Desolate (Desolation)

by Ali Cross

  But for now, he was just a guy, starting out in life, with lots of junk in his past and lots of hope for his future. And me stuck in the middle. “Des,” he said again.

  “What?” I could still try to play dumb if it bought me some time.

  “How did you find out about Heimdall?” Of all the questions the others had asked me, this had not been one of them. I think they knew the lengths to which I would go to get the answers we needed—only James had the balls to call me on it.

  I took a big gulp of my pop and grimaced as it burned down my throat like a fist of fire. When I could finally speak, I still paused for a beat. I glanced up at James then, and found him, as I expected, staring at me. Waiting. Damn him. He could wait forever if he set his mind to it. Miri concentrated on their entwined hands rather than me. But I saw the smirk on her face. She knew I had no choice—James was at least as obstinate as me. Maybe more.

  “I talked to that kid—Eleon.”

  “You mean, the demon, Eleon. The one who pretends to be a kid.” James raised his eyebrow, a Spock-move that drove Miri crazy with happiness. This time he aimed it at me and Miri didn’t even see it.

  “Well, yeah. Whatever.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “No.” My eyes hardened as James stared me down. He chuckled as he gave up and turned his attention to Miri’s hand in his.

  “Are you okay?” For a human, James understood so much. Maybe too much. But then again, I suppose being raised in Hell-on-Earth, AKA his step-dad’s house, would do that to a person.

  I saw in his eyes that he’d already guessed the truth. He knew I’d embraced my Shadow to get Eleon to talk to me. He knew the way that kind of power and authority made a person feel—knew that the temptation would be beyond huge for me. Knew I would have been tempted to fly to Father and never look back.

  He knew all that, but he still met my gaze with tenderness. He knew whatever I’d had to do to get Eleon to talk, I was here now, and that was saying something.

  “Are you? Okay?” he prompted.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  He watched me a moment longer, then smiled. “Good.”

  “But I’m going patrolling tonight.” My voice tightened; daring James to argue.

  “Of course.” James laughed, and oh, I felt grateful for him. Miri hopped off his lap and James stood, stretching like a cat.

  James made this human life possible for me—allowed our home to be a place of solitude, a place where I could be me. Whoever the hell that was.

  Suddenly James lunged forward and thrust his arm out, fist clenched, eyes fierce. Just before he made contact with my shoulder I blocked his hand with my palm, the adrenaline zinging through my veins, my breath gasping. This so wasn’t good. I had to be much cooler than that. I had to be ready. Every minute of every day. Father and his minions wouldn’t give me the heads up they were on their way—they’d come when and where I least expected it.

  I forced myself to breathe—in through my nose, out through my mouth.

  James laughed softly. He relaxed his body and he slipped his hand from mine. He put a finger under my chin.

  Breathe.

  James didn’t take his eyes off me. “Well, you’re not going out like that. You’re way too wound up to be any good in a fight.”

  Breathe.

  “Excellent,” Miri exclaimed, assuming a corny cheerleader position. “Crap, I don’t have my pompoms.”

  “You don’t need pompoms to cheer me on, bright eyes.” James grabbed her hips and tugged her to him.

  I jumped to my feet. “Whoa, whoa. Take it to your room, or outside or in the bushes or wherever you animals like to go.” I pushed forward, making my hands a wedge to separate them.

  They laughed and made kissing noises and groans and moans even louder and crazier because they knew how uncomfortable it made me. Sure enough when I stepped into the dining-room-turned-dojo, the wall of mirrors reflected my super pale skin flushed a faint shade of pink. That was full-on-mega-embarrassed Desi-style.

  I slammed my iPod into the stereo and cued up my workout music. Heavy techno blasted through the speakers and I instantly felt my muscles relax. I belonged here. I could live here. Lost in the music and the movement.

  Dropping into a side split, I leaned forward, stretching out my back and hips. James appeared, dressed in royal blue basketball shorts and a white T. Miri stepped out from around the corner and I sat up. This was new. She came into the dojo, her eyes on the floor, her cheeks speckled with the red dots she always got when she was nervous. She wore flannel pajama bottoms and one of James’ band T’s.

