Chapter Sixteen
Anger didn’t begin cover it. And mixed in with the rage of having my excellent plan ripped to shreds was the crippling fear. Fear that I’d never find my way home. That I’d never see my family or friends again. That I’d be stuck in Gileath forever.
I didn’t care what Oriel said about me being allowed home after I could control myself. If I was really all that powerful, there was no way they’d let me go home. They’d want me to stay for more treatment. Or tests. Or maybe just one more mission. And another. And another.
And when I really probed, I realised that the anger and fear were mingled with just a little bit of shame. Okay, a lot of shame. I’d tried to seduce Oriel and he’d...turned me down. He’d literally laughed in my face. And, oh god, now he was going to think that I fancied him.
The waves of shame just kept on coming but my mind wouldn’t stop poking at it either, like probing a sore tooth with my tongue.
And of course, because he’d predicted that I’d have a tantrum that was the last thing I was going to do even though keeping my anger inside was a Herculean task. Still, I managed to sit still on the edge of the bed, thinking burning thoughts of rage and categorically not smashing the room up.
Eventually it grew dark, so I got up and started lighting the lamps. I wasn’t about to sit about in a dark room by myself.
After a while my anger subsided and I allowed myself a pleasant few minutes of self-pity before again starting to calculate how to escape. This time, though, no answers came. He’d anticipated exactly what I’d do earlier and I dismissed every plan I came up with as too obvious. Besides, even if I managed to get out the front door, Oriel was freakishly fast. He’d catch me before I made it to the main road.
I brooded for a while longer and then, on the basis that I couldn’t do anything about it in the middle of the night on an empty stomach, I pulled the covers over myself and went to sleep.
There was the stomach-twanging sensation of jolting suddenly to a stop, and I opened my eyes to a thick fork of lightning exploding over my head. Like, right over my head. The noise left my ears ringing.
I cringed to the floor, and when the crashing stopped I jumped to a low crouch on the lawn. Wait. I was outside. How was I outside? I shook my head. Never mind that now. I could see lightning playing in the distance and I knew I needed to find cover.
I was in what used to be a garden. The house that it once belonged to lay a little way off, roof missing and the walls blackened stubs, barely a couple of metres high in some places. In the other direction was a large copse of trees. I knew trees were a poor choice in a thunderstorm, so I sprinted for the house, slithering on the wet grass as I went.
I hunched down between two pieces of wall, trying to make myself as invisible as possible as more lightning ripped through the purple-bruise sky overhead.
Keeping to the charred walls I skirted round the building, trying to make sense of my surroundings, until I noticed something glinting in the half-light. I kicked the rubble away to reveal Tempest. Why was Tempest lying in a pile of rubble? I went cold. Where was Oriel?
The blackened house. Oriel missing. My temper tantrum.
I looked over the lawns, towards the ruined fish pond.
I was at Rivermead.
This was me. I had done this. In my desperation to escape, I’d managed to destroy an entire house.
I looked down at Tempest again. Oriel would never have left his sword behind. He was- I had- Oh god.
A scream ripped through the air and I whipped my head upwards to see a large reptilian bird soaring through the air towards me. It had scales instead of feathers, and its glowing red eyes shone with hate and destruction and evil. I could smell its dark energy from where I stood.
As it flew near, a cone of green flames erupted from its curved beak and I threw myself to the floor, rolling to the side.
The bird-demon screeched in annoyance and wheeled around for another attack. As it plunged towards me, I tried to pick Tempest up to defend myself. I could barely lift it.
The bird was just a few metres away and instinctively I dropped Tempest and raised my hands to protect my face. Just bloody crash into a wall, I thought urgently. A prickling rippled over the back of my neck and down my arms and the bird-demon suddenly veered off course towards the charred wall beside me. Its speed on impact drove its beak back into its head.
I gasped. That was me. I’d just done that.
In my astonishment, I almost didn’t notice when the bird stirred on the ground. One leathery wing flopped, and then the other one, and jerkily it managed to raise its head from the floor. Its face was a ruined tatter of scales, but it was still moving.
