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over 600 pages

a novel by Dean Michael Christian 

Rhey, the last of an alien invasion, has captured the human responsible for creating a deadly virus released upon his kind.  Struggling against the chemicals dripping into his veins, the scientist must keep the DNA source code hidden to preserve a world on the edge of annihilation.

But the alien has miscalculated and coma is induced, a state of mind which the scientist uses to escape into a world where song rules and he can run from the pain.  Rhey is determined to follow. 

In this place, Jareth the lone minstrel swordsman, is suddenly surrounded by those that claim to know and  protect him.  Leanan Sidhe, the Dark Muse, says she’s his lover, born of myth and magic with the power of her voice riding ocean winds.  The other, the Cervine, is a stag-man rooted to the earth.  His song riddles the bark of trees and digs with chords of soil. 

Along with the woman of light, they urge him to go home, if anyone is to survive.  When Leanan and the Cervine insist he take the girl Beryl with him, to protect and guide her, he balks.  Until they tell him the Hunter is coming. 

To him, Beryl is an outcast whose skin is filled with living, moving ink.  She’s just another one that’s making his life more difficult.

Without the knowledge he’s a character in a story that has now become the only thing that can save the world, Jareth is a soul stirred by an eight stringed mandolin and a sword he dares not touch.  The memory that each is more must be awakened before time runs out.

It’s a story only imagination can write and a bard could sing. 

It is the tale of Jareth Rhylan.

excerpt

Prologue

Borrowed Time

Another pus-oozing scrap of his skin hit the keyboard, reminding Rhey that he was sitting too close.  Moving back, the three digits on his left hand deftly swept to the floor the piece of cancerous skin that had just deserted his left cheek.  The rot continued there, no longer minded.  Still, these pieces of him that were falling away were nonetheless missed.  He was coming apart at the seams, as the humans would say.  The gloss of the computer screen in front of him changed focus, and he saw in its salient reflection, the tatters of facial skin hanging precariously.

It was the same all over his body and if he moved too much, the attacking virus gleefully reminded him of the consequences.  There wasn’t really any pain, though parts of his skeleton ached sometimes.  No, it was more a silent embattlement in which he found himself.  Ironic, in a way, devious and surprising in another.

They’d done this to him, those outside the white mortared stone building in which he now felt confined.  Oh, he could move beyond the lab’s boundaries, but as already noted, the lesions and scabrous tentacles marking his body just mutated faster.  Time wasn’t something in abundance at the moment.  It seems he’d made a mistake with the woman, the result then altering his chance for success.  Humans were more surprising than he’d thought.  In the end though, it was all borrowed time.

How many had he extinguished so far?  Thousands, surely, maybe millions?  They were adept at hiding once they understood the breadth of his power.  Not that they hadn’t shown some strong opposition––he’d expected that––but almost according to the manual, extermination had gone as planned.

Until now.  Or rather, until the simplest of weapons had been used against him.  Not that there hadn’t been a contingency for biowarfare––the practice was not unknown in other parts of the galaxy, but for some unknown reason, this particular virus was proving difficult to stave off.  Indeed, already the disease had progressed beyond normal confines, hence he found himself barely able to keep the bug at bay.

It was a simple pathogen, perhaps too simple.  At least that’s what he tried to tell himself.  When he became aware of the virus’ existence though, it was too late.  By the time he took measures to stop its spread, every one of his shipmates had succumbed, and where once the eradication process had been almost formality, it now hung in a balance too precarious to ignore.  Too late, oh yes, he’d been too late to save his brethren.  The humans hid and crawled outside the stone walls he’d chosen as his base, attempting futile resistance, but their world was already in ruin, their military destroyed and technology thwarted like flies underfoot.  All but this one fly, this one bug, and even now, he worked diligently and robotically toward a solution.  If only the woman had lasted longer.

