by N. R. Larry
“Lawrence,” she finally said, in a soft voice that went nothing with her demeanor.
My gaze flickered up and I was surprised at the near anguish in her expression. I set the book aside and scooted closer. “What is it?”
She gave a weak smile and shook her head. “It can wait for another time.”
I wanted to tell her that no, it couldn’t. That anything she needed to get out, she needed to do so soon, but telling my best friend I might be dead soon when I needed her to stay strong seemed counterproductive.
“Tell me what’s on your mind,” I said rubbing her forearm.
She shook her head. “While you were gone, I had all this time to think.”
“That’s never good,” I joked.
She didn’t smile.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“I thought a lot about you. About how we met.”
My heart went cold in my chest. I wanted to run away from her words, no more than that, I wanted her to never have spoken them.
The power stormed and I beat it back down.
“Aub… We shouldn’t…”
“No, I need to say this. I can’t…” She stood up and turned away from me, strolling toward the modest fireplace in the corner of the room.
Gritting my teeth, I threw a blast of energy into the fireplace. The wood crackled and smoked, and then a fire jumped to life. Aubrey backed away, unsurprised as always, by almost every move I made.
I sat on the bed, staring at her back, waiting for her to continue.
“Do you ever… me?”
I narrowed my eyes. “What?”
She turned around. “Do you ever hate me?” she snapped, as if she had wanted to ask the question for some time now, and had lost her patience all at once.
I shook my head, confused. “Why would I hate you? I don’t know what I would do without you.”
An expression crossed her face I had never seen. Well, I hadn’t seen it in a while. It was a hatred. But it wasn’t directed at me. “You know why,” she said in a dead tone.
Okay, so we were really going to do this. I tightened every muscle in my body, cursed myself for letting Ty take my damned crystal, and braced myself for emotional impact.
“What happened wasn’t your fault.”
She stood taller. The fire behind her worked to cast her shadow all over the room.
“No, it wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
Her chin jutted upward. “You know why you have so much trouble controlling your power?”
I froze at the sudden aggression in her tone.
She rushed forward. “It’s because you don’t deal with things. Not dark things, and your power lives with the dark things. It’s light and dark. It’s nature. And nature can be very, very ugly.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Where is all this coming from?”
She took a sharp breath. Her flesh, what was left of it, flushed. “It’s coming from the fact that your mother is dead because of me!” She was shouting. Aubrey never shouted.
I stood slowly, approaching her as I would if she were threatening to throw herself off a cliff.
“That isn’t true.”
Isn’t it? a little voice whispered inside of me. I beat it back. It wasn’t true. “My mother—she knew what I was doing.”
Aubrey started at me for several seconds. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”
I blinked at her, emotion choking off any words that might have come out of my mouth.
“But all I saw was injustice. The bullshit the Party was spreading. And I was warned that if I didn’t stop demonstrating, disturbing the peace, burning down their temporary labor camps, that someone would pay.”
Her words made the world around me go blurry. A vision, a memory I never visited while awake, seemed to impose itself over my reality. My mother was in a rush, she was always in a rush in the time I always called Before.
Before the incident where our nation voted to place all its power with one man. A man who formed the Party. Before purity ratings and checkpoints. Before officers of the new regime stormed into houses unwarranted and drove people to their deaths.
She was always in a hurry trying to save one more person. The last time I saw her rushing around our out of the way country home, lining herself with weapons, that one more person was Aubrey.
“Mom,” I had pleaded. “Let me go with you.”
She gave me that always comforting smile as she bent down and kissed my crystal, and then my forehead. Then she would whisper the Charge of the Goddess into my ear, an old wise prayer—words that were supposed to keep the witch race safe.
It was the only time she didn’t return home. We had a plan for this, but I never thought I’d have to use it. I hid under the floorboards, covering my ears against the footsteps pounding in the living room right above my head. I hid in a hole for almost a week.
Tears and memories burned my eyes.
“She didn’t even know me,” Aubrey whispered in a haunted voice.
I couldn’t look at her. Power raged through me, rocking me back and forth on my feet.
“She gave up her life…her life with you...to save a stranger.” She snorted. “What kind of a person does that?”
My gaze snapped in her direction, but I was so blinded by tears and the pain of memory, I couldn’t make out any of her features. “Shut up,” I said, as the floor quaked beneath us.
“No. If your mother had let the party arrest me, make an example of me, she would still be with you today.” She bent closer as if she were challenging me to a fight. “And you mean to tell me that doesn’t bother you? At all?”
It happened so fast it was almost as if I had nothing to do with it. I let go of the loose hold I had on my power and grabbed her by the neck. Her eyes shot open as I lifted her off her feet and closed my hand into a fist.
Her legs began to kick at nothing as she struggled for air.
“I said. Shut.” I squeezed my fist tighter. “Up.”
The darkness stormed all around me. It was on my tongue, in my thoughts, and in my very skin. There was none of the fear Ty warned me about. There was only a sense of freedom.
