His words chilled Lexi more than the stone behind her head. They chilled her almost as much as those fingers calmly tracing her face. She knew now why the text message had been so familiar, carrying the same phrase she’d read on the bloodstained note pinned to her home’s door on the night they attacked her parents.
I have only one chance.
Lexi flooded her mind with the memory of a night when Dominic had stolen her from her dorm room when she wore nothing but her pajamas and a blanket. The sea, the dawn, the kiss, the eye of the storm, a storm composed of frustration and pain and secrets, energy ignited in her by his actions—a break up that had become a wake up, as all break ups can be. Locked at the very bottom of her soul, she remembered the man whom she’d loved or thought she’d loved; it didn’t matter, either way, because back then she’d believed it to be true. She found her memories of a human who had held and loved her in his own twisted way.
She closed her eyes and sought a way out.
41 / The Wake Up
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
–Neil Gaiman
Lexi tore herself out of the car and ran, skirting the gas station. She knew the path. The highway, the tightrope, the stage, the field of fangs, the tree of despair and the burning squirrel, the house that was not her grandfather’s. It took less time now. When she burst into the red room, however, the mattress and blanket were gone. She turned to face the door, knowing what she would find instead.
“What big eyes you have,” she whispered.
“The better to see through your lies,” he said.
“What large hands you have…”
“The better to strangle you with, my dear…”
“What sharp teeth you have…”
“The better to drink your blood with,” he said with a laugh. “Is that what you expect me to say? I know this story better than you do. The wolf wins in my version.”
Lexi thought of a black wolf she once knew in another life, a black wolf that never willingly left her side. “The wolf wins in mine, too.”
“Why do you bother writing these stories?” Dominic insisted. He glared back at her through the mirror. “They are stupid. They offer nothing. You never could see the fallacy of your passion. When you write it’s like you’re stealing pieces of the soul, taking them from others and airing them out and selling them.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “I take nothing but inspiration.”
“Fraud! You’re a vulture, scavenging the minds of others. You chew through their thoughts and keep what you like, spewing it out as yours.”
The vulture face that flitted over Dominic’s was meant to frighten her. It saddened her instead. Playing with darkness had stained his fingers. He allowed his demons to thrive in the shadows of his mind, secluded and neglected—and this, instead of killing them, made them love him all the more, and they thrived off his bottled-up fear like bats suckling on blood.
“I’m a mirror,” she murmured. The revelation slipped through her like cool water, dousing her anger and refreshing her. “I reflect what I see and I share the truth of what I know, even if I do so clumsily. For what is a mirror, that you are so afraid of it anyway? It’s the shadow cast by reality, the reflection of the reflecting lens in your own eye. Beyond that, beyond the glass of reflections, the veil of illusions, the story continues. And it’s a lucky thing that we cannot step into that fictive world, for half of us would never know how to emerge and the other half of us would never want to.”
“Fictive? You mean lies. You write lies!”
“Do I?” She smiled. “Then they are good lies that speak of real truths, giving you a different perspective in the hope you will someday understand them.”
Dominic’s face snarled at her, no longer golden. “I built dreams on you,” he hissed. “I staked my hope on you. You weren’t enough. You couldn’t ever be enough.”
“I don’t care about your dreams and hopes anymore,” Lexi replied. “You never cared about mine.”
She reached forward and grasped at the air where the door knob should have been. Her hand wrapped around the cold metal and she turned it and pushed. The mirrored door opened.
The room flooded with light.
Her grandfather’s village had been razed to the ground during the civil war, but she knew enough of Greece to envision his birthplace perfectly. The air of the islands, she believed, was different than the air of other regions of the world. It engulfed her now, carrying with it flavors of sun-drenched soil and foam-flecked sea, aromas of virgin woods and naked rocks, its tang of citrus trees and its fizz of foreign wine-misted lips. It carried in its pockets the sounds of children’s laughter, the clatter of drunken brawls, the mandolin music thrumming sensually from decades-old cassette tapes in the colorful souvenir shops where the locals waved at passersby. It came from near and far, rebounding off the blue-white flag strapped to ferry masts rearing above the sparkling harbors, glinting in the brown-eyed winks and twirled mustaches of the locals.
The sun and sea filled Lexi’s eyes and blinded her. She turned away once more to look back at her grandfather’s house. Instead, a modern house reared behind her, coldly hued and intricately built, something that Dominic may have built for himself—perhaps for her, too—in secret, a house some contractor had promised was built to last. She rubbed her hands together until sparks flew and these set fire to the building. She knelt then, and built herself wings of leftover cartilage, leftover plywood, leftover dreams. She tied them to her shoulders with the strongest of her heartstrings.
The wind picked Lexi up and carried her into the frothy chill of the clouds that no longer roped her in.
42 / Belief
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
–Mary Oliver
Lexi opened her eyes.
You’re always alone in your darkest hours, Pappou had once told her. When the time comes for you to walk through the badlands of Hell, you’ll recognize them as such only because it is the only place where you will be truly alone.
But that wasn’t true. She had angels on her shoulders and devils on her back. She had the taste of Zach on her lips and the blisters from Elias’ tools on her fingers. She had the voice of her grandfather playing in her mind and the memory of her mother imprinted in her heart.
