The Awakening, page 57
part #1 of Eve Series
want to disguise themselves, but what else are they trying to conceal?”
Eve’s eyes suddenly widened. “The lair. It could be hidden in plain sight.”
Armaan nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”
Eve sighed disappointedly. “For all we know, we’ve walked right past it and
didn’t even know it.”
“So we don’t know who Fairon is or where he’s hiding,” Jason grumbled, anxiously running his hand through his hair. “God, what a mess.”
“What about the torq?” Eve turned to JJ. “Have you found anything?”
JJ shrugged. “I’m still converting the information. It’s incredibly complex.
But I finished coding the virus, and it’s ready to upload.”
“So, we’re ready to destroy the mainframe. We just have to find it first.”
“And until then, what?” Sancho asked. “Keep killing aliens?”
“How about until then, no more nosebleeds,” Percy added, shooting a
critical glare in Jason’s direction. “Keep those face periods under control. We
don’t need any more aliens suddenly attracted to us.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” Jason said defensively. “I can only melt one thing at a
time.”
“There’s only so much our gift can handle,” Eve explained. “If you exhaust
your gift, you bleed. And if you keep bleeding, you—”
“Die.”
Eve stopped short—she turned to Armaan, who sat casually on the leather
armrest, fiddling with his scratchpad and oblivious to her sudden silence.
“What?”
“Exhausting your gift—it’ll kill you,” he repeated.
“Where did you hear that?”
“From Dr. Dzarnoski.”
Jason’s eyes darted between the two. “Care to elaborate?”
“Your gift is a power source. When you push it past its capacity, the energy
is depleted,” Armaan recited. “The more you drain it, the weaker it becomes, until eventually it completely burns out.”
“And then what?” Jason asked. “You’re just giftless?”
Arman shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. If your gift kicks the bucket,
it triggers a chain reaction. Every other function in your brain begins
to shut down, one after the next, until nothing is left.”
“That can’t be right,” Eve interrupted. “It doesn’t make any sense—”
“Sure it does,” Armaan maintained. “Look, think of your gift as a car
battery. If the battery dies, the whole car stops working. Except that, unlike with a car, you can’t just replace your gift with a new one.” He turned to face both
Eve and Jason. “Basically, when your gift dies, so do you.”
A hush fell over the room. Eve and Jason stared at one another, their tension
seeping through the space between them. Armaan glanced back and forth at the
couple and cowered in his seat.
“Um, I take it you didn’t know this,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying
to worry anyone.”
A noise erupted in the corner of the room—a ringing that came from JJ’s
triad of scratchpads. Eve turned to JJ.
“Is that—”
“Another abduction,” JJ answered, darting toward her computers. “This
one’s in Brentwood.”
Jason furrowed his brow. “So soon?”
“And off campus?” Eve asked. “Why Brentwood? ”
“Gee, I don’t know, why don’t you ask them when you get there?” JJ scoffed.
“Look, the attack is going down in less than twenty-five minutes, and that’s barely enough time to get to Brentwood.” JJ turned to the others. “You need to
leave now.”
And so they did, sparing only a minute for Eve to change her clothes—“You
can’t possibly expect me to fight in a skirt,” she scoffed when they protested—
and as soon as they were able, they dashed to Percy’s car and drove straight to
Brentwood. JJ remained in Percy’s suite, nagging the others via their
communicaps, but despite her irritability, the car ride was calm and almost dull. They had killed Interlopers before—countless of them at this point—and
though Eve questioned the location, she had faith in herself and her comrades.
She glanced at Jason, who was sitting with his axe in his lap. When he
noticed her staring, he winked at her and smiled. She smiled back, and in that
moment, any remaining shred of nervous energy she may have felt drifted
away.
They arrived, albeit a bit later than JJ had hoped, and quickly filed out of the
car. Night had fallen, painting the sky with a haze of black that made their unfamiliar surroundings even gloomier. JJ directed them to an alley, and for a
moment, it reminded Eve of the alleyway to the Meltdown—but they were far
from Calabasas, the Pier Lorent hotel, or the neighboring chimera club.
One by one, Eve and the others tiptoed down the alley until they finally
reached its center—the exact location of the abduction, according to the beacon
—and with their weapons raised, they waited.
Nothing happened.
Eve scanned her surroundings. They were completely alone, their soldierly
stances almost silly given the situation. Jason, too, began to stir, his eyes flitting back and forth, perplexed by the glaringly obvious lack of action. After
several minutes of silence, Percy let out an aggravated sigh and dropped his hands to his sides.
“Do you see anyone?” JJ asked.
“No,” Jason muttered. “We’re the only ones here.”
Sancho fidgeted in place. “Give it a couple of minutes. Maybe they’re late.”
“You’re the ones who are late. They probably finished and fled the scene.”
