by Jen Klein
It sounded human.
It ended in a crushing thump when she hit the concrete far below.
Dark Angel gazed down at me. “It was justice,” he said by way of explanation.
I looked up at Corabelle’s murderer, this too-good-looking guy holding the keys to my muddled history. My teeth chattered against each other, despite the warm still-summer air. “What now?”
He shrugged. “Now someone else will have to watch you.”
I opened my mouth to ask a question—to ask every question—but he was already heading back to the helicopter. A moment later, it lifted into the sky. The lights and the deafening whir faded. I was alone on the roof.
Me. The Abomination.
Twenty-Seven
Aggie and Edmund had an older-model Honda Civic with four doors and five seats. The car’s interior carried the fragrance of apples and peanut butter. I wondered if they had bought it used from another family or if Norbert was just one of those guys who always smells like a little kid.
Uncle Edmund was silent at the wheel, as was Aunt Aggie in the passenger seat. I was silent in the back beside Norbert—who was still sporting the white bandage over one side of his head—as we drove up the 405 to the Valley.
I probably needed a bandage too. For more than my injuries. But when I had descended from the roof, I’d refused all medical assistance. I sent Sky a text with my last scrap of battery power. Then I went straight to Aggie and Edmund and Norbert. As far as the hospital staff was concerned, I was fine and I wanted to go home.
At least half of that was true.
Norbert had long since fallen asleep. He flopped against me when we made the turn onto Exposition. I didn’t mind the sweaty weight of his head on my shoulder. I didn’t even mind that we’d left my GTO in Leimert Park.
As we crested the top of the hill and saw the lights of the San Fernando Valley sparkling before us, I could hear Aunt Aggie talking softly to Uncle Edmund. “You know she’s going to tell Norbert. That boy dies of withdrawal, and then his girlfriend commits suicide off the hospital roof. It’s all too terrible for words. We have to . . .”
Uncle Edmund murmured something I couldn’t hear. My aunt settled back into her seat. The exits slid past us in silence.
I wondered if he’d said something about my sister.
But I was too exhausted and numb and bruised to ask about her or my obituary or to find out if anyone in the car had heard of the Abomination (otherwise known as me). Besides, even though my cousin was drooling—just a little—on my shirt, I didn’t want to wake him up.
Maybe I fell asleep too, because suddenly we were parked in Norbert’s driveway. I allowed myself to be taken inside, to be led down the stairs and tucked into a sleeping bag laid across the couch in their basement. I breathed in the comforting mustiness, closed my eyes, and drifted away.
The next morning, Aunt Aggie called the school office and said that Norbert and I were sick. She told us that education was important and she didn’t believe in fibs, but this one time only, she would tell a lie.
“It’s okay to take a day off when you need it. Sometimes lies are necessary.”
She didn’t notice my sudden smile at this explanation. Or maybe she did. She didn’t smile back.
After an utterly silent breakfast of scrambled eggs and cinnamon rolls, Uncle Edmund said he’d drive me back to Leimert Park to get my car. I saw Aunt Aggie’s lips purse, and I gathered that she’d already registered a protest about it. “I don’t see why you can’t—”
Uncle Edmund cut her off. “Jilly will feel better when her wheels are at home.”
“Then why don’t we all go get her car?”
“I want some time alone with my niece,” Uncle Edmund said. That put an end to that.
Among all the fake people in my life, of all the people living lies, I still respected Uncle Edmund more than most. He’d lied to protect me—and that helped, or it would once I knew the reasons—but mostly he’d lied to protect Norbert. That I could understand. Sometimes a lie is indeed necessary. Now I just needed to know why. That he could understand.
We were inching south on the 405 when he finally spoke. “Your aunt doesn’t want me to talk to you about your sister.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s very sad,” he said, careful to stare straight ahead at the sluggish crawl of cars. “She’s afraid of what it will make you think of your parents.”
My mouth went dry. I didn’t answer.
“My brother was a mess,” Uncle Edmund explained. I could tell from the fidgety way he spoke, fingers tapping the steering wheel, that he was embarking on a speech he’d rehearsed many times in his head but had never wanted to give in real life. “He ran away from home all the time when he was your age. Got in trouble with the police. Drugs. And girls. There were always girls around . . .”
I didn’t want to know about my father’s sordid escapades. The only thing I cared about was my sister, but Uncle Edmund needed to get there in his own time.
“Go on,” I told him.
“Everything changed when he met your mom. As far as I’m concerned, he would be dead if it wasn’t for Gwen. He grew up because he made a choice to grow up. He grew up for her.”
I blinked back the sudden heat behind my eyes. If he grew up for her, why couldn’t he be there for me?
“But he also left us for her,” my uncle said, as if reading my mind. “We wouldn’t see him for months at a time, sometimes years, and then we started hearing about this stuff he was teaching, this crazy business he was in. Our parents didn’t like it, but me and Aggie . . . we didn’t care.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “She believes in it, you know.”
I nodded. It made sense. It actually went a long way toward explaining why Norbert was the way he was—a fellow believer living a nice, sheltered life. “Do you?”
