Heart of Darkness

Chapter 59

The first person to pick up their head was Gourry. He was disoriented for a moment, but memory flickered and he looked to where he recalled cradling Lina. “Lina!”

She was gone.

Frowning, Gourry looked around, gaze falling to the servant girl who was starting to stir. He looked beside him, Sylphiel and Amelia were still unconscious, but when he nudged Amelia, she muttered something and shifted away from him. If they were only sleeping, he could handle that. But what he really wanted to know was where Lina was.

The loud explosion down at the far end of the hallway did two things.

First, it told him where Lina was.

Secondly, it woke Amelia from her stupor, and she sat up, blinking and lifting a hand to rub at her eyes. “Eh…. What happened?” She looked around, nearly as bewildered as Gourry had been, and then she noticed Sylphiel leaned up against her. “Oh! Sylphiel! Hey… wake up! I think it worked! Either Lina got up, or someone came and got her!”

“By that explosion back there, I think it’s Lina,” Gourry said quietly, causing the younger princess to turn her head to him. “My best guess is that she just blew a door off of its hinges.”

Amelia had missed the distinctive sound of wood blasted into a trillion little splinters, but she nodded knowingly. Lina rarely, if ever, allowed closed doors to prevent her from getting to the other side of them. Wood, stone, metal, it all blasted the same in the end, the only thing that differed was the spell that Lina chose to use.

That varied on how Lina was feeling.

Sylphiel twitched, opening her eyes with a soft mumbled query. “Gourry, dear?” She put her hand out, feeling his warm grip and she turned to look to him with a smile. “I did it… Lina?” She sounded as if she expected that the sorceress should have still been there to answer her. It surprised her to see that she wasn’t. “Where… where did she go?”

Gourry pointed down the hall, his action accentuated by another loud bang. “That way.” By his guess, Lina was keeping the magic small, sticking to the little stuff. It could be a good thing, meaning that she wasn’t that upset by whatever she’d encountered. Then again, it could be a bad thing, given that Sylphiel had just brought her back from the near-dead. Lina might not have the energy for much more than the basics.

It was Amelia who got worried. “She’s fireballing the Palace!” The petite shaman got to her feet and began to run for the room beyond the cloud of dust and smoke that was rolling out from the other end of the hall.

Not much time passed before Sylphiel and Gourry were running along behind her.

Naga gasped Lina’s name, inordinately pleased to see the redhead, though a bit concerned for the doorway that had just been blasted apart. “You’re alive!!” Part of her wanted to move to Lina’s side and hug the woman that had been her companion once upon a time. The more rational part of her knew that if she tried it, she’d be fried where she stood.

“Lina!” Jedah grinned brightly, relief washing over the older Mazoku. “I wasn’t sure that you’d made it! This is great, Zelgadis! Lina’s okay; we can work this out rationally!” He turned to look brightly to Zelgadis, in the hopes that the appearance of Lina would have offset the anger that he could sense building in the other man.

Zelgadis’ answer was to kick off something similar to a fireball in Jedah’s face. It pushed Jedah backwards into the far wall with a bang, dust and smoke that had only just settled once more kicked into the air. “Lina was caught in my spell, caught in the trap that I had set for you. She’s mortal, there’s no way that she would have survived that. You and I both know it, Jedah.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure that I was dead,” Lina remarked, amazingly calm for the truth that had come to her. Dead by Zelgadis’ hand, her husband… it cut far deeper into the redhead than she wanted to acknowledge, let alone admit. “Sylphiel is pretty handy in a pinch like that.”

The group arriving in the doorway was relieved to hear Lina’s voice, though the words chilled Amelia. Lina knew who it was that had cast the spell that had hurt her, though she probably didn’t know who Jedah was. “Lina! Be careful! Jedah’s not who you think he is!” Amelia called into the room.

Crimson eyes shifted to Jedah for a moment, watching the illusion of youth pick himself up from the floor where he’d fallen after landing on the wall. “Yeah, I know. He’s a high-ranking Mazoku, the son of the Greater Beast. Yeah, yeah, tell me something I didn’t force out of him earlier.” Lina turned back to look to Zelgadis, watching as the Mazoku faltered and stepped backwards, looking at her in confusion.

“What I don’t know is who you are. You aren’t the man that I married, you aren’t the man that stood in the clearing of trees and held me, telling me that he loved me and wanted to spend his life with me. You aren’t the man who defended me, even when I wasn’t there, when you didn’t know where I was.” Tears sparkled in those crimson eyes, and Lina gave her head an angry shake. “Who are you?”

Before Amelia could push her way into the room, Zelgadis took a step backwards, confusion and pain flickering across his eyes, the sapphire taking on a diamond edge for a moment before lightening to an aquamarine. Lina was right, he wasn’t that man any longer. But he didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know what he was. Confusion tore through him, taking the place of the knowledge that he’d had only moments ago, and with a cry of anguish that tore at the hearts of all in the room, he vanished.