by W. J. May
Cromfield leaned down, into her line of sight. “Even Devon.”
Her head jerked one final time of its own accord as every inch of her ached to reach out and strangle this man with her bare hands. He didn’t get to say that name. You bastard, she hissed mentally.
“Yes,” he said quietly, smiling ironically, “even your precious Devon could be saved. In fact, I would still allow you to see him from time to time. Given that you spend the rest of that time with me.” Without seeming to think about it, he reached out and nearly stroked a finger down the side of her cheek. If she leaned slightly, he would be touching her.
Her eyes snapped shut as another rush of tears fell to the ground. Devon! she screamed silently, wishing it would all just end. Devon, come find me!
“I wanted to give you a chance to have your normal life. But now…” he gazed up at her empty home, “surely you see that’s not possible. So I’m not waiting any longer.” He straightened up suddenly, as if someone had sounded an alarm. “The time for waiting has passed, my dear. The time for action is upon us. You and I are standing on the brink of a new world order, and, like it or not, you are a critical part of that.” Without breaking eye contact, he kissed two of his fingers and leaned close, blowing them over her lips.
It felt like a caress against them and she shuddered as if he’d touched her. A heart-wrenching cry echoed in her frozen throat—a cry no one could hear.
“Stay well, my dear. You’ll be hearing from me soon.”
With a parting smile, he pushed to his feet and set off through the park, ambling along with his hands in his pockets, not a care in the world. But before he disappeared from sight entirely, he turned around with a final message.
“And, Rae…please keep in mind what I said about your friends. There’s no reason for everyone to die.”
With that, he vanished into the trees, leaving a frozen, quaking Rae in his wake.
She was going to kill him. Tear him limb from limb and rip his head off if she had to.
* * *
Over a hundred people must have walked past Rae over the course of the next hour, people who had no idea that she wasn’t sitting there, that she was frozen on the park bench. She watched Gabriel’s car get ticketed, and then towed out of the loading zone. She felt her phone buzz deep in her pocket. Molly, no doubt, wondering what was taking so long.
However, despite the urgency to get up, despite the fact that she could feel the sedative beginning to fade…a part of her didn’t see the point.
From the moment she turned sixteen, she had been granted the ability to wield every single power on the planet. There was no limit to what she could do, or how much she could achieve. If she put her mind to something, there was not a single obstacle that could stand in her way.
Except one.
But just that one…changed everything.
It didn’t matter how many powers she had. It didn’t matter if she absorbed the tatùs of every single person alive and breathing today.
Cromfield was always going to be stronger.
For every power she had, he had ten. For every year she’d been alive to gather them, he’d been alive decades more. For every step that she planned, he was five steps ahead.
And even if she figured all that out, even if she somehow found a way to break through all the infinite impossibilities and land the final, lethal blow…it wouldn’t be lethal at all.
Because the man couldn’t die.
So what the hell were they doing here?
She ignored a passing wave of curious pedestrians as a flood of angry tears poured down her face. Instead, she focused on regaining control of her limbs, one inch at a time. She started with her feet, wiggling her toes as she chanted the defeatist mantra over and over in her head.
Doesn’t matter how many powers I have, it’ll never be enough. Doesn’t matter how many powers I have, it’ll never be enough. Doesn’t matter how many damn powers I freakin’ have, it’ll never be en—
A sudden gasp ripped through her throat, and her body fell right off the bench. She hit the ground hard on her side, but was completely immune to the shooting pain that followed. She was on another level of thought altogether. Her mind shouting down a million useless possibilities as a single shining idea rose to the surface.
Maybe it isn’t about having a million powers. Maybe it’s about having just one power.
The right power.
“Excuse me, miss? Are you alright?”
With supreme effort, Rae twisted up her head to see an ancient-looking woman kneeling over her in concern. As the remainder of the sedative drained slowly from her limbs, she slowly pulled herself up, leaning on the woman’s cane for temporary support. “No,” she finally panted once she was standing, “but I’m going to be.”
She didn’t think she’d ever say it. No—she didn’t think the thought would ever, ever cross her mind. But here it was. A cosmic twist of fate.
She needed to see Victor Mallins.
* * *
There was no time to hail down a cab. Or time to call for backup. There was no bloody time to do anything other than dart behind a tree and let her body take to the skies, lifting above the London smog on the wings of an eagle.
If she couldn’t gather enough powers to beat Cromfield, then she would just have to make sure that she was immune to the powers he already had. Her scarcely-healed incision burned against her lower stomach as a dull reminder. If she was immune to his powers, then he would have to fight her hand to hand. And if they were fighting hand to hand, and he wasn’t able to heal…
And to think, if Mallins hadn’t stabbed me in the stomach, I never would’ve gotten the idea. Turns out the little bastard was the key all along. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?
Even as she thought the words she increased her speed, racing through the clouds back towards Guilder. She couldn’t believe that Cromfield hadn’t already anticipated this move. He’d safeguarded against everything else except the one thing that could finally bring him to justice?
