02 Seekers

by Lynnie Purcell

  “That’s part of the problem,” Alex replied.

  Spider held out his arm for Alex to take in an old-fashioned gesture. She took his arm and waved a goodbye to me. As they walked, she put her head on his shoulder, more exhausted than she had let on.

  “Looks like it’s me and you, partner,” I said to Eli. He didn’t reply. “Man, I wish you could meet Margaret. You guys would have so much to talk about,” I added.

  “Was she in the fire?” he asked slowly.

  “I…” I stuck my hands in my pocket and felt the gris-gris bag, Daniel’s rock, and the picture…

  my good luck charms. “I hope not,” I replied.

  “Do you miss them?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s hard to be away from my mom…my family. I would even take Margaret’s

  glares right now if it meant I knew she was alive.”

  “Yes, it is hard,” he agreed.

  “You know?” I asked remembering the picture I had found in the book.

  He clamped his mouth shut but nodded.

  “Who was she?” I asked, referring to the girl he had been holding.

  He kept his eyes trained on the buildings above us and didn’t reply. He was either intensely focused on searching for Watchers or wasn’t interested in answering. I gathered it was both. We walked until there was another line out of a different door and hard hitting music that screamed at people to move to its pulsing sound.

  Eli pointed to a building across the street from the club. “We’ll see more up high,” he said.

  “More climbing.”

  “Nobody looks up,” he replied.

  “I do,” I said.

  There wasn’t a reachable fire escape on the building he picked out – the building with the best view of the entrance – so we were forced to improvise. Eli slid a large industrial trash can under a balcony for us as a stepping stone. I went up first, scaling over the two small balconies until I reached the roof. The top of the building was narrow and treacherous and definitely not meant for sitting. I sat down to keep from falling as he followed me up. He perched on an eave parallel to me with much more ease than I had managed, and we both stared down.

  Club Paradise was typical – nothing on the surface screaming out of unusual circumstances.

  People came and went in more or less intoxicated states. The line increased in volume as the night shifted past midnight, then dwindled down again. It was hard to keep track of so many people, so I didn’t try. Instead, I watched the man and woman who were guarding the door,

  looking at their faces for clues. They had red outfits on, which matched the club’s colors. They didn’t talk to the people in line, but occasionally someone would pass the pair in silent

  confidence they wouldn’t be denied. I started to notice a trend to the people they let in without looking. They were all tall, confident, and had a certain magic grace. Some were more confident than others.

  “Definitely some Watchers hanging around,” I said to Eli after a couple of hours.

  “How can you tell?” he asked.

  Jackson had told me a person would learn to recognize Watchers after a while. I smiled at the memory. “If you’re around them long enough you pick up on things. You see the two in the

  door? They’re Watchers. Watch how they move…and the way they look at the humans. It’s the

  way I look at an ant. And the people they’re letting in without checking their i.ds – they all have this certain set about their shoulders….Can’t you see it?” I asked.

  He shrugged and kept his eyes trained at the two in the door. I stared at him for a moment thinking over what separated humans from Watchers. He had his hoodie pulled over his hair, partially hiding his angular face. He was a lot more confident on his ledge than I was, but it was obvious he wasn’t aware of his full potential as a Watcher. As difficult as his life had to have been, the knowledge I had given him, the truth of what he was, didn’t feel like enough of a reason for him to be so dedicated to helping me find Daniel. He had no vested interest in this.

  “Why are you really helping me?” I asked him softly.

  “We covered that,” he said.

  “You’re helping out two strangers because I told you the truth?” I asked. “I’m sorry, but the world isn’t that generous.”

  His dirty fingernails dug into the shingles of the roof. “You’re the only link I have to this world,”

  he finally said. “To better understand. To fully grasp what I can do.”

  “And were you going to get the information from me through osmosis, or were you planning on asking?”

  “What’s osmosis?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you learn about it in school?” I asked.

  “What school?” he asked back.

  “Any, I guess,” I said.

  “Never went. My…” He rolled his shoulders and stared at the partygoers again without finishing.

  “Geez, Eli…that was a close call. You almost gave away some personal data,” I said.

  He exhaled sharply and cut his eyes over to me. “My mom wouldn’t let me go. She said it was too dangerous. Then she died. Happy?”

  “Not really,” I said. “You knew your mom?” I asked.

  “She died when I was young.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “This place is the nest?” he asked, changing the subject. “That woman wasn’t lying?”

  “It’s hard to tell from a roof,” I said.

  “We’ll have to keep an eye on it for a couple of days to be sure,” he said

  “Watching the Watchers,” I said. “I don’t know if I can handle a couple of days,” I added

  thoughtfully.

  “You will,” he said.

  It was my turn to shrug. We went to staring at the building again. The club stayed open late – late enough for daylight to be brushing the horizon when it closed. The pull of sleep was nothing compared to my adrenaline and the rush of excitement at seeing Watchers so close. Serenity hadn’t just fed me a story to get what she wanted; she had kept up with her end of the bargain.

  While I wasn’t thrilled about handing off a potential weapon to an even more potentially

  dangerous person, I was glad to be closer to Daniel.

