My brother heaved out a huge breath, and as darkness encroached upon my vision, I could see the sweat glistening on his brow drip down his face and spatter onto the stones.
Then I could breathe. It hit me so suddenly, I almost couldn’t believe it. My lightsaber slipped from my hands as I collapsed to my hands and knees gasping for air. I could scarcely hear my brother chanting in what sounded like a mixture of Latin and Ancient Greek. The power in the room exploded upward into the air like a rainbow geyser.
Which was exactly when the door on the other end of the room burst inward with the shriek of tortured steel and the crack of snapping wood. It tore from its hinges, hit the ground, and bounced a few times before sliding to a stop. Justin stood there in wolf-man form. He was battered and bleeding with bits of fur burned off his chest. He’d been hurt enough that his healing was stretched to the limit, otherwise he wouldn’t have been marked at all. That wasn’t good by any means, but the sight of him standing there filled me with hope. He’d come.
His chest heaved with effort as he stepped into the room, leaving bloody footprints on the floor as his claws clicked ominously on the stone. His eyes swept the room and when they fell on me he stopped. Elation filled his eyes, as if he never thought he’d find me.
“Annie!” he cried, bounding toward me just as another surge of energy exploded from my brother’s Infinity Gauntlet. It felt unlike anything I’d ever felt before, so powerful, it was nearly like standing next to divinity. The gauntlet shattered in another pulse of godly energy, flinging bits of gold, emerald, and ruby in every direction as Gordon collapsed to the ground.
The shockwave knocked me onto my back, and the feel of the ritual magic was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It left slimy snail trails across my skin and filled my nose with the scent of rotten meat. I gagged, trying to fight off the feel of the ritual crawling over me, but I knew deep down even a hundred scalding showers wouldn’t wash off the filth clinging to me.
The wave of magic swept outward into Justin with enough force to throw him backward through the doorway he’d come through. I heard him crash hard into the stone with a meaty thud, but I knew he’d live. Even if his healing was stretched to the limit, he’d live. He had to live.
Instead, I turned my gaze back toward my brother. He lay face down on the ground. His eyes were shut, and blood dripped from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. Was he dead? I couldn’t be sure. Part of me hoped he was because if he wasn’t after what he’d just pulled, I’d kill him.
I got slowly to my feet as the figurines in the room shattered one by one. Shards of clay flew through the air like daggers, and as I dropped to the ground and covered my head and neck with my arms in a vain attempt to protect myself, I heard a chorus of screams fill the air.
It hit me deep down in the core of my being, and I honestly had no better way to describe it other than saying it felt like hundreds of people had suddenly cried out in pain. The shudder of their cries sank deep into my bones, rendering me weak and immobile as the bits of clay I barely felt continued to smack into me.
I wasn’t sure how long I lay there unable to move when silence finally descended across the ritual chamber, but it couldn’t have been long because Justin hadn’t returned. I slowly opened my eyes and looked up. The room was dark. The fragments littering the room cast a faint, dying glow, like day old glow sticks.
My brother was still in the center of his painted star, only now his exposed skin was covered by dozens of cuts and scratches. As I got to my feet and took a couple hesitant, swaying steps in his general direction, I realized I could see his chest moving beneath his clothes. He wasn’t dead.
The wave of emotion that hit me was nearly indescribable. Yes, he was a horrible person, and I was pretty sure he’d just murdered a ton of people, but at the same time, he was my brother. And as sad as it was, their deaths were abstract and incomprehensible at the moment.
I took another step toward him as Justin clambered into the room. He wasn’t in werewolf form anymore, having somehow reverted back to normal. His eyes were bloodshot, and as he looked around wild-eyed, he caught my gaze.
“No…” he whispered, and the sound tugged at me in a way I couldn’t rightly explain. It was twofold because I cared for him more than I could really admit, but it was more for the sorrow that sound conveyed. He knew all those people were dead, and he’d known them. Their deaths were not abstract for him.
For him, they were very real, and as his eyes swept around the room and fell upon my brother, I knew Gordon was as good as dead.
