by Julie Hall
“Audrey, stop, look!” He shook me once, hard. Down the hallway, an angel soared above the crowd toward us.
“We’re not here to protect them, but they are. She’ll be fine.” I stopped struggling even as the angel settled over the girl, spreading its wings above her.
“If we want to stay in this fight, we’ve got to go.” Logan’s voice was even, but there was urgency beneath the calm.
Logan was difficult to keep up with. Even though theoretically I could have run forward unhindered, I couldn’t stop the reflex to dodge people, and I kept ramming myself into the walls to avoid them. Whenever I glanced forward, Logan seemed further away. I rushed to catch up, but it was slow going.
An all-too-familiar screech rang out, higher-pitched and louder than what was coming from the scared kids around us. And then, in front of us, a hunter was thrown through the air and collided with a locker. He hit it with a dull thud and slumped to the ground. A few more hunters rushed to his aid. Logan stopped to assess the scene. My heart rate picked up. The boy and his demon were just around the corner.
“Get out of here, Lyons!” a strained voice shouted.
“Man, you don’t have to do this.”
Someone was trying to reason with the shooter. Someone young.
The only people around me were hunters. I hoped that was because all the teachers and students had made it out of the school unharmed. That is, except for the two boys around the corner. The two I could hear but not yet see.
“I mean it, you’re not like them, but I’m warning you, that doesn’t mean I won’t do it,” the shooter’s voice said.
It was silent for a moment. The tension froze my forward momentum.
A loud bang reverberated down the passage, filling my ears and searing into my heart.
I started violently at the sound of the shot.
“I said get out of here!” screamed the shooter.
My heart beat wildly. Was there going to be a dead boy around the next turn? Would I be able to deal with that?
Not waiting any longer, Logan rounded the corner not more than twenty feet in front of me. I started to follow but heard the skidding footsteps too late and collided with someone at the bend in the hallway. I stumbled back at the force. A boy lay at my feet, knocked on his back by the collision.
He cast hasty looks around as he frantically scrambled back up, and for a split second, he glanced up and looked right at me. I blinked and the moment passed—and so did he. The boy who had been talking to the shooter. He was okay.
But on the heels of that thought, I fell straight to my knees in the middle of the hall, in the middle of the chase. It was all there in an instant.
Every memory from my life, back where it always should have been.
I remembered my parents, Judy and Dean. I remembered my siblings. My sisters Jessica and Lainie, and my little brother, James. James Lyons.
The same little brother who had just rushed by to get away from the gunfire I was running toward.
The same precious little brother I’d stepped in front of and pushed out of the way of the car.
I put my hands on my ears and pressed down, hoping to block out some of the memories that were flashing through my mind.
It was too painful, too hurtful to remember now.
I wasn’t ready, wasn’t prepared to deal with them.
This timing was all wrong.
I cried out in anguish, and it sounded as if my voice came from somewhere far away.
I had something to do, I knew I did, but my mind couldn’t push past the memories of all I’d lost.
I may have heard my name being shouted, but it barely registered.
I remembered the pickles again.
Those stupid pickles.
They were the last thing I’d fought with my brother about. I’d found them left out in the morning and thrown the whole jar away. He said it was fine to leave them out, and I said that once they’d been in the refrigerator they had to stay there.
I didn’t even like pickles, but I was still lecturing him for leaving them on the counter all night when the car came screeching around the corner—headed right for James, who was frozen in shock in the middle of the crosswalk.
It was as if I was there again. I felt my body start into motion with the ball of fear in my chest. I screamed at him to get out of the way, but he wouldn’t move.
Why wouldn’t he move?
I made it there in time to give him a shove strong enough to push him out of the way but ended up smashing into the vehicle myself.
In my mind I felt bones breaking, my body scraping across the ground after I’d been flipped over the car, and finally the blinding pain before the complete blackness as my head smashed into the pavement.
With a gasp I opened my eyes and was back in the school hallway. My heart would surely beat out of my chest as I gasped for air. I was having a panic attack, or else I was in shock.
My name was being yelled and I found the strength to lift my head. Logan, shouting for me to get up. I caught his blue eyes, the urgency in them. He needed me. They all did.
Down the hall, a demon’s claws were deeply imbedded in a boy no older than my brother.
A sophomore at most.
I didn’t remember his name—he would have been two grades below me—but I remembered his face. I’d seen him sitting alone in the lunchroom and walking through the halls with his head down, hood up, shoulders hunched.
He was small for his age. I didn’t remember having ever talked with him, but I also didn’t remember him looking this bad. His hair was matted and disheveled. His clothes were hanging loosely off his boney frame, and his eyes were glazed and vacant.
The demon snapped at the dozen or so fighters closing in but refused to relinquish its hold on the child. Logan and I stood several feet outside the shrinking circle of hunters. I had to do this. No matter what was going on in my head right now, I had to push it aside and get up.
I mentally shouted at my body to obey me, and for once it actually listened. A tear slipped down my cheek as I took a step toward the fight. I was ripping pieces of my heart out with every step, ordering myself not to turn around and look for James. I caught up to Logan, who grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake.
