Chapter 28 #2
"You really don't." His pale eyes crack open. "My power isn't something you want inside you. Trust me."
"I wasn't asking."
Something flickers across his gaunt face. Surprise, maybe. Or the memory of what surprise used to feel like. I reach for his bond before he can argue.
The weight is immediate. Crushing. Like someone dropped a building on my chest and told me to keep walking.
Every thought slows. Every emotion dims. What was the point of training?
What was the point of fighting Heaven? What was the point of anything, really?
We're all going to die. Everything ends. Nothing matters.
I yank myself free so hard I stagger backward.
"Told you," Caspian says. His eyes are closed again.
"That's not power," I manage, my voice shaking. "That's a fucking black hole."
"Same thing, where I'm from."
Croesus catches my arm. Steadies me. "Raven?"
"I'm fine." I'm so not fucking fine. Caspian's apathy is still clinging to the edges of my mind like grease, and it takes me a full minute to shake it off. "That one's going to take practice."
"You don't have to use all of them," Croesus says quietly. "Not every tool in the arsenal needs to be deployed."
"If we're fighting Heaven, I need everything."
He doesn't argue. Just squeezes my arm once and lets go.
Last: Croesus. His bond I know best, the most familiar, the most intimate.
Gold and warmth and that deep acquisitive hunger that defines everything he is.
When I pull from him, it feels like coming home.
Like putting on a coat in winter. Like the first sip of coffee in a cold apartment at five in the morning while the rest of the world sleeps.
"Show-off," Seraph mutters.
"What?"
"You're smiling."
I am. I wipe it off my face. "So. That's all seven. Now what?"
Seraph steps into the center of the arena. "Now you do two at once."
“Kinky,” Lysander quips, but there’s nothing behind it. He’s as unsettled as everyone else here by the situation.
Day five.
I can pull from three at a time without passing out. Kael's fire and Croesus's golden hunger and Seraph's crystalline control, braided together into something that feels like a weapon in my hands. The power surges through the bonds in currents, and I'm learning to direct it. Point it. Shape it.
My body is changing faster now.
The silver streaks in my hair have multiplied.
Not just at my right temple anymore. Threads of silver scattered through the black, catching light like wire.
My eyes are more gold than brown in certain light.
My cheekbones look sharper. My skin has a faint luminescence that Dorian noticed first and Lysander won't shut up about.
"You're becoming radiant," Lysander said this morning, reaching out to touch my face before catching himself. "Literally. There's light under your skin."
"That's not normal."
"Nothing about you is normal, darling."
I looked at myself in one of Seraph's thousand mirrors and saw what he meant. The woman staring back at me was familiar but altered. Like a photograph that's been enhanced. Same features, same face, but sharper. Cleaner. More.
I don't know what I'm becoming. I'm not sure I want to.
Day eight.
Kael teaches me hand-to-hand combat that has nothing to do with what Seraph taught me.
Seraph's approach was surgical. Precise strikes. Efficient movement. Minimum effort, maximum damage. Every lesson came with criticism and correction and the unspoken expectation that I achieve perfection or die trying.
Kael just hits me.
"Block," he barks, and a fist comes at my face. I barely get my forearm up in time. The impact rattles my teeth.
"Faster."
Another blow. I dodge left. His elbow catches my ribs.
"You're thinking too much. Stop thinking."
"That's easy for you to say, you're powered by blind rage."
He laughs, a short bark that sounds like gravel in a blender, and sweeps my legs out from under me. I hit the marble hard. The air leaves my lungs in a rush.
"Get up."
"Give me a second."
"Heaven won't give you a second."
I get up. He hits me again. I block this time. Barely.
"Better." He circles me, ember eyes tracking every shift in my weight.
Heat rolls off him in waves. My skin is flushed just from proximity.
"You've got good instincts. You're just buried under Seraph's technique. All that pretty footwork means nothing if someone bigger and angrier charges you in a straight line. You’re small, so you have to learn how to use that to your advantage. You need to get faster."
"You're not exactly subtle in your approach."
"Wrath isn't subtle. That's the point." He throws a punch. I duck, pivot, and drive my elbow into his kidney. He grunts. Actually grunts. "There. See? That's what I'm talking about. Stop being elegant. Start being mean. Or get the fuck out of the way."
From across the arena, Seraph watches with his arms folded and his expression carved from ice.
