“How long did they say it would take before he woke up?” I asked Mother, kneeling beside Sevie as he slept. His brow was dotted with sweat and his light hair was tousled on his head. It took all I could do not to cry while looking at him. The only thing that stopped me, other than the fact that Father would almost certainly hear, was the intense hatred I now felt for Royce.
I had never liked that damn cowboy anyway. He was cocky, foolhardy, and dangerous. Not to mention the fact that he came waltzing in here waving a destiny flag in front of Cresta’s face. But even before that, even before we found out that he was Poe, that he was the true Raven, something about him irked me. I put it down to jealousy. It was easy. He was destined to be with the woman I loved, while I was destined to kill her. So I let myself believe that was all it was. I wanted to be mature and, when things took a turn for the worse and it became clear I wouldn’t be able to protect her the way I needed to, I wanted to believe that he could. That he would. I wanted to believe that he had her best interests at heart, and that he was honest.
But that son of a bitch poisoned my brother. There was no telling where his true allegiances lay. The only thing I knew for sure now was that Cresta was in danger being with him, that I needed to find a way to let her know that, and that if I ever saw that drawling bastard again, I would rip his throat out.
“A few hours,” Mother said, her hands clasped together at her waist. “Perhaps the night.”
“How could he have known?” I asked, watching my bother and measuring the seconds between his breaths. “I watched him give Sevie the poison. It was before he met any of it. It had to be. How could he have known that Cresta would do what she did to the moon? And, even if he did, how could he have known the truth about Sevie? No one knew that. Right?”
“Right,” Mother answered in a small voice. “Not even your father. Just me. This one is on me alone.” There was a heaviness in her tone that betrayed guilt. She had no reason to feel guilty. She saved my brother. She saved me. And even if she had done that for purely selfish reasons (which I didn’t believe to be the case) I would never be upset with her for that. She saved my life, and I wanted to make sure she knew how much I appreciated that.
Unfortunately, the questions I had outweighed any solace I wanted to give my mother at the moment.
“Well if you didn’t tell anyone, then how-“
“I don’t know, Owen,” she cut me off. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any answers for you. “ She settled right beside me, resting her hand on my shoulder. “No one can get through the psionic barriers in your mind. Allister Leeman made sure of that. And you know I would never ask you to answer any questions that you didn’t want to. But if you know anything about where this Royce person came from, if you know anything about him at all, I’m asking you to tell the Council.”
“Mother-” I looked up at her.
“I know,” she squeezed my shoulder. “You don’t trust them, and honestly, I don’t blame you. They haven’t given you any reason to think they might be on your side, and honestly, they’re not the Council of my youth. Their methods have changed. They say it’s out of necessity, and perhaps it is, but that doesn’t do much to garner loyalty, does it?”
“I don’t know what you’re asking me,” I admitted. I was tired, tired of worrying about the people I loved, tired of trying to keep myself from falling apart, and tired because I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Cresta punched a hole in the Great Wall and defected to Fate knows were.
“I’m asking you to listen for just a little bit longer before you make your decision.” She squeezed my shoulder again. “I did this to you. I turned you into this thing.”
I started to protest, but she stopped me.
“Don’t,” she shook her head. “It’s the truth. We both know it. You’re going through all of this because of me.”
“It’s better than being dead,” I said sharply.
“Is it?” She answered. There were tears in her eyes when I looked up at her. “I love you more than anything in the world. I love you more than myself. And more than that, I love you more than my beliefs. But I watch what you’ve been through, what your brother has been through, and I wonder if I made the right choices. Death can be a gift. I didn’t understand that before. But now, after everything that’s happened, I just hope I didn’t do you more harm than good.”
“How could you ask me that?” I asked, standing to meet her. “I’m only here because of you, and no matter how you feel right now, that is not a bad thing. I got to be a man because of you. I got to love a woman because you loved me. And I’ll save the world one day.” I took her hand in mine. “Because you saved me, Mother. Sevie feels the same way. I know he does.”
“The Council is old, older than all of us,” she said, brushing tears from her cheeks. “They may have changed a bit in recent memory, but they’ve done real good in the past. The world has always teetered between feast and famine. The fact that it hasn’t gone off the rails is down, not only to the Council, but to the Breakers who have helped them along the way.”
“Are you asking me to help them?” I narrowed my eyes. “You know what they’re capable of. You know what they would do if they found her.”
“And do you know what she’s done?” Mother asked quietly.
“What does that mean?” I asked, letting go of her hand.
Mother bit her lip, and turned away from me.
“What does it mean Mother?!”
“The bloodmoon-“
“We don’t know she’s the Bloodmoon,” I said instinctively, defaulting to that old argument.
“Of course we do. Don’t be ridiculous,” she answered. “But that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the red moon Cresta manifested the night she broke out of here. It was unnatural, Owen. And it did things.”
I looked back at Sevie. Did she think I was stupid? Of course it had done things. Sevie was lying here, in part, because of what Cresta had done. But she didn’t know that. And, when I told her what had happened, when I begged her to leave the bloodmoon in the sky, consequences be damned, she pulled it down to try and save Sevie.
