Edge of Seventeen

by Cristy Rey

  For a heartbeat, Sunday halted. She craned her neck to look behind at the big bearded werewolf and at least give him the benefit of a sideways glance, but she found his eyes turned away. With eyebrows furrowed heavily and an expression so sharp it could cut through steel, he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  Sunday rolled her eyes and shook her head, the wisps of her long brown bangs catching in the momentary breeze. This man wasn’t going to show her the slightest modicum of respect. He wouldn’t even talk to her like the others did. When she realized that any acknowledgement sought would be in vain, she sighed deeply and drew her eyes away from him. It still wasn’t her problem. Regardless, if it was, she was too damn tired. The drugs might be out of her system, but they had taken their toll and she was wrecked.

  One of the motel room doors behind him was ajar. It had to be theirs. She slung her knapsack strap over her shoulder and her body slumped beneath the weight of it. When she eventually reached the room, she walked in as casually as if she were entering her own room.

  Stephen looked up at her with a Cheshire grin. Thick rippled arms crossed behind his shaved head, the shortest of the three werewolves had his legs outstretched on the bed. Though she looked at the empty space beside him for a second’s consideration, she knew she wasn’t so tired that she would jump into bed next to a werewolf. Her eyes flicked to the empty bed with the sheets still tucked under the mattress at the other end of the room.

  “Glad to see you’ve made it, kiddo,” Stephen said. He wasn’t trying to hide the entertainment he found at her ultimate submission to getting out of the car.

  “Whatever,” she retorted. If she could have peppered it with a little spite, she might have come across the way she really felt. Rather, her whatever came out like a yawn.

  Sunday crossed by Stephen’s bed to reach the one beside it, sticking her tongue out at him as she momentarily blocked the TV. He snickered. Big bad werewolves weren’t so scary. Not to her anyway. They were just annoying. These, in particular, had done little more than get in the way of her bodily functions, her hunger, and her desire to hunker down under a warm comforter and snooze.

  As soon as she was within a foot of the empty bed, Sunday pivoted in a perfect 180-degree turn and flopped listlessly onto the bed. She grunted as soon as her body hit the mattress. She proceeded to remove her battered Chucks and pull down the sandpaper-like comforter until she found the sheets beneath them.

  Before the other two werewolves made it back to the room, she turned her back on the Alpha laying on the other bed and nestled under the covers. Her feet were cold and the air in the room was dry. It was well-suited to the hot-blooded wolves, but not to her. As usual, Sunday found herself either too hot or too cold for comfort. She shuddered inside her cardigan wishing she had the energy to ask the werewolf to turn on the heater.

  Just as she was falling asleep, the door slammed, and she startled into awareness. The other two had returned to the room. With them all finally gathered into the same room, Sunday rolled over not so much to look at them, but so that they could hear the little bit that she wanted to say.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” she said in a half-mumble. She rubbed her eyes as the men watched her—men or monsters, or both. “I knew you were coming and I know that you’ll leave me soon.”

  She turned back and snuggled into the pillow. Within a minute, she was asleep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sunday was blindfolded and tied up. She was also lying naked, stripped entirely of her privacy along with her clothes. She was an awkward fourteen year-old with a long body and long limbs. She was gawky and nervous even when boys looked at her and she sensed that they liked what they saw. Sure, Sunday had all sorts of powers and was all kinds of rebel, but she was also fighting tooth and nail to stay strong in the face of what was the proverbial ‘big bad witch’ in all the fairy tales, and to keep from bursting into tears of embarrassment and shame at her own nudity.

  After too many minutes to count, the door creaked on its hinges and the stagnant humidity in the room was sucked out like a vacuum. The sudden chill of an AC vent from just outside the room blew in, and Sunday shivered. Click. Click. Click. Click. Steps on the bare cement floor made their way toward her. When the clicks stopped, the door was shut behind them.

