Haelo Rising, page 28
He shook his head, but the truth was in his eyes.
“I know about your sorry excuse for a father. How he beat you, belittled you, beat your mother. I know how he used a remarkable earth magic to bury you in underwater stone crevices for days on end as punishment.”
He blanched. We both moved slowly, careful not to tip the other into violence. Not yet.
“I know the secret to your family’s magic. How on the day you transitioned—just fifteen years old—you discovered a power like your father’s, to bend stone and earth to your will. And every day, you siphoned more and more of that power from your father until one day, you used it to bury him alive in the canyon walls of the deepest underwater trench you could find. So much potential, Massáude. And look what you did with it.”
A snarl erupted from his mouth. It did nothing to me. I was past any sort of fear of this man.
“I know that you and Olesa had a daughter sixteen years ago, and that she ran away last year and that you believe Olesa helped her do it.” I stalked closer, palms up in warning. “I know that Karchardeus betrayed you over and over and over and you had no idea. You didn’t see it until he was dead. And you took out your anger on Maria because you think she knew about it. Guess what? She did.”
With the flash of his arm, a large chunk of the stone wall to my left ripped away from the rest of the wall and sailed toward me. With one palm, I held the boulder back. It floated in midair, caught between two forces of power.
I kept my other palm trained on Massáude. “I know you suspect Karchardeus took his infant son to live with your estranged daughter, Ana.”
With a crash, the boulder beside me dropped through the floor, leaving a gaping hole behind me.
I narrowed my eyes. “I know that you’ve been searching for Ana for months, because you’re terrified that when she transitions, she’s going to siphon your powers away from you, just like you did to your father, and he did to his father before him.”
He took off running up the spiral staircase. The ceiling above the arch collapsed behind him, stones pouring down through the ceiling of the palace room from the cave above us. I ran forward, palms out, and blasted my senses forward into the rubble. The stones obeyed me, grinding against each other as I pushed and pulled them from their avalanche to clear the way into the stairs.
When a hole opened up, I dropped my hands, panting, and climbed over the top of the heap into the dark stairs beyond, then raced up the steps, past dead torches, spiral after spiral toward the island’s surface far above.
When I finally reached the top, I ran through the clean white mansion filled with modern furniture, ancient marble statues, and fine rugs. A handful of Forçadores—probably the only conscious ones on the island still loyal to Massáude—shot at me, but their bullets didn’t penetrate the sphere of power I pushed outward in protection. The glass front door shattered with the ricochet of hot bullets.
The smell of fresh wind hit me like a train. My hair whipped behind me as I jumped over the door frame and took off across the dusty landscape of Pankyra Island.
I screamed, letting loose a wall of power that surged forward into the retreating back of my enemy and knocked him down. He tumbled like a rag doll in the red-leafed weeds. A few hundred yards behind him, a dark red helicopter roared to life from where it had been waiting on a concrete pad.
I stopped running.
Massáude pushed up off the ground and stood. His face, half covered in dust, contorted with vitriol and confusion.
With each step I took closer to him, my power itched more and more to be used. “You’re scared, Massáude,” I yelled over the whir of the distant engine. “You’re terrified of the human man on the other end of your three-in-the-morning phone calls, and the only way you can think of to stay ahead of that fear is to keep your powers. That’s why you’re looking for Ana. Because you’d rather kill your daughter than lose your powers to her. You refuse to become vulnerable to a human.”
The trillions of evil, roiling points of darkness that made up his aura suddenly exploded in size. His aura grew in power so quickly, it knocked me backward. I rolled into a knoll, groaning with the pain of getting the wind knocked out of me.
I tried to stand but was knocked down again by the quaking earth beneath my bare feet. Pankyra rumbled and shook. “Massáude!” I screeched over the sound of the quake.
The whir of another helicopter’s blades zoomed at me from behind the mansion, firing bullets toward the grounded helicopter as it soared directly over the top of me. The red chopper behind Massáude lurched into the air and started firing back.
