Marked for Vengeance (Book One: The Alyx Rayer Chronicles)

by Pierce, SJ

  Isaac parked the truck in front of Carla’s two-story, mossy green home with beige trim. He scratched the top of his head as he stared at the front door, delaying the inevitable onslaught of her flirting. He hadn’t seen his son since the morning prior, and knowing he lingered inside, he finally found the will to move and ambled up the steps to ring the bell. Before he reached the door, it swung open. The whoosh from its abrupt opening wafted the smell of her cheap perfume. “Hi, Isaac!” she warbled in her sugary southern accent. “How’s my favorite, single dad?”

  He flashed a lazy grin in return and fought the urge to pinch his nostrils shut. “Doin’ good, Carla. How are you?”

  “I’m doing great! Why don’t you come on in to the living room, and I’ll tell Micah you’re here. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  He stepped into the foyer but stayed as close to the door as possible with his arms tightly crossed and watched as she made her way up the stairs to get the boys. To his pleasant surprise, she had toned down her wardrobe this time to a pair of tight jeans and a sweater. She must have found someone.

  Carla pranced back down the stairs and made her way into his personal space. “So when are we gonna go out on a date and make these boys stepbrothers?” she said as she brushed his forearm with her manicured hand, looking him over like a piece of meat that she just couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into.

  Here we go again. He opened his mouth to respond, but there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t either hurt her feelings or encourage her behavior. She didn’t appear interested in what he had to say anyhow, because his reply wasn’t behind the zipper of his pants.

  When Micah finally tromped down the stairs, Isaac stepped away from her, relieved that he had interrupted their moment. “Hey, buddy!” he shouted. “Let’s hit the road, and maybe we can swing by your favorite pizza place on the way home.”

  Micah’s ears perked as he knelt to tie his shoes. “Sounds good, dad!”

  Micah looked like a shorter clone of his father, lean with dark hair. The only differences were that his eyes were both green with flecks of gold around the pupil – a trait that he acquired from his mother – and he didn’t have his dad’s Irish accent.

  “Thank you for havin’ him,” Isaac said as he opened the door.

  “Yes, thank you, Ms. Bradford,” Micha echoed.

  “Oh, any time! We’ll see you boys soon.”

  Like a bitch in heat, that one, Isaac thought as he shut the door behind them.

  “Dad, seriously!” Micah said, glaring at his dad’s shoes, “I’m going to hide those from you. Better yet, I’m going to throw those away.”

  Isaac jabbed him in the arm. “Not if you want pizza tonight you won’t.”

  Micah reared his hand back in retaliation, an open smile lighting up his face.

  He ducked out of the way and ran down the stairs. “I may be an old man to you, but I’m still faster!”

  * * *

  The clock on their stove read five thirty, and with an empty pizza box on the table and Micah in his loft playing video games, Isaac returned to his studio. His memory still clung to the imagery within his dream, and he feared that if he waited too long he would soon forget the details.

  He rested atop the stool, and as he brushed long, vertical strokes of emerald green on the bottom of the canvas for the blades of grass, he reminisced about his late wife. He didn’t do it often, but figured it was a combination of this being the anniversary weekend of her passing and that he had been to Carla’s house that afternoon. Her undignified nature caused him to miss his wife’s sweet, tender spirit.

  Isaac met Rachel in Dublin, Ireland when she was twenty and he was twenty-two. She was visiting for the summer with her parents, who were both accountants for a Fortune 500 company in Atlanta, and they had rented a summer vacation home back off the road across from theirs. The first time he laid eyes on her, he couldn’t tear them away. Her white blonde hair curled around her face in wispy tendrils, and her green eyes squinted as she smiled when asking how to get to the closest supermarket. It was all he could do to make his eyes linger above her chin as the short, floral sundress she wore accentuated her shapely figure. His favorite quality, however, was her near perfect smile, thanks to a tooth on the side that had slightly turned, melting his heart.

  It wasn’t too long after that day that they’d fallen in love. For the next two months, he served as her personal tour guide through the Southeastern counties during the day where the medieval castles appeared straight from a story book, and her chauffeur to their romantic dinners at night in the bustling, vibrant city of Dublin. Her parents weren’t crazy with the notion of her spending so much time with a local boy, but she was a young, curious woman and could make her own decisions.

  When the end of the summer rolled around, he and Rachel laid on a quilt in the field behind his house, entangled in bare skin. He cradled her tear-soaked face in his hands and vowed to visit her in the States, assuring her that his heart wouldn’t survive away from its counterpart.

  After a few months of late nights on the phone, he more than made good on his promise when he moved to her hometown to pursue a living as an artist. The day he moved into his flat, he proposed to her on the rooftop of the building, to which she quickly and enthusiastically replied with a “yes!” He was her Irish prince, and she was his American princess. It was a real-life fairytale… until her tragic and untimely death five years ago.

  He still recalled the knocks on the door as they echoed through the flat and the solemn stare of the officer who broke the news. He nodded in understanding as the grim-faced man relayed the devastating events, but it didn’t entirely sink in until the door closed behind him and Micah toddled from the bathroom to ask who it was.

