Runemaker, page 15
“They are dead,” she said. Just hearing her voice made shivers race down his sweating skin. Her words were oceanic in their pull, laced with power. He knew, then, she was indeed the one who had spoken to him through Fire’s urgings. She looked over to Tomás’s corpse. In death, the Kin didn’t seem all that seductive. He was nothing more than a bloody sack of meat. “All of them.”
To think, there had been a time when Aidan thought he and Tomás might be equals. That Tomás might be able to grant him everything he desired.
“As you asked,” Aidan replied.
“I did not ask you to kill Tomás.” She still didn’t turn to face him. Didn’t look him in the eye. And for some reason, that dismissal, that tone of her voice, sent a chill of doubt through him. Fire quivered.
“I needed a life to bring you back. Tomás had pledged his life to your return. I thought it fitting the he be the one to bring it about.”
“The poetry is not lost on me. But you, Hunter, are no poet. You killed Tomás because you feared him.”
“I fear nothing.”
“Not even me?” she asked, glancing at him over her shoulder.
That look, that flash of her eyes, made Fire stutter out in his chest. On the slab, she had been beautiful. Delicately human. With a model’s cheekbones and pouting lips. But now, those features were feral. Hungry. She was beautiful, yes, but it was a terrible sort of beauty, the kind that destroyed you the moment you crossed its path.
“Yes,” he admitted.
The word fell from his mouth before he could stop it. Something about her demanded the truth.
She stood slowly and elegantly, stretching as if from a long nap, and not four years of imprisonment. Then she stepped over to Tomás and knelt at his side, placed a hand on his brow.
“He was a good subject,” she mused. “My finest creation.”
And there it was, the tiniest spark of fear within him. That he had pushed too far. That he had overstepped.
Instead, she sighed and stood, her dress swirling as she turned to face him.
“But we will make more, will we not?” she asked. “Better. Far better. We will be gods.”
I already am a god, he wanted to say. He bit the words down. “Yes. But first, you owe me.”
Her eyebrow quirked as she smiled. He could tell she wasn’t used to having people stand up to her. Demanding things.
“I brought you back from the brink of death,” he said. “I saved you from obscurity. From an eternity of this.” He gestured around the room, to the pedestal and stone walls and the two corpses littering the floor.
Her smile widened. She stepped forward, her long dress dragging over Tomás’s face. She reached out and touched Aidan’s cheek, and he realized her fingers still dripped with Tomás’s blood.
“Brazen,” she said. Her fingers were cold on his jaw. “To demand a life from the Goddess of Death.”
“The Goddess of Death that nearly died,” Aidan said. He had to play his cards right. He had to prove he wouldn’t be beaten down. He had to get her to pay her half of the bargain.
She laughed.
“You cannot kill one such as me. Even if my body fades, my name will live forever.” She leaned in. “I have watched you even in stasis, and I know you are not as cold as you would like to believe. You desire one thing more than anything else. Even more than ruling. And I can give her to you.”
“As you said you would. As you promised.”
The last word came out as a squeak. He couldn’t sound like he was begging. He had to remain in power. But how could he hold on to that power when it all seemed to stream from her?
Her eyes searched his face, and her other hand reached down and took his broken fingers in hers. “I will bring your mother back, Aidan. I am a woman of my word. I am no monster, not like the Church who tortured you so. I will bring her back, but not yet.”
He took a step back.
“Not yet?”
“Not yet. There is much that must be done first. The Church will find out I have been set free, and they will come for me. As will those you thought to be your friends. We must be ready when they arrive. We must prepare.”
He shook his head.
“No. No, I already killed all of the Kin for you. I brought you back from the dead. You promised me you’d bring her back. Now.”
“And I will,” she said. “But what use is her life if she is killed immediately after? We must wipe out all threats.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
She smiled.
“With a little help from your friends.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
DREYA
“The hell is that?” Kianna asked, her gun pointed at the fox. “Did you hear that? Is that thing talking?”
Dreya put a gentle hand on Kianna’s arm, but she couldn’t get her to budge. She couldn’t take her own eyes off the fox. The boys stood, dumbstruck.
She had heard the voice, clear as day. Just as they all had.
She knew it deep in her core.
“That is not the enemy,” Dreya said. She kept her voice low, soothing. “It is an emissary.”
“Emissary? Emissary of what?”
“The Violet Sage.”
The fox bowed its head again when she spoke the name.
“The hell is a Violet Sage?” Kianna asked.
“The only human to ever wield all four Spheres at once,” Dreya said.
“That looks like a fox to me.”
“It is her voice.”
Tenn took a hesitant step forward.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “What do you want?”
“You have let the boy unleash terrible evil,” the fox said. “We must prepare to fight it.”
“But how?”
“You already know,” the fox said. “Come.”
It turned and walked away, down the alley. Tenn glanced to the others. Dreya nodded.
