Descendant

by S. M. Gaither

  I could accept that, right?

  His fangs withdrew from my neck and settled between my shoulder blades instead, and I felt myself being lifted—smoothly, effortlessly—and the next thing I knew I was hurtling through the air.

  I collided with a nearby tree. I slid down, my back breaking my fall against the base. Pain screamed through my spine. I stared up at the sky, trying to get a decent breath, unable to move.

  (Not quite the fight I was hoping for.) His voice sounded airy, like I was in some kind of daydream. (You do show some potential though. Once this pact business is all settled, I may be able to find a place for you in my ranks.)

  A low growl rumbled in my throat.

  (Like I would ever fight for you.) With tremendous effort, I managed to roll myself over to face him. I tried to climb to my feet, but my legs shook violently, and before I could straighten to even half of my full height, they crumpled beneath me.

  The vibrant shades that had colored my world were dulling.

  Pain throbbed between my eyes.

  I started to shut them.

  Everything around me was blurring—everything except for the beautiful silver creature that had just stepped between Valkos and me.

  I stared at it for what seemed like a long time, trying to make sense of it, of how clear it was among all of this carnage. I thought I was hallucinating. Valkos must’ve seen it too, though, because he lifted his head and took two steps back, and a second later I heard his voice in my head.

  (And here you are again. Such a disappointment,) he said.

  (I’m beginning to think I should take that as a compliment,) came Kael’s quiet reply.

  Valkos tossed his head back with a laugh.

  Then he lunged.

  And call me a coward, but I did shut my eyes then. Tightly. I didn’t want to see what was happening. I did my best to drown out the sounds of what was going on, too. That was harder; there were so many snarls, and yelps, and whines, and they seemed to be multiplying, too—like I was back at the bottom of that hill, reliving the whole battle over and over again in my mind.

  And for a long time I couldn’t seem to make it stop.

  I heard a sharp, painful howl.

  I jumped, but I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to know who it had been.

  My mind began to haze over, and everything started to feel strangely peaceful. I might’ve completely blanked out if not for a small voice inside my head that didn’t seem to think sleeping was a good idea right now.

  I opened my eyes and tried to lift my nose into the air, tried to inhale the cool breeze and shake off my sudden sleepiness. But my head seemed to weigh a ton. I let it drop back down to the ground instead. The dirt was so refreshingly damp, after all. A nice distraction from the battle still raging around me...

  Watching that battle made me sick.

  So why were my eyes open?

  It didn’t make sense—I could close them, no big deal. Maybe I’d even drift off to sleep, and if death came, so what? I wouldn’t even know it. I wondered if my dad’s death had been this peaceful. Probably not. I should’ve been thankful, maybe…

  (Alex.)

  The voice was familiar, and it filled me with warmth. But that warmth just made everything that much more peaceful.

  I kept my eyes shut tightly.

  (Let’s go, Alex.)

  I felt a growl rise in my throat. I wanted to sleep, didn’t he understand that?

  (Get up!)

  (No.)

  But even as my mind said the words, my body was moving. My eyes opened. The voice said my name again. And then my legs moved, lifting me to my feet like they were attached to strings being controlled by an invisible puppeteer. My thoughts were racing without meaning. I was moving. How or why, I didn’t know.

  But somehow, my body seemed to know where it was going.

  So I gave up trying to understand, and I just let my feet carry me away.

  20

  left

  “Alex?”

  There was that voice again.

  And like before, warmth flowed through me—but my eyes still didn’t want to open.

  “Where’s Lora?” I heard myself mumble.

  “She’s here. She’s fine.”

  “Good.”

  Someone’s hand rested against my forehead. Fingertips brushed down and off my cheek, returning a second later with a damp cloth that they laid across my brow. The cool relief of the cloth made me sleepy, and before I realized it, I’d drifted off again.

  * * *

  When I finally opened my eyes, I found myself in a dark, but familiar, room. I didn’t sit up right away.

  Something moved off to my right.

  I lifted my head from the pillow, and I saw someone sitting in a chair beside the bed, his body slumped over onto the mattress and his head resting on his folded arms.

  Kael.

  He looked incredibly uncomfortable.

  I started to sit the rest of the way up, but froze as he jerked abruptly upright. He stared silently at me, through eyes heavy with sleep. Then he took a deep breath.

  “You’re finally awake,” he said.

  I smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. And you too now—sorry about that. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  He relaxed and leaned forward, shaking his head. “I wasn’t asleep. Just resting my eyes.”

  “How long have you been there?” I asked, eying the dark circles that had settled like shadows over his face.

  He shrugged. “You’ve been asleep for a couple of days.”

  “Days?” I repeated.

  He nodded, and I fell back against my pile of pillows, bringing a hand up to massage my temples.

  “That’s crazy. I…I’m still tired. Exhausted.”

  “That’s not surprising. Not after what happened. Shifting’s hard enough on the body as it is. Add the fact that it was technically your first time, and what you did…”

  For some reason, I was having a hard time remembering exactly what I did.

