Memory Game (Hound of Hades Book 2), page 19
Bastian rested his hands on his knees. He was panting as if he had just run all the way here from West Carson.
Julia stared out at her daughter as if she had never seen her before. “I didn’t know she was this powerful.” She said it like she wished she could have kept on not knowing. “Even when I had her destroy our old house, it was just a normal fire. She’s never done anything like this.”
Flames twined up and down Ellie’s arms without touching her. Her hair blew in a nonexistent breeze as her eyes glowed the color of flame. From inside the barrier, I couldn’t feel the growing power in the room, but I didn’t need to feel it to understand what she was. As the air around her burned, she looked nothing less than divine, and nothing close to human.
The walls crumbled into white-hot chunks. The circle kept on growing. Past the house, through the grass, toward the trees. And Ellie didn’t look anywhere close to wearing out.
When I had looked through her kitchen window, I had seen a child. I had wanted to pretend that was all she was. I had wanted to believe in an easy answer.
I had been wrong.
“Bastian,” I said in a low voice, “drop the barrier.”
“I can’t. She’ll burn us all.” His speech was labored. I took a close look at his face and saw, for the first time, the way his skin wrapped too tightly around his cheekbones.
I had seen this before. I knew what it meant.
Humans don’t have divine power to fuel their magic. What we have, what Humanity Ascendant’s mages burn, is blood and soul. To use magic, humans need to use themselves as fuel. That’s their price for playing on the gods’ turf. If they have time to recover, they can build it back up over time, the way the gods can recover their own lost power. But it’s easy for a human to burn themselves away until there’s nothing left.
Bastian could do more than most. A lot more. But only because he was cheating, drawing on the power of a god as well as his own blood and soul. I wasn’t entirely sure how that worked, or how far past normal human limits his divine connection could take him, but watching him now, I could tell he was reaching his limit. He had been right—he was capable of taking on a demigod. What he couldn’t do was keep holding her back indefinitely.
I grabbed my gun from where it had fallen. When Bastian dropped the barrier—and he would drop it, because I wasn’t about to let him burn himself away to nothing—I had to be ready. “Lower the barrier.”
Julia’s gaze lighted on the weapon in my hand. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t have time to give her some reassuring explanation. More to the point, Bastian didn’t have time. “Look at what she’s doing. In a few seconds, that forest is going to burn. And this is before she’s reached her full power. Bastian, drop it now.”
“You know I’m not going to do that.” Bastian panted the words. His skin hung loosely on rapidly-shriveling arms. His hands were barely more than bony claws when he clenched them into fists, tightening his jaw as he poured more and more of himself into the barrier.
Once he had nothing left, it would fall on its own, and I would be free to act. But that meant Bastian would be dead. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I aimed the gun at his foot. All I needed was to break his concentration for a couple of seconds. I would be more than happy to drive him to the hospital afterward, if he still wanted anything to do with me. Which he almost certainly wouldn’t.
But he would be alive. Maybe someday he would be grateful for that.
The barrier wobbled. A wall of heat rushed in to smack me in the face, and a second later I started choking on smoke. My eyes found Bastian, fearing the worst, but he was still standing. I wasn’t about to waste time asking why he had decided to lower the barrier all of a sudden. I raised the gun—
And lowered it again. Ellie had vanished.
I studied the space where she had been—or tried to. I couldn’t make myself focus on the spot. If I looked away, I could almost catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, but as soon as I turned to face her again, my gaze slid away from her as if that entire part of the room no longer existed.
Bastian hadn’t dropped the barrier. He had moved it.
The unnatural fire was gone. The air was just air again; it no longer glowed with that eerie light. The wall of flame had stopped expanding. But ordinary flames still spread across the grass. She might have started the fire, but she didn’t control it completely. Moments from now, the trees would start burning, and then there would be nothing we could do. But the flames hung back as they approached the forest, stuttering and fading as they began to run out of fuel. It took me half a second to figure out what had happened. Julia must have created a firebreak around the property when she and Ellie had moved in. I had to hand it to her, she had gone into this well-prepared.
I tensed, ready to run from the flames still inside the firebreak. But the house had burned away too fast. Outside the circle of floor we were standing on, all that was left for several feet in any direction was blackened, lifeless earth. A few remaining chunks around us hissed and smoldered, but that was it. The heat rising from the ruins wasn’t exactly pleasant, but if it hadn’t killed us yet, it probably wasn’t going to.
Bastian dropped to his knees. His eyes bulged as his skin pulled taut around his face. But Ellie didn’t reappear. The barrier held.
I had waited too long. If I shot him now, the shock would kill him, if the blood loss didn’t. With his own blood fueling his magic, right now a paper cut would probably kill him. So I squatted down next to him and shook him hard. It felt like shaking a skeleton. I could practically hear his bones rattling inside his skin. “This is killing you. You know it is. And for what? Once you’re dead, she’ll just keep going.”
