Become

by Ali Cross

  Stepping through the door, my eyes found Michael’s in an instant. Tension seemed to leave his body in a whoosh and when I smiled, just a small one, the best I could give right then, his face became the sun—all shining brightness, full of love. He dipped his chin, acknowledging so much. That he saw me, really saw me. That he knew the choice I was making. That he knew I Remembered.

  And I did.

  At lunch, Miri pulled me and Michael toward the back of the school, and through the cemetery with its ancient stones and memories. “I like to eat here—more privacy.”

  “Yeah, cuz who doesn’t like to eat with the dead, right?”

  Miri just shrugged. “So I’m a little weird, sue me.”

  We found a patch of shady grass on a little hill on the far side of the graveyard. The grass was cool and soft and tickled my legs when I sat down. From there, the cemetery felt peaceful and warm, the stones bathed in the late September sun. Miri pulled out her lunch, packed in a black insulated lunch box with a skull wearing a pink bow on the side of it.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling like a doofus. “I forgot to bring my lunch.”

  “I’ve got you covered,” Michael said, reaching into his messenger bag and producing a brown paper bag. And then another one.

  “Do you always pack two lunches?” I reached for the one he held out to me.

  “Only when I think I might get to sit with a cute girl.”

  “And one who forgets to bring a lunch of her own,” Miri added with a laugh.

  “That too,” Michael said.

  “Har, har.” I opened the bag, almost afraid to see what was inside. “Wow,” I breathed as I pulled out a fancy looking croissant sandwich, a bag of sliced apples, a tiny box of chocolate truffles and a bottle of raspberry flavored water. “You pack an awfully fancy lunch just on the off-chance of getting to eat with me.”

  “Who said the lunch was supposed to be for you? My other girlfriend couldn’t make it.” Michael waggled his eyebrows and took a big bite of his more manly meat sandwich.

  Miri laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard she fell back onto the grass and tears squeezed out from beneath her lashes. At first I stared, caught between indignation and uncertainty. But Miri’s laughter eventually won me over and I laughed, too. Just a little. Then all three of us were laughing until my stomach hurt and I couldn’t breathe. If I could have stopped time, I would have frozen that moment and lived there forever.

  Flanked on either side by two people I loved and who, remarkably, loved me back. I’d never seen the sky so blue, or felt the kiss of a breeze on my cheeks. I breathed deeply, relishing the fresh smell of dirt and grass and the fragrance of oranges that always lingered around Michael. After a time we sat up and returned to our lunches—and I’d never eaten anything as tasty as that fancy croissant sandwich.

  “So where’d you go last night?” Miri said, past a mouthful of apple. “I stopped by your house, but no one answered the intercom.”

  “You did?” I paused, the sandwich poised midair.

  She crunched into her apple and shrugged. “I was worried,” she added after a minute.

  I pulled out my phone and saw the screen was blank. “Did you call?”

  Miri leaned over and peered at my phone. “Helps if you charge it.” She bit into her apple.

  “Oh, ha, ha.” I slipped the useless phone into my bag. Without Lucy around to remind me, I didn’t pay much attention to these sorts of things.

  “We’re meeting after school—will you come?”

  I shot a look at Miri and noticed Michael had stopped chewing. I didn’t have to ask who was meeting, I could pretty much figure it out.

  I took the last bite of my sandwich—chicken salad, this boy knew how to make a lunch—and swallowed before answering.

  “Yeah, I’ll come.” Because last night, looking out over the city, I realized something—I could have friends or I could be alone, but The Hallowed, including Michael and Miri, they were going to fight Father with or without me. But without me, they didn’t stand a chance. I didn’t want anyone else’s blood on my hands.

  I enjoyed a school day without any drama and I finally met my other teachers (not a demon among them). When the final bell rang and Michael, Miri and I pushed through the doors that led to the hallways under the cathedral, it was almost easy to forget we were anything but normal kids.

  Yeah, that lasted for like a nanosecond.

