by Apollo Blake
I was losing. I was going to lose. I was dying.
I tried to find my voice, to beg. I wasn’t above begging. But I couldn’t speak, form words.
I was dying.
I tried to digest this or make sense of it but before the thought could settle, I was moving again. He threw me around the room like a sack of flour, more than happy to paint the walls with my blood. An inconsequential boy, a means to an end. Whack, and my arm twisted at an uneven angle. Whack, and another bone snapped. I couldn’t breathe. I just wanted him to stop so I could breathe one last time.
I tried to find something to hold onto, a violet wisp of Riley’s hair or the smell of my mother’s hand lotion, the burn of Hunter’s hands on my hips, the sting of magik, but there was only the burn of pain. Agony. I could feel blood on my skin, hot and slick.
Death doesn’t give you time to think, it just swipes at you faster than you can react.
The world narrowed down to two things: pain, and motion.
Blood. Bones. Beating heart. Grinding teeth. I wasn’t Sky anymore: I was a string of organs and limbs and nerves and blinding fire.
This wasn’t the way magik had felt before, manifesting in shivers and tingles, racing blood and headaches and pressure on my mind. This felt more like an expansion—I left my mind, left my body, felt my soul bleeding out into the world around me like my blood on the wooden floor. I could feel the variations in air pressure around us and the individual grains of wood in the floorboards, became a part of every seam in my clothing and every strand of hair on my body, the blood pumping in my veins, spilling from open wounds. It hurt so much that eventually I stopped being able to feel it, like it was too much for my brain to process, nerve endings set on fire.
No, this didn’t feel like magik, at all—as the pain faded, replaced by a deep numbness, I decided I never wanted to let it go, this hazy filter between me and everything else. Dying must be some kind of spell, I thought.
Then it all stopped. The world stood still, time halting, and even though there was a crashing noise in the far distance and the crescendo of raised voices, I was at peace. I’d given all I had already, it felt like all I’d ever done, let people take tiny pieces of me until there was nothing left, and if I had nothing more to offer then I wouldn’t let myself feel guilty about this letting go. They couldn’t blame me for dying. After all the giving, all the pain. They owed me this.
My heartbeat slowed, and I drifted into the dark.
“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty.”
The voice cut through the stillness.
I tried to open my eyes, to follow it. It was so far away, it might have been a memory.
Shifting, a groan, and then. “Huh?”
“Get up. Pull your weight. Have some fun with this one, but don’t finish him.” That was Crayton. There was a sound like an explosion, wood groaning in protest. “I have been waiting a long time for this, after all.”
“This is it?” That was the first voice, the one that had told me to rise. I felt myself dragged further from the dark I craved. “Not much of a challenge.”
It was Hunter.
I tried to force my eyes open, but there was nothing, no feeling, no result. I was too far gone to even move. I couldn’t even feel my body.
I didn’t want to try.
How dare he? How dare he come here and force me to keep going? I was so close to letting go, I was so close, and it hurt so bad to hold on. Something about it felt so right, not as if death were what I wanted, but as if death were something that could complete me. And there was something else, flickering around the edges of my consciousness, a presence—
“Come and get it, little guy,” Axel’s voice said, and there was the sound of shifting, movement.
I listened, only half-aware, as another fight broke out. I clung to the last of my life force, resentful, bitter, trying to keep floating in this blackness. Trying to resist the lure I felt toward the void waiting for me.
In the distance thunder cracked, and I knew distantly, through the thick haze of weakness, that Hunter was fighting. Either Axel or Crayton or both of them, I couldn’t be sure.
After what might have been a second or a minute or an eon, Crayton spoke again. “So this is it?” He was laughing. “Canceled each other out like stupid, ugly magnets.” And then, a noise like a sack of flour being kicked. “Wouldn’t want to waste this one.”
There was a blast like an bomb going off. Something moved, the world shaking—it might have been me, blown back by sheer force, but if it was then there was nothing left in my body to feel it with.
Silence fell. Settled. Broke again.
Maybe everyone was dead.
Scuffling, closer and closer, broken glass splintering, shards of wood gouging into the floor. Sensation crept into my body, and if I had the strength I would have screamed. Nothing was not on fire, no part of me not sharp and stinging, barely held together.
I tried to float closer to the darkness, but something was coaxing me back.
Stale breath ghosted over my ear, and then lips pressed against my skin, speaking against my temple.
“Quiet,” Hunter whispered, as if I could make any noise at all. “We need to settle the bond, Sky.” His lips were shaky against my ear, voice rough and raw. “I know it isn’t what you want—you can hate me forever when it’s done. But it’s the only way to save you and finish him, and I’m taking it.”
No, no! I was so close!
I tried to tug away, force myself out of the world, stop existing.
There was more scuffling movement, and then nothing.
