A Matter of Forever (29 page)

He hauls back and slugs me the moment he realizes what I’m doing; I no longer care. My fury doesn’t give two shits about pain any longer. Pain no longer controls me. Vengeance does. He took my husband. He took Kellan.

I’m taking
him
.

We’re grappling at each other, chunks of his slimy, putrefying skin sliding off with each attempt to gain a firm grip. We hit the ground; it’s softening in the heat of my madness. He’s laughing, just demonical about all of this, which only intensifies my wrath.

I punch my fist right into Jens’ chest, and then I spread my fingers out wide. He howls beneath me, digs the bones of his fingers deep into my skin, but I’m resolute. Howls transition to panic; he’s flailing, screaming at me about mistakes and deals but the thing is I. Don’t. CARE.

I can taste his fear when I yank every last bit of his essence out and into me.

Nine and ten.

It’s just number eleven I can’t deal with.

Power pulses underneath my skin. Oh so much power that I feel like, if I wanted to, I could unravel the universe with a single sigh.

Jens’ still body lies beneath mine. My fingers curve around the still muscle in his chest. “You. Are. No.
More.”

It disappears. Every last bit of skin and muscle on the floor, on my hand, disappears along with it. The only thing remaining is his power.

Oh gods. So much power. Everything around me is heightened. Every atom bounces and rings, every electron, each molecule’s path is mine to trace. But none of this matters, not when Kellan is lying so still just a few inches away. His head is angled toward me, resting at an awkward angle. All I see are the whites of his eyes. His mouth is open in surprise, his hands bloody from fighting and hanging onto that damn pipe.

Sobs heave up and out of me.

I drag his body toward mine, cradling his head in my lap. His name is my prayer, my confessions for far too many sins in my life. He’s gone.

He’s gone.

I’ve lost them both.

I kiss his face, over and over, crying until my tears look like his. I’ve lost him. I’ve failed him. I failed both him and his brother so spectacularly.

I don’t want to exist any longer if they can’t, too.

“Chloe?”

A small hand touches my shoulder; I jump, but refuse to let go of Kellan. It’s a terrified Cicely.

Oh, gods. In my rage, I must have destroyed so much of the house that she was freed from her panic room. A room only my craft could open.

I close my eyes and rest my cheek against the soft black hair beneath me so I do not scare her any further. I force myself to breathe, but all I can smell is Kellan’s shampoo.

“Is he okay?”

I shake my head, a sob catching in my throat. She needs to get out of here before I lose it entirely. Before she’s at risk, too. I need to get her home, but ... as I have been for so many times in the past, I am entirely too selfish when it comes to Kellan. I won’t let him go. I can’t.

“Are the bad men gone?”

I nod.

“There are some people outside,” she tells me. “Your friends. I think they’re hurt or sleeping. I was watching them on the monitor—one of those shadow monsters found them. I was too scared to go out and see them.”

No. Not Raul and Lola, too.

Her small hand touches Kellan’s face oh so close to mine. “Can I help your friend?”

I shake my head again.

“Can you?”

“I’m not a Shaman.” My whispers are waterlogged.

She’s quiet for so long, I finally open my eyes. She’s sitting crisscross applesauce next to Kellan and me, staring at me like I’m speaking gibberish. “But ... you’re a Creator.”

I want to laugh, but it comes out mangled.

“You destroyed those bad things.” She’s so fierce when she says this. “If you can erase something, why can’t you replace it, too?”

Huh?

“Mama says you can do almost anything. Can you help your friend?”

He’s dead, I want to tell her. His beautiful, generous heart doesn’t work anymore all because I was too scared to take a chance.

The earliest memory I have is of when I’m three. I’m in my mother’s greenhouse, and she’s busy doing something ... potting, maybe? I’m not too far away, but I’ve figured out that if I stack some pots together, I can form a ladder. There’s a flower up on the top shelf that I really want to see, maybe smell. The memory isn’t fully complete; I don’t know if any memory at three can be. Anyway, it’s pink and pretty and far too alluring, and I climb up on the rickety wooden shelves, and then, when I’m up there, I feel like I’m on top of the world.

I’m invincible.

I wonder what it’d be like to fly.

I don’t recall exactly why I decided this was the perfect moment to attempt flying. But I do remember spreading my arms out wide, like they were wings. I am a Creator, after all. Maybe if I wish it enough, my arms will transform into feathery white wings, just like an angel’s.

I remember the exhilaration of anticipation. And then, once I jump and my arms remain flesh and bone and simply arms, not wings, there’s a terrible transition into fear.

My father once told me our brains are wired to remember the effects of pain. Burn your hand once on a hot stove, and your brain will never let you forget it. Burn = pain. Pain = bad.

But the interesting thing about pain, and our brains, is that we never can remember the exact sensation. You can remember how it feels to fall in love. You can remember what a silky flower petal feels like, or the softness of your baby blanket, or the prickliness of a cat’s tongue across the back of your hand. But you can never remember specifically what pain feels like.

You only know it hurts, and that it’s bad.

I remember falling that day, and hitting the ground. I broke an arm and an ankle, and I remember it hurting so much that I never wanted, or even dreamed, about flying again. I can’t remember what it felt like specifically, but I know it hurt like hell, because I bawled the entire way to a nearby Shaman’s house. And then I refused to go to the greenhouse for well over a year, terrified it might happen again.

