I had no idea how they knew our route or how they survived out here during the day. All I knew was that they were out here, waiting for us. It had to mean we were getting close, since there was no reason to concentrate vamps in an area with such limited supplies of blood.
We ran until I lost track. I picked up the sound of water again, so I brought us to a halt, our chests heaving as we sucked great gulps of air.
I made a light, the flame throwing a cliff edge into stark relief.
The sound I heard was indeed our stream, but it wasn’t coming out of the underground in a gentle and controlled way. No, we’d found the point where it joined with a larger stream, more of a small river. It did so by crashing down as a ragged, tumbling waterfall, the spume reaching up like a wet kiss.
I looked at the map. The area circled in red was on the other side of the gorge before us. If we wanted to get to it, we could either try to find a way across or we had to find a way around. Our goal was so close I felt my body hum in anticipation. Win or lose, we were going to take the fight to them. It was liberating.
Back through the rainforest, we ran-- back through the gauntlet of vampires who seemed to pop out from behind every tree and from under every rock. As if the thought had summoned them, I heard footsteps crashing through the brush on the path we’d followed to get here.
I looked at the others. “How much do you trust me?”
32
I looked out over the gorge and lobbed a fireball at the vampire coming up the path at us. There would be more behind him, I knew. I couldn’t see much on the other side, other than a line of trees in the distance. If more vampires weren’t waiting off in that cluster of trees, I’d be stunned. We were in their holy land.
Except we knew they were looking to find it and they thought they were running out of time. So we at least had a chance of getting clear and breaking free if we could make it across the gorge. What I had in mind was risky, possibly foolhardy. It was also our only chance, and that made it our best plan ever.
The others had seen the fireball I’d just lobbed. They knew what was at stake just as well as I did. They could see what we’d be dealing with if we went back the way we came, which I had to admit was a big temptation for me.
“I trust you.” Tess met my eyes. She held her head high, like she didn’t have a fear in the world. “What’ve you got in mind, hot stuff?”
Lila stood by her, in an almost identical pose. Kamila and Zarya nodded, less effusive but still in agreement. They’d been with me the whole way, and that wasn’t going to change now.
I jogged over to the edge of the cliff and peered down. I couldn’t even see the bottom, only a fine mist. My earth powers warned me of the jagged rocks waiting for us there. This option terrified me. There were many definitions of insanity, but what I had in mind fit at least seven of them. My idea was somewhere south of delusional, but still—I heard a vampire hiss in fury, and my mind snapped into place.
“Zarya, I’m going to need your help with this. We’re going to control the waterfall.”
Zarya stared at me blankly. “Of course we are.” Then she glanced back at the dark forest, with all of its sounds and dangers. I could almost see the thoughts going through her head, identical to what I’d been thinking only seconds ago. “Bring it on. It’s not like we’ve got much choice.”
I closed my eyes and extended my senses. The river crashing down onto the rocks below had once indeed been our stream, but another stream joined it deep underground. Now it had become a river, a tributary to one of the great Amazon waterways. The waterfall itself was strong and swift, the kind of thing that made for great film or postcard images. Controlling it was nothing at all like controlling the ocean around Zarya’s island or moving a boat through the water. I had to contend with gravity itself, with velocity, and a whole host of other forces I barely remembered from high school physics, and I was going to do it with raw intuition.
I had a powerful incentive, though. These women all trusted me to get them out of this forest alive, and I couldn’t let them down.
Zarya’s energy joined in with mine, bracing me the way streams poured together underground. I reached out with my mind and lifted, starting with the first little bit of water that fell from the outlet in the side of the cliff. This was not easy work. The water was heavy, brutally heavy, and what I was trying to do went against every law nature had. Sweat broke out on my skin, my wild dark hair clinging to my forehead as I strained to do the impossible.
I staggered a little bit under the weight, even though I wasn’t visibly holding anything. Everything hurt as I strained to hold on to something that was, for all intents and purposes, a living thing that desperately wanted to fall.
With a massive heave, I got the first section of waterfall into the air. It wasn’t necessarily obvious at first, at least not to an outside observer. It would have just looked like the cliff extended outward. Only Zarya and I, who had to carry the weight of all that water, could understand what was going on. That didn’t matter. We weren’t in this for the accolades. We knew what we’d done, and the euphoria of having gotten this far helped us get the next section up. The process was self-actualizing. Seeing our power in action made me dig even deeper into my pool of Ferin ability.
Little by little, we hauled the rest of the stream up from the waterfall, like hauling a giant ribbon. Except the ribbon was as heavy as lead, and wrenching it skyward hurt on a level for which no words existed. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had muscles, but it was all being done with my mind, my core, and my will. My legs trembled, and my stomach threatened to rebel. I recognized this feeling from the old days, when I’d overdone it on a workout. In those days, I’d wound up puking by the side of the road.
I couldn’t do that here. There was no road, and I couldn’t lose my concentration. I knew I would pay for it.
