Marked - Prophecy of Aries - Book 1 Read online

  The snake slithered closer. Ciaran felt streams of sweat running down his back and his forehead.

  “Get up here!” George shouted.

  “No, give me the shovel!”

  There was no way in hell he would run. It would haunt him for the rest of his life if he did—not the snake, but his cowardice.

  “There! As you wish.” George threw the small shovel to the ground and stayed up on the high rock. Ciaran picked it up just in time. The snake flew over, fangs bared with dripping venom.

  It might have just been blind luck. Ciaran swung the shovel in a sweeping motion. He didn’t know how it happened, but he realized the snake’s head had dropped to the ground.

  The body of the snake slithered forward. Or maybe it was convulsing before it died. He stared at those beady eyes of the severed head, and they looked right at him, the venom still dripping from those deadly fangs. It was a dangerous animal. It had attacked him, and he had killed it in self-defense.

  Then everything was a blur. He heard George calling him, but he needed to get away from this. He dropped the shovel and ran. He might have run deeper into the bush. He didn’t know. There were a lot of trees. He heard footsteps, but he didn’t know who they belonged to.

  He kept running.

  When he reached the other edge of the woods, an area he had never been to before, he darted to a tree and was violently ill. There was no one around. He staggered to a large rock, climbed on top of it, curled into a ball, and drifted into sleep.

  HE DIDN’T KNOW how long he had been sleeping. Something cool and soothing touched his face. He opened his eyes and saw an angel. She smiled at him. Her touch was too real to be magical. He could feel the soft skin of her palm touching his forehead.

  The scent of her was even more real—earthy like wildflowers.

  “Bonjour,” she greeted him in French and asked if he was fine. Her voice was light and gentle and had a melodic tone to it.

  She helped him sit up. She smiled again and held out an opened lunch box.

  “An apple!” His natural inclination made him say the word in English, but he understood her French well and could have carried on the conversation in French for hours.

  “Oh, yes, it’s my lunch. And it’s an apple. You haven’t seen one before?” She smiled and spoke in English. There was a twinkle in her eyes. He knew she was teasing him about his reaction to the apple.

  At that point, he knew she wasn’t an angel but the most beautiful earthly girl he had ever met. He looked down and saw he was still on the rock.

  “You had a fever,” she spoke again. “I was worried. But you’re fine now.”

  “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Since sunrise.”

  He looked up to the sky. It looked like late afternoon. But he had run from the snake at late afternoon. If she had been here since sunrise, that meant he had slept on this rock for at least one night. His father must have been worried sick.

  He sat up and buried his head between his knees.

  “Don’t want to think about what’s out there?” the girl asked.

  He looked up at her. She was about thirteen. All he saw in her was beauty. It wasn’t just her angelic look, but the purity in her eyes. She had just read his mind. He wanted to forget what was out there in the bush.

  He was nine. But he had been receiving training in politics, philosophy, human ethics, science, warfare, and combat for as long as he could remember. The only explanation his father gave him for all the training was that he should be ready when the time came. As for what was coming, he had no idea.

  Here, in this bush, Ciaran wanted only to be a kid. He wondered if he had run away from a snake—or something else.

  “What’s your name?” Ciaran asked.

  “Lyla.” She smiled again. “Would you like to hear some stories about magic?”

  That was an experience Ciaran had never had. He didn’t know much about fairytales. Mother had tried to read them to him, but she stopped because he was far too analytical about them. He couldn’t just enjoy them as other kids did—like his brother, Tadgh, who just devoured the bedtime stories Mother read to him.

  But Lyla’s stories were different. They weren’t merely fairy tales. They came from her heart. It was as if she had lived in the fairy land and was just relaying the information to him. There was nothing for him to analyze or judge.

  Soon, he was lost in her stories.

  Then the night came. She led him back to the edge of the woods and promised she would come back to the same spot to tell him more stories the next day. They met each other at the rock every day for a week.

  IT WAS THE SEVENTH MORNING, and he had come back to the woods to meet Lyla. The air was thicker. He knew something was wrong. He felt an emptiness in him that he couldn’t explain. It was heavy. It was sad.

  An old man stood next to the rock—no Lyla. The man turned toward Ciaran and asked with a thick French accent, “Are you Ciaran LeBlanc?”

  He nodded.

  “Follow me, please,” the man said and turned on his heel.

  CHAPTER 2

  I t was a cottage at the end of a small village. Like other French cottages, the house was small, charming, and inviting. But Ciaran’s attention was sharply focused on Lyla, who was lying on the bed, looking as pale as a ghost. As he knelt next to her bed, she opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “I am glad you could come. Sorry I couldn’t make it to the woods today.” She reached her hand out, and he held it.

  His medical knowledge at this stage wasn’t enough for him to do anything to help. But his gut instinct was telling him she was leaving him—forever.

  “Lyla, tell me what you need.”

  She smiled. It was radiant on her tired face. “I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do about this. I have terminal cancer, Ciaran. God will take me very soon.”

