The Violet Awakening (The Elementum Trinity Book 2) (16 page)

I waited in the shadows of his office, sure that the first thing he’d do upon his return would be to slurp back a whiskey with giddy delight at his success of capturing Nadia. I knew him all too well, but I hadn’t expected him to be alone.

I watched as he let the stopper of the decorative bottle fall to the bar with a thud, clinking the rim onto a short glass, then raising the auburn liquid to his chapped lips. His eyes met mine through the mirror behind the bar, but he kept his composure as he turned to face me.

“I knew you would come back. I must say, though, I find it impressive that you beat me here,” he said with a smirk.

I stepped out of the shadows, teeth grinding as the cold in my fingertips became nearly unbearable.

“What is your plan now, then, Angela?” he asked, rounding the long table to have a seat in the largest chair at the end. As he leaned back, the glint of a gun-handle
, identical to the ones we’d seen at Joseph’s house, shone in the dim, flickering light. “I see. You haven’t worked that part out yet. How typical of you to let your emotions—”

I didn’t let him finish his sentence. A torrent of vivid blue light sprang from my palm, shattering the glass in his hand. His eyes widened as he observed the bloody shards protruding from his fingers. I had never seen fear in William’s face, before. The feeling was gratifying.

“I see your abilities have advanced,” he said, returning to his cold, stern-self as he plucked slivers of glass from his skin.

“You could say that,” I said, barely above a whisper, as I circled the table, dropping the Electro-Cuffs in front of him.

I kept my eyes trained on William’s face, as he tended to his hand. Finally, he leaned back in his seat to meet my gaze. After a long period of silence, the glimmer in his eyes faded as he swiftly reached for the gun inside his jacket. But his last chance to overpower me failed him. Another torrent of blue light, and the gun was encased in ice, bound to his hand in frigid pain. He growled as he lunged from his seat, swinging wildly at me. Years of one-sided fights, with opponents typically restrained and helpless, had rendered him entirely useless in a fair battle. Or maybe age had simply gotten the best of him.

I dodged to the side, landing an icy blow to his head as he passed me. With a morbid thud, his body fell to the floor, landing at just the right angle to crush his nose. I
smiled at the thought that, maybe, karma was on my side, before kneeling down to check for a pulse. Apparently, years of watching old action movies had taught me nothing.

William’s eyes popped open. With his free hand, he grabbed at my wrist, then thwapped me in the head with the icy-club his other hand had become. I yowled in pain as I slid across the dusty floor, pulling my shaking hand from my forehead to find a blood-soaked palm.

“Will you never learn?” he spat, wiping the gush of red from his face as he stumbled to his feet. “Your kind just doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done.”

My eyes widened as he pulled a second gun from the band of his pants. This time, it wasn’t the type of weapon meant to
disable my kind, but a real gun—shiny, black, and ominous. I clamped my eyes shut as he pulled back the hammer and squeezed the trigger, but no shot ever rang. Instead, when I opened my eyes, William lay motionless on the floor at my feet, a trail of frost leading from his temple all the way down to his chest.

Lakin helped me up, a blue glow fading from the stone around his neck. We embraced each other frantically, before a mumbled groan made its way from William’s throat. I yanked the spare Electro-Cuffs from the table, securing them around his limp wrists and locking them together in the same way the guards had done on the night of my escape. I kicked the gun across the floor, and Lakin helped me heave him into a chair. I used my jacket to tie his torso back, just in time for his eyes to flutter open. He blinked at us in confusion, before a sinister grin spread across his face.

“You must be Lakin,” he said through his bloodied smile. “You’re scrawnier than I had imagined.”

Through a bout of emotion-riddled rage, I back-handed William across the face, a spray of blood landing on the table.

“Angie, don’t,” Lakin whispered in protest, moving to pull me away.

“Listen to your boyfriend, Angela.” The amusement in William’s voice only made me more livid.

Biting the inside of my lip to keep from exploding with wrath, I retrieved the controller for the Electro-Cuffs from my pants pocket. William’s demeanor changed in an instant, from certain and mocking to frightened and regretful.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, voice cracking a bit as he tried to sound strict. “You don’t even know how to use that.”

