by Shea Berkley
It’s strange, the way it crawls up my skin like a snake curling around a branch until it’s stretched along the limb waiting to strike. It flickers in front of my eyes, and everything I see is bathed in a warm glow. That glow grows until it burns against my heart.
My lashes wipe the flames away for a second and then they pop back, dancing wildly. Sharp, brutal images flash in my mind. I don’t recognize them as my own. I grit my teeth. My heart pounds. Anger floods my gut and the fire brightens.
Water strikes my feet. A sharp sizzle sounds as the flames lick at the water, turning it into steam. I see Wyatt lumber forward in his suit. I can’t hear what he’s saying; only the seductive hiss of fire is in my ears…and it wants to be free.
Wyatt tosses one of those silver fireproof blankets over me. I flare, turning the blanket into ash. As the gray flakes spiral away, I see flames skittering overhead and Grandpa chasing them with water. No matter what he does, the fire crawls along the ground and ripples up the walls. The hay bales behind Wyatt smoke. Soon flames finger their way through the feed.
A hacking cough erupts from Grandpa as the thick, dark smoke builds, curling upward as it presses down. Wyatt pushes him toward the door and takes up the hose. He blasts me with water, thinking he can put out the flames. At first it seems to work. The flames recede. Steam rushes into the air, building a wall around me. For a second I remember who I am, but the fire is insistent and flashes along my skin again. “Get out!” I cry before it engulfs me completely.
Wyatt sprays me again. This time the fire refuses to die. All around us the building has become a living beast of flame. He tosses the hose down and runs for the door. I can feel the power rushing into my body, the fire curling back on itself like a lung filling with air. There’s no way I can stop it. Suddenly, my body arches. Fire bursts from me, rocking the building, tearing it from its foundation and blasting the structure into the air. The power of the explosion rockets the debris high into the sky before it whizzes to the ground like fiery missiles.
When the smoke clears, I’m no longer burning. I’m standing on a ragged piece of charred wood, but not for long. Gravity shifts, and I fall to my knees. My head spins, and as my vision tunnels, I see Grandpa and Wyatt rush toward me.
“You’re okay,” I manage to say, and then I tip forward as the world goes black.
Trust Is a Fragile Thing
The haze sucks me into a dream, something I’ve tried to avoid since the disturbing ones I had before I was released from the hospital. I’m standing in a darkly lit room. The faint shadow of a low bed stretches out near one wall. Closer to me is a small rickety table with basin and pitcher. The stone walls are slick. Water drips. The colors, all grays and browns and blacks, blink dully in the dim light. I hear the flutter of wings, and I whip around. “Who’s there?”
Nothing comes forward. My dreams always carry a sliver of fuzzy truth, and I struggle to find what’s real and what isn’t. The room shudders, as if the walls are taking a deep breath.
It’s odd for me to be alone in a dream. I take a step forward, and immediately get jerked to a stop. Chains fold over my chest, drag to the floor, wrap around my ankles, and slither off into the darkened corners. I shrug, feeling their weight pressing down on me.
I don’t know what they’re made of. Not iron. Whatever it is, the metal has its own power. Keeping me still. Weighing me down. Depressing me in a way that makes me want to curl up and never move again.
I fight the feeling and struggle to be free. The chains cut into my skin.
“The more you fight, the tighter they become,” sounds a deep voice.
I twirl around, and from out of the darkness emerges the man who haunted my dreams when I was in the hospital. Like before, his clothes are tattered, his hair shaggy. Inky crescents mar the skin beneath his eyes. The starved line to his jaw makes hunger gnaw at my own belly.
“Dylan. Do you know who I am?”
Only because Kera told me. “The Lost King.”
Baun. My father. Though I don’t feel any familial warmth toward him.
“Very good.” His lips tilt into a half smile, though his eyes remain dull. “I know all about you.”
Something isn’t right. My skin itches and my head feels soft. I have to concentrate in order to understand everything he’s saying.
