The Breakers Ultimatum (YA Urban Fantasy) (Fixed Points Book 3) (14 page)

“You have disgwacd your bwoodwine with your constant betwayals,” he said, all stunted and childlike. “You have one chance to redeem youwself.”

“Okay…” I said, not quite sure how to respond to a toddler berating me.

“As you know, there is a cost to betrayal. And, to ensure balance, all costs must be paid.” Chant looked past me. “Bring her in.”

I turned, watching shade shimmer behind me in the distance.

“You cannot be punished in the way you deserve, Dragon. Fate has seen to that. But that does not mean balance will not be restored. As such, we have invoked the laws of displaced reparation.”

“What?” My brows crinkled. “That’s insane. Displaced reparation is archaic. No one uses that. Besides, my entire family is sitting here.  Who could you have possibly placed my punishment on?”

He chuckled hard. “Have Neanderthal emotions really clouded both your judgment and observation so much? Are you really blind enough not to realize that the most immediate of your family members is not among our company?”

A lump rose in my throat as the shimmering shade took the shape of a person. I didn’t need to wait for it to settle. I knew who he was talking about.

“Merrin,” I muttered, shuffling to my feet. It was the first time I had seen her awake since that awful day back in Crestview, when I did something unimaginable to her. Tears burned at the back of my eyelids. I hadn’t thought about her, not really. She could have been dead for all I knew, and I didn’t even think to ask. I had three questions with a clairvoyant for God’s sake, and the idea of asking about Merrin never even entered my mind.

She looked worse for wear. Her clothes were tattered, her skin was pale and sickly and her hair was in drab, dead knots on her head. As beautiful as she had always been, she looked almost dead now. What had they done to her?

“Merrin!” I repeated, yelling this time, and rushed toward her.

“That’s enough!” Chant sad loudly and an invisible force pulled me backward, wrestling me to the ground. “How predictable,” Chant said. “Now that the Blood Moon is gone, you go rushing back to your perfect.”

“You can’t do this! You can’t punish her for me!” I screamed.

“No Dragon. We can’t punish you for you. Her, on the other hand; she can be punished until we are fully satisfied.” Chant came into my line of vision, hunched over and decrepit. “And whether or not we are satisfied is up to you.” He looked up at Merrin and then back to me. “The Damnatus has intensified things, if that is even possible. The decisions that come next will be more difficult than you could ever imagine, and the time for sitting by passively is gone. You are the Dragon. You will be made to prove that. But we have to be certain that your allegiance is on the right side. You will be made to prove that as well.”

“What are you saying?” I asked shakily.

“The punishment for betrayal is not incarceration, nor is it torture. The punishment is death,” he said calmly.

My eyes flickered to Merrin.

“You can save her, Dragon. You can fulfill your destiny, both of your destinies. Join with her, as is your duty as a Breaker. Immerse yourself in the path you were born into, and all will be forgiven, but if not…”

“You can’t be serious,” I muttered.

“Dead serious, I’m afraid,” Chant said. “Marry the girl, or she dies today.”

Cresta

Two days before the Blood Moon rose, I had just got the craziest news of my life. I stared at Casper for a long time after that. Watching the way his chest heaved up and down as he stared at the picture.

“You don’t have a kid,” I said, and it wasn’t a question. Casper was my best friend. There was nothing in the entire world that I didn’t know about him. He couldn’t have knocked some girl up and kept it a secret from me. It wasn’t possible. Except that it was. I had sent him away and made it possible. The truth was, I still didn’t know anything about what Casper’s life had been like in Clarity. Aside from Liv, the girl he had a thing for, and the fact that Wendy had somehow managed to send his letters from beyond the grave, the whole thing was one huge blank slate. “You don’t have a child,” I repeated. “You are a child.” The others were still unconscious and scattered on the floor. They could have been comatose for all I knew. It didn’t matter right now. “Casper, what’s going on here? Is that Liv? Did the two of you-“

“No,” Casper shook his head. “Liv and I never even kissed, let alone…” his voice trailed off. “There’s a college right outside of Clarity. A couple of my friends and I sneaked into a bar one weekend. One thing led to another and,” he cleared his throat. “Her name is Sarah. She’s a biology major, and a senior.”

