by A. S. Oren
I shake my head with a smile and heal his arm. A bone near his elbow pop back into place. He doesn’t show any discomfort. “Anywhere else?”
He shakes his head. “I came out of there pretty much unscathed. Let’s find Bullock and your parents.”
I nod. “Everyone good?” They nod. I hate when people get uncomfortable because of me.
Dante rubs his forehead. “You go ahead of us, Fire. We’ll catch up.”
I fold my arms. “I think I should stay back and hear whatever you have to say. I’m not as inexperienced as I was at the beginning of all this. I can help come up with what we should do after we find Elex, Igraine, and Bullock.”
Dante shakes his head. “That’s not what we’re going to discuss. Please, go ahead of us.”
Don’t they trust me after everything we’ve been through? I think I’ve earned my stripes by now. Maverick and Paden glance at each other, before looking at Dante, trying to figure out what he needs.
“Lon, just wait for us near the house. We’ll catch up with you in a second, I promise.”
I sigh. Since it’s Maverick asking, I don’t want to push it. “Fine.” I walk out of the barn. The door closes behind me. I inch back toward it. Maybe I’ll be able to overhear something. Silence greets me, even with the hayloft door open. They must’ve put a barrier around them, so I can’t eavesdrop. With one final sigh, I turn and make my way to the house. The pull around my torso gets stronger with each passing second. They’ve got to be over here. I pick up speed. Please, let them all be okay. I can’t believe I let the guys shunning me out of their conversation make me lose sight of what I really need to be focusing on: making sure my parents and Bullock are all right. He may be the biggest ass I’ve ever met in my life, but I don’t want him to die when I can fix him.
Depletion
I ascend the old, nearly falling apart, wooden steps. I place my hand on the screen door’s handle and with a deep breath, I ready myself. I don’t know what’ll meet me on the other side. How much of it has changed? I push open the old wooden door. Luckily the lock broke years ago and Edgar could never be bothered to fix it. It’s not like we had a ton of trespassers.
There the three of them sit, as if they just woke up, in the center of the kitchen/living room floor. The round kitchen table, small square TV, and chalkboard are gone, leaving behind a hollowed-out room. I force down the tears and walk up to the others. “Are you okay?” Igraine and Elex both nod and rub their eyes. Bullock’s broken glasses hang of his off his ear—a shard of glass sticks in his left cheek—a trickle of blood runs down his lip, and his foot twists in the opposite direction. I wonder what he got hit by. I kneel down next him. As soon as the skin of my knee hits the old wood of the floor, a new memory surfaces.
“I don’t want you to go. I don’t care if you’re fifteen now. They can’t have you. They’re corrupt, and you know more than even the college levels.” I place my elbows on the round, wooden table, and rest my chin on my folded hands.
“He doesn’t have a choice, Avalon. If he doesn’t go, he’ll become an Outcast. Do you really want that to happen? You would never see him again,” Edgar says, waiting for the kettle to whistle by the stove.
Maverick grabs one of my hands from his seat next to me. His thumb rubs circles into the top of my hand. Edgar glares at us, but doesn’t do anything stop it. He learned long ago there was nothing he could do to us to make us stop being a couple, in secret or not. “I need to go. There’s no way around this. You know that. We’ve known that since we were kids.”
“Then I’ll meet you there, when I turn fifteen, next year.”
Edgar pours steaming water into three maroon-colored mugs and uses a spoon to stir all of them. “The families don’t know you exist. How do you plan to get in the school?” he asks.
“I’ll fake my identity and cross-dress as a boy.”
Maverick laughs. “This isn’t one of your gender-bending dramas, Lon. Do you honestly think that would work? You’re face and voice could never pass for a boy, even a super flamboyant one.
Edgar comes over to the table and hands each of us our own mugs. Hot cocoa, on a cold morning, usually brings me comfort—like a cup of coffee of tea for most people—but not today. I just stare at it. “Then we’ll have to let them know about me. Take down the barrier, and let the Watchers find me. They’ll want me.”
