The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (34 page)

In that moment, he made up his mind to do the exact opposite of whatever it urged him to do. If it wanted him to give up, well, that wasn’t going to happen. He hadn’t failed Alex yet. There was still a chance. Lochlan had said—

He looked out into the mist. The blue light emanating from the stage had grown brighter, and an idea occurred to him. He sprinted up the aisle, knowing that Rakev could see him through the mist, but moving with all his newfound speed in the hopes of surprising him. As he did, he flipped through more of Soren’s memories. There could be no holding back now. He had to pull as much energy from them as he could if he was going to have any chance of eking out a victory here.

Soren had been on the track and field team for three years. He thought back briefly to his first pole vault. He remembered the fear that he would either fall flat on his ass or somehow manage to stab himself with the thing. But he also remembered the exhilaration of planting the pole at just the right moment and launching himself into the sky. There was a joy in it, like he’d learned to fly.

Soren leaped up onstage, jumping effortlessly through the mist and landing near the conductor’s podium in front. The blue light was blinding, and Soren could barely make out the outline of the dagger. He reached forward to take it and a sudden blast of wind knocked him away. He spun into the musicians nearby, still clutching their instruments but not playing them. Soren knocked a few over, but they didn’t react.

Rakev appeared by the podium and with a wave of his hand, blew the rest of the musicians off the stage. He looked at Soren. The mist around the stage pushed back, making it easier to see.

“Nice try,” Rakev said.

Soren had to get to the dagger, but he couldn’t do it if Rakev could knock him away with the flick of his wrist. He thought about what Friday had taught him. There was something she’d said. Rakev lifted a finger, and Soren shot into the air. He gestured slightly, and Soren careened into the organ pipes at the back of the concert hall. There was a loud clanging sound. Soren felt the blow through his entire body. He landed with a thud on a narrow upper balcony that was behind the orchestra.

He frantically tried to replay Friday’s words back in his mind.

“Emotions are the key to unlocking the aether,” she had said. “Through them, we can give ourselves strength, agility, even density—anything really having to do with physical attributes.”

Soren picked himself up and stood on the upper balcony, looking down. The fog was thinner up here, allowing him a better view of the stage. Rakev stood in the center, wearing a shit-eating grin on his face. Behind him, the dagger glowed like a small star, its light pushing back the fog in all directions.

Soren closed his eyes and summoned the most powerful memory he had. He’d been running from this one even before he realized he was a pretender, burying it deep because of the guilt that came with it. But he unlocked it effortlessly now, as if it had always been there.

He remembered Sara coming to him late in the night more than eight years ago, telling him a story of something John had done. The conversation had tumbled out from there and Soren’s closely held secret, the one he’d hidden from himself, had been shaken loose. He loved her, had always loved her. And she confessed her own love for him.

There had been pain in that moment, the exquisite pain of lost opportunities, wasted time, and guilt for betraying a friend. But there had also been ecstasy, a joy that blossomed in his heart when she told him how she felt.

They had reached for each other in the same moment and the kiss they shared had all the buried passion, love, and guilt contained within it. He remembered the taste of her tongue, the curve of her breasts, and the feel of her underneath him. They had put friendship and loyalty aside for one night together and though it damned them both to their own separate hells, it had been worth it.

She’d gone back to John shortly thereafter, but those brief moments had been the best Soren had ever known.

When Soren opened his eyes, still standing on the balcony of the Kennedy Center, not even a second had passed. He’d pulled the memory out in the space of a heartbeat, and yet his body had changed. The power of the memory and those emotions had altered him.

Soren leaped from the balcony, landing easily on the stage, and started running toward Rakev, who looked at him with tired contempt.

“Don’t give up, do you?” Rakev said.

He gestured with his hand, sending a wave of air in Soren’s direction. But though it slowed him down, Soren ran right through it. He had changed his density, just as Friday suggested. Soren had just enough time to see Rakev look down at his hand and shake it, like it was a power tool that had suddenly stopped working, and then Soren landed a single, hard punch to Rakev’s jaw. The punch sent Rakev reeling back, a look of shock and outrage on his face, but Soren kept coming. Before Soren could land another blow, Rakev disappeared in a cloud of black smoke.

