by W. J. May
“He’s here,” Rae muttered under her breath. “I know it.”
The abandoned storage unit stretched before them. Ominously quiet, like some sort of a ghost town. It had the same peeling paint and faded lettering as it had fifteen years ago, when Rae had seen it in her father’s mind.
So, this is it. The place where Simon Kerrigan played all his deadly little games.
“Honey,” Devon leapt to the ground beside her, panting slightly to catch his breath, “the government shut this place down. It’s been hollowed out. There’s no reason they’d be here.”
“He’s here, Devon,” she said firmly. “I can feel it.”
Just a second later, her suspicions were confirmed.
A tortured cry rose up from one of the deserted buildings, echoing briefly before getting lost in the cold night. Rae and Devon froze dead still, their eyes locking onto the same building.
One scream to freeze them. Another to bring them back to life.
They sprang into action in perfect unison. Feet barely touching the wet pavement as they flew across the empty lot, kicking down the door as they raced inside.
It was worse than anything Rae could have imagined. A literal nightmare come to life.
Gabriel was lying face-down on the floor, writhing in absolute agony. Her father stood over him, a bloody syringe still clasped in his hands.
“NO!”
She dove to the floor just as Devon launched himself at her father. There was a brief struggle, but only a second or two later Simon was pressed up against the wall, with Devon’s hand wrapped around his throat, squeezing the life slowly out of his eyes.
She wanted to watch. She wanted to watch it happen.
But there were other people who required her immediate attention.
“Gabriel,” she gasped, running a helpless hand over his back. “Gabriel, what did he—”
Another scream ripped its way out of him, doubling him over as he cringed and trembled on the floor. There were five wide gashes on either side of his face and his nails were bloody, like whatever was hurting him he’d tried to literally claw out of his head.
This can’t be happening…
His head snapped back with another feral cry, and Rae felt like she was losing her mind. She didn’t know anyone could scream like that. She didn’t know Gabriel could scream at all. She had seen him shot. She had seen him tortured. She had seen him beaten to the brink of death.
It didn’t hold a candle to what she was seeing now.
“Gabriel, please!” she cried, trying desperately to keep hold of him as he thrashed violently upon the floor. “Tell me what he did! Tell me so I can fix it!”
Tears streamed freely down his face as he pressed his forehead against the floor, trying desperately to catch his breath. He clenched his teeth together to brace against the pain, but when another wave shook through his body a heartbreaking whimper escaped his lips.
“I can’t…” he panted desperately, wrapping his arms around his stomach like he was being torn in half, “please…I can’t…”
Rae lay beside him, holding his hand tightly in her own. “You can’t what, sweetie?” she pleaded. “Tell me how to help you!”
“…no more…enough…” he begged, crying out into the floor. “…Simon…”
Hearing her father’s name was a bolt of lightning, propelling her to her feet. She blurred across the room in an instant. Screaming from just inches away. “What did you to do him?!”
Instead of waiting for an answer, she punched him full in the face. Then kept punching him. Harder and harder every time.
“What did you do?!” she shrieked again, drops of blood flying off her knuckles. “Answer me, or I swear on his life, Simon, I will KILL you where you stand!”
A breathless sob choked Gabriel’s voice as he reached towards them. “…no…”
“ANSWER ME!”
Devon loosened his grip just enough to allow Simon to speak, but he did so with the greatest reluctance. One wrong move, and he’d break the man’s neck.
“He came to me,” Simon gasped, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “He wanted me to give him the serum I developed. The one to help him enhance his powers.”
“YOU’RE LYING!”’ Rae struck him again, prepared to keep on doing so until there was nothing left. But just as she raised her fist, a breathless voice called out from behind her.
“…Rae, don’t…”
She whirled around to see Gabriel reaching towards her. He’d managed to pull himself up to his knees, but the pain seemed to be getting worse, not better. Every breath was agony, and every word was through sheer force of will.
“He’s not lying…” he gasped, lifting a hand to his head as the pain stunned him senseless once more. “I…I came here on my own—”
Another scream tore through him, and he fell once more. Completely lost to the world as he grasped desperately onto the concrete and begged the higher powers to let him die.
“Rae.” It was Devon this time, glancing over his shoulder with a look of fractured indecision. “You heard what he said. We can’t—”
“No!” she yelled. “Simon is doing this to him! Look where we are!”
“But why would he have—”
“It doesn’t matter, Devon! Look around you!”
They could have gone on forever, but Gabriel cried out once more and Simon threw himself against Devon’s restraining arms. “Let me help him! He can’t take much more!”
Gabriel’s body convulsed, and he raised his voice to a deafening shout.
“RAE, HE’S GOING TO DIE!”
Time stopped for a moment as she stood there, staring down at Gabriel’s body, wondering who to trust. Then a cold tremble swept across her skin, and she nodded.
The second Devon released him, Simon raced across the floor. Not to Gabriel, but to a series of metallic cupboards stacked against the wall. He started frantically punching numbers into a keypad, and the door popped open and he snatched up a colored syringe.
