by Vicki Keire
Jack’s voice had a singsong, practiced quality. “You’ve told this story before.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “This blade was special because, unlike any other blade on earth, it could cut through a Nephilim’s stone skin like paper. He made sure his oldest son understood how important it was, and then he used it to cut out his own heart. He couldn’t face eternity on earth without his wife.”
I thought of Asheroth. If he was the alternative, this Azazel had made the right decision. “And this is the sword you’ve been asking about?”
“I gave it to someone the night I was taken. He should have brought it to you by now, unless something happened that prevented it. Which would be bad.” His smile was bitter. “But don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“It hasn’t made it,” I reminded him.
“I know. But it will. I have to believe that.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter much, but I didn’t believe him. Not after the story he’d just told. “There’s another reason I came tonight. I want you to meet someone,” he said quietly, his eyes fixed at a spot just over my shoulder.
“I thought we were alone.” The space between my shoulder blades had begun to tingle, exactly as if someone was watching me from the dark.
“No, I said there was no one in the Dreamtime unless I brought them.” He dropped his voice. “Listen, she’s been through a lot. It’s hard on all of us, where we are, but it’s twisting her more every day. I thought if I could bring her someplace normal, even for a few hours, it would help.”
The feeling of being watched had increased to an uncomfortable level. I spun back toward the fountain. “Who is it?” I whispered. “Is she dangerous?”
The specks of sliver were back in his dark eyes, but they were dull this time. “She didn’t used to be.”
Live Oaks, with their thick, downward swooping branches, perfect for reading and shade, have always felt sheltering to me. Wrapped in white lights, they became something otherworldly. In her white nightgown and light blond hair, the girl at the edge of the fountain plaza looked like a frightened fairy. I had seen a blurry picture of her once before, but that’s not how I recognized her. Even from this distance, I felt her. She pulled at something inside me. My blood roared in recognition. It was similar to the response I’d had to Jack but more protective. “Caroline?” Her head snapped up. “Caroline Bedford?”
Still she hesitated.
“It’s ok,” I added quickly. I wanted very badly to go to her, this child afraid to set foot in my town square. The force of it shocked me. But she was a wild thing, and injured besides, on the inside where things were hardest to fix. I could so easily scare her away. My palms flared with Shadows, so I crossed my arms behind my back. I felt Jack stiffen in surprise beside me. “It really is ok,” I tried again. “My name is Caspia, and this is my town. Jack brought you here, and we won’t let anything happen to you.”
She inched forward. “Is it true you’re an Azalene warrior?” she asked, an ugly skepticism that had no place on a child’s face challenging me. “The last one besides Jack?”
I risked a quick sideways lash with my eyes. He’d pressed his lips into a tight line, like he was trying hard not to smile. We were side by side now; Shadows flared almost painfully at my back. That blackmailing bastard, I thought. To Caroline, I said carefully, “That’s what Jack said, and he’s as good as his word.” I bumped him with my hip. “Isn’t he?” Freezing ants marched up and down my arms.
Jack exhaled heavily. He slipped an arm between us, groping for my hands. I pulled away, angry, but he found my tightly clenched fists first. For one breathless second, his arm lit up like the trees around us. The ink on his skin pulsed an intense electric blue. It only lasted a second, maybe two, and then he turned me loose.
The painful Shadows were gone. Instantly. He’d absorbed them, somehow. He shrugged. “What? Did you think I was trying to hold your hand?”
For once, I could think of absolutely nothing to say.
The girl stood just a few feet from the fountain now, eyeing us with interest. “It really is ok, Caroline,” Jack said at last. “I don’t know how long we can stay, so you should make the most of it.”
“Can Marley come out? Please?” For the first time, she looked like an almost normal twelve year old. “He has to stay hidden, where we are.”
“Oh, is he your puppy?” I asked. Jack made an odd coughing sound. Caroline nodded eagerly. “Of course he can. This is a great park for dogs. During the day all kinds of people bring them,” I took an involuntary step backwards, almost landing in the fountain. “…here,” I finished weakly.
