Atlantis Rising

by Gloria Craw

  Then I heard the voice in my mind. “Don’t stop the fight, Jillian! You’re stronger than you think!”

  My only coherent thought was to wonder why my dead mother kept talking to me all the time. But then the burning started. It began like a slow flame in my stomach that grew white hot and branched out into my arms and legs. This is it, I thought, this is death. But instead of feeling my energy die out, it expanded like natural gas igniting.

  I felt so full of heat I wondered if my body had become engulfed in flames. As my vision cleared, I saw Sebastian’s eyes shifting all over the room. We weren’t alone. Neither of us could see them, but we were surrounded by a number of unseen dewing energies. They felt familiar to me. I recognized one of them as Brandy. I thought I recognized anther as Angela, Lillian’s sister. One of them was my mother, the White Laurel.

  I got to my feet. All the pain of the last few minutes was replaced by white-hot energy. Gathering this power in my mind, I pushed it out at Sebastian. The drapes at the window ignited from the heat, and I saw fear in Sebastian’s eyes for the first time.

  “You’re not a thoughtmaker,” he said in a strangled voice. “You’re a…conduit.”

  “Just think of it as karma coming back around to kick you in the ass,” I said, pushing the energy out again and wrapping it around Sebastian’s neck. I imagined myself squeezing as tight as I could.

  Sebastian transformed into a gasping invalid. He moaned and leaned forward in his chair, his aged body contorting in pain. I waited for the shield around his mind to break. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would. He was already spent from fighting Ian and Brandy. When the crack appeared, I reached forward with my essence and let the energy inside me crush him.

  His body slipped off the chair and onto the floor. Then I saw the wound my mother had left him with all those years ago. His left leg was missing…entirely.

  The rebound hit me all at once, and I dropped like a stage puppet. “You must finish it,” the voice in my head said.

  I made myself crawl to Sebastian’s limp body. I picked up his head and started to turn it the way I’d seen Ian do to the tiger’s. Someone burst into the room yelling, “Fire!”

  Startled, I dropped Sebastian’s body. Through smoke I could see the man looking into the room. He was dressed like one of the cleaning crew and was likely the human Katherine had seen the future through.

  “Call 911!” I yelled at him.

  The fire from the drapes cast a reddish glow in the room. “Finish it,” my mother’s voice repeated.

  I turned to Sebastian, but a hissing sound caught my attention. The ceiling was on fire, too. The sprinkler system above us came on, but it didn’t slow the flames at all. I crawled to Ian. I wouldn’t let him die alone. When I found him, there was no sign of life in his body, but I put my cheek on his chest and waited. Gradually, I felt a low hum and then a faint vibration. Then I heard a heartbeat, and his chest rose. He coughed loud.

  “You’re not dead!” I cried. “You’re not dead!”

  He opened his eyes slowly, and I started to laugh. An absurd reaction, really, but I laughed and laughed.

  “Did you finish Sebastian?” Ian asked weakly.

  I felt for his vibration. There was nothing there. “I crushed his mind,” I replied, looking toward the body. “I think he’s dead enough.”

  “You have to make sure,” Ian insisted.

  So I crawled back into the middle of the steamy room and found Sebastian’s body just as a piece of the ceiling came falling down. Rolling aside in the nick of time, I watched what remained of him burn under the rubble.

  “We have to get out of here now,” I yelled to Ian. “The entire ceiling is coming down!”

  I went back to him and helped him sit up. His movements were feeble, but the light of life was returning to his eyes. “More dewing are here,” he said anxiously.

  “I know. I tried something new. I think it’s time to see if it worked.”

  Ian leaned heavily on me as I helped him to his feet. Suffering from the rebound myself, I’d never been so thankful for my six feet of lean muscle and size-ten feet. I managed to support him into the hallway but stopped when someone came running toward us.

  “Lillian?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Rescuing you,” she shouted. “The casino was crawling with Truss, but they all left in a hurry. It’s like they were chasing something invisible. We’ve got to get out before they come back.”

