by Mike Shevdon
"I'll tell him you love him, Alex. Don't worry."
She glanced to the right. She could see her father mounting the side of the hill, trying to reach her.
"I gotta go," she said.
"I know," he said. "I'll tell him."
She turned and strode back towards the orb and the people stood around it. Behind her her dad's voice rang out, calling her name, but she daren't look back.
TWENTY-ONE
"Jeeezus! It's cold." Alex crunched across the grass, leaving footprints where the brittle strands simply snapped under the pressure of her feet. She went to where Eve and Chipper stood in the freezing air. "You've got it all wrong," she said, her teeth chattering as she spoke.
"Finished sulking now, have we," asked Eve. "Sulk all you like, there's nothing you can do."
Eve seemed unaffected by the cold. Perhaps she welcomed it.
"I wasn't sulking," Alex said. "I was thinking."
"That's a first," said Eve. Chipper grinned.
"I was thinking that the real problem here is you," she said to Eve. "Whatever your problem is, you're determined to take it out on everyone."
"You don't know what you're talking about," said Eve.
"Don't I?" said Alex. "Little Evie, left all alone? Little Evie, with no one to turn to?"
"Shut up!" screamed Eve. "I'm going to make you regret you ever opened your fat stupid mouth."
Chipper, loomed over Alex. "You better shut up, like she says."
"Leave her, Chipper. I can handle the likes of her," said Eve. "She doesn't understand. She's standing on a hundred thousand tons of stone and she wants to challenge me? We don't have to wait for the end of the world. We can kill her now, and bury her. Not necessarily in that order."
Alex felt the ground soften beneath her feet.
"You stupid little girl," said Alex. "You think you're the big thinker with your highbrow books and your pothead philosophy, but you can't see beyond your childish little nose. You accuse me of sulking, but isn't that what this is? One giant hissy fit to show the world once and for all that you want things your own way, or not at all?"
"Say that from the grave, bitch," said Eve.
Alex spread her feet keeping her balance as the ground shifted and sank beneath her. She fought the urge to struggle as she sank knee deep into the earth. She wouldn't give Eve the satisfaction or watching her try to crawl out of the hole that was forming around her.
"We shouldn't be fighting like this," said Sparky. "We should stick together – help each other."
Eve ignored him.
"It's not about sticking together, is it Eve?" said Alex. "It's only about you, isn't it? Everyone else can go screw as long as you get revenge for being left. No wonder you're alone."
Alex felt the ground shift under her when she mentioned being alone.
"Do you know the real irony?" Eve said. "I couldn't have done it without you. I needed four elements to activate the orb, or it wouldn't work. When Gina stole my books and found out what I was planning I had to deal with her, but that left me short one element – your element, Alex."
Alex sank to her waist so that she was forced to look up at Eve. She ignored the grit and stones trickling into her clothes and her shoes. She dismissed the sensation of the earth sucking her down. She had to wait. She knew what she had to do, but it would only work if she had support. She daren't look at Sparky. She daren't even acknowledge his existence.
"I want you to know," Eve continued, "that it will take you a while to die. Suffocation won't happen quickly and you'll be around long enough to keep the orb stable – long enough to trigger the end of the universe."
Alex realised then that she could save the universe. Eve had given it away. All she needed to do was end herself and it would all fall apart. Eve needed Alex for her element until the orb became self-sustaining. Without Alex, it would fail.
"Why, Eve?" Alex asked softly, meeting her malevolent gaze calmly. "Do you even know why they left you? What happened that they would leave you like that?"
Eve's hands were in fists, her teeth gritted and her face blotchy with rage. "They didn't leave me, you stupid bitch!" she screamed. "I killed them. I killed all of them! I buried them alive, which is exactly what I'm going to do to you!"
"Alive?" said Sparky. "Who? Who did you bury alive?"
"Everyone!" she screamed. "My brother, my sister, my parents! The entire house came down. It buried all of us in rubble and bricks. I was the only survivor. I was the only one able to survive."
"You caused it," said Alex.
"It doesn't matter; nothing matters any more. In a short while it will all be gone and it will be like none of it ever happened. History itself will cease to exist. Time will cease to exist."
Alex shook her head. Her next words would have to be chosen carefully. She could not afford to lie, but nor could she afford the entire truth. She hoped it would be enough.
"You picked the wrong person," said Alex. "I'm not ready to end it all. There are still things I want to do, places I want to go. There are things I need, people I need. There's so much we could become, and you want to choke that off before it's even started."
Finally she looked at Sparky. His expression was full of uncertainty, he looked from Eve, to Alex, to Chipper.
Chipper still watched Eve. He had the face of someone who finally understood – and accepted, no matter what the cost. Alex could see the doubt in Sparky. Was it enough? She couldn't wait any longer.
