I dabbed at my cut, wincing from both the pain in my knee and in my mind. Angry, cutting words raged against me, but beneath it all was the memory of Benjamin’s hands on my face, healing power flowing into my body, and the question I’d refused to ask myself until now.
Why did he save my life?
19
I jerked awake. Something was lurking outside the shed.
On my feet at once, I tuned my ears to the quiet breathing of the trespasser. By its breathing alone I could tell that it wasn’t human.
I cracked open the door and peered into the darkness, the poor visibility less of a deterrent to me than to other people.
Dim moonlight glittered brownish-yellow in the eyes of a large dog five feet in front of me. It sat politely, its tail thumping against the ground, as if it were expecting me. Hanging from its mouth was a plastic bag with the logo of the convenience store where Ember was shot.
My eyes met the dog’s and I felt an almost infinitesimal tug in the back of my mind.
Ember had sent the dog to me and was controlling it from across the city. Intense pride washed over me. I’d never, ever tease Ember again, even if she couldn’t fist fight worth a darn.
The dog gently placed the bag at its feet with a metallic clunk and sauntered over to me. I sank to my knees and embraced the shaggy animal, my heart swelling almost too much to bear. “Thank you,” I whispered into its muzzle, hoping Ember could hear me. “I miss you, too.”
The dog pulled away from me and nosed around the bag, eventually picking up, with its teeth, a small black item. I took it and turned it over in my hands, my face breaking into a grin. Ember had sent me a police scanner.
Curious if the bag contained anything else, I fished around and pulled out a few cans of food, a moist towelette from the sick bay, and a bottle of water. Crushed under all the cans lay a thin envelope.
I kissed the dog on the muzzle and ruffled behind its ears. “Go on now,” I whispered. “Go on home.”
The dog stared at me for a long moment and then wandered back into the brush towards the lights of the city.
I returned to the shed and sat on an upturned metal trashcan I used as a chair. By the light of my flashlight I tore open the envelope. Ember’s messy, scrawling handwriting filled a torn piece of notebook paper.
Jilly, Patrick is reely mad at you. He rote a letter to elder Campbell about you and says he will kill you if he sees you in the city and made us lissen to it. Marco told him thats murder and Patrick hit him and he fell. Reid told Patrick he cant act like he is an elder when hes not and Patrick punched him. He shoved me down the stares and I am scared to be alone with him. I miss you and I wish we coold patroll like last time becuz you make me feel braver. Pleez be safe.
Love, Ember Harris
My fist clenched reflexively, crinkling the letter. I smoothed out the letter and read it again.
I had never felt more selfish than I did at that moment.
Determined not to break down, I folded the letter and placed it in its envelope before laying down on my makeshift bed.
Unbidden images of Ember tumbling, screaming, down the hard stairwell seared my imagination, making me sit up with a gasp.
Opposite the horror in my heart, fury wrestled for control. A brief thought of Patrick’s fist connecting with Marco’s jaw crashed over me, and the fury won.
Half-formed plans to storm base camp and rescue my teammates began to whirl around my mind. Every time I imagined punching Patrick’s face, the resultant rush urged me to picture the scene again from a different angle. The thoughts were so deliciously subversive. I let my mind wander farther down that path.
Fighting Patrick.
Making Patrick’s eyes widen in fear again.
Feeling the crunch of bone beneath my first.
Beating Patrick. For good.
A shiver raced down my spine. I’d never deliberately entertained thoughts of facing another superhero in combat before. The elders couldn’t hear thoughts, but if they could, such an idea would’ve been declared a thought crime. I paused, taken aback at the bizarre concept—could I commit crimes in my mind? Was my mind a place that could be, or should be, governed and policed?
For some reason, I thought of the women’s magazine that sat untouched in my backpack.
Even if I defeated Patrick, what would I do?
My own question caught me off guard. Nobody else was trained to be a leader. Sons of elders became leaders. Sometimes nephews of elders became leaders. Marco and Reid had never been trained for leadership, though they weren’t disqualified from leading if the need arose. Ember and I weren’t eligible, period.
