Breaker (Ondine Quartet Book 4) (57 page)

On the mat, nothing mattered but the present. There was no history, no past, nothing but the skills, technique, intelligence, power, and innate talent we brought in that moment.

We were equal.
 

When I arrived in Haverleau, Ryder had helped me here.

I’d then worked here for countless hours on my own, night after night, so I could earn the right to enter the chevalier program.

It was here that Julian tested me for mornings on end, provoking and challenging me to think differently.
 

And it was here that Tristan had given me a gift of beauty, the Bach that still ran through my life every day.

I stepped through the double-doors.

A year ago, an ondine walking the halls of the Training Center would have been unthinkable.

Now, Amber, Chloe, Helene, and Aubrey sat on the front row of the bleachers. They crowded around Aub’s phone, laughing at whatever she was showing them.
 

Blaise showed Ethan a kick I’d seen several gardinels do. A few feet away, Cam was explaining how to correctly wield a nunchuck to Holden.

Alex and Tara sat along the edge of the mat, their backs to the mirrored wall, chatting animatedly.

Like the Shadow, I’d moved my players into place on the board.

Tristan, Catrin, and Gabe on the Council alongside Nanette DesMarais and the Moreauxs. Patrice may be Governor, but Jeeves and the others would steer the ship.

Aubrey, Holden, and the other nixes were handling intelligent weapons design alongside the Armicant.

Chloe and other ondines, including Helene, were trained and ready.

Julian, Gabe, Cam, Alex, Blaise, and Ethan as well as the entirety of the Selkie Kingdom were by my side, ready for battle.

I’d assembled my army and my players were in key positions on the board.

The time for the endgame had come.

“Hey.”

Chloe noticed me first. The others quickly looked my way.

I strode to the center of the mat and sat. Everyone settled around me.
 

Nerves twisted my stomach. “Julian caught you guys up on everything?”

They nodded.

Chloe touched my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

No. A million times no. “Sure. As long as I don’t…” I gestured, “talk about it.”

“Strange stuff,” Holden leaned back, his eyes narrowed. “Gag magic.”

“Don’t worry. It’s not contagious.”

“Does it feel weird?” Chloe asked.

“I don’t feel it. Only when I think about…you know.”
 

No one quite knew what to say and I couldn’t blame them.

Holden said trust was hard to come by when one person held so much more power over others.

I knew the end of this war and I couldn’t tell them.
 

Their discomfort was understandable.

“So.” Cam spoke up first. “This is really it.”

“Yeah.”

Silence fell for a few seconds while everyone absorbed that.
 

“Well?” Helene shot me an expectant look.

“What?”

She motioned. “The speech. The one that’s supposed to boost everyone’s morale. Kick our asses into action. In movies, this is the point where the leader steps up and tells everyone we’re going to win.”

“I have no speech.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” Damn it. I had no speech. “We need to come up with a plan.”

Helene blinked. “That’s terrible.”

Amber critically examined my shirt and jeans. “Maybe if you wore something different you’d look more inspiring.”

“Nah, Kendra ain’t the inspiring type,” Holden said. “She’s more —”

“Ordinary?” Amber added helpfully.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No. More like…” Holden raised his fists, curled his lip, and snarled.
 

Helene blinked. “A dinosaur?”

Cam made a choking noise. Aub’s mouth twitched.

I salvaged the remains of my dignity. “There are more important things to deal with than a damned speech.”

Ethan leaned forward and met my gaze. We hadn’t spoken about the fight and hadn’t seen each other since the attack at Silk.
 

“What do we need to do?” he asked quietly.

Relief flooded me. “We need to prepare.”

He trusted me. They trusted me. I wouldn’t fail them now.

“Will’s been keepin’ an eye out for any unusual movement.” Holden said. “Nothin’ on the radar. You got any hints on what he might do next?”

The problem wasn’t what the Shadow would do. It was me.

When light is at its strongest, you shall decide the final sequence of events.

