Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(121)

“Of war and peace, light and dark. Every choice you made brought you here. If you’d reached for the gun in your pocket instead of finding the strength and courage to help a woman who needed you, you wouldn’t be here. And neither would the woman you love, your children, Katie, and hers. So, that one choice, light instead of dark. The same, the very same can be said of everyone here. This is the center and another shield.”

These faces, Fallon thought, these people, her birth father had once looked at them, and trusted them.

“You’re strong, all of you, strong. You’ll need to be. Your children will need to be.”

“I’m not going to dispute you’ve got something … extraordinary,” Will began. “That extraordinary saved lives in this room twice. I was with your mom once when she had a vision, and that’s stuck with me, so I’m not going to dispute you see things some of us don’t. We’ve worked hard to make New Hope something solid and secure. We’re willing to risk our lives to save others, and fight back against the ones who for whatever damn reason want to see us in the ground or in prisons or enslaved. But the fact is, there are only so many of us, we’ve only got so many resources. We can’t take on the whole dark side of what’s left of the world.”

“And there’s a lot of it.” Chuck tugged on the short, pointed beard he sported. “Every time I turn around I dig up a little more. I’ve dug up some of those other places you were talking about. People trying to get their shit together. But some of it’s hundreds of miles away, even thousands. We’ve got no way to get there to help or to fight.”

“Then your magickals haven’t plumbed deep enough, your technicians and mechanics haven’t, either. Your leaders haven’t fully considered that New Hope can still be swallowed by the dark.”

“You just got here.” Duncan moved forward. “You don’t know what we’ve plumbed or done or think.”

“You learned to flash,” she retorted. “Have you learned to take someone with you? To take your bike or a horse? To take an army?”

She turned to her mother. “You left your friends, your security because you knew the ones who killed here would come back. For you, for me. You didn’t consider they’d come back anyway. And they will.”

“Eric and Allegra?”

“Them or others like them. They wait, too. Our coming here starts the clock again. But … From inside and out,” she said as it swept through her, “the attack will come. From those boiled in the dark it will strike. The fruit and the flower,” she said to Duncan. “The poison and the serpent. You are as I am, and the dark wants your blood, my blood, the blood of your sister. It will not have it! I have not come to see the blood of the Tuatha de Danann shed and another shield broken.

“I am an army.” She stunned Duncan by gripping his hand, sending shock waves through him. “You are a sword shining. You an arrow in flight,” she said as she gripped Tonia’s. “We are the blood and the bone. We stand together for all who came before us, all who come after. Choose, you said to me, Duncan of the MacLeods, and I did. Now I say to you, choose.”

She let them go, took a step back though her eyes still swam with visions. “We rise and fall on your choice.”

“What choice?” he demanded.

“You’ll know when you know.” She rubbed at the headache in her temple, but shook her head when Lana started to rise. “No, it’s okay. The point is, nowhere is safe—that’s something all of you know already. What’s been built can be destroyed. You said there aren’t enough of us here, and you’re right. We need more warriors, more leaders, more healers, and more technicians. I’ve gotten a start on that. I have sixteen hundred and forty-three recruits.”

“Sorry?” Still a little dazed, Will held up a hand.

“She enlisted them on the way,” Simon told him. “Settlement by settlement.”

“Sixteen hundred,” Will murmured.

“And forty-three. I have an accounting, separating the magickals with their skills, the non-magickals with theirs. I have maps. I can show you where some will train in place—but need supplies and equipment.”

“And who’s training them?”

She turned to Duncan again. “Mallick, who trained me, Thomas, an elf elder who leads a group near where I trained with Mallick. Troy, a witch who leads a group of magickals. A man named Boris, who was a soldier like my father. The others will come here when I send for them. We can train them in the fields by the house where we’ll live for now.”

“How many coming here?” Katie asked.

“For now, eight hundred and twenty.”

“Eight … We don’t have the facilities, that’s double the population we’re feeding and clothing and sheltering and schooling.”

“More hands for planting and hunting,” Fallon pointed out. “To build.”

“We can expand at the farm,” Eddie began, and Fred nodded.

“With a little help we could add another greenhouse, even double the crops. And Lana told me today she knows how to create the tropics we’ve been trying to do for years. We’ll have sugar and coffee, cocoa beans, olives. Simon made an olive press. Olive oil.”

“Poe and I’ve made it nearly two hundred miles out.”