by Angel Payne
But everything’s changed, damn it. The stakes have climbed terrifyingly high. Friends. Family. The cause I realize I’ve been called to. The woman I’ve been destined for. The choices I’ve had to make with every one of those weights on my soul. Dealing with the consequences. Living with the consequences.
So goddamned unsure about whether I can live with this one.
“Kane. Fuck. Don’t put this on me.” Air slices in and out of my lungs, harsh and heavy, as if making up for every one I’m taking from him. “I’m begging you…”
“I-I’m begging h-harder.”
Shit. We sound like a couple of teenagers messing around with each other in the schoolyard, comparing our piss streams, except there’s nothing juvenile about what he’s asking of me. “We’ll…we’ll find another way to get you away from her, okay? If you and I learned about this trick by accident, there have to be some more loopholes around her shit. We can block the signals somehow. Wade and Fersh can make you a helmet or ear plugs. Maybe there are liquid firewalls we can formulate. We can inject you… Fuck. Listen to me. Kane.”
“No.”
“The guys—Wade, Fersh, Alex—have amassed a lot of data about those fuckers.” Not the exact information I’ve been looking for but a lot we never knew all the same. “Just listen to what they have to—”
“No.”
I shove up, resulting in my hand plunging harder on his windpipe. “Just like that? No?”
“Not j-j-just like that.” His gaze alters, darkening to the texture of twin onyx chunks. Glittering. Impenetrable. “Not just like that, and you kn-know it.”
I lock my teeth. Another roar brews in my gut, as dark as the smoke turning the sun into a ball of burnt oil, but it lodges in my throat like a rag in that oil, soaked in the awful awareness of what he’s implying. But I have to hear it for myself, perhaps because I still don’t believe it for myself.
“How many times, Kane?” I lean over him, hyper-alert to how he frantically glances to the side. I twist my free hand into the collar of his fatigues. “How many times have you already tried to kill yourself, damn it?”
His breathing gets shallower. His eyes tighten at the corners. “F-F-Five.”
I release his collar. “Five?”
“T-Twice in Paris,” he rasps. “Three more times in Sp-Spain before those f-f-fuckers f-f-finally came for me.”
He finishes by scrabbling his grip up to my waist, causing his jacket sleeve to hitch back.
Revealing the scabbed-over gashes in his wrist.
Fucking. Shit.
I lock my teeth and curl my lips, readying to spit the same words, but the bastard blurts out, “You…you see now? I…I d-d-don’t want firewalls or magic helmets or f-f-fixes.” As he rummages his hand back to my wrist, I once again have to confront the black ink along his knuckles. Brandings he never asked for. A fate he never deserved. “I…I just want to be with Mitch again.”
A love he knows only I will understand.
Because I do.
Because if it were me having to live with the memory of Emma falling to her death, could I stand to confront another sunrise or sunset?
If my plan to avenge her death wound up in becoming Faline Garand’s remote-controlled hit man, would I want to take one more step? Even one more mortal breath?
The answer is an instant, unstoppable swell from the center of my being. It crashes me into a glass window of a destiny I do not fucking want—but now, in a moment in which all the chaos around us seems to stop, I can’t ignore.
I slide my hands up, bracing them on either side of Kane’s neck. My fingers are wet and wobbly. My friend’s proud features are blurry.
I inhale hard, steeling myself. Psyching myself.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“So am I,” Kane rasps back.
“You?” Scowling puzzlement. “Why?”
With my padlock of a hold on him, his head shake is implied more than implemented. “Doesn’t m-m-matter anymore. I’m done taking her orders. Th-thank fuck. It’s…done. All…done…”
He drifts his eyes closed.
“Now, Bolt Man. Send me back to him now.”
And then he smiles.
And I pray.
For his soul and for mine.
Chapter Three
Emma
Trixie, Chase, and I watch the LAPD helicopter carrying Reece approach the wide field behind the ridge.