  He still sensed her there in the apartment sometimes; her supple skin, her soft hair that smelled of lavender and mint. He kept her shampoo bottle in the shower and would smell it from time to time, not having the heart to throw it away.

  As Isaac sat on the stool with his back turned toward the door, it evoked sweet memories of the way she would sneak up behind him and softly kiss his neck after Micah had fallen asleep. With his eyelids compressed, her caress now pressed against his back. His brush strokes ceased, and a sigh escaped his lips. He had a hard time believing he would ever find anyone as wonderful as her.

  Despite mourning her lovely presence, there were times he missed her when it came to parenting, as well. Micah was prone to night terrors that manifested when he was only three years old and would wake up screaming, insisting that there were men in his room. He would say that they were regular people, “like you and me daddy” to which he would add, “but some of them looked like dark shadows, and it felt like they were shouting at me.” After the episodes, his body trembled for close to an hour, and hardly anything they said or did would keep the fear at bay. They had taken him to see a child therapist, but the doctor dismissed his late night terrors as bad dreams and told Isaac and Rachel that they just needed to “work through them”.

  During Micah’s late night episodes, his wife would be the first one up there to comfort him, and on occasion would sleep with him to keep the ‘bad men’ away. As he grew older, the night terrors became less frequent, and when he did see them, he didn’t act as terrified. There would still be some nights, though, that Micah would sleep in Isaac’s bed.

  Too distracted to continue, he sat the paint brush on the wooden lip of the easel and plunked the rest of them into the glass of water. He glanced out the window at the skyline to see if the same shadowy figure he had seen on occasion was there again. It usually stood on the roof, two buildings over on the edge facing his building. There it is.

  He wasn’t sure what they went there for or what they wanted, but whoever it was, he thought from time to time that they watched him. Maybe one day he would find the nerve to confront them and see for himself.

  * * *

  Alyx came home from her girl’s day with her fists full of shopping bags and fe
ll onto the couch. She promptly kicked her boots off and propped her feet atop the stack of old library books on the coffee table to stretch her sore feet. Food, flicks, and shopping at two different outlet malls had filled her and Cindra’s day.

  The clock on her cable box read three minutes past seven. The night was young.

  Dinner didn’t appeal to her. Her stomach still ached from all of the food they devoured at lunch. They had grazed for two hours on hummus and pâté as they talked about work, what movies they had seen, what movie they wanted to see, and of course Gavin from HD1 -- and every other boy Cindra crushed on. She thought about scanning over the TV programs or renting a movie On Demand, but knew that there was something she wanted to do even more. Something she had looked forward to since the last time she went.

  She twirled a loch of hair around her finger and stared at the bedroom door, knowing that once she rocked herself from the couch she would make her way there like a magnet drawn to its opposite charge. After a moment of feeble deliberation, she went to her bedroom and slid the top drawer of her dresser open. The black, leather case resting between her socks and underwear stared back at her, pleading with her to pick it up.

  She lifted it from the drawer and cradled it in her hands. The prospect of using them again caused her heart to flutter. This wasn’t what she should be doing, but she didn’t care. It was a need at this point. She slipped the case inside her purse, put on a pair of sneakers, and zipped her jacket. Shame or no shame, sore feet or not, she was going.

  She turned right at the bottom of her complex stairs and walked three blocks South to the bus station to take the next one to her final destination. When the driver let her out at the usual stop, she shoved her hands inside her jacket pockets and jogged one more block East to the old abandoned building on Ponce de Leon Ave.

  She waded through the waist-high weeds and made her way to the back of the graffiti-covered, brick structure strangulated by overgrown shrubs and ivy. The broken window in the center of the building awaited her, and she stepped onto the empty paint can she had left beneath it so she could climb inside with ease.

  Once through, she skipped up the stairs that led to the roof when the familiar smell of body odor and urine assaulted her nose from the homeless men that slept there on occasion. Her face crinkled, and she placed her hand below her burning nostrils to shield them from the stench. It’s getting worse!

  She busted through the black, windowless door and inhaled a deep breath of fresh, night air, shaking her body like a wet dog to ward off the unpleasantries. All of her troubles to get there that night were a small price to pay, however.

  She looked beyond the ledge at the building she had come to gaze inside of and scanned over the windows. Third one from the bottom, corner unit… yes! The light inside his flat shone through the darkness. Her toes lined up to the edge as she pulled the leather case from her purse and unhooked the latch to reveal a set of binoculars.

  She held them up to her eyes and focused in on the man she had come there to see for the past three months. He painted again, but because he placed his easel away from the window, she was never able to see what he painted. This was of no consequence to her, though. The only thing that interested her was him.

  This man that she watched, which she fondly referred to as her ‘painter man’, was her Marked.

  When her superiors sent her three years ago, part of her orders were to stakeout where he lived and worked, so when or if the time came to capture him, she would have her bearings. However, she was only to do this one time from a distance. Until then, she would solely rely on the instinctual draw they were given to each of their Marked to know where they were at all times, like a honing device located in the center of her chest that served as a direct connection to his soul. At any given moment, she knew what direction she needed to travel in to find him and exactly how far away he was. She had become so used to that draw, like a muscle twitch she was able to ignore, that she rarely felt it unless she thought about it – until this lifetime.

