The Starborn Saga (Books 1, 2, & 3) (21 page)

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

I shake my head. “Don’t be. I’m the one that should be sorry.”

He lets out a deep breath, pulling his shirt tighter against him.

“Why are you trying to hide it from me?”

He says nothing for a moment, but I see in his eyes that he is conflicted. He takes a deep breath and pulls his collar down to reveal the long scar from his collarbone, ending somewhere further down his torso.

“Is that from when it happened?” I ask. “When you discovered your gift?”

“Discovering a gift is usually the most terrifying moment for any Starborn,” he says. “It often happens during a last moment of desperation. You know this.”

I do. 

“My moment still haunts me,” he says. “Every day. Every night.”

“What happened?” I ask, feeling brave. 

“Not now,” he says. “Sometime, I’m sure.”

I understand why he might not want to talk to me about it, although I can’t help but feel hurt by his words. I thought that maybe these past couple of days might have brought us closer. Instead, Aaron feels more distant in this moment than ever before. 

A rustling in the bushes to my right breaks into my thoughts. Then I hear the familiar low grunt of something hungry. A greyskin. 

We aren’t able to see it until I concentrate on the tall bushes and push away branches and leaves with my mind. Our suspicions are confirmed when the greyskin spots us and comes charging. I search the ground for anything that can move quickly. 

“Mora, your knife,” Aaron yells out to me.

Of course!

I reach to my left thigh and pull the long knife from its sheath. I throw it as hard as I can, directing the blade straight for the middle of its head. It’s on the ground in a second. But one little knife wont be any good against the fifty more greyskins that are charging our way. 

“I think we’ve found the herd!” Aaron says. 

I call the knife back to my hand, careful to catch it by the handle to avoid the greyskin blood. But the knife is useless against so many. I search the ground frantically for something that I can use for ammunition. Can I uproot a tree? Aaron shouts for me to get out of his way. I try to protest, but when I look at him, I know why he made the command. 

With arms spread out, he closes his eyes and the clouds above us grow darker. I cover my ears, knowing that he’s going to call a blast of lightning to fry the oncoming herd. 

I’m not far enough away. 

My hair is standing on end, and I feel the heat from the bolt moments before it burns through the air in a flash. What surprises me the most isn’t the ferocity of the bolt, but the fa its target. Aaron stands firm as the light slices through his body. The event would have killed any other living thing on Earth, but Aaron accepts the electric power without even moving.

The greyskins are unfazed as they continue to charge forward. My eyes dart between Aaron and the greyskins. His entire body is glowing with some kind of yellow energy.

He extends a palm toward the oncoming greyskins and from it bursts about a hundred different bolts into the faces and bodies of the undead enemies. Many of them fall to the ground with bubbling, searing flesh; others catch on fire. Some continue to come at us, but Aaron keeps blasting away. Normally, I would try to help in a situation like this, but Aaron needs no help. He has been given his power and nothing can run from this natural force.

My stare shifts from Aaron and past the oncoming herd to see even more greyskins fall in line to try and take on this new phenomenon that is shooting electricity out of his hands. The sight is terrifying. There are so many more, that I’m not entirely sure a single bolt of electricity will be enough for Aaron to stand against them. I suppose this is where we have to work together. 

I ignore Aaron as he calls out my name to keep me from running down into the forest. I’m thinking about everything around me: all the pieces of the Earth that I can use. 

My running draws the attention of a whole host of greyskins and they turn to follow the path that I make. The rain is falling harder, and the clouds are denser. Another crack splits the air. Aaron probably just called another bolt to himself. 

Leaves and brush scatter from me as I run through the forest. The greyskins are closing in on me from behind me and to my left. I’ve accomplished what I meant to accomplish by drawing some of the greyskins away from Aaron, but I am stopped in my tracks by a giant rock wall that I didn’t foresee when I started my sprint. 

I try to climb it, but the wall is too steep and slick. 

Terror grips me as I realize that I’m at a dead end. 

The greyskins are so close that I can almost feel their ravenous, hungry mouths chomping, their fingers clawing.

