Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Kit
“Kit. Kit.”
The urgent whisper scraped across my returning consciousness, and my eyes popped open. I blinked at the dusk sky, almost twilight, a smattering of stars dotting the deep blue expanse. Every nerve in my body was either burning or throbbing.
A strange sound registered in my ears. It wasn’t a shout or a wail, but something … something that was both yet neither.
“Kit!”
I jolted, and my gaze swung sideways. Lienna was crouched over me, leaning close, her eyes wide.
“Can you get up?” she whispered.
Fear lurked in her expression. I gathered myself and, with Lienna’s arm under my shoulders, forced my aching body to sit.
The remains of the table I’d used as a shield covered my legs, debris spearing the half-destroyed wood. Shards of glass, broken dinnerware, and splintered cabinetry were scattered among the scrubby brown grass surrounding me. A mangled coffee maker rested a foot from where my head had been.
I was no longer inside Marsha’s home. Kade had blown me and the entire back wall of the kitchen through the bay window and out onto the small yard. The gas range from the kitchen lay on its side about twenty feet past where I’d landed.
My numb brain sparked with the realization that I wasn’t dead—and that meant Kade would resume killing me at any moment.
I staggered to my feet, and Lienna braced me.
My woozy gaze fell on the collapsed hole where the bay window had been.
Light from the living room illuminated the wreckage of Marsha’s formerly tidy kitchen.
The fridge hadn’t made it through the opening.
It stuck halfway out, caught on the timber frame, the freezer door hanging open.
A broad-shouldered silhouette was crouched in the opening—and cradled in his arms was another figure, slim and frail. Unmoving.
I focused my clairsentience. Kade’s blazing archmythic brain was as bright as ever, but that was the only mind I could sense in the house.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
The strange, guttural wail coming from Kade’s silhouette deepened, and his mind unleashed a tumultuous cyclone of anguish and rage that saturated every nook and cranny of the psychic spectrum.
I could feel it again—that rushing sensation of energy spiraling toward Kade.
“Run,” I said as the power overwhelmed my senses. “We need to run.”
Stooping, Lienna grabbed the black case sitting on the ground beside her. I forced my bruised body to sprint across the yard, dodging remnants of the kitchen. We vaulted over a short stone fence and landed on the strip of grass between Marsha’s property and the beach.
“You have it,” I gasped.
“Found it in a safe in the crawlspace.” She hefted the case as she ran. “Didn’t you get my signal?”
“Yeah.” I’d seen the flickering light outside the window. “I just needed to make sure.”
Behind us, the wailing voice turned to a bellow—and an orange fireball erupted into twenty-foot flames that licked at the darkening sky.
Lienna shot an alarmed look over her shoulder, then picked up speed. We sped along the beach, past terracotta-roofed homes and hedge-lined yards. The breeze was frigid, the sleepy Mediterranean fishing village silent and dark, no lights on the shoreline to illuminate our escape.
The ground trembled.
We reached the end of the beach and jumped over a curb onto a gravel lot surrounding a small marina protected by a jetty of rocks and concrete. The porch light from an oceanfront home shone through the olive trees on the shore, casting shadows on the handful of boats moored in the black water.
Lienna and I rushed across the lot and onto the dock on one side of the marina.
At the end, a thirty-five-foot speedboat waited.
I went for the mooring lines while Lienna jumped into the cockpit.
As I yanked at the first rope, agony pierced my right hand, reminding me that it was broken.
I clenched my jaw, freed the lines, and swung onto the deck as the two outboard motors roared to life.
Morris!
The primal howl hit my brain like a sledgehammer. A dark figure with Kade’s broad shoulders had reached the edge of the gravel lot. Fire burned across his arms. Electricity crackled over the power lines as he passed.
I’m going to fucking kill you, Morris! I will burn you alive!
“Hurry!” I yelled over the motors, gripping the metal railing that ran around the boat with my left hand, the right throbbing incessantly now that I’d noticed it again.
Lienna nudged the throttle forward, maneuvering us out into the open water.
Kade had made it to the marina. That maelstrom of inhuman fury and agony radiating from his mind hadn’t diminished even a scrap. If anything, it was stronger than before, like a thermonuclear warhead in a constant state of detonation.
“Faster!” I yelled at Lienna, scrambling into the seat beside her but keeping my neck twisted to watch Kade.