Magik flowed to life inside of me. My power rose its tired, weary head, and looked to the sky. Began to dust itself off.
For a second, the blackness of death rose back up and swallowed me.
In the dark I saw the end of the world. Giant pillars of jagged obsidian shooting through concrete, hordes of tiny creatures with mottled flesh and chipped fangs swarming over cars and into crowds full of panic and screaming. The sky rippled, bleeding from blue to indigo to juniper, and columns of smoke danced in it like living creatures. I saw Riley, her hair flying behind her as she shot arcs of sharp cobalt electricity into a mass of writhing, hissing creatures, great serpents with wings. My friend vanished, and instead there was a blond I’d never seen, gunmetal eyes blazing with fury as a pair of magnificent wings broke from her flesh and her fingers sharpened to dangerous points.
The vision vanished, obliterated by biting pain and rushing smoke. The presence I’d felt before flung me away, back into the world.
I felt myself come back to my body, to the screaming pain and broken bones. I felt Hunter’s lips pressed against my own, his body over mine, leaning on me. My eyelids flickered open, and I saw his face, caked with sweat and dust, blood dripping from his nose. . . .
The fire crackled across the room, along with something else that ran under it, a broken, raspy breathing.
As my strength rose, and the world climbed up to meet me again, so did my anger. Rage unlike anything I’d ever known flooded my body as the seductive hands of death let me go.
Brought back from the edge of dying, I was ready to kill again. This time I would be strong enough.
Pain ebbed away. I lifted my hands and held Hunter’s face to mine, fingers grazing cheeks lined with stubble, lips moving over lips, the taste of him jolting me back into the waking world. He was rough and sharp against me. It felt like I’d been fighting with one arm pinned behind my back, and now that he was here, he’d brought my true strength with him. We were not just two souls linked through a bond anymore—we were the bond. We were one and the same. My mind flooded with his emotion, stronger than ever before, bitter anger and the red of bloodshed coupled with a rapidly expanding determination.
Inside of me and between the two of us, in each of our cells, something snapped into place. A barrier that had kept us apart shattered under the pressure of our power, and energy flooded the bond. For a second, I felt everything, every
emotion that had ever possessed me, firing off like an explosion in my brain. Slowly, the world righted itself.
There was a strength in my limbs like nothing I’d ever known. Irons threads running through my soul, woven with the core of me.
Me. Hunter. A patch of ceiling above his head. Heat and smoke.
He leaned back, pressing a finger to his lips. When I looked up I found the source of the sound I’d heard before: Crayton knelt over Axel’s bent, broken form, a single hand on his forehead. The rasping was the sound of Axel dying.
Crayton’s eyes had gone entirely black, and he stared ahead vacantly as he held onto the massive Charmer lying before him.
Shadows swirled about his hands, living creatures, clinging to his skin and dripping like blood, a dark swath cutting the air. The tendrils reached inside of Axel. They spilled into his ears and nostrils, pooled over his eyes and snaked through his pale hair. Absorption. Crayton was draining Axel’s abilities, now. I remembered the hulking man using shadow magik to unleash his Hounds at Temptation on Saturday night and wondered how long Hunter’s father had had his eye on this power.
I tried to dredge up some pity for Axel. I failed.
Hunter helped me to my feet and didn’t let go of my hand. For a second we watched our enemy. I glanced at Hunter, looking on as his father pillaged the powers of a dying man—anger and disgust and a deep, familiar sadness moved over his features. He cut a look at me, and nodded.
Crayton must have thought Hunter was truly down for the count when he’d decided to drain Axel before finishing us.
He’d underestimated his son. Underestimated me.
It would be the last mistake in a line of many.
“The fire,” Hunter mouthed.
I lifted my free hand and the fire mirrored my motions. Hunter’s abilities came to me easily now, filtering through the bond as if they’d always been a part of me. Fire magik felt natural, not like something new, but like something I’d always carried with me. My mind flashed to an image of his mother, flames licking at the tips of her hair as she rolled fire in her hands, creating marvels and destroying herself in the process. In response, the flames in the fireplace curled and danced along with the current of my thoughts.
I stopped, let them go. Not like that. Not enough to be sure.
Beside me, Hunter exhaled softly.
Moving away from the flames, I focused on the fire poker. Thick and fat, worn black cast-iron. It was heavy in my mind, as if I could feel the weight of it even through the buffer of telekinesis.
Lifting the weapon, I turned it around so the base of it brushed the flames. The pointed end faced us, a spear ready to be thrown.
“Throw him,” I told my bondmate.
Hunter raised his free hand and blasted his father with a wall of sheer force. A wall of heat hit us.
