The Brotherhood: Kara: Introducing Kara

[k_a_webb]

Lucas walked into the room. He was an easy person to spot. One corner of the lounge always filled with girly sighs and Kara could feel his power. She didn’t have to look up to know that he was flanked by Simon and Andrew. They were his best friends so they were always together. When she looked up he was heading in her direction, alone. Simon went to sit with another of their friends, Gary, while Andrew headed straight for Eric. Eric wasn’t interested in Andrew but that didn’t mean that Andrew was going to give up. When he set his heart on someone he usually got what he wanted. Kara kept her focus on Lucas.

Normally they avoided each other. He’d arrived at a difficult time and she had been having trouble dealing with what had happened. It made her cold to him at a time when he needed support. She couldn’t help feeling grateful when someone else arrived so he had someone he could talk to about what was happening. Ever since then Lucas had avoided talking to her as much as possible, even though they were in three classes together. Fifteen years on she felt bad but she didn’t know how to make amends for what had happened.

“It’s time we talked,” he said, sitting down opposite her.

“What about?”

“A group of us think it’s time that someone took over from Tristan. I want to know that you won’t stand in the way.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Stand in the way of what exactly?”

“One of us killing Tristan, probably me.”

“If you touch Tristan I will kill you.”

He laughed. “You’re not strong enough to kill me.”

When she thought about what happened later she couldn’t tell whether it was the laughter or the derision in his voice that annoyed her the most. It didn’t really matter because either one of them on their own would have caused what followed. She didn’t mean to shatter the table, she didn’t even know how she did it, but that was the first casualty and then she threw herself at Lucas. The time it took him to respond told her that he wasn’t expecting her to attack him. He finally managed to throw her off when he was gasping for breath and she stayed standing without any difficulty.

Moments later the lounge was empty. Two people, Simon and Andrew, stood in the doorway, watching what was happening with interest. Everyone else had scattered. Kara could feel them all over the building. She knew that someone had gone to tell Tristan but that didn’t bother her. Pulling her attention away from the house she focused on Lucas. To begin with they circled each other. They’d never fought each other before so neither of them really knew what to expect from the other’s fighting style but, thanks to her obsession with knowing everyone’s powers, she did know what it was possible for him to throw at her.

When he started off by cooling the room down to almost freezing, she almost laughed at him. That was something she’d been able to ignore since she was six years old and Leonard had her fighting Conrad. She wasn’t worried about his dream power because she wasn’t asleep. Really all he had was his ability to shape-shift but even that didn’t worry her. He had three forms, none of which were particularly dangerous. Grinning, she started pulling the water from the air around her.

“Stop, both of you!” Tristan’s anger didn’t stop either of them. “I expected better from you Kara.”

Tristan didn’t have any powers and the last thing Kara wanted to do was hurt him so she formed a shield around him. She heard him growl but there was no chance of her taking the shield down with Lucas, Simon and Andrew around. No one would be able to hurt him while he was protected by her. Turning her focus to Lucas she found that he was staring at Tristan. It made it easy for her to attack him again, wrapping her hands tightly around his throat.

Instead of throwing her off again he turned into a bobcat and bit her. Her reaction was to throw him across the room. His head made an interesting sound when it hit the table but he didn’t seem to have any lasting damage. She started throwing balls of water at him to see what his reaction was going to be. It wasn’t until one of the balls hit him as a ball of ice that she remembered the room was freezing cold.

Worried she turned to look at Tristan. He had never been trained to cope with such cold conditions and it was obvious that he wasn’t coping very well. She dissolved the shield but her focus on Tristan meant that Lucas had a chance to attack her. Once he was literally clinging to her back he turned back into his human form. The sudden change of weight meant she fell to her knees, unable to cope with a full grown human on her back. He tried to push her down on to the floor but she wasn’t going to give in.

Snarling she thrust her head backwards and must have caught him somewhere painful because he let go of her. It was just for a moment but that was long enough for her to stand up. That was when she noticed that Simon was holding on tightly to Tristan’s arm so he couldn’t go anywhere, even though it was obvious that Tristan couldn’t cope with the cold in the same way that she could. Simon and Andrew were on the other side of the doorway which meant they weren’t in the freezing cold lounge. Unfortunately she couldn’t get at Simon because Tristan was being used as a human shield. That left Andrew.

Andrew’s eyes were full of fear. He didn’t have any abilities that were useful in a fight. She took three steps towards him before he squeaked and ran away. It was something that would have made her laugh if she wasn’t busy trying to save Tristan from the people who wanted to kill him. Lucas grabbed hold of her arm but that wasn’t going to stop her. Ignoring the pain she felt at pulling her arm free she ran for the door. On the other side of the door it was easy to attack Simon.

He fought back. To do so he had to let go of Tristan’s arm, which gave Kara a chance to grab hold of him and pull him behind her. Lucas joined the fight about thirty seconds later. She was thankful that Leonard had forced her to learn how to change parts of her body because it meant she could turn her hands into fox paws. There were people watching so Lucas couldn’t freeze the room again which meant that she could shield Tristan again.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked from behind her, keeping his voice quiet so no-one else could hear him.

“They want to kill you, Trist. I’m not going to let them.”

“Lucas wants control.” Kara could hear the smile in his voice. “All he had to do was ask.” Raising his voice so everyone could hear he continued, “Why didn’t you just talk to me, Lucas?”

“Don’t do this,” Kara whispered, knowing exactly what he was talking about. “Please.”

“You know I never wanted this job.”

Confusion filled Lucas’ face. “Are you being serious?” he asked incredulously.

“Joking wouldn’t be a very good idea right now, would it?”

Lucas shook his head.

