Tegan's Power (The Ultimate Power Series #4) (32 page)

“What trickery is
this?!”

I look up from where
I’m pumping my hands into Emilia’s chest after I’ve given her mouth to mouth to
see Roman advancing on Theodore with a sword. I try to focus on Emilia but my
gut sinks when it becomes evident that there’s nothing more I can do. She’s
dead. Roman’s magic must have been too much for her body to handle.

And the saddest thing
is that I’m not sure there’s anyone who will even mourn her.

I brush some hair away
from her aged but still beautiful face and place a soft kiss to her cheek.
That’s all the goodbyes I have time for because the others need me now.
Cristescu has got Rita’s arms pinned behind her back as she struggles and kicks
at him to let her go. She even tries to bite him.

“You need to let go of
me! You need to let me go!” she screams but the vampire isn’t budging an inch.

Gabriel is holding a
can of petrol nearby, waiting for Roman to gain the upper hand with Theodore.
Unfortunately, it looks like our hero is failing in that department. Theodore
is throwing bolts of magic at him, easily keeping him far enough away so that
there’s no chance of him using the sword.

Pulling my bow from off
my back, I shoot an arrow at Theodore, clocking him right in the stomach. It
doesn’t even make him bleed but simply pops right out and I get a blast of
magic thrown my way in retaliation. Christ, it burns like acid seeping under my
skin. The skin on my hand bubbles and spits and I swear profusely with the
pain.

Ira, who has shifted
into his canine form, approaches Theodore from behind while his focus is on Roman,
clamping his fangs down into Theodore’s shin. The sorcerer shows minimal signs
of discomfort when he winces at the bite. A moment later he easily kicks Ira
away and continues battling Roman.

What a fuckup this is
turning out to be.

Theodore raises both
his hands in front of him and purple light streams out, blasting Roman full
tilt and knocking him entirely unconscious. Then he pulls a vial of blood from his
pocket and pops open the cork. Bringing it to his mouth, he downs the entire
thing in one go.

Gross.

He reaches up into the
sky, his magic still streaming from his hands. A loud tearing sound erupts as a
hole is torn in the clouds. A black, fiery rip is created and I swear I almost
piss my pants when I see dark winged shapes hovering around the outskirts,
waiting to come through.

I’m willing to bet that
was Rebecca’s blood he just drank, and this hole is a portal from hell. Only
nobody’s going there, this time whatever’s over there is coming here.

“Let. Me. Go!” Rita
screeches and finally manages to free one of her hands from Cristescu’s hold.
She smacks him hard in the face with magic and he reels back long enough for
her to get away. I hadn’t noticed before but she’s actually got a sword strapped
across her shoulders underneath a plain black backpack. She whips off the sword
and goes charging to the other side of the stage.

Roman has just now
regained his consciousness and is advancing on Theodore, whose attention is on
the ugly tear he created in the sky.

“Come on, my pretties,
don’t be shy. There is a whole world for you to feast on down here,” he sings
to the creatures that I can almost feel pushing against the thin membrane between
our dimension and theirs.

I start to run,
thinking I’ll stop Rita before she gets the chance to saw off Roman’s head. I’m
not fast enough though, and she rushes easily out of my reach. The sorcerer is
our final hope and now he might as well be done for. The little witch leaps up
into the air, the sword held high above her head. I can hardly look as the
blade comes within inches of Roman, but instead of swinging it his way, she
changes directions and slices right through Theodore’s neck.

Eh…what?

She cuts his head clean
off and for a second, or maybe even a minute, my brain is too discombobulated
to figure out what just happened.

Rita decapitated her
own father.

The second his head
hits the stage floor the tear closes up and the creatures that had almost
broken through completely disappear. White fluffy clouds fill the sky once
more.

We all stare at Rita,
dumbfounded, as she lets her sword fall to the ground and then pulls off the
backpack. She doesn’t look at a single one of us as she zips it open, takes out
a can of petrol almost identical to the one Gabriel had brought, and begins
dousing Theodore’s head and body.

I hear the shake of a
box of matches just before she whips one out, lights it up and flings it at her
father’s corpse. It catches fire instantly and goes up in a mesmerising display
of purple and black flames.

Tegan

Three
hours earlier

I blink my eyes, knowing I feel way too
shitty to be dead – unless by some sick twist of fate I’ve ended up in hell. I
peer around myself and discover that no, I’m not in hell. I’m still lying flat
down in the mud, my neck sore and swollen from almost being choked to death.

I can hear sobbing
coming from nearby. Weakly pulling myself up to a sitting position I spot Rita
a few feet away, her arms around her knees that she’s cradling to her chest.
She’s quietly weeping, tears running down her face. The last thing I can
remember is that same face looking at me with pure hatred. Now there’s nothing
left but sadness.

I shift my body a
fraction and her eyes whip up to mine.

“Not another move,
Tegan.”

“Rita…I…”

“I said not another
move.”

“Okay, I won’t move.”

She looks away from me
then and wipes her eyes with the long sleeves of her dress. Both our clothes
are completely destroyed with grass and dirt. I feel like I’ve simultaneously
been punched in the throat and swallowed a bag of sand.

“So, why didn’t you
finish me off?” I ask in a sore, raspy voice.

She doesn’t answer me
for a very long time, then I all I get is, “I don’t know.”

“You must know. What
made you stop?”

“I said I don’t fucking
know. Now will you please just shut up?”

I reach up and rub at
my bruised neck, and that’s when I notice there’s something wrong with my hand.
The index finger is hanging limply and I can’t seem to move it. My body must
have gone into shock and blocked out the pain for a time, because now my entire
hand is screaming in agony. I suck in a sharp, hissing breath and try to focus
through the pain.