“Audrey, what’s going on? Are you all right?”
He looked rattled, torn between the demon and making sure I was okay. Although my mind was full, I suddenly felt very hollow. I didn’t know how to answer him. I looked him straight in the eyes, which was probably a mistake because it showed what a mess I was.
He nodded once, his lips drawn into a straight line. “Okay, we have to get you out of here. You’re not ready for this.”
I shook my head—I couldn’t leave now.
Another shot rang out. An angel appeared from who knows where and deflected the bullet intended for the fleeing students who had just burst out of a classroom. The chem lab, if I remembered correctly. Mr. Elliott’s class.
I flinched. There were more screams, but they seemed very far away. I looked frantically around to see if anyone had been injured. It didn’t appear that anyone was hit. I think the bullet had slammed into a locker.
Impulse took over. I shoved Logan’s hands off my shoulders and hurled myself toward the boy and the demon attached to his body.
The demon wasn’t the largest one I’d seen by far, but it was doing an effective job of keeping the other hunters at bay with its long, scaled tail, whipping it back and forth so quickly that no one could get close enough to pry the monster off the boy’s back. At this point the boy’s eyes were glassy. The demon had taken so much of his essence that he was barely a shell now.
I willed the boy to hang on.
Not stopping when I reached the other hunters, I pulled my sword from its sheath, and it instantly blazed to life. The demon shrieked at me. With a clean swipe, I severed its tail from its body. The tail turned to shadow, then disappeared.
I advanced on the beast. Its talons dug deeper into
the boy, and the child’s arm rose one more time, although this time he bent his wrist toward himself.
We were almost out of time.
Without a thought I brought my arm up and threw the blazing sword right at the demon’s head.
The sword missed its intended target but sank deeply into the creature’s shoulder. With an agonized scream, it finally pulled its claws from the boy and fell to the ground.
The demon pawed at the sword, trying to dislodge it.
The sword held its mark.
The flesh around the wound started to char and crumble away like overused coal.
I jerked my head up to locate Logan when the warning was shouted but couldn’t react fast enough. The demon coiled its decaying body and sprang at me, bringing us both to the ground.
We slid across the floor until I slammed into a row of lockers. The air was violently expelled from my lungs. I was suffocating with the demon right on top of me.
It gave a horrid scream, then sank its three rows of teeth into my right shoulder.
After that, I may have screamed myself.
The beast was tearing at the very fabric of my soul as well as the soft shoulder flesh. With the empathy connection made, I knew exactly what it wanted to do—what it craved doing. To rip my body to shreds and feast on my soul.
It hated me. Hated me with the purest hatred there was.
It lived only to see my destruction.
It was all rot and death and evil. And in that moment, it was all I felt and what I had become as well.
It offered a black hole to swallow me whole. Soon I was unable to feel fear because the creature’s vile blackness was consuming everything.
And then the hatred was ripped off of me.
I gasped for air, and my back arched off the ground. My vision was still black as I swam in the vile sensations and passions of the beast.
Someone put pressure on my shoulder, and I screamed in pain, my whole body arching away.
“Hold still!” someone yelled in my ear.
Out of instinct, I obeyed. It was Logan.
He knelt on my left, his shirt pressed against my shoulder. Naked from the waist up, he must have stripped off the top half of his body armor in order to use his shirt as a pressure bandage.
I would have made a joke if I didn’t hurt so badly and if my mind didn’t feel so fractured and violated.
The waves of pain were relentless. I held still out of sheer willpower to obey. Logan’s cheek and one of his arms were stained, or rather coated, with fresh blood. I panicked.
“Oh my gosh, you’re bleeding!”
I tried to sit up, but he pushed me roughly back.
“Don’t move. That’s your blood, not mine. Except for that scratch you gave me earlier.”
Oh. An angry ocean churned in blue eyes that wouldn’t meet my own.
A voice behind my head said, “It’s taken care of. The hunters are tending to the boy until an angel can arrive.”
Without turning from me, Logan nodded once. “I’m going to get her out of here. She needs to be treated. Send word that I’m taking her to the extraction point outside.”
“Yes, sir.”
And with that, Logan lifted my right hand and pressed it against the shirt covering my wound. He finally looked me in the eye. “I don’t care how much it hurts, press down on this hard.”
I’d seen Logan mad before, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him this worked up. Blackness still tinged the edges of my consciousness, but at this moment he scared me more. I nodded in agreement. The pain was truly dizzying, but I managed to keep pressure where he instructed.
He slid an arm underneath my knees and another under my back and lifted me from the ground. I bit my cheek to keep from crying out and tasted blood from biting down too hard.
Logan’s long strides took us to a courtyard in the middle of the school in a matter of moments. There were still some hysterics going on outside, but through the hurt it all seemed far away. I grasped at anything to take my mind off my injury.
“You know, Logan, if you wanted to get me in your arms again, all you had to do was ask.”
My lame attempt at a joke fell very flat. A muscle in Logan’s jaw twitched as if he was gritting his teeth, and he didn’t look down on me. A small knot of panic formed in my gut. Had I finally pushed him too far?
