Rising, p.15
Rising, page 15
part #3 of Girl With Broken Wings Series
Fight, I think to myself. Fight you fucking coward!
But I don’t. There’s too much pain. Too much exhaustion. And Tarren didn’t come.
Then cry. At least cry, the small voice of Mousey Maya whispers in my mind. I can’t do that either. I haven’t been able to cry since that night in the grove when I thought Tarren was crazy enough with grief to put a bullet through my heart. All I can do now is wheeze as my battered body is dragged roughly over the door frame and into the house. I keep my eyes on purple horizon for as long as I can until the door slams shut. A group of angels stands in the lobby. The girl with that tattoo heart on her neck looks scared, and the young man with the unruly mop of red hair gazes at me with unrestrained hostility.
I feel myself retreating, sinking into a shroud of numbness. Let it go, my mind whispers. A soft, gentle release. Okay, I think back at myself. It’s almost nice.
“Diamond said to put her in the guest house,” a voice speaks up. War grunts in reply.
More dragging. Pain engulfs my left forearm, crawling up into my shoulder and neck. The world keeps dimming and brightening. Sometimes I think I hear Tarren’s voice, or see Gabe out of the corner of my eye holding Sir Hopsalot in his arms. Once, just for a moment, I’m in the labyrinth again, and Grand is dragging me with his mind. Then I’m back, only now we’re outside, my heels again cutting twin ruts through the snow. A door opens behind me. I am dragged over a new threshold and then dropped to the floor.
“Nicolas and Rachel are in the trunk,” War says in his paper dry voice. “Raven took off. We didn’t have time to find her.”
“Were you followed?” Diamond’s voice is monotone. “We have to assume she was in league with the Vigils who took you.”
“I’ll find out,” a new voice speaks up, soft and chillingly familiar. I turn my neck despite the pain and look into Grand’s ice blue eyes. I blink, and Grand is gone, replaced by a younger, thinner version of himself with tousled blond hair.
“I’ll find out everything,” says the angel named Gem.
Chapter 21
I try to go away. From this. From here. But the blood distracts me.
It winds down my left wrist from the metal that bites through my skin. Thick shackles enclose each wrist. No breakable or pickable cuffs. They connect to a heavy chain that wraps around the big center beam of the roof. My toes touch the floor, allowing me a precarious balance. I’m in the small living room of the guest house. The previous owners obviously took pains to make it warm and inviting. The lemon yellow walls complement the folksy, rustic furniture, shoved roughly against the back wall. One of those automatic puff air fresheners and a year’s worth of National Geographic magazines litter the floor next to the upended coffee table.
Across from me, an expansive recreation of Monet’s Water Lilies hangs on the wall. I stare at the painting and try to escape into it – if only for a moment – but my shoulders are beginning to ache, and my swollen left wrist throbs. I can only pull weak, shallow breaths into my stretched diaphragm.
In front of me, the angels cluster together in heated conversation, Gem, Diamond, War, Heather, and one other, a plain looking man with a shiny pate. Heather’s voice rises above the rest, and her arms swing wildly. I ignore their words. None of it matters. The outcome is clear. They’ll hurt me. I’ll talk. They’ll kill me, probably in a slow and gruesome manner.
I float in the lake, lilies brushing my outstretched arms.
My brothers are safe. That’s the beauty of Styx. With a day’s head start, Tarren and Gabe will have abandoned the house in Farewell and gotten Lo, Dr. Lee, and Francesca out to some safe new hideaway. They will have destroyed all the phones, deleted the email accounts. Any way I knew of contacting them will be blocked, closed, dead ended.
I hear the croak of frogs and the heavy drum of my heartbeat in my ears, magnified by the cool water.
There’s no way I can betray them, which is a mercy, because it means I don’t have to be strong. I don’t have to hold out or try to think up lies or do anything except give up what I know and die.
The water is cool on my body, a peaceful caress. Tendrils of pressure bloom in my skull. I’m not alone. A cloaked shadow stands on the lake’s shore.
