Unearth (The Bound Ones Book 3) Read online

  The two scampered home, and when they returned to the village, everyone was gawking at them. The looks they were getting were making Ayanna feel guilty. Only her family knew about her powers. Had they not worked on the boy? Did he tell people what happened? Her parents had forbidden her from using her powers on others. Would she be punished for what she did?

  One of the Elders approached them and knelt in front of them, meeting their eyes with her stern gaze.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “Did you bring a boy back from the dead?” The wizened old woman was staring hard at Ayanna, as if trying to see through her skin.

  “No, it wasn’t her,” a teenage girl said. “It was the boy. I saw him do it.”

  Whispers arose throughout the growing crowd, and the woman’s inscrutable stare became more piercing. “Did you resurrect the boy?” she asked Joran this time.

  Joran nodded, not a trace of fear in him. He had done nothing wrong, and he knew it.

  “Incredible,” the Elder said. “When I heard the news, I thought that we had found Earth, the Bound One who can heal. But Earth is always a girl. No, you are something new. I sense a great power in you, an affinity for soul. I dare say that you are a fifth Bound One, gifted to us by the gods for all our virtues. Can you show everyone your powers?”

  The Elder led him to the sick den, where the old and infirm of the village were cared for. Ayanna had never been inside the hut, and seeing the poor dying elderly frightened her, but she wasn’t about to let her best friend go through this alone.

  They all gathered around the bed of an old man with ashen skin. With one look at him, Ayanna knew he was dead. She fought back tears, pitying the poor old man.

  “This man died not an hour ago,” the Elder said to Joran. “His soul may have not yet moved on. Do you see him nearby?”

  Joran was looking off to the corner of the tent, where Ayanna saw nothing. Did he see something there? Joran nodded at the old woman.

  “Very good,” she said. “Can you bring him back?”

  Joran looked at the shell of the old man with uncertainty. Hesitantly, he approached the corpse and placed his hands on him just as he had done to the little boy. He closed his eyes, and the audience that had formed was silent with anticipation. Joran’s eyes twitched beneath their closed lids, his brows furrowing and unfurling repeatedly. At last, his face relaxed and he opened his eyes and lifted his hands. The crowd waited, many of them already snorting in doubt that the old man was still dead.

  Startling everyone in the den, the old man sucked in a breath with a hoarse gasp, and color returned to his cheeks and hands.

  “Incredible!” The Elder gasped. She took Joran’s hand and held it up in front of the crowd. “Behold, the fifth Bound One!”

  Everyone around them bowed their heads with respect. Joran looked very awkward at this show of reverence, meeting Ayanna’s gaze with a look that pleaded for help. Both of them knew that nothing would be the same again.

  Fast forward through ten years of friendship, and now fifteen-year-old Ayanna was sitting on a hollow log in the forest in the middle of the night. The area in front of her was bare and charred, the air still burnt and filled with smoke even though the fire had been put out hours ago. Her little sister, the cause of the fire, was now safely asleep in their hut.

  She heard a crunching noise behind her and turned around to see Joran coming through the woods toward her.

  “Hey, what are you doing out here this late at night?” he asked, sitting beside her on the log.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Daigra is Fire, Joran. I should have known. The way she always manages to make people melt for her. I just thought it was because of how cute and sweet she is. I never realized it was her powers at work.” Ayanna sighed, and they sat quietly for a moment. “You should have seen how terrified she was, surrounded by the flames. I never wanted this for her. I wanted her to live a normal, happy life.”

  “And why can’t she still do that?” Joran asked. Even at fifteen, he was wise for his years. Not that he looked like the boy he was. He had the strong build of a hunter, and the voice of a man. “You are a respected witch, and I am the tribe-appointed fifth Bound One. Our lives may not be normal, but we’re happy. Why does your sister’s life have to be any different?”

