by Jessica Gunn
Saving myself, but not the others.
Unintentionally. Unknowingly.
Selfishly.
I had scrambled from the car on all fours, crying and covered in blood that was and wasn’t mine. Veynix had lunged for Jeremy’s body, half-fallen out of the windshield, and slit his throat because he was still breathing. I’d screamed my throat raw at the sight of crimson pouring down Jeremy’s front, spurting from the wound. My heart splintered into a thousand pieces as one of my best friends bled out before me
My body had staggered, lightheaded, frozen. All of this carnage and torture and death for a single mission gone wrong. A peek into a Talon meeting, overhearing things we shouldn’t have.
My breath had come in short, stuttered gasps as I backed against a tree, terrified, screaming my head off until no more sound escaped. Veynix had turned on me, stalking closer to finish the job with the same chilling evil gleam in his eye as the night he’d impersonated Brian and kissed me.
I’d swung my hand in panic, feeling the magik course through me, but having no idea what it had meant. A piece of the metal frame that’d been my shelter followed the unintentional command. It had soared through the air until it had collided with Veynix and sliced down his face.
Veynix had cursed and run, all the while holding his bleeding, broken face. But not before vowing to end this another time as sirens blared in the distance.
Veynix had been the one who had run. Not me.
My eyes focused in on his scar in real time, then shifted to the matching wound I’d just given him.
“You were the coward that night,” I growled. “Instead of ending me, fighting me, you ran away like a fucking coward. You left me there to nearly succeed in killing myself thanks to survivor’s guilt. To the rumors. To being exiled from my life and having to start over. And for what? To come back and kill me now? What, did you have to heal to fight me again?”
I swiped my hand across the air like I’d watched him do a thousand times. But instead of an invisible telekinetic force, I felt the shifting of the metal rebar with something deeper than my soul—my magik.
The rebar flew to my hand, once more my weapon.
“This ends tonight, coward,” I cried as I launched myself toward him, swinging the metal bar.
As we danced this time, I stabbed him twice, as if the metal itself was attacking, and I was just its facilitator. I swiped my hand through the air some more, now feeling all the earth and minerals around me, pulling bits of cement and concrete from the walls and ceiling and sending them flying at Veynix’s body.
Shards of it split his skin like broken glass, leaving behind tiny wounds that creeped open and bled. But no more was Veynix landing attacks on me. No, my rage swirled with the earth around me, making my movements grounded and solid, determined and accurate. Block for block, hit for hit, I met Veynix at every turn, landing more often than being stopped.
Finally, Veynix got a hand between us and pushed himself out of the fight zone with his telekinesis even as another tiny chunk of cement hit him in the chest.
“Enough,” he growled.
“What?” I asked. “Get more than you bargain for?”
A knife blade soared past my face, so fast and sudden that I was sure I wouldn’t have felt it if not for my newly-awakened magik. The knife lodged itself in Veynix’s unsuspecting shoulder.
I spun, looking for the attacker, but instead of finding the back-up I wanted, I watched as Kian appeared in the hole in the wall with one of Will’s arms slung over his shoulder as they climbed through.
“You missed,” I said.
Kian wore a fierce look of rage on his face. “No, I didn’t.”
I turned back to Veynix, confused, but a stricken expression had already taken over his features.
Veynix stared down at his hands, his chest heaving. “No. How? Where did you get this?”
“Your own stores, asshole,” Kian spat.
A flash of realization hit me. “Elin. You stole some on your way here.”
Kian nodded. “Veynix will be down as long as he doesn’t try to use his magik.”
Then, because of elin, he’d be down for good.
Veynix stopped groaning through the pain, only to glare up at us. “You’ve changed the game.”
“Guess so,” I spat, walking over to him. He was more or less harmless at the moment, but I wouldn’t get close enough to be within striking range of his fists.
