Ice that was encased around me.
I’ve … I was actually frozen?
That was … I thought that was …
It wasn’t just a fevered, desperate imagining constructed by my mind to somehow explain the impossibility of —
A shadow falls over me, the daylight otherwise suddenly way too bright. I blink. My vision is hazed over … with … blood? The blood vessels in my eyes have all burst? From being frozen?
I … should be in pain. Shouldn’t I be in pain?
The terrible visage of the Cataclysm looms over me as he places one hand beside my head and crouches to sweep his gaze across me. From the amulet resting against my chest up to my bleeding eyes.
For a moment he looks … terrified. And I catch a glimpse of a scarred pattern almost hidden within the red-rimmed black of his irises, an irregular starburst. Similar to the pattern of the Outcast’s eyes. Scars on shifters of their power and age are highly unusual. Though they do share one particular commonality beyond being half-brothers.
Along with their brother Ward — the brother I’m almost certain the Cataclysm murdered — the Outcast and the Cataclysm were my aunt’s soul-bound mates. With were being the crucial distinction. Are the scars in their eyes from when my aunt rejected those bonds? When she tried — unsuccessfully, it seems — to sever those connections?
Was the Cataclysm affected by my aunt’s death, nearly killed as the Outcast was? Does that make him weak now … or even more unpredictable?
He grabs me, hauling me half upright to snarl viciously in my face. The veins in his neck are dark and distended. “For every trick you try, Conduit, I’ll hunt down and murder someone you love.”
“That’s a short list,” I rasp. “Of very powerful people.” My throat also feels bloody. Raw. The blue sky overhead is too bright. The air somehow suffocating, oppressive.
“Get the fucking healer!” the Cataclysm snarls at someone over my head. I can’t see or feel them.
Apparently, I’m so drained that I can’t even sense nearby essence. Though maybe the person is a null —
“We … you …” a woman stutters, feet shifting restlessly.
She should know better than to act like prey around a predator. Though maybe the Cataclysm is on another level. Maybe he —
The woman rallies. Her accent, even as she stutters, hints at southern North American roots. “You killed the healer —”
“Get another!”
I realize the Cataclysm is holding me upright by my necklace. My necklace. The amulet, the shard of the intersection point, that he shouldn’t be able to touch. He grips the chain, along with some of my sweater. And just at the lower, still-hazy edge of my sight, I can see the pink diamond caged in all its golden threads dangling under his meaty fist. The blackened claws that still tip his fingers dig into his own flesh.
The diamond is … dulled, deadened.
Completely drained of essence?
Panic skitters through my mind. Panic at being even more vulnerable than I was when I initially faced the Cataclysm.
I shove it all away — the fear and the panic. I focus on the now. Cloudless blue sky overhead, hard-packed dirt under me, and all that deadened air around me. “I’m the fucking Conduit. Maybe,” I say, coughing, “don’t toss me into a portal that crosses through dimensions, you fucking moron.”
Something that might be regret filters through the Cataclysm’s anger as he grimaces. “An oversight.”
“You think you’d know better,” I say, unable to lift my arms, unable to do anything but hang there suspended by his hold on my fucking necklace. “Having once loved my aunt.”
He scoffs. “It was never love. Worship. Reverence. But gods aren’t capable of loving.”
I’m not certain what god he’s referring to — and in plural — and I don’t have the time to clarify, because he shifts his hold on me, lifting and carrying me across his arms, tucked into his chest. My head lolls back over his bulky arm.
The movement hurts. Agony prickles across my entire body. As if all my nerves, formerly frozen over, have come back online all at once.
He pivots, bringing a low, windowless cement bunker into view. Not a single cloud softens the expansive sky. What I can see of the landscape is dry and flat, with a scattering of dead plants and a decrepit fence. Beyond that, at the edge of my vision, I glimpse a huge house situated behind a row of tall but anemic trees. It’s too hot for March, but I already know we’re nowhere near the West Coast.
I catch sight of a tall woman in Cataclysm leathers. Her dark-blond hair is plaited in intricate braids and partly pulled back from her sun-kissed face. She’s not much older than her early twenties. She wrings her hands together fearfully. Her light-hazel-eyed gaze falls on me as the Cataclysm pushes by her without a word. Each of his steps sends more and more agony reverberating through me.