He was back across the room the next instant, diving to the floor and pulling Gabriel up onto his knees. Gabriel moaned quietly as he was lifted, but held perfectly still as Simon pressed the needle into his body. A second later, the trembling lessened. A second after that, it stopped.
“Thank you,” he breathed, dropping his head back in sheer exhaustion as Simon lay him gently down on the floor. “I’m sorry, I…I couldn’t do it.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Simon murmured, reaching down to take his pulse. “No one could have started with the dose you did. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Lucky.” Even lying half-dead on a cheap linoleum floor, Gabriel Alden still managed a faint smile. “Right.”
It was like stepping into some kind of alternate universe. A parallel dimension where anything could happen and none of the rules applied. Rae and Devon flashed each other a look of utter astonishment before turning back to the others.
“What the hell is going on?” Rae demanded.
More than the screams and the dying, she couldn’t get past the fact that Gabriel had just let Simon take his pulse. That he’d let Simon touch his bare skin.
Gabriel glanced up swiftly then pushed shakily to his feet, grabbing automatically onto Devon when he offered an arm for support. “When I was younger, I remember hearing Cromfield talking about some kind of serum that your father was developing. He was jealous. And proud. Supposedly, it was designed to enhance a person’s ink. Let it progress faster than was natural.” He pulled in a sharp breath, still reeling from the aftershocks. “I went to your father. Asked him if it was true. Asked him to give it to me.” His eyes flickered to the syringe on the floor. “We came here and tried.”
There was a beat of silence. Then a fierce voice shot through the air.
“You stupid son of a bitch.”
Rae turned to her fiancé in shock. He had taken a step away from Gabriel, forcing him to stand on his own, and stared him down with a look of violent rage.
“You could have died. Do you realize that?”
Gabriel hesitated for a moment, a little taken aback. Out of all the people standing in the room, Devon was the last person he’d expected to confront him. When he finally answered his voice was quiet, though he tried to make it strong. “I had to try. I had to do something—”
“You could have died.”
At first, Rae didn’t understand why Devon was so angry. Yes, Gabriel took an impossible risk by coming here. And yes, they were all as furious as they were afraid. But this…this felt like something different. A moment later, she realized why.
“You don’t get to play around with your life anymore. Don’t you get that?! You don’t get to take those kinds of chances!” The words rattled the metal walls, shaking them all to the core as Devon’s eyes burned a hole into Gabriel. “Not after what he did. Not after he saved you.”
Rae bowed her head as a wave of understanding crashed over her. On the other side of the room Simon was watching them all very carefully, a peculiar expression shadowing his face.
Gabriel’s face tightened in pain as his teeth clenched together. For a second, he looked ready to knock Devon out cold…if he was only able to stand. “Well, maybe Carter made a mistake.”
His quiet retort couldn’t have proved a greater contrast to Devon’s deafening accusation, but the argument wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
“Because that would make it easier, wouldn’t it?” Devon took a step forward, levelling Gabriel with his gaze. “If he was just wrong. If you’re an unredeemable asshole, and he made a mistake by saving your life. It would be easier than acknowledging what he did. Than living up to it.”
Rae had never seen Gabriel Alden lose a fight. But she’d never heard him scream before either. His lips parted uncertainly, but before he could say a word Devon spun on his heel and walked right out the door.
“I’m going to pull the car around,” he called back to Rae, shaking his head in disgust. “Do what you want with these two.”
The door slammed behind him, leaving a chilling silence in his wake. The three of them stood there for a moment, each trapped in their own little hell. Rae squared her shoulders firmly and turned to her father.
“Find your own way back.”
Simon met her eyes for a split second, then he nodded. The next second he was out the door, blurring away into the night with the speed of a fennec fox.
And then there were two.
Rae slowly turned back to Gabriel, and he looked back up at her. For a moment, neither one of them said anything. Then she found herself echoing a recently shouted phrase. “You son of a bitch.”
She hadn’t yelled the words like Devon had, but he flinched all the same. It was a rare moment that Gabriel would show remorse. It was something that had been omitted from his childhood programming, and had only returned with deliberate personal growth. But he certainly looked sorry now. His entire face was awash with it.
“I didn’t want to die.” It was said only a little louder than a whisper, but still seemed to carry through the entire room. “I didn’t come here wanting to die.”
“I know,” she answered softly. She hadn’t thought he did, but it was still good to hear him say it out loud. “Let me guess, after all the shit he’s done you told him the only way to make it right was to help you. To give you the serum.”
Gabriel shook his head, wrapping his arms protectively around his chest. “No, I told him he could never make it right. Then I asked him to give me the serum.”
She wanted to rage and scream. She wanted to shake him senseless. To tear into him like Devon. But at the same time…the only thing she wanted to do was take him into her arms.
She couldn’t imagine what it had to take for Gabriel to come to Simon. She couldn’t imagine what it had taken for him to have held out this arm.
A scathing reprimand died on the tip of her tongue, but the longer she stood there in silence the less it was required. Gabriel seemed to be taking care of it all by himself.
