The Hard Way (Box Set) Read online

  Following his lead, Luster and I carefully ran down a trail marked by Glow, a trail that apparently only he could see.

  “Where is Glimmer?” I asked, discovering that my physical fitness could not be maintained screwing around with Luster once a year! I needed more exercise. I was out of breath as we zigzagged through a maze of boulders and scrub bushes. But I refused to slow the men down. We needed to get to safety and I refused to be the reason we met with disaster if we did run into Titans.

  “Ahead,” Glow whispered back. He dropped to the ground and slithered across the rough gravel of the exposed mountainside. “She got cut off, but I made some room for her to move and prepare the way.”

  I blinked at his actions. Moving like a snake, he seemed to have grown feet and protective gear under his bare stomach.

  “I am not --” I protested.

  “Down!” Luster grabbed my arm and almost ripped it off my body in an effort to get me low.

  Obediently, I dropped. I decided to leave this to the professionals. But if a problem involving three-dimensional calculus ever came up, I was their girl.

  As Luster hit the ground beside me, two things happened. There was a hiss and the air around us tingled. Then, a moment later, a boom sounded where the boulder had been. And under that, there was the faintest sound of wood cracking against stone. It almost sounded like a bone breaking, but the sound was sharper.

  The box! The box had fallen out of Luster’s pouch.

  “Luster --” I began, but again he cut me off.

  “Now is not the time, Sinopee!”

  “But --”

  “No! Tell me later! We need to try to save our lives, not worry about petty shit!”

  “Petty!” I almost rose to my knees to tear a strip off of him, but the explosion to the right of me halted my movements.

  Glow was now rolling down the remainder of the hill, regardless of the sharp stones and stinging branches. Taking his cue, I sucked in a deep breath and rolled.

  I could come back for the letters later. If we didn’t get them back… I remembered the cold feeling in the abyss of space, then shuddered. I didn’t want to think about it right now.

  But I could silently curse, feeling the skin of my hands and face tear as I slid across the rough gravel. I was too scared to remember to cover my face, so I just sucked in my screams and tried to ignore the friction burns being inflicted upon my body, especially after the gown started to rise up.

  Behind me, I could hear Luster doing his own barrel roll down the mountainside. How he managed to keep his sword from stabbing him, I will never know!

  We landed at the bottom of the hill, at the base of a huge green tree, just as the sun chased away the final shadows of the morning.

  “Run!” a voice hissed from above.

  I looked up barely in time to see a shimmering form and deep blue hair before I was jerked to my feet and we were running.

  Glimmer had arrived. We must be close to the Citadel, I thought.

  And we had better not be too far away from the mountain! Luster didn’t know we had lost the box with the letters. If anyone else found them, or if they were destroyed…

  I didn’t even want to contemplate that future. I always said that I couldn’t live being parted from Luster, but if that box was not recovered, I would learn what it was like to die with him.

  Chapter Eight

  My love! They know!

  You must guard these words that I have written!

  Keep them from prying eyes, the eyes that will spy

  The eyes that will lie!

  Disasters beyond your imagining will occur if these letters,

  If these precious words, are lost to you.

  Death will be preferable to having them own

  My gateway to my sanctuary, your heart.

  -- From the letterbox

  “This way!”

  The fairy-like voice tinkling at us led us through a winding, twisting maze of tree roots. This half of the forest was darker, much denser, and harder to traverse. The men followed the voice and the flash of blue hair, and we never missed a step.

  “Lust,” I panted, ducking and dodging over the thick brown roots. “The letters!”

  “Not now.” He looked back over his shoulder before urging me forward. “We need silence. We are too close to the entrance.”

  “But --”

  “Why didn’t you just leave her?” the voice tinkled. The blue hair flashed, and I still could not see who was leaping from tree to tree.

  “Because she is mine,” Luster stated. “She owns me heart and soul.”

  “How cute!” the person snorted. The voice was definitely feminine. “And is she worth dying over?”

  “That is enough,” Luster snarled. He pulled to a stop. His chest was heaving, and damp tendrils of hair clung to his bare flesh. Gorgeous as always, I thought.

  “Glow almost --” our guide protested.

  “Glow did his job. Now I suggest that you do yours.”

  We halted at the base of a large tree with a thick, green base. The trunk was so thick that I doubted that Glow, Luster, and I, with arms linked, could reach around it.

  It was from this tree that the arguments were now coming. As I looked up, the leaves began to tremble and shake, some of the leafy canvas dropping away to rain down upon us. I threw my head back further, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Glimmer, but got another surprise.

  Bark hurts when it gets in your eyes.

  “Ouch!” I cried out as a sharp brown bit of bark pierced my brain. Well, it lodged in my eye but the feeling was just as intense.

  Tears instantly tried to flush out the foreign object, but to no avail. My nose stuffed up and I began to do a little hopping dance, blinking rapidly and trying not to wail out in pain.

  “What is she doing?” The voice was closer.

  I managed to stop the dance of pain long enough to catch a glimpse of a thing hanging from the tree. It had blue hair, so I assumed that it was the elusive Glimmer.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Glimmer asked.

