Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3)

by Lindsey Fairleigh

  And that’s exactly what we did. After our water jugs were filled, the troughs overflowing, and we’d played in enough water to satiate our fear of dehydration, Tavis made the rain stop, leaving everyone in complete, awed silence.

  “She was right!” Sam said. “You’re not a Crazy after all.”

  I laughed at Sam’s quick tongue, and before I knew what was happening, Tavis was hauling me up into his arms for a giant bear hug, so relieved he’d been able to help save us all.

  “I’m not sure I would’ve put two and two together,” he said, a renewed lightness to his voice I appreciated.

  I laughed. “That’s what friends are for.”

  12

  DANI

  APRIL 27, 1AE

  Great Basin Desert, Nevada

  I sneezed, then blew into a red and white paisley hankie, expelling mostly rust-colored dust, and grimaced. “Dusty brains…” And my brain already felt dusty enough without all of the added, well, dust. Slipping into animal minds at night wasn’t quite as rejuvenating as sleeping, but sleeping wasn’t nearly as comforting, and I craved the deepened telepathic connection I shared with whichever animal I was merged with even more after losing some of the horses.

  “What was that?” Jake asked, glancing my way. He was on “Dani duty”—akin to guarding me while most of my attention was funneled into splitting my own consciousness among my avian scouts—and had been riding nearby on Highway 50 all morning. The task was usually Jason’s, but he’d been convening en route with Sanchez, Chris, Grayson, and Harper all morning and had asked Jake to take his place before we’d packed up camp.

  We were still moving through the Great Basin Desert, the endless expanse of parched earth and sagebrush stretching out on either side of us, but we’d managed not to repeat our near-catastrophe via dehydration of a week earlier.

  Jake guided his horse, a robust sorrel gelding whose reddish-brown coat looked overly vibrant in the sun-bleached high desert, closer to Wings’s side.

  “What? Dusty brains?” I laughed as I stowed the hankie in my jacket pocket. “It was just something Grams—my grandma—used to say to me whenever I sneezed.” Adopting her age-roughened tone and Irish accent, I said, “Bless you, child, you and your dusty brains…” With a quick look around, I added, “Though it seems particularly appropriate here.”

  Jake’s lips twitched, and a faint smile cracked the usually austere set of his face. “Dusty brains…I knew someone who used to say that.” Jake stared ahead at some point beyond where Ky and Ben were riding, his eyes distant as he spoke. “But that was a long time ago.”

  I watched him, watched the way nostalgia altered his features, softening them. “Another life,” I said softly.

  Jake’s eyes met mine, his gaze intense in a way that made me self-conscious. “It seems like it sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  Feeling my cheeks warm, I shifted my attention to the road ahead. The highway was empty of all but a few vehicles—some abandoned, some not—making the passage of the cart, wagon, and herd fairly easy.

  “Your grandma,” Jake said, his voice tentative. “She’s the one who raised you?”

  Surprised by the personal question—I didn’t know much about Jake, but a prier he was not—I looked at him, head tilted to the side and eyes wide. “She is…Grams.” I forced myself to smile, automatically raising my right hand to touch my fingertips to Grams’s Claddagh medallion through my shirt.

  Seconds passed with nothing but the sounds of horse hooves on pavement and cart and wagon wheels rolling along behind us.

  Surprising me again, Jake said, “Zoe used to talk about her. Said she was like a mother to her.”

  Running my fingers through the streak of white hair at the base of Wings’s mane, I nodded, recalling the countless days Zoe had passed at my house under Grams’s attentive, motherly watch. During middle school, when the tension at home between her dad and Jason had escalated to an unbearable level, Zoe had spent more nights at Grams’s house with me than at her own.

  Lifting my right hand, I brushed my fingertips over the part of my cast that covered the tattoo on the inside of my left wrist; it was the Celtic knot that symbolized the unbreakable bond between sisters. Zoe had the same tattoo on her hip, though she neither knew what it meant nor remembered the day we’d suffered through their creation together.

  Staring ahead at nothing, I cleared my throat. “I miss her.”

