by Sadie Moss
“Elliot, no!” Roman gets between us, standing above Cam, his legs on either side of his fallen friend. Cam makes a surprised sound—I don’t think he realized I was looming over him. “Reckless, don’t do this. Stop mirroring. Let go.”
But I have to. I’m hungry, I’m so hungry—
Elle, no. It’s Asher, in my head. Don’t. Let go. It’s okay.
I’m so hungry, Asher. I’m so hungry. I want it. I can’t even feel anymore, I just—I want—
Shh, it’s okay. Let go and you won’t be hungry.
I can feel the men circling me. Asher. Roman. Dmitri. And on the ground, gazing up at me, Cam.
They can’t touch me while I’m like this because I’ll just drain their life, but they want to. They want to stop me. Why? Don’t they want me to stop being hungry? Don’t they want me to be full and happy? Because they love me?
“That’s right,” Asher says out loud, clearly still reading my thoughts. His voice is warm and soft. “We want you to be happy because we love you, and you will be happy if you stop mirroring Roman and let go. I promise, Elle. We’ll always do what we can to make you happy. We love you, and you love us.”
“Come on,” Cam murmurs. He’s still sprawled on the rooftop in front of me. “Come on, Sin, stop mirroring him.”
Roman starts backing away, and I have a vague notion that he’s trying to get far enough back that I can no longer mirror him. Cam’s still right there, and I’m still so hungry—
Taking a lurching step forward, I extend a hand toward Cam, the hunger rising up inside me like a beast that will gnaw right through my skin to get what it wants.
I expect to see the same things on Cam’s face that I saw on Agustin’s. Terror. Raw fear. Desperation.
But instead, when I meet his gaze, his blue eyes are soft and warm. There’s no fear in them, just… love.
“You won’t hurt me, Sin,” he murmurs, shaking his head slightly. “I know you won’t.”
And then he reaches for me.
His hand lifts to reach toward mine as mine extends down toward him, and a flash of panic jolts through me like a thousand watts of electricity. If we touch, I’ll kill him. What is he doing?!
The shock to my system snaps me out of my trance a little bit.
But it’s enough.
Enough that I manage to yank my hand back before Cam’s fingertips brush mine.
Enough that the real me—flawed and reckless and stubborn as she is—can force her way back to the surface, shoving away the dark hunger.
Finally, I let go and stop mirroring.
It’s like some monster I didn’t even know had a hold on me releases me. Chains I didn’t know were wrapped around me fall off, and I sink to my knees, shaking from head to toe.
“Holy… shit,” I choke out.
That was—awful. I’ve never experienced anything like it, and I sure as fuck hope I never do again. I almost killed Cam.
Oh, God.
“Cam!”
The word is torn from my lips as my gaze flies up to land on him. He’s almost worked his way out from underneath the earth that trapped him, but I crawl forward to help him as much as I can, scrabbling at the chunks of rock and shoving them aside.
As soon as he’s clear, I throw my arms around him, burying my face in his neck as I cling to him in a loose, careful hug. I want to wrap my arms around him so tightly it would take a crowbar to separate us, but his arm is broken, and I don’t want to hurt it.
“I almost—” I can’t say the words. I can’t breathe. “Almost—”
“No, you didn’t.” His voice is low, and even though he can’t hug me back properly, he buries his face in my hair. Only now can I hear a hint of fear lingering in his voice. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me, Sin. I knew it.”
He didn’t know. He couldn’t have. Hell, I didn’t know. That death touch magic was raging so strongly inside me that I was hardly more than a puppet obeying its will.
But he trusted me anyway.
He believed in me.
Tears burn my eyes, and I kiss his neck, not even caring that he’s sweaty and grimy and streaked with blood. It’s Cam. And he’s alive.
“I love you,” I mutter. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” There’s a touch of humor in his voice now, and I feel his lips press against my hair. “For saving the day?”
A sound that’s part scoff, part laugh, and part sob escapes my lips.
