Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ELLISON
The darkness is suffocating. I can hear my mother’s sobs. My father’s screams.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck?” Landon repeats from where he’s holding my wrist, his voice cutting through my thoughts and pulling me out of them.
“Don’t let go of me,” I say.
“I’m not planning on it. August? Where’s August? He was right behind me. That stubborn asshole ran forward to help the other stubborn asshole. Why does Deus keep throwing himself headfirst into danger? He needs an intervention!”
“I don’t think he’s going to change,” I say as I anxiously think about what I’d seen before the world had gone black. That… blade or whatever it was had torn right through the one man and had started toward Asmodeus… did he get away in time?
“So we know that it’s a manipulation of our minds, right?” Landon asks. “I can’t grab on to anything. Like the table that I know was right here is no longer here. I can’t move it or manipulate it.”
“I’m going to send my illusions out and see what happens,” I say.
“Are you sending them out in this mind fuck or out in the real world?”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it might offer us some control.”
Landon jumps and turns when he hears a clacking noise. “You hear that?”
“I do. I don’t know what’s inside here, but I need you to watch my back while I jump into my illusions.”
“Got it,” Landon says as I drop my mind into my illusion and find that I can see the room around us.
All of us are frozen in place where we stand.
Landon is still beside August but wherever we are, Landon can’t seem to reach him.
The only reason we appear to be in the same darkness is because he’d been touching me before it happened.
My eyes go to Asmodeus who is standing near the dead man, relief washing through me that he appears to be okay. Quickly, I move toward him. Unlike the others who seem petrified where they stand, I see a shift in Asmodeus’s stance when I come close.
And then he turns fast and an arm slides around my throat.
“Asmodeus, it’s me,” I snap.
He freezes but doesn’t pull away, just makes the hold significantly less threatening. “I can sense you’re here, but I can’t see you. The only thing I can see is darkness.”
The hand on the real me tightens and I hear Landon calling me as I split my attention between my real self and the illusion.
“What is it?” I ask.
“There’s someone in here with us. You smell that? I can smell blood,” Landon says anxiously.
“It’s probably from the dead guy by the door,” I assure him. “There’s no one else in this room with us. I found Asmodeus and he can move. Can you move?”
It’s so strange how I can move around in the depths of the darkness, but out here in the real world, I’m not moving at all. It’s like everything I’m doing is just in my very own mind.
I switch my attention back to Asmodeus. “How are you moving?”
“The darkness isn’t the real world. Don’t bother moving there. You have to pull your mind from the depths.” He says it like this is something simple to do. “The only issue is that I still can’t seem to see.”
“But I can,” I say a second before I see August and Lex go flying back.
I dash to help and realize that Landon has thrown the table at them as chairs and food go flying. Unable to stabilize themselves, they fall and hit the ground on their backs, but still, they don’t move or react.
“Landon, stop!” I shout, throwing all of my attention back to the me in the darkness just as I see the man who’d been cut in half rush Landon.
It’s like what is happening out in the real world is completely different from what’s happening in this darkness.
In here, Landon is trying to fend off a villain, but in the real world, there’s no one there and the people he’s attacking are his own.
“Landon, stop! There’s no one there,” I say. “Whoever is controlling this power is making you see things so you’ll attack the others.”
He freezes. “What do you mean? Did I hurt someone?”
“No, they’re fine… but just… don’t fight back.”
Landon looks nervous as the man nears us, and I immediately realize why he chose to fight back. I would have too. Anxiety eats at me that I’m wrong and that Landon is going to get hurt if he doesn’t defend himself.
I slip in front of Landon in case I’m wrong but when he slams into me… nothing happens. Nothing at all.
I drop into my illusion just in time to see August pummel me to the ground. I use the illusion to shove him back.
“August, it’s not real! It’s not real!” I shout, but he doesn’t seem to hear me as he punches me in the face. Thankfully, it’s the illusion he hits because if it wasn’t, with his strength, I’m afraid he’d have broken something. But it doesn’t keep him from going at Landon again.
I send out more illusions with the hope of keeping everyone away from each other before I grab on to Asmodeus.
“We need to stop them.”
“I can hear their thoughts,” a voice behind me says.
I look back at Nolan, who continues, “She’s struggling to fuck with my mind. The drugs I’m on are keeping me slightly in control. I’ll do my best to keep our group from attacking each other. I don’t think I can stop her, but I know that she’s in the west wing. I can hear her words.”
“Asmodeus… do you need your eyes to fight?”
“I once wore a blindfold for a week while five assassins were sent after me,” Asmodeus says. “No one attacked me for the first four days, driving paranoia into me until I began to doubt every sound, but they didn’t get the best of me.”
“Why?” I ask.
“In case something like this happened, of course,” he says as he gives me a thumbs-up. “Come, be my eyes.”
I anxiously look back at the others, a bit worried about leaving them, but having to trust that the faster we end this, the faster they’ll find safety.