“You’re right,” I sighed with false defeat, rolling the device over in my palm. “But there are only so many buttons.”

Red, green, and purple. It was a simple design, and I had been a prisoner of the Electro-Cuffs for long enough
that I had a pretty good idea of how they worked.
Green
. The little lights on William’s cuffs, which had previously been in red stand-by mode, shone emerald. His brows lowered and his eyes grew wide as my thumb lingered over the purple.

My eyes remained fixed as painful volts coursed throughout William’s body. He shuttered and twitched in his chair as he screamed for an end. Lakin had to look away, until I finally released the button.

“Torture?” William gasped heavily. “This is not the way of your kind.”

“No,” I agreed, pressing the button again. “It’s the way of yours.”

My eyes brimmed with tears, as I watched the man who had destroyed my past convulse helplessly in his seat. I could cause him only a fraction of the pain that he had subjected my entire kind to, and even then, it was only physical. Had I been able to mirror the emotional ruins he had induced, maybe it would have been enough to satiate my need for revenge… but it could never happen. That kind of destruction required love for something—for anything—and William cared for nothing. He loved nothing. There was nothing that I could take from him to make him feel the loss that my kind was so familiar with.

“Enough,” Lakin whispered, placing a soothing hand on my own.

The controller cracked as it hit the floor, sending a network of splinters through the shiny casing. William’s seizing halted, leaving him a slumped-over heap of skin and bones and suit in his chair. I didn’t know if he was still alive. I didn’t know if I cared.

I disappeared into the comfort and safety of Lakin’s arms. The world didn’t exist, there. Time and life and hurt didn’t exist, there. It was just us, in the unending oblivion of nothingness that people sometimes referred to as love.

“You’re… not… like them… you know,” William rasped through forced, drawn-out breaths. “You will… never be... like them.”

“Maybe not… but you don’t even know what they’re like.” And in that moment, I realized what I could take from him.

Lakin tried to hold me back, but I assured him that I wouldn’t cause any more harm. Not physical harm, at least. William looked up at me with fear, eyelids sagging weakly. I reached out. His cheek felt rough, like leather that someone had taken to with a cheese grater. The years had not treated him kindly.

A gleam of purple flashed from his eyes as I kept my hand firmly against his skin. His jaw dropped into a ghostly, silent scream as he witnessed the magnificence of my kind, and the horrors they’d been subjected to by his. William had based his entire life on the differences between the Elementums and The Destructive Ones. He hated us so, it only made sense that the most efficient method of torture would be to make him as much like us as possible. And as each Violet gene awakened, as the humanity drained from his body… I found my revenge.

But revenge is never without cost. Perhaps it was because I had not yet become accustomed to the new strength of my powers, perhaps it was simply something that needed to happen, or perhaps karma had been angered by my vengeance; my eyes began to cloud over. As William relived our existence, I relived his—every ghastly and terrifying moment of it. But it flashed through me so quickly, it felt like jumbled bits and pieces of a bad horror movie.

I saw Paula’s torture. I witnessed Emmy being beaten, nearly to death. To my surprise, William had been angered by my escape, not because I had gotten away, but because he had failed in preventing me from leaving. The image stabbed at my heart as he gazed at me in my blue dress, feeling something very similar to pride. A flash of his childhood stung my cheek, as his father slapped him for questioning the purpose of The Facility. When I was young, more resentment for himself when I flooded his office in an attempted escape.
Why does she hate me? Why have I failed in gaining her trust?
He held me as an infant. He gazed upon my face with an affection he had never felt for my kind. He handed me to Paula, as he wiped spit-up from his shoulder. Every moment of anger was only resentment for his own failure. He despised my kind, yes, but not so much as he despised his own inability to control us.

And then, a flash of Eddie’s face, bloody and marked by varying ages of bruise. My heart raced as William struck him
, and beat him, and, eventually… shot him. Moments later, Eddie’s body tumbled to the floor in the rumbles of a violent quake, and I felt William’s lips twitch at the incredible opportunity to break me. I had begun to feel the slightest bit of sympathy, knowing that his actions had been rooted in self-hate, but that sympathy was immediately eradicated in a wave of rage, and hurt, and loathing. The monster he had become may have been a product of his upbringing, but he was a monster none-the-less. And the true monstrosity was that he felt no desire to change.