  She rushed me and Ian toward the emergency exit. Looking down the long flights of stairs, I could have cried. “There’s no way we can get him down these,” I said.

  Spencer burst through a door a couple of flights below and came running up to us.

  “Thank goodness,” Lillian said, letting Ian’s weight fall on his father.

  Like it was nothing, Spencer hefted his son over one shoulder and started down the stairs.

  “What about Brandy?” I asked remembering her lying dead on the floor in the burning room.

  “There’s nothing we can do for her now,” Lillian said, wrapping a skinny arm around my waist to help me. “I think she would want us to get out of here while we can.”

  Katherine and the other Thane joined us at various intervals. Pushing through the door at ground level, we saw four fire trucks in front of the building. Casino customers were being escorted out. It was pandemonium. No one noticed our ragtag group crossing the street.

  When we found a bench to sit on, Spencer set Ian down, and asked, “Can someone please explain what just happened? I was in the middle of smashing a Truss in the face when he turned and ran away. I know I look tough, but I expected him to put up a fight, at least.”

  “Pretty much the same thing happened to me,” a man who’d joined us on the stairs said.

  The others nodded their heads like they’d had similar experiences.

  I watched Ian as they talked. He was soaked from the sprinklers. His hair was covered in ash, and his face was streaked with it, but he was alive. I was alive. When he looked up at me, I could almost read his mind. He was thinking, Told you we could do it—or something very much like that.

  Spencer and Lillian were still trying to figure out why the Truss had run out of the casino like crazy people.

  “I cloaked a thought,” I said to put the matter to rest. “I told them I’d escaped the casino and that Sebastian ordered them to go after me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When we got back to Ian’s house, I called home. Alex answered. “Hey, Alison. What’s up?”

  “Nothing much,” I lied. “What’s up with you?”

  “I’m doing my homework and hoping I don’t throw up dinner. We had bean burgers tonight.”

  I smiled and leaned my head back in the sofa. It was good to know some things never changed. “How are Mom and Dad? Everything is okay with them, right?”

  “Yeah,” he replied in bored tones. “Mom’s on the computer. Dad’s watching the news.”

  “Sounds like a typically boring night at our house.”

  “Pretty much. This afternoon was exciting, though. Your weird boss showed up at my school.”

  I glanced toward the dining room table where Lillian was sitting. “She did?”

  “She tackled some guy in the parking lot during my lunch hour. For an old chick, she’s got some wicked tae kwon do skills.”

  “That’s super weird.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, I’ll be heading home soon,” I said. “Tell Mom, will you?”

  “Yep,” he replied.

  “I love you, Alex,” I said before he could hang up.

  “You keep saying that,” he replied, unimpressed.

  I ended the call and asked Lillian, “What happened at Alex’s school today?”

  “Oh, that,” she replied. “I stopped a Truss from taking him. I didn’t want to be so public about it, but the guy didn’t give me a choice.”

  “Alex said you tae kwon do’d him
.”

  “I just punched him in the neck,” she said with a shrug.

  We all stared at her. “Well, thanks,” I said with a blink.

  There was a moment of quiet after that. We’d all used our essences and we were hurting on different levels. Ian was the worst off by far. Katherine had tucked him under a blanket to help with the reverse heating thing, but he was pale and his eyes kept losing focus. I slid closer to him, so he could lean on me a little.

  “How did Luke get to you guys so fast?” I asked.

  “Luke,” Katherine said. “We haven’t seen Luke since he left town.”

  “He wasn’t the mole,” I said. “Sebastian had him locked up in the casino with me. After Ian took the guards out, we sent him to find Lillian.”

  “I never saw Luke,” Lillian said. “When Spencer and Katherine got back into town, I told them what the three of you were doing, and they started feeling out your location. Thankfully, it didn’t take long to find you.”

