The Powerless Series: Complete 5-Book Set

by Jason Letts

“There is something we can do. Can you go to her and tell her that we love her?” Kevin asked. “In case we’re lost in this range forever.”

  Clara felt how sweet the sentiment was, and it made her think it would’ve been nice to hear that someone loved her during those long years she was imprisoned. But before she could do anything of the kind, the mountainside started to shake, sending a few stones tumbling into the stream. Jeana steadied herself and looked around.

  “Was that an earthquake?” she asked, but Clara knew better. She appeared in her brilliant red armor behind them, her golden sword in hand.

  “Can’t be nobody but him,” she said.

  “Him?” Kevin gasped, suddenly agitated. The panic struck Jeana too, her eyes becoming wide and wild. Clara slowly managed to rise to her feet.

  “What do we do?” Jeana asked her husband.

  “I can’t fight him,” Kevin said in desperation, staring off as though reliving the moment when Arent overcame his power and kidnapped the very child he had only just reclaimed.

  “We gotta run. I’ll hold him off. Stick to the river,” her projection ordered while her body already hobbled upstream. Clara could hardly run at all, but her parents stayed next to her, and they hurried along the mountainside in the shadow of a steep cliff.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Arent stampeded around the other corner. His fists were clenched, the veins in his neck showed, and a dimwitted rage scorched his face. Confronted by the young woman who had betrayed him, his momentum ground to a halt and he snarled.

  “Where are you?” he snapped.

  “I ain’t never gonna tell you nothin’ again. You hear me? Only thing I’m gonna do is lop your head clean off your shoulders!” she screamed at him, holding back her sword, which bent back in a curve so fine it seemed to disappear in the light.

  “You owe who you are to me! You done me a great wrong when you left,” he roared.

  “You ruined my life!” Clara shrieked at the top of her lungs, her face contorted under the red helmet and her mouth gaping wide.

  “I own you! You belong to me,” he demanded, equally indignant and raving.

  “Not anymore! You can’t never control me again. I hate you!” she shouted.

  “You are my slave,” he sneered, leering at her with his dark, dull eyes.

  “I ain’t nobody’s slave, and you ain’t nobody’s master,” she barked, donning a nasty smirk.

  And in an instant the red armor changed into a Dustfalls Academy uniform. The helmet and the sword vanished. She now looked exactly like Mira, right down to the smooth, clean hair. Confidently, she strolled toward him.

  “And that is all because of me,” she said, straining to speak slowly so she could sound more like her educated sister. She felt terrible, hollow, and wasted inside, and she wanted to drill that pain into Arent so he could never forget it. He deserved the worst punishment, the most agonizing torture, and she would inflict it all, if only she could.

  A few feet away, Arent stepped forward to swing his club-like hands at her. They passed right through the projection, which assumed a bigger smile after each failed strike. Arent pushed out and discharged a buildup of energy, but it did nothing to her and found its way to the ground instead, making it shake.

  “I bringed it all down and now you are nothing,” she continued to speak for Mira. “I don’t even have a gift. As weak as I am, you are weaker. You are just lost and alone, and you’ll stay that way forever.”

  Arent’s seething growl rang so loud it frightened away a bird in the trees. But Clara stood firm, intensely driving home her meaning.

  “I will kill you, girl. I will cut out your heart and roast it on a fire. Birds will eat your brains and your corpse will rot in the hot sun with your friends. All of you will be dead and I will be glad to be alone! But first Mom and Dad and you will be brought to your doom!”

  Clara howled at the top of her lungs, transforming back into her armor. She held back the sword, which she knew could not hurt him because she was still too weak, but the fury of her loss consumed her and she swung at his hulking figure. He charged right through her sword and her body, never looking back.

  “We gotta hurry! He’s coming!” Clara said to her parents farther up the stream.

  They hustled and limped through the snow and the mud, leaving a long trail of tracks behind them. Breathing heavily, they climbed over rocks and passed through bushes and around trees. The ground shook often, the result of Arent blasting through the impediments they labored over.

