Everyone looked around confused, no one had a single answer. The obvious one was that we needed to get the hell out of the rickety building that began to fall around us, but before I could suggest it my mother's faint voice barely made it through the ruckus. It was two little words, but they were enough to stop me in my tracks.
"Earth Magic."
My eyes snapped to hers and for a split second I thought I saw a trace of the old her, not the shell that started to occupy her body. It was there one second and gone in a flash, but it was there.
But the question was, how the hell did my mother know about earth magic? My timid mother who never got out of the house and never said more than a few words at a time, even on the days that she was feeling well?
Max and I exchanged looks and he pressed his palm against the smooth tile of the floor.
"Holy crap she's right." He said, his eyes wide. "Not even a little bit, it's a lot. It's so strong I can feel it through the floor, I didn't even need to touch the earth."
An uneasy feeling rose up in my stomach.
The fear of what was coming overpowered the shock of my mother's words.
I could deal with those later, right now I needed to make sure she made it out alive, otherwise she'd never be able to say another word again.
If she died, then Colt died in vain. I wasn't going to let that happen.
"We need to move. Now." I scurried to my mom and helped her into the wheelchair.
"What are you talking about? I think we should stay here and let it pass." Finn protested. "Or are you trying to get us killed too?"
His words stung worse than anything I'd ever felt. They cut me straight to the bone and poured salt into the wound.
I winced at the comment before picking myself up by my own bootstraps.
"Call it a hunch." I said, ignoring his comment. "Just believe me, we need to move."
I took a step forward, pushing my mother closer to the door. Drax was right there beside me, ready to run at a moment's notice, and Draydon held a hand on my mother's wheelchair— if she was going, he was going too.
That left Max, standing in the middle of a quacking room stuck in-between Finn and I.
I could tell by the look on his face that he was contemplating which side to take, what was the best course of action.
No one knew magic better than Max did, he was a witch after all. If he sided with me, I knew it would be because it was the better option and not because he let any attachment he had to me cloud his judgement.
Max was too smart for that.
He looked from Finn, to me, back to Finn.
Meanwhile the rumble in the ground only got worse, sending a chunk of the ceiling crashing to the ground nearby.
That was enough to nudge Max in my direction. He scrambled to me and Finn groaned.
He hated me and probably didn't want anything to do with me or any plan I thought up, but he wasn't stupid enough to die over it. I was glad that his sense of self-preservation was stronger than the boiling hatred he felt because I'd promised Colt that I'd take care of him.
Leaving him in the middle of a magical earthquake in a building that's going down?
Not exactly taking care of him.
And I was done breaking promises and disappointing people.
"I saw a bus just around the corner." I said loudly while I pushed my mother through what was left of the door frame that once housed the glass doors.
We flooded out onto the sidewalk and the world continued to shake. I moved as fast as I could, but it was hard because so many chunks of the cement had broken up and protruded higher than the rest.
"Hang on mom." I warned, expecting a grunt. Maybe I was even hoping for a word, I don't know. But all I was met with was silence from her semi-limp body. Her head hung to her chest and pushing her from behind I couldn't tell if she was sleeping or just too weak to hold her head on her own.
Beside me Draydon held my assault rifle. "You have such strange weapons in this world."
If I had the time to process what he had said I would have scoffed at the odd statement, but time wasn't exactly on our side and my only objective was getting everyone to safety as quickly as possible.
Around us the foundations of buildings cracked loudly, and I could feel the distinct rumble of them falling to pieces in the soles of my feet.
Inside my chest my heart thudded so thunderously that I almost mistook it for the quake. It was like a fear awoke inside me that was embedded so deeply by the trials that I couldn't shake it. Snippets of memories flashed behind my eyes of the elemental magic that had been used to terrorize us.
It all flooded back like a surge from behind a dam, but I shook the thoughts from my head. It wasn't the time to lose my focus.
One foot in front of the other, that's all you need to worry about.
I rushed my mother down the sidewalk, praying that the others were still close behind. To look back wasted a fraction of a second, and it was a fraction of a second that we might need. One that might stand in-between life and death itself if we weren't lucky.
Behind me I heard the loud pop of gunfire, and my head immediately turned to look.
Rookie mistake.
The second I took my eyes off of the sidewalk, my foot snagged on one of the jagged pieces of concrete that stuck out like a sore thumb, and I was spent spiraling to the ground. I winced in pain as my hands and elbow skidded across the harsh surface, very obviously drawing blood. My mother's wheelchair continued forward without me, skewing to the left and sending her wheeling into the middle of the street.
"Fuck!" I screamed, a familiar anger burning in the pit of my stomach. The very anger that I tried so hard to stuff down and ignore.
It was there now, and a small part of me feared that I'd never be able to shove it back inside its cage.
I spun around to find the source of the sound and was met with a middle-aged man with hair frosting at the roots. He wore a faded pair of overalls and an even more worn baseball cap. My eyes immediately locked on to the shotgun that he held in his hands just as he slipped another bullet into the barrel.
"Oh, come on." I sighed.
Without giving it a single thought, I ripped the gun from Draydon's hands, raised it, and aimed it directly at Farmer John, ready to squeeze the trigger at a moment's notice. I wasn't playing games, especially not with my mother's life in the mix. I brought the small sight up to my eye and squinted, zeroing in on the hillbilly target.
He had a gun, but he sure was slow at working it.
He was only about twenty feet away, close enough for me to get a good look at him. I could tell by the look on his face that he was checked out. He stared on blankly, with no expression at all.
He raised his gun and I knew in that moment that it was now or never. I wasn't about to let someone else I loved die, and the darkness inside me stirred in anticipation, about to get exactly what it wanted— to show the world the monster that I was, not that the trials had made me, but that I had made myself.
I squeezed the trigger and felt the gun jolt, and just as I did the weapon was thrust from my hands and pointed toward the sky, sending the bullet spiraling toward the sun.
"What the hell!" I yelled at Draydon angrily.
He didn't bother with a rebuttal, he just charged forward. The farmer was a decent sized guy, but Draydon was bigger, and he sent his body colliding into the farmer’s. The two both ended to the ground, and Draydon laid him with a punch in the face knocking him out cold.