“Ellie, listen to me.” Bastian’s voice had faded to a raspy whisper, and not just from the smoke. “I know what it’s like to have power. Mine isn’t like yours—mine comes from my blood and soul, while yours comes from something extra that you have. But one thing is the same—my power comes from inside me, and yours comes from inside you. It’s a part of who you are.”
His voice grew softer with every word. This was killing him, and he was wasting his last breaths giving a panicked demigod an academic lecture, like she was one of his guinea pigs back at Humanity Ascendant.
“Drop the barrier, Bastian. There’s only one answer here, and you know it.” I dug my fingers into his shoulders. I still hadn’t let go; I couldn’t bring myself to. Under my grip, his skin tightened and withered.
And still he kept going. “It’s a part of you. And that means you’re always in control, even when you don’t feel like you are. Today you faced a threat worse than anything you’ve faced before, and you stopped it. And you learned something—that you’re always safe, because you’re stronger than anyone who might want to hurt you. But it’s not enough to keep yourself safe. You need to protect your mother, and everyone else around here who will get hurt if that fire gets out again. And that means you need to take that power, that piece of yourself, and pull it in.”
I was going to have to knock him out, and pray it didn’t kill him in his condition. It was that or watch him die. I raised the gun, getting ready to swing it at his temple.
The barrier dropped.
Bastian collapsed. He didn’t catch himself as he hit the floor.
I hadn’t been fast enough. He had poured himself into that barrier until there was nothing left, and for what? I was going to have to kill her anyway. Like I should have done from the start. “Idealistic idiot,” I muttered. “Why couldn’t you listen—”
He blinked up at me and smiled. “She did it.”
I didn’t let myself stop to think about the fact that Bastian was alive, because if I did, I might do something embarrassing like throw my arms around him and cry into his shirt, and there was no coming back from that. Besides, I was afraid he would break a rib if I so much as tapped him on the shoulder. He looked less like a living, breathing human and more like a reanimated corpse. So I looked out at Ellie instead.
The glow around her was gone. Her eyes were an ordinary brown again. Along the edges of the grass, the last flames flickered out as abruptly as if she had doused them with water.
Her eyes shone with the beginnings of hero worship as she stared at Bastian. “I pulled it in,” she said, like she could hardly believe it herself.
Bastian pushed himself up on trembling arms. “You did.”
The light went out of Ellie’s eyes as she examined the ruins of her home. “I did all this.”
“It’s okay, honey.” Julia, who had been hanging back, finally rushed forward to wrap her arms around her daughter. “It’s over now.”
“She shot at me.” Ellie’s voice wobbled. “She wanted to kill me.”
I tightened my hand around my gun. If the fire started up again, Bastian had nothing left to stop her. It would be up to me.
But she only started crying, big messy sobs, as her fingers dug into her mother’s back. Julia held her, swaying gently back and forth, whispering words I couldn’t hear.
She wasn’t paying any attention to me right now. I might not get a better chance than this. And sure, everything was fine now—if you could call a house that had been reduced to a few scraps of blackened wood “fine”—but what would happen the next time somebody scared her, or made her mad, or she had a bad dream? I didn’t know how long it would take Bastian to recover from this, but he would need more than a couple of hours, or even a couple of days. If it happened again—when it happened again—he wouldn’t have the strength to stop her.
But in the end, Bastian hadn’t stopped her. She had stopped herself.
I tucked the gun back into my holster. Bastian nodded in my direction, as if to tell me he knew what I had been about to do, and that I had decided against it. I scowled at him in response.
“No one is going to do that to you again,” I said to Ellie. “We’ll make sure of it.”
Chapter 22
After that, there wasn’t much to do but go to bed. We all needed the rest. Julia and Ellie slept in the shed; Bastian offered to take the backseat of his car, until I informed him that if he thought it was a good idea for him to sleep on his own and out in the open in his condition when we knew there was someone out there who wanted us dead, he was even more of an idiot than I thought. After that, he agreed to share the shed with the two civilians. If Ellie counted as a civilian. After that display earlier, I wasn’t sure what to call her anymore.
And me? I sat outside the door to the shed, gun in hand, pinching myself whenever I felt myself falling asleep. It wasn’t like I didn’t need the rest, but I knew how to function without sleep. Colin had once made me stay awake for two weeks straight during my training; one night wasn’t going to kill me. And with Bastian out of commission, I was the only real protection they had right now. At least if you didn’t count Ellie, and I was willing to do a lot more than stay up all night if it meant keeping us far away from another situation where Ellie’s ability to defend herself became relevant.
After we got out of here, though, I planned to stop at the first gas station I saw and clean them out of coffee. Ellie hadn’t killed me back there, but the caffeine withdrawal just might.
The next day, we went over our options. Julia and Ellie could run, but that was a temporary solution at best. We could fight, but Mnemosyne probably had a lot more she could throw at us than a single Marked. Even if her own resources were limited, she had more favors to hand out if she needed to. Memory alteration was a handy skill, and although no one else needed it as urgently as Hades right now, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find it useful.
