BLOOD OF MY BLOOD

  Maxwell's vintage Bentley cuts through Desert darkness like a shark through oil. Stars blink out overhead, one by one, while he rattles off statistics about what they're calling The Parallax Event.

  "Seventeen major cities reporting mass power manifestations," he says, checking something on his phone. Radiation burns mark his usually pristine hands. "Powers just appearing randomly. No warning. No pattern." He scrolls further. "Los Angeles lost three city blocks when a kid sneezed and turned everything to glass. Tokyo's dealing with a businessman who can't stop turning people's memories into birds."

  My strings taste copper in the air. Three months since Moscow. Since Nyx. The powers I stole feel different now. Unstable. Like holding onto a dream that keeps trying to wake up.

  "Shanghai's the worst," Maxwell continues. "Someone there figured out how to weaponize probability. Made it rain teeth for six hours." He glances at me. "Are you even listening?"

  I watch telephone poles blur past, remembering how black blood looked on Moscow snow. How it felt when the twins' power made every ability I'd stolen scream in protest.

  "You said you had a lead," I say, not looking at him. "About who started this."

  "Maybe." Maxwell puts his phone away. Fresh scars cross his knuckles like tallies. "There's a pattern in the chaos. Someone's directing it. Using The Parallax Event to-"

  "To guide humanity's evolution," I finish. The words taste like ash. Like borrowed power growing weak.

  Ten years hunting Lark's new Fellowship. Ten years chasing ghosts. And all that time, the answer was running in Nyx's blood. In the power his father built into him, into both of them. A power that couldn't be stolen. Only born.

  The memory comes back like a bad habit…

  *****

  Ten years of chasing ghosts. Ten years of dead ends and cold trails. Lark's new Fellowship grew in the shadows while reality kept unraveling. More stars vanishing every night. More humans developing powers. The cosmic clock ticking down to something bigger than apocalypse. I should've seen it coming.

  The ambush happens in Moscow. December. The kind of cold that makes even immortals remember they're made of meat. Nyx stands in Red Square, temporal damage making him flicker between ages. Black blood frozen on his collar. Kid never did learn to handle the backlash. They hit like a tactical nuke wrapped in poetry. The air crystallizes. Light bends wrong. The fabric of existence buckles. Five figures emerge from nothing, each one radiating power that makes physics cry.

  Lark leads them. Perfect mirror of his brother, down to the expensive suit. But where Nyx bleeds temporal backlash, Lark glows with contained power. Clean. Controlled. Everything his brother isn't.

  "Hello, brother." Lark's voice carries none of the strain that plagues Nyx. "It's been a while."

  Nyx spits black blood onto pristine snow. "Come to finish what you started?"

  "No." Lark's smile is perfect, practiced. "I came to offer you what you've always wanted. The truth."

  The attack comes from all sides. The Light Weaver's replacement - a woman made of burning radiance, twin stars for eyes - turns air to plasma. A mountain of a man whose chrome flesh ripples like liquid metal launches himself forward. A ghost-white woman moves like a spider, bone spurs jutting from her joints as she pulls calcium from the earth itself. The fourth one, barely twenty with living tattoos crawling up his neck, grins as gravity warps and buckles around him.

  Nyx's temporal bubble expands. Three seconds of slowed time. Then four. A new record. But the strain shows immediately. More black blood. More cellular damage. More years flickering across his face like bad TV reception. I move to help, but something holds me back. Power unlike anything I've stolen. Reality itself saying no.

  "Your fight's over, puppet master." Lark doesn't even look at me. "This is family business."

  The liquid metal man reaches Nyx first. Fists like chrome sledgehammers rain down. Each impact cratering the square. Nyx dodges the first three, temporal manipulation making the attacks look slow. The fourth connects.

  Blood sprays. Ribs shatter. Perfect suit turns red.

  The light woman follows up. Beams of pure energy that cut through temporal shields like tissue paper. Nyx screams as radiation burns flesh. Tries to reverse the damage. More black blood. More years stolen.

  "You're dying," Lark says calmly, watching his brother's failed healing. "Every time you use your power, it takes more from you. Haven't you wondered why?"

