by Alisa Valdes
“What’s wrong?” asked Logan.
“I don’t feel well,” I told him.
“Let’s get you some air,” he suggested.
“You look green,” said Kelsey. “Doesn’t she look green?”
“She looks green,” Logan agreed.
I was afraid I was going to throw up on them.
“Let’s get her out of here,” said Logan, and the next thing I knew, he and Kelsey were leading me outside, through the front door, telling the chaperones I had a bit of stomach flu and needed air. It was all sort of a blur, but soon I was out on school grounds, with Kelsey rubbing my shoulders and Logan watching me with a cold, hard look on his face that I did not recognize as anything I’d ever seen on him before.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked him, shivering under his mean gaze.
He laughed cruelly.
Kelsey gripped my hand now, hard, because she saw the same sinister look that I did on him.
“I think we should get back inside,” she said.
“No, I think the party’s just getting started, ladies,” said Logan, as he snapped his fingers. All around us, shadowy figures emerged now from the trees, three of them that I could see, dark, quiet and stealthy as ninjas. They wore the same red robes I’d seen at the pond with Dr. Bergant.
I turned to run the other way, but there were more of them behind us. About ten in all.
“Oh my God. What is this?” asked Kelsey, fear in her eyes and voice.
“Girls, I’d like you to meet my friends.”
“You?” I asked Logan, horrified.
The shadows rushed us then, soundlessly, surrounded us, and I could see that they were people, or spirits, in dark robes with hoods. They picked me and Kelsey up from the ground, and began to carry us off, kicking and struggling, to the wild part of the campus, the running and hiking fields, which was completely dark at this time of night. I started to scream, but Logan clamped his cold fist like a stone over my mouth.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said with a bit of a snarl. It was so out of character for the boy I’d thought he was that I was stunned silent.
Kelsey began to scream now, and in spite of his warnings for her to stop, she didn’t. She kept shrieking and calling for help. Logan handled the situation by taking what appeared to be a handkerchief from his pocket and holding it over her nose and mouth as she struggled. I watched in horror as she appeared to suffocate, and passed out, her arms and legs splaying limply in every direction.
“No!” I screamed. This wasn’t happening! It couldn’t be happening. And yet it was. And now we were being herded toward a black Cadillac Escalade that was parked along one of the hiking trails, and shoved inside.
Logan was on top of me then, binding my wrists and ankles with rope and duct tape. He tied Kelsey up in the same way even though she wasn’t conscious. The hooded figures helped. One of them held a cloth like the one Logan had used on Kelsey, and brought it toward me, placing it over my nose and mouth. As I breathed in the noxious poison it contained, I caught the edge of his face in a scrap of light from the streetlamps on Academy Boulevard. He had beautiful green eyes.
They were familiar to me.
I tried to remember where I’d seen them before. The world was growing fuzzier, and further away, quieter, more echoing and vague, and it took me a moment, but I remembered. I’d seen these eyes in the face of a young boy, in Demetrio’s memory. It was his half-brother. Hilario.
“No,” I tried to say, but my voice was gone.
Then the men disappeared, and I was fading, fading, and the doors were closing, and the car was starting, and I didn’t know where Logan was taking us, but I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
♦
When I regained consciousness, I was still tied up, and my wrists and ankles hurt badly. I found myself in a half-dark room, on a stained, lumpy mattress, and at first I was panicked because my mind went to the worst possible place it could go. I prayed then. I wasn’t used to praying. But at that moment, I prayed that nothing horrible had happened to me, that I hadn’t been violated as my first experience as a woman.
My dress and stockings seemed to still be in tact, though, and I took comfort in the fact that I had no pain anywhere but at the ends of my extremities. And my head. My head pounded as though my brain were swelling in pulsating rhythm, growing larger and more filled with fluid with every heartbeat. My mouth was dry, but there was nothing in it. I could move my lips, my tongue, I could breathe. I was on my side, with my hands behind my back. My shoulders ached from the awkward position. My neck, too. So maybe I was wrong in my initial assessment of my physical state. As I came to, little by little, I began to realize that every part of me ached a bit.
I struggled to get myself into a sitting position, and turned my head this way and that, searching for Kelsey. All I saw was a very small, very dingy room, with a bed and a dresser and chair that appeared to be falling apart. There was a smell of mildew and stale cigarette smoke, and a single naked bulb dangled from a frayed cord in the ceiling above me. The only light in the room came from a streetlight outside, the dim and slightly orange kind you often found in rural places. There were curtains on the windows, but they were open. My pulse raced, and all I could think about was getting out of here. How could I do it? I opened my mouth to cry out, but thought better of it. What if the only people - or things - who would be here to hear my cry were bad? What if my scream brought nothing but Logan, and more poison? I clamped my jaw shut, and began to look for something, anything. Something sharp, maybe, to cut the binds. This is when I noticed the man standing in the shadows near the closed door. He blended in, tall and lean, dressed all in black, but his green eyes shone in the dark, and they were watching me. I saw a red ember just below them. It grew brighter for a moment, then dimmed again. Someone was in the room with me, and he was smoking.
