by M. K. Easley
Tristan had virtually no time to recover before Orion launched his next attack -- a lightning storm replete with torrential downpouring and high winds. A bolt struck just to Tristan’s left, her body buzzing with the proximity, and she spun on her heel, running through the clearing, thankful she’d opted that night for boots with tread that easily took on the muddy ground. The wind, however, was a different story -- she had nothing to protect against that, and debris hit and scraped her as she was nearly flattened to the earth multiple times.
She kept her eyes squinted, nearly closed, in an effort to protect them, and, working again on intuition alone, Tristan leapt over bodies and dodged the lightning that Orion aimed at her, running into the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. Heading into the trees was not a great option when lightning was the hunter, but it was the best option she had. Her face and hands were prickling uncomfortably with pins and needles, but she ignored them, hoping full feeling would at least return by the next time she'd need her hands.
Tristan tried desperately to think of how to fight off this attack -- she paused in an attempt to push the storm back onto Orion, but that method was not working this time, the wind from his storm was far too strong, and a strike of lightning missed her by a hair. She resumed running as Orion laughed maniacally, willing herself to block him out so she could pull together a plan. She zigged and zagged, working with the direction of the gale force gusts, running as fast as her legs would allow, as the trees around her were hit and caught fire in great flashes of blinding white light. Thick, charcoal colored smoke plumed in spite of the chaos, temporarily obscuring her surroundings, but Tristan kept on. She ran an intricate figure eight as lightning split a tree, and then the ground, to her far left, and for a moment it seemed as though Orion’s barrage had caused him to lose sight of her.
That brief reprieve allowed Tristan to think more clearly, and the wheels in her mind whirred at a frenetic pace. It seemed too comedically simple to be a real solution, but if Tristan was dealing with a real weather event, she had to think of what caused real weather events and, specifically, what caused them to clear up and move out. She almost laughed at the preposterousness of elementary school science class coming in handy now, in a supernatural battle for her life, but she had no other ideas and was in too harrowing of a situation to scoff at the absurd.
While tree branches clawed at her drenched clothes and skin, and the ground began to shake for reasons she refused to turn and acknowledge, Tristan reached upward, praying Orion would not catch her off-guard. With great effort she began pulling dry, atmospheric air downward, concentrating on the warmth she could feel in her hands. Sweat beaded on her forehead and her arms quivered, her muscles pushed beyond their limits, but, to her amazement, the lightning stopped, the wind died down, and the rain gradually slowed to a drizzle as the dry air suffocated the moisture. Exhausted, but knowing the fight was far from over, Tristan pushed the now weakened hurricane back towards Orion. She shoved her wet hair out of her face and, after giving herself a full-body shake, ran back towards the clearing.
She’d just made it through the treeline when one of Orion’s guards, who had somehow rallied, charged her. His expression one of unhinged ecstasy, Orion appeared in front of Tristan at the same time, conjuring a towering wall of fire which erupted from his hands and sped towards her without warning. Once again planting her feet, Tristan held off the fire with one hand as she turned her head to shield her face, feeling her skin bubble sickeningly into blisters. With her other hand, Tristan crushed the approaching guard’s windpipe, sending him immediately to the ground. Orion had taught her that trick when he’d killed Entros.
Orion, spotting a flaw in Tristan's defense against his fire wall, shot his hand out towards her, and, though she dodged to the side at the last second, a blistering pain exploded at her waist as the magic clipped her on the right side, her clothing and flesh immediately burning away in that area. Tristan gritted her teeth, but she was off-kilter now, and Orion had the upper hand. He flicked his wrist this time and Tristan's left leg shattered like glass. She dropped to her right knee with a bloodcurdling scream, but still she pushed back, praying she'd have any skin on her hands and arms left at all by the time this was over.