“A senior?!” I balked. “How old is she?”

“Twenty-two,” Casper said.

“But you’re only seventeen.”

“I know, right,” he said, and there was a hint of lightness in his voice. “She didn’t love me or anything. She doesn’t love me. We were gonna give the baby up.”

“You knew about this?” I asked, jerking to my feet. For some reason, I had assumed this was news to Casper, like my drawing had outed this girl as having a bun in the over. But no, he knew the whole time. He knew and he kept it from me. “How could you not tell me about this Cass?”

“I didn’t want it to be a thing,” he said shaking his head.

“You didn’t want the fact that you’re having a kid to be a thing? Are you out of your mind?”

“No, I didn’t want it to be part of this thing,” he said, standing to meet me. “When I got my memories back, I knew I had to come to you. Wendy’s letters said as much. You needed me here, and so I came. But that didn’t mean my kid had to.”

A pang of the strongest guilt I had ever felt skewered me. Not only had I pulled Casper away from his new life, I pulled him away from his child. I stole that from him. Suddenly, a darker thought settled on me. “The Damnatus. The children. All the children. Your child.” The fragments were all I could manage, but they were all I needed.

“I don’t believe that. I never believed that.” He said firmly. “It’s just, I had made my peace with sending the kid away, with giving the little guy a life that might be worth something. But this, Sarah being the Damnatus, it pulls my kid into this nightmare. Allister Leeman’s people are going to try to kill her. God Cresta, they’re going to kill them both.”

“They won’t,” I said, trying not to sound as helpless as I felt. “I won’t let that happen. We know who the Damanatus is now. We can go get her, keep her and the baby safe. We’ll leave right now Cass, today.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be that simple.” The voice that came from behind me wasn’t instantly recognizable, which put a huge knot in my stomach. Had someone managed to find us here?

I spun around, totally ready to either fight or die, probably both. But I found Renner slumped against the wall. His face was gaunt and soaked with sweat, and he seemed to be barely managing to stay upright. But he was out of bed and, as far as I could tell, that was a definite improvement.

“Are you okay?” I asked; my eyes wide.

“None of us are okay,” he said, clutching at the wall. “Now, one of you help me to a chair. We have a lot to discuss and not a lot of time to waste.”

Casper rushed over to him, clutching my drawing like it was a prize. He sidled beside him, throwing the older man’s arm over his shoulder and helping him through the kitchen.

“Wake them up,” Renner said as Casper helped him into a small wooden chair.

“Are you talking to me?” I asked, looking around at Echo, Dahlia, and Royce; still splayed across the floor unconscious.

“Well, I certainly didn’t mean the helpful ginger,” he answered.

“Hurtful, dude. Way hurtful,” Casper said.

“You’re the one who put them to sleep. You can wake them up,” he continued.

“I can’t control the shade, not like that,” I said sternly.

“Rubbish,” Renner balked.

“It almost killed me the last time!” I said.

“It really did,” Casper confirmed. “She slept for a long time, just; many, many moons....”

“It comes from you. You can control it,” Renner said. He turned to Casper. “Get me a knife.”

“Sure,” he quipped, heading to the drawer. Stopping short, he said, ”I guess I am helpful.”

He pulled a blade from the drawer and handed it to Renner, who held it shakily in his still weak hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked, narrowing my eyes nervously.

“Proving you wrong, Cresta,” he said, and launched the knife at Royce’s sleeping head.

“No!” I screamed. Instantly, the world turned to ribbons of shade again. Without time to think, I simply reacted. Tugging at the shade around the knife, I pulled it to a stop.

“That’s good,” Renner said. “Now go deeper. Look past the shade. Look at where it comes from.”

My head started spinning. I was faint, dizzy even. But I pushed through it. The shade began to move and shift. It shimmered and blinked and soon I was looking at something else entirely. Dots lined the air. No, it was more than that. Dots made up the air. Dots made up everything. All different colors, all different shapes. They moved in a thousand different directions all at once, passing through each other harmlessly like shadows dipped in water.

“What is this?” I muttered.

“I knew it,” Renner said from beside me.