No, she didn’t buy that. This was a stroke of sheer good luck, but it was ending fast. There was only a brief window of opportunity, and if she didn’t get there in time…
Before it even seemed possible, she heard the sounds of the school down below. She swooped lower and lower in the sky, until she finally saw the glistening dome of the Oratory.
Yes, she thought with a surge of hope. I made it.
But the closer she got, the more she realized something was wrong. The stir of voices she’d heard before wasn’t the sound of students. In fact, as she dipped below the clouds she realized she didn’t see a single student on the ground. She saw agents instead.
In a blur of speed, she landed behind one of the tall oak trees and quickly conjured herself some clothes. Then she joined the flood of people darting toward the southern lawn. The whole place was in such an uproar that no one even noticed who she was—not until she’d pushed her way all the way through the crowd to see what the commotion was about.
The second she got through, she stopped cold.
Victor Mallins… dead.
Lying in a pool of his own blood.
She shrank back a few steps, staring in shock. His withered old face was cracked open at the mouth, a strange look of triumph lighting his cold features in a final farewell. Then the implications of his death hit her like a punch to the face.
If he was dead, that meant his tatù was gone forever from the world. And if immunity was no longer on the table, how was she supposed to…
“That’s Rae Kerrigan!”
“Kerrigan—do you see her?!”
“FREEZE!”
“Standing next to Cromfield!”
“DON’T MOVE! DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT MOVING!”
She lifted her head to see a hundred guns pointed directly at her face, the men behind them aiming to kill. In a mixture of surrender and exhaustion, she collapsed to her knees, raising her hands behind her head with a shrill, “I didn’t do it!�
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“READY!”
She couldn’t believe it. They were going to shoot her right here on the lawn.
“AIM!”
She closed her eyes and tried to think of something else. Anything else. Anything to distract her from what was about to come. A single face floated through her mind, and she let out all the air in her chest with a gentle smile.
“WAIT!”
A different voice rang through the crowd, one she knew as well as her own. By the time she opened her eyes, the face she had been picturing was streaking towards her at the speed of light, eyes fastened on hers as it threw itself between her and guns.
“PLEASE!” Devon cried again, placing his body over hers so that every inch of her skin was covered. “PLEASE DON’T SHOOT!”
“Devon,” she whispered, “it wasn’t me. It was Cromfield.”
His arms wrapped around her neck, pulling her even tighter into his chest. She could feel his heart pounding through his thin shirt. Despite the speed at which he’d tackled her, he was barely even breathing.
“Put down your guns!” another voice commanded, almost as familiar as the first. “Now!”
There was a soft crunch of footsteps as another person stepped in front of Devon. Then another. Then another.
By the time Rae lifted her head, every single person she loved was standing in between her and the firing squad.
Julian, Angel, Gabriel, Molly. Carter.
But then there were others there as well; others who had less reason to be.
Luke. Commander Fodder. Even Drake—standing with the rest.
A strangled sob ripped through Rae’s chest and Devon gripped her tighter.
“I didn’t do it,” she cried again. “I swear—I didn’t do it.”
“No, she didn’t.”
There was a murmur through the crowd as another man walked through the middle, a man Rae had seen in passing a hundred times, but had never put a name to until now.
Louis Keene.
In perfect unison, the Guider guards lowered their guns.
“I saw the man who did…” There was a very peculiar look on his face, the look of someone who couldn’t quite reconcile what they’d just seen. “A man I know only from our history books. I didn’t think it was possible…”
Like a person venturing out onto a frozen lake, Carter lowered his hands and approached slowly, keeping himself between Rae and the gunmen all the while.
“Louis?” he asked tentatively. “You saw?”
Keene looked up in a daze, staring at Carter like he’d never seen him before. “From my office. I was just…he’s really alive, isn’t he? Jonathon Cromfield?”
A collective shiver ran through the PC agents, and Rae pressed her face against Devon’s chest in utter exhaustion.
They finally believed… They finally believed…
“Yes, it was.” Carter put his arm around the man’s shoulders, steering him casually towards Commander Fodder to make an official introduction. “Louis, we need to talk.”
And just like that, the crowd dispersed. There were no divisions to it. No partisan lines. Everyone drifted out together. The Council and the Knights alike. All at a loss from what they’d just witnessed. All dazed by the horror of it.
In a single motion, Rae was lifted to her feet. She saw Julian talking to Devon, trying to make sure that she was alright, but she couldn’t hear anything. Her ears were still ringing from the shots that weren’t fired. Gabriel was walking towards them through the crowd, but he stopped when he saw her standing in Devon’s arms.
A second later, he disappeared.
“He just walked in here and did this.”
It was the first sound to cut through the ringing. Rae looked up to see Devon still staring at Mallins, a look of complete astonishment written across his face. “He just walked in here and did this,” he said again. “He’s that powerful.”
Rae had nothing to say in response. She merely shivered again and buried her face in his chest.