  Nyx launches a desperate counterattack. Creates his biggest temporal bubble yet. The strain makes blood vessels burst in his eyes. "Shut up and fight!"

  For a moment, it works. The bubble encases all five attackers. Time slows to a crawl. Nyx's fist connects with the metal man's jaw. Chrome ripples. Something breaks. Then reality remembers who's in charge. Lark moves through the bubble like it isn't there. His punch carries the weight of centuries. Nyx's perfect face caves in. Blood and teeth paint the snow red and black.

  "I tried it your way," Lark continues as his team systematically takes his brother apart. "Ran from what we are. What father made us to be."

  The gravity manipulator turns local physics into abstract art. Nyx's body twists in ways anatomy books would reject. Bones break. Organs shift. Blood flows up instead of down. My strings surge against whatever's holding me back. Lightning arcs between them. Weather responds to stolen power. But reality itself says no. The phasing woman becomes smoke, then solid inside Nyx's guard. Her hand goes through his chest, solid around his heart. Squeezes.

  More black blood. More temporal damage. Nyx looks ancient, then young, then ancient again. His power flickering like a dying bulb.

  "You feel it, don't you?" Lark steps closer to his broken brother. "The way our powers resonate? Grow stronger in proximity?"

  The metal man pins Nyx down. The light woman turns his blood to fire. The gravity wielder makes his bones try to escape through his skin.

  "We're not just twins," Lark's voice carries something like compassion. "We're two halves of the same power. Life and death. Beginning and end. Father's final gift to a universe coming undone."

  Something changes in the air. Power builds like a pressure cooker about to blow. Reality holds its breath. The twins' temporal abilities sync. Harmonize. Where they touch, time itself starts to unravel.

  Nyx feels it too. His eyes widen despite the pain. "What... what is this?"

  "The truth." Lark kneels beside his brother. "Every time you use your power alone, it kills you. Because you're trying to control death without its partner. Just like I've been trying to control life without mine."

  The revelation hits like a freight train carrying enlightenment. Years of cellular damage. Temporal backlash. Black blood and stolen time. All because the power was incomplete. Broken.

  "Together," Lark continues, "we could control it all. Beginning and end. Alpha and omega. No more dying from temporal backlash. No more incomplete healing."

  To demonstrate, he touches Nyx's shattered face. Power flows. Clean. Pure. Perfect. Flesh knits. Bones reset. Even the chronic temporal damage starts to fade.

  "You feel that, brother? That's what we were meant to be. What father designed us to become."

  Nyx stares at his hands. Young again. Stable. No black blood. No flickering between ages. "All this time..."

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "Join us." Lark helps his brother stand. "Help us guide humanity through what's coming. The Unweaving isn't just breaking reality - it's breaking the chains that bind human potential."

  I've heard enough. My strings explode outward, finally breaking whatever held them back. Lightning arcs between them, turning the air to ozone and spite. Thunder shakes the square hard enough to crack centuries-old foundations. The winter storm above turns apocalyptic, each snowflake becoming a razor of ice and electricity. Ajax moves to intercept, seven feet of rippling chrome muscle. His liquid metal skin flows like mercury, reflecting the storm in fractured patterns. Even his face is a shifting mask of silver, features rearranging with each movement.

  "Your strings can't hurt what they can't hold," he growls, voice like steel on granite.

  I show him how wrong he is.

  My strings cut through him anyway, splitting liquid metal like a blender through mercury. Lightning follows, turning his scattered form to superheated plasma. His scream shifts from bass to soprano as his body loses cohesion.

  "Ajax!" The light woman's voice carries harmonics that shouldn't exist. She hovers above the ground, her form a silhouette of pure radiance. Where her eyes should be, twin stars burn with impossible colors. Streams of light orbit her body like solar flares. She launches an attack that burns holes in the visual spectrum - a beam of pure nuclear fury that would make stars jealous.

  I catch it with Veil's stolen power, twist it through dimensions it was never meant to touch. Turn illusion to truth to nothing. "That all you got, sunshine?"

  She answers by splitting into three versions of herself, each one radiating a different wavelength of impossible light. "Let's see you catch them all, puppet master."

