The Rise (14 page)

Slowly, I began to release my hold over them, like setting down a basket of vipers and stepping away carefully, without turning my back. My body was tense and ready, waiting for what surely was to come. I felt an ugly grin come over my face.

And five of the Lamias moved in.

My mental fingers were gripping them again instantly, digging into their slimly souls with clawed hands. The five Lamias let out high-pitched shrieks of panic, and it bounced around the cavern’s walls like bats trapped in a chimney. I heard the other Lamias, the ones who had been wise enough to submit completely, hiss sharply between sawed teeth. I squeezed the challengers hard, harder. Examples needed to be made. Excited anticipation swirled through me.

With one final wrench, I ripped the five souls from their bodies, which collapsed to the ground with dull thuds. Their life energies flooded into me, like crashing waves on the shore. I felt my mouth fall open and knew that my fangs were bared in the darkness. My eyelids fluttered, and I giggled. Smacked my lips. When the feeling subsided, and I knew that the deed was done, my hands clapped together like a pleased child.

Hundreds of black eyes stared back at me. My hands spread out at my sides. “
Now we sleep,”
I heard myself say, and something small inside me whispered that my voice was somehow
wrong.
But I just couldn’t see it.
“Tonight, we hunt.”

Some of the Lamias began scaling the walls, returning to their inverted resting places, but when I took a seat on the floor and laid down, propping my hands behind my head, they began to lie down beside me. They huddled close, feather soft hair brushing my skin, stone cold arms and legs pressing up against me, sickly sweet breaths floating to me in the utter darkness. I closed my eyes. And it felt like home.

A heavy sleep began to pull me under, slowly at first, then suddenly. But just before I slipped into dreamland, that small voice inside of me, that annoying little interjector, spoke up once more.

Three words
: Remember the sun.

Well, that just didn’t make any sense, now did it? The sun had blinded me, irritated my skin. So I slipped into the greater darkness, and it welcomed me with open arms.

Alexa

The rest of the ride was not a pleasant one. Everyone was as silent as the dead, which made me shudder when I thought about it. I didn’t have the nerve to look into any of their faces, because I was still uncomfortable about my display of emotion, even though all of them except for Kayden had missed the worst of it. But the exhaustion in the van was palpable in the stale air. Needless to say, no one was in high spirits.

“I guess this is it,” Gavin said, bringing the van to a slow stop.

Tommy got up and peered through the windshield. “What’s it? There’s nothing here.”

I crawled numbly over to the door and slid it open. The bright sun made me blink again, and I could still feel the puffiness in my lids from crying. I hopped out of the van, stretching. I looked around me. Tommy was right, there was nothing here.

Well, it wasn’t just a void in space. The road we’d pulled off on was graveled and narrow. To the east was a large apple orchard, to the west a creek that ran alongside the road, trickling over a shallow, rocky bed. Beyond that, rolling hills of green and yellow dotted with a few maple trees here and there, and beyond that, far off in the distance, gray mountains. There were no houses in sight, no barns or driveways or cars or tractors, though I assumed that the orchard had to be owned by someone. I couldn’t even hear the highway from here. In fact, I couldn’t hear anything. We were in the middle of nowhere.

The others had climbed out of the van, looking around and probably feeling the same thing I was; pissed off. When the doors to the Mercedes opened, and Camillia stepped out, I strode over to her.

Whatever look was on my face made her wince. “Where the hell did you bring us?” I asked, flinging my arms out at the scene around us.

To my surprise, I saw anger spark behind her puffy eyes. “It’s just across the creek,” she snapped, raising her chin a fraction. “And you don’t have to be rude, Warrior. I lost someone I loved today, too. And I think who both know who was responsible for
that.
”

I took a stepped back, her words hitting me like a slap across the face. For once, I could think of nothing to say, no snippy comment or sarcastic retort. She was right, and we both knew it. If I hadn’t been so stricken, I may have punched her in the face just for
being
right. Instead, I squeezed my hands into fists at my sides and felt something drip down my fingers. I looked down to see drops of scarlet blood plunking to gravel at my feet. I had rubbed my hands raw on the shovel. I thought of something nasty to say to then, felt a crooked smile pull up my lips, opened my mouth to say it—

“That’s enough,” Tommy said, coming to stand between Camillia and me. Tommy gave her a hard look. “We don’t know what happened back there. None of us
saw
anything, so let’s not go making accusations.” He turned to me, and his cool blue eyes were sympathetic. I winced.

“Let’s just get to where we’re getting,” Tommy said. “We are all angry, tired, confused and upset. Let’s just go. Okay?”

I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and I felt like telling them all to take a damn picture already. But then I looked over at little Soraya, whose face was drawn with weariness and worry, the two middle fingers of her left hand jammed in her mouth. The face of a seven-year-old who has seen and experienced things far beyond her years, golden eyes pleading with me to stop causing trouble so that we could be done with this.

I nodded.

