Free Veiled by Silvina Niccum Page A

truly valued.”
    “ You.”
    “ Me?” She was taken by
surprise.
    “ You are perfectly willing
to sacrifice your own existence—for what? The Second One, Legion?
You may have an impact on my mortality, maybe even some of my
friends’, but when our lives are over—then what? What’s really in
it for you? You will never evolve. This is it for you—a spirit, not
even a ghost. You’ll always be a form that will never exist in a
tangible way.
    “ Really Agatha, I honestly
had you pegged for someone who is in it for herself, rather than
‘the hero type’ as you so well put it.”
    “ We will possess your
bodies,” she refuted.
    “ Yeah…you and all the
cast-outs will be fighting for the one mortal stupid enough to
allow that. It sounds like it will be cramped in there. Good luck!”
I said brightly, and turned to leave.
    My words must have struck a
chord, because she just hovered there, looking after me, hating me
even more for finding her weak spot.
    I turned my head and looked
at her over my shoulder, and I saw that Eros was whispering
something in her ear. She ignored him for a while, then let out a
growl, and was gone in an instant.
    Eros was still looking
down, but before he too turned to leave, he exchanged looks with
Max. For a moment they stared at each other, and then Eros spun
around and flew away after Agatha.
     
    * * * * *
     

Chapter 7
     
    “ Well...for better or for
worse the time has come,” Henry announced with a beaming smile.
Ever since he was able to use his smuggled alien explosives to save
one of our own, he had been in the best of moods. Not that I blame
him—it’s Russell and Alex that I blame for keeping the conversation
alive by asking him question after question. Henry was bad enough
without encouragement; with it he was downright vexing.
    Richard, who left Ishtar
before we tried to rescue Max, kept to himself until Max got him to
come over. They had a long conversation where they patched things
up—Celeste, however, was not part of the patching up—she instead
came to my side with a smirk on her face.
    “ Go ahead…you can gloat
now,” Celeste said the moment she was free of Max’s iron clasp. He
only let go of her while he talked to Richard, otherwise they were
pretty much an appendage to each other—not that she
minded.
    “ What, me? I never gloat,”
I said faking innocence.
    “ Yeah, right,” she said
through squinted eyes and pursed up lips.
    “ You have to tell me what
happened. How did you ever end up going to Ishtar?” I
asked.
    She let out a low growl and
took my hand just like old times. We glided some distance from the
group and floated aimlessly through space. “If you tell anyone I
will…never mind…you were right, Richard is an idiot,” she said
owning up to her mistake. “All he cares about is himself and anyone
who happens to make him feel good at the time.”
    “ So…how did you get to
Ishtar?”
    “ Some females came up to
him after one of his speeches and suggested we follow them to a
planet where a group of spirits needed his kind of persuasive power, so of
course, we did. It was Ishtar, but from above you can’t tell that
there’s anything wrong with it. Max and Eros were already there as
if waiting for us and that’s when I realized that something was not
right.
    “ Max came to my side
immediately and told me that I had to leave right away. I had never
seen him like that before, he looked very worried, and he begged me
to leave. I told him I wouldn’t leave without him, and he said that
he couldn’t leave without Eros and Richard, but that I had to leave
at once. He said it would be too much, that he wasn’t strong enough
to deal with that.
    “ You can only imagine that
when he said that I was more curious than ever to know what he
meant by it. So I insisted, and he just kept being stubborn, until
finally I wore him down and he said he loved me and if any harm
came to me he could never forgive himself.
    “ That’s when a bunch