ParaWars Uprising

by Caitlin Greer

  “But it disappeared, and it was like it never happened, except the sword was gone. And then you killed him.”

  He’s silent for a while. More than a few heartbeats. I think, maybe, that what I told him was more than a bit disturbing. But I’m not sure why.

  Eventually, his arms tighten around me as much as he can without hurting me. “Well. You’re safe now. And you’ll heal, given time.”

  Time is good. So is healing. I’m suddenly very tired again, and comfortable in his arms. When I fade into sleep this time, it’s dreamless and peaceful.

  *

  I don’t do much besides sleep for a few days. Mom visits, and Dad. Axel never leaves my side. Brigid and Danu visit, as well, but no one ever stays long. And there are so many other faces I want to see, and don’t. Buc and Sam, Shelly, Thom, and Caleb. I want to meet more of the family, too. But they all keep telling me to wait.

  Until I can’t stand the waiting anymore.

  “Axel, why can’t I see Shelly? I promise I won’t let her tire me out.”

  I’m finally standing, spending more than a few moments on my feet. Axel looks at me with a sudden flash of pain he can’t hide. “Kendry…”

  I sit down, suddenly not wanting the answer. “She didn’t get hurt, did she? Or Caleb? Thom? Please tell me they’re okay.”

  Axel’s face falls more than I thought possible, and I feel the blood drain out of me. I know the answer that’s coming, and I don’t want to hear it.

  God, please, no.

  “Thom’s okay. But the others… They didn’t make it, Kendry. Shelly and Caleb.”

  Oh God.

  “Shelly insisted on fighting, like you. She and Caleb made a great team, I have to admit. She was almost as good a shot as you,” he adds with a ghost of a smile.

  I shake my head, not wanting to believe it.

  Shelly’s gone.

  Shelly, who was so full of life. Who had so many plans.

  Shelly, who knew she might not make it past tomorrow, and lived every day like it was all she had. Who would walk the world to help someone else, because she could.

  My chest suddenly feels too tight, and I can’t breathe, I can’t think. There’s this emptiness, this hole that shouldn’t be there.

  And it hurts. It hurts more than the soul sword did, so much more.

  I think Axel is talking, but I can’t hear him. I can’t hear anything but the emptiness. And I know I’m crying, I know it, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything but the hurt and the ache. My arms cling to my sides, trying to hold me together, but it’s not working.

  “Spill, I want all the sordid details…”

  I’ll never get to tell her about Axel and me, or watch her be nauseatingly cute with Caleb. Never get to laugh with her again, or complain about boys, or hear her gush about the castle’s architecture.

  And all those plans she and Caleb had, that they’ll never get to see happen.

  God, it hurts.

  It’s not fair. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, and I can’t, I just can’t.

  I can’t breathe.

  But I suddenly realize it’s not my arms alone holding me in. Stronger arms than mine wrap around me, holding me tight, and I sink back into Axel’s embrace, wishing I could do more than cry.

  Crying won’t bring her back.

  Nothing will.

  Oh God, Thom.

  This must be killing Thom. Caleb is his best friend, has been his entire life.

  As much as I’m hurting, it must be so much worse for him.

  So I cry. I cry for me, for Shelly, for Thom, for Caleb. I cry for all of us. And Axel holds me, his arms are my anchor, my only solace. I can’t stop the tears, and I don’t want to. I owe her these tears, this grief. For the adventures we shared, and the things I’ll never get to share with her again.

  And he waits until my tears begin to slow, and the hiccups and gasping stop, before he speaks again.

  “Thom and Buc are both fine. Thom is…upset. He’s taking it really hard. No one else you know, I don’t think.” His voice catches a little, and I can tell that there are others, people he knew.

  “Did Sam…” It’s hard to find words.

  “Sam’s fine, too. It’s hard to take out a minotaur.”

  I nod quietly. I can’t think too hard about it. The pain is still too there.

  “It’s not your fault, Kendry.”

  I shake my head. He doesn’t know that. Grittanus wanted me.

