There was a moment of dizzying motion through darkness, followed by flashes of light, all ending with a stomach-twisting lurching stop. Light and color swirled around and then formed into clarity. A room, the floor paved in colorful tiles, water flowing in a channel down the middle, plants all around. Soft light glowed from above, a recessed edge where the ceiling didn’t quite meet the top of the wall.
Declan was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, staring at the back wall, which was all black. Motion on either side of me caught my eye. Stacia stood to my right, dressed in the same clingy black clothes she had just pulled on. To my left stood a boy in his late teens—a young man. He had brown hair and blue eyes like Declan, and his features were similar, so similar that he had to be related to Declan. He looked at me, then down at his jeans and Oxford clothed self, and smiled. “This is how Father sees me,” he said in Omega’s voice. I opened my mouth but Stacia moved forward before I could speak.
“Declan?” she asked. He didn’t turn but a slight twitch of his head indicated he’d heard her voice. She moved up behind him and sank down to wrap around him. A flare of emotion flashed through me—something—jealousy maybe? It froze me in place, even as Omega stepped forward. “Father?”
Declan shifted slightly, maybe responding to the voice, maybe just to the contact of Stacia’s arms enfolding him. But still he stared straight ahead, focused on nothing—just the black of the wall. Part of me analyzed his minute movements, his unyielding attention, while another part of me realized just how much he was loved, deeply loved by the two around him. In fact, he was sitting in concentric layers of love, with the two in here and his aunts and pack members outside in reality, the elementals on guard outside the restaurant, Toni Velasquez, his friends at school.
And at that moment, the emotion I had felt clarified. Envy—of a sort. Comatose and vulnerable, he was still surrounded by more love than I had ever known.
I believe that my mother loves me, as much as she is able, but while she possesses enormous levels of STEM-type intelligence, she has very little emotional intelligence. And she is all I have. Well, except for Talon. And Jetta. Possibly Ashley. No, definitely Ashley. Maybe even Mack.
It felt like a sort of epiphany. One moment I envy my former boyfriend his deep connections, and the next I realize I have some strong ones of my own. Not as many, just a handful, but still more than I had ever fully realized before.
Omega turned and looked back at me from Declan’s side and I jolted into motion. “Hey Declan, what are you doing?” I asked, stepping forward.
His shoulders clenched, a clear sign my voice had also reached him. In fact, that tightening motion was greater than the twitches when the other two had spoken. “What is so fascinating about a black wall?” I asked, rewarded by a wiggle of his head. “There’s nothing there.” Actually, the wall was really weird, like there was no real surface to it at all.
“It’s not a wall,” he said, his voice very soft. Omega’s head whipped around and looked at me, eyes imploring.
“No? Then what is it?” I asked, keeping the questions going, moving even closer, now looking at the wall. It was very black, the deepest dark of night black—Stygian in its blackness.
“A portal,” he said. Stacia tightened her arms and he turned slightly as if just noticing. “Babe? I thought I was dreaming?”
“No, we’re here,” she said. “With you. Myself, Omega and… Caeco,” she said. Could have used a touch more excitement about that last name, but could I blame her? Last time we went this route, I was a pretty major bitch.
Declan turned and looked at Omega on his other side. “Whoa dude, you’re getting on in computer years, huh?” he said, smiling. Then he turned all the way around and looked back at me. “Ah, you all are here. Nano connections,” he said.
“Yes. You’ve got a bunch flowing through your veins. You’ve locked yourself away in here and we couldn’t get to you,” Stacia said. “So she helped.”
“So this is really happening?” he asked, smiling for the first time.
“As really as the inside of your mind gets,” I said. “What happened?”
His smile froze, locking up into something else. Guilt?
“How many?” he asked.
“How many what?” Stacia asked back.
“Deaths. How many deaths?”
“From the quake? None,” she said back before glancing at Omega and then me. “At least none that I’m aware of.”
“Me either,” I said.
“There was a small injury aboard a research vessel above the quake’s epicenter, but it was caused by a fall. Just a contusion, Father,” Omega said.
“What?” he asked, shocked. “I couldn’t handle it… it was too much.”
“Of course it was,” I said. “Like every nuke ever, going off all at once. But it somehow dissipated into the surrounding undersea terrain.”
“Stacia and I think that the elemental you contacted took over what you were attempting to do,” Omega said.
The shock changed to wonder. Then he shook his head and embarrassment took front and center.
“I’ve gotten pretty good at reaching out to elementals,” he said. “Practice making perfect and all that, right? And we’ve been careful to visit smaller elementals first, working our way up in terms of size and power. The older, bigger ones take more to reach. You have to be… louder. Which I am.”
“You take hardly any time to get their attention anymore,” Stacia agreed.
“But this one, the one under the subduction zone, was the biggest yet. And I was psyching myself up to reach out to it. To wake it up. Only I think it was maybe already near to wakefulness and when I sorta… yelled, well…”
“You startled it,” Stacia said.
He nodded. “Yeah, in a big way. And it moved or rolled over or whatever an elemental would do that was analogous to those things. It was like a bomb went off.”
“Many bombs, Father,” Omega said. “It was all I could do to keep the drone from damage. Had we been nearer the bottom, it may have been worse.”
“I knew instantly that I had fucked up. That the displacement was massive,” Declan said.
“So you being you, you tried to channel all that energy away, right?” I said, hands on hips.
He shrugged, both palms up.
“Well, it worked. Because nobody got killed,” I said. “But you sorta fried yourself.”
“Yeah,” he said, his head turning back toward the wall. Somehow, I thought that was a bad idea. Werewolf girl must have thought the same thing because she took his chin in her hand and moved his face back to hers.
“So… how do we wake you up?” I asked.
“Hmm? Is that a good idea? I thought comas were good, at least for a while?” he asked.
“Not in this case. Your aunt says you need to wake up right away,” Stacia said.
“Aunt Ash? She’s here?”
“More like you’re there, at your aunt’s house,” Omega said. “I brought you.”
“All the way back to Vermont? How much time has gone by?”
“A couple of hours maybe,” I said. “He sorta broke a lot of speed limits.”
“More like all of them put together,” Stacia said, shuddering ever so slightly. She was gently turning him, pressing on his knee in a way that spun him in place, still seated, till he was facing my way, back the way we had come. Behind him, the black wall, which might not have been a wall at all, started to recede, the walls on either side of us lengthening, extending, as if the room itself was getting bigger—or moving away from the portal of blackness.
“Yes, that’s it, Father. Follow us,” Omega said, taking Declan’s hand on his other side. Stacia put an arm around him. They both stood, raising him up with them and leading him forward, in my direction. I backed away, keeping my eyes on him, but it wasn’t necessary, as his pace lengthened out. Suddenly the vision of all three of them swirled, spinning around and twisting, my stomach dropping to my feet as the ground went out from under me. Until I opened my eyes.