Chapter 37
ANNIE
My stomach lurched at the rapid ascent, the city shrinking beneath us, buildings becoming miniature models as Helios flew higher and higher. The wind whipped my hair across my face as we climbed, the air growing thin and bitingly cold.
Helios was silent, his usual cheerful chatter absent. I craned my neck to look at his face and felt my blood run cold. His normally warm, expressive features were blank, eyes hard and calculating in a way I’d never seen before.
We finally stopped ascending, hovering hundreds of feet above the city.
“Helios, please,” I tried, my voice shaking from both the cold and fear. “This isn’t you. I know something’s wrong.”
He held me tight with one arm, forcing my chin up to look at his face. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and emotionless, completely devoid of the warmth that defined him.
“You have something of mine, little Annie Bishop.”
Those words. That exact phrasing.
My vision tunneled. Little Annie Bishop. The name Halcyon had crooned as he stalked through my childhood home, calling out to me as I hid.
“No,” I whispered. Those eyes weren’t Helios’s anymore. Something ancient and malevolent stared back at me through them.
“Please, no.” My voice broke as terror clawed up my throat.
I noticed his hands were gloved and Helios never wore gloves. His powers worked better with direct contact, and he’d always said gloves made him feel disconnected from the world. This small detail confirmed what I already knew in my heart: Halcyon was in control.
Helios’s gaze dropped to my wrist, focusing on the cuff. He gave me a savage smile and clamped his gloved hand around it. With a sickening crunch of metal and circuitry, he crushed it against my wrist. I gave a strangled scream as pain shot up my arm, fragments embedding themselves into my skin.
A heavy, buzzing pressure flooded my veins.
It was Havoc’s power waking up from its dormant state.
The stolen power felt like liquid static and vertigo rushing through my bloodstream.
The force pushed against my insides but I hadn’t absorbed the ability to channel or unleash that kind of destructive force.
It would stay trapped inside me where it couldn’t do anything but make me feel uncomfortable.
But my relief vanished a second later. Havoc’s power was never the true threat.
Without the cuff, there was nothing holding back Halcyon’s power. Nothing protecting the world from me.
“So that’s where you were,” he said through Helios’s mouth, his tone filled with cruel delight. His eyes gleamed with recognition and triumph. “How very, very clever to hide you. So very clever.”
I wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but I understood that somehow the cuff had hidden me from Halcyon by blocking his power.
Helios tightened his grip and took off flying again, higher and faster than before.
“How interesting that you stole from Havoc as well,” Halcyon said, cocking his head at me.
I wanted to reach out to Helios, to try to break through Halcyon’s control, but I was terrified of what would happen if I tried. What if trying to speak to Helios while Halcyon was already in his mind destroyed him? And we were so high. If Helios dropped me now...
Panic consumed me, memories of that night twenty years ago flooding back. I was ten years old again, helpless and alone, with Halcyon hunting me through the darkness.
The wind cut through my clothes like icy blades as we flew. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, my fingers and toes going numb. I couldn’t feel my face anymore, my tears freezing against my cheeks.
I tried to curl into myself for warmth, but Helios’s grip remained rigid, holding me exposed to the elements. His body radiated heat, a cruel irony as he deliberately kept that warmth from actually reaching me.
After what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, we began descending.
Through frozen eyelashes, I made out a sprawling complex of buildings nestled against the mountains outside Chroma Bay.
The facility looked abandoned, windows broken and walls crumbling in places, nature reclaiming the grounds around it.
Helios landed roughly on a cracked helipad, the impact jarring through my already aching body. He dragged me toward a rusted door, ripping it from its hinges with one hand while maintaining his grip on me with the other.
Inside, the air was stale and musty, but mercifully warm. He threw his hand up and the lights sputtered to life, illuminated with his power.
Dust particles danced in the beams of illumination streaming from the lights. The place had clearly been abandoned for years—some kind of research facility, judging by the remnants of laboratory equipment visible through doorways as Helios pulled me down a long hallway.
He finally stopped in what must have once been a central testing arena for Supers. Without ceremony, he released his grip and shoved me to the floor. The concrete was cold against my cheek, but I barely noticed, too focused on trying to stop shivering long enough to think.
