Chapter 1 #5
My own energy rises, lashing against his, rejecting it on a fundamental level.
Tension thrums through the Cataclysm. His jaw distends, teeth clenching, grinding.
We hang suspended like that for a breath, waiting. The Cataclysm holding my wrist, struggling to absorb whatever my essence is doing to repel that touch. Me holding Muta, waiting for the universe to intervene.
The universe has to step up, step in, right?
The Cataclysm suddenly yanks me toward him, wrenching my shoulder and sinking his teeth into my neck even as I’m tripping over my own feet.
I scream. In pain, yes, but also in utter confusion.
More power, more energy pours out of me, raging against the Cataclysm, against his hold. My body is utterly paralyzed in his bite, his long, sharp teeth buried under my skin. I’m trapped, trapped —
The Cataclysm pulls from me.
Not my blood, though I’m sure that’s pouring from the wound as well. He’s drinking, consuming my energy.
Other shouts rise around us. Muta, who I’ve managed not to drop, tries to rally but is barely able to loop around my wrist. The same wrist that the Cataclysm grips so tightly that I can feel my bones rubbing against each other.
I can feel Muta’s life force again, as weak as it is. I can touch it.
Go to Presh, I whisper through those threads, breaking my own unvoiced rule to never manipulate those closest to me, even if I’m doing so out of love. To Presh, Muta, I press. Then I manage to loosen my hold on him just enough to let him drop to the pavement.
The bushmaster, despite never having obeyed me in all our time together, listens to me now. As he listened to my mother before me when she sent him to me.
Maybe I’m dying and Muta can sense it. As he knew that my mother was dying. Maybe I’ll be murdered by the same person who took my mother from me, took my childhood. Took the only person, the only parental figure who ever loved me. Me, Zaya. Not just me, the vessel of the Conduit.
The Cataclysm takes another slow, deep pull of my power.
Everything goes hazy around me except for Presh screaming and Reck shouting. I hold onto those connections even as I reach, sightlessly reach, for any other thread, anything that I can use to free myself.
I just need to give Muta time to get to Presh. For them all to get in the SUV. If I don’t have a weapon to wield, I need a distraction.
“You can’t kill me,” I whisper to the Cataclysm, reminding myself of that fact at the same time. “You can’t cage me.”
He chuckles, finally withdrawing his teeth from my neck. The wound stings, aches.
“I will indeed keep you close and will be very careful not to kill you.”
He runs the flat of his tongue over the bite, sending streaks of pain down my neck and over my shoulder.
I don’t understand the power he wields. I don’t understand how he connects to the essence that fuels the universe. I can’t see or feel it.
“You won’t be able to sneak away a second time,” he whispers against my skin. “Conduit.”
My heart thuds in my chest as the ramifications of that statement slowly penetrate the paralysis that’s flooded my body and mind under his bite.
He releases me abruptly.
I fall, seemingly boneless, barely catching myself on my hands before my chin hits the pavement.
He steps over me, crossing toward the SUV with that slow and steady gait.
I manage to shift enough to track his movements, narrowing my eyes and desperately trying to see anything I can touch, manipulate. There is something very wrong about how he moves through the world, neither attracting nor repelling energy.
But I don’t have time to dissect any of it.
Reck is the only thing standing between his father and Precious. Precious and DeVille. Muta hangs limply across his shoulders, unable to twine even once around his neck. Unable to get to Presh in the SUV.
I reach for Reck’s threads, finding that I’m still holding fast to the essence I snagged earlier.
I shove an intent at him.
Save Precious.
Gaze still locked to his father, Reck is actually shoved off kilter at my push.
The Cataclysm pauses, then slowly turns to look back at me. As if he disapproves of my interference.
I’m using too much power, I think. Even with whatever the Cataclysm somehow managed to drain, even though I still can’t sense any essence from him, stolen or not. But I don’t have time for refinement.
I send another pulse of intent toward Reck, rash and reckless with it. Save Precious. It’s possible I’m completely fucking with Reck’s mind, with his fate. Except I know this is a choice he would already make.
A choice he already has made.
Even if I don’t know all the details of my first death, Reck has already sacrificed me once. Twice, if you count bringing me here into Bellamy’s so-called trap.
He shudders under my press. As if trying to fight it? Why would he —
Reck abruptly scrambles for the driver’s-side door, throwing himself into the SUV. I catch Precious’s scream of “No!” before the engine kicks in and Reck yanks the door shut.
