Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
sinner
The sun sank with each passing minute.
Night was falling, stealing away the time I needed to find Athena.
I couldn’t leave her out there alone in the dark. I refused to even consider resting, knowing she could be hurt. Scared. Trapped. In danger.
No fucking way I was stopping without her.
With a quick glance around, I crept into one of the taller buildings. I’d walked in a straight line for the last few hours, and it was getting me nowhere. I needed an advantage. Height would do.
These buildings were risky, but walking outside like a fucking moving target had to be riskier. I didn’t know who I was fighting or what the end goal was here.
If the building was rigged, I would find out soon enough.
With a hand on my knife, I kicked the door open. A cloud of dirt puffed into the air, but before it made its way to me, I covered my nose with my sleeve and slipped inside.
The building had few windows, and as I darted toward the stairway on the other side of the shadowed space, I dodged cobwebs, abandoned furniture, and cubicles filled with desks and out-of-date computers I’d only ever seen in the media.
This must have been a workplace of some sort. I used to hear stories back home about places like this—hundreds of people working for one company, creating technology used on handheld devices or designing microchips or new drugs.
Those things didn’t exist anymore. The only thing that mattered was power—mystic or earthly. We were all too focused on staying alive to work on the kind of projects that were once created here.
Glass crunched beneath my boots as I made my way to the staircase.
At the next landing, I twisted and peered up.
The place looked empty. Sounded empty.
But my phantoms stirred in my chest.
I started up the stairs anyway, foot after foot, step after step.
I made it up another flight. Then two more. Then three.
The sound of glass breaking below me forced me to stop.
The phantoms buzzing in my body stopped, too. Ceased. Froze.
I listened.
One.
Two.
Three.
It was silent again. It was probably just the shifting of the building with my weight. The place obviously hadn’t been touched in years.
I adjusted the grip on my knife and kept going.
My thighs burned by the time I made it up all twenty or thirty flights.
At the top, I was met with a sign on a door—a sign I couldn’t read—marked in large red letters. An exit sign, maybe? A warning sign? Maybe it was telling me to turn around, that the building would collapse if I went this way.
I took the chance, pushing the door open with my shoulder.
Light blinded me as I stepped out onto the roof.
The metal door creaked as I pushed it open. Concerned I may get trapped up here, I propped it open with a large piece of crumbled concrete. Then I straightened and sighed
Fuck.
The sun was dipping below the horizon in the distance. A red glow began to cascade over the city.
And that’s what this was—a city. An abandoned, hell-like city.
I walked to the edge of the roof and scanned the cityscape, finding nothing but abandoned buildings for as far as the eye could see.
What the fuck was I supposed to do now? How was I supposed to find Athena in a place like this?
My stomach churned, threatening to expel its pitiful contents.
Fast steps sounded behind me, and as I turned, a large body smacked into mine, and I hit the ground hard enough to see stars.
“What the fuck!” I yelled.
My attacker straddled me, but before he could get the upper hand, I gripped his shoulders and sent my knee flying between his legs.
He roared in pain, letting go of me.
The sound coming from him was familiar, so for the first time, I examined my attacker’s face.
“Alexander?” I roared. “What the fuck are you doing?”
I pushed him off, and he flopped onto the floor, half rolling away, still cupping his nuts. “That really hurt, man!”
Heart pounding, I yanked my knife from my belt. “Yeah, it was fucking supposed to! What the fuck are you doing?”
Karlyle crept out of the doorway, hands up, as if he were here to make peace. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“Really?” I let out a dry laugh. “Then why is your claimed here attacking me?”
“We weren’t sure you would listen to us,” he said. He shuffled closer to Alexander. “He thought it would be a good idea to subdue you first, then talk.”
Fucking idiots. “No, you can’t fucking trust me,” I spat.
“You can’t trust anybody here. Which is why tackling someone stronger than you was a dumb fucking move.
” I took a breath and reined in my shadows.
Yeah, they wanted to fucking kill him. I still wasn’t sure if I’d let them. “Talk to me about what?”
Groaning, Alexander sat up. “We want to work together, okay? Fuck!”
“I work alone.”
“Clearly!” He pushed himself up from the ground, taking his sweet damn time. “You don’t like us. We get that. Message fucking received.” He brushed his hands off on his cargo pants and took a deep breath. “But I think we can help each other.”
This asshole really did have a death wish. Maybe I’d let my shadows after him now. Shut him up. “How can you possibly help me?”