  I quirked an eyebrow, questioning.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said, her voice high and fluty. “I’m just gonna stretch.”

  “Uh huh.” I smiled as I leaned over my right leg. I’d been bugging Miri to let me teach her a few self-defense techniques, ever since . . . Well, ever since we started into this new normal life. It would make me feel infinitely better about her being involved if she could at least throw a decent punch.

  After ten minutes of stretching I jumped to my feet. “Ready?” I stared down at James as he lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He hadn’t stretched at all.

  “You know I’m gonna totally kick your butt, right? You’re not even trying.”

  “Princess, I learned several beatings ago that with you there’s no point in trying. You’re gonna kick my ass no matter what I do.”

  I stared. Not blinking. Not smiling.

  “True!” Then I let my biggest smile take over my face.

  James shook his head in that aw-she’s-so-silly kind of way, and walked to the wall of weapons. “So what form of torture will it be today?” He surveyed the array of nunchucks, staffs, short sticks, sais, kamas, swords and shortblades.

  “Do you even have to ask?” I strode over to the staffs and pulled a shiny graphite one out of the tall clay pot they stood in.

  “Aw you’re feeling sentimental, are you?”

  “I’m feeling ready to whoop you, whitey.”

  “You. You’re calling me white? Have you seen yourself? You’re like a walking ghost.”

  He wasn’t wrong. But I swung around fast and low and caught him in the back of the knees with my staff anyway. He fell to the mat with an oof!

  I tossed him the staff he usually used and stepped back in a guarding stance to wait.

  “You gonna fight?” I asked Miri. I didn’t dare look at her—that would be an amateur mistake and now that I’d laid the groundwork for today’s sparring match, James wouldn’t likely let me get away with it.

  “Um, I’ll just watch you guys for now. But maybe if you’re not too worn out you could teach me the basics after.”

  We all knew I wouldn’t get worn out. What she meant to say was, “If you’re not mad, you can teach me, but no way am I getting on that mat with you when you’re out to hurt someone.”

  James brought his staff around in a whooshing arc and there was no more time for chatter. I blocked his blow with my forearm. “Come on. You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

  James grinned. And then he attacked. We’d been working out together every day (pretty much) for two months now, and I knew every move he made—because I’d taught him each and every one. But today he came at me with a thrust and spin that didn’t catch me off guard (I wouldn’t make that mistake again), but did surprise me.

  In fact, he threw out a bunch of new moves—a whole repertoire that had me focused wholly on movement, movement, movement. He had me on the rails, had me reacting, responding to his attack—and that’s not how to win a fight.

  I willed my breath to slow. I concentrated on it, forcing my movements to match it. From there, I could see the pattern of the fight—like a grand-master chess player seeing ten moves ahead. Movement with purpose, my old tutor Akaros would tell me. The purpose had to be mine, had to be defined by me—not my opponent.

  I moved faster, thrust harder. I used all of my body, t
he staff an extension of it. The staff became me.

  In less than a minute I had James on the mat, the butt of my staff pressed (lightly) against his windpipe. He slapped his open palm on the ground. I stepped back, swinging the staff to rest against my arm. James jumped up, a wicked grin on his face. I knew mine was as dark as a thundercloud without even looking in the mirror to my right.

  “How’d you like that, princess?” He had a big grin on his face, the kind Lucy called a “shit-eating” grin. I felt powerless in the face of such a smile, and busted up laughing.

  “Where the hell did all that come from? You been watching Deadliest Warrior or something?”

  “Better,” James said, taking my staff and putting it in the jar along with his own. “Longinus has been teaching me.”

  I jerked back as if I’d been struck, but the blow wasn’t physical. “Longinus.” That the ancient warrior would train my friend, would allow him to become mixed up in this life most of us had no choice in, felt like a betrayal.

  Miri snickered behind me. “I’ve been dying to tell you—but they swore me to secrecy.”

