Page 35 of Avelina

“What?” I asked aloud. I wasn’t touching Aaron anymore, so the words hadn’t come from him. Was this a real voice in my head? Maybe the use of Connection had caused me to start hallucinating. This was not the best time to be going crazy. I needed to concentrate on the enemy.

Seleca must have thought my question was directed at her. “I’ve got five of the six Nobles,” she said, “and thanks to your lovely friend, Spirit, I’ve got all but two of the Unspeakables. You and your new lover have the only ones I still need. Come, there’s no reason for this to turn into a war. Why don’t you just let me take it, and I’ll let you steal away with your latest conquest.”

No, Lina! It’s me, Spirit. Please, I’m real. You have to listen.

“Spirit?”

Seleca smiled, still thinking I spoke to her. “Yes, she was understandably exhausted. It’s too bad about the twins, though. They were lovely.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “You killed them,” I whispered. “You killed Spirit.”

Now, Lina! The shield!

For an endless moment, shock and grief paralyzed me. Spirit was dead? I couldn't wrap my head around it.

Spirit, I thought. It can’t be. My eyes welled with tears.

Lina! a stern voice barked. Shield now. Cry later. Or join me over here. Your choice!

I didn’t know if I was losing my mind or if the voice was real. What I did know was that Spirit had always had an eerie way of predicting the future, and she’d changed her own name to Spirit. I had never thought much of that choice, but it made an insane kind of sense now. Spirit must have had Precognition, like Aaron’s mother. Seleca had discovered this on our walk through the woods and killed her to steal it. Somehow, Spirit had predicted her own death, and now her ghost shouted instructions into my mind like a pissed-off drill sergeant.

I feared that this was some kind of stress-induced psychiatric episode, but in my crazed state, I had to assume Seleca told the truth about murdering my friends. Based on that assumption, I made the sanest choice I could think of. I listened to the voice in my head.

“What do I do?” I asked.

Place your hand on your heart, and push Protection into yourself, thought Spirit.

I pushed my grief aside and did as I was told just as Seleca turned to her dragon and placed a hand on its wing. The dragon made a strange warbling noise and launched itself into the air, kicking up a gust of wind that whipped up Seleca’s hair and clothes. Then, the dragon disappeared, blinking out of existence as if it had been a hologram.

I closed my eyes to concentrate, directing my intention into my own body. My chest vibrated, tightening painfully. Then a sharp pain exploded in my rib cage. I grunted, pushing the fragment out like a mother giving birth. The sensation ceased when the force expanded beyond my body, and I opened my eyes to discover a sphere of aqua-blue light growing around me, much like the entrance to the bridge had that first night. The difference now was that I was both the source and the destination. I glowed with that same soft, calming blue, and little firefly specks of multicolored lights sparked out of different parts of my body and were captured in a stream that swirled within the sphere.

The colors were a strange combination of green, magenta, blood-red, and aqua, and they all had a different texture and consistency. The green streaked around the sphere in squiggly lines, as if it were a vine sending out new shoots into the air around us, then disappearing like the tail of a green comet. The magenta lights looked like a tight swarm of flies, trailing smoke as they flew around. The red lights resembled a roiling sea of blood caught in a whirlpool.

The aqua lights were more solid than the rest, like they were actually aquamarine crystals appearing and disappearing in the air, reflecting a bright blue-green light that created a halo around all the other colors. I only controlled the aqua-blue lights, however. The others were pulled forward as if sucked into an energetic circulatory system.

Other than the bridge, this was my first time seeing fragments directly and, despite my terror and anguish, I gasped in wonder at the beauty of their power. Previously, my own reservoirs had been no more than an idea, but now I had visual evidence. I had glowed, sure, but this was far beyond that. I could no longer deny what I saw or banish it to the back of my mind to deal with later. Fragments were real. I was powerful, and here was proof.

As quick as lightning, exhilaration struck down my terror and I nearly laughed out loud.

Encouraged, I pushed the Protection fragment out of my chest, observing that the task of maintaining the sphere was easy. Whereas healing Aaron had felt like blowing up a balloon, this was more like blowing a bubble through a bubble wand. It barely required any force, but rather a delicate touch that could burst if I was too aggressive.

The sphere expanded out from me and bumped into Aaron, who stared up at the sky, holding his knife ready. He hadn’t noticed my Protection sphere, though I didn’t see how he could have missed the bright swirl of colors. The shield pushed him away from me, and he would be trapped outside of it. I couldn’t have that.

I stretched out experimentally and found that I could reach my hand through the shield, so I grabbed his wrist and pulled him into the sphere with me. His eyes widened and darted all around, apparently now able to see what I saw from inside the shield.

“No!” Seleca screamed, her eyes widening as she caught on to what was happening. Spirit was right. Seleca hadn’t known I was protected. She’d known about my Connection reservoir but not this.

The sphere wrapped around Aaron’s chest as Seleca pulled a weapon out of a deep pocket in her voluminous yellow pants. It was a gun. In fact, if I wasn’t mistaken, it was my father’s navy Glock 17, the gun he taught me to shoot with. That weapon was the real threat. The dragon had just been a distraction.

I concentrated on bringing up the shield faster to expand around our entire bodies, praying it could stop bullets, but it wouldn’t be fast enough. A manic grin spread over Seleca’s face as she aimed her weapon at my head. Apparently, I was the juicier target, or maybe she still had other plans for Aaron.

Just as I had that thought, Rogue scrambled out from under the tree, directly behind Seleca. He lunged at her as she pulled the trigger, biting her right in the ass. Her arm jerked to the side as Rogue barreled into her, causing her to miss her shot. He weighed more than her and knocked her off-balance, but she was strong. She shook him off and kicked him in the face, shoving him back. Then she pointed the gun and fired three shots.

Rogue fell and did not get up again.

I screamed, just as I had the first time I thought she’d killed my dog by throwing him onto the bridge to Monash, and the emotion almost burst the delicate shield.

Aaron sheathed his knives and wrapped his arms around me.

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