Something clattered nearby and I forced my head up. Helios had knocked over a metal tray and frozen mid-motion. His entire body trembled slightly, and his face showed a flash of horror. His eyes, for just a moment, were his own again as they locked onto mine, wide with panic and confusion.
Then, like a candle being snuffed out, the light of recognition vanished. His features smoothed back into that terrible blankness, eyes going cold and distant once more.
He walked to the center of the testing area and stopped at a specific spot on the floor, circling it slowly. The concrete there was discolored, darker than the surrounding area, with strange scorch patterns radiating outward.
“Do you remember this spot, William?” Helios’s voice came out wrong. “This is where it happened. Where Ava Morgan stood.”
Helios’s face contorted, a flash of anguish breaking through Halcyon’s control.
“She was so pretty, wasn’t she? All that red hair. Such a shame what happened to it when your power surged.” Halcyon’s cruel words poured from Helios’s lips. “The way it singed away in an instant. The way her skin blistered and peeled as your energy burned through her.”
Helios’s body convulsed, his hands trembling.
“She screamed for exactly eight seconds before her lungs collapsed. I counted. And poor David over there—” he pointed to another area of the floor “—third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. He lived, though. At least for a while. Long enough to wish he’d died immediately.”
His face flickered between expressions, Halcyon’s cold detachment and Helios’s raw agony.
“And sweet little Jennifer. The blast threw her against that wall.” He gestured casually. “She lived for two months afterward before succumbing to her injuries.”
Silent tears started to fall down his face then, unacknowledged by Halcyon as he continued.
“Everyone else that survived testified against you, didn’t they? They all said you did it on purpose.” Halcyon’s voice turned contemplative. “They were so afraid of you after that. So willing to believe you were a monster.”
Another spasm wracked Helios’s body, stronger this time. His mouth opened in a silent scream before Halcyon regained control.
“They experimented on you to control your power, to find a new way to control Trueborn Supers. Then, when the test went awry, the Alliance covered it all up. Buried the records. And then they let you believe you were one of them.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. Watching Helios suffer, hearing Halcyon’s cruel words pouring from his mouth, it was too much. The memory of that night twenty years ago still clawed at me, but something else rose up alongside the fear.
Rage.
“Stop.”
Helios’s head snapped up, turning toward me with an unnatural, jerky motion that no human neck should make. The expression that spread across his face wasn’t Helios at all—it was a terrible parody of a smile, too wide, too knowing.
“Well, well. Little Annie Bishop thinks she can use what’s mine against me? Against this puppet I control?”
He cocked his head, like a bird of prey studying a mouse. The movement was so wrong, so inhuman, that I instinctively tried to back away, my palms scraping against the concrete floor.
“Do you know what I’d like to do to you right now?” He took a step toward me, that terrible smile never wavering. “I’d start with your fingers. Break each one, then peel the skin back. I’d keep you conscious, of course, I have ways to ensure you feel everything.”
He took another step.
“Then your eyes. Such pretty eyes. Havoc’s eyes,” he hissed. “I’d take my time with those. Make you watch in a mirror as I worked.” His voice had turned almost gentle. “After that, your tongue. Your ears. Piece by piece, until there’s nothing left but your beating heart.”
He gave a theatrical sigh. “But I can’t.
Not yet. Not until I figure out how to take back what you stole from me.
” He crouched down, bringing that twisted face close to mine.
He brushed his fingers against my cheek, and I flinched away from the hatred burning in his eyes.
“The truly sad part is that I need your mind intact to do my work.”
He stood back up, stretching Helios’s body as if trying on an ill-fitting suit. The movement was wrong. Too fluid in some places, too jerky in others.
“This one, on the other hand,” he said, gesturing to Helios’s body with a casual wave, “it will be so much simpler if his mind breaks.” He tapped Helios’s temple with his own finger.
“He’s fighting me constantly. Such a nuisance.
It will be harder to use him discreetly if he’s completely broken, of course, but we can’t have everything we want, I suppose. ”
I watched as Halcyon went back to parading Helios’s body around the room, pointing to different spots where tragedies had occurred.