Riven (The Illumine Series)

by Anders, Alivia

  I waited for something, anything, but only the sound of silence greeted me with open arms. I slammed a fist into the wall, screaming as hot tears ran down my dirt-covered cheeks. Death would have been better than the cryptic, mind-numbing silence they continued to torture me with.

  Back pressed against the heated door, I slid to the floor in a pile. Not for the first time I looked around my confined space, counting cracks in the slate grey rock walls and dingy, butterscotch cobblestone floor. The cluster of sheets and blankets in the corner was as close to a bed I had slept in for the last two weeks, and food was something of an entirely different matter. Well, at least they were generous enough to provide me with a bucket.

  My eyes squeezed tight enough to see stars. One day of this had been horrible, one week had been torture-worthy, but two weeks left me feeling lost. I opened one eye, staring at the wall across from me, six small scratches marring the rock. Getting to my feet and crossing the room, I placed my index finger against the jagged rock, digging the nail against it until a seventh mark fell in line with the rest. Seven attempts to flee, seven attempts failed. I was beginning to see a trend.

  Standing in the middle of my small confinement, I could feel the itch to pace beginning to raise my skin. Each day I spent in this place felt like a year, and I didn’t know how much longer I could take. With the exception of Ursula’s sporadic visits to force blood out of my veins for some sick gain, I was left alone. No guard would speak to me, no one would tell me a thing. For all I knew, Kayden and Ari were dead, captured in the mess of our break-in, and I didn’t doubt she’d eventually hunt down Abigail and Jayson, maybe even my mother, and wipe us all out.

  Shivers shook my shoulders, but it wasn’t from the cold. Visions of my brother, bloodied and bruised on the floor, rose the familiar taste of bile to the back of my lips. I barely made it to the bucket in the corner in time before I heaved everything I had eaten for my last meal. My head hung along the side of the bowl, hands gripping the sides for some kind of stability as the all too-familiar empty sensation began to spread from my stomach to the rest of my body.

  “Congratulations, you’re officially starving yourself to death,” I whispered to myself, pushing back from the bucket and onto the floor to lay eagle-spread.

  A pitiful mock-sigh came from somewhere in the room. “Please, you call that food? Try something a little more tasteful, like bacon or brownies.”

  Crap.

  The hallucinations were back.

  Well, not exactly hallucinations, but one hallucination.

  Sitting upright, I searched around the room until my eyes found her. She was sitting on the pile of blankets in the opposite corner, lips turned into a frown that didn’t quite touch her eyes. Still as utterly ethereal as she was the first time I had imagined her, my carbon copy excelled in looking graceful. Her long blonde hair had been tamed to tight spiral curls resting on a backdrop of her v-neck, black velvet top and matching black pants. Unblemished, youthful pale skin reminded me of the perfect china doll, right down to her curious brown eyes.

  Having spotted me sitting up, she gave me a playful smile. “On second thought, how about just brownies baked with bacon?”

  “Go away, silly figment of my imagination,” I sighed with exasperation, lying back on the floor. “And stop teasing me about bacon. It’s just cruel.”

  “Not as cruel as you’re being to me,” she whined. Out of the corner of my eyes, I watched her get up from the pile of cloth and stand beside me. “I have something cool to show you.”

  I stared at her through half-lidded eyes. “My imagined version of my younger self has something to show me that I don’t already know?” The sarcasm was barely held back in my tone. “Oh, this ought to be good.”

  Taking that as a yes, she weaved her fingers into her hair, pulling out a chunk of midnight black colored hair. Eyebrows wiggling, she did nothing to contain the mischievous sparkle dancing her her stare. “Check it out!”

  I scooted to a sitting position on the floor, biting back a sigh. “I see we’re experimenting with hair colors now.”

  “Nope,” she beamed with pride. “Not hair colors, hair color, just one.” Fingers stroked the long silky lock of hair. “I like it. It’ll help tell us apart for the future, aside from having different names.”

