Away From the Sun (22 page)

I let out a curse under my breath. I don’t know what they were thinking, but they are messing everything up. Now, Shadowface has a better chance than ever of getting power.

But not a Starborn power if I have anything to do with it.
 

I finally find Waverly’s room, my knife tightly gripped in my hand, but I’m not surprised to see that she’s not here. I start to leave, thinking about where they might have gone, but I stop myself when a small, metal box catches my eye. It’s under her cot and it has a small lock on it. I guess it’s possible that she didn’t keep the vial with her all week. I don’t have time to try and pick it, so I grab the box and throw it against the wall. I rear back my leg and kick it a few times until the top finally pops open. The only item in the box is the cylinder.
 

My heart beats fast as I unscrew the middle and let the glass vial slip out into my palm. The red liquid seems thick. I hold it in my fist. Ashley isn’t going to be able to meet with Shadowface. She’s not going to be able to show Samuel the blood. So, the best thing I can do is smash it against the floor right now.

I raise my fist in the air, and I’m about to destroy the vial when a thought enters my mind.
 

What if I don’t destroy it?
 

I bring the vial down and look at it in the palm of my hand. All this fighting over this tiny bit of liquid. It makes me wonder why it is so special. What if…what if I drink it?
 

I let the thought linger in my mind. I don’t know the risk. I’ve heard my father say that it could kill someone, but it might not. Would Shadowface want it if it did nothing but kill the one who would use it?

There is a tiny cork at the top and I pull it off as delicately as I can, not wanting to spill any of the blood. I hold up the glass vial to look at it through the light coming from the window. I wonder where it came from. Whose blood is it? How did Shadowface obtain it in the first place?

I don’t know what the effect will be. I don’t know what power I will gain. But I don’t care. It’s better for me to have it than Shadowface. If it’s powerful enough for Shadowface to destroy an entire city, then it will be powerful enough to help me stop him.
 

I set the top of the glass to my lips and tip it up until all the red liquid is in my mouth. For a moment, I let it sit on my tongue. The metallic taste isn’t unusual, but it overpowers my senses. I give my actions one last thought before I shrug, and swallow the blood, allowing it to enter my body and consume me with power.
 

I wrap my fingers around the glass and hold it close to my chest as I close my eyes, waiting for something miraculous to happen. I wait. And I wait.
 

Finally, I open my eyes and look at the vial again. Wasn’t something supposed to happen? Was I not supposed to feel some all-powerful, magical force flowing through my veins?

I take the glass vial and slip it back into the canister and screw it shut. I set the canister back into the dented and broken box and slide it under the cot with my foot. I may not know what power flows through me, but at least Shadowface can’t use it.

I move to the window across the room and can see trucks all around the building. There are greyskins crawling through the town like maggots on a carcass. It seems that Samuel and his soldiers are doing as much fighting against the greyskins as they are trying to take the city. He and his men are pinned between citizens of Elkhorn and a very large herd. It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen the greyskins as a potential ally, or at least an advantage. But with the position Samuel’s men are in, there is no doubt he will try to move some of his forces into this building for safety. And tomorrow morning, Samuel is supposed to meet with Ashley. Shadowface is supposed to be there.
 

I race down the hallway and stairs, out the building, and across the street until I finally get to the conference room. My stomach wrenches when I see an empty table; small splatters of blood leaves a trail in the dusty corridor. Ashley has left here on her own accord. The drops of blood end at a doorway. I go through the door, but now without the trail, there is no tracking where she might have gone.
 

I curse under my breath and smack my hand against the wall. I’m not sure where she went, but I know she’s trying to finish her mission. She will be looking for Waverly before the worst can happen—before death overtakes her.

Traveling through the city to get behind Elkhorn’s lines is no easy task. Not only do greyskins roam the streets, seeking out the source of all the explosions and gun blasts, but there are enemies at nearly every corner. Not to mention, all I carry with me is a knife.

