Nova Unchained

by D. N. Hoxa

  And finally, Luke turned around and his eyes met mine.

  My God, how much I’d missed looking at him. I thought I knew, but I’d had no idea. My heart beamed with pride at the sight of him and all my troubles, at least for the moment, flew right out the window.

  But when Luke saw the men holding me back, the smile on his lips died, and he tried to stand up. But he was weak. His legs didn’t hold him. If it wasn’t for the man in the grey suit holding him, he’d have fallen.

  “Luke, no,” I whispered shaking my head.

  “Get off of her,” he shouted, looking at the men by my side like they were aliens.

  “Luke, please. Look at me,” I said, but he wouldn’t listen.

  “Let her go, you fuckers!” He tried to walk toward me, but his legs wouldn’t hold him and the man in the suit wouldn’t let him leave his bed.

  “It’s okay!” I cried. “Look at me, it’s okay. I’ll be back. You just focus on getting better, okay? I’ll be back, I promise.” What was that saying about never making promises when you’re happy?

  Yeah, screw that.

  “Nova, what…where are you going?” Luke thought to take a look around, and I could only imagine the shock at finding himself in a place like the station.

  But no matter what happened now, he was okay. He was on his feet and he was breathing. Alive. Everything else came second.

  “I need to leave now, but I’ll be back. Please, just get better. We’ll be gone soon. Just get better.”

  It was the last thing they allowed me to say before dragging me out of the door like a dog. And I let them without making a single sound.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Back in the interrogation room—only this time, my hands were cuffed and nobody looked like they wanted to take those damn things off me. And this time, four people were guarding me, standing right behind my back, two dressed in suits and two in some sort of a black uniform with guns and devices and what have you all over them. I had the feeling that the guys in suits were much more dangerous, though.

  I kept my mouth shut as I waited for whoever was coming to interrogate me, hoping it would be Ross and knowing that it wasn’t going to be him. No, this was the Senior Order of Magic themselves, if what others had told me was anything to go by.

  But it didn’t really matter now. A smile stretched my lips as I remembered Luke’s face, eyes open and standing, not exactly on his own but close. And Nash…Nash was going to be okay. I refused to think otherwise and I’d stick to this plan if I wanted to save my sanity.

  Good thing they didn’t give me enough time to mull everything over, before the door opened and two people walked in. The woman wore a white suit, the fabric too expensive to even touch with my dirty and bloody hands. The jacket molded on her shoulders like it was made for them, and the glasses on the bridge of her perfectly straight nose looked no different. She had dark, satin hair cut close to her chin, perfectly straight. Her green eyes seemed to shine as she looked at me, then the man standing behind her pulled the chair across the table, and she sat on it.

  Goosebumps on my arms. The need to break eye contact with her was strong, but I resisted it. And when one of the men standing behind me dragged a chair to her side for her friend to sit in, I was glad I had a reason to look away.

  The man seemed a bit older, his dark eyes even more intense. There was no light in them whatsoever and his thick eyebrows only added to the danger his face screamed. His dark green suit was tailored for his body, too, and the dark red handkerchief on his front pocket gave you the feeling that it had been soaked in blood before ending up there.

  “Nova Vaughn,” the woman said. Her voice reminded me of the ice that left my body when Nash threw his fire at me. “We have some questions we’d like you to answer.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said, afraid my voice would break under the pressure her eyes alone caused me. It didn’t.

  “We’ll see about that,” the woman said, a ghost of a smile on her lips, but it was gone so fast, I couldn’t be sure it was ever there. “We have already spoken with Mr. Ross and Officer Terrin about the…issue.” Fuck. How the hell was I going to know what they’d said? “It seems the fire spirit procedure didn’t go exactly as planned with you, did it? We’ve seen the footage, so there will be no need for lies.”

  “If you’ve seen the footage, why am I here?” Beads of sweat broke on my forehead as I tried to come up with ways to make her tell me more of what Terrin and Ross said, so I could tell her the same story.

  “Because I wanted you here,” was the woman’s answer. “Rest assured that we will conduct all the necessary studies to find out what exactly your magic is, but in the meantime, I do wish to hear about everything that happened from you.”

  Studies? Why did that sound like nightmare-come-alive?

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t know what happened. I never knew about any of this until a week ago. I agreed to the fire spirit procedure to become a salamander, but it…it did something else to me.” Palmer did something else to me. Red Tie did something else to me.

