by D. N. Hoxa
It was the devamp servant holding the gun to Nash’s head.
Blood and flesh everywhere. Something pulled me back and this time, I did hit the floor on my ass. Aiden was in front of me while Kitty and a large orange fox jumped forward toward Red Tie and the devamps that were holding the others captive.
Holy balls, I’d forgotten all about them!
Without waiting for another second, I jumped to my feet and grabbed both my guns again.
“Aiden, move,” I called and when he stepped to the side, I pulled the triggers.
No more bullets.
Cursing under my breath, I ran forward just as a ball of white light left Aiden’s hands and crashed onto two servants who were fighting against the others.
In front of the green painted windows was Red Tie, smiling at Lucian the fox, and at Pixie, who now only had one katana left. Around her wrist, there was still a piece of rope from when the devamps had tied her hands behind her back. They should have known that rope wasn’t going to hold her back—or the others.
In front of me, Aiden, Nash, Kitty and Terrin were fighting off the servants.
“Don’t spell her!” Red Tie called and the floor beneath my feet seemed to shake.
Perfect fucking timing. Without even bothering to think about where to get another weapon, I jumped in front of Nash. Don’t spell her, he’s said. The her was me. Those servants would not dare throw their magic at me now.
The fact that Red Tie knew what I could do was too disturbing to think about, so I didn’t.
“Move back!” I said to the others. “Behind me.”
For the first time since I met them, they obeyed without word. Nash stayed by my side with his arms raised, lava pouring from his palms. The servants shot their weapons, and Nash’s fire consumed the bullets. Terrin was working his magic again and Kitty was on one knee, shooting guns and throwing knives faster than my eyes could see.
My body was my only weapon, it seemed. I was their shield. I’d take it, because it was so much better than doing nothing.
Until a huge body covered in orange fur landed on top of Nash, and they both went tumbling to the floor. Lucian the fox growled and Nash tried to get him off his legs, when Terrin flew forward and landed two feet away from them.
I turned just in time to see Red Tie holding Pixie by the throat, her feet floating on air as she struggled to breathe. I saw nothing as I charged him, a false sense of bravery spiking my blood.
Red Tie was no longer smiling, or in a good mood. When I got close to him, my mind made up to at least scratch him with my nails if I couldn’t do anything else, he simply raised a hand and hit me across the face, and I flew right back where I came from.
I hit the floor so hard, air refused to enter my lungs for a long time.
“You are an ungrateful little bug, Nova Vaughn,” Red Tie said. Black spots were in front of my eyes and I tried to blink them away, but by the time I could breathe again, Red Tie was standing right above me. If I tried to stand up now, he’d just hit me again. No, I needed a better plan. “I gave you so much power, and this is how you repay me?”
“You gave me nothing,” I hissed, and I was going to spit at his feet but my mouth was dry as a desert. No saliva left in it.
“I gave you everything,” Red Tie said, smiling like a snake. “When I told you that I could use people like you on my team, I really meant it, little bug. And I’ve been looking for a way to get through the Order’s mages forever.”
My ears whistled for a second. What the hell was he talking about?
“You came at exactly the right time. A weak little mage with nothing to lose by putting your life on the line. So, I thought, why not give it a try?” Palmer’s face filled my head. Everything else disappeared for a second. “Though I must admit, your turned out even better than I imagined.”
“No,” I whispered because it simply couldn’t be true. Palmer hadn’t betrayed the Order. He couldn’t be working with Red Tie. He couldn’t have put in me whatever the fuck he wanted, because he was the only one in charge of the fire spirit procedure.
Except…he could have. And easily.
Everything came crashing down while Red Tie grabbed me by my arm and pulled me to my feet. He left me there, completely defeated, and went to stand by his twelve remaining servants.
“See these men? They live well, I assure you. Better than most,” the devamp said. He put one hand in his pocket and continued to pace in front of his men, while the rest of my team were down on the ground, unable to even stand on their own.
Guilt roared within me, even stronger than the beast. I’d allowed them to come here and die because of me.
“You are going to live better than them. As well as me,” Red Tie said, then stopped to analyze me, inch by inch. He was at least ten feet away from me, but it still felt like his eyes could touch me. “My demonic mage. The world will never be the same now that we are united.”
“Nova, get down!” Nash called.
Before the words even registered in my head, my legs gave up on me and I fell to the floor. Orange filled my vision as Lucian the fox jumped over my head and crashed onto Red Tie and his men. Hands on my shoulders pulled me up. Nash was in front of me, his hands on my face.
He sealed my lips with his as I held onto his wrists, wanting to tell him how sorry I was, wishing we’d had more time. But there was no time for words, so I said it all in a kiss. I said it in the way I held his arms, and in the tear that slipped from my eye and touched his cheek, too.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered when he let go of me, and I thought he meant about what happened with Clearwater.
But he didn’t mean Clearwater, and I figured that out when he began to run toward the servants and Red Tie.
Lucian the fox was thrown backward by a single fist from the devamp. He missed me by a hair, but I couldn’t care less. All I could think about was Nash, who, seemingly in slow motion, ran toward Red Tie.
