The Chronicles of Kerrigan Prequel Series Books #1-3: Paranormal Fantasy Romance Page 30

  Paul had fired the lightning, but he hadn’t done anything with water. The water had been the work of his wife. Which could only mean that they were both inked. Which could only mean that…

  Holy shit.

  The little boy who had been killed wasn’t a normal kid at all. Not even by tatù standards.

  He was a hybrid.

  The second it clicked, Simon whirled around and punched the woman in the face. She hit the ground with a sharp crack, her eyes closed. As soon as she blacked out, the tower of water collapsed and Tristan went spilling onto the ground.

  Simon rushed to his side and flipped him immediately onto his back. The juxtaposition was utterly bizarre. Here they were, standing on a front porch on a sunny afternoon, except one of them was soaked through and through. But at the moment, that was the least of Simon’s problems.

  There was a lack of resistance to Tristan’s limbs and a lifeless pliability that froze Simon’s heart. Not only was he not breathing, but his body was making no effort to even try. Again and again, Simon tried pushing on his chest. Again and again he got no response. By the time Tristan’s head rolled limply to the side, he was on the verge of tears. “No,” he whispered softly as he clutched at his friend’s soaked shirt. “No—please.”

  It had been his idea to find this place. It had been he who’d convinced Tristan to come along. If it weren’t for him, Tristan would be sitting in biology class right now.

  If it weren’t for him…

  “Stand aside,” a soft voice said from somewhere over his shoulder. Paul.

  Simon jumped in alarm and raised his hands like a shield between himself and Paul. Simon hadn’t realized that he’d woken up. But sure enough, both he and his wife were standing right behind him.

  “Don’t!” Simon warned, keeping a protective hand on Tristan all the while. “Don’t come any closer!”

  Kate’s eyes misted over as she saw the sleeping teenager, and Paul bowed his head.

  “I can help,” he urged quietly. To illustrate his point, his fingers cracked with sparks of electricity. “We didn’t want him to die. Let me help.”

  Every instinct in Simon’s body screamed no, but he didn’t know what else to do. He was at his wits’ end, and while these people may have been directly responsible for what had happened, they might also be the only people who were able to set it right. With a look of the utmost hesitation he moved aside, keeping one hand on Tristan all the while.

  In a surprisingly practiced movement, Paul knelt down and pulled off Tristan’s wet jacket. A second later, he rolled up the T-shirt below. The world around them seemed to stop as he laid his hands gently upon Tristan’s bare chest, right above his heart.

  Simon froze. And watched. But nothing happened.

  “Why isn’t it working?!” he demanded.

  The man was just wasting time! He hadn’t even seen the sparks!

  Paul and Kate exchanged a quick look before he said gently, “You have to let go of him now. I can’t…I can’t do it while you’re holding on.”

  Oh. Of course.

  With a flush of shame, Simon released Tristan’s shirt. Then he watched with wide eyes as two hundred joules of electricity went shooting through his friend’s chest.

  Tristan’s body arched, and fell back against the wood. His eyes stayed closed.

  Another jolt.

  The same thing.

  Another jolt and his eyes squinted shut as he coughed up what looked like a river of water onto the front porch.

  Oh, thank bloody goodness…

  Paul took a step back as Simon rushed forward. He slid his hands beneath Tristan’s head and helped him sit up as he struggled to get his bearings.

  “…wh-what,” his eyes blinked open and shut, staring around in a daze, “what-t h-happened…?”

  Simon said a silent prayer of relief as he helped hold him steady. “It’s alright,” he said reassuringly. “You’re okay. You’re going to be fine.”

  Tristan’s eyes locked onto Simon, disoriented and weak. “…Simon?”

  “We should get him inside,” Kate said softly. Simon looked up and followed her gaze to where a handful of curious neighbors were beginning to venture out of their homes. “Before anyone starts asking questions.”

