by Liz Long
He looked from his arm to my face for a moment and my eyes grew bigger in panic. When he finally spoke, he sounded surprised.
“I can’t tell if you’re fucking with me or not. Are you genuinely worried that people know you’re drunk?”
“So I am that obvious! Oh, man.” My cheeks flushed in embarrassment. I resumed the walk to my camper while Gabriel’s chuckle floated after me.
“If it matters, you’re doing a pretty good job of not seeming that drunk. For someone who clearly doesn’t drink,” he said.
I huffed and kept walking, all the way up to my camper door. Gabriel caught my wrist right before I reached for the doorknob. I turned to face him. Standing on the first step, we were almost at eye level. I became a little distracted by his long eyelashes looking down at me. His hand didn’t leave my wrist.
“You should drink lots of water and pop some aspirin,” he said in a low tone that sent shivers down my back.
“Thanks for the tip.” My eyes refused to leave his and I nearly drowned in the sea of blue.
Gabriel came in to stand as close as possible to me, his body lightly pressing against mine. Heat flooded through me and I resisted the urge to jump him. This was bad. In this state of mind, I might not be able to refuse.
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, the corners of his mouth turned upward and he took a small step away.
“Good night, Lucy.”
Gabriel took another step back and I had a full view of him in his dark jeans and black tee. The camp lights gleamed off his blonde hair. Despite him being covered in shadows, I could still feel his eyes on me.
I managed to get in the camper and when I turned around, he was gone. I shut the door, changed, and got into bed. Then I got up again and poured myself a large glass of water and took some aspirin.
I didn’t fall asleep immediately. Instead, Gabriel’s deep eyes and soft touch flooded my thoughts. He was too smooth, too skilled, too used to sweet-talking any woman he wanted. With his ego and sarcasm, he couldn’t be taken seriously. Why couldn’t I get him out of my head?
Perhaps I shouldn’t have admitted his good looks. It seemed to only encourage him. Alcohol, it seemed, was not great for my normal filters.
Chapter 10
We had finished up the final show of the night and the last group of people filtered out before we shut and locked the gates. I was with the usual suspects; Finley was securing the grounds while we waited for him to meet up with us. We congratulated each other on another night well done and discussed our plans for the evening when everything fell apart.
Fin ran like he was trying for a gold medal, when he literally skidded to a halt in front of us, his eyes wide with disbelief. Red in the face, he looked incredibly freaked out. “You’re never going to believe it. I can’t believe it. I don’t understand how this happened.”
Delia and I shared a puzzled look.
“You are not making any sense, Fin,” Delia said.
“What in the world is going on?” Bianca asked at the same time.
He took a deep breath. “They found Marty.”
“Okay…and?” Brooklyn asked.
Finley’s voice cracked. “He’s dead. No one seems to know how it happened. But…it doesn’t look like it was by accident. I didn’t get a chance to see the body, but people who did are wigging out.”
A small noise escaped from Bianca, but otherwise shocked silence amongst the group; it couldn’t be real. I didn’t understand what happened. Marty was an Unbreakable. How could he possibly be dead?
“What are we standing here for? Let’s go—where is he?” Keegan demanded.
“Over by our parking lot. Word’s traveling quick,” Finley replied.
The group immediately took off towards the car lot. As we all hustled over, I glanced at Delia, who was as white as ghost.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She shook her head and I could see tears gathered in her eyes. “I have known Marty since the day I got here. I do not understand how this could happen. It is not only that he was an Unbreakable. That is mind-boggling, true. But he was also the nicest guy; he never said no to helping anyone and protected the girls when sketchy townies were around. I cannot fathom why anyone would want to hurt him.”
I thought of Marty’s warm voice, the friendly smile that made lines around his eyes. I hadn’t known him well, but he’d been welcoming to me. I could imagine trusting him as my father once did. With almost a sweet composure, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt him. Or how they could even do so.
We made our way over. There was already a crowd gathered near the parking lot entryway. I could make out bowed heads and hear hushed whispers. I only heard bits of conversation.
“I don’t get it—Marty was fine earlier today. What happened between then and now?”
“How did he end up here in the parking lot of all places? No one comes out here.”
“Yeah, well maybe that’s why his body’s out here.”
“How did an Unbreakable get killed? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I can’t see anything. What does Marty’s body look like? Maybe that would give us a better idea.”
Nearly all the females in the crowd were crying. Men exchanged angry whispers of revenge. Marty was family; no way this would be overlooked. Whoever did this would be hunted down and broken.
A booming voice broke through the chatter. Sheffield.
“BACK UP! Let me through—sorry Josephine, didn’t mean to knock you over—guys, seriously, get the hell out of the way and let me get up there,” I heard him say.
I was too short to see what was going on up front, but I could hear everything now that the crowd was silent. I could barely see Sheffield’s top hat peek through the front of the crowd as he broke through to front of the mass. There was a sharp intake of air and a grim pause before:
“Go to your campers. Everyone. Now.” Sheffield ordered, each short punctuation a bark. His seriousness could not be mistaken.