  “Because she’s Fire,” Ayanna protested, as if it should have been obvious. “It would have been different if she were any of the other elements. How many times have you heard of Air, Water or Earth ever accidentally hurting anyone in our history? Fire has always carried a stigma. The villagers may respect the Fire Bound One, but they always fear her more than anything else. She won’t be accepted. Her friends will start excluding her from their games, and how will she ever marry if people are too scared to get close to her?”

  Joran nodded and put his arm around Ayanna’s shoulder, pulling her against him comfortingly. “First, who cares if her unworthy friends shun her. She is already close to the other kids that have been revealed as the Bound Ones, they will always accept her. And she has the best big sister in the world. Your friendship is worth more than a hundred friends.”

  She looked up at him, and they held each other’s gaze for a long moment. When he drew in to kiss her, she didn’t stop him. His lips met hers and suddenly, the ambiguous something that their friendship had always been missing was found. For a long time, she had wanted their friendship to be something more, and now that she knew he felt the same way, the dark night around them might as well be bright sunlight, the crickets chirping turning into birds singing.

  She lifted her hand to touch his face and kissed him back. When their lips eventually parted, they looked into each other’s eyes and giggled. She felt complete. She had found her match…

  Several more leaps in time, parts of her life filling in with Joran—his face, his voice, his intervention. Now they were standing on a cliff with everyone in the village gathered in audience behind them. She was wearing a pain-stakingly weaved gown, facing him with her hands in his.

  “Ayanna, I promise to love you forever, to protect you from any threat, to support you even when you’re wrong”—they both snickered at that— “and to welcome your righteous anger when I am wrong. Until death and beyond.”

  “Joran, I promise to love you forever, to protect you from any threat, to forgive you and lovingly correct you when you are wrong,” she emphasized this part, eliciting laughter from the audience, “and to support all your endeavors as your wife. Until death and beyond.”

  The Elder who was overseeing their union tied a rope around their hands, officially binding their marriage, and they kissed as their family and friends clapped.

  Her memory jumped again to the day she was stabbed with the dagger, only now she wasn’t the only person lying on the altar—Joran was on the slab next to her, his hand in hers. They were staring at each other as the ritual began, both of them afraid to look anywhere else.

  “I love you, Ayanna,” he said solemnly.

  “I love you, Joran,” she said, her eyes breaking from his to the glinting dagger that was coming down over his chest. She gasped and winced, unwilling to watch her husband, her soulmate, die. She heard the sickening slice of the dagger puncturing his chest, and then the sucking sound of it being pulled out, and she tightened her eyes shut even harder. Neither of them had been certain that the dagger’s magic would work, and Joran had insisted on going first, otherwise she would have gladly saved him from the risk. She hated this, she hated it!

  “You can open your eyes, my love,” came his voice after an eternal moment of anticipation. “I’m fine, and you will be too.” He squeezed her hand right before the dagger came down into her chest, and the scene continued as she had remembered it.

  In a heartbeat, she relived hundreds of years with Joran, hundreds of forgotten kisses and stolen moments. But not everything she relived was good. Joran began to turn from the sweet man she fell in love with to something dark.

  One day, an emissary from an enem
y village snuck into their part of the forest and attacked Ayanna. Joran was outraged, punching the captured assailant over and over.

  “Joran, it’s alright, you know he can’t really hurt me anyway,” Ayanna said, trying to calm him and wondering when the man she loved had gotten so violent.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Joran insisted, landing another punch. “He was trying to kill you. Whether or not he succeeded is irrelevant. He will pay for making an attempt on my wife’s life.”

  The bloodied man cackled, spitting blood. “I wasn’t going to kill her, not right away. I was going to invade that sweet body of hers. Where I failed, another from my village will succeed.” He laughed even louder.

  Joran’s face contorted with disgusted fury and, staring with wide, mad eyes at his prisoner, he shouted, “Shut up!”

