by C. M. Owens
You did this for her… Those words were the only words I saw on that journal.
“Slade is more of a beast. Like me. His power comes from channeling all that,” I argue. “Not a visionary.”
He scoffs. “Now. He’s not the same brother I had. I always thought he was weaker than me until we were in those rings.”
He lets out a heavy breath.
“But before the rings, he was primarily a visionary. Calculative, clever, insightful…never ruthless as he is now. His instinct thrived from that piece of himself, and he was constantly piecing together the visions of the changeable future to fill in the gaps of the unchangeable future he couldn’t see. We thought we’d prepared for everything.”
He stares down at his tea, swirling it.
“The night they came, he blamed himself for not finding that a possibility. He said too much knowledge left us vulnerable to variables he never considered, because he thought he knew the worst that could happen.”
My mind flicks back to Slade telling me something almost exactly like that, but a little different.
“You mean your father said that,” I argue. “Just before the attack. Because he sensed it.”
Alton slowly shakes his head. “I remember too well the bloody mess in our wake when we were chained, and I was screaming as I rammed myself into the bars over and over again. Slade sat there calmly, as though he’d already given up, then he said those words to me,” he answers so quietly I barely hear him. “It’s when I decided to hate him, because I blamed him for not seeing it before it happened. I blamed the death of our parents on him, the death of our sister on him…Hell, I blamed my mate’s death on him,” he says, laughing humorlessly before it turns into a broken sob. “I blamed him for everything, but it was an unchangeable future. He didn’t know there were other factors to put the path back into motion. It was never his fault. He only sees the changeable.”
His eyes find mine again.
“But I stole my own mate’s future because I was so desperate to feel her just once. Just once. I never considered they’d let me live without her,” he goes on, his broken mind beginning to wander as he shifts the topic abruptly.
His head drops, and he starts sobbing in earnest. Sighing heavily, I realize he’s a lost cause. He’s not going to be of any real help in piecing this together, and I never know if he’s even telling me the truth or not.
Or maybe he’s just telling me scattered fragments of what he thinks is the truth. Most madmen never realize they’re insane.
I dematerialize us, leaving him in his cave. He curls into the fetal position as he sobs and hugs a sketch of his mate to his chest.
Just as I start to turn, he brokenly whispers, “Let him do whatever he’s planning to do. Whatever it is, it’s all for you.” The words are so ragged that I barely understand them. “It’s all for you,” he says again, letting his eyes close. “You should hate me as he does, because you have no idea how much you would have hated me if they’d succeeded and gotten you. If they hadn’t killed your line to stop you from being born, as I’m sure they would have, then an even worse fate would have found you.”
“But it didn’t happen,” I remind him, even as his back stays turned to me and he remains curled on the ground.
“Only because he was stronger,” he whispers, rocking with the picture still cradled to his chest. “Only because he was stronger,” he says again.
Then he starts rocking harder, and his sobs increase as he whispers sorry over and over again, though I don’t think he’s talking to me anymore.
My eyes water for the brief second I allow myself to pity him.
“He said he’d let you die. The bond’s been broken now that he’s claimed me, and I’m going to make sure he holds true to his word.” I hope I’m not making a stupid mistake by telling him this.
He looks over at me, eyes watery. “The bond is still there, Ella. I can feel it. Just a shard is all that’s left, so I can’t die until it’s gone, or I’ll take him with me,” he says hoarsely, then turns over to start rocking again.
The blood in my veins turns cold, and my vision almost dims even without me trying to use magic. I have to physically work to tether the darkness and push it back. My hands are shaking with the effort.
“What?” I ask on a ghost of a whisper.
“I’d know it if it was broken,” he goes on quietly.
I leave, because my beasts are still pacing, only now they’re pacing twice as hard. Because Slade has been lying to me all along.
I just don’t know why.
Chapter 29
ELLA
Slade is on the training grounds, bloody and angry when I appear, but his eyes soften when he sees me. “I left you to work in the woods without me, and you went to see Karma instead,” he says like he’s chastising me.
“You didn’t actually leave me with instructions. What happened?” I ask, gesturing to his bloody clothes.
“Just a little scrape with some old friends. I have things to—”
“We’re not supposed to meet until tonight. I know. I just came to find Kya,” I state, trying not to let him sense anything.
But he cocks his head. “She’s not here. I can feel your beasts pacing. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I lie, shrugging a shoulder. “Guess I’m just getting antsy. Red moon is tonight, and you know what that means. I’ll need to be locked up. Speaking of which, what do you do on red moons?”
I know damn well he wouldn’t let himself be caged for any reason, so I doubt he’s locking himself up tonight like the rest of the shifters.
“You won’t need to be locked up. I’ll keep you with me,” he states like it’s an order. “I’ll be back before nightfall,” he adds before brushing his lips over mine, not touching me in any other way, as though he’s worried he’ll be tempted to do more.