"And whose idea was it to come here, to Glastonbury Tor?" asked Alex. "Whose bright idea was that?"
"Mine," said Eve. "It's one of the old places – a nexus of power. And it's your grave."
Alex shook her head. "I don't think so. When you picked it, you forgot something. You're so far up your own arse the only thing you can see is your own shit."
"What are you talking about?" asked Eve.
In answer, Alex lifted her arms and began rising from the hole. Though Eve visibly struggled, and the hole around Alex spread outwards so that even Chipper and Sparky were forced to move back, Alex continued to rise.
"A hundred thousand tons of rock, didn't you say? Only a hundred thousand tons?" asked Alex.
The ground around her turned brown and then milky as water rose up through it, lifting her like venus from a mud-bath.
"Your little rock is in the middle of a lake twenty five miles across. It's been drained now, but as far as you can see in every direction was water – and it remembers – it knows what was lost and it's just waiting for a chance to reclaim it all." Alex shook her head in dismay. "It wasn't called the Isle of Avalon for nothing. This is my domain, Eve, not yours."
She could see Eve visibly fighting for control as the rocks beneath her vibrated with the force of the rising water. Eve was so linked to the earth that she was trying to squeeze the water out, to push it back with the sheer weight of stone, but that's not the way water works. Close off one way, and water will always find another. Alex could feel it seeping up through the cracks and crannies, feel the weight of power moving up through the hill.
She knew what must happen. She didn't want it, but she knew it must come, and she would not flinch from it now. Groundwater oozed onto the surface, pooling around Eve's feet, soaking up into her jeans, even as she struggled against it.
Chipper glanced from Alex to Eve, and back to Alex. He could see Eve was losing. Chipper hands bunched. Then he extended his fingers into a pistol, miming the cocking of the hammer, extending his arm until his fingers pointed at Alex's forehead. His eyes flared with anger and hatred. He was doing this execution style, pistol-grip held sideways, arm straight.
"No!" shouted Sparky.
Alex squeezed her eyes shut, curling herself into a ball. Momentarily, she pushed the water back from her skin, giving herself an insulating layer of dry earth, surrounding herself in a thin mist to direct the force away to the ground.
Beyond her eyelids, everything went white. The flash etched into her brain. The shock
wave was simultaneous, a physical blow. There was a double sound wave, Crack-Crack! Her bones shook, her teeth ground together, the blood pounded in her ears.
For a while she couldn't seem to breathe. She opened her eyes slowly, green and purple spots floated in her vision. Uncurling her body, she heard the crack rumbling back in echoes from the distant hills.
The first thing she noticed was the grass, splayed out in a radius from the still smoking hole where Chipper had been. Behind him, Sparky's face was frozen, staring at the thing on the ground near the hole. The clothes had vanished, leaving something that looked like a flayed corpse with burned and blackened skin. As the smell of cooked meat steamed into the frozen air, Alex's gorge rose. Mercifully the body blackened further as Chipper's magic consumed his body, leaving only his outline in ashes, soaking into the wet ground.
Eve didn't look much better. She had finally earned the release she was looking for, though not in the way she wanted. Her eyes were open, but had turned milky white and stared sightlessly up into the black sky above. Her hair was in spikes where it stood out from her head and it looked like every muscle she had was in spasm, pulling her lips back from her teeth in a rictus grin with her fat tongue protruding, her twisted body arched over onto its side so that she looked like she was sticking her tongue out at the vanishing remains of Chipper.
"Too highly strung," Alex said quietly.
Then, to Alex's astonishment, Eve's leg kicked out in a spasmodic twitch. Her body was racked with pain, but somehow, for a few moments, she held on to life. Could it be that at the end, Eve wanted to survive? Then Eve's clawed hand reached out towards the orb, as if she wanted to hold it one last time. Her hand slowly crept across the grass.
Alex walked around Eve's body and stood on her fingers, preventing her from crawling forward, feeling it sink into the wet earth beneath her shoe.
"No more," said Alex. "It's over."
Eve convulsed, her entire body gave one final spasm and she lay still. Beneath Alex's foot, Eve's hand crumbled into dust. Alex watched as her corpse slowly collapsed in on itself, falling into dust that mixed with the wet earth.
Alex asked herself what she felt. She ought to feel sympathy. She ought to feel relief, shouldn't she? What she actually felt was glad. Eve had earned her fate, and had sent enough people to their deaths to deserve it.
It was the orb that pulled her attention from the fading shape. It was spinning faster, the objects turning around it orienting in random directions as if they had lost their compass north. She watched it momentarily and then realised what it meant. She scrambled over to grab Sparky's arm.
"We have to go," she said, shaking him.
He continued to stare at where Chipper's corpse had been.
"Now!" she shouted.
She wrenched at his arm, making him stumble forward. She pulled him along as the sound of rushing air built behind them. She glanced back and the objects were a blur where they whirled in perfect symmetry around the orb.