“Don’t do it, Justin,” I cried, but if he heard me, it didn’t stop him from snarling and breaking into a run toward my fallen brother.
23
“Stop!” I cried, pushing myself to my feet and hurling myself between Justin and my brother.
He slid to a stop on the stone inches away from me. His chest heaved as he sucked in huge, angry breaths. Heat radiated off of him as he looked past me toward the fallen form of my brother. His eyes lingered there and his face hardened into a mask of rage. In that moment, I saw so much of his father’s icy gaze in his own eyes, it actually chilled me.
“He killed my people,” Justin said and his voice was so low it caused my stomach to do a flip flop. There wasn’t any reasoning with a voice like that, but I had to try. You’ve always got to try.
“Killing him won’t make it better,” I said, reaching out and touching his chest with my fingers. “So don’t do it. You aren’t that kind of person.” I smiled at him as best I could. “Don’t let his deeds poison you.”
He tore his gaze from my brother and looked down at my hand like it was made of slime and bugs. “You have no idea what kind of person I am.” He reached down and grabbed my wrist. His grip wasn’t hard, but it was enough to let me know he could hurt me very badly.
“He didn’t kill you, Justin. He spared you,” I said, taking a very tiny step toward him, practically sandwiching our hands between us. “Isn’t that worth something?”
“Then he’s a fool.” Justin shook himself and tried to move past me. I moved with him, keeping myself between my brother and him. I wasn’t sure if he’d go through me or not, but either way, that’s what he’d have to do. Sure, my brother was basically an evil supervillain, but at the same time, he was all the family I had.
“He left you alive. That has to mean something.” I swallowed hard. “He’s my brother… please?”
“No.” The word held the touch of blood and thunder in it, and I shivered despite myself.
“Look, Justin, I know what you’re feeling, but this has to stop,” I pleaded, reaching up with my free hand and touching his chin. “Please. Just look at me.”
“It can stop after he’s dead,” Justin snarled, baring his teeth as his gaze found mine. His eyes were full on wolf. The smell of fur and pine trees filled my nose. He was on the cusp of changing, and if that happened, I wouldn’t be able to stop him.
“No. It has to stop now. Someone has to make the right choice. Please.” I leaned into him. “I fought for you, for your people—”
“But not hard enough.” Justin tried to step around me. I moved again, but this time he grabbed my shoulder and pushed me out of his path. It wasn’t hard, and I could have resisted, but I knew the truth of that gesture. He would pass me if he had to, so I should step aside.
“What more do you want from me?” I cried, my heart breaking as he moved past me and knelt on the ground a few feet away. His fingers found something, and as he stood, I recognized it as my brother’s Beretta. I’d forgotten all about it.
“I don’t know, Annie.” He shook his head. “I wish I did.” He pointed the gun at my brother’s head. “But we can figure that out later.”
“No, we can’t Justin.” I shook my head as tears blurred my vision. “We can’t. If you pull that trigger, there’s no coming back.”
“Annie…” he whispered and turned his gaze toward me. I almost wished he hadn’t because I’d never forget the
look in them. There was so much pain and rage, it almost didn’t seem real. “I need to do this.”
“Don’t you see,” I said, taking a step toward him, arm extended. “That’s what my brother thought too. Look what’s happened.” My fingers touched his shoulder, and I tried to pull him toward me. “When does it end?”
“When he dies,” Justin said and pulled the trigger.
The empty click of the Beretta was the loudest sound I’d ever heard.
He pulled the trigger again, and it clicked again, obviously empty. My brother had threatened me with an empty gun. The realization hit me hard, but not as hard as what Justin had tried to do. No, what he’d done had broken something within both of us. My brother had done the unforgivable and murdered how many people for revenge, but for some reason, I’d expected more from Justin. Much more.
I smacked the gun from his hands as tears filled my eyes. “I can’t believe you did that.”
The sound of the gun hitting the ground seemed to echo across the cavern.