Leaving Tempest, I jumped up and sprinted for the forest. Lightning be damned; the bird-demon was my most pressing concern now and a creature this size would have trouble flying through the woods.
Legs cartwheeling down the sloping lawn, I reached a thicket of closely-packed trees and crouched on the floor between them to take stock.
Something wasn’t right, I thought as I tried to calm my galloping heart. I could totally see myself inadvertently wrecking a house in an unconscious attempt to escape, but demons? Where did they figure in my plans?
I barely had time to formulate these thoughts before I felt a low rumble beneath me. Based on recent experience, this probably wasn’t good. I jumped up with a resigned sob, my feet apart, and looked around.
An explosion of earth a little way away rocked the nearby trees, and something dark and writhing emerged from the ground. With a hairless, segmented body it was roughly the shape of an earthworm, but was the size of a large family car. It stretched, the end of its body waving in the air like it was trying to find something and it homed in on me.
I pressed myself against a tree as it slithered over with freakish speed and again waved the end of its body in my direction, as if it was trying to sniff me out. It had no nose that I could see. No eyes either. Instead, what passed as its head consisted entirely of a gaping mouth, filled with concentric rows of small, spiky teeth.
I leaped out of the copse of trees and ran for my life. I ran with no idea where I was going, just with the simple plan of getting myself away from this new monster as quickly as possible.
I didn’t even see what it was I tripped over. One second I was running at full pelt and the next I was sprawling on the floor with a mouthful of dirt. An insidious rustle of leaves told me that the worm-beast was almost on me.
I twisted round and tried to get to my feet, but quickly collapsed to the ground when a bolt of pain ripped through my ankle. I swore and struggled to my feet, but could only put my weight on one foot. Limping, I quickly lost my balance and crumpled onto my bottom to see the worm-from-hell closing the small remaining gap between us.
Still shuffling backwards on my rump, I didn’t think of my impending death. I didn’t think of the wreck of a house I’d seen, or even the demons that were homing in on me like a beacon. All I could think of was Tempest lying in the rubble.
The worm hunched back on itself and for one shining moment I thought it was going to retreat. It wasn’t. It was winding itself up to strike. I kept my eyes open and straightened my shoulders. I didn’t want to die hunched and weeping like a coward.
It sprang forward, as quick as a rattlesnake just as a voice called out, ‘Stop!’ The beast froze in mid-air, centimetres from my face, close enough for me to smell it, its gaping jaws dripping with green saliva.
A woman sauntered out from behind a tree, hands clasped behind her back. She was petite and her hair and skin were so pale that the dappled sunlight seemed to flow through her, giving the impression of a washed-out photo. Her dark green leathers looked like a roughly-sketched version of the Protectorate uniform and managed to make her face and hair look even more translucent.
‘Well done, Roanne,’ she said, as if congratulating me on completing a particularly tricky puzzle. ‘That wasn’t bad at all. Not outstanding, but you surv
ived longer than I thought you would.’ She nodded her head in approval.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I pressed myself against the tree behind me. Her benign appearance didn’t fool me. Anyone with enough power to stop a beast that size was someone I didn’t want to get too close to.
She raised her eyebrows mildly at me. ‘You mean you don’t recognise me? No, well, I suppose not. My name is Coralin.’
Santine’s words came rushing back to me. The demigod Coralin. Also known as The Warrior or the Peregrine. I stared at her and she gazed back impassively, the ends of her pale hair fluttering slightly in the breeze.
My first instinct was to laugh. Because demigods don’t exist. Obviously. But then I caught her eye and the nervous chuckle died in my throat. ‘What is this?’ I asked faintly. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘This is a demon.’ She tilted her head to one side, birdlike. ‘You were born with the instinct to hunt and destroy them; has life in the Sanctuary softened you so that you don’t even recognise one?’ She looked at me curiously, before shrugging. ‘This particular species is a type of carrion crawler, a scavenger, like a buzzard. They’ve come to pick over the bones of what is left of the world.’ She stared at the worm-beast impassively before swinging her booted foot back and punting the demon high into the air. The huge beast went flying across the clearing and crashed into a sapling, neatly cracking the young tree in half.
