Reign of Shadows (8 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Aern

“They’re coming,” Brianna said. She was wrapped in Logan’s arms, Emily’s palm pressed to her cheek. She’d only been out for a moment, but it hadn’t made it any less
terrifying. Aern moved closer, touching Emily’s back as he listened for more. “Seven of them,” Brianna continued, “dark clothes, some kind of uniform maybe. There are three women and four men.” Her eyelids fluttered, but did not open. “He’s not going with them. He wants me to see. To know.” She shuddered, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “To kill them.”

Aern’s gaze connected with Logan where he stood, jaw tight as
he held Brianna’s limp form. This was it, the start of what their prophet had feared. They needed to fight, but they needed to protect her. “How long?” Aern said.

Brianna took a deep breath, forcing her eyes open
to find him. “I can’t see. The building looked industrial, maybe a warehouse, but they were heading toward a van. There’s something stopping me from finding it, something blocking my real visions.”

Aern nodded. “This time, we wait
at the gates. I don’t want to give them the chance we gave Morgan.” He hesitated, remembering the fall Brianna had taken before the battle with Morgan, the vision this dark-haired man had sent her that was nearly a seizure. “Can we trust him, Brianna?”

“I don’t trust him at all,
” she said, lowering her gaze. “But the images he’s sending me are real. Don’t ever doubt that.” She wrapped a hand around Logan, steadying herself until she was certain she could remain upright. Her eyes were clear when they met Emily’s and then Aern’s. “I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

Emily touched her sister’s arm before turning to Aern, ready to follow whatever plan of attack he had in mind. It was less than four minutes later when his men were assembled in the main hall, all of them aware of the new threat they faced, the power that could overwhelm any of them. Kara, Seth, and Eric stood front and center, key players now that Brianna had given them
extra abilities, restored their connections. Wesley came through the west entrance with Ellin, who appeared to have some trouble with her right hip, but Aern didn’t think she would let that stop her.

“Give them nothing,” Aern continued his instruction
. “Don’t hesitate, because they. Will. Not.” He punctuated his words by connecting with the stares of his men. They had to understand, to have no doubt. “There will be fire. There will be wind. There will be destruction the likes you’ve never imagined. Push through it. There is only one way out. Seven men. Seven.”

His gaze roamed the room of fifty, hoping it would be enough, hoping they weren’t making a mistake.

Emily slid closer, and he could feel her impatience, her readiness, her concern. He gestured for the group to split as he’d instructed, catching Emily’s eye before he called to Wesley and Ellin. “With me.” Soldiers filed past them, a steady rush of boots on the ancient timbers covering the floor, leaving nothing but the four of them to walk toward the lawn. “Eric, Seth, and Kara will be splitting their teams just inside the gates and across the lawn. The rest of the men are positioned throughout the lobby and entrance points. We will be waiting at the south gatehouse, able to move wherever their response requires.”

“I can’t run,” Ellin put in, an apology in her tone.

Aern kept walking. “You won’t need to. This will happen fast.” He glanced at her. “If they make it past us, there’ll be nowhere to go.”
Seven
, Aern thought. Seven shadows and only the handful of them.

As they walked from the building, down stone steps laid in place a hundred years ago, Logan’s team darted past. One by one, heavily armed, they ran over the lawn to their positions, until the sixth man slowed in a spin
, his rifle tip pointed to the sky. It was Daniels, catching Aern’s gaze to throw him a wink that could only mean one thing.

“Brianna,” Emily whispered.

Aern’s hand automatically came to her waist, because the word was full of emotion and understanding. Brianna had given all of the Seven Lines hope, she had turned six men who were more than capable of helping, but at a cost too great for any of them to bear. Because it would hurt her; it was taking something from Brianna each time, exhausting her.

And they needed
her.

Aern turned to find the entrance, Brianna and Logan making their way from the building behind them. Her face was wan, but determined. She knew
better than anyone the importance of the occasion.

In the end, Ellin and Wesley stood at the window of the gatehouse while Aern and Emily waited
near the side door. Brianna sat on the ground at Logan’s feet. He didn’t appear comfortable with the situation, but no one was prepared to argue with her while she was searching for some sort of vision.