Then he vanishes, taking his touch with him as I lean into vacant air, not giving me time to argue that I need to be locked up.
I’m slow to open my eyes, but my gaze lands on the door of his cabin.
Without hesitation, I dematerialize to be inside, seeing all the ledgers still everywhere, but my eyes land on the bed where the journal is.
With shaky hands, I lift the journal and open it, but it’s in yet another language. I close it and open it again, watching the language shift. Then do it again. And again. And again.
It takes a while, but it finally stops on English, and a pang of dread hits me when I start reading the first few words. The gold words seem to pop, and certain ones seem darker than the others, almost as though they were more important to him and he made sure they stayed the boldest.
Things you must achieve:
Make her stronger.
Make her harder.
Make her fight twice as fierce.
Work her like an animal, because that’s what she is. That’s what you’ve become so you can give her exactly what she needs.
You did this for one reason: You did this for her.
Slowly, I lower myself to the bed, ignoring the beasts that start to whine and whimper inside me, almost like they know what I’ll find before I even finish reading.
You were once the most powerful creature in the world, aside from your twin, but evolution makes the following generations stronger and stronger. Consequentially, you became viewed as weaker.
But as you’ve learned inside these rings, power can be earned or taken. Even the weak can take from the strong, but you’ll earn it. You have to. You’ll fuse more power into every fiber of your body.
While you’ve seen a thousand different possible futures, you always knew too much, and unexpected variables always sent the future spiraling back into the same finale as the last time.
Here are the important parts you need to know to hurry your memories…
Animal instinct is your new prime variable. Your beasts are now your weapon, and you’ll draw more power from them. Your visions have been tethered to surround only her, because that�
��s all that really matters.
The rest of your visionary power has been siphoned to fuel your more offensive powers.
This is the only way to start with new equations and fresh variables, but to do so, you need to ensure the biggest change of all happens.
And that will take away your ability to ever see the outcome of this new experiment, because that in itself is the biggest piece to changing the future you’ve seen too many times.
“New experiment?” I ask aloud, then glance around the cabin, my eyes dancing over the hundreds of equations on papers that have been scattered around with no real order.
Quickly, I put the book down, and I run over to start shuffling them all together, using some of my magic to hasten the process. Once I have the huge stack—that is no doubt in no order at all—I grab the journal and dematerialize into Kimber’s room at the new house.
It’s pure luck that I find her room so easily, because I expected to have to look around for her.
She blinks a few times when I’m suddenly in front of her.
“What’s all that?” she asks, confused as I drop the stack of papers and the journal down in front of her.
“I don’t really know, but I think we’re going to need it.”
“For what?” she asks as I pick the journal back up, scared to continue reading.
“Slade sees magic in numbers and formulas, a lot like you see your gatekeeping abilities. Can I ask you something?” I ask, looking away from the journal.
“Sure. What?”
“Gage doesn’t drink blood, but you’ve been with blood drinkers before, right?”
“Before I answer this honestly, I’d like for you to tell me why you’re asking…”
“Hypothetically, if a visionary is with a blood drinker, can the blood drinker see one of your visions while they’re taking blood from you?”
“Absolutely…not?” she says, sounding sure until the end, then it turns into more of a question. “Why?”
“Because I saw an old vision, I think, while I was drinking from Slade, and Alton said Slade used to be more visionary than beast—”
“You saw Alton again?” she hisses.
“Not the important part,” I tell her. “You’re a visionary, so can—”
“I’m a visionless visionary who hasn’t seen more than some nondescript image in too long to even matter,” she grumbles. “But what do you mean Slade used to be more visionary? I’m no expert on creatures like you, but I don’t think you can change whatever creature you lean on the most.”
“Even if you spent centuries living in a place where all creatures, including yourself, were experimented on regularly to learn secrets no one else even knows? Slade’s the kind of guy who would keep any personal revelations to himself and not provide them with the information they thought to extract,” I remind her.
She blinks for a few seconds. “That does change things a little, but why are you turning a little blotchy, and why are your claws coming out?”
Glancing down, I focus on the werewolf claws, forcing them back, even as my bone structure continues to visibly waver under my skin.
“What the hell, Ella?” Kimber says quietly when she sees the same thing.
I force myself to deny the shift that is trying really hard to happen.
“Just read,” I tell her, putting the journal down and picking up where I left off as she reads from beside me.
To be perfectly clear, this is your final resort. As you read this, you’ll slowly start remembering why.
The memories didn’t originally stop with her flying into that invisible barrier and starting all over at the day she turned eighteen.
“He’s talking about you. The night we freed the rings,” she says on a breath. “He saw that coming?”
“Every time he closed his eyes, but that’s all he saw. I thought,” I tell her absently, confused as I read on.
They used to start at eighteen and stopped when she died.