“No!” I screamed at the top of my voice, because I knew exactly what he was going to do.
Red Tie’s eyes grew wide as he looked at Nash approaching. He even swung an arm back to hit him, but Nash dropped down to his knees and slid all the way to the devamp’s feet.
Fire started in Nash’s arms and spread too fast around his torso and legs. I shot forward with all my strength, the whole world around me forgotten. All that mattered was that I reached Nash in time.
But then his fire spread from his feet and onto the floor, coming fast toward me.
He raised his arms to the sides and the fire spread around the servants, too. The devamp could only look down at him, confused as fuck, because he had no idea what was coming for him.
Nash’s fire burned the ground a split second before my foot stepped on it. Another scream tore from my throat as my chest vibrated and the beast inside me roared.
Orange turned white.
Flames turned to ice.
It spread so fast that, even though I ran the four steps it took to get to them, I still couldn’t get to him fast enough.
I don’t remember the exact details, but I remember how it felt. What my mind looked like when I fell down on my knees and put my arms on Nash’s back. Nash’s frozen back.
Nash was gone. In his place was now a statue of ice, of a man kneeling, his arms stretched wide to his sides.
A gunshot close to my ears. When I looked up, I could hazily see Kitty with a gun in her hand, shooting Red Tie right in the forehead, three times.
But the body didn’t fall to the floor, because the devamp was completely frozen, too. I did, though. The back of my head hit the floor right next to Nash’s feet, and I closed my eyes wishing with all my heart that this was all just a bad dream.
Chapter Twenty-seven
When I woke up, the first face I saw was Terrin’s.
That’s how I knew this wasn’t a dream.
He pulled me by my hands until I stood up, and the room spun and spun until I could no longer tell where anything was.
But then, I looked to my side and bile rose up my throat.
A man kneeling, his arms spread wide, completely frozen. Another standing in front of him, three bullet holes in his forehead, dripping blood. Twelve others standing behind, some of them caught by the ice while they were turning away to run the hell out of there.
Run, because the ice queen just went mental.
My brain, trying to cope, I guess, but no amount of bad jokes helped in getting that bile down to my stomach again.
“Nova, look at me. We have to go, now!” Terrin said and he shook me by the shoulders. But I couldn’t look away from Nash.
I’d done that. I’d frozen him. He was no longer man, or fire spirit, or salamander. He was ice.
“If you want to save Luke, we need to leave, right now!”
Luke.
Luke?
“Come on, Nova! Stay with me!”
Luke. My cousin Luke. The light of my life. The reason why I’d gone after the devamp in the first place.
“The blood,” I said, my voice dry and strange.
“I have it,” Terrin said. “But we have to go now. The Order is already on the way to the station. If they get there before we do, you won’t be able to give this to your cousin.” He showed me a syringe. It was full of blood. Had he taken it from Red Tie’s forehead bullet holes?
“But I can’t. Nash is—”
“The others will stay here to clean up the mess. Nova, we need to leave, right now.”
The others. So that meant that the others were alive.
“Is he…” I started to ask but my voice trailed off.
“Alive,” Terrin said. “The devamp is alive.”
“No!” I shouted. “Nash. Is Nash alive?”
Terrin narrowed his brows. “I don’t know, Nova.”
He didn’t know.
But that was a good thing, right? Because it wasn’t a no. It wasn’t definite. When you die, you die. You don’t say I don’t know.
“Save him, please,” I said to Terrin, but he didn’t bother to reply. He simply dragged me around the frozen devamp servants and threw me out the door before I could get another look at Nash.
***
We were alone in the helicopter. I had so many questions, but for some reason, my mouth refused to open. My mind refused to put words in the right order. My body refused to cooperate completely.
Luke, Nash, Luke, Nash, Luke, Nash…their faces had made mashed potatoes out of my brain. I refused to think I’d lost one to save the other.
I don’t know. Terrin said I don’t know. He wouldn’t lie to me, would he?
“It was Palmer,” he said after some time on the air. His voice still sounded funny coming from the headphones he’d had to put on me, because my hands wouldn’t work. “That sonovabitch. I’ll break all his teeth before I deliver him to the Order.”
“Why?” I whispered, surprised that my voice even worked.
“Because, who knows? Money? Power? Just for the heck of it? I never liked that guy,” Terrin mumbled. “But I’m glad that you’re okay.”
Okay? But I wasn’t okay. I was a… “A demonic mage. What does that mean?” Because that’s what Red Tie said I was. The devamp that wanted me to call him god.
Terrin was silent for a very long time. Then, he said those words again. I. Don’t. Know.
“What have they done to me?” I asked, and when I expected tears to fall down my eyes, they didn’t.
“Listen to me, Nova. It’s over, okay? Everything will be fine.” But even he didn’t believe that. “Once we get back to Luke, we’ll explain everything to Ross and the Order, and everything is going to go very smoothly, don’t you worry about a thing.”
I tried to do as he said, but not worrying meant not feeling. And not feeling was impossible, because I felt like a stranger in my own body. Like it belonged to someone else, to the beast inside of me, and I’d been wiped off the map in Palmer’s procedure room. Soon, I would no longer even remember myself. That’s what I felt.
