CONVINCING North to let Oleander walk into the Pain god’s trap with nothing more than our shadow creatures at her side is only the very first of my hurdles.
Convincing the rest of the Bonded Group is almost impossible. Even after Oleander said she was going whether they liked it or not, it came to blows, Gryphon almost taking my head off and Atlas only being stopped by North’s intervention.
I have to come to terms with the vicious, loathing looks that I’m going to receive from each of them throughout this.
It doesn’t matter though.
None of that matters, so long as the plan succeeds.
For the very first time, my brother insists that Oleander takes his shadow creature with her. She tucks August behind her other ear after he shrinks down to the size of a penny, invisible to the world and everyone in it other than the three of us.
North has never trusted his bond or the creatures with her like this.
He’s never allowed them to spend time with her, especially at such a distance. He’s never trusted that side of himself, and certainly not with someone as beloved as his Bonded. Those fears inside of him haven’t just changed, they’ve evaporated altogether.
There is no doubt in either of our minds that she’s safest with our eyes on her, and if our eyes cannot be there, then our shadow creatures are the next best thing. I would trust Azrael with her no matter what, but there’s also something reassuring about August being with them too.
I’ve seen what North’s most vicious creature is capable of.
Standing at the edge of the Wasteland that I’m sure we’re about to be pulled into, my eyes voided out and the hard glares of the Bonded Group on me, I watch the moment the Pain god transports Oleander to the bridge.
I almost second-guess my own plan.
Not because I don’t believe that Oleander is strong enough to go through with our plan at the site of her parents’ death, but because the memory of that car ride lives within me just as it lives within her, and a vicious, violent reaction bubbles out of me.
North side-eyes me for a moment, his own eyes black as he watches through his shadow creature, but when the others begin to question what’s going on, he’s the one to answer.
“The god-bond is trying to get a rise out of her. It’s trying to find a weakness in Oli to get through to the Eternal—”
“And it’s not going to work,” I cut him off. Even if he reads the pure truth in my tone, Gryphon certainly doesn’t believe me.
“What is the point of a Bonded Group like ours if we’re going to just split up the moment one of these things snaps its fingers at us? This is fucking stupid,” he mutters under his breath, checking out his weapons again.
It’s a tic that he usually does when we arrive on a mission to calm himself down, and yet here it is, cropping up as he tries to keep a handle on his emotions. It’s not usually this hard for him, but I suppose this is the first time we’ve had to do something like this. We haven’t been separated from Oleander since she chased Kyrie to that Resistance camp and got herself sliced to pieces. The echoes of her pain back then still reverberate in my mind, and my bond seethes in my chest at the reminder.
We won’t let it come to that this time.
“Tell me again why you think this is going to work.” North mutters under his breath, and I take a long, calming breath of my own.
He’s not questioning me. He’s trying to stay calm. If I keep telling myself that, maybe I won’t lose my shit at them.
It’s almost fucking impossible not to.
“They weren’t testing Oli at the camps because they wanted to use her as a bomb. The Infinite Weapon program was a smokescreen, a way to convince the underlings to do their work for them.”
The records are very clear about what the god-bonds were really doing during the experiments. The patterns are there, and it hadn’t taken long for me and Benson to figure out that we were looking for a very particular type of experiment within the archives. They weren’t just looking at how to shift souls from bodies, but how to mix some bloodlines for certain types of Gifts.
The Pain god knew that whatever vessel it was moved into, it would gain access to that power, the same way that while the Shadows are an indicator of the god-bonds, it isn’t the only thing that we can do. The Draven line gave me the god-bonds, but my mother’s gift of the Madness had given me the Dread that terrifies all of those who hear my name. North’s mother had passed on the Death Touch to him.
The gods have access to these things now, a growing arsenal of weapons, and if the Pain god is able to take over the body of another Top Tier Gifted, it could kill the soul within and take control of the vessel. It could slowly start to collect whatever powers it desired, and it might just start with Oleander and work its way through our Bonded Group. Shapeshifting into a dragon with the shadow creatures at its beck and call, the Neuro ability to hack into anyone’s brain, and the ability to inflict gruesome, bloody deaths by tearing bodies to pieces, all wrapped up in one crazed god-bond.
