LTSV - Lost & Found Epilogue (Patreon)

Many, many years later..

Mira closed her eyes in a quiet bedroom that seemed darker than it was. Adra’s physical form was a warm weight on the mattress next to her and had been for some time. He didn’t leave her side for long these days. It was the first time in a long time that she’d been able to grow old and, actually, she wasn’t as excited about the possibility of dying from old age as she had once been. She always seemed to forget how annoying it was until she was in the middle of doing so. So far, being an old woman had been little more than a constant litany of insults from her body and she was looking forward to something new.

Her question of ‘can Adra father children’ had been answered—five times, in fact. The Priestly lineage was as secure as she could make it and their children were all grown now, with families of their own. 

For the record, being a surrogate was not like her usual experience of motherhood. The children she bore in this life were more like cute nieces and nephews who she liked, but had not bonded with. It would have been impossible to hate any of them since they all came out looking like little Adras with Violet’s eyes. Eventually, she adopted the majority of them back in to continue the Priestly line, save her eldest daughter who went on to become the Crown Princess and later Queen, but she still felt more like their fun aunt rather than the matriarch of their family. 

The kids and now grandkids visited often, more so in recent weeks, but she found herself nodding off more and more during those visits. Her body was giving out or, rather, it had already given out.

Mira had experienced an odd burst of energy earlier in the evening that she knew meant her time would come soon. She should have called her children to her bedside, but dying in the heart of a weeping crowd just didn’t appeal. All she wanted to do was snuggle with her husband before she fell asleep. She’d said what she had to say already and if you couldn’t be selfish when you were dying then when could you be?

They’d said their goodbyes, mended all their old arguments, and her estate was settled. She’d attempted to provide for Adra, but he had his own money and had been clear that he wouldn’t stay in this world for long once she left it. That was less of a threat coming from him than it would be from anyone else.

So she knew it was time and yet the actual event still took her by surprise when she closed her eyes for a nap and opened them again in a private hospital room.

Mira glanced around, pleased to find herself in a High Technology setting. There was a flatscreen TV, currently off, mounted on the wall across from her bed and her full length picture windows looked out onto a bustling metropolis that stretched out along a crescent-shaped beach hugging a crystal blue bay that reflected the moon overhead.

‘Hell yes,’ she thought to herself and promised the first thing she would do was find whatever served this culture as a fancy coffee shop and get them to make her an iced coffee. In her life as Mira Priestly, she couldn’t even get her hands on coffee beans. Both she and Adra had tried, ok? It just wasn’t an agricultural export anywhere in the world they could reasonably get at.

It took her a moment to realize she wasn’t alone in the room. There was a man standing by her bedside, on what had used to be her blind side. She’d gotten too accustomed to relying on just one eye and hadn’t seen him right away so by the time she did see him, he was already tangled in bands of solid shadow that forced him back and away from Mira. A hypodermic needle fell out of his hand as he fought to free himself, but some of those dark tendrils invaded his mouth when he opened it to scream and stifled him. 

Mira watched as her would-be murderer’s eyes flooded with red-flecked darkness and then suddenly turned white once more as the dark tendrils dropped to the ground into the shadows on the floor and he brushed down his front. 

When he looked at her, the man’s previously dark eyes had turned a clear, bright shade of garnet red; not quite the same shade of dark rose that Adra’s eyes had been when he was in his ‘Colvin’ guise, but definitely not the same shade of brown they had been when the man (now Adra) was fighting for his life.

This answered some questions she’d never gotten around to asking about how Adra had gotten a body capable of siring children in their last life, mostly because she’d been afraid of this answer. 

“I was really hoping to have sidelined this man before you woke up,” Adra commented as he rocked from one foot to another, settling into his new container. “Do you recognize him?”

“He’s my fiance in this life, right?” she guessed, squinting at his face. Her hosts had an arranged marriage or betrothal more often than not, so that tracked. Her parents had arranged her engagement to this man and announced it to her as a ‘by the way’ over the breakfast table one morning. Mira’s head hurt as she got a few stray memories of the screaming row that followed. At least she wasn’t married already. That also happened sometimes. 

