“It’s just like old times, isn’t it?” a voice spoke the words from the darkness.
My eyes filled with tears as soon as I heard his voice, turning my head to look at Cato who was now lying next to me on the hood of the car. His brown orbs glinted with unshed tears in the moonlight, and all I wanted to do was throw my arms around him and hold on until wakefulness ripped me away from him. But he was here for a reason, and even I knew it because those you loved didn’t come back to you if there wasn’t one.
“I would say that if you were really here,” I sighed as I looked deep into his gaze, missing my friend so badly my heart was breaking even more just being here. Especially knowing he wasn’t truly here and neither was I. I couldn’t even begin to explain how much I wanted to pull him out of the dream with me and into reality to fight this war with us.
“Who’s to say I’m not really here, Mila? Maybe,” he reached forward and tapped me with his index finger gently right between the eyes, “I’m right in here. Just under the surface.”
I chuckled and grabbed his hand, placing it against my cheek. He felt warm and inviting just like before he died. He had always run a little bit warmer than most people I knew, and it took me until this moment to realize why. His brain was always working overtime, never taking a reprieve from the visions of what was to come. Kind of like running a constant low-grade fever. It made me wonder if he had headaches and never mentioned them to keep us from worrying about him. Now that I knew more of what he was capable of before his death it made me wonder about a lot of things, but I didn’t want to take the few precious moments I had to ask things of him that now seemed trivial since he was gone.
“If that’s the case, then what does that mean for me?” I asked, my stare not once leaving him as he turned away from me to look at the sky, sighing and closing his eyes with a small shift of his shoulders. When he finally opened them again, one single tear rolled down his cheek, leaving me to wonder what was so sad he couldn’t even form the words to tell me. He smiled then and pointed toward the sky, and I turned toward where he pointed, a shooting star streaking across the vast expanse of start spotted black.
“Look at that, Mila,” he said when it disappeared back into the darkness. “You know, when you started teaching me about the constellations and astrology, I began digging into Greek mythology, and I found the story of a Goddess that resonated with me. You remind me of her now. After all of this.” He emphasized the last three words by putting out his hands toward our surroundings, knowing full well that he meant what had happened.
“Who was she?” I couldn’t stop the words even though I knew he’d answer me anyways.
“Her name was Asteria, and she was the goddess of the stars, necromancy, and an oracle.”
I choked out a laugh and said, “You think I’m a goddess now, Cato? That’s new.”
“No, but I do believe you’ll know what it means the more you learn about yourself,” he paused, “and what my death means for you. What I did for you that no one else could have.”
I sat up and stared at him, his eyes meeting mine. “What you did for me?”
“Yes,” he snapped as he sat up and took my hands in his, rubbing his thumb over my knuckles, “what I did for you.” His eyes scanned my face and then he smirked, shaking his head as if there was something I should’ve known, but was clueless to. “You have no idea, do you?”
I was confused, but I had a feeling he was about to explain something. Something he didn’t really have to explain despite my misunderstanding of what was happening to me. It was something I was slowly figuring out for myself. I was changing. My own power was evolving, but there was something else right underneath the surface, and I wasn’t sure what that was. My brows furrowed and I had to resist the urge to slap him upside that gorgeous head of his.
“What the Hell do you mean? I have no clue what you’re talking about,” I practically shouted in frustration as my open palm slapped the hood of the Mustang. I slid off of the hood of the car and turned to face him, not even caring to hide my irritation or my anger. When I looked at him again, his arm was resting on his bent knee, and there was sorrow in his eyes. His face fell and when I watched his chin tremble slightly, I wanted to walk up to him and embrace him and apologize for my outburst. I believed a part of me was too angry to show him any affection. I had been forced to kill him, and he had begged me to do it to save all of us, except now we were all on the run, and no one was safe. So, what exactly what was it he did for me? “What did you do for me besides make me a murderer?”
He shook his head again and sighed, pushing himself off of the hood and taking a few steps toward me. “You’re not a murderer, Mila.”
Tears stung my eyes as I attempted to make sense of the fact that everyone around me kept telling me I wasn’t a killer. That I hadn’t murdered anyone. Everyone except for Nero, who couldn’t forgive me for what I had been forced to do and the shock that I had any friends left at all took over. At that moment my heart was pounding in my chest, my breathing was coming too fast and too short, and I wanted to scream and yell into the heavens. I wanted relief from the gut-wrenching agony that this entire situation had forced me into.
“But I am, Cato,” I stated as I fell to my knees in front of him. “I’m a killer. It doesn’t matter who did or said what. Or who begged me, I killed you, and I should’ve been strong enough to say no.”
He kneeled down before me and took my face in between his large hands. “No.” He shook his head. “No, you’re not. Listen to me for once you miserable girl. Don’t hurt for me anymore. Don’t blame yourself. Blame me if you must.” There was nothing but love in his tone as he practically lectured me into submission.
