Arise (Awakened Fate Book 4) (22 page)

Chloe tensed. I glanced to her.

“Earl,” she said. “The guy who attacked us at Baylie’s place.”

“You’ve met him?” Joseph asked.

Chloe hesitated. “We stumbled on his house a few weeks ago.”

Joseph scoffed. “You’re a right mess, you know that? Can’t track you, and you screw up the magical signature of everything you come near. I would’ve kept you from going near there, but I can’t find up from down in the soup you’ve made. You sent my monitoring systems all to hell a couple months back. There were power surges that vanished as fast as they came, ghost readings first here, then there. All sorts of chaos, and it hasn’t much stopped. And the Beast obviously isn’t dead yet, because the bastard picked up on it too. If you’re as good with this stuff as I am – and as that damn creature is – there’s no way you don’t notice that.”

I studied him distrustfully. Rants and cursing aside, the turtle wizard obviously liked to hear himself talk. Whether or not he ‘did social’, he’d clearly been on his own for a long time and now, with visitors, he’d become a geyser of one-sided conversation.

But he hadn’t answered the question. And given the reasons that we, the species he’d made, liked to get our hands on dehaians, that made me nervous.

“But why are you protecting them?” I asked. “Why should we trust you?”

“Because I need every one of her kind I can get.”

I tensed. “What does that mean?”

His expression turned withering. “Just that her lot screwed up the world when they did their little ‘splitting themselves’ trick. Magic is complicated. Like everything else, it’s part of an ecosystem, and when you take out a component of that, you break things. The ocean generates magic. Why do you think humans are so drawn to it? Why dehaians need it? Hell, even you need it to some degree.” He jerked his chin at me. “And the dehaians – the old ones – they helped that process of magic generation by going back and forth between land and sea. They created an exchange of energy – carried the magic with them like some damn bug with pollen on its body – and thus they kept things from stagnating and dying. Not that they cared, the selfish pricks. They’d already damn near destroyed everything with that ‘Beast’ of theirs. But when they split themselves apart like that, they altered the whole thing.”

He scowled. “And that screwed my kind over too. I made it through their first apocalypse by being off-island with some friends at the time. Saw it from a distance though. Bastards.” He shook his head. “And I did everything possible to avoid their Beast in the years after that. But once the dehaians split…” He made an angry noise. “To do what I do, I need access to magic. It’s kind of a big part of being a wizard. And it takes a lot, keeping yourself going after centuries. I’ve used what we learned from creating greliarans to help that–” he gestured to his face, “–though of course, my targets were long-lived creatures and the like, rather than the rabid concoction that went into you lot. But I still need magic to survive. My machines distill out what they can from the ocean water, and I can modify it to be like the old world magic to some extent in my laboratory, but the amount of energy I get from all that is pathetic compared to what it used to be. The dehaians don’t bring out much from the water, can’t travel far enough inland to carry energy from those places back with them, and regardless it’s not the same. The whole magical ecosystem isn’t the same – like they took saltwater and turned it into fresh. But the dehaians
do
still keep things going in
some
form, and without them, the ocean’s magic would just die out entirely. So you see, I can’t let the greliarans kill them off. Like I said, I need every one of them I can get.”

I watched him, not sure I was buying that. “But you made us to kill them. If this magical exchange is so important, why do that?”

“That was different,” Joseph replied like I was an idiot for asking. “We were defending ourselves. I mean, what would
you
do if you found yourself suddenly at war with a bunch of incredibly strong, incredibly fast, spiky-armed nightmares who could make you adore them with a touch? I mean, one minute you’re fighting side-by-side with your buddy, and the next he’s trying to kill you because you’re attacking the new love of his life. We
had
to counter that. Our leaders
ordered
us to counter that. So yeah, we took dehaian prisoners and human volunteers and every magical trace element we could gather from animals and nature on the islands… and we created you. Gave you strength and speed to fight them, skin to handle their spikes, and hearing and a sense of each other’s location so that – if those bastards dragged one of you underwater – it’d give the others a hope of saving him and killing the dehaian responsible. We made you with all that, plus a craving to absorb the magical energy dehaians give off when they die that was
so
strong, it’d stand a chance of overriding any love magic they tried. Didn’t matter that it left you all as psychotic as serial killers, or that you couldn’t understand anything but brute force to keep you in line. It was necessary. Back then, it was necessary. Now, you’re just a throwback to a bygone era that refuses to die off.”