  The sounds of students hurrying through the hallways and banging through the doors to the parking lot faded behind us as we walked the long, sloping corridor to the old part of the building—the part that didn’t show up on any city blueprints or any official manifest. The temperature grew cooler the deeper we descended, and the walls came alive with swirls and knots that glowed as I passed.

  This place was meant to keep out people like me. Scratch that. Demons—and not like me, because there weren’t any other freaks like me. Demon and angel.

  Michael took my hand, and squeezed.

  Then there was the room and I could hear Longinus’ deep, resonate voice. He stopped talking the moment we got to the doorway.

  “Ah, children, come in, come in,” Father Cornelius said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. When he looked up, he was smiling, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He was sitting at the table, his black shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows, his hair sticking up every which way. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all last night.

  Miri skipped into the room and around the desk. When she reached Cornelius, she threw her arms around him. He held her close for a moment, and when she pulled away, their eyes locked. I hadn’t realized they were that close. I didn’t realize they knew each other before last night. Now I wondered just what I’d stumbled in to.

  Miri seemed to sense my discomfort because she straightened and though she kept one arm over the priest’s shoulders, she looked directly at me. “Father Cornelius has been trying to help me . . .” She glanced at Michael, then turned her attention back to me. She cleared her throat. “To get clean,” she finished, raising her chin a notch.

  I looked at Cornelius, then opened my mouth, but Miri beat me to it.

  “I’d been doing pretty good,” she said, giving the father’s shoulder a squeeze before coming around the table and sitting down beside me. “Guess I’d fallen off the wagon. You know, the other day.”

  My eyes hadn’t left the priest’s—I was weighing him, judging him. The demon in me—or the years of life in Hell, take your pick—had trained me to expect the worst of people. But though I looked for it, that nugget of deceit, the stain of perversion, I found none of it. Instead what I saw confirmed everything I’d decided to believe last night.

  That the Hallowed was Odin’s hand against the dark.

  That it was right to align myself with these people.

  That I had a choice to make and though I wasn’t sure this was the right one, I knew the only other option was not for me.

  I would not remain my father’s tool.

  I would stand and fight him, instead.

  “I think we should tell her,” Michael said.

  “As do I,” Knowles said from the doorway. He came into the room, acknowledging us with a nod as he took his place in a chair against the far wall. “But first, I propose Miri tell us what she saw.”

  “What you saw?” I asked, turning in my seat so I could see Miri more clearly.

  Miri’s face turned a pale pink, and she stared at her hands in her lap. She twisted her fingers together, gripping and squeezing in a rhythmic pattern.

  “Last night. At the game.”

  I thought for a minute. “You mean, when you were having that—that seizure or whatever it was?”

  “It wasn’t a seizure,” she said, raising her eyes to meet mine. “Remember I told you sometimes I—I see things? Like visions?”

  I nodded.

  “Last night I saw one. And—and it was a bad one.”

  “A bad one? What did you see?” The hairs
on my arms stood up and my skin prickled with cold. It wasn’t the cold of Hell, it was just me. Just this world. Just life. With a hefty dose of fear and foreboding.

  For a long time Miri didn’t answer. She concentrated on her hands, like they were the key to unlocking the story she didn’t want to tell.

  Finally Cornelius leaned forward on his elbows and said, “It’s all right, child. You can tell her.”

  She looked up and their gazes locked, until Miri cleared her throat again.

  “Desi,” she said, swiveling in her seat and reaching out to take my hand. I didn’t want her to do that, didn’t want to be touching her when she knew things I didn’t. But she squeezed me hard enough that I didn’t think I could extract my hand without prying her fingers off one by one. “I saw you, Desi.”

  I laughed. “Oh yeah? What was I doing?”

  She took a deep breath and speared me with her gaze. She stared with such intensity, it was impossible to look away. “You were fighting. In front of a white gazebo . . .”