  Even robbed of her vision, Sunday sensed the strength of the witch’s aura as she entered the room. She knew that if she wasn’t careful that magic would flood her psyche. There was no way that she would condescend to this witch’s power. She was too young, though, and too immature in her gifts. Without Maggie’s intercession, she’d blacked out more than once when she’d practiced letting the world seep in. Opening up, even just to get a clearer picture of her captor, would inevitably lead to her own loss of control.

  “Have you no fear? Do you not know why it is that you have been brought to us?”

  The woman’s voice was tight and clipped, but she wasn’t angry. It was more a lecture of rhetorical questions than an interrogation. This was the same voice that had greeted her in Seattle when the werewolves handed her off. This was Bernadette; and, of Bernadette, Sunday knew nothing.

  Sunday didn’t answer. Maybe it was the rebel in her that didn’t want to do what she was asking merely because she asked it. Maybe it was the blind optimist in her that knew she could get away with not answering. Either way, Sunday didn’t have anything to say to the woman.

  “You did not run from the men who sought you and brought you to me. Why is that? Are you so naïve? Have you been so ill-prepared for your fate?”

  She seemed to expect that Sunday wouldn’t respond. Bernadette projected authority. Her pedantic tone implied she was the boss. Child or no, Sunday didn’t want to be spoken to as an unruly, precocious girl who’d been caught being naughty with her hand in a cookie jar. She also didn’t want to be treated like a fool but, then, her choices weren’t many when she was struggling so hard to keep up her psychic defenses.

  “Do you not know what you are, Incarnate?” Bernadette continued.

  Sunday had never heard herself referred to by that name. It was a term that she learned of while in the care of the sisters, but no one had ever told her she was it. Her eyebrows pinched and she jerked her head slightly to face Bernadette’s voice.

  “I see you flinch with recognition.” The witch laughed with cruelty, pleased with the fact that Sunday had, in some small way, responded.

  “The Incarnate child,” she continued. “We have doubted you for so long and yet here you sit in complete ignorance of what you truly are. Can it be true that the Incarnate is so entirely unaware of what she is? Do you not want to know the extent to which you are coveted or why it is so?”

  Behind the blindfold and the single-minded intent she had against her captor’s will, Sunday’s curiosity stirred. The Incarnate stuff tested her reasoning. This being, this natural wonder of humanity, was a myth the nuns passed along generations of their sisterhood. From the stories she’d been told, Sunday learned little to substantiate the existence of such a person. Sure, some people believed in saints and prophets, messengers of God, but saints and prophets were a whole different story than gods and goddesses walking in the flesh. There was only so much Sunday could believe as fact, or even possibility.

  The Incarnate, according to the sisters, was an avatar for something ancient. It was real, more real than the earth and the people walking on it. Incarnate magic was something that, unlike witches’ magic, was born with them and would die with them. It didn’t come from spells or potions. It wasn’t singularly ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ It was just, natural and neutral in that way. An Incarnate was a vessel for all of the mundane and all of the mystical, an avatar for all the things that had spiritual or natural energy simultaneously. It was the walking, talking soul of everything.

  Some people thought the Incarnate could be a god. Other people thought the Incarnate was something of a demon. However many different ways people chose to define it, everyone could agree on one thing: the Incarnate w
as a rare gift to the world. The thing is, gifts aren’t universally good or bad. Gifts could be awesome, or gifts could suck.

  Sunday wasn’t sure all the Incarnate stuff didn’t sound totally crazy. She’d told Maggie only a million times how she thought that, quite possibly, Maggie and her sisters had drunk the Kool-Aid. Still, Maggie answered, “Consider that this kind of being could walk amongst us. Consider that this person could transcend the mundane, physical shell of her body. Don’t you do that, Sunday? Don’t you experience this?”

  Sunday shrugged then. To be compared to a mythical being seemed silly. She would sooner believe in vampires and angels than in an Incarnate.

  “Whatever,” she’d answered to Maggie. “An Incarnate can’t be everything all at once. It’s just not possible.”

