Lives of Kings (21 page)

Late March in Australia was actually fall for them, but as soon as we walked out of the air-conditioned airport and into the street, I felt like I was going to melt. Was it just because we were coming from winter? No. Our taxi driver confirmed the entire south was experiencing abnormal heat and a drought.

Overall, I found Sydney like any nice American downtown. A little like San Francisco, even, though without all the hills. The wide boardwalk we could see in the distance allowed people to walk along the water, enjoying the fresh breeze coming from the ocean. This helped deal with the smoggy weather.

Our hotel, luckily, was down the road from a shopping mall, so one of the first things we did was to go buy summer clothes. We got back just in time for check-in and found someone had already brought our bags up to our rooms.

The three rooms were linked by a middle room, in which my ugly green bag was placed neatly next to the desk.

“Is this in case I set myself on fire while I'm asleep again?” I joked, waving to the adjoining doors that would allow them to rescue me if necessary. Enough time had passed for me to joke about it.

“Pure coincidence,” Seth promised.

That evening we pored over the information I had collected. We looked up the restaurants, street signs, and any other markers I could identify in my dreams. I didn't have much except for the fact that this guy was incredibly active.

“Gwen,” Seth said, trying hard not to get angry, “a bunch of trees is not a point on a map.”

“I was talking about a bunch of rocks, this time,” I told him.

He gave a terse huff.

Our best bet was a rock-climbing place I had seen numerous times. It took me a while to figure out what it was since I had never set foot in one myself. When I first saw the strange walls, hanging ropes everywhere and a clientele that was mostly men, I thought it was some kind of military facility. When I caught sight of the logo, I woke up, reaching for my little notebook.

As far as I could tell, he went there several times a week. All we had to do was wait.

Our first night in Australia was difficult. I was tired but couldn't sleep. The time difference — and a number of other unsolved issues — weighed on my mind.

A few days passed as we visited all of his favourite places. Perhaps they weren't his favourites at all and he barely went there, but we didn't have much else to go on. I was on full alert for that feeling of connectedness, like when I had found Seth and Garrison, or when we had found Moira, but nothing happened.

Four days after arriving in Australia, we were back at the rock-climbing place, sitting in a rental car like creepy detectives. Seth decided he was going to look inside, but we argued with him. If this person saw us, he might get scared and leave, or go into hiding, and we'd never find him. But we were all restless, so we agreed to sneak around back and peek through the windows.

The building was a tall one-storey warehouse, not too far from the centre but not quite in a bustling neighbourhood. A thin metal fence cordoned off the industrial perimeter, but Kian simply reached over it and unlatched the gate to get inside. There was a dirty pool behind the place, as if there was a better season than summer to swim, and it was just closed for the time being. The murky waters had become opaque.

“Not exactly high security,” Garrison muttered.

“What would someone steal?” I asked. “The walls?”

It still boggled my mind that someone would actually pay to climb things — or that places existed with walls to climb.

Feeling more like creeps than detectives now, we peered through the dusty windows. With their helmets and harnesses, it was difficult to make out the faces of the clientele. We spent an hour like that when suddenly I felt something pull at my insides.

It was a twitch, not directionally like what had brought me to Seth and Garrison, but it was more than we had gotten in the last few days.

“Did you feel that?” Seth asked.

“No,” Kian replied.

We all turned to him awkwardly.

“Oh,” he said.

Kian, never having gone through any ritual binding himself to any of us, didn't have the same draw to the others.

“He must be close!”

Seth stuck his head closer to the window, as if that would help him see well through the grime on the glass. It didn't.

“What does he look like again?” Garrison asked.

I pulled up the memory.

“Tall,” I said uncertainly. I had spent my time looking around, not trying to catch glimpses of him.

“Anything else?” Garrison asked, sarcasm lacing his voice.

“Brown hair,” I said. “Maybe not brown. A little lighter than brown.”

I heard Kian chuckle behind me at their frustration. I was really bad at this.

“Longer. Shoulder length. Maybe a bit shorter. Grey eyes.”

We all squinted through the dirty window. More than half of the room could have fit that description. Still, the feeling was getting stronger. It was as if my insides were being sucked toward some kind of magnet outside of my body. My heart raced.

“Enough of this,” Garrison declared. “I'm going inside.”

“Good idea,” Seth said.

Before Kian or I could say anything, they were bounding to the other side of the building. Just as they were about to round the corner, a big fist came out of nowhere and hit Garrison so hard in the face that he fell straight to the ground. Seth tried to stop so quickly that he fell over Garrison and went flying forward. It would have been comical had the fist connecting to Garrison's face not made such a definitive sound.

Kian and I ran. I didn't even need to see who the fist was attached to as the person rounded the corner. I threw up my arms and intended for the lawn to rise up and envelop the large man, but he anticipated it. He stepped on the earth as it rose into a mound and pushed it back down.

I paused, shocked.

“Gwen!”

Kian pushed me down as the eavestrough from the building swung down and nearly whacked me in the head. I got up as fast as I could, only to find the dirty pool behind me was rising in a sheet and coming my way. I reached inside in a panic for my magic. I had nothing in the outside world to fight with that couldn't be turned against me.

Fire slipped through my fingers and met the wall of water.

Everything slowed. I stood face to face with our attacker. The eyes that looked back at me were so familiar, yet escaped me, like an answer on the tip of your tongue. He was the one we had been waiting for. Just as I had seen him in my dreams, he stood before me, looking just as shocked as I was, but also scared and angry. And for the first time there was a solid note of recollection.

As we faced each other, the magic I was holding strained my muscles. I let out a shallow breath, trying not to gasp from exertion.

Though only seventeen, he was probably done growing. He was a huge, hulking man, though through my memories I knew his eyes were usually kind, and I had never fought him before.

