by Kristie Cook
“And,” I add, pointing to a clock tower nearby, “we have all the time in the worlds right now.”
“The clock might simply be frozen.” He doesn’t even bother to look at it.
“Or,” I counter, “time might have stopped, too.”
“We have all the time in the worlds,” he says, beginning to walk once more, “as long as you focus and keep this thing stable.”
I hurry to catch up. “Meaning?”
“Meaning you’re extremely emotional right now, and I’ve seen your Magic go wonky when you’re upset.”
“You have not!”
He stops again and raises an eyebrow.
Okay, so he’s right. “As long as I know it matters, I can keep it together. We find Jonah first and then the three of us will go with your plan.” I pause. “Can you feel him right now?”
Kellan starts walking. “No.”
“Can you feel any of these people?”
“No.”
“Can you feel me?”
He sighs. “Yes.”
“So … how are we going to find Jonah?”
“We are going to start in the direction where I felt him last,” Kellan says, stepping around two people cringing on the ground. “And then we’ll work from there.”
I think it takes us nearly forty-five minutes to find Jonah, but I can’t be sure since I don’t have anything accurate to judge time. He’s in an alley with three other Guards and, much to my terror, two Elders.
Jonah is down on the ground, one arm stretched toward the sky. The Elders are above him, hovering about an inch above his fingertips. This isn’t what has me panicked, though—no, while that is horrifying in itself, it’s the deep gash on his left temple and the dark red matting his black hair.
I whimper his name and crouch down so I can look at his head. Before my hands make contact, though, Kellan pulls me back.
“Make it so I can sense him.”
“What?”
“I can’t feel my brother,” he grinds out, “and I’m not going to let you wake him up if it’s only going to make him worse. Make it so I can sense him.”
I have no idea how to do this, of course. I didn’t even know I could. I attempt to do what he’s asked by visualizing the link between the brothers, and then imagining clearing the debris blocking it.
It must be enough, because Kellan sinks down and lays his hands on either side of Jonah’s face. He closes his eyes and presses his forehead against Jonah’s bleeding one. After an agonizingly long time, he opens his eyes and says quietly, “Don’t wake him up yet.”
I am fully aware of how shrill my voice is. “Why?”
He lets go of Jonah’s face. “Because he was right on the verge of blacking out.” Kellan then moves over to one of the other Guards lying on the ground. “This guy … he was out when Jonah found him.” Another Guard looks as if his leg is broken, as it’s angled in a weird direction. The third’s hand is out, inches from an Elder’s whipping tail.
But as much as I ought to care about the others, I really can only focus on Jonah. “Is he okay, though?”
“I’m not a Shaman. I can’t diagnose anything.”
“But you know what’s going on with him. Just tell me, Kellan. And don’t try to sugarcoat it.”
He rubs at his hair. “There’s something wrong with his left leg. And what they did to his arm before, they tried to do to his head when he was helping one of those guys over there. They caught him off guard—he thought he had more time before they struck. So, he’s barely hanging onto consciousness, and I’m no Shaman, but the way his thoughts are distorted, I’m thinking something’s wrong with his head.”
I don’t even know how to process these words. I want to touch Jonah, soothe him, hold on and make sure he doesn’t let go, but I don’t, out of fear of possibly waking him up and making it worse. And that is impossible to accept, because I should be able to help him. I’m his Connection. It’s my duty to keep him safe.
Kellan slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the ground next to his brother. He reaches out and touches Jonah’s hair. I envy Kellan this luxury, this touch. “I know it’s asking a lot of you right now. I know you’re scared. I know you’re so worried about him you can barely think straight. But I need you to focus. We need to get this done, get rid of these things, and then we can get someone here to take care of Jonah.”
It goes against every molecule in my body to even contemplate leaving Jonah in such a situation. “Can you promise me he’ll be fine?”
Kellan leans his head back against the wall. “You know I can’t. But we still have to try.”