More memories came back to her as she examined the man’s face. “He’s not one of the regular cast members.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to seize his body, were that the case. I’m familiar with him, although I had not learned his last name,” Adra commented as he pulled out the man’s wallet and riffled through it until he came up with an ID. “Mason Dietrich,” he read the name on his drivers’ license aloud, squinted at it, and looked at Mira. “I’m not sure how I feel about this name.”

“If anyone can pull it off then it’s you, darling,” Mira reassured him and then pointed at her chart. “Be a dear and bring that to me? I want to see what I’m sick with.”

“Head trauma, but not really,” Adra informed her without looking, but he did hand the clipboard over. “This one remembers shouting at her and startling her so she stumbled backwards into some furniture. She grazed her head on the way down. He lied to the paramedics and said she took drugs beforehand, but she really only has a few bumps and bruises. They admitted her due to the drug accusation and haven’t been taking her seriously when she says she’s sober.”

Mira paged through the report, temporarily ignoring her outrage on behalf of her host. Both those children were gone now and one deserved it more than the other. 

“Her name was Samira Bellamy,” she commented. She liked her new name better than Adra seemed to like his.

There were no records on her chart of her being given any medications by the hospital, but there was also a small discarded clear plastic cup on the rolling table next to her bed; the kind that nurses delivered pills in. Samira had a memory of a night-duty bringing the cup. They’d looked like ibuprofen so she’d taken the pills. Then she got very sleepy.

It was possible that Mason had used the nurse as a mule to slip her something meant to knock her out so he could do the injection without a struggle, otherwise she couldn’t see a reason why the nurse wouldn’t have recorded the medication on Samira’s chart. Samira’s family had malpractice lawsuit money and weren’t afraid to use it against the whole hospital, especially for a better payoff, so the hospital would have been taking extra care with documenting Samira’s care. At the same time, Mason would have needed a patsy if he wanted to drug her. There was no way Samira would have taken anything that passed through his hands. 

Had the nurse given her too much of whatever that was? If she was willing to risk her job then she was probably willing to do a lot of things.

Mira took the marker off the whiteboard containing her chart and drew a few purification charms on her belly and exposed thighs. This would make it harder to figure out what he’d dosed her with, but Mira was more concerned with the condition of her body right now. The glyphs glowed and then vanished, having done their job. The ambient mana here was almost nonexistent. She had enough juice to clean up whatever drugs were working in her system, but not enough to cast through pure visualization. Drawing glyphs was a primitive workaround for these conditions, but it worked.

“I don’t see a tox screen here, which is odd if they’re making such a big deal about drugs,” she commented as she finished paging through the clipboard. She thought about it before hitting on a pertinent memory. “Ah, poor thing, she had a problem with prescription painkillers when she was a teenager following a sports injury. She’s been clean for a while now, but I don’t know if anyone believes her. Her parents have a stranding order with the hospital that they refuse to let her be drug tested. Hm.” 

Samira seemed like an adult. This was certainly an adult’s body. Why did they get a say and not her? If Mason lied about her taking drugs then a tox screen would have easily absolved her. Mira couldn’t imagine her not trying to prove her innocence.

No, wait. She had the memory, now. Samira had been placed under a conservatorship as soon as she turned eighteen. Her parents had cited her history with drugs and her stay at an inpatient rehabilitation facility for the reasons why she was unfit to make her own decisions. That was also why they were picking out her husband and not her, even though this wasn’t an ‘arranged marriage’ society. That was why their standing orders with the hospital outweighed her decisions.

Mira glanced at Adra. “You were there during this argument? How often did they fight?”