  The gravity manipulator tries his trick again. He's young - barely twenty - with tribal tattoos crawling up his neck that shift and move with each gravitational distortion. Space warps around me as he gestures with ink-stained hands, trying to fold me into shapes biology doesn't allow. I answer with Torque's power, turn his own gravity well against him. Reality groans as forces collide. His bones snap like twigs as gravity remembers which way is down.

  The bone witch moves like a spider, all angles and sharp edges. Her skin is ghost-white, mapped with blue veins and ridges of protruding bone. Spurs of calcium jut from her joints, and her fingers end in talons of polished ossein. She flexes, and the bones beneath her skin writhe like living things. With a gesture, she pulls calcium from the earth itself. Bone spikes erupt from the ground in a wave of ivory destruction. Where they pierce flesh, the wounds sprout smaller bones, spreading like deadly coral.

  They attack together this time. Coordinated. Trained. Ajax reforms from scattered droplets, his liquid chrome body denser now, channeling heat that would melt tungsten. He flows around my attacks like quicksilver, each cut merely dividing him into more deadly pieces. The light woman's trinity focuses their attacks into a single point, creating a laser that cuts through dimensional barriers. Her radiance turns the falling snow to steam, casting twisted shadows that move independently of their sources. The gravity kid forces space into geometries that would give Einstein nightmares, his tattoos blazing with each distortion. The air itself becomes thick as lead, then thin as vacuum. The bone witch is a symphony of lethal calcification. Bone plates slide under her skin like living armor. Her spine extends, splitting into a dozen whip-like appendages tipped with bladed vertebrae. She launches a barrage of sharpened ribs that multiply mid-flight, filling the air with a forest of ivory arrows.

  But they're not Fellowship-grade powerful. They're something new. Something that evolved alongside the cosmic decay. And new doesn't always mean better.

  I pour everything into my strings. Maelstrom's storms. Torque's force. Veil's dimensional fuckery. Lightning arcs between black threads, each one humming with stolen power. The storm above answers my call, turning the sky into an apocalyptic light show. Ajax tries to flow around my attack. I turn his liquid metal body to vapor, then back to solid so fast his molecular structure forgets how to hold together. He drops like mercury hail, each droplet screaming in a different octave.

  The light woman's trinity combines into something brighter than reason. Colors that shouldn't exist paint the square in impossible shades. "You can't stop evolution," she hisses through three mouths speaking in quantum harmonies.

  "Watch me." My strings wrap around her light show, drink deep. The stolen power of three dead gods turns her attack inside out. She screams in ultraviolet.

  The gravity kid gets creative, tries to turn my strings against me by warping the space they occupy. Bad move. The backlash hits him like Newton's revenge. Physics snaps back to baseline with him caught in the middle. What's left doesn't look human anymore.

  The bone witch launches her masterstroke - a cascading wave of ossification that turns everything it touches to bone. Air solidifies into lattices of calcium. Concrete sprouts skeletal structures like dying flowers. My strings slice through her constructs, but each cut surface spawns new growth, like a hydra made of marrow and spite.

  But they recover. Adapt. Evolve.

  Ajax pulls himself together, his chrome flesh now rippling with patterns that hurt to look at. Stronger. Denser. Moving like liquid thinking about becoming solid. The light woman radiates wavelengths that make time itself flinch. The gravity wielder turns local space into a modern art exhibit of pain. The bone witch's form becomes a cathedral of living calcium, each movement creating new architectures of ivory and pain. I'm not going to lie...I'm a little outnumbered.

  "Enough." Lark doesn't shout. Doesn't have to.

  Power ripples outward. Clean. Pure. Perfect. Time itself bends around the twins. The wave of energy they emit, hits me like a ton of bricks. I feel my stolen abilities start to fade. Like trying to hold smoke with chopsticks. Everything I've taken, everything I've built, growing weaker in the face of true mastery.

  "Your time's over, puppet master." Lark's voice carries no malice. Just certainty. "The age of stolen power is ending. Something new is coming."

  I launch everything I have. Every ability. Every trick. Every scrap of stolen strength. The twins move as one. Time parts around them like water. My attack hits nothing but altered reality.

