by Shaye Easton
Then I realise it wasn’t strength.
It was air.
“Aerokinesis,” I breathe.
Newman’s back on his feet. He winks. “Thanks for the gift, gorgeous.”
The ground drops out from underneath me. He never had aerokinesis before. This ability he’s using is stolen. This ability he’s using is mine.
Elodie, realising the power of the man before us, lifts her palm to strike him down—hopefully with another golden bomb. But Newman throws up his arms, creating a whirlwind of air. It spins around us, faster and faster, until it becomes a tornado. My hair blows around me in a frenzy. The roaring wind fills my ears. Caden, Rand, and I are all trapped inside with him. And everyone else is outside, with no way in.
Through the windstorm, I can only just make out Elodie, her features hazy and warped. She releases the golden energy and it’s swept up by the wind. I watch it spin around us, up and up, until it evaporates into the sky like mist.
Caden has only just managed to push himself up when Newman, bloody-nosed and shaking from exertion, pounces. His fist collides with Caden’s cheek, knocking him back down into the dirt. Before he has the chance to recover, Newman draws back his leg and kicks him in the side with enough energy to shatter his ribs. He kicks again, and I can’t take it anymore. I get to my feet and charge him with hands out, aiming to latch onto any exposed skin and make it burn.
Newman swats me like a bug, using a combination of aerokinesis and his own human strength to slap me backwards. I hit my head hard on the ground, the third time today, and my vision flickers and blurs. If I didn’t have a concussion before, I sure as hell have one now. I’m struck by a disorienting wave of dizziness, and my every movement becomes sluggish and tiring.
As I watch, drowsy and helpless, Newman kicks Caden again and again, over and over. I open my mouth to scream, but I’m unable to produce any sound. I’m vaguely aware of Rand launching himself on the man, but he too is brutally shoved aside.
The man draws back to strike again and Caden groans in pain, trying but failing to shield himself with his hands. There’s blood gushing out of his nose, his cheek is red and swelling, and no one seems to be able to help. Eventually, the man steps back, turning his head to smirk at me as he raises his gun. My heart stops beating, my blood freezing in my veins. This isn’t about Caden at all, I realise. It’s about me. He hates Caden, sure, but he hates me more. So he’s taking away someone I care for and making me watch. And it’s true: I can’t save him. I’m a hopeless bystander, chained to an unforgiving fence and forced to watch the horrors before my eyes.
The gun clicks and the man starts to press the trigger. I realise that I can scream after all. On the other side of the miniature tornado, a plethora of shouts echoes around us, the words swallowed up by the roaring wind. Rand is yelling something I can’t make out, scrambling around behind himself. A bird is cawing loudly in the sky above us, as if in a warning. And then, a blur of movement beside me—a smudge against the hazy background.
Looking straight at me, Newman says, “Say goodbye, sweetheart.” The shot is fired, and it’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard, ringing in my ears long after the bullet has met its mark.
Only it hasn’t.
The blur moving swiftly beside me had been a person, and that person now stands in front of Caden, hands clutching the stomach in pain, breath hitching. The person’s mouth makes an “O” and looks down, blood starts to seep through the fingers, dribbling over the hands in glittering crimson spurts.
All I can do is stare as Rand falls, Caden rushing to catch him.
Newman looks spent and disappointed, but not unsatisfied. Rand’s previous yelling turns to words in my mind—“Where’s the bloody gun?!”—and I look behind myself to see it lying on the dark concrete. While Newman’s not looking, I reach for it.
“Oh, well.” Newman sighs, blood drying on his chin. “There’s always a next time.”
I swing it to face him, and before I can chicken out, I pump two lightning bullets into his chest. He flops to the ground, dead. “Not for you, arsehole,” I gasp, and drop the gun.
The wind dies out and everyone rushes in, swarming around the three of us. I’m sitting slightly apart from Caden and Rand, so I’m separated from them, unable to see anything beyond the worried faces bumbling into my field of view.
One particular face belongs to Elodie. My vision blurs her face, doubles it, until I’m watching two Elodies shouting at me, two Elodies dragging me up off the ground. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but it seems urgent. My gaze flicks over her shoulder, drowsily wandering over to where I last saw Rand. All I see is a blur.
Then, as if something’s scared them all away, the overwalkers surrounding me scatter. But not in the direction of the street, they’re running back, towards the smoking building. I swing my gaze around and see underwalkers bleeding from the rubble, guns up and ready. They’ve regrouped.
Fuck, we’re screwed.
Finally, my eyes find Caden. He’s with Elodie, but there’s no Rand. They run towards me, bloody and covered in dust.
“Go!” Elodie yells, just as a ball of blue lightning arcs over our heads. She waves an arm to shoo us away. “Run! Both of you, run!”
Caden puts a hand on my back and urges me into motion. I’m running sloppily —it’s actually closer to staggering than running—but I don’t fall. Shots rocket past us on all sides, painting the morning blue. They occasionally getting close but by some miracle, they never touch us.
