Embers & Ice (Rouge)

by Isabella Modra

  “Stairs,” he said.

  It was so dark that Hunter couldn’t even see Will’s outline before her. They took it slow, and Hunter gripped Will so tightly she could sense his smile, especially in his tone as he encouraged her further. Since her sight wasn’t active, her other senses were on hyper-drive. She could smell wet wood, dust and metal. She heard every creak of the wooden stairs beneath them, every drip of a distant pipe, every breath that blew out of their mouths. Will’s hands in hers were cool and soft and strong, as you would expect of immortal skin.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked to fill the silence.

  “I’m not exactly sure what it’s called,” he replied and for the first time she became aware of a very faint British accent. It was only obvious now in the silence. “But from what I’ve explored, these tunnels were once a part of the institution. Down further is a separate level. It’s deserted and some of the walls have crumbled, but there are cells. Old cells.” Will stopped immediately and felt in front of him. His hands came to a blockage and he bent down, gripping a door handle and pushing it inwards.

  More darkness awaited them, but Will walked confidently forward. She could tell this space was much bigger than the tiny hallway and staircase they’d come through. The reverberations of their voices echoed. She imagined a corridor as he’d described, with cells like theirs stories above, only decayed and in shades of gray, green and black. An old prison. Ruins.

  Will moved left very suddenly and opened another door. There was less space there, and he was soon placing her before what felt like a bed. Will pried her hand away and closed the door. She tried to find him again, waving around.

  “Will!” she hissed. “What are you-”

  “Just a minute.” He was ruffling in something and then a match was lit.

  His face glowed in the fire light that set the room around them in a golden luminosity. Hunter could have sung with relief to have light – or even better, fire.

  They were in what appeared to be someone’s old quarters. A bed with a spring mattress was set up against the right wall. Will stood on the other side of the bed, a chest of drawers behind him. He was lighting a row of candles melted down in mountains of dripping wax. Soon the room was glowing and the presence of even a little warmth was enough to relax her. The smell of age still thickened the air, and the candlelight cast shadows as they moved on the walls. A small wooden cross hung at the head of the bed that made Hunter feel as though she were in a scene from The Exorcist.

  Hunter walked around the bed and joined Will by the drawers. She followed the line of candles with her eyes, waving her fingers through the flames and waiting for the burn. Thankfully, the bracelet seemed to only stop the fire from coming out. Her skin was still immune. The warmth was heavenly after having such a quick reunion with her powers yesterday in the Orb.

  “Is that strange?” he asked. His face glowed with an oddly beautiful presence in the light of the candles. “Never being able to feel a burn?”

  Hunter shook her head. “I don’t know any different. In class, I used to be able to hold my finger through the Bunsen burners and all the guys thought it was the coolest party trick ever.” She chuckled to herself and then saw the look of confusion in Will’s eyes. She realized he would have no idea what she was talking about. Clearing her throat, she pried a clump of wax away from the cupboard so she could keep the tiny flame close to her.

  “I can’t believe you come here by yourself.” Hunter sat on the creaky mattress, ignoring the ugly stains, her back to the wall that was cold against her. Part of the bed was wet from a leak in the roof and layered with dust.

  Will sat himself at the other end, leaning against the iron bars with one leg folded under him. He gave her a tired look. “It’s the only place that I can hide from everyone. No one else knows about it… well, except Fearne. But she knows everything.”

  Hunter snorted, looking around. “We must be pretty far down.”

  “Not that far,” he said. “Sometimes I hear distant voices from the end of this corridor. There’s another passage that leads to the labs upstairs, and I think there’s something else down below.”

  “What? Below this?” She pointed at the bed.

  “I hear scientists going by the locked door at the end of this corridor. I’m guessing they’ve kept part of this old institution running for secret experiments and stuff.”

  Hunter sat forward eagerly. Wax began to dribble down her fingers, but of course, she couldn’t feel it. “Can you get down there to see?”

