Blood Awakens

by Jessaca Willis

Her brother’s eyes widened. “They’re…they’re gone?” That seemed to be the moment he noticed the blood staining their clothes and skin.

  Neither Graciela or Sean answered.

  “I’m just not understanding—what was their purpose? Why come all this way just for you?” When Santiago signaled in her direction, she almost felt offended. “There were probably hundreds of people between Texas and here that they could’ve had instead. Why you?”

  Instantly, Graciela became hot. It was as if her secret was boiling inside her, ready to spew.

  Instead, Sean sighed heavily. “It’s all about power and control with people like Zane. In his eyes, Graciela had duped him, and he couldn’t let an insult like that slide.”

  The tumultuous roar within her settled. She guessed that’s what started it, but she was almost certain that Zane was after her blood, her Awakened power. Graciela remembered then that Zane had also taken Sean’s necklace—or whatever men call their accessories. He was wearing it again now, and nothing about it struck her as odd. They were simple identity tags with a colorful die that Sean told her had been his father’s. It didn’t make sense why a man like Zane would want those things. They would just be junk to anyone without the sentimental attachment.

  But then she remembered what Bram said to her back at the arena. He’d told her to hide her locket. In fact, his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when he saw it.

  Before she could think any further, Sean pushed past Santiago with a gentle shove. “If you’ll both excuse me, I think there’s someone in here I need to speak with.”

  “She’s asleep,” Santiago said. “I don’t think she’ll have much to say.”

  But Sean was the kind of man to make those decisions for himself, so it didn’t surprise Graciela when he went inside.

  What did surprise her though, was that she and Santiago didn’t pick up the argument where they’d left off. The conversation both resumed and ended with Santiago wrapping her in another embrace.

  “I wouldn’t be able to live without you,” he whispered against her neck.

  Her lip quivered, and she buried herself deeper into his arms. Time stood still. Whatever happened last night and earlier that day didn’t matter as long as her brother was safe.

  Graciela grabbed Santiago’s hand, cupping it between both of her palms, afraid not to be touching him. “I’m sorry for what I put you through, Santi.”

  Words, as they’d already established, weren’t necessary. His head rippled with nods that he understood and all was forgiven.

  “I know I’ve made you worry today, and you’ve been waiting for me to return,” she continued. “But I need to clean up. It’s been a long day and I feel...” Graciela looked down at herself. Though Sean had removed the caked layers of blood with his power, the stains remained.

  “Gruesome?” Santiago offered. “Disgusting?”

  Only he could make her laugh after what she’d endured. “Something like that.” When she pulled back, she took him in for the first time since returning. “Santi, your eye!”

  “You like it?” He beamed almost too prideful. “Got it from the gun. Some might say I saved the day.” He eyed the blood crusting the middle of her shirt before she could respond. “Looks like I’m not the only one with a story to tell.”

  Her expression soured, remembering the pain of it all. “I guess you’re not.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Graciela

  Each day that passed since the day the Sanguinatores had attacked, made room for an ever-increasing amount of hope and sense of security. With the help of Dr. Gallagher, Sean, and herself, almost all of the people who were injured during the initial attack, or the battle that followed, had been healed, leaving almost nothing for Graciela to do except study.

  The passing days also made it more difficult for her to sit still. Every impulse begged her to move, to do something. To feel that sense of electricity she’d experienced in Fintan’s eyes…

  Instead of mindlessly rereading the same sentence in one of the medical books, Graciela stood from her chair and exited the medic station. Outside, the air was crisp in her lungs, with the faintest hint at the heat that would soon follow. She peeked down the paths that carved through the town, finding little more than a few vendors or early risers. Drawn to the backside of the infirmary, she decided to visit the place where everything had changed.

  From what she could tell, no one else had visited the stadium since the night of the Tri-Lunar Festival. It was still in the same sad shape, a disheveled vision of a hopeless future. At least, it could be if someone chose to look at it that way.

  Graciela still saw its potential though. After a plant rots into the soil, new shrubs and flowers grow from the nutrients, sending life back into the world. It could be the same for their stadium. It didn’t need to stand as a reminder of tragedy, but it could return to the glory of a place for celebration.

  Kicking a piece of trash, Graciela began to wander into the field in search of anything worth salvaging when a blue bundle caught her eye. A cloud of dust kicked up under her feet as she scrambled to the bleachers to get a better look. Her hand reached out, and the tip of her finger brushed against something soft. When she pulled it out, she came face-to-face with a blue stuffed animal howler monkey.

  Bram.

  Light footsteps echoed from behind, and Graciela clutched the stuffed animal closer. She wondered at the odds of running into someone here, considering no one had dared visit in the passing days.

  Seeing that it was Adelaide approaching brought her great anxiety. Every muscle tightened as Graciela tried desperately not to reveal her secret identity to the young listener.

  “Oh, so you have been avoiding me then?” Adelaide scolded. Her hip popped to the side for an added sassy effect. Sometimes, one look at the girl, and it was all too obvious she was a spitting image of her late mother. Untamed curls, spice, and all. “You know I already know, right?”

  “You do?” Graciela gulped.

