Chapter 17 #2
I lunged, the five bladed Skindo back in my hand. The hilt slammed into a soldier’s chest. He coughed blood and crumpled. I pivoted cleanly, slicing upward in a sharp arc that dropped the next attacker before he could even raise his weapon.
They came at me three at a time, a neat little wedge of green and steel out of the tree line and my first thought was that I finally understood the appeal of bowling.
Two steps in and the first one was already skewered. My Skindo made this thin, eager noise, as though it was thrilled to be doing its job, and the man folded before he could even register disappointment.
The second charged with a godsdamn bayonet; I ducked, nicked his knees, and he went down faster than a Jenga tower on cocktail night.
The third tried to flank me, which was ambitious. Three blades caught him in the chest, and he collapsed in a way that made it look like his bones had given up on anatomy altogether.
None of them laid a finger on me. Honestly, it was kind of rude how little of a challenge they were. At this rate, the only thing in danger of being killed was my patience.
Breath huffing white, I wiped the iron from the edge of my Skindo on a sleeve.
A shot cracked, and I saw James dropping to a knee, Skindo raised right in time to deflect the bullet away from Rachel’s exposed side.
But the rifle fire wasn’t just sound, it was memory detonating in my skull.
The gunshots were too familiar, too exact, and grief punched through me like a second surge of energy ripping loose.
Suddenly I wasn’t on the snow-covered border anymore.
I was back in my dining room.
My mother’s blood spreading across the tile.
My father’s eyes, open, lifeless, and fixed on the ceiling.
Gunfire echoing off the walls.
The stench of death.
The pain crashed over me so hard I could barely breathe.
The translation roared through my veins, faster, darker, hotter. My Skindo pulsed with it, as if it too had felt the shift.
I moved forward instead, Rachel’s commands drowned out by the pounding in my chest and the roar inside my skull.
I didn’t care if this was strategy. I didn’t care if it was reckless.
All I wanted was to kill.
My heart thundered in my ears. The cold was gone. The grief was gone.
Only the fight remained.
The blades of my Skindo extended, pulsing with dark energy as I neared the border by myself, and launched into the fray.
My red haze exploded outward, curling in jagged tendrils through the freezing air, and visible inside the Collective.
That’s going to raise questions.
Screw it, I’d worry about it later.
There was something way more important right now.
Something that felt a lot like healing.
My choking haze was already in motion as I crossed into the Human World, ignoring Rachel’s orders to stay within the Metasphere.
She didn’t know my translation was man-made.
She didn’t know it didn’t weaken behind borders.
She didn’t know what I was.
Not until I showed her.
Not until I slaughtered them.
One by one.
Every single one who dared to cross me.
Who dared to come near me.
They were all responsible.
They’d killed my parents.
They’d murdered them in cold blood.
They were—
Movement flickered at the edge of my vision.
I forced myself to look up through the choking haze, expecting another attacker. Instead, a familiar darkness rippled between the trees on the far side of the clearing.
Obsidian.
Not shadow. Not smoke. Something thicker.
Caden’s haze.
And there he was beyond it, where the forest thinned, moving as if every strike had been practiced a thousand times. Chela flashing, his body a low metronome of deadly, efficient motion.
Nowhere near me.
He glanced up then, as if the weight of my stare had dragged his own to mine. Steel flashed in his hand, cutting clean through an enemy, but he didn’t waver.
The sound of gunfire dulled, muffled, like it belonged to another world. Snowflakes hung suspended in the air, the scrape of his blade carving the only sound that mattered. My pulse thundered in the silence, a drumbeat pounding in time with his movements.
It wasn’t words, it wasn’t relief, but something quieter and more primal, an unspoken tether pulled taut between us: I see you.
Recognition in the middle of carnage.
And just like that, my choking haze recoiled, pulling back from the edge. The world slid back into focus, colors sharpening, sounds separating again. The red fog didn’t disappear, but it no longer owned me.
Not while he was looking at me like that.
My focus still on Caden, I almost missed it when a soldier lunged for me, rifle raised, breath fogging the night. But I was quicker. He froze when my Skindo lashed out, slicing the weapon clean in two. Metal clattered uselessly to the snow.
The whites of his eyes were stark against the dark, pupils wide with fear, yet even with steel blades hovering a hair’s breadth from his throat he spat the words with venom, “You’re an abomination. Nature might’ve given you power, but you’re using it for evil.”
A bitter laugh ripped out of me, jagged with fury that had been festering far too long. “You want to talk to me about evil? Your kind forced ours to bubble in an entire country, branded me a terrorist without reason or cause, and then killed my parents in their own home, and I’m the evil one?”
The soldier’s lip curled as he gave a loud snort, though I caught the way his gaze flicked uneasily to the blades thrumming in the air around his neck, close enough to cut if he so much as twitched. “You killed your own parents, witch,” he bit out. “All we’ve done is come to arrest a murderer.”
My grip on the haze tightened, the blade angling closer until I could feel the tremor of its hum through the air. “Bullshit,” I snarled, the word cracking with rage. “This isn’t just about me, and you know it.”
And then, unexpectedly, his expression shifted. The hard mask faltered, his clear disdain bleeding into something almost softer, like a flicker of empathy, though it twisted my stomach to even think he could pity me.
His voice dropped, rough but strangely steady.
“I know how it looks. But we don’t care about magi coming out of the broom closet.
I can’t speak for every human alive, hell, not even every American, but the men and women crossing this border tonight?
They’re here because of one thing, and one thing only, the warrant for your arrest we were given. ”
My breath stuttered, my blades hovered midair instead of striking, and for a split second all I could do was stare at him.
“You have the warrant?” I asked, the question tearing out of me, only realizing now how much I needed to see it with my own eyes. To know what was written on there.
I needed it to be more than proof. I needed it to be an answer. A name. A department. A stain on a signature I could follow until I found the person who had decided my parents’ fate.
He blinked, surprised by my question. “Yes, of course. We all received a copy.”
My jaw clenched so tightly it hurt. Every memory of that night became loud and bright: the flash of light on my father’s face, the metallic smell in the hallway, my hands slick with something that was not mine.
I could hear my mother, no, not hear, remember the last breath she didn’t get to take.
I needed to know whether they’d died because of a mistake, a lie, or something far worse. I would know whether those men had come for me, or whether someone had come for them and used me as an excuse.
“Where is it?” I demanded, the words a knife.
His brows rose, mocking, his tone dripping with disdain. “Why? You want to make sure the signature’s real?”
I closed the distance in a heartbeat, my fist knotting in the collar of his jacket and yanking him so close I could see every frantic pulse beating at his throat. “Show it to me,” I hissed. “Now.”
His answering laugh was short, brittle with nerves he was trying to hide. “Not a chance.”
The refusal ripped the last thread of patience out of me. My haze coiled tighter, gripping his body in invisible chains.
I translated the Nexus into my hand, carved a green portal into the air, and with a single vicious pull dragged him through the shimmer with me.
I didn’t look back. Didn’t think about the gunfire, the screams, or the people I was abandoning mid-fight.
The battlefield vanished, swallowed whole by the portal, as I turned my back on my team without a second thought.