Midnight Dawn

by Jocelyn Adams

  Most of the soldiers had become sentinels. I could feel them inside me now, like tiny fires in a winter forest, growing brighter, warmer as they claimed their places in the Machine. The Colonel had freed himself from the ropes. He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before, and Kat gave me a respectful nod. They all closed a circle around us as we had our very own convergence of storms that joined us as family, as the Machine. Mom crawled toward me, her now-freed arm obviously broken, blood smearing her face like war paint. They all stared at me.

  Those who rise up in the face of horror will behold its power.

  Asher’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying after the blast, and he struggled to move. I couldn’t feel anything below my waist. Still, I dug my hands into the dirt and dragged myself toward my Shepherd, but only made it a few inches before dizziness swept over me. A glow behind him filled my eyes with flickering light as the cabin began to burn.

  My sanctuary was gone.

  Our abilities are born of our fears, Caine had said. I’m guessing yours is a need to love and protect, so you’ll be the greatest force of us all.

  Cold at my nape let me know Baku was behind me, the contrast against the fire of my rage almost too much to take. If I wasn’t strong enough to keep him out of me, he’d throw us into a universe with hundreds of unknown monsters. If Asher and I were strong enough to expel him from Dad and kill him, without the king’s mojo holding Marcus out, the bastard of a former sentinel could find his way through the veil again and bring death down on us anyway.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you, Adaline. Once you open the way to my family, I’ll let your Medic heal you as it seems his conduit’s touch has healed him.” Baku’s breath chilled my ear. “The other Architects were laughable, no match for me. This time, Izan has really outdone himself as he promised me. Your power has become immense.”

  “Go screw yourself, you dick.” I rasped out between breaths that hammered in and out of my throat. Sentinels rushed at him, but they all flew back as if they’d run into an electrified wall. Baku had put up a grid to keep Asher and me inside, and the rest out.

  The king laughed as I fought to keep my face above the grass. A winter wind blasted against my back, and without looking, I knew Baku had crawled out of Dad. Please let him be all right. Asher was so close now, just beyond my fingertips, hovering at the edge of consciousness given the way his lids kept shutting. I could feel him inside me, desperate, drowning in grief as the history he’d seen from the book played out yet again before his eyes, unable to stop it.

  A freezing finger shifted my hair. Lightning struck my nape in an endless bone-melting surge. I screamed high and loud, helpless to stop the sound. Pain and terror filled the keening sound that kept pouring out of me. I thought I’d come apart as the wraith king invaded my soul, growing larger and colder inside of me until it became agony.

  My storm raged out and around me against my will. Baku began inhaling the power of the Machine through me. Mom’s hot energy wove through the mix. Rippling colors, rich emotions of every flavor, deeper than I could comprehend. Baku’s excitement echoed around my inner sanctum as he crawled all the way inside me, coating my insides with the frost of death. The force of his grief and rage added his own dynamite to the concoction.

  I couldn’t resist when his force rushed through me. The pressure inside grew like a balloon holding too much air. The power crushed against my lungs, and another earth-shattering scream tore open my mind.

  I could see beyond the Earth now, could have ridden the power of the Machine to a place beyond the stars. I could destroy the veils that separated us from the other worlds. Lost to fascination and drunk on power, I wanted to see what they looked like, to explore their cultures as I’d once explored ours. A shimmer raced across the dark expanse of the universe, a faint grid showing me the borders of the many true realities.

  Maybe I could let go. It might be nice to have some neighbors. Denial wanted to creep in and make every excuse in existence, and I’d have done almost anything to have the dragon mantis out of me.

  “Yes,” Baku said inside my mind. “Take me to my family, and I’ll give you back to yours. Feel the truth in my words.”

  I did feel it down to my toes, and I wanted to give it to him. He’d never lied to me once, and had only become what Izan’s people had made him.

  I looked beyond the veil. I could see them now, creatures devouring their planet like locusts. War left others scared and dead. A people who looked frighteningly like humans and could crush a mind with a thought. Weapons like I’d never seen blew flaming holes in strange cities, and the blood of life filled their rivers. Maybe Izan hadn’t done us much harm by planting the artifacts. Even the worlds united by belief still killed one another.