  “Duh. Pretty obvious whenever you walk by someone and all they think is: Don’t think about being Awakened. Don’t think about being a blood guide and then floating around. Don’t think about—”

  “Ay, please stop!” Graciela was blushing.

  Both of their gazes fell to the ground, as if something important lay at their feet. Nothing was there but more dirt and trash. When Graciela began walking farther into the stadium, it was no surprise that Adelaide followed.

  “You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”

  “It’s not embarrassment,” Graciela said, trying to find the right words to describe what she’d been feeling. “I just don’t want to talk about it yet. With anyone. And since you’re the only person who knows—”

  “But you should talk to someone about it. My mom always said that talking helps people feel better.”

  “I can’t. I…I don’t even know what I am…if I am…”

  “You’re just scared. But that’s normal, and you have nothing to be afraid of. We’ve all been there.” Adelaide dug her foot under a matted dyed shirt, the color no longer distinguishable from the mud. “I was too when I first became an Awakened.”

  Graciela perked. “You were?” Being a listener seemed a strange ability to be afraid of.

  With tremendous enthusiasm, Adelaide bobbed her head. “I was. One day I woke up, and all of a sudden I could hear voices, everywhere. Like echoes, only louder. And they weren’t coming from outside. They lived inside my head. I knew what people were about to say, and sometimes I even knew what they were thinking before they did. I thought I’d gone crazy. I was so scared. And then, after the fear was gone, I was mad.”

  “Mad? But why?”

  “Because after people found out about what I was, they started acting differently around me. Some people thought nasty things about me and my family. Others still accepted me, but my ability showed me their true feelings. People who were supposed to be our friends weren’t really. I learned everyone’s darkest s
ecrets and wants. I was so angry with myself for being different and at others for judging me, sometimes I would even cry about it. My mom would rub my back until I fell asleep. Of course, I could hear her thoughts too, and she pitied me for my burden.”

  Graciela couldn’t tell if this was supposed to encourage her to share her secret or reinforce the reasons why she wasn’t telling anyone.

  The girl giggled at the thought. “My point is that there are positives and negatives to being Awakened. There are always people who will like you and those who won’t, Awakened or not.”

  “I know. I will tell them…or I will when I know for sure I’m Awakened.”

  “What do you mean for sure? You were in someone else’s body, right?”

  She nodded. “I think so, yeah? But it didn’t work when I tried it again. Maybe I imagined it. I mean, I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

  The expression on Adelaide’s face was something between delight and nonchalance. “You’re a lutkar.”

  “Lutkar,” Graciela whispered, practically breathing meaning into the word. “What is it?”

  “I knew one at Surviving and Thriving. He was one of my mom’s friends. A tall, funny man named Eman. He and his family moved from Bosnia ten years before the Awakening. They lived at Surviving and Thriving, even though he was the only one with an Awakened power. He was a lutkar.” Adelaide lowered her voice to mimic a masculine tone with a hint of what Mara presumed was a Bosnian accent. “‘A puppeteer of the human body.’ That’s what he used to always say. Just like with you, he could look into a person’s eyes and take control of them. He said it was like renting a car in the olden days. He’d get to take new bodies for test drives whenever he wanted.”

  A sudden remembering of Zane’s sharp, arctic eyes stared back at Graciela in her mind’s eye. They’d been so inviting, yet somehow impenetrable. “Whenever he wanted?”

  “Well,” Adelaide continued, “everyone has limits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, being Awakened doesn’t give you unlimited power.” The girl shrugged. “We all have our limits.”

  She supposed she knew that. From what she could tell, all the Awakened individuals in her life seemed to have reserves of power they could tap into. Once those were depleted, they needed time to regenerate, so to speak.

  But currently, it wasn’t the others that Graciela was curious about. Selfishly, her thoughts were on her own predicament. “What else can you tell me about lutkars?”

  Adelaide sighed in exaggerated exasperation, a reminder that, although she seemed wise beyond her years, she was still just a child, bordering on a teenager. “Lutkars are like souls no longer stuck in just one body. They’re able to fly into others. It is easiest for them to enter the body of someone who is not Awakened and most difficult to enter someone who is well-trained in their ability.”

  Graciela didn’t like the sound of that. Somehow, she had flowed easily into Fintan. Maybe it was because he’d been preoccupied—that she could at least wrap her mind around. And by that logic, it would make sense that she couldn’t break through to Zane, either because she’d already depleted her power or because he was more advanced in his ability. Or both.

  Adelaide continued, courteously acting as if she couldn’t hear every thought Graciela was having. “It takes preparation to jump a body and energy. I don’t think it’s an ability that you can just keep using and using. You need to rest in between. Oh! And once a lutkar leaves their real body, it becomes completely useless. You can’t move it out of harm’s way, can’t scream, can’t even blink, until you return to it.”

  “That’s why I fell to the ground.”

  There was no acknowledgment of the statement as Adelaide twisted her lips in preparation of her next statement. “If your real body dies while you are in someone else’s, your soul will die as well.”

  Questions fired in her mind, but Graciela listened intently, aware that Adelaide could hear her thoughts and knowing that whatever questions she had would be answered soon anyway.

