But it was too late.
I saw my eyes, bright as the inside of a flame, reflected in his visor.
They glowed hotter.
And I exploded.
The water that wrapped me in a warm, wet cocoon became a living grenade, shooting needles of water punching through the chopper. The mechanism that caused the blades to whirl exploded, sending the chopper swirling in a tight, fast tailspin.
I was the only one left alive on board, the needles of water having punctured literally every other surface. And I realized we were going down. Hard.
I jumped.
Arms flung wide, air whistling past my body as I fell from sixty stories up.
The water would catch me.
It had to catch me.
From my periphery a fireball exploded as the helicopter slammed into a nearby high rise, sending glass and steel raining down on people below.
I couldn’t protect them.
Faster and faster I fell, the hard surface of the street approaching at an impossible speed.
I could feel my energy burning in my belly, trying to pull a in wave to cushion the fall.
But it wasn’t going to get there fast enough.
I didn’t know what I was doing.
All the doubts I’d had about myself hit me at once.
I was going to fail before I even started trying.
The wind whipped moisture from my eyes, hazing my view of the ground.
Three stories.
Two stories.
A crush of fresh water barreled down the sidewalk, rushing to meet me, but it would be too late.
I closed my eyes.
And slammed into something hard that cushioned my fall.
Golden eyes regarded me warmly before a crushing wave of water sent us tumbling several blocks down the street. I clutched Ryder’s hand until we came to a stop, sputtering and spitting out water.
“We really need to work on your landings.” His voice was like a blanket on my shattered nerves. “Execution started off beautifully. What a swan dive. Pure poetry.” He kissed his fingers. “The exploding helicopter was a nice touch. But the landing… not your best attempt. I might not be there to block your fall next time.” He dragged his hands through his sopping hair, sending it shooting up in haphazard spikes, before finally looking at me, his smile faltering.
I felt… weak.
Confused, I ran my hands down the front of my shirt, maybe to get some of the water off, and was surprised to find the fabric ripped around my stomach. It felt sticky. I looked down, mouth going dry as I watched blood seep from the bullet hole that stupid gunner had punched in me.
This was bad.
This was really freaking bad.
“Hey guys, we need to get a move-on. They’re subdued for now. That fog of yours has everyone confused, nice one with that, Ryder, but we need to get outta here… Holy shit.” Finn’s mile-a-minute mouth stilled when I assumed he saw the reason I was lying on the ground. My hands had fallen away from the injury, exhaustion setting in. Ryder was at my side, applying pressure to the ugly, red wound, struggling to stop the bleeding.
A finger touched my chin and tipped it up as my head lolled. Finn’s face was speckled with blood and gore, his expression frenzied, lips tight with concern and fury. Ryder spoke to him in a harsh language I didn’t understand and kept the pressure on my wound. Finn nodded.
“I’m going to be brutally honest with you. Is that OK?” Finn asked. I drew in a deep breath, suddenly afraid at the amount of effort it took, and blinked, not trusting myself to speak. “This isn’t great. The good thing is that you are a God. You might not be immortal, but even injuries like this that would kill the average human in a matter of minutes, can be fixed. We have time. You have time. But we need to get moving.”
He broke eye contact and spoke to Ryder in that weird language again. Dark strands of hair blew across his pale forehead, catching on streaks of someone else’s blood. I vaguely wondered if he had gotten hurt. Then those grassy eyes were then back on mine, evaluating, as his tongue flicked his lip ring.
“This is going to hurt like hell, but I need you to stay with me. OK?” I nodded slowly, wondering how much more painful things could get. My head had barely stopped moving when he ducked down, sliding his arms around my body and lifted up. The staunch pressure Ryder had applied vanished and pain racked my body in violent waves.
I opened my mouth to scream but choked on blood instead.
Turns out it could get worse.
