The Goblets Immortal, Beth Overmyer [novels to read for beginners .txt] 📗

sympathetic smile. He looked right through Aidan, to his very soul. “They’re dead, Aidan.” It wasn’t his uncle’s voice that spoke, though.

The voice was all at once familiar and alien. It sounded like…almost like his own. But the dream moved on and was again like the usual one he experienced. He ran into the barn, which should have collapsed on his head, but instead burst upward and outward as he experienced the Jolt. He could not control his powers for the first week he had them, and had slept in the woods for fear of discovery. As it was, his uncle had thought the barn’s explosion had been due to the fertilizer the family always kept stored in mounds. Aidan had run out of there before he could find out the truth that he, Aidan, was a freak and possibly a murderer.

His dream feet carried him down to the creek, where rocks pelted his arms and legs. He could not control their Pulls, and soon collapsed, sobbing for his mother, whom he believed he had blown up in the barn explosion. Everything tugged him in distinctly different directions. There were Pulls from humans, which only took him half a day to figure out, and there were Pulls from nature and animals. The inanimate Pulls, he realized on the second day of hiding, were the weakest, and without meaning to, he ended up Dismissing half of the rocks on the mucky banks.

When he did return home, he was bruised and filthy, and his uncle had already established himself as head of the household. Dewhurst had been appointed lord of the land, and Aidan was nothing to anyone. He didn’t speak for weeks at a time, and eventually he realized his uncle’s true colors.

In the dream, his uncle looked down at Aidan, who swept the floors, his arms bone-tired from the day’s labor. Again the voice that was not his uncle’s spoke through the man’s body: “Let them go, Aidan. They’re dead.”

Aidan awoke from the dream. He was alone, sore, and hungover, but he was no longer chained to the iron slab. Now he lay on a makeshift mattress on the floor, his ankles in irons, but his hands were free. “Odd,” he muttered, then leaned over and threw up all over the floor. Again and again he retched until there was nothing left in his stomach, so he gagged for a solid five minutes.

Closing his eyes, Aidan lay back down on the mat. His head throbbed and he felt as though someone were clutching him by the throat; other than that, he seemed to be in all right shape…until he felt the throbbing in his right arm. Dewhurst had bled Aidan from his left arm, but now the right one was bandaged as well. I must have been out harder and longer than I first thought.

Slaíne’s Pull gave him a small jerk. It was on the move, and it was farther away than he knew it should be. The curse would surely take her. With a weak cry of panic, Aidan stumbled to his feet. It did no good. Before he could open his mouth to shout her name, he attempted to Call her. It worked for a moment. He felt her skid closer to where he was kept prisoner, but the iron was interfering, and he realized he might have given away a secret: that he could Call another living being. No doubt Dewhurst would be interested in learning how to do this. Aidan had no idea how he’d done it. Before Slaíne, he’d never managed to Call another living soul.

He was about to shout for her again, but it occurred to him that perhaps the curse had transferred ownership to Dewhurst. If that were the case, it created a whole array of new problems.

The Pull moved away, and the iron all but entirely muted her presence from his awareness. Bereft, Aidan let out a strangled gasp. He was alone. He’d never been so empty and alone in his life. There were human Pulls moving about overhead, but they were insubstantial, featherweights in comparison. Aidan was gutted. Unbidden tears formed in his eyes, and he fought them in vain for a brief moment before letting them spill.

While he cried, he thought about his next move, his dream from earlier forgotten for the time being. How was he to get out of this mess? “Not through weeping like a child,” he muttered as he rubbed the tears away with the backs of his hands. Once more he sniffed, and then he concentrated on Pulls.

The Pulls around him were nothing: the blankets, the straw, the pillow, a candle, and much to Aidan’s surprise, a plate of food and a chalice full of water. He cringed at the sight of the crust of bread and thigh of chicken. His stomach lurched, and he was afraid he would begin vomiting all over again. Aidan closed his eyes, and his nausea evaporated.

Yes, the Pulls were nothing he could do anything with. He reached beyond the repulsions from the iron, but there was nothing that could aid him, not above or below, and not in the inner workings of his bonds. Perhaps he could find something to pick the lock with, though he doubted it. Dewhurst was stupid, but his advisors were not. They would have interrogated Tristram for every detail he knew. Aidan snarled at the thought of his former friend. Tristram, the one person who knew the contents of his bag of tricks, the one who had betrayed him. The heat was not in Aidan’s anger, though, and soon he’d calmed enough to think clearly again.

Slaíne would be used as leverage, but to what extent, Aidan wasn’t sure. Dewhurst couldn’t know much of the girl’s curse, unless the girl herself had been forced to share that information. With the curse’s possible and probable transfer, she would be all right. However, if Dewhurst had an inkling of what power Slaíne’s Pull had over Aidan,