“What am I looking at?”

“Your birthright,” he said. “What you’re seeing now- or, what I assume you’re seeing now, given that no more than three people in the history of the world have laid eyes on it, is the building blocks of who and what we are. It’s the energy that makes up the shade, Cresta. It’s the Essence, the source of all things. “

I tried to jerk away, to pull myself out of this. I wasn’t sure why, but the idea of peering into the building blocks of Breaker DNA wasn’t something I wanted on my college application.

“Don’t fight it,” Renner said, as though he could sense my apprehension. “The fact that you’re seeing it means you can shape it.”

“I could always shape it!” I said, ignoring his advice and trying with everything in me to make the world go back to normal. But it wouldn’t work. Whatever I had done, whatever barrier I had pushed through, wasn’t letting me go back.

“You could shape shade, Cresta. This is different. This-this is everything.”

“She said no!” Casper’s voice was loud and affirmative, the way it only got when he was standing up for me; which he had to do way too much lately.

I felt his hand on my shoulder. “I’m here, Cress. You’re not alone. You’re not ever going to be alone. I don’t know what you’re seeing, and honest to God, I don’t care. But you look really scared right now, and that makes me really scared. So I’m gonna need you to snap out of this, m’kay?”

“I don’t know how Cass?” I admitted, looking around. The dots, the Essence, surrounded Echo, Royce, and Dahlia; and not the way it seemed to surround everything. These dots were bright and pulsating. They looked like parasites feeding off the auras of my fallen comrades. My eyes darted over to Royce. The dots pulsated around him too but, where they say on the surface of the others, they had seeped inside of Renner's body; digging into every piece of him.

“It’ll be okay, Cress. Just listen to me okay, focus on my voice,” Casper said.

“What makes you think that’ll work?” I barked.

“I'm sorta winging it here, Cress. Just listen to my voice and try to cut down on the bitchy, okay?”

“I’m not being bitchy,” I muttered.  Looking down at my hands, I saw the brightest light I had seen since finding myself lost in the Essence. It was perhaps the brightest light I had ever seen period. My palms were beacons, bright burning things that threatened to sear through my corneas if I didn’t turn away. The dots within them were fierce and swirling. They changed color and intensity at the speed of light. No wonder it felt like I was burning through on the inside whenever the shade got to be too much. I actually was.

“You totally are, but it’s okay. I love you anyway,” Casper said, squeezing my shoulder. “Do you remember that time we ditched Mr. Coulson’s class and went out by the lake?”

“It’s not much of a lake,” I said, thinking of the overgrown puddle that all the old farts back in Crestview frequented on Saturdays to catch catfish and talk about how hot it was.

“Well, it’s not much of a town,” he chuckled. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to get my mind off things, to create a point where I could get mentally, hoping it would pull me out of this.

“But it is home,” I said, speaking more for him than myself. Crestview had never been home to me. Chicago was, in our apartment in the shadow of the Seer’s Tower, with Mom, Dad, and me watching old movies and hanging Christmas lights way too early cause Dad was ‘feeling the spirit’. 

But it was home to Casper and, at this point, Casper was home to me. That was had been made clear in the excruciating months that he was gone.

“It was November, so there was a little bite in the air. I stole my dad’s fishing pole and we sat out on the lake for three hours,” he said.

“And you didn’t catch a thing,” I laughed. I remembered that day like it was yesterday; the quiet chirp of the birds that had flown down from up north, the empty beer cans that littered the lakeshore.

“I don’t remember you pulling in a trophy winner either,” he answered.

“You’re the country boy, Opie. I’m a city girl.”

“You sure are,” he said, leaning in. I could feel his breath against my ear now. “Don’t you go forgetting yourself on me, Cresta Karr. What would I do then?”

And just like that, I was back. The shimmering world of shade disappeared, taking its sticky Essence with it. I was back in the kitchen again; just Cresta Karr standing next to her best friend.

“Cars drive on roads,” I said, leaning against Casper.

“You’re damn right they do,” he said.

He marched over to the fridge and pulled out a block of cheese. “Looks like these folk are gonna have to wake themselves up, Renner.” He gave me a wink. “If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the den working on my crosswords.”