by Sarah Fine
“Wait, are we going back to the Station?” Jim said. “That’s so stupid! I thought we were supposed to be killing all of these Mazikin things. You let that one go!”
“Shut up!” I yelled, banging on the dashboard. “My God, do you not realize you could have gotten both of us arrested? Are you still drunk? Chasing a screaming woman through a populated area? Threatening to hit her in front of a bunch of witnesses? In complete violation of my orders! Don’t say another word, Jim. I fucking swear I’ll stab you if you do.”
The realization seemed to have sunk in. Jim wisely stayed silent as I drove us to the pickup spot. Malachi texted that he and Henry would be there, but it was still the biggest relief to see them standing at the curb. Henry slid into the backseat while Malachi folded himself into the front passenger seat. He sat back and put his seat belt on as I lurched onto the street, cutting off another car.
“What happened?” he asked.
I shook my head, knowing that I’d start yelling again if I tried to explain.
“We saw one,” Jim said from the back. “In a park. It had killed some old guy.”
I slowed down and drove more carefully, feeling Malachi’s eyes on my face. “But you didn’t follow the protocol,” he said.
My nostrils flared as I squeezed the steering wheel … much like I wanted to be squeezing Jim’s neck. Malachi touched my arm. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” I had a feeling if I mentioned the way that Jim had shoved me, Malachi would gut him.
My Lieutenant pivoted in his seat. “You violated her orders, didn’t you?” he asked in a deadly calm voice.
“I chased it,” Jim said defensively.
“That’s insubordination,” Malachi snarled. “You might have alerted the Mazikin to our presence in the area. And you endangered our Captain.”
I reached for Malachi’s hand, which was clenched in a tight fist. It loosened slightly at my touch.
“She’s fine,” Jim mumbled.
“No thanks to you, it seems,” said Henry. “Jim, your actions affect more than just yourself. We all have to help each other, or else someone’s going to get killed.”
Jim punched the ceiling of the car. “Shut up!”
“This isn’t the first time you’ve disobeyed orders,” Malachi guessed. “I would bet that it is not the first time you’ve endangered another Guard either.”
“Stop!” Jim shouted, a frantic edge in his voice. “You don’t know anything about me!”
We were slowing down for a red light when Jim threw the door open and jumped out. I slammed on the brakes. Jim was a mess as he stumbled onto the sidewalk, his eyes red-rimmed, his chest heaving. He hesitated for a moment, staring back at me, and then turned on his heel and sprinted away.
“He may be able to outrun us,” Henry said quietly. “But there’s no way that kid can outrun all his demons.”
SIX
WE SPENT NEARLY FOUR hours driving around town looking for Jim before we gave up and headed back to the Station. Although I’d hoped for some time alone with Malachi, we were all exhausted and down after losing one of our Guards, and I left to go back to Diane’s with nothing but a squeeze of his hand and a lingering stare that made me wish we were regular kids without the weight of the world on our shoulders.
I fell into bed at two and got up at seven even though it was a Saturday, eager to shed my dreams of being locked in a car with Jim, who was driving the wrong way on I-95, steering our car toward the headlights of an oncoming semi. I showered and sat at the breakfast table, letting my cereal get soggy as I scrolled through not one but three texts from Ian that had come in after I’d sunk into a heavy, exhausted sleep.
2:17 a.m.: Got yr number from Teg. Aden ran off. Seen him? Plz lemme no
2:29 a.m.: Still in area? Cant find Aden. Msg me if u have ideas where to look
3:34 a.m.: Found him. Sry for bothering u
I was glad he’d found Aden, but had to wonder what kind of shape our star pitcher would be in this morning when we all showed up to volunteer at the homeless shelter.
Keys jangled at the front door and Diane walked in, her footsteps heavy. “Hi, baby. You’re up early,” she said in a weary voice.
“Morning. Quiet shift?”
She made a so-so gesture and shed her jacket; then she headed for the kitchen.