The wind whipped across the ground and sent my hair flying across my face. Above me, the stars glittered. Beyond, out across the Mediterranean Sea, the shadow of a dark yacht reflected ominously into rippling water. But it wasn’t my father’s ship. Instinctively, I felt threatened by the dark boat.
In the red helicopter, I sensed four humans. In the other—the Blackhawk that had flown over my head—I sensed Griffin, Vernado, my father, two of my father’s Beilstein crew, and . . . Dagger? But . . . how?
Someone called my name. I turned my head to see my husband jump out into a poof of dust and sand.
“No!” I screamed. “Get back in the chopper!”
I snapped my head to the other side as the red helicopter hovered low to the ground behind Massáude. The door opened, and Massáude ran for it.
“Haelo! Don’t!” Griffin yelled.
I ignored him. I pulled myself up and dashed across the scrub landscaping faster than I’d ever run before, up the bank of a raised hill. The air swirled with the warring dust devils and gunfire of the two aircraft.
Massáude lurched onto his stomach into the fuselage. A guttural sound wrenched from my chest as I threw my hands in front of me and slammed the hunk of metal with everything I had left in me. The aluminum siding caved in and the entire aircraft swung back into the air. The blades kept spinning, however, and the helicopter righted itself.
I fell to my knees, heaving with exertion, and watched Massáude’s own palms rise. Beneath me, the island of Pankyra shook violently. Fissures ripped open along its surface, allowing the emerald glow of the cave’s bioluminescent light to pierce the night sky. From my elevated position, I watched as pieces the size of buildings fell from the island’s surface into the cave below.
My heart stopped. This couldn’t be happening! I was supposed to stop this! Why else would Fate have spared me? Why else would I have exploded with so much power?
“Haelo! We have to go! Pankyra is falling!” Griffin yelled from somewhere to my right. “Now!” Behind him, Jade’s Blackhawk dodged a rocket fired from the dark yacht in the sea. The rocket careened into the island’s cliffside, the fireball exploding into the night. Griffin ducked and covered his head, still moving toward me.
I looked up into the mangled helicopter above, where Massáude had snatched an assault rifle from one of the humans inside. It was pointed right at me.
The bullets sprayed the ground in front of me. Reaching, reaching. Closer and closer. I raised my palms, desperate to pull more power from my exhaustion.
“No!” Griffin screamed and threw himself between me and the gunfire. Three shots jerked his body backward into my arms. We tumbled into the dust.
I pushed off the ground and lurched for my husband. “Griffin! Griffin! Please stay!” I gripped at his chest, feeling his wounds for myself. Grit covered our bodies; the violent gusts from the helicopters were relentless. Griffin’s face pinched in excruciating pain. “This isn’t—this isn’t how it was supposed to go! Griffin!”
The ground beneath us ripped apart. On instinct, I reached for the edge to my right and leaned onto the stable shelf of earth, pulling Griffin up partly with me. But I couldn’t hold the both of us much longer. Most of Griffin’s body dangled above the crushing rubble of Pankyra’s palace far below. I screamed at the straining pain in my shaking, weakening arms.
The anger that had flowed through my veins and powered my senses was gone. I couldn’t hang on much longer.
“Haelo!” Dagger called to me in the distance. His aura raced toward us. “Haelo, hold on!”
“We’re coming!” came the echoing voice of my father.
My grip was slipping. I had seconds left to choose between staying with Griffin, or letting him go to save myself.
I chose my husband.
We fell,
and fell,
and fell.
22
Severed Ties
We sailed past the split-open fifth floor of the crumbling palace, furnishings crashing and falling as the island split apart. The fourth floor. The third floor.
People talk of memories flashing by. Like death somehow dregs up all the best and worst memories of your life and spews them out in high-def across your mind for you to both savor and regret. But no. Falling to your death doesn’t dredge up the past. My mind flashed with things I’d never actually experienced. My soul was already missing the future.
