Chapter 4: The Power Inside Her
1042 Words
When I woke the second time, something had changed in the fundamental machinery of my senses.
The room was the same. But the grain of the wooden floor was vivid in a way it hadn't been before. The fire's warmth reached me differently, each degree of it distinct. From two rooms away I could hear a conversation I had no business being able to hear, the individual words clear and separate as struck bells.
I lay still and took stock the way you do after a fall, when you're not yet sure of the damage.
The ankle, better. The mark on my wrist, warm but steady. And underneath both of those, running through the middle of my chest like a current that hadn't been there yesterday, something that pulsed in time with my heartbeat and then, occasionally, faster.
I didn't like it.
I sat up carefully and found Ryker in the chair near the door. He had not been sleeping. He was watching me with the absolute attention of someone who had made a decision about where to be and was not second-guessing it.
"How long?" I asked.
"Six hours."
"You stayed the whole time."
It wasn't quite a question. He shrugged, a single movement, like the answer was self-evident.
I pressed my fingers to my temple. The conversation two rooms away was resolving into clarity now.
Kael's voice, controlled and precise: "If she can't govern it, it's a liability. We suppress it until she can."
Soren, quieter: "Suppression and containment are not the same thing. One manages. The other damages."
A silence. Then Kael again: "You're too interested in the phenomenon to think practically about the person."
Ryker had noticed the change in my expression.
"What is it?"
"They're arguing about me. Kael wants to suppress whatever is happening."
His jaw shifted. When he spoke his voice was flat and final.
"No one is suppressing anything."
"That's not your call alone."
"It's equally mine, and I'm telling you where I stand." A pause. "Kael protects the pack. That's how he thinks. Everything is assessed by what it costs and what it provides. I don't hold it against him, but on this, my answer is no."
"Why?" I asked. "You don't know me. You've known me for less than a day."
"No," he said. "But I know what it looks like when someone is trying to figure out if you're worth the risk." He held my gaze steadily. "You are. That's where I stand."
I didn't have an answer for that. I looked away.
The flashes started without warning.
There was no transition, no sensation of drifting. One moment I was sitting on the edge of the bed in a firelit room, and the next I was standing in a vast open space under a sky that was wrong. Not night, not day, the light thick and directional from no visible source.
Wolves knelt in a wide circle. Dozens of them, maybe more, their heads lowered in unison, and the direction they faced was where I stood. Power came off the scene in waves I could feel against my skin even inside the vision, and when I looked down at my hands they were lit from within, gold and steady, and the light didn't frighten me.
That was the part that frightened me.
Then I was back.
I was on the floor, my knees on the wooden boards, and I didn't remember the transition. My hands were pressed flat to the floor and Ryker was crouched in front of me with his hands on my shoulders, saying my name steadily.
"Ariyah. I need you to look at me. Right here."
I looked at him.
"I saw something," I said. My voice was unsteady.
"Your eyes went gold. Completely. Both of them. For about thirty seconds."
"It was a vision. Wolves kneeling. My hands were glowing." I looked down at them. Normal. Pale and carrying nothing. "I don't understand what's happening to me."
"I know."
"I don't want this," I said, and my voice broke on the last word in a way I hadn't planned. "I didn't ask for any of it. I was walking home. I was just walking home, and now I have a mark I can't remove and power I can't control and I just—"
I stopped. Pressed my fingers to my mouth.
Ryker didn't say anything immediately. He held my shoulders until the shaking in them eased, and then he sat back on his heels and waited.
"I know," he said again, and this time there was nothing practiced in it.
The bond surged.
It came up from below the level of thought, out of the same place the mark had come from, and it moved through the room with a force that was not violent but was absolute. It hit Ryker like a wave hits a shoreline, inevitable and without room for argument, and I watched his eyes widen, watched something move across his face that he couldn't contain.
Slowly, in a movement that looked entirely involuntary, he lowered himself onto one knee.
Not in pain.
In submission.
I stared at him.
The door opened. Kael stood in the frame, and the shock moved across his face fast before the control reasserted itself. The only truly unguarded expression I had ever seen from him.
"That's impossible," he said.
Soren appeared behind him, and unlike Kael his expression did not contain shock.
"No," he said quietly. "It's beginning."
Ryker was still on one knee. His eyes had come back to mine, and his expression was stripped of its usual directness, reduced to something bare.
"I'm not doing it on purpose," I said.
"I know," he said. "That's what makes it real."
The ground shook.
It came through the walls first, a low vibration that rattled the windows in their frames, followed by a boom that travelled through the floor and up through the soles of my feet. From somewhere in the house came the sound of glass breaking. Not one piece. Several.
Kael was at the window in four steps.
Whatever he saw changed his posture completely, something military and immediate dropping into place across his shoulders.
"They didn't wait for noon."
Then the world outside erupted.
- Writer
