A Portrait of Pain

by Jane Washington

  “I’ve learned to draw it out,” Danny told me, his eyes on me the entire time. “I used to just pick an organ and shut it down, but now there’s so much more that I can do. I can halt the blood supply to the heart and feed it, little by little, so that their death isn’t so uneventful. Or I can cut off the air to their lungs, feeding them only a little, only enough for them to …”

  “Please …” Steven gasped, a gurgling sound catching the word.

  “Beg,” Danny finished triumphantly.

  Andre stepped out from behind me, firing off three shots into Danny’s chest, the loud explosions of the gun too close to my ear. I stumbled sideways, clutching at my head, and two sets of hands caught me, hauling me further away from Andre.

  Noah and Cabe.

  I blinked, disoriented, as the room erupted into chaos. Danny was laughing, staggering sideways, like being shot was the funniest thing in the world. He landed against the desk he had abandoned, holding a hand over one of the bullet wounds.

  “Get backup!” Andre shouted at the remaining man, who stumbled out of the room rather than running from it.

  When the door closed behind him, Andre’s entire demeanour changed. He turned his back on me completely, his entire focus switching to Danny. Miro and Silas didn’t waste any more time: they spread out around Danny, forming a semi-circle around the desk with Andre, keeping just out of reach. Danny’s laughter died off, his eyes on the gun in Andre’s hand.

  “You don’t wanna shoot me again,” he cautioned. “I won’t die, but it’ll make me mad.”

  “It’s a stressful situation,” Silas replied easily. “You were bound to get mad eventually. I vote you get shot again.”

  “You need me.” Danny ignored the others, directing his words my way. “If you want to save them.”

  “Them?” I asked, trepidation forcing me forward. Noah and Cabe stepped with me.

  “Poison and the others.” His arm collapsed out from beneath him, and he caught himself against the desk at the last second. We all drew closer, watching as he weakened before us. He probably wouldn’t die, but he sure as hell would pass out from blood loss before his body managed to heal.

  I thought I took another step forward, but when I looked down at my feet, they were still in the same place. Confused, I watched as the room fell away from me. I was stepping forward again, but when I looked back, my body was still there, on the verge of movement.

  “What the hell?” I breathed, as darkness swam before me. “Oh shit, not this again. Not right now.”

  I couldn’t even tell if I was in a forecasting or not, because I was still seeing the same room and the same people—except that they hadn’t heard me speak, and I had somehow divided into two separate bodies.

  “You’re going to tell us everything.” Silas was speaking again. “Or Andre is going to shoot you again. He’s going to keep shooting you until you’re unconscious, and then we’re going to lock you the hell up where you can’t touch anyone, and we’ll use you as target practise until your power finally fails you. Because it will. Eventually.”

  Danny scoffed—but it turned into a pained coughing sound. “Go ahead,” he offered. “Shoot me again. See where it gets you.”

  Before Silas could even give the order, Andre had fired off another shot, and Danny was slumped over the desk, twitching weakly.

  “No!” I heard a cry and turned around in shock to see a copy of myself, lurching forward, hand over her mouth. Behind that copy, there was still the original frozen image, seconds from tipping over into action.

  I realised, finally, that I was experiencing a forecasting; but for the first time, I was seeing the immediate future. It was being set out before me, forcing me to choose. Chills rushed down my spine and I stepped out of the way just before the second copy of myself would have run into the real me. Everyone had turned to look at her—so that version of me, they could see and hear.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” she said to Andre, grief tearing up her words.

  As she spoke, the darkness rushed in around me again, pulling me from the room completely. I was lurching toward the second copy, merging with her body, and then everything seemed to wind back in time as she stepped me back to the first copy. The closer we got, the more my head began to flood with visions.

  I saw Poison struggling in water, her legs tied to something at the bottom of what looked like a pool. As she flailed, my lungs grew tight, and I tried to scream along with her. I could feel the water rushing into her mouth and flooding her. I could feel the life ebbing away from her with each violent spasm as though it was my own.

  But that wasn’t the only death I felt.

  I also felt Jayden, his breathing heavy with terror and … something wasn’t right. I could feel the rough wooden texture of a box as he battered at it. I could feel the strain on my lungs again as he fought to draw in breath. The air was too tight. As he hit the box, dirt rained down on his face.

  I couldn’t separate myself from the visions anymore. I was confused. Drowned. Choking. Suffocating.

  “Eva,” he sobbed, touching something in the box beside him. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  It was a body. He was in a coffin. He was in her coffin.

  I felt his panic as he counted down the hours, purging his soul to the body beside him. One hour passed, and I couldn’t leave. Two passed, and I lost all sense of myself. Three passed, and I became Jayden, staring up at the darkness, feeling the weight of the oblivious, uncaring world above. Four passed, and all I wanted was to die. After five hours, I lost Jayden as well, and my being separated from his with an agonising tear. I stumbled back into the darkness, rubbing dirt from my eyes and sucking air back into my damaged lungs, my sobs heavy and otherworldly.

  When I saw the common room full of students, I could feel my heart breaking. There was a reason the building was on lock-down. There was a reason the humans hadn’t stormed the place and extracted the students.

