I Can't Feel Her

I Can't Feel Her
Draven

Kai was focused, listening to what the earth knew. 

How he could put his rage aside long enough to listen to his magic escaped me. I wanted to tear someone’s head off, and I was close to finding a guard, one that allowed this to happen and rip them limb from limb. 

Dad would probably help 

But when I stole a glance at him, he looked broken. The rage that was in his features had disappeared, replaced by a devastated father. 

Kai tilted his head, and deepened his fingers in the ground. 

The dirt around him began to vibrate, and I felt it beneath my feet, up through my legs. It moved, lifting from the floor and circling his wrist in uneven, jagged motions.

They caught the light, spinning faster and faster around him as his features hardened. My breath stilled in his chest, both from the awe of his powers and from the suspense of hearing what happened to Layla. 

Kai’s brows furrowed, his focus somewhere far beyond us. We seemed to disappear to him, the only thing that mattered was the dirt, the past of what happened here. 

“What are you seeing?” I whispered, hardly recognizing my own voice. 

“Varynth took her,” he said. “She… she’s been scared of him for a while.”

My vision went red, suddenly remembering the way she looked when he danced with her at her birthday party. 

That old fucker had touched her. Taken her.

My sister.

A growl tore up my throat before I could stop it, my hands curling into fists so tight my nails bit into my palms. I would rip him apart. Piece by piece. I would—

Dad kneeled in front of him, eyeing the particles of dirt. “Where did he take her?”

Kai tensed. Every muscle in his body locked at once, and his head snapped back.

A sound tore from his chest, and it sounded wrong. His lips peeled back in a snarl, fangs elongating as his eyes went black.

I froze. “What’s happening?” I demanded as I looked at dad.

He looked unsure, horrified. He shook his head, standing and stepping away from Kai. He recognized the pain in his eyes, and it unsettled him. 

“Their bond,” he said, voice low, tight. “It’s been severed.”

The words hollowed me out. He said severed, not weakened or strained, but severed. Which meant—no. I clenched my jaw, forcing the thought away before it could take root. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be.

I turned to Kai only to see that he wasn’t breaking beneath the weight of the pain. He wasn’t doubling over. 

The sound coming from him grew, rising in pitch, raw and jagged, like he were ripping himself in two. The dirt around him exploded upward.

What had been a thin ring of trembling particles became a storm. Rocks ripped free from the ground, some the size of my fist, others larger, dragged upward into the air as if gravity had simply stopped applying to him.

They spun around his body in violent, chaotic arcs.

The ground beneath us cracked, splitting into thin lines that spread outward from where he knelt.

I staggered back, boots scraping against stone as a boulder shot past my shoulder, missing me by inches before slamming into the far wall.

“Kai!” I shouted, though I didn’t know if he could hear me through the tornado of rocks forming around him. 

The storm intensified. Dust filled the air, choking, blinding. The wind whipped around him in sharp, cutting gusts as the earth itself tore free from its center. 

Suddenly it wasn’t just the rocks that were floating, but him too. 

Rocks and debris surged beneath him, raising him higher, carrying him upward into the center of the chaos. Everything revolved around him. 

I stared. Helpless and useless.

In that moment, I understood something with terrifying clarity. We were nothing.

Not my father, not the council, not the witches, not any of us.

We had thought we were containing him with that stupid collar and those tiny little cuffs. But this wasn’t power we could control.

The ground shook again, harder this time, a violent jolt that nearly knocked me off my feet.

“Kai!” I tried again, forcing the word through the chaos.

His head snapped forward, and those black eyes locked onto mine. There was no rage in his expression, just pure grief, a relentless devastation. 

“I can’t feel her,” his voice tore through the storm.

His expression shifted into a focused one. His jaw tightened as his gaze flicked between us, first to me, then to my father.

Rocks faltered midair, their violent rotation stuttering. He inhaled sharply and then forced it down. His hands clenched, and the tornado of debris around him exploded outward.

They shot away from him in every direction, slamming into walls, tearing through hedges, embedding deep into stone. Dirt scattered in a violent wave, pelting the ground and walls before dropping, one by one, into sudden, unnatural stillness.

The air went quiet, and Kai fell to the ground. He caught himself on one hand, his other pressed into the dirt again. 

I didn’t dare to move. His head snapped up, eyes still black.

“Kai,” Dad said carefully, his voice low.

Kai’s breathing was uneven. His gaze locked onto him, then flicked to me again, restless, skittish, like a predator. “The earth will find her.”

The ground beneath us gave a low, answering tremor.

“It will tell me where she is.”