“I just want a clue,” she muttered, visibly annoyed with whatever
had fogged up her view of the shadows. Her arm twitched, purposefully elbowing Logan in the shin. “Tell Rhona to hold back, he won’t get clear of the tree falling.”

Logan pressed the device in his ear, repeating the message as Brianna instructed.
Given where Rhona was positioned, he must have replied something like, “What tree?” because Logan’s response was clipped, an order. “I said hold back.”

Emily glanced out the window, tapping a finger
on the handle of her blade where it rested beneath her shirt. She’d drawn her hair into a tight ponytail, double-knotted the laces of her shoes. “How long?” she asked again.

“Soon,” Brianna said, eyes tight against whatever image rolled through her mind.

The lights flickered, a brief instant of darkness before they were back again, too strong. The monitors lining the wall shot through with static, and then flashed white; a quick buzz sounded in Aern’s ear before it snapped, an electric
pop
that caused him to jerk the device free, toss it onto the floor. The room was suddenly bright, lit with sparks, and then nothing remained but the pale glow coming in through the windows, sunlight filtered by a narrow line of trees.

“They’re here,” Brianna said from the floor.

“That is so creepy,” Emily replied.

“Not a coincidence
, I’m guessing?” Ellin asked of the surge that had just disabled their electronics and cut the camera feed. She didn’t take her eyes off the window that was now their only warning of the shadows’ coming approach.

“No,” Wesley said from beside her. “I felt the spike. It’s coming from the tree line over there. They’ve hit the guard houses and everything in about a fifty-foot radius.”

Aern glanced at Logan, their communication systems completely down and no way to alert the others, to tell them where at least one shadow hid. Wesley saw the exchange and said, “I’ll go.”

“I’ll follow him,”
Ellin said, eyeing the distance to the trees he’d indicated. “I can make it.”

Brianna pushed herself up from her spot on the floor
, no one moving until she spoke. “That should work. When you get outside, take the wide arc, let them come past you.” She pressed a finger into Wesley’s chest, warning him. “Only this one. Don’t approach the others.”

Wesley nodded,
and Aern could feel that he trusted her order without reservation. There was a silence, a sudden stillness, and Brianna said, “Now.”

All
eyes fell to the window, metal bars resting over shatterproof glass.

Chapter Twenty

Brianna

Brianna watched as the iron gatework between the sculpted block walls that bordered the property melted to a pool on the asphalt below. It was only minutes ago that she’d been surrounded by Logan’s team, an awkward scene where she’d instructed them all to remove their shirts and they’d done so without so much as a snigger. And now she stood with Logan and Aern and Emily, waiting for unknown shadows, seven opponents the man from her visions wanted her to destroy.

Because they were coming
for her.

Brianna wasn’t a killer. She didn’t want to be the cause of war, of any man’s death. But if the flashes of vision
s she was getting had shown her anything, it was that if she didn’t fight, if they didn’t win, a great number of them would die. She pressed her fingernails into her palms, forcing the images down—bodies strewn across the lawn, mangled and torn, trees uprooted, scorched earth. As if a tornado had raged through the yard. She would do it, she would fight. But she wanted there to be a way to make it right.

She glanced at Emily, thinking of how
her sister had burned away Morgan’s power, left him so that he was no longer a danger, and wondered if that gift would work on other shadows.

At the sound of the first gun firing, Brianna’s fear intensified, and Aern’s head snapped up, away from the spot he’d been watching. He’d somehow felt her, she realized, sensed her reaction to the coming fight. Un
derstanding passed between them in that instant of time, and then the door to the gatehouse flew open as the four of them rushed into the light.

It was already chaos. The shadows must have known, somehow predicted the ambush. Brianna hadn’t anticipated things to escalate so quickly, but the moment she stepped from the shelter of the gatehouse
, heart pounding, she felt the assault of wind and debris. She pushed her own power forward, creating a tunnel for her and Logan to run, and saw Emily bearing down on a man in black who dwarfed her. The man’s dark eyes connected with Brianna in a spark of recognition, but she couldn’t stay focused on him, because two more shadows were rushing toward her and Logan.