His own chains clatter as he moves closer. “About now, you should be feeling the strain of your added powers.”
His face swims in front of mine, distorted like the image in a funhouse mirror. My stomach clenches, and I force myself not to bend over in pain. “What’s wrong with me? I’ve never felt like this before.”
Every time I visited Kera in our dream world, I’d felt invincible.
Baun moves closer. I try to step back, but the chains keep me still. He stops. “When you defeated Navar, you absorbed his powers, including those he stole from me.” He raises his hand, and the surge of power trying to escape my body sends me to my knees, gasping for breath. His fingers glow softly and he breathes deeply as if savoring a top-cut steak.
I groan, and he suddenly steps back. “My powers want to return to their rightful owner, but they can’t.”
He closes his eyes, murmurs something, and then opens his eyes. “Better?”
The strange feelings slowly dissipate. I nod.
“Do you know why I’ve brought you here, into my dreams?”
“You said before that I have something you want.” It didn’t take the collective effort of a bunch of astrophysicists to know what he meant. He wants his powers back.
The chains chink together as he walks around the tiny room, an eerie musical score to his movements. They don’t appear to weigh him down like they do me, but then again, he’s worn his chains for nearly as long as I’ve lived while I’ve had mine on for only a few minutes.
“Imagine yourself carrying my chains not for a day, but for years. More years than you can remember. Imagine how desperate you’d become.” A strange light burns behind his eyes. “Slightly mad even.”
The intensity rolling off of him is a little unsettling, and I mutter, “From what I hear, you weren’t all that stable to begin with.”
The light burns brighter behind his eyes. “I had vision. A hope for something better.” His voice softens. “Yet a man learns his flaws when he has nothing but time to contemplate what chains him.”
Bad guy learns lesson. “Yay for rehabilitation.” I shrug. “What do you want from me?”
“My freedom.”
I look down at the chains holding me still and then back at him. “Does it look like I can help you?”
“The pux sense the part of me that’s in you, thus the chains. Their weight is only a ghost of what I carry.”
“Great.” Like that explains everything, and if that’s true, how the hell can he move? “Look, I don’t know what delusional state you’re under, but I can’t help you.”
A tic appears in his jaw. “You can.”
So, all those years, he didn’t have any need to contact me, until now, when he needs help…and he’s desperate for it by the look of him.
I laugh. “Why should I? I haven’t heard one good thing about you.”
He’s in front of me before my next blink. A tall, angry, desperate man. Nothing good ever comes from that combination.
“Do you know what the pux do?” He rakes up what’s left of his sleeve and thrusts his arm under my nose. A series of deep wounds, some new, many old, track up and down his skin. He bends near; his mouth twists in disgust. “They’re evil little fiends that take pleasure in others’ pain. They feed off emotion. Extreme feelings are the sugar coating that makes their pathetic lives livable.”
The sound of wings fluttering outside the door catches our attention. He takes a deep breath and calms himself. “I’ve learned to mold my emotions into a bland existence. It’s how I’ve survived this long.” Tears shimmer in his eyes, and he blinks them away. “I’m about to break, Dylan. Death is seducing me toward the peace I cra
ve.”
His arm drops, and he pulls himself together. “I’m asking for compassion, something my kind has thrown away. Once condemned, forever condemned.”
He doesn’t sound like I expect. He should be bitter, but he sounds sad. Something about him feels off. I want to leave, but he demands my attention. “But you. You know about second chances. You can help me.”
He’s hit a nerve. I craved a new beginning, and I was given one. How can I refuse him? Except the last time I saw Baun, he was in the woods and the pux appeared to be doing his bidding, not torturing him. “I don’t know…”
“You’re my son. My own flesh and blood.”
Playing on the family card isn’t smart. It reminds me of all the problems I had growing up with a mother who cared more for herself than anyone else. Where was he when she went on her monthly rampages? Where was he when the guy-of-the-moment shared his anger issues with a closed fist? I don’t need another messed-up parent who thinks he can guilt me into doing whatever he wants. “You abandoned me and my mother. I may be your son, but you’re not my father.”