“I think sometimes it’s better not to know.”
Right. I couldn’t help but think that this too was something he’d prepared for a worst-case scenario. Something to soothe Norbert or me, without sugarcoating the truth. Why not? Everything would be a lot easier right now if I wasn’t aware of any of it either. If I could just tootle on with my life. If I could go back to being a fake detective solving fake cases.
“Your parents didn’t tell us they were expecting you,” Uncle Edmund said. “They had already moved to California, and we only found out after you’d been born. They sent a picture. You were cute, by the way. Bald, but cute.”
“Thanks.”
His grip tightened on the wheel. “Rosemary . . .”
My sister.
“She was born a year later. Again, they hadn’t told us she was coming, so we had no idea it would be a bad time to take a cross-country road trip and surprise them. We surprised them, all right. Rosemary was two weeks old and . . . there was something wrong with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first Lew and Gwen didn’t want to show her to us, but there we were in the living room, and you were so little and toddling around, bumping into things. They couldn’t exactly say no.” Uncle Edmund coughed into his hand. “They swore us to secrecy. They said we couldn’t tell anyone there was a new baby, and then they brought her downstairs.” He stopped talking while he concentrated on merging onto the 10 going east. Once we were securely in a lane, he continued. “Her skin was so pale. Too pale, almost like glass. You could see her veins through it, and her hair and her eyes were white.”
I swallowed, trying to shut out the memory of Misty’s skin. “Her eyes?”
“All of them, pupils and everything. She’d turn her head to follow noise, but then it seemed like . . .” Again, he paused. “It seemed like she was looking through you. I can’t explain it.”
“What happened to her?” It was hard to get the words out past the lump in my throat. Not only was the obituary right
about one thing—that there had really been a sister—but I had actually known her. Maybe my parents had sat beside me on the couch and helped me hold her, this strange and scary and tiny baby. Maybe they had let me give her a bottle. Maybe we’d all sung a song to her. I wished I could remember.
“They sent her away. I don’t know where. They said it was for protection.” He changed lanes and began to pick up speed.
“Were they afraid I would hurt her?” I asked in a small voice.
“No,” Uncle Edmund said very gently. His hand darted out and gave my wrist a quick squeeze. “It was the other way around. They were afraid she would hurt you.”
Once I’d gotten my car, once I’d driven it safely back to the Valley, I went right back to Uncle Edmund and Aunt Aggie’s house. I spent the rest of the morning playing video games with Norbert in the basement. We didn’t discuss anything. Norbert did his best to respect my desire for silence. It wasn’t until after Aunt Aggie brought down pizza for lunch, and after we had washed it back with sodas from the little fridge, that my cousin couldn’t take it any longer. “What now?” he burst out.
I’d sent Sky a text the night before. He’d never responded. I knew what I had to do.
“Now we go to back to my dad’s house.”
Norbert frowned. “Why?”
“Because my dad knows a lot about succubi.”
“All the succubi we know are dead.”
“True.” I nodded. “But it turns out there are crazier things out there than succubi.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . the Abomination.”
By the time we’d parked ourselves among the stacks of boxes in my dad’s upstairs study, I’d finished unloading everything to Norbert—all the things about the dark angel guy and Sky’s betrayal, plus my own mysterious starring role in my epic family drama. I’d expected a big reaction.
I didn’t get one.
Norbert was shockingly chill. He didn’t even freak out upon learning that his aunt had allegedly been a member of an ancient, powerful race and that she—along with six others—had betrayed her kind. I mean, our kind.
He was all business.
“First things first,” he said.
“Torch the place?” I suggested.
“I was thinking more along the lines of hacking into Uncle Lewis’s network.”
“That probably makes more sense.” I allowed my eyes to travel around my dad’s study. I hadn’t set foot inside it in over two years, but everything was exactly how I remembered. Big carved worktable. A wall clock with hieroglyphics in place of numbers. A low bench made of amber, the shape of a skeleton suspended in its depths. I remembered being little and tracing its outline against the surface of the bench while my dad worked. He had told me it was a bat, but now that I was looking at it through more grown-up eyes, I could see that it had a double set of wings.
Like Corabelle’s double tongue.
Norbert fired up my father’s old desktop computer and started tapping away. “Do you want to check the bookcase?”
I tore my eyes away from the bench. “Sure. What am I looking for?”
“I don’t know. A family tree would be helpful.”
I crossed to the shelves and started browsing. The books were old and dusty, and most titles seemed to relate to the earth: Precambrian Mountain Ranges . . . Icelandic Hotspot . . . Weather Trends of the High Middle Ages . . .
Norbert made a clucking sound.
“You got something?” I asked him.
“I’m almost in, but there’s a block. I need a password.”
“That could be anything.”
“I know.” Norbert peered at the computer screen. “It’s more protected than I thought. I can’t get past this prompt.”
I turned away from the bookshelf. We were screwed. I didn’t know the first concert my dad went to, or even his mother’s birth name.
“It’s weird, though, because it’s not a question. It’s a hint. He must have picked it himself. It’s a word. One word.”