Veynix dug inside the front chest plate of his armor and retrieved a tiny, two-inch by four-inch black device. “If you insist on changing the game, then I’m changing the rules. This is a trigger that will set off all the explosives placed to self-destruct this operation. And you better believe I’ll be pulling this thing with my last dying breath.”
“Assuming you get one,” I said. The throbbing in my body had turned into stabbing pains as the adrenaline from the fight began wearing off. My breaths grew heavy and labored, painful because of my ribs.
“Oh, I will make sure of it,” he said, then spat blood on the floor. “I am so happy to see you so powerful, though. It is good news for my brethren who were counting on me.”
“For what?” I spat. “To die?”
“To build a poison that will turn the tide of this war,” Veynix said, lifting up the trigger device and hovering his thumb over it.
“Hate to break it to you,” Kian said, “but force-changing a ton of Ember witches into demons isn’t exactly a solid war-ending plan.”
Veynix grinned again, sadistically. He was no longer wincing in pain. “Who said this poison was for Ember witches?”
Shit. If I kept fighting him, he’d pull the trigger now that he couldn’t risk using his magik. Not without possibly ending his life because of it. Veynix wasn’t an Old One, but he was pretty damn powerful. Elin might cause his magik to backfire if he used it now, and Veynix must have come to that same realization.
But there was no way out for us, either. We couldn’t teleportante past the ether shield until Veynix’s ether-shaper ally was dead. And there was no way we’d survive a blast like this.
“You’d kill yourself to keep this operation a secret?” I asked him.
“Not to keep it a secret, but to keep the research moving forward elsewhere,” Veynix said, staring straight at me. “Talon’s mission is too important to give the Fire Circle a chance to foil it by creating antidotes.”
“But—”
His thumb inched closer to the trigger.
I spun on Kian. “Get Will out of here now.” There was zero chance Veynix was bluffing. He’d admitted to me somehow being tied to all of this. He’d tracked down, taunted, and killed the rest of my team to attempt keeping their Ember witch operation a secret. And when I’d lived long enough to inform the Fire Circle of Talon’s initial mission, they’d moved on to something more lethal.
Kian shook his head, his eyes wide and pleading. “You need—”
I cut Kian off. “I need you two alive. Go! Try to get to the shield upstairs and—”
“One last fight? Shall we?” Veynix asked. Then, against all fucking sense and odds, Veynix’s telekinesis wrapped around my body once more and pulled me to him. He screamed out in agony as elin hit him back with his magik, but he didn’t let up.
I flailed, swiping my hands up in the only way I knew how to use my new magik. Chunks of ceiling and wall debris followed the command, but the force behind the attacks was as weak as I was. But then Veynix’s hold on me weakened and I could move of my own free will.
I cursed at him. “Elin will kill you if you don’t stop that.”
“Then I’ll take you with me, pet.” Veynix lifted his hand again, but instead of flinging me across the air, he reached telekinetically for a small blade strapped to his waist inside a black holster I knew all too well. Then he flicked it at me.
I waved my hand to knock it from its path, but my magik didn’t follow the command. I wasn’t strong enough to command it against Veynix’s telekinesis. Instead,
the blade tore into my leg, cutting a wound three inches long.
The blinding pain was instant. An excruciating tear began in my thigh and radiated upward toward my hip and spine. The knife had been coated with Veynix’s mutated platypus venom.
My leg gave out, so I shifted my weight to the other side. Kian was there in the next instant, Will’s arm still slung around his shoulder.
“We need to go,” he said quickly.
“Where? How?” I asked. “If the shield’s still up, we can’t teleportante.” Blood poured out of my leg wound—fast, too fast. Had he nicked my femoral artery? My head spun at the sight of all the crimson, just like on the night of the accident.
“There’s nowhere you can go,” Veynix laughed manically between wails of pain. “My venom ends with me! Long live the Empire of Darkness!”
I looked just in time to watch Veynix depress the detonator trigger.
“Goodnight, my venom,” he said, staring at me with those wild eyes and a wicked grin.