Edgar shakes he head. “I won’t let that happen. I promised your parents I would protect you.”
“Yet, I’ve never seen them. I might as well have been adopted and naive of the world I come from. No better than a Harry Potter.” My eyes go wide, as the idea crashes over me. “That’s it. What if we do something like that?”
Maverick frowns. “What are you talking about, Lon?”
“It’ll take a lot of planning and magic, but it’s possible. I could get into Spearwood with you, next year. From there, I could be with you and learn from the other side, maybe even show them I’m not as weak as they think a female would be. Edgar, you’ve always talked about how they could be a threat to the world. Maybe I can change that. Fix things.”
Edgar shakes his head. The loose skin of his chin jiggles. “No. That would be breaking my promise to your parents. I can’t do that.”
I let go of Maverick’s hand, stand in front of the table and pace. The old, wood floor creaks underneath me. For some reason, it always centers me when I need it. “So you want me to live on this orchard for the rest of my life? To always stay within the barrier of the town, and to never see the world? What kind of life is that? There’ll be Vox at the school. Maverick and Den aren’t the only ones, and they would never let anything happen to me. I bet I could do some good for the families, bring their beliefs up to a more modern standard.” I stop pacing and stare into Edgar’s watery blue eyes.
He clears his throat. “And how do you want to pull this off?” He sips at the cocoa. I can tell he probably won’t budge on his stance to keep me here, out of the way of anything that could harm me, but at least he’s pretending to listen to reason.
I take my seat and automatically grasp Mavericks hand a gain. “I’m not saying it’ll be easy, or that it won’t be dangerous. I think we should let the barriers down, after Maverick leaves. Let the Watchers find me. When they look into my records, they’ll find that you adopted me back in 1998, just like my parents faked the papers for you. They won’t dig past that. There won’t be anything to find. They’ll think I was abandoned, and that I don’t know anything about the world I come from, or what I truly am.”
“How are you going to make them think you don’t know anything? I love you, Lon, but you’re a horrible lair, and your skills would leak through at one point or another.”
I sigh. “I’m going to have to forget I know anything and replace it by other memories, fake ones. That’s the only way to do it. You were the best mind manipulator in the families, Edgar. I trust you.”
“Then you want to forget about us?” Maverick asks. His grip on my hand lessen, I hold on tighter, keeping him from letting go.
“Of course I don’t, but do you know how hard it would be to fake like I don’t love you?”
“I don’t want you to forget me completely. I don’t think I would be able to fake that I’ve never met you.”
“Then I will have memories of you tied to my past, but they won’t be ones that make me love you. That would just be too hard for me. We can’t have any romantic connection if this is going to work. When I get back to the level I am now in skill. Paden and you can take me to the Sea Witch. She can repair everything, and I’ll remember what we have.”
Edgar takes another sip of his coca. “She won’t only repair the most recent brain warp; she’ll repair everything. You’ll remember your parents as well. You’ll know who they are again.”
I nod. “I know. It’s time I know, and I know you won’t tell me because you took an oath never to tell me who they are. In order to keep me safe, even when I do know who they are, I won’t go looki
ng for them. I’ll have my memories back and will know better. I have to protect them too.”
“What happens if I don’t agree to help you?” Edgar asks.
“Then I’ll ask Maverick to help me. You’ve been teaching him how to manipulate memories, haven’t you?”
He frowns. “Fine. I know if I try to stop yau, yau will still do what yau want. Just like I wasn’t able to stop yau two from dating.” His Irish accent returns with a vengeance. He’s not happy with the idea, but at least he’s willing to do the memory manipulation. I think I can do some good.
If only I had known about the corrupt Governor and the Psychopath I’m related to. I doubt I would’ve ended up doing all of that, if I had known about any of that. Why didn’t Edgar say anything about Aibek to us? Perhaps he didn’t know, or he thought that Aibek would stay captured for the rest of time and was no threat to the world or us like he is now.
