Power(101)

“Dr. Zollers?” I asked. “You wouldn’t know this, but he’s been blocking you all along.” I took another step forward. “He’s been blocking you since I got back from your attempted abduction.”

“Why?” Sovereign sounded furious, but just a hint of weakness had crept into his voice. “How would you know—”

He shot through the air without much in the way of warning, and he was upon me, inches away. His hand flew to my throat and jerked me from the ground, fingers clutching around my windpipe. He lifted me off the concrete, and I could feel my vision darken, the sensation of being choked, of having the blood to my brain stopped. “You know what?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Because I am not going to take this shit from you. Not from you. All my work, all my efforts, none of them mean a damned thing without you, and I will not lose you. Not this close to—”





Chapter 56


The darkness closed around the edges of my vision, and sensation disappeared. My head drifted to a place I had been only a few days earlier, a place full of life and sensation, a place as far from a dark and dingy basement as could possibly be imagined.

It was a forest.

The sounds of living woods were all around me. I could hear the chirp of birds, the thrum of insects. The smell of fresh greenery had been in the air. The lovely warmth of the sun shone down upon my pale skin, and I lifted my face to it where it streamed through the canopy above.

I’d come here in my mind when I’d been in the box, on the plane. And ever since, it had been a memory that played in my head over and over, always at the surface.

And it was the thing I could not let Sovereign see.

Yet.

“Hello, Sienna Nealon,” came the voice of the girl standing across from me. “I have been waiting for this moment. I have been waiting here in the darkness.

“For you.”

“Adelaide,” I said and looked up into the sunlight. “It’s a pretty nice darkness you have here.”

“This is but a memory,” she said, and I saw the faint echoes of the girl who had once been Adelaide change, shift like an illusion wavering in the summer heat. “You are still in the darkness of your captivity.”

“I am,” I said, knowing it was true. “The Wolfe brothers … they’re going to—”

“Shhh,” she said, and her finger was upon my lips. “They are nothing. A worry for another time. I can teach you to make them as irrelevant to you as they are to the world at large. But there is a greater consideration that you need to be made aware of.”

“Sovereign,” I said.

“Sovereign,” she agreed and took a few steps back from me.

“You can teach me how to use my powers?” I asked. “Really? Truly?”

“I can teach you,” she said, nodding with that sense of peace I’d always associated with her. “But first I must impart to you something else. Something of vital importance.”

“All right,” I said. “Hit me.”

“I can feel your spirit flagging,” she intoned. “I can feel your strength waning. You are the last one who is able to fight, Sienna. You are the last to be able to take up this challenge. Omega fed me full of souls so that I could be ready to accept the mantle.” She lowered her head. “It was all against my will, of course. They made me a weapon and were to make me a bride sacrifice. I was told to follow whoever opened my tank, to become indebted and bonded to them. They meant to give me over to him if it came to it, and if he would not accept me, I was to fight and kill him.”

I swallowed. “But you didn’t.”

“Because you freed me,” she said, and she took my hands once more. “Because you saved me—”

“I led you to death,” I said, and closed my eyes. “I got you killed.”

“You let me see the sun once more,” she said. “You let me make my choices. I was not a pet, but they made me one. They took away my will, subordinated it to their own, and kept me in captivity where I could do nothing but witness the world roll by around me.” She turned her eyes to me. They found mine, and something like a fire roared inside them. “I know what comes,” she whispered.

The forest faded around us, and was replaced by something else entirely. Something … horrifying.

Black skies were clouded with a dense fog. The skeletons of buildings stretched around me in every direction. Girders and broken concrete were all that remained, like a tableau straight out of any post-apocalyptic CGI-fest you can imagine. It looked as though the whole world had been washed away by fire and destruction, and all that remained was ashes and bones of the civilization that had once been.