  Simon’s eyes darted between the house and the car. Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one who’d almost been drowned on dry land. Sure she wanted them to come inside. So she and her husband could finish what they started. He gazed up at the couple warily, and her shoulders fell with a defeated sigh.

  “Do you know I just lost a child?”

  Simon’s spine stiffened as he stared up at her in shock. Her husband bowed his head, and tears sprang to her eyes as she continued.

  “I didn’t want to hurt another. Please.” She cocked her head towards the house. “Come in.”

  It might have been a stupid idea, but Simon was out of options. The neighbors were beginning to close in, and Tristan was in no state to be moved. In the end, he had to concede.

  Although not without conditions.

  Refusing to allow Paul to help, Simon picked Tristan up and carried him carefully inside the house. If it weren’t for the help of the tatù, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to do it. The guy was just as tall as he was and was dripping wet. But he managed well enough, and followed Paul and Kate to the living room, where he lay Tristan out across the couch.

  “What…what is this?” Tristan blinked weakly at the ceiling, before glancing at Paul and Kate with a look of fear. “Simon, why’d you bring us inside?”

  “It’s okay,” Simon reassured him, although in his mind he was asking the exact same question. “We had to get in the house. Neighbors would start to noticing.”

  “Notice how she tried to drown me in broad daylight?” Tristan turned to his side with a violent cough. His wet hair stuck to his forehead, and his eyes were rimmed with red.

  Simon didn’t know what else to do for him, so he simply patted his shoulder and wondered desperately if he’d made the right decision by trusting Paul and Kate. “Are you…are you okay? How are you feeling?”

  Tristan’s eyebrows pulled together. “My throat’s burning.”

  Kate rose immediately to her feet. “I’ll get you some warm water.”

  “No,” Simon held up his hand quickly, “you’ve done enough.”

  Tristan would be alright. He was through the worst of it. Now that they had paid a terrifying price to get inside, he was going to get some answers from these people once and for all.

  “What happened to your son?” he asked sharply.

  Kate glanced at Paul before sinking slowly back into her chair. It only took a second for the tears to come, and she covered her face as she began crying quietly. Paul took over.

  “We don’t know,” he said quietly, in a voice just as choked up as his wife. “One minute he was playing in the backyard, and the next…he’d been shot through the chest.”

  Simon relaxed his aggressive posture as he stared back and forth between the devastated couple. Despite what they’d just done, he felt a stab of pity for them. Then Tristan coughed again, and his eyes tightened. “You didn’t see what happened?” he demanded. “You didn’t see who it was?”

  Instead of answering, Paul stared at him with a question in his eye. “The two of you…you’re not with the Privy Council?”

  Simon blinked. The Privy Council? That’s what they’d thought? “No, why would you…”

  All at once, it clicked. Why Paul and his wife had been hurrying to leave town. Who they’d been so terrified of following them. Who they’d thought that Simon and Tristan were…

  “We go to Guilder Boarding School,” Simon said slowly. “We’re not with the Privy Council.”

  Kate and Paul exchanged another look, before they relaxed slightly. Kate’s eyes flickered again over Tristan, before she stared entreatingly at Simon. “Please, let me get him something warm to drink. He has to be in pain.”

  Simon glanc
ed behind him quickly, before nodding a quick ‘yes.’ By the looks of things, Tristan wasn’t in any state to be moved any time soon, and in the meantime, Simon might as well use the opportunity to get some answers. “That would be fine. Thank you.”

  Rather than heating up something in the kitchen, she merely grabbed a mug from a cabinet and headed back towards the couch. On the way there, she closed her hand around it, and it filled with water. A second after that, the water was boiling.

  “That’s incredible,” Simon said softly as she handed the mug to Tristan.

  “It’s my tatù,” she said something. “Hydro-manipulation. Since I was sixteen.”

  Simon turned from her to her husband. “And you?”

  With a wry smile, Paul fired a few sparks into the air. “I’m sure I’m not the first one you’ve seen.”

