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When Lance Orion dives from the edge of the pool and into the icy waters below, Darcy Vega thinks the worst.
They’ve finally done it.
It’s not difficult to guess what happened moments prior to their arrival, before Orion’s vampiric speed and her own frantic sprint leads them to this terrible scene. Considering that the heirs were out for blood that evening, along with Max Rigel’s ability to uncover secrets like one needs air to breathe, Darcy knows they’ve brought her sister’s worst fears to life.
What Seth had done to her hair was child's play. If Darcy thought the world ended when he grinded any semblance of her trust into dust when he cut all of her hair off, this—this feels like a catastrophe. This is a motorcycle accident in slow motion and her sister has been forced to drive towards her end.
Darcy’s throat constricts and it’s like she has forgotten how to breathe. Air escapes her and although she grasps for the scraps relentlessly, they don’t go far down her throat. Tory must have been trapped under that thick sheet of ice, struggling for air, as everyone around her watched her drown. In a way, Darcy wonders if Tory felt like this, too.
Powerless.
Darcy imagines the roars of their laughter and taunts. Max sealing off the exits with his powers. Then, Tory struggles. Oh, she would. Tory isn’t someone who would take that lying down. She would fling her arms and set the world around her on fire. But as she continued to struggle, the heaviness of the freezing water and the lack of oxygen would set in, leaving echoing silence in her wake.
Darcy’s knees collapse under her.
Her fingers leap to her chest, digging into the fabrics of her dress. Her vision warps. The hole where Orion has jumped in shifts into blacks and blues, but Darcy forces herself to stand up. She can’t be dead. Darcy crawls towards the edge of the pool as Orion bursts through the surface, his arms carrying her sister out of the freezing water.
Orion places Tory on the ground as gentle as he can be.
Darcy doesn’t know whether she should sob or scream.
Her skin is cold to the touch.
This isn’t her Tory.
Her Tory is fire incarnate, both vicious and sweet, the smell of oil and gas from that broken-down gasoline station a few blocks away from their shared apartment. She’s sparky and fierce and so full of life that the scent of chlorine in her hair and the paleness of her skin feels so unnatural.
“Tory,” she sobs, trembling.
Her hands are awkward. Everything she touches burns cold.
Orion’s palm glows a deep red as he concentrates on helping her sister. Darcy watches his eyebrows furrow, confusion marking his features. This feels off.
Couldn’t he heal her?
Isn’t he a teacher?
Isn’t he supposed to know everything?
A loud sob wracks through her chest.
“She won’t wake up. Why won’t she wake up?” Darcy asks him, but oh, she knows why. She obviously knows why her sister won’t open her eyes, but she dares not say it.
“Fuck,” Orion curses. He continues to help her, hands shaking from the effort of gradual and increasing healing. But although Darcy knows nothing about healing magic, she knows one very important thing: that it’s over.
She’s gone.
Her sister is dead.
Darcy’s cries fill the now silent room as she pulls her sister’s body close to her.
“Don’t move her!” Orion yells. “I’m trying to save her!”
She ignores him.
She’s gone.
Darcy can feel it.
“Wake up, please,” The words end up as babble, but she doesn’t care. “Please. Please? We’ll…we’ll go home. Okay? We can earn some money and I’ll save up and buy you that motorcycle you really wanted when we ended up in Denver last year. You can teach me how to drive one. I know I’ll be bad at that but you’ve always been a great teacher even when you get frustrated that I don’t know how to break properly. So…please. Wake up. Please?”
There’s quite a crowd around them. A few whispers flitter around Darcy’s ears, but she doesn’t care about that. They can gossip and stare at the bald patch on her head. How Tory’s practically almost naked on the floor. They can write nasty posts on Faebook about how stupid she was to kiss Seth.
But please. Won’t they give Tory back to her?
Someone yells behind her. There’s a flurry of bodies moving away from them and then Darcy sees Caleb, his hand reaching out to touch Tory’s arm.
