Runebinder

by Alex R. Kahler

  “Get him out of here,” Leanna growled. She didn’t take her eyes off Tomás, but the flick of her wrist toward Justin was indicator enough. “I’ll deal with this traitor.”

  “Perhaps you will,” Tomás said. “But, dear sister, there are two things about this boy I have come to expect.”

  “And what are those?” Leanna asked. Justin had already begun dragging Tenn away. They were nearly out the door when Tenn caught Tomás’s final word.

  “Twins.”

  Above them, on cue, thunder roared. Even Justin paused.

  Leanna was at the window in a heartbeat, one hand pressed to the pane. Tomás didn’t take his eyes off Tenn. His smile spoke volumes; it made Tenn’s blood run hot and cold.

  “How did they—” Leanna began.

  “Go undetected?” Tomás asked. He winked at Tenn. “You’ll have to ask our weak little friend over here. Apparently, he has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

  “The runes,” Leanna hissed. She opened to Earth. Tenn knew without a doubt that she was trying to find the twins’ hiding place. And he knew she would never succeed.

  “Bingo,” Tomás said.

  “Why is he still here?” Leanna yelled.

  Justin jolted and continued dragging Tenn back down the hall. Tenn tried to struggle, to break free, but Justin was much stronger. The whole world shuddered as the twins began their attack.

  And Tenn was right in the center of their target.

  He stopped struggling.

  At least Jarrett was safe. At least one of them had made it out of here alive.

  If Tomás had been telling the truth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THUNDER.

  The chair he was tied to nearly toppled. It probably would have, too, if Justin hadn’t been there to hold it steady.

  “Impressive,” Justin said, staring up at the ceiling. It was the first thing he’d said since bringing Tenn down here, what felt like ages ago. The rafters rained down wafts of dust with every tremor, and the fluorescent lights swayed back and forth. Even from down here, he could feel the great amounts of energy being thrown around outside. Every Sphere—Air and Fire, Water and Earth—which meant Leanna was fighting back. Not that it would do much good. “Your friends are powerful.”

  Another explosion shook the house, this one echoed by a rumble that seemed to come from the pits of hell. A light in the corner exploded in a shower of sparks. Still, Justin didn’t flinch, and his hand on the back of Tenn’s chair kept him from moving. Justin was unnaturally strong; the guy was a Howl, that much was certain, but he definitely wasn’t one of the Kin—not with how dismissive Tomás and Leanna had been of him. The question was, what type of Howl was he dealing with?

  Tenn gritted his teeth and twisted his wrists behind him, hoping he could maybe loosen the bonds. Justin sniffed, and the air left Tenn’s lungs in a gasp.

  That answered that question.

  “What did I say about cooperation?” He glanced down at Tenn before reverting to his skyward glance. He tapped his throat with his free hand. “I can sense every movement you make. Struggling will just make it worse.”

  A sick feeling settled itself in Tenn’s gut. He closed his eyes and focused on the runes he had inked into his friends’ wrists. Only Devon was still on the hillside. His heart sunk, though he’d known she would break command like this: Dreya was heading toward them. Barely a hundred yards away.

  Tenn knew that Dreya was coming to find him. While Devon was throwing around as much magic as he could to distract the guards and Leanna, she was coming in for the rescue. He glanced up at Justin. Even if Dreya did make it into the house, there was no way she’d make it past him. Not if she was going for the element of surprise. Which left one shaky alternative.

  “My friends are going to kill you. Again,” he said. It wasn’t much, but it did get Justin’s attention. The guy looked at him with a bemused expression.

  “Oh, really? How, precisely? This place is a bunker guarded by hundreds of necromancers. Even if they do get in, they’ll have to deal with Leanna and me.”

  Tenn shrugged, as much as he could under restraint.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “They will. Tell me, what were you? You know, before you became Leanna’s toy.”

  Justin laughed, his mouth curving into a smile.

  “And why would you want to know?” he asked.

