2025
The gentle trill of a lone bird perched on her balcony reached Bianca's ears, her eyes opening to small slits as she roused. It was light outside, the sun's height in the sky indicating she had slept late. Lethargically moving her body, she realised her arm was draped over the side of the bed. Raising her hand onto the mattress, she attempted pushing herself up but found she was still too tired to do so. Turning her head on the pillow, she looked to the other side and saw a single red rose had been placed on the pillow next to her. Smiling happily she reached towards it, gently twirling the stem in her fingers, careful to avoid the thorns. Her reverie broke as the smell of smoke infiltrated her nostrils. Cautiously she lifted herself, without notice of fatigue this time, and dropped the rose back onto the pillow. Smelling the air, she was certain it was smoke and hurried out of bed to find the cause. She discovered it was coming from the kitchen, Chris beating the toaster frantically with a tea towel when she got to the door. Thinking rationally, Bianca stepped forward, flicking the switch on the power-point and pulling the plug from the socket. Turning to look at Chris, she smiled playfully.
"You trying to burn down my apartment now?" she teased.
"No," Chris said, glancing down at the blackened cloth in his hand before tossing it aside. "I was trying to treat you to breakfast, but I guess that surprise is ruined."
"Why don't we go for a safer option then?" Bianca suggested. "Bowls are in that cupboard, cereal is in the pantry."
Moving around Chris, she pulled the banana from the fruit bowl, peeling and throwing the skin into the bin behind her before glancing over at him as she placed the fruit on the cutting board, ensuring he had followed her directions. She saw his shirt rise a little as he reached up to the overhead cupboard for the bowls, smirking at the sight of his skin, pleasant memories playing over in her mind. Producing a knife, she turned her attention back to slicing.
"What are you doing here, Chris?" she asked as she raised and lowered the knife through the soft food. "It's too risky you being here, he could orb in any second."
"It's okay. I created a distraction."
"A distraction?" Bianca looked up at him quickly. Lifting the knife, she turned the blade flat so it lay horizontally in her hand, subconsciously jabbing the point towards him as she continued with concern: "You know he's going to expect me to be there."
Chris held up his hands, a somewhat disturbed, almost frightened look on his face as his eyes fixed on the knife. "Uh, can you put that thing away?"
"Oh, sorry," Bianca apologised, looking at the knife in her hand and then laying it aside. She had noticed over the month or so that had passed that Chris seemed to have an aversion to knives. She wasn't sure if it was because he couldn't trust her not to use it on him, or whether it was a deep-seated fear he had held long before she'd met him. "But I mean it Chris, the more diversions you create the busier he's going to be. The busier he gets, the more he's going to rely on me to be there, and if I keep going missing he's going to notice. Just let me handle it, okay?"
"I just wanted to see you," Chris said, pulling her against him, giving her a slight pout as he wrapped his arms around her waist.
A small flutter of a smile crossed her lips, showing she appreciated the thought but was still quite wary of the trouble they could be in. Wyatt didn't know about her and Chris, she'd never told him. Mostly because she was afraid of what his reaction would be, partially because she could envision their whole world crashing down around them, and also because their subtle influences to change him would suddenly have no effect if he thought they had joined forces to work against him.
"Let's just keep it to out spot, okay?" she requested, kissing his lips lightly before pulling away to finish assembling breakfast.
"How much longer are we going to go on with this?" Chris questioned.
"As long as we have to," Bianca said.
She picked up the bowls, shoving one into his hands as she passed him with her own. Looking at her curiously, Chris followed her into the dining room. Taking a seat across from her, Bianca could see the questioning gaze in his eyes. Softly she shook her head, indicating she didn't want to talk any more about the subject. Chris stirred the cereal in the bowl thoughtfully, his eyes looking back to Bianca as he relaxed against the chair.
"So, how about those Mariners?" he asked, lifting the spoon and crunching down on the contents as he watched Bianca return his inquiry with a questionable look on her face. Swallowing the mouthful of cereal, he looked at her innocently. "What? You don't want to talk about us, you don't want to talk about Wyatt, and we can't gossip or relay social experiences because you never go out. We can hardly act like a normal couple. Why can't we be like ordinary people and go to the movies or a baseball game?"
"Because we're not ordinary," Bianca retorted, glaring at him. "I have to do my job to survive, and I was hoping you could understand that. I didn't intentionally get caught up in this and I don't like you bringing it to my attention everyday as if it's my fault that everything's happening the way it is. I don't have the power to influence people or events and I'd appreciate it if you stopped making demands on me to do so."
"Bianca, look, I'm not trying to make you do anything, but what's happening here with us, and with Wyatt, that's the two most important things in our lives right now. It helps to talk about it."