I didn’t have the luxury of taking a breather. The vampires were closing in. The other three were doing their best to keep them at bay; Kamila in particular. She flung fireballs and broiled them from the inside, but there was only so much she could do. The most important part of the work—getting us away from the vampires and over to the other side of the gorge—had to be done by me. Kamila could kill as many vampires as she wanted, but there were always more.
Finally, when I didn’t think my will could physically move any more weight, I managed to shift the last piece of the river into place. I placed the end of the waterfall on the cliff edge opposite where I stood. The waterfall had become a water bridge. It stretched across the wide gorge, a thin stream of silver flashing in the night. It was about as wide as two swimming pool lanes put together, and it still had the current it had when it streamed downward.
“All right.” My voice sounded raspy to my own ears. If I could hear it, no doubt the women could hear the strain in my voice. It wouldn’t do much to cement their confidence. There was nothing I could do about it. We had one option, and it was to cross. “We can swim across just like this.”
“You have to be high.” Kamila squinted at me. Her pupils were the size of some purely theoretical particles. Could she be afraid of heights? I hadn’t thought she was afraid of anything, but I might have been wrong. “Did you get into the local product when we were cutting through that drug field?”
“Do you have a better option?” I didn’t have time to stand there and sell these people on the idea. It was swim across the gorge or die, and I had no idea how long I would be able to maintain the bridge. I was already trembling with fatigue.
Lila swallowed hard, but she stepped forward. She might have just been trying to head off any bickering, or she might have been the bravest person in our group. “I’ll do it. I’ll go first.” She stepped forward without waiting for anyone else and jumped into the waterfall-turned-bridge.
For a second, she completely disappeared into the water. I held my breath, struggling to keep the bridge up. I tried not to let any doubts creep in, but I couldn’t entirely keep them away as I
stared at the roiling mass of water.
Then her dark head popped back up again. She started swimming in a modified crawl, arm over arm, with her head out of the water so she could see what was waiting on the other side. Her backpack bobbed up and down in the water, brightly colored and easy to spot.
Her weight made no difference to the strain of holding up the bridge. From a structural perspective, or the perspective of the person holding the thing up, she might as well not have been there at all. I sighed with relief when she made it halfway across. We were doing this. We were doing the impossible and crossing an open gorge to get to safety. We might get out of this alive.
“All right. Next?” I licked my lips and tasted salt. Maybe when all of this was over, we could go somewhere and just rest for a while. It seemed like a pipe dream right now, but hell, I’d just made a bridge out of water and had a woman swim across open air. Pipe dreams were apparently my thing, and my goal was simple. A place with my women, some land, and quiet. I put that seed away for the moment and turned back to our situation.
Tess hopped in next. The way I was plugged into this, the sensation was weird. I was holding the water up, but the water was part of me. So I could feel Tess as something I was holding, but she was also jumping into me, and it was both erotic and terrifying at the same time. At least the shock of it was a nice change from the strain and fatigue I’d been feeling.
Tess swam a lot faster than Lila, probably because she was Ferin. We were faster than humans in general, and Tess was faster than most of us on top of that. She got to the halfway point in half the time Lila had, and I turned to Zarya. “You’re next.” I didn’t give her a choice. I wasn’t going to argue. We were just going to go ahead and do the thing, smooth and easy. Or at least, easy now that the waterfall was reshaped.
Zarya didn’t fight it, but she didn’t look enthusiastic either. I could see the strain of working on the bridge in her face, and I felt bad about it. I was nervous about sending her over the bridge while she was holding it up, too. We didn’t have any choice. She slipped into the water, not making any splash as she went in. She went fastest of all because she knew how to use the water to move herself along.
On the other side, Lila hauled herself out. I mentally kicked myself for letting her go first. Who knew what was waiting in the dark over on the other side? Lila was no fool, though. She might not be Ferin, but she knew what she was doing, and she wasn’t messing around. She came out of the water with one of her silver knives in hand, ready for action.
My head was throbbing from the effort of shaping the waterfall. I wanted to curl up in one of the branches and sleep for a month, but rest was not in my future. I tried to meet Kamila’s eyes, but she’d found another vampire coming up the path. She flambéed him and turned to me. “What?”
“Your turn.”
On the other side, Tess leaped out of the water and shook herself off like a dog. She and Lila stood back to back, wary of an attack as they waited for the rest of us.
Zarya finished her swim, launching herself up and out of the water like a dolphin. She landed on her feet, perfectly elegant and demure. I could see Lila giving her an envious look, like she wished she could have pulled off a move like that. It couldn’t be easy to live in a group of Ferin like this, regardless of Lila’s stunning natural beauty.
Kamila shook her head, sending her bright red hair everywhere. “No way, no how.”
33
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I didn’t think of myself as god-king of the universe or anything ridiculous like that, but she had to know what kind of a time crunch we were on. “Kamila, this isn’t a debate. Get in the water!” I looked back toward the path. We were all clear for the time being, but that didn’t make us any safer.
She pushed a strand of hair back over her ear. She refused to look at the cliff’s edge. “Jason, you need me here. The vampires are coming, and if you don’t have someone picking them off, they’ll take you out.”
