Darkness surrounded me.
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I had no idea what time it was when I came to or how long I had been knocked out. When I pushed some of the debris off me, I yelped from searing pain on my right thigh. When I looked down, a chunk of concrete was lying on it and some blood had pooled around on the floor underneath it. I managed to get the brick off me, but my wound wasn’t looking good. I hoped nothing was broken, but the only way to be sure was to move it.
The agony had me yelping. I was able to move my leg, but dear God, it hurt. It was as though every moment someone was stabbing me with a knife.
Scratchiness in my throat sent me into a coughing spasm. I finally looked around and noticed more than half of the staircase had been brought down at my feet. It was like a cave-in had torn apart this part of the building. Several people were caught in the blast and were barely moving; the few who were left were staggering.
Using the wall, I forced myself to my feet. By the time I was up, I was sweating across my face and back and it stung like someone had rubbed my skin with a wire cleansing pad. Even my shaky arms hurt. When I peeled back my sleeves, my skin was an angry red that was worse than a sunburn. Tiny blisters started to form. There was no way to prevent them from popping, so my hope was they wouldn’t get infected before I could leave this place.
Moaning from the rubble caught my attention. I wasn’t about to start climbing over it when I could barely walk myself. I shuffled as close as I could get and noticed Ryan’s head and arm sticking out of the rock pile. Part of the railing that he decided to turn into a hot iron was snaked around his upper torso and smoking, probably cauterizing his skin. He couldn’t move and was probably in more pain than he had ever imagined.
“Get me outta here.” That sentence alone sounded like it took way too much air out of him. He sucked in a deep breath and tried again. “Help me, Phaedra. I’m stuck.”
Anger and hatred festered inside me, smoldering to another crescendo. Rather than stay there, I turned and stumbled away, pressing my hand into my thigh wound to keep the blood from leaking. It had already soaked down the length of my jeans.
“Damn you!” Ryan yelled back at me, his breathing labored. “Get me out! My family owns you.”
“Fuck you,” I mumbled.
A crack from the ceiling sent a large block down onto the pile of ruins almost the same distance from where Ryan lay. His voice sent silent. While it would’ve been nice to think my powers had something to do with that, I preferred to believe that was my powers having the last word by sending a chuck of rock down on his head. I wasn’t about to turn around and confirm that. His silence was all the reassurance I needed.
When I entered the main atrium again, refuse was everywhere. Small fires have broken out. It was as though someone had set off a bomb in this place and those who were left either crawling or limping would be the only ones left to tell the tale. The few people who didn’t get out shied away from me or wanted no part of me altogether. They just wanted to get out of this place. I wanted my mother.
Someone grabbed me from behind and shoved me into a wall. “It’ll all be over in a second.”e
“Get off me!” I tried to force whoever was on me, off, but they had strength on their side. I kicked and punched, but wasn’t sure if I made contact with anything. If I did, it wasn’t enough to stop them from nearly crushing me.
“Hold still.” He put something in his mouth and spat out a small plastic tube against the wall. It popped off and rolled to a stop near a fiery piece of debris.
A needle jabbed my shoulder.
A gunshot blasted a bullet into his side and he toppled onto the floor. Frozen with terror, warm blood splattered my shoulder with the needle still sticking out. He never got a chance to release the sedative inside me. I couldn’t move.
“Phaedra?” Someone coughed through the dust and smoke clouds filling the corridor. Whoever it was, they waved their hand and coughed again. “Phaedra. Is that you?”
Fear jolted me, turning me toward whoever was coming. A gulp slipped down my throat. If they came out of the smoke ready to shoot, I prayed my powers would be ready to answer them. Given my horror, I wasn’t sure if anything would happen other than I might die.
As the person emerged from the fumes with one hand covering their mouth and the other aiming a gun at me.
Howard looked like he had been worked over. His left eye swelled with an ugly shade of purple and congealed blood sealed a cut across the top of his nose. His split bottom lip had also swelled and another bruise shone across his right cheek. His hand wavered like he could barely hold the gun anymore. Once he recognized me, he dropped it and his face relaxed.
“Howard,” I whimpered before dragging my hurt self toward him. “Is it really you?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Keeping one hand across his front, he hurried toward me with his other arm spread wide.
He snatched me up in a tight hug, pulling me so tight that I could barely breathe. I didn’t care. Never had I been so happy to be in my family’s arms.
“I was so worried,” he mumbled, choking back a sob. “I thought you were dead. I don’t… I don’t know what I would’ve done if anything had happened to you.”
I leaned my head into his shoulder and allowed myself the first good cry since our house had burned down. My grandfather was more of a dad to me than my father could ever be. This moment made up for all of those years of him missing in our lives. This moment was all the assurance I needed to know that it would never happen again. No card necessary.
When we finally let go of each other, he looked me up and down and noticed my thigh, first. He looked around and tore off part of a lab coat from the guy who had attacked me. A pool of blood continued to spread out underneath his dead body.