  Hands slide down my arms, and I look up at him. “It’s not. I know how you think. She made her own choices, and so did he. That battle would have come one way or another, and the choices they made would have been made the same way. We can’t blame ourselves for any of it.”

  His arms tighten around me, keeping me together.

  “She was the first friend I’d found in a long time,” I whisper, hot tears still sliding down my face. “Since you, really.”

  “I know. At least they went together,” he whispers.

  I have to agree. Together in life, together in death. Better than being left alone. But the tears that never really stopped come heavy again, and Axel understands. He pulls me down to lay on top of him, and lets the tears flow.

  Axel doesn’t let me wander far from the room. On my better days, I want to protest, but most days I prefer to sit on my balcony in the sun. Autumn has come on fully in the short time since we left Greenbriar. I know it’s only been a short time. It feels like years.

  Mom visits everyday. But she and Dad are busy with the Conclave, and she never stays very long.

  I miss Shelly. She would’ve been here, teasing me about jumping into a fight without thinking. Talking about how maybe now there was hope for the world. Comparing notes on whose boyfriend was better in bed. She would have been so happy Axel and I finally got together.

  I wish I could tell her. I wish she was here.

  But she’s not, and it’s a hole Axel can’t even fill.

  Every day I wake up, hoping to have passed that point where you know you’re on the mend. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, I start feeling worse. Weaker, and in more pain. At first it’s my side, but then it spreads. I know I should tell Axel, or my parents. Someone. But the truth is, I don’t have the energy to be fussed over. My dreams have grown darker again, to the point where I can’t believe Axel hasn’t noticed.

  Until I start waking up with bruises.

  Axel traces the line of my cheek with a worried look on his face. “Where did this come from?”

  I know the look on my face has to echo the confusion I feel. The thing is, I don’t know.

  “Kendry?”

  “I…” I shake my head, feeling distant. I don’t understand.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  I want to say I’m fine. But the truth is, I’m not, and I’m starting to feel too muddled to hide it. I also know I’m too weak to hide it anymore. So my head shakes no, slowly.

  “What’s going on?” His tone is quiet and concerned.

  “I don’t know,” I finally manage to say. I try to move, but pain lances through my side.

  Axel is hovering over me in a moment, his eyebrows furrowed.

  I try to say I’ll be okay. It comes out in a moan.

  “Don’t move, Kendry. I’m going to get Danu.”

  I nod, my eyes shut tight.

  *

  When he returns, I’ve managed to at least sit up in bed. And while I’m not really feeling good, I am a bit better. Enough to talk, at least. Enough to make a few connections I’d rather not have.

  “How long has this been going on?” Danu asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t really know. I kept thinking I’d feel better, that my side would heal, and then the dreams started again…”

  “Dreams?” Axel’s even more worried now. “Kendry…”

  I shake my head, gently, because everything still hurts, and talk through clenched teeth. “Didn’t want you to know.” My hand is wrapped around the carvings in the
headboard behind me, holding me there. Really, I feel like I need to hold myself in, like my body will slip away if I’m not careful.

  “What kind of dreams?” Danu asks softly.

  My head shakes again. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Just…dark. Frighteningly familiar. And I wake up…” My hand gestures to my face.

  “And your side?”

  I look away. I knew she’d ask. My hand fumbles with my shirt, pulling it up to expose the bandaging. It’s bloody, and not a little. “It’s been like that every morning, a little worse each day. And…” I hesitate.

  “What is it?”

  My hand reaches up to stroke my bruised cheekbone. I don’t want to voice my thoughts. I don’t like where they’re headed, and speaking somehow grants them a greater reality. “These bruises…they’re old. Not new. They disappeared when I manifested, but…” And here’s the part I don’t want to say.

  “I remember every hit. This… Rockfort backhanded me there, before the battle.” I wave at my ribs. “These are where his men tackled me.” I reach up, trying to pull off my shirt, and can’t. Axel lifts it up for me.