  “What kind of cancer? I’ll take you to London. I’ll tell my father. My family owns the largest pharmaceutical company on the planet. There is nothing my father can’t do. Please let me tell him…” He knew he was just trying to bluff fate, and desperate tears rolled down his face.

  “Your science can’t hold back death, Ciaran. Do you believe in magic?”

  “What?” He wasn’t a believer, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her that after spending six days with her in her fairyland.

  “You didn’t believe the stories I told you?”

  “I did. I believe in magic,” he lied.

  She smiled. “I know magic. Not much, but enough to tell you this. I want to exchange the few days left of my life for the chance to save yours.”

  “I don’t understand. But that doesn’t sound good at all.”

  “My teacher lives in the woods. She’s the one who teaches me magic. One of those spells will allow me to give my life force away to save someone I care for.”

  “I don’t need it. Please don’t do this.”

  “You didn’t ask why it was you I wanted to give the rest of my time to. Most people would ask.” She smiled again.

  “I-I didn’t know… Why me?”

  “Because you will become very important. You will do a lot of great things. I want to be a part of that. A part of your journey, using whatever is left of me.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “My teacher. She shares many things with me. She said I would recognize the sign of giving when it came to me. And that sign was you. She couldn’t save my earthly life. But she taught me how to live forever. Being a part of your journey is the way for me to do that. Will you accept my offer?”

  “Please don’t do this, Lyla.” He started to cry. He had never cried so much in his short life.

  “You didn’t believe my fairy tales…” A tear ran down her face.

  He panicked. “I do!”

  “Then repeat after me…”

  “Repeat what? No—” he began.

  “I don’t have much time left, Ciaran. Repeat after me.”

>   “No! No!” he cried. He didn’t believe in magic. He had lied to her. So why couldn’t he lie to her now, just to make her happy? He repeated a strange word after her. Nothing was going to happen, he told himself. But if she died now, at least she wouldn’t die resenting him for not believing in her fairytales and her magic.

  He repeated the word three times as she asked.

  There was silence.

  Then in front of him was an explosion of white light. Lyla’s body rose up and floated in the air. She opened her eyes, smiled at him, and dissolved like a fading angel.

  Ciaran grabbed the edge of the bed. He felt his rage coming. It came at him so hard and so suddenly that his body vibrated. And then he heard the cobra hissing. It wasn’t just one, though, but what looked like nests of them. Ciaran stepped outside the house and saw the village in chaos. At the far edge of the town, a river of snakes slithered in.

  His rage was there, barely held inside his mind, and he was ready to savage. It had happened before when he was four. He had sent out his mind blade and dug up the entire hillside because wolves had killed his dog. He promised himself he would never do it again as he had no idea how many creatures he had unintentionally killed in that little forest he’d destroyed.

  Now, he wanted to do it again and send these poisonous snakes into extinction. He wielded the blade in his mind, ready to storm the village.

  Then he heard his father’s voice. He felt his father’s embrace and heard him whisper, “Calm down, Ciaran. Settle down, son.”

  “Father, the cobras are attacking the village. I have to kill them.”

  “Son, listen to me. I know you’re angry. But you are hallucinating. The snakes are all in your mind.”

  “But I saw the cobra in the woods, Father. Ask George.”

  “Yes, that one was real. But the ones you’re seeing now aren’t. If you send out your mind blade based solely on unjustifiable sentiment, you will kill innocent people.”

  “I don’t want to justify anything to anyone, Father!” Ciaran shouted and charged out of the house.

  OLEANDER - DARK SOLAR TRILOGY

  BONUS CHAPTER

  Madeline time-travels

  >>> GO TO OLEANDER HOME PAGE <<<

  Click above link or type this: http://9nl.es/dark

  BONUS CHAPTER

  Dorset—England, 1348

  MADELINE PULLED on Arik’s elbow to stop him from heading around the corner to confront the officer who had just received a bribe to allow the French ships into Dorset. He was tall and strong, and he slid out of her grip twice. He was so angry she could feel the rage ebbing out from him in waves. This was so much like Ciaran’s rage—primal and uncontrollable. But Ciaran had a way of redirecting the energy of his rage into his mind blades. The blades directed by his mind could dig up a hillside and kill hundreds. Arik didn’t seem to be able to control his anger.

  “I have to kill him. I have to stop this! I can stop the Black Death,” Arik growled, pacing back and forth.

  Madeline shook her head. “You’re talking about two different things. Yes, you can kill this man, Arik. But that doesn’t mean you’ll stop the plague. The plague is—it was—something that happened. It’s a fact we know. If you kill him, the plague will still happen, but by causes unknown to us. Or a pandemic worse than the plague might occur. Do you want to be responsible for that?”

  “I time traveled for a reason. I was sent here for a reason, Madeline. Millions of people will die if I do nothing. True, something worse might happen if I stop this one. But that’s just speculation, isn’t it? What if whatever happens in place of the plague is a lesser threat?”