  And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know all the details just then.

  “Alex?”

  I lifted my head a few inches from the pillow and looked toward the door. Vanessa was peering around the corner, and as soon as our eyes met she practically sprinted across the room to my side.

  “You’re awake!”

  I smiled weakly at her as she threw her arms around me.

  “How are you feeling, Alex?” Eli’s voice was tired, but he smiled at me as he walked in the room. Beside him walked Will, and they both made their way over to my bedside as well.

  “How’s it going, Al?” Will asked, picking up one of my hands and giving it a little squeeze.

  “I’m okay. What about you, though?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Never better.”

  “And the others? Jack, and Emily?”

  “They’re good.”

  I closed my eyes for a second and breathed out a deep sigh of relief. I took another deep breath and opened my eyes. “And Lora, what about Lora?” I asked quietly. “She got away okay, right?”

  I remembered somebody telling me she was fine.

  Had I dreamed that?

  I didn’t think so.

  But nobody was saying anything.

  Kael was the only one who didn’t look away, so my pleading, needy eyes locked onto his. He swallowed and tilted his head forward in what didn’t quite look like a nod, but his lips formed the word ‘yes’. The weight on my chest lifted a little. But it didn’t go far—because although the word had made it to his lips, that was where it stayed.

  I needed to hear it out loud.

  “Yes?” I answered for him.

  He swallowed again. “Yeah. She did,” he said quietly. “We managed to drive Valkos away, and we got Lora here safely.”

  I wanted to let out the breath I was holding, but I couldn’t.

  Something was wrong.

  Kael’s face wasn’t as difficult to read as normal—in fact, th
e anguish on it was painfully obvious.

  “So then what is it? Why do you all look so…so…” I could barely choke the words out. I leaned back against the headboard, rubbing folds of the blanket through my trembling fingers.

  “Your sister is gone, Alex.” Eli’s words were like a bucket of ice water being dumped over me, leaving me drenched and shaking.

  “Gone?” I repeated, drawing the blanket up around myself. “Wha-what do you mean? She can’t be gone. She was gone before, but I went…I saw her…if she got back here then why…I don’t understand—”

  “She left.”

  I relaxed my grip on the blanket and let it fall off my shoulders as I sat up to meet Eli’s gaze.

  “Left? When? Where did she go?”

  “Sometime last night. Your sister’s health had been a concern to us since she arrived— though she seemed to be recovering well enough. Anyway, the doctor we sent for was sitting up with her last night, and when Vanessa went to check on him this morning…” He trailed off and looked to Vanessa, whose face had suddenly gone even paler than usual.

  “It was a pretty gruesome sight,” she said in a tiny voice. “The doctor…he’s doing better now but it was…not good.”

  I stared at her for a minute, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

  “She wouldn’t have just left. The doctor must have—”

  “The doctor tried to stop her,” Kael said. “And he ended up bruised and bloody because of it.”

  I shook my head angrily at him. “No. No, that can’t be right. Lora would never hurt anybody. She can’t have—”

  “Your sister has been under a lot of stress,” Eli said. “Perhaps too much.”

  “Have you looked for her at all?” I asked, not really looking at Eli.

  He started to answer anyway. “Of course we—”

  “Home,” I interrupted, sitting up and sliding out from under the covers. “I bet she went home.”

  My feet were on the floor an instant later, my eyes focused on the door.

  But what started as a sprint across the room ended with me stumbling and Kael catching me just before I hit the ground. I rested my head against his chest while I waited for the room to stop spinning.

  “She must be at home,” I mumbled into the folds of his shirt. “I bet she went to see Mom.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eli shake his head. “We have already—”

  “We can go see,” Kael said, cutting him off. “Come on. We’ll take my car.”

  I don’t remember how I got there, but ten minutes later, I was in the passenger seat of Kael’s Jeep, and we were making our way down the mountain.

  The dirt track we were on barely passed for a road. I leaned my forehead against the window, and every now and then a particularly nasty bump or hole would shake the car and send my head crashing against the glass. But it was okay, because I was more or less oblivious to pain at this point.

  “So… I’m sorry,” Kael said after about ten minutes of silence.

  “For what?” I said, not lifting my head away from the window.

  “For what happened with your sister. For what I did.”

  “You did what you had to do,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to try and make sense of him or anything that had happened between us. Not right now. Actually, I wasn’t up for discussing anything right now.

  And for a second I thought Kael was going to drop it.

  But after a few minutes, he spoke again.

  “You know, for the past seven years no one’s known the truth about me. I’ve had to lie— constantly—and I’m tired of it. I want someone to know the truth. I need you to know it.”

  After the past week, you would think nothing could’ve surprised me by now. But this new, suddenly vulnerable-sounding Kael was quite possibly the strangest thing I’d seen yet.

  I didn’t know what to say, what to do.