  “God, Kendry.”

  My wrists show the bruises from the cords they tied me with, and my shoulders, I’m sure, are black and blue from where I was hung in the tent. He lays my shirt back down after showing Danu. Tears I didn’t expect slide down my face.

  “What’s happening to me?” I whisper.

  Danu and Axel exchange a glance that I can’t read, but still worries me. Their silence worries me even more, but not as much as the exhaustion I feel. I don’t want to sleep. Every time I sleep, more wounds surface. It’s like I’m reliving the battle in my dreams, but I don’t remember enough to know if that’s right. And I’m so tired.

  I don’t realize I’ve been zoning out until the door shuts, and I look up to see Danu gone. Axel’s sitting on the bed in front of me, his face drawn and closed. “Where’d she go?”

  His hand reaches out for mine, and I grab for it like a drowning man. “To find a friend. Kendry…” He hesitates, searching my face. “Can you remember anything about those visions?”

  “When I broke the sword? No. I’ve been having these dreams, too, but I can’t remember them either.”

  “What kind of dreams?”

  “Don’t fight it so hard, Kendry.”

  “I promised you could join me. If you won’t do it voluntarily…” The sword twists as he drives it deeper into me. The world has gone sideways and upside down and backwards, folding in and out. “…then we can do it the hard way.”

  “You shattered the soul sword, releasing its power.” He laughs again. “This is the world it holds, and you and I are now bound to it.”

  “There is no way out, except through me.”

  “I have the advantage here.”

  My head spins as the scenes tumble through me, half dream, half memory. “Grittanus. He told me not to fight. That I would join him either by choice or the hard way. And when I shattered the sword, he said I released its power, that there was a world it held, and that we were bound to it.”

  “Is that all? Did he give you any other clues?”

  I wince as a shot of pain stabs through my side. “I don’t remember. I only just now remembered that. There’s nothing but darkness. Not even an up or down.”

  “How long have you been having those dreams?”

  My mouth presses into a thin line. “I don’t know. As long as the bruises have been showing up, I guess.”

  Grittanus lets go.

  “Not possible,” he gasps.

  “Always possible.”

  I pull the lightning to me, letting it arc and spark and fly. He comes at me again, but this time I know he’s coming. And in the split second he makes contact, the world flashes back to West Virginia, and the center of my maelstrom.

  The soul sword is gone.

  “You think you’ve won!” he’s screaming. “You have no idea! None of you will survive!”

  Axel roars, his muscles straining, and with a sickening crack that reverberates through the storm and the mountains louder than lightning, Grittanus’ neck snaps.

  “Axel, what if more happened when I shattered the sword? And I don’t remember?”

  Behind my eyes, Grittanus’ limp body falls to the earth. But it’s his words I keep remembering.

  You think you’ve won!

  None of you will survive!

  In my head, it becomes YOU won’t survive!

  God, I’m tired.

  The world spins, dark and malevolent and hopeless. Pain stabs through me in a thousand points, each a remembered punch or kick. Broken ribs, fractured jaw. I gasp for breath.

  “Kendry!”

  Axel’s voice brings me back, and odd sounds I can’t place until I realize that I’m making them. Whimpers of pain through a face too bruised to move. My eyes are almost completely swollen shut.

  I must have fallen asleep again.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  I don’t recognize the voice. It’s deep, melodic, and there’s something to it that soothes me.

  “I’m not sure,” Axel answers. “She woke up a week ago, but it can’t have been long before it started in. However long it’s been, it’s clearly accelerating. She wasn’t half this bad before she fell asleep again.”

  An unfamiliar hand touches my face, and the pain fades a little.

  “How long was she asleep?”

  “Ten minutes, at the most. Ramiel, I watched those bruises form.”

  “Did you try to wake her?”

  “With no success.”

  The same unfamiliar hands touch my side, turn my face this way and that. Whoever he is, his touch is slow and gentle, and leeches the pain away bit by bit, until I can breathe again.

