Savage Wings: Book Three of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 27

Blink.

Blinding white hot light engulfed everything, decimating the city, every building, every car, every paving slab, every blade of grass. It raged, like some great mythical beast that sought to burn everything to cinder and reduce the whole world to ashes.

Blink.

I opened my eyes wide and replaced the searing glare with fairy lights, thousands of fairy lights stretching out across London, draped over the iron landscape.

Blink.

As soon as I closed my eyes again, the fairy lights became swinging amber orbs. Swinging amber orbs became venomous amber stares. And then it was all gone again, engulfed in that awful, blazing light that had been imprisoned inside for so long that its hunger felt untameable.

I saw flashes of them all, of Brandon, of Drachmann, every single one of them knocked out cold from the blinding light. But mostly I saw Philippe. Poor Philippe Charmonde. My friend. My enemy. Even though he was gone, I could still feel his anguish like it had latched onto my soul, a stain that would take an eternity of scrubbing to weaken its presence. A tear slipped down my face as my vision blurred by the many that waited to follow in its path and I wiped it away bitterly and covered my eyelids with cool hands, wishing that I could banish the heat that lingered under my skin as easily as I could banish the heat that pooled in my eyes.

Perched on the high wall that bordered the school grounds, my legs dangled over the side as I watched the city sparkle in the distance. It was cold, probably too cold to be sitting outside at this time of year, but the chill of the night air soothed me and the inside of the school building had just seemed too confining, too oppressive. I needed to be away from the others, even from Lucius who had studied me with more than the usual amount of solemnity in his expression when I'd returned two nights before. Being around him had become something of a comfort, a need even, but as soon as I saw him, I'd felt like I was back to square one, fearing his company, only now it wasn't his abilities that terrified me. It was my own.

The anger I'd felt. The rage. The endless burning. The knowledge that whatever I'd done – whatever had happened – was something so uncontrollable that I now didn't trust myself around the ones I trusted and cared for the most. Those powers had exploded without warning and I'd unleashed them, so consumed by my own fury that all control had been lost to me. It had felt like watching a volcano erupt and being unable to stop the lava as it devoured everything, except of course, I was the volcano. I was the lava. I was destruction and mayhem and retribution.

The problem was, at the time, in that very moment, I hadn't even wanted to control it. I'd enjoyed the feeling of power as it flowed through my veins and burst out of me in great reams of light and fire. In fact, I had revelled in every awful terrifying second of what I had done. Revelled. And what's more, now that those powers had been released, I could feel them still burning below the surface, as if the only thing that would quench the fire would be for me to release them again. They wanted out. They wanted me to use them. To become what I had in that barn. The desire to unleash them was frightening. Intoxicating. 

I stretched, uncomfortably arching my spine and rolling my shoulders to try to ease the tension that seemed to have taken root since my wings had burst free from my back. They were gone again, of course, but the after-effects seemed enduring this time, the puckered ridges of scar tissue throbbing painfully almost as if to remind me: we are still here, we are still here.

The creak of the door wrenched my gaze reluctantly away from the city lights and with a slight turn of my head, detecting his scent as it was captured on the gentle night breeze, I smiled wryly at the inevitability of Fenton's appearance. Since we'd got back, he'd been one of the only ones who seemed unabashed to intrude on my self-imposed alone-time. Everyone else kept their distance, but not Fenton. Never Fenton. He approached the wall where I sat, his face more gentle than the hard lines and blasé expression that I was used to from the aloof vampire. He'd been looking at me that way since we'd returned and it was starting to bug the shit out of me, although it was easier to cope with than the slack-jawed, stunned look of awe that he'd worn when he'd appeared, having witnessed the blinding white light shining through every crack or gap in the wooden slats of the barn. He'd entered, fearing the worst and instead found me alive and on my knees surrounded by the unconscious bodies of Drachmann, Brandon and the rest of the Varúlfur. His jaw had dropped. His eyes had widened with questions he didn't dare to ask. And then with the military precision he was famed for, he'd switched to rescue mode, managing to release Harper from his binds and getting us out of there, before our captors could regain consciousness. The questions came later of course, ones that I was still struggling to know how to answer.