“We will need her help,” she said. “We should follow.”
Tenn nodded. Began walking forward. Then Dreya heard the voice again.
“Not you,” it said. She knew the voice was meant only for her. “It must be him. Only him.”
But there is so much I wish to ask you, Dreya thought back. So much I wish to learn.
“And you will,” the Violet Sage replied. “Soon. But for now, he must go alone. There is much that must be done back here. She will come for you. And you must be ready when she does.”
A vision filled her mind. The sky in flames, clouds roiling as lightning struck and earthquakes toppled buildings. Figures scattered on the ground. Men and women and children, running and screaming as thousands of Howls poured through the streets like blood, like so much blood, and it was then she realized it was Outer Chicago she saw. And there, at its beating, burning heart, was Aidan.
She gasped.
Tenn looked back at the three of them. They had all stopped moving. She wondered if the others had received a similar message, or were simply too stunned to go.
“You must go alone,” Dreya said. She swallowed. “We will be here when you return. We must let the others know.”
She could see the struggle within him. The desire to tell them he wasn’t going alone. But he saw the logic in it. This was no time to let emotion override logic. The war was no longer coming—it was here. And they needed to prepare.
She worried the vision she had been granted proved there was no point in preparing. They had already lost.
Is that what will be, or what might be? she asked within.
“It is what the Prophets have seen,” the Violet Sage replied.
It wasn’t the answer she’d hoped for.
There was not much more in this world to hope for.
“Okay,” Tenn said. As if to ready himself for whatever was to come. “Okay. I’ll... I’ll see you soon.”
She nodded. They all did.
Then the last hope the world had walked away from them, and Dreya felt the weight of knowledge settle on her shoulders.
This was the end.
No matter what Tenn tried, this was the end.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
TENN
The last thing Tenn wanted was to be separated from his friends.
He felt like a raw nerve, felt like everything that could have gone wrong had. Everything felt wrong. Absolutely, horribly wrong.
And it was all his fault.
But he knew he had to follow the fox. Knew it was his destiny just as he’d known in the depths of that internal cave that finding Aidan had been his destiny.
This destiny, at least, he wouldn’t let himself screw up.
It felt like something out of a fairy tale, trailing a fox through the abandoned streets. It leaped over potholes, its feet barely making tracks in the mud, its fur somehow dry despite the rain.
What have I gotten myself into? he thought.
If the fox heard him, it didn’t respond.
He followed the beast down an alley that led to what appeared to be a dead end. With every step, the dread in him grew deeper. This has to be some sort of trick or trap; there was no way the most powerful mage in existence lived here. This close to Outer Chicago.
No way she lived in a place like this.
“Here,” the fox said in the Violet Sage’s voice.
He looked around.
There was nothing. Battered garages and crumbling brick walls and fences choked with dead weeds. Abandoned suburbia at its finest.
“Here?” he asked. “But there’s nothing—”
Images flooded him before he could finish his sentence. A rush of color and sound and sensation that washed from the crown of his head down to his feet. He fell to his knees as the vision overtook him, as the sounds and whispers grew louder, drowning out the rain and the city, until all he could see were the symbols, all he could hear were the whispers.
Runes.
Dozens of them.
They poured through him, racing across his vision, pumping through his blood. He pressed his hands into the cold puddle before him, trying to stay upright as the runes continued. No, not continued. They were repeating. A dozen or so, flickering through his mind, their meanings sinking deep into his bones.
It felt like it went on for eternity.
And then, like the snap of a finger, the sensation stopped.
He shuddered as reality closed around him. The rain. The gray. The mud.
As if it had all been a dream.
Except, he remembered.
With shaking limbs he pushed himself back up to standing. The fox just stared at him with its head cocked to the side. That pose made him think of Tomás.
Tomás.
Tomás was dead.
The final member of the Kin was dead. The one who had haunted and tormented and threatened Tenn all this time. Tenn should have been relieved. There was no longer an incubus stalking his bedside. No longer the looming threat that this creature would come in and kill all those he loved if he said the wrong thing.
So why did that movement fill him with sadness?
Tomás was dead.
Tenn swallowed and looked to the garage door in front of him, trying to push the loss down. He shouldn’t despair over the death of the monster. Even if it did make him feel more alone. A little more cold. Without Tomás, the world would always be a little colder. A little less, well, fun.
He opened to Earth and held up his hand, scrawling a dark, long line of runes vertically along the door. They hummed with meaning in his mind. Some, he already knew—runes for travel, for speed. Others were more precise, more ethereal. Runes for bending, for stalking, for binding to a course. On their own, they wouldn’t do much. But together, they spelled one of the most powerful equations for travel he’d ever seen.
