by Anne Schlea
“Terms?” Sickness starts to well up in the pit of Anna’s stomach. She thinks about the circumstances of her return and then of her own words. No one comes back, you know this.
“I knew he wouldn’t tell you. Did you really think you would be the only Fallen in two thousand years to return to the fold without penance?” The words are not harsh; they are simply spoken as fact. Mia’s face gives no hint of emotion or judgement. She looks over Anna with an impassive calm.
The color drains from her face even before she can form a response. Bile rises up in Anna’s throat and she thinks for a panicked moment she’s going to be sick all over the hallway. She leans over and gulps for a deep breath, fighting nausea and dimness in her eyes. Mia’s hand comes down in the middle of her back and rubs her gently between the shoulders. “I’m not telling you this to hurt you. I’m telling you this because you need to know.”
“I had no idea.” Somehow Anna finds herself sitting on the floor with her back against one of the walls. She’s thankful this part of the city is mostly deserted so that no one will walk by to witness her shame. She should have guessed.
“I know.” Mia crouches in front of her, the fabric of her pants stretching. “My brother is really good at keeping things from other people. Trust me, I know.”
“Mia, you have to understand something.” Anna rests her head on her hands because it’s suddenly so heavy she doesn’t think she can hold it up. “Riley has always been the closest person to me in my life. I kept the truth from him when I left to protect him. If I would have known…”
“I know.” She reaches out to touch Anna’s face. “I know. But the way he looks at you even now…if there’s nothing in your heart beyond friendship with him, you have to tell him. He’s building a life around the pretend family you have. This isn’t fair. He has a right to look for someone who will look at him the way he looks at you; and if there is more in you than I think there is, you need to be honest about that, too. None of us know how long we’re going to have here and my brother has waited long enough. He’s waited ten years for you, Anna.”
He looks at you like you’re most precious thing in the world.
Is Anna the only one who can’t see what’s right in front of her? She’d given up on the idea of marriage and a family of her own when she took in Marissa. Now here she is, somewhere she never thought she’d be again and there isn’t anyone else in the world – not in the human world she’d lived in for so many years, not here in Orasul, not even back in the days when she’s been young and impetuous – that she can imagine her life with. Except for Riley.
She looks up at Mia and wills her to understand.
“Don’t say anything.” Mia holds up her hand and pushes up from the floor. “I’ve already said more than I should have and Riley’s going to kill me when he finds out. Just think about it; and don’t tell me about it when something happens because he’s still my brother and I don’t want think about him like that.”
“Wait.” Anna reaches up and grabs Mia’s sleeve before she can walk away. “Tell me what they did to him.”
“It’s not mine to tell.” Mia pulls her arm away and looks at Anna with sympathy. She starts to walk away but turns back when she’s ten steps down the hallway. “You should ask Riley to see his back.”
Chapter Nine
Anna is still shaken by her conversation with Mia when she changes into her loose training clothes and heads down to the training facility. She thinks about the bruises that were visible on Riley’s sides the day he brought her home and she can’t imagine what kind of fight he’d been in that could have caused that kind of damage. There were more important concerns at the time so she hadn’t put much thought into it. Now she wishes she had.
She should have asked.
The practice arena is already set up when Anna arrives. The arena is twenty-five feet across. A number of large objects are scattered throughout the open space to act as real life obstacles out in the field. A tree. A park bench. A car. She jumps on top of the bench and starts to stretch out her back with a distracted mind.
Riley’s reaction when she told him about Marissa’s questions makes so much more sense now.
“I brought you a katana.” Riley arrives through the doorway to the weapons room. He holds two curved Japanese blades in his hands. One is longer than the other and both look deadly. “I thought it might work better for you because this blade is lighter and sharper. The larger blades are getting in the way of you quiver.”
“Won’t one of these break under the weight of a normal broadsword?” Anna takes the shorter blade from him with some doubts. He’s right, it’s very light. When she pulls it from its scabbard it seems to sing as it moves through the air.
He smiles at her and frees his own blade. “Not the way our people make them.”
Anna swings the blade through the air a few times to test its balance. It’s light and easy to use, much easier to balance than the larger broadswords he’d brought to practice with before. This feels more like it’s an extension of her arm. “You’re right, this feels good.”
“Do you want to give it a try?” The hesitation in Anna’s eyes is a dead giveaway something is wrong and Riley picks up on it immediately. He drops his blade into a safer position. “What’s wrong?”
Butterflies swarm in Anna’s stomach and for the second time in her life she feels nervous to tell Riley what’s on her mind. The first time she just ran and didn’t tell him at all. Now she’s older, maybe a little bit wiser, and understands the importance of honest communication. Well, that and the fact she’s a little afraid of what Mia will do if they don’t have this conversation. She lowers her own blade and reaches out a hand to touch Riley’s neck where his scar is. “Tell me about this.”
Even though Anna has her gloves on she can still feel some of Riley’s emotion slip through the protective barrier and into her. Her hands would have felt the distinct rush of longing even if she didn’t notice his eyes dilate and see the pulse at his throat jump. It isn’t fair of her to use the gifts this way and Anna knows it. She never uses her touch to garner information from the emotions and minds of anyone without their permission, but she’s grateful for it in this moment.
