The Breakers Ultimatum (YA Urban Fantasy) (Fixed Points Book 3) (21 page)

Standing in front of me, contradicting everything I knew to be possible, was Owen.

I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t supposed to be here. This was his wedding night. He should have been…otherwise occupied. But he wasn’t. He was here, looking for me. Maybe I had been too hasty before. Maybe I had misunderstood and Owen hadn’t been ready to move on. Of course, he hadn’t. Suddenly I felt very guilty. I was supposed to know Owen better than anyone. He was my one true love. And I had allowed myself to lose faith in him so easily. Thank God he was here, that he had somehow managed to slip away from Merrin, and the Council, and whoever else was watching him and make his way to me against all odds. Love had, in fact, found a way. And I felt more than a little ashamed at ever doubting that it would.

I stood quickly, releasing the tree and walking toward Owen. My steps quickened as I neared him, deciding that I didn’t care whether he was alone or not.  He was here with me now. We’d face down anything that came so long as we were together. And, stupid crone prophecies aside, I was never letting go of him again. Not for as long as I lived.

“Owen!” I yelled, my walk morphing into a run. He couldn’t hear me, of course. The anchors made perception within them impossible for anyone who wasn’t already looking for them. And, since Owen hadn’t made it to the ‘hidden cabin’ portion of our previous escape, I’d have to make it past the border before he’d be able to hear or see me.

The fear, anger, and frustration melted away as I neared him. It was as though the mere sight of him, the knowledge that soon we would be breathing the same air, was enough to make one of the worst days of my life one of the best.

“Owen!” I said again, and this time, I took a huge and defined step outside of the border. I was like Neil Armstrong with that whole ‘one small step’ spiel. Or at least, that’s the way I felt. “Owen! I’m here!” I said, and tears broke through my delicate façade.

He turned toward me, his eyes widening and his body tensing. He did not, however, move toward me. Instead, he stumbled backward a little, his right hand moving to a place on his waist that I soon realized housed a pistol. This was definitely not how I imagined our reunion going.

“Owen, what are you-” I started. He reached for the pistol and held it out toward me, his hands shaking as though I was something to fear.

“I found her,” he said, obviously into some sort of communicator. “I can’t believe it, but I found her.” A shimmer moved across Owen’s face, and his features twisted and changed. He-he wasn’t Owen at all. It was a trick, an illusion meant to draw me out by preying on the thing I wanted the most in the world. And I fell for it. How very cliché.

I stumbled backward, back through the anchors’ boundaries. But their effect had been nullified. Faux Owen knew that I was there. He knew where to look and, as such, I was as visible and conspicuous as if I was standing under a ‘Cresta’s Right Here’ billboard.

His shaky hands still pointed the pistol toward me as he repeated into his communicator. “I found her. I have the coordinates of the Blood Moon.”

And now everyone else did too.

“Remain where you are!” Faux Owen yelled! His voice lowered and, with hard blinking eyes, he said, “Request permission to eliminate the threat.”

Threat? He was the one with the gun.

I studied his eyes, studied his hands. Neither of them seemed too forceful and, if pushed, I wasn’t even sure this guy had it in him to shoot me. Since his Owen face had melted away, I could now see that he was no older than thirteen, a definite youngling and someone who had probably never even been in the field before, let alone actually killed someone.

He didn’t want to have to hurt me. That much was clear. What wasn’t clear was how close he would come if the Council requested it of him. Breakers were trained to follow orders, and the Council was considered infallible. Their words were as close to fate’s own tongue as anyone other than a seer was likely to ever hear. It wouldn’t pay to underestimate what this kid would do for the Council should they ask.

Taking a deep breath, I tried to compose myself. I needed to concentrate in order to shape the shade and get myself out of this situation. My mind wouldn’t allow it though, not right now. There was too much panic running through it, too much shame weighing down heavy on my shoulders.  So I’d have to do this the old fashioned way; by begging.

“What’s your name,” I asked in my best quiet non-threatening tone.

