Page 57 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

“NO.” SHE SHOOK her head. “Why are you doing this? You can’t do this.”

“He can’t not do this,” Ivan replied, inspecting his nails. “Haven’t you realized? He’s a Strike.”

“The Mystics are marching on the capital! Lethe, real people are about to die. Breaking The Great Light will stop it! It will save lives,” she said, trying to reason with him, and unsure what him being a Strike meant.

None of it made any sense.

Lethe watched her calmly, a dangerous kind of calm. “Ana,” he said, and she could hear his resistance in the word, a kind of pain that told her he would deny her again and again.

Ana approached him as he created space between them. The other Strike watched in a circle and closed them in with interest. The emotion in the room seemed to rouse them, as if despite having no hunger, they still remembered the appeal of human feelings.

“And you’re all fine with this?” she shouted to all of them. “Time is up for you to refine The Great Light anyway! The Mystic army will discover this place either while burning the capital or when tearing through the ruins!”

Ivan sighed. “What, so we should rush to our deaths?”

“You’ll lose all of your progress and research and then will be sentenced for the rest of eternity to a life of illusion,” she shot back.

Some of the Strike seemed to shift and almost awaken at this notion. A couple of them glanced at Lethe, who returned their glances with a silent threat.

“Ana,” Lethe warned.

She stepped toward him, shaking her head. Ivan straightened off the pyre and walked between them as if testing the tension that kept them apart.

Lethe kept Ana’s eyes, “A battle between Strike would ruin the capital faster than any Mystic army,” he said.

“Give me The Great Light,” she replied.

Her mind splintered with the questions and she struggled to wrestle them into a cohesive story. How had she gotten here? She and Lethe, surrounded by a room full of illusion Strike. Lethe, a very real one, now perhaps her greatest barrier to freedom.

“There isn’t a single real reason to break it,” he said. “I’ll face the Mystics if I have to.”

Ana blinked and glanced over at Ivan, who shrugged.

“He’s a Strike who heals quickly and, at least based on past experience, has the rather strong propensity for violence without the help of Madness.

That call is yours. I imagine if the Mystics saw a Strike unleash its full power, they very well might flee. ”

“Help me,” she said to Ivan.

He raised an eyebrow.

“Ana,” Lethe warned again.

“You’ve put me in this position!” she shouted back at Lethe who almost seemed to wince at the extent of her own anger and hurt.

“Interesting,” Ivan replied with a smile, glancing between them.

“The reality of the Strike’s existence will be unveiled anyway,” said Ana. “If someone else doesn’t tell them, then I will. Help me. Your only way out is by breaking The Great Light. Your time to fix it is up.”

“We could always just vanish from this place, transport somewhere else, and kill you,” Ivan offered. “We aren’t real Strike, Ana. We don’t have the same fixations that tie us to the humans in this city.”

“Hurt her and I’ll kill you. I’ve done it once,” Lethe hissed.

Ivan looked over at Lethe, sizing him up as if pleased by the threat. “How did you kill me? Just one man?”

“Actually, a boy killed you,” Lethe growled back. “You’d grown wasted, dull, and lazy, indulging on human emotions in Xal Xel.”

Ivan grimaced. “That sounds awful.” His eyes flickered back to Ana.

“I admit, a battle to the death would be more interesting than what we’ve unfortunately had to tolerate the past few years.

Now that Hailey is dead, it does appear that to some extent the game really is up.

What do all of you think?” Ivan said, glancing behind him.

Several of the Strike shifted as if considering the idea.

Lethe snapped his fingers, and Ana stumbled forward into a vast, grassy clearing. Lethe was standing in front of her. The capital was now at her back.

“Are you mad!?” he exclaimed, marching up to her.

“Are you mad?!” she retorted as they stood face to face. She resisted the urge to grab at the pocket on his chest. One good blow would snap the shell into pieces.

Lethe shook his head as if he could read her thoughts. “Don’t try it.”

“You’re a Strike!” she exclaimed, gesturing to him.

“And somehow you’re the one acting irrationally!” he shouted back.

“We have to break it!” she demanded, pointing to the ground and nearly stomping her boot into the grass. “You don’t have the right to hold this back from the world, from them, from me!”

“It’s my death too, Ana!” he shouted back, and she settled down for a moment.

Her eyes settled into the heat of his, and for the first time there wasn’t dangerous ambivalence or that burning chaos of his soul; there was something strangely familiar. He was not a ROSE or a Strike. He was a man who had lost everything, a man hanging by a single thread.

“Avenging the dead was everything I had left,” he said, pointing to his own chest. “The last name unmarked on my arm, the conviction to hunt down Ivan, I dedicated my life to the dead because that’s what I thought I had and then you—” he started.

“You, like you always do, reminded me of who I am, why I did all of the regrettable things I did, and you reminded me of a place in the world that doesn’t feel so incredibly impossible to survive.

