CHAPTER FORTY

There’s glass flying everywhere.

I don’t know where to look: at Lauren’s body, falling to the ground; at the man who’s just jumped through a window on the other side of the room; or at the source of the screaming.

Before I know it, I’m running to Lauren with tears in my eyes, ignoring the man getting to his feet, ignoring the shouts behind me, ignoring the sound of smashing and screaming and grunting – ignoring everything.

It’s not until I reach her, my eyes landing on her still form, that I clamp my mouth shut and the screaming stops. I feel my body freeze up as shock takes over. I don’t know what’s happened to her, but there’s blood slowly spreading outwards from the centre of her chest like a stain and she’s not breathing.

Oh God, she’s not breathing.

I collapse to my knees and suddenly everything feels heavy and dull, like I’m breathing in murky water. Tears run in steady streams down my cheeks, blurring my vision. “Lauren,” I say quietly, my voice laced with pain. I’m wading through an infinite sea of water, trying to reach her, but she’s too far away – too far gone. And then the hysteria sets in. Shaking her by the shoulders. Screaming her name. Squeezing her wrist into extinction. I’m panicking and I know it, but I can’t stop. The tears fall faster, puddling on her neck, on the floor, seeping into her clothes and hair. “Don’t do this to me!” I’m shouting. “Don’t you dare!”

But her eyes are open, staring vacantly at a spot on the ceiling, and I know she’s gone. I can’t fathom how but she is and I cry harder, my heart feeling as though it’s being ripped from my chest.

“Melissa, she’s gone! You have to get up!” I don’t know where the shouting comes from – it seems to be everywhere at once – but I recognise the voice. Caden’s voice.

I feel a hand on my upper arm – feel someone’s nails sinking into my skin – and I react. A scream rips from my throat as I throw my arm backwards, sending the person shooting to the wall with a loud thwack. But I’m not me anymore – I’m someone else. Someone who is determined and enraged and merciless and entirely different. I get to my feet just as a muscular man with a face like a bulldog comes charging towards me and my arms shoot outwards as I force the air in his direction. He flies backwards before he even gets within a metre of me, smashing into a bookcase that collapses on top of him.

Then I notice my scarlet hands dangling in front of my eyes. They’re covered in blood – Lauren’s blood – and I can’t stop staring at them, my emotions smashing together like wild boars. I’m freaked and hysterical and petrified and miserable and fuming. The emotions are trapped within me and I don’t what to do with them.

But then I hear a noise behind me and I forget about it all, turning in time to see a woman with platinum-blonde hair throw a punch at my face. She’s fast, but I’m faster, and I grab her wrist before her fist meets my skin and throw my own punch into her stomach. Using a mixture of strength and telekinesis, I grab her waist and swing her over my head, slamming her down onto the floor on my other side. And I swear to God, I hear a floorboard snap beneath her.

I look up to see Caden wrestling with a man on the floor and, fuelled by rage, I create an enormous gust of wind that throws the man to the side where he collides with a table.

Caden rushes to his feet, running over to me in next to no time. “How many do you think there are?” he asks, breathing hard. I forget about my hands.

“I don’t know. Three, maybe more. It’s–”

“Melissa, watch out!”

My instincts have me ducking and I swipe the person’s feet out from underneath them. They hit the ground hard.

That’s what you get for trying to attack me from behind.

Standing again and Sarah has run over to us, the frying pan Lauren dropped in her hand. A quick look behind her reveals a woman unconscious on the floor, blood seeping out a gash in her forehead where she’s been hit with something hard.

Out of breath, Sarah says, “There’s too many of them,” even as three of the people I’d knocked over previously get to their feet. Everywhere I look, there’s someone standing, watching us with fury in their eyes.

The three of us stand back to back, shifting our eyes as we try to watch all three standing attackers as they get ready to do what their name implies: attack.

They run to us and suddenly it’s as if I’m not in control of my body anymore. It moves with a mind of its own, swinging and punching without me deciding to move. I’m all arms and legs, kicking and punching and twisting, using a mixture of my powers to take down the man before me. As my instincts take over, I’m semi-conscious of the grunting and banging coming from behind me as Sarah and Caden fight off their own attackers.

