The Awakening of Ren Crown (2 page)

He frowned. “Like you as a friend, I mean. I'd have to kill them otherwise. But cultivating more girlfriends is always a good thing. For all of us.”

“Very funny.” Lightning lit again, but there was no accompanying thunder. Where was it coming from?

“It's all about continuing a benevolent dictatorship and having fun. And it is time for you to become a general, instead of first lieutenant.”

Anxiety ran through me. I could talk to Christian easily, but with other people, words garbled strangely from my mouth. “I don't want—”

“So, during our third week of dominion,” he said, trampling over my objection. “You should be in charge of—”

Lightning seemed to light everywhere at once, and Christian suddenly stopped. He bowed forward, clutching his midsection. His bag dropped to the ground, contents clinking.

I grabbed his arm to steady him. “What's wrong?” I demanded, all humor gone.

“Cramp.”

A weird wave of electricity surged through my fingers where they touched him. I snatched my hand back, staring at the digits. The feeling dissipated within me, but increased in the air around us, swirling and darkening. I tentatively touched his arm again, and the energy shot into me once more. It was like focused euphoria.

Christian shuddered, then rolled his shoulders forward. “I feel strange.” His brows drew together and he looked at his hands, stretching and retracting his fingers. “But good strange. Like I've just made twelve perfect passes and could complete a hundred more.”

Brows drawn together, he bent and lifted his bag. It looked like something was drawn on the inside of his right wrist. I started to ask, but spectral colors flashed out and wrapped around his duffel.

Our heads collided as we peered inside. It looked just as it had before—full of red tissue paper, green wrap, adhesives, and tools. Christian's fingers ran along the top of the bag, sparking.

His
fingers
, not the bag.

I stared at him, dumbfounded, moving my hand along his arm and down to his wrist. It seemed important for some reason to maintain contact. “You...you're electric.”

He gave a strangled laugh, hands jamming together and pulling apart. Electricity sparked between his forefingers, forming five crackling white arcs.

“Is this real?” I reached out tentatively to touch an arc, and a sparkle fell, exploding on the ground with the report of a bottle rocket.

I let go of him in shock. The weird pressure built around us again, pushing.

“The lightning—was it coming from you?”

There was a depression in the pavement where the spark had hit. I looked to see Christian staring wide-eyed too. “I don't know.”

“You!” A man stepped out of the deep shadows cast by the trees near the end of the street.

No
. I had stopped paying attention to our surroundings and now we were about to be caught far past curfew.

“Hands out, and stay right there,” he growled, his voice unfamiliar, his face still too deep in the shadows.

Christian touched my arm and the grip of his fingers indicated a readiness to run. His hands still glowed an electric blue, and the strange sense of elation ran into me again at the point of contact.

I shifted my balance to an optimal flight response. If we were caught, Christian could be benched until Homecoming. No one would be pleased by that outcome.

“Hands out, and—”

Christian pushed hard on my arm. I rolled forward on the balls of my feet with the motion and we immediately tore off into the yard at our right.

“They are running!” The man shouted, as he gave pursuit.

Another man in black sprinted toward us as we reached the fenced-in backyard.

Christian swore and we veered toward a backyard play structure, frantically climbing it, then leaping over the high fence. We crashed to the grass, rolling to relieve our momentum. Blue lightning arced around us.

The man trailing us yelled and I heard him fall into the hedges. We launched forward, skirting a car parked in the driveway and sprinting through the front yard and into the street.

Another man headed toward us down the street.

“What the hell?” Christian asked harshly as we ran, veering again into another yard, where a fourth man appeared from the shadows. Christian ran straight at him, pushing him hard in the shoulder. The man flew back and crashed hard. Harder than it seemed he should have with a normal block, but there was no opportunity to look back or think on it further.

A man stood at the end of the next street, and we swerved to the right. We were being herded out of the neighborhood.