Unlike the other runes of travel, these didn’t require him to have a destination in mind, nor did they require him to use Air. He only needed to feed them power, any power, and they would take him to a preset destination. This, he knew in the corner of his mind. They would take him to the Violet Sage.
He stared at his creation for a moment, marveling at the language that simmered in his heart.
“Are you coming with?” he asked the fox.
When he looked over, however, the fox was gone.
“All right, then,” Tenn said to himself. He glanced once more to the entrance of the alley, toward where his friends had parted ways with him. A pang of sadness strummed through his heart.
He had a terrible feeling he would never see them again.
Before the fear or the prophecy could get to him, he stepped forward and placed his hands to the runes. Then he opened to Earth, and let the language take him where it willed.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
DREYA
An uneasy silence stretched over the three of them the moment Tenn left. Dreya could tell Kianna didn’t want to be here, that she wanted nothing more than to travel back to Aidan and beat sense into him. Though they all knew such an act would be fruitless.
Otherwise, Dreya might very well be inclined to comply.
Devon snorted.
I thought I was the one who was supposed to prefer violence, he thought at her.
Desperate times, she thought back.
“I must be losing my mind,” Kianna mumbled. “A fox. A bloody fox.”
Dreya watched her pace. She wanted to reach out and calm her. But she knew there was no calming her, not now. Kianna had just seen her best friend revive the very force he was sworn to destroy. There would be little comfort for any of them from here on out. Even though Dreya would very much like to be that presence...
Get your head in the game, Devon growled.
Dreya glared at her brother, but he had a point. They must be rational. As she had told Tenn they must be. She drew through Air, a cleansing inhalation, and let clarity breeze away her doubts.
“No one has lost their mind,” Dreya said. It wasn’t much of a comfort, but it was a start. “Outer Chicago is only a few blocks from here. We need to go and warn them of what has happened.”
“Don’t you lot have the Prophets and all to warn you when things go to shite?”
“Yes. But we cannot rely on them. We can only rely on ourselves.”
“That, at least, is a motto I can stand behind,” Kianna said. “All right then. Lead on.”
Dreya was not used to leading. She glanced to her brother, expecting him to step in front and guide them to Outer Chicago. When he just stared at her, she realized that would not be the case.
Sometimes you are insufferable.
Beneath the folds of his scarf, she knew Devon grinned.
She reached through Air and spread her senses throughout the suburb, her mind’s eye racing over ruined streets and abandoned houses. Nearly a mile away, she caught sight of the wall separating Outer Chicago from the rest of the world.
She began to walk.
Why didn’t you just take us to the interior? Devon asked.
Because I could not risk Tenn being taken prisoner again, Dreya replied.
They both knew Jarrett wouldn’t risk Tenn’s freedom. Now, more than ever, Tenn needed to be kept safe. Not only from Aidan, but from himself. Water was a tempestuous Sphere, and when it felt pain, it dragged the user toward it like a moth to flame. Hopefully, resisting that temptation was amongst the skills the Violet Sage could teach him.
Hopefully, he could learn quickly.
No one spoke as they walked toward Outer Chicago’s perimeter. The sky above broke into a heavy rain, and even though Dreya put up a shield to prevent the worst of it from staining their clothes, they were still soaked through and sullen. Not necessarily with water, but with the message they carried with them.
The end has come.
The end has come.
Dreya tried to formulate what she would say, and how she would say it, to make Tenn’s involvement seem even less than it was. She tried to think of how she would explain rescuing him from the prison.
She tried to think of how she could rally the troops, when in the deepest pit of her heart she knew it was a dying cause.
She looked to Kianna, who even now walked with her head held high and a dozen weapons strapped to her body. Who, after attuning to Earth, seemed even taller, stronger, more stable in her body. It made Dreya feel tiny and frail in comparison.
Everything about this situation made her feel tiny and frail.
There is no point giving up just yet, Devon thought. We have never given up. Will never.
And even though he didn’t play the images she knew were running through his mind, she felt the ash in his words, smelled the char of her family’s flesh.
She still had all of them to avenge. Somehow.
She felt the presence before they reached the gate. For a moment, she thought it an enemy. Then she felt the stirrings of the tracking rune she always held loosely in her mind.
Perhaps she would have rather it be an enemy.
Perhaps it still was.
“You helped him escape,” Jarrett called through the deluge when they came into view.
Even those words were enough to rise the ire in Dreya’s chest. He may as well have called them traitors. For what? For doing what the spirits had told them to do, rather than what the ego-driven Guild had decided?
They may have been sent after Tenn for the same reason as Jarrett, but after meeting with the Witches, they knew what their true duty was.
“We had to,” Dreya said. She amplified her voice with Air, filled it with power. She would not back down. “He was never meant to be taken prisoner.”
“No.” They had neared enough that he didn’t have to yell. Dreya stepped up to him, though the others lingered behind. “He was meant to be kept safe. And now where is he?”