After a few long, silent moments, an angel appeared. He enveloped us in his wings, and in an instant we were gone.
We were taken straight to the healing center, the afterlife’s equivalent of a hospital. Logan pushed through a set of doors that led to what looked like an operating room. He briskly but gently set me on the flat bed and put his hand over mine to add pressure to my wound.
The empathy link between us sprang to life, and I was assaulted by Logan’s anger. I gasped at its intensity. He was furious.
He must have thought I gasped at the pressure, because he immediately let up a little, and in that moment I detected something hidden under the thick layer of anger. Logan was deeply concerned. So much so that he was trying to bury it under his anger. This was the first time Logan had ever purposefully touched me in this realm, and despite the pain, I found myself desperate to understand what he was feeling.
My eyes widened as I searched deeper, unable to get as far as I wanted. If I could have reached for his feelings with my fingers, I would have just grazed what he felt for me. I wanted to snatch it and bring it closer to get a better look, but it was buried too deep. But what I could brush felt strong and pure and had me panting for breath.
Was this what it meant to be bonded?
Logan stared down at me with one hand still applying pressure to my wound and the other pressed to the bed adjacent to my shoulder. His head blocked the light in the room, and his face was partly shadowed by his hair as he leaned over me. It reminded me of the first time I had fainted shortly after meeting him. Perhaps he was searching as deeply into my feelings now as I was into his.
The tricky thing about the empathy link was that if you weren’t completely sure of your feelings, they could easily get confused with those of the person you were touching. When I looked up at Logan, I wasn’t entirely sure whose emotions I felt. Something was blossoming in my chest, and I sucked in a quick breath.
“Why didn’t you wait?” he asked.
“What?” I couldn’t piece together what he wanted.
“What happened to you out there? Why didn’t you wait for us? Why didn’t you listen to me like you promised? Do you have any idea what could have actually happened to you?”
His voice wasn’t harsh, but it wasn’t gentle either.
“You mean something worse than this?”
Logan pressed his lips together in a thin line. “Yes, something worse than this.”
“It’s not like I could have been killed. I’m already dead.”
I let out a humorless laugh, but it caused my shoulder to move, and another bolt of pain shot through my body. I bit my lip to keep from gasping.
So quietly I almost couldn’t hear, Logan answered, eyes averted once again. “There are some things worse than death.”
I felt a bolt of dread shoot through Logan’s anger. He had a point. What in the world had I been thinking, attacking the demon like that? It was stupid and reckless, and I’d suffered because of it.
With a start, it all came crashing back. The memories. The pain, the sadness, the loss. Logan felt the moment it happened with the same intensity as I. He sucked in a breath of air so quickly it sounded like a hiss. He cradled my cheek with his free hand, capturing my eyes with his own.
My eyes pooled with tears, and the breath escaped my mouth in short gasps. Logan’s face began to blur, but I heard his voice and felt his gentle touch.
“Audrey, what’s going on here? What’s happening to you?”
I couldn’t get the words out. The anger in Logan’s core evaporated and was replaced with deep concern that bordered on panic. Closing my eyes, I blocked out the world. I d
idn’t even want Logan’s touch right now, and I struggled to get out of his grasp.
“Audrey, stop, stay with me. What’s going on?”
In that instant, the doors of the room flung open. The sound of people arguing filtered through to me, but I was in too much physical and emotional pain to comprehend. After a moment Logan’s hands left my body, and I was left to deal with only my own pain. Then, a soft familiar voice spoke in my ear, telling me to relax, and the next moment it was black.
24
God
Golden warmth pressed itself against my closed eyelids. I floated on a cloud, every part of my body perfectly relaxed and tranquil. I breathed in air so fresh I could have sworn it had begun to circulate through my body, energizing everything from fingertips to toes.
I brought my arms above my head and stretched languidly. I’d never felt so alive yet so peaceful. I could rest here forever. Wherever I was, it felt like heaven.
I pressed my fingers to the cloud beneath me and was startled by the frosty bite of cold. I sucked in a crisp breath of air, and my eyelids fluttered against the brightness.
The world slowly began to take shape. The golden glow suspended above me morphed into blue skies. A brisk gust of wind forced my eyelids shut once again and blew strands of hair across my face, tickling my cheeks.
It didn’t take long for the cold beneath my fingers to seep in, causing a chill to run up my arms and down my back to my feet. I opened my eyes with more clarity this time. I had been wrong. I wasn’t resting in a cloud but was instead sprawled face-up on a brittle bed of snow. I pushed the weight of my half-frozen body to a sitting position and then to a stand, crystallized snow crunching underneath as I moved.
Hand to brow, I surveyed the world around me. I stood on the summit of a snow-covered peak, high up and looking down at the sparkling city beneath. Buildings and structures I’d first considered cold, sterile, and untouchable, I now knew pulsated with life. I imagined a warm glow palpitating from the white marble. Another gust of wind, noticeably colder than the last, added ice to my blood, reminding me just how far away I was from the sanctuary below.
