Ocean Cove

Pain. That’s the first thing my mind registered above all else after Hilda hit me. A huge burst of pain engulfed my face. Hilda had so much power behind that one blow that it sent me across the room where, after I hit the floor, I slid all the way to the opposite wall and crashed into it.

Make no mistake, it hurt like hell, but it made me remember the knife I had. Hilda didn’t ask about it, so maybe she didn’t know I had it on me. But then, it wasn’t like I could use it on her. She was my friend.

“Hilda, what are you doing?” I asked as I stood up, my left cheek stinging. I was afraid of her answer. She stared, walking towards me at a slow pace.

“This will be easy,” she said in a voice that was very much unlike hers. “You’re human, weak, fragile. I don’t see how Lyla could have ever fallen for you. Admittedly you are handsome and I suppose she did have to occupy her time with some form of amusement. But a human? It’s just so… wrong.”

I felt like I finally had control of my body again and got up quickly, but just as I did, a huge burst of pain exploded in the lower right side of my back. I looked down at the spot where I was. I saw a piece of broken wood covered in blood. I moved my hand to the place where the pain was coming from and I felt some moisture there, which meant I was bleeding.

I didn’t know if it was serious or not, but from the size of the wood that did the damage, I was willing to bet it wasn’t too bad.

“Hilda, why are you doing this? Why are you helping Andréus after everything?”

A wicked smile spread across Hilda’s face, making her look evil and unfamiliar to me.

“Watch and be amazed,” she said.

Suddenly Hilda started to grow. Her locks started to undo and seemed to be retracting into her head. Her whole body looked like it was liquefying and changing. The arms grew bigger, more muscular and the hair was now neck long and looked untidy.

The liquid mass finally began to solidify, and now standing before me wasn’t Hilda, it was Andréus. He was tall and slightly muscular, with incredibly pale white skin. Even with the distance between us, I could see his eyes were a misty blue color and he was gazing at me malevolently with them from behind his curtain of untidy hair that was slightly damp.

Seeing him in person seemed to jolt my brain into remembering I had the knife. I put my hand behind my back, grabbing the hilt. My heart began racing, which I knew he could hear. I began thinking I might have a chance if he would just come close enough to me for me to plunge the knife right into his heart.

“How did you do that? What happened to Hilda?”

“You know it’s really amazing what some Aquamuns can do. You see, very few people know that I have the ability to shape-shift. All I need to do is touch the person I want to become. It was actually easy getting to Hilda. While she was outside protecting the house, she herself wasn’t very well protected. She had on her some kind of protection ring, but… well let’s just say I came here with a little magic of my own and that took quick care of her little decoder ring. I didn’t have any more to deal with yours, though.”

He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out my ring.

“Which is why I had to get you to give it to me.” And right there he crushed it in his hand with that nasty smile on his face again. He brushed the pieces onto the floor and said, “Well that’s useless now. Oh and don’t worry about your witch. I didn’t kill her, I just knocked her out and threw her into her storage shed. Then I shifted into her and waited for you to come out looking for her once you couldn’t find her, as I knew you would. You see, Lyla told me about how caring you are.”

Andréus had stopped walking and for some reason seemed to be mesmerized with one of the pictures on the windows. That’s when I realized something about him. He was a bragger. He was one of the types that loved to savour the moment just before victory and achievements, that’s why I wasn’t dead yet. He wanted to be sure I knew how clever he was before he killed me.

Well, that was fine with me. It gave me time to come up with some kind of plan to try to get out of here and back to the house where Hilda and I would be safe until the Morgans got here. And speaking of the Morgans, why weren’t they here? If something had happened to them, he would have said something. He probably wouldn’t be able to resist it. If something had happened to Lyla, Andréus would have been furious and I would be dead.

“Where are the Morgans?” I asked, sounding braver than I felt. Andréus didn’t take his eyes off the pictured glass when he answered.

“I don’t know where they are and that’s the truth. You see, when I first left home to look for you, I wasn’t alone. I knew that Lyla would’ve tried to protect you, so I brought along a friend. This friend of mine has the ability to copy another person’s power. It was simple really, all he had to do was copy my power, shift into me, and have the Morgans follow him for a while and they would have never guessed because when I shift into someone my aura changes to match theirs, which meant they didn’t know they weren’t following me and all I had to do was wait for the perfect opportunity.”

“Lyla will never forgive you for killing me. She will hunt you down.”