“He made it mean something—my life. His sacrifice made it worth something.” A pulsing light flickered behind his emerald eyes, and for a split second he looked truly terrified. “I don’t know what to do.”
Rae stared at him for a long time. Long enough that, outside, the snow stopped falling. It was a question without an answer. One he’d have to work through himself in time. In the end, she simply offered her hand.
“Come on. Let’s go home.”
* * *
The car was waiting out front by the time they limped through the door. Devon never took his eyes off the road, and the three of them didn’t say a word until they got back to the house. The second they walked inside Gabriel was passed into Angel’s waiting arms; Rae and Devon went up to their bedroom and began quietly undressing for bed.
It wasn’t until they were settled under the covers, a happily snoring puppy wedged between them, that Devon finally broke the silence. “Sorry I almost strangled your dad.”
Rae glanced over in the darkness, then returned her eyes to the ceiling with a shrug. “I almost fractured his skull. You’re in good company.”
There was a slight pause before Devon spoke again, his voice dropping to half volume. “And sorry I was so hard on Gabriel. I just couldn’t imagine…”
“What?” Rae glanced over suddenly. “You couldn’t imagine a person shooting himself full of dangerous chemicals just to make himself stronger for a fight?”
The parallels were as ironic as they were frightening.
Devon smiled faintly, but it dimmed the longer he lay there. Finally, he bowed his head with a quiet sigh, spilling his dark hair over his eyes. “No…Carter.”
A silent tear slipped down Rae’s cheek as she reached under the covers to take his hand. “That was a nice speech you gave. It’s a shame he wasn’t here to see it.”
Devon paused for a moment, staring up at the ceiling with a sigh. “He kind of was…Carter gave that speech to me once.”
What?
Rae propped herself up on her elbow, turning towards him in the dark. “He did?” she asked. “When?”
“After my dad kicked me out of Guilder.” Devon bit his lip, his eyes drifting back as he remembered. “I was a wreck. He found me in the Oratory, tearing the heads off the mannequins we used to use for target practice. First he made me stop. Then he helped light them on fire.”
Rae laughed before she could stop herself. Her entire body relaxed in a wave of bittersweet tenderness as she tried to imagine it. Oddly enough, it wasn’t that hard to do. Devon joined in for a moment before getting back to the story.
“He told me that my dad was wrong to have done it, but that I didn’t know the full story. Mostly, he just told me that grudges can kill. You hang on to that pain long enough, it will destroy you. The only thing you can do is move on. The only thing you can do is look ahead.”
A strange feeling of calm settled on them both as they lay in the darkness, silently holding hands. The words were recounted with such quiet accuracy that Rae could almost hear Carter saying them. She could take fleeting comfort in the distant echoes of his voice.
“He should be here,” she whispered, almost to herself. “He needs to be here. He should never have been taken away.”
Devon sighed again. “Yeah…but he was.” It was quiet for a moment before he suddenly squeezed her hand. “But I know a place where we could find him…”
* * *
It was the last thing they did before the fight. And it was something they all did together.
The entire gang stood before the grave. Rae, Devon, Julian, Molly, Luke, Angel, and Gabriel. Beth and Tristan stood side by side. Simon was standing behind them. Even Kraigan had decided to come along, hovering silently on the periphery. The entire unlikely family had come together one final time…with the tragic exception of one important member.
Despite the wintercold, a lone bird in a branch above them started to sing. It was a quiet song. Bittersweet. One
that seemed fitting for the occasion.
Rae closed her eyes as she listened, swaying slightly in the breeze.
It was Thursday evening. The day before the reckoning. The day before that final day, where they would fight that final foe…and see who lived to see the weekend.
After so many years, after so many battles, Rae couldn’t fool herself. She suffered no delusions as to what was about to come. No matter how hard they had trained, no matter how much they had tried to prepare, she was well aware that some of the people standing around her weren’t going to make it to tomorrow’s sunset. That, by Saturday morning, those still standing would be making arrangements to put those people in the ground, in a grave very similar to this one.
With the echoes of Samantha’s murderous oath still ringing in her ears, it was impossible not to think that she might be one of them. That the culmination of everything that had happened in her life—every time she’d ever laughed, every person she’d ever loved—might have been leading up to this very moment. That she and all of her friends had gathered here for a simple reason.
To say goodbye.
It was too much to think about. Too overwhelming to consider. In the end, all she could do was close her eyes and listen to that little bird. Dreaming of a future that might never come.
“He taught me how to whistle,” Julian said suddenly.
Rae’s eyes snapped open. The entire gang turned to stare at him in disbelief, while Devon shook his head with a look of strained exasperation.
“It’s safe to say he taught you a lot more than that, Jules.”
“No. I know,” the psychic backtracked quickly. His eyes flickered apologetically down to the grave, before clearing with a simple shrug. “I was just saying…he taught me how to whistle.”
Beth squeezed his shoulder, as the rest of them warmed with a little smile.
