Shattered (35 page)

The world was more peaceful
with my eyes closed. I could almost pretend Kamon wasn’t strangling me while
scratching at my mind. He was trying to read it and possibly see where my
mother was.

“I was fourteen,” he said. I
didn’t open my eyes. My muscles felt stronger this way. The slower I breathed,
the less I panicked, and the more strength I seemed to steal back. “I was
fourteen when Vincent Shaw ruined my life. He came to
my
home, with
my
master,
raving about his daughter. I knew then. I knew she would take him from me. I
tried to kill her on her first night. I was childish then. I put a poisonous
snake in her bed.”

He laughed, and I stopped
myself from thinking about the time on the watch.
Breathe
, I told myself. My only job was to breathe.

“I woke up with that snake
around my own neck,” he said. “I’d thought I’d underestimated her, but turns
out I didn’t. She fled on her own a few years later. But … she still took him
from me. He was the closest thing I had to family, and she took him! So, it is
with great pleasure that I take your life today. And trust me, little girl, everyone
she loves, everyone you love, will follow.”

He squeezed harder, but he wasn’t
hurting me at all. My mother was probably having a hard time breathing,
however. That was all I needed to think of–her on the floor with Sophia
and my father. My family. My real family. I wasn’t fighting for an evil man who
my twisted mind had aggrandized like Kamon was. This was real love. Real life.
And there was no way in hell he was taking it from me.

I opened my eyes and saw the
watch. Twenty-one seconds.

It took me three of them to
flip him over. The blood from my nose splattered on his face. Her blood. CC’s
blood. Vincent’s blood. I sensed Remi and Carter coming at me, but a flying
streak of white took them down. Nate.

I focused on the bones in
Kamon’s legs and crushed them with a thought. I caught my breath and went for
his back, cracking it in several places. I didn’t need to kill him. I just
needed him to keep still for fifteen seconds.

Fourteen. Thirteen.

Owen Yates appeared next to
him. Before he could touch his father, I gave him matching injuries. Broken
legs, broken back. I was very close to fainting now.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

Nate’s teeth were in Carter’s
arm, and his front paws were pinning Remi to the ground. I moved myself to him
and grabbed fistfuls of his fur.

Six. Five. Four.

I closed my eyes and imagined
us outside on the rocks. I didn’t think I could get us any further.

Three. Two.

The marble floor shifted to
the jagged rocks on the other side of the beach. Sand and water now separated
us from Kamon’s stone castle. Nate’s heavy body pressed me hard against the
edge of a cold rock. I opened my eyes and gasped.

Remi had caught one of his
legs, and Carter had one of mine. They’d made it safely out of the chapel.

One.

The blast knocked all four of
us back several feet. First, there was one big one, right in the center of the
castle. Then they kept coming, one after another, boom after boom. The walls
shook and stood their ground for a minute, then quivered and collapsed. It looked
like a planned demolition, the kind of destruction people are warned about so
they’d be nowhere near the premises.

Flames and smoke reached into
the dark sky. It made a dome around the crumbling rubble where the sky was as
bright as it would be in the afternoon. Christine and Carter screamed together like
they were in flames.

I lay on top of her, instead
of fighting Remi and the copy, to sooth her pain. Her arms shook, and she
burrowed her face into my fur, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Master!” Remi yelled. “We
have to go in there, Carter!” She rose to her knees, watching the building
fall, and sobbed. “He’s in there!”

Remi vanished and Carter
screamed, “Don’t!” It was too late. She’d already taken herself back into a
burning, collapsing building. I couldn’t call her crazy. If Chris were inside,
I would do the same thing.

Carter grunted and covered
his ears. He and Chris had a lot in common right now. Both of their senses were
going haywire, rendering them useless on the jagged rocks. He was vulnerable.
What would one more kill hurt?

“Kids!” Gregory yelled. I
barked at him to stay away, Carter was still a copy after all, but he kept
running towards us. I circled Carter while trying to plan my strike. All of
them needed to die. We couldn’t leave this loose end. “Nathan, come on! We have
to get Christine home!” I barked, a refusal, and pounced on Carter.

Something splattered against
the rocks and stole my attention. Gregory was trying to lift Christine as she
puked and bled and shook. Oh my God. She looked like she was about to die, like
all of the death in the air was pushing her there. I didn’t know if that could
happen, but I certainly wouldn’t take the risk.

I shifted and ran to them. By
the time we got her up to her feet, Carter was gone.

****

Gregory took us to the
warehouse and laid Chris on a bed next to one of the victims we’d saved. The
entire warehouse was full of people–some in robes, some in hospital
gowns, and some in tattered clothes.

Paul and Em’s parents darted
to us. Mr. Arnaud snapped and handed me a pair of pants. I hadn’t even realized
I was naked.

Chris stopped puking as soon
as we got her far enough from all of those deaths. Gregory held a towel to her
nose to catch the blood. When Paul and Em’s parents figured out what he’d done,
they screamed at all of us for doing something so incredibly dangerous.

I tuned them out as I glanced
around the room again. There were more than a hundred people in here. They were
eating, sleeping on cots, and being administered medicine and potions by
Sophia’s other children. They were nursing the captive children and the forced
hunters back to health.

It brought tears to my eyes.
Every one of them would’ve died tonight if not for Christine. Even though I
helped, it felt like the credit belonged to her. She’d volunteered to take her mother’s
place and made all of this possible. My girlfriend was a saint. I guessed that
was what you get when a superhero has a baby and leaves her with nuns for
seventeen years, only to have the nicest witch in the world become her
caretaker.

“Chris,” I said, squeezing
her hand as Gregory held a vial of the potion to her lips. He turned off her
powers to give her mind a break. Her eyes fluttered, and she gave my hand the
tiniest pulse. “Look at what you did,” I said.

