Awake (Book 3)

Two

“Focus, Ellie. Focus.”

            Sweat beaded across my forehead and lined my upper lip, my temples, the back of my neck. It gathered under my arms and in the pit of my elbows; down my back and within the confines of my bra. Everything was sticky and hot and uncomfortable.

            “Ellie, come on.”

            I hated it.

            The twenty men all froze in the field around me, seizing up, under my control. They were Prophets but still people, and they didn’t deserve this.

            I was a monster and a killer and I hated it.

            “You have to fight the pain,” Lucille instructed, voice close to my ear. “How the hell do you expect to beat Angel, your father, and their army, if you can’t even take out twenty guys?”

            Her words encouraged me further. I pushed forward, feeling the power course through me, hyper-aware of all the heartbeats pounding around me and the blood rushing in their veins.

            Ba-dump.

            Power was a sweet, buttery sensation. Completely addicting. The monster inside of me longed for wrath and rage and murder, and for the last six months, it had been well sated.

            “Finish them!” Lucille screamed, a vein bulging in her neck. The psychopathic glint in her eye wasn’t me being delusional. It was definitely there. All that had happened to my mother—with her daughters being freakish experiments and her husband a grade A jerk—was a fairly good excuse for her to fall off her rocker. I wasn’t sure anybody could keep a sane head on their shoulders after that.

            But this . . .

            Sometimes it was just scary.

            Every Prophet she saw had Angel’s face, or Dr. Edmund’s. Every Prophet, whether she knew them or not—and usually she didn’t—had done something to personally victimize her. Usually their only crime was living and working for Angel. The Prophets she brought home who were nothing more than brainwashed kids didn’t deserve to fall at the end of my abilities. And my training, no less.

            Training.

            A pained scream tore from my throat as all twenty men collapsed to the ground, holding their throat or their stomach or their chest, each of them dead. And like always, with every meaningless death, my heart died a little more.

            “Not good enough,” my mother said in her familiar monotone. “You need a better time than that. Run it again.”

            But I was on the ground, drenched in sweat, heaving. “No. I can’t.”

            Her eyebrow rose. “Excuse me?”

            “I said I can’t. I’m tired.”

            “Well, I don’t think Carlton would care very much how you felt one way or another. Regardless of your state of fatigue, you need to be ready. Run it again.”

            The insanity peeked through again. Any time she mentioned her husband, it surfaced quite prominently. “We’ve run this twenty times, and I’m done for today.”

            A disgusted grunt escaped her lips. “I didn’t take you for a weakling, Ellie.”

            My throat burned with a rebuttal, but I swallowed it back down. If I learned anything from these six months in hell, it was that keeping your mouth shut kept you from an all-night sparring session. "I’ve killed a hundred of them,” I told her softly, staring into her eyes with quiet force. “They won’t be coming back. Angel doesn’t know I’m still alive, and neither does Dr. Edmund. I’m tired. Facing them means nothing if I don’t have my strength.”