Marley wasn’t a dog. He was more like a wolf. A monster wolf. He’d come shooting out of the trees at her low whistle, and now angled himself protectively in front of her while she buried her face in his neck and pulled on his ears. “He’s not a real wolf,” she said dismissively, as if explaining something basic to a stupid person. “He’s more like a guardian spirit. He was my mother’s,” she said, very softly. The wolf spirit thing, or whatever it was, licked her.
“Hey,” Jack said gently. “Try and have some fun while you’re here, ok? Caspia and I need to talk.” The wolf, at least, seemed to take the hint. He pulled on her nightgown with his teeth until they were in a grassy part of the park, where they started playing an enthusiastic game of chase.
“Thank you,” he said after a while.
“You don’t have to thank me. We read about her abduction. It’s what made us realize what was going on. Poor thing. To lose her mother in an accident, and now this.” The girl and her spirit wolf had stopped playing chase. Now she was riding him, using his ears for reins. I shook my head to clear it.
“It wasn’t an accident.”
“Excuse me?”
“Caroline Bedford’s mother was killed. She was gifted, like Caroline. But Marley couldn’t save them both. Her mother ordered him to save her daughter.”
“How do you know this, Jack?” I asked quietly. “Why would they kill one of us? Aren’t they trying to collect us?” The horizon of what I considered possible had exploded tonight.
“Depends on which ‘they’ you’re talking about.” Silver sparked in the void of his irises. He paced like a caged version of the monster playing with the kidnapped child. “There are two sides in any war. The minute we became part of one side’s army, the other side started trying to exterminate us.” He was suddenly so close I could see his jaw clench. “All of us, because to them, we’re all potential weapons.” Marley howled. I wondered if he’d heard us. We both looked, Jack and I, to see girl and wolf wrestling in the grass.
“What are you saying, Jack?” My words were strangled and I felt Shadows wreathe my hands. This time, he did nothing to stop them. “That the Light is murdering its own descendants?”
He didn’t look away. “It’s happened before. I know it’s a lot to take in. Our people need sanctuary, Caspia. I will find a way to get them out. But that won’t help us if we’re still being hunted out here.”
“Sanctuary,” I repeated.
“Someplace where nothing ever happens would be ideal.”
“Oh, hell,” I swore.
He nodded at my Shadow-wreathed hands. “I know you don’t believe me about being a warrior. But have you noticed how you explode into Shadows when you’re threatened or feel the need to defend? That’s the kind of fighter you are, Caspia. A defender. The one time you used the Shadows offensively, you almost died. When you saw Caroline, protecting her was your first instinct, wasn’t it? Tell me you don’t feel the need to protect us, and I’ll go away and never bother you again.”
I stared at my hands. Ethan’s silver bracelets shone through the darkness. “I can’t tell you that,” I said at last.
He took my hands in his, and once again, the darkness dampened out as the ink on his hands flared briefly.
“But I’m not a fighter!” I jerked my hands away. “I don’t know how. I make coffee and go to art school.”
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nbsp; Jack just shook his head. “You just don’t think like one. And art’s actually not bad training for Shadows.” I was silent, remembering the day by the river with Ethan, how it seemed I was getting the hang of them by pretending I was drawing. He grinned. “Just don’t make yourself sick again.”
“What about the others?” I asked at last. “The gifted who’ve disappeared, are they safe?”
He looked away and wouldn’t answer. “Remember that he’s hunting you. He can’t take his real form here, but he has agents.”
Marley the wolf-monster rose up on all fours and gave an ear-splitting howl. He took Caroline’s nightgown in his teeth and began pulling her towards us. “We have to go,” Jack said, low and urgent. And then he was gone; everything was, the fountain, the park. I knew a moment’s intense darkness. I opened my eyes to find myself curled around Ethan’s back, exactly where I had been when I had fallen asleep. It was as if I hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
Except I had, and my mind whirled with unanswered questions. But even more than answers, I desperately wanted to hang onto the night. Something told me that when the sun rose, I wasn’t going to like the answers I found.