My eyes meet Kimber’s when we both read that line. “What is this?” she asks me again, this time sounding firmer.
“It’s Slade’s journal. The journal of a man who sees magic as science and can do things none of us thought possible. I think he spent centuries planning something, but it has nothing to do with the war. I just don’t know what. So please shut up so I can keep reading.”
“You came to me,” she grumbles as we both start reading again, but I hop up and put that symbol I learned from Alton on the wall, infusing it with my own magic.
“What’s that?”
“To keep him from seeing me read his journal,” I tell her as I take a seat again, sharing the journal with her.
“I feel wrong reading Slade’s diary,” she tells me, even as she reads eagerly.
You’ve seen her death a thousand and one times, and all of those times, you’ve failed to save her, no matter how many variables change. So you changed all the variables, starting with yourself, since you needed to be stronger.
Specific memories have been erased, and you’ve limited your scope into her life, forcing the loop to end just before you see her for the first time as a free man.
With the remaining bit of your link to Alton, you’ll shield her from him completely, at all times, so that he can’t even recall her face to draw for them.
“This is visionary magic with a twin bond,” Kimber says, shaking her head. “It’s different from mine. I should have suspected he was visionary just because of his ability to show people his memories. I just assumed he picked up some tricks from the rings,” she tells me, causing me to study her face.
“He stopped his visions and put them on a loop. How?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Every visionary works different, but it’d take a lot of knowledge about one’s power to do anything like this. Why would anyone want to not know the future?”
My eyes close slowly when I read the next line of the journal, as my stomach coils with dread. “Because he wanted to learn everything to keep from missing anything important. He was a visionary who never saw his capture, because he thought he knew all the variables. How wouldn’t he have seen the capture, if he saw the future?”
“Shut up and let me read on. Maybe it tells,” she says to me.
You need to learn all over again, and to create a different future, you have to be a different man—more powerful. A man with sharp focus and a far more lethal instinct. Your new main variable is rage. Shouldn’t be hard to acquire, considering the current place of residence.
Focusing on the rage and learning to tap into that power source will make you inevitably stronger. To do that, you have to subtract variables that prevent the rage from fully festering, and to achieve such, you’ve taken these extreme measures.
The legend of the Gemini Twins was born in this prison. You’ll grow it. Make it real. Let the whispers of the cells ignite a truth you’ve concocted to keep yourself relevant to all who takeover before they kill you and Alton for becoming pointless.
There are equations all along the next page and the one after, all of which make zero sense to me, but Kimber sucks in a breath.
“What is all this?” she asks, distracting me from my own thoughts.
“Science disguised as math, or so I’m told,” I grumble, gesturing to the gibberish equations on the page.
“What does that mean? The Gemini Twin legend was born in that prison?” I prompt, even as her eyes stay glued to the nonsensical equations.
“It means he made it all up. He orchestrated this massive legend, and it was believable because he made Alton believe it too,” she goes on, eyes enamored. “He even made himself believe it by implanting false memories and removing others. He only remembers the truth when he’s reading this. He even has one equation notated ‘the first time I betrayed my brother,’ and right behind it is a series of very sophisticated formulas for implanting memories.”
“What?” I ask incredulously. “That makes no sense. Their bond is real. It’s—”
&nb
sp; “Their bond is real, but it’s a twin bond. It’s similar, but at the same time, completely different from Kya’s and Karma’s bond. Their lives aren’t even really tied together like the Gemini tale explains, and he weakened the bond when he siphoned a huge portion of it to grow his own strength. That’s why they really stopped feeling what the other feels,” she states, then reads something else as I digest that new information.
“Kya is inherently stronger than Karma, but according to this—” She points at a series of notations that make about as much sense as the science gibberish. “Alton was once stronger than Slade. Now Slade has five times the strength. We thought they were equal, and so does Hannah. Hannah had a visionary who regularly tapped into Alton’s mind, according to what Dad said he heard from Chaz, who heard…you know what, we’re really overdue for a family meeting, because this ‘he said, she said’ bullshit is getting—”
My deep rumble of an unexpected growl cuts her off, and we both stare at each other blankly for a second before she clears her throat. It’s a little awkward now.
“Slade wrote a fictional Gemini Twin bond that has been whispered to ears throughout the centuries. It’s not real,” she adds.
“How is it not real? There’s a book on it somewhere. Or it’s mentioned in a book. I remember Dice quoting it because he’s so fixated on finding out if they both orgasm when one does.”
“Yeah, and this journal might outdate everything. People write what they think they know about history, and Slade is old enough to have started a myth about himself.”
“Why?” I ask softly, feeling so confused.
The pity in her eyes makes me growl again, and she clears her throat once more. “I don’t have an answer, yet, Ella. But I don’t think we should be reading this. There’s a reason he did all this, and it’s clear he’s doing something to protect you.”