I sit next to him and stare at the blood in Jonah’s hair. “A lot of people are hurt,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“They’re hurt because of me.”
“No.”
“He’s hurt,” I cry quietly, “because of me. He was trying to protect me.”
Hesitantly, ever so gently, Kellan puts an arm around my shoulders. “We’re going to fix this, Chloe. We’re going to stand up, wake our friends, and fix this.”
I don’t ask for his promise this time, because I know Kellan. I trust him to help me fix this.
Our preferred choices over who to wake up first are technically both knocked out, so it’s sort of a crap shoot.
“It doesn’t make sense to wake up Karl first,” Kellan says, giving me a no-nonsense look I’m not quite familiar with. “We need Zthane.”
“Why? I trust Karl—”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But Zthane is lead out here right now, so Zthane is the one we go to with the plan first.”
I have to jog to keep up with him and his frustratingly long strides. “Are you sure about the plan?”
“We’ve gone over this already. It’s the same one we were working under before you froze time—entrap the Elders in a hole beneath Annar’s streets. It’ll just be easier this time to complete, now that we don’t have to actively battle these things.”
“Didn’t seem to be going so well before,” I throw out, winded from six blocks of jogging.
He glares at me.
“Just saying. Don’t you think it’ll piss them off, being stuffed back into a hole?”
He stops. “Do you think I give a rat’s ass if it does?”
“No, of course not,” I say, glad to stop and catch my breath. “I’m just saying, if they were able to break free of a hole before, what’s to stop them from doing it again?”
“The first hole was disrupted because of an earthquake. There are no earthquakes in Annar.” I merely lift my eyebrows. “Normally,” he clarifies. “Outside of Elder attacks. Besides, we’re going to have you seal the hole up along with Iolani, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Funny how I’m allowed to do something now,” I mutter, “besides cower inside a building and pray that everyone around me doesn’t die.”
He takes a step back, but I don’t think it’s because he’s worried I’ll smack him or anything. “Let’s put it this way: Did you like it when Jonah jumped out of that window?”
“What kind of stupid question is that?”
“How did it make you feel, seeing him in that alley, bleeding, on the verge of gods know what?”
Like he doesn’t know. “What’s your point?”
“My point,” he says, walking again, “is that you have to think of how people would feel if you were out there fighting, too. What if that’d been you out there? Would you have wanted to do that to him? Worry him like that?”
“Concern about worrying me didn’t stop him, did it?”
Kellan shakes his head. “For someone who has a Connection to him, you really don’t know Jonah at all, do you?”
I relent and give into waking up Zthane first. It’s an easy process—all I do is lay a hand on his chest and order him to wake up. Which, of course, he doesn’t—I mean, his heart is beating, and he’s breathing, but considering he’d been unconscious when I’d frozen Annar, that’s how
he’s returned to us.
It doesn’t faze Kellan, though. He simply touches his mentor’s head and wills him to feel lucid and relatively pain free. It takes a minute or so, but Zthane eventually opens his dilated eyes. Confusion, then anger, fills them as Kellan helps him sit up. “Why is Lilywhite out here? Orders were to take her to one of the panic rooms below the building!”
“I tried,” Kellan says, squatting down next to the Elemental. “But she decided to do something else.”
“Chloe, don’t you know how dangerous it is out here?” Zthane asks, rubbing at his heavily bruised forehead. “Good gods, girl, are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“Uh,” I say, looking around. “Are you referring to you or Kellan doing the killing?”
Zthane then has a look around himself, mouth open so wide that I’m sure I could see his tonsils if I looked. And then Kellan explains to him what’s happened, and the anger in his eyes fades to begrudging appreciation.
I’m overruled again when it comes time to wake up the next person. Zthane insists on another Goblin named Sjharn Thunderbridge, the Guard’s best Shaman. He’s huddled over another fallen Guard across the plaza, and Zthane reasons that if we’re going to wake up so many injured people, we might as well get them into fighting condition before asking them to do anything, plenty of time or no.
