AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Adoqhina meets my gaze from within the ring of flames and I can see fire reflected there, burnin’ in the green and I hallucinate a vision of Echo’s garden set ablaze. She opens her mouth and grunts as she throws her arms forward, vines sproutin’ from the ground behind me and goin’ for my Six.
The ground tosses once before settlin’ on a tremor. Adoqhina grunts and looks over my shoulder at Echo. I’m almost fuckin’ free and Echo’s got her arm up. The vines stop — literally stop, hangin’ suspended in midair — but after a few seconds of impossible tension, they push forward by an inch, and then another, movin’ through the air like magnificent snakes covered in shards of black glass.
As the vines push forward, the fire starts cutting a violent path towards Echo. She grunts and lifts her hand. The mud beneath her starts to swell and lift, lappin’ at the flames, but if I can see it, the Fates already know it — Echo can’t stop the fire and the vines both.
A stream of bright red blood suddenly bursts from her left nostril and her whole body bucks like she’s been hit in the back with an arrow. Her hands spasm. I roar out a word that reeks of desperation as the vine plunges towards her. The blur of a body — one a’ my Six, Barbero, I think — throws himself in the vine’s path. Bloody gashes appear in his side as he takes a hit. He collapses and my Berserker roars a response that’s caught somewhere between grief, gratitude and rage.
I tear the last a’ the vines holdin’ me back free and surge towards Echo — fuck the fire — but the air is suddenly too thick to cut through. I glance over my shoulder and see Odette’s got her hands up like she’s the one controlling the air and the flames both…
And it pisses me the fuck off.
I redirect and start towards her, fully intendin’ to end this shit.
My claws dig the ground deep and I wrench my way forward on all four paws, one painful step at a time. I get closer and closer and closer… I’m within six feet a’ her now. Echo musta been wrong about the Berserker of Mirage City because Maengor, the coward, stands just behind Odette, usin’ his Fates as a shield like the bastard that he is. He’s just starin’ at me while the wind whips so fast and so hard I slide to my knees. He’s got Sy standin’ right beside him speakin’ directly into his ear, but I don’t bother with them — yet. Right now, I’m close enough to this Fire and Air Fate to fuckin’ wreck her.
I lunge and sink my claws into Odette’s stomach. Her eyes roll back. The wind stills. Blood drips down my arm and I feel around for an organ — a good solid one to rip out through her ribs. But just before I can, Omora screams,“Noon,now!”
My blood runs cold and in reverse, cities toppling, civilizations long deserted. I withdraw my hand as Maengor sucks in a breath and takes a step towards me. I meet his gaze over the head of the Omega standin’ in front of me. Dyin’ by my hand. Odette. She falls to the ground.
“Noon, kill him!” Adoqhina echoes, but all I can see are the brown eyes starin’ outta a’ skull they don’t belong to. They’re light brown, the left one streaked through with a downward slash a’ green. My sister had those same eyes. Shoved into a man’s head who’s supposed to be immortal, I understand nothin’.
“Noon, it has to be you. You must do this. Kill him. Kill the Berserker!” Sy’s voice is shrieking louder now, louder and louder it builds until it bursts.
Maengor closes the distance between us. He lifts his left hand and presses just the tip of his middle finger to the space between my eyes. Lightning cracks down the middle of my body and voices screaming are the last thing I hear before I die.
Sy.“Noon, he wears your Fated sister’s blood on his hands like a glove! He is a malevolent, evil thing! He is a Berserker!”
And then Echo’s tormented shriek,“He was a Beta too, once.”
34 | Echo
At a Crossroads
The Mirage City Berserker touches Adam and as I watch him fall, the soul leaves my body and cymbals clash so loudly, they shatter all of my bones.Pain and Fear emerge from the trees on wings made of warped metal, dripping in Adam’s blood. They lunge towards me, but they pause in their tracks, dig their heels into the ground and scramble backwards, halted in their approach by something bigger than they are, more menacing, more destructive, more terrible and terrifying than either or both ever could be, or ever dream of…
Love.
It screams out of me on a word, “Freya!”
She’s suddenly at my side, a woman and not a bear. She’s got a series of three cuts scoring her chest and she bleeds from all of them. Her face is that of a wild thing. Her eyes are magnificent rings. “We should call for the assistance of the Alpha army your Berserker and his ally…”
“Give me your hand!”
She stutters, looking a little afraid for the first time since I’ve known her — this time, afraid ofme. But she obeys my command. She slams her palm into mine and I feel the energy that courses through our bones come together in a mystical and magical combination that no science could ever hope to explain.
I feel the water in the ground. I feel the rain. I open my mouth on a silent scream and energy tunnels out of me and I know what to do next and how to channel it. I shove my free fist into the soil and with my thoughts alone, I pull. I stab down and energy strikes the place where Maengor once stood, knocking him and the dark-haired Omega back and sending Adam’s body flying away from them, towards me. The ring of fire dies. Adam’s body lands in the mud, motionless. My urge is to go to him, but Freya holds me back.
“She wears his dead skin as a coat.” She shakes her head. Her eyes are huge. She tries to scramble back and pull me with her, but I am stone. I grab her wrist and don’t let her go. “Not even I can do that. We should run, Echo,” she says and it’s the first time she’s ever called me by my name.
“Never!” I screech and I yank her forward.
I see her cause for alarm as I kick and crawl over the mud, dragging her with me. The Fates have fallen back, but the Berserker still stands and the skin Maengor once wore is just as I glimpsed it in that fleeting moment in the hallway by the bathrooms, right before he touched me and my reality faded. It occurs to me just now that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t trying to warn me away from the cave to deceive me. Maybe, he was trying to warn me away from the cave because he foresawthis. Adam’s death.
No. Adam lives.He has to.
The only dead one here is Maengor himself.
Berserker Maengor doesn’t exist.The energy rolling off of the corpse flesh is all Omega and it’s more powerful than me, more powerful than Freya, more powerful than all of us.