“Relent. Relent now and join me. We will set aside the hurt we have caused and are causing each other, and together we will govern this community as destined by our bloodline. Relent.” Orion’s voice boomed in from every direction, and Tristan’s arms began to shake, her fingers curling under the unyielding heat from the fire.
She was losing. Somehow, despite being so sure she would defeat Orion, Tristan was losing.
Orion began to laugh again, and this time it echoed deafeningly in her head.
“You are your mother's daughter. Too stubborn to admit I am too powerful to be defeated. I've taken your worthless commoner, and after you I'll take your traitorous family. They will scream like your commoner screamed when I killed him.”
Tristan's head shot up, and her eyes locked on Orion's alabaster orbs.
“That's right. I killed him. You thought you could get him off of this island by having Celes Crenshaw manipulate my reality, you silly, stupid girl, but all you did was put a target on your commoner’s back, and on Celes’s too. One is dead, the other will be shortly. He will scream for his mother too, I'm sure.”
Something snapped inside of Tristan then. On an inhuman wail she stood, throwing her head back as her mind burst open with a bone-rattling rip and an unbearable tearing sensation. A black funnel rose in the clearing between her and Orion, and she screeched endlessly at the sky, which swirled violently overhead until suddenly the universe was there, in all its divine, cosmic glory, so close Tristan was sure she could have touched it if she had the time. The funnel transformed into a thick wall of blood red smoke, and in rapid succession the visions came next -- visions of people, of destruction, of galaxies known and unknown. Of all four elements, of heaven, of hell. Of the King, Holly and Oak, dark and light, locked forever in battle. Images of famine and plagues, of feasts and islands pregnant with resources, of organisms invisible to the eye and animals as large as skyscrapers. Everything the universe overlooked, everything it was responsible for, it was all there, offering her the truly limitless power of which Orion could only ever dream. Tristan brought her arms together, channeling it instead into the smoke wall, which descended upon Orion as swiftly as his attacks had upon Tristan.
Orion screamed -- a drawn out, most satisfying sound of the purest agony she'd ever heard -- and Tristan continued pushing the wall until all she could hear was the deafening wind it was generating. Using her scorched, burning hands, she molded and shaped the smoke into a tight ball that grew smaller and smaller, until it disappeared completely in a comically dainty puff, taking with it the greatest threat she and the community had ever known. Her only regret was that she hadn't been able to see Orion die.
Tristan turned toward the blue sphere that had encased the Elders. It had disappeared, and they were all getting to their feet, muffled shouts of panic barely reaching her. She took one step towards them and went down hard, everything going black once again as the ground rushed up to meet her.
Chapter 39
The first thing Tristan heard was a steady beeping noise. It was paced pleasantly and reliably apart -- beep, pause, beep, pause, beep, pause. Somewhere in her mind she knew what the noise was, what it belonged to, but she was too tired to think about it. She felt as though her brain and body had run a very, very long marathon, and now she was in her rest period. She listened to the beeping until she’d drifted back to sleep, half-wondering if she was in a crash and had stayed home from school to spend the day in bed. She snuggled into her blankets, figuring if that were the case she’d better get comfortable and enjoy it until Sol did her mini-infusion to get her through until the gathering.
The gathering. Anxiety edged into Tristan’s mind, but why? What was it about the gathering that suddenly made her feel so uneasy? Her h
ead began to hurt, just a little bit, and Tristan stopped trying to think about it. She was simply too tired.
The next time Tristan came to, it was because she felt someone sit on her bed. Rising slowly through the levels of exhaustion that continued to linger on her like smoke on skin, Tristan concentrated very hard on opening her eyes.
In her immediate line of vision was Sol, looking as angelic and youthful as ever with her long hair waving softly down her back, her face free of makeup. Tristan frowned, blinking slowly. The harsh light in the room was not her bedroom light. She looked to her left, seeing a bed rail, an IV pole, a chair, and a bank of windows running the length of a wide windowsill. She was in the hospital.