"I don't want to talk about it," Bianca said defensively, shaking her head as she turned her attention back to the meal in front of her.
"Well I do," Chris retorted.
"Chris, stop pushing me!" she shouted, propelling herself back from the table.
Moving past him, she stopped uncertainly and combed her fingers through her hair, unsure of where to go, which direction to take to escape him. Finally she headed for her bedroom, slamming the door closed behind her. She had to busy herself, to keep her mind off thinking about the situation, to have one normal conversation that didn't involve the predicament she was in or the twisted state of her life right now. She opened up her cupboard then pulled open the drawer until she found the ocean blue top she was looking for, balling it up in her hands and looking towards the door as she heard movement on the other side.
"Bianca, open up," she heard Chris calling from outside. She could picture him standing on the other side, his hands in his pockets as he tiredly looked at the opposite face of the door. At least he was nice enough not to orb in. Instead of answering, she cast the top onto her bed and began looking for a pair of jeans. "C'mon, give me something to work with here."
Pulling up the zipper and buttoning up the fly she paused to look at the door again. Was she really being unreasonable? Couldn't she just have one normal morning without having to worry about everything that was happening? Sighing, she looked away from the door preferring to continue with her task of getting dressed whilst giving her blessing for him to enter.
"It's not locked," she said, sweeping the top into her hands and pulling it over her head, flicking her hair out at the back as he opened the door. If he wanted to talk about this then she would do so to rectify her part in it. "Where'd you send Wyatt?"
"He's down in the Underworld which is why I was telling you not to worry. He can't sense what's going on up here and vice-versa from here to down there."
"So you have absolutely no idea what's happening down there."
"No. Not really. I'm not concerned about him, I'm concerned about you," Chris said, care in his voice as he reached out towards her. His hands brushing her arms, she pushed him away.
"You don't even know what kind of danger you put him in! You sent him down there without anyone to keep an eye on him. How is this working to your plan, Chris? How? He could be doing something bad down there and you wouldn't even know about it, or even worse something bad could happen to him and then I'm out of a job! Don't you think things through? Has all the blood left your head and gone... elsewhere? You're only succeeding in distracting yourself. I'm going down there." Holding her hand up to him, one finger raised in a stilling gesture, she commanded: "You stay."
Shimmering down to the Underworld, she went straight for Wyatt's contacts to find his location. In just under an hour she finally succeeded in finding him, but by that time it was too late. He had his back to her, on his knees as enforced by the arrow buried in the back of one. Seeing the darklighter on her right, she powered up an energy ball and speared it towards him, watching as it consumed his being. Turning to the confidant witch who stood before Wyatt, she saw a bloodied heart in the woman's palm. Her heart leapt in fear, thinking it was Wyatt's, her mind reminding her of that old cliché of someone having their heart ripped from their chest and shown to them moments before they died. The distraction was enough to buy the woman the time she needed to finish her spell.
"Before the passing of this hour, take away this witch's power," the witch finished intoning.
She heard a bellow of protest from Wyatt, and it was this that snapped her back to attention, realising that he was still intact but now not only was he injured but also powerless. Before Bianca could make a move, the witch vaporized in a cloud of smoke, leaving her alone with Wyatt as he collapsed forward onto the cold, dirt ground.
"No, Wyatt," Bianca said, racing over to him and dropping down in front of him. He lifted his head to look at her, his face streaked with dirt and grime. She pushed her hair behind her ear as she looked into his vacant eyes. "I'm sorry."
"I may be down, but I'm not out. Don't go planning my funeral just yet," Wyatt said. Squeezing his eyes tightly as he felt another surge of pain, he shifted his arms until they sat in front of him and lay his forehead back down on his forearms.
Bianca softly placed her hand on his shoulder, shimmering them back to his apartment so that they both now rested on his bed. She looked down at the clean sheets and then at the dirt that covered him, not to mention the black liquid that seemed to be oozing out around the arrow's sheath.
"I think I owe you a laundry job," she half-joked.
"Pain relief..." Wyatt began, another cry of pain escaping his lips, "would be fine."
Bianca looked studiously at the arrow embedded in the back of his knee. It wasn't anything like a normal arrow, except for perhaps in shape. It appeared to be painted black, coated in some dark varnish, the point of contact progressively spreading underneath the tear in his jeans in a bruised and scarred state while what seemed not to be blood but some kind of crude oil ran in little streams down the sides of his leg that attached firmly to the fabric like a leech to skin.
"Break or yank?" Bianca questioned aloud.
"Neither. Not til you get something around your hands at least," Wyatt said. Bianca got up quickly, finding a swath of bandages and speedily winding the cloth around her hands. "That arrow's poisoned. I don't want you touching it without protection, even though it most likely won't affect you. The arrow's only partway in, it didn't make it straight through."