“I’m not perfect,” he said as the realization of what he’d done hit him full on. He slumped broken and empty to the ground beside my brother’s unconscious body. He had that thousand yard stare I’d seen way too many times. Only, he didn’t get to look like that. Not when it was his choice, not when I’d tried to stop him and he hadn’t listened. I’m not sure why, but I wanted to hurt him. A lot.
“You were perfect to me,” I whispered, kneeling down next to him, and the sad thing was that he had been. He’d been everything, but how could I look past this? I could understand my brother. That made sense to me. Intrinsically, I could understand Justin too, but that understanding washed away the white knight I’d painted him into and left behind a person.
And a person was wanting. A person was broken, disgusting, and everything else.
“I like how you say were.” He turned his eyes toward me, and as he did a staccato crack filled my ears. The room shook so violently, I lost my footing and fell onto my ass. The backlash of using the Infinity Gauntlet to call up godly levels of power came flying back through the chamber in an arc of multicolored lightning. It hit the room in a flare of color and sound moments before magic exploded outward, shattering the stone and rocking the place like an earthquake.
The ceiling began to crumble as veins of electricity snaked across it. Stones the size of my head crashed to the ground all around us, and I knew that we were going to be buried alive in seconds. My heart leapt into my throat as I scrambled to my feet, trying to avoid getting killed by falling rocks. It seemed impossible to think we’d live, but if there was one person who’d know, it’d be Gordon.
I moved past Justin who sat there staring at me like I wasn’t even there. The look on his face nearly broke me, but I ignored it. Instead, I crawled over to my brother and slapped him across the face as hard as I could. The shards from the figurines littering the ground began to leap into the air and pop with little sparks of fire that turned the surrounding stone to slag.
“Wake up, jackass,” I said, hitting Gordon again. “Your stupid spell is coming back to kill us.”
My brother groaned as his eyes fluttered open. His lips curled into a smile as he surveyed the scene. “Is it over?”
“Yes, you fraking idiot and now the whole place is coming down from the backlash of your stupid spell. Didn’t think about what using our powers to become a god would do, did you?” I asked, practically shaking him. I stopped myself even with the adrenaline surging in my veins. There was no shaking the stupid out of him, and it wouldn’t help anyway.
“Ow, stop.” He grabbed at me and forced me to release my white-knuckled grip on his collar. “Funny, I figured I’d be dead.” His eyes slid from me to Justin as he started to get to his feet. “Guess the prince is a better man than I.”
“You are incorrect,” Justin said, gesturing at the fallen Beretta as my brother began limping toward a door across the room. Pain stretched across Gordon’s every movement, and I knew that ritual had done way more than he’d let on. “Your gun was just empty, and I’m too pathetic to tear off your head with my bare hands.”
“Good to know we’re all shallow and broken at our core,” Gordon replied with a shrug. He seemed positively pleased with himself. And why wouldn’t he be? He had won.
“How the frak do we get out of here?” I growled, ignoring his assertion because I really didn’t want to be buried alive beneath a thousand tons of stone.
“There’s a teleporter.” My brother wiped his bloody nose with the back of one hand, got to his feet, and shook himself. “We can use it to get out.”
“Great,” I muttered, grabbing Justin by the arm and hauling him to his feet. “Get the frak up. Feel sorry for yourself later.” Another stone broke free of the ceiling with a crack and crashed to the ground beside me. It’d missed me by inches. It was time to leave, and Justin was coming with me.
“Yeah, all right,” Justin said, but his voice was dead to the world. While it seemed like he’d given up, he let me pick him up as the ground rumbled violently. I managed to stay standing, but my brother wasn’t so lucky. He fell onto the stone hard, and as he tried to rise, a ham-sized chunk of rock hit him in the leg. The sound of snapping bone was audible even over his scream.
“Gordon!” I cried, leaping forward. Pieces of ceiling crashed to the ground around me as I made my way forward. As I did, Gordon tried to get to his feet, but collapsed with a cry of pain.
As I crouched next to my brother, and tried to figure out how to carry him, I wondered if he had some way of healing himself. Only if he did, I was pretty sure he’d have used it. Then again, he might just be out of power. Maybe I could do something?