I was almost afraid to ask. “What is it?”
Norbert looked up at me. “Regret.”
What else? I felt a flash of anger. Regret was a luxury. It wasn’t something my father should have been indulging in. Not when he had made the choice to run out on his family. Regret that, asshole.
Regret me.
“Try family,” I said.
Tap-tap-tap. “Nope.” Norbert hit a few more keys. “And not your name either. Or your mom’s. Should I try birthdays?”
“Sure . . . No. Not birthdays. I know what he regrets. Try this.” I paused for a second before I said it. “Rosemary.”
Norbert thwacked some keys. He beamed up at me. “I’m in!”
Oddly, there wasn’t a whole lot on succubi in the files. There was a whole lot more about creatures I’d never heard of. Creatures called the Elem.
According to my father’s files, the Elem once ruled the world. They were like humans, but faster and stronger, with all kinds of crazy powers at their disposal. They were pretty much in charge of all the other creatures. Creatures like succubi.
But like all empires, theirs couldn’t last forever. No empire can.
Just ask the Romans.
From what Norbert and I could discern from my father’s notes, it looked like the Elem had known their rule was about to come to an end (which had to suck), so they’d started squabbling about what to do. They split into two factions. One wanted to become a part of the world that was coming, and the other wanted to fight against it. The two sides went to war, and you can pretty much guess what happened: whole cities turned to dust, massive calamities, things like that. At the end of the day, the leaders of both camps were forced to surrender. They got together and made a pact (or rather, a Pact): everyone would go to sleep—a special, magical sleep—rather than allow the world to be torn apart.
Norbert squinted at the screen. “It says the Elem ‘crawled into the bones of the earth.’”
“What does that mean, ‘bones of the earth’?”
He shrugged. “You got me.”
I flashed back to the rooftop and what Corabelle had said to me. My mother hadn’t fallen asleep with her kind. She and the other six traitors had stayed awake, and now others were awakening too.
“Corabelle,” I said out loud.
“Huh?”
“Corabelle said she’d been awakened . . .”
But that didn’t make sense. Corabelle was a succubus, not an Elem. I returned to the screen. “All evidence of their existence was erased from the world,” I read aloud before looking over at Norbert again. “Okay, that’s wrong. We know all evidence wasn’t erased because, besides the monsters we keep tripping over, everyone keeps talking about keys and bridges.”
Norbert shrugged again, peering at the screen. “Maybe it’s like wiping a kitchen counter. It might look like you got everything. You might even have used a spray bottle, but you always miss a crumb or two. Maybe a piece sticks in the grout or gets stuck in a corner somewhere. A splash of milk dries before anyone can clean it, and the residue is still there, nearly invisible. Stuff sticks around.”
I swatted his arm. “That’s a lot to get from Dad’s file.”
“I’m extrapolating.”
I started to pace around the cluttered room, my mind racing again, a familiar heat rising somewhere inside my chest. “The Pact was broken. And the new world has to be our world. So do you think that guy on the roof was an Elem? One of the original seven hidden Elem? If so, he would have known my mother.” I waited for my cousin to agree with me, but when I looked over at him, he was frozen. “Norb?”
He stared at the screen.
“Norbert!”
His face had gone pale. “They set a trap for the seven who didn’t sleep.” He quoted the words as they formed in my head,
lifted verbatim from the terrifying memory of that thing in Misty’s lair: “The seven lied and one of them died.”
“Norbert.” I whispered.
“Jillian, there’s more,” he whispered back.
Of course there was more.
“There was a law,” he said. And then he spit it out in one fast breath: “A-law-decreeing-separation-between-worlds.”
“What does that even—” I started to ask, and then stopped.
Click.
The puzzle pieces came together with a sickening lurch.
I stared at Norbert. “Someone broke that law. Two someones. An Elem and a human.”
Norbert stood and stepped toward me, unsure of what to do. I knew he wanted to hug me. But he also knew I didn’t want to be hugged. “You were that first child. When you were born, the trap was sprung. The doors opened for the old world to come back.”
“Corabelle was right. It is my fault.” Somehow, I squeezed the words out past the horror that rose up in my throat, strangling any hope for light at the end of this very dark tunnel. “When I was born, the monsters came.”
Twenty-Eight
Norbert finally went home after leaving a voice mail for Sky. I also tried to call him several times but didn’t hear back until early evening. Until then, I was left alone with my thoughts. The ones that were all about unleashing hell, for starters. And also the ones about the con man whose biggest, longest con had been on his own daughter. And about Rosemary. But mostly they were about Sky, the one puzzle piece that still refused to fit.
At 7:15, Sky texted, asking me to meet him.
I immediately called Norbert.
“Meet him,” Norbert said.
“Really? Do you want to come?”
He laughed gently. “No, you got this one. But you know that you’re not alone now, right, Jilly Willy?”
I hung up before he could get sappier.
LA-96C, also known as the Nike missile site, is a hiking destination off Mulholland Drive above Encino. Technically speaking, it really should be known as an antimissile site, since its purpose during the Cold War was to detect hostile aircraft.