Riley brings his hand up and holds it over Anna’s. “It was a bad idea and a stupid mistake for a kid who went out into the field when he shouldn’t have been there.”
“Tell me.” She holds his eyes and doesn’t make any move to pull away. The heat from Riley’s body presses up against her and she knows this moment will change their relationship forever. This is a test of trust: how far can she trust him and how much is he willing to give to her.
It’s Riley who breaks the connection first. He grasps her hand and leads her over to sit on the park bench. She thinks he’ll let go once they’re seated but he doesn’t. He just holds on and looks down at his feet. “I spent a lot of time being angry after Lily died and you left. They tried to pair me with a new partner and I wouldn’t cooperate. Eventually they just let me do what I wanted, which was work alone. The truth is I didn’t trust anyone enough to be at my back. Not after what happened with Jonathan, not after you left. Then one day we heard about a club in the city that was being overrun with demons and our squad was dispatched.”
His free hand reaches up to rub the back of his head and then down his face. Anna can see this is a sensitive topic and appreciates the amount of trust he’s giving her by telling his story. She squeezes his hand to encourage him to continue.
A deep breath seems to calm him. “We found the demons we were looking for but we also found some of the rebel Fallen. I didn’t keep my defenses up because it never occurred to me the other Fallen would attack my squad. I was dead wrong. One of the rebel soldiers came at me and I took the hit right here. It was a bad strike; I’m still not sure how they got me all the way back here without me bleeding out, but somehow, they managed to save my life. I doubled my work ethic and kept working alone until I was one of the best. That, and the num
ber of deaths that happened around me, is what made me a General. The Committee hated my refusal to take a partner all those years. They felt like it was a bad example to everyone under me. Every day I look in the mirror and I see that scar I remember why I can’t trust anyone.”
“I’m so sorry.” Anna wishes Riley shared her gift so he could feel the depth of her regret. One conversation could have changed all their lives in so many ways. He could have died, and she would have been the reason. Even worse, he could have been killed and she never would have known.
“You were young and foolish and so was I.” A halfhearted smile doesn’t make her feel any better. “Neither of us made the best choices back then, we weren’t even twenty-five years old. Heck, I barely make good choices now. I don’t hold any of that against you. I knew how badly you were hurting; I could have checked on you, tried to talk to you. Something. I didn’t. Going out into the field hot headed, that’s all on me.”
“What if I promise I won’t ever run away again without letting you know first?” She matches his halfhearted smile with her own. “Will that help?”
Riley laughs, but it’s still strained. The tension starts to fade from his face. “That helps a lot.”
“Wait.” She stops him from pushing up from the bench. “I need to ask you about something else.”
“What else is there?” He reaches up his hand to run a finger along her jaw. His eyes follow the movement of his hand and his pupils darken, sending a shiver down Anna’s back. This could get out of hand quickly if she’s not careful. “I know you asked me about my life yesterday but I’m not sure what you want to know. I was telling the truth when I said my life was boring. I’m a soldier. I follow orders and I kill bad things. There really isn’t anything else to it.”
“What happened to your back.”
Riley’s hand draws quickly away from her face and his jaw locks shut. Anna’s stomach drops out from her body and immediately regrets the words. Maybe they aren’t at that point of trust yet. His eyes narrow as he puts together the pieces. “You’ve been talking to Mia.”
“Assaulted by Mia would be more accurate.” She reaches out with her free hand to try and soothe him. When her hand touches his face, he turns away and she can see he’s about to close off to her again so she presses the subject, afraid if he closes off now it will be the end. “She didn’t tell me what happened, only that I needed to ask.”
“Mia needs to mind her own business.” His body starts to relax under Anna’s hands. She realizes her left hand is still clutched in his when he suddenly lets go to stand up. Anna wants to stop him, afraid he’s going to walk away from the conversation, but he stops her when she starts to stand up. “You wanted to know. I should have figured you’d see it sooner or later anyway.”
Both hands reach up to pull his black shirt over his head.
It takes every bit of self-control Anna has to keep silent when Riley turns his bare back to her. It’s covered in endless scars, all new enough they still have the red coloring that has yet to fade completely to white. She removes her gloves, stands up from the bench, and reaches out a hand to touch him. There is no emotional, volatile reaction to her touch that there should have been with such wounds. Riley’s arms pucker into goose bumps, but there’s no hostility. “Why?”
He stands there for a moment longer and then drops his shirt back into place before he turns around to face her. He shrugs. “It was the fastest way.”
“This is my penance, isn’t it?” Anger flares through Anna’s body: anger at Riley for doing something so stupid and anger at the Committee for extracting this kind of price. She walks a few steps away from him to gain some distance, the dirt under her shoes grounding her. “You shouldn’t have done that. It was my sin to serve.”
“You wouldn’t have survived it, Anna.” He comes at her with purpose in his stride and when he reaches her he grasps both her arms to keep her from moving away again. “You know how sick you were. They would have thrown you in one of the dungeons and you would have died down there before your penance was up.”