The rotor wash slaps the wild grasses against our shins and knees, whipping the air into chaos that matches my mind. We lift our elbows to shield our faces from the swirling dust and pebbles, ideal stand-ins for the thousand-plus questions comprising a lot of that turmoil.
Funny how those questions build up when a girl has a few hours to do nothing but wait after her fiancé has survived a trip to a burning war zone and a confrontation with the soldier responsible for all of it.
Soldier. I still can’t believe I’m aligning the word with Kane Alighieri. Though I first met him under violent circumstances—the night so many months ago when he helped Reece save me from the trap Faline had set with ’Dia and me as bait—I’ve since discovered the real person: the nerd who spent hours at the public library, knew every line of Cats, and deliberately held back when working out at Muscle Beach so he wouldn’t make the other guys feel bad. But that was the guy I knew. As soon as Mitch took that fall and left this realm behind, part of Kane departed with him.
Clearly, a more significant part than any of us understood.
More than I could force my mind to admit to itself—even when I kissed Reece goodbye and sent him off to battle the man.
Not when I knew—I knew—there could be only one explanation for Kane, or whatever the hell he’s become, to be preening like a talk show queen just minutes after destroying the city like an avenging king. Only one way he could have gone from being Team Bolt’s Gentle Ben to LA’s vengeful dragon.
Sawyer and Angie provided some theories of explanation as soon as they arrived back at the ridge three hours ago, having borrowed a truck from the city’s Parks and Rec department. Wade, Alex, and Fershan confirmed Sawyer’s original postulate could be possible. Kane’s actions likely had been joysticked by higher forces inside the Consortium. But Angelique stood firm in her stance that Kane had been infected or bitten by something, noting his near-zombie glare and oblivion to all the chaos he’d caused.
The explanations were better than anything I’d come up with but were still far from the answers I needed. The only comparison I had to what the guy did to downtown was the state in which we’d found the Brocade’s Presidential Suite after a speed metal band’s Grammy celebration party. But like then, shuffling through the aftermath only means a lot of theories and not a lot of answers—with which Sawyer and Angie haven’t exactly been helpful, aside from their insights, since returning without Reece.
Damn it, both of them stood and watched as I begged him not to leave me behind again. Both of them already know how agonizing it is for me to be waiting like a damn prairie wife on the homestead, watching the horizon for the light of her man. And God, how that last part is true. Reece Andrew Richards is my light—which makes it doubly unfair that I can’t share that horizon with him. That I can’t do anything but play the watching-and-waiting game…
Until I finally get to have moments like this.
Knowing he’s near again.
Knowing he’s alive.
However strangely that definition may play itself out.
However far I need to stretch the word strangely.
As the pilot sets the chopper down, Reece shoves open the door and jumps out. He trudges a few steps but stops, seeming to wonder where he is and what he’s doing. His hands are ridged claws. His stance is braced as if his battle has only begun. His forehead, nearly the only part of his face I can fully see, is a topographical map of anguish.
Making me nearly dread the moment he exposes his full gaze again.
But never solidifying the purpose of my prairie
porch more.
Past the whipping mane of his hair, even across the fifty feet still separating us, his grief pierces my heart like flying glass. I gasp from the impact right before a similar sound erupts from Trixie. I automatically reach for her, as much to rein her as comfort her. She longs to go to him. I get the maternal instinct and even understand it because of my own aching protectiveness for him—but there’s a deeper instinct ordering me to stand back. A dictate twined with the spiritual strands of my bond to him. That intangible energy that blares a signal in my head as loud as it is clear.
“He needs space.”
“Space?” she snaps at me. “Are you looking at him?”
I nod sorrowfully—as I comprehend exactly why he’s returned three hours after Sawyer and Angie. Grasping why the two of them held back on telling me everything that happened on the rooftop with Kane. If they had, I’d be heading into the third hour of my own agony instead of throwing sandbags on my shock to keep the flood from swallowing me whole.
