Salvaged Soul (The Ignited Series Book 3) (27 page)

{Kris}

The building’s fire alarm wailed as we stepped into the hallway. Kala raced past us, toward the stairwell. I started to follow when Micah grabbed my arm.

“Kris . . .” His eyes were pleading when I met them. “You need to stay here.”

I jabbed a finger at Alec’s open door. “Do you hear that out there?”

“All the more reason to stay here,” he replied.

I stepped around him with a shake of my head. Alec and Bruce were behind me as I pushed through the doors to the stairwell, and Micah and Richie eventually followed like I knew they would. We didn’t get far before we hit the line of Kala. Of course, we were the last ones.

As we approached the third floor landing, the building shook from an explosion beneath us, forcing me to grab the railing for support.

“That can’t be good,” Alec muttered from behind me.

I glanced at him, and noticed his hands fisted at his sides. His eyes were strained when they met mine. “You okay?” I asked him.

He nodded his head, but it didn’t look convincing. I was about to press him when the third floor door swung open, nearly hitting Bruce. As he jumped out of the way, my eyes landed on Lillian. And she was alone.

“Where’s Nathan?” I shouted at her.

An unreadable expression crossed her face as she climbed the steps toward me.

“Where is he?” I repeated when she didn’t answer.
God, why wasn’t she answering me?
 

“Downstairs,” she said. “He wanted me to—”

I pushed past Micah as I forced my way down the steps. The damn line wasn’t moving fast enough, and I had to get down there. I had to find him.

Lillian grabbed my arm as I tried to slip by her. “He wants you to stay here.”

“The hell I am!” I ripped my arm out of her grasp. I glared at Bruce until he stepped to the side, but then there were a hundred Kala beyond him, standing in my way.

“Kris, you don’t understand,” Lillian pleaded. “If the Skotadi find you . . .”

“What?” I spun on her. “So now your memory has returned? How convenient.”

Micah stepped forward to address Lillian. “What if the Skotadi find her?”

Lillian glanced at Micah quickly before settling a troubled expression on me. “It’s all part of Circe’s plan.”

“Circe?” Micah spat. “I knew it.”

“She wanted you to take the potential spell,” Lillian continued. “She needs you to reach your potential, because she needs
you
to finish the curse.”

I glanced down at my hands. They were solid again. For now. When I looked at Alec, I knew our thoughts were the same. We had nearly reached our potential. Both of us.

Because of Circe’s potion.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked quietly.

Lillian stepped close to rest a hand on my shoulder. “Have you been practicing spells?”

“Yeah . . .” I nodded. “I’m not good. I haven’t been able to—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she interrupted. “It doesn’t work like that. Everything you’ve been practicing, once you reach full strength, you will be able to do . . . effortlessly. By practicing the spells, you’ve basically been filing them away for use later. For now.”

“She was flickering earlier,” Alec commented. “Almost like she was half invisible, only not.”

I narrowed my eyes at Alec, and he shrugged unapologetically.

“You have to hold your powers back until you learn to control them,” Lillian said urgently.

I scoffed. “Yeah, because I’m so good at self-control.”

Lillian turned to Alec. “How about you? How are you doing?”

Alec’s eyes widened at her question. “Umm . . .”

“You’re fighting it,” I said to Alec, and his gaze slid to mine. “I can tell you are.”

His jaw clenched. “I feel like I’ve been electrocuted,” he said defensively. “Like all this power is running through me like an electrical current, and just waiting for its chance to get out.”

“When this happens,” Micah said slowly, looking at Lillian. “Will they be evil?”

“Ah, hell no,” Alec sneered as he took a menacing step toward Micah.

“I don’t know,” Lillian admitted solemnly. “Really, with them being this close, they should have succumbed to the evil by now. Something else is preventing it.”

Her brow furrowed as her eyes swept over Alec and me, and I knew she didn’t understand how we were still us. Was it the charms Gran had given us? Free will, as my dead friends had once suggested? Or something else entirely?

“I’m not letting that shit take me over,” Alec declared, and turned to me. “And I’m not letting it take you. And neither are the Skotadi.”

He grabbed my hand as he started up the steps. He pulled me a few steps before I ripped my hand out of grasp. “No! I’ve got to find Nathan!”

I ran down the stairs until I hit the line of Kala again, now stopped halfway between the second and third floor landings. And they were running up, forcing me back as a cloud of smoke filled the stairwell from below.

Someone grabbed my hand and pulled me through the open door, into the third floor hallway. Smoke and Kala followed, and I heard someone say the lobby was on fire.

“We’re trapped,” Bruce muttered.

“No, weren’t not. We can use the balconies to climb down.” I moved down the hall, trying several doors until I found one that was unlocked.

I ran through the room, and stepped outside onto the balcony. Looking back and forth, I saw at least thirty other Kala on neighboring balconies, all with the same idea.

We were lucky enough to have found an unlocked room on the back side of the building, away from the village center and whatever was happening there. Though we could hear the sounds of fighting, we were spared from climbing down into the middle of it.

Richie climbed down first, followed by Bruce and Lillian. I started down once they landed on the balcony beneath me. I shimmied down the wooden post until I could go no farther, and then I let go. The drop was only a few feet, and I landed easily next to Bruce. Richie and Lillian were already on the ground below us.

“We need to find weapons,” Bruce said to me.

I glanced up as Micah made his way down next. “Command Center?”

“If we can get to it.” Bruce swung a leg over the railing as Micah dropped beside me.

Alec and Bruce were both in mid-dangle when the sound of gunshots and shouting moved around the side of the building, along with a swarm of Skotadi. My head swiveled as I took in the defenseless Kala hanging from the balconies around me.

