Chapter 29

AN: Hey, all. This chappie's a bit dark. It has death. Oh noes. Thanks to all my reviewers; you guys are great! Don't change the channel, folks, 'cause there's lots more to come. I have some serious plans for this story, my dears, and I only hope y'all stay with me!

Kat opened her eyes slowly, with an almost audible creaking of the lids. She felt like weights had been placed there, or the medical pins she'd heard they put on recently operated-on lids to keep them closed had been attached. At first, there was only fog: a kind of musty light, a diluted greyness that fuzzed her vision and made her squint uneasily. While the fogginess refused to dissipate, Kat gradually became aware of pain.

Slowly, gingerly, she sat up. Cracked pieces of rubble slid from her chest to the ground with a series of sharp noises, and more dust billowed up. Kat raised a hand to her head, feeling a bump the size of a tennis ball rising on her temple. She felt a sting, and when she brought her hand down, there was red on her fingertips. Kat groaned. A massive headache was springing up.

Blinking hard, Kat tried to draw her legs up to stand. Her left one came up fine, but her right foot seemed to be stuck. As she struggled with it, the blur in the air began to clear a bit. Kat started to make out dim shapes, mainly piles of nonspecific debris. A light breeze swept her hair up from the back of her neck, and the fog swirled away enough for Kat to see the skeletal, vaguely threatening remains of the house on Knight Street.

"Jesus," she said, and her voice sounded scratchy, and strange.

"Do it."

She blinked. What had that been? Kat reached down and tugged at her right foot, unearthing it from a pile of broken concrete and heavy timber. The force it took to yank her foot out sent her sprawling backwards, landing on a sharp piece of something hard. Kat cried out hoarsely, sitting back up and rubbing her back. She caught another glimpse of the ruin before her, smoke still rising from the wreckage.

"Kill her."

The voice flashed through her head again, an unfamiliar memory, hard and vicious and cold.

"Kill her."

When Kat realized it was her own voice, she nearly fell again.

And when she looked at the house again, she was smiling.

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Caleb sat up, a small moan escaping his lips as he shoved someone else's feet off his stomach. He couldn't see anything; the world was lost in a distant grey mist. Dust. Rubble, everywhere. He shook his head, eyes going black for an instant. The clouds of fog swirled away in a steady, swift torrent, leaving the night air cool and clear.

"Oh my god…"

The house… there was no house. Only the broken, gutted frame, the guts of the place strewn all across the lawn and the flat, dull road. A mountain of splintered, destroyed wood and broken glass was piled haphazardly in the center. It looked as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of the house, exploding it outwards in a destructive, quasi-nucleic blast. With a queasy thrill, Caleb realized that, in a way, that's exactly what had happened.

With this thought came a fear so sudden and so acute that it stopped his breath. He felt, rather than imagined, the blood draining from his face like thick liquid poured from a clear glass.

"Reid."

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As Kat rose to her feet, the fog was swept away as if by… magic. She glanced around, saw Caleb carefully standing. Tyler was lying at Caleb's feet, and she could make out other groaning figures coming to. Caleb's face was dead white, frighteningly white, and his gaze was locked on the remains of the house. His lips moved in a word she couldn't hear, her ears half-deafened by the blast, but she could read the simple syllable. Kat could feel her heart beating steadily, a low, rhythmic thudding that sounded suddenly like a tribal drum. She began to walk, limping, holding a hand to the cut and bump on her head.

Caleb, too, was picking his way across the rubble. Behind him, Tyler was trying to sit up, and failing. He fell back with a sharp cry, hands flying to his ribcage. Kat saw it, dismissed it. He was alive. He would mend.

She was barefoot. Her feet, coming down unevenly on concrete and wood, hurt. She dismissed that, too.

It seemed to her like everything was moving slower than usual, and faster at the same time. Like walking through a whirlpool. The shock was gone, as was the animal pleasure she'd felt at the thought of the utter destruction her warlock

(lover)

had wrought. All Kat felt now was… a sort of blindness, a nameless certainty that kept her moving, kept her stepping over the jutting bits of glass and avoiding the most obvious nails as she made her way over the ruined lawn and towards the shell of the front door.

"Kat!" Caleb's normally warm voice was taut and stretched thin over something terrible. Kat didn't pause. "Don't go in there!"