  “Her,” Glow corrected as he scratched his head and stared at me.

  “My eye!” I cried out. “It’s in my eye!”

  “Are your personal barriers so weak?” Blue Hair asked, curious. She stared at me with a familiar expression. It was the same look I gave new specimens under my microscope. Fascinated and faintly disgusted by the unknown.

  “She has no barriers,” Luster answered. He assessed the situation and walked over to take me in his arms.

  His hands caressed my face, then a warm, gentle gust of air touched my eyes, pulling out the bark and soothing the scratches that no doubt covered my cornea.

  Vision clearing, I turned to face the rude creature that still hung in the tree.

  “You must be… ack!”

  Well, it was female and it was beautiful in a strange sort of way. But speaking to people who hung upside down was just plain disturbing.

  She must have been hanging by her feet, for her strong body swung back and forth slowly from a branch. It was odd staring at someone whose mouth was where the eyes were supposed to be, but I tilted my head and tried to fix Glimmer’s appearance in my head.

  Her skin was blue. Not unusual here, I decided, where skin tones seemed to flow to the extreme, but it was her extras that made her seem more alien to me than Glow or Luster. Her hair was a deep, almost cobalt, blue. As were her eyes, her lips, and her fingernails, I noted as she tapped her chin in consideration.

  As I examined her, she was assessing me.

  “No magic?” she asked. She crossed her arms just under her breasts and frowned. It made deep wrinkles in her forehead and gave her an even odder appearance.

  “Look,” I protested. “You’re making me dizzy. Will you come down from there?”

  “No time for this.” Luster tapped the tree three times. “We have to get inside.”

  “But the letters,” I tried again, turning to face Luster. “You n
eed to know --”

  But my words ended in a gasp as the ground began to shudder beneath my bare feet. I reached out to touch the tree trunk for support, but my hands touched nothing. I uttered a single muffled shriek.

  The tree was gone.

  And I plummeted into dark, unknown space.

  Chapter Nine

  “You know, magic could have prevented all of this.”

  That female voice made the comment, and I knew of only one female who would dare utter such rude words to a total stranger.

  No, not my mother, but a blue-haired imp named Glimmer.

  I tried to open my mouth to deliver a sharp retort, but only groans emerged as I felt my head throb.

  “I think it’s broke.” With that, I managed to open my eyes and try my best not to scream.

  I was surrounded.

  There were glowing bodies everywhere! Pink ones, blue ones, purple ones, white ones, black ones, and was that periwinkle over there?

  Where the hell was I?

  “Sinopee?”

  I recognized that voice. It was Luster.

  “Ease off!” another voice called out. “I can smell her fear.”

  “If she had magic, she could defend herself.” That from Glimmer.

  “Be considerate!” Glow’s deep voice rapped out. “She is smarter than she looks.”

  What?

  “But magic could have saved her a fall. Luster could do better.”

  “Ease off!” Luster shouted and instantly the murmur that had begun to fill the place quieted down.

  “I was just saying,” Glimmer began, but at a nod from Luster, Glow reached out and bodily removed the woman from my presence. The others followed, shooting curious glances back at me.

  “How are you?” Luster asked as he sat beside me. I realized that I was on some sort of platform. I looked around slowly, ignoring the pounding in my head and saw, to my amazement, that I appeared to be in a dark tunnel.

  “I am… Where am I?”

  “The Citadel.” Luster gently ran a hand across my forehead.

  “We made it?”

  “The tree was guarding it.”

  Well, this was a place of magic. And I had just spoken to a woman with blue hair and fingernails. A guard tree. I could see it happening here. Seemed kind of appropriate.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You fell.”

  “I know that! But where?”

  “I removed the tree -- displaced it actually -- and you tumbled down the entrance. You made quite a splash, too. My people have been eager to meet you for some time.”

  “Why?” I tried to sit up, but the dark room began to spin. So I decided to take a visual inventory while I waited for his explanation.

  We definitely were underground; the tree roots hanging from the ceiling gave truth to that. But it was also very warm here, almost humid. It was dim, but not dark, now that my eyes had adjusted to the new environment. And there were pockets of light here and there.

  The room I was in was pretty large, and the ground was covered in a carpet of thick, fragrant grasses. I had never seen the like before. There were even some small flowers growing here and there, adding color to the living rug.

  Several colorful murals covered the cavern walls, which appeared to be made of stone. The brightness of the color contrasted with the dim room, but perfectly matched the people I had seen milling about when I first opened my eyes.

  This place was beautiful!

  The sounds of laughter, something that I rarely hear even in my own world, filled the air. These people were struggling and fighting, but they were also enjoying each moment of life that they had left to live.

  And why not? At any moment, a Titan could slip up on you and fry you with an energy blast.

  “They want to meet you because you own me,” he said with a small laugh.

  Amazed at his answer, I turned my eyes to him. “I… own… you?”

  “Heart and soul,” he affirmed.

