Reaching Retribution (The Prophesized Series)

by Kaitlyn Hoyt

“Everything.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? I could hurt everyone in here.” I start shaking my head. “No, I can’t do that.”

  “Ryanne, you’re not going to hurt anyone. You’re magic will only hurt people if that is your intention. You don’t want to hurt anyone in this room, so you won’t. Don’t worry about that.”

  “How can you be so sure of that? What if I do?” I whisper as I step closer to him.

  “Are you angry? Mad? Upset? Frustrated?”

  “No.”

  “Then stop worrying. You’re magic is emotion based, so unless you’re feeling any of those, you won’t hurt anyone. Now quit stalling. Unleash. The. Kraken.” Colin starts laughing. I can’t help but join in. “Joking aside. Unleash your magic, Ryanne. All of it.”

  I glance around the room as I take a couple steps back. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I pull back the veil around all my magic. I push my magic out often, but never all of it at once. I’m always worried it is going to cause more damage than good. Everyone is training. Well, attempting to make it look like they are. Colton and Liam keep glancing over at me. I’m hit with their worry when I meet their gazes.

  “Okay, whenever you’re ready,” Colin says.

  I close my eyes as I gradually start pushing my magic out.

  Chapter Eight

  Colton

  “How are things with you and Natalie?”

  “Good. She’s still really worried that something is going to happen to me. She didn’t know that being Ryanne’s protector meant that if Ryanne died, I would follow suit. She’s kind of freaking out about that.”

  “That’s understandable,” I tell him as we both turn and look at the opposite side of the room where Ryanne is standing with Natalie and Colin. They’re just talking right now, but Ryanne keeps shaking her head.

  “She doesn’t want to unleash all of her magic,” Liam says. We both turn and look away when Ryanne glances in our direction. I get into a defensive stance and face Liam again. Neither of us are into training today. He glances back over his shoulder. The girl he’s supposed to protect and his soulmate are both standing over there. We’re not sure what’s going to happen when Ryanne stops trying to contain her magic. We’ve seen little bits of it when she loses control.

  Ryanne takes a couple steps back and inhales deeply. I, too, stop attempting to spar and watch her. What if something goes wrong? Could this hurt her? Shoot, I shouldn’t be worrying right now. She’ll feel that.

  “I don’t like this new power of hers,” I tell Liam. “I always have to think about what I’m feeling and how it’ll affect her.”

  “Natalie will help her come to terms with it. She’s able to block others emotions; maybe Ryanne can too.”

  “Okay, whenever you’re ready,” Colin says loudly to Ryanne. Closing her eyes, she starts pushing her magic out. We instantly feel a change when a sudden breeze manifests. The air swirls around the room, causing Ryanne’s hair to whip around her head. Everyone stops and watches her. The breeze becomes static as the lightning element of her powers makes itself known. I glance over at Liam who is still watching Natalie. She and Colin are taking small steps backward as Ryanne continues to push her magic out.

  The lights in the room start flickering, and some of the weights against the wall start sliding across the room from the wind. I return my focus to my soulmate. Her face is furrowed in concentration. I stagger back a little as the wind intensifies. She has a ton of magic in her; even Colin seems a little shocked.

  Tiny undecipherable whispers echo around us. Everyone tenses when the voices get louder. These must be from her mind-reading ability. The voices ride the wind filling in every available space, and a second later, random colors start flowing out of Ryanne. Reds, blues, grays, greens, yellows, pinks, and purples all start moving throughout the room, lighting up as they mingle with the weather elements.

  She’s still pushing magic out. How can someone so small have that much magic inside her? All the elements in the room intensify the higher her arms raise. When her hands are fully above her head, a white light shoots out from her body and catapults toward us. I shield my eyes the closer it gets to me, but I can’t seem to look away. Following the light is all of Ryanne’s magic. I fly backward from the force of her magic. With my eyes closed, I hit the cushioned mat flooring and roll a couple times before coming to a complete stop. When I open my eyes, the white light is gone. The colors and low whispers are still moving through the room, but the light electricity and the wind are starting to dwindle.