No. They weren’t defenseless. They had me.

I felt the familiar tingle in my hand as I produced a fireball to whip at the Skotadi. Like a flaming bowling ball, it took down the first wave like they were nothing but plastic pins. Their shrieks of surprise and rage reached my ears as they dropped to the ground in an attempt to extinguish the flames that overcame them.

“Go!” I shouted to Micah. “I can hold them off!”

Alec dropped beside me with a fireball of his own ready. As Micah jumped to the ground, Alec helped me to repel a second wave of Skotadi. I kept an eye on the other Kala as they climbed down. They weren’t safe on the ground either, but at least they weren’t as easy to target as they had been suspended in the air.

Once the last one was on solid ground, I turned to Alec. “Go! I got this!”

Using both hands, I produced my largest ball of fire yet—something that resembled a flaming exercise ball—and shot it into another group of Skotadi as they rounded the corner of the building. The ball clipped the wall, and rained a mixture of stone and fire down on them. As they dodged debris, I jumped to the ground.

Behind me, the windows on the first floor shattered from an explosion that threw me forward, facedown onto the ground. Alec helped me to my feet as flames shot out the open windows and a wall of black smoke rolled toward us.

“The whole building is going up!” Micah shouted above the roar of the fire.

I hoped everyone had gotten out.

I hoped Nathan had gotten out. I had to find him.

“Come on!” I took off at a run, moving toward the side of the building, away from the Skotadi.

The smoke thickened as we approached and, as we rounded the corner, I saw why. The girls’ dorm was completely engulfed in flames. Covering my mouth against the onslaught of smoke, I hurried along the trail between the two buildings that led toward the village center. Once it came into view, I froze at the horror of what I saw.

Alec came to a slow stop beside me. “Oh, my God.”

An orange glow from the two burning buildings lit up the night, and illuminated a battle scene straight out of my nightmares.

To our left, groups of Skotadi were scattered across the village center, and had formed a u-shaped line around a small group of Kala pinned down outside the mess hall. Toward the far side of the boys’ dorm another standoff between two large groups took place. Directly in front of us was an opening covered with bodies, and occupied by only a few small clusters of a dozen or so combatants battling to the death with knives and fists.

Finding Nathan in this mess would be impossible. Looking at all the death around me, I feared I wouldn’t find him alive.

“We need weapons,” Bruce said, interrupting my worried thoughts.

Bruce and Richie took the lead as we crossed the village center and wove around the scattered Kala and Skotadi who fought behind the main battle line. Regardless, we were forced to duck low to avoid the occasional stray bullet.

We made it to the Command Center easily. Once inside, Richie scooped up something that looked like a machine gun movie prop, and stood guard in the doorway as everyone else selected from what was left in the weapons cache.

I picked up a silver pistol, but put it back.

“Kris, you need something,” Micah chided.

I lifted my hands. “These are my weapons.” I was much better, and more confident, at conjuring fire than shooting a gun.

As Micah gathered spare ammo and stuffed it into his pockets, his eyes slid to something behind me and his gaze hardened.

I turned to find Alec hovered in the corner with his head down and hands fisted to his sides.

“Kris . . .” Micah drew cautiously as I stepped closer to Alec.

“He won’t hurt me,” I tossed over my shoulder. As I neared, I heard Alec’s labored breaths. My hand touched his shoulder and he flinched. “Alec? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not doing so well.” I heard the pain in his voice, and it tugged at my heart.

“Alec . . .” I stepped closer, and his head lifted fractionally. His eyes met mine, and my heart shattered. “Don’t do this. Please, don’t give in to it. I can’t lose you, Alec. I need you to fight it with everything that you have.”

His eyes shut as if he were in pain, and I took his hands in mine, though with the way mine were flickering in and out, I didn’t know if he could feel me holding them. Nor did I know how much longer I could hold out. I was asking him to do something I might not be able to do.

“Can you feel me?” I asked him. His head nodded slowly. “Good. Stay with me, Alec. Please. I need you. I can’t do this without you.”

His head rose, his eyes met mine, and I saw his struggle. I had seen Alec have episodes before, and he had seen mine, but this . . .

This was it. Alec had reached the moment where his soul would no longer teeter between good and evil. He was about to fall to one side, and I hoped more than anything that he didn’t let the evil win.

Suddenly, his hands cupped my face to hold me still as his lips crashed into mine with an urgency that stole my breath. The force of him drove me back, into the wall behind me. And then his arms were around me, his fingers digging into my waist as he held me to him . . . so tight that I could barely move.

And something made me think that I shouldn’t. His mouth moved brazenly over mine, and I let him part my lips and deepen the kiss in the way that he needed right now.

Because something told me he needed this. 

I felt the shift, and knew the moment everything changed. Alec’s grip around my waist lessened at the same time his lips softened. Though he didn’t exactly stop kissing me, he stopped kissing me . . .
like that
. Now, he feathered my lips with the faintest kiss before he slowly pulled away.

His forehead bumped against mine and when I opened my eyes, I saw the curve of a grin on his lips. “I’m good now.” 

“Oh, really?”

Alec stepped back, freeing me from the wall, and I saw Micah’s scowl over his shoulder, and Bruce’s widened eyes.

“You okay?” Alec asked me.

“Umm . . .” I looked down at my hands. They were solid again, and though they were shaky, it wasn’t a fight to control the growing powers that ran through my body that caused them to shake. Not now. “Yeah, I think I’m good.”

Though I still felt the power rising in me, I felt grounded for the first time since the attack started. And the kiss had obviously helped Alec . . . somehow, in a way I couldn’t have begun to understand.