  “There is one exception. Eman called it the Binding. He said it was possible to bind to another body, to abandon your old one forever. But that it also cast your current host’s soul into the After.”

  “Eman was a Sanjari?” It seemed like more and more people had been adopting the religion since the Awakening began, although Graciela herself knew little about it other than they believed in some place called the After.

  “I guess so.” Adelaide shrugged. “The point is, you kick their soul out. I don’t know if they die, get reincarnated, haunt our dreams from the After, or do whatever it is that you believe happens to people when they die. But I think once you complete the Binding, you remove that person’s soul from their own body forever. If you did bind to another body, anything that happened to your original form would not affect you, and you would live out the rest of your days in your new host, until you chose a different vessel.”

  Graciela eagerly devoured the information pouring from her young confidant. She couldn’t help but feel some relief. A lutkar. At least now she had a name to call herself.

  Another question nagged her. “Why haven’t I heard of lutkars before? Are there any here?”

  “At Hope? I don’t know. I don’t think so. They’re not the most common of the Awakened, but they’re not as rare as meeting Myths. Besides, if there were, they would likely call themselves puppeteers. That’s what lutkar means in Bosnian.”

  Puppeteer. It was an interesting feeling to become something new, for your entire being to suddenly feel foreign, but then to hear one word and think, yep, that’s me. It felt like finding home, like an empty space had needed filling all this time, but she never quite knew what was meant to go in its place.

  “I think you should stick with lutkar though. It sounds cooler,” Adelaide interjected with pluck.

  Graciela couldn’t fight it. Adelaide’s glee and humor was infectious. “I think so too,” she agreed, playfully scrunching her nose and giving the girl a pat on the head. “Thank you, Adelaide. I really appreciate this.”

  “No problemo.”

  “No problema,” Graciela corrected kindly. “What do you say we go grab some food? It’s probably almost breakfast time.”

  Walking hand in hand, they skipped down the streets, intent on bringing back some cheer to Hope. Already the place was coming alive again, only two days after the attack. People were beginning to feel safe once more, especially now that they knew the leader of their attackers was dead. They had Sean to thank for that.

  Their stroll carried them past the medical tent. To her surprise, she heard Mara speaking inside, and it made her heart race. Her first thought was joyous, assuming that the soldier from Italy had finally awakened. Another voice, lowered and guarded, responded, and Graciela recognized it instantly as her brother’s. Curiosity won her over, and she couldn’t help but feel the impulse to check in on Mara one more time.

  “Adelaide, do you mind meeting me there? I need to finish some work inside real fast.”

  “I don’t know why you people keep trying to lie to me. You know I can hear your thoughts,” she said wryly, continuing to skip to the dining tent. “Good luck in there.”

  Graciela entered the infirmary with her head lowered, trying to be as least obvious as possible.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Mara

  Two days had passed since Laurel walked into their lives and since Mara had seen the outside of the medic tent. Although multiple people tried relieving her from various watch shifts, she refused to get rest anywhere besides the cot alongside the mysterious officer. If Laurel were to awaken, Mara wanted to be there. She needed to be there. This was more important to her than anything else, and although it seemed to confound everyone else, she thought it was pretty obvious why.

  With much protest, Mara was able to get her way. Even Sean, the usual over-protector that he was, let her stay nearby the sleeping soldier as long as Mara promised to take
breaks and to eat when food was brought to her.

  Fortunately, for the time being, no one was pestering her to do any of the things she’d promised. It was a relief to have some time to herself. Only in these solitary moments did she allow herself to drift back home to her family, to wonder about their well-being and the state of Italia amid the world’s rebellion. She could only assume her beloved country had suffered the same fate as the rest of the world, but still she found herself clinging to that small shred of hope that her homeland persevered. It seemed possible, if not foolhardy. Last she’d heard from her sister Giulia, so few Awakened had been in Italia that the government had deemed them non-threatening to the general public.

  Of course, it had been over a year ago. A lot could change in a year. A lot had changed in a year.

  Regardless of the severity of the news Laurel brought, Mara needed to hear it, needed the closure it would bring her, one way or another.

  And so, she waited for the officer to rouse, and for her breakfast to arrive, mindlessly purring an old canto italiano her father had sung to her as a child.

  “Sii paziente, il mio amore,

  Un giorno anche tu volerá.

  Fiorire per sempre, il mio fiore,

  E non dovrai mai crollerá.”

  “With a voice like that, you should be careful. You might be lulling her into a deeper sleep.”

  The corners of her lips tugged at Santiago’s complimentary entrance.

  “Really though. It’s beautiful.” Without invitation, Santiago gently leaned against the bed beside where Mara sat.

  Instantly she was aware of the warmth that radiated from him. Energy bounced between the small space between them in palpable ripples.

  He cleared his throat, “Spanish and Italian are similar, so I caught a few words. The song is about patience for a flower to bloom?”

  A weak laugh broke her usually stoic disposition. “Literally, yes. But like most songs in italiano, it is more figurative. It’s about a father who tells his daughter she can do anything she puts her mind to, as long as she ignores the cynics and misanthropes.”