Soren knew the trick this time. During their last encounter, Rakev’s vanishing act had happened so fast, Soren barely saw the smoke. To him, Rakev might as well have been teleporting himself across the room. But his eyes were keener now.

He watched Rakev almost as if he were in slow motion. When Rakev collapsed into smoke, Soren moved with it, following it across the room in a sprint that would have been hard to see if any humans had been able to watch it. When Rakev reappeared, Soren hit him again almost as soon as he reconstituted himself, a punch that sent Rakev into the air and through a black curtain at the back of the stage. As Rakev flew, Soren saw him beckon his hand and the knife followed after him, disappearing backstage.

Soren had unparalleled control of his body. Summoning the memory of Sara had opened up a whole new world. He had a feeling this mastery wouldn’t last long, but he intended to finish Rakev off while it did.

Soren ran backstage to find Rakev sprawled out on the ground, the knife clutched in his hand. He looked up at Soren with a stunned expression on his face.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

Soren didn’t respond, just rushed toward him, aiming a kick at Rakev’s face. Rakev collapsed into smoke again, moving across the room. This time Soren could almost grab Rakev while in that form. As he reached for him, Soren’s own hand shimmered, almost becoming smoke itself. Soren wasn’t sure how he’d done that, and as soon as he thought of it, his hand resolidified. He tried to grasp the knife trapped in Rakev’s smoke, but couldn’t.

Rakev reappeared still holding the knife and Soren barreled into him, the two of them falling to the floor. They knocked over several music stands and hit a piano. The knife clattered to the floor and the two of them traded blows as they went, Rakev’s fist trying not to just hit Soren but punch through him.

But Soren had reinforced his own skin, and though the punches hurt, they couldn’t break through. Soren’s own blows landed on Rakev at the same time. Though they weren’t doing significant damage, Rakev’s expression suggested it had been a long time since anyone had managed to hit him at all.

Rakev became smoke again, and Soren moved a fraction of a second too slow. He scrambled up and sprinted toward where the smoke was headed, determined to get there. When Rakev reemerged, Soren almost didn’t see it in time. He was so focused on hitting Rakev again that he didn’t notice the bright, shiny weapon Rakev held in his hand until the last moment. It was the gun that Rakev had stolen and Friday had wanted. The gun that killed pretenders.

Rakev fired a shot and a ball of red energy came flying at Soren, who barely managed to duck out of the way. Rakev fired again and Soren jumped to the side as a red blast slammed into the wood flooring nearby. Soren was moving faster than he’d ever done in his life, but he was only just avoiding the shots.

“That was a good trick,” Rakev said, still firing the gun. “I’ve only known one other doppelgänger that could move like that, and I heard he was dead.”

Soren leaped from one part of the room to the other, dodging the shots. They slammed into the back wall and the floor, burning large holes wherever they landed. Soren spotted the dagger, but as he moved toward it, Rakev pulled it toward him again. It landed at Rakev’s feet, its blue light illuminating the entire room.

“Goddammit, why won’t you just fucking die?” Rakev screamed, the gun going off in his hand, the knife at his feet.

Soren dodged another red projectile and stumbled across the floor. All this power and he was still going to be too late. There was a dull roaring sound that cut through the fog around them. Soren looked at the knife and saw a strange, blue circle, pulsing as if to unhearable music. The knife was beginning to tear open the doorway. He was going to lose.

He tried to think of some other memory, some emotion he could pull from the depths of Soren Chase’s life. But his mind was a blank space, an expanse of white. This was as much as he could push himself.

He dodged out of the way of another red blast, throwing himself against the wall, only to trip over a body lying in the way. He looked down to see Ken Sharpe lying on the ground, his eyes open but unseeing. Soren didn’t know if he was dead or just caught in the spell of the dagger, but his mere presence here sent off alarm bells. If Ken was here, that could mean—

Soren ducked as another blast shot above him, Rakev howling in outrage. He no longer seemed amused to be chasing Soren around the room. But Soren was only half interested in him. He anxiously scanned the backstage, finally spotting her by the door. Unlike Ken, her eyes were closed. The world seemed to slow down when he saw her, enough for him to register that she was breathing even as he again jumped out of the way of another shot. The blast of red energy slammed into the door next to her.