  "You taught me well," Nyx says, standing beside his brother. No more black blood. No more temporal damage. Just pure, clean power. "But this is what I was meant to be."

  "Think about what you're doing, kid." My strings dance with desperate energy. "Everything we've built-"

  "Was a lie." He cuts me off. "You never wanted to teach me. You wanted to use me. Keep me weak. Keep me dependent."

  "I made you strong!"

  "No." Nyx's power flows seamlessly into his brother's. "You kept me from true strength. From what I really am."

  The twins's combined power hits like a temporal nuke. Every stolen ability, every scrap of power, grows weaker. Even my strings struggle to cut through the wrongness they create.

  Lark steps forward, temporal power radiating off him in waves. "Time to end this. Every power you've stolen, every ability you've ripped away - it ends here."

  Nyx's hand catches his brother's arm. "Wait." Blood still drips from his restored face, but his eyes are clear. Certain. "He kept me alive. Taught me enough to survive until we found each other."

  "He used you," Lark snarls, but doesn't shake off his brother's grip. "Kept you weak. Dependent."

  "Yes," Nyx says quietly. "But I'm not weak anymore."

  I answer their family drama with violence. Lightning splits the sky. Thunder shakes foundations. My strings become a web of electric death. The twins don't even dodge. Their combined power simply makes my attack happen somewhere else. Some when else.

  "Goodbye, old friend." Nyx doesn't sound sad. Doesn't sound anything. "Thank you for keeping me alive long enough to find my true purpose."

  Power flows between the twins like a completed circuit, clean and pure. My stolen abilities strain against it, but even my strings feel the difference. This isn't power taken. This isn't power stolen. This is power born, written into their DNA by a father who saw further than any of us.

  The bone witch's calcium forest crumbles. Ajax's liquid metal form solidifies. The light woman's radiance dims. Even the gravity kid's warped space smooths out. In the presence of true power, their evolved abilities bow like subjects before kings.

  "We're leaving," Lark says, one hand on his brother's shoulder. Their team gathers around them, battered but alive. His eyes fix on me, carrying centuries of cold calculation. "Consider this a courtesy. A debt repaid for keeping my brother breathing." His lip curls. "Next time we meet, there won't be any family sentiment to stay my hand."

  My strings writhe, hungry for one last attack. But something in the air has changed. The powers I've stolen, the abilities I've ripped from dying gods - they feel distant. Like trying to hold onto a dream after waking. Nyx meets my eyes one last time. No more black blood. No more temporal damage. Just pure, clean power thrumming through him like a second heartbeat.

  "I understand now," he says quietly. "Why you never made me immortal. Why you kept me dependent." A small, cruel smile. "You knew, didn't you? That true power can't be taken. Only born."

  I spit blood onto the snow. "Born. Stolen. Power's still power, kid."

  "No," Lark cuts in. "That's always been your weakness. Thinking quantity could replace quality. That enough stolen abilities could equal true mastery." He squeezes his brother's shoulder. "But you're about to learn the difference."

  The air grows heavy. Time stretches like taffy, then snaps back. My stolen powers scream in protest as reality shudders around the twins.

  "The Unweaving is coming," Nyx says, his voice carrying something ancient. Something final. "Humanity's next evolution. And this time?" He looks at his hands, watching temporal energy dance between his fingers. Clean. Pure. Perfect. "This time we're not trying to stop it."

  Lightning arcs between my strings - a last warning, a final threat. But we all know it's just theater now. The twins have found each other. Found their purpose. Found what they were always meant to be.

  "Don't make me regret letting you keep breathing," Nyx adds softly. "For old times' sake."

  They vanish between one heartbeat and the next, taking their team and their newfound power with them. Leaving me alone in a ruined square, surrounded by the wreckage of borrowed strength. Above, stars still shine in the Moscow sky. For now. Before the Unweaving claims them too. I watch my strings dance, tasting the difference in the air. The twins might have found their destiny, but destiny's just another string to pull. Another puppet to make dance.

  And family reunions? They have a way of turning ugly.

  Especially when one side's been playing the long game all along.