Roman comes hurrying back, and he gets an arm under Cam’s, helping him stand as Dmitri pulls me to my feet. I hug the dark-haired mage tightly, swaying, and I realize for the first time just how fucking exhausted I am. Waking everyone up and then using the death touch, and the fight with Agustin before that, has left me wiped.
Asher grabs me next, and I sink into him, letting him kiss me and smooth my hair back from my face, and finally, Roman pulls me into a crushing embrace. I wrap my arms around his broad back, feeling his muscles shift under my palms as he breathes deeply.
“I—I understand,” I whisper, and he tightens his grip on me and presses his lips to my hair, the stubble on his cheek scraping against my temple.
God, do I understand. In the grip of that fierce, consuming hunger, all logic fled, and I can’t even imagine being a child and experiencing something like that. The only thing that snapped him out of it was looking around and seeing his family dead.
Roman nods, but he doesn’t release me. I can’t see his face, but I feel the movement of his cheek against my temple. Dmitri and Cam limp up to join us, wrapping their arms around us as much as they can, and Asher presses in close too. And for a moment, we all just hold each other like that.
Like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
Chapter 25
If this were a movie, maybe this would be where the music would swell and the film would end, cut to credits and all that. But this isn’t a movie, and we just destroyed half my damn school.
The guys and I slowly disentangle from each other and turn to face the other people who made it up onto the roof to fight with us. Kendal steps forward. She’s got what look like claw marks on one of her arms, her face is white, and her lip is split. I hug her carefully, avoiding her bad arm.
“You did good,” I tell her, because Kendal’s not exactly aggressive or a fighter—she’s the opposite, honestly—and it means a lot to me that she came here and threw herself into the fray anyway.
Kendal gives me a wan smile. “You did it,” she tells me, her voice a hoarse whisper, either from exhaustion or pain. Maybe both. “That was amazing.”
I’m not sure if I’d call it amazing, personally. It was messy and scary and almost ended in horrible tragedy. But… I’m glad she thinks so.
We leave the destruction as it is, along with Agustin’s shriveled body. We’re all fucking dead on our feet, bruised and battered, and we can clean up later. We limp—literally—downstairs, everyone supporting each other. My throat hurts when I swallow, and it feels bruised and tight where Agustin grabbed it. Everybody’s bleeding from somewhere, most of us from multiple places.
When we finally reach the first floor and head outside, the fight on the ground is over, and everyone’s kind of gathered in a group to wait for us. There are dead demons and mages everywhere, and I see a few dead Unpredictables, which makes my heart crawl up into my throat and threatens to strangle me. I don’t see anyone I recognize, which makes me selfishly relieved, but the fact that we lost anyone at all is heartbreaking.
It’s not as many casualties as I’d feared though. I didn’t say this to anyone because I didn’t want to put the thought in anybody’s mind, but… I honestly was scared that we might all die today. That the insane plan we’d cooked up was nothing more than a suicide mission, and that I would’ve incited all these people to fight only to lose their lives.
But it’s not nearly as bad as all that. I start to relax a little as the people gathered before the front steps all turn and watch us walk out of Wellwood Hall.
Right at the front of the crowd is Maddy.
Justin’s supporting her—she’s got what looks like a bad burn on one of her legs, and she can’t seem to put all her weight on it—so I’m careful when I walk up and hug her. Maddy flings her arms around me, clinging tightly, and I feel her chest heave with a sob.
“It’s okay,” I murmur, my throat closing, making it hard to speak. “It’s okay, Mads. I’m here. I’m safe. It’s all over. I’m sorry about the, er, the water thing.”
She chokes out another sob and punches my arm lightly, then nods into my neck. I feel my shoulder getting wet, and I hold her and keep shushing her, soothing her, until at last she pulls away and lets Justin support her again.
Justin and I shake hands. He looks a little banged up, but nothing too bad. In the crowd I see Erin and Tandy, Tom, Tamlin, Hardwick—even Alyssa, Megan, and Cristina. Those three look… cowed, I guess you could say, a little nervous as they look at me. Like they know they don’t really have a right to be staring at me like this after the way they behaved.