“Shit,” Terrin hissed a few minutes later. “They’re here.”
“Who’s here?”
“The Order!” he shouted, then did something to the helicopter, because it turned left abruptly. Strangely, even though I was sitting in the pilot cabin with him, I didn’t even feel nauseous at having looked out the window the whole time. I barely even noticed, in fact.
“Take this.” He fished in his pocket, then took out the syringe with Red Tie’s blood in it. “Get it to Luke as fast as you can. I’m going to land us in the woods, and I’m going to create a distraction for the Order. And you’re going to use a side door to get in, okay?”
“Why? You said once you explain everything to the Order, everything was going to go smoothly.” That’s what he’d said. Smoothly.
When he cursed under his breath, I knew exactly what it meant. Everything was not going to go smoothly. On the contrary. All hell was about to break loose, and I, the devil herself, was in the middle of it.
Now that we were there, there was no reason for me to pretend like the situation was anything other than what it was. This was life. I was going to have to face the music now. With a deep breath, I prepared for it.
“Tell me where the side door is.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Terrin sure knew how to cause a distraction. When he landed the helicopter in the woods across from the station building, who I thought were men from the Senior Order of Magic were already running toward us. But Terrin ran out of the woods, waving his arms like a monkey, shouting at the top of his voice, telling them we got one.
I hid twenty-five feet away from the helicopter—I counted—so that when the men from the Order took Terrin inside, and four others disappeared in the woods to search for the helicopter, I waited until Terrin was inside the building—just like he said.
Then I took off running.
The side door was east, right next to a large tree, Terrin said, the only one close to the building, so there was no way I could miss it. He was right. The door was closed, and I kicked it open at the third try. That man was very good with details, it seemed.
Without daring to look back, I held onto the syringe in my hand and ran inside, up a flight of stairs and into the side hallway. Luke was on the third floor, but the elevators were a no-no, according to Terrin. So, the stairs were going to have to do.
I ran like the entire world depended on it. I’d never been in the emergency stairs before, so I had no idea what to expect. The walls were white, no sign anywhere, and I really didn’t have the head to count the floors. So, I went with a feeling.
The door I chose to open was luckily unlocked. I opened it just a bit at first, to see if anybody could see me, but the small space in front of it wouldn’t let me see who was on the other side of the hallway behind the thick wall.
But it was Luke’s floor. I recognized the doors. A cry escaped my lips as I ran forward. Now, nobody was going to be able to stop me.
I stopped in the middle of the hallway to check which way Luke’s room was—my mind was still a bit foggy.
“Stop right there!” someone called.
Absolutely not.
Once I recognized the door to Luke’s room on my left, I ran toward it, not caring how many people were behind me, or if they had guns pointed at me, ready to pull the trigger. My heart beat in my throat every time my feet hit the ground, and when I touched the knob of the door, a little piece of my soul was returned to me.
Inside, there were only five bodies left. Luke was still lying on his bed, and above him was the blond woman who’d laughed at me the first time I’d been there. Cadence was her name.
“You cannot be in here,” she said when she saw me, opening her arms as I ran toward her, as if she were hoping to stop me. But she couldn’t. I didn’t care how terrified she looked. I didn’t care where she’d end up when I pushed her with my arms on her chest with all the strength I had left.
She was the only thing standing between me and Lu
ke now.
“Nova Vaughn, freeze!”
I didn’t. I unfroze. Luke was lying on his bed, so pale and thin, a few days from looking like a real corpse.
No more.
I took the lid off the needle of the syringe and stabbed him right in the heart with it. Terrin hadn’t been specific about this little detail, but my gut said the heart was the place to do.
I pushed the blood into him, and my heart and soul went together with every drop of it.
“Luke, wake up,” I said, grabbing his face in my hands not bothering to remove the needle from his chest.
But just as my skin touched his, someone grabbed me from behind and pulled me away.
“Luke!” I cried. “Wake up, Luke! Wake up!”
Three men held me back while I tried my best to break free from them and get to Luke. He had to wake up. After coming face to face with what I had become, the only thing that would make it all bearable was him. Awake. Alive. Well.
“Take her downstairs,” someone said. I couldn’t even look at their faces.
“No, please. Please just let me—”
Luke’s eyes moved. My breath caught in my throat and my body went limp. If it wasn’t for the people holding me by the arms, I would have hit the ground already.
But they didn’t let go of me, not even after Luke’s eyes popped open and the whole world promised itself to me and me only.
Laughing and crying at the same time, I took in a shaky breath. “Luke, look at me,” I said, and the people stopped dragging me toward the door. I no longer struggled against their hold. I’d rather I saw Luke from across the room, than not at all.
“Nova?”
Another cry escaped my lips, this one much stronger. His voice was weak, scratchy, barely recognizable, but it was Luke. It was him.
“Luke,” I whispered, crying without tears, which for some reason still refused to make a blurry mess out of my vision, no matter how much I needed them to.
A man wearing a grey suit walked over to Luke’s bed when he tried to sit up, and he helped him. Laughing at myself, I didn’t dare blink from fear I’d miss even half a second of this.