  When the club shut its doors, and threw the last drunk patron out to the hungry streets, we left.

  The streets were silent and still, the night air heavy on my lungs as we went to the theater. Eli was quiet, of course. I was silent as well, for different reasons. Inside the dark theater, at the top of the stairs, Eli started down the hall of the second story to a part of the building I hadn’t been in before. I started down the stairs, figuring our time together was over, but he stopped me. “The girl in the picture is my sister,” he said. “I killed her.”

  He left with those words hanging in the darkness. My body was a frozen statue on the dark steps for a long moment. Slowly, his words pounding through my brain, I found my way to the stage. I didn’t know what had made him tell me, I wasn’t sure if I had wanted to know. All I knew is that it changed my opinion of him.

  The only way I knew daylight had arrived to the world was the slow waking of the kids. They were clockwork when it came to waking up and getting breakfast. I had learned to tell the time of day by their stomachs. Ethan was first to wake up. He rolled over on his bed of costumes and sat up. His dirty hair stuck out in odd angles as he stretched and yawned. He jumped when he

  noticed me sitting in the chair watching the group.

  “What the…that’s totally creepy, man,” he chided me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s cool,” he replied. “Just don’t stare.”

  “All right.”

  He came over and sat next to me feeling a bit nervous. He was uncomfortable with the

  strangeness I had brought to the group, and the way Spider had committed himself to my mission of finding Daniel. A part of him wondered what con I was pulling and how it would affect the othe
rs. I didn’t take offense; it was simply the way he thought after years of being on the street.

  For the thousandth time he contemplated asking me what we all did at night, but stopped just shy of the question.

  “I’ll tell you, if you honestly want to know,” I said around his unasked question.

  “Huh?” he asked.

  “What we do at night…why Spider is helping me. I’ll tell you, but you’d better be ready for the answer.”

  “Why would you trust me with that?”

  “You have a code of honor I respect. I know you won’t tell my secret.”

  “You can tell all that?” he asked even more nervously.

  “Yep. I can also tell that you have a burning crazy crush on Cora,” I said.

  “Sh!” he hissed looking over at the sleeping kids nervously, particularly Cora.

  I leaned closer. “She likes you too,” I said.

  His slow grin was the best thing I’d seen in days. As slow as the grin had spread across his face, the frown was twice as fast. His thoughts returned to what Spider, Alex, and I did at night.

  “You’re doing dangerous stuff, right? Things that involve Eli’s strangeness?”

  “And my strangeness,” I agreed.

  “Spider knows, but he won’t say, and I don’t ask. I can’t tell if it’s because he likes feeling important, or because he thinks it’s best not to know.” He thought about it. “I don’t gotta know. I trust Spider…” He looked me over. “Spider said you saved his life, is that true?”

  “Well, I don’t know…”

  “As true as I am sitting here,” Spider said from the stage.

  Ethan jumped, not having noticed anyone was awake. Spider had his shirt off, because of the heat, and I saw dark scars across his arms and chest; scars where he had been hit repeatedly. He pulled his dirty shirt on as he spoke, indifferent to the scars, though I couldn’t help but stare at them.

  “Did you find anything out last night?” Spider asked me.

  “Serenity wasn’t lying,” I said.

  “My fiancée would never lie,” he said grinning at me crookedly.

  “She didn’t say ‘yes,’” I reminded him.

  “She didn’t say ‘no’ either,” he pointed out. He hopped off the stage and sat next to Ethan. “And, believe me bro, you don’t want to know this one’s story.”

  “I can help with whatever you’re doing, though,” Ethan volunteered. “The way you guys are

  carrying on…it feels important.”

  Spider and I shared a questioning look. His eyes were asking my opinion, while I was asking his.

  Before we could answer, Twitch started thrashing in his sleep, kicking out and punching. His yells were surprising and terrifying after the silence I had come to expect from him. I rushed to his side, Spider and Ethan not far behind. Twitch’s eyes were wide with terror as he yelled and fought against whatever unseen enemy he saw. The others woke at the sound.

  “What’s wrong?!” Alex said jerking awake.

  “He does this sometimes,” Spider said. “It’s like he’s awake, but he’s not.”

  “Night terrors,” I said. “Ellen told me she used to get them when she was a kid.” I took hold of Twitch’s shoulders and shook him hard. “Wake up!” I yelled at him.

  He blinked at me, reason returning to his eyes, and immediately started crying. I pulled him into my arms and started rocking him instinctively. The others watched in concerned silence.

  I was grateful they weren’t seeing the things I was. Twitch’s mind was full of the past, and the reasons he had been so painfully scared in his dreams. The things he had lived through went beyond words. I held him to my chest harder as he tried to clear his mind of the thoughts with the poems he loved so much. His first thought was of Poe and the poem he had read before bed. By a route obscure and lonely haunted by ill angels only where an E…eid He hesitated at the unfamiliar word, struggling over it.