  “She raised you,” Jake said evenly, and I had the impression that it was his way of saying that he understood…that he could relate. Of course, he didn’t know I hadn’t meant Grams; I’d meant Zoe.

  I blinked a little too rapidly. “Yeah, uh…my mom died when I was born, and I guess my dad didn’t want to stick around”—he hadn’t even written his name on my birth certificate, and he’d been gone by the time Grams arrived—“so Grams moved to the States to raise me.” I laughed softly, a ward against the decades-old sense of rejection. “I used to daydream about what my life would’ve been like if she’d taken me back to Ireland and raised me there.”

  “You were lucky.”

  Brow furrowed, I sent Jake a sideways glance.

  He smiled, just a little, and shook his head. “Not about your mom and dad; you were lucky to have your grandma.”

  My eyebrows lowered, and I frowned, sensing that I’d just stumbled upon a kindred spirit in the least likely of places. “What about you?” I asked, not really expecting much of a response. Jake wasn’t known for his verbose insights into his past…or for being verbose at all.

  Grip tightening on his reins, Jake stared ahead. “My dad left when I was six, but not before he nearly beat my mom to the point of miscarrying.”

  I glanced over my shoulder, seeking out Becca. I found her on the cart, sharing the bench seat with Camille. “Becca?”

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Jake nod.

  I returned to facing forward. “Did he ever come back?”

  Jake looked at me askance. “Nah.” He shot a quick glance behind us at Becca. “He didn’t want us in the first place, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to come back to take care of us once she was gone.”

  I didn’t think he meant that his mom had left him and his sister, too. “How’d she die?”

  “Overdose,” he said, the single word a blade. After a quiet, tense moment, he added. “Becca found her.”

  “Jesus…how old was she?”

  “Four.”

  I brought my hand up to my mouth, covering my horrified expression.

  “Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be for the best if she never remembers her life before,” he said quietly.

  “That’s not your decision.” My voice was sharper than I’d intended, making the words sound like a reprimand. When Jake turned widened eyes on me, I rushed to say, “Sorry—didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  He said nothing, just stared at me, his expression wary. There was something wild about him, like a mustang who’d been broken but still remembered the days when he could run free through endless rolling hills and prairies. Cracking his shell was going to be a challenge. I smiled on the inside; I’d always liked challenges.

  Finally, after neither of us spoke for some time, Jake broke the silence. “What if Zoe doesn’t want to remember?” There was a challenge in his eyes.

  I stared at him, refusing to look away. “If we find a way to fix—I mean, to return her memories, it’s her choice,” I lied.

  Jake raised his eyebrows the barest amount.

  Snapping my mouth shut, I sighed. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. There’s no way in hell I’d let her choose not to remember. One way or another, I’m getting my Zo back.” I gave him a sidelong glance. “How’d you know?”

  Again, he chuckled. I never would’ve pegged him as a chuckler, but if the shoe fit… “You’re the only person who loves her as much as I do.”

  For a long time, I simply watched him, assessing. I hadn’t known things were quite so serious between them before the Clara-induce
d mind-wipe.

  His horse, a few steps ahead of Wings, veered a little bit closer to us. Wings swung her head to the right, extending her neck.

  “Don’t,” I warned before she could nip at his shoulder.

  With a snort, she shook her head. “Spoilsport” was the general gist of her response.

  I caught Jake splitting his attention between me and my horse, a quizzical expression on his face. “Wings considers herself my second-in-command of the herd, and she gets a kick out of keeping her”—I raised my right hand and made air quotes—“‘charges’ in line.”

  Jake looked like he was trying not to laugh. “So she was trying to show Brutus who’s boss?”

  I nodded. “Pretty much, yep.” Squinting, I looked over the sorrel from nose to flank. Only a tiny white star on his forehead and white socks on his hind legs broke the unrelenting red-brown of his coat. “So…Brutus, huh? Are you, um, expecting him to stab you in the back?”

