Stolen (22 page)

Chapter 39

W
ES RAN OUT OF THE TEMPLE AND
INTO
the surrounding city, following the battle and following Nat. He flattened his body against the wall of a tower, protecting his head as an avalanche of debris clattered to the street. A gleaming tower collapsed, glass and steel billowing in all directions. Dust filled the air and he closed his eyes, feeling the smoke in his lungs. He coughed, wiping his eyes clean before rushing into the alley.

He found cover beneath the eyebrow of a shaded entry.

Where is she? Where's Nat?

A roar shot through the streets, the sound of bolts ripping, concrete exploding. The drakons were above him, in a dogfight above the city. Debris crashed to the street, exploding as it hit the pavement, destroying the sidewalks and benches, falling on the screaming tourists, the market. Soldiers had abandoned their positions, jumping into boats, trying to get as far away from the fighting monsters as possible.

Wes spied the white drakon. The creature swooped low, close to the street, picking up trucks and tossing them into the air. He followed the arc of the truck and saw it strike a building, just barely missing the black drakon. He saw Nat for a second, but she disappeared when the black drakon rolled, turning sharply to avoid the barrage of vehicles the white drakon had thrown at it.

It was unlike anything he'd ever seen.

Wes hoped Shakes and the others were safe by the dock. If they weren't at the dock already, he didn't see how they could get there. The drakons were tearing New Kandy apart, turning the streets into canyons of molten metal and glass.

Something heavy struck the windows above him, and glass dust showered down. He clamped a hand to his mouth and nose, kicked open a buckled metal door, and found shelter in an abandoned lobby. Pulverized glass and aluminum filled the smoke-saturated air. He wiped dust from his face, and his leg was throbbing with pain. When he bent to tie the tourniquet, his hand came up red with blood.

Freezing hunters.

Wes picked up his sniper's rifle and looked through the scope, tracking the white drakon. But it was hard to see through the haze, and he was worried about hitting Nat and her drakon instead.

The dust cleared, and he shoved open the door and darted into the street. He scanned the sky, heard distant roars. He dashed through an alley, through smoke and snow. He caught sight of the white drakon hovering.

Where are you now, Nat?

Wes hid beneath an overhang, shielding himself from the white drakon's gaze. Eliza was sitting on the white drakon, her blue eyes blazing; she tugged at the reins, and the white drakon climbed into the clouds. He lost track of the creature. He heard the beating of its wings, the tortured sounds of steel ripping and stone breaking, but he could not see the drakon, so he followed the creature's roar, the breaking of glass and stone, his heart pounding, his body sweating beneath the heat suit. He unzipped his jacket; he was burning up.

He dashed through empty streets, past the overturned tables and broken tents, struggling but most often failing to follow the white drakon. Whenever he approached, when he neared the drakon, the creature would turn suddenly or arc upward and disappear. Wes would scramble, trying to follow, dashing down alleys, peering through archways, but found nothing.

There was a tremendous roar, and through the clouds he saw the two drakons. White and black, engaged in a duel to the death.

The white drakon opened its jaws, enveloping Nat and her mount in a storm of white. Down below, Wes felt the white drakon's breath, icy cold, as formidable as the black drakon's flame.

Wes felt the cold all around. He had felt this same cold before. He knew where it came from, who had caused it, and the feeling was familiar, the sensation that nothing was quite what it seemed.

After all these years, the memory had not yet faded. He would never forget that moment. The night he had lost Eliza.

There had been a fire, just like this. A cold fire, one that chilled to the bone, that turned breath into ice. And that's when he knew.

It wasn't real.

The white drakon wasn't real.

None of it was real.

It was just another of Eliza's illusions. She had woven a great story, crafted a drakon out of the air to fight Nat's. Her power had changed. It had grown. He didn't know how she had accomplished this feat, but he sensed an evolution. Eliza's tricks, her illusions, were no longer ephemera. The drakon wasn't real but even so it had substance. Her illusions had the power to kill and to destroy—the damaged city was real, and the destruction was real.

His sister, the weaver.

Teller of tales.

Weaver of lies.

She had always wanted to do more with her power, to exceed her given abilities, to weave deadlier and more potent worlds.