I refused to look at him, but he turned my head up until I was made to do so, his beautiful gray eyes piercing mine just like the moment before his death. The stars glinted off of them so beautifully I could’ve wept.
“I did something for you that I can’t explain. Something that can help you along the way if you just let it. It’s you that can end all of this, and I’ve given you the tools to get there,” he explained. I still had no clue what he was talking about. “Open up your mind and maybe, one day, you’ll completely understand. I can try to explain this to you, but the only person who can really understand it is you and only you can use what I have given you to save our kind.”
“Oh God, Cato, why do you have to speak in riddles? I don’t understand.” I was now in tears, and he used his thumb to brush one away.
He smiled and pushed my hair away from my face, leaning forward to kiss me gently on the forehead. When he pulled back, he was practically beaming. “You will,” he whispered. “Just think about what has happened since you left the compound. What you’ve seen since, in here,” he used an elegant thumb to rub the spot right above my eyebrow, “will tell you everything you need to know. And I need you to remember that I’m always here. I never left you and never will.”
“But you are gone. This isn’t real.” I gestured toward our surroundings, the trees swaying in the slight breeze as it moved around us. “This is something my brain cooked up to make me feel better. Right?” Even I wasn’t so sure anymore. It all seemed so real. He felt real. Solid and warm and comforting.
“I don’t think so, babe.” He looked at the sky, the darkness in it beginning to brighten into soft pinks and oranges above us, the glaring gray of the wall behind him past the forest screaming at me to fight against it. I just wanted to tear it down. I wanted to run toward it and let my power fill me until there was nowhere else to go but out and toward that barrier. “Now,” his eyes leveled at mine again, “it looks like it’s time to wake up, sleeping beauty. You have to go save the world.”
Within seconds I had been ripped from the soft comfort of the man I had known all of my life. The man that was no longer a part of this physical plane that I called home. A man that was tor
turing me with his constant dream world visitations and intrusive visions. A man that I had seen as a brother and had changed my world with his untimely departure. I could see the same soft colors filtering through the treetops as the fire died beside me. I hadn’t meant to sleep all night. I had wanted to take watch for a few hours, but I could only guess that Julius and Ryder had felt I had been through enough, deciding to let me sleep off the cold and the plane crash. If only they knew the half of it. My stomach growled, and I groaned as my hands fluttered up to cover my belly like I could stop the sound. Our rations were gone, left in the Humvee in the middle of the forest with no direction to go to get back to it to get them. I rolled onto my side toward the dying flames and didn’t see Julius or Ryder anywhere, causing my heart to pick up its pace in my chest.
Rising to a sitting position, I pushed my hair away from my sweaty face and looked around, seeing nothing, but hearing everything in my alerted state. Then there was a male cry, but there was no way for me to know if it was of pain, horror, or joy. And at that moment I decided it didn’t matter. I rose to my feet and turned to the direction of the sound, which had come from behind me not too far away. The sunlight coming through the treetops dotted the ground, turning the dingy green into a beautiful and vibrant shade. A few leaves fell to the ground, and the sound came again. The same trickling of male tenor.
“Julius! Ryder!” I shouted at the tops of my lungs, starting to move in that direction to find out what was happening. Before I had made it too far from the fire we had built Ryder and Julius rounded a large tree, smiling from ear to ear and each of them with a stick in their hands that had something skewered on them. I couldn’t tell what they were, but they were small, furry, and covered in blood. I cringed at first, but shrugged it off. “Oh my God, there you guys are.”
My shoulders sagged, and my heart rate began to slow as I took in their unharmed frames, each one of them the picture of health except for their small injuries from the crash. They noticed me and waved as they came toward me, moving slow and deliberate through the foliage at their feet. Then another large, male body rounded the same tree and began its approach. The guy was massive in all black and a gun on his hip. I couldn’t recognize him at first, but then the light struck his gorgeous amber eyes that reminded me of pure honey, a shock of blond hair passing through the same ray of light.
I fought the urge to run to him and wrap my arms around him in relief, but I did walk toward them with a huge grin plastered on my face that may have made me look a tiny bit insane with glee. The only nagging thought at the forefront of my mind was that no one else was with them. No matter how hard I stared at the trees behind the three men as they walked toward me, no one else materialized beyond them. My mother not even a lingering presence in the background. Or the rest of them for that matter. My feet refused to carry me any farther as the grin faded and, as they neared me, I noticed a gash above Ajax’s left eyebrow that I could tell had been cleaned, but was still bleeding profusely. That let me know he more than likely needed stitches, but there was no way to do that here. We had nothing. No kit, no supplies, no food. Only what the forest could provide. That was until we could reach our destination.
“The others?” I asked Ryder as they neared me.