The shadows
were weaponless, heading for her with single-minded focus, and Brianna
felt
them. It wasn’t that same tug, the pull she sensed from the dark-haired man, but the instinct to run or to fight. The exhaustion that had been plaguing her was suddenly gone; her shoulders drew back with the impulse to use her power, to strike. The woman seemed to recognize Brianna’s response, and she bared clenched teeth as she threw up her own arms, prepared for the clash.

Brianna
hurled a force of wind at both shadows and Logan was suddenly beside her, running full speed as he gestured toward his team, all other communication lost from the surge and the roar of wind. Several of them must have fired, because the woman spun as her right shoulder was struck, pitching her back long enough that Brianna could take stock, see that the other man had been hit in the knee. It wasn’t slowing them down as it should have, their black uniforms hiding body armor or some other form of protection, and she knew Logan’s men wouldn’t risk it again. The shadows were too close; their next marks would be higher.

A bullet whizzed past Brianna, landing solidly into a post several yards beyond where the shadow’s head would have been, but the woman had dodged it with a precision that was unreal. Brianna and Logan were closing the distance when an explosion rocked the gatehouse behind them. The pocket of air protected them from the onslaught of brick and metal, but th
ey were thrown forward by the concussion.

L
ogan shoved his arms out and Brianna recognized the aura before she realized what he was doing. They landed with a less painful impact than they should have, pushing themselves up before their opponents, but she didn’t take time to examine whether he’d softened their landing with a tactic like her wind tunnel, or somehow altered gravity and mass. Because across the narrow strip of grass that separated her and Logan from the shadows, they’d landed in a crouch and would soon be on their feet.

The blast had
slowed them, she was grateful to see, but they must have expected the pulse and used their gifts to better react. They’d had their powers their whole lives, not a matter of days or hours like Brianna and the others, and that knowledge didn’t help her confidence in the least. The ground shook and trees lifted root and all from the earth where they lined the block wall, suddenly missiles that were knocking Council men off their feet. There was a synchronized
snap
from all around them as the sprinkler heads shattered from the pressure, the water spraying a mist only a heartbeat before it was redirected en masse toward an oncoming shadow. And all of this before the first minutes had passed.

Brianna tucked her head down, driving into the sudden wind for the final few yards to her target
, and was thrown abruptly sideways by some unseen force. Sparks flew as the Council men fired their weapons toward the second shadow, and Logan powered into him at waist level, the two men hitting with unnatural force. Three more shadows were swiftly approaching, doing their best to toss aside the assaults from Eric, Seth, and Kara. Only one had fallen, a dark-clad mass who rested beneath Aern and Emily, who pressed down on him as if they weren’t quite sure he was overpowered. A supernatural gust of wind revealed where Ellin and Wesley fought the seventh behind what trees and block remained.

Hair whipping around her, Brianna dug her fingers into the soil, securing herself to focus on the fight. Her power was strongest through touch, but she would get nowhere with hand-to-hand combat if she couldn’t in fact get a hand on one of them.
She shoved every last thought she had into blasting the woman forward with concentrated wind, the way Emily had been trying to make projectiles out of marbles. Apparently caught off guard by the blast pushing her forward, the woman landed solidly on the ground near Brianna, air rushing out of her as her chest met with packed earth. Dirt clung to Brianna’s fingers as she pushed free, launching herself into the other woman. Her hands wrapped around the shadow’s head, clutching her temples as her grip secured itself into the ridge of the shadow’s eye sockets.  

Brianna’s
hesitation was gone when she felt the ire of the woman, sensed her intent. Something in Brianna warned her of shadows, something said
danger
. But this shadow was different; this was a siren in her head screaming
kill or be killed
. Brianna thrust her power into the woman, breaking every fragile part that made her body work. There was something feral in Brianna, some savage loathing that pushed her farther than she’d ever gone. And then she was thrown free of the woman, struck full-force by another shadow to land sprawled on the destruction of the lawn below.