Destinata (Valguard)

by Nicole Daffurn

  Periodically checking through the lounge windows for any sign of the rain easing, Charlie and Zane spent their day in the basement, going over everything they had trained for, brushing up on skills, building stamina and memorizing body parts to target that were sure to cause a fatal outcome. Of course killing a Valguard wasn’t going to be as easy as killing a human or even killing Charlie but they could be killed if you got enough hit’s to the right spots. Charlie was hoping that her visions were wrong, that she would be able to change the future that she had seen so clearly in her mind; she would always hold hope of this but she knew that if she couldn’t change the events that were still even now firmly put in place, she would have to fight and she was going to have to fight hard.

  Dinner was quiet, Charlie had gotten so used to having Ford, El’ and Matt with her at Zane’s house for meal’s that sitting at the large table with just Zane for company didn’t sit well with her. She wanted desperately to fix things between her friends before it was too late, but she knew in doing so would only put them in more danger. She had broken up with Ford not only to anger him but in the hopes that her other friends would keep their distance as well. There was no way she could keep them from fighting all together now that they knew what was coming for them but if she could just keep them away from her – the primary target – she knew that they could at least survive this. They could return to normal, move on from her and eventually have their memories fade into silence.

  After dinner, dumping her dishes on the sink to clean later, Charlie headed straight back to the basement but found the door had been padlocked, leaving her stranded in the small room beside the kitchen wondering what was going on.

  “Zane! Why is the basement locked?”

  She heard his dishes clatter into the sink on top of hers as she made her way back in to face him.

  “Zane?”

  “You need sleep as well as training Charlie. We’ll get back into it tomorrow but I want a full night’s sleep under your belt before we do.”

  “I don’t need to sleep! I need to train”

  “Not tonight, you’ve done enough for today.”

  She knew he was right, she was exhausted and could do with the sleep. After all, she didn’t know if she would get another chance any time soon. The sound of the rain comforted her as she drifted off to sleep, knowing that while it was still hanging around she was safe. Sometime during the night she awoke from a nightmare that had left her shaking and clammy. She couldn’t remember even a fraction of it but she knew without a doubt that it had something to do with the Valguard, what else could have her in hysterics in the middle of the night?

  “Charlie? You ok?”

  “Zane?”

  “Yea, I heard you screaming from my room. Did you have a bad dream?”

  “I guess so.”

  Charlie hadn’t realized she was screaming in her sleep and blushed in embarrassment at the thought of Zane thinking she was weak. If she was screaming at nightmares, what was she going to be like fighting a super-human race?

  Zane turned to go back to his own room comforted by knowing that Charlie had only had a bad dream and no one had come to attack her in the middle of the night but was stopped by a whisper just before pulling the door closed.

  “Don’t leave.”

  “Never.”

  No more nightmares plagued Charlie’s dreams after that, she slept peacefully and when she woke in the morning was refreshed and happy to see that the rain although only showering was still there. She reached up to touch Zane’s cheek, he looked so peaceful in sleep that she hated the thought of disturbing him but she wanted to get up and get moving. Laying idle wasn’t doing the growing concern in her mind any good, she needed to be doing something. He stirred slightly at first looking disoriented and then smiled down at Charlie who was still cupping his face in her small hand.

  “Hi.”

  “Good morning. Are you ready for training?”

  “Already?”

  “Sure why not?”

  “Well, I thought we could just spend the day talking.”

  “Talking? About what? Have you forgotten what’s waiting for us when the rain clears? This isn’t a time to be having a good old chat.”

  “Why not? It’s the best time. If things go the way you think they are going, we aren’t going to get a chance to talk much again are we? So why not now? You know everything there is to know Charlie, our plan is set in place and you are going to be brilliant. There’s nothing more I can teach you and you’d be better of resting and reserving energy rather than spending it and going out exhausted.”

  She had to admit that he had a point there, wasting energy wasn’t something she could really afford to do at this point so she agreed to talk to Zane although she still didn’t know what he wanted to talk about her, he already admitted to knowing everything about her life so what more was there to talk about?

  “So what do you want to talk about then?”

  “Well, how about breakfast.”

  “Breakfast? Of all the topics in the world you want to talk about food? You’re such a guy.”

  “I meant what do you want for breakfast? You can have anything, you decide and I will gather.”

  While Zane was downstairs preparing Charlie’s bacon and pancakes, she decided she was in desperate need of a shower. The warm water felt like heaven running over her aching body and she almost forgot about the Valguard’s and her father and the war but when she shut off the faucets the eerie absence of water running reminded her that it wouldn’t be long now before the skies turned off their own faucets and the memories came crashing back to her at full force. Today wasn’t about the war though, today was about talking apparently.

  They ate in silence, Charlie blushing a lot more than usual while Zane stared at her, seemingly fascinated by the way she ate. Once finished, she quickly downed the rest of her coffee and tried to shift the focus off herself.