  Her words sank into my mind as I gave her an absentminded nod. The first day of my captivity she had appeared to me, but after a while I grew tired of calling her my carbon copy. She insisted on being called Ebony, saying it would be exactly what her mother would have wanted. Too bad she didn’t know her mother was a deranged basket case, locked in a quiet little white room where the biggest stressor would be what color paint she’d use for her next work of art.

  Then again, since she was just a product of my growing insanity, maybe she did. After all, I was ultimately the one in control; my subconscious was probably having a ball coming up with a friend for me to talk to. Next it would let me believe I can talk to squirrels and mice, maybe even sew a nice dress for a ball where I could don a glass slipper and-

  This time, I let the sigh deflate my chest. “Ebony,” I started to say, when the sound of keys outside the door hit my ears. Instantly I stood up, fire erupting over tightly clenched fists.

  Ursula quickly came into the room, shutting the door with the blink of an eye. Instead of her usual get-up of laced corsets and princess skirts, she was dressed in a maroon turtleneck and black jeans. Her hair had been pulled into a tight ponytail high on her head, heels replaced for combat boots.

  “We don’t have much time,” she spoke in a rush, tossing a pile of clothes at me. It was the exact same outfit as hers, right down to the ribbed fabric in the turtleneck. “Get those on, but watch it. There’s a vial somewhere in the pants.”

  I took a quick look around the room, no sign of my gorgeous hallucination. Setting the pile on the floor, I wasted no time stripping out of the dirty white gown I was still wearing from the night of my capture. “She bought it?”

  “Yes, but I can’t trust that she’ll buy it for much longer.” Ursula paced the room, fingers twitching with each passing moment. Hints of stress touched her face. “Your powers are growing, way too fast for it to be normal. We have to get you out of here. The Queen can only believe you’d be overtaken by Vens so many times before she starts to see how fast you’re incinerating them. Who knows what else is stirring inside of you with her blood.”

  Head through the turtleneck, I fumbled for the sleeves. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you need to get out of here and save us, all of us, before whatever her blood does to you finishes you off.”

  I paused, one leg in the pair of black skinny jeans. When I spoke, it was quiet and carefully controlled. “So you knew.” When she didn’t answer immediately, my blood began to boil. “You knew that vial wasn’t from some medicine woman.”

  “No,” she said sternly, finding my gaze. A mixture of shame and something I couldn’t place had turned her face sad, withdrawn. “I didn’t know. Some crazy green-looking hag on the street in Charon gave it to me, and told me I was to use it on the injured Nephilim. I thought it was a beggar, or someone who had one too many at the bar, how the heck was I going to know it was for you? I must have carried that vial for the last sixteen, seventeen years. It wasn’t... until later that I found out the hag was a consort of the Queen’s.”

  “You didn’t think to go to the Queen about it?”

  “Of course I did,” her tone grew short and bitter. “You want to know what she told me? Do it, or what you love the most will die. I laughed; the only thing I’ve ever loved the most was long dead. When I didn’t take her bait, she waited. Waited until I met you to show me her little prize. That’s when I knew I had to do it, no matter what I learned about you, about Kayden, anyone.”

  Boots on and laced, I stood up to stand directly in front of her. Up close, I started to see just how bad the tolls of things had taken to her. Ursula’s pale skin looked wrinkled and age
d, dark bruises cresting her eyes as if she’d never slept a day in her eternal life. No longer was she the pretty, perfect immortal, but a damaged and blackmailed pawn in the Queen’s never-ending game of chess. But that didn’t explain why she would be so torn over Leo’s death. Wasn’t he just another man in the breath of her life?

  “Why?” I asked, almost as a challenge. “Why should I believe a word you’ve just told me? How do I know she isn’t outside that door right now, waiting to point and laugh in my face at my gullibility?”

  Her petite hands clenched to tight fists. “Because she has what I love the most.”

  “Leo is de-”

  “Not Leo, you stupid girl,” Ursula moaned. Fear flickered in her eyes, tears threatening to run down her face. “She has Euriel. My brother.”

  I stared at her in shock, disbelief riddling coloring my cheeks. Flashes of the day I stood in her house with Kayden by my side, pushed to the front of my mind. “... you told me your brother was dead. He was mortal.”