"Hold still," Bianca instructed, placing one hand on his leg as she wrapped the other around the sheath. Pressing down with her left, she pulled her right hand up, the gruesome exiting sound only covered by Wyatt's shout. Quickly Bianca moved to cover the wound. Wyatt knocked her hand away with his own, his glare met with her own look of surprise.
"You need to do a few things. As much as I like these jeans, you're going to have to tear them up for me or the infection will get worse," he ordered. A hollow laugh escaping his lips at the thought, Bianca looked at him as if he'd gone crazy. "Who am I kidding? I'm dying, right? That's what darklighter arrows were meant for."
"I'm not going to let you die," Bianca stated. "Tell me how to help."
"Well unless you know of a way to get this poison out of my body, you're going to have to find someone to heal me, and with seemingly both the forces of good and evil against me now, that's going to be a mighty hard task to accomplish. I don't know who you can trust."
"I think I know someone," Bianca said, watching as he wearily dropped his head back onto the pillow. "How long do you have?"
"Not long," came the muffled response.
Conjuring herself a blade sharp enough to rip through the fabric, Bianca steadily went to work on destroying his jeans until the wound was clearly exposed. It seemed to be getting worse by the second. Tentatively she placed a cloth over it, the white disappearing almost at once as it seeped up what lay on the surface. Placing another one over the top, she lifted his leg slightly as she wound the bandage around it, watching him with concern as he flinched but said no more to her.
Shimmering away, she successfully found Gazu, a sorcerer who owed her a favour or two and had the ability to heal. Bringing him back to Wyatt's apartment, she rushed into his bedroom and stopped short when she looked at his unmoving figure. He was as pale as a dead man, and for a full minute she believed he was dead, she was too late, and it was her fault that this had happened to him. But the slight rise of his body indicated he was still breathing, even if it was shallowly. She could barely hear him as she approached the bedside, kneeling down and looking over his body now glistening with beads of sweat.
"It's not too late, is it?" she asked, looking back up to Gazu. "I could never forgive myself. I wasn't there in time. I let him down."
Looking back to Wyatt, she cocked her head as she watched him with a worried expression on her face. The words she had said to Chris earlier, the fact she had known something like this would happen and she'd done nothing about it, kept playing over in her mind as the guilt settled in. If anybody was being distracted here, it was her, and all she was doing was hurting them both.
"He looks strong. With my help I'm sure he can fight it," Gazu answered, his hands roaming over the wound.
"Wyatt," she whispered, her fingers carefully brushing his long curls aside so she could see his face, so he could see her. "I'm going to get your powers, okay? I'm going to make this up to you."
He moved his head slightly, Bianca taking it as all signs of acknowledgement and agreement to what she had said before the lids closed as his blue eyes disappeared beneath them. Pushing her hands against her upper legs, she stood up and looked over to Gazu caught up in his own job with lights, powders and incantations. Seeing the concentration on the sorcerer's face, she knew he was trying the best that he could, she knew that if anyone was going to be able to do this, he was.
"I'll be back shortly," she said, shimmering out.
As she scoured the Underworld for information, she found that it was helpful to have seen the witch and what had happened. She could give each person she spoke with an accurate description of the woman, and her gruesome practices seemed to ring a few bells with some people. The spell she had used was something that was used by both good and bad witches, and with this knowledge she felt Wyatt had not been so accurate with his assumption that the witch who had stolen his powers had been a good one. By the end of the day, she had located the witch Brigid in her lavish lair, complete with reptilian accessories.
"Little cold down here for them, isn't it?" Bianca asked, observing the snakes writhing on the floor. Her gaze lifting to Brigid, she cocked her head as a smirk appeared on her face. "Haven't we met before?"
"My, my, my, it's the strong man's bodyguard," Brigid said, playing with her fingers idly as she approached Bianca. "I wouldn't have thought someone so powerful would hire such bad help. No wonder you were made an outcast to society."
Lighting up an energy ball, Bianca began to throw it towards the witch who casually lifted her fingers and redirected its path. Although not surprised that she had blocked her attack, Bianca was still enraged at Brigid's words and at her own inability to fight someone with Wyatt's powers. She had to think of a distraction, of a way that she could work around this and prevent herself from being killed. Conjuring herself a plank of wood, she ran at Brigid with it. Reflexively, Brigid fired up the shield around her body, knocking Bianca back to the ground, the wood sliding away from her. Although Brigid thought she now had the upper hand, Bianca had been working with Wyatt long enough to know that the shield took some time to come down.
"Is that the best you can do?" Brigid laughed. "A piece of wood?"
Bianca shimmered from the floor to the wall where she had earlier spied the flaming torches. "Wasn't for you, it was for them."