  My eyes pull open as much as they can. The pain may have lessened, but it’s not gone, and neither are the bruises. But I can see a little.

  Axel sits on one side of the bed. I must have slid down again when I fell asleep, because I’m laying crosswise on it. On the other side can only be the man whose strange voice I heard. In some ways, he’s Axel’s polar opposite. His long white hair tumbles softly onto his shoulders, around a tan face that’s as smooth as silk, with not even a hint of beard. Ice blue eyes stare out at me. His clothes are whiter than snow, but no less modern than Axel’s jeans and black t-shirt. Which is surprising, given the downy wings that are too big to hide behind his back.

  “Hey.” Axel’s touch on my face is softer than a breeze.

  It takes me a minute, but I manage to get my pain-wracked arms to respond enough to take his hand in mine. My shoulders are on fire.

  “Who’s your friend?” I whisper.

  “This is Ramiel. He’s a seraph, and archangel.”

  “Guessed that.” My jaw hurts too much to say more than I have to. “Why?”

  “Because he knows about soul swords.”

  I shift my head a fraction, trying to get a better look at Ramiel. “Help me?”

  “Yes, Kendry. I’m here to help you.”

  Out of nothing, Grittanus pulls a sword, dark and blazing. Deep in me, I feel a pull, like a drain plug was removed. “We know the all the paras’ secrets.”

  “Said…knew…” I swallow, trying to be more understandable. “Said he knew…secrets… All paras’ secrets.”

  Axel and Ramiel exchange a look. “Grittanus knew many things he should not have, it seems,” the seraph says. “The soul swords belong to the seraphim. He should never have had one, let alone known how to wield it.”

  An involuntary shudder surges through me at the mention of his name. I have no doubt now that this is his work.

  “Kendry.”

  Ramiel’s voice is kind, but commanding. I couldn’t keep from looking at him even if I had the strength to try.

  “These dreams of yours. Grittanus said that you were both bound to the world of the soul sword, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And tha
t the only way out was through him.”

  “Yes.” I wish I could nod, but that hurts more than speaking small quiet words.

  “What are you thinking, Ramiel?” Axel asks.

  The seraph is quiet. It’s so tempting to slide off into sleep, here with Axel’s hand in mine.

  “Stay here, Kendry. Stay awake.”

  Ramiel’s quiet command holds me away from the sleep I both crave and fear. It’s the only thing that does.

  “I think that he was right. They were bound to the soul dimension, her by the breaking of the sword, and him by his misuse of it. And I believe they still are.”

  Grittanus’ head rolls back, his mouth open wide in a fit of insane laughter that echoes, growing louder and louder until it fills my ears and my mind, until I can hear nothing else.

  I twist away from the dream-memory, desperate to escape despite the pain that hounds my every movement. I gasp, but I don’t know if it’s at the pain or at the memory.

  “Kendry, what is it?” Axel’s hands reach out for me, but his touch is unsure. He doesn’t want to hurt me more.

  “He’s in my dreams,” I sob. “Laughing. Always laughing.”

  “You remember, don’t you,” Ramiel says.

  “Pieces.”

  “Kendry, there’s only one way to make this stop.”

  I suddenly don’t want to hear anymore.

  “What do you mean?” I think Axel must be guessing the same thing I am.

  “I mean that he’s still there, inside the soul dimension. He’s pulling her back to the battle, to before he died, before she was powerful enough to stop him. She has to face him, Axel, and soon. Before he kills her.”

  I have the advantage here.

  God, I don’t want to face him again. I beat him once, isn’t that enough?

  “No, Kendry. It isn’t enough.” Ramiel’s icy blue eyes pierce me to the core. “But you have the strength in you to do this.”

  I don’t want to.

  “I know.”

  Hot tears stream from my swollen eyes. I can feel the soul dimension pulling at me now, trying to drag me back.

  I don’t know if I can do this.

  “You can.”

  I wish…

  “This is not Axel’s fight.” Ramiel glances around, and through my tears, I look too. Axel’s eyes never leave mine.