  I gave her a burning, E tu Brutus? glare, but she only shrugged.

  “Yeah, and he’s teaching me, too.” She said the last in the barest of whispers, but of course I’d heard her.

  “Huh.” What was left of my humor whisked out of me like a draft under a basement door. I didn’t know why, but my loneliness ratcheted up several degrees.

  “Show me,” I said in an effort to cover up my weird feelings.

  Miri laughed a short staccato—her self-conscious laugh. James took her hand and pulled her to the center of the room, while I took up Miri’s post by the wall. I folded my arms and watched them drop into a guarding stance.

  “I just taught her a couple basic defensive moves,” James said. He spoke to me, but his eyes smiled at Miri. A tight knot of loss clenched inside my heart. No one would ever again smile at me like that.

  James lunged forward with a punch aimed at Miri’s head and she laughed self-consciously while she caught his arm mid-swing, hooked a hand around his neck and pretended to knee him in the nose.

  “Good,” James said so quietly I almost didn’t hear it.

  “Good,” I echoed.

  “You mean it?” Miri dropped her hands to look at me, her expression so open and hopeful it startled me. Without intending too, I let my consciousness skim hers—she was more worried about my approval than James’. She wanted me to be proud.

  “I’m proud of you,” I said. I added a smile and Miri grinned, turning back to James.

  “Do the kick one,” she said, raising her hands into the guard position. James laughed and shook his head, but obliged.

  They went through a few more techniques, all of them carefully advanced by James and slowly and clumsily defended by Miri. I watched them as if from a distance, my feelings a jumble of good and bad and indifferent. Pretty much everything was upside down—I should feel good where I felt bad, bad where I felt good. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.

  When James landed on his back from Miri’s low whip kick, I pushed off from the wall. “Hey, I’ve gotta get ready. Catch ya later, ’k?” I didn’t wait for their answer, just turned and headed down the hall to my room. They’d be okay without me. They already were.

  chapter eleven

  Three hours later, I’d regained my perch on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, darkness wrapped around me like a cloak. The chill in the air cut deeper than the previous night though the rain had stopped. The air tasted of Hell. I paced restlessly along the girder before jumping toward the water. The wind whisked by my face in tearing streams. At the last possible moment I Became and watched my dark shadow on the water—blackest black against the midnight blue of the ocean. It wasn’t until my second pass that I saw it—the faintest glow from deep beneath the water’s surface.

  A Door.

  Exhilaration, fear and anticipation zinged through my veins. I tore for the sky, rising high above to watch unseen for what would break free of the ocean. I circled, waiting. Worrying. There was so much to fear from Hell. Though I didn’t know of any demon who could properly challenge me, Father had secrets—like brick and mortar, Hell was built on them. When I killed Akaros, Father’s general, a couple months ago, Father had been strangely undisturbed. Shouldn’t he have been more concerned over losing his best warrior? That he wasn’t, left me with questions.

  Questions I hoped would shortly be answered.

  The brightness beneath the water grew, and with it, my fear.

  And my fear terrified me more than anything else. I thrust it back down, banished it to the dark recesses of my soul. I could not allow any speck of fear to distract me.

  Before I could think about it, before I could come to terms with the reality revealing itself before me, a shape emerged like a rocket, ribbons of water and darkness obscuring it from my view.

  It leapt toward the shore and charged over the beach. A horseman and his mount—just like Miri’s dreams. I shaped my body into a blade to increase my speed. They moved fast, too fast, keeping more than an arm’s length ahead of me. The demon and his mount were huge, the giant hooves of the horse leaving prints like craters in its wake.

  They looked like they’d been carved from a granite mountain, shades of gray layered together making them look like one creature. But I could see the folds of the rider’s cloak, flying over the rear of the horse.

  Despite their thunderous progression, neither horse nor rider made any sound. Only my own breath rasped in my ears, and the waves crashing on the sand. I forced myself forward, forced myself faster, to reach further and . . . I could almost . . . there!

