Chapter 102 102
Kaelen's POV:
Everything was black.
Not dark, not shadows, just... nothing. The absence of everything. No sound, no feeling, no sense of up or down or where I was or who I was. Just black, stretching in all directions, and me floating in the middle of it like something already forgotten.
Is this death?
The thought came slow, like trying to move through water. Or whatever thick thing my brain could still remember because my brain was shutting down, probably, dying in the dirt somewhere while Annabeth—
Annabeth...
I tried to reach for her. For the bond. For that place where she lived inside my chest, that warmth I'd gotten used to over the past days, that constant presence that meant I was never really alone anymore.
Nothing.
The bond was gone. Silent. Empty. Like reaching for something that had never existed in the first place, and god, that hurt worse than the hole in my chest. Worse than the harpoon. Worse than anything.
She was dead. They'd killed her. Or she was dying, or they were hurting her, and I was HERE, floating in this black nothing, useless, unable to protect her, unable to do anything except... feel cold.
The cold was spreading through me now. Starting at my chest, where the wound was, radiating outward. My fingers, my toes, my face. Everything going numb. Everything going quiet. And somewhere in the distance, very far away, I thought I heard something.
Crying?
No. I was imagining it. Dead people don't hear things. Dead people don't anything, that's kind of the whole point of being dead, and I was definitely dead because I could feel myself slipping away, could feel the edges of whatever I still was getting softer, blurring, like a photo left in the sun too long.
Except the crying got louder.
And then there was heat.
Two points of it, one on each side of my chest. Small hands, I thought. Or I felt. Or something. Small hands pressing down on me, and heat pouring from them into my body, and it HURT, god, it hurt so much, like being born and dying at the same time, like fire and ice fighting inside my veins.
"DON'T YOU DARE."
Marlen's voice. Marlen's voice, cracking and breaking and sounding nothing like the careful controlled girl I knew, the one who never let anyone see her scared, the one who'd been just a child when our parents disappeared and had just... stopped crying. Overnight. Like she'd decided tears were a luxury she couldn't afford anymore.
"DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE, KAELEN. DON'T YOU DARE LEAVE US."
The heat intensified. My whole body was burning now, but not the bad kind, not the kind that destroys. The golden fire. Our fire. The healing light that ran in our bloodline, that made us valuable to the Order, that made us targets.
Someone was healing me.
"It's not working," Lucian's voice, higher than usual, younger than fifteen, cracking on every word. "Mar, it's not working, there's too much blood, I can't—"
"SHUT UP AND KEEP GOING."
The pressure on my chest increased. Two pairs of hands now, I could feel them, Marlen on my left and Lucian on my right. Both of them pouring everything they had into me, their fire, their life, their desperate terrified love.
They'd come back.
They were supposed to run. The plan was: I scream basement, they go, they don't look back, they get to the rally point and wait for Marcus. That was the PLAN. That was the whole point of all those drills, all that memorizing, Marlen with her maps and her escape routes. They were supposed to be safe. They were supposed to be—
"Please," Lucian was sobbing now, actually sobbing, the kind of crying he hadn't done since he was eleven and woke up screaming from nightmares about Mom and Dad. "Please please please, Kael, you can't die, you can't, you're not allowed, I'm not, I can't, please..."
The black was getting lighter. Gray at the edges. And the cold was receding, pushed back by the heat pouring into me from my siblings' hands.
I tried to move. Tried to open my eyes. Tried to do anything except float here while they burned themselves out trying to save me.
"He moved," Marlen said. "Lucian, he moved, did you see that?"
"His fingers. His fingers just—"
"MORE. Give him more."
"Mar, I'm getting dizzy—"
"I DON'T CARE. MORE."
The gray was turning to white now. I could feel my body again, or pieces of it. My chest, where the heat was concentrated, that's where the wound was, the place the harpoon had torn through me on its way out. My hands, fingers curling into dirt. My face, wet with something. Blood, probably. Or tears. Someone's tears.
I opened my eyes.
The sky first. Gray sky, winter sky, the kind that promises snow but never delivers. Pine trees at the edges, their tops swaying in wind I couldn't feel. And then, closer, blocking out the sky:
Marlen.
Her face was inches from mine, dirty and tear-streaked and twisted into something that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite grief. Just this raw desperate intensity I'd never seen before. Her hands were on my chest, both of them now, and they were glowing. Actually glowing, golden light seeping out from between her fingers, pulsing in time with something I slowly realized was my heartbeat.
