Emergence Read online

  Emergence

  From the Embers Book One

  Jaliza A. Burwell

  Emergence

  Copyright © 2019 by Jaliza A. Burwell

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copy Edited by Zyanya Avila Louis

  Proofread by Bookends Editing

  Book Cover Design by Cover of Darkness

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Author’s Note

  Coming Soon

  From the Author

  Stalker Links

  Prologue

  Breathe.

  You’re alive.

  Breathe.

  You survived.

  Breathe.

  This pain is nothing.

  Breathe.

  You’re strong.

  I lived. I survived. This pain meant nothing. I won.

  Each step was a struggle. Each step was only a reminder. I defeated him.

  Finally.

  Victory.

  Each step drew me closer to the edge, to the light, to where darkness didn’t touch.

  Why though? Why would I go there after living in the darkness for so long? What was I doing?

  Surviving... I was surviving.

  My body gave out, and I collapsed to the ground, shaking with exhaustion. My lips curled in a way that my muscles didn’t recognize. I ached from it. Something in me snapped into place, repairing itself and making everything feel like it’d be okay. A word came to mind as my cheeks grew sore. Smiling. I was smiling. I hadn’t been able to do that for a long time.

  I stared up past the trees and into the blue sky, keeping the silly smile on my face even as my vision darkened. I may have lost just a little too much blood, and I knew I should do something to stop it.

  But who gave a shit?

  I won. He was dead.

  Finally.

  That was all that mattered, that was all I focused on as the darkness fell over me.

  Hot hands touched my face, and I jerked back into awareness, the edges of the darkness receding. I shoved the hand away and growled at its owner. No one was allowed to touch me. No one.

  I took in the reddish-brown hair falling softly around slim shoulders; the baby fat was still in her cheeks, the innocence surrounding her. Her skin glowed from all the kisses the sun gave her. She looked and felt warm, her magic different than what I was used to.

  She blinked a couple of times, and I couldn’t get up the energy to fight her. Hell, she probably didn’t even know how to fight. She was so... human.

  I took in a deep breath, scenting her, tasting her. She wasn’t human—not fully anyway. The nip of magic on my tongue told me so.

  “Witch,” I said, the word a croak out of my throat. How long had it been since my vocal cords were put to use? When was the last time I formed human words that went beyond growling and grunting?

  “Well, if you want to go around classifying everyone, then yes, I’m a witch. Name’s Cecil.” She held out her hand, and I stared at it. What did she want me to do with that? Bite it off?

  She let out a huff. “Can I take a look at you? You’re hurt.”

  I didn’t say anything, looking around. I had managed to make it to the edge of an open field with large structures scattered around. “Where?”

  She frowned at my question.

  “Where am I?” I deserved a pat on the back for forming a full sentence.

  “Teragona.” She looked behind me at the woods and then to me. Her face paled as she pointed to the trees. “Did you come from in there?”

  I nodded, not understanding why her heart rate picked up and sweat formed on her face.

  “No way.” She grabbed me, and in the blink of an eye, I was on my feet and being dragged away. I became so taken with her and curious that I just let her. Her touch felt different from anything I was used to. She pulled me toward the unfamiliar structures.

  No, not just any kind of structure. My mind conjured up the correct word. Buildings. They were buildings. She was dragging me into a city. I’d heard about them in passing. Places where humans and beings coexisted. Harmony. Peace.

  I shook my head dumbly, not really understanding what was going on. I should have pulled away from the witch, should have turned around and gone back into the woods, back to what I knew, but something about her made me follow.

  She felt warm.

  Chapter One

  ~Six Years Later~

  I remember a small log cabin with two rooms. A kitchen and a sleeping room. I remember warmth. Not the warmth of a fire but the warmth of people. It is similar to how Cecil makes me feel but different. Deeper. And I have no name to go with this feeling.

  —Nyssa’s Journal

  I leaned up against a light pole with my arms crossed over my chest, the summer heat pounding against my skin. The loudness of everyone around me turned into a low buzz as I stared hard at the magical gate before me. I tilted my head to the right, focusing on every little detail that I could both see and feel. The newly discovered gate was crude. The energy barely held its form together, and it stood at about the size of a typical doorway, just enough room for one person to slip through, but that was the only thing done right. The instability of its existence prickled along my skin as I stood ten feet away. The gate didn’t know how to be, and it fought to exist as it rippled in the air.

  Normally, a gate had a more solid presence, something easily felt by others in the vicinity. This one shimmered a translucent gray, showing me the blurred outlines of the tree and cast-iron fence on the other side of the construct. It shouldn’t have been like that. It should have been solid.

  The creator deserved some credit though. There was a spell attached to this poorly made gate to hide it from everyone. That was no easy feat, so despite being a newbie in building gates, the creator was at least an expert in creating spells to hide them.