  “To repeat your point, Arik, that’s speculation. So we either deal with fact, or we deal with speculation. I prefer to stick with the facts. We know what happened in the past, and we’ll find a solution to deal with it in the future. I don’t like the idea of us taking chances shooting at moving goal posts.”

  “So you expect me to do nothing? I’m sure I’ve killed before. I’m sure that whenever I traveled to the past, I was sent to places at exactly the times when significant things were about to happen. I know I would have done something about it.”

  “And then what?”

  “When I come back to the present, I remember nothing. I think I forget for a reason.”

  “Oh, so now you think you’re some kind of vigilante who can take matters into his own hands and doesn’t have to face the consequences of what he does?”

  “For your information, I cop the consequences big time. Whenever I come back, I don’t remember what I did or where I went. But I always know I have blood on my hands, regardless of whose it is. You tell me—remembering or not remembering… which one is worse?”

  He slammed his palms against the wall outside the trading station.

  “You were alone before. But this time, you’re with me. And I can remember.”

  “How?”

  “I’m only half human. Ciaran must have told you that.”

  “I know now.”

  “I’m a psychic, a mind reader, and a mind tracker. Now you know that, too. My mind doesn’t work the same way as yours. I do remember, and I’ll tell you when we get back whether you killed someone or changed the course of history. I’ll tell you if you’ve caused something worse to happen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. So do you think you can you stop yourself from killing this time?”

  He nodded.

  They heard a crash and then a cry from inside the station. Madeline peeked through a small gap in the wooden wall and saw the old officer grabbing a poor young female peasant’s breasts. The girl cried, but her cry was quickly muffled by the man’s hand.

  “Easy. Don’t cry. I’ll pay you. You don’t have to go to the market with this stale bread today.”

  “Please, sir…please let me go. The bread is freshly baked, sir. My mother made it. I need to take it to the market.”

  The man brushed his fingers across the girl’s face. “You could be quite pretty if you cleaned your face.” He tore the front of the girl’s dress. The girl cried out and begged him to stop. A shadow moved past the hole through which Madeline was looking.

  It was Arik.

  He snatched the officer away from the girl and slammed his face into the wall.

  “Go!” Arik said.

  The girl didn’t wait for a second invitation. She hurried out of the room.

  Madeline entered. “Don’t. You promised me.” She wasn’t sure using his name in front of this man was wise.

  “Do you know who I am?” the officer said.

  Arik lifted his face from the wall and slammed it forward again, breaking his nose. “Yes, you’re the broken-nosed officer!”

  “I know people in high places. You don’t want to hurt me.”

  “No, I don’t. I want to kill you.” He slammed the man’s face into the wall again. Broken teeth fell to the floor.

  “Cry and I will cut your tongue out and feed it to the dogs.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  Madeline wanted to pull Arik off of the officer, but she didn’t know what the man would do or what weapon he might have. If Arik was harmed in this time period, what would happen? She knew they shouldn’t do anything to change the future. But could they die here? And what would be the consequences if they did? She moved in front of Arik so he could see her and shook her head. “You promised me! There will be consequences for this. Please let him go!”

  Arik released the man. “Take the gold coins out,” Arik said.

  “Oh, so you want the gold, sir. Of course. Here they are. I have plenty.”

  He pulled his pouch out and poured the contents on the table. Gold coins dropped onto the wooden table, shining as if haunted by the spirits of the millions of lives lost because of them.

  Arik’s eyes were bloodshot. She could see his rage intensifying. She knew he would soon butcher this man. For some very unfortunate reason, she was able to read his mind now—she cou
ldn’t do it before. In his mind were terrifying images of cities falling because of the destruction of the plague. Dead bodies were piled up in front of houses on the street.

  The Black Death spared no one—the rich, the poor, men, women, the old, the young. All perished. All because of the greed of this one man.

  Before the man withdrew his hand from the coins, Arik swung the knife he had grabbed from the bench outside. The man’s hand dropped to the table.

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  Ciaran, Madeline and Alex

  VIRGO - MINDSCAPE TRILOGY - EPILOGUE

  SYNOPSIS

  I magine if it was hot in Antarctica! Watching the polar caps burn.

  Madeline is no longer a journalist in New York, but her connection during the peak of her career deems to be useful when she needs to assist her husband, Ciaran, to stop a plot in the paranormal world, that might destroy the Antarctica and Earth.

  The only weapon they have is their Silver Blood. The only contact they have is a retired journalist living in Argentina. Yet they fight the vicious paranormal and space creatures to obtain the Virgo key to save Earth.

  CHAPTER 1

  A ntarctica breathed. He didn’t.

  He loved the sight of blood pooling on the snow. The deep red enticed his appetite, while the contrast of the white snow added a kick.

  Life. Death.

  Heaven. Hell.

  He smiled and waited.

  His adrenaline was like a snake slithering through his system. Although his fangs had descended and the blood in his vein was surging up in waves, he wanted to keep it slow.