I’d forgotten that any place could feel that way and then you—” He hesitated, and it was strange to see a man who embodied so much strength and bravery express so much weakness with his words.

“I don’t have the strength to lose you again. I can’t risk it.”

Again? What was he talking about?

Ana flinched when Ivan appeared with three other Strike behind him.

“All right!” he announced, clapping his hands. “We’re in!”

Lethe eased back, eyes flickering fiercely.

A horn blasted behind him, and they turned to see the Mystic army cresting over the horizon.

* * *

“Ana,” Lethe warned a final time, though now that Ana had baited the Strike, it was unlikely they’d relent.

Ana and Ivan exchanged a silent message. Lethe knew without being able to read it that Ana was prepared to leverage the Strike against him. She wouldn’t hesitate now. She wouldn’t let him explain.

How could he?

He knew it didn’t help to reveal that he, too, was a Strike, a very real one, and likely the last one across this continent. What reason did she have to trust him now when he, at such a cost, withheld the last thing she wanted?

Ivan and the others dissolved into a shroud of mist behind her as if they’d agreed on some kind of plan. Lethe’s eyes narrowed as black mists of Madness, summoned from The Ocean, rose across the field around them. The mist solidified into rows of soldiers guarding the capital.

A black bulb rocketed up from behind the soldiers with a shriek, spiraling out and opening with dark, expansive wings that swallowed the sky.

Ivan’s own sloppiness and apathy had prevented him from unleashing all of his power in Xal Xel.

Now, he and three other Strike would pose a very formidable challenge.

Lethe’s eyes flickered back to Ana’s as he sent the warning again that a battle of such magnitude would wreck everything around them.

Ana didn’t respond in her mind. Instead, she kept her eyes trained on his as she drew back the triggers of Chronos.

A boom echoed over the Capital, washing across the clearing and swallowing Ana.

He flickered back several yards, reappearing at the edge of Chronos’s expansion, the gray haze and sheer breadth of it shimmering over the horizon.

A murky figure moved through the frozen time. Ana’s form took shape, her clothes and hair drifting through it as if they floated in water.

Lethe heard a rush behind him and turned with only enough time to extend a hand and block a vast wall of black mist before Ana attacked from the opposite side.

She swept him onto the ground and rolled him back into the mist. A force in the mist grabbed him, black hooks biting him before throwing him over the ground.

The puncture wounds, taking the shape of bite marks, healed across his side as he stood back to his feet.

He was surrounded by the darkness, curling and circling around him with a small window of light filtering down from above.

Ana emerged from the blackness. Some haze lingered on her shoulders and body as she circled the dark storm in the opposite direction that it twisted.

He was acutely aware of the shell in his pocket. Fragile before, now it seemed infinitely so, and surrounded by the other Strike’s collective power, Lethe knew it wouldn’t be so easy to transport it away. As he fought, he’d have to be mindful of it, close against his chest.

Something deep inside reacted to these new stakes.

His humanity sank farther back, considering the threats at hand.

The world through the eyes of a Strike was different; everything in life appeared connected with waves of push, pull, and release.

The powerful influx of information made Strike like himself much more inclined to function off of pure instinct.

Instinct, as it was at the moment, made him want to engage in the mounting conflict. Watching as Ana circled, he knew she wasn’t ignorant to the impulses of the Strike.

The shell. The words rode through Ana’s focus as he watched her. She was asking for the shell, a last request perhaps, before the violence started.

Twenty-three minutes . The thought flickered through Ana’s head as if by accident, and then she struck again.

He countered, and she fought back, moving with his weight and pulling him back into the mist. Ivan grabbed him there, a violent arrest that he felt in his bones, but he curled his body around the shell as Amiel rolled again through the smoke.

Madness swam through his veins like adrenaline, begging to be released.

Dark soldiers took shape through the surrounding mist—products of Ivan and the others’ power, no doubt. Ana was waiting in that darkness, waiting to provoke him again, but her figure blended in with the dark hulls of soldiers carrying swords, knives, and rifles.

To push back, he’d have to use his abilities as a Strike, which could very well mean him losing sight of why he was fighting in the first place. He was a Strike of Amiel’s breed, as much as he hated to admit it, one of brutality over sophistication.

He was inclined to get caught up in the chaos. Testing his power against the others had an appeal to it he couldn’t deny.

Lethe heard Ana run up behind him, the mist of the other Strike with her.

He turned just in time, intercepting the blow, and this time, returning it.

Twenty-two minutes.

He heard from her thoughts. He could only imagine it was her deadline for getting the shell.

No doubt when that time was up, Chronos would deactivate, and the rules of the game would change again.

She was trying to restrict the use of Chronos, but in activating it, she now protected the capital from consequence.

Something in his mind clicked like a trigger.

Permission. At last, permission to do what he wanted, and it intoxicated his blood with a cold and inexplicable power.

Manaj had given him rules, but those rules wouldn’t govern him now.

This was the battlefield.

He now had twenty-two minutes of complete and utter freedom.