by Kaleb Nation
“Try not to die so quickly,” I heard a male voice behind me. I spun around and my hands reacted again, the silver scales bursting forth in the same way they had seconds before. This time, however, ten long, curled silver claws slid from my fingers, bursting from the cuticle and covering my nails like armor with razor-sharp ends.
I don’t know what scared me more: the claws, or the person I saw across from me.
“You!” I gasped. I could hardly believe my own eyes—the boy who’d appeared in my nightmares was now sitting in front of me, deep in the shadow of the high stonewall beneath a tree that left him in a dry circle. His clothes were far more modern than before: a black tank top that left his muscled arms exposed, and faded blue jeans above navy-blue Converse scuffed by dirt stains. His hair was still long and black, tied behind his shoulders. There was a silver ring on his finger, exactly like mine. Not to mention the most unusual thing about him, which frankly was beginning to lose its novelty: silver scales on his hands and long claws on his fingers.
The moment I saw the silver, I panicked and stepped back. He looked at me and I at him, neither of us able to speak at first. Then, as if judging me no threat, he leaned back again, and the claws and scales withdrew back into his skin.
“I’m Thad,” he said calmly. “Stop that before you hurt yourself.”
“Did they send you to kill me?” I demanded, and at this accusation my fingers twitched. I wanted them to stop but I wasn’t controlling them, their movements involuntary.
Thad shrugged.
“I sure hope not,” he said. “You’ve been laying there for hours and I haven’t sliced you to bits. I’d be the worst assassin the world has ever seen.”
He regarded me with a slightly amused, crooked smile. I didn’t know how to respond to that, except to feel stupid. My claws retreated again, as if they could sense there was no danger. I tore my eyes from him slowly, looking down as they shriveled back and the scales vanished with them.
Impossible…
But too real for me to deny.
I studied Thad but was unable to voice any of the questions that I had—questions that only continued to compound.
Thad pushed himself up from his slouch and dusted his hands on the knees of his jeans.
“Maybe I should have left you back there,” he said in reflection. “I’d get a whole lot more appreciation from those Guardians.”
“I…I’m sorry,” I said, swallowing hard. “I just don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know who you are.” I stopped, correcting myself. “Actually I do. You’re the guy from my dreams.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard that from another guy,” he murmured.
I wasn’t amused, even though Thad was fighting valiantly to end the heavy air between us. I was so confused that I didn’t know which reaction to go with, so I remained stuck, like a robot shutting down from too many commands.
He gestured to a dry spot next to him.
“You want to get out of the rain at least?” he suggested. As he spoke, he reached into his pocket for something, but finding that it wasn’t there, he glanced to his wristwatch swiftly.
“I’d give it about ten more minutes,” he said. “Then we’ve got to run. Just enough time to figure out how we both got into this mess.”
He tapped the dry spot again. “Come on, just a few minutes. I’ve been running all over the place trying to save you in time.”
I relented, but more because I felt that my knees would soon give out if I didn’t sit. I still wasn’t sure if I could trust him, but he had made a good point: I’d have been dead if he wanted me that way. I sat an arm’s length from him and shivered.
“What do you mean you saved me?” I finally mustered up the courage to ask. He huffed.
“I mean if I’d been a few minutes late, both of us would be dead now,” he replied. “You think that monk was keeping you in that room waiting for your mother to arrive?”
I twisted my lips up wryly. I could recall most of it clearly and Thad was right. Why wasn’t I with the Guardians, locked up wherever they would have taken me after Brother James had handed me over? The sounds flooded back too: the loud scuffle and the gunshots. I began to realize that all that fighting hadn’t been between Brother James and a Guardian after all. Thad had appeared instead.
“I must’ve given that monk quite a fright, tearing down the door with these,” he said, flexing his claws. “He shot himself in the head when he saw me.”
Obviously, Brother James had thought Thad was a Guardian come to kill him and collect me. I didn’t know whether to feel sympathy for him or to think that it’d served him right. It was too late now, though. Whoever was returning to the church to pick me up would be greeted by yet another corpse—the latest in a long line.
“I—I don’t even know where to start,” I stammered. “How do you even know who I am? And how’d you know I was in there?”
“Psh,” Thad said with disgust. “Those are all the same questions I have and I was hoping you could answer.”
I didn’t have any.
“Look,” he said. “Give up now on getting the answers you want. They’re not going to appear. I’ve already tried.”
He scratched the knees of his jeans, looking blankly toward the cliff edge. “That was the first thing I learned, when the dreams started…”
So, he’d had them as well. I shifted a bit.
“You sure act like you know me, though,” I noted.
“Yeah?” he said. “I guess you’re right. I kinda feel like I do. Enough to risk my life to save yours, at least.”
He checked his watch again. As he did, I couldn’t help but notice that even the skin around his ring was still bearing the light red inflammation, like he’d gone through the same transformation as I.
“Did it all happen the same for you?” I asked, now letting my curiously take over. I looked down to where my scales had been but now the skin was smooth and unbroken, as if it had simply healed itself back into a human disguise.