I drove my nails into my palm. Finn said I would get through this. I needed to get through this. My body bounced in his grip, the scenery moving before my eyes as Finn jogged down the street, ducking around cars and trashcans tucked in back alleyways. Ryder led the way, searching for something as his head twisted first in one direction, then another.
Behind us I could still hear the wail of sirens, the occasional burst of gunfire.
“They fey?” I whispered.
“They’re fine, mostly,” Finn muttered. “They’re holding off the Order so we can get you out of here. There weren’t many soldiers left, anyway. They’ll escape if things get too bad.”
Ryder’s frenzied searching stilled and he launched himself at a black hatchback SUV tucked into a corner. He whisked a thin, flat piece of metal out of his jacket pocket, followed quickly by smaller pieces. Ryder’s fingers twitched and flicked and moved like snakes, fiddling with the lock on the driver’s side door until it clicked. He yanked it open and went to work.
“I need a few minutes to get her ready to drive,” Ryder muttered, almost to himself, as he tucked his lean body under the console. “You get our girl situated in the meantime. I don’t want to stick around any longer than necessary in case those goons followed us.”
Finn grunted in response, but was already tugging the back door open as carefully as he could to avoid jostling me around much. Slim chance of that though. My hands were clenched so tight they were probably going to have to pry my nails from my palms with pliers. Every little movement felt like an earthquake.
He took his time setting me down on the leather seats, laying me out comfortably. He even stuffed an old sweatshirt from the backseat behind my head and cotton t-shirts over my arms to warm me up. He frowned as he appraised me, then reached out and started tugging my shirt up.
“While I will accept a good old-fashioned ass kicking as a solid substitute for a movie—” enough blood had cleared my throat to talk, and I slicked my tongue over cracked lips. “—I really must insist on dinner before we do this.”
Ryder cackled from somewhere in the front seat, cursing when he cracked his head on the underside of the steering wheel where he pulled at wires. Those wicked eyes flashed back at me over the center console, humor glittering in their depths, before he shook his head and returned to his work. Even Finn cracked a small smile of relief.
“No time for that, Z. I already told you you’re not my type.” He held out a bottle of water that he must have found in the back. “I do need you to bear with me as I pour this on your injury. I can’t submerge you yet—I need that to really help—but it should slow the bleeding.”
“Weak-sauce. You owe me whiskey later, then.”
“Let’s get past this hurdle first,” he said, “and I’ll buy you a whole bottle of the good stuff.”
“Got it! Hot damn, I still know the tricks.” Ryder’s sudden burst of enthusiasm, along with the roar of a motor, caused both of us to jump. Finn’s lower lip was back between his teeth as poured the water over my skin and swiped at it with one of the shirts. I barely felt it. Ryder tucked himself into the driver’s seat as Finn pulled my legs across his.
“Let’s go.”
Ryder didn’t need to be told twice. He floored it onto one of the main roads. Finn fixated himself on my injury once again. My shirt was bunched over my ribs and his fingers lightly probed the broken skin. He upturned a second bottle and it tingled, but my magic wasn’t catching on the water and healing my body
like it had earlier.
Should the pain be receding this quickly?
Should I be feeling quite this light-headed?
Why couldn’t I feel that connection?
For the first time since he’d appeared out of nowhere to get us to safety, I noticed the toll battle had taken on Finn. Blood and gore didn’t splatter only his face, it was over his whole body. He had scrubbed his hands clean with some of the water, but the rest of the skin on his arms, neck, and clothing was coated in the stuff. His grey polo was soaked with sweat, and he’d removed his jacket at one point. He caught me watching him and gave me another reassuring smile that didn’t meet his eyes.
A rasp of breath escaped my lips, and I settled back onto the hoodie, trying to get comfortable. I must have closed my eyes and nodded off at one point because the next thing I heard when I regained consciousness was Finn arguing with Ryder.
“…need to stop and get her underwater.”
“We don’t have time for that right now, we need to get out of here.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“She drew it on a map, kelpie. We’re going north.”