A nice thought, a voice intrudes into my daydream. I flounder in the water, and then, like that, I’m back in the guest house, balancing on my toes, feeling the blood trickle down my arm. Gem has stepped away from the group and stares at me with his father’s eyes…my father’s eyes.
He’s thinner than Grand. Too thin for an angel, for the tides of power I feel exuding from him. Those tides grow as he comes closer. I can smell his aftershave, see every pore on his face, but I can’t read his expression.
He walks behind me. “This is how your brother was chained,” he says, and his voice is soft. “So my father could cut both sides of him.” His fingers brush across my back as he comes around to my left.
I feel him slip into my mind again, and suddenly I’m in a different room, staring at a gruesome scene from behind a different pair of eyes. Tarren, a younger and very frightened Tarren, hangs from shackles, head sunk to his chest. Grand walks around him, trailing the point of a long blade in the same path of Gem’s fingers on me. Tarren’s eyes are closed, his mouth pinched together, but he can’t stifle the moan as another ribbon of red opens up at the blade’s kiss.
Grand looks up at me. “Try again,” he commands.
Then I’m back in the guest house, shivering, disoriented enough that I lose my balance. The ache in my head is heavier. I struggle to find my footing and shake away the horror of that vision.
Gem comes back into my field of vision. “He made me watch. He wanted to show me how we treat our enemies.” Gem looks at me. “They were very brave, Tarren and Tammy, but my father used their love against them.”
He thinks this will scare me, the thought of my skin laced with the same white, shiny scars that disfigure Tarren’s body. It won’t. My fate is already sealed, and my brothers are safe, so what more is there to fear?
Gem’s mouth quirks up, just a little, and when that happens he doesn’t look like Grand at all. “I’m not going to torture you. I don’t need to.”
“Yes we are!” Heather cries. Her hands are balled into tight, blood-stained fists. I notice blood on her jacket too.
Gem turns away from me. “That isn’t necessary,” he says to Diamond.
She stands away from the group near a big window. The darkness is just beginning to lighten. Hanging on the wall next to her head is a framed black and white poster of two children hugging. A big caption at the top says “A hug is like a boomerang – you get it back right away.”
I know this is funny, but I can’t find it in me to laugh.
“You’re just here to extract information,” Diamond says to him.
“She’s still family,” Gem says, that voice, Grand’s voice, but different. There’s a note of emotion within it. I stare at the back of his head, all that messy, whirling hair.
“She chose her family,” Diamond says, and thunder growls loudly overhead. “Now find them.”
Gem nods and turns back to me. There’s something in his expression, something that strikes past the barrier of my numbness. Sympathy.
“You’re very different from him,” I say.
“Something he never tired of pointing out,” Gem replies. He steps forward and extends his hand toward me. I flinch back, losing my balance. My wrists and shoulders scream in unison as they take the weight of my body, and I can feel the shackles sinking deeper into my skin even before the thin channel of blood grows fast and heavy down my left arm.
“This will be easier if you try to relax,” he says, placing a firm hand on my back and steadying me on my toes. His hand moves up to my shoulder and tightens.
Light pulses beneath his skin, even behind his eyes, and they glow like blue lamps. I feel his power focusing, pressing into my mind. He is drilling a channel between us, something invisible but strong. I feel him, not just his fingers digging into my shoulder, but the whisper of his thoughts, the sadness inside him.
No, No, NO!
I thrash, losing my feet again, twisting in my chains, trying to break that channel. Gem holds me fast, and he’s inside my mind, this horrible, heavy, foreign thing. I throw my head back and forth, trying desperately to dislodge him. This is wrong. So fundamentally wrong. An invasion into the most private, sacred part of me.
Relax. Gem’s voice is everywhere, echoing around my skull. Don’t resist, or it’ll be unpleasant for us both.
His fingers scroll across my thoughts like a collector flipping through a bin of vinyl records. I stop thrashing my head and concentrate inside, on those fingers. I try to bend them back one by one, but Gem has a thousand fingers, and the more I push, the stronger they become. The meaner and sharper.
