Read Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) for Free Online Page A

me.
    Before my stint
in the Colony, I’d thought I had him figured out, but now he was even more of
an enigma to me than he’d been during my teen years. He was still a classic
Adonis, all lean muscle and chiseled features, but now his masculine perfection
was marred by an angry red scar slashing across his face. It added a layer of
menace to the confidence and sense of carefully honed power he usually exuded.
He’d always been guarded, just like his sister, but since my abduction, he’d
withdrawn further into himself. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why,
and I didn’t know how to draw him back out. Even though he was never far from
my side, emotionally, he was miles away. I missed him.
    I turned around,
facing Zoe, and leaned my head on Wings’s shoulder. My need for girl talk, for Zoe
to listen as I spilled out all of my gnawing worries and offer up her usual,
no-nonsense advice, was becoming overwhelming. Should I just talk to her
like everything’s normal? Can’t I just pretend she’s her ? I really
needed my Zo…
    “You’re staring
at me,” Zoe said. She lowered her brush hand and, using her opposite fingers,
tucked a flyaway that had escaped from her ponytail behind her ear. “Are you
okay?”
    I blinked several
times, noticing the excessive moisture in my eyes, and forced a smile. “I’m
fine…I think.”
    Zoe shifted her
feet and looked down at the dirt. She swiped ineffectively at a dark smudge
staining her jeans. “You can cry…if you need to. I don’t mind. In fact, you can
consider me your official shoulder to cry on.” She shrugged, meeting my eyes
only briefly. “It’s the least I can do, since I’m pretty much otherwise
inept…at everything.”
    The thundercloud
thinned, just a little, and I started chuckling. That was something Zoe would
have said; she’d always looked out for me, always been the first to comfort me
when I needed it and the first to defend me when I couldn’t defend myself. Not
that I didn’t try to defend myself. It was just that I was so damn small nobody
was ever intimidated by me. And when I had made a point to stand
up for myself or—shudder—lost my temper, I was pretty sure people saw me as the
human version of a snarling Chihuahua. Not. Scary. At. All.
    From the way Zoe
was watching me, it was obvious that she was unsure how to respond to my abrupt
shift from verge of tears to genuine, if gentle, laughter. Her eyebrows drew
down, and the corners of her mouth twitched. She smiled weakly. It was like she
was trying to figure out how I wanted her to react—how the old Zoe would
have reacted. For a moment, the disquiet I felt around her melted, and the only
thing that mattered to me was making her feel comfortable.
    I pushed off
Wings gently and stepped closer to Zoe, nudging her arm with my shoulder. “Don’t
try so hard, Zo. Just do what feels natural and stop worrying about the rest of
us and what we expect from you.” I flashed her a halfhearted grin. “We’ll
figure it out as we go.” Empty platitudes for the most part, but from the way
the tension around her eyes relaxed, I could tell the words meant something to
Zoe. Apparently even crap friends could pull through every once in a while.
    Just as I was
turning back to Wings to resume brushing her, I heard a dog barking. I craned
my neck to see around Zoe and Shadow and spotted Jack trotting through the overgrown
field beside our camp. He
barked several more times as I watched him draw nearer.
    Without warning, something
inside me snapped. A whoosh, like the most intense ear-popping imaginable,
knocked the air out of me, and I doubled over. My Ability burnout wore off in
an instant, and thousands upon thousands of sparks of awareness burst to life
in my mind’s eye, a glowing galaxy representing all of the life forms around
me. It was glorious. And unexpected. And so far beyond too much that I thought
I might be crushed under the enormity of what I was sensing.
    Several things
happened