  There were four barrels sitting in the middle of the room, a little blinking timer taped to the top, ticking down the minutes. I could see the wires running from the barrels to the windows and the doors. If anyone tried to get in or out of the room, the barrels would explode. It had taken five hours for Jayden to die, but it would take five minutes to blow up each common room in the college, killing anywhere close to eighty college students and faculty members.

  “I can’t watch,” I pleaded, turning and running for the edge of the room. “Stop making me watch!”

  I had nowhere to turn, no escape route. I would die inside this room with all of these people, just as I had drowned in the pool and suffocated in the coffin. No amount of screaming and bashing my fists against the wall would change that fact.

  I collapsed where I was, slumping down the wall and curling myself into a ball—the way I usually ended up when these visions trapped me. Maybe the forecasting power didn’t have a sense of good and evil outside of its battle with the Dead Man’s power, or maybe it was showing me this so that I felt what was at stake, instead of simply knowing it. I didn’t understand why it was forcing me to die so many times, but I was beginning to doubt that it cared at all—at least not in the way that people cared about things. It had its own agenda. It was preoccupied with the age-old battle of life and death: the powers of life fighting with everything at their disposal to defeat the ugly outcome of death.

  Danny and I had become their weapons, instead of us using the Atmá magic the way most other Atmás did. We were able to access the source of our magic, but I was beginning to understand that accessing more of it simply meant that it was able to have a greater influence over us. It really was a living thing. Maybe that was why the bonds were created: because the bodies that they slipped into weren’t enough. The power needed more energy, more life-force, to keep it going, to keep it in place. It was the Atmá power that created the bonds between Atmás and pairs. It was the Atmá power that created the strain, pulling people together until they were connected, unt
il they grew close enough to seal the bond. It was the Atmá power that fused the pairs to their Atmá, creating one borrowed life-force that it could sustain itself with.

  It was my Atmá power that had reached out for the Adairs and Quillans. It should have been impossible to break them away from their existing bonds, but if the Atmá powers could create bonds, then they could also destroy bonds.

  The more I thought about it … the more evil my powers began to seem. They were alive, and they were caught up in a battle against the power of death. A battle that spanned centuries upon centuries. They had forgotten about their original purpose: the ability of the Forecasters to prevent disaster; the ability of the Readers to understand human nature; the ability of the Materialists to create matter out of nothing; the ability of the Elementalists to protect and nurture …

  And the ability of the Dead Man to heal. To prolong death, instead of inflicting it.

  The powers should have died with the Original Atmás. It should have been a freak accident, never to be repeated again—and it would have turned out that way, if the Dead Man’s power hadn’t taken over the same way Danny’s power had taken over, kick-starting a never-ending war between immortal entities of magic. But that was the way it had turned out, and the Zevghéri adapted. They continued to form bonds and wield the magic, but they never opened themselves fully to the powers.

  That was never supposed to happen.

  Kingsling had messed up some kind of natural order, opening a door that should have been cemented shut, and tearing down an essential barrier that had evolved between the source of the Atmá powers and the Zevghéri people.

  With Danny, he only partway succeeded, but with me … he finally achieved the impossible.

  When the explosion happened, it jolted me immediately back to my real self. I gasped, my eyes flying wide, my body seizing up in shock. I could still feel the death clinging to my bones. My skin felt tender, as though it had been torn off and reapplied multiple times.

  I fell against Cabe, my hands gripping the soft material of his shirt, my mind stuck in the aftermaths of horror.

  I was so weak, even though time had been frozen and I apparently hadn’t moved an inch.

  “Seph?” Cabe was speaking quietly as I stared at the scene before me: at Silas, Miro and Andre surrounding a laughing Danny, who was leaning against the desk in the library.

  Andre was going to shoot him, and when that happened, we would lose our only chance. We would lose Poison, Jayden, and so many more.

  “What is it?” Noah asked, his hands cupping my face as he stepped in front of me, blocking out Danny. His bright eyes were apprehensive; he must have been able to read something terrible on my face.

  I touched his arm, about to answer, but Silas’s voice distracted me.

  “You’re going to tell us everything,” he said, giving me a flashback to my vision. “Or Andre is going to shoot you again. He’s going to keep shooting you until you’re unconscious, and then we’re going to lock you the hell up where you can’t touch anyone, and we’ll use you as target practise until your power finally fails you. Because it will. Eventually.”

  I yanked myself away from Noah and Cabe, diving forward to grab Andre’s arm. “Don’t,” I warned, panic ripe in my tone.

  He pulled his arm free of my grip, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. He was still going to do it.

  I ran in front of him, my heart in my throat, my arms spread. I could feel Danny at my back, laughing again. He could reach out and touch me whenever he wanted. He could stop my heart and kill all of us at once.

  All he needed to do was reach out.

  “Put the gun down!” Cabe yelled, jumping in front of Andre the same way I had.

  Silas and Noah were on either side of him in the next second, wrenching the gun out of his hand. Silas unloaded the clip and tossed the gun toward one of the bookshelves.

  “Next time you do as she says,” he snarled at Andre, who looked ready to get into a fight over the fact that his gun had been confiscated.