The pressure inside my mind ratchets up, pushing outward. My skull is going to split, my eyeballs are about to pop out of their sockets.
Relax, he says again.
GET OUT! I howl at him helplessly, but those fingers just multiply. Each memory he touches opens up in my mind, and soon my head is a deluge of quickly shifting images. Even as my body convulses, and the pain in my head becomes its own black void, I see my life forcefully played out.
Karen and Henry, my adoptive parents, are both held up for inspection and quickly discarded. So are the family Christmases dominated by Karen’s massive fake tree filled with carefully color coordinated bulbs. The memory of hitting my cousin when I was six and getting unenthusiastically spanked by Henry. Eating ice cream in my huge, bloated Saturn costume after my third-grade play. All those high school track meets where I was lucky if I finished second to last. The fear and adrenaline of the SATs. Getting lost on campus that first day and trying not to cry.
Another memory opens. Ryan, our nights together and his rumbly stomach. Avalon, the dream that was always a dream. Gem pauses on this one for a moment before tossing it away like the rest.
But then he finds my brothers, and my mind floods with their faces.
And even though I know it’s over, I keep fighting, because I can’t let Gem take this from me. He already has my blood and bones chained up in this room. I’m prepared to give him addresses, phone numbers, all the pointless digits.
But he can’t have Gabe’s goofy grin – the one that used to light up his face when he thought he’d said something clever. I won’t give up Tarren’s his eternal guilt, or the way his expression can soften, making his face almost painfully handsome when he thinks no one is watching. I have to protect that day on the motel roof when Tarren told me the story of how Gabe dislocated his shoulder as a kid.
No, no, no, NO, NO, NO!!! I screech in my mind. Stay away from them!
Far away, I hear myself screaming out loud. The ragged howl of heartbreak.
Gem finds it all. Tarren’s artic eyes, the scars, all those nights on the roof with Gabe and the stories he told me of Diana and Tammy. Gem watches our shovels dig shallow graves for the ones we killed. He even sees Tarren constantly adjusting the setting on the windshield wipers so that they move in perfect harmony with the rain.
There are more. So many more. He finds Lo and Dr. Lee and Gabe’s hopeless crush on Francesca. He sprawls on the roof with me as Gabe tells me how Tarren and Tammy used to make him wear dresses as a punishment for losing their made up games as children. Gem finds my odd obsession with Rain Bailey. He hears my cry of agony as I use my sputtering telekinesis to pull the trigger that puts a bullet through Grand’s head. The beauty of Gabe’s energy soaking into me – he sees that too.
And then it’s over. The pressure is gone like a sudden vacuum, leaving only a heavy, throbbing emptiness in its wake. My thoughts are strewn around my mind, like someone dropped a beautiful vase, watched it shatter, and then walked away.
I blink, and the living room comes back into focus. I’m gasping for breath, and my hair is plastered across my lips. I don’t even bother trying to stand. Blood pulses from both wrists now, but what does that matter?
Gem takes a step back, panting. His face is white.
“You…can’t…have them,” I say roughly.
“She’s not affiliated with the other group,” Gem says. He swallows, straightens up, and turns to the angels. I ignore his words and retreat inside my mind, huddling among all the ruins.
I just want them to kill me. Why can’t they just kill me?
Gem says the word “Styx,” and I tune back into the conversation.
“…code word,” he’s saying, “when she was taken by the other team. They’ve cut her off. Left her to save themselves.”
“Some family,” War sneers.
“They’re professionals,” Diamond says. “I can see the sense in it. So we can’t use her?”
“They won’t come for her,” Gem confirms.
“Do you think you could still find them?” Diamond asks him.
“Perhaps. I know them better now, how they think, what resources they have. It won’t be easy, though. They’ve prepared for this possibility.”
“You won’t find them,” I manage, though my voice is nothing but a creaky whisper. “But they’ll find you. One by one.”
“There’s too many of us now,” says the bald angel. “They’re swatting raindrops in a downpour.” He laughs, but no one else does.
“And what of my brother?” Diamond asks.