“Don’t you have a med pack or something to heal yourself,” I asked as I glanced from his pain-creased face to his leg. Blood stained the section of his jeans where the bone was jutted out against his pant leg, obviously broken.
“Yeah, but it’ll take way too much power for either of us to heal.” He gritted his teeth and tried to push himself up while using me for leverage. “If we do that, we won’t have enough to get out. Even with both of us using our power together, it’ll be a near thing.”
“Are you kidding me?” I cried as he forced himself onto his good leg and threw one arm around my shoulder. “How the frak did you expect to get away once your ritual went off?” I knew there was no way we’d get out of here together. Not like if we had to walk anyway.
“I expected you to help me in the end, or I’d die. Either would have been fine.” He gave me a pained grin as we took a tentative step. I nearly dropped him, and not just because he was way too heavy for me to support. No, it was that he’d been willing to sacrifice himself. The motherfucker. How dare he?
“Do you really know how to get out of here?” Justin asked, moving beside us. “Or are you lying?” Rocks and magic continued to cascade around us, but he didn’t seem to care very much. Then again, he could probably heal anything and given enough time, dig himself out too.
“I’m not lying,” my brother said through clenched teeth. “But we need to hurry.”
“Of course we do,” Justin said in his dead, empty voice. Then he threw Gordon’s free arm over his shoulder and hoisted him up with apparent ease. “Let’s go.”
“Justin…” I murmured, but before I could say more the entirety of the ceiling cracked ominously. A rain of debris fell from above, and I shut my trap and moved toward the door with Justin and my brother right behind me.
I grabbed the knob, and as I did, I realized it was locked. I started to turn, but before I could ask about a key, Justin kicked it near the knob. The jamb snapped into kindling, and the door flew open as Justin continued forward undeterred. I’d known he was stronger than he’d looked, but damn.
Luminescent moss lit the way forward, but not by much since there was so much dust in the air, I could hardly see. My eyes began to water as I pulled my hoodie up over my mouth and nose and followed behind them, thankful the hallway see
med better reinforced than the ritual chamber. I wasn’t sure why, but I was starting to wonder if this place had been designed with the ritual in mind.
The sound of the ritual chamber coming down behind us echoed in my ears as we moved forward. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed the truth. The rocks had sealed us inside this narrow hallway and while it didn’t seem to be coming down, it was probably only a matter of time. Either way, we weren’t getting back out through the ritual chamber, so I really hoped Gordon wasn’t lying about another exit.
“You know what’s funny,” Gordon said, glancing back at me as Justin dragged him forward. “I think you’re right for once, Annie.”
“What?” I asked, confused as I hurried up to them. The hallway was too narrow for me to walk alongside of them. Not that it mattered because Justin was moving far too quickly for me to keep up.
“You were right. I know, stopped clocks and all, but nonetheless…” Gordon trailed off as agony flared across his face.
“What are you babbling about?” I asked, partially wondering why Justin hadn’t beaten him into silence. Then again, there was so much pain and guilt in Justin’s eyes, I doubted he was paying much attention.
“I don’t actually feel better,” Gordon said, and the admission seemed to deflate him. “When you asked me earlier, I lied. I knew this wouldn’t bring Pauline back, but I did it anyway.” He took a deep, pained breath. “I’d expected to die doing it…”
“Well, you aren’t dying here,” Justin snarled, glancing at him. “You’re going to get Annie out of here first. After that…” The way he said it, made me think he wasn’t planning on coming with us.
I was about to ask him about it when the hallway opened up to reveal a room that looked ripped straight out of Star Trek. Gordon hadn’t been lying, but the thing was, there was no way I could power something like this even at full strength, and I was far from full strength. He’d always been a bit stronger than me, but based on what I’d seen him do, he was a lot stronger than me now. Still, he didn’t seem strong after what he’d pulled off and even the magic in the air that had been my constant companion my entire time down here was gone.
Throne to the Wolves: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Spell Slinger Chronicles Book 1) Page 15