She was never really alone.
“I warned you not to trust anyone,” Dominic hissed. He yanked the front of her shirt and shook her until she yelped in pain. “I warned you not to trust me. I let you fall off the radar—I gave you every chance to get away. And here you are, full bloody circle, making the one thing you must not make. Is it my fault you’re so stupid?”
No, Lexi decided in turn. Your calling me stupid can’t make me stupid without my consent. She gazed up at him, unblinking, unaware that the fear had left her eyes. I’m not stupid. I’ve done stupid things, yes, but that does not make me stupid. And even if it did, I’d choose stupid over heartless any day. I choose Zach. The realization made her smile. I choose the truth. I choose my family. I choose love, you sad little man. And I will, for as long as I live.
“You should have never tricked me into Seeing, Lexi.” He expelled each word more forcefully, as if to convince them both. “I was happy as I was. It is you who unleashed the monster.”
“You never turned me in, though you had a thousand chances. You said so yourself: you let me escape. You showed mercy. You were kind.”
Inches from her face, Dominic stared at her. For a moment, the mask slipped. The lining around his eyes reddened so faintly, as if on the verge of tears. Then his hand crept up and wrapped around her throat. “The only way to kill the snake is to cut off the head. You’re no hydra, Lexi. It’s just one head. There’s only you.”
“You pulled me from the crash,” she insisted. “You could have let me die. You warned me of the Tzami’s bomb
ing even as you ignited it. I’ve seen the angel in you, too.”
“Have you?” Dominic lowered his head and pressed against her cheek with one of his horns until it slit her flesh, the worlds of sight and texture blurring. A cry escaped her before she bit her lip. “Where?”
Lexi felt the fresh blood trickle down her face, the pressure of Dominic’s fingers bruising her skin. His hand would soon constrict her airflow; seconds later, she knew, it would constrict her thoughts.
How many seconds did she have? Ten? Six? Two? Lexi’s eyes sharpened with fear. Despite the deaths she’d seen during her life, Lexi had this stupid human attitude of considering herself untouchable. She’d had dreams where she’d been followed, stabbed, shot—and she’d had time. Sometimes, in those dreams, someone was coming for Anastasia, and Lexi would throw herself above her mother’s hospital bed, taking the blows. Sometimes someone was shooting at Sophia, through the windows of their home, and Lexi would tackle her sister and take the bullet. Days ago she’d had a daydream of someone throwing a knife at Zach; she’d blocked that, too, with her body—and lived.
Hero complex—the term came to her now, a fragment of a sentence she’d once read in a book. Yet it was the only way to change the dreams, to take them and shake them and throttle the nightmare out of them. It was the only way to stay in control.
Reality was different. Pain. Helplessness. Dizziness.
The dreams had not prepared her.
. . .
Farhad opened his eyes and saw darkness. It was, he realized, because he lay face-down on the ground. He struggled to sit up with limbs that took a long while to cooperate. Fire swathed his left foot although it rested in the icy fleece of fresh-fallen snow. The snow reddened from the blood that drenched through his sock and sneaker.
Adam lay near him, face upturned and mouth open, catching snowflakes on his tongue. His breath punctuated out of his mouth like visible spurts of spirit. Their eyes met when he felt the younger man’s gaze, although Adam did not move his head. Judging from the angle of his limbs and the redness of the snow around him, he probably could not.
“They taste of death,” Adam said.
Farhad grunted.
They’d been returning from the woods after an afternoon spent hunting in the snow with the black wolf. Zach had implied he and Lexi would be staying overnight in town, so the guys weren’t worried about their return. Then the wind had picked up, wailing its warnings and bringing in heavy clouds that blemished and bruised the false blue sky, promising snow. Suddenly they’d seen smoke drifting from the factory. Farhad could not remember much else.
But someone was there and something was wrong.
. . .
It was as if time stilled around her, each of her final seconds screaming for an extra moment to linger and look. Flames danced around them, tiny bonfires that ate through the ripped pages of her family’s books and notebooks. They danced along the wooden handles of the tools. They crackled through the rugs and rags that Lexi had unearthed. They morphed her red cloak to dust…
And conjured something black amidst the grayness of their smoke.
It barreled into Dominic, a frenzy of fur and fang. The force knocked Dominic clear of Lexi’s body. Man and wolf rolled until they collided against a furnace. Lexi turned her head to watch, too emptied of air to do anything but wheeze.
Surreal, sideways, beast against beast, lit by the glow of the moon and the snow and the flames. Black claws tore into human flesh, red welts crisscrossing the skin until it became an open book of blood. Fangs bit into wings ineffectively, their sharpness blunted by the pinions. Spiraling horns gouged at fur, inciting yips of pain. A leathery tail whipped against the ground and the air, hesitant to strike the beast for fear of striking the man; perhaps it, too, was confused about who was the butcher and who was the beast.