  “Because you had a spine once. I can’t imagine what that would have been like.”

  In the blink of an eye, Justin was hunched over Tenn, a finger jabbed between his clavicles. Tenn didn’t gasp, even though it felt like Justin was about to collapse his throat.

  “I was a fitness instructor in LA before my girlfriend joined the cult of the Dark Lady,” he said. “She turned me. I was her first.”

  “So why are you with Leanna?” Tenn managed to ask.

  Justin’s eyes narrowed. “My maker was human. Humans. Die.” His finger dug deeper. “So I came to serve Leanna, who is as close to my goddess as we can become.”

  “Then tell your Goddess of Death hello for me,” Tenn whispered.

  “What?”

  The door at the top of the stairs blew open.

  The force of the explosion made Tenn’s ears ring, but in that one brief moment of Justin’s distraction he pushed the chair over and opened to Earth. The bonds broke free. Tenn crashed to the side and scrambled away on shaking limbs. Justin didn’t try to stop him. He didn’t curse. He just stared up at the broken door with his arms crossed over his chest, a bored expression plastered on his face.

  Dreya floated down the steps, her white coat fluttering in the windstorm. She looked like a goddess, her body laced with an aura of yellow and blue, her Spheres blazing. Tenn ran toward Dreya’s side. Her power roared in his ears.

  “Go,” Dreya said. There was a tightness in her eyes as she stared at Justin, a recognition that bordered on madness. It reminded him of when Devon let Fire take control.

  “I’m fighting,” Tenn replied.

  She said nothing to this.

  Justin didn’t attack. He raised an eyebrow instead and looked at them like they were mice toying with a cat. Tenn was still horribly weak, and the very thought of fighting again made him want to sink into the ground and never come up. But Jarrett was alive. He was alive. And that was worth fighting for.

  “Who are you?” Justin asked.

  “You wouldn’t remember me,” Dreya replied. “But I remember seeing you, running. You escaped me that once. You will not do so again.”

  She struck. The air within the basement became a cyclone of dust and rubble. It whipped around Tenn, slashed marks in his skin, but he didn’t flinch and he didn’t close his eyes. He might not have been any use in the fight, but he was going to see this through.

  Water sprayed from the wall as the water heater tore away, crashing into storage boxes and scraping along the concrete floor with the wail of banshees. Everything swept up in the maelstrom—pipes burst, foundations cracked. Everything thrashed about but Justin.

  He stepped forward, appearing from the screen of flying debris in a halo of stillness, water sloshing around his feet. The Sphere of Air burned in his throat, a bruised blue, a garish yellow, and Tenn realized the awful truth: his inverted Sphere consumed the power Dreya whipped at him.

  Justin grinned. “Dumb bitch.”

  Tenn had no idea how he could hear the guy over the roar of wind, but his voice carried like they were talking over a dinner table.

  “You’re making him stronger!” Tenn yelled, praying that Dreya would hear him. “He’s a Breathless One!”

  “He is,” she replied. “And he was there, when our clan died. He was there, stealing their breath. For that, for all of this, he deserves a slow death. I will make him suffer.”


  Her face was a grimace, a mask of barely controlled rage. Then she opened her mouth and sang.

  The burning light within her flashed bright as a strobe as the power inside the basement amplified. Wind howled. Tenn sank back against the wall behind her, trying to find shelter from the hell Dreya had unleashed. Through the blinding light and whirling debris, he saw Justin take a step forward. He was laughing now, and his twisted Sphere devoured the power. The water heater flew past, and he smashed it with a fist without even looking. His eyes were focused entirely on Dreya.

  “I will eat you alive, little bug,” he sneered. “I will drain you till your bones implode. And then I’ll feed you to the kravens.”

  Dreya paused her singing, just long enough to call to Tenn, “Hold him!”