  “So, what do you want to talk about?”

  “You.”

  “Me? But you know everything about me.”

  “Not everything, only the things that Kara told me and they were limited. She gave me just enough so that you would believe what I was telling you and that was about it.”

  “Ok fine, ask away. But be prepared to be talking about yourself as well when I get my turn to ask questions.”

  “Oh you get to ask questions? I thought this was my day to ask questions.”

  The playful banter put Charlie in a better mood, she could feel herself relaxing at the light air of the conversation and knew this was a good idea.

  “Well, this may be the only day I get to ask questions so how about you ask five and I will ask five.”

  “Ok sounds fair, I’ll start. When did you lose your first tooth?”

  What the hell? Why would he want to know that?

  Raising her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth Charlie thought about the question for a moment before remembering.

  “I was five, I remember I bit into an apple and when I took my mouth away it was sitting right there in the middle of the flesh of the apple and I freaked out. My mom deposited $2 in a glass jar that night and thought I believed the tooth fairy had brought it. I had seen her do it but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I knew the truth.”

  Hoping that satisfied him, she motioned for him to move onto the next question.

  “What’s your favorite season and why?”

  “Does that count as two questions?”

  “Nope.”

  “Fine, I’ll play along. My favorite season is spring because everything is perfect at that time of the year, the days are clear, the nights are cool, everything is in bloom and the birds fly more in spring.”

  Nodding his head in accent he moved onto the next question with a slight hesitation.

  “Do you believe there is only one right person to love?”

  His questions just got a lot harder and Charlie chose her words carefully before answering.

 
; “I don’t think there is only one right person to love. I think you can love more than one person and have it be right for that time of your life but I think that there is only one soul mate for every person, the one that completes you. That you fit with perfectly because they are the missing half of yourself.”

  No pauses this time before launching straight into the next question. Charlie could see now that he had only asked the trivial questions at the start to ease her into the tougher questions that were coming now and she had to hand it to him, it had worked.

  “How many right for the moment loves have you had?”

  “One – Ford. And that didn’t exactly turn out too well did it.”

  She saw Zane’s face tilt lower towards the bed as if to hide whatever emotion was playing across his face and she wondered whether she had said the wrong thing but she never got the chance to address it because he was straight into his last question.

  “Why Ford?”

  She wasn’t so sure she wanted to answer the question now but she had agreed to play the game and she wasn’t one to bow out when things got tough, so she answered as honestly as she could.

  “I’m not sure really. I’ve known him since I was about five. Right around the time my first tooth fell out actually but it wasn’t until I turned thirteen that I started looking at him in any other way other than a protective big brother. I started to notice his appearance first, the sudden onset of muscle, the squaring of his jaw, growing into himself you know? And then we started hanging out more at school and then at home and soon we were as inseparable as me and El’. I loved everything about him, the way he talked, the way he would ruffle his hair when he got upset or worried, the way he protected Ava and El’ above anything else. He always put himself last and his sisters first. He’s older than I am and when you’re a teenager growing up in Tole, there aren’t many choices in boyfriends but I didn’t need any, I only had eyes for Ford, of course I would never admit it because of the fact that he was older and the girls his age were so much better looking than me and funnier and more experienced. I honestly thought he just thought of me as another little sister to protect until El’ told me the day he came back that he’d always loved me. And that’s it.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and turned away from Zane’s intent gaze thinking up her first question to ask him before he could retaliate to her last answer. Taking her cue from him, she decided to ease him into the harder questions with easier ones first.

  “My turn. First question is did you go to a regular school?”

  “Yes, I was raised in a foster home so I went to a regular school and did the regular boy things but I could never show my eyes or use my hazing powers. My ‘parents’ made me wear contacts while we were in public. I hated them because I could see the reflection from the glow on the inside of them.”

  She had always wondered whether contacts would cancel out the glow, now she knew that they did maybe she could invest in a pair if she made it through the war alive.

  “If you could choose anywhere to be in the world where would it be?”

  “Right here, in this room. With you forever.”

  Charlie hadn’t expected this answer and before she could begin to turn red once again she hurried on and reused one of his own questions.

  “Do you think that there is only one right person to love?”

  “No, like you I think that there are right moments to love different people and one soul mate for each of us.”

  She wondered briefly why Zane had wanted her to answer that question when his own answer was the same as hers but ignored it and moved on, wanting to know more about the mysterious man upon whose chest she still leaned against.

  “Have you ever had your heart broken?”

  “Once.”

  “By who?”

  “Pass.”

  “What? You never said anything about passes.”

  “You never asked, so I pass.”

  “Ok, well then I have just one more question. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  “No. I think that you can be attracted to someone at first sight, even be in lust at first sight but not love. I think it takes a certain amount of intimacy to connect to someone before you can love them. Sure I think you can love someone instantly but not be in love with them.”