Smeared with a layer of soot and the dust of blasted concrete, the windows still let in the light of another day, showing in which direction this world’s sun rose.  He turned his head slightly, the stab of yellow light reflecting off his green irised eyes, pupils contracting as if to deflect an assault of another kind.  It showed him the destruction outside, how charred his own weapons could make a landscape.  It had been a good fight; a grim smile creased lips that showed clear signs of being the next casualty of the virus.  Which only made him frown and redirect his gaze; a male human lay strapped tightly to a shiny metallic table amidst a plethora of half-filled test tubes.  

So far, none of his efforts had purged the human of resistance long enough so that the extraction of the virus’ DNA could be had.  That’s all he needed, that’s all it would take, but as noted earlier, humans could be the most obstinate and surprising of creatures.  Threatening the life of the woman should have worked.  

Holding a glass phial containing a shimmering blue elixir, Rhey carefully injected it into a bag of colorless liquid.  Without acknowledging the ensuing show of rarified bubbles, Rhey was precise in waiting for time to pass and the reaction to complete.  His thoughts moved from the sounds of bitter insufficiency outside, to the rattle of breath emanating from the man’s chest as earlier injections took their toll.  Sometimes, there was partial movement toward a solution as the man’s mind grew passive.  Then, the signals being sent through probes attached to his skull recorded as blue phosphor graphs on the monitors to either side.  There was a threshold to breach, wherein suggestion would be mere formality.  The man would give up what he knew, and what he knew would lead to a cure.  Already, on a stainless steel bench to the man’s left, a beaker of aqueous solution brimmed in waiting.  Rhey had the carrier prepared but needed specific data so the encoding would be accurate and complete.  

But time was frittering away and even though his kind didn’t show what the humans called ‘emotions’, nevertheless, he was acutely aware that if his skin continued to shed, that the virus would rout his mind soon thereafter.  Then, no one would care about the last alien to conquer earth, nor the human who would die on the table next to him.  Time would only record an end and Rhey knew he didn’t want it to be his.

Tapping on the hypodermic, a thin stream of boiling blue fluid squirted from the needle’s end.  Irony, again, closed a smirking hand about a peeling alien wrist.  Rhey approached the human, noting the lines of hair marking his face, the greasy nest of darkness sweeping back from his temple and behind the ears.  The man’s face was almost florid, the rise and fall of his chest erratic but persistent.  Yes, mankind could be very surprising sometimes.

The clutter of laboratory paraphernalia didn’t bother Rhey at all as he strode to the man’s side, noting how veins popped and writhed, as if the torment were being manifested before him.  Surely the human couldn’t be awake, striving to escape by hiding beneath unconsciousness.  But there were ways to reach Martin’s thoughts that even the scientist knew nothing about.

Martin Hennessy, second grade genetic biochemical engineer and part of an obscure wing of the land’s governing body, hadn’t been easy to find.  Eventually though, Rhey had traced the attacking virus to this nondescript white stone building in the heart of a city called Detroit, in a nation called America.  The man was just another soldier to Rhey though, and as such, was treated as someone to neutralize.  

And ordinarily, with such technology as he had at his disposal, it would have been an easy operation––had been for too many other human soldiers––but not this time.  No, he had to be more careful because unlike the others, this man held something he needed, something that couldn’t be lost due to carelessness.  This man held the key to the code and it was only time that Rhey feared now.  The source of the DNA was locked inside the mind of Martin Hennessy, the man who gibbered and slobbered on the smooth metal table.  What he dreamed about was of no concern, not now, and if anything intelligible ever came out of the human’s mouth, it wouldn’t matter.  No, what mattered was being hidden in the intricacies of the human cortex.  The data was there, he knew it, and so too did his prisoner.  Victim was a much more accurate descriptor, however.

A clear tube dripped a viscous yellow liquid into the man’s arm through a triple stint of needles that allowed Rhey to control the man, despite the leather straps.  The man once would heave and struggle, summoning a depth of desperation that no doubt would have proved valuable in another instance but not this one.  Still, procuring information wasn’t anything new to Rhey.

The man didn’t struggle anymore, not since the mistake with the woman, and though at first Rhey didn’t think much about it, later, in retrospection, he did find it odd how quickly the scientist had lapsed into almost a comatose state, as if waiting.  Odd.