“Yes,” I tell Trixie. “I’m looking.” And I’m seeing.
“But—”
I’m not the one who yanks her back this time. Quickly, I follow the hand that’s encased her elbow, up a lean-muscled arm to Chase’s determined face. “I’m hurting for him too, Mom. But we need to trust Emma.” He dips his head toward me with the weight of respect. “She has the full window to Reece now.”
No sooner has he said that then the chopper lifts up and away, leaving Reece standing in the field by himself. At once, he reels back by a few steps. He lifts his hands higher but then spins around as if needing to run from them—and does. As he breaks into a full sprint, his aching bellow shudders the air and echoes through the entire canyon. As energy explodes off his fingers, he disappears into the hills that are washed into the mix of late afternoon gold and early evening black. They welcome him with restless winds that crackle from the force of his speed.
He moves so fast, Trixie and Chase hardly realize the deafening whomp is Reece and not the departing helicopter.
“R-Reece?” Trixie stammers. “Reece? What on earth?”
She rushes forward, bending the tall grass back the other way, easily able to escape Chase, who’s slowed by his own version of incredulity as he joins her in eyeballing the new dust cloud that billows close to the hills in the distance. A cloud that’s laced by lightning in all-too-familiar shades of blue.
Trixie’s gaze bulges. “Oh, dear heavens. What should we…shouldn’t we…”
I wrap one of her hands with both of mine. As obvious as the action seems, I do it with torn feelings. I’ll never be a mother in the biological sense, but it doesn’t take emotional rocket science to relate to why Trixie’s close to a basket case after everything that’s happened in the last twelve hours. In the last twelve months. She’s had to accept that one of her children was permanently mutated by mad scientists before another died in battle against those same psychopaths—all because of her husband of nearly thirty-five years. It hasn’t felt right to ask if Lawson’s death worsened or bettered her ordeal, but the way she’s immersed herself in caring for Reece, Chase, Joany, and me, constantly flying between New York and here to do so, has struck us all as a viable therapy regime. Since we’re all so grateful she hasn’t chosen alcohol, sex, or boy toys as her therapy of choice, the four of us have formed a tacit agreement not to challenge her decisions.
Which makes me feel like a sizable shit right now.
Still, I state with quiet firmness, “He knows you’re here for him.” I include Chase in my regard too. “That everyone is. But he can’t deal with bad days by just coming home and grabbing a hot shower and a cold beer.”
Chase moans softly. “Which sounds like a damn good plan.”
“Which you need to go do.” I clarify it as encouragement and not commandment, with a tight but sincere smile. “Please.” My addendum isn’t so tactful, because my senses start to crackle again. Yanked from their moorings by Reece’s furious, flaring beacon again. He’s alone and adrift, grieving and angry—and right now, all that matters is just getting to him. “I’m…I’m sure he just needs to clear the mental cache and cookies,” I add, squeezing Trixie’s hand once more. I look down at our twined fingers, noting that Reece definitely got his long fingers from his maternal side.
“And she’s his tech support.” Chase is equally resolute about his message, calmly extricating his mother’s hand from mine, seeming to sense my compulsion about hurrying to his brother’s side. “So let her go and be that, Mom. Come on. I’m sure Joany’s rustling something up for dinner.”
For a second, Trixie still vacillates as if deciding between one muddy slope and another, her face crunched with conflict. “Tell him I’ll make chocolate chip cookies for dessert,” she finally urges to me. “His favorite. With the walnuts.”
The breath she hitches between the sentences sends a little hook into my heart. All too clearly, I can imagine Reece as a boy, running into a huge kitchen in which Trixie is pulling out a tray filled with those cookies. That kitchen is inside a place called Richards Hall, where the woman probably had a staff numbering in double digits who could’ve baked those cookies—but she knew that the most valuable ingredient in fresh-baked cookies was, and always will be, a mother’s love. It’s a perfect reminder that no matter what state I’m about to find Reece in, he’s a man beneath it all. The man I love, part of a family I’m growing to adore just as equally.
