Power boils through my veins.
My father lifts his hand.
Time drops its speed.
The storm of the room roars. Or maybe that’s the sound in my own throat—the sound in his throat too.
In an instant, my father sends magic hurtling at me with a force that makes my skin prickle. But I’m ready.
If I thought the air exploded before, it’s nothing compared to this.
Our power collides.
And that raw, brutal, killing magic rips right through the air between us.
Magic isn’t supposed to react this way. I’ve never heard of it happening before, but maybe because I carry my father’s blood in my veins, it’s allowing our power to react to each other.
The estate cracks, a fissure appearing between us. But this one isn’t a physical break or palpable rot. This is something else.
A metaphysical rip in the air appears. It’s broken with jagged darkness and rotten lines. It crackles like a lightning storm, thunders with a barrage of deafening blasts. Wind whips from it like a cyclone, tearing off pieces of wallpaper and spinning it around, sucking it through the gash like blood, making it disappear.
My father’s eyes are wide, face leached of color, and the fact that he’s showing any hint of panic should worry me, but I’m too focused. Too caught up.
I pour more and more of my power into it. I let it collide with his, ripping this break in the air even further, filling the whipping wind with the stench of decay and hate. My hands shake, my father sweats. We grit our teeth.
Pain lances down my bones, and for a second, I think maybe he’s broken something, but no. My magic is draining me too fast, too strong. My spikes are going up and down in volatile bursts, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode.
“Slade!” Distantly, I feel my mother’s hand on me, trying to pull me away, feel Ryatt on my leg. But I don’t stop.
I can’t.
And right then, that’s when my father sees it in my face. Sees that I’m not going to give up. The booming outcry that comes from his sneering lips makes a fierce scream come from my own.
Because I would rather die than let him win.
The wind tears at my clothes, tosses dirt into my eyes, the smell of rot clogs my throat, his power pushing, pushing, pushing against mine so hard that my entire body shakes.
Control, Slade.
All those lessons. All the punishments and lectures and hours of exhaustion and pain. I put up with it because I knew I had to learn, had to push so that I could have just as much power and control as he does.
I learned control so that I could take his away.
I shove everything I have. Everything I am. I shove so much it feels like two parts of me rip right down the middle. And that’s when that preternatural tear in the air finally erupts.
I feel it the second the magic explodes—feel it because it explodes through me.
The power finally comes to a head, breaking my father and me apart with an ear-piercing explosion.
For a second, I’m weightless. Numb. Caught in the air right alongside my mother and brother.
But then that slow, slackened time snaps back into place. The rip in the air is suddenly like a massive maw of a bodiless beast, and its dark, storming mouth opens wide. It suspends in the air, facing my half of the room, ready to devour us all.
I don’t even have time to land back on the ground before those lightning teeth snap shut around our entire cracked half of the room. Then it devours us all in a storm of blackness, and all I know is agony and falling and echoing screams of dozens of people.
That ripped mouth swallows us down, down, down into the darkness of nothing, through time and magic and hallowed air.
And then we land in the belly of the beast, and my ripped apart body and poisoned power succumbs to unconsciousness.
I wouldn’t know that I’d ripped a tear in the world until I woke up four days later. I wouldn’t know that I’d ripped myself in half in the process or that I’d ripped the other people into Orea with me, who would now depend on me forever. I wouldn’t know that everything was about to change.
Unconsciousness was my only reprieve, but I wouldn’t know.
CHAPTER 38
AUREN
“Rip.”
That’s the first word out of my mouth when he finishes speaking. Because now, I know what it means. Now, I know how much it signifies. All this time, his greatest secrets have been carried by his most common nickname.
I’m not sure when I sat down, but I think my legs gave out somewhere around the time when Slade told me the story of how his power first manifested as a little boy, and I’ve stayed planted here all the way up to that fateful fight between him and his father. The fight that led him here.