“She said she was going to the Hadron Collider,” said Amira. “She’s going to try to dismantle it.” Eden freed her wrists and Amira took over, untying the knots around her ankles. “She’s a demon! That whole story about her being possessed was a lie she made up after her initial plan failed.”
“We have to get to the Collider before—”
“Before it’s too late?” came a voice from behind.
Katy was standing in the doorway, holding a fistful of frayed, ripped wires. Eden recognized those wires—Katy had taken them out of the power pack which attached the nuclear fusion generator to the main battery.
“Oops,” said Katy. She giggled. “Too late.”
Eden sent energy waves into the wires, which immediately started sparking and one caught on fire. Katy dropped them and shook her hand, which had been partially burned.
“You bitch.” Katy’s voice seemed to drop an octave, her demonic side starting to take over. “You will regret that!”
Katy yelled something in a language Eden did not recognize and then she slashed at the air, with her long, cat like fingernails. Although Katy was a good five feet from Eden, the scratch made contact with her skin. Four deep cuts were sliced on her right shoulder and over her collarbone.
Eden screamed and clutched her wound. She tried to conjure an energy ball, but Katy was too quick. She slashed again, and this time she got Eden in the stomach. The cuts weren’t quite deep enough to penetrate any organs, but the attack sent Eden to her knees just the same.
Amira stood up and started a spell of her own.
The pain in Eden’s chest and stomach was overwhelming. She could hear her blood pumping through her veins and the sound was deafening. She couldn’t make out much of Amira’s spell, besides her initial call upon the Goddess Tessa.
She watched Katy as Amira continued to speak, and Eden saw her skin slowly start to disintegrate, as if it was being eaten away by millions of tiny, invisible bugs. She felt something tickling her leg, crawling up her back and on the not-injured shoulder. It was Cricket. She had gotten into the habit of leaving him in the workshop overnight so he could video record, in case anyone snuck inside while she was asleep.
“Cricket,” Eden whispered. “Go get help.”
The little bug clicked two of his metal legs together, his way of saying yes, and then scurried off, right through Katy’s legs and out the door.
Katy it seemed had managed to block Amira’s spell, although not before it did terrible, scaring damage to her hands and forearms. She was holding up a shielding spell, which Eden recognized as one she’d mastered years ago. It used light waves. Katy looked like she was in immense pain, and she was likely going to keep the shield up for as long as it took for her mental healing spell to start working. That gave Eden about two minutes tops.
Taking a deep breath in, Eden took her hands away from where they were covering her wounds, and she held them up in front of her.
“What are you doing?” asked Amira.
“I’m going to take down her shield,” Eden whispered. “She’s stronger than me, and even though we are both weakened, she’ll be able to put it back up within a second or two of my dismantling of it. You need to be ready to send an attack spell, understand?”
Amira nodded.
“Good,” said Eden. “Then here’s goes nothing.”
She reached her arms out even further, wincing and having trouble catching her breath. She pinched the air between her pointer fingers and thumbs, and began to untie the fabric of the shield. She could manipulate each wave of light individually, pulling them apart from one another, and eventually finding the one that would unravel the entire shield. Like pulling a loose thread of a sweater—there’s always one that, when pulled, ruins the whole damn thing.
“I’ve got it,” said Eden, glancing over her shoulder at Amira. She looked back and saw that Katy was no longer staring intently down at her arms. Her healing spell was working, her skin was starting to grow back. “On three!” said Eden. “One, two, three.” She focused all of her energy on the single strand, the wave of light, and grabbed a hold of it mentally and physically. She ripped her hands backwards, as if she was in a vigorous game of tug-a-war, and Katy’s shield shattered, in a sparkly display of light. Eden fell to the ground, the pain too much. She slid around in her own pool of blood, trying to get out of the way of whatever spell Amira was going to cast.
Amira didn’t say anything. She must’ve gone for a mental spell.
Eden didn’t see it, but she felt it. Like a random and massive gust of wind, something rushed through her and slammed into Katy, sending her onto her back. The wind was knocked out of her and Amira didn’t waste any time. She jumped over Eden and was on top of Katy, tying her up with the magic rope.
Eden closed her eyes for just a second. She tried to call out to Amira, to tell her she’d be over to help in a second, but her voice was nothing more than faint cry. Her head fell down heavy on the ground and she was out.
Chapter Thirteen
Controlling the Uncontrollable
“Eden, come back.”
The voice was somehow both unfamiliar and also vaguely recognizable. At first, she thought it was her mother speaking, but no. That can’t be.
“Come back, come back.”
It was dark, wherever she was. And the voice seemed to be coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
“Eden, they need you. They have asked me to bring you back.”
It wasn’t her mother, it was the mother. Tessa. Tessa was talking to her.
Tessa was whispering to her, prompting her to leave the darkness, to go back. But how? How do I go back? Tessa, where am I?
“You are exactly where you are supposed to be, child. All you need to do is open your eyes, and fulfil your destiny.”
Eden tried it, fluttering her eyelids. The light was nearly blinding. She was lying on her back, staring up at the sun which was now high above the trees.