I sit hunkered down behind stacked boxes in an alley between two large buildings. I have no way of knowing where Ashley went, but I’m hoping she might have traveled to where the Elkhorn soldiers were holed up, fighting off the enemy. That seems like one of many directions Waverly might have gone.
 

One of Samuel’s soldiers sees it fitting to patrol the alley, searching for enemy combatants. I grip my knife with the blade facing down. When he least suspects it, I’m going to stab him in the throat where he hopefully won’t make a sound. With each step he takes, I grip a little tighter. I hold my breath so as not to give myself away. Tap, tap, tap, go his feet. Closer and closer they move. I ready myself to stab upward. Finally, when I know he’s right on top of me, I lunge outward, stabbing right at his neck, only I didn’t anticipate his height. I miss his neck and stab into his lower chest instead. The look of shock on his face mean’s he’s too surprised to scream. I wrench the knife out of his chest, but he composes himself enough to know that he needs to fight. He swings the butt of his gun at my face and it lands squarely on my jaw. I fall to the ground and hold up a hand.

“Don’t shoot me!” I don’t know why I say it. In fact, I feel like a coward for saying it, but in my last moment of life, it’s all I can think to do. Only, the soldier doesn’t shoot me, just as I asked. He stands there, his teeth straight in a line, his eyes filled with hatred. He wants to kill me, but something inside of him keeps from doing it.
 

I stare at him, bewildered. The man reaches for his chest to try and stop the bleeding. I start to get up from the ground and the man turns on me, pointing the gun, but he still doesn’t shoot. I would try to fight him, but I’m at least three feet away. If I lunge at him again, he will pull the trigger and that will be the end of me. Does he recognize me? Does he want to take me as a prisoner just to please his boss, Samuel?

“Just let me go,” I tell him.
 

“You can go,” the soldier says through labored breaths.
 

“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
 

“I don’t know,” the man answers.

I stand up straight, the man pointing the gun at my face. He wants to blow my head off, but he can’t for some reason.
 

“Are you out of ammo or something?” I ask.
 

“No,” the soldier says.
 

I hold out a hand. “Give me your gun.”

Without hesitation, the soldier stops pointing the gun at me, pulls the strap over his head and hands me the rifle. I take it from him, thinking about shooting him in the face, but I decide not to.

A thought strikes me.

Is this the power? Is this what the blood can do for me? Can I tell this man to do anything I want and he’ll do it?
 

Noises behind me distract me from these thoughts. Three greyskins are headed toward the two of us from the other end of the alley. My first instinct is to hold up the rifle and shoot each of them in the head, but I don’t.

I look back toward the soldier. “Distract them. Keep yourself between me and them, whatever the cost. Use no weapons.”

The soldier does as I tell him without stalling. The greyskins are nearly on top of him. Just before they get to him, he looks at me, his anger replaced by fear and uncertainty.
 

“Don’t scream,” I say.
 

I take a few steps backward as I watch the soldier do everything I commanded. He tries his hardest to fight off the greyskins without any weapons, but fingernails dig into his back and teeth sink into his shoulders. The greyskins rip flesh away from the bone, all without a single scream from the soldier.
 

I feel sick for only a second as I watch, but I’m so enamored by the power that I wield, it’s hard for me to remain focused on the victim as the greyskins devour what is left of him. I keep backing away slowly until I reach the corner of the alley.
 

So, that’s what Shadowface wanted all along. Complete control. With this power, Shadowface could command anyone to do anything with a simple word. And if what my father says is true, the power can grow with use. Eventually, I might be able to command others without the words from my mouth. I might be able to control the minds of many people at once. The possibilities are endless.
 

It’s a good thing this didn’t fall into Shadowface’s lap. In the wrong hands, this could be dangerous. Innocent people could die. I look back at the soldier whose limbs flinch as one of the greyskins bites into his nervous system.

My enemies
will
die.