  Demonic mage. The words echoed in my head, the desire to know what they meant burning me with a fire the monster inside me couldn’t turn to ice.

  “Yes, something that enabled you to bring down a demonic vampire all by yourself,” the woman said, raising a thin dark brow.

  “I didn’t do it all by myself.” In fact, I did nothing. It was Nash who sacrificed himself by throwing his fire at me. And it was whatever Palmer had put inside me that turned every flame he threw into ice.

  “Take me through it all, Nova.” It wasn’t a request. It was a demand.

  My choices were limited. There was no way they’d let me keep my mouth shut like I wanted. But, I could ask for something in return.

  “If I tell you everything, will you let me speak to Officer Terrin after we’re done here?” Luke was okay. I’d seen him with my own eyes. But Nash…I needed to know.

  “Of course. In our presence,” the woman said with a nod.

  “Okay.” That was good enough for me.

  So, with a deep breath, I began to tell them about the night at the club, about Red Tie, and about Terrin. About the station, my training, and how we’d decided to go after the devamp on our own. The only things I left out was the part where Ross knew about us going out on our own, and Red Tie’s speech.

  I hadn’t planned on it, but when the time came, the words just refused to come out. Every instinct in my body told me to keep my mouth shut, even knowing that, if Terrin or anybody else had already told them exactly what Red Tie had said about me, I’d be in for a really, really bad time.

  Maybe they could tell I was lying, and maybe they couldn’t, but by the time I finished speaking, my throat was dry and my strength close to zero, so I leaned back in the chair and stared at the table while they decided if my story was trustworthy.

  “Bring Officer Terrin in,” the woman said after what felt like hours, and my heart almost leaped out of my chest when one of the suited men from behind me walked out of the room. “This is not to say that I believe you, Nova, because I don’t. You are hiding something. All of you are, but I haven’t gotten where I am by being impatient. Breaking people is what I do best.” She gave me a bright smile, and the image made me feel like I was looking into the eyes of a wolf. “We will be leaving here in a few moments, so please make you conversation with Officer Terrin short.”

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, my voice now shaking, as if my body just realized that Las Vegas was a dream that was apparently going to remain such, and never become reality.

  “Someplace where you’ll be far away from danger. Someplace safe.”

  “Where is that someplace?” I demanded, terrified suddenly, because I doubted her version of safe and mine were even remotely the same.

  But the woman didn’t get to answer me, if she even intended to. The door opened, and the suited guy came back with Terrin right behind him.

  I j
umped to my feet, relieved to see a familiar face, but two strong hands on my shoulders pushed me down the same second. My chest vibrated, and I was going to try to stand again, but the look on Terrin’s face didn’t let me.

  He was pale, his eyes wide, and his hands slightly shaking. What the hell did that mean?

  “Where is he?” I asked in a whisper, already terrified of his answer.

  “He’s okay, Nova. On the way to New York,” Terrin said, raising his hands at me as if to tell me to stay calm.

  “He’s okay? Are you sure? Have you seen him?”

  Terrin flinched. I knew it. I knew he was lying.

  My heart fell all the way to my heels. “Tell me. Just tell me if he’s dead.” I could handle it. That’s what I told myself, too.

  But Terrin seemed to see right through my bullshit. “No, he’s alive. He’s just…changed.” Then he squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Nova, we’re all fine. You need to do exactly what they tell you to do, okay?”

  I could hardly believe my ears. “They’re going to take me away!”

  I didn’t want that. I wanted to stay here. If I couldn’t be free, the least they could give me was a choice of prisons.

  “And it depends on you whether you are the only one who leaves here today,” the woman said, crossing her hands in front of her chest.

  “You…” you bitch, I wanted to say, but the hands on my shoulders suddenly tightened, and if I’d continued to speak, they would have broken my collarbone.

  I’d been stupid to think that they’d let me choose, or to hope that they wouldn’t be as merciless as everybody else painted them to be. It was laugh-worthy. They were going to take me away to God knew where, I was going to have to follow them with a smile on my face. If I didn’t, she wasn’t going to let it go for Ross, Terrin, Nash…everybody else. It wasn’t even a choice.

  Tears in my eyes. At least my tear ducts weren’t broken like I’d feared. “Take care of Luke for me, will you?” I said to Terrin, realizing that there was no way out of this. “Tell him everything. No secrets.” Luke was the only one I’d want to know everything that had happened, especially the part about me. “Make sure he’s safe and far away from here. Please, just make sure he’s okay.”

