Chapter Forty-Six

Brae

I punched Cassen in the face.

The Wind Bearer jerked awake, blinking blearily in the dull light of the one hanging lightbulb from the cellar ceiling.

When he saw me, he smiled. Actually smiled. Bastard.

“Vehega.” His white teeth were covered in blood. The rest of him was in mud. We hadn’t gone through the trouble of cleaning up Cassen or Tifa. Especially since we weren’t entirely sure what we were going to do with them yet.

Cassen winced and tilted his head gently to the side, squinting, as if he was trying to see through a raging headache. “I’m surprised I’m alive.”

“I’m surprised you are, too,” Kai muttered to my right.

I ignored my friend and leaned down into Cassen’s face. I could smell the stench of burning from him still. I’d really smoked him good with my last hit.

“How did you know how to fuse the enelia crystals?”

Cassen just chuckled.

I punched him again, right in the gut. He coughed, blood dribbling down his chin.

Even hitting him didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, I didn’t feel much.

Going numb was the easier choice after being with Marley. In that room, right after her bath, smelling like a damn meadow, kissing her, and…

Telling me that.

Nothing had ever tested me quite like that before. Nothing had ever hurt quite like that before. A different pain I was wholly unfamiliar with but seemed to sting just as bad as anything else.

“Tell me, Cassen!”

“Vele! What the hell does it matter?” he spat, straining against the zip ties we used to bind him. “That girl has the oculi inside her. I can feel it even in this goddamn cellar. Even if she’s”—he paused, a slow smile creeping again onto his bloody lips—“miles away in her car. She’s like a beacon. And you’ve got the blade.” He nodded toward the amethyst dagger in Kai’s palm. “You’ve won. Feels to me like you’re just looking for trouble. Something to take your mind off things, maybe?”

I lunged for him, grabbing the collar of his shirt and pushing his chair so it balanced on its back legs. “You know something about the oculi more than I—more than the elders knew. Tell me how you know.”

Cassen’s gaze narrowed on me. The light silver of his irises looked gold in the yellow glow of the lightbulb.

“The elders were old fools who destroyed our planet, Brae. They held on to stories of revenge and led Enos to ruin because of them. We have a chance to start over here on Earth. We could recreate Enos, but we wouldn’t have to live as clans anymore. One oculus. One ruler. One people.”

“The oculus was too powerful for one—”

“THAT’S WHAT THEY WANTED US TO THINK!”

His shout made both Kai and I flinch. Wind stirred in the room, swinging the lightbulb and throwing shadows in the corners. The fury in his gaze heated to a boiling point.

Kai leaned over and pressed the dagger to his throat. “None of that, Cas,” Kai hissed. “Lower your wind.”

The wind settled and Cassen closed his eyes, taking a deep breath.

“If that’s all a lie, Cassen,” I said, trying not to play too much into his hands, but even I was curious, “then who’s been telling you the truth?”

Cassen slowly opened his eyes and then fixed me with his gaze. “Jenna.”

Kai dropped the dagger. It clattered to the floor.

The name of the Frost Clan leader wasn’t a name I’d been expecting to hear. Especially not from Cassen’s lips. He’d been the one to drive her away four years ago. After their epic battle that had resulted in an entire Minnesota town buried in wind and snow, the Ice Queen had taken her people and vanished into the night.

“You’re lying,” I said at once.

Cassen shrugged. “I don’t really give a shit whether you believe me or not.”

“Why would Jenna talk to you? She hated you.”

“No. We hated each other. Both of us blaming each other’s clans for Enos’s demise. But then she came to me one night a few months ago and she showed me that the oculi containers could be fused. She told me it was the secret that her clan had vowed to protect. But protect from what? Brae…” Cassen shook his head. “There aren’t enough of us to be fighting with one another anymore. The war that raged on that planet is dead. We’re alive. We don’t have to protect secrets. We can live as one people now.”

Kai picked up the dagger. “She came to you one night…just like that?”

Cassen smirked. “People who are attracted to each other fight the hardest.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to drive Cassen’s words out, but some of them hit closer to home than I would’ve liked.

“I want to talk to Jenna.”

Cassen laughed. “Knock yourself out.”

“What do you mean?”

He rolled his eyes. “She finds me. I can never find her. She’s like a damn isha.” A wind spirit.

I glanced at Kai, he just shrugged. “Okay fine. Nice talking to you, Cassen.” We turned to walk up the cellar steps.

“Wait!” Cassen shouted.

We paused.

“Where’s Tifa? Is she all right? What are you going to do with us?”

“Tifa is in the attic. Still unconscious,” I replied. “We’re not setting you free.”

“And you’re not going to kill us?” Cassen scoffed. “What, are you two humans now? Believing in jails?”

“Apparently living with what you’ve done is sometimes a worse punishment than death,” I replied, thinking of that barn, the ruins of that house…

“What I’ve done? I barely scratched that girl,” Cassen hissed.

In less than a second, I was back in his face again, gripping his shirt collar. “You maimed her, you asshole. But let’s not forget the other humans you tortured.”

Cassen frowned, looking genuinely confused. “What humans I tortured when?”

“Don’t deny it, Cas,” Kai said at the foot of the stairs, his tone almost bored. “Elias told us everything about you experimenting with the enelia blades and humans.”

“Elias?” Cassen glanced from me to Kai, then back to me. Then a look of pain crossed his face. “I don’t know what shit you’re trying to pull, Brae. But you’re seriously pissing me off now.”

“Elias told us you used the enelia blade on humans, and I’m guessing that’s how you figured you could draw out the oculus in Marley’s blood,” I snapped. “I should have killed you for that alone.”

“Elias is dead,” Cassen snarled.

The cellar went quiet. Just the sound of Cassen’s rough breathing as he stared back at me.

“Since when?” Kai broke the silence.

Cassen looked from me to Kai, frozen on the stairs. “A few months ago. Nitrogen poisoning. Too much in his blood. Couldn’t handle it.”

“That’s impossible. We talked to him. He was right there!” Kai shouted.

“I don’t know who the fuck you talked to, but it wasn’t Elias!” Cassen roared back.

There was real pain in his voice. For all of Cassen’s faults, he really did care for his clan. So even though I’d seen and talked to Elias myself, I actually believed Cassen when he said Elias had died from nitrogen poisoning.

That had happened in the Rain Clan too, just last year.

Earth’s atmosphere was young and powerful, sometimes too powerful for us. If Elias truly had died because of Earth’s gases…then it made sense why Cassen would go so far as to want to recreate Enos. Why Corinthe would give up her oculus to Cassen. She didn’t want to just give her son the world, she wanted to make sure he kept living in it.

Even I had gone through that pain of losing one of my clan members to nitrogen poisoning. It had nearly destroyed me in more ways than one.

“And Jenna was the one who told me how to take the oculus containers and fuse them to form an enelia blade.” Cassen spat a wad of purple blood to the cellar floor. “She knew.”

I turned and stormed up the stairs, the thoughts in my head spinning faster than a twister. Alessi and Nova called for me, but I waved them away as I fled out of the farmhouse and into the field in the backyard. The sky was darkening, the sun setting directly across from me through the cottonwood trees.

A breeze came through and flattened the grass.

I turned my gaze up to the stars that were just beginning to appear, where the remnants of my planet and all its secrets had been laid to waste.

But it was possible that those secrets had survived and followed us here. It was possible that all the deceit and lies that fueled those wars had come to Earth with us.

I had to find Jenna and the Frost Clan.

I had to put an end to something that was already spinning out of control.

But to find them, we’d have to track their oculus, and I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to do that without the other three.

Without her.