“Please. You really think they completed the entire abduction in”—Percy
looked at his watch—“four minutes? Give me a break.”
“Look, no one’s even walked by since we got here,” Jason groused.
“Are you sure we’re at the right location?” Sancho asked.
“They listed the longitude and latitude. It doesn’t get more specific than that.”
Percy shrugged. “Did you read it wrong?”
“EXCUSE me?”
“Shut up,” Eve blurted. “Everyone just be quiet. They’re not coming.”
Sancho sighed. “But they said—”
“They changed their minds,” she interrupted. “Or they chose a different
location. Whatever it is, they’re not here.” She scowled, failing to conceal her
disappointment. “Let’s go back to Billington.”
Percy and Sancho piled their guns into the car, grumbling under their breath.
Jason made his way to Eve’s side and rested his hands on his hips.
“I don’t understand,” he mumbled. “Why would they stage an attack and then
bow out at the last minute? Did they know we were coming?”
“I don’t know.” Eve stared down the empty alleyway, and a sense of dread
began to fester in her stomach. “Let’s just get out of here.”
The group drove back to Billington in silence. A cloud of chagrin settled
over the car—Percy muttered about the traffic, Sancho pouted childishly, and Jason blankly stared out the window—but while the boys were preoccupied
with thoughts of loss and inadequacy, Eve instead tried to ignore the grim feeling that gnawed at her gut.
They parted ways in the Rutherford Tower. Percy continued up to his suite,
agreeing to manage JJ’s wrath, while Sancho, Jason, and Eve sulked through
the hallway of the twelfth floor, idly maneuvering toward their prospective
rooms. As Sancho shuffled into his room, Jason lingered by Eve’s side for a
moment longer.
“We’ll get ’em next time,” he whispered, his fingers lightly grazing her arm
before he pulled away, following Sancho’s lead into their room.
Eve continued on to her dorm, tromping past the pajama-clad
Rutherfordians and trying to stifle her persistent anxiety. With a growl, she thrust the door open, so consumed with worry that she failed to notice that it was unlocked.
As she stepped into the room, she froze, her feet fixed in place as if cemented to the floor. Her room had been ransacked. Both Madison’s
abandoned mattress and her own were ripped to shreds and tossed across the space. Her end table was in pieces, its paneling scattered along the floor in splinters, and her wardrobe was tipped on its side, its contents spilling from the opened doors. But it wasn’t the mess that concerned her—she hardly even
noticed the damaged walls, the scuffed floor or her torn clothes. What
concerned her were the three Interlopers who were still digging through her things.
They stopped their rummaging and gazed back at her with glassy eyes. One
of them snarled and kicked at the ground, scratching the floor with his
sharpened talons. Another one pointed at her, or at least he attempted to, as his
hand was nothing more than a scabbing stump. Eve recognized that one—she
had fought him only days ago, and he had flown out of sight and out of mind—
but she paid him no attention. It was the third Interloper that made her blood run cold.
He was huge: ten, maybe eleven feet tall, so tall that he had to hunch his shoulders just to fit inside her room. His wings were massive, easily large enough to break through either wall, but he kept them resting gently against his
back, bobbing occasionally with his subtle movements. Like the other
Interlopers, he had deep black eyes, but his skin was unique—a cloudy, milky
white that absorbed the light of the moon. His sharp teeth and talons were a gleaming gold, and two thick, golden horns jutted from his forehead and
curled over the top of his skull. Though his body looked gaunt, his shoulders
were broad, his legs were sturdy, and his presence alone commanded a power and fear that kept Eve rooted where she stood.
After what felt like an eternity, Eve finally parted her lips and let out the only word she could manage to utter.
“Fairon?”
“WHERE IS IT? ” he roared. “THE BEACON—TELL ME WHERE IT IS!”
Finally, the spell was broken, and Eve was able to move again, to feel her body
—the heaving of her lungs, the pounding of her heart, the tension in her
muscles. She braced herself and let out a piercing scream.
“IT’S A TRAP!”
With a baleful glare, Fairon dragged Eve’s wardrobe from the floor and
hurled it in her direction. Eve threw herself to the side, barely dodging the wooden monstrosity as it smashed into the wall beside her. She pulled herself
to her knees, her eyes wide and panicked. She knew without a doubt that her situation was dire.
The other two Interlopers charged toward her, their mouths spreading into
sickening smiles. The first one swung at her with his single clawed hand and his useless stump, but Eve quickly plucked her gun from her jeans and fired at
the creature, blasting the teeth from his mouth and sending his lifeless body collapsing to the floor.
Eve turned to aim at the second Interloper, but she was too late—he swatted
the firearm from her hands, sending it skidding across the floor. He swung his
talons at her throat, but Eve dodged his advances, and she pounded her fist into
his face over and over again until he, too, toppled to the ground. As the Interloper paused to regain his balance, Eve forcefully melted him across the
room and slammed him against the opposite wall. Again she rammed him into
the sheetrock, and then once more, the wall now covered with yellow blood.
