Love Beyond Time Read online

  Time

  The Outsiders, Book One

  Rebecca Royce

  Published by Silver Publishing

  Publisher of Erotic Romance

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  Cover Artist: Reese Dante

  Love Beyond Time © 2011 Rebecca Royce

  ISBN # 9781920502034

  Attention Readers: This book uses US English.

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  Dedication

  To Liia Ann who rescued me even though she doesn't know

  it. Much appreciation!

  Love Beyond Time

  Rebecca Royce

  Prologue

  Abraxas Moore stared one more time at the

  unforgiving clouds forming above him. The weather would

  soon become perilous, and he knew he had very little time

  until they caught him. Even the Green Hills, the place that

  had sheltered him and his kind for centuries—their home—

  was no longer safe.

  The rain that he was sure would start at any moment

  would not be life renewing. It was not a sign of rebirth, and

  he knew with a near perfect certainty it was not even

  natural in its origins. Rather, it had been conjured by those

  who sought to kill him as a means to draw him out into the

  open. They hoped he would make a mistake and fail at his

  task. Then they would be able to trap and kill him.

  Most disturbing, however, was he knew they would

  succeed in their task.

  His role as leader of his people, not one he ever

  truly sought, weighed heavily on him that night, and he

  knew not even the love of his wife, Niki, would sustain him

  through what was to come. The prophecy was no longer

  something that would eventually happen, but was actually

  occurring in front of his eyes.

  Time had finally caught up with them.

  After centuries of very little change, his people

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  were facing almost immediate destruction, and it had fallen

  to him to somehow find a way to help them survive what

  would be certain annihilation.

  Ironically, the storm that had come out of nowhere

  this evening had been the final sign he needed to indicate

  their impending doom. When an Outsider stopped being

  able to predict the weather then it really was the end of the

  world.

  How would humanity last even another decade

  without them around to silently keep the balance of

  lightness and darkness in order? His people had thrived, for

  centuries by walking the lines of grey that fell between the

  two extremes of Good and Evil. They kept order and

  balance in their little space in the universe.

  They always had and he had hoped they always

  would.

  Oh sure, they may have slightly pushed things

  towards the side of Good whenever possible. They were,

  after all, not Gods or Deities who could see the fabric of

  time and know the outcome of decisions they made before

  they made them. They were humans—of a sort—with

  another power, another layer, to their minds that allowed

  them to see what most humans could not—all things were

  connected.

  Time, energy, life, and even death all flowed on the

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  same strings of current, like a sound wave or an electrical

  wire, and they had been used or manipulated by his people

  since the dawn of time to keep things in order. This had

  been their sacred duty since creation, and it was the

  obligation they would all be forfeiting with their deaths in

  no short amount of time.

  Without them, it was likely there would be chaos.

  Humanity would fall in this dimension. Chaos.

  Enslavement. Famine. Death. Evil would finally win its

  battle to control all things. Good would stand no chance of

  prevailing because they wouldn't see the 'bad guys' coming

  until it was too late to stop them.

  His people had forgotten they were not Gods. He

  was to blame for this, as he was to blame for so many other

  mistakes over his short reign. If there was a way to fix

  things, he would gladly do whatever it took to complete the

  task. But alas, the chanting had stopped for him, and he

  knew he was out of the precious currency known as time.

  Even transporting backward
s into the past seemed

  to be out of the question. It was as if a wall had been

  erected to keep his kind from reaching back to that moment

  when all things had gone awry.

  He should have been paying better attention.

  Clenching his fists at his side, Abraxas stomped

  across the grass from his small cottage home towards the

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  top of Windfelt Hill. What would the local population think

  when the barriers fell and they suddenly realized they had

  been living side by side with unknown people for

  generations?

  The wind blew, pushing his blond hair into his face

  and since he couldn't see, it made it exceptionally hard to

  proceed to his destination.

  It was absolutely essential he get up the hill before

  the sun went down and he was plunged into darkness. He

  needed to place his ritual staff upon the hill and call to the

  heavens for help. That is if they hadn't abandoned him and

  could still hear his pleas for his people. Was anyone up

  there still listening to the Outsiders or was it too late?

  The grass chomped below his feet. It was still

  winter, and spring hadn't made its first pushes to thaw out

  his part of the world. Ice sat atop the grass, changing its

  color from its natural green to a more transparent blue. It

  crunched below his well-worn boots. Niki had started

  mending them, begging him to actually acquire a new pair,

  before she had taken off with their daughter to hide with

  the others.

  Perhaps he should have stopped her, but it had

  seemed futile. Let them go. Let them all go and see if we

  can hide the children was what he had ultimately decided.

  Finally reaching his destination, Abraxas stopped to

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  look around him. He had known the top of this hill

  intimately since he was a child.

  Windfelt Hill was the outer ring of their boundary.

  To cross over the top of the barrier and over to the other

  side was to cross into the land of humanity. No amount of

  power, his or anyone else's, could shield his people for very

  long from the humans if they crossed this hill, which was

  why in the past only a select few were chosen to make the

  trek.