I slip past the alley and keep running until I reach one of the buildings that I think has Stephen and his men fortified within. Hopefully this is where Ashley went. She knows her time is limited, but she doesn’t need to find Waverly anymore. I can finish this myself. All I need is to get close to Samuel. If I can get close to him, then I can get close to Shadowface. If I can get close to Shadowface, this could all be over in a matter of hours.
 

The road to Crestwood is familiar and long. I don’t like the fact that I’m on my way to tell Paxton about his long-lost granddaughter. First, I don’t trust the jerk. I think he’s just going to steal her away from Lydia, making me an enemy of Elkhorn. Second, I don’t think he will make good on his promise to let me back into Crestwood. But after all the stuff I’ve seen go down over the past couple of weeks, I’m not so sure I want to go back there. I’ve made myself an enemy of Shadowface, and I didn’t really mean to. I guess it’s okay that I did, she being kind of evil and all, but that doesn’t make for a very relaxing end to my situation. It simply means that I’m either going to die before this is all over, or I’m going to hit the road again and try to go it alone—which probably means I’ll be dead soon anyway.
 

Gabe drives in silence as I thumb through my sister’s notebook. I would feel bad about reading it, given that it’s sort of like a diary, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve snooped through her stuff before. Only, now it’s not about cute boys she likes, but about people dying and what their possibly terrible future will be.
 

The vivid detail of these futures—Ashley and Stephen; Ethan getting shot by sniper fire; Lydia and Ashley getting shot by Samuel; me giving Lydia’s little girl, Evie, away to some stranger—really kind of freaks me out.

That last one is strange. I can only assume that Waverly lied to me about what she saw when I let her look into my future. I suppose I would have done the same thing. Trying to explain her vision would have been confusing because it’s not like she has the answers. She probably made up the vision of me walking through a grassy field because it was something I wouldn’t really question. I can’t blame her. But knowing the truth is perplexing.
 

At some point in the trip, Gabe asks me what is in the notebook, but I just shrug and tell him that it’s a lot of random thoughts my sister wrote down. It’s a lie that he accepts without question. I’m not sure that he cares so much as he just wants the distraction of talking. I don’t really give him that distraction until we’re only about thirty minutes from Crestwood.
 

“How are you going to explain why you’ve been gone for so long?” I ask.
 

Gabe shrugs. “Things happen, you know that. I’ll just tell him that Shadowface’s raiders jumped us, which is true. But I’ll be sure to elaborate on the fact that they drove us miles and miles into the middle of nowhere until we were able to fight our way out and you happened to save my life. I’ll say that you took me to Elkhorn to recuperate and that’s where we learned all this information about Shadowface.” He looks at me and shrugs. “It’s the best I’ve got.”

“It’s better than anything I could come up with,” I say. I bite my lower lip and look at Gabe who now stares at the road ahead of him. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he says, grinning.
 

“You didn’t have to come to Elkhorn. You didn’t have to save my little sister. You didn’t have to stay. I know you’ve only been doing what you think is right, and I want you to know that I appreciate it.”

He keeps staring at the road. He scratches at the stubble on his chin. “You know why I did it,” he says.
 

I know what he’s thinking. He’s wanting me to think that it’s because he loves me, but I know that he didn’t know Waverly was my sister before he helped her. His care for her and Ethan was genuine.
 

I look away from him, for some reason feeling embarrassed. I like Gabe. I really do. But I can’t think about anything romantic right now. How stupid would that be? I always hated movies where the world was crumbling around two people but they found strength in each others’ arms.
 

I’ve already tried that.

But Gabe has been more of a help to me that anyone has in a long time. I won’t easily forget it.
 

My stomach sinks when the walls of Crestwood come into view. The closer and closer we get, the less I want to be here. I hope that we are ushered in quietly. The last time the general public saw me was when Paxton declared to everyone that I killed a scout named Skip. I have a feeling that my presence will not be well-received.