I chewed on my lip and stared at the ceiling. Crickets and cicadas outside called to their own kind in a familiar symphony that normally I would’ve found relaxing, but now I just found annoying.
I’d spent my entire life sleeping on the ground, listening to bugs. I’d run away from my whole world and here I was, sleeping on the ground and listening to bugs. I hadn’t changed my life, just my location.
With a groan, I sat up and hugged my knees. My head felt foggy and slow as it worked through my late-night thoughts.
What was I doing here? What was my goal?
Closing my eyes, I breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly, as my cousin Christiana had taught me to do. Before she was killed during the skirmishes with the Westerns, she’d suffered from hearing voices and would do breathing exercises to calm down and tune them out.
I breathed in and out again, deeper this time, and one by one, I sifted through the shreds of thoughts.
I am Jillian Johnson.
I am a superhero.
I almost died a few days ago.
I was saved by Benjamin, a criminal.
I left my team in disgrace.
I promised the citizens of Saint Catherine that I would defend them.
I am outside of an authority umbrella.
I don’t care.
At that moment, the tension in my body that I had been unaware of lessened a little. I lay back down and closed my eyes, and for the first time in many nights, I slept well.
The next morning, I cracked open a can of baked beans and turned on the police scanner. While I listened to chatter between units, I thought I heard a voice far in the distance.
I turned off the scanner and concentrated.
“Jillian! Where are you?”
It was Marco!
I jumped up, unbolted the shed door, and threw it open. While clambering through bushes, I spied Marco in the distance with a garbage bag over one shoulder and no mask on.
“Marco!” I didn’t care who heard me. I crashed through the rest of the thorns and broke into a run. When I met up with him, I hugged him so hard he let out a little “oof!”
“Jill, you’re squishing me.” He tried to pull away.
I squeezed him harder.
And then he’d dropped his bag and was embracing me with equal desperation, his whole body shaking with everything left unsaid.
I inhaled my cousin’s scent, allowing myself to remember happier times in years gone by. In all those memories Marco was a constant—his sneaky grin, his silly jokes, his unfailing belief that I was admirable. I hadn’t realized until just then that I needed Marco, and he very possibly needed me equally as much.
Marco was here and everything was going to be alright. I wasn’t going to be alone anymore. I released Marco and gently pushed him back, taking in the sight of him.
My joy drained away.
Marco’s lip was swollen and purple, as was the skin around his left eye. His right hand was bandaged, and I thought I saw a hint of bruising under his collar, as if someone had wrung his neck.
I swallowed. “Patrick?”
Marco sighed. “Yeah.”
“Come inside and we’ll talk.”
Resisting the childlike impulse to take him by the hand, I led him through the bushes to the small shed. When he crossed the threshold, he stopped and stared at the little ho
me I’d made for myself.
He picked up my homemade lantern, a metal can with tin foil inside to better reflect my flashlight’s beam, and examined it. “This place is as least as nice as an elder’s house. Did you do this in just a couple of days?”
I shrugged. “Not much else to do but fix it up.” I took the lantern from him and put it in the corner. “Now tell me everything. Why are you here? Are the others on their way now?”
He sighed. “No, it’s just me. I couldn’t stay there anymore.” He sank down onto the upturned trashcan and I kneeled down beside him. He looked at me, his brown eyes sad.
“After you left, things got ugly. Uglier than normal, I mean. Patrick would walk around the house and fly off the handle about everything. Reid did something, I don’t know what, on the afternoon after you left and Patrick threw a pot of boiling water at him. It didn’t hit him, but some of the water splashed into his eye and now his vision is blurry. And then later Patrick yelled at me for not arranging the sick bay the right way, and he punched me and tried to choke me, but then Ember came in and asked him to stop.”
He furrowed his brow. “I guess he thought something bad at her, because she screamed that she’d report him to the elders if he did it. Later he threw her down the stairs.”