“Sara,” he said.

He rushed to move away from her, aware that if he was near her, she was in danger of being caught in the crossfire. He felt desperate and helpless. He didn’t know how she’d gotten there, but she was now sitting only a few yards from what would become Ground Zero.

Soren moved quickly across the room, eager to get as far from her as possible. But only when he was on the other side did he notice the gun was no longer firing. He looked up to see Rakev grinning from ear to ear. He still held the gun in his right hand, but he was only vaguely pointing it in Soren’s direction. He reached out and beckoned with his left.

Soren realized what he meant to do a half second before it happened. Sara was lifted off the ground and pulled toward Rakev, the same way he’d done to members of the audience earlier. Soren raced to get there in time, moving with all his newfound speed. But his hand reached out a fraction of a moment too late. When Soren looked up, Rakev was holding Sara by the throat.

“I should have guessed you’d bring more than one reinforcement,” he said. “This just got fun again.”

He had turned Sara in midair and held her from behind, the gun in one hand and her in another. Sara sagged in his arms. Her eyes were shut and she didn’t move. In front of Rakev, the blue circle of light grew larger as the roaring noise grew louder. The hole in the universe was getting bigger and soon it would be too late to close it.

Soren held himself frozen in place, uncertain what to do.

“Normally, what a villain does in this situation is force you to surrender,” Rakev said. “But I don’t really give a shit if you do that. You hear that noise? That’s the sound of victory, buddy. I’ve already won.

“Have you ever heard the song ‘Sara’ by Starship? It’s pretty awful, but I think you’ll find the lyrics apropos. ‘Sara, Sara, no time is a good time for goodb—”

Soren streaked toward Rakev with a sudden, violent burst of speed. But Soren couldn’t reach Rakev before he calmly snapped Sara’s neck.

Soren watched Sara die, and his mind shattered.

He saw Rakev twist his hand, heard the sharp crack of Sara’s bones breaking. He watched as Rakev let her fall to the ground, releasing her from his grasp. As he did, Rakev began to collapse once again into smoke, trying to keep ahead of Soren before he slammed into him. Soren could still see the smile on Rakev’s face as he began to vanish, a malevolent Cheshire cat grin.

A rush of pure hatred surged through Soren. It pulsed through his body like a living thing. The hate opened doorways in his psyche, unlocking secrets he didn’t know he kept. They weren’t Soren’s secrets. In a single moment, he knew exactly who he was.

Memories of someone older, far older, hit him like bullets even as the real world around him slowed to a crawl. He saw empires rise and fall, with him and his kind always standing on top of the ruins. He’d built up whole civilizations and let them crumble at his feet. He’d gone by names too legion to count: Augustus, Xerxes, Ozymandias, and Dumuzid. He had led his people, helped them overthrow their masters, and showed them greatness. As a result, they had given him a new name.

His own name, the one he gave himself, was Falk. But his people, doppelgängers, had called him Magnus.

As Rakev’s body became smoke, Falk reached inside it, letting his own form take the same shape. Falk evaporated into smoke and pushed himself through the space Rakev was inhabiting.

If there had been anyone to watch from the outside, they would have seen two columns of smoke, one black and one red. The black one tried to move through the air to the other side of the room, but the red one was faster. The red smoke slowly enveloped the black, consuming it.

When Rakev reconstituted himself a second later near the piano on the far side of the room, only the top half of him reappeared.

He was still alive. Rakev wasn’t made of blood and bone. In this way, Rakev and Falk were alike. He could live as long as some piece of him, no matter how small, survived.

Rakev started screaming.

“No! No!” he shouted, looking down at himself in horror. “You can’t do this. You can’t do this!”

When Falk formed again next to him, he gave Rakev a savage smile.

“You were one of The Council, were you?” Falk asked. “I have old business with you.”