  No, he wasn’t. There was a second-year student at Guilder with the same ability. Jason was already eyeing him for training. But he wasn’t nearly as advanced as Paul.

  Simon shook his head uncertainly. “But you two are…”

  Kate smile. “Together?”

  A faint blush spread up Simon’s cheeks. “Yeah…together.”

  The couple exchanged a look.

  “We fell in love,” Paul said softly. “After I graduated, I turned down an offer to work with the PC. I had no interest in furthering that agenda. I went to London and started writing for a local paper, when I met Kate. At the time, I had no idea who she was. No idea that she…was like me.”

  Kate smiled warmly, repeating his words to the letter. “We fell in love. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t intentional. And it certainly wasn’t sanctioned. But it happened. There really wasn’t anything we could do.”

  A strange light-headedness descended over Simon, and he realized he was holding his breath. For whatever reason, he found himself strangely in tune with the couple, mentally uniting himself against whatever obstacles stood in their way.

  …even if he happened to be hoping that the very obstacle would offer him a job.

  “So what did you do?” he asked quietly, staring hesitantly between them.

  He was suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that he was asking the most personal of questions, but he couldn’t help himself. They were shedding light on a side of the inked world he’d never known. A side of dark ultimatums and questions to which he was dying to know the answers.

  Paul’s eyes came to rest on his wife.

  “We fell off the grid. We knew it wasn’t allowed, so we moved out of the city. Stopped talking to our family. Our friends. To anyone who knew us. We lived for each other, and no one else. Until…”

  Kate’s eyes welled up with sudden tears. “…until Davey.”

  A sudden hush descended over the room, and Simon dropped his eyes to the floor. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened next. He just didn’t know who was responsible.

  Surprisingly, it was Tristan who spoke up next. “The two of you decided to have a kid?” He sounded a bit stronger now, and had hoisted himself up to a tentative sitting position on the couch. But Simon couldn’t understand the note of accusation in his voice. “The two of you are inked with both water and electricity…and you decided to have a kid?”

  A cold chill ran down the back of Simon’s neck as he suddenly understood the horrific implication in the words. Tristan was right. How could two people in their right minds dare to mix such volatile elements? Water and electricity? Combined into a single person? The potential risks involved for the child were too gruesome to even imagine.

  “We didn’t mean to,” Kate’s voice was scarcely above a whisper. “We were taking all the precautions, but it just…happened.” Her eyes flickered up to a picture resting in the center of the mantel. “Davey was our little miracle.”

  “He could have died,” Tristan said coldly. “The rules are in place for a reason. So that those kinds of situations can never happen. They put everyone around them at risk.”

  Simon frowned to himself, but only half of him was listening. The other half was buzzing with a newly-awakened curiosity. He had never once stopped to consider what kind of tatùs could happen if you dared to mix the right ink.

  “Those kinds of situations?” Paul demanded, half-rising to his feet in rage. “You’re talking about my son!” But even as he said the words, all the fight went out of him. It was replaced with a dull kind of heartache as he sank back down in his chair. “You were talking about my son.”

  Tristan fell silent as Simon looked up with sudden feeling.

  “You don’t know?” he asked softly. “You don’t know who shot him?”

  Paul turned his face to the window as Kate forced herself to speak. “At first we thought it was the Privy Council. The assassin was so trained, so talented. He pierced Davey’s heart from over a thousand feet away.”

  Tristan and Simon froze with identical expressions as Paul took over.

  “But when the PC came afterwards with members of the Guilder staff, they were as stunned as we were. I can’t believe the reaction was faked, especially because if they’d known that Davey existed, they surely would have come for him long ago.”

  “Come for him?” Tristan echoed faintly. “What do you mean, come for him?”

  But however they answered him, Simon would never know. His mind was stuck on a loop, repeating the last words Kate said over and over in his head.

  ‘The assassin was so trained, so talented. He pierced Davey’s heart from over a thousand feet away.’