  Perhaps Maggie and the other nuns were witches in their own way. She assumed, perhaps wrongfully, that growing up among them, she was one of them. That she was merely someone with a gift, an innate ability that had grown into a practiced skill. Sunday had never assumed that she’d been anything but what they all were, just a little stronger.

  The air in her dungeon had once again grown stale. Bernadette came into this room alone, but she wasn’t alone. There were others outside. Sunday could feel them eager to enter her dungeon. They were hungry for her. Rabid, even.

  “You are going to experience pain, child,” Bernadette continued sternly. Sunday could imagine the woman’s furrowed eyebrows and narrowed eyes set on her looking down her nose.

  “Your body will be assaulted as will your spirit. You will be reshaped and molded, inside and out. You will be cleansed of your ill, and you will be born again, pure and supple. Here, our coven gathers to fashion your rebirth from human child into something wholly new. You are the Incarnate, dear child, and that wondrous gift comes at a cost.”

  Maggie had explained rape to her once. You know, because that’s what parents do. They warn their sons and daughters about the wrong kinds of touching and the shame that arises even if it wasn’t one’s fault. Sister Margaret did what she could after Sunday’s mom couldn’t any longer. This wasn’t exactly rape yet, but that’s what Sunday feared most: the ‘yet’ part. In her limited experience, Sunday could think of no other reason why she was in the position she was in if not for that horrible end.

  Pulsing just a hair beyond the walls of it were those desperate auras. They were excited that Sunday was here. Theirs were the bated breaths of wanting.

  Right now, Sunday wished she follow Sister Margaret instructions: poke him in the eyes, scream your head off, and run. So much for good advice when you’re naked and bound to a cement block. For a second, Sunday wished she’d followed that advice the second Angel had approached her. She’d known what was in store then, except perhaps not the details of what was to come.

  Sister Margaret had been less forthcoming in what she envisioned of Sunday’s destiny. The nuns who cared for her after her mother’s passing were kind and generous. But they had their secrets too. What little they told her clicked together in Sunday’s mind as Bernadette lay out what she planned for her.

  “You’ll be hunted, you know. You’ll be feared by some and envied by others,” Maggie had told her.

  It was the most candor with which Maggie had ever answered any of Sunday’s questions and, of course, it was one of the last things Maggie said to her. When Maggie told her that it would happen soon, her certainty flowed through Sunday. Sunday knew it would because Maggie believed it, and the nun was never wrong. Maggie grinned wanly as she wished she could be there to help, but that Fate deemed that she couldn’t. Sunday would brave the suffering alone. That’s just how it had to be.

  “When the time comes, you must remember all your training. You must remember all your lessons and all the strength you’ve developed over the years,” Maggie imparted.

  The training Sister Margaret referred to was pretty much all Sunday had ever known in her life. Since she was six years-old, Maggie and the sisters had set about the task of teaching Sunday to hone her talents, talents that had always hinted just below the surface, but became evident and strong with practice.

  “You train yourself to minimize the perceptions because it is the only way that you can retain your sanity, but you must learn, above all else, to keep out those others that would want to control you from within. You are as powerful as you allow yourself to be. Your sensitivity is both your strength and your weakness.”

  Those words were etched into Sunday’s brain, carved there by repetition. By whatever gifts the nuns had known, they had expected that something would happen to her one day, and they needed to prepare her for the unfortunate event.

  Life, however, proved to be the greatest practice session of all. Held captive by some nut-job sorceress, Sunday learned that Maggie was right about Fate’s designs for her. Worse, she learned that she was alone. Being alone meant that all of the stuff that welled up inside of her could overpower her, and she wouldn’t know how to control it. Being alone meant not having Maggie and, without Maggie or her sisters, then Sunday wasn’t sure that what she had was a gift rather than a curse. A really shitty, really horrible, and, evidently, ironically enviable curse.