  Will sniffed a laugh. The amused glimmer in his eyes caused Hunter’s heart to flutter. “Why the hell would I want to do that? Do you know how much trouble I’d be in if I was caught snooping around down there?”

  Hunter shivered inside. “I can imagine,” she muttered. Her thoughts were racing. There were so many secrets in this place that Hunter would bet her right arm Dr. Wolfe was hiding something, and it had to be down there. But what was she willing to risk to find out?

  “You’ve known Dr. Wolfe a while, right?”

  “Almost all my life,” he said. “Charming fellow, isn’t he?”

  “Very pleasant,” she replied, equally sarcastic. “Do you ever think he has another agenda besides torturing us for his pleasure?”

  “Oh, all the time.” Will drew his other leg up and matched Hunter’s cross-legged stance, leaning closer to her. She stared into his eyes, almost black in the shadow of the candlelight behind him, shadows defining the shape of his square jaw and length of his eyelashes. “He built this place from scratch, but he’s never really with us unless it’s something important.”

  “I’ve noticed that. He stopped seeing me for my checkups almost two weeks after I got here.”

  Will nodded.

  “I wonder what he does every other time.” Hunter had the urge to tell Will about Fearne’s escapades, figuring he already knew since he was so close to her. “Fearne works with him sometimes, she knows what he’s up to right?”

  Will’s face instantly hardened and his hands clenched tightly together. “Fearne is an innocent girl. Dr. Wolfe is cruel to her.”

  “He’s cruel to everyone.”

  “She has a special place in his heart, because her mind is so complicated. They haven’t figured out how to stop her powers completely yet, and she’s been here for six years.”

  “What is he using her for then?”

  Will’s brow creased. “Using her? What makes you say that?”

  Hunter sighed. Will was like a protective big brother to Fearne. If he ever knew what Dr. Wolfe had her do to those scientists, he’d get himself into a hell of a lot of trouble. So she brushed it off.

  “Never mind. What’s it like to be immortal?”

  He readjusted his legs and grimaced.

  “I hate it. I always have. From the moment I knew I could heal myself, my life turned to shit. I was four when I was cast out of my family.”

  “What happened?”

  “Uh…” Will began to shut himself off from her, and Hunter wanted so badly to know what made him so heroic and fragile that she leaned over on the bed and put a hand gently on his knee.

  “Hey. Whatever hell you’ve been through… I was just around the corner.”

  Glued to her gaze, Will’s troubled frown deepened to the point where he blinked rapidly and let out a long sigh. “You’d be a lot more messed up if you went through what I went through.”

  “And we’d be a lot closer if I knew what it was you went through.”

  “Fine.” He took another deep breath. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Hunter let a wry smile form on her lips. “Try me.”

  He looked deep into her eyes, drawing her attention with a tug as strong as the tide. “I was born in Northern London. My parents were wealthy and high up in society. My father was a power hungry man. When I was a boy, he would constantly grain it into me that I needed to grow up fast to get ahead in life. That I should do whatever it takes to be su
ccessful and rich. Money is a privilege, he said. You have to work for it. I hardly saw either of them and was taken care of by the housekeeper, Hannah. When I was a boy, I was… in an accident.”

  Just the way he said it made Hunter sure he was lying. She peered at him closer and couldn’t stop the words that fell out of her mouth.

  “Your father beat you, didn’t he?”

  Will’s lips were pursed in a tight line and every muscle around his neck tensed. He didn’t say a word.

  “That’s how you got that scar, isn’t it? You-”

  “Stop.” He spat the word out and instantly, she was silent. Will threw his legs off the bed and walked to the corner of the room with his back to her. The air was tensely thick.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I just… I wanted to know more about your past.”

  After a moment, Will turned back to her. “The doctors thought I wouldn’t live. They gave up on me. But someone noticed my apparent strength as I clung to life in a hospital bed after my father beat me within an inch of my life and decided to experiment with my biology – secretly, I might add. He changed something in me, gave me the ability to regenerate. That man’s name is Dr. Albert Rosenthal.”