I stared at him, uncertain whether to be more angry or shocked.

“Shut up,” Baylie ordered.

Joseph glanced to her. “What? Is he your boyfriend?”

“Stepbrother, you jerk. And if you keep talking about him like that, I’ll–”

“Yeah, well, your stepbrother shouldn’t even be able to stay in the same room as her. Not without twitching like an addict in desperate need of a hit. I know what he is. I made his kind, and he’s got just as much of that in him as the rest do. He should be going crazy, and if he’s not, that doesn’t mean he won’t eventually.”

I tensed.

“She said shut up,” Chloe snapped.

Joseph regarded me for another moment and then his gaze flicked to the girls, taking in the anger on their faces. “Damned United Nations,” he muttered again. He gave them an exasperated look. “Listen, I’m not telling you anything he doesn’t already know is true.”

“It’s not true about me,” I said, carefully keeping my voice calm.

He hesitated and then harrumphed again. Pushing away from the desk, he straightened. “Whatever you say. I have work to do.”

I drew a breath.

He circled the desk and then tugged open a drawer. From inside, he pulled out the white box of a first aid kit, though the thing was held closed with string and appeared to be nearly bursting at the seams. With quick motions, he untied the string and then took a plastic-sealed syringe from inside.

“Just a bit of blood to begin the process,” he said while he examined the syringe.

He waddled back around the desk to Chloe’s side. She shifted like she wanted to pull away.

“Don’t move,” he cautioned.

She nodded, the motion tight and jerky.

Joseph ignored it. Unwrapping the needle, he checked over it one more time and then stuck it into her arm.

Blood began to fill the syringe.

Chloe turned her face away, closing her eyes.

Seconds passed. He removed the needle and pressed a wad of gauze to the inside of her arm.

“There. Hold that.”

She did as ordered.

Joseph set the syringe down and then retrieved a strip of medical tape. Quickly, he stuck it across the gauze and then turned, grabbing a pair of scissors from the box. Chloe flinched back in surprise when he snipped off a lock of her hair.

“Alright,” he said. “That should get me started.”

He shoved both the needle and the hair into the first aid kit. Hefting the box beneath one arm, and losing a few random bandages from its sides in the process, he headed for the door.

Ellie twisted in the seat. “Wait. Is this safe, though? Us being here while you work on that, I mean. We’re so close to the water, and if the Beast picks up on her…”

Joseph tossed her a derisive look. “First off, that thing was targeted at my kind, and I’ve been here for decades. We’re fine. Second, I’m guessing your friend is muffling the magical energy coming from her just about as tightly as she can, am I right?”

He eyed Chloe, waiting.

She gave a small shrug. “I guess.”

“Yeah, well, with you hiding like that, you’re fine here. You could even go in the ocean and, if you got lucky and the Beast was far enough away, you wouldn’t attract it even if it was back at full strength. Not right away, in any case. And keeping folks like her,” he nodded to Ellie, “or dehaians around makes you safer still. Disrupts the signal you’re sending off and makes you harder to track.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

His withering expression returned. “Okay, it’s like this,” he sighed. “You’re energy. I’m energy. Every damn thing in the world is energy. And that energy has a variety of frequencies. Signatures. Things that make you different than, say, a cauliflower. The Beast is tuned only to those frequencies that are unique to old dehaians and to wizards like me. Just those. It ignores greliarans, because apparently, the dehaians aimed it at us first. Probably thought to get the creators of the weapons before we could make more. But then they lost control of the damn thing and it turned on them too.”