Rhey pushed the new cocktail of chemicals into the holding bag, watched the colors merge and change, a kaleidoscope that lasted mere seconds before the blue surged into bubbling brilliance.  Once the fluid hit the man’s veins, he’d know how close he was to a cure.  But time was not on his side and even through alien features, a frown couldn’t be mistaken.

It had been a last minute consideration to hook the man’s mind to his own computer, as if maybe through a familiar medium, Rhey could find the answers more quickly.  With modifications, the wire leads had been input to Martin’s laptop.  Even as the signals were displayed across his own screens, Rhey watched to see where Martin’s mind went.  And flee it did, ever since the accident.  Up until that moment, the man’s mind had been holding out, bracing against the different drugs being forced into his veins, as if this soldier had undergone terrorist training at some point in his life.  Rhey considered this possibility but dismissed it upon remembering Martin’s life; the human was just too much of a weak link to be anything other than a lab rat, someone who apparently did have a strong sense of loyalty but lacked the backbone to fully implement any sort of strategic plan.  He was the type that was given orders and didn’t operate on his own initiative.  At least, that’s what all the data told him.

Searching through the files and folders that spiderwebbed the magnetic drives within human technology, Rhey had found out all he needed to know about Martin Hennessy.  Once the virus’s path had been traced back to this man, the rest had been relatively easy.  The focus narrowed to reveal what motivated this human; like dissecting a dead animal, the man’s life had been laid bare, especially the fact that though the original lab containing the virus had been inadvertently destroyed in one of Rhey’s first attacks, there was still the creator whose mind possessed its blueprint.  It had taken time though to locate Martin because the man had never been considered part of the first strategic initiative, no doubt believing as most of the other humans did, that his small contribution to the conflict would be inconsequential.  Like the others, no one expected that the minor bug Martin Hennessy had created would ever be valuable enough to deploy.  The very fact the man had even let the virus loose in the first place still mystified Rhey; hadn’t he and his kind shown enough to cow the humans into instant surrender?  Apparently not, as another piece of alien skin slid on pus-filled tracks down his right ear.  

A soft sound emanated from the blue screens on either side of the table, showing change was occurring.  The frown began to lift on Rhey’s face even as he watched the lines transform from graphic lines describing the man’s vital signs into lines of text, tapping into the core of his brain.  At last, readouts that found ways past superficial data and baseline defenses...

Rhey was focussed on the text, trying to make sense of the man’s delirium brought on from too many chemicals and a growing lack of hope, too focussed to notice the man’s hands clench spasmodically against his thighs, as if tightening his gut.  He also missed seeing the man’s eyelids move over eyeballs that now swerved and veered, as if they were frantic to find escape.

But Rhey did notice the man’s chest halt in mid-rise, as if a breath was being held, and the alien wondered at this new development.  Maybe it was the piece of eyelid that slipped and partially obscured alien snake eyes that caused Rhey to momentarily take his focus off the text and curse the man in his own way.  But whereas a moment before the text was a tumble of words that only needed a pattern to be understood, now letters that wove humankind’s language devolved into cryptic, cyrillic characters to which no pattern could ever be ascribed.  The man’s brain, once being decoded, suddenly merged and formed a mesh of stability which both surprised and perturbed the alien.  The lines were no longer technical data being reported from within the man’s mind, instead, they flowed like strings of well-ordered text, weaving an incongruity which Rhey found all too easy to understand.  The data changed and morphed, but all too easily seen was that they formed wings upon which Martin Hennessy flew.  The text transposed on the screens, their blatant expression of fantasy and anxiety only too obvious.  What had the new drug done?

With his jaw dropping unheeded and the skin at the corners of his mouth cracking with the sudden pressure, Rhey began to read...

Chapter 1

It Was You

Precious small bones erupted amidst a trail of sticky saliva, staining the dark granite floor.  In his hands, the lowest string of his mandolin still vibrated.  Beyond the last sweet chord just played, and the reverberation of large stones striking the castle wall, an intruder broke his concentration.  The two were intimately intertwined; Piper had thrown up...again. 