“Hey,” I called, shoving my phone in my pocket. “I need to ask you something. I want to go to this volunteer thing with Tegan this morning.”
She smiled as she pulled a box of cereal from the cabinet. “She’s the friend who planned Nadia’s vigil, right?” I nodded. “What are you doing?”
I crossed my fingers under the table. “Going to a soup kitchen. We’re helping to serve meals.”
She froze. “A soup kitchen here in Warwick?”
I considered lying, but Diane knew the area really well, and she’d figure it out. “No, um … Pawtucket.”
Her smile evaporated as she closed the cupboard and turned to face me. “Haven’t we talked about this? I don’t want you in that area. Every night there are more sightings. I just heard that a homeless man was mauled to death by something last night, right around there!”
I shrugged even though my heart was beating really hard. “But all that stuff’s going on at night, and we’ll be there in the middle of the day. With a lot of other people. Doing good.” And maybe spotting a Mazikin or two. If they were really attacking the homeless, whether to possess their bodies or to steal their supplies, maybe a homeless shelter was the best place for the Guards to be.
Diane folded her arms over her chest. “Can’t you do good somewhere else?”
“Diane, I’m going to be with a group of other kids, surrounded by responsible adults. This shelter serves meals to people who are homeless.” I cleared my throat. “If it hadn’t been for you, I might have been on the streets, too. So maybe I’d like to give back.”
It was absolutely true, but even so I worried I was laying it on a little thick. Then I saw that her eyes had gone all shiny. She turned away and wiped at them. “You can go, baby. Just be careful, okay? I couldn’t handle it if anything happened to you.”
Now my eyes were probably getting shiny. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Thanks.” I got up and set my cereal bowl in the sink. “You don’t have to worry about me,” I said quietly.
Her laughter was brief and raspy. “The hell I don’t.” She waved at the door. “Have fun. Do good.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I was pulling into the driveway of the Guard house about fifteen minutes later. I tromped up the steps and knocked, but no one answered, so I let myself in. Malachi had left a note for me on the kitchen table. I smiled at the tiny, neat script. And then I processed the words: Jim has not returned. Henry and I are training in the basement. Come down.
I groaned. We were supposed to pick up Tegan in an hour, and one of my Guards was still missing. And, with a twinge of guilt, I realized I wasn’t that broken up about it. Maybe we’d be better off without him. Not the most charitable thought I’d ever had, but there it was. Jim was a problem, and I had too many of those already. I could only hope Raphael and the Judge would realize that assigning him to this mission had been a mistake.
I paused at the top of the stairs, listening to the sharp breaths and grunts of my Guards sparring. The basement of the Guard house was a near-perfect replica of the training room used by the Guards in the dark city, except the light was provided by halogen bulbs instead of gas lamps, and it was about a third the size. Malachi had told me that Raphael sometimes opened some kind of door to the Shadowlands down here, and that the morning after we’d arrived on Earth, Michael, the Guards’ weapons supplier, had done the same. I guessed it was something only angels could do because the foul-tempered fat man had magically appeared, along with his entire blacksmith’s forge and a respectable arsenal. Along the far wall, staffs, knives, and sharp things I didn’t even recognize hung in orderly rows. Cloth dummies were clumped together in a corner.
The floor was covered with a thick rubber mat, soft enough that we wouldn’t break bones when we hit.
And that was good because Henry crashed to the mat with a loud thud right as I reached the bottom of the stairs. His face was twisted in a grimace, showing all his crooked teeth. A weird wheezing sound was coming from his throat. I was about to ask him if he needed Raphael, but then realized he wasn’t in pain.
He was laughing.
Malachi leaned down and offered his hand, which Henry accepted. Once Henry was on his feet, the two of them stepped apart, both breathing hard. Malachi gave Henry a genuine smile as the older Guard wiped his face on his sleeve.
“Henry’s a very crafty fighter,” said Malachi.
Henry grunted. “Doesn’t matter much when your opponent is both stronger and more efficiently brutal. You have some things to teach me. I’ve always been better at a distance. In the Wasteland, I used a crossbow.”