  Charlie didn’t respond, instead she put her head back down on his chest which had risen slightly waiting for his answer and let her breathing fall in step with his, the steady rise and fall of his chest calming her. That sense of calm vanished the moment she notice that everything was quiet… A little too quiet.

  “The rain’s stopped.”

  There was no sense of urgency or worry in her tone, it was only riddled with sadness. The time had come to fight.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was time to put the hours and hours they had spent planning - with the help of Charlie’s foresight – into place. They had known for weeks now that the Valguard would come at them from the Town Hall. There were currently 642 Valguard residing in Tole, not including Charlie or Zane. The odds weren’t great but if their plans went accordingly they would have numbers on their side as well. It was still daylight when they started to set their plans in motion and Charlie felt nothing but grateful that the Valguard didn’t like the thought of fighting during daylight hours. They thought it would give them the upper hand if they could fight in darkness but Charlie had other ideas.

  She decided not to let the others know that the time was now. They would find out in a few short hours anyway and her and Zane could get around a lot quieter and quicker without another three people following them unnecessarily.

  The ‘stinky old thing’ that Ford had retrieved from Kara’s basement the day she had died had in fact been a cloth bag – the kind that was sold in Tole’s gift shops. Printed on the outside of the bag was a map of the whole town, no one else would have been the wiser about the hidden meaning behind the map, except that in her final letter to Zane she had told him to check the inside lining of the bag. They had spent hours taking turns to carefully unstitch the lining of the musty smelling tote so as not to rip an essential part of what they were looking for and when they finally had every piece of cotton unpicked they found that the underneath the lining of the bag was another map. Almost identical to the one on the outside and at first they couldn’t distinguish why they had needed to go through the effort of unpicking all those stitches. It wasn’t until that afternoon when Charlie was standing in the pantry looking for something to eat that something clicked about the differences on the maps.

  “The houses are marked!”

  The loud exclamation had come as a shock to the rest of the house who came running to her side to find out what she was talking about.

  “What are you on about Char?”

  “The houses on the inside of the maps are marked. On the outside they are just houses but on the inside they’re marked.”

  Ford ran to grab the stuffy tote from the back of the dining room chair and returned to the kitchen to spread it out over the counter.

  “See there. There’s a small mark probably where the kitchen is. And what’s the bet that those small dotted lines symbolize tunnels, just like the one that runs from this house to Kara’s.”

  Their attention immediately turned to the house on Oak Street that they knew to be the one they were standing in and traced the faint dotted line from their own kitchen to the basement below the kitchen in Kara’s cottage. She had left them a map of every house that had connecting tunnels which would assure easy travel around town and the best part was that the the Valguard had no idea of the tunnels existence.

  The Valguard don’t know.

  Those four words were the last words Kara had ever written and until they had figure out the map, they hadn’t been able to figure out what she had meant. Kara had interpreting her visions down to a fine art, Charlie only wished she could be so sure of her own.

  The warmth of the shower beating down upon her head was
comforting but it felt all wrong after fourteen days of showering with Ford; just the thought of him sent a pain through her stomach that gnawed away at her until she shut the shower off, dressed and met Zane in the kitchen. Having showered before her he was dressed and ready by the time Charlie found him leaning against the counter looking… What? Bored? Worried? Indifferent? She couldn’t decide on which emotion was playing across Zane’s face at that moment but it was gone as soon as he looked her way, his face breaking into a small smile and erasing all traces of any other feelings.

  “You ready?”

  “Not really. But I don’t think I’m ever going to be ready to willingly kill another being. Let’s go.”

  Their equipment had been packed for over a week now and as they made their way through the concealed pantry door into the hidden shelter behind, Zane grabbed the bag and did a quick inventory making sure that everything they needed was in there. They didn’t want to be entering a war empty handed after all.

  Handing a flashlight to Charlie he also pulled a second from the bag for himself, lightly pushed against the almost bare wall to their left and started on down the tunnel, making sure the door was sealed well. If the Valguard decided to raid their house there was no way they would ever find the shelter let alone the network of tunnels they were moving along quietly now. Having traveled the tunnel several times since finding the map inside the tote bag they knew exactly where they needed to stop, open the next door by pushing firmly on the wall of the tunnel, and move onto the adjoining tunnel that would take them next door to where Ford, El’ and Matt would hopefully be preoccupied. Not bothering to turn any lights on in the shelter identical to the one back in Zane’s house, they made their way relatively silently into the basement of her old place. This basement was nothing like Zane’s pristine, training basement. It was just full of old junk and dark corners that had always freaked Charlie out. She decided to sit in the middle and lightest part of the basement, hoping that no one would choose that moment to come downstairs, while Zane started on the first part of their plan.