seen upon his lips.
“How will your lost lover know you, even if you’re able to resurrect him?”
“I don’t know.” He breathed. “Perhaps my only hope is that my soul is not as far gone as my body or my heart, and that Nimir will still recognize the essence of me.”
Layla’s heart screamed. Deep within, her Dragon roiled with a tortured surge of coils. Not because she was furious now, but because she was feeling Hunter’s pain. Adrian’s face flashed in Layla’s mind, then Dusk’s. Layered upon them, she suddenly saw the caramel-tan faces of Hunter’s beloveds, Nadia and Nimir. She heard how sexily Nimir chuckled just like Dusk, ribald with joy. She saw how Nadia’s eyes flashed gold like Adrian’s when pissed or impassioned. She felt Nimir’s hard muscles beneath her hands, how cut they were like Dusk. She touched Nadia’s body and it was like touching Adrian’s honed musculature, fight-hardened and intense with energy.
They were hers in that moment, as she felt them, touched them. Layla felt them torn from her; she felt their Binds ripped apart by murder and heartbreak. Looking down, she saw blood on her hands – Nadia’s blood, and Nimir’s.
Adrian’s blood, and Dusk’s.
A black hole devoured her and Layla gasped, staggering backwards with a cry, one hand gripping her heart and the other covering that endless hole in her center. But it was as if her hands were still covered in blood, the center of her life torn out and replaced by darkness as she staggered to the bower’s wall.
Through Layla’s merged memories, she saw herself – tall and lean, caramel-skinned and incredible, honed from a life of fighting out in the desert. Masculine and beautiful, she was a god among lesser creatures, even though her body was rent and torn from fighting, her hands stained with blood. It was Hunter’s body she was seeing; Hunter’s original form as he gasped from his fight with Nadia, holding his bloody hands over his rent middle as he gave up. Layla’s hand slapped to the massive ruby in the bower wall to steady herself, and she saw her caramel-skinned hand leave a smear of blood; blood that wasn’t actually there but was.
Blood from Hunter, blood from Nadia – and blood from Nimir.
She heard Hunter cry out. Layla’s head whipped up as she gasped, seeing him doubled over, gripping his chest and middle just like she was; staring at her with wide eyes. “What did you do?!” He rasped, gasping.
“I didn’t do anything!” Layla coughed, feeling a terrible void eating out her middle; Hunter’s cavernous darkness resonating from her sudden understanding of his pain.
“You showed me my body!” He rasped, staggering towards her as if everything inside him hurt. His eyes blazed a pure green now, and deep in their center Layla saw his irises suddenly swirl with gold. “How did you show me my body?!”
“I don’t know!”
Shuddering with Hunter’s pain, Layla staggered to a defensive posture in front of the ruby. Holding one shaking hand to its faceted surface, she raised the other up before her, tightening her fingers. But she couldn’t make fire. A humming vibration passed through Layla as her Dragon roiled inside her, coiling in agony, distracted. Something was happening between her and Hunter, some kind of unstable resonance.
Something that made Layla’s own fighting powers unavailable.
Still holding a hand to his abdomen as if she’d raked his guts out, Hunter began to vibrate hard like Layla. Like he had a palsy, he began to shake with it, his knees buckling as he crashed to the stone floor of the bower. All of a sudden, his body began to shift, furiously. A mirage roiled through him in disastrous surges of light and darkness, flooding him. Hunter screamed, gripping his fingers hard into his flesh, tearing Tempeste’s navy suit, and Layla saw his face morph through ten, twenty, thirty different people as his body did also. He was screaming in waves now as he changed and changed again, still shuddering like the resonance between himself and Layla was going to rip him apart.
And though Layla shuddered with something close to a seizure now, she managed to keep a hand on the ruby as Hunter’s voice began to roar. Resonating with impossible overtones and bass notes, she saw him coil in upon himself – and heave outwards into a massive body of black and gold scales.
Layla shrank back as much as her shuddering would allow, against the wall in a crouch. She gasped, wide-eyed with horror as Hunter became enormous inside his whirl of heat-mirage. Surging up on powerful forelimbs, he heaved into the heights of the dome with a thundering roar, smashing his enormous head of gold and black corkscrewing horns into the dome’s wall. Black talons bigger than Layla’s thigh punched into the floor, gouging up stone, flinging chips everywhere. Muscled coils as tall as Layla and forelegs like an armored tank heaved furniture aside as the enormous black Dragon slammed into the walls of the dome.
Slammed its head into the dome over and over – as if it had gone insane.
The bower’s walls cracked with thunderous retorts. Sticks and silk, CD’s and glass crashed down around Layla in a torrent. She cried out as a shark skeleton was liberated from the dome, careening down – and by a fast movement of her hands, Layla thrust a barrier of wind up, sending the bones careening through the shattering walls instead.
A hard churning of bird-wings came from outside as the enormous black Dragon heaved his blocky skull against the wall again, blasting one side of the dome out into the sea below. As the wall was blasted away, King Arini alighted through the gap with wings wide – his feathers ruffled up into a serrated prickle, his golden eyes blazing like a raptor of death as he drew himself up tall like a battle-commander.
“Hunter! Cease!” Arini roared, his voice half eagle-screech, half Dragon-thunder.
But the massive black Dragon still roiled like an injured snake inside the bower, a mad thing with no mind left. Layla saw Arini note it with wide eyes. One moment, King Arini stood in the blasted-out gap – and the next, he was launching at Hunter in full Phoenix-form.
Enormous and lithe, King Arini was a magnificent cobalt bird-Dragon. And though he was lean and fast, with sleek feathers that could maneuver like a falcon, Hunter was ten times larger. Magic cascaded in a furious whirlwind as they connected in a surge of coiled muscles, vicious barbs, and ripping fangs. As King Arini and Hunter hammered each other with powerful muscles, renting and biting, they slammed each other into the bower’s dome. The walls shuddered, then shattered. One moment, the bower had a dome, and the next it was exploding from the Dragons battling inside it – everything cascading down from the tower’s heights into the sea far below.
Hands above her head, holding her ward to protect from debris careening down, Layla ran toward the garden. As she rushed out, plants and fruit trees shuddered all around her from the blasts heaving the tower. Suddenly, the roaring Dragons careened through the tumbled dome – smashing pots and trellises as their battle spilled out onto the terrace.
King Arini shrieked like a raptor as his feathered tail was bitten by Hunter; Hunter roared with the sound of storms as his gold-streaked snout was raked by Arini’s long, cruel talons. Over and over they tumbled, hammering each other into the broken bower and the tower’s balustrades, cracking each other on the garden’s flagstones. Blasts of magic careened everywhere; Layla hunkered in the middle of that fury, down on one knee and holding her hands spread at her sides in a maneuver Dusk had taught her, creating a personal dome of protection with her winds.
Lightning flashed around Hunter in a whirling funnel like a sandstorm as it swept up all the dirt from the garden into its spin. Flashes slit the falsely-darkened afternoon under Hunter’s storm; thunder deafened Layla as lightning cracked all around the tower, stabbing at the Phoenix King. But King Arini was faster than lightning; faster than sandstorms. As their fight shuddered the foundations of the old tower, Arini darted in, locking himself around Hunter’s neck. Hunter bit like a snake, King Arini’s wing now savaged in Hunter’s jaws – but Arini’s talons and fangs were locked in Hunter’s breast, digging for Hunter’s heart and making blood fly.