  Pushing myself up, I see Ryanne trying to do the same. I get up and start to walk over to her, but Liam grabs my arm and pulls me back. “Let Colin work with her.”

  Colin, who had also fallen from the blast, slowly gets up and helps Natalie stand. Together both of them walk over to Ryanne, who’s now looking around the room with a shocked expression on her face. “Ryanne, can you hear me?” Colin asks.

  She nods and pushes herself fully up. “How do you feel?” Liam and I both step a little closer to hear them.

  Ryanne looks around the room again. She seems very confused. “Umm, I don’t really know. I feel weird.”

  I take another step forward to hear her better. “Weird how?”

  “I don’t know. I can hear everyone’s thoughts and feel their emotions, but it’s not as annoying as before. I can actually ignore them.”

  “You had to release the hold you had on your magic. Before, your magic was cramped inside you, building up pressure. By releasing it, you’ll probably start to feel better. You won’t feel the effects of keeping your magic down anymore, so you shouldn’t as tired. Keeping your magic inside probably would have been more dangerous than what you just did. You can push the thoughts out of the way and hopefully with Natalie’s help, you can control the emotions. Everything should be a little easier now,” Colin says. I turn and look around the room. Everyone is watching Ryanne, wondering what she’ll do next.

  “Like what?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I don’t have all that magic coursing through me. Get creative,” he says.

  “Uh oh,” I say right as Liam laughs. You don’t tell Ryanne to get creative. She smiles and puts her hand out in front of her, palm up. A ball of electrified blue light starts forming in her hand, gradually increasing in size. Colin’s smile falls as Ryanne’s gets wider. Adding her left hand, she expands the ball. Looking up at Colin, Ryanne winks at him as she sends the magic toward him.

  Colin throws his arms up to shield his face. When the ball is about to hit him, the wind picks up and spins around, cocooning him. The ball collides the wind, uniformly spreading out. Colin is entrapped in an electrified tornado. Thunder rolls above him as it starts pouring inside the wind cocoon.

  “What is she doing?” Chris asks as he walks up beside us.

  “Getting her payback,” Liam answers without taking his eyes off of the scene playing out in front of us. Ryanne drops the tornado, but keeps the rain around Colin. There’s a chorus of laughter around the room when everyone sees him. His clothes are soaking wet and clinging to him, his wavy hair is sticking up in every direction, and he has a very obvious frown directed at Ryanne, who is trying to hold in her laughter.

  “I don’t know of any Hobbits that can do that, do you Colin?” Ryanne asks through her giggles.

  “No, Gandalf, I don’t know of any,” Colin mumbles.

  “I’m surprisingly okay with that one. Gandalf was awesome,” Ryanne says as she heats up the room slightly and increases the wind, drying off Colin. Tom walks over to him and slaps him on the back.

  “I probably should have warned you not to tell Ryanne to get creative. She takes it very literally. You can ask any of the guys in the room.”

  A chorus of agreements ring out as we all shout our responses. Ryanne laughs, but apologizes to Colin. He just laughs it off. “It was impressive. Granted, it would have been funnier if it wasn’t done to me, but it was nonetheless impressive.”


  For the next hour everyone trained. Ryanne put a shield up in the middle of the room so her magic wouldn’t affect the rest of us while we worked. Both Liam and I fought with all we had, neither one of us letting the other get away with anything. If I had to pick someone, I’m glad Liam is Ryanne’s protector.

  “Hey, I think we’ve had enough training for the day,” Tom says. “We should let Colin and Natalie work with Ryanne using the full room. We’ll train again in the morning.” Following everyone out of the room, I look behind me once more. Ryanne is moving the magic around her, weaving water in and out of the air. It’s amazing what she can do.

  “You don’t think she’ll pass out from using too much magic, do you?” I ask Tom as we walk downstairs.

  “I don’t think so. I believe she only passed out from the magic use because it had nowhere to go. It was stuck inside her, using up all of her energy, and making her more tired. That’s probably why she was always falling asleep. I think Colin had the right idea when he asked her to unleash it. From what I’ve seen, she now seems able to do more. She already appears more powerful. With a little more training…I can’t imagine what she’ll be able to do.”