They are less than ten feet away when I turn. I’ve got nothing solid to throw at them. There’s nothing I can do but throw dirt in their faces. A loud bang sounds through the air, but this time it isn’t lightning. It’s a shotgun. 

Limbs fly and greyskins drop right in front of me. Best of all, the greyskins shift their attention to my right to find the gunman. 

Connor. 

He fires again and again.

“Mora!” he yells. “Move the greyskins!”

Move the greyskins?

Of course! How stupid could I be? If I can make cranes crash into buildings, then I can throw a greyskin or two around. Or thirty. I close my eyes and focus on them as they run, ripping them from gravity’s grip. With another thought, I fling them into trees and onto the ground. 

Some don’t move after the impact, but others force themselves back to their feet. I become their target again. But this time, I have even more help. Seemingly from out of nowhere, a rock the size of a vehicle smashes a group of seven or more greyskins into the ground. A quick glance to my left reveals Danny, picking up a fallen tree that I didn’t even notice before. I had panicked too much to notice.

A quick blur of motion whiz
zes past me and toward the greyskins, and Heather dispatches them one-by-one. Normally, I would try to help in the effort of killing the greyskins, but I’m captivated by the scene in front of me; especially when Aaron comes over the top of the tr toh to ee-covered hill and shoots electricity into about five of them at once. 

One after another the greyskins fall. And for the first time, I see what it is that Evelyn is trying to create. I see the kind of potential the Starborns really have. I also see why Jeremiah has made it his primary goal to bring us to his side. 

When the bodies finish moving, when all the greyskins are dead on the ground; the forest is quiet, and the smoke clears, I see us for what we really are. 

Protectors of the human race.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Connor steps forward to ask if I’m okay, but I don’t answer him. Instead, I ask him my own question. 

“How did you find us out here?”

Danny, Heather, and Aaron stand next to me. Connor faces all of us, but apparently feels no intimidation. To me, that’s a good thing. I don’t want him to feel that way toward us. Most of all I don’t want him to feel that way toward
me
. 

“I’ve been following you and Aaron,” he says. “I saw Heinrich taking you away from the crowds and I was curious as to where you were going to hide. You can imagine my surprise when I saw you leaving the colony.”

I can feel my cheeks burning red. Does this mean that he saw me kissing Aaron? I didn’t want that. I don’t even understand my attraction for either of them, but something inside me seems torn by feelings for both of them. But I don’t want to be attached to either of them. 

I don’t know if he saw us, but Connor’s eyes are full of pain. Perhaps he feels betrayal. All he has wanted this whole time was to look out for me. 

“I was pretty surprised with your presentation yesterday, Mora.”

“Go back to the colony,” Aaron says, stepping forward. “You shouldn’t have come out here. You’re going to mess everything up.”

“Mess what up exactly?” Connor asks with narrowed eyes. “Your little magic club that you’ve been hiding from me for years now?”

“Go back,” Aaron repeats. 

“What’s your plan?” Connor asks. “You want to take down Jeremiah, but you’ll take the rest of us down with you. All of you forget that most of us don’t want Screven gone. Some of us like the protection his guards provide.”

“Some of you are ignorant fools,” Aaron comes back, but Connor only shakes his head and looks at me again. 

“So, you’ve become fully seduced by Aaron and his band of magical insurrectionists,” he says. 

“It’s something you’ve only known about for a few days,” I say. “How can you be so against it?”

“It’s not your abilities I’m against,” Connor says. “Aaron’s hate for Jeremiah and the Screven guards has been there since the beginning. His special abilities are just a new twist to the story.”

“Connor, why don’t you leave?” Aaron says. 

“You run with a dangerous crowd when you run with them,” Connor says, nodding to those standing next to me. “Just don’t forget about your family. Don’t forget your original mission.”

Connor slings the gun over his shoulder and turns. His slow walk begs for me to go with him, but my feet are planted. He doesn’t look back as he walks from us, beaten and defeated. I fo kffun oveel torn as I watch him go.  