I backed instinctively away from the figure, toward the flimsy plywood headboard of the bed. This only caused whomever it was to laugh to themselves. I recognized that voice, that low smooth tenor, that unsympathetic guffaw.
“Good morning, sunshine.” He stepped out of the shadows and into the pale glow from outside. The light made his skin glow with a red hue, and I saw that he wore only pants. No shirt. He had gold chains around his neck, and the jeans were so loose and belted so low around his hips that a good portion of his boxer shorts showed. He had bandana around his head, knotted the way gang members did it, and a limp to his stride that was completely and utterly genuine.
“Hilario?” I asked.
“How sweet,” he said, sucking the ember bright orange again. In the light from the end of the cigarette I could see his eyes crinkle in a smile - but it was a smile without a hint of kindness. “You know my name. That’s nice, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby,” I spat.
This excited him, and he chuckled some more, walking slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed, looking at me with eyes that seemed to have a supernatural yellow glow to them.
“Why not, baby? Don’t you like it? I felt something when you touched me in the car, didn’t you feel it?”
“I didn’t touch you. You touched me.”
“That is true,” he said. “But you know you felt something. Demetrio thinks it’s his, doesn’t he baby, that feeling? He thinks he’s entitled to it, just like he was entitled to everything else I ever wanted. Especially our father. I never knew him, but he did. He never came to see me, but he loved Demetrio.”
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked him.
He came close now, and touched my hair, my cheek. It felt dangerous, thrilling. I had been scared a few times in my life before then, but never terrified.
“What am I going to do to you,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Now there’s a good question, baby.”
“Don’t.”
He sighed deeply and sat next to me on the bed. At this range, I had a very good sense of how he looked, and again was struck by how
beautiful he was, from a purely aesthetic point of view. Looking at him was something like looking at a lion close up at the zoo. You recognized the majestic beauty of the thing, but you also realized it could easily slice you in two and eat your for breakfast. I remembered the child he had been once, how he’d once had it in him to protect Demetrio, rather than destroy him.
“He showed me, the day your father broke your leg,” I told him.
“What?” He grew very intrigued at this, but also visibly angered, though he tried to conceal that fact through a horrifyingly cruel smile. “Who did?”
“Your brother. He took me to your house the night it happened, he let me see the memory, and I saw how you protected him. You weren’t always like this. You don’t have to be like this. That’s why he hasn’t let them get rid of you yet, you know that? Because he carries that memory around with him, and it makes him hopeful for you.”
I saw a flicker of emotion in his eyes, but I could not tell what it was. It might have been regret, but it was more like amusement.
“Demetrio was always too soft for his own good,” he said.
I realized I was trembling in every muscle, dying to be out of here.
“What did you do to Kelsey?” I asked.
“Your little blonde friend?” he asked.
“Where is she?”
“She’s hot. But not as hot as you.”
“Where is she?”
“She’ll be here as soon as she wakes up. We have her in the next room. I wanted to have a moment to chat with you alone first.”
“What did you do to us, while we were unconscious?”
“My goodness, you ask a lot of questions. Don’t worry, I didn’t defile you. No one did. If that happens with us, and I would really very much like that,” he stopped to caress my arm with his fingertips, in a way that made me shudder with horror. “I want you awake for it so you can say my name.”
“You won’t get away with this,” I told him.
“Oh, but you see, that’s where you’re wrong. I already have.”
At that moment, the door opened, and a flood of light poured in from the dank hallway beyond. It looked like we were in an old trailer of some kind. Two men stood on either side of Kelsey, who looked like she’d been roughed up a bit.
“Maria!” she cried when she saw me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “Are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Shut up, females,” said Hilario now. “You’re giving me a headache.”
We did as he said, because in that kind of situation it was the best decision you could make. The men came into the room, carrying a lantern of some kind. I realized that the light wasn’t coming from any fixtures in the hallway, because this was actually an abandoned home, without electricity. As they came closer, I saw that one was Ulysses, from the trailer. The other was Logan.
“How?” I asked Logan. “How is this you? What are you? Why are you doing this?”
Logan looked at Hilario as though requesting permission to answer me, and Hilario cut him down with a curt shake of his head. Logan and Ulysses dumped Kelsey on the bed next to me, and retreated to the wall near the window, to stand guard. I noticed Logan had a gun in his waistband. Kelsey and I scooted as close to each other as we could, not that this was going to help in the even that we were shot, but instinct is instinct.
“Here is the short version of the story for you, Maria,” said Hilario, getting up to pace nervously back and forth, back and forth, in a way that very much reminded me of the coyote he sometimes materialized as. “My brother is too soft. He is a sellout, and a traitor. He left the gang, or he tried to, and that was a no-no. You don’t have a lot of rules in the gang, but you have rules. You don’t snitch, and you don’t leave. We don’t let you leave. But he thought he was better than we were, and he wanted to get himself out. Thought he was going to do good in life.”
“He did,” I screamed. “He graduated with honors and he got a college scholarship. He was on his way.”
