Runebinder

by Alex R. Kahler

  “You should eat something,” she said finally. “You will need your strength.”

  She had a bag slung on her back she’d pulled out of the SUV. Apparently, they hadn’t been lying about planning ahead. It made Tenn feel even worse. His stomach rumbled with the thought of food: even the small amounts of Earth he’d been using had drained him.

  “Maybe later. I...I think I need to sleep.”

  Clearly, Dreya knew he was lying. He’d never been good at that. But she didn’t question. She probably figured he’d already been through enough.

  Tenn glanced over her shoulder to Devon, who sat on the bed and stared out the window.

  “Why?” Tenn asked.

  “Why?” she repeated.

  He looked to her. It was so hard to keep his voice from shaking, to keep himself standing.

  “Why did you come after me? The three of you. Why?”

  “The Prophets,” she said.

  He shook his head in agitation. The urgings of the Prophets had saved more than one outpost Tenn had been stationed in. But that didn’t mean he trusted them. Anyone who used Maya was a wild card. It was the one element you couldn’t just attune to, the only one that was supposed to be mildly sentient.

  Maya was the godsphere, the power of spirit. It chose you.

  “But why you three?” he asked. “Anyone could have come. Why did it have to be you?”

  He wanted to say him. He could tell from the look in her eyes that Dreya knew it, too.

  “We were chosen by name,” Dreya said. Her words were small. Clearly, she didn’t like being singled out by the Prophets, either. “We had no choice. ‘Find the boy that Water weeps for. His words will shape the world.’”

  Cold settled in Tenn’s chest.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “We have no way of asking them. And I hear the Prophets don’t interpret, only relay what Maya whispers.” She looked back to her brother. There was no way he wasn’t hearing this, but he ignored them entirely. “We can only hope that the Witches will know something of this.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  She hesitated.

  “Then we find someone who does.”

  He nodded. He knew it was a lie—if the Witches didn’t know, who would? It’s not like they had any hope of finding the Prophets.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he whispered.

  She reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “Tomorrow.”

  The moment their door was closed, he felt the emptiness around and within him contract. He pressed his forehead to his old door, squeezed his eyes tight. He felt the dorm breathe around him, felt the throb of blood in his ears as Water roiled with memory—his classmates, dragging a mattress into the hall and jumping around after sign-in; him, carrying his first care package from his parents back to his room, opening it while listening to music and dreaming of family; the day of the Resurrection, when they were dragged from their rooms and told they would need to return to their homes and defend their loved ones.

  And Jarrett. The night they’d studied together, when Jarrett led him back to his room.

  Tenn had wanted so badly to invite Jarrett over to watch a movie. He’d planned on it.

  He’d never gotten the nerve, and never got the chance. How different would his life have been if he’d made a move back then? If they’d fallen for each other? If they’d spent this whole time fighting at each other’s side?

  They were thoughts he shouldn’t have allowed himself to have. But there, it was impossible to keep them down. They were living, breathing things. They had teeth.

  He pressed his hand to the cold doorknob. Then, before he could tell himself this was a horrible idea, he opened the door.

  History washed over him in a waft of dust and desertion. The faintest light filtered through the window opposite him, casting heavy shadows on everything within. He didn’t need light or magic to see. His body knew every corner of this place—the cinder-block walls, the wooden shelves, the desk with his computer still sitting on it. He stepped slowly inside and felt the bile rise in his throat. Moonlight shone in from a space in the clouds. Photos still lined his wall—him and his few friends making sand castles by the lake or eating lunch at the mall; his family at Thanksgiving; the tree outside his old bedroom window.

  He collapsed to his knees.

  His heart was on fire, every fiber of that muscle tearing itself apart. He gripped his head in his hands and sobbed on the floor, tears pooling in the dust. Memories ripped through him, but it wasn’t Water at work. The Sphere didn’t need to do anything. The real wounds were all there—the pain, the history. This is where he’d lain awake for hours, wondering if Jarrett actually liked him. Wondering if anyone would like him. So much time wasted to worry. He would never get it back.

