Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [106]
I reached out to her with my left hand, lifting my face toward her. “No, Mirax, no. I do love you!”
“How can you love her?” My father’s voice slashed at me from behind. “Her father hired the bounty hunter who murdered me. A murder you could have prevented. Was that it? Had she seduced you even then? Were you her creature? Did she lay warm in your arms so I could lay cold in them?”
I levered myself around into a sitting position to meet my father’s accusing stare, then had to tear my eyes from him. Gone was the man I had known in life. His flesh had become ashen, his eyes holes onto a void. The only color on him came from the blood spurting from his wounds to puddle around him. I heard it splashing from him. I couldn’t get the cloying scent out of my nostrils and dreaded the touch of the rivulet slowly snaking its way toward me.
“You know that’s not true!”
“I only know you failed me. You left me to die.”
Mirax chimed in. “As you leave me to die.”
My mother’s voice joined them. “He never cared if I died, either.”
Laughter, low and cold, echoed from the obsidian walls. I looked up and saw the image of Lujayne Forge, one of my first friends in Rogue Squadron. The right side of her face had been burned away by blaster fire. “He let me die. He wanted to play the hero, so I paid the price.”
“No!” I slammed my right fist against the courtyard stones, breaking it and grinding the bones in my arm. I latched onto the pain and used it to recapture control of my mind. Their accusations bored into me, freeing the part of me that second-guessed everything I did. I knew that piece of me well and loathed it. I could replay conversations in my mind for hours when it held sway, wishing I’d said this, wondering why I’d said that, hoping things would not be taken in the worst way, but dreading the fact that they would. When I began doubting myself, I was paralyzed. The cycle always built on itself, growing, reviewing more things, until I dissected my whole life.
And it continues until I get angry at myself and stop it.
The desire to give in to the anger and cut Exar Kun short almost overwhelmed me. That option hung there, tantalizing me. I could use my anger like a lightsaber. I could slice to ribbons these false spirits, these treacherous phantoms. I would cut down Exar Kun’s army, then I would rip into him. He would be nothing before me and my anger. I would sunder him the way my explosives should have sundered his shrine.
And then I can find other targets that deserve destruction.… I raised my right hand triumphantly, then curled it down into a fist.
Pain jolted through me again and in its wake came outrage. I slammed my hand against the ground and screamed, then shot Exar Kun a sidelong glance. “No. My anger is not for you to use.”
The Dark Lord towered above me. “Anger is a most sweet nectar. Despair will also suffice.”
Another phantom congealed before me, looking and feeling and smelling and sounding more real than I was myself. The little boy, all tow-headed and grey-eyed, barely older than Jacen Solo, looked at me with his lower lip quivering. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes. He reached out with little stubby-fingered hands and took my broken hand into his.
“Who hurt you, Daddy?” His innocent gaze searched my face. “I can make it better. I can. Let me. Please …” His voice became a plaintive wail that faded with his image. I felt his grip, feathery and gentle, soothing and kind, fading to be replaced with pain. “Why won’t you let me help?”
The lump rising in my throat strangled me. Through the boy’s fading image I saw Mirax, no longer hateful, standing there. She wore a simple white gown. She rubbed her hands lovingly over her swollen belly, the look on her face one of pure, unadulterated joy. The image shifted slightly as the boy reappeared, older, yet still a child, to