“I’d think so,” he said. “If you mean the dreams and the ring that just came out of nowhere. The claws happened a day before my seventeenth birthday.”
“My birthday is tomorrow,” I said.
“Of course it is,” he replied matter-of-factly. “That’s why they’re so desperate to make you a dead Michael.”
Did growing claws make a person impervious to empathy? I’d known this Thad person for ten whole minutes and I already wanted to shake his hand in thanks and punch him at the same time.
“Just think like one of them,” he said. “You know what Guardians are. Do you think they’d let anyone who can fight them stay around?”
“It’d help if I knew what any of that meant,” I said.
“It’s because you’re a threat,” he said insistently, as if I was missing some obvious point. “You haven’t realized it yet? You’re one of them. You are a Guardian.”
He looked at me like I should have expected his answer, as if somehow I should have known that this was coming. But nothing so far had prepared me for it, and suddenly I was unsure if anything surrounding me was real or if Brother James’ chemicals were still at work.
“Me?” I said, the fright causing my voice to rise in pitch. An unwanted feeling began to creep its fingers up the back of my neck. I wanted to say he was lying but I couldn’t form the words.
“You have claws and scales,” he said, gesturing in my direction. The proof was attached to me, after all. My insides didn’t feel any different. I still felt like a human, and my mind still functioned in the same way it always had. In fact, the very mind that should have been helping me understand what he was saying was busy fighting against what appeared to be the inevitable truth.
“What do you think Guardians are?” Thad asked. “You’re not human, that’s for sure. At least not entirely.”
I wanted to curl up into a ball and block out his words, that flippant, uncaring tone like this was all so natural when absolutely nothing a
bout it was. I realized why he bothered me so much. I’d just lost control over everything. Or rather, I’d found out that I’d never had any control to begin with, but had been a pawn in some greater game. And Thad, irritatingly calm, appeared to have already come to terms with all this.
“How did you find me?” I asked. The more answers I could get, the more I’d feel like I was actually sitting on solid ground.
Thad gave an unexpected grin.
“Ah,” he stated. “The start of all of this mess for me. If only I didn’t know.”
Again, his fingers twisted at the ring, almost like he wished he could remove it but it simply wouldn’t budge. “Don’t even ask me how. It started right after the dreams and I still didn’t know who you were. Then all of a sudden, I woke up—on my seventeenth birthday—and I had this bizarre feeling. Like I had to find you.”
It felt like he was leading up to some big joke, but he never reached the punch line.
He shrugged. “It was weird. I just knew where you were. I mean, I’m looking at you now so I know you’re right there. But at the same time I know you’re there.”
He gestured at me. “I could go a mile the other way and still now you’re right there. I could stand and point to you from where I was back in that white room they had me in. That’s why the Guardians took us.”
He looked up, gaze stronger now. “They wanted us to take them to you. Luckily, that gave them a reason to keep us alive.”
I blinked. His positivity had only suffered a tiny crack as he spoke of his own possible demise. But I’d caught something unexpected in his words.
“Us?” I echoed. “There are others?”
He nodded. “Yes. Don’t you remember? Wasn’t Callista in your dreams too?”
“She’s alive?” I burst with dismay. Keeping my outbursts in check had become an impossible task.
“I read in the newspaper that she’d died in a fire,” I blurted. Thad gave me a quizzical look.
“Obviously you’ve been doing some research,” he said, a little impressed. “But no. That was a cover-up. Guardians have had her for weeks, I think.”
“So she’s alive?” I said again, unwilling to believe until I was certain.
“I hope so.” His face fell slightly. “Last time I saw her she was…”
His voice trailed off, and I couldn’t help but notice that his shoulders sagged lower, and the nonchalant gaze changed to something more of concern. That wasn’t exactly the answer that I’d wanted, but for some reason I felt my insides soar because it was far more than I’d had earlier. She was actually alive somewhere? All this time? Of everyone I’d tracked down so far, this girl had always seemed the most important. Finding out that she hadn’t died was like erasing a history book chapter and starting over—a mental rewriting of what I’d thought was concrete truth.
Nervously, Thad glanced at his wristwatch again. Then he stood abruptly, the rain already having slowed from before, and started toward the cliff edge so that he could see over. He studied the horizon, checking his watch yet another time.
“You know the Guardians will go back to the church and find I’m not there,” I said. “That’s if they haven’t already.”
I didn’t know what to do next. I’d reached the end of my plans long ago when I’d found the priest, and everything after had only been venturing further into the dark. Intuition told me I could trust Thad, as strange as that seemed. He looked up from his watch.
“Don’t worry yet,” he replied. “Callista made a plan.”
“And what’s that?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but instead something else chose to respond. It came in the form of a dramatic, faraway explosion, with a burst of orange light flashing from the coastline. It made me jump, then a second later I heard an echoing roar like a bomb going off. Seeing a tall curl of black smoke heading for the sky, Thad smiled.
“That,” he said, “would be Callista’s plan.”