  “We knew we were outnumbered,” Spencer said, “but I wasn’t going to wait for more help.”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten very far if the thoughtmaker hadn’t done her cloaking thing,” Ian said in a cracked voice. “That was amazing.”

  I smiled over at him.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” Katherine asked me.

  “This is my wedding dress,” I said, still grossed out. Everyone but Ian was stunned. “Sebastian wanted me to choose to likeness with him, so the two of us could rule the world together.”

  “Choose to likeness,” Lillian repeated with disgust. “Even if you wanted to likeness with him, you couldn’t make it happen.”

  “Maybe she can,” Ian replied.

  “Sebastian was half human,” I explained. “He said being that way meant he could choose his own likeness.”

  “That’s just ridiculous,” Spencer said. “Aside from the fact that neither human nor dewing are attracted to each other after a certain point, a pairing between our species wouldn’t produce viable offspring. We’ve done tests to prove it.”

  “Whatever your test results,” I said, “it’s possible. Sebastian was part human. He tried to hide it, but I can tell the difference between human thoughts and dewing thoughts now. His were definitely human. Because we had that in common, he thought we could choose our likeness.”

  “He can’t have been half human,” Katherine said disbelievingly. “Maybe he’d just been raised by humans like you.”

  I shook my head in denial. “What happens to a dewing when they lose a leg or an arm?”

  Spencer thought about it. “It takes some time, but it would grow back.”

  “Well, Sebastian was missing a leg. That’s what my mother did to him when they fought. She must have cut his leg off and it never grew back. That’s why he was so reclusive. He couldn’t let anyone see him that way, because they’d know he wasn’t really dewing. Not entirely, anyway.”

  “Whatever Sebastian was,” Ian said, “his energy was stronger than I’d ever dreamed. I was half dead during whatever Alison did to him.”

  Lillian watched me, expecting the details I’d promised her, but I didn’t want to explain everything about my fight with Sebastian Truss. Not yet, anyway. He’d called me a conduit, and I knew what that meant. All the energies around me back in his office had been the energies of the dewing he’d killed. I was just the gate they’d come through. The problem was, I didn’t know how or if I could ever open the gate again.

  Feeling too tired to explain it all, I said, “Sebastian was weak after his fight with Brandy and Ian. Ian was in bad shape, and I needed to get Sebastian to direct his attention to me. His main goal was to get me to likeness to him, so I used thoughtmaking to get him to believe I’d already likenessed to Ian. That really pissed him off, but it confused him, too. That’s when my essence rose, and I crushed his mind.”

  It was an anticlimactic explanation, and I knew Ian suspected I was holding back. It was good enough for Lillian, though. “You finished him, right?” she asked me.

  “I didn’t have to. He was on fire when the ceiling collapsed on him.”

  “Hmm,” Lillian said. “I would sure like to have been there when he died.”

  Silence settled for a moment. “What are we going to do for Brandy?” I asked quietly. “I hate that we had to leave her…body behind.”

  Ian studied his hands, and Katherine wiped her eyes. “We don’t hold funerals,” Spencer said. “But maybe in this case we could have a memorial or something.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “That’s what we’ll do.”

  “So what now?” Lillian asked.

  “I get to go home,” I said, with a tear falling. It was the first time I’d let any out in years. “I’ll go back to school and maybe even college.”

  “We’ll be around for a while, too,” Spencer said smiling. “Katherine and I have decided to stay in Vegas for a while. Ian wants to continue at Fillmore, so the three of us will be around to help you learn more about your heritage and abilities.”

  I’d expected that the Thanes would go back to their lives as soon as our business with Sebastian was finished. They’d changed their plans to help me. I took a deep breath as I looked at them. “Thank you,” I said.

  After that, Spencer and Katherine walked Lillian out. When Ian and I were alone, I looked inside my backpack, where I’d put Brandy’s letter. I pulled it out and unfolded it. “Brandy gave me this,” I said. “She told me not to read it until the fight was over. I think she meant for you to read it, too.”

