Chapter 48 The Surge

Chapter 48 The Surge
Dominique hits the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
One second she’s lunging at me, demonstrating a counterattack I’ve failed to execute properly for the past hour. The next, something erupts from the center of my chest, a wave of force I didn’t summon and can’t control. It slams into her like an invisible fist and launches her backward across the training room.
She crashes into the far wall and crumples to the mat.
I stand frozen in the middle of the room with my hands still raised in a defensive position. My entire body is vibrating, humming with energy that feels foreign and familiar all at once. It’s like someone plugged me into an electrical socket and forgot to turn off the current.
“Dominique?” I squeak. “Oh God. Dominique, are you okay?”
She groans and drags herself up onto her hands and knees. Plaster dust coats her dark hair and shoulders. When she lifts her head to look at me, her eyes are wide with something I’ve never seen from her before.
Fear.
“What the hell was that?” she demands.
I lower my hands and stare at them like they belong to someone else. They look the same as always. No glowing, no sparks, and no visible sign of whatever just happened. “I… I don’t know. I didn’t mean to. I swear, I didn’t mean to.”
She climbs to her feet and brushes the debris from her clothes. A thin trickle of blood runs from a cut on her forehead, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her attention is fixed entirely on me.
“Has that ever happened before?”
“No. Never.” I wrap my arms around myself because I don’t know what else to do with them. “One second you were coming at me, and the next I felt this pressure building in my chest. Like something was trying to get out. And then it just…exploded.”
Dominique crosses the room toward me slowly, like she’s approaching a wild animal that might attack at any moment. I want to tell her she doesn’t need to be scared of me, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
I’m not sure of anything anymore.
“How do you feel right now?” she asks when she’s standing in front of me.
I take a moment to actually assess. The vibrating sensation has faded, leaving behind a dull ache in my bones. My muscles feel weak, like I’ve just run a marathon. There’s a metallic taste on the back of my tongue that reminds me of blood but isn’t quite the same.
“Drained,” I admit. “Like I just used up all my energy at once.”
“That would make sense. Whatever you did, it took something out of you.” She reaches up and touches the cut on her forehead and winces. “And put it into me, apparently.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know you didn’t.” She drops her hand and frowns at me. “This has something to do with the prophecy. With your bloodline. It has to.”
The Valdris bloodline. The genetic mutation that hasn’t appeared in four hundred years. The reason the Primigenii are willing to go to war just to get their hands on me.
Maybe this is why.
“We need to tell Thad,” Dominique says.
“Tell him what? That I accidentally turned into a supernatural grenade?”
“That you have abilities we didn’t know about. Abilities that could change everything.” She grabs my arm and steers me toward the door. “Come on. He needs to see this.”
We find Thad in the war room, a space on the first floor that used to be a formal dining room before someone covered the walls with maps and filled the table with tactical documents. He’s bent over a layout of the mansion grounds, marking positions with a red pen.
He looks up when we enter, and he draws his brows together once he sees Dominique.
“What happened?”
“Your mate just threw me across a room without touching me,” Dominique announces.
Thad sets down his pen. “Explain.”
“We were training. She was attempting a defensive maneuver I’ve been teaching her. Something triggered, and this wave of energy came out of her and sent me flying into a wall.” Dominique gestures at the cut on her forehead. “I’ve been fighting for decades, Thad. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
Thad’s eyes flit to me. I can see him taking in my disheveled appearance, the fear I’m sure is written all over my face, and the way I’m holding myself like I might shatter at any moment.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
“No. Just confused.” I find myself gravitating straight to him without even meaning to because, whether I like it or not, this man makes me feel more grounded than anything or anyone else. “I don’t know what happened. One second everything was normal, and the next I was pushing out this force I didn’t even know I had.”
“Can you do it again?”
I wrinkle my forehead and ask, “What?”
“Can you summon it? Control it?”
I shake my head. “I don’t even know how I did it the first time. It just happened.”
Thad exchanges a look with Dominique. Something passes between them, some understanding I’m not privy to.
“The prophecy mentions power,” he explains. “Power that could reshape the balance between vampires and humans. We assumed it was metaphorical. A reference to your bloodline’s historical significance.”
“But it’s not metaphorical,” Dominique finishes. “It’s literal. She actually has power.”
“Hey.” I wave my hand between them. “Still in the room. And still completely lost.”
Thad closes the distance between us and gathers my face in his hands. His grey eyes search mine, looking for answers I don’t have.
“We need to figure out what triggered it,” he states. “If you can learn to control this, it could be the advantage we need against the Primigenii.”
I want so much to believe that we can figure this out, that I’m not some ticking time bomb waiting to explode and hurt everyone around me.
But as I stand there with his hands on my face and Dominique watching from across the room, all I can think about is the terror in her eyes when she looked at me from the floor.
If I can do that to a trained warrior without even trying, what else am I capable of?
And what happens when the Primigenii find out?