Nikolas shook his head. “No way,” he whispered to us. “Give everyone a minute to break away and then I want to see him.”
Delia nodded in agreement, cheeks wet with tears.
We waited for the crowd to disperse and shuffled around so it didn’t appear as though we were intentionally staying. Brooklyn and Bianca immediately lit cigarettes, and I couldn’t blame them. If I was about to see a dead body, I might need one too.
As we waited, I looked up to see Gabriel. He stood by himself near a tree where Sheffield might miss him, but it was obvious he wanted to see Marty’s body. I excused myself from the group and walked over to him. He barely so much as glanced up and I rethought my decision to strike up conversation until he spoke.
“Unbelievable, right?” he said. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and offered me one. I shook my head; he instead took one for himself.
“No one can explain how an Unbreakable got killed. Have you ever heard of anything like this?” I asked.
“Once,” Gabriel replied. “But it was an accident—guy drowned. Nothing remotely close to Marty.”
“I don’t really remember him from before, but he made sure to introduce himself when I came back. It’s so sad. One of the strangest things,” I commented.
He shrugged again. “Damn shame, but nothing anyone can do about it. Guy’s dead.”
“Well, Gabriel, dead or not, Marty was a part of this family. People are going to try to find ways to take action,” I said, taken aback by his indifference.
“What do they think they’re going to do? Go after the guy’s killer? Please. Whoever did this is probably long gone. Or it’s some stupid townie, probably from the other night, that we’ll never find. Then we’ll leave and it’s over.”
“Did you know Marty?”
“Not very well, but yes, I spoke to him several times, mostly about weather or the shows. Just because the guy died doesn’t mean I’m gonna start crying.”
“Gabriel, he
was murdered. Even if you didn’t know him well, you’re as much family in this troupe as he was. What about the rest of us? How do we know we’re safe? Doesn’t that worry you?”
He shrugged again. It infuriated me. Loyalty was a huge priority. Even though I didn’t know Marty well and had only been here a handful of days, I still felt anger towards whoever killed him. This would cause pain throughout the entire crew; of course it made me unhappy.
“We take care of one another, Gabriel. We need to stick together. I think you should start understanding that before getting too deep within the troupe, otherwise they’ll know you don’t care about being here.”
“I don’t get why you’re taking this so personally, Lucy. You and I have been here the same amount of days; why do you care so much about someone you met once? About people you barely know?”
“Are you kidding me? After the other night? We’re a part of this now. You’re in whether you like it or not.” I couldn’t grasp how little he cared.
“False. I happened to be in a situation where I had to defend myself. Just because we all fought some townies together doesn’t make us best buddies.”
“Are you really even saying that? When you agreed to be here, you agreed to be in a family—”
“You keep saying that word, so first of all, please stop,” he interrupted. “But second, “family” means nothing unless you’re accepted and loved by them. You signed your name on a piece of paper and agreed to do some flips; it doesn’t mean you belong.”
His coldness stunned me into speechlessness. I thought after the other night we shared something, that maybe he even liked being around me. I wasn’t trying to sneak looks at the lunch table or anything, but in my opinion, a life-threatening situation created a sort of connection. Embarrassed and angry with myself, I didn’t even realize my arm was on fire until Keegan whistled softly in our direction.
“Luce, you okay? You know you’re on fire, right? C’mere,” he said, motioning back to my friends.
“Yeah. Wasting my time over here,” I replied. I shook the flames off.
Gabriel quirked an eyebrow at me and I stomped off back to where everyone stood. The crowd thinned out and Sheffield disappeared into the dark, presumably to call the police. We all stepped up to get a better look. What we saw took our breath away.
As soon as I saw him, I regretted it. All that resembled Marty now was a charred corpse. The smell was god-awful and I held my breath to keep from inhaling the rotten stink of his scorched skin. It looked as though he had been burned alive. His hair was burnt off, clothes and skin blackened beyond recognition.
Neither Bianca nor Delia could stop their tears and Brooklyn lit another cigarette, her hands trembling so much it took her four tries to light it. Not taking my eyes off Marty’s body, I offered up my hand and she finally lit it with the fire in my palm. The others stood there in grim silence.
I hardly registered when Gabriel stepped up, took one look at Marty’s body, and never so much as blinked. He stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered off without a second glance.
I couldn’t stop staring at Marty, lying there dead on the ground. The only bodies I had seen were in caskets. This was nowhere close. His burnt, blackened face with his mouth frozen in a forever-silent scream would haunt me to my grave. He’d been destroyed. My stomach threatened to upchuck its contents.
Then a terrible thought struck me. Someone did this to him. They watched him burn alive. What if it had been a Firestarter? How else would an Unbreakable die this way?
I immediately shook it off. No way, I thought. No one here could be capable of this evil torture. Whoever did this must be full of hate and rage. There was no way anyone in the troupe could be responsible. I couldn’t accept anyone would do this to someone with whom they spent every day of their life.
“I think you’re right,” Brooklyn said, breaking the silence. I jumped; I forgot that she could even do that.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I’m not exactly thinking straight.”