He looked down at once, arms coming up automatically to protect her. “Come on,” he murmured, “let’s get you home.”
She looked up in a daze as he swept her off her feet and carried her over the grass.
“Where’s that?”
He marched towards the horizon, a fiery look in his eyes. “It’s wherever we’re together.”
Chapter 11
Rae’s eyes slowly blinked open and closed before finally focusing on the cracked lines in the ceiling. The same lines travelled through every room in the Abbey—a single connecting thread, banding the whole thing together. Judging by the general look of the place, the compound had to be very old—but these lines were the only signs of it. Everything else had been refurnished and repainted and restructured into a state-of-the-art military facility. You could house an army in the place. You could fend off a war. Strangely enough, Rae took comfort in the lines. If nothing else, they proved the place had lasted this long.
The crisp smell of fresh air and wet stone wafted in through the window, along with the distant sound of men and women coming together to talk and train. But the sky was a uniform ‘English white,’ providing no clue as to the hour, and Rae had no idea what time it was.
Why didn’t anyone wake me up, she wondered as she sat up on the mattress and pulled a thick bathrobe over her arms. There was still an imprint in the sheets beside her where Devon had slept, but she was alone. They probably think I’m still too fragile from what happened last night.
It wasn’t an outrageous assumption. Truth be told, Rae had very little memory of exactly what had happened after she left Guilder last night. It came back to her in fractured images, cracked though consistent, like the line in the ceiling, continuing its journey through her mind.
Devon carrying her through the crowd. Carter shouting something as they left. The fact that Guilder’s entire ancient fence had been ripped right out of the ground—a fact she hadn’t noticed when she’d flown in as a bird. In hindsight, that was probably the only reason she was able to get through the domed force-field that curved up over the place. Otherwise, her tatù would have been stripped and she would have fallen hundreds of feet to the ground as a human.
However, despite all the chaos that surrounded her memories, the thing that struck Rae most was the people. The looks on their faces. A hundred different faces. A hundred different ages, ethnicities, and sizes; yet, somehow, they all looked exactly the same.
Resolved.
Devon looked that way, too. The hard lines etched into the sides of his mouth made him look years older than he was. A veritable silver bullet, making his way through the crowd.
Rae shook her head and refused to think any further. That was yesterday. As of this morning, ‘yesterday’ was officially something she could categorize as ‘the past’ and make every attempt to move forward. It wouldn’t help to dwell. It wouldn’t help to be shocked, or scared, or any of a number of things that went along with the image side by side.
Now was the time for action. Now was the time for momentum.
Now was the time to unite.
Which again begs the question why no one woke me up.
“Devon?” she called tentatively as she conjured herself a black running suit and slipped it on. There was no answer, but she hadn’t really expected there to be. There was something a little too resolved about Devon’s face last night, and she figured she would have to sort that mess out before even starting to handle the rest.
Her man tended to take things personally. And when those things were a hundred guns aimed at her head, he tended to take them very personally.
Sweeping her hair up into an efficient ponytail, she pushed open the door and set off down the long, curving corridor.
From the second she walked across the threshold, she felt the change.
She was starting to recognize the people she saw in the halls, and they were starting to recognize her. Not as a scary ‘Kerrigan’ or a rogue Privy Council agent, but as Rae. Th
e dark-haired girl with the huge bandage who lived in room 4C. Several hands lifted in a cursory greeting as she passed, and a few people even offered a tentative, “You doing okay?” The now-familiar smell of the mess hall’s inedible breakfast buffet triggered up her gag reflex, and by the time she made it to the door that led to the outdoor courtyard, she was almost beginning to smile.
She might have officially lost her home yesterday, but she wouldn’t write off the whole concept so quickly. This place might just be a contender. This place might just have what it takes.
Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who thought so…
A gentle mist settled upon her the second she stepped outside, but that’s not the reason she froze. She froze in her tracks because of what she saw going on at the other end of the practice field.
Angel, Julian, Gabriel, and Luke were all standing out on the grass, training with the Knights.
For a second, Rae just watched—a strange sort of pride swelling up in her chest. It’s not like they were going through their regular routines; it would be quite a while before their injuries had healed enough for them to do that. But they were going through the motions—assuming more of a teaching role than a student’s—taking their Abbey counterparts through each attack, step by step.
What’s more…the Knights were really listening.
It had become instantly clear from the second the gang arrived at the Abbey that there were some major discrepancies in terms of how both the Knights and the Privy Council chose to get things done. There was a reason the PC was the higher-ranked agency. There was a reason they got things like the royal protection contracts and the Knights didn’t. They pushed harder, demanded more, and were—Rae hated to say it—a lot more cavalier when it came to the lives of their agents, no matter how young or inexperienced they were. They quite simply demanded the best.
But after spending time with the Knights, Rae wasn’t so sure they’d won the title.
Sure, she and her friends were technically better trained than the agents here at the Abbey, but what they’d acquired in skill they’d lost in other areas. Security. Trust. Freedom. These were things the Knights had in spades.