  Ian looked over my shoulder as I read. Dear Alison, If you’re reading this, you lived. I can’t tell you how happy that thought makes me. I want to say thank you for helping us carry out our crazy plan to fight Sebastian Truss tonight. If we were successful in our work, the world will be a better place tomorrow. If we weren’t successful, you are part of a different puzzle with different players that will one day defeat him. You are truly gifted among us. No other dewing could have learned so much so fast. I know you were abandoned and hurt when you were young. I can’t begin to understand why destiny placed you in such a position, but I hope in the end you won’t turn away from those who care about you. Please tell the Golden One I never thought of him as an imitation of his father or Jack. He has always been the real thing. Remember your promise to me and be happy. Love, Brandy.

  I closed the note, wiped my tears away and leaned my head against Ian’s shoulder. “Wherever she is now, I know she’s happy,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he agreed.

  Looking down at my clothing, I said, “We need to have a bonfire in your backyard, so I can burn this dress.”

  I went home to find my parents cuddled up on the sofa again. Seeing me standing in the doorway, Mom asked, “How did it go today?”

  Well, I’d been drugged, kidnapped, and almost killed. As usual, it was the almost that really mattered. “Same as always,” I said, coming in.

  “Where did you get those clothes?” she asked.

  I had no idea what Sebastian’s people had done with my clothes. I’d borrowed a shirt and pants from Katherine. The pants were about four inches too short. “Ah…I borrowed them from Ian’s mom. I spilled something at dinner.”

  Mom got up. She touched my hair and kissed my cheek. “You’re such a pretty girl,” she said, “and almost all grown-up. You’ll be at college this time next year. I can hardly believe it.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll make the most of the time we’ve got until then.”

  I said good night to my parents and hauled my tired, sore self up to bed.

  The next morning I sat up slowly, testing my muscles. As expected, I was stiff, but I could still move, which was saying a lot since I hadn’t been able to walk after the tiger attacked me. The white-hot energy that had flowed through me last night must have had some kind of healing power.

  Pulling back the covers, I saw Brandy’s letter lying haphazardly on my nightstand. I’d been too tired t
o know what to do with it the night before. Picking it up, I ran my fingers over the creases in the paper. Brandy’s fingers had folded the paper just a day before…now she was gone. She hadn’t wanted me think of her death as a tragedy. To her it was an evolution. I would try to see it that way, too. But I would miss her.

  I opened the top drawer of my nightstand and put her note between the pages of my dog-eared copy of Dragonsong. I wondered if she had ever read the book. I thought she would have liked it.

  Mom was sipping a cup of herbal tea at the table when I went to the kitchen. She looked me up and down. “You love me, don’t you, Alison?” she asked.

  I poured myself some cereal. “Of course I love you, Mom.”

  “Then for the love of all that is holy, will you please let me buy you some clothes with color in them?”

  I chuckled. I’d actually been considering a wardrobe update. “How about we go to the mall this Saturday?” I suggested.

  Mom sighed deeply. “Finally,” she muttered.

  Alex came in looking upset. “Have you guys seen my rocks?” he asked.

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Two of my favorite rocks are missing from my collection,” he said, sitting down.

  “You have a million rocks in your collection. How can you know if two of them are missing?” I asked

  “I really like my rocks,” he replied. “I just know.”

  “What would your friends say if they knew how much you liked your rocks?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Ben collects yo-yos. Mike likes old Hot Wheels. I like my rocks. What’s the big deal?”

  I hid my smile behind a glass of orange juice. “If I come across them, I’ll let you know,” I assured him.

  At school, I stopped in the north hall to flip through my locker combination. I opened the door and moved things around, but about halfway through the process, I realized it wasn’t necessary anymore. The hunt for thoughtmakers had ended with Sebastian Truss. I unloaded about half the book weight from my backpack into the locker. Then I tossed the notebooks I never used in the trash can across the hall. An enormous weight had been removed from my back, literally.