The mist swirled around me. Whitening out everything else.
And just as suddenly as I’d appeared in this place, I was back in the hospital parking lot, grasping the car door handle with both hands for balance. Facing Raven.
“Oh my god,” she said. “This changes everything!” And then she was gone.
Panic surged through me. Aunt Jo! I had to find her! What if Raven was on her way there now? What if that’s where the Order had set their sights next? Aunt Jo was in danger, and I had to find her, wherever she was.
I felt around in my purse and dug out my phone. I pressed the number for Aunt Jo and the call went immediately to voice mail. “Dammit!”
She was probably out of cell phone range. I called the office, and no one answered. They always had someone at the office to field calls in case of an emergency. They could always get in touch with Aunt Jo via satellite phone. So why was no one there?
I jerked open the car door, slid in, and revved the engine, peeling out of the parking lot as I simultaneously riffled through my glove compartment for any maps Aunt Jo might have left in there. Where did she say she was? The Collegiate Peaks? I hadn’t been there in years, but I knew it was west, toward Denver. I gunned it toward the highway. What was I going to do when I got there? She was out in the backcountry. How could I find her?
As I drove, my mind turned over everything I knew now. What people had told me over the years—and even as recently as today.
The day I turned six years old, my father had been driving me and my mother home from my birthday party at the county fair in the next town over. It was raining, but everyone at the party had had the best time. Cassie, Dan, and I got to ride ponies, and all three of us were as dirty as if we’d rolled in the mud with the farm animals. It was my best birthday ever. I was so happy.
On the drive home, Dad missed the exit on the freeway and ended up crashing into a Buick before he could reach the next turnoff. They found me in the backseat after they’d pulled my parents from the wreck. The car was totaled, but I didn’t have a scratch on me.
Gurneys were everywhere. “Mom!” I called. “Dad!” My arms wanted to flail, but something was holding me down. I was okay, though. I wasn’t bleeding, and I didn’t even have scratches anywhere. No broken bones. The doctors and nurses were using words like miracle and amazing. I just wanted to see my parents. I was in a bed in a hospital room, just sitting there, eating red Jell-O, when they told me. “You’re alone now, Skye.”
They probably didn’t say it exactly like that, but that’s how I remembered it. “You’re alone now.” That was before Aunt Jo, my mother’s best friend, adopted me. Before I moved into this house with her.
In the car, with the trees and primary-colored road signs flickering by, I started. Alone. What did that word make me think of? You’re alone now, Skye.
I wanted to wait until we were alone to share this with you.
Devin. He’d said it just a few days ago, the night he tried to show me how to heal a flower. Raven was right. The Order did want to get me alone, didn’t they? They’d arranged for Cassie’s brakes to fail so she’d get into an accident—hoping to kill her and wipe out anything I might have told her. They’d fixed Jenn Spratt’s fall so that Aunt Jo would be the one to go out on extended trips, leaving me alone in the house while my fate came crashing down around me. The Order wanted to isolate me, get me alone. So I could be that much easier to pull away from my old life—everything I once knew. So I would be weak. And Devin had been their pawn. Until he’d stopped following orders and Raven had taken over.
That’s what I was thinking when my car hit an ice slick on the road and sped wildly out of control. I panicked and shoved the wheel to the right, narrowly missing a huge tree. I fought to turn the wheel to the left to avoid another one coming straight at me. But I couldn’t spin it fast enough. I couldn’t stop this from happening. It was going to, whether I was ready or not.
My car was smoking.
I flashed back to the last car accident I’d been in.
Skye, stay with me.
Miraculously I wasn’t hurt again. The car wasn’t even totaled—but it didn’t look good. I grabbed my purse from where it had been flung to the floor of the passenger side and got out. It was freezing, an even more biting cold up here in the mountains than in town, where the buildings blocked some of the wind. I reached into the car for my parka, put it on, and zipped it up all the way.