“What makes you think they won’t follow us there, Inkie.”
“Cut that shit out right now.” Ryder’s knuckles were white as they clenched tight around the wheel of the Subaru Outback. “The last I heard from you was four centuries ago. We hardly know each other anymore.”
Finn scoffed. “Nobody made you tag along on this field trip of ours.”
“You called me up.”
“I needed your help. Not your personal attention.”
“Whatever. I’m not leaving. You know how my soul craves adventure.”
“Correction, your soul, or lack thereof, craves danger. There is a difference.”
“Maybe I’m here because it’s blatantly obvious that you need someone around to help fend off the forces of evil following you around.”
“Doesn’t that go against everything you stand for? Doing something good for the sake of it being good?”
Silence filled the car, heavy as gravity. I peered through my lashes again to look past the edge of the seat at Ryder whose jaw was clenching and unclenching furiously. “You aren’t the only one who wishes they could be more than what they’re meant to be.” Raw emotion bled into his voice, and my heart clenched.
The emotion was lost on Finn.
“Oh please. You’ve always loved being a playboy, a Sucker of Souls, the Epitome of Sin. You’re still a legend in our old circles. Hell, even circles that you aren’t a part of, you’re legend.” Finn’s voice came out bitter as hops. “There’s no party too big to grace your presence, no man or woman too beautiful or powerful to escape your enchantments. Don’t tell me that now you’re a wall flower.”
That didn’t sound like the Ryder that had held me in his arms in the parking lot, or the Ryder that broke down a door because I was hysterical. That wasn’t the man that had followed me through glass doors to face almost certain death because of my recklessness. But the way Finn talked, the earnestness in his voice, I couldn’t help but reconsider.
“Habits change, Finn. Circumstances change.” I shouldn’t be eavesdropping like this. It wasn’t my place.
“Circumstances like meeting a God.”
“Circumstances that you know absolutely nothing about,” Ryder hissed through clenched teeth, sadness lost in an undertone of steel. “And you know as much as I do that there’s something about her. Something special. Something that I’ve never seen or felt or dreamed before. She’s a game-changer, man. And I want to be there when she forces the world to spin around her finger.”
Yeah, definitely time to make myself known.
The car hit a bump in the road, jostling me in the backseat so the moan that slipped past me was incredibly real. Finn’s face was above mine a millisecond later, the piercing in his eyebrow twinkled in the soft light. “Z, you’re sweating really bad. I don’t like how you look at all.”
“I really don’t feel very good.”
“It’s going to be OK. We’re going to stop in a minute and get some help.”
I was shaking, my vision blurring.
Where was my magic?
“No,” the word shot out of me from nowhere. “We don’t have time to stop.”
What was going on? These weren’t my words, my thoughts.
Finn looked as surprised as I felt.
Let me in, a female voice whispered. The same female voice that I’d felt when I’d lost control at the beach all those days ago. Let me in, or you’ll die.
Who are you?
That’s unimportant right now. You’ve lost too much blood. You exerted too much power. You’re drained. You need me to help.
You don’t sound like the Kraken, I said.
I’m not the Kraken. But It helped me once before, too.
Who are you? My resolve was weakening. If the Kraken had helped her before, she couldn’t be that bad. Whoever she was.
Let me in, now. You need me to fix this mess. Let me in NOW.
The word boomed and my grip on control slipped. I floundered, lost in my own body, reality blurred in my own eyes as someone new took the reins. Someone I wasn’t sure I should trust.
“We’re pulling over at the next exit. We need to submerge you in water to fix the damage to your body. We can’t wait much longer.”
“No. We can’t. That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said yet. If we don’t deal with this now, I’m going to die.” My voice sounded foreign to my ears, harsh as the ocean during a storm and equally angry. Finn drew back, but my hand shot out and grabbed him by the shirt, tugging him close. “You’re going to fix me, kelpie. Deal with it.”