I can’t imagine anything worse.
If we allow that to happen, we might as well say goodbye to the human race, because the Pain god will just consume and kill and maim over and over and over again until there is nothing left. This goes beyond just wanting to give our god-bonds the life that they have been yearning for or living a life with our own Bonded Group in peace. As selfishly as I want those things, this is about whether or not the world is going to be taken over by, quite frankly, the root of all evil.
“What they really want is to be able to shift vessels. They want to live forever, and none of them give a shit about who they live within. They don’t care about lifetimes or sleeping or any of that. All they care about is power—”
“But none of them have a Gift to manipulate souls within a vessel,”Atlas finishes off for me, a scowl on his face as he rubs a hand across his chin.
He’s been surprisingly quiet about the entire mission, keeping to himself and taking Oleander at her word when she said that she trusted me and wanted to do this. He hasn’t spoken to me or looked at me. He hasn’t questioned me in any way, and he hasn’t started a fight either, which is definitely a change.
I have no doubt that if anything happens to her, he will be the first person to kill me.
It won’t matter if the Pain god comes looking, I will already be a corpse if he has anything to do with it. It really would be a test of whether or not the Cleaver can take on the shadow creatures, though I suppose that if Oleander and I are wrong and something does happen to her, I won’t fight back.
I don’t think even the guilt I’ve had on my brother’s behalf will be enough to keep me around if something does truly happen to her. I’ve always felt an obligation to stay here for him, even in my darkest days after he’d found me and killed my mother for what she’d done to me.
“This is fucking stupid,” Gryphon says again, his eyes flashing to white as he lets his Gift kick in.
He scans the area, almost as though he’s developing new techniques to settle himself, and I choose not to say anything about it, not to him or to the rest of them. I keep my eyes on Oleander, and when the Pain god finally strikes, pushing everything it can at her until I know her bond is forced to take it all, I square my shoulders and prepare myself.
I glance over at my brother. “They’re coming.”
North nods, a scowl on his face as he watches the same scene that I do, Oleander’s body slumping down to the ground as the Pain god and the Transporter take her once more, Transporting into the Wasteland before us.
“I want this over with,” he says, and I nod slowly, lifting a hand as the shadows fall away from my body and begin to fan out.
The TacTeam personnel all lined up behind us in neat rows stay calm as the shadows overtake the area. The original personnel have seen it all before, and the new recruits were warned about how tonight will go. There’s an air of trust that has never been there before, a preparedness that was hard won.
Tonight.
Everything will be finished tonight, their death or ours.
We feel the moment that the Pain god appears in the Wasteland, moving Oleander’s unconscious body into the impenetrable area they’ve built specifically to keep us out.
The walls of the Wasteland are strong, the strongest Shields that we have come across; which is exactly how I knew that this is where they would end up. Hundreds of Gifted have been brought here to work together to make the entire area impenetrable.
When the scouts came across it, we knew right away that it would be endgame for the Resistance. We spent a lot of time trying to infiltrate it but failed again and again.
Except that was part of our plan as well.
The god-bond doesn’t realize the strength that we have taken from our Bonded, the unprecedented growth in our abilities, or the fact that the Draven family has taken in the powers of the gods over hundreds of generations. Instead of their manipulations of the Bonded Groups affecting us in a way that would weaken us, it has only made us stronger. It has only made the arsenal of weapons that we have at our disposal even more formidable.
It’s given us a way in.
“We need to go now,” North says under his breath, and I nod, glancing over at each of them for a moment just to be sure that they’re all as ready as I am.
Gryphon gives one last command to the Tac unit at our backs, and then each of them grabs my arm. The Shield can protect against Transporters that aren’t welcome within the Wastelands, but they can’t protect from something that’s already in there.