Utterly exhausted but still actively implementing my brilliant distraction plan, I start dragging myself — literally — toward the portal.
The Cataclysm watches me, not amused anymore.
Reck hits the accelerator. The SUV fishtails, then shoots forward, almost rolling as it swerves onto the road.
The Cataclysm doesn’t bother to give chase, though I have no doubt he could catch up to the vehicle. Or maybe he has other roadblocks in place that Reck will have to fight through?
I make it onto my hands and knees.
The Cataclysm sighs as if the weight of the world rests on his shoulders as he watches the SUV speed away.
But the weight of the world doesn’t rest on his shoulders.
It rests on mine.
Desperate to keep the Cataclysm’s attention on me, I crawl toward the seething maw of the portal. I’m fairly certain the berserkers who went through it unassisted were disintegrated.
I have no idea what sort of essence the Cataclysm can harness and wield. But if I disintegrate, what will the universe do to bring its Conduit back? Seeing as how it’s already abandoned me in the now, perhaps the power will simply fall to another.
I don’t get anywhere near to testing that supposition, though.
Choosing to secure me over chasing after the others, the Cataclysm closes the space between us in a few strides. He yanks me up onto my feet by a tight fistful of my sweater. I’m not actually holding any of my own weight.
“Point to you, little Conduit,” he snarls in my ear. “But I’ll eventually win, win everything I want. And I’ll use your own power to fuel the coming war. This earth will be mine.”
He lifts me up like a bag of garbage and tosses me into the churning vortex of the portal.
I’m instantly swallowed whole, my scream trapped within my lungs.
Everything goes dark, pitch black. I lose sight, sound … touch.
I’m suspended in nothingness, connected to nothing.
The hair in my nostrils freezes. My next breath fills my lungs with sharp shards of crystalline ice. Pain, utter agony. I can still feel that, even as all my other senses have been stripped from me.
This is death.
True death.
I’m utterly lost, utterly alone.
The pain eases. My already struggling heartbeat falters. No breath fills my lungs, no oxygen filters through my blood.
A numbness encases me, spreading across my skin, then sinking deeper and deeper until it’s penetrating my bones.
A soul-deep numbing — reminiscent of the pockets of nothingness I passed through, that I was momentarily suffocated within, when I reached for the trinkets on my windowsill.
Or when I tried to walk directly up the path toward Rath outside the beach house.
Understanding flares through me — too late — as my mind connects all the missing pieces.
Those collectibles were connected to the soul bonds that were somehow stripped from me, connected to the missing sections of my past. And when I inadvertently trace those missing threads, I find only the nothingness.
The lack of essence.
That’s what surrounds me now.
Wherever this portal is supposed to lead, I’ve been trapped in the middle and cut off from the essence that fuels the universe. The universe as I know it, at least.
I’m trapped here, either dying or to forever be suspended within nothing. No one is coming to rescue me. The universe won’t suddenly reach for me, won’t move me out of harm’s way.
What happens if I die here? What if the universe can’t shift the power I hold to another vessel? Does the rest of the world crumble into nothing without its Conduit? Without all the essence that flows through me?
No.
I refuse to be thrown away, tossed aside so carelessly both by the Cataclysm and the universe. Even as death seeps through me, I understand that much.
The power that opened this portal — both the person and the energy they harness — is the antithesis of the power I hold. The Cataclysm doesn’t want me dead. But he’s also drastically miscalculated by trying to transport me within or through a power so diametrically opposed to my own.
And I’m not fucking dying by accident.
I’m not inadvertently taking the rest of the fucking world with me just because I chose Presh, chose to go with Reck rather than be plucked away and sheltered by the universe.
There has to be … something … I can reach … some part of me, some thread of essence …
Yes.
There.
I reach for the power I can feel frozen just above my chest, just over my heart. It’s dying too, flickering in and out …
It’s mine.
To protect me, shield me, focus me. And also for me to wield.
I grab for it. With my mind because I cannot move my hand.
I claim it. Mine.
Power — pure unfiltered essence — flares, searing through layers of my clothing as the power conductor that hangs around my neck ignites. A shard of the intersection point, according to Rath’s research.
Disguised as a multimillion-dollar pink diamond caged in threads of gold, that shard alone is enough to sustain me, even —