“You’re okay?” Bullock asks. His hand grasps mine, gently, bringing me out of the new memory. So all of it was my idea. Bullock looks at me. His left cheek swelled so much that it forced his eye closed.
I force down my surprise that a guy like him would worry about me. I take his glasses of from his ear. There’s really no saving them. Hermione Granger and a magic wand would come in real handy right about now. “You’re worried about me, while you have glass sticking in your face? This is going to hurt, but I doubt I can heal around it while it’s embedded in your skin.” I grasp the rounded edge of the shard and pull at least an inch of it out. His grasp on my hand tightens, but he doesn’t voice his pain or flinch. Sometimes, I wonder if these guys are just immune to pain.
With the glass out of his face, I begin to heal him. The white light cures his injures. A part of me almost has a sense of relief over it. That’s odd; I never expected to feel that over someone like him. I guess he’s grown on me a bit in the last few days, or I’ve grown tolerant of his jerkish exterior. Igraine holds out her hand, as if she wants to stop me, but then pulls it back to her chest. Her eyes show worry. I’ll have to ask her what’s wrong when I’m finished. Maybe she needs me to heal her. When I finish with his foot, I look at his face. His brown eyes stare at me with such intensity that if he could wield fire magic, he might just catch me on fire. “Is something wrong?”
“I see you.”
“I would hope so, you can’t be that blind without your glasses.”
He twirls a lock of my hair. After a few days with no shower, I grimace. It’s probably greasy. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the side of me that takes my appearance into higher regard than I did before.
“When I was a kid, I got in a training accident. I lost most of my vision in one eye and a little less than half in the other. Glasses just helped me make out distant better. Now, it’s like my eyes were never hurt at all.” His fingers move from my lock of hair, and he grazes my cheek with the back of his knuckles.
“You’re warm, I didn’t die.”
I pull back from his touch. “You think heaven would look like this if you had? If anything, this is my heaven.”
He looks around, as if seeing the house he’s in for the first time. “Where are we?”
Before I can answer, the others come through the door. Dante has a busted lip and a shadow of a bruise on his right cheek. He won’t make eye contact with me. Maverick’s right hand has busted knuckles. They got in a fight. “What the hell! Is that why you wanted me to leave? So you could get into a fight? There’s been enough fighting for one day, we don’t need it within the group, too.”
I stand and reach down to help Bullock up. He takes my offered hand and easily stands. At least, he doesn’t have any pain from the mess his ankle was a few minutes ago.
Maverick folds his arms in front of his chest. “Just know, I wasn’t the first one to throw punches.”
“I figured that,” I say, as I go to Maverick. I take his busted hand in mine. “You’re the type to always be on the defensive. You’ll only fight back if you need to. What were you talking about?” He shakes his head, as I heal his knuckles.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I must warn you not to do that anymore. Every time you heal someone with angel powers, you take their illness or injury into you, and it will deplete your mortal life. You’re healing them with pieces of your own soul. The worse the injury, the more life will be taken from you. The closer the person is to death, the more you’re sacrificing yourself,” Igraine says.
Maverick’s skin go back to brand new. “I don’t feel any different or weak,” I say.
She stands from the floor and wavers a tad on her feet, before righting herself. “You won’t feel it, until you’re healing someone on the verge of death. Once you get to that point, your own death won’t be far behind.”
“What about the elemental healing I do?”
Igraine shakes her head. “That’s not part of your angel powers. That comes from the dragon side. It won’t hurt you to use them, because none of your own life force can go into the healing. However, no elemental magic I know of can bring someone back from a mortal wound. Keep that in mind, and keep yourself alive.”
I frown. All of this just makes my head hurt. How can Amr and I be hybrids? I was told that wasn’t possible.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this? Why can I suddenly use powers I never had before, if I was always a hybrid like that guy?” Amr asks.