Chapter Fourteen:
Splinters
Awareness of my surroundings slammed into me like an anvil. Like drowning, but in reverse, I choked against light, oxygen, and reality as I blinked into Ethan’s frantic face. He straddled me, shaking my shoulders so forcefully that I knew his next step would have been to try slapping me. I was alarmed at how deeply under the Dreamwalking seemed to pull me, but then Ethan’s actual words penetrated.
“…on fire. They don’t think anyone’s hurt.”
Icy horror gave strength to my struggle against him. “What’s on fire? Where?” I demanded, jumping up the second he let go of me. I got tangled up in the sheet that had been our make believe tent the night before and almost fell. He was there in an instant, steadying me like he used to before the change, except his skin was soft and warm and he stumbled with me. Mutual effort kept us from falling this time. He hauled me upright by the waist, tangled sheet and all.
“It’s the coffee shop,” he said, even as I smelled the smoke. If I could smell smoke from two stores away, it had to be bad.
“Oh no,” I whispered. “Oh please no.” I stood in the middle of my bedroom in Ethan’s arms, wearing a bed sheet and pajamas, and realized I’d never really known what being in shock meant. In my case, it meant a mind gone truly blank, incapable of processing the next step. On fire, I thought stupidly, my mind whirling like a record stuck in a groove. The Whitfield Coffee Shop is on fire. Today’s special is supposed to be Vanilla Chai. I knew I should put pants on and do something, but the actual steps involved in finding pants, putting them on, getting to the coffee shop, and then deciding what to do weren’t something my brain could process. Fire, it’s on fire…
Ethan shoved some jeans at me, breaking the spell. He was bare-chested in the early morning darkness. The muscles of his arms moved as he bent, seemingly prepared to dress me himself if that’s what it took. I realized it wasn’t quite dawn yet, and there was no sign of my brother. “Where’s Logan?”
Ethan just looked at me. He didn’t answer because he couldn’t.
Surely not, I thought. Surely Logan hadn’t stopped off to bring us coffee and a bag of muffins after his run on today of all days. Surely he was still trying to make me drink his godawful healthy weed concoction…
I snatched my jeans from Ethan and ran, barefoot, for the stairs.
When I hit the sidewalk outside Moore’s Hardware, all I could see of the Whitfield Coffee Shop were big black columns of smoke. They rose towards the lightening sky over the heads of the gathering crowd. Police had blocked off the street in front of my house. The crowd fanned out in a semi-circle all the way to the park, every single head turned toward the place where I had worked since I turned sixteen. Logan was nowhere to be seen.
The smell was even stronger here; thick and acrid, it worked its way towards me through the crowd, its black fingers smearing bits of ash and choking smoke to coat my eyes and throat. I rubbed at my face and tried to push my way through the crowd anyway. The coffee shop was like my second home. My co-workers and Mr. Markov were the closest thing I had to an extended family, especially after my parents died. The thought that any of them had been caught in the blaze made me frantic. I pushed through the crowd even more forcefully, stopping only when Ethan’s arms around my waist made me.
Black smoke whirled and churned behind the window where I’d lit tea lights every night I’d worked a shift. Orange flames leapt and danced. Together, the smoke and flames looked as if they were performing some kind of demented tug-of-war behind the glass. The heat burned my face and made my eyes sting. I smelled charred wood but also something chemical underneath. What surprised me most was the sound. I didn’t know intense fires had sounds, but this one literally roared and pounded like waves gone mad, with the occasional groan of heavier things buckling.
“Miss, you have to get back to a safe distance,” a uniformed police officer told me. I didn’t recognize him. Ethan’s arm around my waist kept dragging me backwards. I realized the crowd was gone; everyone else had moved back. Only I stayed, fixated on the horror, the police officer’s warnings drowned out by the roar of the fire. I tried to remember whose turn it had been to open that morning. Amelie? Nicolas? Or was Mr. Markov himself trapped in there?