‘But I don’t- What happened?’ I asked, looking round me. I hadn’t noticed before, what with spending the last half hour or so running for my life, but there were dark holes, like cracks in a windshield, all over the sickly sky.
Coralin held her hand out and hauled me to my feet. Her skin felt dry and papery, but warm. She slung my arm around her tiny shoulders to help me walk, but the pain of my twisted ankle had already faded. Yay for dream-injuries.
‘The end of the world happened,’ she said. ‘Metaphorically, anyway. The planet itself is still here, but life as we know it has ended.’ She looked around us regretfully. ‘What I’m showing you is a picture of the future, of how everything could look in half a year’s time.’
Half a year’s time? That meant- ‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t do this.’
We started walking along the gravel path that ran around the ruins of Rivermead. Coralin moved as sedately as if she was at a garden party instead of the end of the world. ‘Actually, you did do it,’ she said. ‘Not with your mind, but with your actions. Or lack of them. What we are looking at is a world in which Baeroth has broken down the wall between his prison and the real world.
‘You see, Roanne, there is something vital you must understand about Baeroth. The people of Gileath may view him as a madman, but he’s also a genius. A true visionary. The way he sees the world…’ She shook her head, looking off into the distance. ‘I have existed for a very long time and his mind is one of the most interesting I have ever seen. It’s like a shattered mirror. Full of facets and angles and utterly unique. Truly fascinating. But ultimately broken.’
We came to a small pond and Coralin sat down, tucking her legs to the side, her straight back making her look taller than she really was. The surrounding grass was nicotine-brown and the pond looked like toxic waste, but she held herself like a queen. ‘The ritual Baeroth devised, the one that Oriel and Neve found, is the work of a genius and a lunatic. Its very nature is inherently unstable. If he were to complete it, it would dissolve the wall between the Jeopardy and the Anarchy, allowing the two worlds to bleed into one another. And this,’ she waved her arm to encompass the fractured sky and dead landscape with an utter lack of drama, ‘would be the result. A world overrun with demons.’
My brain clicked over as this sank in and I sat clumsily on the crunchy grass next to her. This close, I could see her eyes. They were hard, like pebbles, in her otherwise bland face.
‘I saw Oriel’s sword. On the floor.’ I looked down at my hands and started picking a hangnail. I knew what she was going to say, but I needed to hear it anyway.
She looked at me and nodded understandingly, contriving to look almost human. ‘He died quickly, if that’s any comfort. He was alone, but it was quick.’ She folded her hands in front of her.
She looked out across the ruined gardens, her face a blank. She did look genuinely sorry to be delivering this world-rocking news, but who knew? Maybe she was just a great actress. ‘There is a war coming, Roanne. Long-portended and inevitable, chaos versus order, light versus dark. I created you and I gave you astonishing gifts because you are the weapon I intend to use in this war. Baeroth must be stopped, and you are the one to stop him.’
I wrapped my arms around my chest, shivering despite the warm breeze. ‘There must be another way. This isn’t my fight. All I want to do is go home. I never asked for these abilities, I don’t want them. Why can’t you give them to someone else, someone who will appreciate them?’ My words were blustery but I could already hear the resignation in them.
‘Perhaps you will grow to appreciate them,’ she said wryly. Unlikely, I thought. Coralin evidently read my mind because I heard her chuckle humourlessly to my side.
We sat by the scorched fish pond under a ruined sky for a while longer. I wondered when I would wake up, when I would be able to put this nightmare behind me.
‘Will you stay?’ Coralin spoke lightly but I could sense it was a real question. ‘Do you still feel you could return to the Sanctuary after what I’ve shown you?’ When I hesitated, she pressed the attack. ‘Knowing that in this version of the future the bodies and souls of the friends you have made have been ground into the dirt, consumed by demons... Do you still feel able to turn your back on them?’