Their battle gave Lexi time to regain her breath. She staggered to her feet, shaky as a puppet freshly cut from its strings. She saw Dominic struggling to his feet as well, stumbling in the opposite direction, his wings dragging behind him on the ground, parrying off the bleeding wolf with his hands and horns—one of them still unhealed, broken, the edge chipped away—leaving a trail of feathers and blood. Towards a table near a furnace. Towards what she suddenly saw was a layout of tools, sharply metallic and nonflammable, a torturer’s dream come true.
The wolf tackled Dominic again from behind and brought him to his knees. The man howled and flung the wolf off with a clapping of his wings. Yang yelped as he hit the ground, the noise morphing into a snarl as he scrambled back to his feet, only to be met with a lashing blow to the head by Dominic’s tail. The wolf did not rise a second time.
“How many?” roared the devil at the sky. “How many more must die in your games?”
No… Lexi’s mouth formed the word, the screams emerging soundless. No!
And she charged, less gracefully but as ragingly as the last person who’d tried, towards Dominic. At the last moment, he faced her, his old mask diluted in a mess of tears and blood. His head lowered the same moment hers did.
Their horns locked.
The suddenness of the crash—not a spearing against flesh that she may have envisioned, but an abrupt and clacking stop that flooded her head with pain as if she’d barged against a glass door with her forehead—took her breath away. It was surreal, standing an arm’s breadth away from him, a void of air above their heads where their horns entwined and kept them trapped both together and apart. His arm’s breadth, actually.
For a fleeting moment, Lexi understood. She processed the information as abruptly and violently as the way in which her horns had jarred against Dominic’s. It was belief that rendered them real. A fierce, joint, earth-shattering belief, that the angelic and the demonic manifested in the human form, for the angelic and demonic were also innately human: humans molded and taught each other of the balance of good and evil. The more people allowed themselves to believe in the reality of these qualities, the more solidly they’d manifest.
Before she could collect herself, Dominic had reached out and touched her. In seconds, he’d both pushed her free and pulled her close. He flung himself against her so that she fell back against the stone floor. It would have cracked her skull open if her wings hadn’t swept out to soften the fall.
He’d predicted that.
Perhaps.
Lexi writhed away, grappling against the floor to escape him. Now both his hands found her throat. This time he squeezed hard enough to dim her vision.
He was whatever he was, Lexi realized, but he was also the vision that she projected on him. For her purposes, he would be whatever she believed him to be. And it was this belief, intangible and impossible, that was more real than anything else. Love trumped hate. It had to. That’s how it had always been, in all the fables and stories.
He hadn’t denied saving her.
Her head slipped to the side, her cheek kissed by the cold stone floor. The fires grew around them, now consuming tables and benches, rearing until they were taller even than Dominic. Her eyes fell on the shard of horn, a black shadow within the matted black swirls of her hair. It had fallen from his fingers when he’d grabbed her shoulders. She saw its tip, stained a different black than the black of horned bone.
And she knew what had become of her grandfather.
Instead of struggling against Dominic, Lexi raised an arm to embrace him and wept at the pain of the motion. He raised his head the moment she leaned closer to him. A breath away from each other, his mouth fused against hers instinctively, her tongue tracing the sin tattooed on the inside of his lower lip. Reflected in a thousand mirror shards, though she could not see them, his wings snapped open. She heard them: a sound like boat sails stretched taut, filled with a sudden wind.
His eyes closed. She held him close. The pressure of his hands lessened against her throat. She heard the thick thunk-ing—and felt the violent vibrations traveling through his body to hers—as his tail lashed against his back in self-flag
ellation, in shame.
With all of her remaining strength, she raised her other arm as if to widen the embrace. She lowered it then, that shard of bone she now clutched in her hand, and buried it in his neck.
. . .
Farhad did not know how long he lay there, watching the snow fall on Adam’s closed eyelids and inside his gaping mouth.
He remembered now. They’d started running. Through the blanket of snow that began to fall, they hadn’t heard or seen the vehicles behind them until it was too late. The pick-up had swerved, barely in time, missing Jerry as he ran blindly across the road. They’d recognized it as Lexi’s; they’d run toward it, fearing the worst, turning only at the sound of another car behind them that could possibly help. A man had jumped out of the Audi, a pistol in his hands. He’d shot at them, felling them all before running out of bullets.
Yang had appeared from the forest, alarmed by the gunshots, his snout red from the meal he’d gorged on. He’d paused when he reached Farhad and Adam, whining as he licked at the latter’s unresponsive face. Circling Farhad for a moment, the wolf had then bolted towards the factory.
The Kurd focused on breathing, following the wolf with his eyes until it disappeared into the building. He tried to force himself to stand, growling in frustration as he failed each time. His legs refused to hold him. He couldn’t feel his foot as much, numbed perhaps from the cold. He began to crawl instead, pulling himself forward towards the forsaken factory, dragging the unresponsive parts of his body behind him. Twenty yards may as well have been twenty miles.
It was the sound of an engine that broke him from his trance. He looked up to see a motorcycle revving through the drifting snow, following the tracks left from the vehicles, resurrecting behind it a cloud of snowflakes that had just fallen from the sky. Its rider hunched over the handlebars like a man riding a stolen motorcycle for the first time.
The Wake Up (The Seers Book 1) Page 20
