Authors: Amy Braun
I could scarcely remember.
Vitae took another step closer to the bed and knelt down to meet my eyes. She seemed much more relaxed now. Approachable, even. I wondered if that was because she finally believed I didn’t know what was going on, or if she was trying another tactic to get information out of me.
“The answers will come, Ava. But first, you must tell us about the man you saw. We can answer your questions once we know the circumstances.”
Made sense. There was no point in hunting for answers when I didn’t know how they would affect me.
So I told them. I explained how I ended up in the middle of the hurricane. What I saw the Stormkind do and what it looked like. I described the man with the crystal knife that he plunged into my heart, and how I’d seen him with Ferno in a dream-induced memory. I told them how they were trying to determine something from me, evaluating the sensations of my pain, that I would be the first of many.
Vitae’s face became grimmer with every word. Hadrian balled his fists at his side. He looked
furious.
But not at me.
“Mortis,” he grated out.
Vitae sighed. “So it seems.”
“Who is Mortis?” I asked.
“Our enemy,” she replied. “It seems you have been caught in the middle of our conflict, Ava. For that, I am truly sorry.”
Vitae sounded entirely sincere. That made me alarmingly nervous.
“Who are you people? Why are the Stormkind afraid of you?”
She exhaled heavily. “For that, I fear I must tell you a very, very old story that no human has ever heard.”
Vitae stood up and looked at Hadrian. He was still tense with anger, but he handed over the folding chair. Their eyes locked for a moment longer than necessary, something unspoken passing between them. Vitae unfolded the chair and sat in front of me. Hadrian folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall.
“Has Hadrian told you how old we are?”
“He said he doesn’t remember, but I know he’s older than a hundred.”
Vitae’s smile was small, but it lit up her face and almost made me forget the hostility she had shown me.
“Much older. We were born shortly after the first storms were created, made by the Primordials.”
I stared at her, eyebrows shooting up my forehead.
“The Primordials were the elemental beings that formed with your earth. They shaped it, drew power from it. When they used their powers, they left refuse. What you know as storms. After a time, the Primordials grew bored and began to experiment with the refuse. They condensed the power of a storm into different shapes until they held. Added some of their sentience to them. Those shapes became the Stormkind.”
My eyebrows rose to an almost painful degree. This was definitely a different version of the creation myth I’d grown up with.
Vitae didn’t appear to notice my astonishment, and continued her story.
“But all that concentrated energy was volatile for the Stormkind. It corroded their minds and turned them mad. They needed to balance it, so they sought other energy sources. The Primordials had yet to notice, too infatuated with creating new creatures of flesh and blood. They did not realize the Stormkind were out of control until the dinosaurs were extinct.”
My eyebrows couldn’t go any higher up my head, but my jaw could drop pretty damn far.
“The Stormkind killed the dinosaurs?”
Vitae nodded grimly. “During that catastrophe, humans were being created. The Primordials decided these new beings needed to be guarded, so they divided their energies one last time. Half of their powers went into the Guardians, flesh and blood warriors that would share the gifts of the Stormkind, to a lesser extent, in order to protect humanity from them. We are capable of controlling certain storms for a time. Some of us can manipulate ice or water, others can manipulate wind and dust. The more powerful of us can use both. For example, Hadrian has mastered control of ice and cold, though he is incapable of creating a blizzard. We must draw our strengths from our tempest-blades.”
At my confusion, she added, “The Primordials created weapons for us that were capable of holding a limited amount of power. They help energize our gifts and make it easier for us to fight. Tempest-blades can only be passed down from Guardian to Guardian, are energized by the tethers, and can never be broken.”
“What’s a tether?” I remembered how seriously important that seemed to be.
“Tethers are what allow us to connect with our charges– the Stormkind. While we are capable of restraining the Stormkind, every hundred years, they are released from their cages. Their hunger simply becomes too insatiable for us to control. So they break free, and fall to earth for the event you call the Centennial Storm.”
Understanding hit like a painful fist. “Like a stick of dynamite.”
Vitae nodded. “An adept analogy. We use our tethers to find the Stormkind we are charged with and rely on tempest-blades to overcome them. We work as fast as we can, but the Stormkind are quite dangerous the more power they absorb. We try to stop them from attacking humans and consuming them, but… We cannot always succeed. That is why some storms last as long as they do– hurricanes, floods, tornadoes– and others merely last hours instead of the full day.”
“Why do they want to consume us? I don’t understand what we have to offer them.”
Her cool eyes met mine levelly. “Yes. You do. You experienced it when you attacked Hadrian.”
I flinched at the bluntness of her statement, even though I knew that Hadrian was okay.
Then I remembered the feel of his skin, the warmth that poured through me like the sun coating a sandy beach. The strength and pleasure of it. How it was a drug I didn’t know I craved, and would never be able to get enough of. I recalled the desperation that filled my heart and warped my mind until I was mutilating him, grabbing him and trying to absorb it from his mouth–
Hadrian held up his wrist again, showing me the small pink marks on his skin. “It does not hurt, Ava. Be still.”
That was when I heard the chains on my wrists rattling. I was shaking.
Vitae and Hadrian waited patiently as I calmed down. It took way longer than I wanted to admit.
“What did I–” I closed my eyes and reconsidered my question. “What do they take from us?”
Vitae didn’t look like she wanted to answer me. “Life force, Ava. They steal the very energy you were created with to feed themselves.”