  Tenn looked between the two of them, standing only feet apart. Then, before Justin could take another step, Tenn opened to Earth. The floor beneath Justin’s feet turned to quicksand, sucked him down to his ankles. Then he let go of the power, and the concrete solidified in an instant. Even that was enough to drop Tenn to his knees. Shock turned to hate on Justin’s face as he tried and failed to wrench a leg free.

  “Oh, you are going to pay for that,” he said.

  He inhaled.

  If it weren’t for the sheer strength of Dreya’s magic, Tenn knew they would have both died in that instant. Justin pulled the air from the room. Tenn’s lungs burned, and even Dreya stumbled. But she didn’t cease her song, and her power filled the void with everything Justin tried to steal. Her song became a scream, one that matched pitch with the howl of wind, but it only fed the monster. All Justin had to do was wait for Dreya to become used up; then, a small gasp and he would have them both.

  “Dreya,” Tenn said, hoping he could get them both out of there before she fainted. She glared at him, her eyes bright as azure stars, and he shut up. That was a look that said she knew precisely what she was doing. Whatever it was, it seemed insane.

  He glanced back at Justin, still sunk in the concrete, still glaring at them as the wind whipped around him and his Sphere swallowed it whole. The water had risen, was now splashing around his calves. That’s when Tenn noticed something...different.

  The darkness of Justin’s empty Sphere was lightening. The vortex of power that swirled around and into him flickered.

  “I hear it hurts,” Dreya said, the song cutting off, her words slicing through the maelstrom like a knife. “I hear that the hunger is unbearable. That this is why you kill the very people you once loved, because it hurts too much to do otherwise. Consider this your final blessing, then. No. More. Hunger.”

  She flung her hands forward, sending a blinding torrent of magic and wind at Justin’s locked frame.

  Justin gasped. His hands shot to his throat.

  And in that instant, with a roar of magic that sent shivers through Tenn’s very bones, Justin’s Sphere...healed.

  There was no other word for it. One moment, the Sphere was a vacuum in Justin’s throat. The next, it was whole: shining, flickering, exuding. Dreya let go of her power. If Tenn hadn’t been watching her, he would have missed the way she slouched and steadied herself on the stair banister. She quickly righted herself, her chest heaving with exertion and her eyes wild.

  “You healed him,” Tenn whispered.

  He looked to Justin, who was just as shell-shocked as Tenn felt. The man had been cured of the incurable.

  Dreya didn’t give him time to question. She grabbed him by the sleeve and began pulling him up the stairs, her breath loud and ragged even against the roar of leaking water.

  “Wait!” Justin called out.

  Tenn looked back. He was still stuck in the concrete, water quickly rising past his knees. The basement was small. How long would it take to fill? Water sent a chill through him. What would it feel like to drown?

  “Don’t leave me like this!”

  Dreya paused, perhaps from the panic in his voice, perhaps because she couldn’t move any farther. Her eyes were pale, and her chest fluttered as fast as a rabbit’s. She leaned against the wall and looked back to the Howl. She didn’t speak. For a moment, Tenn wondered if she even could.

  “You saved me,” Justin said. He was frantic, struggling against the concrete that was lodged around his legs. “You can’t just leave me like this. I’ll die.”

  “I did not save you,” Dreya said. Her voice was flat, emotionless, but it also had a breathlessness that made Tenn fear the worst. She’d drawn way too much, and they still had to find a way out of here. “You are still a monster,” she continued. “But you will die a human.”

  She turned and walked up the stairs. Justin screamed.

  Tenn didn’t move. There were tears in his eyes. Justin screamed at him, begged to be released. They couldn’t let him die—not when he was no longer a Howl. Not when he was human, and scared.

  Dreya grabbed Tenn by the collar, pulled his face close to hers.

  “Move,” she grated. “Before the Kin return.”

  “But you saved him! You made him human again.”

  Sure, Tenn had brought Jarrett back from the brink of becoming a Howl. But that wasn’t reversing the process and that wasn’t his power. That was the runes. Dreya had done the impossible, the task they’d come all this way to achieve.