  Simon knew someone like that. In fact, he’d just had the privilege of meeting him.

  Bullseye.

  Chapter 7

  “I just don’t get why they would say that,” Tristan said for the hundredth time as they streaked back under the starry sky towards Guilder Boarding School.

  Between the weighty confessionals and the near death-by-drowning, the little trip had taken a lot longer than either one of them had anticipated. At this rate, Simon was worried about making curfew. Tristan lay stretched out in the passenger seat while he drove. It was an arrangement Tristan had greatly protested, while the latter had silently encouraged. But in the end, even Tristan had to admit that he was in no shape to be operating heavy equipment, and Simon could scarcely contain his excitement at driving a Porsche. It wasn’t long, however, before the logistics were put to rest and both boys lost themselves in a baffling whirlwind of thought. But as hectic as their minds were, they were focused on two very separate things.

  Simon couldn’t get past the assassin.

  Tristan apparently couldn’t get past the Council.

  “Yes, the PC has rules in place for a reason. And yeah, they’re well within their right to enforce said rules. But how Kate and Paul were talking about it…” Tristan shook his head in frustrated confusion. “It was like they were worried about a kidnapping or something. Like they thought the PC was going to come after them and make them… disappear.”

  “Uh-huh.” Simon never lifted his eyes from the road. He had his own battle of cognitive dissonance going on, and didn’t have time for Tristan’s. For his part, Tristan was either too oblivious or too wound up to care that he didn’t have an audience.

  “And you heard what they said in the beginning? When they were standing over you?” His face clouded as the image flashed behind his eyes. “This is for my son.” He dropped his voice to mimic the older man from earlier that afternoon. “That’s what Paul said. They thought we were the Council, and that the Council had killed their kid.” This time, when he didn’t get a reaction he struck Simon on the arm. “Are you hearing me? They thought the Council actually murdered their kid! Like the PC would kill a kid! They were ready to kill you over it! How the hell could they possibly think that?!”

  Simon glanced over quickly and nodded, but stayed quiet.

  Truth be told, after the things he’d seen today he wasn’t sure there was a limit to what the Council would and wouldn’t be willing to do. To start, he had no idea how they could have pos
sibly orchestrated the cover-up with the press. The man who killed Davey had obviously been inked and had obviously used his ink to do it. How they had somehow manufactured fabricated evidence to make it look like a regular drive-by, Simon had no idea. But even more convincing than their sway with the regular press was Kate and Paul themselves.

  A couple didn’t just fall completely off the grid on a whim. They didn’t abandon their families and re-invent their entire lives as a mere precaution. It was more than that. The fear that Simon had seen in Paul’s eyes when he thought they were with the Council, the vengeance that he glimpsed in them moments after, when he stood above Simon…that was real.

  Whatever repercussions they feared from the Council were just as real. And yes, whether or not Tristan could believe it, Simon believed they would be just as severe as well. He wasn’t sure he liked the PC all that much. He definitely wasn’t sure he trusted them. All this power… somewhere, something or someone had to go wrong. His gut was telling him that.

  Tristan threw up a hand in frustration as the other rubbed absentmindedly at the burns on his chest. They weren’t serious by any means. They’d probably resolve themselves in a few days. The only thing that was strange about them was that they were in the perfect outline of a hand.

  “It’s like talking to a wall,” he muttered. “Honestly, Simon, I don’t see how you’re not worked up about this. I’m the one who almost drowned on someone’s front porch, and I’m still worked up about it. Besides, it was you who wanted to go there in the first place—”

  “I think the guy who killed Davey was the same guy who tried to kill me.”

  Tristan’s eyes widened as he shifted slightly in his seat to look at Simon full-on. “Why do you think that?”

  Simon’s brow furrowed with a look of concentration. “Something about what the mother said…that the assassin was so trained, so talented. That he pierced Davey straight through the heart from over a thousand feet away. How many guys do you know that could do that?”

  “I don’t know. Why is that—”