Crayton’s eyes never even had time to return to normal, to let go of the absorption or look up—the fire poker impaled him through the chest as he flew back into the flames. The sheer size and weight of him nearly put them out, the impact sending out a wave of displaced air. Then, the fire reclaimed what it owned. Sparks caught on the edge of him, on the fabric of his clothing, the fine hairs on the backs of his hands and the stuff on his head, and the man went up in flames. I forced them to spread over the body, fueling them on. Let him be ash.
Empty eyes and a flaming corpse and a broken young man holding my hand were all that was left of him, the only mark that he’d stood here and fought.
Hunter stared into the fire, at his burning father, eyes like glass. “My mother and my father,” he said. “When I die, it will be in fire.”
The words frightened me.
I didn’t move. The silence felt heavy and fragile both, and some irrational, disbelieving part of my brain wondered if he would come back to life if I spoke.
We stood together. Hunter tugged on my hand. “We should go and find the girls. Riley and Destiny,” he added when I didn’t move. “They called me and told me where to find you. And Jackson wasn’t far behind me. . . .”
So that’s what Destiny’s wink was about.
Hunter’s voice was toneless. He squeezed my hand harder. He hadn’t looked away from the corpse of his dad, burning slowly in the fireplace.
There didn’t feel like much I could say to him. Didn’t feel like much to say at all.
We were alive. And it kind of fucking sucked.
We left the doors open behind us as we stepped outside.
The problem with adventures that movies and books didn’t tell you was they didn’t actually feel like adventures when you were living them. They felt like bullshit. You got your ass kicked. And even when you got away, power left a scar on you that wouldn’t heal like the ones in your skin.
We’d killed a man today. And it wasn’t regret that left me unhinged. It was that I didn’t regret it at all. Not even a little bit.
What kind of person did that make me?
One that protects what’s mine.
Maybe. Maybe something else. Maybe evil.
The air had warmed, but a slight chill still brushed my hands and cheeks. In the rising light of morning, the pink shades of the sky twisting above us and the ground wet with dew beneath our feet, I watched my hand, entwined with Hunter’s.
Everything would vanish some day. I had to hold onto what I could, while I could. My fingers tightened around Hunter’s and I drew in deep breaths of the morning air, feeling slightly intoxicated on the overflow of emotion.
I knew what would happen now: I would keep going. I would survive.
Find a way to deal with the bond and these powers, with my mother and my career. But a career seemed like small beans when you’d just fought Voldemort and won.
I felt a hysteria coming over me. A laugh bubbled up before I could catch it. Hunter looked at me, and then away, at the pastel sky and the barren trees.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing, really. My mind is just blank.” He looked thoughtful. “I guess I could use a burger. And some whiskey.”
A matte black sports car pulled into the mouth of the driveway, and I braced myself for another fight. Jackson and Penn hopped out of the car, followed by Lucie. After her? Destiny, of all people, and close on her heels was Riley, sliding out and darting past them to bolt in my direction. Later I would learn that they hadn’t simply called the others and led them to us, but that Destiny had taken care of other Charmers under Crayton’s employ upstairs, incapacitating them so they couldn’t rush to his aid when Hunter arrived.
Another car was pulling in, the same make and model as the first, but I had no time to focus on those. I ran forward, pulling Hunter along with me until he shook himself free, and then I was running alone across the massive lawn. I barreled into my best friend’s arms. Riley held me in an iron grip, one of the only things that kept me on my feet.
Suddenly, what had happened hit me like a brick. The weight of our survival was crushing.
If you try to run from the things that hurt you, be prepared to fail. Pain can run faster than you can. It will catch you.
I think maybe it’s supposed to.
And that’s not me being poetic, because honestly, I hated every second.
“It’s over,” Riley muttered in my ear. “Thank fuck.”
My shoulders shook with laughter. Awful, hysterical laughter. Feeling me shaking, my best friend pulled away. Her arms dropped to her sides, and Riley’s lips lifted in a tentative smile, and the shard of dread in my stomach sharpened to a point of guilt and gouged deeper. She thought this was relief, from me.
“Over?” I asked. “I don’t think there’s an end to any of this.”
Hunter reached us and spread his hand against the flat of my back. I pushed back against his touch like a cat getting its ear scratched.
“You’re going to kill me,” I told him. “And I think I might kill everybody.”
“So basically nothing has changed.”
“L
ots has. Before I was just going to stab someone and go to prison. Now I have magik powers to use instead.”
“Those are my magik powers.”
I turned into him, using him to keep myself steady. “What’s yours is mine, witch boy.”
Riley watched, baffled, but still relieved. It hadn’t set in yet, but I was sure she’d see over the next few weeks.
Nothing was over. Nothing was done with.
The world was only just starting to turn.
Sometimes after you can’t run anymore, when you’ve finally turned around and faced your demons, it’s only to find the sun rising behind their backs to turn them to ash, to bathe you in the cleansing light of a new morning, a fresh start.