My stomach dropped in time with loud booms echoing in the short distance—above us and beside and below.
I turned to Kian, my eyes wide. There was nowhere to go, no way out of this explosion.
“Your magik,” Kian said as he yanked me closer to him and Will. “Do something.”
“I don’t know—”
A massive boom right next to us echoed through my chest, collapsing the ceiling above us.
I gripped Kian’s arm, pulled he and Will down against the ground with me, and squeezed my eyes shut. Clenched my fists. Grabbed on to all the metal I could feel around me and pulled it close, twisting it into a ball or shield, wrapping it around us. Layer after layer of metal and concrete and cement, metal and more metal. Building it up in the blink of an eye.
My eardrums tore with the sound of the explosion. Heat swathed our protective metal ball. Sweat coated my face and neck, dripping down my shirt and into the still-bleeding wound on my leg. The metal cage around us was conducting heat. But we just needed to survive it long enough for the explosion to be over.
I locked eyes with Kian. His normal brown irises had returned, as if the poison in his system had finally run its course. There was hope for Will. If we got out of this alive.
The heat seared my skin, burning where it touched metal.
“We can’t stay inside here!” I screamed as the chain of explosions demolishing the building continued. “The ether-shaper has to be dead by now, or gone.”
Kian nodded and squeezed my arm tight. Then his lips formed a single, glorious word, “Teleportante.”
We disappeared from inside the metal ball and reappeared in the sunset shining down along the street outside the building.
The three of us collapsed against the pavement as the ground beneath us shook.
“Holy crap!” someone exclaimed as the shaking died down. “They’re there!”
A flash of blonde hair graced my narrowing vision. Ben.
Ben?
Darkness finally overtook my mind as people ran over to us. Ben and Krystin. Avery’s trademark mohawk made an appearance.
The last thing I saw was Kian’s gaze meeting mine, and a squeeze of his hand reassuring me we were alive.
For now.
Chapter 26
Sounds. Light. A weight on my right palm. Heavy. Reassuring.
I blinked, my eyes burning when light touched them, as if it’d been a long time since they had last been opened.
The fingers holding my right hand squeezed. “Ava?”
My mouth was dry. I worked my tongue until I could speak, despite even drier lips. “It’s bright in here.”
A soft laugh echoed. “It is. You’ll get used to it.” They squeezed my hand tighter. “How are you feeling?”
With a brilliant flash of recognition, I saw Will’s face—my Will—leaning over me. “You’re alive.”
He smiled down at me, blue eyes shining. “Because of you. Thank you, Ava. You saved us all.” But his smiled faltered.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him. I swallowed hard. My throat hurt. In fact, most of my body was beginning to register as one giant, pain-filled area. A throbbing pounded in my chest. My elbow ached and burned. My throat felt swollen.
Will shook his head. “How are you feeling?”
I blinked up at him again. “I’ve been better.” I tightened my grip on his hand. “Tell me you’re okay.” But the stricken look on his face told me he or I were definitely not.
Will nodded. “I am. The poison passed through my system. Same with Kian. Kian’s totally okay, but… the poison changed me, Ava.” He squeezed one hand into a fist and his skin glowed a faint orange.
My eyes widened. “Will!”
He shook his head. “It’s uh… I mean, it’s okay, but…” He winced, then looked over his shoulder at the door. “I’m sure they’d rather someone else explain it, but I think I somehow ended up with, what’s it called?” He looked at the ceiling, the skin around his eyes wrinkling as he recalled something. “Ember witch magik? Ether, maybe?”
My stomach dropped. “Excuse me?”
Will nodded. “Yeah, that was it. I don’t really know how. My head is still a foggy mess, and from what I can tell, Dacher and the others are still looking into it. It apparently makes little sense, if any at all.”
“Um, no. It doesn’t.” I swallowed hard again. You didn’t just develop witch magik on a whim. And if Veynix’s poison had been a twisted version of Demon’s Blood, it, logically, should have turned Will into a demon of some sort. Not a person with Ember witch magik.
