The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Training

LATER THAT WEEK, KUTOYIS CAME TO IN MY ROOM. I WAS READING over some books Sadie had brought back from Salem, comparing them against texts that were set in the times and places in history Raven had alluded to being a part of. Next to the stack of books, I'd started a Moleskine notebook of my own full of theories. Right now I was working on other people in history Alexander Raven might have been.

"What are you up to?" he asked, joining me on the couch.

"Trying to put the puzzle together," I said.

"Hard to do without all the pieces, I'm guessing," he said.

"You're telling me. What's up with you?"

"I need to talk to you about this . . . puzzle," he said, furrowing his brow.

"I'm listening."

"How bad is this dude you're going to fight in the war?" he asked.

"About as bad as they come," I said. I had just reread portions of The Iliad that recounted the death of Achilles and filled Kutoyis in. "He'll do anything for power. Right now, that means killing supernaturals, but I think there will come a time when his goal will be humans. Controlling them, if not killing them."

"But now, his main goal is to destroy the Survivors in the Hidden City?"

"Right," I said.

"I think I have to fight him too then, don't I?" Kutoyis asked. "All I've ever wanted was a community of real supernaturals like me. And I understand from Ben that they aren't exactly like me, but they're closer than humans are. From what Sadie's told me, the elders running their community now are pretty awful. Maybe they'll need someone like me when it's all over," he said.

I could see in his shining blue-black eyes that this war as a chance for him to be the Kutoyis he once was. A chance to find solace in others like himself. A chance to do something right.

I clapped my hand on his shoulder. "Yeah, maybe they will. So you're in?"

"Yeah," he smiled. "I'm in."

THAT AFTERNOON, MY SIBLINGS AND I WERE TRAINING WITH OUR QUARTET OF Survivors in the fields behind our house when Kutoyis showed up at the edge of the forest with a hundred Red Bloods. He had fathered more than 150 children in his lifetime almost all by different women. The children were all mortals with magical powers or supernatural abilities of some kind. They were healthy and strong but lived lives of normal length. Sky had given birth to nearly sixty children before she left. As each generation passed down the powers, they weakened, so the 100 he had with him today, I knew, were only his or Sky's actual children and not any more distant and weaker descendants.

I realize one distinct difference between Sadie and Kutoyis. With his magic, he wanted to make more magic. With hers, she wanted to end it.

Suddenly our group of ten looked like a paltry excuse for an army as his family crossed the field.

My father was ecstatic. "You're exactly what we need." He got to work quickly, introducing people to one another and identifying powers. Their powers had amalgamated in interesting ways since they came from the same two original sources. Kutoyis's power yielded offspring who could move people with their minds, infiltrate others' minds, deprive people of their senses, morph into versions of their opponents, paralyze them, and even one young child who could make you believe she disappeared even though she hadn't. In Sky's line, there were flyers, astral projectors, elaborate leapers, and two who could teleport. Teleportation would be an invaluable resource to us, not just on a battlefield but in our lives. If we could have stolen anything from Sam, that would have been it. Though we referred to it as her disappearing power, that was really only half-right. She always did reappear somewhere after disappearing, did she not? Months ago, Patrick and Madeline had spent a month in Europe looking for someone who could teleport so we could acquire the power and be lifted from the constraints of human travel. But they'd had no luck on an entire continent, and now two of them stood in our backyard. Not that we could take the powers from them.

Sarah and I were under strict instructions from Anthony to continue working on our ability to merge powers away from one person and into the other. We had almost succeeded. Lately, I'd find a sleepless Sarah in the makeshift apothecary while Sadie slept upstairs in my room, and so she and I would practice our merging and power bestowal act. We progressed. The day before, I had merged my power with Ben's in such a way that it didn't transfer his power to me or mine to him, but instead temporarily mutated the power itself. In air, my newest power — the ghoul's invisibility power — was visible, a sort of milky white smoke with a solid black center. Ben's power surfaced to the skin around his neck, the same red mercury Lizzie's power had been, but it never separated from his body. I sent my power into his, and his whole body radiated white smoke while his eyes turned pitch black. He screamed as if in anguish, and then his body melted into a puddle of water. I thought I'd killed him or irreversibly turned him into water. But Ginny, with her out-of-the-box logic, suggested I hadn't mutilated him as I had feared but instead, I had actually merged our two powers into one weird one. Ben turning into water was really two parts: using my new ability to become invisible first, using his own ability to create and manipulate elements — in this case, water — second. I could turn wholly invisible. He could just turn into a see-through element.

When Kutoyis arrived, we had been trying to get my invisibility back from Ben, but unmerging was not going as well as merging. We kept to this task as the others worked with the Red Bloods.

It didn't take long for them to see the giant flaw in our preparation. We could train everyone as hard as we wanted to on maximizing their powers for battle, and work together subdue opponents. But what would it matter? We still didn't know how to defeat any enemy Survivors. Not one of us yet knew how to kill a Survivor.