  Baku pushed me down further inside myself, rising up to take complete control of me. I fought, but it was like trying to block water coming out of a sieve with one finger. He flowed around me, and I sank into the halls of my own soul. The light there blinded me at first.

  Light.

  Oh my God, was that it? Only light can hold the darkness. It was the magic Izan didn’t understand, the power of soul.

  I used everything I had to climb back into my body, Baku’s presence squeezed in alongside me. Asher had my face in his hands, screaming at me in mid-sentence. “…sanctuary.”

  I blinked at him, and he said, “You don’t have to open the sanctuary.”

  The darkness was in my soul, in the light of my inner halls. “I am the sanctuary,” I said.

  “And only love can keep him there.” Asher clamped his arms tighter around my physical body. “I know what I have to do now. I’m sorry. I love you.” He closed his eyes, and I somehow knew he was speaking silently to the others however he did it through the Shift.

  In an instant, the outward momentum of our massive storm reversed and rammed into me. My own power always made me feel like a sardine can, but this was a universe-sized ocean pouring into me like liquid fire. I screamed, “Help me!”

  Asher made a choked sound. “We are. Hold on.” The sentinels stood in pairs around the periphery, staring into the faces of their conduits. They were all joined, the dome of Machine energy closing in, keeping the storm in and everything else out.

  Baku screeched in my head as he resisted the downward flow. “I will tear you apart, you stupid girl!”

  Caine roared, “What’s happening? Don’t stop now, please!” The crack of a fist against a skull made it through my screaming.

  I had to do something with the power before it tore my soul apart. My survival instinct tried pushing it back out, but the Machine was too strong as they kept it flowing into my body. My only option left was to open my metaphysical box and start drinking it down like hellfire, but the more I swallowed, even more poured in.

  Baku resisted like a cat avoiding the bath, digging his dragon claws into my skull. I imagined my flesh ripping from the inside, woozy with the pain of it. I screamed, shoving Asher away. Not because I meant to, but because panic had risen again like a beast with red eyes growling in my dark places. I rolled to the side and vomited ice water that burst into snow all over Asher. A crimson stream trickled down to the ground on top of it. Baku really was tearing me up inside.

  “Oh, God!” I rasped.

  Asher pulled me into his lap, and Mom cried silently beside us, her form slightly blurry. “He has to go deeper. Just let it happen.” He rocked me.

  I couldn’t think about anything but the wild animal flailing inside me, pushing inhuman sounds up my throat.

  If its will is not strong, the light will fade. If it should go out, the sun will fall and never rise again, and the Earth will be forever dusk.

  I was the Darkside Sun, and my will was a freakin’ rocket ship, destination life. I’d waited a thousand years for my Asher, and if I failed now, Izan would take his treacherous ass and leave us to our doom. How could I keep Baku inside? My storm matched his for potency at its basic level, and I kept mine locke
d up. I just had to get him into the box and shut the door, but I had nothing left in me to unhitch his claws from my head.

  The king screeched inside my mind, ripping at me again. Warmth on my chin and the copper taste of blood in my mouth suggested I didn’t have much time, and even though so many had come to help, I was no longer sure it would be enough.

  I hovered on the edge of consciousness, adrenaline rising while my vision grew distant, as if I stared through a tube at my dark god of war, my Asher. Tears streamed down his face, his mouth shouting frantic words I could no longer hear. If I weren’t choking on blood, I’d have told him that I was proud of him, that he’d figured it out. Smart, gorgeous, and all mine.

  If I didn’t hold on, Baku would fight free of our trap and disintegrate the veil. And my mother, my love, my dad, and the new dysfunctional family that had closed ranks around us would all die. I’d already lost Raldad and Iris, and several more of those small fires in my head that had snuffed out, their deaths like a bruise on my heart.

  I locked onto the feeling of Asher’s heaving chest under me and blocked everything else out. He’d been torn away from me again and again in the past, but I wasn’t letting him go this time.