I knew about that already, of course, but it was still horrible to hear. “Was she seriously hurt?”
He shook his head. “No, but I heard her crying in the kitchen. I went in to comfort her, and saw her putting stuff in the bag, and the dog at the door. I realized what she was doing so I asked her to tell me where you were. I got lost a few miles from here when the dog got away from me. That was…that was rough.” He cleared his throat. “I thought it was my punishment for leaving the authority umbrella. I spent a long while wandering around Northside thinking I’d never find you.” He looked me square in the eye. “I’m not going back.”
I squeezed his hand. “Neither am I. We’ll figure this out together.”
I smiled weakly, my genuine happiness pricked with sudden guilt for leading him into my life on the edge. I had to be strong for him, though. He’d never know about my doubts.
Some of the emotion left his face and he opened the garbage bag. “So, where should I put my stuff?”
20
Though I’d told myself I would continue to protect the city, the police scanner and our masks were pushed under a pile of clothes in the corner of the shed and ignored after Marco joined me. Every day I glanced at the pile and told myself I’d know when the right time was to bring them out again, but before I knew it days slid into weeks.
Marco and I found odd jobs to do for a little money in the nearby neighborhoods. Elderly residents were happy to have young, strong people mow their lawns, weed their flower beds, and put together simple sheds and other construction projects. Sometimes we earned cash, other times we were paid with a meal and a shower. The edge of Northside was outside of our usual patrol area, so we remained blessedly unrecognized.
It was the most peaceful life I’d ever known.
Though we worked for people of all ages, the young women of our neighborhood were especially fond of Marco, and they made up a disproportionately large number of our clients.
The newly-married Mrs. Macudzinski, whose husband never seemed to be home, fussed terribly over him and asked him, and him only, to dinner on more than one occasion. He politely refused each time.
A flock of tanned teenage girls in impossibly skimpy bathing suits approached Marco en masse one afternoon and asked him to join them at the local swimming pool. When he actually hesitated in his answer, I smacked him and told the girls to get lost.
“You’re the least fun person alive,” Marco groaned a few minutes later, massaging his shoulder where I’d hit him.
“We may be outside of the umbrella now, but if I ever catch you abandoning a job to cavort with girls, I will write your mother.” I picked up my pruning shears and turned back to the shrubs.
After three weeks of working every day, we’d saved up enough money to do something fun downtown. After much discussion, we agreed to see a movie together at a discount theater. It was our first movie and we were terribly excited. At the theater, Marco spent a small fortune on a box of brightly-colored gooey candies about which I couldn’t bring myself to lecture him. When he offered me a handful I found myself savoring the sweet, bold fruit flavors.
I enjoyed the film, which was an action thriller with car chases and explosions. However, halfway through the movie, a scene played out in which the scarred, accented villain grabbed a young female bystander and held a knife to her throat, issuing an ultimatum to the frantic hero.
“Jill? What’s wrong?” Marco whispered.
I was hiding my face in my hands and suppressing the urge to vomit. I heard a wet gurgling coming from the movie and jumped up from my seat, sprinting down the theater steps to the exit.
I didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. I doubled over in the hallway and threw up. The skin of my throat tingled as if I’d just been touched there—I clasped my hand to it and squeezed my eyes shut.
I hope this person misses you. It’s nice of you to send a final message.
“Whoa,” a theater employee said behind me. “You sit down. I’ll get one of the janitors. Dang.”
Marco hurried out of the theater and put his arm around my shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go home. You got a bug or something?”
I heaved again and Marco half-dragged me out of the building into the muggy night air. He pulled me down onto a bench and ordered me to put my head between my knees. I complied, and he started gibbering about food poisoning and the flu.
“It’s not the flu.” I slowly lifted my head up. “It was the movie.”
“The movie made you sick?”
I briefly considered lying to him about why I reacted the way I did. After a moment’s pause, I stood up and beckoned him to follow me home. “I need to tell you something.”
