“Please!” I screamed, my heart in my chest as the pressure inside me felt like it was going to make my ears explode. “It’s coming.”
“You say that like you know exactly where it’s going to land. It could hit the ocean!” Seph burst out, his eyes wild as he stared up at the sky. All that was visible was a plume of smoke, and from this angle, I knew what he was seeing—it looked like it was thousands of miles away from here.
But it wasn’t.
“I don’t know,” I hollered at him, wishing the alarms would stop, wishing the city would just go back to sleep so I could concentrate. “Please, just trust me.”
My plea had them gaping at me, and I knew why—they wanted to keep me safe, and keeping me safe didn’t involve me potentially getting whacked in the head by a meteor the size of which only Gaia knew.
Sol, this wasn’t Armageddon. Aerosmith wasn’t playing in the background, and Bruce Willis sure as shit wasn’t my daddy, but Sol, I knew that I was meant to be here for this reason.
When they carried on gawping at me, I screamed the word I prayed they’d have faith in. “Kismet!”
As a unit, they flinched, but it was the catalyst. They stopped wasting time and did as I asked, spreading out. One of them winked clothes onto us so we were covered, but I didn’t really notice. I was focused on the manifestation of my magic. How was I letting it spread this far? How was it even doing this?
It was crazy, stupid, but I wasn’t like the others, I didn’t carry a knife so I raised my arm and bit into the fleshy forearm I’d torn into last night. At the sight, my Virgo gaped at me once more, and a knife flashed into being in my other hand. I blinked at it, yelled, “Thanks!” and slashed into my flesh. Instinct, pure instinct, had me making the move, letting the blood drop, except it didn’t slip through the glow as gravity made it fall. The magic was viscous, and it captured my blood.
At the sight, they all pinged knives into being and within seconds, the pink glow of my magic was tinged purple and blue from our sacrifice.
The two magics worked together, uniting and combining just as I was with my warriors, making the glow seem less transparent now and more opaque, almost as though it were a tangible force instead of just a sheer net.
That they were responding to my movements, mirroring them without me having to utter a word, thrilled me. These powerful men who, in time, would be strong warrior Fae, were letting me lead them—even if I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing, and was working solely on instinct.
I surged upward, my wings beating as fast as they could. We needed to get higher, much higher. My body, built for altitudes now that I had wings and my magic was protecting me, didn’t quiver under the intense pressure from the distance below us but I wasn’t as fast as my Virgo, wasn’t as strong. Still, my glow was definitely helping because I didn’t feel the frigid cold and wasn’t battered by the winds that would tear a regular human to shreds. I knew when we hit a different stratosphere, knew that we were probably on the same par as commercial liners flew, which meant they were a threat to us at that moment—not that I had time to worry about that.
With the glow in place, fortified by our blood, I waited. My wings beat tirelessly and, even though I was exhausted, something was keeping me up here, something was giving me strength. My men? Or what we’d just done? I knew they’d triggered the Rut with their lovemaking, and I knew that might have been feeding me.
Kismet.
Again.
That this was my destiny just seemed to spill into place.
“Where is it?” Daniel roared at me, not angry, just trying to be heard. He was a distance away, like the length of a tennis court away from me.
“It’s coming,” I screamed back, and this time, it was.
My lungs slowed down and my heart rate increased as I felt the huge lump of space rock hurtle toward us. The glow acted as a beacon, and though the rock was inanimate, I felt the magnet ping into place between us. I closed my eyes, praying to Gaia that I wasn’t signing an early death warrant for me and my men, hoping Sol would aid me in saving the people in the city on the island below us from a nasty death.
When the meteor was there, maybe five hundred feet away, I wanted to puke. It was hurtling toward us, and I felt like I was in a video game where the character was about to get squished before the level restarted and the gamer could choose a different option that didn’t involve flying toward a meteor.
And the size of it?
Sweet fuck.
It was huge.