The Transporter just let us in.
We’d been standing outside the Shield wall, unable to move or advance any further. We hadn’t been trying to hide, and they hadn’t attempted to engage with us either. They’ve been so secure in their protections that they haven’t even attempted to mobilize against us. They just ignored us entirely.
One moment, we’re looking at that Shield wall, and the next moment, we’re stepping through the shadows. I’d spent a lot of time honing this skill, sharpening it, perfecting it, and making sure that it’s not the slow process of the shadow growing anymore.
I made sure that we wouldn’t give them enough time to prepare themselves for the death that is coming their way. The moment we appear, the alarm goes off, but it’s too late for them.
We’re not here for anything but death.
THE CRUX TAKES over North’s body before the Pain god even realizes that we have Shadow Shifted in.
It is so confident in its ability to keep us out, never dreaming that we’d find a loophole through its plan of Shielding us from our Bonded. It would have worked; it has worked a hundred times before.
Thanks to the breeding experiments that the Resistance had been conducting and the mixing of my mother’s blood, my incidental Gift was something that the Corvus had never had before.
Shadow Shifting.
Simply by having Azrael tag along with Oleander meant there was nothing they could do to keep us apart, nothing they could do to stop me from arriving here. When we’d soul-bonded and forged an unbreakable connection, I knew that I’d never again let anything come between us, and that was all thanks to the Pain god.
I’m going to make sure it dies a horrific death, regretting that fact.
It used a lot of its power knocking Oleander out, more power than it should have been willing to, leaving it vulnerable to attack.
A vicious roar tears through the air as Gabe shifts, his body snapping and crunching as the Draconis takes over. The Crux moves towards Oleander, blind to everything else that is happening around us as it sees her unconscious form lying there, its devotion to her as blind as my brother’s. The Soothsayer takes control of Gryphon and moves with him, getting a hand over her throat as it pours power into her.
The Corvus pushes at my mind as it attempts to take over, but I push back, letting the streams of shadows fall away from my body and pushing them to devour their Transporter whole. I’m eager to remove any potential threats before the Pain god has the chance to get out of here.
I watch the way that its mouth twists scornfully, the hatred there a sickening thing as my shadows turn their heads towards her. How it ever managed to pass as a simple, non-Gifted woman is beyond me, because all I can see in those depthless void eyes is the sort of murderous madness that isn’t so easily disguised. A smirk stretches over my own lips as I see the realization set in, the tension filling its body as its power washes over me without breaking into my mind at all. It’s desperate, and it now knows it’s used its trump card too soon.
It knows that we don’t want to simply kill it.
Doing such a stupid, rash thing would just send it back into the cycle; and I’m not spending the rest of my life waiting for this evil to return. If we cycle again, if this keeps on happening to us over and over, I’m not going to risk this coming after Oleander again. Not this version of her or the ones to come. Never again.
I watch as it scrambles away from us, throwing out its power as though it has a chance of getting through to any of us, but it can’t. The one and only time Gryphon used his Gift to knock Oli out, he told us it was like she pulled the power from him.
I’m sure the Pain god is hating every second of my poison girl’s power right now, every inch of it perfection.
The Draconis roars again, and this time, it takes off, leaving us behind as it senses something out there that none of the rest of us can see. A burst of fire lights up the night sky moments later as he wipes out the threat before it can even get close to Oleander. I push my shadow creatures even further, letting them free to start taking out the Resistance.
I watch as Atlas follows the line of the dragon’s body in the sky, torn between moving to Oleander and watching to see what is coming for us next. The Cleaver hasn’t taken over yet, it’s still the man in there making the choices, and as he glances back over in Oli’s direction, he curses under his breath.
I glance back to find a gun in the Pain god’s hands.
Atlas shakes his head at it, pushing his power into the barrier around it, but it’s not as simple as keeping us protected from the bullet.
It’s not aiming at us.