While we walked under streetlights and past rowdy bars, I explained to him how I’d met Benjamin in Café Stella and begun a tentative friendship with him.
Marco didn’t say anything until I told him about the fight with Beau and my neck wound.
“I thought there was an unusual amount of blood. I couldn’t explain it, though, so I guess I just never thought about it.”
“Well, I think about it. Anyway, stuff happened and he figured out it was me in time to reverse the blood loss. And then I went home and beat up Patrick.”
Marco threw his head back and laughed until his eyes teared up. “That will forever and always be my favorite memory. So, have you seen Benjamin since that night?”
“No,” I muttered. “I doubt I’ll ever see him again. Besides, what would I say to him if I did?”
Marco smirked at me. “How about, ‘wanna court?’”
“Did you not hear the part where he’s a supervillain?”
“No, I heard that part. Did you know you smile whenever you say his name?”
That caught me off guard. “That doesn’t mean anything,” I snapped. “He’s from one of the forbidden families and I can’t be associated with him.”
“You also can’t beat up Patrick and run off. And yet, here we are.”
I had no reply. We walked back to the shed in heavy silence.
When Marco and I lay down on the floor of the shed, now with a cheap blanket on it to insulate us from the dirty surface, he drifted off to sleep immediately. I listened to his gentle snores, yet more late-night thoughts swirling.
Deep in the recesses on my mind lurked disquiet, like an invisible splinter in one’s finger, too small to detect from anything besides the constant throb. I strained to focus on it. It didn’t have shape or form, like thoughts. It was a tiny ball of emotion, but unconnected to anything else in my mind.
I bolted upright. The splinter was unconnected to anything in my mind because it wasn’t from my mind. Ember was casting her influence farther than ever before, reaching out across t
he void to send me a message, faint as it was. I focused as hard as I could on her pinprick connection.
Fear. Anger. Stress. A ghost of a shadow of a memory of falling, falling, falling. A call for help. Thunderous voices and breaking glass. And finally, one clear image: Marco, sitting on the couch, quietly unraveling a knitting project.
The connection blew out like a candle in the darkness.
“Marco! Wake up!”
Marco jerked awake and nearly blinded me with a ball of light. “What’s wrong? Is it Patrick?”
“Sort of.” I shoved my feet into my boots. “Ember just sent me a distress call. I’m going back to base camp right now and rescuing them. This whole split-team situation is a load of crap.”
Marco stepped between the door and me.
I huffed. “What are you doing? Move.”
“No. We’re not going back.”
I did not have time for this. “Marco, I’m not going to physically force you to move, but I will punch an escape hole in the roof. I swear I will.”
Marco took a shaking breath. “If it’s so bad there, let them leave like we did.”
“Ember’s in trouble! She probably can’t leave. She—”
“She’s in the same damned situation we both were until we left!” Marco’s eyes glowed yellow, vapor-like tendrils of raw energy curling up and away from them.
“Easy there,” I whispered, my hands up. “Your eyes…”
My priorities swerved from aiding Ember to preventing Marco’s further power incontinence. I would not fare well if he unleashed the full potency of a Georgia summer day two feet from me.
The glow faded as quickly as it had come, and Marco sank to the ground, his face in his hands.
“Don’t go,” he groaned. “Don’t go, Jill. Patrick will kill you and this will be for nothing. Ember and Reid and Patrick have been going at it since you left. Whatever is happening there now is nothing they haven’t said or done before.”
I kneeled opposite Marco and put my hand on his shoulder. This wasn’t the Marco I knew. I struggled to recollect the last time I’d seen his eyes glow—Gregory’s death, maybe. He never raised his voice at me. I’d been accused of unforgivable obtuseness before, but I wasn’t so dense that I couldn’t sense that my friend was deeply upset, and his newfound contempt for our friends was foreign to me. There was something beneath this outburst, something he wasn’t telling me.
Battlecry Page 13