Bigger than a Buick on the side that was screaming toward us, the sight had all my instincts running away from me like rats on a sinking ship because, at my base, I wasn’t Superwoman. I was fallible, dammit. Acknowledging what we were about to do, even though I’d been so sure of myself mere moments before, made me tremble, every part of me quivering, praying that the glow I had no idea how I was controlling, would somehow hold up, would capture the rock.
My heart stopped the second it was there, hurtling between us. I’d swear a thousand times that I was dead, that this was it. My life was over, and Seph’s, Dan’s, and Matt’s were too.
But, when I opened my eyes, the space between my Virgo and I was filled with that mahoosive chunk of space rock. It was contained within the net of my magic, filling every inch to capacity, meaning I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were alive. Could feel them in my heart as mine beat in time to theirs.
The heat the meteor was giving off made me feel like my skin was frying, and I had no idea what the radiation was going to do to us. Sol, the notion of surviving this only to get cancer down the line was just too sickening to bear.
But we weren’t dead yet, and the Fae didn’t get cancer like humans did. Sure, they had their own nasty diseases too, but… My bottom lip quivered. I didn’t want to die because of this. Just because I’d acted on instinct—
Fuck!
Now wasn’t the time to mope. Tomorrow was the time for regrets. The present was for action.
“Is everyone okay?” Seph roared, his fear evident even though I knew he had to be just as aware as I was that all our hearts were beating. “Riel?!”
“I-I’m fine,” I screamed, but it wasn’t loud enough for them, and I had to holler it twice more before they heard me. Not even using the wind to carry the words worked.
“We need to take it down carefully,” Matt cried back.
“Where?” yelled Dan. “We can’t just place it in Linford’s garden. There’ll be a fuck ton of radiation! It’ll destroy everything in its vicinity.”
As he spoke, I felt the surging energy beaming off the meteor and knew it was rebounding into us. I could see it. With senses that weren’t Fae, witch, or human, but a mixture of all three, I could discern the energy ricocheting into us.
Well, there went the ‘no cancer’ theory.
Blowing out a breath, I hollered, “I think it will be burned off by the time we get it down. My magic is absorbing it.”
Silence followed that statement, and who could blame them?
They knew what I was saying, even if I hadn’t spelled it out, and they knew what that potentially could mean for us health wise.
In other words, we were fucked.
And it was all my fault.
❖
Dan
As we floated down with the huge, motherfucking chunk of space shit in the net of Riel’s magic, I glowered at it.
Was this piece of fuck going to kill us?
Sol, we were too young to die, and we’d only just found her, she’d only just found us. But, and it was a huge but, if this was kismet, then that just sucked even harder.
We’d been fated to die young.
Fated to meet Riel, for her to be sent to this fucking island, and fated for her to catch this Sol-damned piece of space shit like a baseman in baseball whose goal was to catch a ball that had been knocked out of the park.
Rage bellowed in my blood as we fluttered down to the ground, but as we did, and as it soared inside
me, I had to admit, we’d had no other alternative.
This meteor was huge. I couldn’t see my troupe around it, and it was as wide as it was long. It was a bright black, but deep in its ore, there were a thousand different colors that were reflected in the scant lights still working after the explosions from the city beneath us. Even with meager illumination, it was like looking at the source of a rainbow.
Huh, maybe that was where leprechauns lived?
On top of Sol-damned meteors.
When the land beneath us could be measured in the hundreds rather than thousands of feet away, her voice, when it came, was more audible. “I don’t think we have a choice,” Riel screamed, but I could hear her exhaustion. “I can’t make it to the ocean to dump it there.”
“Linford’s yard is big,” Matt screamed back. “We should be able to find a place to land it.”
Like we were landing an aircraft.
Sheesh.
By the time we made it twenty feet to the ground, the tangible force of Riel’s magic net had stopped acting like a trampoline under the meteor’s weight. It wasn’t bowing under the pressure of holding such a substantial mass, but it had enveloped it somehow.
Sealing it in?
I couldn’t say, because I didn’t know.