  He curled in on himself, wishing death would take him. The fire from before, the burning desire for revenge, snuffed out. What point was revenge if there was no one to come home to? What was the point of pushing forward when everything he loved, everything he worked for, was continually ripped away from him? He couldn’t find any answers, and he couldn’t find any drive. All that was here was the dust of his past. The memory of what wouldn’t be.

  He forced himself to kneeling and stared at his hands as they pressed into the linoleum. His hands were worn. Long, thin fingers, crossed with scars. They didn’t fit into this place. Neither did he.

  He pushed himself up, grabbing the chair for support. He was about to make his way to bed when he stopped; something caught his eye.

  The dust on his desk was lit up by the moon, a pale sheen of uniform gray. Save for one small patch.

  Words had been written in the dust, a fingertip’s scrawl.

  Three words, in a script he didn’t recognize.

  Welcome home, Jeremy

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HE STARED AT the handwriting for what felt like hours, every throb of his blood the tick of a clock. He didn’t recognize the script, but he knew without a doubt that it was Matthias’s. Tomás would have just appeared in briefs and a smile to torment him. It wasn’t the fact that the writing was recent that made his heart clench but, instead, what it entailed. Matthias knew his name. Matthias knew his history. Matthias knew more about him than Tenn had given him credit for.

  Which meant Matthias would be back. He expected Tenn to return here.

  They weren’t safe.

  He brushed the dust and the handwriting away.

  Water resonated.

  “We have to go!” his roommate yells. Greg shoves clothes into his backpack, but he’s barely paying attention to what he grabs. Tenn watches five pairs of socks and a scarf and two tank tops go into the bag.

  Tenn can’t move.

  If he moves, he’ll have to believe this is real.

  He’d thought it was a joke, at first. Some part of their training. Handling emergencies or something like that. It started with a news clip on repeat, one that had taken over every single TV station, every radio signal, every internet channel: a woman in black in the middle of a basement somewhere, a man chained to a chair in front of her, marks covering his body. A grim smile was on his face like he wanted to be there. Like he volunteered.

  The woman said that the time had come for a new savior. And she was the one to herald them in.

  Them. Not him. Them.

  Tenn had watched on the dorm TV with his classmates as she opened to Earth. As the man screamed and shook in the chair, as his body arched and snapped and bones shot from flesh and blood oozed down skin and then the screaming stopped. Changed. Became a howl that pierced Tenn to the core as the man’s face contorted and elongated and his jaw cracked and his teeth gouged and when it was over, when it was finally over, he was no longer a man.

  “I giv
e you the new era,” the woman said. She stepped forward. She wore black, but her face was pale. Almost angelic.

  Blood splattered her cheeks.

  “Join me,” she said. “Join me, and know eternity. Defy me, and not even death will release you from my wrath.”

  The footage had cut off, repeated itself for at least an hour. But then the repetition stopped, and new footage appeared. Live footage. People running through the streets, screaming as monsters chased them. As mages set fire to buildings or boiled lakes or called down storms. It was coordinated. It had been planned.

  The moment it started, the war was already won.

  “Jeremy!” Greg calls. “Get off your ass and pack!”

  Head reeling with memory of the footage, Tenn stands and begins slowly putting things in his bag. This is all just a dream, he tells himself. This is all just a joke. Water simmers in his gut, as if responding to something far away. The Sphere had been acting up the last week. It had been harder to control. More volatile. Had it felt the wrongness in the world?

  Was that even a thing that was possible?

  Someone knocks on the door and opens it before Tenn can say anything. He hopes it’s Kevin, but it’s just Mark, their RA.

  “Bus leaves in twenty,” Mark says. Then he’s off to the next room.

  Tenn thought it was strange that they were evacuating the school. There were gates here. And people who used magic. That had to mean it was safe, right?