An unfortunate mouse...did Jareth sense a growing irony in that fact?  The black cat’s fur was soft against his roughened hand in an effort to gain attention.  But the external sounds had come on the soft footfalls of yet another, one which sought to awaken him from his melancholy.

He realized maybe his luck was running out, or perhaps was coming due.  He sighed, cursing the fact he could handle a sword and a bow, and glowered at his post, high up in the west tower.  Sentry duty was tedious at best, especially when under siege.  It wasn’t his choice though and besides, everyone on the inside had a job to do.  No more songs inside warm castle taverns, now there was only singing softly to himself as the days and nights dragged into a depression of time.

In the far corner of his post stood a wrought iron candelabra, bent and scraped, sending the glow of three guttering candles up and inside a bricked-up portico.  There were precious few windows now available for he and his bow, and one less view of those outside surrounding the walls.

Heedless, Jareth thrust his head outside, dismissing the possibility of feathered shafts and anyone paying attention.  Overhead, the moon was in decline, sloughing into its last phase.  Darkness gibbered on the horizon.  Still enough light to limn tents and trebuchets stabbing up from the eastern plain. 

East; he’d never been this far before and the experience was chafing at his skin, as if a beetle whose carapace was just a bit too tight.  Was this the cause of his growing unease?

The mortar beneath his scarred hands was cooling, signifying a change in the weather.  As if the build of cloud that was swallowing the stars to the north wasn’t warning enough.  The moon’s current brightness wouldn’t matter soon as he suspected there’d be more than the collision of rock and wall to mar the night.

He longed for respite.  But he imagined many wished for this.  Not for a surcease to the fighting, just a brief moment in which to breathe and gather what inner strength still existed before the last stand.  The last stand––something which even the slowest witted peasant knew was imminent.  Indeed, it seemed a long time since the great stone gates had been closed and barred.  Jareth knew  this because he’d been part of the reinforcement detail.  

But respite wouldn’t be had with the sky’s show of brewing anger to the north.  It looked like those outside the wall would bear the brunt of the storm, though.  So, why did he still feel this urge to escape?  More than rain was being promised from the creeping horizon.  He liked getting wet about as much as his cat did, so why the sudden urge to leave?  

Piper growled low, a sound others liked to call purring, but something which Jareth knew meant more than close comfort.  It was a warning, the sound of a watchdog.  

Stretching his hand and swooping under the cat’s belly, Jareth hoisted the expectant animal to his shoulders where despite the leather pauldrons, razor-like claws still pierced skin for stability.  And the cat would need it because unlike a month of past nights, Jareth was emerging from a lethargy he hadn’t fully understood was lurking.  How long had he been in stasis, waiting, always waiting for something to happen?  This wasn’t part of a minstrel’s life––to wait; he tended to go where and when he wished.  Such ideals didn’t matter though when something deep in the night of his soul stretched, and began stirring strings of the heart.

Strings defined the pattern of his life, actually.  But not now; now there was only the unrelenting assault from those outside.  And his song had echoed the dismal situation in which he found himself.  It hadn’t always been this way, though he tended toward more toward sad songs than not.  The reasons for this escaped him at the moment.  The moment...now, why was this so important?  Time.  Did he sense its movement or was he the one who’d been fully stalled?  While such intricacies laced up his thought, he knew too that it was time to go.

To go was an idea formed from within a dream even before that last reverberation of the walls.  The seed at this point had burst from its husk, breaking past dementia and trampling reality.  Go.  No, more like the urgent yet soft decree from the whores up the street, those that understood he had to leave as another was coming all too soon to take his place.  

Jareth gave in and abandoned his post, keenly feeling the lateness of the hour.  To stay would only serve sentiment’s cause and there was little chance that a change of the castle’s ownership would also bring a better audience.  Besides, a minstrel’s survival depended on looking out for number one.  The walls shuddered again, the interval shorter than he’d expected.  

There wasn’t any doubt that another escalation was in progress.  Looking around the tower’s small room, Jareth didn’t see it as a place of fortitude and strength anymore but rather, as a cell.  The broken and bent bars from an earlier blow reminded; they’d been the only thing holding the stones up.  

