Chapter 48 #2
“No,” I said bluntly. “I didn’t.”
Screams and shouts still flung left and right from behind us as Garvis, Barberro, Nara, and stray villagers still fought the other exiled ones with their various weapons.
There wasn’t time for pleasantries or heartfelt explanations on why I didn’t want to murder a classmate—even if she’d been a horrible one who’d wanted to murder me.
“You’d better get her somewhere safe and tend to those wounds if you don’t want her to die, though,” I added quickly, nodding down at that oozing wound on Jenia’s forehead and the blood leaking from the corners of her mouth.
“There’s a bunker on the east side of the village.
” I pointed in the same direction the others had gone earlier, and Steeler’s gentle nod in my head, the skim of his fingers on my lower back, told me I was right before I could even ask him for confirmation.
“Dazmine Temperton’s there. She’ll help you.
” When Kimber’s eyes flared, I pressed, “No matter how she and Jenia left off, she’ll help you. ”
A single nod was all Kimber could seem to manage. But as she looped an arm around Jenia’s waist and hoisted her up on quaking legs, I felt a whisper in my head. Just for me.
The rest of the Good Council is here, Kimber told me, her Mind Manipulating voice like a skewer through my brain: unwelcome but straight to the point.
They’re sitting in their carriages on the edge of the clifftop, observing the results of their…
She winced. Of their test. I managed to slip away, but Dyonisia is going to realize he’s here soon.
Her gaze flicked, for the first time, to Steeler, who still had a hand against my lower back and was watching her retreat with palpable impatience simmering beneath his skin.
He didn’t trust her enough not to attack us as soon as our backs were turned, apparently, but he was already itching to go help the others.
Dyonisia gave me a second power when I became suspicious of his connection to the other four and reported my suspicions to her in my fourth year at the Institute, Kimber continued in my head, urgency smothering her tone, as if she were begging me to understand.
She wanted me to spy on his mind… but he broke up with me soon after, and I wasn’t ever strong enough to break past all of his barriers.
Then you came along, and did what I could not.
She opened her eyes, looking pained.
I didn’t realize that Dyonisia was playing me, feeding into my hatred, until they Branded Jenia in the sick bay…
they gave her Mind Manipulating, not to recruit her, but to see if she could recover any of her missing memories of that day in the jungle.
Dyonisia didn’t care that it might make her go insane.
She only cared about figuring out how he’d escaped her clutches.
Another subtle nod at Steeler, one that he noticed with a narrowing of his eyes, distrust and loathing emitting from him like the smoke around us.
Dyonisia will not let him escape again, Kimber finished.
When she finally turned and hobbled off with her arm slung around her sister and her parakeet fluttering after her, I recognized those words for what they were.
Not a threat, but a plea—from one woman who had once loved a male to another who…
I let the rest of that thought bleed into my subconscious so that I could focus on the point of her message.
Protect him.
Save him.
At that moment, Barberro bellowed out a Sorronian curse even louder than the shrieks of monsters, and Steeler and I whirled toward him.
One of the exiled monsters with a mouthful of sharp, needle-like teeth had clamped down on his arm, impaling it in three dozen places up to his elbow.
Next to him, Nara screamed as her own arm went limp.
Phantom pain, I realized. From their mating bond.
“Go,” I hissed at Steeler.
It seemed I was always telling him that when all I wanted was for him to stay. But there was no denying I was holding him back. With his Walking power, he could have all of these monsters disarmed in minutes, and Barberro needed help now.
Steeler didn’t need to be told twice. He only flashed me a single look that seemed to beg a thousand things at once before he disappeared and reformed on the other end of the square, already a blur of movement.
I flicked my attention to Garvis, who was battling a boar-like monster in a dance that moved closer and closer to where I stood. It looked like he’d already mutilated three of the boar’s brands with his machete—only the left shoulder and forehead still to go.
When the boar suddenly erupted with a new set of tusks along either side of its body, one of them narrowly missing Garvis’s abdomen, I hurled the knife in my hand.
The blade embedded in the monster’s snout. It twisted in a furious circle in a futile attempt to dislodge it, giving Garvis enough time to jump back and make eye contact with me for a second that seemed to waver on the brink of time.
There’s something I need to do, I shot into his head. If Steeler realizes I’m gone, tell him I’ll be right back.
Rayna, I don’t think that’s a good—
Behind you!
Garvis whirled back to the boar as it charged him again.
I didn’t waste another drop of the time I felt ticking in my veins.
I ran.
Down a side street where I batted swirls of white-hot ashes out of my way, coughing as I went. Up an avenue that climbed a ridge of the cliff, bordered by homes with glass that had long shattered. Toward the vague outline of the jungle I could make out beyond the veil of smoke.
Finally, when the blast of heat had faded behind me and the first unburnt weed appeared in the cracks of the cobblestone, I dropped to my knees and began to crawl, searching, searching, searching…
There. A scurrying dot of brightest red.
“You,” I panted, “can you help me? I need to send a message.”
I didn’t realize I was sweating until a single drop rolled off my nose and splatted onto the stone right beside the fire ant.
It paused its scurrying long enough to lift its antennas in my direction. I lowered my ear to hear its rasping answer better.
“What message do you need to send?”
Oh, thank God for my Wild Whispering power.
I pressed my finger to the ground long enough for the ant to crawl onto my palm, which I lifted to eye-level so that it wouldn’t miss a single sound.
Then, after I’d described the specific smells of who I wanted to contact, I let out the words I never thought would leave my lips.
“Now. I need help now.”