"I'm getting him out," she responded evenly, stumbling a little and catching herself neatly. Caleb made a long, loping stride and caught her arm, spinning her halfway about. She watched him cattily, her brown eyes burning with a secret light. Caleb ignored the warning written in every line of her face.

"Kat, listen to me," he said, and the desperation in his voice made her still to his hand, granting him the right to continue. His eyes pleaded, but they weren't pleading with her. They were pleading, she realized in confusion, for him to be wrong. Pleading with himself, begging for what he was saying not to be true. "You're going in there for Reid."

"I know that," she said, just as evenly, and made to pull away. Caleb finished in a rush.

"But what you find may not be him anymore. It may not be him at all."

Kat slid her arm out of Caleb's grip and he did not stop her again.

"He could kill you," he said quietly. She didn't look back, but did pause briefly. He understood that it wasn't a hesitation, but a gift.

"I know that, too."

And then she walked, carefully, into the broken remains of Mary's special trap.

There was nothing there. Nothing but wreckage and ruin and destruction. Kat could feel the power in this place, the power that rose and spilled and licked at the edges of her being. Out of destruction, comes rebirth.

Reid was destruction.

What was born?

She didn't call out for him. Just picked her way to the center of the mess, moving by instinct. Climbing swiftly, Kat reached the top of the chaotic heap in the middle of the gutted floor, the twinges of pain from her right foot minor distractions. There, like the pit of a small volcano, was a clear space in the rubble. Two figures lay, flopped like rag dolls. One had messy red hair and twisted, motionless limbs.

The other was leaner, blond. He lay limply, equally motionless… and a good two or three inches above the ground. As Kat jumped lightly into the shallow pit, her breath caught warily: his eyes, wide open despite his obvious lack of consciousness, burned black as twin chunks of coal.

"Ow," the redheaded rag doll moaned. Kat turned sharply, her hair whipping around her face. Mary wasn't moving, but her eyes were open and mildly unfocused. Kat scanned the older woman quickly: looked like a broken leg, a dislocated shoulder, a severely smashed up collarbone (something white was jutting from the bloody mess between her shoulder and neck) and a nasty bruise that covered the entire right side of her face. Kat felt like she should feel some sort of satisfaction at Mary's pain, which would almost certainly be fatal if left much longer, but she felt nothing. The witch focused on her and coughed a little, not trying to move. "You're too late," she said through broken teeth.

Kat took one step forward, bent down, and snapped the redhead's neck.

"Promise kept," she murmured before turning back to Reid. Or, back to Reid's hovering, magic-saturated body.

Kat reached out a hand, steeling herself for it, and touched the pale, still cheek.

Nothing happened.

His cheek was colder than she'd expected, and soft. The black eyes did not change or focus, and he didn't fall out of the air. There was no electrical charge to zap her, no magical burst to fling her away. Just... nothing. It was like there was nothing of Reid left in his own body, only power.

"Shit," she whispered. Closing her eyes, Kat let herself Change just a bit, just enough to give her the strength to hook her arms beneath Reid's knees and shoulders and lift him out of his supernatural resting place. He was much lighter than she'd thought he'd be, body lithe and light, like a dancer's. She lifted him onto the ledge of the pit, hefting herself up and clambering over the edge. Bending again, kneeling as if she were at prayer, Kat lifted the boy again and began to walk, blank-faced, proud in her barefoot, bloodstained glory.

She left Mary in the ghost of the house on Knight Street. Nothing but a body.

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Caleb held a hand to his ribs, wincing. Something in there was broken, he was sure. He wasn't sure why he didn't follow Kat into the house, but he didn't question it. It was better, he'd found, not to question these things. Squinting, he saw the lonely, noble rescue in reverse: the woman carrying out the man. Something in his chest seemed to compress and tighten, a clamp against his heart. Reid, from this distance, looked dead.

From behind him, shaking and harsh, a voice.

"Don't you all fucking move. You're all under arrest."

Damn, he thought. The cop.

Turning, Caleb saw his people standing now, rubbing various injuries, trying not to trip as they moved towards him. And behind them, leaning out of the truck, the detective. Holding in his hand a police baton (quite useless at this point) and Pogue's forgotten cell phone.