One way or another, this all ended tonight. Two years of running, of hiding. The life of a damaged man. A line of years where I had been able to say I’d never taken a life.
After this night, I would be a murderer until the day I died.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. Destiny hadn’t been expecting it, obviously—her shoulders hiked.
After a minute of silence, she said, “Not everyone is an a position to make better choices.” She looked off into the darkness for a second, then shook her head, breaking the spell. “Try not to get yourself killed, kid.”
She started up the stairs. I followed behind as she reached out and shoved open the wide door, painted a darker shade of green than the rest of the house, to reveal the interior.
Destiny stepped inside, me pressing in after her, and the door fell shut behind us on its own. There was silence.
The inside of the house was all gleaming dark wood. Persian rugs lined the shining floors, and light from the hanging chandeliers flickered off of the dark glass window lining the archways into other rooms. Off to the left was what looked like a little sitting room, empty and dark. To the right was a wide staircase that turned up, around a corner, and went out of sight. Straight ahead, an open set of French doors formed a path to a brightly lit room, and that was the direction Destiny led me in.
My best friend was visible just inside.
“Riley!” I strode in her direction. She sat on an antique couch, alone, purple strands messy, a lightly bleeding scratch on her cheek.
I’d kill whoever did it.
“Sky, no! Idiot!” She bolted to her feet.
Axel stepped into my path, bringing me up short. I raised my hands to toss him out of my way.
“Not so fast,” a new voice said, too casually. Another man stood in the corner of the room near a wide desk, a bottle of scotch perched next to him, full glass in his hand.
I knew who he was instantly. He looked exactly like his son, all dark hair and onyx eyes. I could see bits of Althea in him, too. He was broad, handsome. Collected in a way that I hadn’t expected but found slightly disturbing.
He looked like an old Hollywood stud, aging gracefully. A California dad with a vineyard in the countryside.
I braced for an attack that didn’t come. He watched me, waiting for me to put on a show.
“Crayton Abbot,” I acknowledged, and he grinned wide.
This was it.
“So you’re the boy my son fucked into forming a bond? Never took him for a faggot. Disappointing, but in the end it doesn’t matter, does it? Once I’ve drained everything I need out of him he can do whatever he wants—including you—so long as he never gets in my way again. Traitorous bastard.”
Of course he was fucking a homophobe. The logical part of me wanted to tell him Hunter wasn’t even gay, but pansexual—but I wasn’t here to explain the nuances of human sexuality to Crayton. I was here to end him.
“You’re not going to drain your son—and I have no intention of letting you take my powers. But it’s a nice fantasy, isn’t it?” I tilted my head back, looking down my nose at him. “If you hurt my friend, I will kill you. I will rip your eyes from your head and feed them to you as you bleed to death.”
He smiled at me.
Old man humouring small child. Medium: blood, firelight, and scotch, on flesh and hardwood.
I watched him, curious. He looked like Hunter, though older and more weathered by the world. There was a lightness to him that his son didn’t possess, his hair was more mahogany than black, eyes a murky hazel. There were frown lines around his mouth and crinkles around his eyes. I couldn’t piece together the man before me, the one who’d stolen something he could never give back from his mother and who hunted his own son. He was not the monster I expected. If I were being honest he looked more like a lawyer or a college professor than a dangerously powerful magik user.
He wasn’t the big bad I’d been expecting, no red eyes or clawed fingers or dark aura here—and he didn’t feel evil. If anything, he seemed unstable, a wild animal that could lash out at any second.
He didn’t though. He smiled at me, his eyes gleaming with something like amusement. The old fuck knew he was in his element now.
If Hunter and Althea were afraid of him, I sure as hell had reason to be. And I couldn’t tell if he could see that fear or not.
“What do we have here? Maybe you won’t be as boring as I’d thought.”
“Boring?” I asked, full of false bravado. “No, I don’t plan for you to have a boring death at all. On the contrary, I suspect I’ll enjoy every second of it.”
Crayton looked away from me, untroubled. He snapped his fingers at Destiny. “Bring the girl upstairs. This won’t take long.”
Destiny brushed by me and stalked around Axel, grabbing Destiny by the arm.
“Come on,” she said coldly as she yanked her up. Like she was bored, if anything.
She met my eyes as she led Riley past me, and then—so fast I had to have imagined it—she winked her right eye, the one facing away from her employer. I stared straight ahead.
I was getting sick of this shit.
“Don’t worry, Ri—it won’t take me half as long to kick this guy’s ass as it did to get here in the first place,” I muttered as the girls reached the door. They passed through and were gone. I wondered if that would be the last time I ever saw my best friend.
“Maybe we shouldn’t let him go after you’re done with him,” Axel said to Crayton. “We could use a comedian around here.”
“A career path you’ll never be able to follow. Well, at least not the stand-up kind, since I intend to break both your legs within the next five minutes.”