When they were little, Eliza would make puddles appear out of nowhere and he would trip, or she would make ghosts dance in the darkness of their bedroom. More than once she had set kids on fire, just to watch their reaction, to see them squirm as they tried in vain to dampen the illusory flames. She'd tricked him a few times, when he wasn't paying attention, but she'd never hurt him. Not much, at least. Not everyone was so lucky. She'd once made a glass door look open when it was closed. A girl, maybe eight, nine years old, hit the glass, shattering the pane, blood on her hands and face.

The night Eliza disappeared, the night of the fire, she had told him she was going to do it.
Someone is coming for you,
she'd said.
But I won't let them take you away. I will burn down the house before they do.

He didn't believe her. Eliza always said stuff like that. But frightened and curious, he had stayed up that night, waiting. After midnight, he heard noise, confusion, yelling. A wild flame lit their room, a blaze so bright, it hurt his eyes.

But there was no heat. Only cold, and he'd known it wasn't real.

Nothing she did was real; it only felt real, only smelled and tasted real, but it wasn't real—or at least it had not been real when they were children. Wes had not seen his sister in nine years; she was seven when they last spoke. Those years, the time they had spent apart, had changed her; Eliza's power had grown. He tried to recall the night she disappeared, the iridescent light, his bedroom, his bed, aflame. And now, for the first time, as if he had repressed the memory on his own—or maybe Eliza had blocked it—he remembered the figures who had come that night, who had come to take her away.

The tall woman in white with the sad eyes who stared at the two of them.

Twins?
she'd said.
I did not see two in my mirror.

It's me,
Eliza had said.
It's me that you want!

Then they were gone and Eliza with them.

This isn't real. Stop it. Stop her.

He could do it.

Whatever this was, whether it was real or not, he could stop this.

He could stop Eliza's power.

He could do it when he was a child and he could do it now.

He felt a release of pressure, a ringing in his ears, and a red trickle of blood began to flow from his right nostril. Pain washed over him, but he did not relent, he had to keep fighting, fighting back against the cold that threatened to take them all.

Chapter 40

T
HERE HAD BEEN NO
TIME TO ACT,
no moment to counter the white drakon's strike.
I will not die—not like this,
Nat thought, but it was too late. The white drakon was upon her. It had unleashed a blast of ice, cold enough to freeze her bones into glass, but just before the cold could hit, it halted in midair and moved around and away from her as if she were protected by a bubble.

Nat was safe inside a shield that blocked the white flame, sitting inside an impenetrable barrier. The white frost fell harmlessly against the swirling orb and did not touch her. She was unaffected even though she was at the heart of the cold fire.

Nat sat, transfixed by the flames, her drakon's wings flapping, the creature suspended above the city. The white drakon poured its flame into the air, throwing its hatred and its madness into the white cloud, its cold flame billowing like an icy hurricane. Nat did not flinch or move. She sat, motionless, like a stone fixed in a babbling river, the frost flowing like water around her.

Then she saw him.

Wes, standing in the middle of the street, looking up at her, his face pale and his eyes red-rimmed, blood pouring out of his nose, dripping onto his shirt.

He was doing this somehow. He was shielding her from the cold, holding back the deadly frost.

The cold fire began to close in on itself, and now it was Eliza who was screaming in terror. The cold consumed her, and in an instant, as quickly as it had appeared out of the charm, the white drakon disappeared.

And Eliza plummeted to the street.

Chapter 41

W
ES SAW
E
LIZA FALLING.
H
E SAW HER
disappear into a haze of dust and smoke. When he reached the place where she had fallen, he saw a pile of wreckage, broken pieces of marble, dust, snow, and ash left over from the battle. Wes scrambled through the pile, shouting his sister's name. “ELIZA!” He needed to find her. He hadn't known she would fall to the street when he shattered her illusion. He hadn't had time to think. His only thought had been to save Nat. He didn't mean to hurt his sister. He was angry and furious and horrified to find who she had become, but she was still family. He couldn't leave her here, lying beneath the wreckage, gone and forgotten. In spite of what she'd done, he still thought he could help her.

Right before her drakon had disappeared, right before it was clear that he would win, that his power—whatever it was—would be able to push back the cold that she had created, she had called to him.

“Ryan,” Eliza had whimpered. “Ryan, don't, you're hurting me. Ryan!” And it was the voice of the sister he remembered.