  “Do you want to get left behind?” Greg asks as he pushes out the door. He looks Tenn up and down. “God. At this rate you’ll be the first to get eaten.”

  Then he leaves, before Tenn has a chance to respond or even comprehend. Eaten. That’s a legitimate threat now.

  He looks at the photo on his desk of his family. Reaches to take it, then thinks better. It would be safer here. He’ll find them. Soon. He’ll find them, and he’ll bring them back here. Where it’s safe.

  Of all places in this world, Silveron has to be safe.

  Tenn barely felt Water transition from a memory to a pull. It sloshed around in his gut and his mind, dragging not only his memories back, but his body forward. Safe. Something has to be safe.

  But Water knew better. Water resonated with the pain, and embedded deep within the foundations of the school was a burning, nagging shadow of something terrible. Something inhuman. And that sense, that wrongness, twined itself around Tenn’s heart. Water echoed the monster’s hymn, and Tenn’s body had no choice but to march to its cadence. It tugged him forward. It told him to obey.

  He left his quarterstaff in the room and slid out the door. A small part of him was dimly aware of how silent the hall was, how loud his footsteps were on the tile. But the twins didn’t stir. He had meant to tell them something. Something about the safety of this place, but Water was louder in his head than his own thoughts. He could only move with the tide, a stick caught in the stream.

  He didn’t stop at the lobby. He continued down into the basement, toward the room where the laundry machines and Ping-Pong tables were. The room was more than just a lounge. Doors lined every wall, and behind them was a series of tunnels that linked to every building on campus. He could practically feel the ghosts of his classmates here, but the perception was dim, lost under the crashing of his mutinous Sphere. He slipped through the lounge like a sleepwalker, past sofas and tables littered with magazines, and made his way to a door at the far end. It opened silently under his touch, the hall beyond stagnant with dead air.

  The door at the other end of the long hall was locked. Water roared like rapids.

  A flick of Earth, and the lock crumbled. When he stepped inside, Water stabbed him with agony, a pierce that coiled through his guts and made his eyes flutter. The walls in here breathed pain. And that pain, that crippling hurt, drew him forward and filled him with a new sort of ecstasy. A different sort of hunger.

  In a small corner of his mind, he knew the room should have been like many of the other downstairs lounges, with sofas and tables and bookshelves. But this room looked like a kitchen. Knives dangled from grids on the ceiling and steel bowls piled on every surface. Rows of metal tables were meticulously arranged side by side in the middle of the room, more knives and bowls artfully displayed on top. Stacks of wood or metal were piled along the walls in pyramids. Tenn didn’t need light to know that there was no dust in here. He could sense it—the cleanliness, the almost sterile scent in the otherwise-stale air. And yet, despite the order, he knew the walls should be bleeding. They were screaming curses through his veins. He pitched forward. The door slammed shut behind him.

  That’s when he noticed the body.

  It was the mouth of the whirlpool, and Water left him no choice but to fall toward it. The slumped corpse against the wall dragged him forward, tugged at Water with a hook he had no desire to escape. It was male. Older. The flesh tight over sharp bones. Tenn dropped at the body’s side, his head spinning, spinning. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t—I need to get out of here, I need—Water drowned the fear. It sang a horrible ecstasy. The body was wearing a suit, a wool suit. Tenn’s fingers brushed the rough fabric. His hand pulled itself toward the body’s face. Fingertips brushed dead skin. Water screamed.

  “Dmitri,” she says. “You love me, right?”

  He nods, though he doesn’t mean it. Of course he can’t mean it. Not after this.

  “And you see the good I’m doing, yes?”

  He nods again. It’s all he can do, really; it’s impossible to talk through the gag, and the ropes tying his wrists to the chair are strong. He’d given up struggling hours ago. The walls are thick down here. Even if he could have screamed, no one would have heard him. Even if he managed to escape these bonds, there was nowhere for him to run. The whole faculty has gone insane.