  Right before Ayanna’s eyes, the man fell silent and hung his head up toward the sky, mouth agape. She could see a whisper of the man’s essence being yanked upward, like smoke in the shape of his face trailing up into the sky and then disappearing forever. Then the man fell over to the ground, dead.

  Joran was standing over the corpse, still panting with anger, and all Ayanna—or anyone else—could do was stare, unable to deny what had just happened. Joran had ripped this man’s soul right out of his body. The same magic that could breathe life back into the dead could also suck life right out of the living, and the ramifications of that were horrifying.

  Once the other half of Joran’s powers had been discovered, it didn’t take long for the villagers to start treating him like some sort of god, or for him to start acting like one. Joran led an army to the enemy village and wiped them out, and the villagers loved him for it. They worshipped him, calling him the Shade King, master over the souls and shades. He had ambitions to create an empire, to lead attacks on all other neighboring villages and demand they recognize him as their king.

  “I have been given this power for a reason,” he told her. “It is clear that the gods want me to decide who lives and who dies. I can cleanse the world of bad people, like the man who attacked you. I can make our world peaceful, and ensure that the pure souls enjoy longer lives.”

  “The world isn’t meant to be controlled like that, Joran,” she said. “If you do this, people will be acting good out of fear of you rather than deciding to be good for the right reasons. There is supposed to be a balance of good and evil, because the evil in some often brings out the good in others. You can’t just kill the people that you decide are unworthy to live.”

  “I can, and I will,” he said. “You just can’t see the big picture, my queen. Together, we will make this world perfect.”

  He was beyond reasoning with. His ego had been stroked so much for so long that he actually believed he was a god and that the world belonged to him. Ayanna couldn’t let things continue this way. If she didn’t make a change, Joran would destroy this world, and drag her and the Bound Ones into his dark web of chaos.

  She had one chance to save him, something she had avoided doing for a long time because she was afraid it would change him too much. But right now, he needed to be drastically changed. She had to make him forget about his powers. Then maybe, just maybe, he might go back to the sweet, humble boy that had been her best friend.

  That night after he fell asleep, she put her hands on his head as gingerly as she possibly could, very careful not to wake him up. She held them in place for several seconds, watching for any reaction or sign of cognizance. When he remained still, she closed her eyes and focused her powers to make him forget everything about his powers, the good and the bad.

  Firm hands clamped around hers and yanked them away. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, the look of betrayal on his face breaking her heart.

  She couldn’t speak. She could feel her lower lip trembling, and she just sat there with her arms still in his grip.

  “Well!” he shouted.

  She flinched and turned her head away from him. She had betrayed him in the worst possible way. There was no coming back from this and she knew it.

  “You were going to use your powers on me,” he said with a sneer. “I knew you disagreed with my views, but I never thought you would do something like this.” He grabbed her throat in his hand and pulled her face close to him. “I should rip out your soul for this!”

  Ayanna squeezed her eyes shut, preparing herself for a termination she never thought she’d face. She hated that she’d had to resort to this. But she knew it had been for the greater good, and if she was going to die, she was glad that she had at least tried to save the world, to save Joran from himself.

  Tears streamed down her face, and Joran tightened his grip on her neck. The loss of oxygen was causing rainbows to saturate her peripheral vision.

  “Luckily for you, I love you too much,” he said, and he pushed her away from him as he released her neck. “I will forgive your ignorance this time, but if you ever attempt to betray me again, I will kill you.”

  He got up from their bed and stormed out, leaving her to weep in solitude. She had just lost her one and only chance to save him. Ayanna had to face it. Joran was too far gone, and if he couldn’t be saved, then he had to be stopped, even if it would shatter her heart to do it.

  The next morning, Ayanna gathered the Bound Ones. For many lifetimes, they had seen Joran descending into madness and agreed that he needed to be stopped.

  “But he can’t be killed,” her sister’s reincarnation said. “How can we stop him if he can’t be killed?”