After Sjharn finally comes Karl, which makes me feel a bit better. His arm looks worse upon inspection; in fact, if I were a betting woman, I’d say every bone had been broken. It takes Sjharn a long time to fix all the bones, and Kellan has to help by upping Karl’s endorphin levels until he’s nearly drugged out of his mind. Karl is giggling like a schoolgirl while rambling on about things I can’t even begin to understand. During this process, Zthane goes over the plan with us. Karl will work on the hole while we wake up the rest of the Guard. Then I’m to solidify the ground, making it impenetrable. Iolani will create a lid of sorts, which I’m to also make permanent. And then I’m to will it so nothing but a Creator can ever open this patch of land again.
“Best to keep your enemies close,” Zthane is saying. “Will be much easier on us if we always know where they are.”
I’m exhausted by the time Kellan and I wake up the thirty Guards around the plaza, not including the ones with Jonah. Everyone has already insisted that we do them last—I think, especially with the way a now-lucid Karl is watching me, that they’re all worried I won’t be able to focus if I have to watch Jonah go through a painful healing process.
They’re probably right. I can barely focus as it is, wondering how he’s doing. And that’s ridiculous, really, because I know nothing can happen to him as long as he’s not moving. But it feels wrong to have him like that, even more wrong to know it’s me who has taken life away from him, even if it’s only in a temporary stasis.
Karl pounds away at the hole after I will the ground below us to react to his fist, shaping it in ways I didn’t know was possible for a Quake. Now that he has the time, he’s able to smooth the crack until it’s roughly circular, rather than a jagged edge. He makes it deep by extending certain fingers during each of his fist poundings—so subtle and nuanced that it’s really a marvel to watch. During this time, I sit on a partially broken bench and observe him and Iolani, who is mixing the rock with magma she’s moving and pulling upward, while the rest of the Guards discuss the situation.
This part of Annar is devastated. The other Creator will be asked, apparently kicking and screaming, to come and rebuild before the week is out. When I offer to do it myself, I’m told no—not that they don’t trust me, but that sometimes things like this take a seasoned, Ascended Creator, instead of a wild card who flies off the handle and freezes time and whatnot.
Well, they didn’t actually say that last part, but I know it’s what they’re thinking.
Once the hole meets Karl’s standards, I’m called over to tighten and make the walls permanent. I throw a bit of class to the joint, making the surrounding walls reflective so it doesn’t seem so oppressive once sealed.
“You know,” Iolani says, amused, “they won’t have any light down there to throw reflections off of.”
I dust my knees off. “It’s the thought that counts.”
Jump-starting the tornadoes already hanging in the sky is a bit tricky, especially since I keep remembering how it felt to actually be in one of them. I end up creating little balls of my willed thoughts to hand over to Raul to toss into his winds. He has no fear of one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour winds, so I let him deal with them.
Rustling up the Elders takes an excruciatingly long time. Raul is the only Cyclone around, and since the other Elementals deal more with other weather aspects, they are not much use. Like a cowboy, he uses his twisters to rope and herd the Elders toward the hole. He goes after one at a time, making sure it’s safely ensconced before heading out toward another. I’m not allowed to go with him when he goes to fetch the two hovering over Jonah, but Kellan is, and I know—as pissed as he is at his brother—he’ll never let anything happen to Jonah. Even still, I find it hard to breathe until those last two Elders are in the hole and I’ve been promised that everything is exactly as I left it in that alley.
Iolani uses more lava to create a thick lid to the hole. It amazes me how, in the face of such heat, she doesn’t manage to sweat one single drop. I’m fifty feet away and ready to pass out from the extreme temperatures, especially since there are no more winds to move the stifling, thick air. The two Blazes stand next to her, also apparently impervious to such high temperatures. Their arms, I’d noticed, are covered in bumpy, distorted scars, making me wonder if they began playing with matches at a very early age.