  “I will,” Terrin said with a nod, and when the woman stood up, the men behind me pulled me to my feet.

  “Tell him I—”

  “Move.” One of the men cut me off by pushing me toward the door with something hard in between my shoulder blades. Terrin looked terrified.

  “I will, I promise. Just…just be safe.”

  But he and I both knew that, in the presence of the woman with the white suit, safe did not exist.

  Chapter Thirty

  They must have drugged me, because the last thing I remembered was following the woman in the white suit up to the roof of the building, where a helicopter waited for her. I dragged my feet behind while the men pushed me forward, and when I was practically thrown against a seat, my eyes closed and even the deafening sound of the rotor blades couldn’t penetrate the bubble that wrapped around my mind.

  When I woke up, the sky was pitch black. My legs wouldn’t hold me, but they didn’t need to. Two men grabbed me by my shoulders, not caring that the cuffs around my wrists went into my skin when they pulled me up, and they ran forward like I weighed nothing at all.

  My head hurt like hell and it made me dizzy to a point where I couldn’t make out anything around me—just the dark sky.

  They definitely gave me something, because I blinked, and then I was inside, moving fast down a corridor with grey walls and doors of steel on the sides.

  And a blink later, I was in a room.

  When the cuffs were taken off of me by someone, I’d have cried with joy had I had the strength.

  I still couldn’t see very well, but the slap on my face certainly helped in clearing my head. My jaw hurt now, too. Whoever had slapped me hadn’t been gentle.

  It was the man with the dark eyes and the green suit from the interrogation room, only now, he was smiling. The woman was gone, but the four other men weren’t.

  The room they’d put me in was square, dark, and the walls seemed to close in on me every time I looked at them. A small window was on my left, and the bed they’d sat me on was set in crisp white sheets. Other than that, there was a table and a chair, and there was a black bag on top of it. My black bag, the one I’d left at the station in Mississippi before going after the devamps.

  “Where am I?” My voice was dry and hoarse, as if I’d slept for hours, but I didn’t feel any better than before.

  “In New York,” the man said. His voice was hard and smooth at the same time, both melodic, and dark enough to send anyone running. “This will be your room from now on. Waking time is seven. Your team will be here to pick you up for breakfast and take you through the rest of your day.”

  “I can get to breakfast on my own if you show me—”

  “There is only one rule here, Miss Vaughn, one that applies to everyone without exception: no talking.”

  Leaving me with my mouth open, the man turned around and left the room, together with the four others. The door groaned when they pushed it shut. I didn’t even breath until I heard the lock turn.

  It took me quite a while to come to terms with what I was seeing and manage to move my body again. With shaking legs, I went to get my bag before practically falling onto the bed again. Everything was in there, just as I’d left it. My diary, my lipsticks, two hair ties and my wallet—except the things in it. All of it was gone, including my ID.

  Too shocked to cry, I grabbed the diary in my hands and held it to my chest when I lay down on my back. The ceiling was white, not a crack in it, and on its surface, I could paint Luke’s face with the bright colors of my imagination.

  I’d done it. I saved him. He was alive.

  And Nash was alive, too. I didn’t care how he’d changed. He was breathing. As long as there is life, there are options. At least that’s what Luke used to tell me.

  When I closed my eyes, I tried my hardest to come to terms with how my life had changed in eight days. I tried to accept that the future was never going to look the way I’d imagined it since I was a little girl. But, like always, I was going to play the hand that was dealt to me, because I had no other choice.

  At the first sign of sleep, either minutes or hours later, one thought stayed with me:

  The next morning, I was about to enter the rest of my life, and I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t going to like it.

  _________________________

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  Also by D.N. Hoxa

  ———————————

  Winter Wayne (Ongoing)

  Bone Witch

  Bone Coven

  Bone Magic

  Bone Spell (Coming Soon)

  Morta Fox Trilogy (Complete)

  Heartbeat

  Reclaimed

  Unchanged

  Starlight Saga (Complete)

  Assassin

  Villain

  Sinner

  Savior

  Chronicles of the Demon Hunter

  A Soul's Worth

  Book Two (Coming Soon)

  Book Three (Coming Soon)

  Water Wielders

  Trapped

  Book Two (Coming Soon)

  Book Three (Coming Soon)

 

 

 
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