“She’s awake!” someone yelled.
“Quick, get her up.”
Arms wrapped under her arms and she was hoisted into a seated position.
She looked over her shoulder and saw Chris behind her. She smiled at him, but he didn’t return the gesture. His face was grim.
“Eden, listen to me,” he said. “We need you to get the Hadron Collider working again. We don’t know what Katy did to it, but we are running out of time.”
Chris’s voice sounded distorted, like he was in slow motion or something. It took a minute for the significance of his words to dawn on her, but once they did, Eden was pushing herself up to her feet and looking for the machine.
She felt dizzy and the skin around her wounds was hot and wet. She looked down to see somebody had wrapped some cloth around them to stop the bleeding, but most of that was already soaked through.
It was right in front of her, the Hadron Collider. Chris helped her over to it. He was in his human form, wearing only a pair of pants. Amira was already by the machine, trying to evaluate the damage. Leo was nowhere to be seen.
Amira pointed to the area where Katy had ripped the wires. “It looks like she just tore them out but didn’t have time to do anything else. You can do a basic connection spell, can’t you?”
Eden nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I can hold that and contain the black hole.”
“That’s where they come in,” said Amira. She pointed to the group of women off to the side. Wen, Olive, Bev, and Seera were all there. “They are going to contain the black hole, all you have to do is keep the connection going. There are three portals in this area. One there, there, and there.” She pointed in three different directions, but without getting dangerously close to them, or seeing something emerge from one, Eden had no way of seeing the portals. “We’ve cleared all of our people out of the way. We think with five witches working to contain the black hole, we can let the thing grow to about a twenty-foot radius, which should get rid of all three, without risking it getting
out of hand. Just like the fireball.”
“But the fireball did get out of hand,” said Eden.
Amira waved her off. “Not because of us! Besides, we’ve got Katy tied up with more magic rope than you’d use to contain a dragon. Also, we have two dragons guarding her in a cell. She won’t be bothering us.”
Eden looked around at Chris, wondering if he thought this was a good idea, or, if like her, he realized it was totally and completely insane.
“If we can knock out three portals in one hit,” he said. “That will end this battle for sure. They will retreat and we can work on closing the rest of them on the property.”
“Or,” Eden suggested. “We will make a massive black hole that sucks up the entire planet. Portals and all.”
Chris laughed. “Well, we either die fighting spirits or we die getting sucked into a black hole. Personally, I think the latter sounds a lot more badass.”
Eden smiled. She went to shrug, but the slightest upward movement of her shoulder sent searing pain throughout her entire arm and neck. “Let’s do this then,” she said through an exacerbated breath. “I don’t know how much longer I’ve got before I’ll be bleeding out and powerless.”
Amira stood up and the other five witches made a circle around the Hadron Collider. Because the collider would be the one actually creating the black hole, all the women had to do was cast a containment spell, which they would do mentally.
Eden stared at the unconnected wires and envisioned a connection. She focused energy waves, making them run back and forth between the exposed pieces of wire, and the metal conductors attached to the collider’s battery. Once she could feel there was electricity going through the wires and into the power pack, she flipped the switch on the side of the machine. It turned on, but the generator was taking a minute to get going. Eden sent an extra surge of energy through the wires, but not so much as to fry them, and then the collider started to hum.
The black hole started out impossibly small. A spec, suspended in mid air, just above the machine. Then it started to grow. It was the size of a baseball, then a soccer ball. Eden had to tear her gaze away from it and look once again at the wires, maintaining their connection.
As the black hole grew, the witches had to step back so as to not get sucked in.
Eden crawled backwards as well, with the help of Chris.
Leaves and twigs, anything that wasn’t anchored down, flew up and into the black hole. Even a few trees were starting to lose their rooted grip on the Earth. Finally, the black hole was big enough to suck up full grown pines. The witches’ circle reached the required radius and they stopped. They contained the black hole and Eden made sure her connections were secure. There were three loud whooshing sounds, followed by a cracking sound and flashes of light, like the loudest and brightest thunder imaginable.
Eden yelled, “Now!” and at the same time that she dropped the connection spell, the other five witches casted their own form of energy suppressing spell and the black hole shrunk then disappeared in seconds.
She waited until she could no longer see even the smallest black pin prick remaining, and then Eden allowed herself to collapse. This time, she didn’t fight the unconsciousness, she welcomed it. Saving the world was exhausting.
Eden was in and out of sleep for the next three days. The castle doctors, of which there were three, were working on getting the wounds on her chest and stomach healed, which required dosing her with a lot of pain relievers and antibiotics. When she was awake, which was only usually for stints of about twenty to thirty minutes, she would try to ask the doctors questions about what was happening and whether or not everyone else was safe. They would provide her with one word answers, sometimes elaborating a “yes” to a “yes, lay back down,” or “yes, go back to sleep.”
On the morning of the fourth day of her recovery, Eden was for the first time not awoken by the sensation of pain shooting throughout her body as the painkillers wore off, but instead, it was the soft touch of someone’s hand atop hers that brought her back to the waking world.