Danny and Heather start making their way back to the house, but Aaron and I stay, still watching until Connor is out of sight. 

“Why are the two of you so different?” I ask Aaron.

He doesn’t answer for a while, but I am patient. 

The rain has nearly stopped falling, and the first rays of sunlight begin to break through the clouds and treetops. 

“My relationship with Connor isn’t what it once was,” he says. “We used to be close. We grew up that way. It’s been six years since the greyskins attacked. Not long after that, Salem sought help. When we were kids, it was a village, much like your Springhill, I’m sure.”

Aaron begins to walk, and I follow. We aren’t headed back to the house. Our steps are random as we wander through the forest. 

He smiles at something. 

“I talk like greyskins attacking wasn’t a common occurrence.” He shakes his head at his own words. “But this particular attack affects me to this day. We’d gotten word of another village that had been attacked and they needed help setting up their defenses again. Salem had been pretty lucky, and my parents both volunteered to help. After being gone for more than a week, we started to get worried. Soon they came back.”

“Well, that’s good,” I say. 

“Would have been,” his tone is solemn, “if they hadn’t come back as greyskins.”

I do my best not to gasp at his words, but I can’t help it. 

“They came in the middle of the night. But there were hundreds of them. We assumed this group had broken off from the larger herd that had attacked the village my parents had gone to help.”

He lets out a sigh and a slight shudder.

“I don’t really know what happened,” he says. “It probably took them about a day to die. They reanimated and must have started walking toward Salem. Only there were many more that followed. They came in the middle of the night and surprised all of us. Somehow, I lost Connor in all the commotion. But the corpses of my parents came after me.”

“How did your parents know to come after you?” I ask in horror. “Greyskins can’t think.”

“To this day, I can’t really make any sense of it,” Aaron says. “Maybe their brains were working enough to remember images of me. Maybe it was a complete fluke. Either way, it was the most sickening experience of my life. And the most terrifying.”

I hold out a hand to touch Aaron’s arm, stopping our walk to nowhere. “You don’t have to continue,” I say. “I know how much this hurts.”

“But you need to understand where I’m coming from in all of this,” he says. So, I say nothing more. 

“My father came at me first. I didn’t know it, but the gun I was using had only one shot left. We were in our house. The big house, at the end of Salem. Have you seen it?”

I nod, not wanting to reveal what I saw there.

“Back then, Salem was full of houses, not these shacks you see now. Anyway, my parents got in somehow. I didn’t want to defend myself against them but I had to. It only took one shot to take down my father. But my mother came at me viciously. I got cornered. I thought I was about to die. That’s when the lights started flickering. The bulbs burst. Everything electronic in the house flowed to my body. I had no idea what was happening until the shocking light came out of my hands and fried her. There was a lot of glass and shrapnel. That’s what made this scar.”

Aaron pulls down his collar and sighs again, almost as if to keep himself composed. 

“I was left alone in the house with my dead parents lying on the floor. That’s when Connor came in and found me. For some reason, I never told him how it all happened. For some reason, he never asked. Shortly after that, Evelyn found me. She had heard about my situation, and she somehow knew about how I killed my parents. I know now that her suspicions were confirmed when she held my hand to comfort me.”

He pauses to rub his face with his hands. “There is much for you to learn about Evelyn. She is a good person and her intentions are pure. But her past is dark.”

“So, she’s hiding something?” I ask. 

“We’re all hiding something,” Aaron says. “You’re only the third person to know how I discovered what I am. You, Evelyn, and me.”

I’m surprised to hear this. I thought surely that Heather and Danny would know. When I express this to Aaron, he just shakes his head and smiles. “They’ve both asked me about it on separate occasions, but I decided not to tell them.”

“Why are you telling me?”

He doesn’t say anything for several quiet moments. I almost fear what his answer will be. In my mind, I’m pleading that he doesn’t say something about how much he cares for me, or how he has loved me since he first saw me.

“Because you’re the one that needs to know,” he says. 

I’m relieved that there is no declaration of deep feelings, but his answer leaves me curious.