Aunt Jo had made me program the number for AAA into my phone when I’d gotten a car, so I dug around in my purse for the phone. I pulled it out, went to punch in the programmed number, and froze. No reception. I slammed my palm on door.
“Do you have any idea how easy it is to block a signal so it doesn’t reach a cell phone? Child’s play,” a sickly sweet voice taunted in front of me. I looked up to see Raven standing among the trees in a white puffy jacket with a furry white hood. “I think it’s sweet that you want to protect your adoptive mother,” she said with a smile. “Because you couldn’t save your real one.”
“What do you want from me?” I screamed.
“Well, I think you know that,” she said. “I want you to follow me.”
“Why should I follow you?”
“Oh, Skye, when are you going to learn that running from your problems isn’t going to do you any good? You can’t run from your destiny. It follows you everywhere.”
I swallowed. “Where are we going?”
Raven smirked. “You’ll find out when we get there.”
And so, with nowhere else to turn, I followed her.
Chapter 37
We entered a clearing at the top of a mountain, not unlike the one I’d practiced in with Asher and Devin. The earth was hard and frosted over. The sky was a violently bright blue above us, and the clouds wisped out into a fog that covered everything. It felt like we were no longer on Earth. I guess, in a way, we weren’t.
Raven stood just behind me. Before us were two angels I’d never seen before. One had huge ivory wings extending from his back, yellowing in the way that a polar bear’s fur might. He looked strong, though advanced in years. Wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes and mouth, and his hair was a salt-and-pepper gray. From what Asher and Devin had told me about how angels aged, he must have been thousands of years old for him to look like an old man. The other angel’s wings matched Asher’s. They were blackest black. He looked slightly younger than the man beside him, though white patches gave his temples a dignified appearance.
Devin and Asher stood next to who I assumed were their respective Elders. They avoided meeting my eyes and looked at the ground instead, hands behind their backs as if they were following orders.
“Well,” said the angel with the white wings in a low, velvety voice. “She’s come.”
My two messengers looked up, each with a different expression flickering across his face. Asher radiated fury. Devin, fear. I sensed somehow that it wasn’t fear for himself but for me. And they both looked like they were in pain.
“I am Astaroth, one of the Order’s Gifted. And this”—he motioned with one long elegant hand to the angel beside him—“is Oriax. He is a Rebel Elder.”
I gulped, and immediately thought everyone had heard. Astaroth raised one gray eyebrow.
“We seem to have a . . . situation.” His eyes flicked behind me. I whipped my head around.
Raven. She stood smugly off to the side, her white wings outstretched and her hands clasped behind her back, looking like a delinquent schoolgirl in her little white jacket. When our eyes met, something freezing shot through my veins.
If you don’t fix this, I’m going to, she’d said to Devin.
I felt as if I was in one of those dreams where you’re shoved onstage to be the lead in a play you’ve never even heard of. I balled my fists tightly behind my back. What was it that always made the strange things happen? When I was emotional, or exposed to the elements, or near electricity . . .
I closed my eyes and tried
to focus what energy I had. The rush of wind in the sky around me. A bird chirping. Asher’s spicy scent curling through me from across the clearing. How warm and safe he made me feel. Devin, who I would never understand.
“Your powers have emerged.” Oriax’s voice echoed from the other side of my closed eyes. “They’re more than we’d ever imagined.”
My eyes flew open in time to catch Asher and Devin exchanging uneasy glances.
“Light and Dark, in small ways and large,” said Astaroth. “In many ways, combined even. But dangerous, yes.” He picked up a rock off the ground and tossed it in the air. When he caught it again, he looked me square in the eye. “So very dangerous to us all.”
“To some,” Oriax said with a look toward Astaroth, the excitement in his voice growing. He turned back toward me. “Your other ability, the whole reason we have our messengers watching you . . .”
What? What whole reason? Wasn’t it to see what kind of powers I had? I looked wildly to Asher, to Devin, but they were avoiding eye contact. I knew they’d been hiding something, that they’d been vague about the parameters of their mission. What was it?
