Chapter 17 #2
Even knowing I have no control over its thoughts, my stomach revolts at the label.
It feels it, knows the reason why, and ignores it.
It doesn’t pity me or feel sorrow for what was done to me, but instead it just watches on almost clinically.
It’s probably why I can bear it, a witness to my pathetic and most worthless state of being.
Is the color change linked to her Gift? Does she even have one worth looking into?
Of course. My Bond is unparalleled.
It speaks like that is a fact, not an opinion, and icy fingers of dread creep down my spine.
Echoes of memories just beyond my grasp thrum through my blood until I’m shoving away from the desk to refill my glass to drown out the compulsion to find that girl.
Whether my bond’s incessant demand to Bond with her wins out, or my own desires to destroy her do, the consequences would be the same.
I’d finally know whether my brother’s nightmares are strong enough to take on my own, because I have no doubt he’s picked that girl over his promises to me—and I couldn’t care less.
Al’s bar is quieter than it usually is on a Friday night, but with the escalation of kidnappings and the council slowly beginning to devolve into cannibalizing itself, I’m not surprised. Pleased, sure, but not surprised.
I sit in the booth my brother favors, a twisted form of payback for the asshole refusing to leave me alone, and my glass is steadily refilled throughout the evening as I finally finish marking the papers for my Draven classes.
The material is so familiar to me I could mark it in my sleep, blind-drunk or in a coma, but I still get disapproving looks from half the patrons who come and go.
Again, it’s the downside of drinking in a college town; the bars are filled with faculty staff and students alike.
Fuck the lot of them.
“…mouthing off at Giovanna? Daniella is gunning for her now. Draven is going to find himself without a single ally at this rate—oh. Let’s… take this somewhere else.”
I don’t even bother to glance up. Dr. Camile Toby is another lecturer at Draven and his voice is like nails on a chalkboard, irritating and unmistakable. He’s hated me since he taught me back in my sophomore year, thanks to his inability to admit defeat and my own refusal to back down.
He’s a threat.
I down my glass in one go, lifting it over my head before I set it back down to ensure Al comes over to refill it. He’s good about it, and ignores my seething silence as I talk my bond out of needless bloodshed. Not that I give a fuck about Dr. Dickhead’s life.
I’ll never get these stupid papers done if I hunt down every Gifted stupid enough to be a threat to me and my brother.
They’re all threats—he will be dealt with, but we’re only putting ourselves at risk if we run off after every idiot mouthing off. There are limits to what even a Death Dealer can do.
Gut clenching around the bourbon, it feels as though it’s burning a hole through my stomach lining.
The words I’d thrown at Gryph like grenades now detonate in my own hands.
I have limits, just as he does, as we all do.
That Gifted who took Gryph out could take me out as well, especially if I’m wasting my time and energy on pithy gossip-mongers.
Death comes at the hands of the weak, bound together in their fears, made unstoppable by their numbers. Do not allow them to pass unchecked. Our Bond depends on our strength, and this time we will have it all.
‘This time’—it’s obsessed with this time, this Bond, and the bile creeping up my throat almost chokes me.
My skin crawls viciously at the thought of the last time, the last Bonded I was tied to against my will.
I clench my hands into fists so tightly that pain shoots up my arms and sweat begins to bead across my forehead as white light dances in front of my eyes, panic staved off instantly by the physical demands of my injuries.
The abysmal state of my fingers are hard to ignore, even for people who don’t know how they came to be broken or left to heal into the misshapen mess they’re now in.
The only grounding technique I’ve ever found that actually works to stop a descent into self-loathing madness is this; a reminder that I did, once, attempt to fight back.
I did attempt to stop that woman, and my body will never fully recover from that act, just as my mind will never recover from her.
It almost cost me my life, but I learned not only that I was too weak to kill Emmaline but what that inability would cost us all. Her stain has leached into every crack and crevice of my life, poisoning everyone around me, weakening the strength of the Draven name to a breaking point.