“Not him,” Mother said, reading my face. “Not just him.” She ran hands through her hair. “You know there are anchors throughout the world, anchors that Breakers set up in order to keep peaceful alliances or stop the human race from bleeding itself to extinction.” She shook her head. “The Council didn’t tell you. There’s just been so much going on, and they wanted to make sure where your loyalties were.”
“What didn’t they tell me, Mother?” I asked, moving toward her.
“She broke them, Owen. When Cresta brought about the bloodmoon, anchors around the world began to snap. Things that had been carefully put in place decades and centuries ago were ripped up and laid bare.”
“That’s not true. They’re lying to you,” I said, praying that I was right.
“It is true, Owen. Dozens of Breakers have been dispatched to try and fix the damage, but it’s already been catastrophic. Volcanoes made dormant by anchors have erupted. Fault lines have roared back to life. Long standing peace treaties brokered by the secret assistance of Breaker persuasion have been discredited.” She bit her lip again. “The world is ending, Owen. She’s bringing about an end to the world.” My mother shook her head. “Imagine the devastation she’d be capable of if she was actually trying.”
My mind started to spin a million miles an hour. This, obviously, wasn’t the sort of thing I ever wanted to hear. But now, knowing that Cresta was in trouble in outside of the Hourglass, it just made everything more complicated.
“She didn’t mean to,” I muttered. “She isn’t that person. She would never-“
“But she did,” Mother said softly. Her words contained no venom, none of the bite or joy that the Council members would have gotten from telling me how right they had been about all of this. This wasn’t about right or wrong, not for my Mother. For her, it wasn’t even so much about the world. It was h
er sharing a hard truth about what was going on with her son.
The girl I loved was destroying the world.
Now what in Fate’s name was I supposed to do about that?
Chapter 11
You People
“We need to talk about this Owen. It isn’t something that’s going to go away.”
Mother’s voice rang through the bathroom door. I had been sitting in there for nearly an hour, trying to get my mind set in the one place in our house that still had doors.
This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. Cresta was destroying the world. The prophecies were coming to pass. No! She wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t do that. Intention aside, Cresta wasn’t capable of this sort of destruction.
Even as the thoughts trailed my mind, I knew they were lies. Cresta was one of the most powerful Breakers I, or anyone else, had ever seen. There probably wasn’t much she couldn’t do if she really put her mind to it. But did she have that sort of control over her abilities?
The bloodmoon that lingered in the sky, the fact that Sevie was still unconscious, answered that question well enough. She was potent, and she was forging a path of destruction that she likely had no idea even existed.
And that was when it hit me. She didn’t know about this. Cresta Karr, the girl I loved, would have drug herself back here if she had even the smallest hint that she had been party to this sort of anarchy.
“Not now, Mother,” I said, my voice as strong as it had even been. I may have been hiding in a bathroom technically, but I was not hiding from the situation. I knew that every moment I spent trying to figure out what to do next was a moment that the entire world could shift, but I needed to be sure. I needed to know that what I was going to do (whatever it was) would be the right thing. And I needed to make sure, above all else perhaps, that I kept her safe.
“I know this is difficult for you, and I understand why you don’t feel like you can trust them. But there’s a new Seer now, Owen. And, from what I can tell, he’s told the Council that there might be another way. Ilsa told you as much, didn’t she? Didn’t she say that death wasn’t the only way?”
“She’s a fixed point, Mother,” I muttered.
“So were you,” she said lightly. “And I found another way. I love you more than that. So I was stronger than death. Maybe you need to be too.”
I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment after that, studying the lines of my face and crest of my hairline. Had I always been this person, so lost and confused?
I used to think of myself as so sure, as so on top of things. After I cheated death, I gave myself permission to be bold. I could succeed if I really tried. I could make up for the sedentary nature of my perceived-to-be-doomed youth. I could prove life wasn’t something I was going to waste. I could make my father proud of me for once.
Perhaps that was where it all went wrong. In my exuberance, I allowed myself to look at things too closely. I stopped seeing right and wrong, duty and responsibility. Instead, I only saw what I might accomplish. It was that that left me open to Allister Leeman. And from there, the rest was history.
I felt a prick at the back of my mind, and instantly knew Merrin was close by. All of the things that I had forgotten I was living without came flooding back into me with her closeness. Contentment, ease of breath, total completeness. It was like a severed arm had just been reattached.
“What do you want Merrin?” I asked, letting my gaze drift up to the reflection of my arm, of the binding carvings that now sat on it.
“I want to talk to my husband,” she said in a voice that was much lower than I had come to expect. “But I won’t do it in a bathroom. We can be alone, if you’d like. But I won’t go sneaking off like a pair of younglings who have something to be ashamed of.” She coughed. “Now get out here.”
“You’re not going to be able to change my mind,” I answered, and it was only then-saying that to her- that I knew what the contents of my mind even was. The Council was too risky. I could never do anything they asked, not with Cresta’s life at stake.
“Don’t presume to know my motives, Owen Lightfoot. You haven’t been right about them yet.”