"Come on!" she shouted, as the sound from the orb rose like the buzzing of a million flies.
They hit the slope of the hill and gravity kicked in, taking hold of their feet. There were people ahead, Alex thought she recognised Blackbird. They started running towards her, converging on her and Sparky. She screamed at them, "The other way! Run!"
They hesitated, then looked up and turned as one.
Alex risked a glance backwards and saw the clouds had funnelled down towards the orb, flickers of lightning pulsing randomly within the column, giving it a sense of hunger as it spiralled down.
She ran on and saw a growing shadow run away from her, growing taller by the second as the light grew from behind. She yanked at Sparky's arm, tumbling him over, and leapt to land on top of him. A sound like a giant oven door slamming hit them from behind them, and for a second Alex thought she could see not only her bones through her skin, but Sparky's too.
The two of them were picked up by a wave of force and hurled down the hill, tumbling and turning together until they hit the grass and rolled, over and over, one entwined in another, over the grassy bumps and hummocks, until they finally bumped to a halt.
Alex opened her eyes to see Sparky staring up at her. His eyes didn't change. They stared at her silently, mute and still. She shifted her weight, wanting to disengage from this dead thing, and he blinked.
"You're alive!" she said, and kissed him full on the lips.
He lay still and then responded so that the kiss turned into a longer one than Alex had intended. She disengaged. She hadn't meant it like that. Sparky's face was filled with… what? Beneath her, where her body lay across his, something stirred between them.
She pushed herself upright. "How! How can you possibly think of sex now? We nearly died! We nearly worse than died!"
Sparky grinned up at her from his position laid out on the grass.
"We're alive," he said.
It took a moment to disentangle myself from the hedge where I'd landed. Snagged by thorns, I had to pull myself out. By the time I was free, Blackbird was brushing the grass from her clothes, watching as the sky changed.
The clouds that had pulled into a spiral were flattening out, erasing the strange distortions caused by the orb. The giant hole in the centre was fading into a uniform grey. A few muttering rumbles of thunder drifted overhead, like memories of what had been, but all the anger had gone from it. The light was changing and the clouds no longer had a luminous quality of their own, but faded to a night-time gloom, reflecting only the orange of street lights from nearby towns.
"What happened?" I asked Blackbird.
"Something good," she said, taking my hand in hers and squeezing it.
Around us a new sound emerged. From all over the hill, tiny springs emerged, running in rivulets of muddy water down the hill.
"What the… Alex!"
I ran up the hill in the dark towards the place where I had seen Alex running down towards us. I found her halfway down the hill with a boy not much older then her. She was standing while he lay on the grass, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I had just interrupted something between them. Something was amusing the lad because he had a big grin on his face, while Alex scowled down at him.
I stopped a few paces short. "Alex?"
Now she was here I didn't know what to say to her. Even in the dark, I could see she was filthy dirty, her hair was in disarray and her clothes were torn. She looked battered and bruised, though even through the grime I could see that she had gained elaborate tattoos down her arms. When had she had that done?
She looked thinner, leaner and more hungry. The Alex that stared back at me was another version, a different Alex than the one who had sulked and refused to get out of bed. This one stared back defiant and independent.
"Alex?" I repeated.
I wanted to open my arms to her. I wanted to rush up and grab her and lift her up, whirl her around, kiss her hair, but I was scared that if I did any of those things she would bolt again and I would lose her.
Then she rushed towards me, tumbled into my arms and hugged me round the chest as fiercely as I could ever remember. I wrapped my arms around her and she pressed her head onto my shoulder, squeezing me with a strength that belied her lean frame. I kissed her muddy hair and stroked her head and pulled her close.
"I'm so glad you're safe," I whispered to her. "I couldn't bear to lose you again."
In return she squeezed me harder, then lifted her face to mine, the tears running down her cheeks unheeded, making lines of wet clean skin amongst the muddy smears. Then she was hugging me again and we were both laughing.
I became conscious of Blackbird standing close.
"It's all right," I said. "She's OK."
"At the risk of interrupting your reunion," Blackbird said, "we have a problem."
She moved sideways, revealing Garvin, Tate, Fionh, and Amber.
Garvin stepped forward. "Alex Petersen, Mark Handborne, I am arresting you in the name of the Seven Courts.
You will accompany me to the High Courts of the Feyre immediately or suffer the consequences."
His long blade was bare steel in his hand. I suddenly felt the lack of mine and wondered for the life of me where I had last seen it. Nevertheless, I released Alex and stood forward between my daughter and her friend and the Warders.
"You can't arrest them, Garvin. They saved us."
"That's for the Courts to decide," he said. "Stand aside, Niall. This is Court business."
"I will not stand by and let you arrest my daughter," I told him.
