Into Eternity (The Eternals Book 3) Read online

  “To be fair, some of that whimpering was Jean,” Merryweather corrected.

  “Either way,” Grella sniffed, “I saw that damned ship float off into the night and cursed my impotence.”

  “Did anyone see you?” Merryweather slathered, the froth sliding from his lips.

  “Yes, one saw me.”

  “Who?”

  But Grella's features were set, his taciturn expression unwilling to reveal more.

  “Who?” Merryweather begged.

  “You now know as much as I,” replied the prince.

  I could see in the Britannian's blood-shot eyes he was less than satisfied with affairs. But Merryweather was ever pragmatic and his anger ebbed away.

  “What is a Super-Zeppelin?” Aurora asked cutting straight to the point as was her way.

  “It is an airship that can depart not just Hvit, but also the planet.”

  “The what!” Merryweather and I gasped in unison.

  “They seek to cheat fate.”

  “What fate?” asked Aurora.

  “Yes, what fate?” I echoed.

  “Who does?” added Merryweather.

  If Grella would have answered, we would never know. At that moment his albino face paled further to a death-mask sheen, and he fell back into the soft snow.

  “Oh no you don't, mate,” Merryweather bared his fangs, snatching the prince up by the scruff.

  “Take… your… hands… off… him!”

  The blow, more rockslide than strike, knocked Merryweather halfway into the next day, so far did he travel. Aurora hit him with such power, I expected his prone body to slide across the ice for all eternity. It did not. Instead, Merryweather spun in mid-air to land on his feet, coming to a sliding halt, and was racing back across the Arctic ice and snow in less than the blinking of an eye. His face, contorted with rage, snarled like a rabid wolf, his fists balled and ready to strike. But Aurora was quicker. She was up on her feet and braced between her aggressor and brother like a snarling she-wolf. In true Merryweather fashion, he backed down.

  “I was only thinking of how we might find Linka if what he said is true.”

  “Really,” said I.

  “Indubitably, dear boy, yours and Aurora's wellbeing are forever at the forefront of my thoughts.”

  “And mother?” Aurora interjected.

  Again, a flash of something other than the man I knew assailed Merryweather's features, but he was quick to suppress it.

  “She too,” he replied with composed dignity.

  “I never got to ask, Walter.”

  “Ask what?”

  “Why you referred to her as saying she said she'd wait.”

  He cocked his head to one side and replied, “I never said such a thing.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “You infer that I lie. I cannot. I am the most honest individual you have ever been friends with.”

  “You are not my friend.”

  “Ouch, that hurts, Jean, twice in the space of a few minutes. Thou words doth strike deep,” he said in exaggerated fashion placing the back of a hand to his forehead. “I thought I was your only friend, anyway.”

  “Not anymore,” Aurora answered, taking my hand and pulling me to her brother's side. The shake of her head was almost imperceptible, but it said more than a thousand words; I let further questions lie.

  “So what now?” Merryweather sniffed.

  “We leave,” replied Aurora.

  “But we've only just got here.”

  “Look behind you,” she said in her cool way.

  Merryweather did. His disappointed, “Oh,” said it all.

  Hvit was no more. The enormous hole in the ice created by the retractable roof stood filled to the brim with ocean, the city's flotsam and jetsam congealing on its surface. The sea ice crystallised upon the broiling waters even as we watched. Multiple creaking and groaning sounds soon converged to a single, sharp crack, as of a lightning strike, and the city and all that it had stood for was lost to the Arctic waters forever.

  “Bugger.”

  “Thank you, Walter,” Aurora replied. “But in essence, I agree.”

  “Can we move him?” I asked.

  “Oh, don't worry, I'll be fine,” Merryweather said with a placatory gesture.

  “Not you, you idiot, the prince. Please don't tell me we have to stay here with this lunatic?”

  “We shall all travel together,” Aurora's response.

  “Hooray!” cheered Merryweather. “It'll be just like going on holiday. I haven't had one of those in – well, a very long time,” he concluded.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I shall take Grella,” Aurora offered.

