Chapter 43
EVER
Eli’s murmur reaches my ear. My brain. My heart. Every inch of me at once. “I didn’t kill your mother for you.”
The man in gray runs forward and lunges for me, armed with a knife and a club, a snarl uglying up his face.
“Wait!” I holler. My hand flies up, palm out.
But that doesn’t stop him.
Not a chance.
It’s the root that stabs up through the earth, into his stomach then out his back with a revolting, flesh-ripping sound.
Hailstones fly. It lifts him into the air.
The hundreds of Vaile surrounding us take a collective step back.
Probably bumping into hundreds more. And thousands behind them.
The man’s hair flicks back and forth across his forehead as his body jerks, his legs kicking the air and flailing.
I watch it all out of the corner of my eye, never letting Eli free from my stare, and not quite able to deny that was my doing. “Say the words,” I plead. “Don’t tell me what you didn’t do. Tell me what I did.”
“You already know.”
“I don’t. I’ve lost my mind. I fell apart over the death of someone who never existed! Okay? There’s something wrong with me. I’d rather kill off parts of myself than face my own feelings.”
The Vaile regain their courage. A woman shouts, “What do Vaile do? What would the Centress want?”
Thousands chant in response, the same rhythmic pattern, the same words as the children back at the village school months ago. The sound ricochets off trees and sails through the afternoon. “Preserve the magic of our land!”
“At what cost?” dozens yell.
“At any cost at your command!” the mass answers, fists punching the air.
I rip off one of my rings and shove it in front of Eli’s face. “Do you see this? Do you see what I’m holding?”
A muscle ripples in his jaw, right beneath his scar. His lightness caresses my cheek with a warm breeze, and his darkness strikes my tongue with the tang of blood. “No.”
It’s one thing for a voice in my head to claim I made Cam up, but to know that no one held my hand as I braved each new home, that I never received a piece of advice from someone who cared, that every single ring meant to remind me I wasn’t alone was a lie I constructed.
Because I was that alone. To know all that is utter destruction within.
“You can’t see it because I imagined it! I can’t trust my own mind. How am I supposed to choose what matters to me if I don’t know what’s real?”
His firm hand lands on my lower back and pulls me into him with a rough tug. “I am real. I showed you. Is that not enough?”
His question is enough to take my breath away, but even if it weren’t, the intensity burning through his pupils evacuates the last drop of oxygen from every cell in my body. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“Never, you are so godsdamn real to me, and I’m going to need you stop feeling sorry for yourself, lift your own fucking chin and tell me who you really are. And believe it dammit!”
I tremble. He wants to know who I am?
I’m life and death.
I’m a storm. A disaster. A nightmare.
I’m vengeance and riot and wrath… I’m pain.
I’m everything I never knew I wanted to be.
“I’m a demigod!” I scream.
He smiles. “Fuck yeah you are. And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to split every last one of their balls in half!”
“Close enough.” He kisses the tip of my ear. “Now!”
I finally turn to face the Vaile.
Hundreds more join in prompting the others, already on the third round of the chant. “And how do we do it?”
“Maintain the Separation!”
“What will you give?”
“A friend, a life, a generation!”
The Vaile charge toward me, the giant circle shrinking.
Slipping from Eli’s grasp, I throw my ring down and rip off another. And another, tossing them to the ground like the pieces of my heart I gave away so easily as a child, squandered.
I’m too fired up to stop, even when the rings turn into massive puddles of molten metal.
Silver and black and blue and gray. Not nearly far enough away from my bare toes.
The icy layer of hailstones hisses into steam.
Kaleida and Milo jump behind Eli and me as another ring hits the ground and liquifies.
The puddles spread, circling the four of us like a moat and creeping outward.
We huddle in the remaining four-foot wide circle, far from the gift-wielding hands of the Vaile.
A disaster. A nightmare.
They can’t stop their attack in time, can’t skid to a halt.
Their eyes erupt with terror at the realization.
They trample through the puddles, only making it two steps before their feet melt off, then their ankles and calves.
They get shorter and shorter, bodies writhing in a hypnotic dance all around us, their screams and cries for help like a death song as they disappear.
Vengeance and riot and wrath.
The woman leading the chant looks straight at me, determined brown eyes now racked with torment, smoldering with fear. “A friend, a life, a generation!” she grinds out in her final moments.