  Clara tripped and fell, and her parents raced back to lift her. They could hear him thrashing and growling behind them like a rabid animal. The mountain kept curving beside a steep cliff, and there didn’t seem to be any way around it. The woods were too sparse to provide enough protection, and the river was too narrow to be a serious obstacle.

  “Quicker!” Clara urged, though she was the one who could move no faster.

  “What do we do?” Jeana cowered.

  But there was no time for an answer, shaking ground and angry huffs alerted them to the presence of their pursuer. The incline increased in front of them, and there was nothing left to do but turn to confront him. Storming around the corner, Arent halted when he saw them and broached a ghastly smile.

  Out of breath, the three Ipswiches must’ve looked like easy prey. Clara could barely stand on her own, and her parents struggled to support her, but they were not going to go down without a fight. Kevin rolled up his sleeves and stepped out to face the man who had long tormented his family. He was not a man of slight stature, but he looked so in comparison to Arent. Regardless, he clenched his raised fists.

  “No,” Jeana pleaded, grabbing him by the shoulder. She had desperation in her eyes but some ferocity too. “All I need to do is touch him. He’ll sleep!”

  “You’ll never get the chance,” Kevin rebutted, staring down his nemesis, whose muscles surged with bolts of energy.

  Though Jeana and Kevin continued to debate who had the least hopeless chance to protect them, Clara appeared in front of Arent. Unlike before, she had none of her armor. Her appearance was perfectly her own, from the slave rags covering her body to the damaged strands of hair cloaking her almond eyes.

  “You can kill us, but you never gonna be rid of us. We gonna haunt you till the end o’ your days,” she threatened.

  “And for that I’ll be glad!” Arent snarled, lunging forward and driving across the remaining ground. Kevin and Jeana had their hands up, though their big eyes revealed they thought the cause was hopeless.

  Arent’s gurgling growl echoed around the mountainside, but a louder roar much like an infuriated bear ripped through the trees. A huge shape sprung from the cliff above, collided with Arent, and knocked him down toward the stream.

  Shocked, the Ipswiches gasped at the man before them. He was wrapped in thick animal furs, but as he recovered from his fall they saw a doll-like porcelain face and scar along the chin.

  “Ogden Fortst?” Jeana gasped.

  Arent too appeared astonished; he recoiled from the water and gazed back at the cause of his fall. His angered face flushed red, and he squeezed his jaw shut so hard it looked like his teeth would crumble.

  “You didn’t go and forget about me now, did you?” Fortst rumbled.

  Springing back to his feet, he cut off Arent’s next dash for the Ipswiches, catching him by the waist and throwing him back against the ground. A thud accompanied Arent’s crash, which caused him to expel some electricity and make the ground shake.

  “I never woulda left you if I’d known you survived!” Fortst shouted.

  “No one can kill me, least of all you,” Arent frothed.

  Furiously, they collided again, grappling for position and trying to land a blow. Fortst caught him by the wrists, struggling to keep the charged fingers off of his body. Pushing and shoving, the Herculean effort from both showed them to be evenly matched.

  “I can touch him now. I can end it,” Jeana claimed, rushing out
at them.

  “Stay back!” Fortst ordered, but the loss of focus left him open to a punch to the stomach. Arent sent him sprawling against the cliff and jumped at him arms first. Catching him by the neck, the surge of energy raced down to his hands, but it traveled straight through Fortst and down to a hand touching the rock behind him.

  An explosion followed, and part of the cliff collapsed around Fortst, knocking him to the ground and enveloping him in stone. Arent fell back and surveyed the pile but had time for just a single breath before a lion’s roar permeated from underneath. The loose rock shifted and fell away under Fortst’s great strength until he emerged on his feet.

  Fortst barreled forward, smashing his fist into Arent’s face, but the blow did little to disturb him. Arent ducked the next punch and drilled his knee into Fortst’s stomach. Reeling, Fortst couldn’t prevent a push that sent him on his back.

  It only took Arent a second to get on top of him and put his hands down to execute another electrical discharge. The flurry of tiny blue bolts ripped through his fingers but caught a little wisp of cloud that arced away and into the ground. The energy traveled along the cloud and vanished harmlessly, disappearing a second later. Arent hissed back at Kevin, allowing Fortst to kick him away.