“You did it,” she whispered.

Mrs. Arnaud and Mrs. Ewing took
over cleaning Christine’s face, but that didn’t stop them from yelling. Poor Gregory
was at the center of it. I escaped our surrogate parents’ wrath and went over
to the food table to help Paul’s cousin Stephanie. The little kids were
swarming her and snatching food faster than she could get it on a plate for them.
 

I managed to get them in a
shape close to a line. Without the chaos, she was able to start the job
assigned to her–get them calm and find out who their parents were. Many
of them were related, so we grouped them by the separate deliveries that would
have to be made to homes in Mexico. Siblings together, even cousins. Their
families were about to get the shock of their lives.

Paul appeared in the
warehouse and ran to his grandfather. “Mayday! Incoming!” he yelled. Because of
the hell I’d just come out of, I braced for another fight. We’d left that
stupid copy alive, and for all we knew, Remi could’ve made it out too.
Actually, Kamon could’ve made it out.

“Where is he?!!” Lydia
yelled. She, Sophia, and Mr. Gavin blew in like a storm. Emma followed them, warning
everyone too late. Paul and Emma stepped between Gregory and Christine’s pissed
off guardians.

“Before you hang me,” he
said. “I should tell you Kamon is dead, and Christine and Nathan are alive.
Look around you. Look at what they did. If anyone has an objection after that,
I’m willing to hear you out.”

I don’t think anyone could’ve
said anything better.

****

Christine

It took my mother forever to
calm down. What did it was that Pop and Nathan didn’t let me kill anyone. I was
grounded, of course, but she eventually stopped threatening to kill Pop. I
begged to stay and watch all of the children get to their parents, but Sophia
took my immediate family home, minus Nate. Dad allowed him to kiss me on the
cheek before leaving the warehouse.

I took the longest shower I’d
ever taken in my life. When I turned the water off, I still didn’t feel clean
and went back in for another scrub down. My parents were sitting on my bed
waiting for me to come out. They didn’t let me out of their sights for hours. We
cried together when I told them about the horrors I’d seen. I felt ten years
older after the short hour in that place.

Through the hours we spent
together, cuddled in bed like a normal family, they never once said they were
proud of me. Oddly, I didn’t expect them to. Especially not Mom. I’d bet it was
all she could do not to scream at me.

After dinner, we returned to
my room. Mom’s phone rang and I finally sensed our time together coming to an
end. She used her Lydia Shaw voice to answer.

“Shaw.” She let out a loud
breath. “Thank you. And the others? Good. Check in tomorrow when you need to.
I’ll answer.” She tossed her phone to the foot of my bed and sighed. “It’s
official. He’s confirmed dead. Kamon is dead.”

“And everyone else?” I asked.

“They aren’t sure yet, but
they suspect some got away. Not many, but some. Two copies were found dead.
Owen and William. Remi and Carter have not been found yet, but my agents are
still going through the rubble.”

“You’re not going to help?”
Dad asked.

Mom shook her head and lay
back on my pillows, pulling me into her arms.

“My daughter just risked her
life,” she said. “I can’t leave her. If you’re tired of me being here, we can
go somewhere else.”

“No. I was just asking. You
can stay or go … whatever.”

They made awkward eye contact,
and I sighed. “Cut the crap,” I said. “I know you’re together. I saw you
kissing.”

Dad sang a long and
hilarious, “
Whaaaaat
?”

“Don’t what me,” I said. “You
were kissing and you’re probably sleeping together, and all I’m asking is that
you two don’t gross me out. That’s what closed doors are for.”

They stuttered for a moment,
maybe trying to work out a story. Finally, Mom sighed and said, “Okay, kid. We
don’t know where it’s going, so that’s why we didn’t tell you.”

“I thought we kind of knew
where this was going…” Dad trailed off and frowned. “I guess we weren’t on the
same page. Not shocking.”

Mom reached over me and
touched his face. She held it there with this intense gaze. I discreetly
crawled away.

“We were, Gav. We
are
. I just didn’t want to get my hopes
up. I figured when you came to your senses, you’d change your mind. I wanted to
give you a way out.”

“I don’t want a way out.”

And then they started
kissing. In
my
bed! I shooed them out
and pushed them into the hall. “Goodnight!” I yelled.

They laughed and pulled me
into a three-way hug. “I love you, honey,” Mom said. “And we’re just going to
go talk.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “Talk.
We’ll come back after we … talk.”

I fanned my hand like:
yeah, yeah, yeah
, and closed my door. I
waited a moment then peeked out again. They were making out as Dad carried her
down the stairs. They were right on the edge of adorable and nauseating. I had
a feeling they were going to make life really weird for me for a while.

I flipped the lights off and
crawled in bed. I closed my eyes and saw ghost children, bones, and Kamon’s hypnotizing
eyes. If there wasn’t a chance I’d interrupt something, I would’ve run
downstairs and crawled in bed with my parents. Images from that horrible place
were burned into my mind. The more I thought about it, the more I shook and
wondered if I’d done enough to stop the second war.

We didn’t know where Carter
was, and Remi could’ve also gotten away.

My comforter lifted up and
let cold air into my bed. I panicked for the quickest moment before warm arms wrapped
around me. “I hope you don’t mind,” Nate said. “I invited myself over.”

I turned around and kissed
him. “Your timing couldn’t be better. I didn’t want to sleep alone.”

He pulled me closer, his arms
tight and protective. He was my best friend right now, my bodyguard. “You’ll
never have to.”

We fell asleep like that,
with his feet shielding mine and my head tucked against his bare chest. Like
magic, because of him, my heart settled, and I had the sweetest dreams.