The cold damp wind blew through my hair. My
soaked blouse clung to my skin. Tristan’s warmth lessened the
chill, but the side of my body that wasn’t beside his was being hit
with polar strength. It felt almost numb. So when Tristan
unexpectedly dropped me, the plunge didn’t feel as painful.
Even if I had my eyes squeezed tight, even if
I couldn’t see the unexpected cause of my sudden drop, I knew that
something really bad had happened. If a normal person had been
carrying me while running, I would've thought he’d stumbled over a
rock or a twisted root. But this wasn’t a normal person. It was
Tristan. Running at the speed of the wind without tripping or
crashing came natural to him. It was part of his nature. Dropping
me or throwing me wasn’t, though.
I rolled and rolled on the craggy surface,
piercing my body with hammer-hard stones and thinking the scratches
on my back would rip open, when something hard like marble hit one
side of my forehead and stopped my body’s motion. I felt a severe
numbing wave reverberating throughout my head, causing a terrible
pain that deadened my senses. All I could feel were the cold
teardrops falling from the sky, melting the earth to mud beneath my
body.
Everything was blurry, from the bestial
growls rumbling somewhere near me, to the vague shapes my eyes
couldn’t fathom. My heart started beating fast, painfully fast,
shortening the breath passing through my throat. I was struggling
to breathe, opening my mouth wider and wider to get more air. My
chest hurt, my head hurt, everything hurt. I found myself in the
mayhem of a maddening pain. And I didn’t know what was happening to
me. Confusion and despair were choking me.
Pump
, my head throbbed sharply when
someone pulled me up with a jerk. My whole body felt shaky, as if
all its strength had been sucked by a vacuum. The bitter wind was
raging in my face again, numbing the drumming in my forehead. I
didn’t know who was holding me or where I was going. I couldn’t see
anything, just blurry and fuzzy and...light, a sudden sharp light
around me.
It wasn’t rainy anymore, nor cold. The
thunder was distant now, like it was part of a remote nightmare. I
was in a dry, warm place, no wind hitting my face. A faint voice
was talking in the distance and I tried to catch the sense of it.
But the sound wavered in different cloudy pitches, zooming in and
out.
The one holding me let me down on a puffy
surface, like a big, soft sofa, and knelt down beside me. I could
see the blurry dark shape of a face a few inches away. I couldn’t
see who it was, and I wanted to tell him that I could barely
breathe, that I couldn’t see, that my heart was about to explode
and that the scratches were burning me alive. But then he stroked
my face with a heavenly silky touch, sending through my pores
familiar soothing currents to my entire body. Tristan.
“Tristan…” I muttered with a gravelly voice,
as if stones were rolling out of my throat.
Foggy sounds hissed through my ears, still
too unclear to define. He squeezed my hand, letting me know it was
him, and I spoke again. “I can’t hear you…I can’t…”
He cupped my face in his hands and different
pitches of sounds rolled around once more. This time more clearly.
A different dark shape came into view. And then another appeared
behind, and another, crowding the image with shadowy figures that
deepened my frustration.
But then, the sounds started clearing, giving
me glimpses of clarity in their voices, until they finally broke
open, stripping the seal from my ears.
“…eyes, why are they so black?” Elan’s voice
asked somewhere.
My eyes, black?
“Dilated pupils. It’s one of the symptoms,”
said Julian’s calm voice.
“Her heartbeat. It’s too fast,” said
Tristan’s melodious voice, soaked in anxiety. “Way too fast.” He
laced his fingers with mine.
“Yeah, I can hear it all the way up to here.
She’s flying,” Elan said.
Someone pressed his thumb against my wrist.
“Tachycardia,” Julian explained. “Loss of balance, blurry vision,
dry throat...it might end up in convulsions.”
Convulsions?
I didn’t understand. What
was wrong with me? Why all this pain?
Tristan sighed in misery next to me,
caressing my hand as if touching a flower.
“Don’t worry son. The antidote will cure her.
You’ve seen this before,” Julian said and seemed to turn away, his
voice blowing through another direction. “Vincent! She’s about to
collapse—bring it.”