He scoffed. “Bastards. But regardless, the Beast is drawn to those specific signatures – and you’re close enough to that old signature to wake the thing up. But the current dehaians and landwalkers, the Beast ignores them. They’re basically invisible to it. They’re still putting off energy, though, and just like two songs playing in the same room make it harder to listen to one, their signal disrupts yours. More of them around you, the better off you are – which probably is
also
why I’ve had such trouble getting a lock on you, if you’ve been around them and the dehaians all this time.” He glared at Chloe briefly before falling back into his surly, lecturing mode. “But meanwhile, muffled up and trying to hide as you are, you’re sending out the energy of, say, a candle. When you stop hiding, you’re the damn sun. If the Beast is close, it’ll spot you either way. But if it’s not… well, it’s harder to spot a candle at a distance than a star, right?”

Chloe’s brow furrowed at all the metaphors. “Um, alright, but how do I even know if it’s close?”

He chuckled. “Well, once it’s strong enough, you’d know mostly because you’d be dying. But until then… you’d want to watch for changes around you. Weird feelings in the air and water, like you’re getting weaker and you don’t know why. That means it’s got your scent and you better run – or swim – for your life.”

Chloe swallowed hard.

“But it’s not an issue,” Joseph continued. “I’m going to change up your magic same as your ancestors did theirs. And until then, I’ve got enough shielding around my property that you could stop muffling yourself up with the Beast right outside and it still wouldn’t pick up on you. What do you think you all passed out there?” He snorted derisively. “You probably didn’t even see the markers in the forest. The concrete–”

“The little pillar things, yeah,” I interrupted. “We saw them.”

“Huh. Well, those form protective barriers. Layers of them. Every trace of magical leakage from my machines is trapped, so there’s nothing for the Beast to pick up on.”

“That’s what we drove through?” Ellie asked. “The weird feeling in the air?”

“Basically the magical equivalent of instantly going up a few thousand feet in elevation – except it probably won’t kill you and you adjust to it faster. But that shielding will hold, even if I let you drive through it. Magic leakage might make it past a few barriers, but it can’t get by
every
one. And the house is even more secure, meaning that as long as you’re in it,” he looked pointedly to Chloe, “the Beast won’t have a chance in hell of knowing you’re here.”

Ellie fidgeted on the chair. I glanced to her. She had that look on her face again – the nervous one, like she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure it’d be okay.

Chloe seemed to see the expression as well. “What is it?”

Ellie looked her way and then hesitated, catching sight of me. She dropped her gaze quickly, almost as if she was uncomfortable meeting my eyes.

I tried not to scowl, mentally thanking the turtle for making Ellie frightened of me on top of everything else.

“It’s just, you said Chloe messes your stuff up,” Ellie explained to Joseph. “Couldn’t she do that to your barriers?”

Joseph paused, and then harrumphed again. “It’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.”

He waddled back toward the other room, leaving us sitting beside the desk.

“Why doesn’t that reassure me?” Baylie muttered under her breath.

I looked over to her. Baylie’s lip twitched when she realized I’d heard, though the smile died quickly.

“We’ll keep an eye out,” I told her. “If something starts to seem off or you feel anything strange,” I glanced to Chloe, “we’ll leave.”

Chloe hesitated, her gaze on the desk in front of her, though it didn’t seem like she was seeing it. “Yeah,” she agreed distantly.

My brow drew down.

She seemed to feel my curiosity. A weird, pained expression flickered across her face. Without looking my way, she shoved up from the chair and hurried after Joseph.

I watched her leave and then turned to Baylie, confused.

“I’ll go talk to her,” Baylie said.

She followed Chloe from the room.

I took a deep breath. Chloe couldn’t be scared of me too. She knew what I was, but whatever that turtle said, she had to know I’d never hurt her.

At least, I hoped she did.

“So, um… he’s kind of a jerk, yeah?” Ellie asked, more than the regular share of nervousness in her tone.

I glanced to her. She eyed me askance, like she felt awkward about looking at me.

“Yeah,” I replied flatly.

I gave her a tight smile and then pushed out of the chair, heading for the door. I needed air. Space. Something.

And I wished we’d never come to this place.

Chapter Twenty

Wyatt

Owen pulled the SUV to a stop.

The landwalkers were ahead of us, standing beside a brown sedan with their attention on a gravel track leading farther into the woods.