My father was ruined by her.
My brother will be, too. He may have escaped any consequences for her death, but North has still spent more than a decade trying and failing to change how we’re both perceived.
Gifted and non-Gifted alike, they know a predator is among them the moment they lay eyes on us both, and Nolan Draven’s violent end is the proof they point to.
As though waiting for my thoughts to return to their usual orderly design, the moment the chaos clears, my bond speaks again.
Once Bonded, we will be limitless. There is no end to the power of my Bond.
I scoff, gripping my glass again as I glance around the bar as a distraction.
It’s emptied out some, Dr. Dickhead running obviously spooked enough of the other patrons, but there are a few students still sitting at the bar and others crowding around the pool table, respectful enough to play and joke around at a volume I’ve been able to block out so far.
The girl has no Gift… or so she’s claiming. Tell me what it is and I’ll consider the Bonding.
A ripple works through my mind as my bond eases away from me once more, one parting retort as though scolding me. You cannot lie to me. We are of the same mind, child.
Instead of being insulted at the dismissal, a thrill of victory has a grin spreading across my face briefly. I’ve pissed it off, no mean feat, and with any luck, that’ll shut it up for the rest of the week.
Downing the glass again, I focus on the papers again and try not to let my mind be distracted. A difficult task at the best of times, but it’s now been made impossible.
I loathe the girl all over again.
More insistent than anything else plaguing my mind today, her paper is impossible to get out of it.
There’s nothing particularly brilliant or pioneering about her opinions, no new insight on the riots or the founding Gifted families that make up the council that has sparked my curiosity, and yet it’s tugged at the back of my mind the entire time I mark the other papers.
I thought reading hers first would get it out of the way, rather than having it looming over my head for the rest of the evening. I’d marked it the moment I’d read her name on it, but there was no way I could set it aside without reading it first.
Even as I slowly work my way through the rest of the assignments from her classmates, certain lines of thought she focused on stay stuck in my mind.
Her point of view is far too perceptive for an uneducated runaway, and the research areas she chose to lean into are beyond the majority of her peers.
Worse still, there were at least a dozen specific phrases within her work that echo in my head regardless of my efforts to push them aside until finally, I fish the fucking paper back out from the completed stack to reread it.
Grabbing my own notebook, a colossal mess of research and the scraps of information I routinely collect throughout the day, I get to work sifting through the paper more thoroughly.
Setting aside who wrote the words is difficult at first, but once I do, I begin to jot down anything that stands out to me without stopping to question why or second-guessing them.
Deeper scrutiny can be saved for when I have all the offensive points in one place.
Indoctrination tactics.
Cherry-picking Gifted types.
DNA markers.
Concentration of Gift types according to geographic locations.
Patterns of birth rates rising and falling over decades of conflict.
There’s nothing in this that should be flagging with me, yet the list grows.
Measures put in place to stop the escalation of violence.
The Gifted watchlist, once spoken of as though a myth was proved to be an indexation of the Gifts and birth lines that the Resistance was keeping to predict when Gifted of unprecedented power were likely to be born, thanks to the established patterns that were discovered through this work.
For some reason still outside of our grasp, there are hot spots within the community that seem to give greater chances of Top Tier Gifts, no matter the family lineage.
Magnifiers.
Like a shot of heroin, adrenaline races through my bloodstream so fast that I almost black out.
With frantically shaking fingers, I flip back through my notebook to the scans of the intel and my notes until I find it. Within the cipher, there was talk of an ‘amplification’ of power. AMP was used several times within the texts as well.
Gryph’s Gift was amplified and turned back on himself. It wasn’t Neuro, just as he thought, but it’s clearly not a passive Gift either. When directed at him, the greatest threat to the Resistance in his TacTeam was taken out in a split-second because of the strength of his Gift, not in spite of it.
This is the Resistance’s Infinite Weapon.