Lightning flashed again and a crackle of strange thunder finally accompanied it. The lightning connected with the overhead power lines around us, white, sparking lines leading toward the utility company's lot.

Christian pushed at my arm, and we ran directly toward the lot. Something clanged into the chain link fence as we scrambled up and over.

A knife lay on the ground on the other side of the chain link fence where we had just been, and my heart leaped fully into my throat. A harmless prank of breaking and entering into the coach's garage was a punishment on par with laps around the football field, not mortal wounds.

And the police didn't fling knives at fleeing suspects.

Electricity seemed to spark from the entire lot around us, the blue lines arcing from the poles and power lines toward Christian.

He pulled me behind a short, square building.

Why were we stopping? I quickly signed at him—
plan?
I had been in enough paintball fights at his side—staying in one position eventually meant death. But there weren't enough structures for us to move stealthily between. Why were we
here
? The street chase was far more in our favor.

He motioned with his glowing fingers to signal that he was going to jump the men when they came near. I signed back a quick negative with a few added expletives that we had added to the code years ago.

But there was a focused mania in his eyes. “I don't know what this is, but I can do
anything
right now, Ren. I can feel it.”

“What?” I hissed, grabbing his arm, the terror of being discovered combining with panic at his uncharacteristic behavior. Some of the mania in his eyes immediately lessened at the skin contact, but the focus remained.

He squeezed my hand. “Run. I won't let them hurt you.”

“Hands at your sides.” A man stepped out of the deep shadows cast by the main tower. There was malevolence in his very movement. “Your type is so predictable, always looking for energy. Boy, put your hands against your sides
now
. Girl,
come here
. Clean and easy. There's no escape now.”

The four other men appeared, surrounding our position. One of them was limping, his expression full of rage.

Christian stepped in front of me and the electric field between his fingers grew stronger.

“You don't want to do that, boy.” The man lifted something dark and barreled.

I lunged at Christian's back at the same time that he half-turned, grabbed me, and threw me to the side as easily as tossing a child's stuffed animal. Something cracked in my right forearm as it hit the edge of the building and spun me around.

A deafening blast immediately hit the place where we had been.

As I fell back in horror, I could see Christian dodging left, then lightning lit from his fingers and three of the men went flying. The man from the shadows raised his gun toward me.

Christian's arm reached out, and a wave of something warm and protective shot from his fingers into my chest.

Then something pulsed, blinding me, filling my vision with crimson. Lights exploded and detonations rocked the universe.

Everything in my world went end over end, and I slammed face down onto concrete.

Blackness. All I saw was blackness.

Darkness blurred. Faint shapes formed. My cheek was pressed oddly to the hard ground, and dark red streams streaked away from me.

I tried to move. My cheek wouldn't lift. My neck wouldn't lift. My vision was streaked red.

I told my neck to move. My lips tried to repeat the command, soundless, something wet upon them.

On my fifth blink, my vision returned. There was a strange absence of light, only the stars and crescent moon casting any at all. Power lines and towers lay in pieces around me. No electricity arced—as if the entire supply had all been used. There were six bodies lying twenty yards away. One slowly, painfully, rose—becoming a large shadow hovering above the others. The rising figure gave one of the motionless bodies a kick.

The shape and hair of the kicked body registered, and I instinctively rejected all emotion.

He was so still, splayed like a carelessly tossed doll. I had never seen Christian like that. Not even after being blindsided by a spectacular sack.

Protectiveness and primal panic surged.

I struggled to push upright, blackness completely overtaking my vision, pain radiating through my head. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, then forced my too heavy head to still and my vision to clear.

My view of the obliterated lot wobbled with my success. I tried to move my left arm, but it wasn't working, so I stretched out my right and pulled myself forward. Eighteen feet away. Seventeen and a half. Seventeen. Just a little more.

Each pull scraped a layer of the void away from my mind and a layer of skin from my useless left arm, and my pulling became increasingly erratic and frantic as the figure with my brother's hair didn't move. The blackening pain and the nagging thought that something else required my attention were nothing next to my need, and I curled my fingers into the grit of the concrete, pulling, trying to get to him.

