Chapter 22 #2
“If you’re human, nothing. But if you’re not . . .” He brushed his thumb over my fingers. If you’re not. “Guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
Inhaling and exhaling slowly, I tried to ease the tension in my shoulders. I let my lids close.
“Open yourself to it. Remember, it can’t actually physically hurt you.
Everything you experience is in your mind, like watching a movie.
The events have already happened, and you are just watching them.
Can’t interact.” Our fingers hovered over the pages.
“In your head, introduce yourself, show it respect.”
Introduce myself to a book? Seriously?
As the thought went through my head, I felt zaps of magic. Angry. Insulted.
“Brexley,” Ash warned.
Rolling back my shoulders, relaxing my face, I let go.
Hello, I’m Brexley Kovacs.
Ash pressed our fingertips into the pages.
As if an explosion went off in my body, every nerve in me froze as the electrical current burst inside my veins, my heart pumping like it was going to explode.
Images I couldn’t grasp flew through my head as a deep, inhuman voice repeated my name as if he were tasting me, learning me, flipping through my memories so fast I was about to throw up.
When it stopped, I stood on a field. No moon was out, but the sky glowed with vibrant colors, swirling and weaving like the aurora borealis.
The air snapped with magic; the countryside was stuffed full of figures battling.
Screams and sounds of metal clanking shredded the night sky.
I whipped around to take in the chaos, fear shooting up into my chest.
Creatures I had never even seen before tore into each other, and birds the size of planes flew in the sky. Creatures as little as brownies and as huge as giants dotted the landscape. The night rang with death, the field drenched in blood.
In the distance, it looked as if there was a curtain of energy that crackled and sputtered with light, holes forming in it.
Behind it I saw an outline of a castle. It looked exactly the same as some of the drawings and pictures I had seen in books of the Fae War, of Queen Aneira’s castle, the Seelie leader before the wall between the worlds fell twenty years ago.
I was there. The night Earth and the Otherworld became one.
The night I was born.
I could feel guts squishing between my toes, smell the bitter odors of blood and fear, hear every clank of metal, every shriek of death. People were dying right in front of me. Everything was so real. So vivid, overwhelming me.
“Let me out,” I spoke to the book, but nothing happened. “I want out!”
Why would it bring me here?
“Warwick?” a man boomed, spinning me around. I gasped, my gaze landing on a familiar figure.
Ash.
Dressed in layers of dark clothes, his hair was longer than he wore it now and tied up in a knot. Most of his face was covered in blood. Carrying a sword, his belt dripped with more knives and guns.
The guy next to him was tall, lean, dark-skinned, wearing the same outfit, with sharp but pretty features. There was something familiar about him I couldn’t quite place.
“Where the fuck did he go? What did he tell you?” Ash asked his comrade, but the guy didn’t seem to hear him, his eyes moving frantically over the terrain. “Janos? Hey!”
Janos’s head whipped to Ash. In a gesture I wasn’t expecting, Ash reached out, touching the man’s cheek gently. “It’s okay, we’ll find him.”
“Don’t lie to me, Ash,” he muttered. “I can read your face. They caught him, didn’t they? How could he just run off without us? If they finally found him, they will show him no mercy.”
“Come on, this is Warwick we’re talking about.” I could sense a deep intimacy in the way Ash’s fingers rubbed the other man’s cheek. “The guy is tougher than anyone I know. He’ll be fine. We’ll find him. Okay?”
Janos nodded, pulling away from his touch, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He sniffed in and pulled his chin up high, readying himself to go forward. Looking regal. Refined.
Holy fuck.
In one action, I saw someone else in Janos’s face. My jaw dropped in shock.
Madam Kitty.
There were rumors of transgender people in the Savage Lands. But in Leopold? There weren’t even whispers of them. I hadn’t even known what the word meant until my late teens. When I met Ms. Kitty, I didn’t even consider she was trans.
I had been so sheltered within the walls of HDF.
“Come on!” Ash tugged on Janos’s arm, giving me no time to think more about it as I followed them through the combat. They sliced into bodies and fought as they moved over the field swiftly.
Gunshots volleyed past, and small bombs dropped from the giant birds in the air, spurting dirt and flesh into the sky, landing on me like hail.