Even to this day, I’m fearful of heights.

I think about this now, this first memory of mine. And I realize ... I don’t know Jonah’s first memory. Or Kellan’s. We’ve known each other for years, shared so much, but I never thought to ask either of them this question. And now, I’m to never have the chance to ask, and it makes me so angry and so unbelievably desolate I can barely stand it.

The truth is, I’m living through the pain of losing not only my husband, but my other Connection as well and I am having a hard time conceptualizing that someday, I’ll come to accept I’ve gone through it, but won’t remember the specifics of just how it tears me apart. Because I’m drowning in it right now. It’s all I can see.

It consumes me.

When it comes to Connections, everyone always talks about how great they are. Soul mates, they say. Love. Acceptance. Friendship. Loyalty. There are a million great reasons why Connections are great. But no one tells you what’ll happen if the other person dies. Not really, anyway. No one tells you how your chest hollows and doesn’t fill back up. No one tells you how your will to function, or hell, even live, evaporates in less than a blink of an eye. No one tells you that your whole body feels like your funny bone has been hit, and that someone’s kicked you in the gut at the same time. No one tells you your brain short circuits, so that anything pleasurable is lost to you and that the pain is all you can feel.

“You feel different,” Cicely tells me.

Kellan feels so cold. I don’t know how long we’ve been up here, me holding him, unwilling to let go.

“You should help your friend,” she says again. “Before it’s too late.”

I open my mouth to answer, but tears come before words. It’s already too late, I want to tell her. Doesn’t she see the hole in his chest, where his heart used to rest?

“You were so brave outside. I was not scared as much when I saw how brave you were.”

I wish I could be brave right now.

She takes my hand and slides it down to the hole that used to house the muscle that kept him alive. “This is where you should fix him. He’s missing his heart. You’re a Creator. Can’t you make him a new heart?”

I cry even harder. But I do as she asks. I made Bios a body, didn’t I? I didn’t love him like I do Kellan, so I make this man a new heart, so his body is at least whole.

She smiles at me, clapping her hands together like I’ve just done a wonderful thing. “Now, make it work!”

If only it was that easy ...

Except, maybe it can be?

Enlilkian and his kind took life essences from Magicals to replace what they’d lost. I’ve ... I’ve just taken every last drop from the most powerful Creator ever to exist. He ... he had the power of reanimation, Bios said. Could it really be that easy? Just ... take what I’ve stolen and put it in Kellan?

I have nothing left to lose. So, I curl my fingers around the new heart I’ve just created in Kellan’s chest. I think, please gods, please let this work. And then, for good or bad, I force every last bit of life force I stole from Enlilkian right into that muscle.

Cicely tells me, “Quick! Take your hand out!”

The moment I do, her small hands cover the hole I’ve left behind. Her smile is so sunny in the hazy, smoking wreck we’re sitting in. “Mama was right about you.”

Wh-what?

She lifts up her hands like a magician, all voilà
and flourish; shiny, pink new skin has formed over the hole. I ... I ...

Am I hallucinating? Is this real?

I touch the skin. It’s warm. Beneath my pads of my fingertips, I feel ... a heartbeat.

Oh my gods.
His heart is beating
.

My hand moves slowly up and then down.

He’s breathing.
Kellan is breathing.

I can finally breathe, too.

Karl is the one to find us.

A helicopter sets down on the ruined lawn minutes after Cicely’s miracle occurs, like in one of those movies or books where everything happens at just the right time, exactly when it needs to. Only ... the right time never really happened for any of us. Not for all the people, Magicals and Métis, over the years who were brutally murdered and drained dry by the Elders. Not for any of the people kidnapped and murdered by them, so their bodies could serve as rotting puppets to monsters. Not for any of the people who were injured or perished in Karnach, from faceless strangers to brave Ling to Mac and Kofi. Not for my beautiful husband, whose death will forever cut me to the core with every breath I take. Not for the people who lived in this house, not for Cicely, stolen from her parents, not for Vance.

And now all the Elders are gone, but it doesn’t feel like a victory. I’ve made sure nobody else dies at the hands of these monsters, but it’s little consolation to those who paid steep prices to get to this point.

Karl has brought a team with him, including familiar faces such as Giuliana, Iolani, and Kopano. They find me on what is the new roof of the house, clutching a breathing Kellan in one hand and a scared little girl in the other. They find Vance’s body, Lola’s, too—both dead as thanks for their bravery. Lola bled out, they say, and if I could, I would destroy those Elders all over again just to pay them back. Raul is hurt, but thank the gods, his heart is still beating, even if just barely. Cicely checks on him for me, says he’s asleep, like Kellan—and I can’t tell if that means he’s in a coma or just sleeping.

The team finds the neurosurgeon in a pantry off the kitchen; he’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours, as he’s no longer stiff. I think about his kindness toward me, his fear, and wish so much he and the woman in the closet could have had so many more years to enjoy their house out in the woods. Enlilkian took that from them, though.

He took too much.

I’m glad I took everything from him in return.

I refuse to let go of Kellan, even when Karl carries his body downstairs. Cicely keeps saying it’s okay, he’s just really tired right now, but I’m worried. He’s breathing, yes, his heart is strong—but his eyes haven’t opened once.