  Last month, all of his people, with the exception of

  him, had opted to cross. His job wasn't done. He didn't have

  the luxury of leaving. Not until he had exhausted every

  option. If the Darkness knew where they were, then it was

  time to be somewhere else. They had decided their strength

  no longer held in numbers but in small hidden groups that

  were far from each other, far from the hills and woods that

  had hidden them and nourished them. It was their last

  desperate attempt to keep this annihilation of their people at

  bay and it made him crazier than he cared to dwell on that

  the whole of their society had opted to run away than stay

  and fight. Why was he the only one who could see it was

  better to stay and fight than turn and run?

  He wondered how they were all faring out there in

  the world and once again he felt the pull to Niki and the

  unrelenting desire to throw away all of his responsibilities

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  and join her in her hiding place. So maybe he wasn't that

  different from the others when it came down to it. He

  wanted the family life too. Their daughter was a month

  older and she aged without him there to watch her do it. A

  lump formed in his throat and he swallowed it away. He

  had thought they would never have children. They should

  have been too old. One lone tear slipped from his left eye

  and he brushed it away. She was growing up without him

  and it truly made his insides burn.

  The trees around him swayed from the wind of the

  coming storm. Their emptiness, as they swayed in their

  death-like dance, matched the rhythms of his own heart. He

  wanted to sway like that, back and forth just floating in the

  breeze. He didn't want to fight anymore, to stand straight

  and rigid, it would be so much easier to just give in.

  Shaking his head, he pushed away those thoughts. At this

  moment, they would help nothing.

  Thank you, old friends, he thought quietly, directing

  his thoughts to the trees and the hill itself, for your years of

  service to our people. You shaded us well. You kept our

  boundaries hidden. Don't think that I will ever forget.

  Lightning crackled in the sky, but still no rain fell,

  and he could feel the threat of it in his every bone. He knew

  he needed to hurry.

  It wouldn't be long before it was too late to lend his

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  people his final aid and help shield them from harm. He

  would take the protective shields off of this land and send

  them out into the universe to the Outsiders wherever they

  hid. They could use that energy to protect themselves for as

  long as it lasted.

  Maybe it would only be a few months worth of

  power but it would be better than nothing.

  He slammed his staff, which to the uninformed

  looked like a giant walking stick, into the ground next to

  him. The Staff of Aknala had been handed down from one

  leader to another for as long as his people had existed. It

  would cease to exist this day, and once again, he questioned

  himself.

  Had he done enough to try to save them?

  Now his efforts had become useless. His burden had

  been tremendous, and though he had shouldered it, he had

  not been powerful enough to stop what had been

  prophesized. It was all coming true. There would be no

  stopping the destruction now.

  His people had counted on him, counted on his

  powers being infinite. He had tried to tell them that it

  wasn't the case, that he was as flawed as they were and only

  a joint effort could undo what was about to strike them. But

  they had rejected that plan and instead chosen to go into

  hiding.

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  Separated from each other, they were like lambs to

  the slaughter. In their efforts to guard their children, they

  would doom the prophesized infants to death and there

  wasn't a thing he could do to stop it.

  Unless…

  The thought hit Abraxas so powerfully that for a

  moment he could barely breathe or move from the shock of

  it. His temples pounded with excitement as his blood

  pulsed heavily in his veins. Were the heavens finally

  speaking to him again? Was he being given intervention

  when he needed it the most? With no other choice left to

  him, he had to believe it was a message from the moon and

  the sun.

  He could keep the children alive and ensure that at

  least one more generation would live to see adulthood. It

  was too late t
o help the entire clan. It would take too much

  power and he did not have the strength left in him to handle

  it all on his own. But he could send the children away. He

  could hide them; direct all of his power to keeping them

  hidden.

  They had been the children that had been foretold

  would defeat the growing Darkness. The clan was right.

  There was nothing more important than saving the children.

  But it wasn't in small groups that would quickly deplete his

  power source. No, the safety would last longer if they were

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  all together and only needed to be guarded in one location.

  Eighteen children had been born three months

  earlier, some too early and some strikingly late, but all of

  them at the same exact time—ten past twelve, to shocked

  and terrified parents. It had been the beginning of the Great

  One's prophecy. On his death bed he had told them and

  they had not believed. Some of them had called it the last

  ravings of a dying man.

  They had grown too complacent, too used to their

  modern existence. Little by little, they had adapted their

  ways to fit the ever-changing world. It had seemed the

  smart thing to do. Asking a Warrior who returned from

  battle to go back to living in a house with no air-

  conditioning in the summer seemed akin to asking him to

  return to the dark ages when he'd visited the Renaissance.

  Certainly their enemies had used all of their modern

  technologies to try to locate and destroy them. But the new

  'toys,' as he liked to think of them, left them dependent and

  had done something to the group's feeling of self-

  sufficiently. Instead of being separate from the humans,

  they had become part of them, at least when it came to their