Gem turns to face me. His skin is ashen, and his hands shake. My eyes wander down his rumpled corduroy jacket, the jeans that bag around his ankles, and his scuffed tennis shoes. I wonder how old he is, but it’s hard to tell. Older than Tarren probably, but not by much. I let the thoughts go, it doesn’t matter.
“She killed him,” Gem says, “with lies. With betrayal.” He grabs my chin and pulls me toward him. Our eyes lock. “And then she burned him.”
They’re both close, his voice whispers in my mind. I instinctively lash out, but he bats away my mental defenses and pushes roughly into my thoughts. Would he risk his life to save you?
He picks up a piece from the shattered vase. In my mind I see Tarren trudging next to me through the swirling snow. He’s cold and miserable, that granite jaw stubborn as always as he lectures me on the stupidity of my mittens and scarf. Gem is showing this memory to me for some reason.
Would he risk his life to save you? Gem’s voice is more insistent.
I understand what he wants.
No, I think back at him as fiercely as I can. He’s not stupid enough to fall into your trap.
Gem plunges deeper into my mind. Far away, I hear a guttural moan bubble out of my lips. I see Tarren again and again. Running out of the burning building in Poughkeepsie with Rain’s unconscious body slung over his shoulder. The steadiness of his arm when he dragged me out an acrobatic show the time I almost lost control of the hunger. Tarren’s silhouette, tall and unbreakable below an overcast sky, when he stood his ground against Grand so that I could escape.
He will come for you, Gem says in my mind.
He’s not here, I argue weakly, and even if he was, he wouldn’t. But Gem has seen the truth. Tarren will always sacrifice himself for another, even me, who he doesn’t like at all. It’s his nature. His duty. His atonement.
No, not from duty, Gem says.
All the pictures and memories of Tarren drop away from my mind, and I’m back in the room, dizzy and surrounded by hostile angels.
“You want her dead? You want her to suffer?” Gem says. “Then I’ll give her the same consideration she gave to my father.”
He extends his left hand, and a flame dances to life in his palm. Just like the match that night in Wichita Falls, Texas. Grand’s body was inside the gasoline soaked warehouse, but my hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t light any of the matches. I was down to the last one, and it sprang to life before I even tried to strike it. That’s when I’d noticed Gem standing on the roof of the opposite building with that unreadable smile on his face.
It’ll be close, perhaps too close, Gem says in my mind, but it must look real.
He’s not here, I think back at him. You want me to believe that there’s still hope.
In response, he reaches out with his right hand and sets me back on my toes. His eyes are sad, and for one crazy stupid moment I actually believe him.
Why would you help me? I ask
“We need to discuss this,” Diamond says. “We can still use her.”
“There’s nothing to be discussed. I’m done with her, and we’ve got greater concerns,” Gem says. I feel the crackle of static in my mind. Diamond must be communicating directly to her nephew.
Her face turns dark. “That’s ridiculous,” she says out loud. “I don’t sense….”Her eyes widen. She pulls in a sharp breath that hisses out through her nostrils. The windows blaze with sudden spears of lightening.
“Don’t try to fight them, Diamond,” Gem says. “Just run. Tell all your people to run.”
“Run from what?” Heather asks in a trembling voice.
The calm mask has slipped from Diamond’s face, revealing an angry snarl and something else. I think it might be fear.
“We don’t run. Your father should have taught you that,” she spits at Gem.
“He was never very successful in teaching me much of anything,” Gem responds.
Thunder crashes overhead, and Heather squeaks and grasps War’s arm.
“Will someone tell me what the fuck is going on?” War growls.
Diamond’s head snaps to him. The static returns, and fear dawns onto Heather’s face. She presses herself into War, and he pushes her roughly away.
“Shhhhhit,” the bald angel groans. He looks to Diamond, almost beseeching.
“Good,” War says, smoothing out his leather jacket. “I owe those fuckers.”
“Take care of her,” Diamond hisses to Gem. She glances around, her flint gaze landing on each member of the group for a moment. “We fight. This is the beginning, the reason for all that we’ve done.”
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