What I did know was that I was exhausted too. I’d surged through the sky to chase after my woman, donated a lot of blood, and we’d just carried this bastard down from the troposphere—the part of the atmosphere where planes flew.
A shriek sounded as we approached, and that was no masculine cry.
“¿Qué has hecho? ¿Qué tontería es eso?” What have you done? What stupidity is this?
The splurge of Spanish was about as much as I could understand as we made it down to the ground. With Riel’s net around it, and our fatigue taking over, we were fluttering, trying to find a part of Linford’s garden that we wouldn’t destroy too badly when we made the drop.
Riel’s voice was slurred as she called out, “Abuela?”
I blinked. Gabriella, her grandmother, was dead.
Right?
Concern for Riel had me wondering what the fuck the radiation from the meteor had done to her if she was seeing dead people—this was no time to pull a Sixth Sense—but when another boatload of Spanish slammed our way, too fast for me to translate, especially in my current state of fatigue, I had to figure that someone was definitely here that was related to Riel, and that someone was definitely pissed.
Her mom, maybe?
Funny how that seemed like a better option than a grandmother who’d somehow come back from the dead to scream at her granddaughter.
“I need to put this down,” Riel slurred into the mix of hurled Spanish. “I-I can’t keep it steady—”
Before she could say another word, a glow appeared beneath us.
“Not another fucking glow,” Seph rasped loud enough for me to hear. I peered down at my feet and saw a red glow merging with ours, which was close to purple from the blood we’d shed to fortify the makeshift net.
How that was even possible, I didn’t know, and I was pretty fucking certain that Riel wouldn’t have a clue, either. She seemed to be well-versed in the doing, but when it came to understanding why? She was pretty useless.
Still, I could empathize. I was a doer, too, and what she’d done tonight, though insane, had saved a fuck ton of people’s lives.
The red glow pulsed like a beacon and the Spanish reverted to English as the woman called out, “I have it.”
I felt the mass retract from me like a load lifted from my shoulders. The old tales of Atlas pinged into my memory, and I could only imagine how heavy the world must have been if this piece of space junk was this overwhelmingly weighty.
We fluttered away, our wings caving in on themselves as we made it to the ground. The woman came into view, old and small, her face crinkled but her body strong and straight beneath the might of the meteor. As my feet connected with the ground, I felt a charge slip through me. One that I’d never felt before.
I cast a look at the others, wondering if they’d sensed it too, and I knew they had.
It was like…
No.
Surely not.
The Earth didn’t have a pulse, but that was what it felt like. A rumble beneath our feet, a constant beat that had my ears rushing with blood.
Blinking, I stumbled back, unsurprised when the others staggered too, tumbling onto the ground so that we were staring up at the meteor that a small, old Latina was managing when it had taken the four of us to hold it in place.
To be fair, we’d been dealing with momentum and terminal velocity, so that had to count for something, right?
Shrugging off my bruised pride, I stated, “Who are you?”
The old woman turned to glower at me. “I’m concentrating.”
I blew out a breath and stared straight up. From this angle, the meteorite looked even bigger, especially as she maneuvered it into Linford’s yard.
When a set of sandaled feet appeared in my peripheral vision, I sat up and stared at Linford’s back as he chided, “Granddaughter, did you have to bring it to my garden?”
I hadn’t realized Riel was next to me, but now that I did, I had to get closer to her. Even if it meant scrambling on hands and knees to get nearer. Linford ignored me as I moved around him, and as I scurried, I saw that I wasn’t the only one desperate to get close to Riel.
When the four of us were within touching distance, I knew I could take my first deep breath. Just the momentum of sucking down that huge gulp of air had me rocking backward, and toppling onto my ass.
Whatever the fuck we’d just done was messing with us. Bad.
“Had no choice,” Riel slurred again, and I knew she sounded worse than me. Figured, since she was half my size, had no stamina for fighting, and had done something with her magic I knew for a fact she’d never done before.
Oh, and we’d just triggered the Rut.
