Earth Awakened, page 15
“I’m so sorry,” she said, clamping her hands over her mouth. She lowered them and shook her head again. “When we came back and Bonnie met Naomi outside, their talk looked so serious. Naomi told me that you were going to have to make a big decision and it was best to not add to your stress. She said that we would tell you at a later time. I’m so sorry. I thought I was doing a good thing.”
Naomi is hiding information from me.
How long had that been going on?
“Don’t worry about her, or me.” He took her hands again and ran his thumbs over her smooth skin. “I’ll worry about all of this. I just want to know what happened to you.”
“Nothing happened to me,” she said. “Something could have happened, but it didn’t. I became friendly with some people there. Everyone was so nice to me, and it was so nice to be around people just living normal lives. The campus was not officially open yet, so I knew many of the people there. Whenever the team went into the library, I would stand outside as their lookout and talk to anyone lingering outside. It worked for most of the time we were there.”
“Then something happened?”
She nodded. “Yes. On the last day. There’s this woman. A Westran with new power, just like us—and she was afraid of it. We sat together a few times in the cafeteria, talked about stuff. I found her outside of the library on the last night and went to talk to her, but it was like something changed. She started yelling at me to run. Everything around me began to move. God, it-it looked like she was in pain. She kept saying she didn’t want it to happen, kept telling me to get away, but her power wouldn’t listen to her. She just lost control.”
Javen swallowed. “What happened to her?”
“A man came,” she said. “He touched her, and she fell. Out cold. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Rosie took a deep breath, and her eyes began to water again. “She didn’t want to hurt me, Javen. She is my friend, and she just…she just fell. They took her away. She didn’t mean to do it. She tried to stop it.”
When she fell back into his arms, she brought her pain with her. Her clawed hands gripped onto his arms, and she cried against his shirt. He looked at the wall, his mind staring past it. The muscles in his face worked as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.
Rosie was almost killed by a friend, and Naomi chose to not tell me.
“Hey,” he said, fighting to keep the anger from his voice. “Hey, look at me for a second. Please?”
The midday heat brought bits of frizz to her dark hair that tickled his chin as she raised her head. All the flesh around her eyes had swelled, and the edges of her eyes and nose were red. She wiped her face on her T-shirt and settled back on her side of the hood.
“You’re Fire,” he said.
She groaned at the statement.
“No,” he laughed. “You are. I taught high school, remember? My kids had little problems, too. Maybe not as little as the ones your kids had, but they were little in the eyes of their parents. It’s frustrating when you are trying to help a kid and their parents do not consider their problems real. I know you. I know how you are. I guarantee that, when the cards were down, you stood up for your kids. That, Rosie, is Fire. It takes a courageous, tenacious person to carry a banner for a cause no one supports, especially when that cause is in the name of those who can’t defend themselves. You are Fire. No one here is more Fire than you.”
Rosie mumbled a thanks and smiled.
“And, after we get settled here, I know exactly what I am going to do,” he continued. “First thing. I am taking the longest, hottest shower in the history of mankind. Breaking records.”
She laughed and slid off the hood. Her fingers worked at the top of her pants to better the fit, and she smoothed down her T-shirt. “How hot are you thinking?”
“You know that curve in the drain? How it bends?” He moved his hand in the air to mimic the shape.
“The U-bend?”
“Yes! My water is going to hit that spot, but it won’t follow the pipe. It will burn a hole right through.”
She laughed again, “That sounds nice.”
“It will be. Now, those crows woke us up insanely early. I am thinking that some sleep will do us all good. You can go first. Why don’t you head to the house with Gannon? Send Caleb back in, please.”
“Okay.”
They walked together toward the front door. Either the exhaustion of the talk or the fatigue of an early rise made Rosie’s heavy combat boots drag across the dirty floor. She stumbled into the direct sun, and Javen turned back into the garage.
Tears and sweat made his shirt cling to his skin. He remembered his canteen on the workbench and, while he waited for Caleb to come back, he deliberated whether the water would feel better in or on his body. Holes of various sizes cratered the floor, giving it the appearance of Swiss Cheese. At the side, Caleb had made several holes around a piece of concrete that looked as if it could be finished off with bare hands.
Then, Caleb came into range, and that line of connection snapped into place.
Earth senses opened up to him.
With a thought, he sent it into the concrete, pictured the symbols in his mind, and punched toward the far wall.
Sigils flew onto his arms. With a series of resounding cracks, bits of stone, concrete, and metal burst from around him and corkscrewed together in the direction of his attack.
They hit the wall as one, sending debris crashing along the floor.
When the dust settled, the wall was gone.
Chapter 18
May 13th, 2003 - Transition Year Twenty-One
Mersetzdeitz
McKay swayed, squinting her eyes into tired slits as she once again followed Kitty through the front entrance of Gobardon’s swanky condominium building.
It was more populated this morning. Men and women in business attire occupied the seating area to the right of the lobby, browsing their phones or working on laptops. Others spoke in low, polite tones to the concierge. Across the hall, off to the left beside the bank of windows, a mother and father entertained a small, well-dressed toddler with the view from outside while they sipped their morning coffees.