His eyes flickered up at me in surprise, as though he never imagined that the Blood Moon would actually ever talk to him. Maybe Royce was right about these guys being scared to death of me. This kid obviously was.

“I’m not allowed to speak to you,” he said quickly. “I said I have the whereabouts of the Blood Moon. Requesting permission to eliminate the threat. Why aren’t you answering?”

“They can’t hear you,” I said, noticing that he had inched his way into the anchors’ boundaries. The Council (or whoever he was talking to) didn’t know about the cabin or the anchors. So they couldn’t hear his pleas or questions while he was inside. Of course, if I told him that, he’d just back up three feet and I’d be good as dead, so I added, “I’m blocking your communications. It’s um; it’s one of my Blood Moon things. Now, what’s your name?”

“Tennison,” he answered. His voice was cracking and his hands were positively jerking now. I hated the idea of scaring this kid, but this was war and it wasn’t like I had much of a choice.

“Are you going to kill me?” He asked. To his credit, though he was shaking, there were no tears in his eyes.

“You’re the one pointing a gun at me,” I answered, motioning toward the pistol.

“I have to do my duty,” he said, and it sounded as though the prospect pained him.

“No, you don’t, Tennison,” I answered, moving closer to him slowly, the way one might do to an especially skittish deer, careful not to spook it. “No one knows you saw me, Tennison. I blocked the transmission. You can just walk away, go back to your patrol, and pretend none of this ever happened.”

“No!” He yelled through gritted teeth. “You’re trying to trick me! You think I’m afraid!”

“No Tennison, afraid would be doing exactly what the Council wanted you to, even though you know in your heart that it isn’t right.”

That was sort of a risky game, assuming that there a piece of this kid who was having second thoughts about the whole ‘Blood Moon’ thing. But he had kind eyes and a lilt in his voice that made me think he’d be happier going through the motions than actually making any sort of difference.

“You don’t know what’s right,” he said, biting on his bottom lip. “You’re the Blood Moon. You’re the worst- the worst thing that has ever been.”

Well, that’s complimentary.

‘Is it hard?” I asked, playing a hunch and going a different direction. “Doing what they say no matter what? Being who they say you have to be, regardless of what you want, of who you know you really are? Tennison, I-”

“Stop saying my name!” He screamed, his face growing red and frustrated. “Do you think I want to kill you? Do you think that’s what I want, to be some murderer? But I don’t have a choice. You’re going to bring about the end of the entire world. Every person living on the planet will suffer horribly if I don’t do this. You have to understand that.”

“I had a friend once,” I said with images of Sevie flashing through my mind. “He was a good person, maybe the single best person that I’ve ever known. But his life wasn’t easy. See, he felt like he didn’t belong anywhere; like he was trapped in this world that didn’t value him, where he’d never be the sort of person he needed to.” Tennison’s bottom lip started to quiver, and I knew that he was relating to the story I was telling. “He lived every day of his life like that, Tennison, feeling like he was less. That wasn’t fair to him, and it’s not fair to you either.”

“You don’t know me,” he said, lip still shaking. “Requesting permission to eliminate the threat,” he repeated uselessly.

“They can’t hear you, Tennison.”

“Stop saying my name! You don’t know me!” His eyes trickled down to the red moon splattered across my chest. “It’s an act of war,” he said. “Just you being here is an act of war. We learned about you in our studies, about what you’re capable of. You’re going to do horrible things.”

“I do know you,” I answered, basically ignoring the ‘you’re gonna end the world, you horrible monster you’ thing that had become a standard greeting for me as of late. “I know what it is to be pigeonholed, to be forced into some box where you don’t belong just to satisfy some idiot’s idea of what the future should look like. A really smart woman once told me that there was a reason for everything, and I think there’s a reason for this, Tennison, for you being the one to find me here.”

I saw something break behind his eyes, and I pressed on. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to shoot me, or ever become the type of person who would shoot a defenseless girl in the forest. There’s a way out of here. We’re taking it tomorrow, and you can come with us if you want. There are places in the world you can go; places where you’ll be safe and you can be anybody you want to be.”