I didn’t stop at taking her words, I reached in further and snaked into her thoughts. With a smile, I dragged her closer to me. “You don’t think you deserve to live?” I shook her with my power. Her skin was flushed bright red. “Maybe you’re right.” I brought her closer to me and stared down my nose at her. Her lips were starting to turn blue. “I mean, I have always taken your counsel to heart.” With that, I loosened my grip and flung her across the room.
She hit the stone, and it was like rock grinding up against rock. “Good ole’ Aubrey,” I taunted. “I wonder what would happen if I removed all those magical stones holding you together.”
At that moment, footsteps echoed through the halls. I glanced up. Douglass was charging toward the room. I swept my hand to the side, shutting and bolting the door in his face. Then I turned my attention back to my best friend.
I crouched over her as she turned on her side and stared up at me, seemingly unfazed. I hovered my hand over her body and grinned again. “I’ve always admired how nothing gets to you.” I poked at her with my power. “But I know now it’s merely a face. I can see you.” I poked again, and again. Blood spurted out of her nose and sprayed my jeans. “I can see all the things that get to you.”
She took a strangled breath, reared back, and clocked me across the face. Blackness streaked across my vision. I flew onto my back. Seconds later, Aubrey stood over me, cracking the knuckles on her modified hand.
“Thanks for that. Because of all your hard work, my punches mean a lot more.” She reached down and grabbed me by the collar. Before she could stand me up, I summoned a storm of energy and threw it into her.
Her eyes popped wide open. Her skin began to vibrate. I could feel the pain, the terror rushing around inside her skull. It brought back a memory. She was in almost t
his much pain when I found her barely alive. When I found my mother dead.
Again, something inside of me switched. I pulled back that power. “Gaia,” I whispered. “What am I doing?” I shook myself away from the power, but the scary thing was that even though I was now aware of my actions, I wanted to see how far I could take them.
I wanted to know if I had what it took to kill her.
With a gasp, I let go of my hold completely, and Aubrey crashed to the floor. I turned away from her, and rushed to the fire, letting its warmth bounce off of my skin. I covered my face. I wanted to turn to her and apologize, but I had more than crossed a line.
I had lost part of myself to a single moment.
Behind me, Aubrey hacked for several minutes. Finally, she said, “Look at me.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head.
“You tried to kill me. Please do me the courtesy of owning it.”
I took a deep breath and slowly turned around. Aside from the fact that my magic had left a few visible scars on her arms and cheeks, I couldn’t find any evidence that I’d attacked her at all.
I nodded. “Yes, for a second there, it looked like I could have gone through with it.”
She nodded, and then placed her hands behind her back as she often did when she was in the middle of a serious conversation.
“But—” I took a long pause to consider my next words. There was no point in lying about anything now. Not after she’d seen me like that. “I don’t…I’ve never hated you.”
She continued to stare at me.
“But I have…” I glanced at my bare feet and sighed. “I have blamed you. A lot.” I glanced back up. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know the difference between grief and reality.”
She nodded again.
The longer she stood there, staring, the more frustrated I got. “I don’t get why you even brought this up now, of all times, and you don’t even want to talk about it?”
She tilted her head, cleared her throat, and rocked back on her feet. “I have a good reason.”
I threw my hands up. “Can’t wait to hear it.”
She stared at me, and sort of smiled. “It’s hard to express.” She shifted her gaze past me, and said, “I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching your mother die.”
The way she said it threw me off, she sounded more like a poet going on about the night sky than a person that blamed herself for a tragedy.
“Why?”
“Because.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’d seen so many people die before her. I’ve forgotten almost all of them.” She shook her head. “I don’t mean that. I’ve forgotten almost every detail about the moment they left this world for the next… But your mom… I remember every. Single. Detail.” She shifted her gaze to meet mine. “And I remember it because she was so absolutely, unafraid. She made me feel like death was a Sunday morning, something that simply happened, over and over. Everyone else…” She shook her head. “Everyone else fought it to their last breath. They cursed. They wanted to know why. But your mom, it’s like she died with every question she ever had already answered.” Her bottom lip quivered ever so slightly. “That, more than anything, told me everything about who she was. About who you’d eventually be.”
I didn’t realize I’d started crying until she was finished speaking. In that moment I felt still. More still than I had in years. “She was like that about everything,” I croaked out. “Just accepted things.” I wiped my cheeks. “That still doesn’t answer my question.”
She nodded. “I needed to know how much of your mother you have inside of you,” she whispered, and for the first time ever, I saw the strain of our lives etched in every line of her face. It was the most human I’d ever seen her. Even more human than she was in the video feeds I used to watch about her protesting magical bans and purity policies. “I see so much of her in you.” She chuckled. “I thought that would make me glad.”
Her words began to play on a loop in my head. They stilled me. My eyebrows furrowed. “You’re scaring me.”
