• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Vishous began the walk as all walks began. He put one foot in front of another. Then repeated. Then repeated.

He tromped through the forest, getting wetter and wetter until he became as the trees were, just another object for water to fall off of. He took a roundabout way to their destination, until his arms and his back ached from carrying her.

Finally he came up to the entrance of a cave. He didn’t bother checking to make sure he wasn’t followed. He knew he was alone.

He walked into the earthy well, the sound of the rain receding as he continued farther over the dirt floor. He located from memory the catch in the rock wall and triggered the release. As a nine-foot slab of granite shifted over, he entered the hall that was revealed and approached a set of iron gates. He released the locking mechanism with his mind, and the barrier parted without a sound as the rock behind him replaced itself.

Inside, it was beyond pitch-black, the air denser in this underground place, as if it were crowded into the space. With a quick thought he flamed up some of the wall torches with his mind, then started down toward the Tomb’s place of worship and ritual. On either side of the hall, on shelves that reached up some twenty feet, there were thousands of ceramic jars containing the hearts of lessers killed by the Brotherhood. He did not look up at them, as he usually did. He stared straight ahead as he carried his beloved forward, his wet boots leaving tracks on the glossy black marble floor.

Not long thereafter he stepped into the Tomb’s belly, the vast, subterranean cave opening up a great hole in the earth. At his will, thick black candles on stanchions lit up, illuminating the daggerlike stalactites that hung down as well as the massive black marble slabs that formed the wall behind the altar.

The slabs were what he had seen in his vision. When he’d stared down Route 22 and looked at the trees, he had pictured this memorial wall: As with the trees’ interlocking branches, the inscriptions on the marble, all those names of warriors who had served in the Brotherhood for generations, formed a subtle, gentle pattern, looking like lace from afar.

In front of the wall the altar was crude, but powerful: an enormous block of stone set on two stout lintels. In the center was the ancient skull of the first member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, the most sacred relic the brothers had.

He pushed it aside and laid Jane down. She had lost her color, and her limp white hand as it fell off to the side made him shake all over. He carefully returned it to her, putting it on her chest.

He stepped away until his back hit the etched wall. In the candlelight, and with his jacket over her upper torso, he could almost imagine she was sleeping.

Almost.

Surrounded by the subterranean vista, he thought of the cave of the warrior camp. Then he saw himself using his hand on the pretrans who had threatened him, and on his father.

He undid his glove and slid it off his glowing palm.

What he contemplated now went against the laws of both nature and his species.

Reanimation of the dead was not an appropriate or allowable course of action under any circumstances. And not just because it was the Omega’s realm. The Chronicles of the race, those volumes and volumes of history, provided only two examples, and neither had resulted in anything but tragedy.

But he was different. This was different. Jane was different. He was doing this out of love, whereas the examples he read about had been done out of hatred: There had been a murderer that someone had brought back to use as a weapon, and a female returned to life as an act of revenge.

And there was more in his favor. He healed Butch on a regular basis, drawing the evil out of the cop when he did his business with the lessers. He could do the same for Jane. He absolutely could.

With iron resolve, he pushed from his mind the outcomes of those other forays into the Omega’s realm of dark arts. And focused on his love for his female.

The fact that Jane was a human was not an issue, as reanimation