Empire Island, Exile the First

Chapter 23

"Day!" I called out as I stood up on my feet.

Calla grabbed my arm and yanked hard. "Don't be stupid, don't call her name," she hissed at me through gritted teeth. "First of all, we don't want to call attention to ourselves. And second, we don't want them to know her familiar name."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Names have power, the more familiar a name is to you, the more of you it contains."

"I didn't know this," I replied.

She shot me a sharp look containing the simmering anger she'd been holding in all along. "I wouldn't expect you to. You ran away before you had a chance to learn any of this. Before there was time to property guard Empire or its people and now look where we're at. Day is missing and we might possibly be more fucked than I ever expected."

Red heat of shame flashed across my face like the after effects of a day in the sun. It burned hot and I swore if I put the tip of my finger to my cheek, it'd sizzle and come away blistered.

"Excuse me," I replied with as much defensiveness as I could muster through all the shame I was fighting off at that moment. "I left because of what happened to my mom. You can't sit there and blame all of this on me, why didn't you ever fucking call me? You knew where I was."

She narrowed her steely gray eyes, locking me in a stare down that felt inescapable for a heartbeat or two. Time stretched out like elastic, as neither one of us wanted to back down, in that way our genetics bound us together like elk in the spring, unable to escape the urge to bash their heads together. We were unable to escape the need to be right.

But more pressing concerns got both of us, and Calla's left eye began to twitch as the tension melted and we both backed off. I saw our auras receding, from the brilliant sparks of rust red to the more mellow variations both of us normally had. Orange streaked with red and patches of blue.

"We need to find her," Calla said, meaning Day. "If we don't get her, they're going to tear her apart. She's too soft for this kind of thing."

"We are," I said in a harsh whisper. "Let's go get her back and then find Phoenix."

Calla surprised me by taking my hands in hers, holding them tight and saying, "I wanted to call, you know. I wanted to call you in the city a million times. But you know we tried, but your phone number was already out of service by the time we made the move."

I didn't bother letting her know that I'd called back to Empire more than a few times, but had always chickened out on the first ring. It made me seem pathetic and grasping, and dealing with the shame of abandoning my duties was already too much for me to bear.

Calla made motions with her fingers, and then she twisted her left hand through a series of complicated knotted glyphs. The kind of magic I didn't think I'd ever get to, judging by how clumsy I was and had been without Empire's help.

I watched as the colors grew more intense and vibrant around her glyph and spell casting, yellow, green, blue and finally a line of violet that snaked out of the palm of her hand and zig zagged through the forest and trees.

"She's that way," Calla said, nodding along the violet line. "We have to hurry or they'll come find us. This shit is pretty powerful and I might as well be standing on top of the rocks screaming at them to look at me."

"It feels powerful," I said, following in behind her as we set off to find Day, rescue Phoenix, and apparently save the fucking world.

I was taken aback at how my vision wasn't just through my eyes now, but in the fine hairs on my arms and at the center of my brain. If I closed my eyes, I could still follow the pull of the violet line through the trees, twisting and turning around rocks and stumps even with my physical sight covered.