“You broke my finger.”

“You got lucky then.”

“Rita, I know why you
stopped. You stopped because you couldn’t bear to kill someone who’s your
friend. No matter how much you try to convince yourself you’re evil, you know
it’s not true. You know that Theodore is a madman, and I’m sorry to have to
tell you this but despite the fact that he’s your biological parent, you’re
nothing like him.”

Talking seems to be
distracting me from my effed up finger, so I keep going.

“Even now when I look
at you I see Noreen. I see her in your eyes and in your hair. I see her in your
face. She will always be a part of you, a far bigger part because she’s the one
who brought you into this world and she’s the one who raised you. Theodore is
no better than a passing sperm donor and you know it.”

I feel like I haven’t
gotten through to her, and I don’t know what else to say. But then, Rita starts
to speak. “If that’s true then how come every time I look in the mirror all I
see is him? All I see is a lost cause.”

“If you were a lost
cause you would have killed me, but you didn’t. The good in you stopped it from
happening.”

“I can’t find the
good.”

I’m being brave when I
get up on my hands and knees and crawl to her. She doesn’t tell me not to move.
Instead she waits patiently for me to get to her.

“I can help you find
it,” I whisper, kneeling before her now. Her eyes lift to mine and there’s a
trickle of hope within their watery, tear reddened depths.

“Okay, then. Help me,”
she says, her voice barely audible.

“First you need to kill
the darkness.”

“How?”

“By killing the person
you think put it there. You have to kill Theodore.”

Her eyes widen in
disbelief. “I can’t do that. You don’t understand how powerful he is. I’ve
spent time with him. The magic he possesses is unfathomable.”

“That doesn’t matter.
Everybody has a weak spot, and I think you just might be his. He’ll never
expect you to be the one that kills him. You have the element of surprise on
your side.”

“Element of surprise,
or not. I don’t know
how
to kill him, Tegan.”

“Ah, but I do,” I say,
pulling off my backpack and Ethan’s sword. “I have everything you need right
here.”

It takes only a minute
or so to explain to her what I need her to do. We both rise to our feet and I
take her into my arms, hugging her tight. This might be a tentative arrangement,
but I think I may have actually won Rita back. Once we break the hug she
disappears and I curse. Theodore must have shown her how to magically transport
herself, while I’m left here in the middle of nowhere.

Shoving my hand into my
pocket, I retrieve my phone only to find the screen’s been cracked in several
places from our earlier scuffle.

Great.

I stare out at the long
stretch of empty field ahead of me and know I have a long walk back to Ethan’s.
Fingers crossed I don’t pass out before I get there.

A New Day

Finn

It feels like there’s been silence for
years as we all watch Rita do away with the remains of her sorcerer dad.

The silence is broken,
however, when Cristescu asks, “Is that
my
sword?”

I can’t help but to
burst out laughing. Then Gabriel and Alvie join in. Soon enough, we’re all
cracking up, our relief at having escaped a full scale apocalypse by the skin
of our teeth coming out in uncontrollable laughter.

Once the flames die
down and there’s nothing left of Theodore but a pile of ash, Rita looks to
Cristescu and answers, “The sword probably is yours. Tegan gave it to me.”

“Hold on a second,
Tegan was in on this?” I question. That crafty little mare.

She nods and sits down
on the edge of the stage. “We fought. I was going to kill her but then I
realised I couldn’t do it. That’s when we made a deal. She said she’d help find
the old me, but first I had to kill Theodore because he was the one pulling me into
the dark.”

I walk over and sit
down beside her, throwing my arm around her shoulders. She goes tense for a
moment, but then relaxes into it. “I don’t think you need any help. I think the
old you was there all along, you just didn’t know it.”

Her nod is almost
imperceptible. A minute or two later Alvie tentatively approaches us, sitting
down on the other side of Rita.

“Reet,” he chokes out
and she turns her head to him.

I’m not sure what she’s
going to do, but then she pulls away from me and wraps her arms around Alvie’s
small frame, squeezing him tight. They both start crying. The others join us to
sit on the edge of the stage, a sea of bodies before us.

“There are going to be
many changes in this city,” says Cristescu, a solemn but determined sound to
his voice.

Nobody replies, but we
all know it’s true.

It’s certainly a strange feeling to look
down on your city and see everyone lying prone on the ground, a charade of
death. When we were kids, my little sister’s favourite fairy tale was sleeping
beauty. Right now I’m looking at thousands of sleeping beauties, and I’m hoping
that just like the princess, they’re all going to wake up soon.

It’s a couple of
minutes before sunrise. I’ve brought Allora with me up onto the roof of a department
store on Campion Row so that we can watch and wait for everyone to come alive
again.

Apparently I’d been
right about Emilia’s heart giving out because of the magic from Roman’s spell.
Now that she’s dead her barrier around the city has also been lifted. Ira wore
a strange expression when he heard what happened to her; it was more like sadness
than the relief I’d expected. I guess that despite what she’d done to him, he
started to feel sorry for the lonely old woman she’d become in the end.

Tegan also seemed a
little taken aback by the news. Her eyes grew watery and she left the room when
we told her. I didn’t see her again for a couple of hours. Perhaps she was
unconsciously holding onto the hope that Emilia would see the light and want to
be a decent grandmother to her in the end.

That’s not going to
happen now.

I look down at Roman as
he walks through the bodies, a delicate silver light streaming out of his hand
and touching off each person in turn. This is to ensure that they forget
everything that’s happened in Tribane over the last few weeks. A year ago I
never would have condoned the act of keeping people in the dark, but now I know
there’s no other way. If they knew they’d all go crazy and start following some
other cult leader in much the same way they’d started to follow Theodore.