He extends a palm toward the oncoming greyskins and from it bursts about a hundred different bolts into the faces and bodies of the undead enemies. Many of them fall to the ground with bubbling, searing flesh; others catch on fire. Some continue to come at us, but Aaron keeps blasting away. Normally, I would try to help in a situation like this, but Aaron needs no help. He has been given his power and nothing can run from this natural force.
My stare shifts from Aaron and past the oncoming herd to see even more greyskins fall in line to try and take on this new phenomenon that is shooting electricity out of his hands. The sight is terrifying. There are so many more, that I’m not entirely sure a single bolt of electricity will be enough for Aaron to stand against them. I suppose this is where we have to work together.
I ignore Aaron as he calls out my name to keep me from running down into the forest. I’m thinking about everything around me: all the pieces of the Earth that I can use.
My running draws the attention of a whole host of greyskins and they turn to follow the path that I make. The rain is falling harder, and the clouds are denser. Another crack splits the air. Aaron probably just called another bolt to himself.
Leaves and brush scatter from me as I run through the forest. The greyskins are closing in on me from behind me and to my left. I’ve accomplished what I meant to accomplish by drawing some of the greyskins away from Aaron, but I am stopped in my tracks by a giant rock wall that I didn’t foresee when I started my sprint.
I try to climb it, but the wall is too steep and slick.
Terror grips me as I realize that I’m at a dead end.
The greyskins are so close that I can almost feel their ravenous, hungry mouths chomping, their fingers clawing.
They are less than ten feet away when I turn. I’ve got nothing solid to throw at them. There’s nothing I can do but throw dirt in their faces. A loud bang sounds through the air, but this time it isn’t lightning. It’s a shotgun.
Limbs fly and greyskins drop right in front of me. Best of all, the greyskins shift their attention to my right to find the gunman.
Connor.
He fires again and again.
“Mora!” he yells. “Move the greyskins!”
Move the greyskins?
Of course! How stupid could I be? If I can make cranes crash into buildings, then I can throw a greyskin or two around. Or thirty. I close my eyes and focus on them as they run, ripping them from gravity’s grip. With another thought, I fling them into trees and onto the ground.
Some don’t move after the impact, but others force themselves back to their feet. I become their target again. But this time, I have even more help. Seemingly from out of nowhere, a rock the size of a vehicle smashes a group of seven or more greyskins into the ground. A quick glance to my left reveals Danny, picking up a fallen tree that I didn’t even notice before. I had panicked too much to notice.
A quick blur of motion whiz
zes past me and toward the greyskins, and Heather dispatches them one-by-one. Normally, I would try to help in the effort of killing the greyskins, but I’m captivated by the scene in front of me; especially when Aaron comes over the top of the tr toh to ee-covered hill and shoots electricity into about five of them at once.
One after another the greyskins fall. And for the first time, I see what it is that Evelyn is trying to create. I see the kind of potential the Starborns really have. I also see why Jeremiah has made it his primary goal to bring us to his side.
When the bodies finish moving, when all the greyskins are dead on the ground; the forest is quiet, and the smoke clears, I see us for what we really are.
Protectors of the human race.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Connor steps forward to ask if I’m okay, but I don’t answer him. Instead, I ask him my own question.
“How did you find us out here?”
Danny, Heather, and Aaron stand next to me. Connor faces all of us, but apparently feels no intimidation. To me, that’s a good thing. I don’t want him to feel that way toward us. Most of all I don’t want him to feel that way toward me.
“I’ve been following you and Aaron,” he says. “I saw Heinrich taking you away from the crowds and I was curious as to where you were going to hide. You can imagine my surprise when I saw you leaving the colony.”
I can feel my cheeks burning red. Does this mean that he saw me kissing Aaron? I didn’t want that. I don’t even understand my attraction for either of them, but something inside me seems torn by feelings for both of them. But I don’t want to be attached to either of them.
I don’t know if he saw us, but Connor’s eyes are full of pain. Perhaps he feels betrayal. All he has wanted this whole time was to look out for me.
“I was pretty surprised with your presentation yesterday, Mora.”
“Go back to the colony,” Aaron says, stepping forward. “You shouldn’t have come out here. You’re going to mess everything up.”
“Mess what up exactly?” Connor asks with narrowed eyes. “Your little magic club that you’ve been hiding from me for years now?”
“Go back,” Aaron repeats.
“What’s your plan?” Connor asks. “You want to take down Jeremiah, but you’ll take the rest of us down with you. All of you forget that most of us don’t want Screven gone. Some of us like the protection his guards provide.”
“Some of you are ignorant fools,” Aaron comes back, but Connor only shakes his head and looks at me again.
“So, you’ve become fully seduced by Aaron and his band of magical insurrectionists,” he says.
“It’s something you’ve only known about for a few days,” I say. “How can you be so against it?”
“It’s not your abilities I’m against,” Connor says. “Aaron’s hate for Jeremiah and the Screven guards has been there since the beginning. His special abilities are just a new twist to the story.”
“Connor, why don’t you leave?” Aaron says.