“Yes, your . . . ability,” Astaroth said with preternatural calm. “Your ability to obstruct the one thing we hold above all else. But what to do with such a dangerous girl? What to do, indeed.”
“What ability?” I cried, whipping around to look at Raven.
“Skye,” Asher jumped in.
“Silence!” Astaroth commanded. “Have you no control over your Rebels, Oriax?”
Asher stepped back, his head down. It was the strangest thing, to see him so submissive.
Oriax seemed nervous. “You know what must come now, Skye, don’t you?”
“I think,” Astaroth said in a booming voice, “before anything else, we must have you choose. You must give your power over to one side and one side alone.”
Raven smirked from the side of the clearing.
She’d been the one to tell them to interfere. After my flash at the hospital parking lot. But what had that been? And how did that mean I was dangerous?
One side alone.
Alone.
Why did that word continue to bother me?
“You may return to the Order now, Raven,” Astaroth commanded. “You have accomplished your mission here.”
“But—”
He gave her a look that would have ignited her into flames if he’d possessed the earthly powers. Lucky for her, he didn’t.
She bowed submissively. “Yes, sir.”
As I watched her soar gracefully over the treetops, I couldn’t help but think that sometimes beauty camouflaged the ugliest creatures.
“Well, Skye?” the Rebel Elder said, cutting into my thoughts. “What will you choose? Will you align yourself with those who believe in free will? Or”—he gestured to Astaroth and Devin—“with those to whom humans are mere puppets?”
“We keep the world in harmony,” Astaroth said. “Without us, the Rebellion would destroy humanity with chaos. You know which you must choose, Skye. Choose.”
The Order had been trying to manipulate the events in my life to get us to this point. But why hadn’t the Rebellion prevented this moment from happening? My mind scrolled back through memories, through snippets of words, clips of my life, like a movie reel.
Not a scratch on you.
Gurneys, everywhere.
Stay with me, Skye. Come on. Stay with me, girl.
The Order had been capable of crashing Cassie’s car.
She’s blurring your destiny.
And they crashed my parents’ car, too.
“Mom!” I screamed. “Dad!”
They were responsible for my parents’ deaths.
“You’re alone now, Skye.”
And they had wanted me dead, too. But what about now? What did they want from me now? Could I trust them?
Raven is dangerous, Skye. If she’s here, something bad is up.
Could I trust either side? Did the Rebellion want me for its own reasons? What was it that Raven had said at the hospital?
You are dangerous! They were right!
And the only reason I was still alive was because the Rebellion interfered to save me. Asher was on their side. But I knew somehow that it didn’t mean what I’d thought it meant. They’d wanted to save me because they could use my powers. The ability they were talking about? It was my ability to blur destiny. It must be. But then what was it about my flash at the hospital parking lot that had made Raven call them, bring me here? What had that been?
It was clear to me why the Order wanted me. I had a power that they wanted to control and to keep safe. Because if they didn’t, it could cause chaos for them. Chaos that the Rebellion, I was sure, would love to get their hands on.
The truth hit me so fast I never saw it coming.
Asher didn’t care about saving me from the Order. He wanted to use me as a weapon against them. He’d said as much, but I hadn’t fully understood it.
“No!” I shouted before I had a chance to think twice.
“No?” The collective murmur rose from the group.
“I choose neither!” I cried. “You killed my parents!” I pointed at Astaroth, letting my gaze fall in the process on Devin. He flinched. I turned to Asher. “And you don’t care about me at all. You’ve been using me. You lied to me this whole time.”
Asher looked like I’d smacked him across the face, but I didn’t care. “I want nothing to do with either side. I want my life back!”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” the Gifted One said. “But if you refuse to choose—we will choose for you.”
“Get her!” The Rebel Elder said frantically, turning to Asher with a rising fury.
“Don’t touch me!” I flared at him.
“He has a mission,” the Elder growled. “He must complete it.”