The Shadow’s words were similar to what had been written in the first prophecy.

When the long light stretches strong…

“He said we’d meet on the day the light is at its strongest,” I said slowly.
 

Blaise wrapped his arms around his knees. “You mean like at noon?”

I shook my head. “It didn’t seem like it was a time. More like a general period or day. Maybe it’s —“

“The solstice.”

Holden pushed back a lock of hair and gave an excited nod. “The summer solstice is when the sun reaches the highest point in the sky. It’s the longest day of the year.”

“When is —“

“Depends.” Aubrey tapped her phone screen. “This year it falls on June 21. Nine forty-eight at night. ”

Ethan frowned. “That’s two weeks away. We don’t have much time.”

“You’ll need to ramp up production.” I looked at Aubrey. “Gabe and Tristan are pulling in a lot of their men.”

Most chevaliers and gardinels would remain comfortable with their
kouperets
. But all of us had received training in weaponry and had a wide range of skill.

It couldn’t hurt to have more variety in the armory.

Holden glanced at Aub. “I’ll get us what we need.”

“Holden and I have been working on a few other designs.” Aubrey rested her arms on her knees. “Booby traps and other devices that might be useful in a fight.”

“Sounds good. Anything else?”

Holden’s brow furrowed. “We need land. Space to test things.”

I thought of the rarely used chevalier post on the north side of Haverleau, a clearing just beyond the woods lining the coast

“There’s a spot that might work. I’ll get it.” Patrice or Julian could secure it for us. “How are the ondines?”

The moment Patrice signed our agreement, the ondine training program had been reinstated.

Turned out, Chloe and Amber had remained busy during the interim. They’d brought in a number of new recruits, ondines whose interest were piqued by the very fact that the program had been outlawed.
 

“Gabe assigned more chevaliers to help Michael with marksmanship and weapons training,” Chloe said.

“I’m trying to get a few more recruits with powerful Virtues to sign-up,” Amber added. “Kinetics and Teleporters would be helpful.”

It still wasn’t enough.

Even if we pulled in every chevalier and gardinel, even if Ancelin sent over every trained selkies, we still didn’t have the numbers.

The Shadow had carefully planned the attacks in Merbais and Fontesceau.

Each time he’d had almost twice the number of our security.
 

We would be outnumbered.
 

Helene rubbed at a spot on the mat.
 
“So what happens on the solstice?”she asked, her voice too casual.

“The worst.”

She looked up. Her face paled, but she held my gaze. Good.

“We got a taste of what he’s planning at Merbais and Fontesceau,” I continued. “The Shadow wants to annihilate us so he’ll bring everything he’s got.”

“An army,” Holden murmured.

“The biggest one he can assemble. Most or all will be turned from his blood which means they’ll be stronger and faster than anything you’ve seen. They won’t stop until every last one of us is gone.” I remembered the darkness of our imprisonment, the systemic destruction of every mental, physical, and emotional defense. “The Shadow will unleash hell.”

A haunted shadow flickered across Cam’s face. He remembered, too.

“If you want to walk away, now is the time to do it,” I said calmly. “There’s no shame in that. I can’t guarantee your survival. There may be a great deal of pain. Torture. You may see or experience things beyond your worst nightmare. Some or all of you may die. And you will be terrified.”

No one was going into this without understanding all the consequences.

“I can only make one promise.” I looked at each one of them. “You may not be there to see it and I may not live to tell you about it. But I will end this.”

I waited.

No one moved.

Silence stretched for another minute.

My chest felt full. Guess they were as crazy as me.

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Any thoughts on where he’s going to hit us?” Alex asked.

I needed to create a type of energy that had never been seen before in the history of our world.

Intent fueled magic and in order to produce what I needed, it had to be meaningful in as many ways possible.

You’ll invite me into Haverleau.

This had to end where it had begun, a circle completing itself.

“The battle will take place here.”

Blaise crossed his arms. “How do you know?”

“Because we’re going to remove the wards and let them in.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The next week flew by in a blur of activity.
 

