“They did blood sacrifices up in the mountains of PA—some bad shit. Eddie, Poe, and Kim were up there with your mother and father, and they’ve told us what went down. My father died in the Doom. Mom put his name on the memorial tree.” Duncan gestured toward it. “Your father’s up there, too.”
She looked toward the tree. The stars on it shimmered quietly in the thin snow. “Will you show me?”
He walked her over, picked out the star with Max Fallon on it. “I don’t know who put it up. I never thought to ask.”
“It doesn’t matter who. It matters you honor the dead.”
“Is this why you’re here? You wanted to see this.”
“No.” But she reached out, brushed her fingertips over the star with her father’s name. “I didn’t mean to come.”
“Wires crossed?”
She looked at him in the shimmer of stars. He’d grown taller since she’d seen him last, and had a dark stubble over his cheeks. He hadn’t bothered with a hat so the snow fell over his hair, as shaggy and unkempt as before.
He wasn’t being an asshole, she thought, so she wouldn’t be one, either.
“I guess so. I went to Washington, D.C.”
“What? When? What’s going on?”
“Just now. I mean to say: I went there, meant to go home, but I’d just thought about New Hope, and … I thought about why. Why, why, why?” She paced away. “Why are they trying to kill us, or lock us away? The Purity Warriors, they’re vicious religious bigots—or they hide behind their version of God.”
“White’s version.”
“And theirs, or they wouldn’t follow him. Raiders, they are what they are. What they probably were before the Doom, or wanted to be. Bounty hunters, they want the reward, or just like the hunt. But the others. Why? Most of the world died horribly, and they waste time and lives hunting us down.”
“They blame us.”
“They’re blind and stupid.”
“Didn’t say otherwise,” he pointed out. “What did you see there? In D.C.?”
“Death. Death claiming more death. There’s no heart beating there anymore. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Eventually we’ll have to retake it, but its symbolism’s finished.” She turned back to him. “We’re mobilizing at home. Training.”
“About damn time.”
“There are other places, not so different from here, from home. We’ll need them. Did you find the traitor?”
“No. We haven’t had any more trouble like that. We have to figure whoever it was left. But we’re watching. They attacked, the PWs, like you said that night in the kitchen.”
“I know. I watched.”
“You were here?”
“No. You didn’t need me.”
“How did you get to D.C., then from there to here? Did you zip?”
Her brow creased. “ ‘Zip’?”
“Yeah, like.” He gripped her hand this time. She felt a quick rush, then they stood back at the edge of the gardens.
Her hand tingled in his.
“We call it flashing.”
“Zip, flash, same deal.” One that had taken him weeks of focused practice to learn, and weeks more to perfect. “Is that how?”
“No, it’s different.” She looked into his eyes. “I saw you in the moonlight walking from the trees through the fog toward a circle of stones. Toward the first shield. You told me I had to choose. You looked right at me through the dream and said I had to choose. I chose.”
“I saw you standing in the moonlight, in the fog by the stone circle. You carried your sword. This one. Solas. And when you lifted it, the sky cracked open with lightning.”
“What happens next?”
“I always come out of it. Wake up or come out of it. I never see. I’ve seen you on the battlefield, fought with you there. And … other things.”
“What other things?”
“Hell.”
He gave her hand one hard tug, and when her body bumped his, gripped her hair with his free hand, crushed his mouth to hers.
It was nothing like Mick, nothing soft and sweet and … nice.
This was hard and hot, and made her insides quake.
She could have struck him away—she would have if she’d thought of it. But everything churned and quivered and rocked.
The fingers of her hand on his shoulder dug in once as this connection, conflict, chaos that was nothing, nothing, nothing so gentle as the word kiss blew through her in a storm.
Then he drew her back as roughly as he’d drawn her in. His eyes burned into hers and didn’t look particularly pleased.
“I just figured it. It half pisses me off.”
“Let go or I’ll make you let go.”
“We could see who wins that battle, but”—he held his hands up, palms out, stepped back—“I guess you haven’t had that dream yet.”
“I don’t dream about you.” Lie, lie, lie.
“You just said you did.”
“That’s different.” Everything felt different, and it more than half pissed her off. “You’ve got no right to grab me like that.”
“You didn’t say no. Didn’t think it, either. A girl says or thinks no, that’s no.” He put a hand over her sword hand—just in case. Smiled at her. “Say no.”
Instead she pushed him back, a little harder than she intended, and retreated through the crystal.
“Didn’t say no that time, either,” he mumbled. “Or think it.”
He looked up as the light snow melted into light rain. “She’s not my type!” he told the heavens. “So cut me a break.”
He heard a distant rumble of thunder that sounded all too much like a laugh.
She didn’t have time to think about boys or kissing. Part of her sensed that Duncan kissed more like a man than a boy—or at least someone who’d done a lot of it.
It didn’t matter. She had work, important work. Not only building an army, brick by brick, but calculating just what to do once she had one.
She thought of D.C. often, pushed it aside, wound back to it. A dead city, but people lived in its ashes, and some who did lived locked away.
Prisoners, experiments, weapons.
Since the Doom, those who clung desperately to power or craved it had unleashed weapons. The magickal in killing lightning and burning winds, and the bombs men made that turned cities to rubble.
The problem with bombs was they could be turned back on those who launched them. In her nighttime journeys, Fallon visited the craters and ruins in Texas, California, Florida, Nevada.
The destructive power scorched her soul, but more, much more, the knowledge that humans would use such evil to destroy their own.
How many more waited to be woken to fly and fall?
Eradicating that power, that evil, had to be a priority.
“Even if you figured out how to disarm or destroy every bomb, every drone, and/or the capability to use them, globally,” Simon told her over one of their late-night strategy sessions, “they’ll build more.”
“Then we eliminate them. It’s too easy to kill when you’re not looking your enemy in the eye. You don’t see the child hiding under his bed when the flames take him. When black magicks fly, they seek to destroy. This isn’t any different. We’re asking people to fight with swords, small arms, their fists, and their powers when one of the enemies has the capability to turn them into dust with … technology. We find a way to destroy that technology. How do we thrive, Dad, after the battles, after all the blood and sacrifice and risk, if someone somewhere can kill thousands with a machine, with a code?”
She pushed up from the table, paced the kitchen, their usual meeting place. “It’s man’s magick—the atomic, the nuclear, the remote killing. And it’s just as dark as a strike of black lightning or the shearing of wings, the hanging of children.”
“Logistically, realistically, what you’re talking about may be impossible.”
“Did anyone believe, logistically, realistically, that it was possible for billions of people to die within weeks across the planet? That a shield broken in a circle of stones in a field in Scotland would kill so many and, because of the killings, change the world?”