“Of course I’ll tell him.” It comes from the center of my soul, which flares again from the inescapable call of its mate. Reece’s need is so intense, I have to fight the rage at my human limitations as I run-walk across the distance to him. Already knowing, despite no other guidance system but the ache in my chest, that I’m going the right way.
The pain worsens, meaning I’m either about to have heart failure or I’m closing in on him. I don’t dismiss the possibility of the former, since the journey into the depths of the canyon covers some seriously rocky terrain. But just when I’m getting ready to curse the unsteady ground, the prickly coastal shrubs, and the strengthening nighttime gusts, I let out a cry of gratitude.
And then awe.
And then alarm.
Gratitude because that wind now carries brilliant blue sparks, as if a cosmic torch welder is doing repair work just around the corner.
Awe because all those lights look dipped in a puddle of blue magma. I’ve never seen the blue so rich and vibrant and concentrated before.
And alarm—because I realize that where there’s magma, there has to be a volcano.
A volcano with a god in its core.
Never have I truly been tempted to apply the label to him—and wonder, in every clamoring, chaotic corner of my being, if it might really be true. That all the ancient mythmakers and storytellers might have been on to something the modern world has dismissed as a cute story. An adventurous tale for fireside fantasies.
But no.
Zeus is real. And I’m engaged to him.
If he survives long enough to marry me.
At this moment, I’m not sure he remembers who I am. Who he is.
Though I’ve been summoned here by the call of his soul, I barely recognize the force of the fury he’s spewing from his mind and heart—which spins around him like a gyroscopic firestorm, his bare-torsoed body serving as the hub for hundreds of electric lassos that snap and spark and hiss, lighting up the twilight as if it’s high noon again. If sunlight were actually blue. And if everyone actually walked around in vortexes of their own anguish all the time.
Maybe that’s why the gods chose to stay on Olympus.
Because speaking as the mortal in this equation, I don’t know how much longer I can watch him do this. His face, contorted with self-loathing. His body, flinching from the searing self-floggings. But that’s not even the worst of it.
What the hell is he doing to his hands?
What he continues to do, over and over again, driving them at full intensity into the canyon w
all—a rock face that was probably striated with amber, brown, and bronze as little as an hour ago. Now, the stone drips with metallic red and brilliant blue, the same pigments covering Reece’s knuckles, wrists, and forearms. He barely stops to stretch out his fists, but when he does, he glares at them like winter tree limbs weighted beneath a ruthless storm.
Only…the storm is him, and ruthlessness is just the start of his self-inflicted bloodletting.
As swiftly as he stops, he’s back at boxing with the cliff. He snarls from the pain and slips in the dark-red puddle around his feet, letting the falling rocks cut into his naked back but refusing to let up by one degree. Denying himself even a shred of mercy. As if I need to have that thesis confirmed, he joins a savage grunt to every blow, adding a visceral version of his pain to the surreal glow on the air.
And the girl who just moaned about getting off the porch and taking action?
She does nothing but stare.
Damn it!
The last time I felt this helpless, Reece had just fried nearly every electron in his blood to rescue me from Faline and was crouched inside a New York apartment shower stall that had turned into a plasma storm. But this canyon isn’t a shower stall, and he’s doing a lot more than crouching and shivering. Yet, like then, he’s aware that I’m here. And that his every pound impacts me too. Though it’s not my blood pooling on the ground, it may as well be.
And that despite how he may be ordering himself to ignore me, his soul has called mine here for a reason.
A certainty that couldn’t be better timed. Because as his next punch reverberates hard and deep into the rock, I fortify my resolve to stay.
Even as his blows cause a twelve-foot-high chunk of cliff to shear off.
I fall to my knees and shield my head as pebbles and dirt pelt around me. A stunned gasp gets me two lungs full of the same grit, and I cough in a fight to survive the blast.