I nod respectfully at them. They may be bitchy and shallow, but they stepped up in the end and did what they could to fight the good fight. We’re never going to be friends, and I’m not going to be thrilled to see them at a party, but when the chips were down, we were on the same side. That’s what matters right now.
The three of them look surprised and nod back at me, then look away. I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Maybe they wouldn’t be so gracious in my shoes—and I admit, it’s tempting to rub it in their faces—but I’m not sinking to their level.
As the guys and I make our way through the crowd, Tamlin and Hardwick walk up to us. Hardwick looks like he got hit full blast by a smoke bomb or something. Ash and soot cover him from head to toe, and for once, Tamlin is in complete disarray, her hair a mess, her clothes singed and smudged with dirt and blood.
“You all right?” Hardwick asks, eyeing all of us with concern. I think we’ll always be students to him, people he needs to look out for and protect, even if all the men have graduated and I might possibly be more powerful than he is.
I nod. “Yeah. We took care of it.”
And if that isn’t the nicest-sounding euphemism for “we killed an evil, maniacal mage”, I don’t know what is.
Hardwick smiles at me and claps me on the shoulder. “We’re all quite proud of you, Elliot.”
A little cloud of dust rises up from his arm at the sharp movement, and I have to swallow down a lump in my throat. “Thank you, sir.”
I’m not sure if I’ve ever called Hardwick “sir” and really meant it, but I do now. I underestimated him and kind of dismissed him sometimes, but at heart, he’s an incredibly brave, dedicated person who was ready to do whatever it took to help make a better future for us.
Tamlin steps forward and hugs me. I hug her back without hesitation this time, expecting it and glad for it. I still think it would feel weird to address her by anything other than her last name, but I’m calling it—we’re friends now. We’ve been through enough shit together that even if I’m still technically her student, our relationship has evolved beyond that too.
“The Circuit members who were here have woken up,” she tells me. “You’ll want to talk to them. They’re coming out of the infirmary now.”
As if walking around the abandoned school grounds as we prepped for the fight wasn’t creepy enough, we found several Circuit officials in the same kind of stasis as the ones at the holding facility had fallen into. A few members of the Griffin healing staff who came to fight brought them all in the infirmary, and someone stayed behind to monitor them during the battle.
“Good.” I glance over in the direction of the building on the west side of campus. “How many are there?”
“Close to a dozen. They were left behind after we were loaded onto the buses and taken to the holding facility. I think they were supposed to make sure everything was kept in order, so that we could have it ready when we got back or that it was prepared to be shut down properly. The Circuit didn’t yet know what they were going to do, so they wanted people on site and prepared for whichever. They fell asleep just like everyone else and, now…”
“Could someone explain what the fuck is happening?” somebody yells.
Tamlin winces. “That would be one of them, I’m sure.”
With the men flanking me, we walk through the crowd, making our way across the quad to where a bunch of dazed and exhausted-looking Circuit officials are standing. They’re being counseled by Brodie, who has half of his shirt missing from either the claws of some monster or a fireball or maybe a combination, I honestly can’t tell.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Brodie turns to look at me, relief clear on his face. “Ah, there you are. Elliot, this is—” He gestures toward the officials, not bothering to introduce them all by name. “Hey, guys, this is Elliot. She’s the one I was telling you about, I’m sure you all know her.”
The Circuit officials all gaze at me with various levels of recognition and suspicion. I glare back at them, raising an eyebrow. I am so not in the mood to be treated like I did something wrong here. Not after I just risked my life saving all of them. I could’ve left them in those damn comas.
“Elliot is the one who got rid of Agustin,” Brodie adds. “He was the one who was causing all the problems at Griffin, and I can show you—well, I don’t have it on me right this second, but I can show you the numbers—he made Unpredictables disappear for years, and he was the one attacking us. He put you all into comas—”
“Eighty-five percent of the government was put out of commission,” Hardwick says.