  None of that was helping matters any in Bernadette’s lair. For all her training and all the knowing better, Sunday tore her concentration away from keeping up her walls to protect herself from Bernadette, and let her mind wander to the question of the Incarnate. As her shields waned, the witch’s power bulged. It pushed its metaphysical body to the edge of Sunday’s consciousness. Slowly, Sunday became aware of it, and she snapped back to the task at-hand.

  “The Incarnate’s a crock of shit,” Sunday spat.

  From behind the blindfold, she narrowed her eyes and shot a hard look into the darkness and in the direction of the witch Bernadette. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see Sunday’s glower. Sunday shimmied her shields down just enough to ensure that anyone standing just outside the walls would feel it.

  Turning back to face the ceiling and pushing her shoulders back so that they rested flat against the cement bed on which she lay tied and shackled, Sunday clenched her molars tight and felt her jaw pulse.

  “Let’s get this goddamn show on the road,” she spat.

  Shaking her head quickly, she bit down on her lip and focused on reasserting her strong will. Nevertheless, the first words she spoke were the last that she would have for some time where she had any real control over herself. After that, she was nothing more than a pet project for the strongest witch in the Northwest, a witch who would later assert control over the entire country.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cyrus sat cross-legged at his post, eyes boring into the pages of a well-worn copy of Heart of Darkness. The hallway’s walls were dense with religious tapestries. Red-blood carpeting and gold accents spoke of rich opulence that contradicted Bernadette’s otherwise stark presentation. If the witch wore bangles and necklaces, they were nothing particularly handsome. The house, however, was straight out of a Russian oligarch’s dream. The wealth Bernadette had acquired through her organization was well catalogued in even the dankest corner of her estate.

  Rather than take off for Alaska on the morning after the Incarnate exchanged hands, Cyrus told Stephen that he’d be staying in Seattle for another day. When Stephen asked why, Cyrus merely said that it was a private matter. They locked eyes for a full minute while Stephen attempted to crack Cyrus’ ever resilient mask of emotions, but he found nothing. Nothing but purpose.

  However clear the determination was in Cyrus, the direction was not. When Cyrus approached Bernadette the next morning, he had nothing to ask and nothing to say. Not anything he could put into words, anyway. For whatever magical or mundane reason, Cyrus just couldn’t pull himself away from the girl he’d dropped into Bernadette’s hands. He couldn’t get on a plane to Alaska, and he couldn’t put one step in front of the other in any direction that didn’t lead him straight back to the fourteen year-old.

  “I w
on’t lie to you, Cyrus Barrow,” Bernadette said with a gleam in her eye. She leaned forward onto her elbows and gave Cyrus another once-over.

  “Your employment would be a boon to my business. You’re a well-regarded hunter and a much-feared werewolf.” She paused for a moment, but only to crack a sinister smile. “What I’d like to know is, in all honesty, why you would want to stay on with me. You have an exceptional commitment with the Alaska contingent. You are a soldier and a field agent. The only occupation I could provide you is my protection detail and, depending on the outcome, the protection detail for the child. I don’t suppose that would be suitable to a man of your particular temperament.”

  Cyrus’ lips pressed into a tight, impassive line as he considered what Bernadette offered. All of what she had said was true. Cyrus had a great gig in Alaska. If he had to return to pack life, he wouldn’t blink before going back to Stephen. He didn’t particularly want to leave his current situation or employment, but he couldn’t leave the Incarnate. It didn’t seem that he could do both. He was chained to her, and he was committed to staying close to her until he could figure out what was happening to him.

  Before Cyrus could option a response, Bernadette sucked in a hard breath. Leaning back in her chair with that satisfied smirk, she drummed her fingers on the tabletop and shot a finger in the air that she wiggled from side-to-side in the international sign language for ‘no.’

  “I see,” she said, playfully, voice light with song. “You find yourself affected by the child. Perhaps even bound—“

  “No.” Cyrus slapped the table so unexpectedly that Bernadette hopped in her seat and clapped her hands over her beat-skipping heart. As soon as the shock wore off, however, she was back with her smile. She shook her head and puckered her lips to keep from flashing too-bright a smile.