Water surged from behind our boat, and the long V-shaped bow tilted up, slamming through each wave so hard that the windscreen couldn’t protect us from the icy spray.
Kade reached the end of the dock, his raging silhouette shrinking by the second.
He stood there, watching—then the dock exploded as if someone had stuffed a stick of dynamite in it.
The earth heaved, uprooting the olive trees.
Water shot upward in fifteen-foot geysers, and the other moored boats capsized like plastic bath toys.
Lightning ripped down from the cloudless sky and struck the water in three quick flashes.
But the elemental storm couldn’t reach us, and we kept speeding south until Kade and his magic were lost in the darkness.
Lienna and I were silent until we were almost across the gulf; the roaring motors and relentless wind didn’t create an environment conducive to conversation.
Only after the bright lights of Patras had turned into discernible details of the seaside city did Lienna ease back on the throttle and speak.
“What happened?”
I let out a long, tired breath. “Kade tried to kill me. He accidentally killed his mother instead.”
“Oh my god.”
I shook my head, aching in every bone and cradling my broken hand, which was bruising and swelling with impressive speed. “I think he underestimated his new power. He completely lost control and ripped the entire kitchen apart with telekinesis.”
Lienna looked at me, eyes wide. “Just telekinesis?”
“Yeah.”
She cursed under her breath and turned her attention back to the water in front of us. “That’s …”
She trailed off, but I could guess what she was thinking—Kade’s power dwarfed mine by several orders of magnitude. My most impressive telekinetic feat had involved yanking Lienna away from the assassin in Bahla Fort.
I was outmatched.
“He’s figured out how to power up.” Bitterness soaked my voice, and I rubbed the cold sea spray from my face with my left hand. “I don’t know how, considering he’s been an archmythic for all of a week.”
“And you’ve only known that was possible for less than two weeks,” she pointed out gently. “Kade and the Consilium had access to all the knowledge in Bodil and the Sha’ir’s grimoire. Kade knew he would become an archmythic. He was prepared.”
Prepared because he’d been handed the instruction manual. Meanwhile, I’d almost gotten my head chewed off by a desert fae lord in an attempt to learn the same damn thing and had nothing to show for it.
Lienna navigated the boat towards a small inlet down the coastline from the city’s major port, dropping our speed even further. “Did you learn anything about Griva?”
“Yeah.” I left my seat and picked up a mooring line I’d dumped on the deck, untangling it one-handed. “It’s our worst-case scenario. Kade and Griva are in cahoots. Uneasy cahoots, but cahoots nonetheless.”
A Consilium ruled by a squabbling court of would-be world dictators was terrifying enough.
A Consilium ruled by two calculating, merciless monsters was about twenty times worse—especially when one of those monsters was an archmythic and the other had a death grip on the MPD department with the most dangerous combat mythics in the world on its roster.
“I may have planted a seed of mistrust in Kade’s brain while I was jabbing holes in his defenses,” I added. “But with his mother’s death, who knows what he’ll do.”
Now within the inlet, Lienna steered the boat into its designated slip. Huge lights towered over the coastline, banishing any shadows from the rental company’s property, even though it was closed and there was no one in sight.
“Kade didn’t reveal any specifics about their plans, but I expect they’ll betray each other eventually, and whoever comes out on top will get to be World Leader Supreme.” I tossed a rope onto the pier and secured it to one of the mooring cleats. “We can’t wait for that to happen.”
“So, we need a new plan,” she concluded.
Lienna and I hurried to secure the boat and unload our belongings from the cabin. A few minutes later, we stood on the pier, our backpacks and the astrolabe’s case at our feet, water splashing gently against the hull of our speedy escape craft.
I awkwardly slid my phone out of my right pocket with my left hand. The screen was cracked, but it seemed functional.
“We’re out of time.” I stared down at the keypad, the fractured numbers waiting to be pressed. “We can’t pick off Consilium acolytes from the shadows anymore. We need to move fast and hit hard before Kade and Griva can consolidate their control of the Consilium and the MPD.”
Lienna looked from my phone to my face. “And we can’t do that alone.”
“No,” I murmured. “We can’t.”
I tapped out a number and hit the call button. It rang. I counted, my breath locked in my chest as I waited with unexpected agitation for an answer. I needed an answer.
Three rings … four … five.
The line clicked. “Who is this?”
All the breath rushed out of me. I pressed the phone to my ear and grinned through the aches and pains of defeat.
“Hey Darius. It’s Kit.”