  When she opened her mouth, Ursula let out a harsh laugh of anger. “Funny, the longer I live, the more I see that nothing is as it seems.” Her eyes were dark, images of pain and anguish weaved inside.

  I reached out to comfort her, but thought better of it. “When did you find out?”

  She hiccuped, tears rimming her eyes. “That night I ran into you. After the... after the bonfire incident with Kayden, she came to me. He’s been in servitude to some vampire for the last couple hundred years on the Queen’s debt.” A rivulet of salty tear ran down her cheek. “She knows I can’t do anything. If I approach him, they’ll kill him, and he can’t leave because he needs his master’s blood to live.”

  Great. So there were vampires in this messed up world, too? What next, Sparkling werewolves? Unicorn-vampire hybrids? I didn’t even try to pretend I understood vampire rules. “That’s why you’re helping me, isn’t it? You want me to find him and somehow save him.”

  Ursula stepped closer, lingering far enough to leave a hint of space between our faces. Between the waves of anguish and sadness mirrored in her eyes, fire stirred a deep-seated flare of vengeance. I knew how that look felt; it was the same look I had worn the night I went for the Queen. She, too, had been through enough to harden her delicate skin to iron, stitched with staples to hide the invisible wounds she kept pressed against her heart. She had been stolen the one thing no one should ever have taken from them, family. The thought of someone taking Jayson from me, lying to me that he was dead for years, only to reveal he was hostage by the Queen’s doing? I would have died trying to get him back. It wasn’t that huge of a surprise that Ursula would do the same for her own.

  “For years I have been told that you, a Nephilim, would destroy the beautiful balance Lucretia had given our land, that you were the enemy and she was our salvation. But all she has done is manipulate, slaughter, and incarcerate those who truly hold the key to saving us.” She paused, taking a shallow breath that wheezed in her chest. “You have to find him, Essallie. Find Euriel, he can help you kill the Queen.”

  “He can’t help me.”

  “If you find him, he can.”

  I dared ask. “How?”

  “Remember how I said that library was his, the one we had together?” She waited for my nod. “Before we moved here, before I relocated to Maine, our last home had a library four times that size. He knew every book inside and out on those shelves-”

  “This isn’t the time for a monologue.”

  “There was a book,” Ursula said with growing urgency, eyes burning bright as the memory blossomed in her mind. A fierce, triumphant smile brought her tired face to life. “On Nephilim in our original sacred library. It spoke of bondings, and Watchers; it was one of the original texts the True Queen owned, and when she passed we took it before her tainted daughter could burn it. I believe it holds the key to saving your life.”

  There was a pause, a moment that lingered between us as our eyes locked. If she was telling the truth, if I stood a chance of ever finding a way to save myself and everyone at once, this was it. As much as I loathed the idea of putting my faith into the hands of the woman who unwittingly put me here, I figured she had to believe in me if she was here, risking everything.

  Giving her a single, short nod, I said the words. “Let’s do this.”

  The fire in Ursula’s eyes flared intensively, the smile on her lips spreading. Stepping back, she held out her hand. “Give me the vial.”

  I reached into my jeans pocket, pulling out a corked, thin glass tube. Purple liquid sloshed within. Before I could ask what it was, Ursula had taken it, uncorked it, and swallowed the liquid in a single gulp.

  She stumbled back with a gasp, colliding into the wall. I watched her body shake, skin stretching and bending to the sickening snap of re-forming bones just underneath her superficial layers. The straight, waist length platinum blonde hair she was known for turned short, falling off until a crop cut remained. Her body jutted like an improperly assembled jigsaw puzzle, stretching and shortening until the girl standing before me looked nothing like the immortal succubus I had come to know.

  The girl before me was most definitely Ursula, only she looked like me.

  “Judging by your slack-jaw stare, Lilix’s potion worked again,” she said, wincing. Her voice, normally soft like a sea breeze, was now strained and tense. Did I really sound like that? “Enough with the brain-dead behavior, we need to move.”