“We’re here, we’re here,” said Vincent’s
voice. “Oh man…she’s whiter than whipped cream…”
“Nice, Vince, really smooth,” said Lamia
mockingly. “Here Julian, four milligrams. I guessed you needed
double dosage.”
“Excellent, Lamia.” Julian’s voice faded, as
if concentrating on something else. “We do need the extra
Physostigmine. It saves us from going to a hospital to give
ludicrous explanations.”
“Here’s the blanket.” Mingan covered me with
soft cashmere. “At least it'll keep her warm.” Even amid the entire
distressing jumble, I noticed how different his voice sounded, not
cold and hard as it used to, but warm and worried.
Tristan’s face was really close to mine,
warming the sudden chill. But even if he was silent, I could feel
his worry. I wanted to comfort him, to make him feel better, to
tell him…
“It’s okay,” I mumbled croakily. “It’s okay…”
The blurry shapes and colors started to fade away. Something cold
and dark underneath was pulling me, dragging me to a weightless and
serene state. The temptation was too hard to ignore, so I let the
soothing force pull me, little by little, wrapping my eyes with dim
blackness, when a faraway pleasant hum waved through my ears…
“Kalista?” Tristan echoed faraway.
And then I blacked out.
I was floating. Floating in a vast, void of
darkness. No. It wasn’t a void and it wasn’t completely dark. The
black was dotted with millions and millions of sparkling diamonds
that spread around me boundless, infinite. Everything silent,
absolutely and surprisingly soundless. I turned around slowly, as
if moving in water—my hair waving around my head like a black
veil—and saw a silvery swirl spiraling around a luminous
sphere-like center suspended miles away.
Or maybe light years away.
This blend of powdery diamonds and darkness
wasn’t an ordinary swirl. It was a galaxy. An honest-to-God,
mind-blowing galaxy made of real stars. And the shape…it was
familiar, one I’d seen in books as a kid…it made my heart ache,
made my breath catch in my throat with its breathtaking beauty.
It was home.
I stretched one hand forward, my arm pushing
through invisible waves of water. And suddenly, I was sucked into a
wormhole and spitted out onto the ground a second later. I was
laying next to the same mysterious waterfall, with no pixie dust
edging the waters this time, no silver eyes watching me from the
shadows, and no…I gaped astounded, staring at the silver orb
gleaming a few feet above me. It was in the air, radiating dim
light like a small star, a light that faded to a bluish mist, as if
it was the halo of a powerful magic ball.
I rose slowly to my feet and got closer,
closer. My hands itched to touch it, to reach it, as if
magnets—
Swoop
. I was back again on the sofa,
the dark shapes surrounding me flickering wildly. My body was
shaking and my muscles contracting violently. Strong hands were on
both sides of my body, pinning me down against the cushions.
“Damn it!” Elan’s cried above me. He jerked
his hands from my wrists. “She just electrocuted me!”
The hands at my feet disappeared at the same
time, releasing me from their iron-grip. “There’s something weird
going on with her,” Mingan said with shock and pain in his voice.
“Is it normal to give off electric discharges while
convulsing?”
Tristan’s hands were still cupping my face
tenderly.
“Whoa, the lights are flickering,” Vincent
said. Though my eyes couldn’t see clearly, and confusion was still
clouding my mind, Vincent’s comment sowed anxiousness in my
stomach. This had happened before. Only this time, my whole body
was tingling.
“What...now you’re afraid of the dark?” Lamia
said. “If you haven’t noticed, there’s a storm outside. It could be
messing up the electric posts.”
“Son,” Julian said to Tristan. Everybody
quieted, as if something important was about to being said. “The
storm…was that you?”
Tristan didn’t answer.
“Tell him about what you did to one of the
Insurgents, Tristan,” Elan urged him a few seconds later. “Kalista
saw it, too.”
It took a long moment for Tristan to answer.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he paused. “I really don’t. I was
just finishing off with one of them when I…sensed him. He was ready
to kill Kalista, and the bestial pleasure he radiated because of
that was maddening. I’d never felt so overpoweringly enraged and
furious. And I had less than a half-second to get there and stop
him. But I was too far…too far away to do anything, and that’s when
I did it. I focused on him and sent out in a powerful, galvanic
stroke all the rage roaring inside of me.”
“And it was literally a galvanic hit,” Elan
said eagerly.