  Jake smiled and shook his head. Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, “Don’t laugh.” He was quiet for a moment, and I was about to badger him for more of an explanation when he said, “Our neighbor, Joe, he took us in for a bit after our mom…” Jake raised one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “I used to watch college football with him. Ohio State was his favorite team, which didn’t ever make sense to me because he was from Indiana…but the mascot’s name was Brutus.” He met my eyes briefly, a self-deprecating half-smile on his face. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”

  “It’s sweet,” I reassured him. “What was he, anyway—Brutus the mascot?”

  “A Buckeye—it’s a nut.”

  I snorted. “You are such a geek,” I said without thinking. Worrying I’d gone too far, I peeked over at Jake. He was smiling.

  ~~~~~

  Carlos pulled his hands away from almost touching Mase’s head and shook them out. It always amused me when he did that, because every time his fingers touched, they emitted a faint crackling sound, and when he did it in the dark, little blue sparks accompanied the crackle. I smiled.

  Mase stood from his perch atop a knee-high rock and stretched his thickly corded arms over his head. It was late in the evening, and Mase, Camille, and I were sitting by the stream near our camp—a freshwater supply like that wasn’t one we could pass up—“washing dishes.” Which was code for helping Carlos hone his electrotherapy skills in semiprivacy. He was still reticent, bashful even, to show this new facet of his Ability to the others, but I didn’t think we could make much more progress without a certain member of our group’s help.

  Camille took Mase’s place and closed her eyes, a small smile curving her lips. Both she and Mase seemed to enjoy the sensations caused by Carlos’s version of electrotherapy, which was utter lunacy to me. Not that I said so out loud. Often, anyway.

  Mase moved several yards upstream to crouch beside me and grab a plate from the stack of dirty dishes I’d been working through for the past fifteen minutes. “He’s getting really strong,” Mase said quietly, his eyes flicking toward Camille and Carlos. “And his control—” He shook his head. “The way he can focus it so precisely…contain it…”

  I met Mase’s murky gaze. “You think he’s ready?”

  Mase nodded. “I know he is, but I think the only way for him to know that, too, is to bring Gabe in on what we’re doing.”

  Narrowing my eyes, I nodded slowly. “You can be incredibly insightful sometimes, you know that?”

  With a shrug, Mase once again glanced at Carlos and Camille. “He has more in common with her than I do…now.” His voice was that of someone letting go.

  I touched Mase’s thick forearm. “They may be around the same age and be able to relate to each other’s troubling pasts, but she loves you, Mase.”

  Mase was quiet for a moment. When his eyes met mine, they were glassy. “She’s different now.”

  I shook my head and laughed softly. “But she still loves you.”

  “How do you know?”

  I rolled my eyes and bumped his arm with my shoulder. “Because I see the way she looks at you, doofus.”

  He frowned, apparently not buying my skills of observation and insight.

  Sighing, I said, “Fine, don’t believe me. But you should talk to her about this. If you don’t, you’ll never know…”

  Mase opened his mouth, but he was interrupted by Ray, who’d been circling overhead as my lookout. “Kak-kak-kak.” She swooped just over our heads. “Kak-kak-kak.”

  I watched her land on a rock directly across the creek from us, ruffling and settling her black-and gray-speckled white feathers effortlessly. “Someone’s coming.” I translated stalk-of-wheat two-legs and, laughing, said, “It’s Gabe.”

  “I need a few…more seconds,” Carlos said between clenched teeth. His hands were covering around Camille’s head like a flesh and bone skullcap.

  I pivoted on the dusty rocks so I was facing Jack. My dog’s ears perked up, but he remained on his belly. “Please go after Gabe and distract him.”

  Jack sprang to his feet and trotted away.

  Mase watched the German shepherd go. “I can’t imagine being able to communicate with other creatures like that.”

  A smile spread across my face, and I shook my head. “I can’t imagine facing the prospect of going through life without being able to talk to them—or fly or run with them—but it’s more than that. It’s like I’m a part of them.”

  It was Mase’s turn to shake his head. “Like I said—I can’t imagine.”

  “Okay, I’m done,” Carlos said, straightening and, once again, shaking out his hands and making that faint crackling sound.