While we talked, I watched the trees for Jade. She didn’t appear. By midmorning, I was getting impatient. By lunch—protein bars and stale crackers, an emergency stash Julia had buried out here at some point—I was just confused. What game was Jade playing? The more time she gave us, the more chance we had to regroup. I could understand her not wanting to face Ellie again, but no matter how long she waited, Ellie wasn’t going to get any less powerful.
The food helped fortify us a little, but not nearly enough. My head was pounding from the circular discussions that weren’t getting us any closer to a good solution, not to mention the night spent in front of the shed feeling my legs cramp and my butt go numb. When I looked around the room, I could tell the others weren’t in any better shape than me. And we weren’t just exhausted from the uncomfortable night and the day of debates. Julia kept shooting Ellie wary looks out of the corner of her eye, when she thought Ellie wasn’t looking. Ellie got up every so often to look out through the crack in the wall at the place where her house used to be, and every time she sat back down, it took a good half hour before she would look at anyone or say anything else. And Bastian was trying to act like he felt fine, but either he was a terrible liar or I knew him better than I thought. I saw the way he winced every time he sat or stood or shifted his legs, as if every movement cost him something. I watched his share of the food and water disappear almost before Julia handed it to him. And every time I looked at him, I had a fresh moment of nonrecognition before I remembered again that, yes, the walking corpse over there really was Bastian.
When the afternoon light started to fade, I clapped my hands. “We’ve been at this long enough. We know our options, and they’re not going to start looking any better if we talk through them another dozen times. It’s time to decide—what do we want to do?”
Julia answered almost immediately. “I want to run.”
Ellie’s answer came on the heels of her mother’s. “I want to fight.”
Julia looked at her daughter with sharp surprise. She shifted away from Ellie—a tiny movement, one I was sure she wasn’t even aware of—a second before she wrapped an arm around her. “You know how dangerous that is.”
“I just want it to be over. And…” She stared at her own feet, her face drooping like she had just found out sunny days and puppies had been outlawed forever. “And I can hurt them. You know I can.”
“Not without losing control.” Julia tightened her grip on Ellie’s shoulders. “You almost didn’t come back from it last time. If you let yourself go to that place again, you don’t know what will happen.”
Ellie studied her shoes like they were the most fascinating objects on the planet. She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
“What was that?” Julia asked.
She only raised her voice a fraction, but it was enough. “Then maybe I should let them kill me.”
Julia drew back. “What? No. Don’t you ever say something like that again.”
“No,” Bastian agreed. “That isn’t the answer.”
“You heard her.” Ellie pointed at me. “And you saw it for yourself. I’m dangerous.”
Bastian and Julia both glared at me. Again.
“Your mom is right,” I said. “That’s a terrible option.” It still might be the best one we had—I was willing to admit that, even if the two of them weren’t. But that didn’t mean I was going to say that to Ellie. If that ended up being our only solution, the least I could do was make sure she never saw it coming. “But so are all our others. We’ve been talking about this all day, and that’s about the only thing we’ve figured out. So it’s time to find another option.” I stood. “I’m going to talk to Jade.”
“And do what?” No matter how decrepit Bastian looked, his skeptical expression was still exactly the same. That was actually pretty impressive.
“Ask her why, instead of sending her here on her own, her goddess went to the trouble of making a deal with me. Find out why Mnemosyne thinks Ellie is a threat to her when her territory isn’t anywhere near here. See if she’ll drop the whole thing if I ask nicely.”
“We do need some answers,” Bastian conceded.
“That last part was sarcasm.”
“I figured that out.”
“You’re the one who wants to negotiate a surrender with the gods—their surrender, not yours—so I thought I should spell it out.”
“How do you plan to find her?” Bastian asked.
“She’ll find me. I know she’s watching.”
“I should come.” Bastian hauled himself to his feet. It was painful to watch.
I held out a hand to stop him before he could start shambling toward the door. “You need to stay here. I don’t need to tell you what bad shape you’re in. If you come with me, you won’t be protecting me; I’ll be protecting you.”
“I’m nowhere near fully recovered, but I’m not as bad off as I was yesterday. I can defend the two of us if I have to.”
Looking at him, I would have been surprised if he could do anything more than make a single spark appear, but he was the one who had spent years creating this form of magic from scratch. I trusted him to know his own capabilities. That didn’t change my answer, though. “In that case, you need to stay here with them. They need defending more than I do.”
“I can keep us safe,” said Ellie, still studying her shoes. She didn’t sound at all happy about it.
“None of us want that to become necessary.” Bastian sat back down. “You’re right. I’m needed here.” His gaze lingered on me as I reached for the door. “But watch yourself out there. You know what she’s capable of.”
He didn’t mention the Marked we had found in here, the one who had died without getting the chance to fight back. Neither did I. It didn’t matter; I knew what his warning meant. “I haven’t forgotten.”
I stepped outside slowly, hand on my weapon as my gaze flicked from left to right. If she touched me even once, I had no chance. And she was faster than I was. Which meant I needed to be smarter than her.