His eyes darted between mine and his skin went sallow. Even Ryder risked a glance to the backseat to see what was going on. His face hardened as he looked at me, something cool and calculating taking over his features.
“Do what she says, Finley.”
Finn glanced at the back of the headrest, then back to my injury. “I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know what to do.”
“That water bottle you found? Pour it right over the wound, again. Do you know if the bullet went through or if it’s still embedded inside me?”
“Went clean through and through.”
“Good. That makes it easier. Now pour, like that, the water is going to act as a catalyst as you help me heal. I’ll guide you.” His eyes flickered over mine and flashed away as if it were painful to look at me for long. “As a water elemental we are tied together. You get your energy from me. I tapped mine earlier, but you have plenty still running through your veins. I need it.” My voice was clipped and sharp as a winter wind whistling through the Rockies. “Lay your hands on the injury.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I’ll hurt a lot more if I die.”
He pressed on the wound. Hard. The being in possession of my body didn’t flinch, but my spirit felt every touch, crying out in agony. Her, no my, hands gripped his, pressing down even harder, pushing what remained of the tatters of my power out and connecting with his. Our combined hands glittered dark blue. Abstract shapes and patterns and swirls rose from my skin. My insides burned. I wanted to scream, but the sound was locked deep inside. Finn flinched as if sensing my agony, but kept his hands still as she wrenched his power from him and used it as if it were her own.
Wildfire ripped through me, and I tugged on it, the pain of it bringing me to the surface for a moment. I gripped harder, pleading with him for help. He glanced up and seemed to realize I was myself again before I was shoved backward by the Other presence, slammed into a corner.
Stay back there where you belong, she hissed.
It’s my body. It’s my power you’re controlling.
And you’ll thank me when all this over. Now shut up.
I did. Silently holding in screams as fire burned and bristled and roared.
And then it was gone.
> Her grasp on Finn’s hands loosened and he pulled back, his face gray and his breathing harsh. But he managed a low whistle as he examined the skin. He was shaking. Ryder glanced back again, eyes skittering over my face, and gave a single nod at seeing my flesh healed and whole again. He spared another look out the front windshield and turned back, a wry twist to his lips.
“Nice work. Now tell us who in the name of the Gods you are.”
Not-me stilled, a small smirk sneaking over her features. “I’m Zara.”
“All three of us know that’s false. Now talk.”
“How did you figure it out?” Her voice was confident, catty even.
“It was pretty obvious, really,” Ryder’s voice was disgusted, and he was peering through the rear-view mirror at something. Finn? “And since you aren’t going to tell us who you are, we don’t really need to know any more. We want Zara back.”
She, we, didn’t see Finn’s fist.
23
Geoffrey
“That was a gods-forsaken nightmare.”
The plaques hanging on the wall rattled as the door slammed shut behind me. Toren raised a dark eyebrow.
“On the contrary, I think it went quite well.”
I paced behind my desk and pointed over his head at the array of monitors. Three of them showed footage of a girl who was clearly Zara standing on a waterspout in the middle of the city. A fourth broadcasted a roundtable of so-called experts discussing the very same footage playing on the monitor in the background. And the fifth zeroed in on a massive crowd of protestors swarming the streets of London. Many held signs demanding answers from the Order.
Every major news network, and most of the smaller ones, had fixated on this single story, replaying footage of the Order gathering all the way to the helicopter exploding, discussing the implications of the return of the Gods.
“No. Nothing about this is going well.” My voice was soft, an indicator of how hot the rage in my stomach was burning. “You assured me this situation would be contained. This, right here, is hardly contained.” I tapped in my phone’s passcode and flung it across the desk at Toren. He looked down. Hundreds of missed calls, dozens of voicemails, and too many notifications to count stared up at him. Our PR team was working overtime trying to contain the closest thing we’d experienced to disaster since the attacks on the temples.
Walk on Water Page 19