I could almost feel the hive mind start to work, the red ant in my palm immediately sending out electrical signals to its nearest colonist. A tingling kind of energy zipped off my skin, and then it was gone.
“Thank you,” I told the ant. “Thank you.”
I deposited it gently back into the crack of the cobblestone before hurrying back downhill with my heartbeat pumping furiously in my mouth. How long would it take for the message to reach the other end of the island? How long would it take for them to come?
The smoke was actually thinning out by the time I made it back to the village square.
In the shadows of two smoldering buildings, I watched Garvis finally slice off the boar’s last brand, watched the boar crumple into the man he’d been. On the opposite end, Nara was covering Barberro’s body with her own, hissing at any monster who so much as looked his way.
Steeler himself was a whirlwind of wrath and glinting sword, his body moving in such a beautifully hypnotizing way that I had to remind myself to exhale.
He’d already taken down three of the monsters by himself, their collapsed forms cowering against their own bloodstains on the cobblestone… but alive. They were alive.
He was alive. Not a single speck of blood on his skin was his own.
Just as I felt my mouth hook up in its first smile since the lighthouse, something else seemed to hook around my torso.
And tug me backward.
A single breath whooshed out of me at the sudden pressure, snagging Garvis’s attention. I’d barely managed to make contact with the confusion in his eyes that mirrored my own when that invisible hook reeled me around a corner, up an even narrower alleyway, out of sight.
It wasn’t until it had dragged me up against a dead-end slab of blackened brick that the pressure around my torso loosened. I gasped for air as a figure stepped into my field of view.
Kitterfol Lexington kept his hands casually clasped behind his back, his irises dancing with glee, as he strolled toward me.
I didn’t even have time to grab a new knife and hurl it. As soon as my fingers twitched toward my sheath, every single blade—the crescent one included—zipped out of their pockets and rose into the air, spinning inward to face me instead.
“The benefits of a second power,” Lexington said. His eyes never unstuck themselves from mine as he lifted his arm and his sleeve fell away to reveal the imprint hidden on that part of his skin.
I didn’t dare squirm or move an inch. Not with my own knives hovering in a cage around me, keeping my back firmly against the wall.
Object Summoning. Lexington’s second power was Object Summoning, and now past events were reshaping themselves in my mind.
That time he and I had gone soaring up and over the cliffs, back to the Testing Center, after Steeler had left me last year—I’d assumed it was another Summoner in the group doing the heavy lifting, but no, that had been Lexington.
Just as it had been Lexington who’d cranked everyone’s heads away from us in the Wild Whisperer dining hall, not with Mind Manipulating as I’d suspected, but with the same magic my fathers had always treated with such tenderness and care.
I should have known as soon as those Element Wielder doors had blasted open at the ball last night…
not with the kick of a violent foot, but with this.
This extra hidden power he kept tucked away.
This extra hidden power that might just defeat both of mine.
Lexington didn’t need to lift a finger or break a sweat to keep my knives airborne. In fact, he almost looked… contemplative. As if he had all the time in the world to stand and observe me like a monkey in a sharp, glinting cage.
“I wonder—how did you manage to lie to me?” he asked, the stringy braids in his hair falling to the side with a slight tilt of his head.
“I began to suspect that you were, but still… I couldn’t sense it in the way I can with everyone else.
In fact, I begged Dyonisia to attack Hallow’s Perch instead of Cardina today, just because I had a suspicion and wanted to see if you would prove me right.
Which, you did.” He gestured at me. “Throwing yourself into danger for the traitor you definitely do love.”
I forced my voice to maintain a gritty level of fear rather than the boiling hatred that seared the inside of it instead.
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“Oh, none of that, girl.” Lexington waved a hand. “You and I both know you did. Were the pills even real? Or did Steeler plant another fabricated memory in your abysmal wasteland of a brain?”
The insult landed like the blunt edge of a sword to my gut. Abysmal wasteland. That’s what I was right now, wasn’t I? Empty and alone. My eyes were scampering over Lexington’s shoulder, desperate for a certain body to materialize behind him at any moment.
But Steeler and I… we weren’t vigates. He couldn’t intuitively sense my distress like Nara had sensed Barberro’s. And right now, he was still fighting monsters in the village square, his focus trained on the immediate threats before him.
I redirected my own focus to Lexington’s face, flexing my blockade like a bubble around me.
The fire had pushed away all the wildlife in the area, so my Wild Whispering power wouldn’t be of any use to me right now.
I’d have to rely on Mind Manipulating. If I could just slip into Lexington’s mind and command him to let me go…
Lexington himself squinted at me, taking a step closer.
“Did you know that Dyonisia has a strict no-killing policy when it comes to you? I can’t slice your throat open right now, or she will slice open mine for disobeying. But there is a part of Mind Manipulating that’s not taught at the Institute…”
Another step closer. I lowered my blockade a notch, and my knees buckled at the cascade of ugly, slimy thoughts that barreled into me.
“I can destroy your consciousness,” Lexington continued, the glee in his irises dancing with mania. “Your body will live, but your mind…well, you will be dead in the ways that matter but alive in the ways that don’t. Then both Dyonisia and I will get what we want.”
The rest of his thoughts were too slippery for me to grab onto. I couldn’t dive into a rotten cesspool like that, squirming and writhing with so much hatred and malice. I just couldn’t.
“Please don’t.”
My knives only floated toward me, one of the tips grazing my nose.
“Please don’t,” Lexington mimicked in a high-pitched warble. “It’s too late for manners, girl. No matter how you did it, you lied to me. And the greatest Mind Manipulator in the world does not tolerate liars.”
Then he lunged into my mind.