"Mom!" I exclaimed, sprinting across the room toward her. She lifted her head up heavily, her eyelids barely opening. A faint smile played on her face. My father and the boy I assumed was my brother based on rationality looked up at the sound of my voice.
"You found me," she breathed, relief filling her voice. I clasped her hand in mine, not wanting to touch any of her injuries and worsen them. The stench rose while I was so close to them.
"I'm gonna get you three to a healer. You're gonna be okay," I said, imagining the chains that bound them unraveling and freeing them.
As the same thing played out in front of me, I surged forward and grabbed my mother as she nearly collapsed onto the ground. My father and brother seemed to be doing better with less blood coming off of them. It seemed almost as if whoever had been holding them here-most likely Grey-had gone easier on the two of them.
"You're one of them?" my brother asked in disgust as he stared at me with wide eyes. By 'them' I assumed he meant wizards.
"Not all wizards are bad. We'll figure this all out, but for now you three need to get healed. We're wasting time!" I exclaimed as my mother coughed, putting all her weight in my arms.
I imagined the four of us appearing in the room I was just in for healing and raised my right hand. Within seconds we were standing in the cleansed room.
"I need a healer!" I screamed just as Bruno had, and then walked my mother over to one of the pristine tables. She slumped down onto it immediately. Her eyes were shut. I looked to her side where she was clutching and there was a large wound as if someone had taken a knife and gouged out a semi-circle from her skin. Blood seeped out of it.
No healer seemed to be coming to my aid, so I imagined the blood clotting and a bandage covering the wound.
My father and brother stood next to the table, injured and scared, watching me. Just as the bandage appeared, a healer busted into the room, sprinting toward me.
"You need to leave now. You're not aloud to be in here for the healing process. They'll be in good care," the healer said, quickly whisking me out of the room, seemingly annoyed at the fact that I was here.
Outside of the room, I was in a long, empty, white-washed hallway. In the back of my mind, I wondered why there wasn't any healers in this hallway.
After a moment of thinking, I was unable to come up with anything useful I could do here, so I imagined myself appearing in the planning room and raised my right hand. Hopefully, Bruno would still be there and not somewhere else in the Base. I needed to talk to him about this.
When I was standing in the planning room, Bruno was turning into the hallway.
"Bruno, we need to talk," I exclaimed as I ran after him.
He turned around, clearly startled.
"What're you doing here? I thought you went to your quarters," he said. There was something in his voice that sounded off. It sounded almost like . . . worry. As if he was worried I found something. I knew that tone of voice all too well; it was one I heard from my very own father before he left with my brother. It felt as if he was always hiding something from me, even at a young age.
"You know something, don't you?" I asked, taking a step toward him and tilting my head. I wasn't in the mood for games, or deceiving.
"I, um, found your family locked up here in the Base the other day," Bruno confessed, sorrow filling his face. I didn't believe that false misery for one moment.
"You just stumbled upon them and then closed the door and kept going? Why didn't you tell anyone or do something about it? Who are you really working for?" I asked, running a hand through my hair and leaning into the wall. Was there anyone that I could trust anymore? It seemed like there wasn't beside Vanessa.
"I just didn't know what to say," he began, a look on his face that plead for forgiveness. "I knew that I had to do something, but I didn't know what. Besides, we still didn't know where you and Vanessa were and I was so focused on that."
"I hate to say it, Bruno, but that is complete bullshit. I've never met one person who would see a family of innocent people locked away in a room bleeding out and chained to the wall, living in their own excrement and just closed the door and kept walking. Things don't work like that. If you ignored them, you had a reason. So what was it?" The anger in my voice was blinding. A woman brushed by us, trying not to interrupt our conversation and averting her eyes toward the floor when I looked her way.
"I'm not working for Grey," Bruno said, as if trying to take the attention off the fact that he was aware my family was shackled in the Base and didn't tell anyone or do anything.
The fury I felt overtook me, rendering me unable to think straight.
"I get where your suspicion is coming from, but I promise you're seeing this all wrong," Bruno protested, looking at me with pleading eyes.
I rolled mine.
"How would you like me to look at it? There's not exactly a positive spin to put on any of this. And there's no way I'll ever think that you did the right thing. So how do you want me to look at it?" It was hard for me to stand still in front of this coward. He was too scared of Grey or whoever else was in power to do the right thing, and it made me want to hurl.
"I couldn't do anything," was all the Bruno said.
I grunted.
"They probably would've died if I hadn't found them. They've probably lived a month of their life in pure agony. And you were too cowardly to help them."
I sent all of my anger shooting toward my fingertips and turned it into magic.
Moments later, I sent pillars of flame flying toward him filled with rage. They hit him, but I was so angry that flame engulfed the hallway around him as well. He screamed in pain, causing me to roll my eyes again. He was a wizard too; he could put it out.
"Burn in hell," I screamed over the flame and him. With that, I disappeared from the hallway and reappeared in the cold air. The wind howled around me as I sprinted through the woods. I didn't have a set destination, I just had to run. The air was colder and shaper than ice and I had to duck out of the way of any low hanging branches, but I never once stopped running, not even when my breaths became so short it was more like wheezing. The small amount of light that had been present was waning slowly.