“Often enough,” Adra replied in a clipped, unhappy tone. “If you’re asking whether he hit her, he did not, although he wasn’t afraid to let her think he would. I was supervising the argument in case that changed. I cushioned her fall, but she grazed her temple on the side of a table on her way down; just enough to leave a scratch.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “The only reason she was brought to the hospital was this one’s accusation about her taking drugs.” He gestured to himself for emphasis. 

“Interesting,” Mira murmured. “Usually, my host’s heart stops for at least a second or two before I transition. Mason gave her something to knock her out, but she only remembers taking two normal sized pills. It’s hard to believe he managed to find something that she could OD on with two pills when she hadn’t mixed it with anything. Not to mention, he still had the hypodermic needle in his hand when I came to. Whatever he was doing wasn’t finished. Do you have any of his memories?”

Adra shook his head. “No, what I did to him was—traumatic. His memories for the past several hours are lost. He didn’t bring the drugs with him to the hospital, so whatever he used was something he found here where an unattended visitor could pick it up or already had on his person. They do take medication security very seriously here,” Adra explained and then frowned as something occurred to him. 

“She told you it would be different, going forward,” he said, recalling Mira’s brief encounter with the Veiled Goddess during Cecily’s Awakening. “Do you suppose this is what she meant? That you transitioned into your new life without dying?”

“Have you ever known the Gods to mean just one thing?” Mira groused. He was probably right, though. Her last life had been a departure from the usual rules. Did that mean this life would be something different, too? “Maybe whatever was in that needle would have killed me when it interacted with the pills and that was enough? Or…”

She paused and considered Adra’s new body. He was a big man and heavily built, although not necessarily fat. Rather, he had a classic ‘strongman’ build with a little bit of a belly. He had strong features with thick dark hair, a lantern jaw, eyes that were a touch small for his face, and a heavy forehead—also, um, a thick dark unibrow. 

They would be waxing that at the first opportunity. 

The more she looked, the more she understood why Adra had not seized this man’s body before she woke up. For one, Adra wasn’t in the habit of casual murder, despite what he might say sometimes. For another, there was a faint yellow cast to the whites of the man’s eyes, suggesting he had a bad drinking habit and his liver was starting to struggle. He also had some persistent acne and his hairline was receding.

‘Anabolic steroids?’ she wondered, although that didn’t fit with Samira’s memories of Mason. He wasn’t an athlete, but his body sure seemed to indicate that he was using performance enhancers. Was that what had been in the needle? Had he gotten his hands on some opioids? Samira had been out like a light after those tablets. He might have been able to swipe them from another patient if he was careful or willing to spend the money. There was supposed to be a bad interaction between those two drugs. Had he been trying to fake Samira overdosing?

“Is he still in there?” Mira asked, holding out her hand for Adra to take, but just to hold. She knew better than to try and get out of a hospital bed too quickly, especially if she’d been given gods-only-know-what.

What she meant by her question was ‘is there even anything left of him to punish?’ Her body was rapidly re-assembling a narrative for her as she got a flood of Samira’s jumbled life experiences and she liked her memories no better than Adra did his. Mason might not have hit Samira, but he seemed to cause a lot of the accidents she was almost involved in. This most recent incident was his final escalation in a hateful trend of violence. 

Through those memories, Mira could see the echoes of Adra’s interferences. He was the one who’d kept Mason from ever succeeding in injuring her. Samira hadn’t been aware of her guardian shadow, but Mira was looking at those memories with different eyes. Poor kid, at least someone had been looking out for her.

“No,” Adra said as he shook his head. “There can only be one operator in any physical body. There is only me here, now.”

Well, good riddance to bad rubbish. She hoped it had hurt. 

The girl whose life Mira had inherited was pitiful, but also not all that likeable. She had little to no personality other than what had been forced on her at a young age. Any time she tried to develop an interest, it got taken away from her or made fun of by her family. The Bellamys had designated her as their resident fuck-up early on and now could not seem to entertain the possibility of a world where she was not the resident fuck-up so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her parents had even picked out her fiance for her on the basis of who could best control her. Even if Mason had been hitting her, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have cared. 