Camillia haughtily marched off toward the creek, but I could see that even her walk was underlined with grief. Suddenly I felt very childish over my actions. And selfish, too. That’s right, I thought. Just keep piling on the shitty emotions, universe. No really, I don’t think I’ve had enough.

My Monster chuckled its amusement in my head. I sighed and followed the others, who were leaping over the creek and trailing Camillia across the green grass and into the open field on the other side. I looked back over my shoulder to see Kayden carrying Soraya atop his shoulders, her chin resting in on the top of his golden head, eyes closed tight. When I turned back around, the Warrior whose name I didn’t know was standing beside me.

I really looked at him for the first time. He had dark, closely cropped hair and very round dark eyes. His face was all sharp lines and edges, with a slight sheen that hinted at oily skin. He was taller than me, but not as tall as Kayden, and built wiry and muscled, like most Brocken Vampires. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were running the length of my body and back again.

“I’m Simon,” he said, and something about his voice made me instantly dislike him, though I couldn’t tell you why. It could have been just that I didn’t feel like talking to
anyone
right then. I struggled not to roll my eyes. I was two seconds from telling him very eloquently to
piss off.
But a sweet little voice beat me to it.

“And she’s taken,” Soraya said, peering down at Simon from her perch on her uncle’s head, dark curls spilling around her face. Kayden’s face gave away nothing, but I could tell by the sparkle in his eyes, the almost imperceptible turn in his lips, that he was pleased with his niece. If I had been capable of it at the moment, I might have laughed. But I wasn’t.

Either because he knew better than to be rude to Soraya, or he just had a very high tolerance for children, Simon smiled at the girl. “Was just making introductions,” he told her, but he fell behind us after that, and didn’t attempt any more conversation. I was glad for this. In my current mood, Simon could consider himself lucky. He’d gotten off easy.

Just when I was about to say to hell with it and say something about how we were going nowhere, the air in front of me shimmered, like a wall of still water hanging before me. I stopped in my tracks, my companions doing the same. I began to discern things beyond the blurry curtain, things that hadn’t been there just a moment ago, taking shape and becoming more and more concrete the longer I stared, until it looked as though it had always been.

It
has
always been, Warrior. You just never knew where to look. The world is so much bigger than you give it credit for.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Just an observation.

“Great. Keep the next one to yourself.”

A chuckle rang out in my head.
That’s a confusing way to put it.

“Then just shut up. When I need your help, I’ll ask for it.”

You just remember that you
will
need my help. You can’t shun me forever. I’m part of you. And, who knows what waits for us there?

I studied the scene in front of me. A row of wooden cottages, set only feet apart, stretched out what seemed like endlessly in either direction. Beyond that, other wooden structures, large, medium, and small, rose in the distance, cresting the green hills, dotting the country side. From my vantage point I could see people going about their days, carrying buckets and pushing carts and sitting out in the sun. The clothes they wore were modern but modest. The trails they walked tamed but unpaved. It seemed to me like a place out of a fairytale, a time not yet overrun with technology but not uncivilized either. I could see new structures being built, could hear the pound of hammers and drone of voices.

Various flowers bloomed in gardens around the cottages, which each seemed to have been built by someone different, just small varying characteristics that made each unique and unalike. White flags with silver suns printed on them blew in the breeze on tall wooden poles, surrounding the hidden city along its edges. A whole other world hidden within a simple field, that surely some human held the ownership of, yet was none the wiser. Just like Two Rivers. It was somehow a lot to take in, though I’d known that other places like this had to exist somewhere. I just couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around the physics that were implied here. It broke too many rules, even if I didn’t know exactly what those rules were. I’d never paid much attention in school.

My Monster’s words went through my head, but I was the one who thought them.
The world is so much bigger than you give it credit for.

Yeah, no shit.

“What is this place?” I asked, and couldn’t keep the wonder from my voice.

Camillia looked at me sideways, her expression still grief-ridden but also smug. “This is the Outlands. The edge of our world. No race in particular owns this territory, and all those who mean no harm are free to enter. We will find what we’re looking for here.”

Oh yeah, I thought, and what exactly
are
we looking for?

Camillia continued forward, cutting between two of the cottages, and I could see my hesitation mirrored in my companions. We followed, me and Kayden bringing up the rear of our small group. He had set Soraya down, and she was walking very closely to her mother, almost huddling against her. A bit of anxiety came over me. The last time I had stepped into a hidden city in the middle of nowhere, I had ended up having to fight in an arena, and everything else that had followed that hadn’t been pleasant, either. New, unknown places meant new and unknown dangers. But what other choice did I have? Where else was I supposed to go?

As I passed between the two cottages, I began to notice small things that made the city appear somehow stranger, even from a distance. The gardens I’d seen held flowers of all colors, but they were of the type that I had never seen before, that I wasn’t even sure existed in the human world. Some were as silver as the marks on my arm, others as gold as sunlight, not yellow-gold, but
gold.
Things hung from the wooden slats of the cottages’ roofs, smooth stones and pieces of glass and translucent jewels that tinkled softly in the wind, making me feel as though the city itself were singing a sweet melody.