I’m the first person to have my assailant on the floor and unconscious, and immediately my eyes find two more men approaching us, smiling nastily. There’s a thud behind me as someone hits the floor, but I can’t turn in order to check who it is – not while two men have me in their sights.

“Caden… Sarah…” I say warningly. There’s a crash as someone hits a wall or furniture.

“Shit,” Caden says. I look quickly over my shoulder. We’ve all managed to overcome our oppressors but already they’re getting back to their feet, and as we move in a circle, I try to count the amount of people surrounding us. But there’s too many to count – way more than three of four – and they just stand, watching us. A dark-skinned man steps forward.

“You’re surrounded,” the man says, an authoritative tone in his scratchy voice. “You should submit, otherwise we’ll have no choice but to kill you.”

“Submit? Since when do you want to capture us?” I demand.

He ignores me. “You have five seconds to raise your hands. Five…”

“Melissa, Sarah,” Caden whispers.

“What?” I reply as Sarah whispers, “Yeah?”

 “I’m gonna try something, but I need you two to duck when I say.”

“Four…”

“Duck? Why?” I ask.

 “You’ll see. Just promise me you’ll stay down until I tell you it’s safe to stand.”

“Three…”

“I’m not going to duck until you tell me what you’re going to do.”

“There’s no time. Just promise me you’ll stay down.”

“Two…”

 “I promise,” Sarah says. I keep my mouth shut.

“Melissa…” Caden warns.

“Okay, okay, I promise,” I say finally.

“One!”

“Duck!” Caden shouts. And I do. I drop to the floor the moment the word leaves his mouth, putting my trust in him completely.

And it pays off.

The world around us erupts in golden light, the scent of burning metal flooding my nose, and I watch on in a mix of horror and shock as a crackling gold ray shoots from Caden’s hand, hitting and obliterating a woman in front of me, leaving nothing but a black singe mark on the floor. The others continue to rush towards us.

They don’t stand a chance.

Lightning fast, Caden obliterates the people in the room before they reach us. I quickly lose track of how many people he’s hit, trying instead to count the growing number of singe marks on the floor. The remaining few start fleeing, jumping out smashed windows or running for the door. Some get away. Some never make it.

And then Caden releases one last spurt of gold light and the final man is reduced to a spot of ash on the floor. We fall into silence, interrupted only by the sound of Caden’s breathing.

“You can stand now,” he says, stepping over to a slightly broken chair and collapsing into it.

I stand slowly, speechless and horrified, and watch as Sarah grabs her mouth and runs over to the corner of the room, emptying the contents of her stomach out onto the ash covered floor.

I’m stunned into silence, feeling sick and horribly lost. He told me he only had one ability – he shouldn’t have been able to do this. But thoughts of Caden and his newly revealed power fly out of my mind as my eye catches on where Lauren fell to the ground. A sickly dark puddle of blood is spreading slowly across the floor and ash litters the singed floorboards near where she lay.

‘Lay’, as in, past tense. Because there’s blood and ash and burning but there’s no Lauren.

I walk hurriedly over to the spot, staring disbelievingly at the sight that confronts me as tears trail slowly down my face.

“No,” I whisper, feeling my heart breaking apart once more. Someone’s stepped in her blood and left a path of scarlet all the way to the back door.

They took her. They took her twice: once with a stab to the heart and a second time, when they stole her body right out from under our noses.  I squeeze my eyes shut, guilt and anger and pain roaring in my veins.

An earlier me would have blamed myself for this – would’ve been filled with self-loathing, believing that this death had been my own doing. But now I know better. This is his fault – Patricks fault. It’s always been his fault.

And I’m gonna make him pay.

-:-:-:-:-

The drive back to Rand’s place is silent, and I pick the dried blood off my hands without a word. No one has anything to say – that, or they all have too much to say, thought after thought swirling in their heads, begging for attention.

I know that I personally sit in silence because I’m trying to figure out a way to keep the lid on that bottle of anger and sadness within me. Every time I breathe, the lid seems to move slightly out of place and I have to press on it to keep everything contained. I shoved my grief and rage from losing Lauren in it earlier and now it’s reached max capacity. All I need is one more drop of emotion and I’ll explode.