One of my shadows jumps up to grab it by the hand, another wrapping around its body to stop it from killing itself. It starts cursing and shouting as it squirms, fighting uselessly against the shadows, and I enjoy the sight of it all over again. I let one of the dark tendrils wrap around its mouth before I snap its arm, breaking the bone in a single movement.
The sound is like music to my ears.
The Draconis roars again, and Atlas curses under his breath.
“What the hell is going on up there?” he murmurs as he walks towards the opening to the tent, lifting it slightly and then jolting back.
“We have a lot more than the Pain god to deal with,” he says quietly, and the Soothsayer finishes healing Oli, standing up behind Atlas to glance out for a second.
“Tell me you’ve got her back, Crux. We can’t stay in here for much longer,” Atlas says, his tongue only tripping over the god-bond’s name a little.
There’s no answer, but the Crux stands smoothly, Oli looking so small and fragile in his arms. The Corvus pounds at the edges of my mind, demanding to be let out, but I hold onto control desperately. I need to see her wake up first. I need to know this wasn’t a mistake.
Her eyes stay closed, but her chest is moving steadily, her breathing even, as though she’s just enjoying a good night’s rest.
My eyes drift back to the Pain god, the loathing and disgust dripping from its gaze as it stares back at me.
I don’t really care about what this god-bond thinks.
The Soothsayer steps over to where the Crux is now cradling Oli against its chest, rocking her gently as their skin glows. He’s letting her feed from his power, seeping it into her through touch to fill her inner well and revive her.
I’m ready to take over the moment she needs it.
The Crux is clearly unhappy with what is going on, the skin on his hands turning black as he taps into his own well of power. He’s on the edge of losing control and taking down the entire Wasteland with his own Gifted rampage.
The Resistance have no idea what they’ve unleashed.
I stare at the Pain god, watching the madness writhe underneath its skin. “You should’ve known when she brought me back that it was all over for you.”
It snarls at me, too rabid to play these mind games, and yet it keeps on trying. “You say that like she hasn’t brought you back before. Always the same, always simpering after the rest of you like some pathetic little bitch in heat. You could be so much more.”
I shrug, the picture of calm even as dread pools in my gut due to Oleander’s unconscious state. “Why would I want to be more if I don’t have her?”
It spits on the ground between us. “Disgusting.”
“And yet, one of us is going to die today and the other is going to walk out of here, perfectly safe and with a complete Bonded Group. A long life ahead of us all. Tell me again how weak we are,” I say with a taunting tone, and Bassinger shoots a grin over his shoulder at me before it slides off of his face again, almost as though he’s just realized who he’s in on the joke with.
I don’t particularly care about that. I care about the details and how I can use them here to really extend the suffering of this god-bond.
I want it screaming.
“How many times have you killed your Bonded?” I say, lifting up a knife from the table in front of us.
It looks a little too much like the table on which Oleander had been subjected to torture for my liking, the echoes of her memories are as clear in my mind now as they have ever been. Her screams and the blood and the terror are waiting there for me the moment I shut my eyes.
I could hate this god for killing me, for being the one to spark the soul-bond that I share with my Bonded, but there’s a part of me that will always be grateful for my death.
I wouldn’t have found Oleander in the darkness of my mind without it.
No, I hate this god-bond for what it built. I hate it for the movement that it began purely to kill the rest of us. The Resistance has harmed so many, but ultimately, I will revel in this god-bond’s death because of what it did to Oleander. For Silas Davies, the death of her parents, the nightmares she still has lurking in the back of her mind, and for her years of loneliness and suffering.
For that, I will see this god-bond destroyed so permanently that it can never come back.
There’s a gasp behind me, and for the first time, I take my eyes fully off of the god-bond as my entire body turns towards Oleander. It always has, even when I fought it off so desperately.
She is awake, she is mine, and she is hungry.
She devours the god-bond’s soul before her eyes even flutter open, tearing it out as though it’s nothing more than a small, fragile being, ridding our world once more of this vengeful god. Only this time, it’s for good.
The Pain god is no more.
