Free The Last Revenant (Book 1): The Crash by J.S. Carter Page A

stopped and looked down at my outstretched hand to see the silver heart stare back with just as much lifelessness as it had the first time, though now it looked incredibly smooth to the touch. Curious, I bit the tip of my other glove and pulled it off, throwing the necklace onto the flesh of my exposed palm and waited for a moment. I poked the pendant and could feel the cool metal begin to seep the warmth away from my skin, but nothing else happened.
    Figures...
    I looked away and shook my head. I shouldn't have let Ryan's craziness get to me.
    Then it began to burn.
    I gazed down to see a silent blue flame completely engulf my hand and lick its way up my arm.
    That... can't be right.
    The thought barely crossed my mind just as a searing headache crashed itself through my skull. I tried screaming while the flames twisted up and over every square inch of my body, but the sound never made it past my paralyzed nerves. My legs gave out and I dropped down onto my knees, only able to struggle in agony as I felt a thin glowing bar dipped in molten hot metal drive itself past my eyes. The sensation effortlessly progressed deeper towards the back of my skull, every inch given leading to a new feeling, one of absence and unknown familiarity.
    I wasn’t in my own body anymore.
    Everything stopped. It was as if the sun in all its intensity had been extinguished, throwing me into a complete and utter darkness with the last thoughts of my mind suddenly absent but lingering on edge—unattainable, yet strikingly familiar—the world a lost cause off the tip of my tongue.
    I opened my eyes, but they weren’t mine anymore. They were hers. I felt what she felt. I moved as she did. It wasn't until we were together that we both forgot what it was like to be so alone.
    The cries of men dying ceased to exist. The sensation of hundreds of humans fighting for their lives lost all form, leaving in its place a hollow shell of distant surroundings that yearned to be filled. The clash of metal and blood lust from a span of fifty men below me, while once all encompassing, now echoed off into areas not seen, but I did see the few that managed to get inside.
    They moved as one, bursting through the closed doors without so much as a pause before two arrows drove themselves into the throats of the guards that stood in their way. I felt their surprise, felt their anguish, felt their alarm at not being able to cry out in pain, yet the group moved on before the bodies had time to reach the ground. They quickly eliminated any form of resistance as they hoped to reach me in time. The long flight of stairs labored their breathing, but the steady stream of fresh corpses that blocked them before only strengthened their resolve to face their fears head on.
    I felt them the whole way, each mind unique and backed by a name that had once meant something. I didn’t even bother to watch them breach the doors and rush into my room with their weapons drawn and locked onto my heart, ready to be released at the first hint of movement if need be.
    But they hesitated.
    With a flick of my wrist, I knocked two against the wall and redirected the now useless sticks that had flown at me. Another tried rushing at me with his weapon raised, but it was all he could do as a shard of ice as thick as his forearm met his chest, slowing his heart and halting his breathing as he dropped to the ground. The rest stood helpless. I could have done more, but I only turned and focused on the task at hand.
    They could be spared.
    Yet I suddenly found my mind closed, fully immersed in an alien world with complete absence of thought and feeling, only able to look with a dull sense of surprise into a pair of fierce blue eyes filled with as much remorse as they were hate, inches from my own.
    My hand reached down and grasped the edge of a blade in front of my chest, but the rest kept going unhindered and continued out my other side. It wouldn’t budge, though it wouldn’t have to. I was sure I