  Someone needed a high five or a pat on the back. Not much got by the mages, especially gates, and this creator was able to pull one over them. They had potential.

  The mages shifted around nervously, glancing at the gate and at me. I would like to think I intimidated them, and for the most part, I did. But today I knew better. They were just embarrassed and trying to figure out how much shit I was going to give them over this little “oversight.”

  The grin already on my face widened as I turned to the head mage. Mage Thomas was a small, squirrely guy with deep-set brown eyes and framed by wrinkles more from
stress than anything else. His peppered brown hair stood on end from running his hands through it over the last few hours. Mage Thomas was one of those high-strung, nervous types but also powerful enough to turn a man into ashes if he was ever tempted to and could get over his skittishness. The anxiety he always emitted was also etched into the lines of his face, mainly in the corner of his mouth and between his eyebrows, and they would only deepen the older he got. The man needed to learn to relax before his heart gave out.

  “So, Nyssa?” he asked, his hands fidgeting.

  “So?”

  His frown deepened. “Wh-why are you s-smiling?”

  I shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I be? I mean come on, Sparky, this is pretty damn funny.”

  He scowled, and his hands stopped moving. He opened his mouth but then closed it, looking back at the gate for a moment. Finally, he asked, “A-aren’t you the least bit worried about where that leads to?”

  “Not really. I’ve been through hundreds of gates, and I’ve yet to face anything scary. Well, except for the one with the old lady. She’s definitely the scariest thing I’ve faced since I came here.” I resisted a shiver. The lady was a human and a hundred years old. She was also really cranky and needed to take a damn nap. Instead, she decided to gnaw on my arm with her toothless mouth. Ick. This time, there was no stopping the shiver crawling through my body. “You know, you can always go take a peek and save yourself a fortune if you don’t like how I’m doing this.”

  Mage Thomas’s eyes widened with fear, and he shook his little head adamantly. “N-no. Not after we lost one of ours to the Woodlands.”

  Aw, he was bashing my second home. I grew up in the Woodlands, which wasn’t hard to do since seventy-five percent of Terra Firma was considered the Woodlands with little pockets of towns and cities scattered all over. Something about how way back then, the humans and other... nicer beings congregated and decided to live together instead of trying to fight for survival. I liked to think they were just too weak and decided numbers were better.

  I was also biased.

  The Woodlands taught me some profound lessons in surviving that couldn’t be learned anywhere else. It was a place where no rules existed and creatures who were killed on sight in a town or city could flourish, skulking freely without laws to hold them down. Living in the Woodlands meant quickly learning how to survive.

  I straightened from the pole and patted Mage Thomas’s shoulder, holding back a snort when he jumped from my touch. “Well, good thing it’s my job to go in. I even did all that training and have a laminated certificate saying so. I’ll jump through, check the area out, and make sure it fits in with the DST’s regulations. If not, you’re taking it down.”

  The Department of Supernatural Transit had regulations on top of their regulations when it came to gates. I was really good at ignoring rules, but when it came to DST, even I didn’t mess around. Usually. The basic rules were easy. If someone wanted a gate formed, they went through DST to have them created. If someone created their own, then they had to register them with DST. Any gates formed and not registered were to be vetted by people like me. Which was why I was there now, surrounded by nervous mages. Either we had an anomaly—randomly formed through atmospheric craziness—or someone created it and didn’t bother telling anyone.

  “What if you don’t come back out? What do we do?”

  “If I don’t come back out, I hope you’ll be kind enough to call my emergency contact to come and get me. I’ll try to be out within an hour, just long enough to poke around, try to determine where I ended up, and then come back.”

  He didn’t look happy, but what could he do. The DST had crazy rules with contingencies built in for gates of unknown origins. They trained people like me to hop through to make sure it fell into regulation. Nowhere private, and nowhere dangerous. If not, they were torn down. Gate-hopping wasn’t a popular job, only the crazies like me did it. Sometimes, gates popped up randomly all over the large city, and more than enough people had gone through only to get themselves killed in seconds, and that only happened if they were even capable of stepping through.

  I patted the nervous mage’s back again and smirked. “If you really don’t think you can help me if something goes wrong, you can always call the witches.”

  Mage Thomas’s face grew red with indignation. I might as well have said he was a useless sponge. Nothing got a mage’s magic ruffled more than to hint at witches being better than him. I think it was jealousy because witches had inherent magic to use, while mages had to rely on the magic around them and were restricted to the elements. Of course, they both had their strengths and weaknesses.

  A witch would lose easily against one mage because the mage pulled in the magic around them for powerful spells; but put more than one witch against a mage and things got crazy. Also, witches could use magic faster because they didn’t need to rely on spells, while mages did. Of course, if you gave a witch time to say a spell, you might as well just climb into your own coffin. Overall, put a bunch of mages and witches in a room together and get a bag of popcorn because a shit storm always brewed. They despised each other.