  “But you're a… you know… girl,” Merryweather quivered.

  “Your point being?”

  “The weaker sex and all that. You are a most delicate flower, after all.”

  “I shall endeavour to manage.”

  “Ah, my own motto repeated: endeavour to manage when others falter.”

  “I wish you would,” I said.

  “Ooh, that hurts. And I didn't see you offering to help. She is a girl, Jean. Decorum states you are to be courteous to them.”

  “I am a princess and more importantly family,” Aurora interjected.

  “Family,” Merryweather sniffed with contempt, but Aurora did not bite.

  “So, which way?” I asked.

  “How did you know which way to go when you last departed Hvit?” she replied.

  “I didn't. I just walked in the opposite direction to the water.”

  “Well, that's marvellous, absolutely marvellous! Thank God you weren't allergic to ice or we might just run around in circles screaming.”

  “Thank you, Walter,” I bowed.

  “Oh, you're quite welcome. I couldn't have answered her better if I'd tried.”

  “You didn't try.”

  “But so sorely wish I had.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Aurora said.

  The princess stooped to gather her brother and set off walking with him cradled in her arms.

  “Where are you going?” Merryweather snapped.

  “Away from the water.”

  “Oh God, you're not taking Jean's advice, are you?”

  Aurora did not reply. The pale princess strode off with purpose, Merryweather grumbling in her wake.

  I took one last look at where Hvit's brooding legacy lay obliterated and then set off in pursuit. I was glad to leave; the city was better off sunk.

  Chapter Four

  -

  Hunting

  I lagged behind the others, dragged my feet through the deepening snow, the furrows of their passage my guiding tracks. Not that I didn't want to walk beside them, I did, truly, but sometimes a person has no option but to remain apart. This was one of those occasions.

  The snow-filled distance became a balm, a salve I applied with liberal strokes, and as oft was my way, my mind wandered. Perhaps it was those feathered snows, perhaps walking away from the light, but the spatial barrier between my compatriots and I became a physical one. If left unchecked, one's sanity whittles away in such solitude like limestone cliffs before the ocean's heaving breaths, an absence of words creating a void filled by nothing other than the realities of life. The eternal melancholy that clung to my being deepened, a moroseness set upon me. Thoughts of lost love and she of the emerald eyes consumed my every moment and for all I knew I might have been traipsing through Hell. In many ways, I was.

  * * *

  I'd heard it said each falling ice crystal unique, as individual of composition as those they descended upon. One would never find two identical snowflakes even if one searched for all eternity. I guessed my father taught me that, but couldn't be sure? I'd always had a tendency to be foggy around matters concerning he. For me, though, it was a clear untruth, for every single snowflake bore a face and that face was Linka's, always Linka's. Each tiny, white gem that gathered upon my night-hued clothing was she, delic
ate and displaced. I twinkled in the glare of her eyes and felt a better man for it. She smothered me in herself, cast her atoms upon me, yet I was no more able to touch her than if she stood before me, and it hurt. One might have said it weighed upon me. If I'd had a soul, I'd have said it twisted, contorted in pain. If I'd had a real heart, I'd have said it shattered. If? Always, if.

  I lifted my head to the enforced darkness, traced the pattern of the falling night, an endless barrage of little, fluttering shapes falling to earth. Had they passed my darling's eyes, too? Was she up there gazing down from the Super-Zeppelin's windows tracing a line to the selfsame snowflakes that touched me?