“Hey there, superhero,” a voice said as she worked to open her eyes, which proved to be quite the effort in her weakened state. “How are you feeling?”
It was Leo.
She squeezed his hand and smiled.
“I feel fine,” she said. “All things considered.”
“You took quite the hit,” said Leo. “The doctors say you are lucky to be alive after all the blood loss.”
“She didn’t get anything vital,” said Eden, looking down at the bandages on her stomach. “Just a few scratches.” She started to laugh, but it hurt too much. “Where’s Chris?” she said, once the pain subsided.
“He’s off dealing with the demon formerly known as Katy,” said Leo. “The original plan was just to kill her, but Chris thought maybe they could get some answers from her. If she could tell us where other portals are nearby, we can get a headstart on closing them all. He was here to visit earlier. He’ll be back again this afternoon, I’m sure.”
Eden nodded. “Was anyone badly injured in the battle?”
He laughed. “Besides you?” He frowned. “A few of the dragons were injured, but nothing too serious. Amira was pretty weak after the fight, but she’s doing okay. We lost two human staff members.” He sighed and looked down at their hands. “I had to notify their families yesterday. It was probably the second hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Eden gave him an odd look. “What’s the first hardest thing you’ve ever had to do?”
“Let you go,” he said. “The morning of the battle, when we figured out what the plan was, it took nearly everything in my power to let you go and risk your life, alone, without me there to protect you.”
Eden shook her head and stifled a laugh. “That’s very sweet,” she said. “Very romantic. But you don’t need to worry about me, and you sure as hell don’t need to protect me.”
“You don’t have to tell me!” he said. “I saw you on the battlefield, bleeding profusely, and yet standing tall next to a black hole holding your spell until the last minute. You were like… well, like a superhero. Or a god.”
“Goddess,” she corrected him.
“Right, yes, a goddess.” He took his hand from hers and reached up to touch her face. “You are amazing, Eden. I have never met anyone like you.”
She wasn’t sure what to say, so as a response, she simply leaned her head forward to rest her cheek in his hand.
“I love you,” he said.
Eden closed her eyes.
“I love you too.”
She dreamt of both Leo and Chris that night. The three of them were taking a walk through the now safe, portal-free castle grounds. They were telling jokes, laughing together, and Eden was entertaining them with stories from her colored past working in Twin Glades. She teased that they were sheltered, having grown up with all this wealth and privilege, which they both denied at first, but ultimately they relented.
At some point in the dream, Eden remembered one of them, Chris or Leo, saying something about how they would raise their own kids.
Eden woke not long after that, unsure who it was who had said it, and questioning whether it even mattered. Whether or not she even cared. She loved them both, although in slightly different ways. She wondered if they would accept that, if they would be able to each have their own personal relationship with her, or if it would be too much to ask.
When Chris entered the infirmary a few minutes later, Eden was in the process of trying to figure out exactly what she would say to each of them, how she would explain her complex and powerful feelings.
“Hey,” he said as he took a seat in the chair next to her bed. “Did I wake you up? Sorry, I was trying to be quiet.”
“No, you didn’t wake me up,” said Eden. “I was just… thinking.”
“About?”
She smiled. “Oh a little of nothing and a little of everything I suppose.”
“Well that is just about the mos
t cryptic answer a person could give to that question,” he said and laughed. “But that’s okay. I won’t pry.”
“I heard you were dealing with Katy today.” Eden frowned. “Is that her real name? Or was that just the name the demon used to appear less… demonic?”
“Beats me,” said Chris. “I haven’t managed to get a single word out of her.”
“And what about the other portals? Are you waiting on me to close up the other ones on the property?”
“Nah,” said Chris. “We’ve been managing just fine. I fixed the wires so now it can run without someone keeping a connection spell going.”
“You fixed the wiring?” Eden said, not doing a very good job at hiding her surprise.
“Yes,” said Chris. “I did. I know what I’m doing… sort of.”
Eden laughed. “I’m sure you do, but still… I’m impressed.”
“You should be.”
They were quiet for a bit. Eden tried not to think about how itchy her healing wounds were.
“There’s something I came down here to talk to you about,” said Chris after a while. “If you’re feeling up to it? I know it’s late and you’re probably pretty tired.”
“I’m up for it,” she said, although she was not being entirely honest. If Chris was about to say something romantic, declare his love, or in any way ask her about her feelings and how she wanted to proceed with their relationship, she wasn’t prepared. “But if you think that it’s going to be a long conversation then,” she started to back track but then trailed off, hoping he would pick up from where she left off.
“It’s not really a conversation, just something I would ask that you think about.”
Oh great. This has to be about us.
She tried to relax her breathing, which had all the sudden started to get heavier and irregular. Why was she nervous?
“You don’t have to say yes right away or anything,” Chris continued. “I know it’s a big decision, very personal and life changing.”
Shit. Now I know why I’m so fucking nervous. Because Chris is going to ask me to marry him!
Auctioned to the Werewolf Princes Page 14