I winced from the lie—sharp pain rippling through my head, unease expanding in my chest like air held in. I wasn’t planning to break both his legs—I wasn’t planning anything. Except maybe to piss myself.
Crayton inched forward, the step making me draw back. He stopped. Smiled, again.
He liked the fear.
I could feel magik rush and rage inside of me, looking for an outlet. It danced across the backs of my hands and made my gums sting in my mouth.
Power sizzled—Axel’s, all over the place, a truly chaotic energy, and Crayton’s, running as black as his son’s and twice as powerfully. He had his own powers and Althea’s. Axel would pose enough of a challenge—but the two of them together, even Crayton by himself, the idea was not a pleasant one. Hurry up, guys. The odds here were decidedly not balanced in my direction, and there was no second chance for me, no angry lion waiting in the wings to step in or stone in my pocket that could resurrect the dead. One chance. Kill or be killed. For a second the thought brought an image of what I imagined Hunter’s mother must have looked like to mind. I wished I could bring her back, watch her wreak havoc with the flames she’d mastered.
In a way, I was relieved they didn’t plan to kill us—but the idea of being drained and tossed aside was almost worse. To have the magik sucked out of my being as if it wasn’t part of me—part of my soul, if I had one—was more terrifying than a thousand deaths could be.
Death led to rebirth. What Crayton had planed for us led only to loss. I would rather die than lose that. I would rather kill.
Maybe it said a lot about me that I didn’t have more reservations about the idea of taking a life, but I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me, maybe. To really care. I didn’t relish the idea of his death. But I wouldn’t hesitate, either. There was no room for guilt among all this power.
He would not take what belonged to me.
Not without a fight.
“Axel.” Crayton nodded toward me, a quick jerk of his chin. “Incapacitate our young friend.”
“More than happy,” the brute said, and charged at me.
I raised my hands, felt an invisible force bend to my will, and sent the couch Riley had just vacated flying at him from behind. Before it hit him, another burst of telekinesis knocked it away so it slammed against t
he wall and clattered to the floor, a wooden leg snapping off.
Crayton was interfering. Alarming, but I hadn’t expected this to be a fair fight in the first place.
As Axel bore down on me I rushed to the side, slamming into the wooden wall. Spinning around, I ran for the open doors. Flexing my fingers, I unleashed a blast of telekinesis that crashed them shut behind me, and sparks of energy raced up my spine, propelling me onward. I veered into an empty room off of the front entrance, my mind racing as my eyes scanned for another path. Move. Move. Move. There was a crash behind me as Axel burst through the doors, and then he was stepping into the doorway.
He leaned against the archway, smiling. I could see him in days past, walking amid the smoke and blood of a battlefield littered with corpses and strung with screams, picking his way through the carnage, a berserker drunk on violence.
I threw my arms out, knocking a fat armchair at him, Light flared to life around me, red and blue sparks snapping and flaring. Heat washed off them, but where they hit the ground they just fizzled and died.
Axel raised his fists and punched through the armchair, as if it were nothing more than a feather pillow.
Shards of wood and fabric exploded into the air, and he stepped through it all and hit me like a train. The air rushed out of my lungs. I hit the ground so hard the entire world flashed in and out for a moment, coming back like a hazy echo of itself. My ears rang where I’d hit my head on the floor.
Axel bore down on top of me, too much weight, too heavy to breathe around. My head lilted to the side, vision dimming.
His massive hands wrapped around my neck, choking me, where Hunter had kissed and bit and licked, bled power and poison into me. He was carried away and he was going to strangle me. I could see the harsh light in his eyes.
This was it, wasn’t it? I thought. And then, a second later. No.
I wouldn’t let it end here.
My eyes settled on a fat splinter of wood like a stake, and power fluttered dimly in the tips of my fingers. Not the magik kind, but the kind made of blood cells and nerves and firing impulses, so many intentions flooding through me, pushing my hand over the grainy rug to wrap my weak fingers around a chunk of sharp debris.
Survival. That’s all I am.
I plunged the shard of wood into Axel’s back as hard I could and felt skin give. Warm blood spilled over my hand, down his back. The giant screamed in outrage and reared back, hands flying from my throat to reach for the spot I’d stabbed him.
Power rushed into me with the air, and a blast of force rippled from me.
I shoved it out, sent Axel crashing through the wall to my left harder than he’d burst through the chair—a gift for Crayton.
Wood and plaster and steel wrenched apart under his weight. Dust rained down, coated the air. Seconds spent scrambling up over the broken bits of furniture, blood flowing in my eyelids and my aching shoulders and my hollow stomach and my frantic mind.