I thought of Neve. Gorgeous, fiery Neve. And Raelthos. And Kallista... Okay, maybe I wasn’t bothered about saving Kallista.
I thought of Oriel.
‘Fine. I’ll do it,’ I ground out. He was alone, but it was quick. I fought to stop a wave of nausea. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll help them rescue Owen.’
She nodded regally. ‘Good.’ And then, as an afterthought, ‘thank you.’ I glared at her. I wasn’t doing it for her. She made an annoyed sound and returned ‘I have existed for millennia, and the one thing that never ceases to surprise me is the degree of choice people assume that they have. You may rant and rave and throw blue china bowls and refuse to do as you are told, but in the end you will have as much choice in your destiny as one of the arrows in your quiver.’
Coralin pulled something up from by her side and laid it across her lap. It was Tempest. I found this odd, because last time I’d seen Tempest she’d been half-buried beneath rubble, but hey, Coralin was a demigod and this was a dream so I figured she could pretty much do whatever she wanted. She started to flip Tempest idly from side to side on her blade, the green jewels on the chased silver crossguard flashing in the light. I itched to slap her hand away. Tempest wasn’t hers. ‘I find it interesting that you enquired about Oriel’s fate before you asked about your own,’ she mused.
I let out a small, scornful puff of air. ‘You already told me. I went back to the Sanctuary.’ I shot a look at Coralin. ‘Wait. The Sanctuary stays safe, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s the whole point. The Sanctuary stays demon-free so that humanity survives.’
‘I assume so,’ she shrugged. ‘The barrier my brothers and I constructed has held up against the demons so far. I meant your fate generally. It’s usually the first thing humans want to hear: what does the future have in store for me?’
‘I’ll stay to rescue Owen,’ I clarified. ‘I’ll stay for that, but as soon as he’s safe I’m going back to the Sanctuary. I don’t need this training, and I’m not bloody well joining the Protectorate. Bugger that,’ I snorted.
‘I see,’ she said, with the air of someone talking to a small, recalcitrant child. ‘Let me show you something else.’ She stood up and started slowly spinning her hands in the air in front of us. A small ball of mist formed between them, reminding me of when Kallista had conjured her fireballs. I
t span faster and faster until she flicked her wrist pelting it away.
It unfurled and blossomed in front of us into an amorphous viewing screen. ‘Very swish,’ I said, with more bravado than I felt.
She looked at me condescendingly and sighed as the picture in front of us came into focus. ‘You’re lucky. I don’t usually give glimpses of the future, and here I am giving you two in one day. Now. Watch this.’ She clicked her fingers in front of my face and pointed to the screen.
Our viewpoint was shaded by the tree beside us, but it was easy to see where we were. The neatly mowed lawns, floral tributes, grave markers. A cemetery.
The closest grave to us was newly dug and strewn with elaborate wreaths of flowers. Black-clad figures gathered around it, hunched over in fresh grief. A tall, blonde woman in a long coat was being held by a dark-haired man as she sobbed uncontrollably. My mum and dad. Beside them, Chec clung onto Mal in that loose-limbed way people do when they can no longer support themselves.
I looked away and the inscription on the gravestone caught my eye. Roanne Jasmine Harper. Darling daughter. Beloved sister. The date of birth matched mine, and the date of death was eighteen months in the future.
‘A touch over-dramatic, don’t you think,’ I said through numb lips.
‘I’ve extrapolated based on the intensity and frequency of your uncontrolled outbursts of power, assuming a rate of growth based on your activity since your thirteenth birthday. Continuing along your current trajectory you have a shade over seven hundred days before the pressure in your mind will reach a critical mass resulting in a cerebral aneurysm.’ She wagged her head from side to side. ‘Doesn’t have quite the same effect as a visual representation, does it?’ She turned to me, signifying that our interview was over. For the time being. ‘Find Owen,’ she said. ‘Complete your training. These are the only things you need to worry about for the time being.’