"He's undoing everything I taught her," he says to no one in particular.
"He's adding to it," Croesus replies. He's leaning against a pillar, watching me spar with Kael, and there's something complicated in his expression. Pride, maybe. And fear. Because every day I get stronger, I get less human, and we both know it.
Day twelve.
Four bonds at once. Then five.
The fifth one nearly kills me.
I'm standing in the center of the arena, eyes closed, pulling power from Seraph, Croesus, Kael, and Lysander simultaneously. It's a river of sensation. Ice and gold and fire and desire, all flowing through me, controlled, directed, mine. I feel invincible. I feel enormous.
I reach for Dorian. The fifth bond opens.
Sensation explodes through my body. Every nerve ending screams to life. The four currents of power I'm holding collide with Dorian's overwhelming abundance and the result is chaos. Too much. Too fast. My vision whites out. I taste copper. Something warm runs from my nose.
"Raven!" Croesus is there, hands on my shoulders, shaking me. His voice is far away, tinny, like he's shouting through water. "Let go. Let go of them now."
I can't. The bonds have locked open, all five of them pouring into me, and I don't know how to close them from this side. The power has a weight, a momentum, and it's dragging me under.
Then Seraph's hands are on my face. Cool fingers. The smell of lilies.
"Look at me." His voice cuts through everything else. "Open your eyes and look at me."
I do. His eyes fill my vision, mirrors reflecting a woman I barely recognize. There's blood on my upper lip. My eyes are solid gold, no iris, no white. Just burning, metallic gold.
"Breathe," he says. "One bond at a time. Close them one at a time. Start with Dorian."
I find Dorian's bond. It takes everything I have to squeeze it shut, like closing a door against a flood. The sensation dims. I gasp.
"Good. Now Lysander."
Desire fades. Then Kael's fire. Then Croesus's golden warmth.
Until it's just Seraph's connection, cold and clear, holding me steady.
"There," he says quietly. He wipes the blood from my face with his thumb. "You pushed too fast."
"I almost had it."
"You almost died."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." I try to grin, but blood runs into my mouth and I know I’ve lost any chance at defusing things.
His mouth does something that wants to be a smile. Fights it. Loses. "No," he admits. "With you, they rarely are."
Day fourteen. Sunday.
I lock the bedroom door. Sit on the edge of the bed. Stare at Luna's contact photo for two minutes before I can make myself hit the button.
She picks up on the first ring. "Raven!"
Her voice hits me like a fist to the solar plexus. Warm and bright and normal, so painfully normal it makes my chest ache.
"Hey, Luna."
"Oh my god, it's been ages. I've been calling and calling, did you change your schedule? Is Sunday still good? Because I can do Wednesdays now, my afternoon lecture got moved to—"
"Sunday is still good. I've just been busy."
"Busy with the consulting thing?" There's an edge there. Not suspicion, exactly. Concern. The kind of concern that comes from knowing your sister is lying to you and not being able to prove it.
"Yeah. Big project. Lots of moving parts."
"You always say that."
"It's always true."
She laughs, and the sound is so normal, so human, that I have to close my eyes against the sting behind them. I picture her in her dorm room, cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by textbooks and empty coffee cups and that ridiculous throw pillow shaped like a frog that she bought at a thrift store.
"So tell me about your week," I say.
She launches into a story about a group project gone wrong, about her environmental club's latest initiative, about the biology guy. I listen. Make the right noises. Laugh when I'm supposed to.
I don't tell her about being trained for war. I don't mention Heaven's ultimatum. I don't explain that in sixteen days, an army might descend on us and everyone I care about could die.
"Oh, before I forget," Luna says. "I'm doing a video project for my media class. Can we FaceTime next week instead of just calling? I need practice with my framing and lighting and stuff, and you're the only person who won't judge me for being terrible at it."
My stomach drops.
"I don't know, Luna. My reception is kind of spotty where I am."
"Where are you, the moon? Come on, it'll be fun. I want to see your face."
My face. Which now has gold flecks in the eyes and silver in the hair and cheekbones that could cut glass. My face, which is slowly, undeniably, becoming something other than human.
"Let me see what I can do. No promises."
"You always say that too." A pause. Longer than usual. "Raven?"
"Yeah?"
"You sound different."
The words land with the precision of a sniper round. Not because they're harsh. Because they're true, and Luna has always been terrifyingly good at hearing things I don't say.
"Different how?"