Looking at the child’s life through the lens of an outsider, Mira was only surprised she managed to get and stay clean. Her life looked miserable and—ah. 

Mira finally struck on a set of memories that were relevant to the confrontation that landed her body in the hospital. Something about a photograph of a girl on his phone—no, it was a lot of photographs. It was a gross number of photographs; all of the same girl taken in candid poses that suggested she didn’t know the pictures were being taken. What was worse, the girl was someone Samira knew.

There was no evidence in her memories that Samira liked Mason enough to be possessive of him, but the scattered memories of that argument led Mira to feel like Mason’s infidelity in a relationship Samira didn’t even get to choose and was constantly being punished for being in was the last humiliation she could bear before she exploded. 

“Darling, can you tell, was he having an affair?”

Adra squinted into the middle distance as he chewed through his body’s history.

“Affair is a strong word,” he said at last. “I would rather say it was a one-sided obsession with whoever Cecily is in this life. The girl has something of her aura, but I cannot be sure from secondhand experience. He was convinced that you were the only thing standing in the way of their inevitable love story, but I can’t actually find any evidence in his memories that she even knows who he is. He seemed to think she was sending him secret messages through her eyes in the pictures he took of her.”

Picturing Cece gave Mira both a name and a little pang of loss. 

Cece had been at Mira’s bedside almost as often as Adra had been towards the end of her previous life. She was still strong and healthy at eighty-seven, thanks to her divinely fortified constitution. She couldn’t marry after she became the state-recognized Saintess, but Randall never married either and they were always in each other’s company so Mira saw him almost as often as she saw her sister. The entire family acknowledged him as their in-law, no wedding ring needed. His health had started to decline somewhere around the time that Mira’s had and Cece basically split her days between their bedsides. It was probably for the best that Mira had moved on first, so Randall could have his lifetime lover’s undivided attention when he left too. 

“I know we’ll see each other again,” Cece would say, “But this might be the last time I ever really know you again. I’m not ready to be done.”

Mira had not pointed out that Cece would never be ready to be done, but that was one of the things that made her who she was. There was no point in rubbing her nose in that fact.

“Cecilia,” Mira corrected Adra. 

Cecelia Newman worked for Samira’s parents as a maid. This wasn’t a culture where many people had individual maids, other than the top 10%, but they wanted to project a certain image so they had Cecilia come in during the afternoons to take care of the house and keep up with laundry. She also did their shopping, walked Samira’s Mother’s tiny inbred dogs, brought in their mail, and whatever else crossed their minds. She did all that with a bright smile for shit pay. 

Adra was right, Cecilia had Cecily’s fundamental goodness and a deceptive aura of fragility that hid her inner strength. She was the very model of a plucky underdog romantic heroine.

“Her name is Cecelia in this life; she’s the general maid in my parents’ house and a college student.” Mira thought about it. “I don’t think we’re related in this go-round, but she might have a living parent with cancer?” 

Mira’s memories did not provide any evidence that her prior self had taken much interest in the help, aside from knowing their names. Cecilia was only the most recent in a long string of maids who took the job only to realize they were working far too hard for what the Bellamys were willing to pay. 

Anyway, the maids didn’t bother with Samira and she didn’t bother with them. Mira’s host’s parents, siblings, and fiance demanded all of her mental energy. She only knew Cecelia because that was who cleaned her room and brought her water when she didn’t feel well. 

Adra continued his hard squint at nothing until he hit upon the memory he’d been searching for. “The Maid and the Magnates,” he growled, correctly identifying their setting with disgust.

‘The Maid and the Magnates’ was a forgettable installment in an equally forgettable romance serial about a spunky heroine struggling to support her dying mother, further her education, and juggle the attentions of multiple, overbearing men. There was a bit in there about a secret heritage from her absent father, but that wasn’t the main thrust of the story, just a way for Cecelia to not end up being fully dependent on her husband in the epilogue. Avenon readers didn’t really enjoy fantasies about financial rescue through marriage so her absent parent had to come through for her instead. 