He shook his head and refused to look at me. “No, I’m sorry.”
“What? You’re not happy to see me?” Ajax asked, placing his hand over his heart as if my lack of concern for him had hurt him in some way. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that there were three more of our men out there, including my mother, and that we had no idea where they had ended up. “I’m hurt, Mila.”
“It’s not that, Ajax. I was just hoping the others were with you is all.” The tone of my voice wasn’t amused.
He stopped in front of me, and his eyes fell as if he were ashamed of something. “I’m sorry. We tried to stay together, but we got separated. We were followed and attacked, and I just kept walking in the direction I knew all of us would go.”
I turned to see Ryder and Julius stoking the fire, placing what I could now tell was a few squirrel carcasses over the flames to singe off the fur before cooking them. “Where did you guys find him?”
“He was walking along the river where we had crashed,” Julius replied quickly.
Images flashed in my mind of the sudden impact, the water flowing into the plane before everything went dark and cold, the water attempting to swallow us all whole. And it nearly had. I saw Julius fall from the plane before we hit and the man in white’s wide eyes as I used my power to escape him once more while submerged in the dark depths. I could still hear the water flowing in the not too far off distance, reminding me of everything that had happened the night before. I shook the images away and turned back to Ajax, who was watching me and my every move with empathy. Or was that pity?
“That plane back that way was you guys?” Ajax asked as he pointed at him with a jerk of his thumb, his eyebrows rising just an inch.
“Yup,” Ryder answered, short as if it needed no further explanation.
“Hmmm, I should’ve given you all more credit.”
I ignored the statement. “Do you know if the others are alive?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They were when we got separated but, in war, things can change like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t be sure. And if I knew for sure I’d tell you.”
“I know, it’s okay.” I walked to him and wrapped my arms around him in a friendly hug, which he returned without hesitation as his large hands slowly pat my back. “Nothing’s simple anymore, you know?”
His chest rose and fell against mine as he sighed, placing his chin on the top of my head. “I know. I know it all too well, darlin’.”
I hadn’t known Ajax long, but, besides my mother, he was the first face I had seen outside of my prison that I didn’t associate with King or the compound and felt comfortable with. He had helped my mother save me, and I couldn’t thank him enough for that. I pulled away from him and saw tears brimming in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. He was too manly to cry. This was a ‘he was a tall, large, burly man and men didn’t cry tough guy’ act, and I had seen it plenty of times before now. After all, I had grown up around so many strapping men that wanted to act as if they were invincible.
“I never got a chance to say it before so I am now.” I paused, trying to hold back the tears that I felt burning the back of my throat, swallowing them down. “Thank you for helping my mother save us. I’m eternally grateful.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as Ajax absorbed my words, and then he smiled tiredly.
“I wouldn’t take any of it back.”
I nodded and took a step back from him and placed my hands on my hips. “Now, which way do we need to go? Because, after we try to patch you up, if a war is what King wants, a war is what he’ll get.”
Chapter
THIRTEEN
We made quick work of cleaning, cooking and eating their catch, making sure to eat as quickly as we could so we could get moving. This wasn’t hard because a squirrel or two was the best we were going to get and I couldn’t complain. I was just happy there was something to fill my stomach even if it wouldn’t last for long. After that, we had smothered the fire as best as we could to ensure that we didn’t start a forest fire even though we knew King’s men had begun plenty on their own while attempting to hunt us down. I felt awful for what I was putting our small portion of the world through as well as the people having to live in it, and I wasn’t certain how far the reach of my influence had gone up to this point. Underneath it all, I wasn’t even sure if I truly wanted to know or not.
Now, the forest was my only sanctuary, if it could even be called that at that point. There was nothing I could do to stop the encroachment of King’s men on its fertile grounds that only served to keep me as safe as they possibly could, but they were
no match for his weapons. I was beginning to think neither was I, and my resilience could only last for so long. My power had caused so many people around me trouble and one word came to mind then. One that I had been called multiple times by Jones, one of King’s men that I had injured when I attempted my first escape. He caught me, and I used my power against him, nearly killing him. He had come back once after, resulting in his death at the end of Ryder’s gun. Freak. Was that what I was? A freak?
A sound pulled my attention from my darkening thoughts, taking my mind away from such an ugly word to the beautiful sound floating down from the treetops. Birds were singing their merry song, but it did nothing to cheer me up. It only made me even more sad about what had transpired over what I could guess was the last few weeks or so. Only two to three weeks between my abduction and now? Was that even right? I could only be honest and admit to myself that I had lost all track of time while inside the compound. It wasn’t like it wasn’t true. I was tired and weary, but I felt that we were closing in on our destination. Hopefully. And then I could finally get off of my feet and rest for however long I had until I was back on my feet again.
The Pursuit (The Permutation Archives Book 2) Page 13