Great time to be catching meteors, right?
“No, I can see that.” With a grunt, Linford dropped to his knees. His wings fluttered out to control his descent so he gently tapped the ground as he pressed a hand to Riel’s forehead. He wasn’t speaking to us, but to the woman, as he said, “She’s burning up.”
“They all will be,” the woman snarled, and I felt the exact second when she brought the meteor to the ground. “It’s inevitable after what they’ve just done.”
Her words faded into nothing as I felt the pulse in the Earth stagger beneath the mass, and the shockwave settled into my bones, throbbing through me.
“They’ve just absorbed what the whole island and most of the North Pacific Ocean were due. Gaia only knows what it’s about to do to them,” came the curt response, and I could feel her anger, but more than that, I sensed her distress. Her concern.
I squinted at them. “Absorbed?”
Linford grunted. “Think not of that.” Yay, now I could think of nothing else. “Riel, I need you to cast a spell for me.”
“Can’t,” she mumbled. “Too tired.”
I twisted up so I could lean onto my elbow, frowning at him before I peered down at my woman. She was a boneless heap of arms and legs that was surrounded by three more piles of boneless heaps. I splatted down, unable to take the weight on my arm any longer as I muttered, “Why? Why do you need her to cast a spell?”
Linford’s face was grim. “Just help her focus,” he commanded, shooting me and the others looks.
“I don’t know how,” I admitted.
“Send her strength,” the woman snarled, but her gaze was skyward. “Sol, the troupes could be on their way as we speak, Linford.”
“I know, Gabriella,” Linford snapped, his tone curt. “But there’s no point in panicking them. We have to focus. We must make her cast a spell.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
I was, once more, ignored.
Growling with impatience, I watched as Gabriella barked, “Just open a portal. Take us from
here.”
“You know that won’t work. They’ll take her from us again.”
Again?
Matt, Seph, and I all tensed at that—well, as much as we could when we felt like overcooked spaghetti.
But… Riel had been taken once before?
Who the Sol by?
More AFata?
Why did I feel like I didn’t have all the story?
“She wasn’t supposed to do this,” the older woman cried, watching as Linford’s hands swept up and down over her calves like he was chafing warmth into them. “She wasn’t supposed to take it all.”
I scraped a hand over my face and forced myself to sit upright. “She didn’t take it all. We took some of it too.”
“She’s witch born,” Linford discounted, “forged from the three of our kinds. She took the blast of it through her magic. Look at her and look at yourselves.” His glower was dark. “You’re aware, exhausted, but aware, while she’s half unconscious.”
Unease began to coalesce in my gut. “What’s happening here?”
And I wasn’t talking about the fact Riel’s dead grandmother was alive, or the fact that Linford now had an extraterrestrial rock decorating his garden either.
Gabriella shot me a look. “My grandmother had a vision. She foresaw this day.”
How the Sol could anyone have foreseen this?
I shook my head, trying to clear it, but when that didn’t work, I just gawped at her. She grunted at my bewilderment, but before she could chide me on it, we all heard it.
Wings, en masse, made a shushing noise. It shouldn’t have been as loud as it was, considering, but there was no avoiding or evading what was heading our way. Everyone knew that sound. Everyone knew to shift ass and bolt the Sol out of wherever you were because not just one, not even just a single troupe, was on its way.
Panic slipped inside me. Gabriella had been concerned about troupes coming, plural, and now, they were on their way. There were more than just a set of six wings soaring toward us, as well. This wasn’t the troupe from yesterday, or if they were there, they were joined by dozens more warriors.
What the Sol was going on here?
The sound had Linford grabbing Riel’s shoulders and dragging her upright, shaking her so quickly her head rattled, whipping from side to side in a way that was going to hurt later, and I winced at the sight. I wanted to stop him, but the fear coming from her grandparents was as tangible as the net about the meteorite. Whatever we were in the dark about, she and Linford weren’t.
The Ascended: The Eight Wings Collection Page 38