“She left me,” he hisses.
There’s no doubt Mom is messed up, but he has to take some responsibility for the woman she became, though he’s hardly the demonic madman Kera painted him. He barely looks like a man, more shriveled soul than maniacal tyrant.
“You didn’t take her with you. You knew what that would do to her. Kera told me. Our kind loves deeply, but the humans, they become enslaved. You ruined her forever.”
“It was not my intent. If she had only waited…but she fled. I vowed if ever I broke free of these chains, I would find her.”
“And do what?”
His voice drops so low I can barely hear him. “End her torment.”
“How?”
“We are only whole when we are together. I will keep her close to me always.” He turns away and drags his feet back into the shadows. “If you will not help me, then we have nothing further to discuss.”
His shoulders sag as his shuffled steps expose his defeat. He’s so alone…completely and utterly alone. It actually makes me wonder. “Even if I wanted to help you, I can’t.”
“You have the power to do so much, but you are too weak to use it. Your imagination is too small.”
If I have so much power, how can I be weak? The mess coming out of his mouth is the type of parental support I’m used to. Mom and Mr. I-Lost-It-All/Woe-Is-Me are perfect for each other.
“You don’t know me,” I snap. “You don’t know what I can do.”
“Your talents aren’t an eighth of mine,” his voice booms from the darkness. “I would show you how to control the powers surging through you, to use what you’ve been given, but why show an ant an elephant’s strength?”
“An ant can lift twenty times his body weight. An elephant can’t even lift his own.” Take that, old man.
Baun chuckles, but it’s not a pleasant sound. “When has an ant ever crushed an elephant?” The shadows shift as he lies down, turning his back on me and ending our meeting.
Instantly the dream blackens, and I’m swimming in a void. For once, my dream isn’t paired with the distorted images of death. It only shows me my own doubts and insecurities and the sharp edges of “what if.”
Unwanted
The caves that hid those tainted with human blood loomed ahead. Dragging a one hundred and ninety pound weakling with her caused her shoulders to ache and her back to spasm. She should have reached the caves by now. Frustrated, she settled Reece against a tree, calling the moss beneath him to thicken. He immediately closed his eyes and let out a huge sigh of relief. She touched his forehead with the back of her hand, checking for a fever.
He cracked open his red-rimmed eyes and stared at her. He hadn’t said much, but then he’d been concentrating, much like her, on putting one foot in front of the other. Lips pale blue, eyes shadowed darkly, and skin the shade of rancid butter, he looked awful.
She produced a flask of cool water and a serving of bread and cheese and placed it in his hands. The act of summoning whatever she wanted was becoming easier, but because of her, someone would most likely go hungry tonight. She had yet to learn how to pick an item from a specific location, so whatever she needed was plucked from close by. Even she couldn’t make something out of nothing.
“Nice trick.” His voice was weak and shaky, but calm. “Can I ask you a question?”
Kera held her breath and nodded.
“Exactly where are we? I know we’re in Teag, but what does that mean?”
“Teag is part of a bigger realm attached to your world. We share the same ground, but in a different way. No one talks about how it’s done, just that it is. Entering the human realm is forbidden to us. It wasn’t always so. We were your healers. Your wise men. Your philosophers and artists. We were a gift from God to the humans. Jealousy and fear turned your kind against us. Humans kill what they don’t understand. We returned to our land and the borders were sealed. We are better off without the humans. That is the official explanation.”
“And the unofficial one?”
“We are manipulators, given to the earth to keep it balanced. Yet we are easily insulted, and if that happens we can create more havoc than the devil. As your kind progressed, we began to fear you. We are not creatures who easily accept change. Humans have always forced that upon us, though we profited from it.