My head spun, a tornado of questions and possibilities.
“Kian seems to be fine, though,” Will said. “Something about building up a resistance to a similar poison.”
“Kian’s been ingesting Demon’s Blood for months now,” I said. “So that makes sense. It makes him strong like a demon.”
Will nodded, eyeing me like he knew what I was talking about. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
I reached for his arm. “You’re going to be okay, though, right? No dying?” I wouldn’t have survived losing Will, that much I knew for sure.
He shook his head. “Afraid not. You’ll have to put up with living with me for a lot longer than six months.”
“Oh, Will,” I said and pulled him to me. Pain lanced up my arms as we embraced, but I ignored it as best I could. We were both alive and that was enough for the moment. And now we both had magik.
“You were poisoned by Veynix’s venom,” he said into my shoulder.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
Will pulled back fast. “Then I won’t hug you anymore. I know how much that hurts. Looks like we’re both on that rehab list.”
“And the Fire Circle?” I asked. Veynix had spouted words about war, about directly attacking the Fire Circle in a very specific way. But that had been before the stores of various poisons beneath Midnight had been blown up.
Now I wondered if war might be coming from a different, more human place altogether.
Will cringed. “See, that’s where things get fuzzy. They refuse to tell me anything of substance since I’m not a Hunter.”
“I’ll gladly fill you in,” said a third voice. I jumped, grabbing Will’s hand tighter.
Ben appeared in the doorway, walking with a cane into my recovery room. “You’re at Headquarters now, though they wanted to move all three of you to an Infirmary run by the Ether Head Circle.”
I winced. “And you told them no, right?”
Ben shrugged. “I told them it was your choice. I also didn’t want to get moved there while infected with Veynix’s venom. So there’s that.”
Will glanced up at Ben, then got out of his seat, offering it to him. Ben nodded his gratitude.
“Sorry, I’m still hurting,” Ben said.
“More than me, dude; it’s cool.”
Ben had been hit with Veynix’s venom not long ago. And although Will seemed to have recovered from whatever had afflicted him, Ben didn’t seem
much better than when I’d last seen him, apart from being mobile.
Ben offered me a hard stare. “We need to talk, Ava.”
I looked down at my hands. “I know. And I deserve every bit of the punishment you’re no doubt here to dole out.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Of course not. “Ben…”
He shook his head. “You disobeyed a direct order. And while Krystin should have said something and stopped you, or at least tried to read your mind, you shouldn’t have gone alone in the first place.”
“I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt because of me,” I said, so quiet it might have been a whisper. “I know that’s not what happened, though.”
Kian, Will, and I—we’d all nearly died. Plus whatever innocents might have been involved in the explosion.
“Luckily, there were no fatalities that weren’t demonic in nature,” Ben said, as if reading my thoughts.
“Thank God,” I whispered. “And Veynix?”
“The entire building collapsed,” Will said. “If he was still in there, he was crushed, if not incinerated.”
“Like you three might have been,” Ben said. His eyes narrowed. “Care to explain why you weren’t?”
“It’s a long story,” said a fourth person.
Kian now stood in the doorway, his eyes asking for entry into this weird party.
Ben waved him in. “Shut the door and tell me the truth.”
Kian did the former, then turned to me. When our gazes locked it was like the weight of the world fell off my shoulders and half onto his. Like everything that had happened over the past few days was now a shared burden, if it was to be a burden at all.
Kian gave me a reassuring nod. “Ava and I met the night before we showed up at Headquarters with a poisoned Will.”
“Kian,” I hissed.
If he revealed how we met, he’d be subject to as much punishment as me for what had happened and for fighting in Midnight’s ring. Not that I guessed it mattered anymore now that Midnight had been destroyed.
Kian lifted a hand. “No. I’m ready to come clean if you are.”
Ben watched our exchange with a raised brow, glancing briefly at Will.