  Dreya squeezed her eyes shut. Her breath was fast, too fast, and when she spoke it was barely a whisper.

  “It’s impossible,” she said. Another rumble shook the house, but neither of them flinched.

  “But I just saw—”

  “You saw nothing,” she said, her eyes opening in a flash of blue. Her voice was tired. “You cannot cure the disease that ails him.”

  “But—”

  Again, her eyes closed.

  “One can only assuage the Sphere’s hunger for a time. When the Sphere is damaged to that degree, it cannot be mended, not by any human hands. Soon, that Howl’s Sphere will eat itself again. And when it does, he will be just as broken as before. He will always be a monster, Tenn. I just wanted him to remember how it felt to be a terrified human.”

  Tenn glanced back at the man who, only moments before, had threatened his life. He deserved to die. He deserved to die like this. Right?

  What are you becoming?

  What have you become?

  The question made his heart sink. Dreya pulled him again, and he followed.

  “I’m sorry,” Tenn whispered. He doubted Justin heard it over his own, terrified screams.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE SKY BURNED RED. Not just the red of fire, but the red of a wound, raw and bleeding. Clouds dripped fire like lava, and the once-picturesque mountain landscape now looked like the fangs of some broken beast. Flames roared on the hillside, weaving trails of smoke up into the air as lightning forked back and forth with strobe-like speed. Everything was heat and fury. Every hair on Tenn’s body stood on end, his Spheres echoing the destruction around him. And yet, in spite of the havoc that wove like madness through the countryside, the town below was strangely untouched. Only a few fires leaped between buildings, snaring the dark shadows that raced through the streets. Tenn knew Devon was trying to avoid the innocent lives that swarmed near the outer wall. Trying, and probably failing. There were just too many to save.

  Dreya paused in the doorway and turned to him. Her breath was still erratic, and she looked paler than usual, as though her skin was becoming translucent. She reached out a shaky hand and took Tenn’s arm.

  “I must go help my brother,” she said.

  “Is Jarrett...?”

  “Alive. With Devon. Though we will speak of what happened later. You must finish this.” She took a deep breath. Swayed. “I am no help. I should not have killed the Breathless One like that. Anger overtook...”

  Tenn reached out, steadied her.
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  She shook him off. When she looked at him, her eyes were fierce, even if the rest of her seemed uncertain.

  “Leanna cannot make it out alive,” she said. “End this.”

  His legs were lead. He’d already run in here alone. But to be left amid the destruction?

  “I can’t—”

  She shook her head.

  “Your pain gives you strength,” she said. Another chill swept through him. Did she know she was repeating Tomás’s words? “And that will help you win this fight. Just don’t let your pain consume you.”

  Air flickered in Dreya’s throat. It was faint, barely a trace of its normal strength, but the wind still whipped around her and sent her white coat fluttering. She lifted herself up, hovered a few inches above the ground. “Good luck,” she said. “We will see you on the other side.”

  And with that, she shot through the air like an arrow, speeding toward her brother.

  It wasn’t until he turned to find the Kin that he realized her parting words were far from comforting.

  * * *

  Tomás was near, that much was certain—the incubus’s tracking rune glowed in Tenn’s mind, a red lace against the fibers of the Howl’s heart. Tenn ran around to the back of the house. His body screamed with protest, but he shut it down, deep in the recesses he usually reserved for silencing Water’s screams. Those, he let loose. If ever there was a time to drown in the wrongs he had suffered, in the rage he wanted so badly to unleash on the world, it was now. He had Jarrett back, sure. But he was done with being used. It was time to use his power.

  He found Tomás in the courtyard. The house formed a horseshoe around a cleared space that had, at one time, been beautiful. Now it was the scene of an eerily silent apocalypse.

  Every window facing the yard was blown out and gaping, shards of glass sticking from the churned mud like incisors. Chunks of concrete jutted from the soil, along with toppled trees and statuary. The earth itself rippled like static waves in a black sea. In the center of it all was Tomás, standing on a dais of black marble.