Then Kael’s words were clear in my head, somehow, rising loudly over everything else: The feral had access to my mind, but I saw pieces of his thoughts and memories, too.
And suddenly, I had an idea.
An absolutely insane, reckless idea.
But then, those had always been my favorite kind of ideas, hadn’t they?
I steeled my resolve, and I managed to crane my neck toward the trembling portal and make myself look properly terrified. “Not this,” I gasped. “Anything but this. I don’t want to die in there—I-I would rather we make a deal.”
His head cocked, and his rat-like tail swished. But he only stalked silently closer.
“You wanted me just a few weeks ago,” I continued, breathless. “You want to use me the same way you did Joseph. You said we could make a deal, right? If I let you in, I get to live, and so do my friends. Does the offer still stand?”
He hesitated.
“You win, okay? I just don’t want anyone else I care about to die. I don’t want to die. Not like this.”
I held my breath, my entire body tense and waiting for him to say no way and shove me sideways into the portal.
But then he said, (We may be able to negotiate something.)
I propped myself up on shaking arms as he paced in front of me. “But remember what you said,” I stammered. “I’ll still be in there. You’re an advisor, right? I still get to have a say over my thoughts. It’s still me.”
(Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be gentle.) As he spoke, tendrils of white soulwalking magic lifted from several of those strange symbols etched into his scaly skin. They hovered around him for a few seconds. My breath left me as I stared at them. They seemed to narrow and sharpen, taking the shape of javelins ready to pierce my body, and in that moment I realized the impossibility of what I planned to do.
Of course he’d agreed to it.
Because, even if he knew what I planned to do, he probably thought I was an idiot for believing I could pull it off.
But my body was broken, and there was nowhere to run, and no time to come up with another plan.
Magic engulfed me.
There was pressure. Everywhere. Pressing into every inch of my skin, from every side, until I thought it might make my insides pop. I tried not to resist. It might have to be a conscious effort to let this magic in, after all; I’d been protected from it, both from my own defensive stubbornness and because of that spell Joseph had placed over me, weeks ago.
But Joseph was gone now.
And apparently he’d taken whatever remained of that spell with him—because I soon felt that pressure breaking through easily, and the feral magic sliding like knives into my body.
My thoughts blanked.
The world went from grey, to white, to pitch black. That ringing in my ears stopped. Everything stopped.
My sight came back first, but there was no sound to go with it. I could see the cavern around me again, but it was blurry. Distorted. As if I was watching a movie playing out on an old TV. The more I tried to stare and bring the cavern into focus, the more the corners of my vision flickered. It was like someone was adjusting the display. There was even a low hum of a sound that sounded a bit like white noise from a channel we didn’t get; I turned toward that sound. The room swung with my movement.
When everything went still again, the smooth rock walls that had surrounded me were gone; there was only blackness on either side of me, stretching toward a pinprick of light far off in the center of my vision. The cliché light at the end of the tunnel, I guessed.
But the thing was, I wasn’t supposed to be dead.
I was very aware of that thought, but it didn’t send any sort of panic through me; it didn’t send any sort of feeling through me. All I felt was detached. Which made it surprisingly easy to remember what I’d planned to do—because I had no more fear, no more despair, no more pain getting in my way.
So I simply thought: I’m not dead. I’m still here, still conscious, and I need to see a memory. The one that holds the key.
That pinprick of light in the distance danced. Images began to flood it. Too fast, too blurry to make sense of at first, but I still focused on it. I imagined myself moving toward it, until those images flashing by were directly in front of me. And they weren’t blurry anymore, but they were still too quick and too scrambled to make sense of. I tried focusing all of my mental energy on what I wanted—needed—to see.
My father. I want to see Carrick’s memories of my father.
The lights and images grew larger, like I was zooming in on a camcorder.
And then a very clear image stabilized all around me: a memory of a full moon rising, glowing over evergreen trees that reached dizzyingly high above me. There were wolves to either side of me. Dozens of strange, ethereal wolves; one of them was Cerin, I noticed after a moment of staring. And the rest were clearly feral like her.
Like me, I realized, suddenly—because I was somehow doing exactly what I’d hoped I could: I was seeing a memory through Carrick’s eyes. In this moment, I was him.
And this wasn’t just any random memory, either.
I heard footsteps crunching over dry pine needles. Carrick’s eyes turned, along with the rest of his pack, to see a figure in a hooded jacket walking toward us. The jacket was bright orange. Obnoxiously bright orange. It took Alex a moment to surface, to grab hold of her memories associated with that jacket. But then I pictured Alex’s mother, the way she’d always made a funny face when she saw this man wearing it, and how she’d teased her husband about the risk of that bright orange possibly blinding people.
My mother.
And I know the man in that jacket, too.
“Dad.”
(What did you just say?)
The world around me shook. The memory started to fade. And I wanted to let it; I didn’t want to look at this memory anymore—because I knew that was all it was: A memory. Even though my dad looked impossibly real and painfully alive. It was like walking through another of those nightmarish landscapes that Carrick had been setting up for me over these past weeks.