But that moment seemed long ago and many trebuchet scores since.  The tower really wasn’t as important as the main gate––it was there the demons outside had concentrated their fire, as was expected.  He thought about alerting his captain but dismissed the idea as superfluous; this tower wasn’t going to stop the invaders no matter how many he could put on the spit of his arrows.  The city was lost and most were braced with the sword or holed up in deep shadow.  Maybe both.

There’d be no parlay, not with this enemy.  When the heads of those cowards who’d tried to escape were flung back over the wall, the message was clear.  And even as he gave consideration to the victims, he didn’t for a moment ascribe that label to himself now.  Everyone-for-himself time had come and gone; Jareth was just late in acknowledging that fact.  He wasn’t immune to the obvious signs of torture and mutilation and had foreseen this eventuality.  Lately, the homeless ways of his kind lay heavy and he was growing tired.  He dismissed the stirring misgivings and strode to the window again, assessing the distance between storm and wall.  There was still time.

Flee.

The word was sinuous, like an exhalation too swiftly taken by the wind.  It was like an echo though, and the resonation inside was  a familiarity that surprised him.  There was also confusion because behind the word, or perhaps enveloping it, a voice that sounded like a single note echoing from his mandolin.  

Flee...you’re running out of time.

Jareth paused at the top step, trying to separate the voice from those that now rose in hysteria outside.  It had begun.  He disassociated from such sounds because only the unexpected ones were important.  Just like Piper’s growl.

Looking back, the window seemed to taunt him, calling him a coward and a liar, no better than a thief as this new course of action went against his vow to defend the castle.  Not that anyone was going to care about him or his songs anymore.  The city was lost and now there were only pieces waiting to let go.  Which is why he knew there was more behind the urge to leave, and it was being mirrored by the faceless voice.  It was then he realized that his purpose had changed.  But to what was still unknown.  

The fallen pile of wood that had kept him warm too many nights, lay strewn in a pattern that spoke in mysteries more often associated with his songs––simple and effortless, yet holding something beneath the surface of which few people really understood.  But Piper did and that’s all that mattered to Jareth, most of the time.  He didn’t play his music for them as much as for the cat...and himself.  Sometimes, it was the only way he could safely hold the memories.

As the sky darkened and all light coming in through the mortised stone arch of a window was extinguished, Jareth stood frozen for one near-fatal second, his eyes closed, feeling his lids raked by the swiftness of movement beneath.  The realization of what was happening was astonishing.  When the huge boulder hit the outer rampart and crushed in his window, the force threw him backward and down the spiral stairs.  If he’d been anywhere but in the entrance, the force of bursting rock would have embedded his bones deep into the opposite wall before they too crumbled under the force.  There was a reason trebuchets were feared!

Having the wind knocked out of him battled with each bruise inflicted by stone steps.  This kept his momentum harshly against the  curving wall.  Flesh scraped at each turn and tumble, but since he didn’t know when his next breath would come, it was almost a relief he didn’t have to hold it.

Still, the stairs eventually ended and four flights down, bleeding and battered, Jareth groaned with every new breath, rattling the ache in his back.  His eyes quickly scanned the debris, looking for the cat.  The welts on his shoulder comforted him more than he let on because they wouldn’t be there unless the animal had launched itself free in time.

Scanning quickly, he saw his mandolin swinging rhythmically on a wall sconce.  Jareth secured it once again before he heard the unhappy mewl indicating that indeed, the black cat had survived.  A fleeting grin appeared as he saw a dusty and annoyed fluff of fur clinging to a cross beam one flight up.  

“Time to go, Piper.”

And as if absolving the man from any responsibility for its plight, the pupils of the black cat dilated, gold-green irises glowing in the shadows.  Sometimes, it was the only way Jareth could spot the cat when the dark closed in.

