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“How? This is steel!” I shout before I remember that there are Betas lurking in the hallway outside, specifically planted there to monitor me. I drop my voice to a hiss. “I don’t thinkflowerscan break that.”
Her hand comes out of nowhere and strikes me upside the face. She hits me! The bitch hits me! “You…you!” I can’t even come up with an insult. Doesn’t matter. She doesn’t give me time to, anyway.
Instead, she’s back up on me, nearly nestled on my lap again. No sense of personal space. “You are not…Fallen,” she whispers, grabbing the sides of my face and squeezing until my lips pucker. “The man in the cave…sent me for you…but he must be wrong. You are not one of the Fallen. You are not one of us.” She moves with the breeze and returns to the window in elegant, graceful strides that make no noise on the carpet. Not even a whisper.
My heart starts to pound and I feel a budding headache. I can’t watch her leave. Because she’s going to take something very important with her when she does and I might not recover from the loss of it.
“Wait!” I whisper-shout.
She doesn’t stop, but touches the window frame and opens it wider. Her hand…her hand looks like it’s disappearing into the wind…or growing wings. If she turns into a bat again, she’ll be gone forever.
Desperate to keep her here, I blurt out the words that come to me without thinking. “I ascended three months ago. I don’t know what I’m doing. If you tell me I can get myself out of this, then I believe you, Freya. I trust you. You’re the only one I trust here. The Berserker, he…he lied to me. I trusted him when I shouldn’t have. I should have believed you and killed him when I had the chance.”
Her fingers smooth over the wooden frame of the window, tracing its square edge. She’s deciding. Everything hangs on the now.
Tears grip my eyes, but she won’t respond well to that. I don’t know her at all except that she hates Berserkers and weakness, so I suck it down and infuse my voice with strength. “Freya, please.”
“I see the…cloth you tried to use to free yourself. You are still thinking like a Beta, not an Omega…but a Beta cannot kill the undead. An Alpha cannot, either. Only…Omegas…” She gestures absently at the pieces of torn blanket I used to try to break the iron posts of his bed.
Bashfully, I confess, “I heard somewhere if you pee on silk, it becomes strong enough to bend steel…” My words sound about as lousy a theory as it turned out to be. Instead of busting out of here, all I got were pee-covered sheets.
“Why did you not use your instinct?” She looks at me over her shoulder, still touching the window frame. Still poised to leave.
“It’s not strong…”
“You have control over earth, yes?”
“I can…”
“Yes or no?”
I swallow. Well, when she puts it like that… “I guess…”
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.” My voice comes out in a breath.
“And control over water, yes or no?”
I remember the river, pulling our bodies from the water and how little control I felt until I was summoned. The Berserker told me to bring the water, so I brought the water. It had been easy, but only under his command. “Yes.”
She turns in a flourish, grabs the pitcher of water left for me on the bedside table and dumps it over the chain. Then she tosses the glass onto the floor where it lands with a heavy thunk, but doesn’t shatter. She doesn’t look back at it. She doesn’t care. She stands over me like an archangel, an underworld demoness, her body covered in shadow while the window behind her creates a halo of her silhouette.
She grabs the chain at my neck and pulls it out from behind me. Taut, I stare at the droplets clinging to it. “Freeze the chain.”
“What?”
“Freeze the water, freeze the chain.” Her eyes narrow when I don’t react except to stare at her like she’s crazy. “That was a summoning, Omega.”
I suck in a breath and, staring into her eyes, am lost to the disorienting sensations swirling through me. She is not my Berserker but, when she orders me, I feel that compulsion deep in my stomach, that urge, that essence, that force, that pull. Like a good Omega, I obey.
I inhale and glance at the chain when she drops it with a hiss. Cold radiates from the metal as the water crystalizes and I shiver as a chill shoots up to touch my collar and I shiver again as ice comes to cover the headboard and then the bed, and then the sheets around me. I clutch the blankets to my chest as memories of a lifetime of being cold creep in.
Fear and Pain slink out of the shadows, resuming their rightful places at my left and right hand. They’re crowding me now and I feel my throat hitch, nerves getting the best of me. I’ve been without them for so long, it’s both a hatred and a longing for them that keeps me from reacting right away when Freya takes the now frozen chain and yanks.
It shatters instantaneously. “You are not…a coward. Why do you…act like one?”
“I’m afraid of Paradise Hole,” I confess timidly. Her genuine confusion only makes the pain in my chest worse.