Asher stepped forward, between us, one hand on my arm. I flung him away. A day ago, I couldn’t let him go. But now I never wanted him to touch me again.
“What about your ability to choose? Or is that only when it’s convenient?” I demanded.
“There’s so much you don’t understand, Skye.”
I felt my temper rising.
“Oh, I understand. Much better than you think. So tell me. Is that all I am to you?” I cried. “A mission? Some way to earn cosmic brownie points for the Rebellion?”
“Skye, no!” Asher saw it just before I began to feel it. My temper. The rumbling of the earth underneath us. I felt something overwhelming rush through my body. “Control it! Flip the switch!”
Everything I’d been holding inside since this whole thing began finally burst out of me. I knew my eyes were flashing silver. I could feel the electricity surging through them just as the earth began to quake.
Astaroth was staring me down from the opposite end of the clearing. The earth shook beneath us, and outside the clearing, I could hear a tree or two cracking thunderously as it fell to the ground.
I couldn’t have stopped it even if I’d wanted to. The power raged within me, and I felt everything pouring out of me all at once. Anger for disrupting my perfect world. For being forced to abandon my friends. My home. For not having an easy choice, and for caring about Devin and Asher when they only wanted me for the power each side stood to gain. For looking into the unknown and not having any idea how it would unfold. For not ever realizing what I would become.
Clouds rolled menacingly across the clear blue sky, shrouding us in darkness as rain began to pummel the ground. And I realized what it was I was capable of. The Order had mental control. The Rebellion had taught themselves to control the elements. And me? I could disrupt all of those things. Blur out the Order’s control over destiny. Disrupt the Rebellion’s power over the elements, draw power from the earth itself, heat from its core, shifting the weather. And what else? Because I knew somehow that this strange mix of powers didn’t stop there. I was capable of much more. More I didn’t even know about yet.
My
life had been controlled by someone else since the very day I was born. Call it fate, call it manipulation, call it the choices of others. The Order and the Rebellion had always watched me. They’d molded and shaped my life to unfold exactly how they’d wanted. How it would best suit them. My birth, my parents’ death, coming to live with Aunt Jo—my friendships with Cassie and Dan.
Even falling in love.
Everything I thought had been real—everything that made me me—had been a lie. Both sides wanted me. Both sides were at fault. The Order wanted to keep me under close watch to prevent the Rebellion from grabbing hold of me. And the Rebellion wanted to use me to fight the Order every step of the way.
That’s what Raven had meant this whole time. That’s why no one would tell me. It was all part of the plan. And both sides had one.
The wind howled, rising to a gale. The rain slanted sideways.
Trees were cracking more rapidly now, falling into the clearing as the earth shuddered violently. As one tree fell just feet from where I was standing, a flock of crows rose as one from the branches, flapping over us in a dark blanket. Their frantic caws echoed above us even after the birds had flown away.
“Skye?” Devin said uncertainly, moving toward me with arms outstretched, palms outward, like one might move toward a wild beast. He reached out his hand for me to take as another crack ripped through a nearby tree. As if in slow motion, it began to fall toward us. Devin stretched his hand out farther to me. “Skye!”
I stared into the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. I couldn’t move, trying to figure out exactly what I saw in them. I was rooted to my spot. The tree fell faster, roaring through the air.
I saw everything flash before me. Devin yelling for me to take his hand. Oriax’s huge black wings as he lifted himself into the air to avoid a tumbling rock. Astaroth’s intense, unflappable gaze as he stared at me from the very edge of the clearing. The world tilted on its axis, turned dark.
But where was Asher?
Strong arms wrapped themselves around me tightly, knocking the breath out of my lungs. Black feathers grazed my hair and batted against my cheeks, and I was enveloped by the warm, earthy scent I knew so well. I was lifted up and up, above the clearing, into the air as the tree finally fell. The mountain echoed as the tree crashed right into where I’d been standing moments before. We touched down on the other side of the clearing, close to the Gifted One.
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