Page 94 of Shadowlands Omega

“I’m just thinking,” I say, lowering my voice even further and speaking directly into her ear. “What if…maybe this is a bad idea.”

Zelie gives me an incredulous look. She looks so much like our father in that moment, I’d have laughed if I weren’t feeling so appropriately scolded. “Are you for real?” she hisses, grabbing my wrist and yanking me towards her even though there isn’t anywhere left for me to go. When I don’t answer, her voice shoots up an octave. “We’re more than halfway there now! And Owenna — ”

“It’s about Owenna,” I whisper-hiss loudly enough to cut her off. I pull back just enough to be able to look into her eyes, but still smell the scent of clean shea butter on her skin and Mama’s signature hair grease in her curls. “What if Owenna doesn’t want to be found? What if Owenna issued those warnings to us through that girl as just that — warnings? Maybe of what’s to come. What if Trash City is planning something? What if Owenna is in on it?”

Zelie’s eyes are wide. She hadn’t even considered it. I feel like an ass for daring to have such a low opinion of my own sister, but I can’t help it. She already betrayed us once. “You think she left to rejoin them? After everything we went through? After what Lord Yaron did for us?”

I wince, hating that I don’t…that I no longer have trust. “I mean…” I glance away, then back again and shrug.

Zelie quiets, expression growing distant and more thoughtful. She’s staring down at our linked hands, dark brown skin against dark brown skin. Little scars on her wrists. I know the provenance of most of them, but not all. Because I am not her. I am not my family.

But I do love them, though.

My mind flashes with Yaron’s face, a yearning I can’t suppress accompanying it. My whole body floods with the sudden urge to return to him and I open my mouth to tell Zelie as much, but she’s already talking. “I think we should…”

“What’s this now?” the older man says and suddenly the cart rolls to a jerky stop.

“Hey! Get out the way!” Desmond shouts.

But whoever it is does not get out of the way. The road has been almost completely empty, save for three other wagons that rolled silently by since we branched from the Orias highway line. That’s no surprise. Trips from Orias north are common, east less, and west even less than that. South beyond the keep, least of all.

When the cart comes to a complete stop, I use Zelie’s shoulder to stabilize myself as I stand up. And what I see standing in the center of the highway line couldn’t have shocked me more than the sight of a sunny, cloudless sky. No, not what.Who.

A woman with a shock of blonde hair stands directly in the middle of the road. She doesn’t have a horse or a wagon. She’s completely alone. She’s wearing rags and has goggles pushed up onto the top of her head now, but as she turns to face our horse cart fully, she lowers them.

I lurch forward, stumbling over the uneven slats of the cart beneath my feet, and practically fall onto the father in my haste to move forward. “Sir — sirs, we need to turn back. With great haste. This woman is not a friend to us.”

The father, much to his credit, immediately snaps his horses’ reins and starts to turn the cart around, bringing Zelie and me closer to Merlin. Merlin, who I remember clearly from the dungeons and who I’ve heard much more about since. She looks better than she did then, dripping in rags and blood, and no less spirited. Her rags have been replaced, her wounds evidently healed enough for her to be able to walk upright and without difficulty — I shouldn’t have let her go, I know that now, but back then I feared Yaron. Istillfear Yaron and what horrors he’s capable of inflicting on his enemies. I don’t want him to be capable of such violence. Of such…inhumanity…but…

I know now, meeting her gaze through her murky goggles, that if granted the opportunity, I would not make the same mistake I once did. She isdangerous,this woman.

“Can we move any faster?” Zelie says, voice trembling.

Desmond encourages the horses along with light swats to their behinds with the prod. “She stands alone. She can’t be such a threat. You can calm yourselves. We’ll be out of her vicinity soon,” he says to Zelie and me, but I’m not listening. My focus is on Merlin.

She smiles and winks and waves at me. “My Lady, don’t be discouraged. You’re just the woman I wanted to see,” she shouts over the sound of the horses stamping their feet.

I shudder while my heart slams against my chest. I’m feeling nauseous on my regret. The cart turns all the way around, but I continue to pivot so that I can keep Merlin in my sights. I scarcely dare to blink.What is she doing here?I glance worriedly towards the woods, wondering — knowing — that she must have more members of her tribe hiding somewhere close, ready and waiting… Is this an ambush?

I glance around, suddenly horrified that these two men are being dragged into this alongside us. I’m petrified for them. They did us a favor and how do we repay it? By getting them killed?No. No, I won’t let that happen.I clench my hands into fists and try to give Merlin my best, most courageous gaze. She smiles wider, to show all of her teeth. Some are black or missing. She tongues the gaps as Zelie tugs on my wrist.

And then Merlin mouths words I can hear as if she’d shouted them,“You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

“What the…” Desmond’s voice murmurs, followed by his father’s lower baritone, “Is that…a relation, m’Lady?”

“Kiandah!” Zelie shouts, yanking hard enough on my wrist to break the spell Merlin had me under.

I flinch and look back over my shoulder, meeting Zelie’s gaze. She points forward and I look over the top of Desmond’s and his father’s heads, but my mind blanks as I take in the strange sight. The strangest I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Stranger than seeing the leader of Trash City alive and not dead and just standing in the middle of the Orias highway line like she owns it.

There’s another female standing in the road. Unlike Merlin, she wears no rags, but a dress in dark crimson. It swirls around her ankles. Its corseted middle accentuates curves just as subtle as the ones visible through my own dress — a dress that is the exact same color and nearly the exact same style, minus the lower cut of mine and the higher cut of hers, which has a collar that cinches tight around her throat.

The woman has medium brown skin, the exact same color as mine and Zelie’s, thin box braids that fall to her waist, just like the ones I used to wear, and one brown eye that’s shaped so eerily like my own it almost feels like I’m staring into a mirror. It almost does, except for her one blue eye. That blue eye and that brown eye are fully focused on me as her pale brown lips curve in an expression that could only bracingly be considered a smile. It’s carnivorous, whatever that expression is, flashing white teeth that could be fangs for what they do to me.

Fear swells in my chest and the woman lifts her hands, both of them, palms up to the sky. Flames dance at her fingertips. “Get down!” Zelie shouts, yanking on my arm at the same time that Desmond curses and his father shouts, “Fates!” Whether he means it as a curse or as an identification, I’m not sure, but he’s right either way.

I’m not given long enough to dwell on the fact that the Fated Fire Omega is here, standing before me, wearing my face.

The flames between her hands swell in a brilliant wall of red before crashing down on me and my sister and our two unsuspecting travel companions in a wave of terrible vengeance.

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