Page 137 of Never a Hero

‘Close that seal back up!’ Tom said. ‘Close it now, before that tear gets bigger!’

Could Joan do something? She focused on the flame of power inside herself, and she hurled it at Eleanor’s hands, trying to undo her stream of power at its source.

‘Stop that!’ Eleanor snapped at her. ‘Stop it!’ Her tone reminded Joan weirdly of Ruth’s when they’d argued as kids. The irritated tone you’d use on family.

She was so annoyed that Joan realised with a jolt that her own blast of power must have done something. She concentrated. Eleanor’s power was almost visible, like heat distortion in the air.

Joan hurled her power again at Eleanor, and this time she tried to keep up a steady flow of it.

‘Stop it!’ Eleanor said again. Maybe it was working.

But then Eleanor’s power roared to life—a wall of fire to Joan’s flame. Joan gasped—she could almost feel it as real heat, and her own power couldn’t compete.

‘You’d really fight me on this?’ Eleanor said to her thickly. ‘After you sacrificed everything to save the Hunts? If you remembered your real family, you’d be doing anything to bring them back!’ Her expression crumpled again for just a moment. ‘God, look at what the King did! Our whole family is gone. And you don’t remember them at all! You don’t miss them at all! You don’t feel anything!’

That wasn’t quite true. Joan did feel something—pressure thrummed deep in her chest again. Maybe Eleanor was right. Maybe if Joan could remember the Graves, she’d have been fighting for them too.

But she could only act on what she knew. ‘You need to stop!’ she said to Eleanor. ‘That world is wrong. I saw it! You’ll make people suffer!’

‘It’s going to engulf us!’ Tom said. Joan looked up dizzily and saw that uncanny blue sky bearing down on them.

A rumble rippled through them all suddenly—more earthquake than thunder. It reverberated through Joan’s bones in a long, long bass note.

Eleanor’s head snapped up.

‘What was that?’ Ruth whispered.

‘What was what?’ Nick said, and Joan realised that it hadn’t actually been a sound. Only the monsters had sensed it.

‘No,’ Eleanor breathed.

The air in front of Joan blazed. She flinched away, shielding her eyes, and then realised that the brightness wasn’t something she could actually see. It was an interpretation by her monster sense.

A man was stepping out of the air. He exuded so much power that looking at him felt like looking into the face of the sun.

Joan’s eyes watered with the effort of trying to see him. He was handsome, but she couldn’t make out much more than that. Her perceptions seemed to be oscillating. He seemed old and young at the same time; terrible and benign; cheerful and grave.

The man spoke. Joan had expected his voice to match his presence—to be a rumble of thunder—but he sounded surprisingly human. He addressed Eleanor. ‘Did you really believe that I’d allow this? Did you believe I wouldn’t know? I am aware of every moment, every ripple, in the timeline.’

Beside Joan, Aaron drew in a sharp, shocked breath as if he’d realised who the man was. He collapsed to his knees and dropped his head into a bow. He wasn’t the only one. Eleanor’s allies were lowering their guns and falling to the ground, prone, their arms outstretched.

‘Joan,’ the man said. ‘You sent a message to the Court. You sent for Conrad to save you.’ He lifted his hand, swatting lazily at the sky. And the timeline responded like an obedient pet; the blue gash above vanished as if it had never been there, zipping itself back into white sky. Joan gasped at the immense power of it.

‘You sent for Conrad,’ the man said again. ‘But I rather think you need a king.’

thirty-seven

The King stood outside the alley, his back to the river. He was a bear-like figure, taller and broader even than Tom. Or was he? Joan’s perceptions of him kept changing: he was old and young, his face lined and smooth; he wore prehistoric furs or maybe a futuristic suit. And Joan had thought that Eleanor and her allies were strong, but the King’s power spilled from him like sunshine. It was difficult to look at him directly; Joan’s eyes kept sliding away.

‘What have you done?’ Eleanor whispered to Joan.

Joan couldn’t answer. She’d asked Ying to get a message to Conrad, saying that Eleanor had turned against the King. She hadn’t imagined that the King himself would arrive. This man hadn’t just murdered the Graves—he’d erased them from memory. His presence here was even more frightening than Eleanor’s.

‘Those on their knees may rise,’ the King said in his oddly human voice. ‘And then you will all stay where you are.’ It was conversational, but Joan felt it as a press of power, an order impossible to disobey.

She started to shift her weight, and then realised with a wave of horror that she couldn’t lift her feet from the ground. It didn’t feel like mind control; it felt like her shoes had melded with the wooden walkway. She tried to slip her shoes off and couldn’t make them slide at all. Trying not to panic, she lifted her arms just to see if she could. A rush of relief ran through her. Only her feet were trapped.

Was this what the Argent power felt like to humans? Was this what it had felt like to Nick? She turned to him, but he just looked grim as he tested his own feet and found himself stuck too.

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