Airel: The Discovering (Airel Saga Book Two)

Chapter V

KALE'S GRINNING FACE LOOKED stupid to me; I was beyond irritated. He held out his hand to me.

I looked at his fingers as if they were attached to the hand of Satan. “Nice. Attention getter. Okay then, now that we’re done, what’s for breakfast?” I finally took his hand, deciding to “just roll with it,” as Kim would say. I cooed, an aftershock of my injury racking my body one last time as I regained my feet.

Kale cracked a joke. “You should not train on an empty stomach.”

“Hilarious.” I placed my hands on my knees and breathed hard. “Yeah—mine’s killing me.”

I stood there like an outfielder for a while, just taking everything in. I guess you always want what you can’t have—now that it seemed impossible for me to die, I felt trapped in my own life. More so than usual.

He must have heard some of my doubtful thoughts. “In time, you will have your answers. For now, you must just accept things as they are.”

There was real, honest compassion in his voice. It was refreshing, I decided.

“You have been given a gift—will you accept it?” He still held out his hand, though I was standing already.

Kale, the sight of him standing before me like that, now triggered something in me. I knew it, too. Something had let go way up at the top of some gigantic mountain of me, and an avalanche was going to come down and change everything. My eyes filled with tears. “Do I have a choice?” Destiny was coming for me again—I could feel it. The moment was beginning to crash in upon me, and I had been stripped of my defenses against it.

“You always have a choice.” His words sounded like the voice of God—very still, very quiet, and purely true.

I broke. I heard the sweetest music. I took his hand and collapsed into his enormous chest, heaving in big, wet sobs. I felt like heaven, creation, God Himself, were all part of a conspiracy designed to bring me always and forever back to the point where the tiny capsule of all that I was resided on the tip of a pin.

Kale simply held me like a child and let me cry. I didn’t know how long it was. And I wasn’t sure what exactly happened. Lots of times I just cried because I had to, to let off the pressure that accumulated inside me, to say with tears what words couldn’t describe. Whatever happened in that moment of time changed everything.

I pushed Kale away and dried my swollen eyes with the sleeve of my track jacket, now mangled and bloody. I took it off, deciding I could manage with just my T-shirt, but that, too, was destroyed. It made my mind tangle in knots.“Fine, then. What do we do now? Cut me some more to see how much I can take?” I wiped at my eyes and sucked in a sob.

Kale’s voice was gentle. “We need to find out what you are able to do and how much control you have over your abilities. When I say that you have a choice… you do realize that you have the choice to do good with what God has given you, or to do evil. Which do you choose?”

It was surreal. I felt like I was on a game show. I felt like I was back at the kitchen table arguing with my parents about the SAT and what college I would go to, what major I would declare. I felt like asking Kale how I could possibly know. The truth was, though … the answer was obvious.

But wrapped up inside his question to me was another one, directed right back at him: How can a murderer ask someone to choose between good and evil without being crazy himself? I wanted to ask it—and I unwittingly did, forgetting that he could read my thoughts. Crud. I found myself wishing desperately for some privacy.

“Good,” he said, obviously willing to gloss over all my mental baggage for now. “The first thing we will work on is hand-to-hand combat.” He turned and walked over to one of the racks that held staff upon staff like pool cues, and I followed, shaking my head, trying to clear it. He continued, “You are stronger than you think, but only when you’re filled with raw emotion. You will be able to feel it coursing through your veins.” He handed me a staff.