The Night Rider

Chapter 63 - Pull

Hawkins opened his eyes.

The tingling of the black grimoires' pull felt like a distant memory.

"I need to...I need to..."

Hawkins tried to steady his breathing, the realisation emerging sluggishly with every curl of his fists. The gashes on Rin's shoulders, the pinpricks of lance like wounds on Cricket's arms, the brick dust on her fingers still soaked from earlier rain that didn't cover the whole area.

Cricket's foetal position hid most of her injuries but the burn scars differed from the wounds she had suffered indirectly from Cull's hands. The mottled scabbed over skin was already healing like a flash fire of brief desperation and hesitation but this...this was intentional.

It was like her chest had been carved out with someone's bare knuckles, choosing to use a blunt instrument that rippled over her skin like wasps burrowing beneath it. But the strangest, most horrifying thing wasn't the bloated redness of her skin or the misshapen concave within her skull but the loud, sharp sound of cracking stone. Not stone. Bone.

"Hawky?"

Hawkins' breath caught in his throat.

With every shallow rise and fall of Cricket's chest, her ribs realigned, recentred and slotted back into place again only for the impact to recoil back into her body and shatter. Cricket was reliving the injury over and over again. Necromancy.

Hawkins couldn't look away at the exposed heart, his own breathing matching in time with her own no matter how much he tried to ignore it. He didn't know how she was still alive. Part of him didn't want to know. Hawkins wanted to wretch, his stomach gurgling without any sustenance in hours but he forced it down, looking up at the sky to stop his eyes from watering.

Moisture dripped from the broken stone, forcing him to wipe away tears he didn't realise he still had for the young Traited. Whatever this was, whatever happened to Cricket...she was in so much pain that all her body could do was re-experience the impact over and over again. It was a far cry from whatever Hack had attempted but it still soured every uttering of the phrase.

"Hack was right. I need to finish this myself."

Rin's voice was barely a whisper but her jaw clenched with determination, gripping the glass like blade in her hand even as blood threatened to drip onto the ground. Hawkins wanted to reach out to them both and pry it from her hands, but he was too shaken up.

"Rin, we need to get you to a healer! Hawky can-"

Mantis was cut off by a guttural scream, startling everyone to dart about and search for the Overtaken only to look down in horror.

"No!"

"No. He lied to us. He said he didn't know. But he does. He's just lying to himself." Rin repeated over and over again, her steely glare maddened by everything she had seen but being unable to speak of it.

"Rinelle, what happened to you? You disappeared...."

"Mantis."

Hawkins gently placed a hand on Mantis' shoulder, the Air Traited flinching while August flared his wings and threatened to peck him to death. He lowered his head in recognition, giving Mantis the space to spend near Rin despite all the destruction around them. He had seen this before but that didn't make it any easier.

He winced at the memory of his father's face. It was the first time he saw his mother's anger redirected at someone else. Hawkins had flinched, more stunned she hadn't aimed her ire at him and rather at the once upstanding noblewoman who had threatened her job.

Threatening the hero of the Burning Wall was one thing but Kalaris Hawkinson did not allow anyone to disrespect her Trait. That was all she had cared about, her Trait. Hawkins Trait had been the only one in their family besides her to be a Dual Traited, leaving him depressed and broken the moment she found him more akin to a Smoke Traited than her own coveted Ash Trait. He had been broken by the promise of his own Trait and now, Rin's eyes mirrored exactly the same thing.