  Back on their feet, they continued to grapple and wrestle. Pressing with all his might, Fortst backed his nemesis near the stream but couldn’t knock him into it. Arent steadied himself against a stone on the bank, heaving back as hard as he could.

  “Get in there!” Fortst growled, but couldn’t find the strength to knock him into the water.

  As they labored back and forth, Clara appeared by their side. The men had tense, contorted faces, but she looked calm, peaceful even. She floated over Arent’s shoulder, whispering into his ear.

  “You gots no idea what I can do,” she said.

  Suddenly, she reappeared between the two men, not even tall enough to make it to their locked arms. Facing Arent, she slowly extended her right index finger. The projection wasn’t in any way transparent, but the tip of that finger looked particularly lucid. Holding her breath and closing her eyes, she pushed her finger into the wound in the center of his chest where Mira had cut away the carafe.

  The touch seemed to sear him, and he howled. All of a sudden, Fortst tipped him into the stream. Splashing and growling, Arent couldn’t contain his energy, which leaked out into the water and immediately caused the current to kick up. The tiny stream mustered a wave that crashed into Arent and carried him downstream. Altogether, they watched him vanish in the bubbles of the deluge, which swept him down the mountain and out of sight.

  “What’d you do that for? I was about to make my move!” Jeana proclaimed.

  Kevin stepped away from the incline and cast his eyes as far as he could for any signs of their malicious adversary.

  “Do you think he’s dead? Did that do it?” he asked.

  “We won’t get to safely call him dead till we see his body stiff on the ground. But he’s gone for now at least, and that’ll have to do,” Fortst’s deep voice rung as he turned his back on the brook.

  “Well, you saved us again, Mr. Fortst, just like you did back at Cloud Cottage. Thank you,” Jeana said embracing him warmly.

  “It’s my pleasure, M’am,” Fortst smiled, finally looking up and seeing Clara alone by the incline. “But you can’t be Mira. She doesn’t have a power.”

  “Let me introduce you to our other daughter. This is Clara,” Kevin said.

  “So it’s true? Unbelievable! What happened to you? Where you been all this time?” Fortst gasped. His eyes welled up but no one could’ve guessed why it meant so much to him.

  “I seen this man before. And I’d bet he seen me,” Clara muttered.

  Fortst squinted at her, his hand on his chin, but then he shook his head. For a brief instant, her red armor etched itself into the air around her, and Fortst’s mouth dropped open.

  “Oh my,” he whispered, looking to her parents and seeing their calm. “Pyrenee has been the hand of death since the war began. And she’s your lost daughter? I could’ve never guessed.”

  Dredging up these memories of who she used to be struck Clara with a burning feeling of regret. She couldn’t erase her past, and she wasn’t sure if she’d want to because it still felt so much a part of her. But now she’d felt she’d learned from it, and there had been one above all who had done the teaching.

  “I done some bad things in my time, but I didn’t know any of them were bad till Mira found me,” she said.

  “Mira’s the reason we’re out here, the reason we’re free,” Kevin added. “By taking the carafe, she found a way to break the spell Arent held over us. Our thoughts weren’t our own. All we had in our minds was the selfish drive he instilled in us. We disowned Mira because she had trouble dealing with her problems, but she never stopped working to save us.”

  Fortst nodded, starting to appear more relaxed for the first time.

  “I always knew that girl was special, never a doubt about it. She does things that just seem impossible. So if you’re telling me she ended the war, then I believe it,” he said.

  “But the war ended a long time ago,” Jeana added, flinching at the incongruity. “We’ve been in work camps all this time, and she shut them down and made the Sunfighters disband. Where’ve you been?”

  Adjusting his fur coat, Fortst stepped on a rock to survey the area. Snow whitened the ground around them, and only the soft caw of a single bird drifted in from the distance. Fortst dropped down to sit on the rock, exhaling deeply as though a long journey had come to an end.