"You're awake," she said. Her voice cracked on the second word. "You're awake, you ASSHOLE, you were dying, you were actually dying, I could feel it, I could FEEL you leaving—"
"Mar." My voice came out wrong. Wet and broken and barely there.
"Shut up. Don't talk. Just... just stay awake, okay? Just stay with us."
Lucian appeared in my peripheral vision. He was on his knees next to me, hands still on my right side, still glowing, still pouring that golden fire into my body even though I could see how pale he was, how much this was costing him. His face was a mess. Snot and tears and dirt, and his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and he looked exactly like the scared ten-year-old who'd crawled into my bed the night our parents disappeared.
"Kael." He couldn't say anything else. Just my name, over and over, like saying it would keep me here.
The healing was working. I could feel it. The wound in my chest, that massive torn hole where the harpoon had ripped through me, it was closing. Slowly, painfully, the tissue knitting together from the inside out. Normally I healed fast, all golden dragons did, but this injury was too severe. Would've killed me. SHOULD'VE killed me.
But Marlen and Lucian were doing something I'd never even known was possible. They were sharing their healing power with me, channeling their own fire into my body, giving me their strength because I didn't have enough of my own.
"The plan," I managed to say. "You were supposed to... run."
"Screw the plan," Marlen said, pressing harder. "What were we supposed to do, just leave you here to bleed out? Watch you die and then, what, go hide in the woods like good little kids while our brother's corpse got cold?"
"The Order—"
"Took Annabeth and left. We watched from the trees. They loaded her in a van and drove away, they weren't even looking for us." Her jaw clenched. "They left you here to die, Kaelen. They didn't even bother to finish you off. Like you weren't even worth the bullet."
That hurt more than the wound. Not being worth killing. Just being left to bleed out in the dirt like roadkill.
"We came back as soon as it was clear," Lucian said. His voice was steadier now, probably because I was awake and talking and not actively dying anymore. "Mar made me wait until the vans were gone. It was like... fifteen minutes? Felt longer. But we watched and when they left we ran back and you were just lying here with this... this HOLE in you, and Mar started screaming at me to help her and I didn't know what I was doing but she grabbed my hands and put them on you and said PUSH and I did and—"
He stopped. Wiped his nose with his shoulder because his hands were still glowing on my chest.
"We weren't going to let you die," Marlen said quietly. "You've been taking care of us for five years. Giving up everything so we could be safe. Missing your own life so we could have ours." Her eyes met mine, and for the first time since our parents disappeared, I saw them fill with tears. "Did you really think we'd just... run away while you died? Did you really think we were that kind of people?"
I didn't know what to say. For five years I'd protected them. Fed them, housed them, moved them across the country whenever danger got too close. I'd dropped out of college, given up any chance at a normal life, put every single thing I ever wanted on hold because THEY came first. Always. Always them.
And I'd never once thought about what would happen if the situation was reversed.
Never once considered that they might want to protect ME.
"Mom used to say," Lucian started, then stopped. Took a breath. "She used to say that golden dragons protect. That it's what we're for. And I always thought she meant, like, protecting humans or whatever. But I think maybe she meant this. Protecting each other. Our family."
Marlen's hands were shaking now. The glow was dimming, she was running out of energy, burning through her reserves. I could see the exhaustion in her face, the pallor under the dirt and tears.
"Enough," I said. "Both of you. Stop."
"You're not healed yet—"
"I'm healed ENOUGH. You're going to kill yourselves."
"We're fine."
"Marlen. You're shaking."
She looked at her hands like she hadn't noticed. They were trembling visibly, the golden glow flickering like a dying lightbulb. Lucian wasn't much better, his whole body swaying slightly, like he might fall over at any second.
"Just a little more," Marlen said stubbornly. "The wound isn't—"
"The wound will close on its own now. You jumpstarted the healing. My body can do the rest." I reached up, ignoring the pain, and covered her hands with mine. "Stop, Mar. Please. I can't watch you hurt yourself trying to save me."
She looked at me for a long moment. Something broke in her expression, that careful control she'd maintained for five years cracking wide open, and then she was crying. Really crying, not the silent tears from before, but ugly snotty sobs that shook her whole body.
"I thought you were dead," she choked out. "I thought you were DEAD, Kaelen, I felt you stop, I felt your heart stop, and I couldn't... I didn't..."
I pulled her down. She collapsed against my chest, her face buried in my neck, her whole body shaking with sobs she'd been holding back for god knows how long. Lucian crawled closer and I pulled him in too, one arm around each of them, holding my siblings while they cried on me in the ruins of a cabin surrounded by the bodies of people I'd killed.