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Pain like nothing I’ve ever experienced hits my back and spreads through my limbs. I hear a crack. My spine, or my neck, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m dead. My body can’t survive this pain. I’ve broken it.
I don’t feel dead, though.
“Alis!” Reiks shouts again. He’s so far up, I can’t see more than a shadow obscuring the light behind him.
I glance at my hands and frown in confusion. I think I see blood at first, but I bleed liquid gold, and the blood on my hand is red.Not blood, then.
The bright red silky thing coating my fingers is something else altogether. I feel it pulse like a living thing. I know I can let go. It would be easy. I’d just fade into the darkness peacefully. This thread is pain and suffering, coated in disappointment.
“Alis, stay with me. Stay here. I’m coming!”
I grasp the thread and watch it disappear inside me. Then the pain in my back, arms, legs, and neck comes back with a vengeance.
Reiks appears in my field of vision, climbing down as fast as he can get there. He pulls me out of the water and drags me up. I wince as everything in me burns.
“You’re fine. You’re going to be just fine.”
I start to cackle, but that hurts too much. “Now, you turn into a liar.”
If I’m lucky, I’ll just be paralyzed.
“I still have most of your power. Take it. Take it back.” Reiks runs his hands over my skin, and despite everything, I still want him. Somehow, that’s hilarious. Even with all the pain, I get all tingly.
His touch feels nice, but I don’t need more power. My issue has never been strength. It’s just the fact that I can’t use it.
Can’t you?
When I was afraid, my power set out to destroy the things—and people—around me. When I willed Callan’s lover into healing himself, I didn’t need to use spells or hexes. I just wanted it and made it happen.
What I want right now, more than anything, is to get out of here with Reiks. I close my eyes and focus on that one desire, obscuring everything else.
“What the fuck?”
“Hold me tight,” I ask, as I feel myself levitate over the line of the water.
His arms wrap around my shoulders and hook under my knees. When we’re both steady, we speed up, lifting high over the precipice, then taking to the sky.
I watch the city burning under us. There are fights in the street, but they’re mostly empty by now. The bulk of the crowd has gathered at the gates of Five.
I notice thousands upon thousands of people screaming at the gates, some clad in the uniform of city guards, other in civilian clothes. Beyond the gates, I notice my cousins at the head of a group of demis reinforcing the gates with spells.
“Look out! There’s a flying witch!” Someone throws something at us, and it explodes too close for comfort.
“We can’t go through, not with those shields.” Mar spots us just as Reiks is done speaking. She waves us forward, and I keep our course steady. Just as we approach over Five, the shield flickers long enough to let us through.
We land at her side. “She needs a medic,” Reiks says immediately.
“No time right now. Take her to the tower. We have to deal with those people.”
“I say let them feel a taste of their own medicine. We burn them,” Laetta sneers.
“Yeah!”
“Count me in.”
I shake my head. They can’t mean that, right? Half the city is at the gate. If they make that move, this day will be known as the day when a dozen demis massacred the public.
“We can’t. Some of these people aren’t rebels. They have nothing to do with the Hall of Peace being blown up—they just turned up because they’re tired of struggling. We can’t kill them.”