He leapt off the cliff edge. In that same second, the scales appeared on his hands once again, and he rose into the air a few feet as if there were gentle rockets at the bottom of his shoes. The motion caused water to sling from his clothes and into my eyes. His motion seemed as natural as walking.
“Come on then,” he said, hovering with his feet now at the level of my eyes.
“You still have a lot to explain!” I protested. It was a wonder I managed to speak at all.
“Well,” he replied, lowering himself a bit, “I could stick around and tell you everything, or we could go down and see what horrible thing Callista’s done.”
He shot up and away. I was left alone on the cliff, and watching him rise into the sky, I came to the rim and stopped. What did he really expect…he couldn’t actually mean for me to…?
I’d done it before but that’d only been by instinct. It had felt effortless. But I didn’t even know what I’d done or if I could do it again. The rocks below seemed so far away. I licked my lips, stifling a sudden urge to jump, as if even my body and mind were telling me to just do it, to just step over that edge, to let the air carry me…
I felt like a tiny child about to skydive out of a plane, a sinking feeling inside that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. But Thad beckoned me, and I looked up and saw his head blocking the sunlight that had just begun to clear the storm clouds. He looked impatient. So I jumped.
It was a stupid thing to do. I wasn’t close enough to the edge to clear it, so my heels ended up slipping on the end, my arms waving frantically. I was entirely unprepared for having nothing beneath my feet, falling like a stone toward jagged rocks and trees. I gasped because I couldn’t gather enough air for a shout, feeling the scales emerge on my hands again…
I was caught by the air.
With a whoosh, my plunging dive turned in the opposite direction, my body soaring up like I’d leapt out of a swing. Fear had pressed my arms to my sides, but though I trembled, I continued to rush up with such grace that I knew I was not consciously controlling my motion. One second I was falling, the next I was floating.
Air ruffled my hair as I rose, feet and arms still pressed tightly against my sides because I was too fearful to move them, afraid that any motion would upset whatever force held me aloft. And yet it all seemed so normal. So natural. I simply wanted to go closer to Thad and with less than an active thought, my body started toward him like an arrow.
The motion was smooth and I closed in on him in seconds. Thad regarded me with approval.
“I can’t promise I won’t make fun of you for that sound you made,” he said. When stopped, our bodies righted themselves, so that our feet dangled below us. Thad’s hands were out as if even he was still getting used to balancing in the air. I struggled to get a feel for what I was doing. When I willed myself to climb an inch, I did, and when I turned my head to look back at the cliff that I’d been on moments before, my body turned midair to follow.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” Thad said. “Let’s go see Callista.”
We headed toward the blue as the distant black smoke continued to crawl its lazy way into the sky.
11
Pyromania
If I’d had any lingering fears that I was still dreaming, they were beaten in a moment. I could not have invented such a feeling even in my imagination, as we broke through low tufts of cloud that fought like vapor and then fell again toward the miniature ground below.
I finally dared to look down at the houses and buildings, spots darkened with moisture from the rain. The smell hit me in a rush—a mixture of dust and smoke and smog. How was I held up? There were no wings or devices. Gravity just seemed to have less power over me. Everything seemed to have less power over me.
How can no one see us? I wondered. Was that another part of the supernatural powers: something in the semi-invisible shell that allowed me to breath and kept my eyes clear? We were either invisible or camouflaged. Or maybe we were merely faraway birds darting between the clouds to everyone below.
&nbs
p; I saw another explosion in the distance, a belch of black smoke erupting from a fire on the beach, followed by a boom. We were nearing the Pacific coastline, the long stretch of sand bordering the blue water like some type of cream-colored road. The rain had left the beach abandoned but I could already see the flashing lights and hear the sirens of police cars and fire trucks rushing toward the flames. I looked closer and saw that the fire had consumed the wreckage of a small executive jet.
Thad began to dive so I followed him toward the ground. The plane had been absolutely obliterated, a mangled clutter of wreckage with pieces of it floating in the water, a wing poking from the sand and another tossed a few hundred feet away. Even as I descended, it was hard to take my eyes off the destruction.
Until, of course, I spotted a figure sitting in the shade of a tree, staring out in my direction. It only took one fleeting second to recognize Callista.
I wasn’t watching where I was going, so the ground came upon me quicker than I could react. My shoes scraped a pile of sand, making me fall forward and roll, dirt and sticks clinging to my already-tattered shirt. I fell onto my back, eyes flying open. No more clouds or sky. I was surrounded by palm trees.
Sand flew into my eyes as Thad leaned over me with his head blocking the sunlight. He shook his head.
“Watching where you’re going is supposed to be the easy part,” he said. He offered me his hand, and with some flailing I managed to catch it and pull myself up. Both of our scales had disappeared.
We were in a shaded area on a hill, the breeze blowing in from the coast and the sounds of the waves hitting the beach like endless radio static.
“What happened over there?” I asked, smelling the smoke even from where we stood. Thad didn’t answer me, hopping across the slippery rocks in the direction of Callista. I hurried to follow him, hearing the sounds of police shouting to residents to stay away from the beach. I’d probably heard more police megaphones this week than my entire life.