With a deft leap and bound, the cat caught the stair edge and slipped down the remaining steps until at the man’s feet, it bunched its muscles again and leaped to the shoulder from which it had been disturbed.  As Jareth took stock, noting his short sword was still at his side, he flipped the red hood of his short jerkin over his head, as if to conceal himself within the growing shadows.  Night wouldn’t last forever and really, he had to go.

Grasping firmly but without drawing more blood, Piper settled into a sentient hump, just another shadow looking for its corner.  With eyes growing wider by the minute, the animal looked comfortable and secure even as the man increased his pace, picking his way among the new debris, looking for egress.   

The rush of cool night air hit him forcefully as he pushed open a heavy stone door, the tunnel behind it leading toward the outside.  The guardroom was empty––as he’d expected.  No reason to inform him that it was time to leave and they hadn’t.  But where the others had gone didn’t concern him anymore, even as he passed to the lower levels.  Soon, the force outside would flood beyond the gates and he had no intention of having to fight his way out.  There were easier ways to die.

He heard muted voices but for the most part, the noise of  lurking storm and invading force dominated to the north.  How fortunate was it that the voice in his head had spoken when it did?  Jareth dismissed such thoughts because right now was not the time for questions.

The row of windows facing west ran at intervals down a long hall which was dimly lit from burning sconces.  The shadows burned in their nakedness.  Almost alive, they wormed their way ahead, stroked window arches and caressed stone tiles too cleverly laid.  The fortress was old, more ancient than Jareth could reasonably guess.  But he knew its foundations were rooted deep into the bedrock below, its history a stalwart stone framework even as it was being threatened.  There’s a soul here, Jareth thought, something which hints at stronger magic than I could ever understand.  But, wasn’t that as it usually came to be?  Such mysteries always enthralled and delighted, but they also prompted thoughts that he should know these secrets, that he should take the time to understand their nature.  

Forcing the timing of such idiocy away in disgust, he urged himself forward, taking time to stroke Piper once in assurance when the animal began to dig in.  

“We’re not caught yet, no, not yet.  Have some faith.”

The sound of his words surprised him as they sped off and echoed down the empty hall, their portent chiding mock confidence.  The cat didn’t notice.

And there, even as he neared the hall’s end, visualizing the castle’s layout, he saw one of the shadows move.  But was it the darkness or the sliver of mirrored steel (where none should be) that first caught his attention?  Nevertheless, his hand went to his side and he began to withdraw a shiny blade of his own.

“You’re going to need more than that, methinks!”

The sound of the voice brought him up short.  Piper’s balance precariously slipped and caused new blood to trickle beneath his pauldrons.  

In the dim light of torches, a thin line of darkness oozed down and seeped toward the ugly blackness of archaic letters emblazoned across the man’s chest.  The pain of his shoulder was nothing compared to his astonishment, though.

From the shadows, led by the ever increasing glow of a long, basket-hilted sword, a woman dressed in lacquered black leather armor and similarly clad heeled boots, stepped toward him.  She approached as if she knew him, as if the familiarity Jareth was feeling was real.  He knew her.  Or did he?

The woman was tall, her face drawn in shadows and milky pale skin, cheekbones high and as deeply shadowed as her eyes, which were as sharp as her outstretched sword.  This extension bothered him as he recognized it was being offered in supplication.  Gold irises split dark pupils amid purple shadowed lids, while long dark eyebrows arched and disappeared beneath a lustrous weave of midnight.  But not totally, because Jareth could see the shimmer of white that curled through her long hair, beginning near her neck and furling like a sail beneath black waves.  She was stunning in a way few women ever affected him, causing his tongue to tangle.  She turned her head and he noticed pointed ears that were almost too delicate for such a perilous face.  

And perilous is exactly the vibration that resonated from both her demeanor as well as countenance.  But something else beside the look on her face and tone of her voice was dominating the moment; as if the true meaning of seduction were undergoing transformation, this woman exuded a sensuality that Jareth felt not only within his loins but as a tourniquet around his heart.  He knew  then that he knew her and yet, he did not.  She was the very depths of the ocean in dreams so wet they belied existence.  And yet, there she was.

And he knew something else, as well.

“It was you!”