She scoffed. “All my life, I’ve believed in the greater good. My parents were activists. Sometimes I felt like they loved humanity more than their own daughter.”
The air around me went still. Something was shifting. Some energy that didn’t belong made my temples throb.
Her laugh was bitter, as if she were trying to expel something from herself she didn’t particularly want to hold on to. “For so long it made sense. We should be tied to something bigger than ourselves, right? Or else, what’s the point of living?”
A dark thought occurred to me. “This whole thing, it has nothing to do with my mom, does it?”
In that moment, her eyes begged me to understand something that I couldn’t understand. To hear something that she couldn’t bring herself to say. It was the strangest feeling, standing here with my most trusted friend, unable to understand anything about her intentions.
“It has everything, and nothing to do with your mother.”
“Aubrey—”
“For so long, I’ve thought only of you. Of us, here, in the Underground. But that kind of thinking doesn’t serve the common good.”
In the distance, there was a scream, and then what sounded like a gunshot. The room rippled, and my heart exploded into the pounding of panic. I rushed for the door.
“Don’t worry,” Aubrey said from behind me in a low voice. “I have been assured that they won’t be harmed.”
I didn’t turn around because I couldn’t turn around. Their footsteps were like thunder sweeping through the Underground, uprooting my home.
“I had to make sure that you could accept the fact that you might have to die,” she said in a barely audible voice. “I had to because you’re the only one that can take it. And you must… you must take it.”
Her words meshed together like so much white noise. People were calling my name. People that had depended on my protection for five years. They told me to run. To get out. I was rooted in place.
“Lawrence, you must believe that I remain your truest, most loyal friend.”
I closed my eyes, still unable to turn around. “Aubrey, what have you done?”
Boom against the door, followed by a rattle.
Boom. Boom.
The buzz of voices, mostly men.
“Not you,” I said, shaking my head, in a daze. “Not you, Aubrey.”
“It isn’t—”
The door flew off its hinges and crashed to the ground, the thud stealing with it the last of her sentence. I stared into the eyes of a tall, graying man. He was lean but well-built for a man his age. His green eyes bore the intensity of a leader. That was the feeling I got from him. And there was a jagged scar slashed across his right eye.
“Lawrence Kincaid.”
Three women dressed in flowing, white robes flanked him. Behind him, an army of more men. They had weapons trained on me. The man with the scar reached into the pocket of his long coat and brought out cuffs that matched the ones I wore for play only hours before.
A shiver of magic rushed through me. It built, like a dark storm as I stared into the eyes of this man that thought he could come into my home and threaten my people.
He did the last thing I expected him to do. He smiled. And it was a warm, friendly gesture, so out of place given our situation. “Before you act, Miss Kincaid, please remember, you may very well be powerful enough to take me and my men down, maybe even protect your people. But you must consider the people not here, that you can’t protect. People that I will go after if you fail to simply surrender, and come with me.”
My eyes narrowed.
He held up his hands. “You’re a powerful witch. You know I am not a man that bluffs.” He smiled. “Or is there no one on the surface dear to you?”
Tears stung my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. “Why?” I asked, still staring at the scarred man.
I knew she knew I was talkin
g to her. I could feel her discomfort. Her guilt. I wasn’t moved.
“Because,” she finally said. “The means justifies the ends.”
They were only words to me. Words that I allowed to be able to exist when I didn’t kill her.
“Well, Miss Kincaid—what’s it going to be? The easy way?” He snapped open the cuffs. “Or the bloody way?”
I considered my options. Was I willing to risk Ty? Dorothy? Of course not. I knew I only had one move, at least for now.
“Do I get to at least know the name of my captor?” I asked in an even voice.
He smiled again, reminding me of the father I barely knew. “My friends call me Alpha.”
I narrowed my eyes and held my arms out to him. He bowed his head as some show of respect, stepped forward, and bound my wrists. “You’ve made a wise choice. If you continue to be this cooperative, our arrangement will go off smoothly.”
I set my mouth into a hard line as he took me by the elbow. Before he could lead me out, I turned my head slightly. “You best make sure that I never see your face again.”
They were the last words I ever planned on speaking to my best friend.
Alpha draped a black, velvet cloth over my head. I almost laughed at the overdramatic gesture. Inside, my blood boiled, and then Alpha led me through the tunnels of the Underground with no idea he was now fucking with the most dangerous woman in the city.
Chapter 18
The next moments of my life were all darkness, in more way than one. There was the fact that I couldn’t see, and even worse, there was the darkness swelling inside of me. I felt as if Aubrey had scooped me out, left me hollow, and let the darkness of spirit to better attach itself to my bones. To sing in my blood.
I felt the moment that I was no longer in the Underground. My body and mind were so attuned to its protective magic that the moment I was no longer around it, I felt it leave like a physical breath.
Alpha threw me into the back of something, a truck was my bet. He sat next to me, on a cool metal bench, muttering something about how everything was going to be okay.