So I’ve resorted to an emotionless silence, telling myself over and over again that I don’t care about anything in order to stop the tide of emotions within me that have resulted because I cared too much.

We reach Rand’s place and I step out, following Caden down the short path that leads to the door. He slides in the key in the keyhole and the pushes the door open. Sarah and I step in after him, and I walk with them to the lounge room where Rand sits, waiting.

He turns off the television as we each collapse onto a couch, remaining silent.

“What happened?” Rand asks, sensing the plethora of emotions charging the atmosphere around us. No one replies. Again, everyone has absolutely nothing and all too much to say.

We sit in silence for a while. I quickly lose track of how much time has passed, my eyes focused on the window in front of me that overlooks the backyard while my brain goes over everything, thinking, thinking, thinking. Eventually, I can’t bare it anymore and I have no choice but to let a slither of anger out of the bottle.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Caden, my voice like a spear that splinters the silence. “All this time, you’ve been lying to me, and for what? To keep your precious power a secret? What even is it?”

Rand drops his head into his hands and curses under his breath. Caden is silent.

“What? You got nothing to say?” Silence. “Why did you lie to me?” Why is this bothering me?

“I had to,” Caden says at last, his voice quiet.

“Just like you had to pretend to be my friend?”

“I wasn’t pretending,” he says, still quiet, shaking his head.

“And I don’t have a disease that’s killing me from the inside out. How about we just be honest with each other, yeah?”

“I am being honest,” he says, finally meeting my eyes. “Yeah, sure, at first I was just being nice to you because I was told to, but I never pretended to be your friend. I cared about you, just like I do now, but you’re not making it easy on me. You’retreating me like your enemy and I’m not. The enemy is out there. Hell, the enemy tried to kill you tonight. And even after protecting you, you still can’t tell the difference between me and them.”

“Don’t be stupid – of course I can see the difference! They were honest about their intentions. But you – you lied. You lied to me about being my friend, you lied to me about pretending not to be my friend, and now you’re lying to me about yourself. You told me you only had one ability, but you have two. Two, Caden. What else have you lied to me about?”

“Nothing! And I’ve only ever lied to keep you safe – to keep us all safe.”

“And how has that worked for you? Just today, we nearly died twice, accumulating injury after injury along the way. News flash: your lies aren’t protecting us – they’ve never protected us.”

“It doesn’t work like that!”

“Oh, it doesn’t? Because I swear you just told me that you lied to keep us safe. Do I look safe to you Caden? Maybe I should show you the burn on my shoulder or the blood on my hands, because you obviously aren’t seeing it. I’m dying, Caden. Dying. And while I should be trying to figure out a way to keep myself alive, I’m stuck trying to figure out if I can trust you.”

“Then trust me. I promise, no more lies. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Everything? As in, you’ve lied about other things as well?”

“No, I–”

“Stop, I don’t want to hear it – I’ve had enough of your excuses. I’m going to bed.” I stand up and walk around the couch, heading for the stairs.

“Melissa. Melissa, come on. I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t think it’d effect you this much.”

I don’t turn back when I say, “Think again.”

Upstairs, I shut the door to my temporary room and collapse onto the bed, the day’s events finally catching up to me. Exhaustion rolls off me in waves, and I know that if I let myself, I could fall asleep in an instant.

But my mind is still buzzing and my heart is still throbbing painfully in my chest. I can’t sleep because my emotions are drawing my attention – my raw, barely contained emotions.

I let out a breath. I shouldn’t be this angry – it’s just an ability. He probably had his reasons for keeping it secret. So why am I getting so worked up?

This question, I can answer. And the answer is because it’s not about the ability – it’s never been about that. It’s about the fact that he’s lied to me one too many times and I can’t take it anymore. I need someone who I can trust and Caden’s proving that I can’t trust him. What am I going to do if I have no one to rely on? How am I going to get through this?

These are the questions that are swirling in my head as the tears start flowing. Too much has happened in one day and I feel like opening a hole in the earth and letting it swallow me. What is taking my disease so long? Why am I not dead yet?

Eventually, all my thoughts fade from my mind until there’s just a trickle of emotions leaking out of the bottle within me. And, fuelled by those emotions, I cry myself to sleep.