“You run with a dangerous crowd when you run with them,” Connor says, nodding to those standing next to me. “Just don’t forget about your family. Don’t forget your original mission.”
Connor slings the gun over his shoulder and turns. His slow walk begs for me to go with him, but my feet are planted. He doesn’t look back as he walks from us, beaten and defeated. I fo kffun oveel torn as I watch him go.
Danny and Heather start making their way back to the house, but Aaron and I stay, still watching until Connor is out of sight.
“Why are the two of you so different?” I ask Aaron.
He doesn’t answer for a while, but I am patient.
The rain has nearly stopped falling, and the first rays of sunlight begin to break through the clouds and treetops.
“My relationship with Connor isn’t what it once was,” he says. “We used to be close. We grew up that way. It’s been six years since the greyskins attacked. Not long after that, Salem sought help. When we were kids, it was a village, much like your Springhill, I’m sure.”
Aaron begins to walk, and I follow. We aren’t headed back to the house. Our steps are random as we wander through the forest.
He smiles at something.
“I talk like greyskins attacking wasn’t a common occurrence.” He shakes his head at his own words. “But this particular attack affects me to this day. We’d gotten word of another village that had been attacked and they needed help setting up their defenses again. Salem had been pretty lucky, and my parents both volunteered to help. After being gone for more than a week, we started to get worried. Soon they came back.”
“Well, that’s good,” I say.
“Would have been,” his tone is solemn, “if they hadn’t come back as greyskins.”
I do my best not to gasp at his words, but I can’t help it.
“They came in the middle of the night. But there were hundreds of them. We assumed this group had broken off from the larger herd that had attacked the village my parents had gone to help.”
<
br /> He lets out a sigh and a slight shudder.
“I don’t really know what happened,” he says. “It probably took them about a day to die. They reanimated and must have started walking toward Salem. Only there were many more that followed. They came in the middle of the night and surprised all of us. Somehow, I lost Connor in all the commotion. But the corpses of my parents came after me.”
“How did your parents know to come after you?” I ask in horror. “Greyskins can’t think.”
“To this day, I can’t really make any sense of it,” Aaron says. “Maybe their brains were working enough to remember images of me. Maybe it was a complete fluke. Either way, it was the most sickening experience of my life. And the most terrifying.”
I hold out a hand to touch Aaron’s arm, stopping our walk to nowhere. “You don’t have to continue,” I say. “I know how much this hurts.”
“But you need to understand where I’m coming from in all of this,” he says. So, I say nothing more.
“My father came at me first. I didn’t know it, but the gun I was using had only one shot left. We were in our house. The big house, at the end of Salem. Have you seen it?”
I nod, not wanting to reveal what I saw there.
“Back then, Salem was full of houses, not these shacks you see now. Anyway, my parents got in somehow. I didn’t want to defend myself against them but I had to. It only took one shot to take down my father. But my mother came at me viciously. I got cornered. I thought I was about to die. That’s when the lights started flickering. The bulbs burst. Everything electronic in the house flowed to my body. I had no idea what was happening until the shocking light came out of my hands and fried her. There was a lot of glass and shrapnel. That’s what made this scar.”
Aaron pulls down his collar and sighs again, almost as if to keep himself composed.
“I was left alone in the house with my dead parents lying on the floor. That’s when Connor came in and found me. For some reason, I never told him how it all happened. For some reason, he never asked. Shortly after that, Evelyn found me. She had heard about my situation, and she somehow knew about how I killed my parents. I know now that her suspicions were confirmed when she held my hand to comfort me.”
He pauses to rub his face with his hands. “There is much for you to learn about Evelyn. She is a good person and her intentions are pure. But her past is dark.”
“So, she’s hiding something?” I ask.
“We’re all hiding something,” Aaron says. “You’re only the third person to know how I discovered what I am. You, Evelyn, and me.”
I’m surprised to hear this. I thought surely that Heather and Danny would know. When I express this to Aaron, he just shakes his head and smiles. “They’ve both asked me about it on separate occasions, but I decided not to tell them.”
“Why are you telling me?”
He doesn’t say anything for several quiet moments. I almost fear what his answer will be. In my mind, I’m pleading that he doesn’t say something about how much he cares for me, or how he has loved me since he first saw me.
“Because you’re the one that needs to know,” he says.
I’m relieved that there is no declaration of deep feelings, but his answer leaves me curious.
“Your situation, your gift, everything is all there,” he says. “Evelyn has pegged you as the one to lead us against Jeremiah.”
I can’t help but laugh at this. “What? Is she prophetic too?”
“No, nothing like that,” he says. “But you’ve got an amazing gift. No one knows who you are. Your gifts are more powerful than the rest of us. You have a past to fuel your anger.”
I can feel my face turn serious.
“You mean my parents? How do you know about that? Evelyn? She touches my arm for half a second and suddenly she knows everything about me?”
“Well, not exactly,” Aaron says. “That was part of it, but the rest was just me piecing it all together.”
And what exactly did you piece together?” I ask, feeling hot.