“When I was younger I took on the job of being leader of the Brotherhood because I had a traumatised girl to look after. I never wanted the job but I was the only person who could. Grandfather never trained anyone else because he expected to live for another few years at least and then one of the children who had arrived here would be able to take over.”

“Conrad,” Kara whispered, trying not to let emotion overwhelm her at the memories.

“Or Lucas, depending on who was the stronger of the two.”

“Who’s Conrad?” Lucas asked, looking even more confused than he had before.

“Conrad was Grandfather’s shooting star. He was one of the early arrivals here and he was powerful. One of the girls was jealous that he was getting more attention than she was.”

Kara swallowed, hoping that Tristan wasn’t going to tell the whole story. When she’d told Tristan the story she’d done everything she could to hide the truth from him. She was trying to protect two people: him and Mim.

“She had mind domination as a power. I’m sure you can understand what happened. Kara was the only one who survived.”

Lucas looked at her. “How did you survive?”

“Luck,” she replied, wrapping her arms around herself.

“I don’t believe that.”

“Then you’re an idiot. I was nothing compared to Conrad.” To be honest they were pretty well matched, but they wanted Leonard to think certain things about them and Leonard had believed that Kara was the weaker of the two, so that was the story she went with. “He fought her domination as much as he could when she set him on me and pretty much let me kill him.”

“Where is she now?”

“Miriam died.”

“Drop the shield,” Tristan whispered. When she did he wrapped an arm around her. “Kara had to kill her as well.”

“Tristan…”

“She’d used Conrad to kill everyone else in the house, including Grandfather. I turned up the next morning to find Kara in her bedroom sobbing over Conrad’s body. All we could do was bury them in the garden and move on. Not that moving on was easy.”

“Then I arrived,” Lucas said quietly, focusing on Kara.

“It wasn’t even three days after we buried everyone. I was still trying to cope with what happened and it made it hard to deal with new arrivals.” She sighed, as she told the truth for the first time. “I wasn’t good with new arrivals even before Mim… happened. Conrad found it the easiest but then he always was the most sociable of all of us.”

“Why didn’t you tell us what had happened?”

“At the time there were a lot of reasons not to say anything. Tristan thought it might scare new arrivals off, I wasn’t ready to talk about it and we were terrified that it might happen again if talked about it. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“There are records of what happened,” Tristan said. “I made sure to write about it all and Grandfather had kept notes about all the training that the nine of them did. He did notice that Miriam was pulling away from everyone but he didn’t expect what had happened.”

“No one did. We thought Mim was having difficulty dealing with the fact she had this amazing power. It never even crossed our minds that she might try to kill us all with it.”

“Why did she pick Conrad?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t know. There was no time to ask her.” Again Kara returned to the story she’d told Tristan. “Mim was…” Kara shrugged. “… frantic. She wanted to end things.”

“We think it was because Conrad was easily the most powerful of them and he had been shown to be weak to someone using their powers on his mind. Grandfather was trying to teach him how to shut people out but it wasn’t easy for him to learn.”

“Even I tried to teach him. Leonard always praised me for being so strong of mind and that was why Mim would never have picked me, even though I was the second most powerful in the group. I think there was a time when she was jealous because she wasn’t as strong as the rest of us. Then we found out that she could dominate other people’s minds. We were all so happy that she’d got a power that was strong like ours.”

“Grandfather let her practice on him a lot so she could get the hang of controlling people. They talked a lot about how important it was that she thought about when to use her power. He seriously believed she was capable of dealing with it.”

“She was utterly capable. Unfortunately she used it against us because we had become her enemies for some reason. I wish I knew why.” When Conrad had died they’d lost their only empath, so Kara wasn’t worried about someone picking up on her lies, but that didn’t make it any easier. “She was my friend and I miss her. Maybe that sounds silly after what she did but I really miss the Mim that I knew before her power changed her.”

“There’s no one here with that power now. It’s really rare.”

“I’m glad,” Lucas said, swallowing. “You’re really happy to pass the leadership of the Brotherhood onto me?”

Kara felt Tristan nod behind her. “Like I said I never wanted it to begin with. If you want I can show you where all the current records are and how I do things so you’ve got somewhere to start.”

“That would be good.” Lucas’ eyes met with Kara’s. “Can you ever accept me as your leader?”

She looked at Lucas. It was hard to think of Tristan not being in control any more but she knew he wanted to move on. The Brotherhood had always been a burden that he didn’t want. Finally she nodded because he was the best person for the job. He was strong enough to take control and he would be able to take over the teaching without much difficulty.

“Thank you.”

There was a sudden noise from down the hallway. A couple of people were on the floor. One looked like he had been pushed into the wall because there was a trickle of blood on the side of his face. Kara opened up her focus so she could feel the whole of the house and realised that someone was there who shouldn’t be, someone who felt even more powerful than Lucas. She looked at Lucas. His eyes were full of confusion. When she opened her mouth to speak she felt that someone push her aside. Her shield went around Tristan three seconds too late.

All she could do was watch him sink to the ground, a knife sticking out of his ribs exactly where his heart was. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she didn’t have time for grief. The someone appeared right where Kara had been standing and she found herself looking into the eyes of a person she had met before. She shook her head as she moved to stand next to Lucas, not quite believing he was really there. He smiled at her in that terrifying way of his that always caused a shiver of fear to go down her spine.

“Hi all,” he said cheerfully. “I’m Daniel and I’m here to be your new leader.”

“Over my dead body,” Lucas replied.

“That is easily arranged but I suggest you talk to Kara before you try taking me out. She might have some suggestions for you.”

“Why are you here?” she asked in little more than a whisper. “You said you weren’t interested in the Brotherhood.”

“That was then. This is now.”

“It was six months ago.”

He shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

“Who the hell is he?” Lucas asked angrily.

“He’s Mim’s brother.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.