My chest knotted. Our lives were vacuumed out of our very bodies to feed creatures that were millions of years old. I could barely wrap my mind around the concept. I groaned and dropped my head into my hands.
“Now you understand why they are so rampant with destruction when it is time for the Centennial,” she said softly. “We are forced to starve them for a hundred years.”
That revelation left me torn. On one hand, I knew the Stormkind were literally life-devouring monsters that used their power to destroy the world I loved. On the other, I couldn’t help but pity them. They were wild animals that managed to see freedom once every hundred years, if only because they became too dangerous to control.
“You said there was another part of the Primordials that separated,” I said when I found my voice again. “What was it?”
“Ah,” Vitae sighed. “This is where we come to the most difficult part of our predicament. Exhausting so much energy to create the Guardians made the Primordials weak. They left the humans to evolve on their own and retreated to rest in the earth. Their power now goes into helping the earth thrive. They help keep the forests green, the soil rich, the water drinkable. We all love them for that. But humans do not understand the truth the way we do. They have no idea that with every new machine, every severed tree, every toxin or oil spill, they are destroying the last energies of the Primordials. What resides in the Guardians and the Stormkind is sufficient only for us, and while we are strong, we are not immortal. We have friends and lovers and families that can be killed in combat, either by the Stormkind, or the Mistrals.”
She fell into a quiet silence, as if an old memory was resurfacing and saddening her.
“We all tried to adapt to the human ways of life,” Vitae said. “We understood their fascination with the unknown, the need for competition and advancement. We know they are not so different from us, as we are simply a secret, gifted version of the human race. But we cannot abide by the way they treat the earth our ancestors left us to guard.” She looked in my eyes. “I would be lying if I said I was not grateful that humanity advances very slowly after each Centennial.”
I swallowed the lump of nerves in my throat. I suppose I could see her perspective, if I didn’t think about the millions of people that died on the last Centennial. That had been one of the strongest pieces of evidence when the SPU began to form that the Centennial was not an event to disregard lightly– death certificates and missing persons reports that all stemmed from a single day, when millions of people across the world were killed in a flurry of freak storms.
“Yet some of us– the Precips, who are established to tether to the water and ice based Stormkind– are willing to abide by them. We will guard the humans, as the Primordials have asked us to. The Mistrals, however, have no such loyalty. They despise humans for torturing and slowly killing the Primodials that gifted them with control over the wind and dust Stormkind. They have chosen to reclaim the throne left open by the Primordials by using their ultimate weapon.”
“What is…” I knew the answer as soon as I asked the question.
The Guardians were amazing warriors. I had seen that from Hadrian, Ferno, and Turve. I hadn’t seen Vitae or Zephys fight, but they wouldn’t be carting those swords around if they didn’t know how to use them.
But I remembered the way that hurricane-Stormkind looked at the man who stabbed me– Mortis. How scared it had been of the black-eyed Guardian. The entire purpose of the Guardians was to control and restrain the Stormkind. If they were able to wield them half as well as they could wield their swords…
A shiver wracked my spine. I crushed the pillow to my chest.
“How are they going to use the Stormkind?” I whispered.
“I do not know,” answered Vitae. “The Precips and the Mistrals had a grave falling out two Centennials ago. We lost many of our brothers and sisters in arms, along with any communication we had to the Mistrals.”
As she spoke, I noticed Hadrian out of the corner of my eye. He was no longer leaning against the wall, but standing straight up with his arms binding his chest. The depth of the anger I saw in his eyes seemed fathomless. They were navy blue pits that threatened to swallow me whole and smother me if I looked at them for too long. So I looked away.
If Vitae noticed– and I was pretty sure she had– she didn’t say anything.
“Where do I fit in?” I whispered.
“I wish I knew,” she told me. “The man who attacked you– Mortis– is not known for his kindness to the Stormkind. We know the destructive nature of our charges, but we also treat them with respect. The men you encountered tonight do not have that kind of consideration.”
Vitae looked at me. “The blade that pierced you. It was crystal, you said?”
“Yeah, I mean, I think so. I didn’t have that long to look.”
She leaned closer and held her hand out toward my chest. Her eyes lifted, seeking permission. “May I?”
My first reaction was
hell no
, since I didn’t know what she was going to grab, and I didn’t want her feeling me up with Hadrian watching. My second thought was that of all the things I could think about, that should have been the last.
The third and final thought was that I was chained up, and there was no way I could stop her from touching my chest, let alone strangling or punching me or whatever else she intended to do.
That being said, Vitae was obviously feeling less hostile toward me, and even though Hadrian was having some kind of inner turmoil, he’d brought me pillows, blankets, and food. I was a prisoner, but they weren’t hurting me. They were scared of whatever I was, and what I could do.
I lowered the pillow into my lap and nodded slowly.
Vitae’s fingers curled around the collar of my shirt and gently pulled it down. I blushed a little, knowing Hadrian was watching. I tried to tell myself I didn’t really care if he saw my exposed chest– I had nothing by the way of curves to display– but the most I had ever done with a boy was at one of Piper’s parties last year. There was some sloppy kissing and a couple awkward gropes before I realized I needed to get the hell away from him. I don’t know what I wanted from Hadrian, assuming I should have wanted anything… but it wasn’t that.
Though when Vitae pulled my shirt collar down to the beginning slope of my left breast, all thoughts of Hadrian vanished.
Ever since that awful night in the hurricane, I had noticed the weird scar. I hid it from everyone, tried not to think about the skin that shouldn’t have healed so quickly. It was engrained in my mind– a raised white path of skin over my heart.