I took a step towards her and put my arm around her for a moment. No matter my annoyance at her, this was not the time or place to get upset over something like her reading my mind. “It’s okay. I’m glad you agree.”
Finley sounded far away when he spoke. “Agree with what, Brooklyn?”
“There’s no way this was a Firestarter,” she replied in a shaky voice. She took a long drag on her cigarette.
Nikolas turned to the side, his eyes accusing me. “You seriously think it could be one of us?”
I nearly wilted under his glare. “No! Brooklyn agreed with me because I was insisting there’s no way it could be one of us. When I see anything fire-related, my first instinct is to make sure I didn’t cause it, so my thought process went faster than I could stop it.”
I babbled so fast that I doubted anyone understood me, but Bianca jumped in. “It’s okay. We know what you meant. But you’re right—no way it was one of us. This is cruel.”
“I’m willing to put money down it was one of those stupid townies from the other night. They got their revenge on us, took the first they saw out,” Finley growled.
“That’s a big difference between drunken brawl and murder. It would have taken them a long time to realize he was Unbreakable and to plan that fire,” I reminded them.
“Yeah, but look at him, Lucy. He was set on fire
“That makes sense,” Keegan said. “If he was patrolling the lot and saw them, they would kill him as fast as they could. Make sure no other gifted find them and get out fast.”
“Even if that’s true, that doesn’t really make me feel better. That means he died because of me,” I said miserably.
“I’m pretty sure I told you all to get to your campers. It wasn’t optional,” Sheffield bellowed from behind us.
We all jumped at his angry voice. I spun around and bumped into Keegan, who put his hands on my shoulders to steady me.
“C’mon, Sheffield. You can’t expect us not to see what happened to him,” Nikolas said.
“I don’t care what you want to see. This part isn’t a circus show, despite your surroundings,” Sheffield replied. He kept his voice calm but the red face gave away his anger.
“What happens now?” Bianca asked in a small voice.
“Nothing you need to lose sleep over,” he said.
“Hate to break it to you, boss, but the image of Marty’s body is going to keep me awake for days,” Brooklyn said. I agreed.
Sheffield snorted. “Then I guess you should’ve listened to me the first time and gone back to your camper instead of trying to get a glimpse. What is this, the paparazzi? Get the hell out of here.”
“Aren’t you going to call the police?” I blurted out. It slipped out; I hadn’t meant to be noticed. But instead of only Sheffield snorting at me, the entire group turned to look at me as though I’d grown wings.
“You’re joking, right? Call the cops? And tell them what, that our nearly impossible to kill carnie got killed? Right, that’ll go over extraordinarily well,” Finley replied.
My red face gave away my emotion, so I ignored my instinct to hide and dove in. “But it’s not like it was a natural death or even an accident. A man was murdered. I think that’s enough reason to bring in the cops. What if it was from what happened the other night?”
Sheffield walked closer to us. “Lucy, it doesn’t work that way, not with our troupe. Add in the unusual death and the fact so many of us, Marty included, are gifted, and it gets too complicated. We can’t afford to let this get out in the public eye. It’s not just that we’d lose money. Humans don’t—won’t—understand us if they knew about us, our powers. It’s a war waiting to happen. I won’t allow my people to become involved with such a mess.”
“But what happens now? What’ll happen to Marty’s bod
y, to his murderer?” I argued.
“We’ll find them and handle it,” Sheffield said. It sounded final and ominous.
“But if it’s a townie and we move to the next city, we might not have the chance again,” I tried again.
Keegan squeezed my shoulder and I could tell it was a warning. They all thought I was too persistent, that I needed to let it go and have Sheffield handle it. I sighed and shut my mouth.
Chapter 11
We returned to our camper where Delia immediately went to town on a bag of cookies. I shot her an incredulous look.
“I am a nervous eater. Do not judge me,” she mumbled through crumbs, a scowl on her face.
“Is Sheffield really not going to tell anyone outside of the troupe? I could understand if it weren’t something this serious,” I said.
“Lucy, you know as well as anyone how people react to us. I do not see any way that cops—local in this part of the country, I might add—would be able to help or solve anything. So many regular murders do not even get solved. How would they handle an Unbreakable being incinerated?”
I winced at her word choice. Delia had quickly moved from shocked to angry and was now expressing her feelings through chocolate consumption. She even ate fast. I was pretty sure I saw her eat a sleeve in about thirty seconds. Impressive.
“I want to know how any sort of justice can be achieved if no one is going to look into it.”
“Sheffield did not say it would not be looked into,” Delia replied. “He only said that we are not calling the cops.”
“So what does that mean? He’s going to solve the murder by himself?”
“I am sure he will do everything he can to figure it out.”
I sighed, frustrated. “Well, what about why Marty was killed? That part really doesn’t make any sense, according to the information I know about him.”
“I cannot figure that one, either. He was the nicest guy. He never married or even dated that I know. We were his family. You know he has been here since Sheffield started the show. They have been close friends for a long time. I do not know how anyone could do such a terrible thing. They must be crazy. Sheffield is going to absolutely own them when he finds out the truth.”