For some reason it’s deeply connected to
my emotional state
, Tristan had said when I'd asked him about
his bond with rain. Apparently he still didn’t know about his
control over lightning.
“Holy shit!” Vincent uttered. “You were the
one doing all of that? Since when?”
“Since tonight,” Tristan said, still in a low
voice. “Normally rain takes longer to come when I'm…you know, sad.
But tonight was entirely different. Everything was more intense,
and I guess the fury boiling throughout my body added more strength
to the connection.”
“Wow,” Vincent sighed. “How cool is that? I
definitely want some of that undine mighty juice.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,
Vince.” Tristan sounded irritated. “Having this…is too much. It can
drive one crazy. I would take out all of this in a second if I had
the chance.”
“We know that, son, but it’s your mother’s
legacy and you have an important commitment that comes with it.”
Julian stated.
Commitment?
What did he mean?
“I know.” Tristan’s irritation was no longer
edging his voice.
“Well, the one thing I know is we can take
down Insurgents fast, even if there’s a lot of them,” Elan
said.
“Talking about them,” Lamia said, “We have to
go out there and get rid of the bodies if we don’t want Fox News
and CNN wandering around tomorrow.”
Vincent snorted. “Since when is the media a
threat? Last time I checked those guys were still being paid the
big bucks to keep it shut—talk about honest journalism.”
“How much time?” Tristan suddenly said in a
low tone. I could imagine everyone turning their heads toward me.
“You gave her a big dosage. It should be working by now.”
My winged heart clung to his words, fighting
against the intense power dragging me down into that cool darkness
once more, waiting for me at the bottom.
“She’s not going anywhere, Tristan,” Lamia
said softly reassuring. “We caught her on time.”
“Yeah, Tris, don’t worry,” Elan said.
“I can’t lose someone again, just…not again.”
He leaned down close to me. In that moment, all I wanted to do was
look into his beautiful eyes and tell him I wasn’t in pain, that
the scratches on my back weren’t burning anymore, that I could
breathe normally again. But the darkness was covering my eyes
again, getting heavier.
“It all depends on how many berries he gave
her,” Lamia said in a business-like tone. A furious gasp came from
Tristan, as if the memory of it irked him. “The convulsions will
end in a few seconds, but it may take several hours to reverse the
effect suffered by her central nervous system. By the looks of it,
I think she ate quite a lot.”
“Yes, if it weren’t because you went to look
for the antidote to the studio, she would be dead by now. But she’s
out of danger. You did well.” Julian pressed his thumb against my
wrist once more.
“I didn’t,” Tristan’s voice was grave. “All
of this happened because I left her alone and…” he sighed. “Because
I was selfish, really selfish. I'm sorry, Father.”
“You should’ve thought about this first
before getting us all into this, Tris," Vincent said. “I mean,
she’s beautiful and really nice, yeah, but is it worth it to
endanger our lives just because you suddenly wanted to bang a
human?”
“Guys and sex,” Lamia said. I imagined her
rolling her eyes.
“This isn’t like that,” Tristan said through
his teeth.
Silence fell, heavy and sturdy as a rock. It
felt as if everybody in the room was weighing the meaning of
Tristan’s words.
“Oh, shit. Now we’re really screwed,” Vincent
sighed a moment later. “Royally screwed. I thought the thing you
had for her was just a fling.”
“Son, this does complicate things a lot,”
Julian said with a flat voice. “You do realize what you’re putting
on the line with this.”
“I…yes,” Tristan said in a defeated tone.
No, Tristan, no.
I wanted to hold him,
tell him he shouldn’t give up on us, that we could convince them
together. But a heavy fatigue fell upon me, weighing me down,
pulling me deeper into the dark. But it wasn’t cold this time, it
was warm, reassuring.
“We’ll talk about this later—and that
includes all of you since you decided to hide this situation from
me,” Julian said sharply. He wasn’t being a father in that moment.
He was being the Alpha of the pack. The leader. “But this is not
the time to speak about it. Kalista needs to rest.”
I could feel my consciousness slipping away.
The voices getting fainter.
“I can’t believe how powerful those tiny evil
things are. She could barely walk when I saw her out there,”
Vincent suddenly said.