“What have you done to me?” William snarled as I backed away, tears drenching my cheeks.

“You? You killed Eddie?” My words were barely more than a rustle of leaves on the breeze, as I felt the wall against my back.

I slid down to the cold floor, cradling my knees against my chest. I felt Lakin’s hand on my shoulder, but my vision tunneled in on William’s face as I rocked in place. He took a break from his shouts of violent despair to revel in my anguish, bloody teeth peeking through his lips as he sneered at my pain.

“You monster,” I whispered.

“I may be a monster, Angela, but you are doing a fine job of following in my footsteps,” William said.

“I will never be like you,” I said, eyes hot and blurry with angry tears.

“No? What about Mr. Gray?”

My breath caught in my chest as I stared with wide eyes. Lakin looked at me with confusion, but I ignored his gaze.

“Oh, yes. The cameras got the whole thing.”

“What’s he talking about, Angie?” Lakin asked, as I glared daggers at the old man across the room.

“Yes, what
am
I talking about, Angela? You really shouldn’t keep secrets from the people you love.”

“What do you know about love?” I called, half-laughing through my tears.

“Angie!” Lakin shouted, demanding my attention.

I finally shifted my gaze to him, staring into the eyes of mist-layered forests.

“I let a man die, when I could have saved him,” I said coldly, glancing back at the grinning-William.

“What?” Lakin breathed, unbelieving of my words.

“He didn’t want my help.” I tried to justify my actions, but I knew there was no excuse. I hadn’t been sure before, but I knew now; I was a murderer.

“Aww,” William said through a bloody, fake pout, utterly delighted by the hurt on Lakin’s face.

“Shut up,” I growled, bounding to my feet.

“Or what? You’ll beat me up? Electrocute me? Turn me into a Violet?” he spat. “I have nothing left for you to take, Angela.”

A drop of water fell from my fingertip, echoing a muffled thud across the floor. Another drop, and then another. At first, William stared at my palms with confusion, but a purple glare in his eyes spread a wildfire of panic through him. I stared, cold and hard, as his face contorted in gasping agony, a steady stream of water flowing from my palms. His skin began to shrivel, his entire body shrinking in on itself as I stole the essence of his life.

“Stop,” a familiar voice cried from behind me.

My heart sank into my stomach, the water ceasing its journey from my hands as I turned to the doorway. Out through the shadows, Eric pushed Nadia ahead of him. He had found William’s gun on the floor, and was holding it to her back. His eyes were dark with a type of fear that made his face nearly unrecognizable, and his entire being looked diseased with hate. William had plagued him.

Lakin tried to step in front of me protectively, but I shoved him aside. I felt my insides tumble from the way Eric looked at me, like I was a bug meant to be squashed. Any sort of love he’d once felt for me had been eradicated, William had made sure of that. The boy, who had been my best friend not long ago, hated me fully and completely, and he hated everything that was like me.

“What… marvelous… timing… you
have…” William gasped through pained breaths, skin nearly cracking from dehydration.

Eric’s hand shook as he raised the gun in my direction, keeping a firm grip on Nadia’s shoulder, taking extra care not to touch her skin. His eyes flickered to Lakin, and then to the ring I had forgotten to take off. It was almost as if I could feel whatever was left
of his heart crumbling into shards of ice.

“We don’t really need her, do we?” he asked, turning his face to William but keeping his eyes locked on mine.

“Eric,” I whispered, taking a step forward.

“Don’t,” he said. “Just… don’t.”

“I can’t… see… why… we would,” William wheezed.

“Eric, listen to me,” I pled, wishing now
, more than ever, that turning back time was one of gifts of the Elementums. If we could just go back… “Eddie—”

“Don’t you dare speak my father’s name,” he cut me off, pulling back on the hammer of the gun.

“No, listen, Eric! His death wasn’t my fault,” I shouted. “William killed him!”

