I didn't pass out. Not quite anyway. I was in one of those grey areas where you're not unconscious yet but you're not conscious enough to be anything but a human slug; slow, grey and a nuisance to your friends and family. After the orb crashed into my head, the flames surrounding me seemed to disappear. It must have broken the connection between me and the flames. Either way I was out of the frying pan and into the mob that wanted me dead. The 'Eye for an eye' policy seemed to be a mutual understanding amongst the Army.

They threw themselves at me but didn't get much further than that as a solid wave of darkness hurled itself at them, carving its way through soldier after soldier like they were blade of grass. Then there was a sudden burst of light, a bright purple light. It seemed we were portaling again. Miraculously, I couldn't feel any of the side effects this time, I must have been too out of it to sense anything. Not that I minded. 

I didn't have the remotest clue where we were going, but I didn't have a very good view all things considered as I was staring straight at the ground from being carried in a fireman's carry. Shadow must have thrown me over his shoulders when we left the portal. I say Shadow because he was the only one who could lift me. I'm not Sheira wasn't strong enough, that girl could break my neck if she ran at me fast enough, I'm saying she wasn't tall enough. She was five four, I was five eight or thereabouts while our good friend commodore grump was well over six-foot-tall (Its funny to think about the thoughts that prioritise your brain when you've got a concussion).

Either way, I must have passed out for real not long after as I woke up to find myself in a bed (Waking up in strange rooms was becoming a habit). Miraculously I didn't get any more night-time visitors from Molly's magic dream machine. Perhaps I was too out for it to dream of anything. Again, not that I minded. I moaned quietly and, like a piece of gum on the bottom of my shoe, the image of Josh crashed into the front seat of my brain. His body lying in a pool of blood, the burning wound cutting open his chest, his dead glassy eyes gazing at me, blaming me for what I'd done. I decided to keep my eyes open, at least that way I couldn't see him.

The room looked like a cheap hotel, what with the bright yellow wall paper and deep green carpet that made your head spin, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. It was warm at least, even though there was a weird smell in the air, kind of like sushi. Oh my god Shadow must have given me a concussion if I'm rambling on about sushi.

Now I think about it, it must have been Shadow who hurled that ball of darkness at me. Point A) It was a dark elemental attack, duh and point B) he was the only one who seemed powerful enough to punch through that firewall. Even then, that was pretty damn strong. Unnaturally so.

I groaned again and tried to force myself up into a sitting position, only to be shoved down again as Sheira tackled me into a bear hug.

"Oh my god oh my god oh my god you're alright you're alright you're alright!"

I wheezed for breath. This girl really doesn't look strong, but she has the grip of a god damn boa constrictor. "Can't...Breathe..." I gasped which did the trick of loosening her crushing hug. I gave her a quick hug back.

A snort came from across the room which could only have emanated from the moody, brooding figure huddled in one of the beige nylon armchairs (It also seemed that we'd been transported back to the eighties while I was out for the count). "Honestly, you two are like an old married couple, you're bickering like housewives one second and snuggling and making up the next. Your relationship is weird, you know that?"

"Morning Shadow," I grunted, finally untangled from Sheira.

He snorted again, "I would hardly call this morning. Its two in the afternoon."

"Two in the– How long have I been out?" This could be interesting.

"Not long all things considered, about thirty-two hours."

Not long she says. I was expecting less than a day, not nearly two days for my brain to perform a systematic reboot. "Thirty-two...Jesus Christ, how hard did you hit me?!"

"Not hard enough, you were still blubbering like an idiot the whole way here. How'd you know it was me?"

"I may not be Sherlock Holmes, but it doesn't take a detective to work that one out. Big ball of darkness making a beeline for my face really narrows down the candidates."

"Hmph, fair enough."