  Camille stood and stretched much more languorously than Mase had done before picking her way across the uneven rocks toward us.

  “Thank you, Sweet Boy. Now, please bring Gabe to me,” I told Jack.

  The crunch of rocks and dirt under boots alerted us to Gabe’s approach. Jack slinked ahead of him, loping the last few yards to reach us first. With a sigh, the German shepherd lay back down, rolling on his side in universal dog-speak for “rub my belly.”

  “Good job, Sweet Boy,” I told him, scratching a spot that prompted him to kick out his leg in pleasure. I patted the side of his tummy before standing to greet Gabe. “Hey…do you have a minute?” I asked him, fiddling with my fingers. I still felt awkward every time I spoke to him, courtesy of all that had happened between us at the Colony.

  Gabe leaned his shoulder against a scraggly tree, eyeing Carlos, Mase, and Camille with curiosity and a hint of caution. His pale blue eyes flicked to me, and he nodded.

  I smiled shakily. “Right, so…” I glanced at Carlos, then back at Gabe. “I—we wanted to talk to you about Carlos’s Ability. It seems to be, um, evolving a bit, and—”

  “Evolving how?” Gabe asked.

  “Well…” Carlos picked up a twig and rolled it around between his fingers. “At first I could just turn stuff on and off, like radios and lights and stuff.” He paused, staring at the twig with intense focus. “But now…” There was a crackling sound, closely followed by sparks and threads dancing around the twig like blue lightning. Smoke drifted up from the twig, carrying the scent of burning wood, and Carlos dropped it on the dirt. “Now I can do that, too.”

  Slowly, Gabe stepped closer to Carlos. He sank to a crouch a few feet from the teenager and reached for the twig. The second his fingertips made contact, he sucked in a sharp breath and pulled back. “Impressive…but why are you showing me?”

  “Because he can do the same thing to a person, at the same intensity or much lower,” Mase said.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and raised my eyebrows. “Remind you of anything?”

  Standing, Gabe looked from Mase to Carlos to me, his eyes lighting up with interest. “It most certainly does.” He stepped closer to Carlos and held out his hand, palm up. “Show me.”

  Carlos glanced at me. When I nodded, he extended his hand, holding it about an inch above Gabe’s. “
Don’t move,” he told the older man. “And don’t touch me.” When Gabe’s head tilted to the side, Carlos said, “The twig.”

  “Ah…so direct contact is more intense while you’re using your Ability?”

  “And for a little while afterward,” I added.

  Carlos pressed his lips into a thin line, and a few seconds later, Gabe’s breath hitched.

  I watched, seeing no visible sign of Carlos’s Ability, but I could almost feel the hum of electricity flowing over Gabe’s skin.

  “Don’t extend it any further up my arm,” Gabe said, his voice slightly hoarse. “I don’t want to risk you actually knocking my Ability out for who knows how long.”

  Carlos shrugged and stepped backward, shaking out his hand for the third time that evening.

  Gabe did the same and met my eyes, excitement shining in his. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  Giving Gabe a tight smile, I nodded. “He thought of it and figured it might help give us an advantage down the road, especially if we come across any other people like Herodson. He’s been practicing pretty much every day with Camille and Mase.” I tapped my index finger against my lips. “The only problem is that he’s a little bit deadly if he accidently touches anyone at the wrong time.”

  “We’d have to figure out a way around that…otherwise it’d be too dangerous to be practical.” Gabe’s gaze grew distant. “But I do think it could be useful, and for more than just your standard Ability-increasing electrotherapy.”

  I frowned. “Like what—use Carlos as a weapon?”

  “Not exactly what I was thinking, but it’s a definite possibility.” Gabe paused, taking a ponderous deep breath. “Electrotherapy is similar to part of the process that creates Re-gens.” He glanced at Camille and Mase. “We know that you two experienced an excessive amount of self-administered electrotherapy, and that by doing so, you regained some access to the memory centers in your brains, diminishing the retrograde amnesia we’d previously believed was an unavoidable side effect to the Re-gen creation process.”

  I glanced at Carlos. “So…what? You think this could help Mase and Becca remember more of their lives before?”