Reaching Retribution (The Prophesized Series) (10 page)

“Okay, whenever you’re ready,” Colin says.

I close my eyes as I gradually start pushing my magic out.

“How are things with you and Natalie?”

“Good. She’s still really worried that something is going to happen to me. She didn’t know that being Ryanne’s protector meant that if Ryanne died, I would follow suit. She’s kind of freaking out about that.”

“That’s understandable,”
I tell him as we both turn and look at the opposite side of the room where Ryanne is standing with Natalie and Colin. They’re just talking right now, but Ryanne keeps shaking her head.

“She doesn’t want to unleash all of her magic,” Liam says. We both turn and look away when Ryanne glances in our direction. I get into a defe
nsive stance and face Liam again. Neither of us are into training today. He glances back over his shoulder. The girl he’s supposed to protect and his soulmate are both standing over there. We’re not sure what’s going to happen when Ryanne stops trying to contain her magic. We’ve seen little bits of it when she loses control.

Ryanne takes a couple steps
back and inhales deeply. I, too, stop attempting to spar and watch her. What if something goes wrong? Could this hurt her? Shoot, I shouldn’t be worrying right now. She’ll feel that.

“I don’t like this new power of hers,” I tell Liam. “I always have to think about what I’
m feeling and how it’ll affect her.”

“Natalie will help her come to terms with it.
She’s able to block others emotions; maybe Ryanne can too.”

“Okay, whenever you’re ready,” Colin says loudl
y to Ryanne. Closing her eyes, she starts pushing her magic out. We instantly feel a change when a sudden breeze manifests. The air swirls around the room, causing Ryanne’s hair to whip around her head. Everyone stops and watches her. The breeze becomes static as the lightning element of her powers makes itself known. I glance over at Liam who is still watching Natalie. She and Colin are taking small steps backward as Ryanne continues to push her magic out.

The lights in the room start flickering
, and some of the weights against the wall start sliding across the room from the wind. I return my focus to my soulmate. Her face is furrowed in concentration. I stagger back a little as the wind intensifies. She has a ton of magic in her; even Colin seems a little shocked.

Tiny undecipherable whispers
echo around us. Everyone tenses when the voices get louder. These must be from her mind-reading ability. The voices ride the wind filling in every available space, and a second later, random colors start flowing out of Ryanne. Reds, blues, grays, greens, yellows, pinks, and purples all start moving throughout the room, lighting up as they mingle with the weather elements.

She’
s still pushing magic out. How can someone so small have that much magic inside her? All the elements in the room intensify the higher her arms raise. When her hands are fully above her head, a white light shoots out from her body and catapults toward us. I shield my eyes the closer it gets to me, but I can’t seem to look away. Following the light is all of Ryanne’s magic. I fly backward from the force of her magic. With my eyes closed, I hit the cushioned mat flooring and roll a couple times before coming to a complete stop. When I open my eyes, the white light is gone. The colors and low whispers are still moving through the room, but the light electricity and the wind are starting to dwindle.

Pushing myself up, I see Ryanne trying to
do the same. I get up and start to walk over to her, but Liam grabs my arm and pulls me back. “Let Colin work with her.”

Colin
, who had also fallen from the blast, slowly gets up and helps Natalie stand. Together both of them walk over to Ryanne, who’s now looking around the room with a shocked expression on her face. “Ryanne, can you hear me?” Colin asks.

She nods and pushes herself fully up. “How do you feel?”
Liam and I both step a little closer to hear them.

Ryanne looks around the room again. She seems very confused. “Umm, I don’t really know. I feel weird.”

I take another step forward to hear her better. “Weird how?”

“I don’t know. I can
hear everyone’s thoughts and feel their emotions, but it’s not as annoying as before. I can actually ignore them.”

“You ha
d to release the hold you had on your magic. Before, your magic was cramped inside you, building up pressure. By releasing it, you’ll probably start to feel better. You won’t feel the effects of keeping your magic down anymore, so you shouldn’t as tired. Keeping your magic inside probably would have been more dangerous than what you just did. You can push the thoughts out of the way and hopefully with Natalie’s help, you can control the emotions. Everything should be a little easier now,” Colin says. I turn and look around the room. Everyone is watching Ryanne, wondering what she’ll do next.

“Like what?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t have all that magic coursing through me. Get creative,” he says.

“Uh oh,” I say right as Liam laughs. You don’t tell Ryanne to get creative. She smiles and puts her hand out in front of her, palm up. A ball of electrified blue light starts forming in her hand, gradually increasing in size. Colin’s smile falls as Ryanne’s gets wider. Adding her left hand, she expands the ball. Looking up at Colin, Ryanne winks at him as she sends the magic toward him.

Colin thro
ws his arms up to shield his face. When the ball is about to hit him, the wind picks up and spins around, cocooning him. The ball collides the wind, uniformly spreading out. Colin is entrapped in an electrified tornado. Thunder rolls above him as it starts pouring inside the wind cocoon.

“
What is she doing?” Chris asks as he walks up beside us.

“Getting her payback,” Liam answers without taking his eyes off of the scene playing out in front of us. Ryanne drops the tornado, but keeps the rain around Colin. There’s a chorus of laughter around the room when everyone sees
him. His clothes are soaking wet and clinging to him, his wavy hair is sticking up in every direction, and he has a very obvious frown directed at Ryanne, who is trying to hold in her laughter.