But you can’t wake up yet, I told myself. I didn’t have to wake up yet; after all, if nothing else, these past weeks had taught me how to walk through nightmares. And so I managed to stay in this one for just a few more moments.
Just long enough to watch my dad pull a familiar-looking crystal from beneath that awful jacket of his. Long enough to watch, and to listen very closely as he lifted the jewel in front of him and said, “Scaoileadh. An. Fórsa. Laistigh.”
I repeated the words over and over in my mind, memorizing them.
And just like that, I had it.
I spun away, and the movement brought me back into reality the same way it had removed me from it earlier: I left the dancing light and its memories and found myself back in the cavern, seeing it again with blurred eyes.
We’d moved, though. We were back in the grotto room, making our way down the stairs that I’d watched Joseph fall to his death from. Moving quickly, but I didn’t know why. Where were we going?
Almost as soon as I thought it, I saw faces of the people I’d left behind again. And I no longer felt that floating sort of detachment to my own thoughts. I felt fear. I had the terrible sensation of knowing that my body was moving—possibly toward my friends, possibly to hurt them—but I couldn’t get myself to stop running.
My body leapt from the stairs and into the water. It waded across the pool with an obvious mission in mind, even if I—if Alex— couldn’t clearly see what it was. I thought, as hard as I could, about forcing my legs to stop. But I only stumbled a bit, and then kept going, all while laughing in a way that didn’t sound like me at all.
This is not me. My mouth moved with the words, but they didn’t come out.
But still, my mouth had moved.
I could move my mouth, and somewhere inside of me, I still had a voice.
And now I knew exactly which words I needed to say. And after several attempts
, I managed to mumble something vaguely similar-sounding to what my dad had said: “Scaoileadh an fórsa....”
My body stumbled. The Solas made a noise like a fork tinging against glass.
Ting ting ting.
I heard Carrick’s voice in my mind, demanding that I stop. But he had already started to sound more distant. There was a force, rising up inside me, centered around that jewel and that ring that hung from my neck. It was pushing him out. It was making my body slow to a stop as I shook my head.
And it was making my voice sound louder, clearer.
“Scaoileadh an fórsa laistigh—”
TING TING TING.
Light exploded downward from the Solas. It cut through the water, parting and rolling it away from me until I stood on dry stone. The waves of it rolled up, up, up to the ceiling. But what happened next, I didn’t see. Because just then, I felt an enormous heaviness settling, pushing down over my heart.
I fell to my knees, and I watched as everything around me faded away.
Twenty-Eight
heaven
Heaven, it turned out, was about as peaceful as you’d expect.
There was warmth. There was white light—not at the end of any dark tunnel, but wrapped all around me. And there was an enormous sense of peace. Of forgetfulness. I didn’t remember how I’d gotten here, or what I might have left behind, but I had the sense that everything was as it should be, so none of that other stuff mattered.
There was an angel there, too.
Maybe that sounds stupid. But I didn’t know what else to call this blue-eyed woman who knelt down beside me and tenderly brushed the hair from my eyes and wiped the blood from my cheek.
Blood?
Why am I still bleeding in heaven?
Pain shot through my chest.
“Where am I?” I managed to mumble, leaning my cheek into her touch. She reminded me of my mother, even though she looked nothing like her.
“You need to wake up, Alex,” she said in her soothing voice. “Please wake up.”
“…Wake up?”
“You must. Carrick is gone. The portal is dissolving, but this entire island existed as an extension of the same magic—and so it will be gone soon, too. Along with everything on it.”
I heard her, but everything about this place was so comforting. And my memories of everything that had happened were still hazy, but still, they were starting to flood my mind. So I knew that going back meant facing all the blood and destruction I’d left in my wake. And I wasn’t sure I had the strength left to do it.
“Please wake up,” the woman said, taking my hand. “Please go back to him. I can’t stand the thought of him losing you.”
I started to ask who she meant by him. But I ended up just staring at her a little more closely instead, until I suddenly I realized who she was, and I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t seen it before now.
Her eyes looked exactly like Kael’s.
I stared some more, still speechless for a long moment. When I finally managed to speak, all I could think to say was, “I saw a painting of you, once. I’m not sure it did you justice.”
She smiled. It lit her eyes in the same way that Kael’s rare, genuine smiles did. “Did you know Joseph painted that himself?” she asked. “I’m sure he never told you. He was always very modest about his artistic talents.”
I was wordless again, thinking about what had happened to Joseph. I didn’t say anything—though something told me I didn’t need to. I could tell, by the way the corners of her smile were wilting, that she already knew.
“Never mind that, though,” she said, pulling me to my feet. “Up you go.”
The white glow around her, around all of this place, was beginning to fade. And so was the warmth. I wrapped my arms against me and reached for the ring that hung around my neck, searching for its comfort out of habit. Her eyes followed my hand, and her wilted smile perked up a bit. I remembered Kael saying that he thought she would be okay with him giving it to me, but even so, it only seemed right to ask, “Do you want this back?”