  My fingertips clasped the edge of the rider’s cloak, not a grasp, nothing so tangible, but it was enough to burn me with its frigid ice. And it was enough to draw the rider’s attention.

  He whirled, pulling back on the horse’s reins and causing it to rear up, mouth open, green foam slathering its teeth, dripping onto the sand, burning the grains to glass. Against my will, my gaze climbed past the horse’s mouth, past its blood-red eyes and ears lying flat against its head. Up past the rider’s gloved hand on the reins, over the billowy folds of his robe—to his face.

  A face cloaked in such blackness I couldn’t catch even a glimpse. The horseman wore a hood that hung so far forward I wondered if he could even see. If there was a he in there at all. Above his head, the demon held a blade aloft—the black, curved blade of a reaper.

  But this was no soul collector—the demons sent to retrieve sinners from life.

  Though this demon was death, it was unlike any demon I had ever seen.

  In seconds only, the creature and his mount had completed their turn, the blade a mere foot from making contact with my head. I drew a pair of kamas from my Shadow, gripping them tightly in my fists as they materialized.

  As the scimitar descended, I reached up with the right kama, it’s small, curved blade flashing in the darkness, and braced it against the demon’s weapon. The clash of metal sparked in the darkness, but made no sound. The demon pressed harder and my wings beat fiercely to keep me from stumbling back. The creature had immense strength and the whisper of fear I’d worked hard to ignore now crept over my skin.

  With a visceral scream I pushed all my power, all my strength into forcing both kamas, gripped firmly in my hands, against the blade that pushed relentlessly forward. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop him. My cheek stung with the bite of his breath until I angled the right kama just enough to get leverage and push back.

  I twisted my wrists and wrenched the scimitar from the monster’s hands, breathing with relief when I heard it splash into the water. The demon turned away, looking to where he had come from as if hearing something.

  The rider spun his mount in the sand, filling the air with the fine particles, and dashed back into the sea.

  I clasped my right wrist, hissing when my hand came away slick with blood. Only a nick, that’s all. I collapsed t
o the beach with ragged breaths.

  chapter twelve

  Cold sand seeped between my fingers, dragging me back to myself, to the reality that screamed at my senses from every angle. My breath still gasped in short bursts, but it was the fog escaping my lips that finally cut through to my consciousness. Cold. Hellishly cold.

  I climbed to my feet with Herculean effort. At the shore, the sea foam had formed into crystalline ice, and the sand grew harder and denser as the cold crept in.

  I spread my wings and fought the trembling that threatened to consume me—it had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with Hell. I picked up a stone, its glossy surface identifying it as one of the clumps of sand that had turned to glass. I hoped it held some clue as to what we were facing. Slowly I took to the sky, working through the fear and confusion as I flew to St. Mary’s.

  My boots clomped to the ground as I alighted in front of the cherub, the angel that watched over my memories of Michael. I needed its blessing, perhaps now more than ever.

  I sat down and pulled my phone out of my back pocket. I knew when Knowles had answered by the heavy silence on the other end. “Call them,” I said. He said nothing, and I disconnected, slipping my phone away.

  My Shadow retracted until I was just a girl, sitting in T-shirt and jeans, on a late autumn California night—a night that felt balmy compared to the freezing chill overtaking San Francisco. I turned the glass in my hand over and over, something both appealing and appalling about it.

  I felt the moment the others began trickling in; first Cornelius with Longinus and then Knowles. Still I waited. Shortly afterward, James and Miri arrived, Miri whispering in high, worried tones.

  It wasn’t until the door to St. Mary’s had closed behind them that I stood. Still turning the stony glass over and over in my hand, I looked up at the angel. “I Remember,” I said to it. I Remember him. Remember his name, his touch, his taste. I waited for the scent of citrus to filter into my nose, but it never came. Only the smell of dirt and grass, and wet stone. Tears burned behind my eyes, but I forced them back, forced myself to swallow the torment of loneliness that crushed against me. Squaring my shoulders, I marched toward the door, and the proclamation that would change everything.