Page 17 of Legacy Ascended

"I know your face," Benny says, and his voice changes. "You were at the staging ground."

One of the two Frances told me they'd secured. Apparently secured didn’t really mean anything.

Behind him, along the outer wall, a handbell starts up and somebody begins shouting for everyone to get out and get behind the stables. Lights come on in the buildings. Somebody has found the service door standing open.

"Stable shelter," Benny says. "That's where they put the children during an alarm."

Along the ground behind the buildings, a group hurries toward the stables — adults in coats thrown over nightclothes, moving children toward the shelter.

One of the children has one sock on.

The man swings the pistol toward the families crossing to the shelter. Tomas is among them, one hand wrapped around a woman's fingers, looking back over his shoulder at the torches.

"Walk back up the slope," the man says, "or I shoot one of them."

The trees are close. The slope drops away into black, and past the bottom of it there's a track and a road and every bond in me pulling hard enough to hurt.

"Elise. Get to them. Behind the stable wall."

"Jessica—"

"Now."

She goes. I come up the slope instead of down it.

"Stop," the man says, and swings the light onto me.

"You want the heir. I'm walking toward you." I keep my voice level. "Point that at the ground."

He doesn't. He tracks me and keeps half his attention on the children, because he's worked out exactly what's holding me here.

So I stop well short of him, and let out a long breath, and reach for it.

Not angry. Soren taught me what happens when I reach for the shift angry — I get all the power and none of the steering. He taught me in the cold field behind the arena with his hand flat between my shoulder blades. Find the heat. Know where everything is standing. Know where you want to end up. Don't pull it. Just go.

The sedative is still in me somewhere, thinner every hour since the van, and it's the last of it that fights. The first surge comes up, hits something flat, slides off — and for one horrible second I think it isn't going to take.

Then it takes.

There's nothing graceful about it. My spine goes and my shoulders drive up and forward and keep going, and the torn place in my flank pulls hard enough to turn my vision white. My hands are gone. They're wrong, and then they're right.

The slope shrinks. The trees come down toward me.

Then the smells arrive and the world triples. Frost, pine, gun oil, sheep somewhere, woodsmoke, and the man's fear.

I'm enormous, furious, and still completely myself.

He fires just before I reach him.

The bullet tears through the top of my left shoulder, the same one that took the dart this morning. Pain detonates down my entire left side. It doesn't put me down. I keep going.

I could take his throat. I don't.

I hit him across the hips and the shoulder and put him into the ground, and stand over him with my head down while he finds out how much of this mountain I take up.

He gets a knee under himself and a hand toward the pistol.

Benny lands on his shoulders with all his weight.