“Get down now!” roared a familiar voice. Something knocked my feet out from under me. I found myself planted face-first on the concrete, Ethan’s arms completely blocking all light. The sound of breaking glass rained down all around us; the front windows had exploded. I had two unrelated, bizarre thoughts at the same time: that breaking glass sounded really pretty, and that Ethan was going to need the first aid kit again since he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
Something sharp rapped against my anklebone. I yelped. “In shock again,” Mr. Markov commented, in his absent, philosophical way.
Ethan rolled off me, checking us both for damage before hauling me to my feet. I ran my hands up and down his chest, amazed that he wasn’t cut to ribbons. I examined his back just as thoroughly. Nothing. The glass seemed to have landed around us in a tight but perfect sphere, exactly as if we’d been encased in a protective bubble. But that was crazy. That would be like…
“Magic,” I hissed, low and dangerous. Mr. Markov merely raised an eyebrow. I grabbed his forearm. “What’s happening? Do you know what caused the fire?” I swallowed convulsively, no longer sure if my eyes were tearing up because of smoke or emotions or some combination of the two. “Is everyone all right?”
My boss’s sightless eyes fixed somewhere over my head. He slid his arm through mine and led me back through the crowd, towards the park. “No one was hurt,” he said gently. He sounded old and tired, as if he had been up a long time and had done his share of grieving already. The new morning sun shone down on a town square full of shell-shocked citizens. Many of them were covered with ash. Some of them were crying. All of them gave Mr. Markov, Ethan and I a wide berth as the three of us made our way towards the fountain. “But the fire was intentional. Someone wanted to send a message.”
Oh, no. No, no, no. “What message?” I made myself ask. I remembered Jack’s warning from my dream. He can’t take his full form there. You’re too well protected. He’ll send messengers after you. Dread coiled in my stomach as I wondered if that extended to people I loved, as well. “What happened?” I demanded as I pulled out my cell phone from my back pocket and scrolled through my messages. One from Logan. I exhaled heavily in relief. He was spending the night at Amberlyn’s.
Mr. Markov’s expression did not change, but he shook his graying head. “Caspia,” he said, and I could hear the thunder underneath his words. “This is not your fault. You and Amelie and Nicolas are under my protection, as surely as if you were my own children. When our visitors last night couldn’t take you, they destroyed my property instead.”
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�It’s not your fault,” Ethan assured me again, gathering me into his arms. I wanted to pull away, to correct him. He needed to know it absolutely was my fault, that everything going wrong in Whitfield could be traced back to me, to the darkness I carried in my blood. But I was weak. It felt so good to let someone support me that I didn’t pull away.
“You don’t understand,” I said at last, much too softly. I should have been louder, more insistent in claiming responsibility. “This is my fault. Even the fact that they found the twins is my fault.”
“If they wanted you, it was strictly as a side job,” Nicolas said. “They came for my sister and me.”
I didn’t recognize the two figures standing beside us in the park. I had to look twice to make sure, but yes, there stood Amelie, my gloriously beautiful co-worker, practically glued to her twin’s hip. I had never seen her in an outfit that cost less than two hundred dollars, and I’d never ever seen her without make-up, a manicure, and perfect hair. Today, however, she could have passed for a very clean homeless person. She wore a plain gray hoodie and straight-leg, slightly baggie jeans. They had a rip in one knee and were slightly too long for her, bunching up over her scuffed black combat boots. Without make-up, she looked young and pretty in a fragile sort of way. Her usually elaborately styled hair hung in one thick silver braid over one shoulder. The hood of her cheap jacket shadowed her pale gray eyes.
“Don’t say anything,” she warned, ducking further under her hood. “I already feel like a circus freak.”
“It’s necessary,” Nicolas said severely. He was dressed exactly like his twin, except that his hoodie was black, and bulged suspiciously in the exact same places I would stash a weapon or two. I stared and he caught me, meeting my curious gaze with a fierce frown. “You met our visitors last night,” he reminded me. He flipped his wrists out and angled them upwards. He wore black leather wrist sheaths, the kind that carried knives for easy access. I wondered what he carried concealed in his boots. “It’s worth taking every precaution.”
