The Crystal by Jones M (the chimp paradox .txt) 📕

that I didn't want to disappoint you."

Wow! I didn't know she felt like that.

"Selena, it's okay. I'm your friend and family. I don't want to be the reason why you can't pursue a career in music. I'm telling you to go for it; that is if you really want it. I'll be okay with going to college alone," I said.

She looked surprised.

"Really?"

"I'm happy for you! Also, it will be cool having a celebrity relative. Just do me a favor by not becoming a snob."

She laughed at what I said before engulfing me in a hug. A tune began playing on stage. My cousin and I turned to it, looking at the boys as they began their performance.

CHAPTER 28

Emery’s P.O.V

“Uh huh… Okay. Thank you, Trevor,” Liam spoke before he hung up the phone. Selena, the members of the Ordinary Brothers and I were in a hotel in Blackpool, England. The boys had a day break before they were to perform at a venue called the Blackpool Opera House. At the moment, we were in a hotel suite having breakfast together.

Liam had received a phone call from the tour manager about something that seemed serious. The rest of us stopped eating to try to listen in. We heard nothing from the other line, and so we just waited for Liam to hang up and tell us what he was being informed.

“Guys, we have a problem,” he said as he kept browsing through his phone. Seconds later, he flashed us an online news article.

‘WHO ARE THESE GIRLS?’

I was confused by the title. There seemed to be no problem. My eyes traveled below the title, and that was when they widened at what I saw. Below the title was a picture of Selena and me running with the boys in London, trying to avoid the boys’ admirers.

Taking a moment to think about it, why were Selena and I running? We were not famous at all. Maybe we wouldn’t have brought such unwanted attention to ourselves if we stayed put.

I frowned at the thought.

“Don’t worry. The paparazzi don’t know who you are,” Zane said with an easy smile.

“Yet,” Ethan added, receiving looks of warning from the rest of the boys.

“The unknown girls have been spotted with the boys during their current tour. They have brought a frenzy of questions about them in the past two weeks, and everyone is dying to find out who they are. Could they be family members or secret lovers of the Ordinary Brothers?”

“WHAT?” I yelled at what I had just read.

“For now, we don’t know, but we’ll keep you posted.”

“Oh,” Selena stated with a hand over her mouth. Then she began squealing with excitement. I turned to face her with a look of disbelief.

“Are you kidding me?” I yelled. “The celebrity reporters spotted us! By now, I am certain they are searching for info about us. This is not something to get excited about! What if they find something embarrassing about us?”

“Emery! Why are you acting like that?” Zane asked with a frown. “It’s not the end of the world. Sure, the paparazzi will eventually find out who you guys are, but they won’t bother you as much as they bother us. Trust me.”

I turned to face the band member who spoke. “Zane, I appreciate your efforts in trying to calm me down, but have you guys forgotten that you bullied me in high school?"

The atmosphere turned serious all of a sudden, and I rolled my eyes.

"Sorry. I just realized I brought the mood a bit down, but think about it. What would you say if they dug that up?”

“Actually…” Logan trailed off, earning a look of suspicion from me.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, before we formed the band, we kind of made everyone in high school to keep quiet about us bullying you.”

My eye twitched as I calmly tried to process the information I had just received.

“What. The. Hell?” I cursed out as calmly as I could. "How?"

"Well, we apologized," Liam said, and I rose both eyebrows in disbelief. He sighed.

"Um, we had to kind of pay them to keep quiet."

"WHAT?" I screeched.

"Nothing too big!" Liam said with wide eyes. "Just a couple of signed T-shirts, VIP tickets to our concerts..."

"...setting up meetings with celebrities that they love, giving them enough cash to help them through college..." Ethan continued.

"ETHAN!" the rest of his bandmates yelled at him, but he just shrugged.

"She was going to find out eventually."

"No, she wasn't. If only you kept your mouth shut," Harry glared at Ethan before he sighed.

“We’re sorry,” Harry apologized. “It was necessary to stop the paparazzi from finding out about what we did to you. Besides, I know you would have disliked the attention that would have turned to you.”

Harry was right, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Oh please. You were trying to secure your future in the music business. How would you have known about me not liking the attention?”

Harry’s eyebrows squinted in confusion at me. “I am sure you ran away with us when our fans spotted us. You could have stopped and told them who you are and how you know us,” he pointed out. I remained silent, knowing that he was right.

“This will all blow up within days, and you could go back to being invisible,” Logan said with a smile.

“Umm…” Liam trailed off as he read through his phone. Logan and I sighed at the same time.

“What now?”

Instead of handing it to me, he handed the phone to Selena. She grabbed it with a worried look. That facial expression quickly disintegrated to a look of happiness.

“LOOK!” she yelled with a smile, pushing the phone to my face. I grabbed it to read through what Liam showed her.

‘MYSTERIOUS BEAUTY OPENED FOR THE ORDINARY BROTHERS WITH AN ORIGINAL SONG, AND IT WAS MARVELOUS!’

I read through the article. There were many words appraising Selena’s talent and her song, which was mostly accepting one’s whole beauty. Apart from that, there were speculations about popular music companies wanting to sign her.

