Grudgingly, and with a cavalcade worthy of a president, Tyler drove us back to the mansion.
“Food or shower first?” Ethan held my hand all the way home, up the stairs from the garage, and through the foyer. I really wanted a shower, but the mention of food had my stomach growling. It was well past lunchtime, and near-death situations really took it out of a girl.
I tried not to dwell on the fact that I’d been in enough near-death situations to know that.
Ethan was all too happy to feed us, whipping up some mac and cheese. We all slumped around the dining table. Lucian wheeled into his spot at the head, and Josh pulled me into his lap, crushing me to his chest.
Tyler was on the phone, demanding updates and answering questions while Lucian threw in his two cents over his shoulder.
As Ethan dropped bowls in front of us, Tyler hung up. “It’s confirmed. Our guys raided the woman’s apartment in Bradford Hills East and found all kinds of Variant Valor paraphernalia, including propaganda material. On her computer they also found some direct communication between her and some of Davis’s higher-ups. They’re discreetly telling some of their more zealous followers they need you.”
He looked right at me, tired, resigned. Considering what she’d said, it wasn’t much of a surprise.
I picked up my fork and started eating. The mac and cheese was delicious, as Ethan’s food always was—creamy and rich with little bits of bacon through it. Perfect comfort food.
“Why did she try to kill me?” I asked my empty plate, interrupting whatever it was they were talking about. I’d tuned out, but now my food was gone; I couldn’t stop my brain from demanding answers.
I looked into Tyler’s calm gray eyes. “At the end, after I shot her and she lost control of her ability, she said something about it being better for everyone if I just died, and then she came straight for me. If Davis needs me, why would she try to kill me?”
Had we read the situation wrong?
Tyler shared a loaded look with Lucian but didn’t try to evade the question. He was getting much better about the whole “keeping secrets to protect me” bullshit. “We also found some evidence that Variant Valor was threatening her family. I suspect she realized she was going to fail to capture you, that she was probably going to die, so she decided to kill you”—his eyes darkened and his hands curled into fists, making the roped muscles in his forearms twist—“in order to prevent others from going through what she was going through.”
“He’s getting desperate.” Lucian took a sip of his whiskey.
“He’s always been desperate. He’s just no longer hiding it as well as he used to,” Josh observed.
Davis had been obsessed with my mother’s glowing Light for years. That fixation had driven his every decision. And now here I was—capable of even more—and I was just out of reach. There was no doubt in my mind he would do whatever he deemed necessary to get to me. My shoulders slumped. How many people had to die?
I cleared my throat and pushed the despair deep down into a dark, soundless part of myself where I could avoid dealing with it a little longer, right between Zara’s betrayal and Alec’s undying love.
“What was her ability exactly?” I gave my mind something else to think about. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“It was a rare one,” Tyler answered. “She had the ability to control the elements. Not like Kid—she couldn’t conjure fire like he can, but she could control existing fire, water, air.”
I thought back to how the liquids formed a ball to drown the agent, how the fire only came from the grill in the back.
“It’s a bit of an evolutionary throwback.” Tyler had answered my question, but he was giving me what I needed—a distraction. “We’ve found that the types of abilities that manifest in Variants are sometimes affected by environmental factors. A lot of defensive abilities happen during periods of war and unrest, for example. And it’s only in the last thirty to forty years that we’ve started seeing things like being able to control electronics. That woman’s ability would’ve been incredibly useful a couple hundred years ago. Not that it wasn’t useful in this day and age, but back then, it could’ve been the difference between life and death.”
“Yeah, I read a paper on this a while back in the Journal of Variant