With a deep breath, he hauled Cress off the floor and onto his shoulder. The contact staggered him backward as deep purple tendrils lashed into his body signature. He recovered his balance and charged for the door. His body essence wavered halfway across the lobby. Thicker ropes of essence slithered out of Cress and tangled into his body essence. He fought against the intrusion, forcing himself forward.
Wake up, Cress, Laura sent. The sending shredded in her mind.
Sinclair stumbled, his legs weak beneath him. He wasn’t going to make the doors. He pushed forward, his strength slipping away like a receding tide. He pressed on, determined to cover more distance, struggling to within a few feet of the entrance.
“Take her!” he gasped.
He slipped to his knees as he draped the weight of Cress’s body over Laura’s shoulder. With more essence pouring into Cress from the Monument, purple tendrils of light wound around Laura’s body shield as she pressed through the door. Dazed and nauseated, she staggered across the pavement outside. The landscape spun as she fell forward. Cress rolled away from her. Someone helped Laura stand, but she couldn’t stay upright.
“I need earth beneath me.”
She was dragged out into the hot night air and eased to the ground.
CHAPTER 49
EYES CLOSED, LAURA became aware of darkness first, her sensing ability not registering anything. The dead earth pressed against her back, its inherent essence a bare trickle. The staccato sounds of gunfire reached her next, a distant echo that sounded more harmless than it was. With the shriek of jet engines overhead, she forced her eyes open.
An army officer stood guard over her. Above, essence whirled like a corona around the man’s head as it flowed over the top of the Monument. Laura eased into a sitting position. With a short chant, she tapped into the essence in the air. The tenuous connection flared, and she drew strength from the flow, drinking it in like she was parched. As a druid, she needed to touch something to tap its essence, but so much of it gathered in the air around the Monument that she was able to recharge herself.
The Monument glowed with a sickly indigo light. The faint sheen of the dampening field warped and twisted off the peak in a spiraled dome. Without Cress connected to it anymore, the field was collapsing in on itself, its own stolen essence feeding the dampening.
In the strong wind, smoke and the stench of burning wafted across the Mall. Whiting lay not far off, alive but unmoving. Dizzy, Laura let the soldier help her to her feet. The hulk of a Blackhawk helicopter smoldered on the ground on the other side of the Stryker.
“Where is she? Where’s Cress?” she asked.
He pointed beyond the burning vehicles. “She went that way.”
“She did? She’s walking?”
He nodded once. “Yes, ma’am.”
She wandered through the haze, soldiers running in the same direction, toward the White House. A pall of smoke rolled across the grass, obscuring her view. The wind shifted, and the smoke billowed up. Sinclair stood in the street beyond the Blackhawk. His body signature registered normal, no fluctuations or reductions. He stood, mesmerized by a thick column of violet essence spiraling into the air.
“Jono?”
He turned, his face stressed with concentration. As if waking, relief swept over him. In long strides, he reached Laura and wrapped her in a hard embrace. “Are you okay?”
He smelled of smoke and gunpowder and sweat. The fear that vibrated off him—fear for her—almost made her cry. The last time someone had worried about her like that was too long ago to think about. Controlling her emotions, she nodded into the crook of his shoulder. As her head finally cleared, she broke the embrace. “Where is she?”
He gestured toward the column of essence moving across the Ellipse. “That’s her. She woke up and knocked me on my ass.”
Cress? Laura sent. Static filtered through her mind, but no words.
National Guard unit trucks raced toward them. Soldiers jumped out, moving toward the essence column. Gunfire sounded in the distance ahead, oddly muffled.
Laura rushed across the street. “They’re firing on her.”
Soldiers ringed the edges of the essence column, shooting into it. The shots sparked in bursts of orange that vanished, snuffed like spent candle flames. Laura ran past the soldiers, plunging into the hazy purple essence. Cress’s body signature burned into sight, an incandescent shape moving away from Laura.
Sinclair ran in after her. “Are you crazy? We’re going to get shot.”
“The bullets aren’t penetrating, Jono,” she said. “She’s deflecting them with the excess essence.”
“Where the hell is she going?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Cress spread her arms, as if reaching out for the Monument. The air roared as wind raged around them. The marble facing on the column cascaded down the sides of the Monument, exposing the granite underlayment. The indigo essence contained within the stone burned in a black halo. It spiraled into the air, coiling above Cress like a funnel. With a snake-like strike, it plunged into her chest. A sound came out of her, the screech of metal and fire.
Laura gasped as essence surged into the vacuum left behind. Cress’s body flamed violet in the haze. With sharp gestures, she flung cars out her of her path, tossing them aside like toys. She approached a long black van and stretched her arm forward. A gout of black essence burst from her palm and slammed into the van. It flipped on its side and spun in a cyclone of sparks.
A wing of Danann fairies swarmed the air with renewed strength. Bolts of searing white essence rained down as they soared and dove around Cress. With little effort, she absorbed the strikes, then knocked the Dananns back.
“I have to help her,” Laura said.
Sinclair grabbed her arm. “Do what? Destroy everything in her path? She’s out of control, Laura. You can’t stop this.”
She yanked herself away. “Look around you, Jono. They are going to kill her. DeWinter did this, not her. I can’t let them kill her.”
Sinclair slipped his hand into hers. “She’s fighting everyone who’s trying to stop her, Laura. There’s no fighting this.”
She fought back tears as she followed Cress toward the van. “She saved my life, Jono.”
He tugged at her hand. “She’s broken, Laura. She doesn’t know what’s she’s doing.”
She shook her head. “I have to try. I’m the only one here she can trust.”
“She’ll kill you,” he said.
Something moved within her, a deep moment of recognition. The look of fear in his eyes, the way his voice cracked. He wasn’t playing games, wasn’t trying to break down her defenses for the challenge of it. He cared. Jono Sinclair cared. And in that same moment, she knew that whatever it was he saw in her, it wasn’t someone who would walk away. It wasn’t someone who would give up because she was afraid of dying.
If she let Cress die, whatever chance she had with Sinclair would be gone, no matter what he thought right then. Because she wouldn’t be true to herself. And if she couldn’t be true to herself, she couldn’t be true to anyone. On a level that Sinclair didn’t realize yet, that was what he was attracted to. Who she was, no matter the consequences. And that was who she was.
She kissed him, a kiss of passion and thanks and realization. He held her, his essence glowing, breaking open before her, letting down his guard and showing her the man behind the jokes and frustration and anger. She saw him then, a man in fear. And in love.
She broke the embrace and searched his face one more time. “Please, Jono. I need to do this, or nothing else will ever matter.”
“I . . .” he began.
Laura touched his lips. “No more. Just be here. I’m going to need that.”
He let her slip out of his arms. She ran toward Cress and slammed into a shield barrier unlike any she had ever encountered. Cress stalked around the wrecked van. She swiped clawed fingers through the air. The rear doors ruptured and fell aside. Ropes of jagged violet essence slithered out of her hands and into the dark interior of the van. With a clenching of her first, the essence ropes tightened and whiplashed out, dangling a body in the air.