  “Eidolon,” I said helpfully, “named night, on a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly…”

  He took over the poem again, totally focused on the words. As I rocked him, saying the poem along with his quiet thoughts, he calmed down. The others watched, their thoughts undergoing a silent, but profound shift. In that moment I was no longer an outsider there to disrupt their world with my strange past: I was one of them.

  When Twitch had calmed considerably Spider touched him on the shoulder. “You okay?”

  Twitch blinked away the remaining tears from his eyes and nodded. He was embarrassed at the attention. I’m better now, his thoughts told me.

  I let him crawl from my arms. Alex’s blue eyes met mine as I searched for an ally to the pain I had witnessed. She had tears of sympathy in her eyes. I wondered how much of Twitch’s agony she had seen to the core of. I stood and dusted off my increasingly ragged clothes, trying to brush off the enormity of those emotions with the dust. Alex came over and hugged me silently. When she pulled away, the others were still watching me.

  “What?” I asked them.

  “I want breakfast,” Sprint said moving beyond the moment.

  “Bagels!” Cora said. “I want bagels.”

  “The bagel place knows I lifted some the last time we were in there,” Sprint said heading for the door. She spun around and walked backwards, facing the others. “What about pizza?”

  “You want pizza with everything,” Ethan said. “You want pizza on your pizza on top of your pizza.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

  “Pizza is not a breakfast food,” Spider said.

  “Food is a breakfast food,” she corrected.

  Twitch remained surrounded by his friends, his family, as they left in search of food. He kept his eyes on the floor, his mind wrapped around the poems, his source of comfort in the darkness. I didn’t follow the group. My long night, and the experience with Twitch, was too raw and too draining. I sat down on the old stage and let my feet hang over the edge. I swung my feet slowly, letting them create a low sound as they brushed the moldy carpet.

  Alex plopped down next to me and took my hand. “Clare, I totally love you.”

  I laughed and put my head on her shoulder. “Aw, shucks Alex, I love you, too, but I’m already in a relationship with someone.”

  She flicked my ear with her finger, and I winced. She took my hand again. “Tell me what

  happened last night,” she commanded.

  “Not much. We watched for a long time…nothing happened,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s definitely a place where Watchers are hanging out, though.”

  “Well, that’s good…sort of.”

  “I guess…sort of.” I pulled Alex up at the sound of her rumbling stomach, and we followed the kids outside. They were long gone, getting whatever breakfast food they had settled on. Alex frowned as we walked the narrow streets. “I know that look,” I said. “What have you suddenly discovered about the world?”

  “Something happened with Eli, didn’t it?” she asked.

  “You sure you can’t read minds?” I asked.

  She smiled and waited for me to answer.

  “He opened up a little. As much as possible with him. He said…well, he said he killed his

  sister,” I said.

  “Killed her? Like physically killed her?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. He went all quiet and walked off. You know how he is,” I said.

  Alex thought about my words for a long minute. “That would explain why he’s so protective of the kids. He’s trying to atone for things in his past.”

  “If you say so, doc,” I said.

  “I think that maybe he’s punishing himself for more than what he’s actually guilty of,” she added.

  We stopped at the convenience store and picked out muffins and coffee. I counted out dollar bills for the young guy behind the counter, imagining what it would feel like if I were responsible for Ellen’s death or Alex�
�s. I would never forgive myself. It was another reason I was so terrified of losing my temper. I didn’t want to hurt them accidently.

  “Could you imagine killing your own sister?” I asked her. The guy at the counter stared at me.

  “Hypothetically,” I added as he handed me my change.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine…” Alex said in response to my question.

  “He knew his mom, too,” I said as we walked back outside. “He said she died, like he knew her when she was alive.”

  “She was his Ellen?” Alex asked.

  “I guess…” I said slowly.

  The mention of Ellen was a reminder we hadn’t been able to get in contact with her; a reminder that I had something else to worry about. I wanted to talk to her and be sure she was okay. I wanted to hear her voice and see her chocolaty eyes again. Her laughter always helped me see things in a different light. If I had her laugh now, maybe I could see answers to all the questions I had.

  “Clare, I have to tell you something…something about Eli…”

  Spider’s unexpected presence as we turned a corner interrupted her words. Alex shifted

  uncomfortably as he spoke to us, annoyed her admission had been cut short.

  “I am awesome beyond awesome. Tell me how awesome I am,” Spider said.

  “Is awesome now a synonym for annoying?” I asked Alex.

  “I believe it is,” Alex agreed lightly. Her blue eyes weren’t as playful as her light tone suggested.

  “Then, yes, you are awesome,” I said.

  “Very funny,” he said. “If you don’t want to know what I just saw, I won’t tell you.”

  I listened to his openly excited thoughts and was serious in an instant. He’d seen Daniel with another man, a red-haired man whose face scared Spider more than he was willing to admit.

  “Where’d you see him?” I asked.

  “Where’d he see who?” Alex asked.

  “Daniel. He just saw Daniel,” I explained.

  “It’s not fair when you cheat,” Spider complained.

  “Spider, this is serious,” I said. “Tell me where you saw him.”

  “He was coming out of a hotel. He got in the car with the red-haired dude and they drove off.