  “Why, I’ve been right here in these mountains. Since the day the Sunfighter army descended on Corey Outpost and I saw Arent’s grimy mug leading the charge, the truth of it all cut me to the bone. I’d left him for dead under a mile of stone, but instead I’d buried him with the diamond carafe, allowing him to have its incredible power. Corey agreed there was no way the village could survive and I should bide my time for a better opportunity. That’s when I took to this range, which must be crossed to get to the place where we found it. I knew someday it would lead him back, and I’d be waiting for him,” Fortst explained.

  “’Cording to Mira, Arent only has a piece of the carafe. And that’s why we got to go back to where it comes from,” Clara said.

  “Is that so?” Fortst scratched his neck. “And how on Earth does she know where she’s going with it? Why, this old man backtracked his footsteps, and we wandered all over the northwest trying to find the place. Musta canvassed a thousand square miles and circled it three times before we finally found the throne room hidden by the crevasse in the shadow of a mountain giant. I always believed the only people who’d known how to get there were Arent and I.”

  “There’s a baby,” Kevin said.

  “A baby?” Fortst jumped, his eyes bulging. “We’re a long ways from the day care center!”

  “The baby inherited his power from Yannick, and so it knows the way to the other half of the carafe,” Kevin continued.

  “But Mira doesn’t even have the carafe or the baby anymore!” Jeana interrupted, annoyed. “They were taken by three kids, one of them was in your old class, Jeremy.”

  Stunned, Fortst swayed in a daze, throwing up his arms.

  “Pyrenee, Yannick, Jeremy, this is too strange to be believed. You folks are out here, Mira is somewhere, and Arent was just here. I’ve been kicking around these parts alone for so long and then suddenly everybody shows up!”

  His gruff demeanor continued to melt, perhaps because of so many connections to people he thought were lost and gone forever. Jeana started looking around and took a seat on another rock by the cold stream.

  “So we’ve been out here trying to find Mira, but we’re not having much luck. They could be anywhere. I keep hoping Mary will detect us but we must be too far away,” Jeana explained.

  “Mary survived the war too? Hate to say it but I thought she’d die of a broken fingernail in the first f
ive minutes. Who else is out there with Mira?” Fortst begged to know.

  “Chucky, Vern, Aoi, Will, and Roselyn,” Kevin said, and Fortst chuckled heartily.

  “Incredible! Gosh, I can’t believe how much I’d love to see their faces after dreading them every day before school began so long ago. We’re in luck though. We know where they’re going, and I know how to get there. Mr. Ipswich, if you’d be so kind as to provide the transportation, we’ll be waiting for them when they arrive.”

  Kevin grimaced, putting out his hand in the direction of the stream. The tiny water molecules collected above the surface, forming a cloud, but it fell apart as soon as he tried to raise it.

  “There’s still so little moisture in the air. Unless there’s a steady source of water around, I can’t do much,” he said.

  “I’m dying to be out of these mountains,” Jeana complained.

  “Sounds like we’ll be going on foot, and the journey will be long and hard, mark my words. Water will be a luxury. In fact, you’ll be missing these surroundings in no time. Where we’ll be going next can only be described as completely inhospitable.”

  Fortst’s words cast a somber air over the group, and together they followed his eyes to the northwest.

  “So, let’s go then!” he cheered, hopping from the rock.

  Groans and sighs met his enthusiasm for the hardships ahead, and together the three Ipswiches fell in line with Mira’s old teacher and started across the mountainside.

  Chapter 5: Everything

  The plateau behind them, Jeremy and Gloria followed Neeko’s blinding light down a long, gradual slope of loose rubble. Their feet shuffled and dragged underneath them, each step a cruel and aching continuation of their torturous journey. Knoll continued to cry for the most part, but sometimes he became perfectly silent. Jeremy wished for the silence and thought it a blessing, but when it came and the child seemed unresponsive it scared him ever more.

  Always wandering nearby, Gloria haunted him. Today, she appeared even more pitiless and cold-hearted. Minding his own business and attending to the baby only worked for so long. She always found a reason to sidle up beside him and torment him. Startled, he jerked to the side and almost tripped when he found her watching him.