  Get the kids out. Get the kids out. Those had been his last words, before Helena pulled him down here. Those had been his last words, and he didn’t know if anyone had heeded him.

  Helena pushes herself away from the desk. Her black hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears the pencil skirt and white blouse that he’d always joked made her look like a sexy librarian. He isn’t joking now. And neither is she.

  She holds a scalpel from one of the art studios. It’s already covered in his blood. His skin burns with cold and pain, his blood dripping in slow rivulets to the sterile tiles below. She hadn’t hesitated the slightest bit when she’d brought the blade to his flesh. Not the first time. And not the second or twentieth.

  She leans in close, her green eyes blazing.

  “Then you understand why I must do this.” Her eyes flash to the blade in her hand. She isn’t a Howl—one of the monsters that had been kept out of sight of society until yesterday. He knows that much. She’s worse. He’d watched her slow progression toward madness and power. And like everyone else at the Academy, he’d done nothing to stop it.

  Hell, he might have encouraged it.

  He’d been on the admissions board, and had handpicked the students she used for subjects. He’d found fuel for her madness. So much of this was his fault...

  “I’ve studied the words of the Dark Lady. I know her secrets. And I think,” she says, leaning in, like this is some intimate secret and not his death sentence, “I think I can become just like her. I could become a goddess.”

  The Sphere of Water courses in her stomach. You’re unstable, he wants to say. The Spheres have made you crazy. But there was no logic with her, no reasoning. Not anymore.

  “With these runes, I can keep you sane. I know the science. The base creatures, they lose their minds. Only those of Water or Fire or Air have sentience, but even that is fragile. But I know. I know how to keep you mine. I know how to give you power.”

  He can’t scream as she pushes the blade into his skin, scratching marks along his arms and chest that he can’t see and can’t
comprehend. Runes to bind you to me, she’d said. Runes to make you like the Kin. Runes to let you keep your magic. There had been tears in her eyes the first time she’d made a cut, unflinching as she’d been.

  Not anymore.

  Now she’s smiling, his blood staining her lips a deeper crimson as her scalpel licks him again.

  Tenn surfaced from the flood, barely able to gasp as Water’s grip loosened and reality crashed against the waves. His thoughts were dim, congealing. He knew those people. Dmitri had been his biology teacher. And Helena...he knew her all too well.

  She had been Silveron’s president.

  Dmitri’s body twitched beneath his hand, breath escaping in a hiss from long-silent lips. A voice inside of Tenn screamed, begged him to run from the Howl at his fingertips, the Howl that was slowly coming back to life, but Water bellowed louder. Water wanted to help Dmitri, wanted to mirror his pain.

  Water won.

  “Please,” Steven cries. “Please don’t do this.”

  The boy squirms on the table, but the ropes hold him strong. Helena stands beside Dmitri, watching him work, watching as he sobs with hunger and hatred.

  She hands him the knife.

  “Do it,” she whispers into his ear. “My love, my slave.” She kisses the back of his neck.

  Dmitri’s hand trembles as he brings the knife down. He can feel Steven’s pulse without touching him, can hear his heartbeat echoing his own. The water, the water—it’s all he can sense, all he can taste. His throat burns with hunger, with need. He’d heard that higher-Sphere Howls could control their hunger, could remain sentient. Helena swore the runes she carved into him would make him like a Kin, would let him keep his mind, his emotions, his identity.

  She lied.

  The runes only make him more aware of what he does. Of the hunger he has no control over.

  Steven struggles as Dmitri slowly lowers the blade. It feels like a blessing, like the most intimate of touches. It makes Dmitri’s bloodlust rise—that increase in pulse, the terrified patter of the boy’s heart. He barely hears the boy scream as the blade pierces through flesh, shallow first, then deep as the hunger takes over. Red fills Dmitri’s vision. Red fills his lips. His starving Sphere sings, and hunger becomes ecstasy.