  I ignored them, turning to Danny. I could feel my pulse getting heavier, my heart beginning to race too hard. We were running out of time already.

  “I want to play your game,” I told him, trying to make my voice as calm as possible. “I’m going to heal you so that we can play. Is that alright, Danny?” I was speaking to him as though he were a frightened little child, but in a way … he still was. He hadn’t ever grown up.

  He had died as a frightened little child, and the Dead Man’s power had brought him back, suspending him in the same body, without the cumbersome humanity that had been holding him back.

  Danny tried to pull himself up, but slumped back against the desk again. He didn’t say anything, only stared at me, the laughter completely gone.

  Everyone else was silent.

  I could feel Cabe behind me, restraining himself from pulling me away. For just a moment, I felt a spark of deep appreciation for my pairs. They were so strong, so fierce and protective … but they never stopped me. Never held me back. They believed in my strength, and they trusted me completely. It was exactly the thought I needed to be able to reach out and lay my hand against Danny’s arm. He didn’t even blink as I drew on the valcrick, feeding it my brief moment of warmth. He didn’t watch the sparks as they converged over his torso, not even when the wounds began to close. He stared directly at me.

  I searched his eyes, trying to figure him out. Trying to find some semblance of the boy inside him … but his eyes were stone: cold and hard, smooth and perfect. There were no cracks, no hints of anything more. It was his true face: impassive, unemotional … sociopathic.

  “Let’s play,” he said, as I pulled my hand away. I hadn’t healed him completely, only enough. I was sure that I would need my strength very soon.

  I stepped back, feeling Cabe’s hand flatten to my spine. He was shaking.

  To Danny, I only nodded.

  “When we were little, they used to put you in this room.” He pulled up from the desk, walking over to one of the shelves. We all turned, but didn’t follow him. “We could all see you and observe you through the glass, but you couldn’t see us. You could only see a mirror. They used to ask you to draw things, and you would. You would draw things that hadn’t even happened yet … do you remember?”

  I nodded again, not trusting my voice. I wanted to shout at him to hurry up.

  “You seemed to predict very important things,” he told me. “They were very impressed with you … but I wasn’t, because there was something you didn’t predict. Something that should have been more important than all of that.” He pulled one of the books from the shelf, watching it thud against the ground. “Do you know what that was?”

  This time, I shook my head. He forced another book to fall, and then another, watching me the entire time.

  “They separated us,” I finally croaked.

  This time, he smiled, picking one of the books from the shelf and bringing it over to me.

  “Happy hunting, sister.” He handed me the book.

  The Art of Architecture: Hollow Valley University.

  I pulled the book under my arm and glanced around at the others. “Keep him here.” I spoke to Andre. “I don’t care what you have to do to keep him here but make sure he doesn’t leave. You’ll have five hours—after that, you can shoot him as many times as you want.” I ran toward the door, but Danny’s voice stopped me.

  “Five hours?” he called out. The words were accusatory.

  I turned, and he knew. He knew that I had seen it all: I wasn’t playing his game. I was playing him.

  “Goodbye, Danny,” I muttered, searching his eyes one more time.

  Nothing.

  He growled and made a lunge for me, but Silas swooped down and pulled the gun from Steven’s belt, smashing it into the back of Danny’s head before he could get within reach. We all watched as Danny slumped over, but when I turned for the door again, a walkie talkie sticking out of Steven’s back poc
ket crackled.

  “First backup team down. Hostiles surrounding library.”

  Andre swore, stepping over Danny to grab the communication device. “Clear out the hallway so I can get some backup in here.” I wasn’t sure who he was talking to, since he didn’t make eye contact with anyone. “If you do that, I’ll keep the little psycho alive for the next five hours.”

  “Good enough for me,” I announced, pushing the library doors open and striding out.

  Almost immediately, there was a gun in my face.

  “I’m getting really sick of those.” I stared at the barrel, fury boiling up inside me.

  I thrust my hand out, a wordless shout escaping from my throat as I expelled all of my fear and anger in a burst of valcrick. It exploded outward in the now-familliar wave, and I watched as more than one body was shot backwards, several weapons skittering uselessly across the floor.

  “Consider the hallway cleared!” Noah shouted back into the library, and then we were running.

  I didn’t exactly know where I was going, but I didn’t have time to figure out Danny’s game. I was holding the book as a backup, because I wasn’t taking any chances and because my vision had shown a direct correlation between Danny being shot at that exact moment, and everyone else dying. I knew the order of things. I knew that Poison would go first, and that I would have five hours to save Jayden before the bombs went off in the school.

  In a spur-of-the-moment decision, I dove sideways into an empty classroom.

  “What do you need?” Miro demanded immediately. One of them slammed the door shut, and we all grouped together as I tried to make a decision.

  “A pool,” I mumbled, screwing my eyes closed. “Is there a pool here?”

  “The Sporting Campus,” Cabe answered.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Blue tiles along the bottom. Indoor, glass roof and one glass wall, kind of like a giant greenhouse—”

  “That’s it,” I announced, my eyes flicking open again. “We need to get there. Poison’s tied up and the pool is being filled. She’s going to drown soon.”