The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Kutoyis

THE WEATHER HEATED UP. IT WAS AS HOT A CANADIAN SUMMER AS I'd ever felt. We ran around outside with shirts off like we were normal people. Sadie even bared her arms when she was on the property. I assumed Ginny had been instrumental in this. She had shown up in my room with two wardrobe boxes with giant bows on them and left them for Sadie. Not a thing inside had long sleeves. She had felt for Sadie in her particularly persecuted shirtless moment in the Survivors' City. This was her quiet way of saying: It was time to be free.

I idly wondered when my embattled baby sister would start to feel free.

Sadie eventually got used to the sound of me and stopped leaving rooms when I came into them and texting me to apologize for it. And I eventually got used to the feeling of electricity in my bones. I also got used to her sleeping in my bed again, in the home I'd known best in my life. She hadn't admitted it, but being away from the Survivors had given her peace in a way, even if she felt like she was failing them.

It seemed stupid we hadn't thought of it before that acquiring from a Survivor meant more than acquiring a power. Why else would Raven have acquired Achilles' weakness? Didn't it make sense that consuming the essence of warrior vieczy Survivors who had consumed that of other Survivors would only continue to fuel Raven into a bigger and hungrier monster? Sadie was excited and terrified to learn how it worked. The rest of us were just grateful to know something, to have made any progress at all. She was also particularly grateful that something useful had come from Lizzie's still unexplained tragedy.

This was crucial because we were at a standstill. We kept one eye on the Survivors and one on the murmurs of the supernatural world at large to see if Raven was moving. But like so much of this journey, we'd run full speed into brick walls. All we could really do was prepare for the inevitable, which, as it turns out, is not as focused of an activity as one would think.

The first week I had the power, we kept it from Anthony. But by the second week, he had figured it out. I had learned to use it, and it had already become second nature to Ginny. Anthony lingered, watching us practice more closely than he usually did, and he was there to see the moment Ginny unintentionally merged two squirrels into one rather normal, if not a little large, creature. If it weren't already, the jig was then up.

By the third week, I had the power mastered, and I began working with Sarah to pick up where she and Lizzie had left off: merging the power from one of us with the power from another. Sarah was capable of bestowing power on others, if it had been taken from another source. Our theory was that if I could create a merged power — a blend of my own and whomever's — then she bestowed it upon me, it would stick because it was mixed with a power already belonging to me. In this same way, if I could pull the power from two supernaturals —one enemy and one ally, for example — and merge them, then she could put the power in ally.

We were getting closer, but so far it hadn't totally worked. I was trying to do it on myself before I did it with others, but I couldn't manage it. Mark and Patrick thought that was because I didn't have any individual powers for someone else's powers to merge to. So one afternoon, they showed up at our makeshift training space in the yard dragging a ghastly looking creature behind him, bound by invisible chains. Patrick killed the creature — a disgusting shape-shifting, flesh-eating beast called a ghoul whose roots could be found in the mythology of a few Islamic countries — on the spot, and unceremoniously called, "Everett, get over here!" He had me inhale the milky white smoke that rose from the creature's dead lips. Patrick clapped me on the back and said, "Congratulations, kiddo. I'm pretty sure you just earned either the ability to be invisible or to walk through walls. Now back to work." I'd been working on merging someone's power to my new one ever since.