Page 136 of Love, Nemesis
Lethe snapped his fingers, and Ana stumbled forward into a vast, grassy clearing. Lethe was standing in front of her. The capital was now at her back.
“Are you mad!?” he exclaimed, marching up to her.
“Are you mad?!” she retorted as they stood face to face. She resisted the urge to grab at the pocket on his chest. One good blow would snap the shell into pieces.
Lethe shook his head as if he could read her thoughts. “Don’t try it.”
“You’re a Strike!” she exclaimed, gesturing to him.
“And somehow you’re the one acting irrationally!” he shouted back.
“We have to break it!” she demanded, pointing to the ground and nearly stomping her boot into the grass. “You don’t have the right to hold this back from the world, from them, from me!”
“It’s my death too, Ana!” he shouted back, and she settled down for a moment.
Her eyes settled into the heat of his, and for the first time there wasn’t dangerous ambivalence or that burning chaos of his soul; there was something strangely familiar. He was not a ROSE or a Strike. He was a man who had lost everything, a man hanging by a single thread.
“Avenging the dead was everything I had left,” he said, pointing to his own chest. “The last name unmarked on my arm, the conviction to hunt down Ivan, I dedicated my life to the dead because that’s what I thought I had and then you—” he started. “You, like you always do, reminded me of who I am, why I did all of the regrettable things I did, and you reminded me of a place in the world that doesn’t feel so incredibly impossible to survive. I’d forgotten that any place could feel that way and then you—” He hesitated, and it was strange to see a man who embodied so much strength and bravery express so much weakness with his words. “I don’t have the strength to lose you again. I can’t risk it.”
Again?What was he talking about?
Ana flinched when Ivan appeared with three other Strike behind him.
“All right!” he announced, clapping his hands. “We’re in!”
Lethe eased back, eyes flickering fiercely.
A horn blasted behind him, and they turned to see the Mystic army cresting over the horizon.
* * *
“Ana,” Lethe warned a final time, though now that Ana had baited the Strike, it was unlikely they’d relent.
Ana and Ivan exchanged a silent message. Lethe knew without being able to read it that Ana was prepared to leverage the Strike against him. She wouldn’t hesitate now. She wouldn’t let him explain.
How could he?
He knew it didn’t help to reveal that he, too, was a Strike, a very real one, and likely the last one across this continent. What reason did she have to trust him now when he, at such a cost, withheld the last thing she wanted?
Ivan and the others dissolved into a shroud of mist behind her as if they’d agreed on some kind of plan. Lethe’s eyes narrowed as black mists of Madness, summoned from The Ocean, rose across the field around them. The mist solidified into rows of soldiers guarding the capital.
A black bulb rocketed up from behind the soldiers with a shriek, spiraling out and opening with dark, expansive wings that swallowed the sky. Ivan’s own sloppiness and apathy had prevented him from unleashing all of his power in Xal Xel. Now, he and three other Strike would pose a very formidable challenge.
Lethe’s eyes flickered back to Ana’s as he sent the warning again that a battle of such magnitude would wreck everything around them.
Ana didn’t respond in her mind. Instead, she kept her eyes trained on his as she drew back the triggers of Chronos.
A boom echoed over the Capital, washing across the clearing and swallowing Ana.
He flickered back several yards, reappearing at the edge of Chronos’s expansion, the gray haze and sheer breadth of it shimmering over the horizon.
A murky figure moved through the frozen time. Ana’s form took shape, her clothes and hair drifting through it as if they floated in water.
Lethe heard a rush behind him and turned with only enough time to extend a hand and block a vast wall of black mist before Ana attacked from the opposite side. She swept him onto the ground and rolled him back into the mist. A force in the mist grabbed him, black hooks biting him before throwing him over the ground. The puncture wounds, taking the shape of bite marks, healed across his side as he stood back to his feet. He was surrounded by the darkness, curling and circling around him with a small window of light filtering down from above.
Ana emerged from the blackness. Some haze lingered on her shoulders and body as she circled the dark storm in the opposite direction that it twisted.
He was acutely aware of the shell in his pocket. Fragile before, now it seemed infinitely so, and surrounded by the other Strike’s collective power, Lethe knew it wouldn’t be so easy to transport it away. As he fought, he’d have to be mindful of it, close against his chest.
