Special Passage (The Coursodon Dimension Book 4) Read online

  Special Passage

  Book Four of the Coursodon Dimension Series

  M.L. Ryan

  Special Passage, Book Four of the Coursodon Dimension Series

  Copyright © 2015, M.L. Ryan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, business establishments, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by: Linda Boulanger ([email protected])

  and M.L. Ryan

  Acknowledgements

  It took much longer to finish Special Passage than I anticipated, but I hope you think it was worth the wait. As always, there are many people to thank for their help and support: my editor, Cynthia Shepp; my beta readers, C.M. and T.D.; and everyone in the BookGoodies author group that constantly provide reassurance and suggestions.

  While there is only a small chance anyone reading this will have ever climbed Baboquivari (Bob-oh-KEY-var-ee) Peak, I must disclose the description of the ascent of Babo is not topographically precise. Mostly accurate, yes. Completely? Not so much. Suffice it to say, it is not an easy trek to the summit and artistic license is a writer’s prerogative. The tale of I’itoi (EE-toy) and his association with the sacred mountain is real, however, and the maze symbol, shown on the cover, is often depicted in Tohono O’Odham art.

  Last, but certainly not least, my heartfelt thanks to my husband and son, who give me the space and encouragement necessary to make my writing dreams come true.

  For my boys….

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  1

  A caress of balmy ocean breeze slid across my naked flesh. Never a fan of lying around outside unclothed, this was different; except for Alex and me, the beach was deserted. How my sexy hunk of a lover found this isolated, tropical enclave for our well-deserved vacation was a mystery, but if he could shell out the bucks for this kind of privacy, I was willing to put up with the ground-up shells in places where such material should never lodge.

  That he was also au natural was a big selling point as well. The late afternoon sun cast shadows that accentuated every glorious, sinewy muscle on his long, lean frame. I had the irresistible urge to run my tongue over every inch of him, and I was just about to make my fantasies a reality when Alex pulled me to my feet and guided me into the gentle waves. We swam out past where I could touch the bottom; not that I was a particularly strong swimmer, but having a guy from another dimension with magical abilities and super-human strength as my personal lifeguard made safety concerns trivial.

  We intended to make love, but it was actually a lot more difficult than was commonly depicted in film or fiction, even with the added buoyancy of salt water. Nevertheless, I thought we had everything set for some fine aquatic lust-and-thrust, when I felt something brush against my thigh.

  At first, I thought it was Alex, but nothing on him was that large or that grey, nor did I recall him possessing a dorsal fin. As I pondered the irony of ending up as shark bait after surviving all my previous close calls, Jaws leapt out of the water and revealed itself as Flipper. Soon, four more of the mammals arrived, all darting playfully around us. I’d always wanted to swim with dolphins, so I cut them some slack and forgot what they interrupted. Besides, I should have been ready for this. Animals of all sorts were attracted to me since I acquired some magical abilities of my own. Eventually, all kinds of sea life—angelfish, horse-eyed jack, spotted drum, moray eels, and sea turtles—joined the cetaceans and surrounded us, but I decided to call it a day when a sperm whale showed up. I was, after all, naked.

  Back on dry land, Alex wrapped us in an oversized, fluffy towel, and we settled in to watch my marine entourage slowly disassemble and disappear into the deep. I laid my head on Alex’s shoulder, inhaling the scent of Cherry Garcia ice cream, his natural fragrance du jour, as it wafted from his moist, caressible body.

  Ah, bliss.

  An emphatic, low-pitched droning, much like the forlorn call of a jilted bullfrog advertising his availability, except way more annoying, interrupted my euphoria. Seconds later, the toady chants became the least of my problems as I felt the world flipping upside down.

  The sensation brought me back to reality, and the words, “Did you fall asleep again?” spoken in a familiar, deep baritone, allowed me to identify the source of the irritating sound.

  “Damn it, Sebastian,” I snarled, “I’m a bird, not a bat!”

  Technically, I was neither, as I was still in human form. I had drifted off, but there was no way in hell I was going to admit it. How I managed to slumber while being hung by my feet over the edge of a rather imposing cliff was unclear. Maybe the five-hundred-foot drop made me pass out with fear. Maybe I was becoming narcoleptic along with the other odd developments in my life. All I knew for sure was Sebastard had just woken me from a fantastic dream—which was particularly galling as most of mine were just plain weird—and as he dangled me with one hand, his other was busy trying to snap a selfie of the maneuver on his cell phone. Sebastian Kess didn’t have to take camera shots; his magic allowed him to display any of his memories holographically. He claimed these photos were for my benefit, to show me what I needed to work on during training, but I feared that was not his sole motive.

  “You post that on Instagram and you’re a dead man.”

  Sebastian chuckled. “You know I like to keep a photographic record of our sessions. For posterity, my dear.”