Mira might have been incarnated as the troubled daughter of the heroine’s employers, but Adra had just accidentally cast himself as the heroine’s obsessive and poorly-fleshed-out stalker, which explained his irritation. He’d come to like Cece well enough as a sister-in-law, but neither of them had ever reached the point where they would willingly seek out one another’s company. Living in a body that had had an erotic monomania about her had to sting. 

“Of all the melodramatic drivel…” he continued grumbling as he stomped over to lay down next to Mira and glanced around at the hospital room. The architectural style was a bit like mid-century modern meets brushed steel techno future. “This was not the setting I pictured when you forced that book on me.”

“No, there wasn’t much discussion of the environment, was there?” Mira replied, stroking his hair as she also took in their setting. Adra had hated every book, play, and radio drama she’d made him sit through. He’d understood why she made him do it, of course, and knew they would reap the benefits in this life, but relationship dramas annoyed him on an integral level. “All our lives will be based on melodramatic drivel, my love.”

“Yes, you’ve said so before,” he sulked and then added, “We’re moving the wedding up. I can clean up any evidence of this one’s past misdoings, but I will not have you living in that house any longer than what is unavoidable. If we can sneak you out earlier, all the better.”

‘That house’ was Mira’s now-childhood home, where she was meant to still be living. In practice, her prior self had slept out a lot in hotels, at friends’ houses, and with illicit boyfriends so as to avoid the relentless aggression from her family. Her father refused to let her have her own apartment until she was married and had her assets tied up in a conservatorship, of all things, so she had to make do with whatever he let her have. 

Mira made a pleased noise. “We’ll be able to have a wedding in this life,” she realized aloud. “I’ve never had a wedding I was interested in before, except in our first life. Do you suppose my ‘mother’ and ‘sisters’ will try and wear white to the ceremony?”

‘The Maid and the Magnates’ had been a trashy mass market romance novel. Samira’s memories were painting a similar, but different picture for Mira. Unless she’d missed her guess, this universe was shaping up to be a Soap Opera!

“Is that rude here?” Adra asked. In Avenon, the wedding color was gold and even the wedding guests wore it, but they’d never had a ceremony due to Mira’s role as a Royal surrogate. “If so, then let them try and see what happens.”

“I almost hope they do,” she chuckled and wiggled under her thin hospital blankets. Tomorrow would be annoying, most likely, but for now she had a new young body and was starting a new life with her soulmate at her side. What had once been a tiresome necessity seemed almost —exciting. 

She was looking forward to find out what this life had to throw at her.

-Fin | Book One

A Preview for Book 2: Harbingers of ChangeMira stood, looking out across a wrecked inland cityscape that in no way matched the beachside neighborhood where she had, not twenty minutes ago, been picking out house-made fruit infused water in a Wholefoods.

Her memory of the actual event was choppy. She’d been in the readymade area, looking to stock the empty kitchen in the penthouse that Adra had inherited from his host body. Neither of them could cook nor were they interested in learning, but they also couldn’t eat out at every meal so the basket dangling from her limp grasp was filled with cut fruit, cold cuts, crackers, protein bars, and the aforementioned fruit water. The Wholefoods, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen and there was no waterfront in sight.

Wherever this was, she wasn’t in the same city she’d started in.

The last thing she recalled was the feeling of static electricity rising in the air, her body hair standing on end, and then a great flash of blue-white light from below her feet as the ambient mana went from almost nil to oversaturation in the time it took for her to blink, then she found herself here and alone.

Motes of soft blue light bloomed before her eyes and came together to form a hover rectangle with words on it.

[Welcome to the Hunter Network System, Samira Bellamy! Congratulations on your Awakening.]

“Fuck!” she hissed as she realized what had happened.

She wasn’t in a Soap Opera universe at all. This was a Gate Hunter Fantasy!

She’d been thrown into a LitRPG!!