  Something else dropped down on my inner world, some force that smothered me like an avalanche, not cold but warm. At first I thought it was Izan, but it held too much emotion to be him. Love, fierce and strong as a mountain. It was Mom, and somehow I knew she held nothing back for herself. She’d left her body and joined me in mine to send my tug-of-war with Baku in the right direction.

  I couldn’t find the voice to tell her to stop before she killed herself. On top of her, Izan came down like a sledgehammer. His presence squeezed me inside myself and Baku along with me. At first I thought he was trying to lock me in the box, too, but a bright white grid formed a second container within it. I sprang back into my body as Izan sealed Baku inside, closing the prison door before he departed on a wave of what felt distinctly like regret.

  Maybe Izan had finally understood what he hadn’t in all the time he’d been watching us. The force of emotion, of family, and of soul. He’d been strengthening ours with lifetimes of trial, loss, and loneliness, and even though I hated him with every fiber of my being, it had worked. We’d been strong enough to hold on to what we never could before.

  Awareness of the outer world came slowly back. Mom’s presence had left me at some point. The sound of my sluicing blood roared in my ears, and my heart punched against my ribs. My whole body shook with trauma and the ice storm raging inside my internal prison. The king’s inhuman sounds echoed inside my head, along with his grief that I’d destroyed his last hope of reaching the family he’d lost. It made it harder to hate him knowing he’d been a decent dragon bug before Izan’s people had turned him into a monster.

  I opened my eyes long enough to see Asher turn his face toward the sky. Just as Baku had done in New York, our powder keg of energy left me and rushed out of Asher’s mouth. Like a laser beam, it shot into the sky and shattered. A thundercrack shook the ground beneath my butt. Tendrils of blue and white spread far and wide, beyond the horizon, and then disappeared. A blend of Machine and Baku’s power. To hold the veil and keep the rest of the wraiths out.

  Holy crap, we’d really done it. Those still breathing would have a chance to find the good life they’d earned a hundred times over. Teetering on the edge of darkness, I wasn’t so sure I’d be joining them. Hell no. I would have my dork dance and the night of slow and sweet loving with Asher. So I’d hold on now and the next day and the next, even while the wraith king’s madness crushed my own marbles one by one until he left me a walking zombie. That was the sacrifice. Not my death, but my sanity.

  Well, shit.

  “Addison,” Asher rasped, patting my cheek. I supposed burping out the force of a nuclear bomb would do a number on the old voice box. “Say something. Addison, please!”

  Sophia cried out, her delicate hands wiping my chin. “Oh God, she’s still bleeding. Sampson!”

  Low voices spoke somewhere close, and I wondered if they were trying to help Mom. Was she alive? What about Dad? Panic strangled me again when I couldn’t make my body move so I could go to them.

  Caine sobbed nearby, his Amanda now lost forever in the void, and I couldn’t hate him, either. I wasn’t sure he’d ever recover from coming so close to having her back, but I wouldn’t send him away if he asked for help.

  Grass swished to my left. I couldn’t see who knelt beside me.

  White light blasted against my lids, which had closed again. Agony filled me with razors as Sampson chanted in his Aussie accent. Screaming, a mixture of mine and my new passenger’s. When the flash ended, I stared up into Asher’s face, beautiful even tight with fear. Whatever Sampson had done to me didn’t totally erase the pain, only concentrated it into a knot in my center where we’d boxed up the king. At least I could feel my legs again.

  “That’s the best I can do,” Sampson said, staring across me at Asher. “We need to get her warmed up in a hurry. She’s hypothermic.”

  “Mom,” I rasped, my teeth clicking with my shivering. Ick, why did blood taste so nasty? “Dad.”

  Asher gave a frantic laugh full of relief, hugging me to his chest. “Remy’s got her, and Kyle’s got your dad. Don’t worry about that now. God, you’re so cold. Is he in there?”

  Relief unlocked my joints. “Got him. Not bad for a small-town country girl, huh?” I whispered, barely holding onto consciousness.