Sighing, I opened the door. Merrin stood there next to my mother. The sight of her shocked me. She had always been gorgeous, and she was today. But where she was usually very put together and stunning, not she looked pale and disheveled, as though she hadn’t slept in days.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking her up and down.
“I’ve been a little under the weather. It’s not important. ‘We need to talk about what’s going on.”
“We don’t,” I answered, pulling at my hands. “It’s fine. I have it under control.”
“Please,” she scoffed. “Did you forget what this does?” She lifted her arm, scarred similarly to mine. “I felt your heart drop from a half a mile away.” She turned to my mother. “If it’s empty, my husband and I would like to use your back field to have a talk.”
“Of course,” Mother answered, gave me a small glance, and walked away.
“You don’t have to ask like that, like we’re strangers,” I said, closing the door behind me and starting toward the back door with Merrin close behind. “I grew up here, after all.”
“And you’re grown now,” she said, coughing again. “You’re a grown man with a new life. Your parents’ things don’t belong to you anymore, not even their property.” There was a tint of resentment in her voice, an emotion that jumped from her brain and started tickling the back of my mind. It wasn’t completely unexpected, and honestly, she wasn’t wrong in feeling that way.
After we were forcibly married by the Council, they gifted us with a house. It was a large white thing, and very similar to the house I grew up in, the one I now walked out of now. It was supposed to be where we were to start our new life together. And someday, after our Breaker missions were done, where we’d settle down and raise a family.
But things had gotten so crazy, and Sevie was literally on the other side of death’s door. I sat with him day and night. I slept there. So no, I hadn’t been to that damn house. I hadn’t so much as walked through the front door. And the life I was supposed to be starting with Merrin-well, we both knew I was in no position to do that right now.
“I know you’re upset with me,” I said, settling on a patch of green grass that led out to the expanse that my family farmed.
“This isn’t about that” she answered. Out in the sunlight, Merrin looked even worse. Circles ran under her eyes and, though I had seen her just yesterday, her face looked gaunt. Her cheekbones jutted out like sharp knives beneath her skin.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked again, narrowing my eyes at her. Setting myself, I searched her mind with my own, the way I was only able to because of the symbioses we shared.
She was fine; a bit aggravated, a bit tired. But other than that, she was her old self. It didn’t make any sense. But then again, what did make sense anymore?
“I came because you’re driving me crazy,” she said, ignoring my question about her health and diving right into what was going on. “And I don’t mean in the good way.” She closed her eyes, as though she was catching her breath, and continued. “I understand you’re going through a lot, and I understand that you aren’t where you want to be. Neither am I, Owen. But we have to find a way to make this work. You need to understand that there is no getting away from this. There is no going back. You said it yourself. The crone told you that you can’t see Cresta, not ever again. And while I understand the way you feel about her on an extremely intimate level, I’m afraid the idea of being joined to a sad sack with a martyr complex is more than I’m willing to take.”
“I…I don’t have a martyr complex,” I muttered. “I just-”
“Do you want to be happy?” She asked, looking at me with tired eyes.
“Of course I do,” I answered, lowering my brows.
“Do you want to be happy with me?” She coughed again, loud and long.<
br />
I wanted to run to her, to scoop her up and do whatever I could to make her feel better. But the question she asked stopped me where I stood. Did I want to be happy with her? It was something I had never considered. So much of my identity was wrapped up in Cresta, in the way I felt about her. Now that she was gone, the truth was, I wasn’t sure what that meant for me.
Could I ever be happy again? Did I even want to think about that possibility? Wouldn’t that be letting go of her?
Merrin composed herself, catching her breath and straightening her stance.
“You should see a medic,” I suggested in a quiet voice.
“Just answer the question,” she breathed. “Do you want to be happy with me?”
“I-I don’t know,” I admitted, letting my eyes trail the ground.
“That’s more than I expected,” she said. She leaned against a nearby tree and I got the feeling that she couldn’t really stand on her own right now. “I don’t hate her. You know that, don’t you? You can feel it?”
“ I can,” I answered, sure to keep my distance.
“It was never about hating her. Even after I felt the way you two felt about each other, it was never about that for me. It wasn’t about her. But it is for you, isn’t it? It still is.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“So tell me,” she nodded weakly. “Tell me what happened to Cresta to make you feel the way you feel now, and I’ll try to help you.”
“You want to help me?” I asked, sincerely surprised.
She sighed, her tired eyes inching up to my face. “We have to live this life, Owen. Whether we like it or not, it’s ours now. And the prophecies are as the prophecies are. I don’t have any ill will toward you or her. I’m passed that now. But you’re not going to end up with her. You’ve end up, Owen. It’s over, and she’s not part of it. At least not the part you wanted her to play.” She moved closer to me. “But that doesn’t change the way you feel, and it doesn’t change the way you’re going to feel moving forward. I have to live with you, and I’ll have to live with you long after what happens to her happens.”
The Breaker's Resolution: (YA Paranormal Romance) (Fixed Points Book 4) Page 8