Eliza, nine months old, when they still shared a crib.

They said twins had a secret language, and he had always felt special because he was one. He had a sister. His parents weren't rich, they couldn't have afforded a second child license, and just by luck, they had rolled the dice and come up snake eyes. Two children.

Eliza, at three, with her chubby fingers and secret giggle.

“Don't do it, Ryan, please. Don't hurt meeeee.”

Wes had almost given in, had almost stopped fighting her, when he remembered Liannan's words.
She will use anything and everything against you.
Even his love for her. He had brought his crew, his family, to the far side of the world to find her.

He had said good-bye to the girl he loved so he could fix what was broken inside of his sister.

“No one ever loved me, because I was different, because I was marked,” she told him while they fought, cold against shield.

“That isn't true, Eliza. We all loved you, Mom, Dad, me. You were loved. You just didn't see it. You never understood that we didn't love you
in spite of
your power; we loved you
because of it.
We were proud of you. We loved you.”

And he pressed the shield forward until the cold cracked, until he had used everything in his power to destroy her. She was gone. Eliza was no more.

Now he stood in the middle of the pile where his sister had been and wept bitter tears at her passing. He was alone in the world; there was no one left of his family.

Then he felt a soft, warm breeze on his back. He turned around.

Nat had arrived on her drakon. “Wes!” she called, sliding off the saddle and almost falling.

He ran to her and she jumped into his arms. He held her so fiercely, he didn't think he would ever let go. She bent down to kiss him and slowly slid down the length of his body.

“You're covered in blood,” Nat said.

Wes looked down. There was blood all over his shirt, on his face, his hands. “It's okay.”

“You did it,” she whispered. “You saved us.”

He nodded, too tired to speak. The wind had stilled, but now snow was falling, burying them in soft white flakes.

“I'm so sorry about Eliza,” she said.

He nodded. There was nothing more to say. She was his sister and he loved her and now she was gone.

Nat took his hand and helped him up so he could sit behind her on the drakon's back. “You all right?” she asked, turning around.

He grunted.

“I'll take that as a yes,” she said, digging in her heels so that the drakon soared into the sky.

“Whoa! Take it easy,” he said. Wes had never flown on the back of a drakon before, had never been this high off the ground.
The world is not the world I knew,
he thought.

Beneath them, the whole gray earth seemed to pitch and roll back and forth. The sea and the grid of the city slid about, miles below, as if he and Nat and the drakon were the one fixed point in all the universe.

Maybe we are,
he thought as his head ached and his own blood dripped down his throat.

He did not know anything, not anymore.

His sister was not his sister, but his enemy was not only his enemy, either.

The story of his life had slid apart and broken into pieces. He tried to catch them, but his head hurt and there was so much blood.

He could almost hear his sister's voice in his head—not the Lady Algeana's, but his sister's. Eliza's.

Try. Look.

What do you see?

What is really there?

He opened his eyes and saw.

Everything is smaller from up here, but somehow more vast.

We crawl like ants on a leaf, but the leaf stretches all the way to the horizon.

Wes dropped his head and let the air and the sea blow past him.

He was a creature of the earth, and he preferred the ground, its solidity, or the sea, as he knew how to keep balance even as the waves moved underneath him. But this—this was not the earth that he knew. This was something else, something new and different and wonderful.

Wes was tired, so tired, and he leaned against Nat's back and closed his eyes.

He had done it. He had defeated the Lady Algeana, had used his power against hers.

My power,
he thought.
I have power.

Why, and why now?

Where did it come from?

Had he always known, or was it something he hid even from himself, like the memory of the night his sister was taken? Was it something he had pushed away, if only because he never wanted to be like her?

He couldn't accept that Eliza was truly dead or that he had killed her. He hadn't wanted that for his sister, he had not meant her harm, he had only meant to keep her from destroying Nat.

He was so very tired.

But it was okay. He was with Nat, and they would be together now. Whatever happened, nothing would separate them.

Wes held on tightly and vowed never to let go.

The earth can keep rolling. I have the one piece that matters. It's not going anywhere.

Nat's not going anywhere and neither am I. Not anymore.

We are fixed.

Together they flew to the only ferryboat left on the dock, where their friends were waiting.