Once again, she felt out of place. She was in another jeans and T-shirt combination, with combat boots too old and worn down to be anything resembling chic—one of the laces was almost completely shredded on one side, hanging onto the hooks with obvious fraying. She’d done her best to clean her jacket, and it had regained some of its looks, but there was no denying that it had looked less abused before she’d engaged in an Earth Magic battle with it.
Well, two Earth Magic battles, technically. She couldn’t forget what she’d done to the Kenmin Center yesterday.
Fucking hell, I’m just a shitshow.
But she’d slept surprisingly well last night. Although there’d been a small, initial panic upon waking up in a strange place, it had been quickly over and a far cry from the full-blown PTSD episode she had woken up with yesterday. And she’d slept all the way until seven o’clock, waking only once around three to use the bathroom.
It was surprising, considering the shared hostel room she and Kitty had plunked down in last night.
Maybe I should sleep with Kitty more often. Clearly, she is the answer to my PTSD.
She’d thought about it. She really had. But only in passing.
It had been a long dry spell for her, and Kitty seemed to be an… open person.
But no. That was not going to happen.
It had been a nice night, though. The hostel was a small, out-of-the-way place down an alley and in the back of an old warehouse in Mersetzdeitz’s southern district. An odd, multi-leveled place that fit into a skinny building between two others and had an industrial grunge chic that McKay had really appreciated.
Mersetzdeitz was full of that, she’d found. Old parts of its industrial past converted into new, modern arts installations that threw back to the city’s heritage.
And before they’d gotten there, the motorcycle ride had been… good.
As much as she’d joked about riding bitch on a bike, riding with Kitty had reminded her of her teenage years in Terremain. She’d acquired a bike and an illegal license at fourteen. When she’d needed to get out of the house, she’d just take that bike and cruise.
It had been a bit dodgy in the early years, when she’d still been underage, but the freedom had been worth it.
She still had a favorite set of roads just outside the city proper, lined with farm fields that had been let go to make hay—just miles and miles of slowly-undulating green or tan, lined with the occasional dip and rise of a rusted barbed wire fence, with Terremain in the distance beyond and the mountains rising up behind it.
It had been like looking into some goddamn fantasy novel.
The bike was still in Terremain, under a tarp in her friend Sayako’s old garage.
Sayako had died during the later years of the war, when everything had been falling apart. Her family hadn’t given a shit. They’d abandoned her the second she’d stepped out of the lesbian closet.
Terremain had turned skeletal by then, with less than a third of its original civilian population.
The soldiers had been there, though. Every single part of Westran’s surviving military, including the Navy, which had undergone some massive reassignments and retraining in the landlocked city—and which had, somehow, managed to get three ships up the Tir River. There’d been so many soldiers, the city had bloomed again, bar and restaurant owners staying behind and running a skeleton crew to serve them. They’d piled into the base, overfilled it, and spilled into the downtown core, taking over dorms, apartment buildings, offices, anywhere they could that would house them, which led to some interesting neighborhood interactions.
Once, she and her team had bunked in an apartment next to an eighty-year-old who’d baked them cookies.
God knew how she’d done it. Supplies were hard to come by in that city. She must have had a lifetime supply of flour and sugar tucked in a spare bedroom.
She wondered if the apartment was still there, or if it had been bombed out.
Swarzgard hadn’t been gentle in taking the city.
Then again, Westray hadn’t been gentle in defending it.
She let out a breath and gave her head a small shake.
No. That was in the past. It was over, and there was nothing she could do about it. Losing the war had been inevitable. She had to move on.
Last night had been nice. Nice to relax, nice to forget, nice to feel at home—if only for a few hours.
And Professor Tachun was correct. Whatever Dark Magic had been affecting her thoughts last night had lessened this morning.
She hadn’t thought about killing herself once yet today.
Score a point for the Dark Mage. Maybe he does know his stuff.
She wasn’t sure if she was going to call the therapist he’d recommended. That, she felt, was something for a different time. When the cat was under control and she was no longer at risk of cracking a building in half with a single incident.
“You should let me do the talking,” Kitty said.
McKay looked up, pulled out of her thoughts. “Yeah?”
Kitty wore roughly the same as she’d worn yesterday, a grunge rock combination of leather and ripped skinny jeans with a woven conglomeration of bandanas, bracelets, and purple mesh hiding a ripple of scar tissue on her left wrist. Her fingers glimmered with a combination of rings, and roughly five separate necklaces made knots of each other around her neck. Today, she’d changed out her shirt for something loud and splattered in rainbow coloring, as if she’d made a run through a paint warehouse and a bunch of colors had been on the shakers with their lids off.
McKay envied the small leather jacket she wore.
Then again, she envied most leather jackets she saw.
She just wanted to collect them all.
Kitty shifted from one hip to the other, brows forming into a small frown as she kept her gaze forward. “Yeah. Situations like this—well, they require a delicate hand. He’s hurting, but that’s no fucking excuse to do what he did yesterday, and he needs to know that it is unacceptable.”