  “Posterity, my ass,” I griped.

  “Well, that is the part of you which I am getting the best view at the moment.”

  “Funny. Just hilarious. How long do you intend to keep me like this?”

  “Until you figure out how to get out of the situation without using magic.”

  I’d already freed myself once before by changing into a hawk. I punctuated the feat by swooping out of the canyon and forcing Sebastian to duck when I flew perilously close to his head. However, my ability to shift form wasn’t in question. I was supposed to be learning how to defend myself using human means, and that was a lot harder than it seemed.

  “Can’t I just shoot you?” I spoke theoretically, of course. I didn’t have a gun and as much as Sebastian pissed me off, I’d never do anything to actually harm him.

  “If you did, I would lose my grip, and you would plunge to your death,” he replied coolly.

  “And before that happens, I’ll change into a hawk.”

  A loud sigh cascaded down from the top of the cl
iff. “No magic, remember?”

  “The only reason you said I couldn’t shift was because I can’t do it in front of humans. If I shot you, you’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter. You know, it’s like if a tree falls in the woods. If I form-bend into my Yterixa form as a hawk and there’s no human alive to see it…”

  “You are missing the point, as usual,” he interrupted. “If you are going to become a Xyzok, you have to learn to protect yourself. Magically and non-magically. However, I will concede that your reasoning in this very specific scenario is sound—as long as you kill your attacker, or develop the ability to alter the mind of a human.”

  The last part was highly unlikely. My magic was sort of “leftover” from the time I was inhabited by Sebastian, a leader of a mega-powerful enforcer group called Xyzok from the parallel dimension of Coursodon. Using some highly experimental arcane energy, he managed to save his life by transferring his “essence” out of his dying body into a Kindle. He remained trapped in there until I turned on my new eBook reader and released him. Into me. I wasn’t sure which was worse—Sebastian’s constant, pompous banter in my head or his seemingly insatiable sexual desires, but somehow we managed to coexist. Thankfully, his protégé, Alex Sunderland, showed up and figured out how to return Sebastian to his own body. In the process, Alex and I began a relationship, and I ended up with the ability to destroy stuff, particularly when really ticked, and to form-bend into a hawk. I doubted I’d ever be skilled enough to do anything as elegant—or practical—as wiping people’s memories. As I was the first human transplanted with Courso magic, my whole repertoire was a bit of a crapshoot.

  With all the blood in my body now pooling in my inverted head, it was getting harder and harder to speak. I managed a somewhat garbled, “Now that’s settled, can you pull me up?”

  “Fine,” he huffed, flinging me unceremoniously up and onto the rocky ground beside him. “If you want to take the easy way out.”

  “Easy way out?” I repeated as dizziness overtook me. “I’m going to spend the whole way home listening to your incessant blather about my failure to, I don’t know, overpower my attacker by using my body as a fulcrum to shift his center of gravity.” I had no clue if the physics involved in what I just outlined was even possible, but I was kind of raving.

  Sebastian peered at me thoughtfully. “That would never work,” he assured. “You still would have been dropped.”

  If my brain hadn’t felt like it was about to explode, and I didn’t have the world’s worst case of the sober spinnies, I’d have pointed out that I was more likely to be damaged by his training regimen than being dangled by some criminal. Instead, I opted for a more concise response.

  I blew chow on his twelve-hundred dollar, crocodile-skin loafers.

  The drive back to the house was blessedly free of discussion about my unsuccessful training exercise. Instead, Sebastian voiced his unending concerns about the best way to clean fine leather and my shortcomings in gastric fortitude. It seemed like a good deal for me at first, but after forty minutes of listening to him go on and on about my affront to his Martin Dingman Arlo’s, I’d had enough.

  “Who pays that much for shoes?” I complained. “And who wears something that expensive on a training mission? Besides,” I pointed out, “aren’t crocodiles endangered? Those are probably illegal.”

  “I would never purchase contraband goods, my dear. These are made of African Nile crocodile, which are not a protected species. And it is not about the price—it is about the sublime craftsmanship you have likely ruined.”

  He looked away from the road for a moment, and when his eyes met mine, anguish, not anger, filled them. Only someone with Sebastian’s obsession with fashion could experience that kind of desolation over footwear, and it was something I couldn’t fathom. The entire contents of my closet probably cost only half as much as that one pair of shoes.

  Regardless of the couture calamity, I wasn’t about to be swayed by his suffering. “Don’t you think you should take some responsibility, seeing as how you were the one that made me puke?”

  “I do not. You had the entire clifftop on which to vomit. You did not have to do so over the small area of ground upon which my feet happened to be placed.”

  While Sebastian and I no longer shared a body, the time he spent inhabiting me gave him an uncanny understanding of how my mind, and in this case, my stomach, worked. He was right; I could have easily avoided his precious slip-ons and voided someplace else. However, there was no way I’d give him the satisfaction of admitting he was right.