I saw a little girl I’d never mother. And a family barbecue I would never attend. I saw conversations that would never be had and fragments in time that would never be—flashes of moments my heart had stolen from the future to cherish in that split second before there was nothing left.
All the way down.
I don’t know where I found any scrap of power left, but just before Griffin and I smacked into the polished wood of the intact ballroom floor, four stories below where the underside of the cave’s ceiling used to be, I screamed out a buffer of power, like a rush of senses thick enough to cushion our fatal fall.
We still hit the floor hard. I saw stars. Or maybe those were the actual stars in the gaping, splitting hole above us. “Griffin?” I rolled onto my stomach, searching. “Griffin!” Coughing, I crawled over to him.
There was blood everywhere. Massáude had shot him in the chest, stomach, and shoulder. He tried to say something. “Shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay. Fate won’t let you die, remember?”
He smirked, like I’d said a funny joke, then coughed blood.
“We’re okay, Griffin. We’re going to be okay.”
But our auras didn’t feel right. Something had shifted, like the interlocked edges of our puzzle pieces had warped.
A loud, splitting crack began at the far end of the ballroom and rushed toward us. The floor beneath opened. I shoved Griffin onto one side and grasped the edge just as the two sides split apart, barely managing to swing one leg onto the splintered hardwood floor. Above us, palace walls and stone boulders came crashing down. The island was imploding into itself.
Artifacts of the palace showered around us. Candlesticks, clothes, frames, books, pillows, tapestries. . . . Furniture slid and crashed. Walls buckled and caved.
I clenched Griffin’s torso and closed my eyes. Suddenly, the floor beneath us tilted. We rolled off the side and fell.
With a thick splash, a warm liquid coated us and cradled our fall. I couldn’t breathe. This liquid wasn’t water. Reaching, my hand found air above me. I sat up and opened my eyes.
Molten magma dripped from my hair and slipped between my fingers.
We were in the lava pool! Griffin was completely submerged beneath its sloshing, molten surface. I grabbed his arms and pulled the top of his body out. He wasn’t breathing. Magma and scorching liquid gold dripped down over his lashes, leaving no mark in its wake.
My eyes flashed to the pola ring on his finger, and then to my own. “Open your eyes, Griffin!”
The surrounding rumble grew. The walls of the Fire Room quaked and buckled. Two of the four basins that had flanked the room for centuries fell, snuffing out the magical flames inside them. Broken pieces of fractured medallions clattered and tinkled on the vibrating stone floor. I stood to pull us out, but my foot dropped into a pit in the center of the pool, sending me back under its surface.
A force from deep in the hidden pit pulled on me, beckoning me under. Fighting back, my arms desperately reached for freedom. I broke the surface and whipped my hair behind me. Goldsmith Malik’s words echoed in my mind. The pool obeys the pola ring, Your Highness. And then I remembered Dagger’s words: Gate, crossing, portal.
Portal.
“Griffin!”
But Griffin was nowhere to be seen. A stone the size of a car, covered with the glowing green veins of bioluminescence, fell from right above me. I shielded my face and fell back into the pool. Griffin was there.
The depths pulled me under. Deeper. All I could think of was the safety of the identical pool in Hawai’i. My stomach lightened and felt as if it had moved into my chest.
Farther.
Like a freight train through the middle of the earth, I rushed through the lava that suffocated me—my skin couldn’t absorb oxygen from magma like it could in the water.
Farther.
Farther.
Faster.
In a gasp of air, I emerged from a sloshing lava pool. Warm, liquid gold ran in rivulets down my skin and through my hair alongside the dripping magma, marring neither my flesh nor my clothes.
I looked above, expecting to see crumbling walls, splintering, gilded furniture, and tumbling stone, but instead was met with steam and the stalactites of a low, natural ceiling, dark but for the red glow of the lava pool.