“After I kill you, yes, she will be mad, but we have forever ahead of us and you’re just a human, she’ll forget about you in time. Or,” he said, thinking on something. “I could just frame your witch. Have them believe by the time I got here she’d already killed you. It’s not so hard to believe when you think about it. Lyla told me she doesn’t like our kind. The Morgans will think she just snapped and thought of you as one of them.”

I actually started to laugh and it scared me a little, because I sounded just like him. It was just hard to imagine that someone could believe Hilda was capable of murder.

“No one would ever believe that. Hilda would never kill anyone. Everybody knows that.”

But Andréus just shrugged and finally turned to look at me.

“Maybe that’s true, but it’s my problem to deal with. You, on the other hand, don’t have a thing to worry about.”

“Because you’re going to kill me.”

“Well, this is a fight to the death. However as you are human,” there was strong contempt in his voice when he said the word ‘human’, “I’ll make you a deal. If you leave Lyla and have nothing to do with her ever again, I will spare your life. How does that sound?” He had a look his face as though he’d just told me I won the lottery. I ignored his question.

“How do you know your friend won’t hurt the Morgans?” I asked, ignoring him. He actually chuckled, and it sounded so normal you would have thought he was laughing at a joke.

“Well, he knows not to hurt Lyla, but I can’t say the same about the rest of her family. Or your witch, if she gets in his way. I will say this for her, she does know her stuff. She was able to keep me away for a while, but her trust took her down. When I approached the house looking like Lyla, she sensed something was wrong, but because I was able to tell her what she wanted to hear, she let her guard down. You humans are so gullible.” He moved a strand of hair from his eyes. “What about my offer, do you accept or not?”

I gripped the knife a little tighter. I knew after I gave him my answer he would attack

me.

“No.” I answered strongly.

He simply smiled at me and said, “Well, you die.”

He was standing right in front of me and for a split second I caught a whiff of his aroma. It was sweet, like something sticky, but deep down, that amazing sea scent was present, but before I could appreciate it Andréus gripped me tightly by the neck with one hand, and lifted

me off the ground. Gasping for breath and feeling like my head was going to pop off, I pulled out the knife and plunged it into his chest.

There was a horrible scream and I felt myself hit the ground as Andréus released me. He had a mystified look on his face, as though he couldn’t believe it was possible that a knife could injure him like that as his hands fumbled with the hilt, like he was afraid of pulling it out.

Not waiting around for the outcome, I pulled myself up and headed for the door, but just as I reached it I felt someone grab my upper arm. I spun around and saw that Andréus had pulled the knife out and he looked pissed.

With fury bright in his eyes, he pulled my arm so hard it came out of the socket and to add further pain, he squeezed my arm until he broke it. The scream of pain that escaped me was one to rival Andréus’s.

For the second time, he threw me across the room, away from the door. I collided with the back of the chapel-- again--and that wall wasn’t soft.

Pain flashed through my whole body and my already dislocated shoulder seemed to want nothing more than to torture me with agony. It felt like every part of my body was attacking me from the inside.

As I pulled my head off the ground, I looked up and felt a trickle of sweat drop into my eye, stinging me. With only my right eye open, I saw Andréus walking towards me with the knife in his hand and his shirt stained with blood.

I let my head fall back to the floor, resigning myself to the fact that I wasn’t getting out of this; that I was going to die here.

Now who’s the negative one? I thought to myself. I knew that whatever happened, Lyla wasn’t going to have that monster in her life and this calmed me somewhat.

There was suddenly a huge crash and two loud bangs as what sounded like the chapel doors crashing onto the floor. Curiosity getting the best of me, I looked up and saw Andréus

being held by someone from the back. Whoever it was had his hand with the knife in the air and an arm around his throat. Then, with what looked like little effort and amazing strength, they threw him into the air, where he flew so high he collided with a very thick beam with a loud bang and left it broken in two. Andréus fell to the floor, but landed on his feet, though I was glad to see he did stumble a little, and placed a hand over his chest. It seemed the wound did more damage than I thought.

By this time, the Aquamun that stopped Andréus was now standing in front of me and that’s when I realized it was Nick. He had taken a defensive position in front of me, but Andréus was blocking our way out of the chapel and going through the windows was out of the question, as the low ones were sealed with bricks. Nikolai wouldn’t be able to break through before Andréus got to him.