  No matter which way I considered, no matter which way I pondered the possibilities, they brought us no nearer and thus were pointless. It maddened the man I was, and like one of the caged beasts the Hierarchy used to parade at extra special parties, I raged. I seethed in my skin as Linka's perfect form was replaced time after time by the contorted sneers of my enemies. Even if I screwed my eyes up tight and quested for images of my lost love, I always came back to those same twisted visages. The Marquis was most prominent, bulbous oath gloating from behind invisible walls. He laughed at me; I did not like being laughed at. If it wasn't he, then Chantelle, her flaking, ashen self loomed out of the darkness, more night than the night itself whispering accented words of hate. That made things worse. My fingers grasped at the thought of her demonic form's nearness to Linka, and at what she might do. But worst of all on that floating barge of collected enemies, worse than the Marquis, Chantelle, Raphael, and the whole of the Nordic peoples was Queen Serena. She looked down on me with contempt written across her every feature. She hated me, as I hated her, and I sensed with all of my un-beating heart to fear her most, for she was the most unpredictable. Linka remained safe to a degree with both her sister and the Marquis, for both wished to use her to get to me. I still didn't know the reason for that wish but was thankful for it. If either of those two devils had deemed my darling unnecessary, then I knew she would never have seen another sunrise. But they did, and that offered hope. Serena, however, she was another thing altogether. I felt her as fickle as the new moon and twice as unobtainable. The what, where, and how of her game was as unknown as when she'd taken charge of Linka in Hvit. Yes, Serena was the one to watch. I felt her animosity wriggling within every cell of my being. She could turn with the tide, the blinking of an eye, a breath. Such things troubled me greatly as I traipsed through the Arctic snow. Such things troubled me deeply as the author of so much of my dismay giggled to Aurora from close by.

  I sought to lose myself in the darkness, disperse the voices, postpone my worries, free myself of a burdensome mind; I failed. Yet the night offered quiet and for that, I was grateful. Darkness had to have some uses. Unlike the sun, that was. Sunlight had proved such a disappointment, so much less than I'd hoped. One would have thought a sky of a cheery disposition would beget children of a cheery disposition. How wrong I was. How I longed for it to stay night, and how I longed to spend those nights with Linka.

  I gazed into the sky and wondered if she was in light or night before returning to my earthbound misery.

  * * *

  I followed my fellow Eternals across the Arctic ice in a daze of self-loathing and bitterness. Footstep after endless footstep, more automaton than man, I laboured in their wake. I traversed the furrow ploughed first by Aurora and then deepened by the trailing Merryweather. If not for it, I would have wandered off and never returned, such a torpor had taken me. Like a carriage stuck in the ruts of another, I pursued the pair oblivious to the world around me until walking right into the back of the Britannian.

  “My apologies,” I said by reflex.

  “Shh,” he hissed.

  “Don't tell me to shh.”

  “Shh, you idiot.”

  “Why?”

  Merryweather shook his head in peeved fashion and pointed to Aurora. Statuesque, the Nordic stood some way ahead sniffing the cold, night air.

  Launching a pre-emptive strike at my parted lips, Merryweather put a finger to his own and shook his head once more. He was enraptured by the girl, I could see it in his eyes and every expression. He sought to understand her mannerisms as I might her words.

  I leant around my Britannian colleague to get a better look. Aurora was lost to a world of her own. If she knew we observed her, she did not let it show. As if mesmerised, her head tilted one way then the other at a speed to not even trouble the falling snow. The Nordic princess sampled the air, licked at the night's essence.

  I was clueless to her actions even when she stooped to rest her brother on a duvet of snow. What she did next was more direct.

  Aurora's fists raised then fell like sledgehammers in a great explosion of snow and smashed ice. The shock wave of her strike knocked both Merryweather and myself onto our rumps, such force she mustered. We didn't even have time to curse, as in a shower of displaced Arctic water, she was gone, departed into a hole of her own making.

  “Was that my imagination?”

  “She really oughtn't to have done that,” Merryweather said sucking in his cheeks.

  “What?”

  “Gone a hunting.”

  “She's what?”

  “You asked.” Merryweather got to his hands and knees and shuffled over the ice, feeling here, probing there, like some kind of demented lemming.

  I watched on, one part intrigued, the other still shocked, as he traced unknown routes across the snowscape. He tunnelled about like the rodent he resembled until there were more criss-cross patterns in the piled snow than there was snow. He looked such an idiot I almost forgot why he was doing it. However, before I had time to voice my concerns, Walter located her.