Something moved beside me. “Griffin!” I reached down and pulled my husband above the lava’s surface. I dragged him through the pool to the edge and heaved us both over the side. We slipped and crashed onto the gritty floor of a familiar cave, a cave I hadn’t seen since the day the Hawai’ian Makole had told me of their legends. The molten rock that dripped from us hit the floor and steamed, hardening into pumice.
“Please, wake up.” I shook his shoulders, then stopped, remembering the bullet wound in his left shoulder.
The bullet wound in his chest.
The bullet wound in his stomach.
I closed my eyes, panicked with the thought that the impossible had happened. But no, a tiny flicker of Griffin’s aura remained lit inside of him. “Griffin!”
I could do this. I could save him.
I placed my palms on his chest and centered myself in the ancient power that thrummed through this cave. “Come on, come on, come on,” I muttered. “You can do this.”
Gently, I gathered my senses, my powers, and melted them into Griffin. His heart barely twitched—I could see it clearly in my mind. The synapses in his brain sizzled, dying one by one. Inside, his chest filled with blood.
“No,” I gasped. Tears ran down my face. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! Fate promised to protect us!” His body had given up. Pooling all my senses into surrounding what was left of his aura, I fell on top of him and sobbed.
I loved you, Haelo. An echo.
Please don’t go, I begged him. Please.
The universe seemed to shift. His aura, mine. The way I sensed the world around me. My connection to the pola magic in the pool beside me morphed into complex incompatibility. I now feared the pool that moments ago had welcomed me. My access to magic felt like it had been reset.
Something had changed.
The world was different.
I tightened my embrace around Griffin’s chest. Don’t go. His soul warmed slightly with love, and then the few grains of light left in his aura flickered, and went out.
23
Broken Promises
Eventually, the sound of stone grinding on stone, cracking and snapping apart, woke me from my grieving sobs.
A light patter of footsteps came closer. “Haelo?” It was the familiar voice of my young step-sister, Keli. “What happened?”
Behind her, the warm, earthy auras of the rest of the Makole tribe crept into the cave. Their hushed murmurings bothered me.
Leave me be. Let me grieve. My fingers clenched in Griffin’s shirt. I didn’t look up from where I’d buried my face in his neck. Tears slicked the space between our skin.
Someone tried to move me, but I only clung tighter.
“Haelo,” my father’s wife Malia soothed. “Let go.”
I shook my head, new tears stinging my eyes.
She rubbed my back. “It’s time.”
My throat ached. “No.”
“Let’s get you home.”
“My home is gone.” Massáude had buried Pankyra under a pile of stone. Who knew how many hundreds or even thousands of people were buried with it?
The aura of the strapping Makole interim chief Kai came behind me. “Take her to the Yellow Plumeria,” Malia told him.
“No,” I said. Griffin was my safe place. I’d given up everything to build a life with him. Then evil had ripped me away. We’d finally made it back to each other; I couldn’t leave him now. He was my home. I couldn’t leave another home.
But there wasn’t any strength left in my arms, my hands. Kai lifted me from Griffin’s chest and carried me a few feet from the glow of the lava pool. The gritty, hollow sound of dried lava pumice tinkled on the floor as it fell from my clothes and hair.
I opened my eyes. Malia stood over Griffin’s body. “What about my husband?” I asked.
Her eyes widened with shock. “Your prince?”
My own eyes crinkled with more tears.
“We will take care of him. You have my word. I’ll call your father; he’ll know what to do.”
Meagerly, I shook my head. “No. Jade never trusted Griffin.”
Her whole body softened with pity. She came closer and put her hand on my cheek. “But Haelo, your father loves you.”
“We were just there. The entire island imploded.” My voice cracked. “I don’t know if Jade even survived. I don’t even know if it’s over.”
Her face grew grim. “Trust me. Your father is a crafty man.”
I nodded, chin quivering against Kai’s shirt.