I raised a hand to the area that he'd lobbed his projectile at. It felt tender to say the least. Oh well, another bruise for the collection. I tried to stand and instantly regretted it. The whole room violently lurched sideways and then began to spin like a tea cup ride. If I didn't have Sheira hooked under my shoulder to support me I'd have fallen flat on my face and destroyed whatever dignity I still had left. Even Shadow looked mildly concerned. Only mildly though.

"What happened to me?" I asked.

"You reached your Limit," she said, expertly manoeuvring me back down onto a sitting position.

"What's that?"

"The end of your power that you can go to without losing control. It's when your powers use you as an energy source rather than you consciously supplying it."

"So that's why I feel like I've been beaten to death with a baseball bat."

"Something like that, here drink this and eat that."

Was it a bad thing that I'd had a Lucozade and a Belvita for breakfast before? Whatever, gimme those sweet electrolytes. I chugged and munched while Shadow and Sheira kept explaining what the Limit was.

"All elementals have different breaking points; different distances they can go the first time they really use their power."

"I have to admit kid, I wasn't expecting that from you. You were like a goddamn supernova."

"I have to agree with him, that was on another level."

"Well to be fair if I didn't I'd be dead by now," I said before I took another swig of the drink. "They probably would have cut me in half with my own..." At that moment a genuine flashback whizzed through my mind. Incaendium. I dropped him!

"Where's my sword?" I asked, the hint of my panic in my voice was probably as subtle as a solid gold brick to the face.

Sheira quickly darted into the bathroom and came back holding the wonderfully familiar sight of Incaendium. Why she was keeping him in the bathroom was beyond me but all the same it was very good to see that Josh hadn't melted him down for scrap.

I gently took Incaendium from Sheira's hands. Golden flames instantly erupted from the metal, the fire licking at my fingers in a comforting manor.

"Hey Incaendium, you doing okay? Im sorry I dropped you, I didn't even realise until now."

I'm fine. Although, I'm more worried about you if I'm honest.

He certaintly didn't beat aroubd the bush. "I'm fine," I lied.

You know I can read your mind, right?

No I didn't. I sighed, it seemed that nothing was going to be getting past Incaendium. "I'm alright", I said firmly.

He didn't press the matter, if you need to talk I'm always here, literally, I may as well be attached to you.

"Thanks bud," I murdered as I slipped Incaendium back into his sheath, which was still on my belt, extinguishing the flames with a flicker  of pale grey smoke.

Sheira sat on the bed next to me and gently rested a hand on my arm. "How are you feeling?" She asked gently.

I gave her the same answer as Incaendium. I shrugged wordlessly, offering a sad smile to prove my point. "I just can't believe I did that, I'm not a killer, I didn't think I had it in me."

"What were you trying to do then?" asked Shadow.

"Disarm him." Shadow raised an eyebrow in doubt. "I mean it! I've never handled a sword before, I just over did it, that's all."

"Were not blaming you,"Sheira said firmly.

They might not, but I most certaintly did. I was holding the blade so in every court of law in the world, even goddam Judge Judy, I was guilty. "Did I hurt anyone else?" I asked miserably.

"You mean with the fire?" said Sheira.

"Bingo."

"No one died if that helps."

So I just roasted them to a crisp. Wonderful. I tried summoning a little flame, the red flicker danced harmlessly on my palm. How the hell had I managed to cause so much destruction? I'd gone from harmless, mostly anyway, fireballs to a towering inferno that had almost killed me in the process. There was no other way to explain it. I'd turned into the Human Torch only I didn't have Chris Evans to make it all better.

"How?" I muttered. "How did I do that?"

"We're not sure. Ehat you did was on a completely different level. Boss level grade of power."

"Any explanations then?"

"Its just...you're just..." Sheira paused, looking for another word.

Shadow filled in the gaps for her. "You're unnaturally powerful, especially for someone of your age and training. Even your parents didn't throw up any curveballs."

I looked at Sheira, "you told him about my parents?"

"If he's travelling with us he should know...and he was asking."

"I'm not mad, just wondering if you picked up anything else."