  “This is really happening isn’t it?” Emma asks.

  “Yeah, it is. The end is coming,” Tom answers.

  Sitting down on the couch in the entertainment room, I listen upstairs for Ryanne’s movements. The training room is directly above us. I can hear people shuffling around, so I know they are still training. Chris sits down on the couch next to me, and I turn to him.

  “So you were the paramedic that helped Ryanne?”

  “Yeah, I was the first EMT to arrive on the scene,” he tells me. “The cops cleared the area and gave us access to the vehicle. Her mom died on impact. There was nothing we could do to save her. I thought Ryanne was dead too when I first saw her. She was unconscious and bleeding a lot. If she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, she definitely would have died.” Chris doesn’t seem to like to talk about emergency situations.

  “When we were finally able to free her from the car we found out where all the blood was coming from. She had a four inch piece of glass embedded under her ribs from the windshield breaking in. We couldn’t remove it on the spot; we had to stabilize her until we could get her to an emergency room for surgery. She’d already lost so much blood. We almost lost her twice on the way to the ER. She opened her eyes once in the ambulance and stared right at me for a couple seconds before losing consciousness again. To this day, I can’t get the image of her looking at me with so much pain in her eyes out of my mind. Honestly, I’m shocked she made it,” he says. “I tried everything to make sure she didn’t leave us. It’s always hard to loose someone so young. I’ve seen more death than I ever wanted to, but I’ve saved a lot of lives, and I was so happy when I could call her a success story.”

  “Well thank you for saving her,” I whisper. I can’t image what everything would be like if she had actually died in that crash. At least now, I’ve gotten to know her. If she died, everything would be a big ‘what if.’ I’d never know for sure. I’d be incomplete…empty.

  “I was just doing my job, Colton.” Chris looks at me. He’s a good guy. I already feel like I can trust him completely. We drop the conversation when Ryanne, Natalie, and Colin all walk into the room. Ryanne dramatically plops down on the couch next to me.

  “I’m tired now. Goodnight,” she whispers. Chris scoots over to give Ryanne more room. She smiles gratefully at him and curls into my side. Wrapping my arm around her, I pull her to me. She laughs, but lets me move her. “Surprisingly, I’m actually not that tired.”

  “I told you unleashing your magic would help. Now you can easily control the thoughts and emotions. The magic is always around you, so you no longer have to suppress anything. Everything should be much easier to manipulate. Come on, let me hear it,” Colin says with a large grin.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ryanne mumbles.

  “Just once. I need to hear it.”

  Ryanne turns and buries her head in my shoulder. “You wmfh righsh,” she says. Her voice is muffled by my shirt.

  “I couldn’t hear you. Could you please repeat that, Gandalf?” Colin asks. He’s literally grinning from ear to ear. Tom starts laughing from across the room.

  With a sigh, Ryanne sits up and looks directly at Colin. “Right, Colin, you were. Hmmmm.”

  “You sound nothing like Yoda,” Chris says with a laugh.

  “I wasn’t trying to sound like Yoda. I was just trying to speak like Yoda,” she retorts. Chris shakes his head.

  “I’ll take it,” Colin says.

  “That’s probably a good idea, because you won’t get anything better than that,” Bragden says.

  Ryanne laughs and turns toward the TV. Without saying anything, she silently gets up and walks over to Colin’s DVD collection. Zeroing in on the movie, she grabs it and turns around. “Can we watch this? I’ll beg if I have to,” she says.

  The Avengers.

  Turning toward Emma, she says, “Chris Hemsworth.”

  “You only like him because of his voice,” Emma replies.

  “And everything else,” she mumbles as she looks toward Colin.

  “You can watch it. I don’t care.”

  Ryanne smiles widely and then quickly hides the smile and glares at everyone, making sure that no one will argue with her. Larkin opens his mouth to say something, but a large ball of water forms in midair and falls down on him.

  “Don’t even try it, mister,” Ryanne says.