There’s a black four-wheel drive waiting on the road. Caden slams into it and hurries around to the driver side. I tear the door open and dive into the passenger seat. It’s only now that I realise Elodie’s no longer with us.
“Wait,” I say as the engine revs to life. “Elodie.”
“She’s not coming.”
“What?”
“The captain always goes down with the ship. That’s what she told me.”
“She’ll be killed if she stays here!”
“Elodie will be fine.”
Blue lightning crackles over the roof of the 4WD. The vehicle shakes. We look at each other; that’s our cue.
Caden thrusts the gear into drive and slams on the accelerator. We spin off into the grey morning and leave it all behind.
Chapter Forty-Three
“Is anyone following us?”
Behind us, the road is empty. Quiet. It’s started snowing again and the flakes drift down to earth, silently painting the world white. Birds chirp in their nests, calling out to the morning, but aside from our car, they’re the only sound. It’s barely 5am and suburbia has yet to wake.
“No,” I say, turning back to the front. I sink into the chair. “We’re good.”
Still, he alternates between checking all the mirrors and windows every couple of seconds like he’s paranoid. Maybe he is.
“Are you okay?”
He shakes his head. “I’m fine.” But even now I can see that he’s fighting to keep his face neutral. “I suppose I should be asking you the same question.”
I lift up my left arm with my right. “Broken arm.” I point to my head. “Possible concussion.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Really.”
We’re both lying, and we both know it. So I take a deep breath and ask the question I’ve been terrified of. “Rand?”
Caden exhales shakily. He knows what I’m asking. “He’s being taken to a healer as we speak,” he says, and I let out the breath I’d been holding. “He’s going to be alright.” But it sounds to me like the person he’s really trying to convince is himself.
He checks the rearview mirror again and frowns. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean?” I look sideways at him, catching the worry on his face.
“Why would Davion just leave you like that? You were out there alone, with no powers. And you’re telling me he just teleported home?”
I turn my
attention back to the road. “I mean, he didn’t just leave. He said something first.”
“What did he say?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Caden spares an incredulous glance in my direction. “Melissa. Seriously?”
I swallow. “You’re right, I’m sorry. It was just—it was crazy.”
“What did he say?” he repeats.
I exhale. “He told me to get away from this world…before he had to kill me.”
There’s a sizeable pause.
“Crazy, right?”
But Caden isn’t laughing. In fact, he looks uneasy. “Crazy,” he agrees at last, without any conviction.
Oh hell no. I’m not letting this drop.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I agree with you,” he replies.
“About what?”
“About us.” I raise my brows. He quickly clarifies. “About spectres. I meant us as in spectres.”
“Right,” I say, nodding. “What about them?”
“Inside, Davion said you hated the spectre world—that you were afraid of us. I suppose I’ve known for a while that you aren’t particularly fond of spectres, but I’ve never really thought about why. Until today.”
“Caden,” I say, shaking my head. “Those were Davion’s words, not mine.”
“But they are true, on some level. Aren’t they?”
I remain silent.
“You don’t see the distinction between overwalker and underwalker as clearly as the rest of the spectre world.” he chuckles darkly. “I suppose you have that in common with Davion. You just see all the areas in which we fail as human beings.”
“Where is this going?”
He looks at me out the corner of his eye. Quick movements, back and forth, between the road and my curious gaze. “I know who I am, Melissa, and I won’t say I’m particularly proud of that person. For all the times I’ve rebelled against an order, I’ve followed another through. I’ve done ugly, grisly work. And I haven’t blinked at it. Spectres are raised as fighters—as murderers, to put it in your words—and our leadership is sketchy at best. Everything is morally grey over here, and it shouldn’t be.”
“And so I agree with you—about spectres being worse than humans. We’re more powerful, and all we do is use that power to fight each other, to do harm. We’re the worst of humanity, magnified.”
I stare at him for several seconds. “I feel like there’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere.”
He half smiles. “But…that’s not you. You’re the first spectre who’s managed to grow up with her morals intact. You’re the best of us—the best of humanity, magnified. And this world…it’ll corrupt you. It’s happening already.”
“What does any of this have to do with Davion?”
Caden sighs. “I guess, in some twisted way, he cares about you. That’s why he said what he did. He wanted you to get out while you still could.” He pauses. “I should probably mention that while you were captured in that building, I was put in a room with Davion, and he spoke to me about some things. Not much really, a lot of it was a lie, but he did seem to see things a lot like you. He may not be a good person, but wants a good world. Underwalkers are named so because they believe spectres are better than humans. Davion’s no different. Like you, he can see all the power spectres have and how they waste it on bloodshed, but he believes we have the potential to be better than that—that we’ve just forgotten how.
“He also told me he was taking your powers.”
I blink. “Why would he tell you that?”
“Because he wanted me to tell you something, if I got the chance.”
“Tell me what?”
“That he wasn’t taking your powers solely for personal gain, although I suspect that was a big part of it. He did it to take the target off your back. If you don’t receive visions, you can’t be the Final Prophet, you know? You can escape.”