  No. She couldn’t see that. Please don’t say it. I wanted to look at Michael, but he was on my other side and I’d have to turn away from Miri. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her—I had to stop her from telling everyone.

  I laughed. “Oh, the gazebo, yeah. That’s at Daniel’s. Sometimes . . . sometimes I spar out there. Just spar.”

  Miri shook her head sharply. “No, you weren’t sparring. It was nighttime, and—”

  No.

  “There was someone in the gazebo. Someone dying, and—”

  No.

  “And you were fighting a . . . a—ow!” She yanked her hand out of mine and rubbed them together. “You were a fighting a demon or something,” she finished in a rush.

  Oh.

  “A creature so dark, I could barely see him against the black night. And he had wings that reached high into the sky, blocking out the light of the moon.”

  Father Cornelius cleared his throat. “You know the place?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you know the demon?”

  I glanced at Miri, who hadn’t looked away from me. “Maybe.”

  “Akaros,” Knowles said. I glared at him. It really could be anyone. “He is here.”

  “You can’t know that,” I said, a little annoyed at the way he presumed to know so much when I was sure he hardly knew anything at all.

  Knowles’ gaze was unwavering. “Yes, I do know.” A challenge. “And so could you, if you would only try.”

  I glanced around at the other people in the room. Longinus, standing vigilant and silent behind Cornelius, whose full attention was on me. Miri . . . and Michael, whose eyes told me things I wasn’t equipped to know. Things like love and trust. I looked away. I looked at Knowles.

  He nodded, and I swallowed. I’d take his challenge, and prove him wrong—so I closed my eyes.

  And popped them right back open again. Akaros was everywhere. How had I not felt him? Knowles nodded again, but this time I didn’t argue.

  “So what now?” I asked Father Cornelius. He sat up and slipped his glasses back on.

  Pulling a pad of paper toward him and clicking his pen, he looked up. “Now I need you to tell me everything you can about this demon, Akaros.

  chapter twenty-one

  After I’d told them everything I knew, I excused myself—turning down Michael’s suggestion that he go with me. I needed time to be alone, to process everything that had happened. All the ways my life had changed.

  But I couldn’t go home. Couldn’t go to the cemetery—Michael’d find me there, for sure. Couldn’t go anywhere.

  I found myself . . . at Miri’s.

  I stood outside her property, hiding in the shadows of the towering gate that belied the friendly home far down the lane. I figured the gate told the truth—that the house it guarded was anything but friendly, and felt more like a prison to the girl that called it home. I could get in—if I wanted. But I wasn’t sure I did. Miri was still at St. Mary’s so I didn’t even know why I was there.

  “Sure you do, baby.”

  Warmth infused my body at the same moment fear gripped my throat in its ice cold grasp. I stood straighter, not daring to look left or right.

  “Lucy?”

  “I’m here, baby. I’m here.” And she was. My beautiful Lucy, warm and real and pulling me into her arms where she heldmeheldmeheldme and I lost myself in the one thing I’d never felt in Hell. Love.

  “But . . . how are you here? I—” I couldn’t say the words, those cold horror-filled words—not when she was right here, making me feel all better again—the last thing she ever should have been doing, even if she were real.

  “I am real, baby. Look at me.” She leaned back and took my face in her hands, forcing me to see her—her smooth ebony skin, her warm, shining eyes that always held so much love for me when I never deserved it. “I’m here because I want to be, you need me to be.

  “But listen, baby, I can’t stay long. Can you listen to me?”

  Speechless, I nodded my head oh so slightly, and she moved her hands to my shoulders, still spearing me with her gaze.

  “I know you’ve got a lot goin’ on right now, baby, but you’re gonna need to be strong. You can be strong, right?” I nodded again, because what else could I do?

  “You know I’ve got my own daddy-issues, but I’m tellin’ you, if ever there was a girl who needed to get the hell away from her daddy, it’s you. That place—that Hell—was never the place for you. You hear me?”

