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Morgan smiled at him, the same beaming, lovesick smile I’d seen her give him a thousand times. She nodded once and said, “Okay.”
Then she pushed my sister off the ledge.
Chapter Thirty-One
Everything changed in that second.
Lucas grabbed hold of the door in an attempt to catch Genie. Morgan raised her weapon and aimed it at him, and her snarling voice demanded, “Stop.”
The command rang through me like a church bell at noon, and I, too, thought, Stop.
But it was different now than it had been when I held the car in place, because instead of just thinking the one word, I demanded, with every fiber of my being, Stop everything.
Pain zapped through my skull again, reminding me Aubrey had spent hundreds if not thousands of years honing these abilities, while I had only had them for about an hour. I was putting my mind and body through the ringer by using his gifts too much and too quickly.
Time went still.
Morgan’s face was frozen in a hateful sneer, and Lucas’s attention was not on the gun pointed at him, but on Genie’s falling body. My sister was caught midair, her hand having missed a steel beam by inches. She was poised for a very long drop.
Stepping towards the edge of the pit, I almost jumped without thinking. And while Aubrey’s magic might give me the ability to fly, I’d already learned I could only do one thing at a time. If I made any further demands, time would un-freeze and Genie would fall.
But I couldn’t reach her from the ledge. Gravity was a fast-acting menace, and Genie was at least one floor down. I might be able to run down to the floor below, but what if the magic only worked as long as I was focused on it? With Aubrey, we’d been able to walk around like it was a lovely afternoon in the park and he’d barely seemed to twitch.
I was not the fairy king, though.
Now that the car had fallen, there was no cable to grab hold of, only the steel framework of the elevator shaft. Many of the beams meant to create a safe structure were bent or broken clean in half. But if I could climb down them, I should be able to get hold of her. Bringing her back up might prove impossible, but perhaps if we could get to the floor beneath us, I could will the doors open.
Keeping her from falling was the most important thing. Any other concerns could be fretted over once I got to them.
Without much thought for my personal safety—something I rarely worried about—I stepped out onto the ledge, knocking the gun out of Morgan’s hands as I did, tossing it down the open chute. At least now, if time unstuck, she wouldn’t put a hole in Lucas.
I sat on the edge and stretched my legs down until my toes touched the beam of a girder below me. I tested my weight on it, making sure it wouldn’t break the moment I used it as a foothold, then turned around, using the ledge as a hand grip, and let myself drop.
I kept moving, trying not to spend too long on any one beam, since I couldn’t see which ones were damaged or not. It took me five minutes to get from the open doors to a larger steel beam, where I was able to stand without holding on to anything else.
Genie was level with me now, and the expression of shock and terror on her face was heart wrenching. She’d thought she was free. We’d saved her, and she had believed the nightmare was over, only to be pushed into one so much worse.
I cursed Morgan for her cruelty, and cursed myself for letting her live when I’d had a chance to kill her.
Another situation where my foolish mercy had turned around to bite me in the ass.
I held the beam above me for support, then swung out and grasped Genie’s arm by the cuff of her shirtsleeve. She moved easily, like she was weightless and floating in space. Still, my position made it difficult to retrieve her, and her shirt slipped out of my grasp. She drifted back to her former position.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, readjusting my hold on the beam. My hands were sweaty now, and I was worried I might slip off if I stretched too far. “Come on, come on.”
I swung out again, getting a much firmer hold on her arm, and reeled her in towards me until I was back with both feet on the beam and my arm wrapped around her waist. I considered trying to adjust her body position to see if she’d be easier to move but decided it wasn’t worth the time. She was so light, as long as I kept one hand on her, it didn’t matter how her body was posed.
Because I didn’t have to worry about hauling the weight of a second body up with me, it made sense to go back the way I’d come. I followed the same series of railings and handholds that had gotten me to her, with slightly more difficulty since I was now one-handed. It took twice as long to climb up with her as it had to climb down, but the moment I pushed her body up over the ledge and felt her weight settle onto the floor, I let out a sigh of relief.
She was safe.
I gripped the edge with both hands now, and thought to myself, It’s going to be okay.
Evidently, I should have kept my mind focused on other things before getting too far ahead of myself. A wish for things to be okay was not a command my new powers recognized, nor one I imagined was in my scope of ability to perform.
Yet I’d focused on something other than the command of Stop, and so time started moving again.
Morgan was too motivated in her goal to kill Lucas to notice right away anything had changed. And Lucas, who had been ready to dive in after Genie, pulled to an abrupt stop when he saw me dangling in the shaft and realized Genie was on the floor beside him. My sister, who had probably experienced more shock in the last ten minutes than anyone her age ought to go through in a lifetime, was curled up in a ball, sobbing.