Shadow shrugged, "my first though was if your mother may have still had the Vessel Spirit when you were born, but that's a bust."

"Yeah, I think she lost it when she was eighteen and she had me when she was twenty, so unless she has the pregnancy of an elephant that's not happening."

"Yeah, and as for your dad...yeah I got nothing other than the fact that he was stronger than normal. Nothing that could produce that sort of power first time."

This was becoming a recurring theme. People kept telling me that I was stronger than normal, from Sheira at my first training session to the entire Fire cabin after my first day to this very conversation. I wasn't special, never have been never will, but this was odd, this kept coming up again and again. There had to be something about me that explained all this, but what? I'd have to figure that later. "What happened after you knocked me out? What's that smell? And, where are we?"

The two of them exchanged glances. Oh god this was going to be interesting. "Erm...Well after we knocked you out we needed to get out of there ASAP. Everyone wanted you dead after you killed Josh–"

"But I didn't mean to!"

"We know that, we don't blame you," Sheira said kindly.

"But the Army has an 'eye for an eye' policy so we had to get out of there," said Shadow.

"And the only way we knew how to do that was...err..." Sheira trailed off. Oh god this was going to be interesting.

Shadow picked up where she left off, "an emergency portal. And they're unpredictable to say the least as you can't really program where you're going if you don't know where you want to end up."

A pause stretched out. "Where are we?" I asked.

"We just had to get out of there, and the important thing is we're still in the country."

"Sheira. Where are we!"

"Essex," she muttered.

Pause continues for a lot longer. "What?"

"Southmarsh, Essex."

Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I stumbled groggily over to the window and threw open the curtains. After the momentary blindness from the sudden sunlight passed I looked down onto the scene below me. We were in a seaside town, (which explained the smell of a rotting sushi bar) that mainly consisted of the colour grey. A handful of tourists aimlessly meandered along the promenade while vendors dressed in navy blue and shocking pink handed out their wares of fish and chips and bags of sweets. Oh well. At least it wasn't orange.

But there was also one more little problem. "We were in York. Now we're here. We're two hundred miles in the wrong direction."

Shadow nodded grimly. "Yeah, that's the problem with emergency portals, you don't know where you're going to end up. Just be thankful we didn't end up at Lands' End."

"Or America," I muttered. A seagull landed on the windowsill in front of me, a chip dangling from its beak.

I could almost hear Shadow's eye roll. "Portals can't cross water you idiot, why do you think we don't use portals instead of planes or whatever to get around?"

"Alright I get the point–"

"They're difficult to create, unpredictable, carry a slight risk of dismembering–"

"I GET THE POINT!" I yelled to cut Shadow off in his list of everything that could go wrong with portalling. "Don't use portals because they're bad for your health and I would rather like to keep my head so I'm not going to try that again any time soon."

"Good. And as for what happened after what happened after you were knocked out...well..." Sheira trailed off on that particular thought.

"You may as well have just declared war against the Army. Amy will hunt you down until the end of time, but that goes without saying. Her boyfriend died at your hand, accidental or not she's going to try and avenge him. Whether or not Josh would have done the same thing is highly unlikely, the guy had a book of all the girls he slept with, Amy was just another addition to the collection."

"I still killed him..."

"The world's better off without him."

"That's not for you to decide," I snapped. For the briefest moment Shadow looked like he was going to fight back against my opinion, but his open mouth snapped shut. For once I was right, no one should have that sort of power. I sighed, "we're in a B'n'B right? How'd I get past the owner?"

Shadow scoffed, "we arrived at three in the morning, we just said you were drunk."

"Cheers."

Sheira cleared her throat to get our attention. "Now that you're awake can we get to the more pressing matter of how Amy found us?"

"She didn't, Sabrina did." My two traveling companions looked at me, then at each other then back to me again.

"Hey kid, can we ask you a quick question?"

"Don't call me kid."

"Nick..." Sheira growled warningly.

"What? I'm just saying that I have a name."