Suddenly it clicked. I recognized him from the vision of when the king had handed down his decision, ultimately our death sentence — this man had been right next to me.

The water hit the fire and we were enveloped in a dense steam. I choked in the haze and could only make out the stranger in front of me by his shape. I didn't dare move — Garrison was somewhere around my feet. The shape in front of me crumpled and fell to the ground. Garrison yelled.

I had to sit, blind and lightheaded, until the mist cleared and we could actually see. It turned out that Seth had snuck up behind our new friend and put him to sleep while I distracted him. I could see Seth felt guilty about using his magic on us by the way he refused to leave the larger man's side.

When the steam cleared, we assessed the damage. Kian announced Garrison's nose was most definitely broken. When we pried him out from underneath our new friend, who had fallen on him, his face and shirt were covered in blood. He took his hands away from his face, and it didn't even look like a nose anymore. I tried not to wince.

“'Ow 'ad id it?” Garrison asked.

“Not that bad,” I lied.

Kian helped him up while Seth and I looked at the prone figure on the ground. At least it didn't look like anyone had noticed us behind the warehouse. This would have been much more awkward and difficult to contain had he come upon us in the parking lot.

“What do we do with him?” I asked.

His gym bag lay beside him. He hadn't even gone in yet. He must have sensed us before he got close to the doors.

Seth walked around the body a few times, as if examining it from different angles. I knew he was trying to find a good way to move this guy, but from any side, he was still big. He was taller than Kian by about half a foot, and more muscular than anyone I had seen before up close.

Garrison couldn't bend over with his bloody nose, so after securing him in the car, Kian ran back to Seth and me.

I still don't know how we did it, though magic was definitely a factor. I tried to roll the body on the ground along the turf, but I couldn't do this into the parking lot or someone would notice. We had to lift him. Seth and Kian hoisted him up, each one under an arm, as I hopped around them trying to be helpful, even though I really wasn't.

It was a sprint to the car, since anyone could have stopped us at any moment to ask why we were carrying this unconscious man and stuffing him into a vehicle, and I had no answers prepared.

I briefly considered how easy Kian had it when he had tossed me over his shoulder. I was wondering if he was thinking the same thing as he and Seth nearly toppled under the weight, sweat beading on their foreheads just from the short walk to the car.

Getting him into the car was another challenge. I was struck with paranoia, as if we had just killed him.

While I kept lookout, Kian and Seth managed to push him in, which ended up with him in a weird position resting on Garrison's lap. Garrison, who still had his head tilted backwards, could do nothing but squeeze himself as far toward the door as possible. When Kian and Seth got back into the car, finally ready to go, we realized there was no room for me. I stood in the parking lot.

Improvising, I had to climb into the trunk of the hatchback, hugging my legs with only my head popping up over the seats. This was probably the most awkward thing I had ever done in my life. I really did feel like we had just killed somebody and kept watching out for the police on our tail.

When I wasn't doing that, I was asking Seth to feel the guy's pulse to make sure he was still alive. Which was a little annoying, I admit.

We hadn't been able to predict any of what would happen. Finding our newest friend could have gone as smoothly as when Kian and I had found Seth and Garrison, or as complicated as when we had found Moira. If this experience taught me anything, it was that we were all different — and finding numbers six and seven was a question still very much up in the air.

Upon pulling up to the hotel, we realized a further flaw in our plan — we had no way to get him up to our room without anyone noticing. And Garrison was still bleeding all over the car and himself. It looked like someone had been shot.

Seth ran in to find out where the service elevator was, and after a lot of shuffling feet and hoisting limbs, our broken little group managed to get him into my room without anyone seeing.

While Seth and Kian laid him carefully out on the floor, reminding me of how I had woken up with Kian in my own backyard, I gently moved Garrison's hands away from his face. His nose looked even worse than before and had swollen to the size of a pomegranate.

“Ba?” Garrison asked, more nasal than ever.

“It's okay, I can try to fix it,” I told him, trying to sound reassuring.

“Dry?”

“Well, I've never really done anything so … delicate.”

I looked at his broken nose from a dozen different angles, trying to figure out what went where. He didn't seem convinced by my abilities, but I wasn't either. I didn't actually know how to heal, so the plan had been to move his bones back into place. Now that I looked at it, though, I had no idea what that place was.

“You're going to make him look like a Picasso,” Seth joked. “Or maybe Michael already did.”

Garrison shot him a sideways glare. He couldn't really move his head.

“Michael?” I asked.

“I found his ID,” Seth said. “Michael Davis.”

I turned back to Garrison. The dried blood everywhere made my stomach churn. I had no idea where things went, so I tried for the healing. It was hard, and I don't know how long I stood over his chair as he leaned his head back and tried breathing.

I felt very little connection with my magic inside the hotel. There were no natural things to move or shift. After failing to find the connection with a more concentrated magic that could heal him, I focused on the sunshine falling on my hands from the window and warming them. I drank in the feeling of rays against my face and pulled on the threads that laced over my hair and the back of my neck, bringing everything into me. Finally, it flowed throw my fingers.

Satisfying cracks and pops, along with Garrison's shrieks of pain — which Seth quickly muffled — told me something was working. It wasn't until I had drained my own magic and felt faint that I finally stopped and looked.

Garrison's nose looked pretty much right. His face was a mess, with blood caked everywhere and tears running down his face, but it was otherwise fine. As soon as I tried to move, however, I sat heavily on the ground.

I shook my head to clear it and got up to reassure my friends.

“Just overdid it, I think.”

“Thanks,” Garrison said, standing and feeling his nose. “Try not to make it hurt so much next time.”

“Try not to get punched in the face next time,” I retorted.

Garrison looked at me, deadpan. “You know that will be harder than what I asked you,” he said.