Ash and Janos moved with skill and partnership through the battle, ascending a small hill.
They came to a stumbling stop, my feet slowing next to them, their eyes latched on to something below.
“Warwick!” Janos screamed before he took off, running to a large object lumped on the grass. Janos’s legs gave out, and he dumped himself onto the damp earth next to the form, his body curling over the burned mess, a sliver of a face showing through the scorched blackness. “Noooo!”
It took me a moment to put the pieces together. To recognize what I was seeing. Acid tore up my throat, and I covered my mouth, emotion punching me in the chest as vomit burned my esophagus.
Warwick was that object. He told me the night at Kitty’s how he died, but to see it was a wholly different thing.
The larger-than-life man was a distorted pile of vulture fodder.
His neck twisted unnaturally, his huge build had mostly been burned down to the bone, clothes still smoldering, stabbed so many times his entire torso looked like he had been flayed open.
The one eye that wasn’t charred stared emptily up at the sky.
Dead.
“Oh, gods.” I swallowed back more bile.
Ash stood there, agony etched on his features, his frame swaying as if he was about to pass out.
Janos sobbed in grief, bending over the corpse. “I’m so sorry. I failed you . . .” Touching Warwick’s face gently, he closed the one unburned lid. Janos’s fingers shook violently, lingering on the slice of Warwick’s face that still somewhat resembled a man.
Like a zombie, Ash staggered up, dragging his weapon behind him and staring down at the remains of his friend.
“Baszd meg,” he uttered, his expression twisting. “BASZD MEG!” A guttural bellow howled into the night, screamed up at the sky in sheer agony, burning my eyes with tears at his heartbreak.
The atmosphere crackled and popped, the holes in the atmosphere growing bigger, and the castle no longer looked like it was being seen through a film as fairies, trolls, ogres, and other figures battled everywhere. Only a sliver of the wall was left between the two worlds.
A pack of wolf-shifters came tearing over the land, snapping and ripping into everything it passed, getting closer to Ash and Janos.
“Come on!” Ash yelled for Janos to move and fight, but Janos continued to weep over Warwick. Ash stomped over, yanking Janos up, bringing their faces close together.
“He wouldn’t want us to die tonight too.” Ash held Janos’s face, their noses touching. “If you can’t fight for that, fight for him. We owe it to Warwick to track those fuckers down. Kill each and every one. Do what they did to him. I need you, Janos. I can’t avenge him without you.”
Janos sucked in, nodding. They stepped away from each other, pulling out weapons, and turned straight into the mass of wolves, hacking and slicing at them, dissipating into the endless enemies coming.
I didn’t follow, my feet timidly moving closer to the man on the ground. The brutal way he was murdered showed even more prominently up close.
I bit my lip until I tasted blood, lowering myself down next to him.
Even if I knew he was alive in my reality, seeing him here was gutting.
Heart-wrenching. Wrong. Supposedly the half-breed fae died this night, and the legend rose from his ashes.
I couldn’t imagine how he could come back from this.
How was he alive now? There seemed no way.
He had been burned to nothing, gutted, had his neck broken.
No one came back from that.
Not even fae.
A deep panic at the idea he wouldn’t wake up this time drove into my gut like a drill. The terror of losing him trailed a tear down my cheek, building energy in my chest. The air hissed and sizzled, magic sparking at my skin.
I couldn’t stop myself; my hand reached out for his cheek.
My palm touched his singed skin as a loud crack filled the night. A lightning bolt struck the earth; earsplitting shouts and yowls echoed throughout the battlefield while blinding lights exploded near the castle.
The last strands of the wall were falling.
A whoosh of magic slammed through me like a tidal wave, the power shredding me so brutally, a gut-wrenching scream tore from my lungs. Tumbling me over Warwick, the energy plunged into me felt as though I was going to combust, my muscles shuddering violently.
There was so much pain.
I thought the book couldn’t hurt me.
It whipped through me like spiked tails, lashing and spearing my insides, leaving me heaving for air and twitching as if I’d been electrocuted.
Under my palms, Warwick’s lids burst open, and he heaved in a violent breath of life, his body convulsing. His blazing aqua eyes went straight on me.
Looking directly into my eyes.
Seeing me.