Page 1 of War Games

PROLOGUE

SUBIRA

Subira stood in the darkness. Inky and pitch-black. She didn’t look around, didn’t wonder why it was so. She felt no fear of the expansive dark and had no reason to. She waited, knowing the only reason there was darkness was because the door was closed, and she had only just knocked.

He would answer. He always answered.

Her faith in him was unshaken, but she had a rueful smile as she waited longer than normal.

Oh, you know you can’t run from me. We both know who will lose this game first.

Shesentthose words to him, as if she was whispering through a crack, knowing his sharp hearing would always hear her, no matter the distance.

It was still a few minutes before the surrounding landscape began to change, and light began to push away the darkness.

He opened the door.

Like a watercolor painting that her daughter Mischa would paint, the scene formed around her, colors clashing together until they reached the perfect hue, capturing detail that wasalso smeared. In her daughter’s paintings, that smear was from water.

For them, it was because their memories of this place were old.

So very old, just like they were.

She turned, not seeing him immediately. She found him quickly enough, sitting on the dirt floor, stomped flat with bits of straw and other debris that helped soften the floor of this space. She didn’t speak when she saw him, though, taking in the image as she did every time he opened the door for her.

They were in a hut, one she hadn’t seen in some time. It no longer existed. It hadn’t in over five thousand years, yet the details were still clear enough. Her fingers twitched at the urge to touch a weaving her mother had made for the space. She wondered if she opened the clay jars, if the smells of the herbs would still be clear. The walls were mud and thatch, the earliest building tools of humanity when they left the caves. The roof was thatch or straw as well.

This place, rough and lacking charm to anyone with modern sensibilities, was a special place, a powerful place.Herplace.

This was the place where she had learned her first magic from her mother, starting with the magic that kept this very hut standing as long as it had endured. This was the place where she had grown up under the oppressive rule of her father. This was the place where her mother had died, blood between her legs, covering the floor, while Subira held her dead baby brother, stillborn and lost before she could ever properly greet him. She buried them both just outside, together in eternal peace. This was the place where her father attacked her, forcing her to survive the Change or die. This was the place where she hid from the monstrous men her father led into war, making potions and charms to attempt to help them at his direction.

This was the place where she had tried to do great magic for the first time, stretching her ability to control and use magic to the breaking point to master it.

This was the place where she had all the power, all the control, even over the men who once terrified her. Something her father despised but couldn’t challenge, not at the time.

Somethingthisman knew from the moment her father decided she would be his wife.

She looked at her mate, the husband her father chose in an offhand decision to reward his greatest warrior, thinking his warrior was just like him. Just another monster who would help control her, and she was also to control him.

He had known the moment her father told him they would be married that she had all the power here. He respected it from the first day. He never crossed a single line. Never made her know fear.

“We haven’t visited this place in some time,” she commented softly, finally looking back at her mate.

Hasan was on the ground, and the only modern thing in the room, the only thing that broke the illusion of this place, were the chains wrapped around him. His loincloth did very little to protect him from the burns he let those chains leave on his skin. They were new andwrong. They weren’t supposed to be in this place.

He didn’t speak, but she knew it could take some time to reach that point.

Here, deep in his mind, he was punishing himself. He knew she saw what he was doing. The scene was the same for him. His silence was another piece of his punishment for himself. She had to wait it out. Here, in his mind, she was a visitor, even if she was given free will to do as she pleased.

She stepped out, deciding he could continue to stew in his self-loathing for a moment as she went to see just how far his memories reached in this place.

The fire she kept outside her hut was still there. Around her, the grass was green due to a recent rainy season, and the land was flourishing. It was her favorite time of year as the wildlife returned to feast on the bounty. The nearby river was running strong, the sound loud enough that it was permanently embedded into the scene. The birds were loud, their symphony of sound music to her ears. Somewhere, a lion roared, warning off other potential challengers to his pride. A leopard hung lazily in the tree, no kill with it, but it was watching for a potential fool to pounce on.

Such detail. He always had such detail about the mental landscapes he could form when she visited him like this. Even absorbed in his self-loathing, he always gave her this gift.

“Well, you did promise you would,” she whispered, mostly to herself, but knowing he would hear. “When we discovered I could use the mate bond to enter your mind at any distance to be with you, you promised you would always remember as much as you could, so I could be with you no matter where you were. The originals were rougher, but you mastered it. You always had a keen eye for detail.”

They never told their children about some of her more dangerous innate witch abilities. Entering another’s mind was dangerous. It was so very dangerous. She wasn’t the only witch born with the natural skill to do this without a spell, but with her power, she could rip someone’s mind to pieces, torture them with nightmares until they went mad. It would be too easy to do so.

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