  Larkin spits out water and instantly starts laughing. No one else says anything, but everyone is trying to hide their laughter. I get off the couch and grab the movie from Ryanne. Putting it in the DVD player, I press play and grab Ryanne’s hand, pulling her back to the couch.

  She sits down, but her eyes don’t leave the TV. Chris starts to say something, but Ryanne instantly shushes him. “She’s into Superhero films?” he whispers.

  “Oh yeah,” I tell him.

  “Interesting. I would have pegged her as a romantic comedy girl.” Ryanne makes a gagging noise at his comment. “I stand corrected.”

  “I can stand them, but they’re not my first option. Now shhhhhhh,” Ryanne says as Nick Fury appears on the screen. For the next two hours we watch The Avengers. Ryanne quotes many of the lines of the movie and laughs at all the funny parts before they happen.

  “This is my favorite part,” she says as she lightly hits my arm. Mark Ruffalo had just shown up for the end battle sequence. “That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry,” she whispers along with Bruce Banner.

  “You’re too cute,” I whisper to her as I lean back a little. Ryanne curls into my side and smiles up at me.

  “You know who is also cute?” she asks.

  “Chris Evans!” Emma yells from across the room.

  “Emma is delusional, Colton. Don’t listen to her. I was going to say Hemsworth. She just forgot his last name.” She puts a finger out and stops me. “You’re cute too; don’t worry.”

  “It’s a good thing you added that last part. I may have had to tickle you otherwise.”

  “I’m learning,” she mumbles and she leans back against me and returns her attention to the end of the movie.

  Chapter Nine

  We all train for the next couple days. Now that I’ve released my magic, I don’t feel as overwhelmed. It’s much easier to contain the thoughts and emotions. I still have all my magic, but it’s not stuck in me anymore. It moves freely around me, but only acts when I will it to. It listens to me completely. Natalie has helped me control the emotions. Since those are stronger than thoughts, it took a little more practice to have complete control, but I quickly got the hang of it. I can call them to the surface whenever, but I can’t hear them unless I want to.

  To strengthen my magic, I select a strong emotion such as anger or love and wrap it around the strands of magic. This magnifies the strength of them. With pra
ctice, I do believe that I can stop Dravin now. I’ve noticed a difference in my abilities and I know that Dravin won’t know what hit him.

  Logan and Chris have been helping Lily train. She’s gotten better, but still needs some work. Considering she’s only been training for four days, she’s a very quick learner. Tom could also have something to do with that. It’s all very encouraging, but I know this isn’t going to last for long. It can’t. We’re going to have to go back out and find others to help us again.

  “How much longer do you think we’ll stay here?” I ask Colton as I walk out of the bathroom, drying my hair with a towel.

  “Not too much longer,” he replies honestly. “Though I wish we could. It’d be nice to relax for a little while.”

  “Yeah, it’s like how things were before; only there are more of us now,” I tell him as I step in front of him.

  Colton takes the towel from my hands and tosses it lightly on the bed. Putting his arms around my waist he starts swaying. “What are you doing?”

  Instead of answering, he rests his chin on my head and starts humming. I wrap my arms around his waist and lean into him. Under my ear, I can feel his steady heartbeat. I step closer to him as his arms tighten around me and start swaying with him. I love these moments with Colton. I don’t know how many more moments we’ll get like this for a while.

  His chest vibrates under my cheek as he continues to hum. Colton always knows what I need. I’ve needed this alone time with him for a while now. I just want him to hold me and let me know that everything will be okay. That we’re going to be okay.

  Hearing a knock at the door, we both stop moving. With a sigh, I lean back and look up at my soulmate. I don’t want him to answer it. His eyes meet mine before he gives me a small smile and steps away from me to answer the door. My heart swells with my love for him. I bite my lip to keep my girly sigh in as I watch him walk away. Opening the door, he quietly talks with Tom. I can’t hear anything they are saying. I could read Tom’s mind, but since they’re being quiet, they don’t want me to hear their conversation. Leaning against the doorframe, Colton starts shaking his head, obviously disagreeing with something Tom just said.