  Every lifetime she had a new Marked assigned to her, and she would always do as ordered and stakeout where they lived. That was nothing new to her this time around. What she didn’t expect, was that during her simple, routine stakeout, the person on the other end of the binoculars would captivate her. From the moment she laid eyes on him, her soul responded with a resounding, unmet desire, which drew her to him that much more. It was a separate draw, however. Apart from the innate one placed inside of her during her creation. This one came from somewhere separate, somewhere deep inside. Like nothing she had ever experienced.

  She followed orders for the first two and a half years and stayed away from the rooftop, but occasionally the draw would tap on her conscience, and his face would appear in her thoughts or dreams, reigniting the desire to which she would lock away again. But three months ago that all changed. One lonely Saturday night at home while she folded a basket of laundry, it called to her again, the tapping more of a sturdy knock. Years of suppression allowed the longing to grow stronger, relentless. She lay awake that night, wrestling with her conscience over what to do with it. Should she lock it away again to be ignored? Was there something she could do? She asked herself where that line was that couldn’t be crossed, if there was a grey area among all of the black and white. Her grey area was these rooftop visits.

  When she gave in to the persistent temptation that night, she followed her draw to his condo. The perfect spot for her to spy had already been lined up from where she completed her first stakeout. She had reasoned ever since that she wasn’t technically giving herself away to him. There wasn’t a chance for him to know that she was there. She had no plans to approach or meet him. Those orders were black and white. Simply watching him wasn’t something that they told her she couldn’t do. Besides, the risk was worth it to her. It fed her need for him.

  At first, it was only once every two weeks, which then became once a week, and now, twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Her desire began like a kitten, innocent and tame, but as she fed and nurtured it, the kitten grew into a cunning feline, and eventually into what it was now – a wild lion, ferocious and unruly. There wasn’t a day that went by now that she didn’t think of him in some form, but knew it would need to end one day and lock the lion away for good. But tonight wasn’t the night.

  She sighed when her ‘painter man’ put away his paint brushes. He must have started early. On Saturdays, he would paint until midnight, at least, which gave her plenty of time to watch him. She lowered her binoculars and shoved them back inside her purse. Because she couldn’t do what she came there to do, she would sit on the roof and take a moment for herself.

  Part of the enjoyment of these visits was to gaze at the stars and moon, soaking in every last bit of this world that she could. Knowing this was her last time on Earth, it wasn’t unusual for her to stop and stare at the horizon or admire the birds as they flocked together through the sky. She would miss it here.

  She sat on the concrete with her knees bent to her chest, and the flickering of the street light below stole her attention. Her head turned to study the scene. With her chin buried into shoulder, she watched as the moths danced and wove around it, bumping into the light and darting around one another with a clumsy gracefulness. In that moment, a realization manifested – she wasn’t so different from those moths.

  Last week she watched a special on the Nature Channel about moths and how they’re considered ‘positively photo tactic’, meaning that they’re drawn to light in an instinctual way. The scientists theorized that this was because moths are migratory insects and use the moon as a guide for navigational clues.

  This ‘painter man’ was her light -- an alluring glow that her soul migrated to. She certainly felt lost in some ways, her place within the world a façade for a higher calling. But he was the one place that was real and constant. The one place that, despite her better judgment, that called to her, that she truly connected to. And although these moths k
new that this wasn’t their home and was an artificial light source, they stayed there or continued coming back. When they flew away from the light, it took their eyesight a lot longer to adjust to the darkness so they migrated back out of instinct. She recognized a similarity there, as well. Being away from the rooftop and in the real world didn’t have the same appeal. Even Benjamin’s light didn’t burn bright enough to keep her away. She always made her way back around to the rooftop, even if it meant that she was possibly going in the wrong direction, which was, within her grey area.

  A scant hour had passed, but she wasn’t ready to go home just yet. Her attention directed itself to the open sky. She lay back with her head rested inside her interlaced hands to gaze at the stars, her body relaxed, although her spirit somewhat ungratified.

  She closed her eyes, and the crisp air washed over her face as she fantasized about the man on the other side of the lens; the soft angles of his face, the mystery in his blue and green eyes, the way his tongue curled over his top lip as he concentrated on his paintings. She drifted off and into his world, opening herself up to let it consume her.

  Her mind wandered around what it would be like to be there with him; what his voice sounded like, if he was funny, what the more intricate details of his face were. She allowed herself to daydream about meeting this man, knowing she could never cross that line, her contact forbidden. As that reality slapped her across the face, her eyes reopened to perish the thought for good. That was something she would never be able to consider. Ever.

  The wind grew stronger and whistled through the buildings, tossing plastic bags and aluminum cans from between them and into the street. With the wind’s growing strength came a bitter chill, leaching the warmth from her bones. She sat up and wrapped her jacket tightly, glancing toward his window one last time before rocking herself to her feet. The light no longer burned inside his home. See you again Wednesday, painter man.