  “I wish I had that kind of control over my bodily functions.”

  He glanced at me and his expression clearly conveyed I hadn’t fooled him one bit. “If you are not happy with my methods, you always have the option of discontinuing your training.”

  He said the last part as a smirk crept across his handsome face. If Sebastian wasn’t so maddeningly arrogant most of the time, I might be able to appreciate his dark, shiny hair and smoldering good looks. Mostly, we just annoyed each other, like petulant siblings. In this case, Sebastian knew he was the only person Alex would allow to put me through my paces. If I wanted to continue working with the inter-dimensional enforcers—and I most sincerely did—I was stuck with him.

  Sighing with resignation, I steered the conversation toward a common theme of late. “I know there’s a lot of stuff I should learn, but no amount of training is going to bulk up my magical repertoire to Xyzok standards. I’ll never really be one of you, so why do I have to be tortured with all these ridiculous scenarios?”

  Sebastian pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. Shifting in his seat to face me, he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “That is precisely why I am so hard on you, my dear. You will not be able to rely on a lifetime of arcane talent to get you out of a sticky situation.” He held up his hand when I tried to interrupt. “I know exactly what you are about to say, but there may be a time when you are not with me or Alex or another Xyzok to help you. I want to be certain that if a situation arises and you are left to your own devices, you have the devices you require.”

  “As I’ve pointed out before, a gun is a great equalizer.”

  “So is your temper, my dear.” He grinned, turning to restart the vehicle. “Just ask Angelica, Lyjwix, and Keem.”

  As he well knew, I couldn’t ask them. They were dead. Because I had killed them. In my defense, all the offings were completely justified. The first, Angelica, was trying to kill Alex, and I shoved a chopstick through the traitorous bitch’s eye. Lyjwix was a disturbed Courso bureaucrat who I blasted with my wonky magic when he tried to kill me. The most recent fatality occurred when I turned into a mega-hawk, dragon-like something and incinerated Keem, a maniacal wacko from a previously unknown third dimension who was trying to kill everyone.

  “I think the common denominator in all instances was terror, Sebastian, not rage.” At least, that was what I hoped. Somehow losing control when afraid seemed less of a personality flaw than doing so when irate.

  “Even more reason for you to be over prepared for any situation. Good, solid practice is the best way to overcome fear.”

  “Or a nice shot of tequila,” I remarked under my breath. I knew Sebastian could hear me—blessed as all Courso with hyper-aural acuity—but we had an understanding that, for the sake of group harmony, we’d ignore anything said as a snarky aside. He responded only with his trademark, a lone raised eyebrow.

  The remainder of the trip was largely conversation free, but he forced me to listen to music from his favorite Courso band—Alien Butt Crack. They sounded like a middle school string quartet backed up by a pack of feral cats in heat.

  It was a long, long ride.

  2

  When we finally made it back, Alex was out. However, my best friend, Rachel, sat on one of the living room sofas reading—based on the picture on the front—a paranormal romance. The genre’s cover art always seemed to depict a s
imilar theme: a misty background behind a leather-clad, sword-carrying woman clutching a shirtless vampire. This one had all the essential elements, except there was also a wolf standing on the other side of the fanger. Snuggled next to Rachel was my big, brown dog, Ulut. The fact that he wasn’t really a dog, but a man from the third dimension trapped in his animal form, made Rachel’s book choice particularly apropos.

  “I’m so glad you waited,” Sebastian cooed, flashing a beatific smile her way. He shooed Ulut from the couch and settled himself in the now-vacant spot next to Rachel. “Hailey had some problems with the exercises today, and it took much longer than I anticipated. Please forgive my tardiness.”

  Rachel beamed back. “Oh, that’s all right. I haven’t been here that long.”

  My roiling stomach returned. Rachel had broken up with her last boyfriend, Cortez, another hunky Xyzok, a few weeks earlier, and it seemed Sebastian was laying the groundwork for laying her. I was not completely okay with his attentions. To begin with, he had a reputation as a womanizer. Legendary, actually. He’d vowed celibacy until he made Rachel his, and as far as I could tell, he seemed to be keeping that pledge. Nevertheless, I feared Sebastian would lose interest once he made the conquest, and because Rachel always initiated the demise of her relationships, I worried she might react badly to getting dumped. Additionally, she had no clue other dimensions existed, much less that Cortez, Alex, and Sebastian came from a parallel one. She thought the guys were private investigators and they were teaching me the ropes. I longed to reveal the whole Sebastian-in-my-Kindle saga and my newfound magical abilities, but it wasn’t entirely my secret to share. In my opinion, if Sebastian wanted an actual relationship with her, she deserved to know the truth before anything started.