  “Just because he can’t die doesn’t mean we can’t nullify him,” Air pointed out. “He is immortal, but we can trap him in a prison from which he won’t be able to escape. We’ve all seen that, somehow, sucking the souls from his victims makes him more powerful. If we can put our powers together to lock him in a tomb deep within the earth, too far down for his powers to reach anyone on the surface, we can put an end to his madness.”

  Earth gasped, and the other two Bound Ones, took a moment to consider the suggestion. Ayanna imagined the horror of what Air was proposing. Joran would be buried alive and sentenced to an eternity of solitude, hunger, and dessication, unable to die. Her stomach iced over with panic, all the blood draining from her face.

  She shook her head. “No. There has to be another way.”

  The group was silent for a moment.

  “None of us likes this plan,” Water said at last. “But I don’t see any other way. You know what will happen to this world if we do nothing. Joran will kill millions of people and build an empire atop their bones. We have to stop him, and soon, before he starts his campaign across the sea.”

  Ayanna swallowed to push down the doubts that were coming up like bile. She recalled the way he had looked at her with such disgust when she thought he would kill her. She wasn’t sure if the dagger’s magic would have protected her from Joran’s power, but she had been quite certain in that instance that she was going to die. If Joran was willing to kill her, his wife, his oldest friend, then there was no telling what he would do to the rest of the world. Joran had completely lost touch with justice and rationality. He was simply mad.

  Though she knew she was sentencing her husband to a fate worse than death, she nodded resolutely, blinking back tears.

  She went home and pleaded for Joran’s forgiveness, inviting him on a walk so they could talk.

  “I’m ready to see things your way,” she said. “I want you to tell me all about your plans for the world. We can change it together.” She forced a smile, hoping she sounded more convincing than she felt.

  Luckily, Joran bought her act, and they went for a long walk. As he talked on and on about his maniacal machinations, Ayanna led him toward the clearing where the Bound Ones were to meet her. Listening to him, she knew she was doing the right thing, but it didn’t make this any less painful. She held his hand tightly as they walked, trying to enjoy every second of their final moments together and silently saying goodbye.

  She sa
w the four Bound Ones before Joran did.

  “What is this?” he demanded, instantly suspicious.

  But no one answered, and before he could do anything, the Bound Ones unleashed their powers on him. Air trapped him in invisible bindings, lifting him into the air as he struggled to get free. In fear that Joran would reach for one of their souls, Fire ignited him, distracting him with the pain of his burning flesh. Then water droplets pulled up out of the moist ground and the dew came up off the forest’s leaves and convalesced into a great watery serpent that surrounded Joran as well. He was now encased in an elemental ball.

  The ground opened up beneath him, a deep and dark cavern ready to swallow him whole. Huge roots and vines shot up from this perilous pit and wrapped around the swirling sphere, then pulled it down, down, down. The earth closed in over the top of it, burying its prisoner. The dirt smoothed to a level surface and even sprouted new grass.

  By this time, half the village was gathered around this terrifying site. The shaking of the earth as it opened had brought them, but they were all too afraid to interfere. The anger at this mutiny was clear on every face looking back at Ayanna and the Bound Ones, and the five of them knew they were no longer safe in the village.

  “Let’s go,” Air said. “We’re not welcome here anymore.”

  They all ran into the forest, running and running until they were out of the village boundaries.

  There was a giant black emptiness inside Ayanna’s chest, her regret and guilt and mourning threatening to eat her from the inside out. Joran was gone, and she was responsible for it. She wanted to just stop running and curl into a ball and die rather than live without him. But she couldn’t die, and neither could he. He would live forever in that elemental tomb, and she would live forever with the knowledge of the hell she had put him in.

  It all became too much to bear and she stopped running. She could turn back, undo this mistake and set him free, and they could be happy together again. That thought died before it even finished. She knew she couldn’t let him go. Whoever he was, he wasn’t her husband anymore, and if he ever got out of that tomb, it would mean the end of the free world.