"Don't be awkward."

"Is too much to ask just to be called by my first name?"

"Nick."

"Yes?"

"Shut up."

"Oh, for God's sake, HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THAT!?" yelled Shadow. He'd clearly gotten bored with mine and Sheira's little argument and decided to cut very firmly to the chase.

Sheira nodded in agreement after being knocked back a few meters by the sudden increase in volume. I'm surprised the walls didn't rattle after that. "Yeah, start talking Nick. First, you're mumbling in your sleep, then when you wake up the first thing you say is 'They're in Edinburgh', then you somehow know about Sabrina before we even see her and now you're saying that she was responsible for finding us. Please do us a favour and enlighten the rest of us mere mortals."

I looked between the two of them. Shadow looked like he was about to say something, but decided against it and shut his mouth again, while Sheira waited expectantly with her arms folded in front of her. How the actual hell was I supposed to tell them that I had dreamt the whole thing? Was I just supposed to say, 'hey guys guess what? I had a prophetic vision of the whole thing. Bow down bitches I can see the future!' Only it didn't feel like the future, it was more like someone was...showing me? Yeah, that's what it felt like but saying that out loud would probably deem me as a madman and then I would be locked up in the nearest Bedlam eating fishfingers and custard for breakfast! (Okay, maybe not that extreme, but you get the point).

I sighed, taking a sudden interest in the fraying yellow carpet. "Would you believe me if I told you?"

I knew that Sheira had just rolled her eyes and Shadow's lips had turned up into a smirk, call it instinct, at that comment. I looked up, Shadow still smirking, "try us," he said.

So, I did. I told them everything I had seen. I told them about going to sleep and then finding myself in that corridor with Sabrina. I told them about the snowstorm that was raging outside and the fact that I could feel the cold wind hitting my skin. I told them about Sabrina walking down that corridor, describing everything that she was wearing right down to the silver nose ring and every detail of the surrounding corridor that I could remember. I told them about the room she had gone into, with the steel vat and the pipes connected up to it like the legs of an octopus.

I told them about Molly and her conversation with Sabrina, detailing how she had got to the position of wind reader, how Molly now had extra guards surrounding her, how Shadow was now public enemy number one. I then had to watch the look on Sheira's face when I told them there was a spy at camp. I never wanted to see her look like that again, the betrayal, the shock, the heartbreak at the news that one of our friends had turned their back on us. It was replaced by a grim determination. I told them that Molly was experimenting on people, trying to improve something and how it wasn't working so far.

Then I told them about Juliet. I didn't want to talk about her, or go into the detail about what I'd seen, but I had to. I described Juliet being dragged in, I quoted her screams and pleas for mercy word for word, I told them about how Juliet had let Mum and my siblings go, I told them what Molly said 'Fifteen measly little minutes and Aleena and her precious brats would slip away from us. Give them an hour and they've reached this country's pathetic little branch of goody two shoes', I recounted Juliet's explanation, how Molly hadn't listened, how she'd snapped her fingers and the little kid, Marx, had appeared carrying that box with that syringe in it. That unholy syringe. I described how it thrashed and writhed within the tube, trying to get out, how it was plunged into Juliet's stomach. I tried to skip some of the more graphic details, I really did, but simple words couldn't make that situation any less horrifying.

I watched their faces as I told them what happened. I watched Sheira's expression turn from disgust to pure abject horror at the way this poor girl had died. I watched as Sheira started to cry. I take back what I said about never wanting to see Sheira's expression after I told her about the spy, it was nothing to compared to this. Even the usually emotionless Shadow, who barely revealed a flicker of a smile, had his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open in shock. After I finished describing what was left of her I told them about Sabrina's final conversation with Molly, Molly's final words and how I'd woken, only to have everything come true. None of us said anything for a little while, they were either to horrified or too deep in thought to say anything. Only the sound of Sheira's muffled sobs punctuated the eerie quiet.