  Hunter frowned. “Dr. Rosenthal?”

  “You met him?”

  “Yeah. I woke up beside him after you knocked me out in the Orb. But what was he doing in London?”

  “I’ve asked him consistently, but he has never told me the truth. I remember the day I first met him in the hospital in London, the day he told me how I survived the accident and what I could do with my body. He said-” Pausing, Will stared at the mattress between them and ran his fingers down one of the seams. “He said ‘No manmade formula can ever protect you from the pain of a life without love. Every bruise, every fracture, every slice in your skin will heal, but there are some wounds that never heal completely.’” He stared around at the dark, shadowed room. “I grew up in a family that neglected me, and then I came here, where the nights were cold and dark dreams haunted my sleep and no one ever held me. The only people I let in were Fearne and Dr. Rosenthal. He became like a father to me. A father I never had.”

  “Why didn’t your parents take you back from the hospital?” she asked. “Did Dr. Rosenthal bring you here?”

  Will let out a small, bitter chuckle that raised the hairs on Hunter’s arms. “After they discovered what I’d turned into at the hospital, they took one look at me and closed the door in my face. They didn’t want a ‘mutant’ son, not when they had a reputation to uphold. A part of me thinks that my father couldn’t bear to look at me after what he almost…” Will couldn’t seem to finish his sentence. “Dr. Rosenthal brought me here. Later I heard him and Dr. Wolfe talking about my parents, that they told the police I’d run away.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why should you be, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I’m sorry I thought that my life was any worse than yours. There can be nothing more terrible than growing up here.” She looked around as he had, at the long cracks in the walls and the dirty stains on the concrete. Then her eyes met his, shaded by loose locks of hair not tucked behind his ears, pained from the memory of his horrible childhood. “I understand now why you’re so quiet and… broken.”

  Again, he chuckled. “So I’ve not had a very colorful life. I’m still alive, right? I’m strong. Ish,” he added. “It’s because of my past that I’m able to keep living.”

  “That makes no sense. If anything, you should be crazy by now. Like Fearne.”

  “She’s not crazy,” he growled. Hunter flinched at the ice in his tone, and his eyes fluttered. “Sorry. I just mean there’s nothing crazy about her. When I arrived here, I was kept separate from the others. I was young, but not the youngest. You were there, in the nursery, and then one day you were gone.” His eyes swum with a memory of the night Joshua took her away from ICE. “For many years I didn’t speak to anyone, only Dr. Rosenthal. I ignored the others that tried to comfort me when I was moved into the cells upstairs. I lived for so long without a purpose. Dr. Rosenthal tried to help; he put others up to the challenge of at least having a conversation with me. Some succeeded, but I was just too sad to talk. Until a little three-year-old girl arrived. I was fourteen. She was so fragile, with her big green eyes and the light that radiated from her.” He breathed a laugh, shaking his head, his eyes swimming with tears. Hunter didn’t realize until her vision started to blur that she was crying too. “She came straight to my table at breakfast, sat down with me, and started talking.”

  “What about?”

  Will smiled at the memory. “I have no idea. Everything that came out of her mouth I didn’t understand. But listening to her became one of the best things that had happened to me here. It wasn’t a therapist or one of the other kids telling me I needed to cheer up or that everything would be okay. It was just a little girl, talking to me. And it was nice.”

  Smiling, Hunter finally felt the courage to ask what she’d been thinking since the moment they were alone together.

  “Will, why am I here with you?”

  “I just… I thought we should talk about what happened. In the bathroom and in the Orb. We hadn’t been introduced before we were thrown together into the Lion’s Den.”

  “But you saved me from Jamison,” she said. “Why did you do that when you knew you’d get in trouble?”

  “Come on Hunter.” He smiled and swung his legs off the bed. “Don’t look at me and tell me you don’t have a hero tendency that comes with your powers. You practically shielded me with your body when the acid rain was falling.”