With one quick manoeuvre, Bianca ripped the torch from the wall and tossed it towards the plank of wood, towards where the snakes lay, their actions becoming more frantic as they fretted over whether to get closer or move away. One finally deciding the fire was a good idea; it wriggled closer, only to catch alight as well, the flames quickly spreading from one body to another.
"No!" Brigid shrieked, moving her hands frantically as she tried to find a power to stop the escalating death of her pets.
Bianca shimmered behind her, grabbing hold of her arm tightly, twisting the red locks of hair between the fingers of her other hand and yanking her head back. "We've got somewhere to be."
She shimmered them both to Wyatt's room, knowing there was a highly likely chance that she would be endangering him more, but this time she was confidant she could kill this witch. She had the upper hand. Whether that was before or after she took Wyatt's powers from her remained to be seen - it was all dependant on his condition for she couldn't just 'take' someone's powers without having an outlet to send them to.
"How is he?" she asked Gazu.
"He'll be fine."
"You hear that?" Bianca said to Brigid, pulling her head roughly to the side. "You inflict the worst kind of damage on him you can, and you still can't destroy him. Now say you're sorry."
"Bite me," Brigid responded, trying to break out of her hold.
"Don't invite me," Bianca retorted. She tugged harder. "Say it!"
"The only thing I'm sorry about is that we couldn't finish you off," Brigid spat towards him.
Wyatt rose weakly on the bed as Gazu made his exit from the room, his gaze flickering between Bianca and the red-haired witch she had in her grasp - the one who had attacked him before and taken his powers. He wasn't strong enough to try anything, but that thought easily gave way to the interest he held over what Bianca was going to do. He didn't have any idea what she had meant before, barely latching onto the words in his delirious state, and the only thing he could comprehend was that perhaps she knew some ancient spell to fix this. But what he saw he found certainly a whole lot more rewarding as Bianca buried her hand into the woman's back, the witch's shrieking likely to be heard from three buildings away. His eyes moved to Bianca's face, seeing that she was enjoying this; that this was something she allowed herself little opportunity to do. Certainly he had never seen her do this in the few years he had known her. Brigid dropped to her knees as Bianca withdrew her hand.
"Look who's kneeling now," Bianca seethed close to her ear as she positioned her hands around the woman's head, turning them slightly and hearing a satisfying crack as she broke the witch's neck. Letting go of Brigid's body, it fell in a dead heap on the floor. Bianca stepped towards Wyatt. "Now for you."
"I hope you're not intending on roughing me up the same way."
"From what I hear, it's actually quite enjoyable," Bianca said, placing her hands on his chest as she pushed him back against the bed.
He watched with increasing interest as she placed herself over him, withdrawing her hands slightly as she cupped them together, separating the fingers so that only the palms were now joined. He noted the shape had the remarkable appearance of wings, wings that blocked the sunlight that seemed to stream from around her hands.
All that was gathered
Absorbed in whole
Leave my possession
Into this soul
A white light sparked from the centre and Wyatt felt it enter his body. At first he envisioned it to be painful, but she was quite right when she had said that it was more enjoyable. It didn't hurt him at all. It only felt like the tiniest pinprick against his skin. Inside his body felt like a gigantic hole was being filled; a balloon filling with water, a void absorbing and containing the very warmth that made him real, complete and who he was.
"Bianca," he breathed, grabbing her wrists as the last of the power petered out, his eyes locked on hers.
"It's done," Bianca said, fear rising inside of her as she hastily pushed herself away. She was expecting to be punished, he in turn looking for something that was far the opposite.
"Don't leave," he said urgently.
Shaking slightly, her eyes glassy, she froze where she was and inspected him. How could she have put him in this state? Simply because she allowed Chris to take up her time, because he seemed to give her something which she needed - which everybody needed. He gave her love, but at what risk? Killing the only other person she cared about? Her life was beginning to fall into the same repetitive morbid cycle, and what could she do to stop it? What could she do to keep her world from being destroyed? Because certainly whatever it was she was doing now wasn't working. Whatever she was doing was threatening everyone, including herself.
"I'm not going anywhere. I just need to find a way to fix this," she said softly.
"I'm okay," he insisted, grimacing at the pain as he shifted himself up.
"You're not," Bianca said. "You're suffering because the world out there is threatened by you. They're scared of you. Now they're trying twice as hard to hurt you, and you're losing defence because I'm not there to help."
"Well be there," Wyatt insisted.
Biting her lip, she stared at him. He had no idea what was going on. He was an innocent party in all of this. Everything she was saying he was misinterpreting because he didn't know, and she was never going to tell him. She was never going to mention it to him, and she would never have to because she wasn't going to abandon him anymore.
"Give me some time and I will."