Ava Rising: Book 2 of 3

Chapter 1

Ava rose slowly out of unconsciousness, ushered by the twinned scents of grease and sugar. Somebody made me breakfast in bed, she thought with a smile. Her eyes fluttered open to behold an unfamiliar mountainous landscape. The earth was swirled in colors of brown and yellow and littered with pockmarks. And the air was laced with the smell of cinnamon...

She blinked and raised her head slowly from where it had been slumped on a diner booth tabletop, inches away from colliding with a cornucopia of breakfast foods and close enough to make those foods look like an alien landscape. Pancakes, cinnamon rolls, waffles and tater tots formed miniature mountains before her, with icing and syrup dripping down their peaks. What was she doing in a diner? She looked up from the mounds of food to find Lucas—his blue eyes staring anxiously at her.

Why did he look so sad? Had he found out about Owen? She knew she should have told Lucas sooner, but things with Owen had been such a whirlwind. Wait a minute, Lucas had found out about her and Owen months ago. What was going on here? Why did she feel so out of it? She shook her head, trying to clear the fog from her memory.

For the first time she got a good look at Lucas—the bags under his eyes were deep purple and he had a truly spectacular array of bruises across his face and arms. Had he gotten into another fight?

And then she felt it, the dull ache coming from her wrist, a drumbeat of pain every time her heart pumped. She shifted in the booth, slowly lifting her arm to assess the damage. She looked like some kind of cheap zombie Halloween costume. Her wrist was wrapped in strips of torn white cloth, already fraying. Blood had soaked through the bandage in huge swathes. Blood? What happened to me? A single image bloomed in her mind, Lucas in his mid forties, shaking with rage and weeping tears of blood. No, not Lucas. Lucas's father. Why were his eyes bloody like that? She looked down at her bandaged wrist as a thought wriggled at the periphery of her memory, trying to unbury itself. She had done that. She had clawed at Lucas's father's eyes in an effort to protect Lucas.

Then came the onslaught of memories. Ava shivered—the terror of that night, the pain of Lucas's betrayal, and then his ultimate sacrifice of killing his father to save her—it was all too much. She felt herself begin to fade, willing herself back to the peace of unconsciousness. But then her head snapped forward violently as she remembered what had triggered the agony of that night.

"Lucas! My family? Owen? Are they alive? Did they make it?"

She saw Lucas whiten, saw his face tighten in agony, and she couldn't stand it. She tried to edge herself out of the booth so she could run, run far away so that the truth could never find her. But she was so weak. Lucas put a hand on her shoulder. She jerked back from his touch. It was like being raked by a live wire. Energy flooded through her body and her wrist stopped aching for a second.

"Ava, wait. You don't understand. Your family's safe, or that's what all the Ares communications that I've intercepted seem to be saying."

"But you looked so upset—" Her eyes widened and she covered her mouth with her good hand. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Your father..."

"It had to be done," Lucas said, stone-faced.

This time Ava reached across to grab one of Lucas's hands. There it was again, that flash of electricity.

She didn't speak. What could she say? Lucas's father had been trying to murder them both when Lucas had killed him. She couldn't mourn his death. But she could lament how much Lucas seemed to have aged in the last few hours.

Had it really only been six months since they'd met? She thought back to the first time she'd ever laid eyes on him, the ultimate predator, slinking down the halls of Roosevelt High her first day of junior year. From that very moment, she had known it would end like this—in death. There had never been any other option for the two of them. She was Gaia; he was Ares. She was sworn, as her forebears had been sworn for seven centuries, to protect the Earth and maintain the balance of nature. And Lucas—as an Ares his mission was to cement the supremacy of man and eliminate any threats to the ascendancy of humanity. As nature retreated before man's roads and guns, black-smoke factories and industrial development, the power of the Ares grew and the Gaia found themselves as prey. They were now outnumbered and outmaneuvered. And this boy sitting across from her, with his high cheekbones and blue eyes, the splash of freckles across the bridge of his nose only visible in the sunlight, and his incurable bedhead—he was on the opposite side of that war. He had been sent to destroy her because she was an Alpha Gaia—a member whose connection to the Earth was magnified beyond that of anyone else in her Order, allowing her to command nature's strongest forces. Within her lay the power of the hurricane, the tidal wave, the volcano and the quaking earth. It was a power that frightened her—and it was growing.