I stepped through the Axel-shaped hole in the wall and found Crayton still at the desk, holding his glass and sipping his scotch like this was a normal night in for him. Probably it was. Torture and fighting, his bread and butter. I tipped the desk over with an upward curl of my fingers. The bottle of scotch hit the ground. Amber liquid spread at Crayton’s feet, forming a shallow puddle around his expensive Italian shoes.
“Oops,” I said. “Looks like happy hour is over.”
Crayton held his arm out from his body and let his glass slip from his grasp inch by inch, until it fell and shattered. Alcohol and crystal sprayed everywhere, ice cubes rolling. “I couldn’t agree more.”
The gloves had come off. It was time to get to the main event of the evening.
I waited for him to make a move, but he didn’t—he stood there a moment, simply watching me. We were nothing but two people both ready to destroy each other, observing the calm before a storm. And then he started to rise.
Flight. I watched him lift into the air. A freedom stolen from the woman who’d brought him into this world, who’d now tried to help me take him back out of it. Blood against blood. Some part of his soul had fractured. He was not a son, anymore. He was just this desperation.
Kill or be killed. But I didn’t know if I was strong enough to kill him alone.
I tried to infuse my skin with steel like Hunter’s, but I couldn’t call up that incredible strength in my own muscles. I remembered the iron threads of it, the sound of Destiny’s bones snapping, but there was nothing. There was only room for this aching exhaustion.
Crayton floated in the air as Penn had in the cathedral. But he didn’t look like a saint rising from the dark. . .he was the dark, come to deal the death blow.
Something in the flex of his fingers and the tilt of his neck reminded me of an owl, eyes wide as they landed on prey. But I wasn’t prey. I was a fucking Charmer, I was magik with two eyes and four limbs, and I’d be damned if I was going to die in this hellhole after everything I’d been through.
Hurry, Hunter.
Crayton spoke down to me, “I am a reckoning brought down on this world in physical form. I am the fire that will burn away all blemish. You’re nothing but a child.”
There was an awful glow in his eyes, something like hysteria.
“Nobody will stand against me,” he said. “I will be untouchable.”
“You know, its probably not too late to just see a therapist or something, mister.”
“Come closer,” his voice whispered in my mind, and I took a step forward. Telepathy. Influence.
“No,” I said out loud, and forced my feet to stop moving.
Pressure built inside my head, his words repeating again and again, curving themselves on the surface of my brain. My feet edged forward, trying to take me to him, puppet parts connected to strings that could be tugged with ease. He would make me blind to the world, if he could.
Molten heat spread through my chest and limbs. He didn’t get to own me.
He leered at me. “You always think you’re going to win when you’re the underdog. But that isn’t how it works in real life, is it boy? You don’t send a pawn to fight a king and expect to keep the piece. My son should have played this game much better than he did. I taught him better than this.
“I don’t think I’m going to let you live after all. I think that would come back to bite me in the ass.” He tilted his head, teeth bared. “Now, come here!”
I dug into my last reserve of energy and tried to render myself invisible. A mask of magik rose around me like a shield, that cold light flashing through me, and I picked my way to the side of the room unseen. Crayton’s eyes spelled rage. I moved as silently as I could, each step torture, wondering if I would bring my foot down in the wrong spot.
Silence. The sound of his breathing and the pressure building inside of me as I tried not to, myself.
He smiled. “You can’t hide from me.”
My mind tugged me in his direction again, and I dug my fingernails into my palm.
Crayton let out a furious curse, eyes roving around the room. He sent the shards of glass from the floor flying at the doors. The passed through empty air, shattered on the hardwood. He cursed again. Changing tactics, I halted my retreat. The thrum of telekinesis burned my fingertips and I reached out invisible hands to grab up the debris from the hole in the wall. The projectiles shot at his back, and I grinned victoriously—
They halted in midair. Rearranged themselves.
The shards of wood and clumps of drywall spread around his shoulders like insects hovering. He stared into space, squinted. And looked directly at the spot where I stood, unseen.
The swarm of objects turned back on me with tidal force, and when it crashed over my head like a wave, I was tossed back. They rained against me, pierced my skin. Something cracked apart against my shoulder and I fell. My back hit the wall, my skull slamming against the wood. There was a sickening crack. My vision blurred.
The makeshift weapons fell and so did I, sliding down to the ba
se of the wall. On my ass, too dazed to move, the pain began to creep in, merciless.
“Fucker,” I rasped.
Crayton smiled. “We’re not done, are we?” He lifted me into the air.
I shot across the room like a comet, trailing blood and stolen breath and leaking adrenaline, only to hit the opposite wall. Something snapped in my face, bones and cartilage breaking, and blood gushed from my nose. The world burned away to white light at the edges of my vision, heat flooding my body.
I couldn’t see properly, blood and tears softening everything. Firelight flickered, distant and flat. Was this how lost divers felt as they drowned? Surrounded by empty space, separated from the world?
Shadows of Ourselves Page 35