The mixture of anger and sadness that filled me was so strong I didn't think I would ever escape it. Instead, it felt like I would be pulled into its black hole, becoming lost in the darkness.
When I finally did skid to a halt, I was in the field that I first met Vanessa in. My emotions overtook me and I didn't know what to think about or what to focus on, I just knew that I had to get it out in some way. And there was only one way I'd found that worked for emotions: magic.
I took my anger at Grey for turning my life into what it is today, at the world for not allowing me to be able to trust anyone, but most of all at Bruno for what he did, and sent it toward my fingers and then sailing out of my body in whatever form it chose to come in. Fire and water exploded out of my finger tips, balancing each other out. The wind picked up around me as well, but luckily no seeds decided to attack something.
As the different elements continued to funnel out of my fingers with my emotions, the world around me seemed to grow clearer; less muddled.
The fire clung onto anything it could, and the water thawed the frozen ground. The wind blew both the fire and the water everywhere.
And then suddenly an overwhelming wave of sadness crashed onto me once again, the magic around me growing stronger.
I didn't want to be here, doing what I was doing. When I was a child, I promised myself I would never use my magic for bad purposes, and I would only use it for the good of people, but so far all I'd managed to do with my magic was screw up anything that I already had going for me. And I didn't want my family to have to be healed because they were shackled to a wall and taken as a prisoners and beaten. I just wanted things to back to the way they used to be when I was child. Everything seemed to be so simple back then; good and evil were two separate things and you could only be one. Once you made the decision to be good, you were always good, but that's not the case in life. Even when you think you're doing good, you could be doing bad. You just never know. And I longed for the overall simplicity of life as a child. Nothing has consequences worse than your mother yelling at you.
I shook my head trying to clear the thoughts away, but I couldn't escape my muddled ideals because I was emotional and that's what emotions do to you; they muddle your thoughts.
Magic continued to flow out of my fingertips, my emotions dying down slowly, but not fast enough to prevent the lone tear slipping down my cheek.
As my emotions felt released and my body felt more relaxed, I prevented the magic from coming out of my fingertips and walked toward a tree. Despite my calmness, I wasn't ready to go back to face the horrors of the Base and what it held. I wasn't ready to go back to reality and face the problems I inevitably would have to. Instead, I sunk down next to a tree, leaning against it and looking off into the horizon.
Vaguely, I wondered what the date was and of what month as I watched the last of the sun sink behind the trees in the distance.
It felt like it was about time to snow, although I didn't know for sure. My mind was still very sidetracked by the fact that Bruno had betrayed me like that and tried to justify himself in the way he did.
What type of person would do that? It really put into perspective the entire situation and the possibility that there was more to Grey's operation besides just Grey. And, it sounded like from the small encounter I heard between Bruno and Axel-although I had no way to be sure if it was true or not-from when Vanessa tried to attack Axel, Grey's spells went away when his soul was trapped, which means that Bruno would have to have been working willingly for Grey.
And, if that fake image of my mother was in the hallway, either Bruno or someone else working for Grey had to be casting that spell while we went to find her or else it wouldn't be there.
The whole matter was so complicated it made my head spin.
"Ryder?" Vanessa's voice came from behind me. I was too wrapped up in everything that had happened to jump.
"You're okay," I exclaimed with half a heart and stood up to hug her. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and she buried her head in my chest, letting out a long breath.
"I must've been in there a lot longer than you," Vanessa said after pulling her head away and looking up to me. I could just make out her emerald eyes in the darkness.
"Vanes-" I faltered a moment. Was I supposed to say Vanessa or Holly?
"What's wrong?" she asked, a hint of curiosity peppering her voice.
"Should I be calling you by your real name or Vanessa?" The question sounded stupid when I said it out loud, but I didn't want to call her the wrong name.
"Call me Vanessa, because that's who I am now. I'm not that scared, cowering little girl anymore. Holly was my past, but Vanessa is my present."
I nodded.
"So, Vanessa, I have a ton to tell you. About my family and about Bruno," I said, my voice darkening considerably at the mention of Bruno.
"What happened with Bruno? Did he do something?" she asked.
Slowly, in agony, I retold the events of the day that she had missed. When I got to the part about Bruno betraying us, I made sure to add every detail to the story.
"He's been lying the whole time?" she asked, shock and anger resonating in her voice.
I nodded.
"I can't believe we let him fool us. The whole time we thought he was working toward catching Grey with us, but the entire time he was just lying." It seemed she was experiencing the same anger that I was, but she could control it more.
"So what do we do now?" Vanessa asked. My answer was quick.
"We figure out a way to stop him."
~+ Uncontrollable +~
Thanks for reading. Sorry about this train wreck of a chapter. It's really bad. Sorry.
As I said in the last chapter, we're getting very near to the end. Much nearer than I'd anticipated. Maybe five chapters. Thanks for your support!
Happy Thanksgiving (if you celebrate that?)!
Also, I'm thinking of doing a news book so I can update you guys more often. Thoughts?
Lastly (eek this is getting long), I'm going away so you guys won't see or hear much from me for the next few days but I promise I'm here and will respond to comments when I get back. Update should be after that.