Elex sighs, but stays seated on the ground. He runs his hand through his blond hair and keeps his eyes down as if he doesn’t want to deal with the fact we’re waiting on him to answer us. “We weren’t sure if you had inherited the angel side. Aibek’s angel powers were brought out by his mother at a young age. She trained him to be like that. Filled his mind with dark ideas and helped him grow with the dark. You never showed signs of having any angel abilities . . .”
“And I made sure never to use my angel powers around either of you. Now, I know my theory was true. Seeing another use Angel powers awoke your own, and the healing was the first thing that came naturally in you two.”
Elex stands. “If the families knew of what you were when you were babies, they would’ve tried to kill you, not wanting anything else to mix with the dragon. Aibek got by without them realizing it, and by the time the families came to realize he wasn’t only dragon, he had enough of them brain washed that he had formed his own army. The Ancients were unable to stop him, even at the young age of fifteen. He killed two of them, before they went into hiding. There were many of us trying to fight against him, and then your mother became pregnant. We went into hiding, no one could know.”
“The night I had you both was the happiest and darkest night of my life.
Sisters
“I had a feeling I would have a girl, but it wasn’t set in stone. When I had you, I didn’t know what to do or what would happen to you. Something the young men of the families don’t know is that females are born into the dragon shape shifter families every day. However, they don’t live. The transformation is too hard for their tiny bodies to handle and they die. In the past, the father’s would snap their necks when the transformation started, so that the child’s last moments wouldn’t be of agony.”
My hand goes to my mouth and hot tears rush into my eyes. How could they do something so morbid to an innocent life? “How could they do that? What if the girl pulled through and lived?”
Elex looks to the floor and takes over the story. “Back then, they were unwilling to believe that females could be strong and survive.”
Igraine steps forward and places her hand on my shoulder. “But you survived it all. It was terrifying. I couldn’t bear hearing you scream, but I stayed by your side your entire first night on this Earth, and you pulled through. Then you survived the month, and each morning you were a ball of happiness, as if it had never even happened. It was wonderful.” Her other hand goes to Amr’s shoulder. “You two brought everything thing together and made us a true family.”
“Then why were you forced to put
me into even deeper hiding?”
Elex begins to pace. “Aibek found us. He was sixteen. He found out about you both and wanted to destroy you at all costs. He wanted to be the only one of his kind. We put you both in hiding, splitting our family up. Then, your mother and I were able to imprison Aibek. We thought everything was safe and were able to retrieve Amr, but when we went to get you, Avalon, we found out that the Families had learned of you too. We knew if we led them to you, they would take you from us, wanting to raise you in the image they saw as proper. You would’ve become a breeder for them, when you had come of age. They would’ve wanted your dragon blood as a female. They wouldn’t have known about the Angel in you until later, at which time they would have killed you for being imperfect.”
Edgar spoke very little about the Families when I was growing up. All I know is they’re like a communal order, keeping outsiders—Norms, or normal human beings—from ever knowing that the fairy tales and legends they grew up reading were true. It’s a mixing pot of all creatures ever created, like the United Nations, but they’re mainly run by Dragon shifters, since we’re the majority at the moment. I never knew they had those types of plans for me. If I had, I never would’ve gone through with the idea to let them know about me. Did Edgar not know about that? Maybe like me, he had been cut off from our world. I just don’t understand. Did he want me to walk into danger as a lesson?
Igraine gives a sad smile. “There wasn’t a day we didn’t think about you or want to get you. We kept our distance for your safety. Then, Edgar contacted us, letting us know of the plan you had come up with. Erasing your memories and entering Spearwood as if you had grown up as an uneducated—in our world—Outcast. That you wanted to change things and be with your friends. He told us you were a spit fire like your father and that there wasn’t anything he could do. You would’ve found a way to Spearwood one way or another, and either way you would be at threat. So we made sure you had the finest of the Vox implemented to guard you, especially in your untrained state. Our connection with Michael helped with that.”