She shook her head. “Keep it. It will help lead him to you.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but that chill was diving deeper into my bones. I was almost back to reality, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to go.
“Can I ask you something before I leave?” My mind raced with possible questions; I wanted something of her, some sort of truth that I could take back to Kael when I saw him again.
If I saw him again.
“Quickly, child.”
“How? How did you die? And why? Did the feral kill you?”
It had brought me a strange sort of peace, learning the truth about how and why my father had died; I thought it might do the same for Kael.
“Kill me?” She shook her head. “They didn’t. I poured my life-force into the Solas of my own freewill, hoping that my power combined with it would be enough to destroy the feral once the right person came along to wield it; I thought that would be your grandfather. But it took a few extra generations, unfortunately. So it goes.”
“A sacrifice, then?”
“Some of the most powerful sort of magic there is involves sacrifice. Something you know a thing or two about at this point, hm? But the difference between us, of course, is that you still have some power left in you. So you must go back.”
“And now that your power is used up…?”
“Now I get to rest.”
I didn’t want her to, though. I wanted to bring her back with me, just for a little while, somehow, and I couldn’t help but say, “Isn’t there a way you could see him? Just to give him some sort of peace—”
She studied me for a moment with her kind eyes, and then knelt down a bit to plant a kiss on my forehead. “Alex. Don’t you understand? You’ve already given him that.”
She straightened up and turned to leave, and suddenly my limbs felt the heavy, solid weight of existence settling in.
I was waking up.
I didn’t know what I was waking up to, but I could only hope that the last of my nightmares was truly over.
(Besides,) came Eleanor’s soft voice in my head, (it isn’t as though I’ll be alone. I’ve been waiting for quite some time to rest with him by my side.)
I looked, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a white wolf sitting among sand and driftwood a few hundred feet away, waiting. Then I blinked. He was gone, and so was she.
But the island was completely back. The water was back. It crashed up and around me, taking me in. I knew there was a shore on the other side. A whole country on the otherside. I just had to swim. Somehow, I had to swim…
It isn’t as though I’ll be alone.
And then, in the exact moment that I decided the waves were too much, I realized I wasn’t alone, either. Because I felt hands wrapping around me. Strong arms pulling me from the sea. And I heard a voice. The same voice, the same words, that had kept my head above water on the plane ride over—
“You’re okay. I’m right here.” And then he said that single phrase I had given everything I had in me to hear: “You’re safe, and it’s all over now.”
epilogue
present day; four years later
The problem with war is that it’s never really over.
The things we did, the things we saw, the people we lost—all of them still haunt us. Some days the ghosts are quieter than others. Some days they stay in the shadows, chased there by the laughter we still manage every now and then. Held at bay by Kael and I’s occasionally fearless talk of the future we plan on building together, or by the visits with my mom and Lora that are finally starting to feel normal again, or simply by us noticing, almost daily, how Vanessa and Will’s son looks exactly like his father.
And, incidentally, the tiny clone—Liam— is responsible for almost as much ghost-chasing laughter as his father was.
So, yeah, somedays we do okay.
Other days are harder.
This is one of the hard days.
&n
bsp; This is anniversary number four, and I am standing between Kael and Vanessa on the beach, staring out at the place where it all ended. The island is gone, but that doesn’t make it feel any less real, or any less painful. A lot of hurts are invisible.
Eli chases a squealing Liam in and out of the breaking waves. It’s funny to see how the toddler breaks down the walls of even someone as studious and serious as Eli has always been, and I find myself smiling a little, even as I clutch the white flowers in my hands so tightly that I’m crushing some of the petals.
It’s a tradition we’ve kept up for all four years now: on the anniversary of that fateful blood moon, all of us who fought converge here once again, and we toss white roses into the sea to honor the ones whose bodies we had to sink into it.
There are already several dozen roses along the shore, waiting to be fully pulled out by the tide, which tells me that we weren’t the first ones here today.
It’s quiet now, though, which I’m thankful for; because it turns out Will wasn’t completely wrong. No one’s built a statue to me yet, but I do tend to attract attention wherever I go in the shifter world, now. The good sort, mostly. I’m the peace bringer, after all—along with all of the other names people call me by.
And yes: It’s been a more peaceful four years than we could have ever hoped for, too.
But I don’t feel completely at peace myself, especially on days like today. So I’m glad it’s just the five of us—and then just the two of us, even, after Vanessa and Eli take Liam back to our hotel for a nap. Kael holds my hand loosely in his as we stroll up the beach. Neither of us has to say where we’re heading; we both know that we’re just going to keep walking until we reach a part of the beach that the blood didn’t stain.
We walk almost three miles, just to be sure, before we plop down at the base of a sand dune.
“I hope he’s napping,” Kael says, glancing back toward where we’d parted ways with the others. “He barely slept last night…I think the plane ride was rough on him.”
“It’s adorable, you know—the way you worry about him.”
Ascendant (The Shift Chronicles Book 4) Page 23