“You just all woke up feeling woozy, right?” Brodie raises his eyebrows, his expression earnest. “That’s because you’ve been in stasis for the past several weeks.”
The Circuit officials all nod slowly, looking down at themselves as if they’re expecting to find that cobwebs grew on them, or like they’re checking to make sure everything’s still where they left it.
“It was Griffin’s students and alumni that defeated this threat,” Hardwick says. He has that “stern dad” tone in his voice, the kind that says he’s not going to back down on this. “You know that there was one individual who was attacking us and our school. Fomenting prejudice against Unpredictables and stirring up trouble in the government and in our society. You know that this person posed a threat. He would’ve only become a greater threat, and we have video documentation to prove it. But we stopped him. We fought back. Especially Elliot.”
Hoo boy. I wave awkwardly, and then wince inwardly, because waving? Really? Ugh. You’d think after all this time, I’d be somewhat used to this whole being put in the spotlight thing, but nope.
Hardwick seems to wait for me to explain, but when I just blink at him silently because I have no idea what I’m supposed to say, or how to say it without sounding arrogant, he speaks up again.
“Elliot has mirroring powers. She’s the only one with them, as far as we know. Unique even to the Unpredictable community. She can get close to a person and use their powers, and she used Agustin’s to wake you all back up from the stasis that he’d put you in. Without Elliot, you might very well have stayed that way forever.”
The officials all visibly react to that, eyes widening, heads jerking back.
“He had some contact with each of you personally,” I explain. “He needed to, in order to set the spell. And then it was kind of like a web in his mind, and he could just activate it and send you all to sleep. If we’d just killed him without deactivating that web, then I think you all would’ve been stuck that way permanently. The switch had to be flipped back, if that makes sense.”
“You’re all awake and alive thanks to her,” Dmitri growls from behind me.
The Circuit members all look at each other, an unspoken, uncomfortable energy passing between them. They seem a little nervous, shuffling their feet and murmuring as if they’re coming to grips with the fact that an Unpredicta
ble, and one that got a hell of a lot of shit from all of them, is the one who saved their asses.
“Oh, no, please. Groveling isn’t necessary,” Cam says dryly. He’s cradling his broken arm, and his face is still bloody, but some of the color is starting to return to his cheeks.
At that, at last, the officials start to thank me and to thank the rest of us. They all seem to be a bit in shock, but one recovers faster than the others and looks a little more in charge than the rest. He reminds me a bit of Aurora, with that same air of natural authority, like he could walk into a room and know that everyone in it will do as he says.
I hope Aurora’s okay, actually. We moved the Circuit officials out of the Unpredictable holding facility when we left, so she wasn’t there when Agustin sent his second attack. But I hope she’s woken up too. She’s not my favorite person, but she is a good person. She didn’t deserve this any more than anyone else.
“Excuse me?” I step up to the man who seems to be in charge and clear my throat.
He gives me an odd look. “Miss Sinclair. We’ve heard of you. Thank you for your service.”
“I wasn’t in the armed forces, you can cut that out.” I try to keep from sounding too curt, but I’m not sure I’m all that successful. “Listen. I had a deal with the Circuit. If I dealt with Agustin, you guys would let Griffin reopen. Well, I’ve dealt with him. He’s gone. Permanently. I didn’t just find him for you, I didn’t just bring him to you in handcuffs, I got rid of him.”
Maybe this is what Hardwick was waiting for me to say. This was a deal I struck with the government, after all, so maybe he wanted to let me be the one to remind them of it.
“So when can Griffin reopen?” I ask, standing a little taller. “I held up my end of the bargain, I took care of Agustin and proved that Unpredictables weren’t the threat, he was. So, are you going to hold up your end?”
The guy looks at me with raised eyebrows, then turns and pointedly looks at the holes and scorch marks in the buildings, the ruined tower up on the roof, the caved-in walls, and the destroyed quad before glancing back at me.