I divided my time between teaching ondines at the Training Center, working out battle tactics and strategy with Julian, Gabe, and the other chevaliers, and discussing political strategy with Catrin, Jeeves, and even Patrice.

The busy schedule helped keep my mind off what I needed to do, but magic didn’t forget. The itchiness beneath my skin had worsened and the skin on my arms now bore long red marks from over-scratching.

The summer heat had turned sweltering, but I wore long-sleeved shirts to cover the welts and avoid unwanted questions.

At nights, Tristan wrapped his arms around me, holding my arms to my side while I gritted my teeth against the writhing discomfort.

He didn’t mention the magic, nor did he try to ask me for more information about the end.

But I felt the fear and helplessness seething inside him. I caught it in the way his eyes constantly tracked me as if afraid I would suddenly disappear.

I didn’t resist. It raged between us. Anger and desperation, an inevitability in everything we did.
 

The tighter he held me, the more passionately he made love to me, the more I clung to it, reveled in it. Guilt and grief lingered along the edges of that ecstasy, always threatening to break free and overwhelm me.
 

There was two weeks left until I had to make a choice I did not want to make.
 

I couldn’t bear to think about it, to look at him and think about it. So I sank into his love, into his warmth and beauty and drowned in it.
 

No one outside my circle talked about what would happen. But the rise in the number of chevaliers and gardinels had inevitably stirred public curiosity. Avoiding the Council was no longer possible.

I leaned back and gripped the sides of my chair, resisting another urge to scratch my arm. Around me, the cottage was a disorganized mess of books, bags, empty snack bags and soda cans.

Too many nights working late. It was beginning to look like Nexa’s place.

Laughter drifted in from the living room. Helene, Cam, and Alex were gaming, virtually relieving their nerves by shooting each other on screen.
 

“You’re goin’ about this all wrong.” Holden sat across from me at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. “What’s the point of addressing the Council? We’ve gotten this far without ‘em. Have Patrice initiate evacuation, get everyone out, and you’re done.”

“I don’t know.” Chloe rubbed her brow, exhaustion marking her face. “If Kendra addresses the Council, there’s a possibility they’ll listen if she words it right.”

“That’s a big if,” I pointed out.

She shrugged. “They’ll provide support if it’ll cover their own asses and allow them to save face in front of everyone.”

“And what are they gonna say?” Holden spread his arms. “We’ll trust your word the end of the war will take place here on the solstice? The word of an ondine who abandoned the Governorship and the Council to go Rogue? Someone who can’t actually tell us anything specific because of an obscure, sketchy sounding magic no one knows anything about? Sure, let me just pack up and leave my home for an undetermined, extended period of time.”

We’d been going over this all morning. My testimony to the Council was in two hours and I still wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing.

Patrice had set up this opportunity. While her actions seemed very supportive on the surface, I had no illusions about the truth of her intent.
 

She couldn’t order Haverleau’s evacuation without admitting where she’d gotten the information from. Right now, I was untrustworthy elemental number one. Associating herself with me would be political suicide.

Patrice was too much of a coward to face the Council herself. But if I came in and presented a case, she could feign ignorance like the other members and then make a decision.
 

Like many things Patrice did, it wasn’t about protecting others. It was about protecting herself.

“Someone once told me that being a leader was just as much about giving trust as receiving it.” I nursed the cup of coffee in my hands. “I’m choosing to take that advice.”

A pause. “Hell of a time to do it,” Holden said quietly.

“That’s exactly why it’s right.”

The front door opened with a click and Helene’s shriek of delight echoed through the cottage.

I walked into the living room and two very familiar faces greeted me.

Lucas grinned. “Hey, Kendra.”

Once again, he’d grown taller since I last saw him. The summer sun had lightened his hair to a caramel blonde and his skin glowed with a light tan. He looked strong and healthy.

“What are you doing here?”

“Providing support and my professional services.” Daniel took in the chaos around him. “Looks like we got here just in time.”