“Don’t look at him,” Howard said as he tied off my wound. “If you felt this was the only means to protect yourself, then you’re within your rights to do it. Don’t feel guilty about him or any of this. I’d gladly kill anyone who puts their hands on you or Nadia or any other member of my family.”
“This didn’t have to happen.” I shook my head and blinked back tears.
“You’re right. It didn’t, but it did. You can’t go back now, sweety. You can’t. All we can do is get you out of here.” He slipped his arm around my waist to help me.
“No.” I pulled away. “We have to find mom. She’s here. I know it.”
“You sure?” He glanced around the destroyed atrium and rubbed his forehead. “She could be anywhere. I came from down on that end on the second floor. Some idiot came into my cell to get me as the building was falling apart. I beat him with a lamp and that’s when it was like a grenade went off in this place. I thought it was a gas leak. When I came to, people were getting the hell out of here.”
“The other staircase. We can use that to go back up.”
“You seriously think she’s up there?”
“She has to be.” I started for the staircase. “I’m not going anywhere without her.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
We had to step over a few more injured and dead people, large stone fragments, and around a fire or two, but we made it to the second floor. The smoke was worse up here. I covered my mouth as best I could keep from choking on it. A gaping hole in the ceiling let in breezy snow that shook me from my bones. Howard led the way, once in a while looking back to make sure he hadn’t lost me.
We finally came to an area that was just as destroyed as other parts, but these were more like labs. We checked the ones where the handles weren’t too hot to touch until we finally came to one that had a large glass window. Inside several people were walking around a gurney as if they were getting the person on it ready for travel. When one of them moved to the right, I saw the person on the bed was my mother.
I placed my hands on the glass. More than anything, I wanted to get to her, to hold her, to be with her again. Everything inside me teared up. She was alive. All these weeks of not knowing and there she was
. My mom survived...and now these bastards were going to take her from me again and I’d never see her. Nadia would never see her. I wasn’t doing that to my little sister.
The glass shattered outward from my palms, webbing all the way out to the edges and turning more so into tiny pebbles. The noise caught the attention of those inside the room. They turned and some of them dropped whatever they were doing and ran out a door on the other side.
I didn’t care about that door when I had an entryway right here. I pushed all of my emotions into getting into that room. All of the anger, hatred, fear, and desperation, I pooled into imagining myself standing beside my mother as she lay helpless on that bed. Someone needed to protect her and that was my job. That was how I spent a third of my life and I wasn’t about to stop now.
“Get away, Howard.” It came from whatever ounce of sanity and humanity was left inside me.
He backed away to the other side of the hallway.
“Stop!” Tobin appeared on my right and looked like he had been through a war zone himself. He had a gun trained on me. “It’s either you or your mother, Phaedra. I’m not leaving without one of you. I need my powers restored and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
“You want a restoration?” Keeping my palm on the glass and staring at my mom, I held out my other hand to my right. “I’ll give you what you want. You know I can.”
“Don’t you move,” he said to Howard. Keeping the gun on me, he approached. When he stopped a few feet from me, I was still out of grabbing range. “You’re coming with me, aren’t you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not.”
Howard slammed into Tobin’s back, throwing him hard onto the floor. I grabbed Crother’s by his hair and slammed his face into the glass, holding it there.
“We’re going to try this without my friend Jayden’s enchanted tablet.”
I pressed his face with everything I had into the pebbled glass. If the glass didn’t break, then perhaps it would melt. It didn’t matter though. One way or another, I was getting my mother out of there and I needed the extra push to make it happen.
Heat bled into my hands, but it was more so due to body contact and not his powers. Heat began to spread outward, touching every piece of shattered glass that my powers did. When it reached the metal edges, the glass started to peel away from the seam. My powers slipped around the open pockets and began swirling around the room, picking up and tossing anything that wasn’t too heavy or wasn’t nailed down. My mother’s gurney wobbled, but it didn’t lift in the air. The machines connected to her sparked and slammed against the walls, catching some of the furniture on fire. The lights overcharged and popped the bulbs.
By the time the glass had melted away, Tobin crumpled to the floor. He was still alive, but his face and neck were horribly burned and the smell of burnt flesh infiltrated my nostrils.
“Are you okay?” Howard approached, not taking his gaze off me. Either he was scared of me or being careful in case I let loose again.
I nodded but was unable to turn away from Tobin. He opened his mouth and a gulp slipped down his throat. Perhaps “still alive” was pushing it.
Howard felt around the melted glass first to make sure it wasn’t still heated. When he thought it was good, he hopped inside the room and went to my mom. By then, the medical technicians were all gone.
“Is she okay?” I asked, just able to get around the lump growing in my throat.
He nodded. “She’s fine. I think they have her sedated though.”
I climbed over the window sill and inside the room. My mother was moaning and sweat was pouring off her face. She had a cast on both of her wrists up to her elbows and looked about as thin as Nadia. Her frizzy hair was splayed out on the pillow with a few strands of gray here and there. Her face was so pale that it almost looked like she was suffering from a horrible disease that had ravaged her. She wore a green and yellow tee shirt with the number forty-six on the front and a pair of gray sweat pants.