“Let me guess, you’re Lyla’s little brother, Nikolai,” Andréus taunted. I knew he said ‘little’ just to rattle Nikolai, but for all it was worth, it didn’t do any good, because Nick remained as he was, poised for battle, perfectly still. So still, in fact, that with his pale skin you’d think he was some sort of 3D figure. For every inch Andréus moved, Nikolai adjusted himself.

For all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen Nick so serious, even when we were looking for Chris or planning to stop Andréus. It was like a whole new side of him, like a different personality.

A dark frown had replaced the sneer that was on Andrus’s face.

“Get out of my way before I have to hurt you too. He’s mine.”

Nikolai actually did one of his funny comebacks.

“I think my sister would say he’s her’s, but I’m sure you two kids can share.”

If someone wasn’t trying to kill me or I wasn’t in so much pain, I would have laughed, but it seemed Andréus didn’t find it too funny as he sped towards Nikolai, who in turn ran towards Andréus. After they collided, they were moving so fast I couldn’t tell what was

happening during much of the fight. After a while however, I did notice that they were out of the path to the door, which meant that I could escape.

There was no way I could leave Nick here, but I was hurt. Bad. What could I do? Then I remembered… I could call Lyla. I still had no idea why she and her family still weren’t here with Nikolai and that had me a little worried, but if I opened the connection wide enough for my thoughts to flow to her, she would see what was going on and would know Andréus was here. So, trying extremely hard to close out what was going on (Andréus threw Nick onto the floor but he was up before Andréus could do any damage) I closed my eyes and focused on opening the connection. However, instead of feeling Lyla’s emotions, I felt nothing.

Well not exactly nothing, but instead of the bridge I usually felt, there was an almost non-existent thread-like connection, so small it wasn’t enough to contact Lyla, which meant she was trying to hide her emotions from me.

“Damn it!” I shouted in frustration. No way to contact Lyla, no way to help Nick. I just felt so helpless. Suddenly Nikolai flew across the room and slammed so hard into the wall that huge, deep cracks appeared and the place where Nick hit seemed now to be dented, but Nick was unharmed.

However, Andréus had used this time to find the knife he dropped and once he had it, he looked at me with animalistic rage and ran at me. Before he got too close Nick once again grabbed him from the back.

This time, however, Andréus was ready. He turned the knife backwards and plunged it into the left side of Nikolai’s stomach. I couldn’t tell who was more shocked, me or Nikolai. Seconds later blood started running out of the wound and onto Andréus hand and that’s when he pushed Nick onto the ground, where he stayed.

“No!” I shouted at the same time someone else said it. I saw Marcus standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the sunlight. Less than half a second later, he was standing by Andréus where he grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him against the east wall, which made a deeper impression than the one Nikolai made. Marcus then forgot about Andréus and

ran towards his son. In the space of time it took him to get to Nick, Andréus was inches away from him, but before he could get his hands on Marcus, Michael, Salathia and Lyla sped in, dragged Andréus away from us and engaged him in fight.

Weak but determined, I crawled over to Nikolai in time to see Marcus pull the knife out of his stomach. He screamed for a second and was covered in sweat. I’d never seen any of them sweat before, which meant this was getting worse.

Marcus took off his shirt and I was horrified to see that not only was the wound deep, but Nikolai’s skin was getting paler and what looked like veins were showing up all over his body, carrying what looked like dark blue blood which seemed to be originating from the wound.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked Marcus, though I was afraid of the answer.

When Marcus answered, his voice sounded grim.

“He’s still young. His body doesn’t yet have a defense for such an injury. He’s dying. We have to do something now or he’ll die. Lyla.” She was crouching next to us. “You have to take Nikolai.” Marcus told her gravely.

“Now, Lyla. You’re the fastest of us, he doesn’t have much time. We will take care of things here. Lyla go. Do whatever you have to to save your brother.”

And with that our connection was back open and I felt everything she wanted to say. I love you.

Lyla took Nikolai in her arms and sprinted out of the church in a blur. As soon as she was gone, I turned towards the fight and saw that Andréus had his hands full. Marcus and Michael were both in front Andréus, taunting him with their actions, and Salathia was behind him. Taking her chance, she ran and jumped onto Andréus’s back, wrapping her legs around his middle. She grabbed his head with both hands and quickly twisted it to the side with a sickening snap, then she pulled it back, which was followed by another snap and a scream, then Andréus’s dead body fell to the floor with a thud.

The last thing I remember seeing were the Morgans walking towards me, then I finally gave in to my pain and exhaustion, and passed out.