“I don’t know of any Hobbits that can do that, do you Colin?”
Ryanne asks through her giggles.

“No, Gandalf, I don
’t know of any,” Colin mumbles.

“I’m surprisingly okay with that one. Gandalf was awesome,” Ryanne says as she heats up the room slightly and increases the wind, drying off Colin. Tom w
alks over to him and slaps him on the back.

“I proba
bly should have warned you not to tell Ryanne to get creative. She takes it very literally. You can ask any of the guys in the room.”

A chorus of agreements ring
out as we all shout our responses. Ryanne laughs, but apologizes to Colin. He just laughs it off. “It was impressive. Granted, it would have been funnier if it wasn’t done to me, but it was nonetheless impressive.”

For the next hour everyone trained. Ryanne put a shield up in the middle of the room so her magic wouldn’t affect the rest of us while we worked. Both Liam and I fought with all we had, neither one of us letting the other get away with anything. If I had to pick someone, I’m glad Liam is Ryanne’s protector.

“Hey, I think we’ve had enough training fo
r the day,” Tom says. “We should let Colin and Natalie work with Ryanne using the full room. We’ll train again in the morning.” Following everyone out of the room, I look behind me once more. Ryanne is moving the magic around her, weaving water in and out of the air. It’s amazing what she can do.

“You don’t think she’ll pass out from using too much magic, do you?” I ask Tom as we walk downstairs.

“I don’t think so. I believe she only passed out from the magic use because it had nowhere to go. It was stuck inside her, using up all of her energy, and making her more tired. That’s probably why she was always falling asleep. I think Colin had the right idea when he asked her to unleash it. From what I’ve seen, she now seems able to do more. She already appears more powerful. With a little more training…I can’t imagine what she’ll be able to do.”

“This is really
happening isn’t it?” Emma asks.

“Yeah, it is. T
he end is coming,” Tom answers.

Sitting down on the couch in the entertainment room, I listen upstairs for Ryanne’s movements. The training room is directly above us. I can hear people shuffling around, so I know they are still training. Chris sits down on the couch next to me, and I turn to him.

“So you were the paramedic that helped Ryanne?”

“Yeah, I was the first EMT to arrive on the scene,” he tells me. “The cops cleared the area and gave us access to the vehicle. Her mom died on impact. There was nothing we could do to save her. I thought Ryanne was dead too when I first saw her. She was unconscious and bleeding a lot. If she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, she definitely would have died.” Chris doesn’t seem to like to talk about emergency situations.

“When we were finally able to free her from the car we found out where all the blood was coming from. She had a four inch piece of glass
embedded under her ribs from the windshield breaking in. We couldn’t remove it on the spot; we had to stabilize her until we could get her to an emergency room for surgery. She’d already lost so much blood. We almost lost her twice on the way to the ER. She opened her eyes once in the ambulance and stared right at me for a couple seconds before losing consciousness again. To this day, I can’t get the image of her looking at me with so much pain in her eyes out of my mind. Honestly, I’m shocked she made it,” he says. “I tried everything to make sure she didn’t leave us. It’s always hard to loose someone so young. I’ve seen more death than I ever wanted to, but I’ve saved a lot of lives, and I was so happy when I could call her a success story.”

“
Well thank you for saving her,” I whisper. I can’t image what everything would be like if she had actually died in that crash. At least now, I’ve gotten to know her. If she died, everything would be a big ‘what if.’ I’d never know for sure. I’d be incomplete…empty.

“I was just doing my job, Colton.” Chris looks at me. He’s a good guy. I already feel like I can trust him completely. We drop the conversation when Ryanne, Natalie, and Colin all walk into the room. Ryanne dramatically plops down on the couch next to me.

“I’m tired now. Goodnight,” she whispers. Chris scoots over to give Ryanne more room. She smiles gratefully at him and curls into my side. Wrapping my arm around her, I pull her to me. She laughs, but lets me move her. “Surprisingly, I’m actually not that tired.”

“I told you unleashing your magic would help. Now you can easily control the thoughts and emotions. The magic is always around you, so you no longer have to suppress anything. Everything should be much easier to manipulate. Come on, let me hear it
,” Colin says with a large grin.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ryanne mumbles.

“Just once. I need to hear it.”

Ryanne turns and buries her head in my shoulder. “You wmfh
righsh,” she says. Her voice is muffled by my shirt.

“I couldn’t hear you. Could you please repeat that
, Gandalf?” Colin asks. He’s literally grinning from ear to ear. Tom starts laughing from across the room.

With a sigh, Ryanne sits
up and looks directly at Colin. “Right, Colin, you were. Hmmmm.”

“
You sound nothing like Yoda,” Chris says with a laugh.

“I wasn’t trying to sound like Yoda. I was just trying to speak like Yoda,” she retorts.
Chris shakes his head.

“I’ll take it,” Colin says.

“That’s probably a good idea, because you won’t get anything better than that,” Bragden says.

Ryanne laughs and turns
toward the TV. Without saying anything, she silently gets up and walks over to Colin’s DVD collection. Zeroing in on the movie, she grabs it and turns around. “Can we watch this? I’ll beg if I have to,” she says.

The Avengers.

Turning toward Emma, she says, “Chris Hemsworth.”