Her melt grew in intensity, and this time she sent the alien flying right through
her glass balcony doors and plummeting to the terrace below, where his body
splattered onto the campus grounds.
And then only Fairon remained. He stared at Eve, his eyes vacant and his
body unmoving, and even though he was silent, he exuded a formidable
strength that sent a wave of terror down Eve’s spine.
Suddenly and with no expression, he stomped toward her, snapping the
floorboards beneath his feet, and Eve instantly lunged for the gun that now lay
in the corner of her room. With trembling hands, she snatched the firearm
from the floor and launched all of her remaining bullets at Fairon’s face, knocking a flurry of golden teeth from his mouth and boring deep, bloody
holes into his cloudy skin and blackened eye.
She waited—her hands were still raised, her gun still smoking—and hoped
to God that Fairon would drop to the floor, dead, just like the others.
But he didn’t fall, or even move. He simply stood in front of her, his body
perfectly still, and then Eve noticed that something about him was different: his
face was quivering, the skin rolling like boiling water. His flesh pinched
together at each entry wound, pushing the bullets from his skin, spitting them
onto the floor at his feet. His oozing eye glossed over, repairing itself so rapidly, it soon looked as if there had never been any contusion to begin with,
and his bloodied skin did the same, regenerating with such precision that not a
single blemish remained. Then Eve noticed his teeth: they, too, grew back,
sprouting from his gums to replace the ones he had lost.
In seconds, it was over. Fairon was fully healed, his entire being in perfect
condition, and he smiled at the look of horror in Eve’s eyes.
“Killing me will not come easily for you,” he explained, his voice chilling.
“Killing you, however—it will be hard to avoid. I must be delicate with you.”
Eve melted Fairon across the room, sending his colossal body crashing into
the back wall with enough force to shatter the sheetrock behind him. Still, Fairon was unfazed. He jumped to his feet, casually shaking the debris from his
shoulders, then charged at Eve yet again. Just as she began to channel her gift a
second time, he struck her across her face with such power that she spun in a
full circle and toppled to the floor. Her cheek screamed in agony, and the pain
seemed to pulse through her entire body, yet she launched Fairon across the room yet again, slamming him against the frame of the balcony door.
Eve groaned and winced—every inch of her body ached, but still she
dragged herself to her feet just in time to watch Fairon’s broken arm snap miraculously into place. He turned to face her, his sinister grin still intact, and he barreled in her direction.
Before she could even move from his path, he whipped his claws forward,
sinking his talons deep into the flesh of her arm. Eve shrieked in pain and clutched at the open wound. She stared down at the blood running between her
fingers and then gazed back at Fairon.
“It is only the beginning,” he declared.
Eve dodged his next advance, dipping beneath his sharp jabs while trying to
ignore the stinging of her arm. With as much strength as she could summon, she threw her fist into the creature’s jaw—only to immediately pull back and cry out in agony. The impact was excruciating, as if her hand had collided with
a brick wall, and she doubled over, struggling to breathe through the shooting
pain.
She forced herself upright, but there was no time to recover—Fairon
grabbed her by the shoulders and tossed her against the wall, sending her
collapsing to the floor.
Eve took in a short, shallow breath. Her mind felt dulled, a muddled haze that
matched the thick blanket of fog consuming her vision. In that moment, all
she could feel was the unbearable aching of her body—the throbbing of her
skull, of her bloodied arm and her shattered hand—and through the pain, she
faintly sensed the sinister presence of Fairon looming over her.
Above the ringing in her ears she could barely hear the commotion behind
her door. There was frenzied running, panicked screaming, and through it all,
a familiar voice shouting, “MOVE! FOR GOD’S SAKE, GET OUT OF THE
WAY!”
And then she felt a gust of air as the door swung open behind her, and the feeling of one—no, two bodies standing in the doorway. She glanced up and
saw Jason and Sancho, their eyes wide with shock as they stared directly at Fairon.
“HOLY SHIT,” Jason gasped.
The words had hardly left Jason’s lips before Fairon was charging toward
him, fueled by a heightened aggression. In one fluid motion, he seized the front
of Jason’s shirt, pulled him high into the air, and slammed his back into the floor. Again, Fairon lifted Jason and hurled him to the floor, this time hard enough to crack the floorboards as well as his bones.
Jason winced; he struggled in Fairon’s grip, trying to free himself, though his
attempts were futile. And then he noticed his axe lying only a few feet away
from him. With great effort, he pulled his arm from Fairon’s grasp, seized the
axe, and plowed it deep into the center of Fairon’s face.
Jason yanked the axe from the creature’s skull and breathed a sigh of relief