“What do the Guards in the Wasteland do if there aren’t Mazikin to fight?” I asked.
Henry turned to me, his face serious. “We protect anyone who needs it. There are creatures there. Wolves as tall as a man and twice as broad. Vultures with twenty-foot wingspans. Humans who have lost touch with anything that made them human. In a place where everyone’s a murderer, there are still different kinds of evil. Lots of ’em.” It seemed like he was avoiding my eyes.
I looked him over. Henry’d basically just confirmed he was a killer, but then again … technically, all of us were. And he’d been chosen as a Guard and then chosen for this mission—where he had yet to disobey an order, unlike Jim. I was beginning to believe Henry might prove useful. “What’s the range of your crossbow?” I asked.
Henry’s eyebrows rose, like that wasn’t the question he expected me to ask. But then his thin lips formed the faintest smile. “Sixty yards, maybe?” His gaze flitted cautiously to mine.
“In other words, you can shoot to kill from far away.”
He nodded.
“That could be really important,” I said. “Maybe you have something to teach us, Henry.”
He bowed his head. “I’m going to go wash up before we go,” he said quietly, and marched up the stairs, that faint smile still on his face.
“That was good, Lela,” Malachi said when the door to the basement clicked shut.
“What?” I tore my eyes from the stairs to look at him. He was wearing warm-up pants and a sweaty T-shirt that clung to his lean torso.
“Henry thought you would judge him for his past crimes. But you showed him that you value what he can do now. You’re earning his loyalty. It’s a good thing to have as his commander.”
“If only I could do the same with Jim,” I said.
He nodded, his jaw tightening. “I don’t think Jim has been a Guard for very long.”
“What makes you say that?”
His eyes met mine. “Because when Guards are first sentenced, they often don’t … accept it.”
“Did you?”
He rubbed his hand over the hair on the back of his head. “I tried to escape at least three times before I realized it was impossible. Worse than that, I attacked my Captain at the time, Philip, and Takeshi, who was my Lieutenant, on numerous occasions, unable to control my anger about the situation.”
“How long did it take you to adjust?” I asked.
Malachi considered this. “It took me over a year to resign myself to my new existence.”
“A year?” I asked in a choked voice.
Malachi folded his arms over his chest. “Hopefully, Jim will learn faster than I did.” The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “You certainly have.”
“I’m trying, but I’ll be honest: part of me wants to blow off my responsibilities and go to a movie or something.”
He smiled and closed the distance between us. “Could I go with you?”
“Of course,” I whispered, suddenly breathless as his fingertips skimmed along my neck.
“There are so many things I’d like to experience here,” he murmured.
“What would you do if you could do anything?” I asked, remembering how he had looked when he was at school: like he’d hit the lottery. “If you were free. If you weren’t a Guard.”
He pondered that for a few moments. “I think I’d travel. I want to see the world as it is now. I’d go to Bratislava, maybe. I would walk the streets and breathe in the scents of the city and not worry about who was at my back.”
“And after that?”
“I think I’d like to go to university,” he said, and then gave me this adorably sheepish look. “I would perhaps study to be a teacher. Or maybe do something with computers. I like them.”
My voice was husky and strained as I said, “So basically, you’re saying you would be an ordinary guy. With a normal kind of life.”
He slid his arm around my waist. “I would love nothing more than that. To have a job. A home. A family. To wake on a Sunday and choose to stay in bed with my love warm beside me. To chase my children around the backyard. To watch them grow and know that they would have that chance. That it could not be taken from them.”
My chest ached fiercely. Suddenly I wanted these things for him more than I wanted anything else. And more than that, I wanted to be part of it. I touched his face, smoothing my fingers along the plane of his cheekbone. “Maybe you could have that someday. Maybe it’s possible.”
Our eyes met. “Maybe it is,” he whispered.
The door at the top of the stairs creaked open. “Hey, Captain,” Henry called from the top of the stairs.