“Mom?” Tristan croaked. She sounded like she was about two thousand years old, and her throat felt like it'd been rubbed with sandpaper. Her sluggish brain tried hard to make sense of where she was and why.
“Hi honey.”
Tristan shifted, pain blasting through her body, and she froze. Hands and forearms heavily bandaged, she slowly lifted the thin blue blanket that covered her to find her left leg casted. Orion. The battle. The gathering. Beckett…
Covering her face, Tristan immediately burst into tears. Sol placed her hand gently on Tristan’s good leg while Tristan bawled until she gagged. The noises she was making were awful, and shockwaves of electric pain tore through her body with each sob that wracked her, but she couldn’t stop. She remembered now, and she wished she hadn’t. Beckett was dead. Orion was probably dead, too, and she’d happily dance on his grave when her leg healed, but Beckett… After everything that had happened, she hadn’t been able to save him.
“It’s OK, honey. Let it out.” Sol’s voice was soothing, but it did nothing for Tristan, who knew she would never be soothed again. Not in this lifetime, anyway.
When Tristan physically couldn’t cry anymore, she used her blanket to wipe her face, wincing at the scratchy fabric on her raw skin, and tucked her hair behind her ears with hands that stung and burned in protest. She looked at Sol, not knowing what to say or how to start.
“We can talk, but I know you’re still very weak, so if you’re not up to much conversation, tell me and we will take a break, OK?”
Tristan nodded, and so did Sol.
“The first thing you need to know is that Beckett is alive.”
Tristan blinked, and then blinked again. And then she tilted her head, squinting at her Mom. She had killed Orion, right? He wasn’t here now, pretending to be Sol, trying to mentally torture her by telling her Beckett was alive when he wasn’t?
Sol shook her head. “It’s me. You did kill Orion. He did not kill Beckett. Beckett is on the floor above you, in the Intensive Care Unit, in bad shape but stable. If it’s OK with you, Dad, Oceana, and Ember would like to come in. We can help fill in any blanks you might have.”
Tristan nodded, still too shocked to speak. The news that Beckett had survived, though she hesitated to believe it still, heartened her, and she felt the all-consuming fatigue loosen its grip on her a little more. Sol floated out of the room to collect the rest of the Wallaces, and Tristan tried to remember what she could.
“Hey, badass.”
Evander came in the room first, followed by Olivia, who was already in tears. Sol and Umbris pulled up the rear, and Tristan noticed immediately the wall of tension that stood between them. She looked at her family, who looked back at her. Olivia rushed to her side, taking her hand.
“How are you?”
Tristan opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“She’s a little overwhelmed right now, I think,” Sol said gently, and Olivia nodded, backing off.
“How are you? The last I saw you, you were…” Tristan’s croupy voice trailed off; she was not eager to vocalize the horrors that had taken place at the gathering.
“I’m fine,” Olivia said quickly. “A little stiff, but otherwise fine. Mom worked her magic… no pun intended.”
After a weak chuckle that passed around the room, everyone fell into silence, each person waiting for the other to begin the conversation.
“Trin, I have to apologize,” Evander said finally, stepping forward. There was real anguish on his face, which Tristan felt like she should understand, but she couldn’t connect why he looked that way. “Telling you that Beckett was dead was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. If we hadn’t thought it was the only way, I would have refused.”
“We?” Tristan asked, an edge to her voice that surprised even her.
“I told him to lie to you.” Sol came to stand beside Evander, looking equally as sorrowful. “I knew it was the only way you would be able to defeat Orion. The only way you could access the power you needed.”
“Funny, because I think I remember you saying something like, there’s always another way when it came to Orion.” Tristan’s voice was venomous, which she knew was not entirely fair, but with each memory that came back, each reminder of having touched the very bottom when she’d been told that Beckett had died in spite of every effort she'd made to protect him, anger flared higher within her.