Her eyebrows twitched.
By the way Kitty was talking, it sounded more like she was training a dog rather than confronting one of the more powerful Mages in the city.
“I think he is aware of that,” she said carefully. “If he isn’t, then I and everyone I’ve spoken to about him have supremely overestimated his intelligence.”
“Most people do,” Kitty said, rolling her eyes toward the numbers flashing by above the elevator door. “But most people don’t spend the kind of time that I do with him.”
“Oh…” McKay frowned, a hesitant confusion worming its way through her brain. “Are you two… together?”
Maybe it was a really good thing she hadn’t slept with Kitty.
But the woman visibly recoiled. “Jesus fucking Christ, McKay. Ew! I just had breakfast. Fuck, I did not need that in my brain.” She made a retching noise. “No, we are not ‘together’ and we never will be. God. He’s more like a family member to me—and I am not into incest.”
“Right. Okay, then.”
“I still find it hard to believe that he’s stupid,” she said. “He’s not. Stupid people don’t make detailed plans to infiltrate enemy territory and find Earth spirits, nor do they make detailed plans about killing their parents.”
“Well, no, okay—he’s not stupid stupid. He’s smart. Intelligent, even. But he is stupid in other ways.”
“Like yesterday when he attacked me?”
“Yes, precisely that. He’s smart enough to initiate the attack and plan it, but not smart enough to realize how stupid doing it is, or what the potential long-term consequences are, and why he should care about them. He’s very self-involved. He’s gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s something his father drilled into him. He was taught to go for power above everything, and to put the worth of the family over everything, no matter how he felt about it and what morals he was required to bend.” She took a breath. “I think that, after Rurutia was killed, he became even more obsessed with finding power for himself—only this time, he wants it for the benefit of society as a whole, or for those he calls friends, like me and Meese, rather than a selfish, blind climb to power for his family and their fucked up ways. He sees a lot of injustice in the world and wants to correct that.”
“That’s still no excuse for attacking me.”
“No, of course it isn’t. And he’s stupid for even thinking that—for believing his own excuses. But that’s where he’s coming from. Please, let me do the talking. It’s a sensitive situation, and it requires a delicate approach.”
McKay’s eyebrows twitched again. In her opinion, it was a pretty damn black-and-white situation—he had attacked her, and that was fucked up.
But she decided to let it go.
She was very interested in Kitty’s definition of ‘delicate approach.’
The elevator stopped and the doors rolled open, once again revealing the gleaming hardwood of the hallway. The cat sat up inside her, paying a little more attention. A whisper of power slipped through her and into the floor, pushing a mental image of the floor’s layout into her mind, along with who or what was in each apartment.
The ones closest to the elevator were empty, but a few people were still in their apartments to the right. McKay caught flashes of sight and motion and feeling. Of cold, solid concrete. The quiet hum of sophisticated heating equipment and air ducts. The sharp teeth of a garbage disposal in someone’s kitchen sink.
A pulse of power flagged the other Earth user on the floor, painting him where he sat in his apartment some ways off to the left, close to the edge of the building.
Gobardon was home. And, by the answering touch of power she felt, he knew she was there.
Good. They hadn’t exactly come up the elevator for a surprise attack.
Within a second, the vision of Earth magic stopped, and McKay found herself stumbling back into reality from the abrupt transition. Despite the suddenness with which she’d been dumped, the cat kept a foothold in her thoughts, sharing a small stream of her Elemental view of the apartment in the back of her mind.
Okay. So they were back to normal, then. Or mostly normal.
It was funny. Most of the time, they would be like this—not a complete partnership like Meese and the Phoenix had, or Kitty and her Thunderbird, but tentatively cooperative.
Like holding each other’s fingers when walking down the street.
Then, in other times, it all went to shit.
After yesterday, she hadn’t expected this level of cooperation from the cat.
It was nice—like she could count on the spirit to have her back.
Of course, she found herself giving somewhat less care about potentially losing control and destroying Gobardon’s nice apartment.
When Kitty got to the door, it didn’t open. In fact, judging by the twitch of magic the cat caught in her Elemental sense, Gobardon had just thought about doing the opposite.
But he’d only thought about it, not acted on it.
She resisted the urge to pop the door open herself, instead watching as Kitty gave its wood a flat look and pulled a key from her pocket.
A light on the door flashed once, and some internal mechanism disengaged and beeped.
Kitty shoved the door open and stomped inside.
“Gobardon! What the fuck were you thinking?”
McKay grinned.
So much for that ‘delicate approach.’
As Kitty stormed in, the cat caught the door on the back swing, slowing it from closing on her. It let it go gently once she was through and, when she stepped in, she got a sudden, visceral connection to the floor.
Every single detail of the apartment came spinning through her mind in crystal clarity, pushing through her brain like a blaring tuba blast. She swayed, blinking hard to clear it, and let her hand find a side-table to lean against for balance.
Easy now, she thought to the cat. We haven’t even heard him speak.