  “It was true, you know,” he said. “What Sera said to my father. I’d planned on killing you. And if I could’ve made myself do it…”

  I looked at him then, shaking my head. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you deserve to know.” He gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “And I’m tired of all the uncertainty between us.”

  I moved away from the window and settled back against my seat with a sigh. “You were going to kill me. And Sera was going to help you do it, I guess?” If he insisted on talking, I was at least going to get some answers.

  “It started out as a partnership. I don’t think she was ever in it for the same reasons as me but…yeah. She agreed to help me.”

  “And that day at the lake? She attacked me on your orders?”

  He shook his head. “I saved you that day. That part wasn’t an act. By then Sera had lost her patience with me, and was back to working on Valkos’ orders—and I didn’t realize it until it was too late. You weren’t supposed to be bitten. I didn’t want that to happen, I didn’t want you to be dragged into all this—that’s why I tried to talk you into taking the antidote.”

  “But I wouldn’t listen,” I said quietly, staring at my hands.

  Kael nodded. “Sera got a little carried away, but she really was out to simply infect you. I guess by that point Valkos knew that if he showed you the truth about your past, about what really happened with your father, then you’d eventually come after him yourself.”

  “And I would have.” I felt incredibly disgusted with myself all of a sudden. “I would have played right into his plans.”

  Kael didn’t say anything to that, so after a minute of silent self-loathing I continued.

  “But how did he know so much about me? How did he know what I would do?”

  “I was a different person a couple of years ago.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When this all started, I didn’t know how it was going to end up. All I knew was that I couldn’t risk blowing my cover until I figured out what I was going to do. I had to keep relaying him information about you, about the operation I was supposedly undergoing to further his cause. Some of what I told him was true. I told him about possible strategies I’d come up with, based on what I’d learned from observing you. Strategies I never planned to do anything with, but still.”

  My fingers dug into the leather upholstery. “But he got it from you then?” I had to fight to keep my voice level. “You gave him everything he needed to hurt me?”

  “Alex, I—”

  “What about Lora? Did you tell him how close we were? Was taking her one of the genius plans you gave him?”

  He stared straight ahead.

  We drove at least another quarter-mile before he answered. “It got more complicated than it should have,” he said. “I never meant to hurt you like this.”

  I almost laughed. “You were planning on killing me.”

  “Only so I could stop another war. I don’t know how to make you understand. If you were alive during the last shifter civil war, during those early, chaotic days…well, then maybe you would. I didn’t want to kill you, but getting rid of the descendant seemed like the only way to stop my father. To give our world a chance at peace. I just felt like it was the lesser of two evils.”

  I stared at him as he spoke, but he still didn’t take his eyes off the road.

  “Why didn’t you, then?” I asked quietly.

  “I’m not sure. All I know is that from the first day I saw you I’ve been fighting this. One part of me kept saying that killing you was the only way, and that the answer was obvious: it was one person’s life over the thousands that might be lost if Valkos kept driving his wars. But the other part of me knew I could never hurt you. Not then, and not now.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “I understand why you don’t. And I can’t undo what I did. But from now on, things are different. I’m not living two lives anymore. I’m done with that.”

  We rode in silence for a long time after those words. I wanted to stay mad at
Kael. What he’d done was terrible. Misguided.

  But I was beginning to think everyone was misguided.

  I know I was. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, much less why I was doing it—and I sure as hell didn’t know what I was supposed to do now.

  “Lora’s not at the house, is she?” The question came as I stared into the rearview mirror and watched the mountains in the distance get smaller and smaller.

  “That’s the first place we looked,” he said quietly. “There was no sign she’d even been there.”

  A week ago, I might have insisted we go look again. I would’ve wanted to see it for myself, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. And I would probably still do that eventually.

  But there was somewhere else I wanted to go first.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later Kael pulled up to the cemetery gate, and he cut the engine as I stepped into the sunlight. Warm, brilliant sunlight.

  The weather had fallen back into its old habit of mocking me, it seemed.

  This was the first time I’d been here since the funeral, and it took me a little while to navigate my way through the rows of headstones. After about five minutes, though, I finally found it.

  Dad’s grave was simple, just a smooth, square slab of granite with only his name on it. He would’ve liked it that way—he never cared for complications.

  I guess that’s why he never told me the truth about who we were.

  “If only you knew how complicated things were now,” I said quietly, kneeling down beside the stone.

  It was weird—and a little creepy—but also strangely comforting there beside his grave. After a few minutes, Kael came and sat down beside me. I laid my head against his shoulder, and we sat silently for ten minutes, twenty minutes—I don’t know.

  Time seemed kind of irrelevant now.

  I could’ve sat there forever.

  I would’ve, too, if a ray of sunlight hadn’t broken through the trees just then, shining down on my dad’s grave and reflecting off something laying beside the headstone.

  “What is that?” Kael asked.

  I leaned forward and pushed aside the blades of grass that had been hiding it. I lifted it by the chain and placed the pendant of it in my hand. It burned a little, and the familiar humming filled my ears as I drew it close to me.