“What the hell is this?” I asked, staring at the horizon for any sign of life, of movement. There was no breeze and the air stunk of death and fire.
“This is the world as it will be if you fail,” she said. “This is what will remain if Sovereign has his way.” She stretched out a hand to encompass everything around us. “This is his legacy, what he will forge should you surrender.”
“My God, this is …” I looked at the nearest building, a structure where nothing remained but a half-foot wall with the occasional burnt wooden stud to mark what it had been. A massive maple had been turned utterly black in the yard beyond, and it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. “This is my house.”
“And so will be the rest of the world,” Adelaide said, sounding like some sort of oracle. “I have seen it, and now I give it to you to be its keeper. Remember this moment each time you wish to give up. Remember in darkest night. I said to you once before that I would be waiting for you in the darkness. This is the darkness in which I have dwelled. This is the vision that Adelaide—not Andromeda—lived to pass along to you.” She took my hands in hers, and they felt warm. “Andromeda was a broken creature of men.” There was a subtle shift in her appearance, and I saw a faint hint of a mohawk replacing her long hair. “Adelaide fought to the last in hopes of finding a kindred soul to carry on with what she saw, with what she knew.” The British accent came full-on, damned near Cockney to my ears.
“I won’t forget,” I said, taking it all in once more. “I can’t … forget.”
“Remember,” she said, and it was a word that reverberated through my soul, soaking up all the sensation—the charred smell, the hot, dead air, the feeling of my flesh prickling—and filling the word with its essence. “Remember, and ready yourself for the moment when you will need it. He is the most base and deceitful of liars, and he thinks his world will be bright and glowing, not filled with ash and death borne of his fury and impatience and wrath.”
“I don’t think he’ll believe it,” I said. “But I’ll … keep it to myself”
“Until the moment you need it,” Adelaide said. “No man wants to know they’ve unmade the world while they’re trying to build it anew in their own vision.”
“I won’t let him see it,” I said. “I promise. And I will … remember.” The word send a stir through me, a sickening, rushing feeling that this was on me, that there was no one standing between the world I saw and the one I’d left outside the box before Frederick and Grihm had shut the door on me. “I won’t stop. Whatever it takes. I swear it.”
“Then I have but one final thing to teach you, Sienna Nealon,” Adelaide said, with a ghost of a smile. “One last thing to show you, and then you must go back into the darkness, then take your light out into the world that awaits …”
Chapter 57
Sovereign’s hand was around my throat and I didn’t care for it. I punched him in his, hard enough that he noticed it, then smacked his arm with enough strength to deaden the nerves for the second it took me to slip free. I landed and kicked him in the chest with a boot, flinging him into the concrete block wall, which shattered, sending dust into the basement air.
“Don’t touch me,” I said simply. I could feel the fury reverberate inside, though.
“Still don’t know … how you knew,” Sovereign grunted as he got back to his feet, dusting himself off. “No one knew but … Weissman and Claire and me … and I had her scooping out those memories whenever he had even a chance of running into a telepath without her …”
“I knew because a girl named Adelaide knew,” I said.
“Who?” He shook his head, partly in rage, partly in disbelief, partly in sheer frustration and WTF.
“She was a succubus,” I said, “who had a Cassandra-type shoved in her brain along with a ton of other metas so she could either be your bride or your worst enemy.” I sneered at him. “Care to guess which she turned out to be?”
“Ohhh,” he said, and the rage just pooled off of him. “You look so cocky, so smug, standing there. Like you have a chance. Like this isn’t going to be the fight you can’t win.” He snorted. “You think you’re done already.”
“Going by the numbers, I’d say I’m about ninety-nine percent done.” I cracked my knuckles. “One to go.”
“Well, that last percentage point is gonna be murder,” he said, and there was no trace of Joshua Harding in his features now. He was scorned, plain and simple, and his rage had taken over. “I’m going to—”