“There might have been,” Sol agreed, her voice still calm. “But not for you. You hadn’t used your abilities in eight years; Orion would not have even had to lift a finger to kill you. You needed to access what has always been inside of you in order to take him down, but you couldn’t do that unless you truly believed you had nothing left to lose.”
Tristan understood what Sol was saying. Objectively, she could see the necessity, but subjectively? She could not quite believe how deeply her family had betrayed her. Tristan looked at Umbris. Then again, maybe she wasn’t quite in a position to cry about betrayal.
“And have I lost him anyway?” Tristan asked quietly. She looked between Sol and Umbris. “When you did the memory wiping on Beckett, did you do it back to September after all?”
“No.” Umbris looked at Sol, who would not look at him, and Tristan’s heart contracted just a little bit. She had never known Sol and Umbris to be anything but harmonious, and that she’d caused a rift between them was making her feel things she wanted to keep being too angry to feel.
“I did the modification,” Sol told Tristan. “I took him back to Friday afternoon. You agreed to go to prom with him. You were in a car accident on the way -- an elderly driver lost control of his car, going too fast on the wet road, and the car flipped. It ripped the frame around the windshield, which gouged Beckett’s shoulder. The car itself crushed the front of Beckett’s car, which resulted in your broken leg, and his broken ribs and concussion. We needed to be able to explain your burns, as well, so a good Samaritan had pulled you both out of the wreckage, and as you were lying in the road, the car exploded. You were burned along your right side when a piece of metal struck you, and your hands, arms, and face got something akin to a bad wind burn from the blast.”
You could have heard a pin drop in the hospital room. Tristan and her siblings stared at Sol with their mouths hanging open, rendered speechless.
“Well, now we know where you get your badassery from, Trin,” Evander said finally, and Tristan smiled. Her first real smile. It made her face hurt.
Sol’s eyes crinkled, but a grin never made it to her face. She looked at Tristan once again.
“Memory modification is not perfect, especially when it’s this complex. There were a lot of memories we had to amend, to sync, and there is a chance that in the future Beckett will remember real events from last night. The preference is that you correct him with the falsified memories, but we won’t ask that of you. Which leads me to this.” Sol finally glanced at Umbris, briefly, before continuing. “The Elders will be coming to our home when you’re discharged. Since everyone now knows you will not be accepting your place in the community, they believe there is no reason for you to hold onto your abilities any longer than necessary. Once you’re off the map, you’re out of their jurisdiction and there is nothing they can do about what you choose to share with whom.”
Tristan frowne
d, puzzled.
“So you modified Beckett’s memory, but you’re giving me the OK to tell him what really happened?”
“I’m neither giving you the OK nor forbidding you from telling him. My only advice would be to wait a while before you do, if that’s what you decide. It’s a lot for all of us to take in and process, Trinity, which makes it ten times more confusing and overwhelming for a commoner. For now, the best thing to do is to go with the car accident story. We’ve given you the memory as well, since you’ll need to access it, but did not touch any of your real memories from last night.”
“Last night. It was only last night?” Tristan touched her forehead.
Sol nodded.
“What else do you want to know?” Evander asked, sounding both eager and impatient; the master of decorum.
A nurse came in the room then, looking startled at the Wallaces surrounding Tristan’s bed.
“Tristan, hi,” Nurse Meeker, per her ID badge, greeted in a voice as sweet as honey. “It’s so nice to see you awake! I’m Rachel Meeker, and I’ve had the pleasure of taking care of you while you’ve been here. How are you feeling?”
“Sore.”
Rachel laughed as she busied herself with the various tubes coming from Tristan’s IV pole. She looked like an actual ray of sunshine, all blonde and petite with gigantic blue eyes and rosy cheeks, decked out in bright yellow scrubs and immaculate white clogs, and Tristan immediately felt some of the gloom in the room lift.
“I’m sure you are! I’d say you got off pretty lucky, considering how bad your wreck was, but most patients don’t like to hear things like that.”