“You’re looking for Athena, right?”
I said nothing.
“We can help you find her.”
The laugh that came out of me this time was more like a twisted bark.
“How the fuck are you going to help me?” I arched a brow, looking from one man to the other.
I didn’t fucking like this. How convenient for these two to show up after all this time.
Together? “Have you been following me?” I asked, then held up a hand.
“You know what? Don’t fucking answer that.
I don’t need help. Especially not from you. ”
“You don’t like us,” Karlyle said, stepping forward. “I don’t blame you. It’s smart to keep your guard up in a place like this. But we knew we could trust you from the beginning.”
Annoyance coursed through me. “What are you talking about?”
Karlyle swallowed, taking his time. His mellow temperament convinced me to stop and listen rather than take off and get as far as fucking possible from them.
“From that day in the water, when you stepped in to help Athena, we’ve trusted you. She’d almost drowned trying to help Alexander. If you hadn’t done that, who knows—maybe they both would have drowned. And I know the punishment you must have faced was fucking brutal.”
A flash of Alexander kissing Athena’s neck hit me. Fuck. They had no fucking idea. My freed phantoms slipped out, nipping at Alexander’s boots before I could get control of them.
He yelped and danced backward.
I sighed. They weren’t hurting him. Not yet.
But they wanted to.
“You actually care about Athena. And she clearly has a big heart. She’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve—”
Karlyle cut himself off.
He peered over at Alexander, who gave him a look of warning.
“What?” I shouted. “She doesn’t deserve what?”
Say it. Say you’re against the Ministry. Say this whole fucking thing is stupid and you don’t actually agree with killing innocents for the sake of the Ministry’s power.
“She doesn’t deserve any of this. Being forced to kill those men yesterday…” Karlyle swallowed. “She’s not that kind of person. Not that kind of mystic. Please. Let us help you find her.”
“I don’t trust you. Either of you.”
Alexander opened his mouth to retort, but Karlyle held up a hand and cut him off. “Trust can be earned. Let us show you that you can.”
I studied him, considering it.
Athena had a soft spot for them. Though I’d never fucking understood why. Alexander was number one on my shit list.
Though Karlyle didn’t seem half as miserable, he was still bonded with Alexander. And that was enough reason to hate him, too.
It was too risky.
We were in enough trouble as it was. I didn’t need my enemies tromping around with me, threatening my life every step of the way.
“I’m fine on my own,” I said. “I think it’s best if we split. I’ll leave you alone. Just go your own fucking way.”
Alexander finally pushed past Karlyle’s warnings to shut up. “You’re really going to let your fucking ego stop you from accepting help? You’re that stubborn?”
Yes, I was.
But before I could tell him that, a deafening explosion rang out below us.
The three of us were thrown off our feet—tumbling into a mass of concrete and rock and fire—off the three-hundred-fucking-foot building.
We were dead. There was no way around it. My mind simply accepted this truth as I entered a free fall. The side of the building had crumbled in the explosion—I couldn’t even fucking see through the dust and fire engulfed us.
With my eyes squeezed shut, I braced for the impact that would end it all.
Burn them all to hell, Athena, I wished silently, hoping my final message would somehow find her in the ether.
But rather than hitting the ground, my body came to a stop, the sensation of falling disappearing.
Gasping for breath, I blinked one eye open.
Then another.
“What. The. FUCK.” The three of us were not, in fact, crushed to a pulp in a massive pile of rubble. We were floating. Like—fucking flying a few feet off the ground.
Karlyle was using his power. Saving our sorry asses from death.
He had his arms outstretched in concentration, but Alexander did too.
I’d seen him manipulating the ground in training, sending piles of dirt into the sky and causing small rifts in the field, but I’d seen nothing of this magnitude.
He was literally manipulating the concrete around us, moving the rubble so it settled on either side of us instead of crushing us whole.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Within seconds, the debris was cleared. But I was still wrapping my mind around the fucking strength these two had.
And if they hadn’t been here, I’d most definitely be dead.
“Well.” Alexander wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The dust settled around us, and before long, the only sign of the explosion was a small fire a few feet away. He moved rock over that, as well, smothering it at the source.
Karlyle dropped his hold. We all fell the last bit to the ground, landing on our feet.
“Still want to go your own way?”
Fuck. “Cover my back,” I said, inching to the right. “Let’s find out who just fucking tried to barbecue us. Then we can talk.”