  “But…”

  “My people mate for life, Sinopee. There can be no other for me. You are the one to hold my thoughts and my desires.”

  I was speechless. I knew that Luster loved me and we had often said that we belonged to each other, but this was total devotion, or that was what it sounded like to me.

  “I love you too, Lust,” I managed. Tears welled up in my eyes.

  How could I leave this man? Why had the fates cursed me with a whole year between couplings? A whole year to wonder if I would become pregnant, a year to miss him and wonder what he was doing. A year to hate him for making me love him this way and then leaving me. A year of feeling guilty for my selfish thoughts, then accepting what had to be.

  He was mine, but only mine for such a short period of time.

  “I know,” he said proudly as I reached out for his hand. “Otherwise the letters would have never brought you to me.”

  “Yes, letters. Oh shit! The letters!”

  “What?” He leaned down to get a clear view of my face.

  “They are gone! The letters are gone!”

  Luster reached for his thong, for the pouch that he wore there, and encountered nothing. Emptiness. Space!

  “What…” His eyes grew into wide lavender plates as the realization of what this meant sank in.

  “Before we rolled down the mountain! I heard it fall!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because, numb-nut, you wouldn’t let me!” I was getting angry at this point. If he had paused for a second to listen to the magicless Thinker, this could have been instantly corrected.

  “Numb-nut?”

  “You refused to listen to me, Luster! Just because I have no special abilities, doesn’t mean that I can’t think or feel or see when a box falls from a pouch!”

  “You don’t know what this means!” he said. The color fled his face. He rose up on shaky legs and stared at me.

  “It means that when the sun goes down and begins to rise again, I will probably be sucked into a deep dark abyss of space and die floating in nothingness. Of course I know what this means!”

  “It means, too, that I shall die.”

  “I hope that the void is not as cold as I think it will be. I am not equipped to deal with torture and death.” Then I brought my eyes to his pale face again, realizing what he had said. “Did you say die?”

  “You own me, Sinopee. I told you that. We mate for life! If you die, then I die as well.”

  Chapter Ten

  We were walking.

  I would rather have been discussing plans to go back out and get the letterbox before anything happened to it, but Luster wanted to plan.

  “They will have the box by now, Sinopee,” he’d said when he pulled me out of his chambers. “Now we have to plan how to get it back.”

  But instead of planning, we were walking.

  I was enchanted by the underground land, but I was too scared to enjoy the beauty of the underground rivers and waterfalls.

  The people were interesting though, each one so different and yet so similar. I realized that I was seeing the magic in each one. That was the one thing they held in common.

  “We each are gifted, Sinopee.” He led me to a vast underground waterfall. “But we can only give our hearts once. Each of us has a mate predestined. Each of us knows who our partner is. You are my partner, Sinopee. I can’t function without you. And though I only have you for one day out of the year, that one day sustains me.”

  “Then why do we have only one day, Luster? Why?”

  He turned to look at me, his purple eyes direct and serious. “Since I brought my people here, Sinopee, since I helped us to escape that place where they held us -- when I decided that I had had enough, a few joined me and we went against being held… I thought it my punishment.”

  “What?” I stared at him, incredulous.

  “My punishment, for going against what surely must have been ordained. The Thinkers, Sinopee, they have always been. They were al
ways there, ordering us, making us do things, hurting the order. The natural order of things, Sinopee. Maybe the gods decreed that we were supposed to be under Thinker rule, but I went against them and showed my people a better way, a free way of living.

  “I always thought that the gods finally agreed with my decision, for my people flourished, something that never happened under Thinker rule. But I could never find a mate, was punished by being alone and hunted. But then I found the waterfall, Sinopee. I found the cavern and the words to the spell, and they brought me you. And now I think that the gods were testing me, Sinopee. I think that they are testing me still. And if I can overcome this latest problem, you will be mine forever. But I must prove myself first. And when I prove myself, you and I will be joined as one forever.”

  “There has to be a way to keep me here, Luster,” I sighed, watching the waters swirl.

  I didn’t believe in his gods punishing or testing him, but there had to be a reason his magic had brought me here. I didn’t want to leave his side, and I just knew he was going to do something foolish to keep me here.

  “I know you can’t go home with me because of the Titans. They would destroy your people and all that you have built here. So the only solution is for me to stay here. I will help you in your battle, Luster. You have a Thinker on your side.” Then I sighed as I realized what I was facing. “But here, I don’t belong.”

  “You belong!” he almost shouted, turning to grip my shoulders. “You are mine, Sinopee. You belong here with me.”

  “But I will never fit in.”

  “You can!” he insisted.

  “Lust, look around you!” I pulled away from him and pointed to the waterfall we were admiring. “Where I come from, there are no pink waterfalls, Luster. Waterfalls don’t exist underground! People are not pastel colors! Where would I fit in?”

  He stared at the waterfall for a moment.

  Its waters were pink. It fell almost eight feet to the small river that flowed through the Citadel and disappeared again under some rocks. It was beautiful and enchanting with its white mists and sandy bank. But still, it was a pink waterfall. An underground, pink waterfall.