“Do you think your brother got the message?” Howard asked as he unstrapped her from the gurney.
“I’m pretty sure Nadia gave it to him.” I glanced around the room, looking for a way to get her out of here. As much as Howard might have been willing to do it, I doubted he could carry her. Every now and then, he’d grab his ribs and wince.
I went to the door where the remaining employees had escaped and noticed a wheelchair waiting. I grabbed it and wheeled it inside the room. Working together, Howard and I got her situated hurried out of the room. There was no telling when her drugs would wear off, so we needed to get her out of here and hopefully to a place where she could cause less destruction.
The elevator was out. So getting her down the stairs was a challenge with both of us hurt and tired. By the time we entered the atrium, more of the building was on fire than before. We had to wander around for a while before we finally found a way out.
A loud bang came from the other side.
“Take her.” Howard turned the wheelchair around and nudged me to take the handles. “Go out the other way.”
“What about you?” Alarm threaded through me.
“Never mind me. You need to get your mother out of here, understand? I’ll hold them off.”
“No. Come with us.”
“No, Phaedra.” He paused and took a breath. “Look, sweetie. I’ve come this far with you and I’m not about to let anything bad happen to either one of you again. For once in your life, let someone else run the ball down the court, okay? It’s fine. I’ll be okay. Now, go!”
I absolutely hated this plan. Stil, I couldn’t stand there while my mother was in no condition to protect herself. I touched his forearm before tearing off with the wheelchair.
I dodged a couple of falling beams from above and came close to more fire, but we made it to a backdoor. I cracked it open and looked around before heading outside. My biggest concern was that someone saw the fire and called the fire department or the police. The last thing we needed was our names traced back to Colburn where our own house had burned down in a similar fashion.
Cold air gusts made me think twice about going outside. We had nothing to protect ourselves from the elements. I went around to the front of the wheelchair and hoisted my mother out of it. She was so heavy that we both crashed down to our knees. I tried to lift her again, but it was almost impossible. I struggled to get her dead weight up against the side of the frigid building.
A large lake was on the other side of us with at least two to three inches of snow on the ground. The best I could do was get her to the boat and then paddle us away from the crime scene and hope we didn’t freeze to death on the lake or in the woods. I’d have to drag her, which was going to suck for both of us. I was still smarting from my own wounds along my neck, arms, back, and the deep wound on my thigh. If nothing else, I’d build up enough sweat to keep me warm.
“Phae,” mom whispered. Her head dropped between her shoulders, but she rolled upward again.
“Mom?” I searched her eyes, praying she would recognize me. “It’s me. It’s Phae. Can you hear me?”
“My babies. The monsters took my babies.” Her speech slurred enough to say she was still under the drugs but coming out of them, too.
“Can you walk?” I hooked her arm around my stinging shoulders and supported her as we headed toward the boat. “We have to get away, okay? We have to go home.”
“No.” She tried to push me away. “I have to get to my babies.”
“Mom, I’m your baby. I’m right here.” I stepped carefully, tugging most of her weight, though I could tell she was pushing against me.
“No.” She shook her head and finally set her gaze on me. “You did it! They said you took my babies!” She broke free of my grip and slammed her heavy cast across my cheek. “Give them back! They’re not yours.”
The wind whipped up around me like a tornado. I tried to stay on my feet, but I fell to my knees. I dug in and fought to get to her, but
my feet started sliding back to the lake. With the freezing weather and my own windchill dropping to what felt like negative degrees, the last thing I wanted was a dunk. The shock of the cold alone would probably kill me.
“Mom!” I shouted. “It’s me. Phaedra!”
“They said you’re lying that you’ll do anything to keep me from my babies.” She threw all of her powers into pushing me further and faster toward the lake. “I’ll drown you, demon. I’ll kill you before you kill me.”
“Mom.” Tears slipped down my cheek but were quickly blown off my freezing skin. “Please. Don’t do this.” I didn’t want my powers to manifest, but they would. They always did when it came to the two of us sparring for survival.
A few feet from the water, something swooped in and grabbed me by the waist. We rolled about eight feet in the air before we finally hit the ground and still rolled a few feet more. Whoever it was, they flew around from me and opened my body up to the frigid elements again. When I looked up, Mason had my mother in his arms. He was holding her tight and kissing her. She punched and kicked him to get away, but slowly she settled into his arms.
“Phaedra!” Howard came through the backdoor and hurried toward me. He glanced around. “Someone get me a blanket or something. She’s freezing.”
“What…?” What....?” My teeth chattered so much I couldn’t speak.
Someone handed Howard a blanket and he covered me with it before helping me to my feet and cradling me in his arms. Others were there, but I had no idea who they were. Orders were being levied around my head as Howard and another woman guided me around the large facility toward the front. Flashing emergency lights lit up the area. There were fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars everywhere. I thought I’d be herded toward an ambulance, but instead, Howard and I were told to head toward an SUV.
Silent Scream (Bittersweet Series, Book 2) Page 24