  “I’m kidding,” I said to prevent the poor mage from having his heart explode. “I trust you to do the right thing if something on the other side of the gate tries to kill me. All you have to do is call the number I gave you. He’s my backup.” I turned away from the mage and focused on the gate before he decided to sharpen his mage skills by turning me into a Nyssa Popsicle.

  I reached up and pulled my light, shoulder-length hair up into a ponytail with a hair tie I had on my wrist, my eyes never wandering from the gate. A wavy strand of strawberry red hair fell into my face and I huffed, quickly grabbing it and redoing my ponytail. The strands of my hair ranged from blonde to red, with every color in between. As I pulled it back for the second time, my mind quickly went over different possibilities of what was on the other side of the gate.

  The gate may have been crudely designed, but it didn’t mean there couldn’t be a pagan ritual happening on the other side to summon some obscure god or another. I’d run into that once or twice so far. Idiots, the lot of them. What did they expect to happen when they called their god down to our realm? The laws forced me to report them. If someone wanted to attempt to summon a god, they needed to do it in the Woodlands, not in a city. And they’d better pray those gods stayed the fuck away from any civilization.

  I stepped closer to the portal, already feeling its energy nipping at my skin, trying to entice me to enter. This one had the potential to be one of the pesky portals, the kind that called out to beings, enchanting them to go through the gate. They were usually a trap and dangerous, but this one fell short. I easily shook off the feeling and was pretty sure the mages didn’t even feel the call. I’d always been more in tune with these things than others. One of my talents was the ability to form an attachment to gates. No one else I knew could do that, and Cecil said she didn’t know anyone either.

  My body hummed with warm anticipation as I smiled and stepped through. The gray parted long enough for me to enter and then closed around me, tingles brushing against my exposed skin. I had a few moments of weightlessness, the feeling of the ground moving beneath my feet, of a breeze rushing past my face. I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the sensations. There was no malice in this gate. Nothing at all. It called out for attention but in an innocent way. More of a cry for just a simple hello. A little acknowledgment.

  When I came to my new destination, I had to take a moment to just stare. I was not expecting this at all, and frankly, I was a little disappointed. I landed in a bathroom. A normal bathroom. Well, a normal bathroom for the rich. It was bigger than my bedroom.

  A rustle caught my attention, and I turned to the noise, and my disappointment turned into something warmer, primal. A man stood in front of a massive shower stall, tall and hard, and completely naked. My eyes traveled down his massive body, chugging him down like a tall glass of cold beer. Deeply tanned skin covered a s
trong, powerful frame. No tan lines in sight.

  Yum. My hormones sizzled with excitement.

  “Who are you?” the man growled as he snatched a towel and hid his manly bits with a speed not many had; his energy nipped at me. Correction: shifter. He was a shifter. His muscles flexed as they moved to wrap the towel around his waist.

  “More like where am I?” I asked, taking a second look around.

  Definitely a rich man’s bathroom. There were two sinks, a his and hers duo, a massive mirror, a shower stall, and an impressive tub big enough to fit five people. The towels looked like they could be used as blankets. The air was heavy and warm from the shower, condensation forming on the mirror. He must have just finished.

  The man snorted, his eyes shifting to his beast’s. Normally, I could tell what kind of shifter a person was if I saw their eyes. Not him. His silvery eyes were foreign, nothing I’d ever seen or knew to exist. He was something rare. No ordinary lupine or feline or even rodentia.

  “As if you don’t know. How did you do it? How did you hide a gate from me?” He sniffed the air, probably trying to figure out why he could now see the gate but not sense it. The spell was apparently still working on this side of it.

  I did a quick glance at the gate behind me. Whoever made it was a practicing peeping tom.

  The man took in a deeper breath, drawing my attention back to him. Not that I forgot he was there. He was a very hard man to forget. My fingers wanted to trace his smooth masculine jaw, over his sensual lips and across his huge, strong cheekbones.

  I curled my fingers into my hands, keeping them at my side.

  His beast flickered through his silvery eyes as energy slammed into my chest, trying to shove me back through the gate. Then it hesitated before turning into gentle rolling waves, washing over me, checking me out. Feeling me up—which I didn’t mind at all.

  Something within me clicked, as if something right just occurred. I’d always considered myself broken. I knew something in me didn’t work as it should, but looking at him, feeling his energy brush against my skin, I felt less broken, more complete. Memories from so long ago tried to rise but hit a wall instead, unable to come up any further, even as I tried to tug on them. But still. I knew he was someone special. To who? Me? The world? His energy gentled into a whisper of a touch, and he tilted his head to the side, his eyes drinking me in, softening the longer he looked at me.