  “What a girl,” he cooed after one straight trip of about twenty yards. “Is she not the ultimate, Jean?” he said, wide-eyed. “Is she not everything that the vampire race should have been?”

  “Eternal race.”

  “Potato, potahto.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Is she not magnificent,” he purred ignoring my complaint.

  “Don't ask me,” I replied. “I've no idea what she's even doing.”

  With nothing else to offer, I shuffled over to check on Grella. The prince lay motionless in the snow. He looked terrible, but slept in relative peace and for that I was thankful.

  Merryweather, on the other hand, continued to scurry around until sensing something amiss, whereupon he scrambled away from his last position at speed. As it happened, he did so not a second too soon.

  The outward explosion was cataclysmic, twice that of the inward, a veritable mansion's worth of brick-sized chunks of ice smashed up into the atmosphere to rain down in great heaps all around. Instinct told me to cover Grella's prone form, which I did. It was a good job, too, as I received several painful blows to my back.

  Merryweather found the whole thing hilarious and laughed into the increasing storm like a psychotic chicken. He rose to his feet in a flapping of loose fitting clothes, hands on hips, groin thrust out. A king without a kingdom, he laughed at the irony of his own mania and more besides. Spittle flew from Merryweather's lips to merge with the snow, his eyes lost to the impending blizzard. He had never looked so insane, and that was saying something.

  It wasn't Aurora that flew from the hole like an oversized bird in dappled, grey flight, but another form, a lesser form. The whatever-it-was, a diminished version of the walrus she'd landed previously, squelched in a heap of gelatinous blubber and for a moment I thought it the Marquis' corpse and beamed. It wasn't though, and my grin became a frown. Next out of the shattered ice came Aurora. Like a cannonball, she shot into the air like some avenging angel in shades of blurring white. Her hair flowed like spilt milk, her cloak clinging to her svelte form like a second skin, her eyes set with determination. Up and up she rose, then spun in the air to drop to the snow with barely a snowflake displaced. She did not stop for pleasantries, but rushed past the joyous Merryweather to the fallen lump and
hauled it to Grella and I.

  “Please move aside,” she commanded.

  I did as bade.

  A scimitar nail sliced into the creature's globular girth in a slurp of severed flesh.

  “Drink, brother,” Aurora whispered. “Drink until you can drink no more.” She lifted the creature with languorous ease and vented the thing's innards over her kinsfolk. She drenched her brother in the creature's vital fluids until he was no more than a crimson outline within a larger pool of blood. Even then, she had not finished. Aurora took her brother's head and raised it to the wound. She forced him to drink until every last drop had been extracted from the beast, his tongue lapping at that which his mouth could not reach. Gentle as that first kiss of frost on a winter's day, she laid his mumbling body back down into the snow and flung the creature's deflated form away.

  “Charming,” Merryweather huffed, as he ducked to avoid its trajectory. “I could have done with some of that.”

  “Get your own, and get me one whilst you're at it,” I said.

  “You wish.”

  Aurora ignored us both, fixated on Grella as she was. She held her brother's head close to her breast as he flickered into motion.

  It was unnatural to see a man such as Grella contort and writhe, as though in abject pain, but unable to voice his distress. His arms and legs flailed about like a shaken rag doll but Aurora did not let him go. Not even when his fingers curled into a ball and he lashed out with destructive force did she do any other than turn her face from the worst of it.

  Realising something more amiss than either of us had suspected, both Walter and I leapt to her aid each pinioning a leg. Within seconds, I was cast off, then Walter; Aurora clung on. She fought for her life, as the pair of us rushed back to aid her, this time with more success. In incremental stages of diminishing madness, Grella returned, and then, just like that, he stopped.

  Water and I placed each held leg back down on the snow and backed away. It seemed wrong to be touching such as the Nordic prince then. But not until his eyes flicked open, the pupils wide with obsidian mania, did Aurora herself take a deep, unnecessary breath and lay his head back in the snow. “I thought we'd lost you, brother.”