Aaron sighs and looks away for a moment, almost as if to wonder if he is doing the right thing. He turns his head back to me and begins to speak.
“Despite what you believe, your parents’ death wasn’t your fault.”
My eyebrows fall at his mention of my parents. I somehow feel it’s all right for me to bring them up, but not for someone else to talk about them. Aaron isn’t supposed to know about them. I didn’t choose to spill my guts like he just did.
“Then whose fault was it?” I ask, glaring at him through squinted eyes.
Aaron clears his throat. “Jeremiah is directly responsible for killing your parents and the people of Springhill.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When I tried to get more information out of Aaron, he only told me that he had already said too much. Evelyn didn’t want me to know the specifics yet.
“Don’t you think I have a right to know?” I had asked. But he only told me that he didn’t know all o kff toof the details, and that he didn’t want to tell me something that wasn’t completely true, especially when it came to my parents’ death. All he knows is that Jeremiah was directly responsible somehow. When I asked why they hadn’t said something sooner, Aaron just said that he had only recently learned it and Evelyn didn’t want it to be my only motivating factor in joining the Starborns.
I see his point, I guess. But that doesn’t quench my desire to know why Jeremiah is responsible. I can’t believe he would just blurt it out and then say that he can’t give me a reason until Evelyn thinks it is the right time. Maybe I will be able to coax it out of her when Aaron isn’t around.
We are all together again, walking back to Salem. Aaron and I had initially run away from the colony out of panic, but Evelyn has assured us that we shouldn’t fear. We have insulted and maybe embarrassed Screven, but we haven’t attacked them.
Quietly, Aaron sneaks us to the secret entrance under the outer wall of Salem and within a moment, we are blending in with the rest of the colony. At least, we are for a few minutes until people start to recognize me. Some point at us and whisper to the person next to them. Others just stare. Heather and Danny eventually break away from us to go to their own residences while Aaron and I follow Evelyn to her shack.
Once inside, Evelyn and Aaron make themselves at home in the tiny living room, but I remain standing next to the window. I can’t help but stare out at Connor’s place, wondering what he must be thinking.
I know he feels betrayed. I know he thinks I’ve easily fallen under Evelyn’s strange influence. And though that may be true to an extent, there is so much more to it than that. These are the only other people in the world like me. I can’t just ignore them because my friend disagrees with them about Jeremiah. Leaving them behind would be turning my back on discovering why I have this gift and what I can truly do with it. If we can band together to protect the colonies, why wouldn’t we?
Then there is the idea that it’s Jeremiah’s fault that my parents are dead. It’s a thought that refuses to escape my mind. I’m not sure I believe it, though. Despite what anyone tells me, the fact that I climbed out of the safety of the tree house to try and help my father cannot be ignored. It’s an action I will regret for the rest of my life. It will always be my fault.
Aaron and Evelyn are talking about something as they sit in the living area, but I don’t hear any of it. My thoughts drown out all noise and comprehension of my surroundings.
I close my eyes, trying once again to focus on Connor. My invasion of his privacy would probably be unwelcome, but I want to know if he is in his shack. My mind’s eye shows a view of Connor sitting at his table, eating vegetables. Alone. His solitude isn’t that of a simple afternoon meal by himself, but of someone who has no one to turn to. In a way, he doesn’t. I want him to know that I’m still his friend, that I care about him. But so many things have changed so quickly. He has to know that. Maybe he just needs me to explain it to him. I did just leave hi
s place the other day, only to slap him in the face with my one-eighty on Jeremiah and Screven.
Opening my eyes, I see the shack out the window, knowing that inside is a lonely, betrayed man that saved my life once, maybe twice.
I owe Connor an explanation.
“I’m going out,” I say to the others.
“You think that’s a good idea?” Aaron asks.
I shrug, not really giving an answer. As I leave Evelyn’s shack, I imagine the two of them moving to the window to see wherow a?e I’m headed, but I don’t particularly care. I have nothing to hide from them. All I really care about is making things right with Connor.
At his front door, I hesitate to knock. I don’t really know how receptive he will be of my apology.
I bring up my fist and knock on the door.
Nothing.
I knock again, this time a bit harder. Still nothing. I know he is in there. He can’t know that it’s me at the door. I knock again, this time a bit harder. Still nothing.
“Connor, it’s me. Open the door, please.”
There are a few seconds when I think he’s just going to ignore me, but now I hear footsteps. The door opens slowly and a tired-looking Connor stands there uninviting.
“Can I come in for a sec?” I ask after a long pause.
“Krindle is looking for you.”
“I figured as much.”
He walks away from the door, leaving it open for me to come in. He sits on the couch, but doesn’t look up at me when I walk in and close the door.
“He was surprised that you lied on the stage yesterday,” he says. “So am I.” He slumps on the couch and sets a leg on the table in front of him.
“I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to talk to you about any of this,” I say, standing awkwardly in front of him. “I hadn’t decided what to say until I was already on stage.”
“Why not the truth?”
“Because I don’t trust Jeremiah.”
The Starborn Saga (Books 1, 2, & 3) Page 17