Pain.
The stench of melted flesh rises from the puddles. Not even a jumpsuit button is left intact in the immaculate colored blobs. But I can’t find it in me to care. My heart is cold.
The Vaile that escaped the puddles shuffle backward with petrified steps, arms out to keep their balance as they push against the crowd behind them.
I rid my fingers of every imaginary ring, throwing them farther out this time, expanding the metallic circle around us.
Splashes of blue and black. Of silver and purple.
Only Milo’s ring with the red fabric wrapped around it remains.
Because it’s real. One thing is real. My hands feel naked.
My body is incomplete, my heart sprawled out over the forest floor.
How am I doing this? I finally look at the others, at Eli’s delight, visible in his dancing eyes.
At Milo’s shock and pride, the way he puffs out his chest next to Eli.
And Kaleida. The horror she holds in her stare.
I can’t see the memories of her dying family and friends, can’t hear the way they screamed as she ran for her life, but I know my imagination is not far off with death around every corner.
When I run out of rings, the ground is a pool of molten metal. But the awful crowd remains. Yelling. Threatening. Searching for a way to me.
A man with a thick neck and eyes much too close together pushes to the front of the line and readies his hands. Not even a matter shifter could touch molten metal, right?
“Allow me,” he says, elbowing a scrawny guard in a black jumpsuit out of his way.
“I’ll make a bridge.” His hands latch onto the bottom of the nearest tree trunk, and turn the bark beneath it to ash.
He works his way around the fat trunk in circles, whittling away the layers in a matter of seconds.
Ash flutters up and floats before settling on the surface of the puddles.
“He’s chopping down the tree!” Kaleida shrieks and wraps her arms around Milo. “We have nowhere to go.”
She’s right. I trapped us.
The final piece holding the trunk to the stump wisps away in gray flakes, leaving the massive tree to fall on top of us and create a direct path to our tiny island. The man steps back to admire his work then waves for the others holding it up to let go.
The molten metal is sure death, the tree sure pain, and I can’t quite decide which is more appealing.
I don’t have time for fear to flip my insides upside down.
I feel the destruction of the trunk as if it were my own, my stomach decimated through to my core.
I scream as it falls in slow motion toward us, its size appearing to grow with every nearing inch.
I throw my hands up. The surrounding trees thrust their branches out.
Twigs twist and curl, interlocking with each other and catching the trunk before it reaches us.
My jaw hangs open. But not for long. The man is already halfway through another trunk, another devastating attack on my stomach. I feel the tree’s pain. It comes crashing toward us, and I catch it again in a hammock of stretched branches above. He goes for another.
Eight trunks later, the sky barely shows through the weave of branches above, the cone-shaped cocoon of tree trunks I built around us.
I let out a long breath, pretending I can’t hear the shouts on the other side, that I can’t smell the death.
Eli stands behind me and envelops me in his arms, his skin against mine as comforting and familiar as slipping on a fresh, cold T-shirt in the morning. No need for words.
“How are you doing this?” Kaleida’s dark eyes blaze with fear.
Milo rubs his hands together so hard I’m sure they’ll be raw to the bone before long. “Does it matter? You’re alive because of her.”
I lean against Eli’s chest and try to count the number of people I killed so I could live. So I could stand here like this again. In his arms.
But the moment is far from calm. I shake so hard my teeth must chip.
Eli holds me even tighter. I’m used to it now, his strength.
He tries to hold back, to keep it in check, but if he succeeded, I’d miss the way it hurts when his arms are around me.
How I’m sore for a bit after, as if his touch lingered. I’d miss how safe I feel.
“Help!” Atom screams from over our heads. He clings to a wobbly branch of one of the fallen trees. Three Vaile scurry up the inclined trunk toward him, only visible from below when they toss their arms outward for balance.
“Where are Sypher and Maverick J.?” I ask, searching the treetops. “He should be with them.”
“There!” Kaleida points to two figures crawling across the canopy of branches above us. Vaile climb every trunk now, closing in on them.
“I’m not a Hollow,” I yell, loud enough to stop most of them in their tracks. “I don’t want your magic. I’m only trying to fix things!”
The Vaile erupt in chatter, their heads turning in question toward one another. They weren’t trained to talk, only to kill.