Once the lava lid is finished, I’m called back over to make it permanent. During this process, Iolani gets more lava to fill the rest of the cracks in the streets around us. While not pretty, it’s at least safe now to walk without fear of dropping dozens of feet down.
And then, just when I’m about to go crazy that we’re not already with Jonah, Zthane tells us, “I’m afraid to tell you all that this isn’t all of them.”
“Who’d I miss?” Raul demands. “We scoured the entire city.”
“You misunderstand,” Zthane says. “You did get all in Annar. But shortly before I got knocked out, I got a call from the Dwarven plane. There was a sighting of Elders there. It appears they split up to attack two spots at once.”
“Fantastic,” Karl mutters. “Do you know if any were captured there?”
“No,” Zthane says. “I’m afraid cell phones don’t work in Chloe’s no-time zone. But, I’m doubting it. In fact, after today, I’m doubting any of our tactics. It appears most of our skills don’t seem to work on them too well. We know that Emotionals, Electrics, and a Creator are effective. The rest of us unfortunately are flying blind when it comes to controlling them.”
This is not what any of us want to hear.
It isn’t an easy thing to listen to a Shaman tick off the things wrong with the person you love. It could be worse, I’m told, a broken leg is nothing. Sjharn claims he fixes those all the time. The Guard goes off and gets legs messed up on missions frequently. But it’s the head injury that has me freaked out. The Elders managed to crack Jonah’s skull, and there is significant swelling of the brain.
I can create a city on the turn of a dime, I can destroy it with the blink of an eye, but I cannot do anything to help fix Jonah. All I can do is sit nearby and watch and wait and remind myself that I need to breathe, because when he wakes up, and I know he will, he’ll need me.
So this is what I do while he lies in a bed in yet another safe house. I hold his hand, stroke his hair, and talk to him as if nothing’s wrong. And I wait when waiting is not easy.
chapter 40
In the past day, I’ve gotten used to the sounds of different knocks on the door. Lizzie’s are soft, fingernails against wood. Meg’s come in short bursts, like flits of unrestrained chunks of excitement. Alex’s are measured and come in threes
, Iolani’s a shave and a haircut. Karl doesn’t knock—his fist would shake the entire building—so he bellows from outside the door. Kellan simply enters whenever he wants. And when he comes, it’s not to talk to me—never to me. He checks on his brother, and then leaves.
Lizzie’s latest round of soft tapping comes nearly twenty-four hours after Sjharn brought Jonah here. “Cora’s awake,” she informs me. “I just talked to her on the phone.”
A set of weights rise off of my shoulders.
“I’m going to go over to the hospital to see her,” Lizzie continues. “Meg and Alex, too. We were wondering if you wanted to come with.”
I hate the thought of being that girl, the one who, when she gets a boyfriend, disappears from her friends’ lives. I don’t think I’m that girl, but I can see how it’ll be interpreted as such when I say I don’t believe it’s a good idea if I leave just yet.
I know he’ll wake up. Sjharn says he has no worries about Jonah right now. Jonah will wake up, and he’ll be fine, albeit tired and possibly prone to headaches for a few days. But I want to be here when he does; I want to be the first person he sees. I want him to know he’s not alone, that I’m not leaving. We’ve spent far too much time apart as it is.
Lizzie accepts this, and is kind enough not to voice any judgments she may have about my clinginess. I ask her to give Cora my love and tell her that I’m so, so glad she’s safe.
I’ll save my apologies for when I see her.
The Cousins leave, and eventually, so do Karl and Kellan. They’re off to some kind of Guard meeting. Now that Annar’s shields have been reinforced and the other Creator has gone round to solidify them (based on what I’d done in California—apparently he’d never thought to do such a thing before), no one seems to think we need babysitting.
My mother calls a little while later, to tell me she and my dad are going back to the Human plane. I wait for her to mention the attack, so when she doesn’t, I am hurt enough that I bring it up.