“Whoa! People want to make me a star!” she screeched with excitement, and I joined her, jumping up and down and clapping my hands like a child.

“This is great! I have never been so happy in my life,” she commented with a smile. The boys and I joined her in the celebration.

Our moment of excitement was interrupted by a fireball passing past my head and to the wall beside me. I turned to face it just in time to see it explode and send flames that were close enough to char my head. Selena and I ducked on instinct as we turned to search for whoever threw the fireball.

The boys had also ducked. My eyes continued to roam around the room until they instantly caught sight of a female erwich in ragged clothes.

“We’ll deal with this!” Harry shouted, stopping me from moving towards the erwich. Harry shot up from his hiding place and threw a fireball of his own at the erwich.

He missed. The erwich had teleported within milliseconds to stand beside him. His eyes had widened with disbelief before he was sent flying backward onto the wall behind him. A sickening crack sounded throughout the room. 

That could not have been good.

“Harry!” we all yelled out his name just as he landed on the ground like a sack of potatoes. He was unresponsive, and I hoped he had just passed out.

Ethan stood and threw the erwich back with his powers of telekinesis.

“Foolish witches,” the erwich said before disappearing into thin air. The rest of us spent the next couple of seconds panting aloud. 

It finally happened! An erwich attack finally happened!

I was kind of hoping they wouldn't attack after Eva's demise, but I was wrong. Now that they were going to attack, those guys were not going to hold back their true capabilities.

“Harry!” Logan shouted as he ran to the curly-haired boy who lay on the floor. Our attention turned to the unmoving band member as we all followed Logan, curious and worried at the same time about Harry’s physical state. We crouched down to inspect him.

“There’s a pulse,” Selena said as she placed her index and middle finger on Harry’s neck. We then all sighed in relief. At least Harry was still alive. We only had to worry about the damages done to his body.

Selena suddenly screamed as she was brought upwards by an invisible force. Our attention turned to her just in time to see her dangling mid-air while trying to get rid of something around her throat. She was thrashing, and that was not helping.

“Selena!” the boys and I yelled before I levitated to her dangling form. My hands grasped something, and I wanted to wince in pain. Whatever was holding her up did not want to be let loose.

“Guys, I need help here!” I yelled out to the rest. Within an instant, Ethan and Logan came under Selena. They hoisted her up in hopes that the thing that held her would stop choking her. That didn’t work, seeing that she was still struggling to breathe. My heart began to pound with worry and a sudden feeling of helplessness.

This couldn’t be happening.

My cousin could not die on me at that moment. She was my best friend. She had a lot to look forward to in life. She was the only piece of my father that remained, and I would be damned if I let her go under my watch. I took a deep breath and grasped onto what was holding her midair.

I had winced before a scream tore through my throat as I felt around the object. The thing was hot, and it was burning the flesh of my hands.

What the hell?

The smell of burning flesh, no doubt mine, wafted through the air. I found a point of release on whatever held my cousin. I pressed on it with as much force as I could summon with my vision threatening to darken, and my cousin released a large gulp of much-needed air. The thing was unlocked. Some kind of red fire appeared in the form of a circle before extinguishing itself in the air.

Selena tried to plant her feet on the floor, only to collapse into Ethan’s arms. She began coughing a lot as tears began to leak from her eyes.

“What the hell was that?” she asked through a still-hoarse throat after being given a glass of water.

“I don’t know,” I replied as Liam tended to my burnt hands. I had not seen how disfigured they had become, and I was not looking forward to finding out.

“There,” Liam said as he finished healing my hands. I raised them to inspect how healed they were. I was amazed. It was like they weren’t burnt at all.

“Thank you,” I told him. He nodded with a smile before going to tend to the still-passed-out Harry.

“Do you think that this is the erwiches’ way of revenge for killing their leader?” Selena asked with a frown.

Selena was right. I would not have put it past the erwiches to try to avenge Eva. But what were we to do? Declare war within the hour? 

By the way, why did they target Selena instead of me? That seemed weird on its own.

“I think it is. We must tell the Queen and Erick about--” I was cut off by an invisible force that sent me flying towards a wall behind me. Once I hit it, pain exploded at the back of my skull. I was seeing stars once again for a moment.

“Look at you,” taunted the same erwich that had tried to attack us minutes ago. “You’re the crystal, and you’re already planning to cry to the rulers of Crystalia. You can’t even deal with something as small as me!”

Selena and Liam rushed to my form. They helped me steady myself, and all the while, I was facing the erwich that dared to smirk at me.

“No wonder it was easy to kill your mother.”

My eyes widened at the disbelief of what the erwich said. It seemed like it had a death wish.

Sometimes wishes do come true.

Rage exploded in me like a chemical test gone wrong, or more vividly, a nuclear bomb on a small island. I swiftly summoned a fireball, and before the erwich could react, I sent it at a fast pace towards it.

The erwich exploded within an instant, not even getting time to scream in agony.

“Emery!” I heard someone yell out my name. I turned to face the source, only to realize it was Logan. He had crouched down before he stood