I jerked away from Malachi. “Yes?”
“You want me to leave early? Maybe go scope the place out?” Unlike Jim or Malachi, Henry actually knew how to drive, and Raphael had gotten him a driver’s license. The plan had been for him to drive with Jim to the shelter in the generic gray sedan, but now he’d be going alone.
“Sure,” I said, sounding winded. “We’ll see you there.”
The door closed again, leaving Malachi and me staring at each other.
“We have some time before we need to pick up Tegan,” he said. “Do you want to train for a bit?” He moved closer and wrapped one of my curls around his finger. “Or do you want to …” He lowered his head and brushed his lips over mine, and it sent the most powerful jolt of want through me that I took a full step back, shaky and overwhelmed.
“We should train!” I squeaked, not sure I could trust myself. Beneath the weight of all the new things I wanted to share with him, I was tempted to forget what we were actually here to do.
“Come on then, Captain,” he said, stepping back and arching his eyebrow. “Show me how much you’ve learned.” He beckoned me forward. A challenge, for sure.
He probably had no idea how much it felt like a seduction.
I planted my feet on the mat, breathing like I’d been sprinting. My thighs and calves ached; I’d done about a thousand knee strikes in the last half hour. The muscles of my abs and arms were screaming, too, courtesy of palm and elbow strikes aplenty. I had knotted my unruly hair to keep it away from my face, but tendrils of it had escaped and were sticking to the sweat beading on my temples. I’d shed my hoodie and was down to my T-shirt.
Malachi had stripped off his shirt entirely. It was miserably distracting. He stood across from me, a spider waiting for a vibration in his web. The only part of him that moved was his eyes, following me as I moved closer.
“Are you waiting for some type of signal from me?” I asked.
A shadow of a smile crossed his face. “Always.”
“It would feel less weird if you attacked. You know, like a Mazikin.”
“Maybe I need practice, too.”
I laughed as I took another step toward him. “You’re hilarious.”
I faked toward his left and then skipped back out of his reach as he blocked and recovered.
His dark eyes never left mine. “And you’re dangerous.”
“I’m trying.”
“Keep
your weight on your rear leg so that you can propel yourself forward. You cannot rely on your upper body strength alone …”
Before he finished his sentence, I threw myself into an attack. He blocked most of my strikes easily with his forearms, but I landed a palm strike against his chest that resonated with a deep thud and left an angry red mark on his skin.
I dropped my arms immediately. “I’m sorry!”
His shoulder hit my chest before I could draw another breath, driving me backward until my back smacked against the wall. “Don’t you dare lower your guard!” he said as he released me. “You need to break that habit, Lela. Do your damage, drop your opponent, and don’t stop fighting until it’s done.”
I shoved off the wall and got my fists up before he could hit me again. Malachi was all severe angles and barely contained ferocity, the way he always looked when we trained—so intent, so determined to make me better.
I ducked to avoid his palm strike and gritted my teeth when his knee hit my side and sent me flying. Instead of pain, all I felt was a grim resolve, this desperate desire not to let him down. And also … that bone-deep hunger for him I couldn’t shake. It was too big to understand and too scary to analyze, but it was there, always. Low in my belly, clawing at me.
I scrambled to my feet, keeping low to avoid another kick, and leaped on his back. I wrapped my arm around his neck in a choke hold and hung on as long as I could before he flipped me over his shoulders and onto my back. In a flash he had me pinned to the floor. The weight of his body sent shockwaves of heat through mine. It should have scared me. It did scare me, but it was also exactly what I wanted.
Instead of punching or choking me, which was what he was supposed to be doing, Malachi stared down at me, his chest heaving, his eyes dark and intense. They held me fast, quickening my pulse. My hands slid up his arms, over the raised welts of his battle scars, over sweat-slicked skin and the rigid muscles of his shoulders. I took his face in my hands. “You win,” I whispered, pulling him down, giving him the signal I hoped he’d been looking for.