  “I couldn’t stand there and watch you melt.”

  “Exactly.” He opened a drawer and peered inside it. “I heard a scream as I was passing, and when I saw him on top of you I couldn’t walk away.”

  He has a point, the fire reminded her, its opinion a nuisance to her at that moment. Hunter sighed and let her fingers dance through the flame of the candle. She was sure there was more to it. He tries so hard to deny his goodness, she thought, and doesn’t see the signs that prove it. Will is a true hero. And a true hero does not boast of their abilities. They refute it with modesty.

  “You fought back too, you know,” he rubbed his arm as he sat down opposite her again, his smile tipping to the side. “I remember.”

  “Well… when you lose everything, you have nothing left to live for.”

  Will gazed at her with fire in his eyes. “If you’ve got nothing left to live for, why are you still fighting?”

  For a long time, his stare remained that way. It did not soften or lose its fierceness and emotion. The tension in the room was so strong Hunter felt every muscle in her body freeze in place. The sheer depth of his eyes trapped her and caused the fire to roar and swirl inside her until her breath caught in her throat.

  Then, Will reached into his pocket and drew something out of it. He lifted the object, placed it between his lips and slowly lowered his head to meet the flame of the candle she was holding.

  Oh God. Her insides melted. He’s found my kryptonite.

  Will inhaled, smoke billowing around him, and frowned at what would have been a very disturbing expression on her face. “Sorry, do you mind?”

  “Where did you get that?” she breathed.

  He plucked the cigarette out of his mouth and smiled. “I won them in a poker game with one of the guards. Here,” he shuffled closer to her so their knees were touching and stuck the cigarette in her mouth before she could protest. “You’re practically drooling.”

  With eyes darker than the sky at midnight, he watched her inhale with his lips stretching into a sly grin. The toxic smoke danced around her and Hunter felt as though she might collapse from relief. Ignoring the glimmer of amusement in Will’s eyes, she inhaled deeper. Oh, it was glorious.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had a smoke?” he asked.

  “Since I’ve been here.” She blew out a long draft. “I was never ad
dicted, I just did it because the smoke soothed me and it helped me relax sometimes. What about you?”

  He pointed to himself with the cigarette. “Immortal. Lung cancer is irrelevant.”

  She huffed a laugh and coughed, waving the smoke away. Will’s smile widened, and it was beautiful. Perfect white teeth, creases on each side and a real glow in his eyes. Eli had a great smile, but Will’s was immaculate. Perhaps that was because he rarely smiled, and to see it was just as breathtaking as a clear sky after a storm. Hunter cursed herself for the feelings that stirred inside her, but she was only human. Any girl would be swooning right now.

  “Too much for you is it?” he chuckled.

  Hunter opened her mouth to retort, but only a cough came out. Will laughed, and it was so loud and surprising and wonderful that Hunter started coughing harder, and then they couldn’t stop. Will was laughing at her coughing fit and the tears rolling down her eyes, and Hunter was laughing at how utterly ridiculous and high pitched his laugh was. After a moment, the both of them were wheezing and lying side by side on the reeking bed amidst their cloud of smoke.

  For the next five, ten, sixty minutes – or however long it was – she and Will lay there in comfortable silence together, making formless shapes with the smoke.

  “Will…” she whispered. “Can we do this again? I like being here with you. It’s comforting.”

  He turned his head and gazed at her. She was sure she saw relief in his eyes, or perhaps it was uncertainty. It could have been both. But whether Will was afraid or not, he said “okay” and smiled.

  PART 4

  A GREATER LOVE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Joshua is going to murder me.

  Eli rested his forehead against the cool glass of the cab as they passed Lake Johanna outside the city of Minneapolis, trying to still the rapid beating of his heart. The pink slip of paper in his hands was crumpled and torn from how many times he’d scrunched it up on the ride. He was so close now, he could almost see his mother’s face when she opened the door.