“Don’t touch her!” Darcy screams, her voice cracking. “You’ve done enough!”
His eyes darken. They’re focused on Tory’s arm, a spot on her neck, and his lips are wavering. And if Darcy tried to look further through her haze of sorrow, she would have seen how bizarre Caleb’s handsome face looks when he wears devastation like a crown.
“She’s freezing,” Caleb offers, oddly frazzled. “It won’t work if she’s that cold.”
“I said don’t touch her!” Darcy shrieks.
A blast of hot air works its way through her, hitting all those in her near proximity with a force strong enough to knock over quite a few people on the outskirts of the pool. The onlookers struggle to get back up, shifting towards the exit.
Orion raises his hands, trying to tell her that he’s just trying to help. He looks over at Caleb, who frowns, but lifts his hands off Tory’s skin.
“Leave,” she demands. But neither of them move.
“Darcy,” Orion says slowly, as if he’s talking to a child. She doesn’t want to think about how he’s using her actual name. She doesn’t want to think about anything at all.
But then Darius is there, appearing beside her. Darcy peers behind him, where both Max and Seth stand. She watches as Seth hands reach forward, trying to comfort Max, while the siren looks everywhere but at her face.
Maybe she should blast them all into pieces.
If Tory’s dead, then she has nothing—
“We need to get her body into room temperature,” says Darius. His palms stretch towards Tory’s chest and Darcy sees red. A shockwave of air hits Darius first, but he stays intact. All it manages to do is force him to shift whichever knee he leans on more while he sat down on his knees to get to her sister.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” she sobs. “We were given a choice to make. We had no other choice. We had nothing. You didn’t know what we had to do to make sure we had somewhere to sleep. All we wanted was money. Did you enjoy it? Watching her die?”
Darius stares at her with an expression she doesn’t want to decipher.
“Blue,” Orion begins. “We need to warm her up.”
“Why should I trust any of you? She’s dead because of you in the first place!”
Darius pauses. He looks like he wants to run away—go run, before she kills them all—but stands his ground. “You shouldn’t trust us. But if you don’t let us do this, you're making that decision for her.”
She’s already dead, Darcy wants to say. Yet, something within her tugs at her heart and begs her to let them help. It’s a sensation she’s never felt before but it doesn’t feel unnatural: it seems like it’s always been there. Silent and steady.
Darcy nods. It’s a soft one - a dip of her chin, but it’s there.
With this, they move.
“Come on, Roxy,” Darius mutters, hands on Tory’s chest. Darcy watches as his skin glows red and then he’s shaking. Why the hell is he shaking? Aren’t they the assholes who killed her sister in the first place?
Darius continues his ministrations as Tory’s skin grows back to her usual color. Caleb’s hands are on Tory’s wrist, thumb laying on top of her pulse. Then, Orion takes over, healing her sister with his own glowing hands to her chest.
“Come on,” Orion mutters, again, struggling with the effort. “You’re stronger than this.”
And then suddenly, Darcy hears the sound of Caleb’s sharp inhale. Tory splutters, alive and coughing, but alive nevertheless, and Darcy cries in relief.
Darcy moves forward, cradling her sister’s head on her lap. “You’re okay.”
She pats Tory’s back as she continues to wrack up coughs.
“IF A SINGLE PERSON IN THIS ROOM MOVES ANOTHER INCH, YOU WILL BE FACING IMMEDIATE EXPULSION!”
When Orion orders the four of them to face the wall, Caleb and Darius seem reluctant to leave her sister’s side. But they do, eventually. She doesn't even smirk when Orion smashes Seth's skull into the wall. All Darcy cares about at the moment is the movement on Tory’s chest so she zones out when Orion does his thing: yelling out questions and the subsequent receival of obvious answers.
She does wonder if they felt satisfied, but throws out that thought.
When Tory rasps out apologies, Darcy has never felt rage like this before.
But she’s never lost a sister before, either, so she lets that fury simmer into her blood.