“But it was still mine.” The anger drains out of Anna as quickly as it came, much like it had that morning with Mia. She feels defeated. He was right at dinner, she doesn’t want to depend on anyone. Knowing he’s right, that he did for her something she never could have done for herself, is hard. “Penance is meant to give the sinner time to think through their transgression. Being sent to a dark cell would have been appropriate. What they did to you was cruel.”
“It was my choice.” Riley’s grip loosens but he doesn’t let go. “I had one chance to get you. I’d been by your apartment a week earlier and saw how sick you were. I didn’t have time to sit in a cell and I knew you wouldn’t survive it. This is the option I was given and I took it. This is on me, Anna. I made this choice. I wasn’t a kid this time, either; I knew exactly what I was doing.”
Anna opens her mouth to say something, to protest or berate him or anything, but nothing comes out. The hands on her arms are soft now, barely gripping her. She can step away if she wants to. There’s heat flowing into her body from Riley’s hands; it funnels itself into her own cells and starts to burn deep in the core of her being. She steps toward him of her own accord until her body comes up flush against his. His hands slide up her arms and hold her close; one hand cradles her head, the other rests on her waist. She feels his chin brush the top of her head.
“I don’t want you to feel guilty.” Riley’s voice is lower now, deeper somehow. Maybe it’s because Anna can feel it vibrate in his chest where they touch. “I knew exactly what I was doing.”
Then Riley’s breath is on her face as they stand forehead to forehead. She’s always been so very careful not to touch anyone so closely. Her fear that her gift would overwhelm her kept everyone at a distance. Now she realizes this is far more than her gift. Their essence mingles in a way that’s different than before. This is different than sitting close together to heal. The purpose is different. This touch threatens to set her on fire.
Anna knows he’s going to kiss her. His eyes are focused on her lips and his breathing speeds up. She thinks she should step away, that she needs to think about what’s happening, but her legs refuse to move. Both his hands move to her face where they tighten ever so slightly. Anna closes her eyes but can still feel him moving, repositioning his head.
The door to the arena opens with a loud bang and Anna jumps back like a guilty child.
Anna knows her face must be flushed and is glad her back is to the observation deck doorway; but she does have a clear look at Riley and he looks ready to kill whomever is about to walk in. His face shifts from fury to guilt when he sees who it is. His back straightens up and he takes on the air of General.
“I’m so sorry; I thought you were using the larger arena today, General.” Anna recognizes the voice and spins around. Standing on the observation deck in their gym clothes, Marissa’s entire class is holding fighting dirks. “We’re going to start working on proper sword technique today. I can move the class to a different arena if you’d like.”
The world fades out of focus as Anna looks at her daughter. She’s standing between Amy and Nick, dressed in black cotton pants and a black tank top, tennis shoes, and she holds an officer’s dirk in her right hand. It isn’t that she didn’t realize this moment would come, but she’d fervently hoped it could wait a year. Or ten.
“No, I think we’re done here.” Riley takes a breath and looks over at Anna. “Do you want to continue this somewhere else?”
Anna’s mouth falls open. He surely didn’t just say that in front of not only Marissa, but Marissa’s entire class. Yet he’s looking at her waiting for a reply so he must have. She walks over to the katana and picks it up. “Actually, I think I need to go for a really long run right now. I’ll see you at dinner.”
Before Riley can respond, Anna escapes through the weapons room doorway. She can hear his footsteps behind her so she breaks into a jog and leaves him behind.
The treadmill has to be ready to break. She’d had it running on near full speed for the better part of two hours; at least now Anna felt like she’s gotten rid of her demons for the day. Part of her wants to berate herself for the near miss with Riley. The other part wants to find him and disappear into a dark room for a long, long time. Both parts are desperately trying to block out the image of her daughter with a sword.
And all three thoughts are losing ground to her growling stomach.
She switches the machine off and steps onto the ground. Her lungs feel like they’re going to burst and her legs are shaking. She palms the towel she’s already set on the floor and wipes a thick sheen of sweat from her face before she heads into the shower.
The sweet smelling soap and hot water are blessings as she washes off sweat and then puts on a clean set of clothes from her locker. Dirty clothes are tossed in the laundry where they’ll be cleaned and returned to her locker in a day or so. Some days there are nice perks to being a member of the military – like the days she doesn’t want to do her own laundry.
Anna contemplates dinner on the walk home. She plans all her meals with enough for Riley and Mia but she isn’t sure if she should expect them now despite her words in the arena. Neither one of them might want to be around her after today’s fiascos. She can’t blame Riley for avoiding her. About half way to the treadmill she realized running away from Riley in the weapons room was a silly thing to do. They’re both adults, one almost kiss isn’t anything to run away from.
She’d behaved like a child again, running away instead of facing up to the situation the adult way. Of course the adult way of facing the situation very well could have landed them both in a lot more trouble quickly. Anna has a feeling if they cross the kissing boundary a lot of other boundaries will get crossed quickly, too; and those boundaries have definitive consequences when you are a Fallen.
Anna’s so lost in her own thoughts, she doesn’t notice someone approaching from the other end of the hallway. He stops in front of her doorway and waits for her like he expects her to run the other way. She realizes she shouldn’t blame him.