The car is silent for a few minutes. I’m so lost in my thoughts that I don’t realise how much time has passed until Caden says, “So? What are you thinking?”
I let out a breath. “It’s a lot. I don’t know what to think right now, about any of it.”
He nods.
“I suppose it makes things a little clearer though,” I say, letting my thoughts tumble out. “When he . . . when he killed Kathryn, he said, ‘You can’t love what doesn’t exist.’ And I don’t know, I obviously can’t claim to know how his mind works, but maybe he killed her because he loved her—because she was a weakness. Maybe he let me go, and told me to get out, and warned me he’d kill me too because he cares. It’s twisted and fucked up but—”
“It does make a modicum of sense.”
I nod.
We’re nearing home, and I’m starting to get tense. There are a million different horrific scenes from the past couple of days swirling around in my brain, and they’re all trying to spread themselves out in all their gory detail across the fronts of my eyes. But I don’t have time for them.
One last horror awaits—at least, potential horror. If we don’t walk into that house and find Sara alive, I think I might finally fall apart.
Caden parks the car in the driveway and cuts the engine. Neither of us moves.
“Okay,” he says, “here’s the plan. We go in, grab Sara and get her to the healer. If he can fix Rand—,” he nearly chokes on the name, “—he can fix Sara too.”
“Caden,” I say.
“It’ll at least give us enough time to be able to figure this thing out. Someone has to know something. We just have to look harder.”
“Caden.”
“I can’t let you die, Melissa.”
Bloody hell. “Caden, listen to me.”
“What?”
I meet his eyes. “Davion told me some things as well.”
He stares at me, frozen. He already knows what I’m about to say, but I say it anyway.
“I know how to swap back.”
***
After explaining everything Davion told me, we head inside. There’s a summoner waiting for us in the entryway, hands folded formally in front of herself.
“Rebekah,” Caden says with a nod.
She must not be that much older than us, with smooth, golden brown skin and sharp eyes. Her hair has been dyed a striking deep red and is cut to her shoulders. She still looks familiar to me somehow. Maybe I saw her at the convening of the Ring?
“How is she?” Caden asks.
“Weak,” Rebekah replies, and her voice is deeper than I expected, “but alive. She’s got some time in her yet.”
Her eyes flicker over me briefly before she nods and starts for the door. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Caden turns to watch her go. “Don’t you want to know? How they’re all doing?”
She opens the door and looks back over her shoulder. The question is vague, but she knows exactly what he’s asking her. “No.”
Rebekah leaves and the door swings closed.
I look to Caden. Who was she? My eyes ask.
“Elodie’s daughter.”
Ah. So that’s why she looked familiar.
“We should check on Sara.”
I nod, and he leads me to the living room, to the couch where I last saw her pale and shivering form. Not much has changed. She’s unconscious, her skin coated in a glistening layer of sweat. Occasionally she moves in her sleep, quick jerking motions that make it seem as though she’s having a nightmare.
The entire room smells of imminent death, a scent characterised by its heaviness, the weight of it squishing me down into the floorboards and snatching the air from my throat. I can’t take it. Quickly, I turn and half run from the room.
Caden follows me into the kitchen where I’ve stopped to gulp for air. But the scent has followed me too. It tugs at my hair like a child, whispering at me to take a deep breath.
So I try not to breathe too much.
“You need to swap back.”
“Yeah, Sherlock, I
know.”
“Like, now.”
“I can’t just force a heat surge. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then make it work like that. She’s not going to live much longer, and then you’ll both be dead.”
“Then that’s just a risk we’ll have to take! The heat surges come when they come. I can’t do anything about it.”
Caden turns and slams a fist on the bench. “Fuck!”
Our emotions are getting to us. We’re both wired, both achingly restless. We’ve killed and we’ve watched people we know get killed, and we’ve been moving so fast we haven’t had time to survey the inner damage. If I was shaken after the party-turned-bloodbath, then everything I’ve been through last night and this morning has probably traumatised me.
I lean on the bench beside Caden. “Look,” I say softly, “I haven’t had a heat surge since yesterday morning. One’s got to come soon. In the meantime, what we need is some sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Then food. We need food.”
“There’s no way I could eat right now. Could you?”
My stomach growls, but in truth the thought of food makes me sick. I sigh. It’s going to be a long day.
***
Later, after grown so tired we can no longer keep our eyelids open, we decide to try for sleep. I end up lying on an air mattress in the lounge room. I insisted Caden take one of the beds, but he refused, moving a mattress from one of the bedrooms to the living room floor.
“Caden?” I say once we’ve gotten comfortable
“Yeah?”
“I…” I swallow. We both know what’s coming, but I feel it more than him. After we sleep, I’ll have a heat surge, and after that I’ll swap back. I’ll become Sarah and she’ll become me. And it’s a crazy, stupid fear, but I worry when I swap back, our duty-based relationship will snap. I worry the only thing tying Caden to me is this body, this life. His job was to protect diseased, human Melissa. But it was never to look after the recently-swapped-back Final Prophet. After today, his assignment ends. And I’m terrified I’ll lose him.