  Tight laughter spilled out of him, and it hummed inside me. “Stay with me, Plaid. Let’s get you warmed up before you turn into a Popsicle. God, you are such a badass. I always knew it, but to see it was something else.”

  Dizziness let me know he was taking us home through the Shift.

  Darkness took me before a strangled cry launched me out of the abyss. When had I checked out again? It was Dad, his shaking hand on my face. “She’s freezing. Jesus, there’s so much blood, and her lips are blue.”

  “Listen to me, Raymond,” Asher said, cradling me to his chest. “Run the tub full of hot water. Sophia, put on the kettle and find as many warm blankets as you can. Remy, light the fireplace. Kat, you and the Colonel make sure everyone stays out of here, and keep them calm.”

  Their voices grew distant as I lost my fight to stay awake.

  Searing heat brought me back, and I thrashed, sloshing water over my head. Strong arms pulled me against hot flesh as I gasped. “It’s all right,” Asher said, injecting me with calm. “We’re in the tub; just let me hold you.”

  “Oh, God, it hurts.” My teeth chattered harder, and I swayed with dizziness when Baku stretched inside me and resumed his screaming.

  “I know, but it’ll get better soon, I promise.” Asher guided my head back against him, smoothing my hair away from my forehead, his hand soothing against my chilled skin. Darkness descended on me again.

  The next time I returned to awareness, the cold had retreated inward around the prison, along with the raw pain that had been eating me alive. The crackling of a fire mingled with quiet conversations, and the scent of woodsmoke and Asher’s sweet smell filled my nose.

  An attempted shift of my arm didn’t move it, and I flinched in a panic.

  “I’ve got you,” he said, loosening his arms from the blanket that cocooned me on his lap. I jacked open a lid, surprised to find a calm smile on his face instead of signs of my impending funeral. He pressed his lips to my forehead, no longer the brand of a hot iron, but pleasantly warm.

  Dad crouched beside the chair and offered a glass of water. His cheeks were drawn in, and his skin still held a gray pallor. “Thank bloody hell. Gave us quite a scare there, Addy,” he said, his voice a heartbreaking wobble of sound.

  I smiled but couldn’t find the will to move. “Let me guess,” I rasped with a dry throat, “if I ever do that again, you’re going to ground me for a month?”

  He laughed, covering my hand with his, his chin quivering. “For the rest of
your damn life, and considering you live forever, that might put a cramp in your honeymoon plans.” A frown darkened his features. “I could see everything he was doing to you, and I couldn’t stop it. There are no words for what I did to you.”

  “Dad, I know. You would never hurt me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Just tell me it’s over. It is, right?” His honey-brown eyes pleaded with me to say yes.

  For everyone else it is. “Yeah, Dad, it’s over.”

  He shook off a visible shudder, folding his arms together as he stood. My head bobbed against Asher’s shoulder, and I jerked it upright again.

  “Addison?”

  My sight returned outward to find Sophia standing with Dad with her new snazzy sentinel eyes, a powder blue with a bright jade star. “You with us?” she asked. “You still look really pale.”

  I smiled. “Just tired. Check out those eyes, sentinel. I saw how you went all crazy ninja on those wraith-infected. Always knew there was a wild streak in you somewhere.” My light mood darkened as mental flashes of the battlefield lit up my eyes. “How many did we lose?” I asked.

  Asher pressed his lips to my temple. “Don’t think about that now.”

  “No, I need to know. I saw Raldad and Iris go down.” I paused until my throat unlocked again. “Tell me they’re not wraiths.”

  “We lost three pairs,” Sophia said, “and their energy spread out into the air and into the ground. I like to think they’re all together, wherever they are.”

  Whether it was true or not, we all needed to believe it. I wasn’t sure how to feel at the moment, but when I’d recovered, what had happened would haunt me in every quiet moment. “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “In the infirmary,” she said while Dad rushed into the kitchen. “She’s sleeping. Sampson and Kyle are with her now, and Remy’s keeping an eye on Caine.” She shrugged. “I kind of feel sorry for him even after what he did. He hasn’t said a word; he just holds a hand over his heart and stares at the sky as if he can still feel Amanda out there.”