His eyes moved back and forth rapidly in his head like he was trying to figure out something. Instinctively, he stepped backward, away from me. But the pistol lowered in his hand. “What about my family?”

“It’ll be hard at first, I won’t lie to you. But you have to live your life for yourself, Tennison. You have to be the person you were meant to be, the person that you are. Trust me, anything else is impossible.”

Now the tears were beginning to form in his sky blue eyes. “I-I-”

“Let me help you,” I said, and actually meant it. Somewhere along the line of the conversation, it became about something more than saving myself. Maybe I could save him too, and wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing.

“I...”

“Tennison?” An unfamiliar voice echoed through the forest. I looked up to find an older man, obviously a Breaker on patrol, standing at the edge of the forest, staring at the boy. Damn. When he had moved backward, he had stepped out of the boundary line. “Who are you talking to?”

Tennison looked at him with horror plain on his face and then back at me. But I was still inside of the anchors and, since the older man didn’t know to look for me, he couldn’t see or hear me.

“I… nobody. I’m not talking to anybody. Just to myself,” Tennison answered. He was doing it. Since he was about as cool and collected as a two-legged dog stuck on the freeway during rush hour, he wasn’t the most convincing thing in the world. But still, he was on my side. And that made me feel strangely triumphant, even if I was only hours away from almost certain death.

Then other Breaker eyed him for a long moment, leaving Tennison nervous and fidgety.

“Don’t look at me,” I instructed him, sure that the other Breaker wouldn’t hear me. “Keep your eyes on him, and try to act naturally. You haven’t done anything wrong. There’s no one here.”

“There’s no one here!” he repeated, sounding a little too panicked.

“Is that right?” The other Breaker moved forward, narrowing his eyes. His left hand settled over his pistol, a fact Tennison didn’t miss as I watched his entire body go stiff.

“There isn’t,” he said, a splash of pleading coloring his voice. “It’s just us. Of course, it is. I mean, do you see anybody else?”

Oh, Tennison, that’s so not the way to go.

“Do you know what the punishment for lying to the Council of Masons is?” The other Breaker’s voice went deep and low. “Even in times of peace, the cost of that is death. Can you imagine what the Council would do if a Breaker was to lie to them at a time like this?”

“No!” Tennison said, shaking his head hard. “I mean, I wouldn’t lie to the Council, not ever. There’s no one here. Everything is normal. It’s quiet even.”

“Then why is your pistol drawn?” The other Breaker asked.

A flash of panic registered on Tennison’s face. Even if he was to come up with the most convincing lie of all time right on the spot, it wouldn’t do any good. The truth was plastered on his face.

“Run! Run Tennison!” I screamed, but it was too late. Before the boy could even turn toward me, the other Breaker had pulled his weapon and fired two shots into his skull. I shuddered as the bullets ripped through the boy’s head, splattering blood all over me and sending the poor soul crumbling to the ground. Tennison gasped a few times as blood gurgled up from his mouth. His eyes flickered over to me, and then I watched the light fade from them.

I fell to my knees, wiping away fresh tears as I sat there and stared at Tennison’s body. He was just a kid, just a child who had never seen any of the world, who didn’t know what life really was, who certainly didn’t deserve this.

I was so lost in that moment, in the injustice of it, that I didn’t realize what Tennison’s death meant. As blood poured out of the poor kid’s head, the Breaker who shot him moved closer. But there was something troubling about his movements, something I should have put together. He stepped deliberately, like a man who knew where he was going, a man who had eyes on the prize.

I looked up to find his eyes pinned right on me, staring into my own. Seeing me. He could see me. Of course, after Tennison died, the information in his head was immediately transmitted to the Council, who must have sent it back out to all the Breakers on patrol.

“Hello there, little Blood Moon,” the Breaker said, pointing his pistol at my forehead. He knew what Tennison had known. He could see me because he knew where to look for me. And so did every single breaker inside the Hourglass.