There was a sense of vertigo, like stepping off a roundabout too fast, and a sleepy blackness pulled me under.
When I woke up it was light. I had no idea what time it was. My stomach was trying to digest itself, but I felt strangely refreshed, like waking up after a huge crying jag. I immediately ran to the window.
The grass was green. The sky was the blue of faded jeans, with wispy clouds trailing lazily around.
And there were no. Freaking. Demons. Anywhere.
I gave a surprised, joyous cough of laughter and sprinted to the door. I was surprised to find it unlocked and after a moment’s hesitation I slipped out into the hallway.
It struck me that this was the first time I’d had the chance to properly see the inside of the house. It was nice. Not exactly elegant; the identical doors and carpet that had clearly been chosen for its hardwearing properties gave it an institutional air, but still, the few pieces of furniture I saw were well-made and solid-looking, the sort of thing rich people invest in and then pass down through the family so that you end up sleeping in a bed that about fifty people have shagged in and died on before you.
I was looking for Oriel, but soon realised that in a house this size I could end up wandering all day. I ducked inside the next room to look out the window and orientate myself.
There were paintings on the walls that even to my untrained eye were well executed. One in particular caught my eye. A woman stood slightly side-on to the artist mirroring the pose of the man next to her, who looped his arms loosely around her waist. The artist had given both figures equal canvas-space, but there was something haughty and challenging in her face that kept drawing my gaze.
After a minute, I heard Oriel’s footsteps against the threshold of the door. I kept my eyes trained on the portrait, my hands stiffly at my side. The chill of the previous night’s dream was still on me and I knew if I looked at him I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from sprinting over and patting him down to make sure he was alright.
He came over to stand next to me and studied the portrait with me. ‘They were friends of my parents,’ he said. ‘Years ago, back when they were all in the Protectorate together. He was a Psion and she was a Guardian. I can’t remember much about him, but she,’ he waved his finger towards the woman, ‘was a pirate queen.’
I turned to him to see if he was joking, forgetting for a moment about my creepy dream. There he was, in all his non-corpsified glory, Tempest strapped to his back. ‘No!’
‘Solange Babineaux,’ he flicked his finger towards the portrait, ‘seized power of the stretch of water between here and Gaulle when she was twenty or so and ruled her crews with an iron fist. She was pretty fearsome, by all accounts.
‘Was?’
He nodded. ‘You can’t tell in this picture, but she was pregnant when it was painted. She, her husband and her son were one of the Blessed families captured by Baeroth when he took Thornsvale.’
He didn’t need to spell out the sub-text. Baeroth is evil and must be stopped. As if my dream-slash-demigod-meeting last night hadn’t been enough to convince me on that score.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said bluntly. ‘For the thing. Yesterday.’
He raised an eyebrow and I was relieved to see there was a spark of humour in his eyes. ‘The thing? Do you mean the thing where you tried to shoot me?’
I decided he could have that one. ‘And thank you,’ I said. He looked quizzically at me, his eyebrows pulling together in an arch. ‘For telling me all about my, you know...’ I twirled my finger at the side of my head and he smiled. ‘And thank you for organising training for me. It was- It’s really-’ Argh! Why did I have to sound so ungracious? I took a breath. ‘Thank you. I appreciate it.’ I looked away and scratched at a mark on the table next to me with my fingernail.
He tilted his head towards me. ‘You’re welcome. Does this mean you’re back on the mission?’ I nodded. ‘And you’ll stay in the Citadel to be trained?’ I nodded again, my eyes still on the table.
He was right. There were bigger issues than me dealing with some unwanted abilities. After rescuing Owen and averting the end of the world, I would go to the Citadel and I would learn to pack my Blessings safely away. And then I would go home.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him nod and slowly, as if he thought I might slap him away, he reached out and covered my hand with his, squeezing it gently. His hand was warm and dry and the pads of his fingers were about as rough as you’d expect from someone who spent all day messing about with swords and knives and as I watched the slanting sunlight pick out swirling dust motes in the air, I felt my heart thump a little faster.
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