Eric shook his head, eyes filled with betrayal as he scoffed. “
No more lies, Angie.
”

It happened so quickly; Lakin jumping forward, knocking me to the ground; the click of the trigger; Nadia’s scream; the gust of wind; the deafening bang. I didn’t even know what order it all happened in—it felt like it happened all at once, and it felt like it lasted through the end of time. The eternity of those jumbled seconds decided the fate for every life in that room.

I pushed myself to my elbows, lungs reeling, trying to replace the air that had been forced from them. It felt as if my insides had been gouged out and replaced with darkness. I felt hollow. And as my eyes landed on the heap that was Lakin and Nadia, I understood why.

“Lakin,” I whispered, weakly heaving myself to my hands and knees, using all that was left of my strength to drag myself over to them.

I felt a fraction of relief as he slowly turned toward me from his place over Nadia. Relief, because he was still alive. Fractured, because the hollowness inside of me, inside both of us, inside all of our kind, had still been caused by a death.

Lakin and I had felt the loss of our kind through Lily’s recap of our history, but I never thought we would feel the pain directly. I was young, and naïve, and I thought we were indestructible. The idea that we would lose one of our generation seemed impossible. But there we sat, next to Nadia’s unmoving body, a puddle of warm crimson soaking her shirt and pooling out around her. Indestructible, yet her life had been taken by nothing more than a bullet and a broken heart.

“Angie, no,” Lakin whispered, as I reached for the gun that rested next to Nadia’s head.

My eyes searched the room for Eric, but he was nowhere to be found. He had fled out of fear… panic… self-preservation, maybe. But he wasn’t who I intended to aim the barrel at.

“One… down…” William gasped, sneering through his bloody teeth.

I paced a few times across the room, glancing back at Nadia’s face, drained of color and warmth. Something inside me knew that I was making a mistake; a nagging feeling in the center of the hollowness told me to walk away. But I didn’t listen. I stretched out my shaking arm, staring at William’s face over the barrel.

“You’re not going… to shoot me… Angela,” he panted knowingly, eyes gleaming even on the brink of death.

“No?” I said. I had never shot a gun before, but it didn’t seem too difficult.

“Of course… not. Your kind… would never—”

“Would never what? Torture someone for revenge? Let a man die on the cold floor? You’re right. My kind would never do that,” I said coolly, arm slowly becoming steadier with my words. “But as you so attentively pointed out, William, I’m doing a fine job of following in your footsteps. And you wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.”

“You’re about… to start a war. And you standing here… with a gun at my head… proves that we’ve already… won. A being of… peace… about to kill… out of spite,” William began, breath becoming more pained with each word. “You will… inevitably destroy yourself… as you are about to… destroy… me. And you will take… the rest of your kind… down… with you.”

“Angie,” Lakin whispered from the floor, “let’s go. He’s going to die, anyway.”

I shook my head at the attempt to stop me from committing a definite murder. It wasn’t like not saving Mr. Gray, after all. There was no gray area. I would be killing a living being out of vengeance.

“Take Nadia’s body, and leave,” I said. Lakin began to protest, but I spoke l
ouder. “Take her to Lily. Go.”

Lakin stared at me for a moment, hurt. Finally, he scooped up Nadia’s body, his arms immediately drenched in red, and left. I didn’t know if he looked back.
I kept my eyes trained on William’s.

“Send away… your boyfriend… so he doesn’t… have to see you… at your weakest?” William questioned. I knew he would have been laughing, had he been strong enough to do so. “Afraid he… won’t love you… after this?”

“Weakest? This isn’t my weakest,” I assured. “This is my strongest.”

I lowered the gun, holding my breath as I made my way for the door. I silently begged for the strength not to put the monster down. Every muscle in my body was telling me to turn and pull the trigger, but that nagging feeling within the hollowness kept my feet moving.

“You are… a coward… Angela Dawson,” William spat.

I stopped, staring desperately at the door a couple feet away. Just a couple more steps.
Just a couple more steps, Angie
. I turned, and looked William in the eyes.

“You want me to shoot you, so you don’t have to spend what few moments are left of your life in agony. You’re afraid of what it will feel like to die the excruciating death you deserve,” I said, tossing the gun to the floor as I pushed my feet those last couple steps. “I’m not the coward.”