"I...I...I need some air," and with that she ran from the room leaving Shadow and I sitting in quiet silence.

He sighed, rubbing the sides of his temples like he was trying to get rid of a bad migraine. The silence stretched out for a few more minutes, and then Shadow got up and stared at the door than Sheira had ran through.

"I'll go keep an eye on her. Make sure she's alright." He sighed again, "and I need to clear my head..."

I nodded, "yeah, I need a shower then I'll meet you out there. Does by the pier sound good to you?"

"Yeah that's fine. And seriously, take a shower. You smell like landfill."

"No thanks to you!"

I barely caught it, but the corner of Shadow's mouth flicked up into a smile. It was a blink and you'll miss it thing, more like a reflex action than an intentional one, but either way it was gone as quickly as I'd noticed it. There was definitely more to him than what met the eye.

Now back to his neutral face he shrugged, "just take a shower, towels and stuff are already in there."

Cleanliness is close to godliness and if you're following that logic then I was a demon. Mud, dirt, grime, blood (I knew where that had come from, but I really didn't want to think about that) and every type of bacteria know to man coated every surface of my skin. I hadn't had a wash in, I really don't know how many days, and I really didn't want to think about what I smelled like. Half an hour in a piping hot shower was just what the doctor ordered. I headed towards the door, momentarily considering that I could cause a nationwide drought with the amount of water I needed, when...

"I knew Juliet."

My head snapped round to look at Shadow. He was studying his shoes with great interest, not meeting my eye. Not revealing anything.

"She's a– was, a nice girl. Really sweet, the sort of person you couldn't expect to harm a fly." He lifted his head to look me in the eye, "she was only in the Army because Molly forced her to. She was given the ultimatum of join or her entire family would be murdered. You and her are very alike. Reckless, slightly impulsive, the first time she killed someone she barely managed to get behind a locked door before she started crying. She was sensitive, kind...too kind."

"So, you think that she let my mum and siblings go?"

He nodded firmly. "Yes. Without a doubt she wasn't tricked, she willingly let them go and she paid the price for it."

Shadow suddenly stepped forwards, his hands clamping down on my shoulders. I looked up into his eyes. Those red eyes that always seemed to angry now looked desperate, almost sad. Shadow's eyes looked old, all of him did, but his eyes carried the sights of times gone by. The things he'd seen would put horror movies to shame.

"Listen to me kid, this is what Molly does. She finds and stamps out the good, choking this world of anything pure and kind. She tortures people for fun, revels in the pain of others just so she can plunge the world into suffering and misery. This isn't just going to end when you get your family back, you're going to be fighting Molly for the rest of your life and for the love of any gods that can actually be bothered to listen, do not let her rid this world of goodness. Juliet was an example of that goodness and she's dead because of it because that's what Molly does!" He breathed in deeply, his eyes shut in concentration, then he opened them. "Keep fighting, use those powers of yours for good, and so help me you better keep fighting even if there's one speck of light in the darkness, keep fighting. Because so long as there's light, there's hope and that's the one thing that will never die." Shadow detached his hands from my shoulders while I just stared at him in complete awe. "So long as there's light this stupid planet's worth fighting for, understand?"

I nodded.

"Good."

The door slammed shut behind him, leaving me standing in the middle of a hotel room in Essex trying to process those words. Keep fighting, keep going, that was the lifestyle I already lived by and there was no way that was going to change now. I turned and walked into the bathroom, so long as there's hope there's a cause worth fighting for, I thought as the door clicked shut behind me.

***

Alas! Due to a combination of exams, stress and a five day trip to New York that I am currently fighting off jetlag for as I type this, the next chapter is finally here. It's a shorter one due to someone pointing out that one chapter was over 100 pages long (...oops) so I'm trying to cut these chapters down from now on. Anyway, leave a vote and a comment with any questions or general chit chat if you're enjoying the story. It means a lot to me to know that people enjoy what I create. But enough rambling from me, peace out!