I gritted my teeth against the pain and fatigue. Kamila was probably afraid, and I could understand that. Later on, I’d apologize for being insensitive about it. Right now, I didn’t have time to coddle. In that moment I had to be firm, or we were both going to die.
And if both fire-using Ferin died, the whole group would be shit out of luck.
“I can hang on long enough to get you over, but Kam, this is damn hard work. If you don’t get in that water right the hell now, we’re both fucked.” My whole body felt like jelly. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to walk when this was all said and done.
Assuming we lived.
“I’m sure we can come up with some other way!” She put her hands on my arms. She was trying to sound reassuring, but the way she clutched onto me was like someone holding on for dear life.
I roared at her without thinking. “Get in the goddamn water right now, or I’ll throw you in myself!”
Kamila jumped. She let out a strangled-sounding scream, and for a second, I wondered if she’d missed the bridge. My heart thundered in my chest as I searched for her—
Then I saw her long red hair streaming out behind her. She swam as fast as she could, just the way Lila had—a crawl stroke, with her head out of the water so she could see exactly where she was going. She wasn’t able to swim fast, probably because she was terrified. I could hear her whispering prayers as she swam, prayers she probably didn’t even realize she was saying.
Fear often made people revert to the practices of their childhoods, and the roaring water was a perfect source of fear.
I could hear more vampires coming down the path. Here I was, holding up however many tons of water with nothing but the power of my mind. I was solely responsible for the life of one of my mentors, lovers, and friends, and I couldn’t use my powers to defend myself, lest I accidentally sent her crashing down to her doom.
I couldn’t wait. I jumped into the water. I didn’t know if I would be able to swim while holding the bridge up, but I’d rather try and fail than not try and get torn apart, sending Kamila to her death.
I splashed in, and for a moment, all was silent.
Then I felt the cool water against my skin.
I kicked my legs furiously, but fatigue made it difficult to do more than some perfunctory movements, and I knew I needed to do better. I fought to do more. I put my head down and went for the full crawl, not looking up. I didn’t want to see anything outside of the water; I needed my full concentration to get me through without dropping the bridge. Looking at anything, be it my women or enemies would fracture my concentration, and I would not let that happen.
I’d always been good in a pool, but this was miserable. I could feel Kamila in the water ahead of me, hot and afraid and on the verge of panic. The current propelled us both forward, but Kamila was fighting it. I tried to stay patient with her, but my nerves were frayed to the point of breaking.
I wouldn’t be able to hold on for much longer, because I was asking the water to do something completely against nature. This wasn’t like fire, when my little tricks went hand in hand with things fire could do anyway, given the right conditions. I’d done some wild things with water before, but it was all things it did in the context of weather or natural events.
This violated all of the rules, and I knew it.
I reached the halfway point, and the vampires reached the shore. They spoke among themselves, their voices carrying along the water. The water itself recoiled from them, showing a kind of sentience brought on by my Ferin powers.
The things you learned when you were suspended in an impossible swimming pool a thousand feet above the ground. I made a note and kept going.
Behind me, a vampire put their foot into the water.
The current sped up. In terms of holding the bridge up, it was like holding a cat at the vet. One minute, it was calm and sedate, and the next, it was an out of control chainsaw. I ground my teeth so tight my jaw ached, and I pushed myself harder until Kamila made it to the other side. I f
elt her lift herself out of the stream of water. She didn’t fall, and thus, it was time for me to let go. My job was done, the vampires were at bay, and the women were safe. Inside me, I felt something loosen, like a band around my chest, torn free by the completion of a task well done.
But I wanted to live.
I planned to exhaust every option for making sure that happened. Knowing Kamila was safe, knowing I wasn’t going to be destroying someone else if I slipped, still turned out to be incredibly freeing. I pushed myself forward a little farther, no longer concerned about pacing myself. If the bridge slipped, the bridge slipped, but we’d come a long way in a short time.
Behind me, a vampire got all the way into the water, bitching about the current. Well, shit.
The good part of the vampire’s choice was the extra help I got from the current. I might not have the juice to keep going, but the river did. Unfortunately, that meant the vampires were coming toward me even faster than they had been, and I had even fewer resources for dealing with them.
The other shore loomed ahead of me. I stretched myself, struggling to reach the end. I opened my eyes, but I kept them straight ahead. Looking to either side or even down would not be in my best interest. I needed to move as fast as I possibly could.
My hold was slipping. The water was dropping around me in fits and starts as my power began to give up the ghost. The vampires wouldn’t be able to feel it, not yet. Water was life, and vampires couldn’t attune themselves to it. I didn’t care what the vampires could feel. I was the one who would fall to his death in a matter of seconds.
I cast about for another option. I wasn’t close enough to jump out yet, but my women were on the shore cheering me on and reaching for me. Even when I got to the end, I had that cliff to contend with. With my battery blinking red, I made the final choice. The end game. I would combine powers, kill the vampires, and drag my sodden carcass out of the pool, or die trying.
Forever Young - Book 3 Page 18