Then I was splayed out on my back, looking up at the twirling night sky. Stars twinkled and whirled. A booted foot pressed heavily on my chest. I felt and heard something crack, but nothing concrete registered through the all-encompassing pain and the thwarted need to reach my brother.

I tried to separate the shadowed features and black clothing from the starry sky beyond. The man held a device over me, his boot pushed down harder, and I could feel a gurgle in my chest.

“Stupid ferals. But I've got you now.” His hands moved with the device. A braided leather band dangled from his damaged fingers.
Christian's band
.

He pressed harder and everything started to go black.

I flung up my free arm and grabbed the end of the band. Power and pressure flooded through my hand, and the sparking seemed to travel from the leather into my bones. The release on the other end of the band sent my arm slamming to the ground, but the band stayed within my grasp, vibrating, then abruptly stilling as it calmed something deep within me. My vision continued to dim, but was now replaced by a calm blue light hovering in my mind's eye.

The shadowed man above me uttered a long stream of expletives, then stepped harder on my chest.

“Get up and get over here, you idiots,” he shouted. “And either wake up Lynch, or dispose of him.” Under the increased pressure of his boot, something else cracked in my chest.

I was...going to die.

A spark sluggishly ignited in my midsection around the steady blue light, like a wick that had been dormant too long, and the crack of another rib was echoed by a bang a few feet to my side.

“Son of a—” The foot was suddenly gone.

Flares of brown, swirling and long-tailed flashed, then the earth trembled as a body crashed next to me, and three others fell farther away.

A long pole twirled over me and poked down toward the ground.

“Isn't hunting supposed to provide a challenge, Uncle?” The new voice was masculine and edged. Could a voice be described as chiseled? I longed to see the face attached to such a voice, but everything was going hazy again.

“You got lucky with that sudden trace that popped from nowhere,” an older voice responded.

“Or maybe I'm just that good.” I could almost picture the smile behind that riveting voice. I wanted to see it, but couldn't turn my head.

Not being able to move, confusion, hearing irresistible voices. Angels? Maybe I was dying.

Dying.
Christian
. Panic penetrated my muddiness. I tried to turn myself, to reach him, but my body was absolutely useless, heavier now—my muscles seemingly nonexistent.

The older man sighed. “Try to stay out of the headlines this week, won't you?”

The two figures moved into view, but like images from a Kandinsky. Frenetic motion and dark colors not allowing my eye to rest.

“Wild magic is flowing everywhere. The scavengers finished the feral off fifteen minutes ago, then drained him dry.” The older voice sounded disgusted, then swore. “We have to report that they have a tool to identify and hide an awakening.”

A twinkling white light beckoned me closer, slowly strangling the rest of my senses.

“...scanning...difficult...heavy in the air...”

“...feral...awakening...subverts suppression field.”

I couldn't cough or breathe.
Christian
. I pushed away from the light with difficulty. I needed to get to my brother. I tried turning again, but the only parts of me I could still feel were the two fingers clutching his band.

“...scanner stopped working...”

A figure crouched next to me and touched my wrist. “The girl is fighting.”

As if the touch had connected me to an external speaker source, I could hear clearly again. It was the guy with the beautiful masculine voice. Michelangelo’s David would sound like this.

I tried to choke out the words for him to help Christian, but only liquid bubbled up.

I used every last resource I possessed to slowly curl my hand and touch the boy's fingers at my wrist. The pressure of his fingers increased minutely at the touch. I tried to tell him to help my brother, but I couldn't remember how to make my lips work anymore.

“I can barely tell it's human under the blood.” The older man sounded extremely disinterested. “Broken nose, shattered cheekbones, but she does have long hair. Girl chose the wrong boyfriend. Poor mongrels.”

“She is as human as we are, Uncle.” The boy's lovely voice radiated disapproval.