  I shook my head, still in disbelief. “You do realize, out of all the people I imagined you’d turn into, I would be the last. You know, being the prisoner and all.”

  She ignored me, turning to face the door as she pulled something out from under her shirt. It didn’t take me long to see it resembled a grenade. Wires with different colored liquids wrapped around it, held together by what looked like a piece of clockwork. “That’s the point, idiot,” she hissed. She looked over her shoulder, meeting my shocked stare. “Get against that wall, take cover.”

  I backed into the wall, dropped to the floor and pressed my palms tight over my ears. Ursula twisted the the clockwork, counted to three and tossed the grenade through the small window on the door, running for me. She had just reached my feet when the explosion rocked the hall. Chunks of destroyed concrete and torn metal flung around the room, dust spiraling like a inside-born storm from the bowels of the Dust Bowl.

  Ursula wasted no time, rising to her feet and making for the gap in the wall the explosion had created. “I’m sorry for what I did to-” She paused, turning back for a split second. In that last look, I read more in her stare than I ever had. It spoke of fear, the kind that submerged you under ice water and told you to breathe. The words that tumbled off her lips seemed choked as she grabbed at the fabric near the base of her throat. “Tell Ari we’re even.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BODY CRUMBLING

  For what felt like forever, I stared at the gaping hole in my cell wall.

  Like the beginning of a dramatic melody, my heartbeat picked up speed, turning from the soft pitter-patter to helicopter blades smashing against my ribcage. Sounds of explosions and screams, distant but strong, floated through the air in the mess of dust that lingered. Screams, both male and female, filled the silence between explosions, a mystical symphony of death and ferocious fight.

  What did she mean, that her and Ari were even? How could she possibly know Ari, given her stance with the Queen? My head swirled, adrenaline rushing hard enough to make me lightheaded. Back pressed against a wall, I slid down, hugging my knees to my chest in a weak, minimal attempt to find comfort in this freaking mess.

  Another explosion, this one much farther, gently upset the mess of rubble scattered to the floor. I wondered just how many grenades Ursula had stashed in her outfit. More importantly, I wondered if the Queen would kill her when she found out who she really was.

  Something smacked against the outside of my cell, scraping rock making me flinch. For a moment, I figured it was probably a dead bir
d, until I heard the beeping. Fear and fire coiled in my stomach, flames instinctively sparking on my skin. I was a lighter, primed for igniting.

  The left wall of the cell shattered, rubble flinging in every direction. Dust exploded into the room and clouded my view, but that didn't stop me from calling fire to my fingers, lighting up the room in a beaten blue hue.

  "Easy Essallie," came a soft, gentle voice. A hand flung out from the cloud of dust, grabbing my wrist with strong, calloused fingers. Through the dust came the glimmer of something white, burning and pure.

  I paused, the intensity of my fire dimming to a low glow. I knew those hands, remembered them well. It seemed forever ago those hands had guided me across an open floor, dancing while I lingered under the guise of Lilix.

  "Ari," my voice broke, and I coughed. Speaking was like scraping an open wound against sandpaper, and adding vinegar for extra effect. "How did you find me?"

  He stared at me. "You're kidding, right? This place doesn't exactly need directions."

  Swallowing, I tried to make my voice less like the remnants of a rocky road. "You can't stay here, go before they grab you, too!"

  "New living quarters, eh?" He ignored my plea, giving one of the rocks strewn across the ground a good kick. "Funny, I didn't take you for the swamp-cave type."

  "They're probably already on their way. You need to leave now, before they hold you, too. Go!"

  "Oh, thanks for the warning," he muttered sarcastically, "Always the martyr."

  The dust began to clear, drawn out by the whistling and whipping winds outside the gaping hole in the wall. His platinum blonde hair came into view first, like a beacon of light against the dark backdrop. By the time the rest of him registered in my sight, I realized he looked almost exactly as he had the night he vanished from the party. Eyes still as blue as an open summer sky, skin fair with undertones of peach. His body was wrapped in a tight, long sleeved black shirt, matching black pants blending him perfectly with the pitch black sky.