  “But—”

  “No buts. I know all about him, and I’m tellin’ you—you forget everything he ever taught you. And Akaros—well, I’m afraid you’re not done with him, baby, but you can take him. Ya hear me?”

  Lucy stepped back, looking over her shoulder as if something was coming, or someone was calling. But there was nothing, no one.

  “Odin, he says you need to trust Cornelius. He can help you. But you gotta do somethin’—can you do somethin’ for me, baby?”

  I barely had time to nod again before she hurried on. “Forgive yourself. I know it’s the hardest thing in the world to do, but forgive yourself. And baby, anything of mine is yours, ya hear? Anything, everything. The best thing I ever did in my life was love you. And I do. And I always will. Ya hear?”

  She hugged me tight then stepped away too quickly for me to even wrap my arms around her.

  “Lucy, wait—”

  “I’ve gotta go, baby. But you’re not alone—not unless you want to be.” She turned away, like she’d just walk down the street, and not like a vision walking straight out of my dreams. “Oh.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled, and my heart melted to see it because it always made me feel like there was something worth loving inside of me. “You really are Desolation, ya know? But ya don’ have to bring the kind of desolation ya think. Just like I always told ya—it’s up to you to claim your destiny, baby.”

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand any of it. I shook my head, begged her to please tell me what she meant, pleaded for her to stay, to come back.

  But between one blink and the next, she was gone.

  Like a crazy person I stood in the middle of the street looking for a ghost.

  “Desi?”

  I spun around, a smile lighting up my face like a beacon before my brain had time to register that it wasn’t Lucy’s voice calling my name, but Miri’s.

  She stood beside her open car door, a little wary, but with kindness in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was mad or afraid. But she didn’t leave. She just stood there, watching me.

  For a second I let the unshed tears burn behind my eyes. I could let them define me, let myself be swallowed up in them. But I suspected the time for tears and feeling sorry for myself had passed. If there’d ever been such a time.

  So I squared my shoulders and faced Miri—this girl I barely knew and yet did know with every fiber of my being. She was Lucy—at least to me.
And I would do anything, everything, in my power to protect her from the evil my father had unleashed on the world.

  I looked into Miri’s face to see her, to see what she thought of me, since she knew, now, that I was no normal girl. But all I saw was a friend. A friend who needed me as much as I needed her.

  And I realized just then, that I really did have a choice. Not the life-or-death kind of choice. Or the end-of-the-world kind of choice. Just this. Just a girl, standing in the middle of a street, battling her own demons.

  I looked over my shoulder in the direction Lucy had gone. And she was gone. Really gone.

  But right in front of me was a girl who needed a friend—like I’d needed Lucy. I didn’t know anything about what Lucy said, but I did know right here, right now, I could make a difference.

  “Hey,” I said, stuffing my hands into my skirt’s front pockets. “Wanna go pick out some paint?”

  We drove down the mountain into the small, prosperous town of Desert Peak. I looked out the window and watched the scenery pass by—the small restaurants with couples enjoying late dinners at outdoor tables, candles flickering in the breeze; a small art gallery with windows so big you could see right in to the lighted artwork on the walls; window shoppers strolling down the street, their little ones sleeping in their strollers.

  Miri pulled into a spot near the door at a home improvement store and touched my arm. She kept it there until I turned away from the window and met her gaze.

  “Don’t sweat it, ‘kay? Mr. Knowles can be a . . . well, Mr. Knowles. He means well, though.”

  Ha. Like that was what was bugging me. More like, no one look at the demon-angel-freak-thing in the car.

  “Besides, after you left things pretty much degraded into a brainiac-fest.”

  “Did I miss anything?” I found myself asking. I totally didn’t want to talk about it. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief when she shook her head.

  “Nah.”

  So I channeled what little of Lucy I had inside of myself and put a smile on my face. “Good. Let’s go buy some paint.”

  Miri laughed, a little strained, a little I don’t know about this, but it was good enough. It was something.