“I … don’t,” I growled, a bear scaring a rival predator from her den.
Along the taffy thread connecting us, I felt Magnum shudder under my emerging fortitude.
“You do, you do,” he said, unable to hide his desperation.
As deeply linked to him as I was, he couldn’t conceal much.
“Look,” he begged. “Look at what I’m trying … ah, ah, ow … to show … you.”
In my own mindspace, images, cloudy like smoke, crispened in front of thelushina’s light bodies to form scenes—clips from Magnum’s memories.
After Griffin went over the cliff on the way to Raven’s Lagoon, Zoe’s big sister, Hayden Wills, was one of the first responders at the scene. She was there when they defibrillated Griffin after my crew and I begged them not to give up on him despite the broken neck. Out of sight, later Hayden stepped out of her skin to reveal herself as a Magnum underneath the cute-girl facade.
Magnum was also Jaggar at the gymnasium, posing as the obedient soldier who offered up defibrillator paddles in anticipation of his murdering us.
At the drag race, when Clyde exploded into a raging fireball with Griffin inside, Magnum was again there, once more in the guise of Hayden Wills.
Save for the first occasion with Brady, since the press covering the “Miracle Kid” incident was what first garnered Magnum’sattention, each time one of us died, Magnum was there. He eventually emerged from a cocoon of someone else.
Linked to his mindspace as I was, I understood that the confident, handsome billionaire was yet another shell. Like matryoshka dolls, the Magnum persona could nestle inside another. But within the Magnum hid a gray, creepy, toothy, alien-lookingdrashjust like those within Fanny and Zoe.
This “special”drashfar preferred his human disguise—and hell, who could blame him? So long as he didn’t remove his Magnum skin suit, his body behaved exactly as his human counterpart’s would.
When my crew or I were being revived, before Magnum shed his borrowed skin suit, as our essences returned to our physical vessels, he stole all he could, leaving sufficient to reanimate our bodies. Relatively, it was a minuscule amount, sure, but souls are meant always to be whole. Any part of it missing was a significant deficiency.
“You’re the one who conferred immortality on them,” Magnum explained, his voice steady and pedantic.
Distantly, alarm bells clanged. He was no longer suffering.
I tightened my mind’s eye around his essence and gave a violent tug.
He winced and hissed. “Once you … gave them the immor … tality … they didn’t need your pow … er. But only … because you were strong. That augmented the ability … you gave them.”
I pulled as hard as I could. A spurt of his essence flowed
into me.
He hissed again, louder this time, more drawn out. “They can’t … do it now. You’re not … whole. You”—hsssssssss—“need me to help you.”
Even latched on to his mindspace as I was, I couldn’t determine the veracity of his claim.
“If you try to bring them back…” he grunted, “it will kill you.”
Perhaps I would die.
I knew one thing for certain: The creepy alien in the smooth-rich-dude skin would never, ever, help me or my family. Not unless it benefited him.
Magnum Chase would want all my abilities: immortality, dreamwalking, telepathy,andpreternatural healing. With his own powers alone, he was scary enough.
And megalomaniacs never stopped.
No.There was no room for negotiation, or for error.
I couldnotallow him to escape.
No matter what it cost me.
Even if it cost me myfamily.