“Shut up!” roared Hilario, stalking in a strange way now, shifting shape before our very eyes. His shoulders grew hunched, and his arms became thinner, and longer, and the bones made a terrible din of crunching and crackling, as he became a coyote. Even so, he was able to keep talking, through his coyote’s mouth, the voice deep and horrible now, snarling and guttural.
“I wasn’t going to let that happen, you understand. I wasn’t going to let him go free like that, and risk having him turn me in, rat on me. He knew that. We were having that talk the night it happened. And then, when it happened, wouldn’t you know, it was the same old thing again, with him getting the better deal. He always had it easier.”
Kelsey and I backed up as far as we possibly could on the bed, and she was shaking as much as I was.
“I studied, after I died. I wanted to know everything there was to know about revenants, about the system, and how to manipulate it. I found out about the system of Kindreds, and about Kindred Primaries. This intrigued me. And I found out that there were spells you could do, divination ceremonies, deals that could be made, to find out information like that, and that’s how I found out about you.”
“You knew about me?”
“I’ve known about you longer than he has.” His eyes glowed with pride.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not my doing that you drive past his haunting grounds twice a week, Maria. The Maker has a way of throwing souls together and hoping they figure it out. But the two of you, without my help, you would have never figured it out. Too stupid.”
“You caused my crash.”
“Of course I did.” He seemed insulted that I might have ever thought otherwise.
“But why?”
“Because, I knew we’d eventually end up right where I wanted us.”
“And where is that?”
“Here, of course.” He shape-shifted again, this time into something even more horrible than a coyote. I heard the bones of his body as they crunched and grew and shrunk and reformed in the shape of something I can only describe as a demon, hairless and spiny, with a long, barbed tail. The voice, when it came, was even worse now than it had been before.
“Here,” he growled.
I didn’t ask anything more, because I didn’t like the looks of the way he licked his chops and his yellow-green eyes glowed at us.
“Your date, Logan here, is my friend. He’s always been my friend.”
“Is he like you, a spirit?” I asked.
“No. He’s human. He’s one of the minions of humans who do what we ask of them.”
“Gladly, your highness,” Logan said.
Hilario continued. “I found Logan because he called me. There are some among you who seek to be associated with us, or with even darker souls. They reach out in their own ways, through their own magic, and I was lucky enough to find him just in time to get him to ask you out last year.”
“But for what?” I asked. “For what?”
“The answer to that question is very simple, Maria,” growled the beast. “You are the bait. My brother’s soul is the prize.”
“He thinks you’re good!” I cried. “He refuses to believe you’d do this.”
“Of course he does,” chuckled the beast, as it seemed to be calming down now, and taking the form once again of the man. “It’s all part of the fun.”
“He’s your own brother! How can you do this?”
“Because I enjoy it.”
“All so that you make him fail?” I asked. “Even though you fail, too, in the process? Does that even make sense to you?”
He came in close then, and kissed me on the lips. I resisted, and spit his acrid taste off when he was done. Kelsey somehow curled her legs into her chest, and unleashed them with a stunning blow to Hilario’s chin, knocking him down, to protect me.
He rose up, furious, with bright red blood dripping from his lower lip, and took a knife from his pocket, unsheathed it with sl
ow, cold deliberation and a devilish smile. The blade gleamed like the ones that had been used in the ceremony, with snaking, moving lettering along the blade.
“You shouldn’t have done that, BFF,” he told her. “You do realize you’re the disposable one here, don’t you blondie?”
“No!” I screamed, as he came close to her, and, grabbing her hair in his free hand, yanked her head back and held the blade to her throat. “She was only trying to help me. Take me. Not her. She hasn’t done anything to you.”
“My brother won’t come for Kelsey,” Hilario hissed in her face. “Pretty as you are, delicious as you look, he doesn’t care about you. And that hurts you, doesn’t it? I see what Maria doesn’t. You’re jealous. You hate that she gets more boys than you do.”
Kelsey’s face was such a mass of fear and pain that it physically hurt me to look at her.
Hilario laughed in her face. “It’s Maria my brother wants. I could cut you right here, right now, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to my plan.”
“Please,” she stammered, terrified.
“I’m so sorry I got you into this,” I told her, crying.
Hilario watched her squirm for a few more moments, before abruptly dropping her, sheathing the blade once more, and standing up to face me with a wild grin.
“I’ll wait to take care of your friend, later, after you’ve gone to sleep. I wouldn’t want you so traumatized that you won’t help him when he finally arrives, and be part of the plan.”
“You don’t have to be this way,” I told him. “I saw how you were when you were little. You had a heart. You felt things. You can’t let them take that from you. That’s still inside of you, somewhere. The Maker believes in you.”
“Listen to her lecture me,” he said to the other men, and they laughed with him. He turned back to me, and oozed closer.
“You see,” he said. “Here’s what Demetrio can’t understand, because he’s a moron. Heaven never held much interest for me. I was always a lot happier with the thought of Hell. Hell is a lot more fun. I would have gone right away, except that it would have been a lot harder to get to my brother from there. He betrayed the gang, and he has to be made to pay. You don’t betray your brothers.”