“Firsts cannot lie, but humans…they wallow in lies. So when they were brought into Teag, a disruption occurred. Powers were born to half-bloods who could lie. It strained the balance of Teag. Where we once could believe a man on his word alone, it became impossible. At first, any with human blood were driven out of Teag, but they always found their way back and integrated further with our people. Then a war began. It was small at first, occasionally receding but never dying out. It lasted for two hundred years. It only ended when Dylan’s father was thrown into exile and the wall was permanently closed. The humans who remained either became slaves or went into hiding. Even as weak as they had become, Navar still feared the humans, and hunted them down until only a few were left.”
“And that’s why Lani used her dagger on the wall, cutting a hole through it so she could cross and be safe?” Reese asked.
“It was a daring move, one born out of desperation.”
“I’m glad she did it. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Kera gave him a sad smile. She wished she could agree with him. She couldn’t. Lani lost her life because of what she did, and the wall continued to disintegrate, no matter what the council tried. Teag needed a leader. Teag needed Dylan, but he represented the troubles—all the bloodshed and pain of their past—and Kera was no fool to believe they would accept him.
“Eat,” she said and rose.
He tore off a small chunk of cheese and ate, though he kept his eyes on her. “It’s strange. You look like me, but you’re not like me at all.”
The implication that she was different snapped her spine straighter. “I’m exactly like you.”
But that was a lie. She was a full-fledged first now. And then it hit her. The spell that kept the firsts out of the area was keeping her out. No matter what she did, she wouldn’t be able to break through the barrier.
“Damn and be damned,” she muttered.
Reece shifted, his movements groggy. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, but whispered under her breath, “Everything.”
Because of her impetuousness, they were stuck in the forest. It wasn’t like her. She had to start thinking before she acted.
Facing north, she wondered what her father was doing. Did he miss her? Was he safe?
Her father’s warning before she’d left for the human realm echoed in her head.
A somber spirit circled his eyes, highlighting how tired he was. “Promise me, Kera, that you will look deeply into Dylan’s heart. He is the son of a man who has a tenuous grip on reality. I did not see it until it was
too late. Mark my words, where there is a love of power, there lies evil.”
“Don’t you mean the potential for evil? Everyone has that.” She rose on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “You are wrong about Dylan. He is good. As good as I am.”
His countenance didn’t ease as he lingered on her face. “Let us pray you are correct.”
Dylan had begun to exhibit strange magical episodes, but he was still caring, passionate, and loyal. He had her heart, and she trusted him. He would work through the growing pains of their added power, just like she needed to do.
“Finish eating,” she said to Reece. “I’ll be right back.”
Moving away, she drew her dagger and made a quick circle of the area. Her whole life she’d leaned on her natural abilities to fight. Her skills had impressed everyone. But now that she was in Teag, she could feel her newfound powers stretch and rise beneath her skin, stronger, more insistent. It took all she had not to give in to the urge to let out the magic. But why? Why deny what was now a natural part of her?
As she stepped, she dragged her fingers along the bushes. Flowers bloomed as though it were full summer. She called an owl to hand, stroked its head, and set it free. Overhead, she wove a canopy out of tree limbs and climbing plants, and as she walked, rose petals fell. Soon her path was deep in their colors of red and pink and white and yellow, her feet crushing out the scent. Behind her, the canopy slid apart, and the petals slowly curled until they were brown and dry.
Ahead, the woods grew thick with brush. She bent and peeked within the brambles. The animals quickly took to their burrows. She straightened, confused. These were her woods. She knew them well, yet tension filled the air and she couldn’t place its source. Not a sign of trouble. Not even a whiff of enmity. It appeared as if her father had been able to calm the unrest. Everything seemed normal, but not.
She whispered her dilemma into the wind and sent it toward the caves. She could only hope someone would hear her request. Being locked out of their safe haven had her as jittery as a worm on a hook. She felt exposed. Vulnerable. She had to either get help for Reece soon or risk going back to the human realm with their questions she couldn’t answer.
