I’m lost in the moment until the sound of the screen door shatters everything.
Chapter Twenty: The Right Reason
(Zander)
“What is she doing here?” Annabelle hisses. “David is in the living room! Are you insane coming here?”
My mouth starts to open, but I really have no idea what to say. Everything that comes to mind will only make things worse. I can see it in Annabelle’s eyes that she’s trying not to jump to conclusions, not to give in to the hurt she’s so obviously feeling at the idea of finding Ivy and me alone in the backyard.
“I just came to talk,” Ivy says, taking a step back.
“Talk? When have you ever just wanted to talk?” Annabelle snaps.
Ivy drops her eyes to the ground. “Since Zander tried to show me the truth.”
“The truth about what?” Annabelle growls. “You seem to think you know what’s right better than anyone else. The Eroi don’t care what the truth is, just how they can get rid of a few more Godlings.”
“I’m not Eroi!” Ivy snaps. Her eyes are now boring into Annabelle. Suddenly, I feel the need to step between them, but I don’t dare get in their way.
Annabelle storms off the back porch and barrels across the yard, coming as close to Ivy as she can stand. She’s bristling with fury as she points a finger in her direction. “Not Eroi? Not Eroi? Who the hell are you then?”
“I’m Richiamos, not Eroi. I never chose this life like they did.”
“You sure seem content to do their bidding!”
“Like I had any choice!” Ivy hisses. “They made the pain stop. They told me I had a purpose to fulfill. I was two years old! It was the only life I knew, the only thing I had to believe in! Zander was my first mission. I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought I was saving him from a worse fate. I believed what I had been taught!”
Ivy throws her hands up, frustration reaching its limit. She glares at Annabelle as if she hopes her anger alone could make her burst into flames. “How are you any different than me, Annabelle?” Her whole body tightens as she tries to hold back more vicious words. “When they found you, didn’t they make everything bad go away? Didn’t they tell you that you had a purpose you were meant to fulfill, that you had to fulfill? Didn’t they make you feel like you had no other choice? Even though you suspected deep down that what they were telling you wasn’t right?”
Trembling fingers press against Annabelle’s lips. “How could you possibly know that?” Her eyes dart over to me, but I quickly hold up my hands in defense. I never said a word about Annabelle to Ivy. Not one single word. Slowly, Annabelle turns back to Ivy, rigid as she waits for a response. I follow her gaze with baited breath, hoping Ivy has a good answer.
So much of Ivy’s anger falls away under our staring. Her shoulders drop as she meets Annabelle’s gaze. “I know, because you and I aren’t all that different. I recognize the same pain I’ve been carrying around all my life in you. Pain that has nothing to do with what we are. I wanted to trust the Eroi, because the alternative was letting them kill me.” Ivy’s eyes glass over before she looks away. “Sometimes I thought about giving in.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask, daring to break into their conversation. “Why continue to pursue me as far as you did if you thought I was different, if you really… loved me?”
I don’t miss the pain that flashes in both women’s expressions. It’s Annabelle I move to comfort, though. I take her hand and gently pull her against me. Ivy’s chin begins to tremble, but I can’t do anything for her right now.
“I thought that if we were both going to die anyway…” She shakes her head. “I don’t want to make decisions based on lies anymore. I need to know the truth, no matter where it leads me.”
For me, the honesty in her voice is easy to hear, but for Annabelle, this is far from a done deal. “What on earth makes you think we’d trust you?”
“I…” Ivy shakes her head. “Nothing. I know I don’t deserve your trust, but I… I do care about Zander. I don’t want to see him hurt if it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“Oh, but if it has to be that way, you’ll be more than happy to be his death-bringer?” Annabelle snaps. She starts to pull away from me, toward Ivy. I have no delusions about how that will go.
Tightening my grip on Annabelle, I say, “Stop. That’s not what she meant.”
When she looks up at me in disbelief that I would take Ivy’s side, I can only sigh. Thankfully, Ivy provides the words I’m struggling to come up with when she says, “Zander would want me to.” She holds up her hand against Annabelle’s immediately angry response. “None of us seem to know the real truth, but if Zander found out his true purpose was to hurt others, kill others… that isn’t a life he would want to live and you know it.”
Annabelle’s body stops fighting against me. Her struggle lessens, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to trust Ivy. “Prove you don’t have the tattoo.”
It takes Ivy a minute to respond. “What? I don’t have any tattoos.”
“Prove it!” Annabelle snaps.
When Ivy turns to me, questioning Annabelle’s orders, I can only offer the barest of explanations. “We have reason to believe the group responsible for all the lies are marked by a certain tattoo. If you want us to believe you, we need proof you’re not one of them.”
“Where is this tattoo supposed to be?” Ivy asks as she folds her arms across her chest.
“On your sternum.”
“Of course it would be there,” Ivy mutters under her breath as she starts shedding her jacket angrily. She tosses the pullover onto the little bench, revealing a sports top that covers her chest and torso. For a moment, I am alternately worried and intrigued by how Ivy plans to reveal such a delicate area on the female body, but I realize a moment later that the upper portion of the top has a zipper. Ivy yanks the zipper down the full four or five inches of its length and holds up her hands. The pale skin displayed between the open sections of cloth makes me swallow hard. Annabelle simply looks away in frustration.
“All that really proves is that you aren’t one of them yet,” Annabelle mutters.
Ivy’s face flushes red. “Why don’t you strip down and prove to me you aren’t one of these phantom puppet masters? Who says you aren’t the one manipulating Zander?”
I expect Annabelle to be furious at such an accusation. When she simply smiles at Ivy and starts unbuttoning her blouse, it takes me a moment to respond. For some reason, Annabelle seems to expect me to stop her. Her smile only grows more pleased when I reluctantly pull her hands away from her shirt. When I speak, though, it’s not to Annabelle.
“She doesn’t have the tattoo.”
Ivy’s eyes close slowly. “I suppose you would already know,” she whispers.
I know exactly what she’s thinking, how she is imagining the way in which I became so familiar with Annabelle’s body. It’s not true, but I let her believe it anyway. Annabelle finally releases the last of her bottled up anger and lets me simply hold her instead of holding her back.
“I should be getting back,” Ivy says. “Isolde won’t allow me to stay away for very long.”
She starts to walk toward the fence, but I say, “Ivy, we’ll figure this out. I know I can’t stop you from dying, but if you are going to die, it should be for the right reason.”
“Thank you,” Ivy says before grabbing her jacket and disappearing over the fence.
It takes several long minutes before either of us even moves. Annabelle is the first to speak. “When I first walked out here, what was going on? It looked very… intimate.”
“It was,” I say, “but not in the way you think.”
Annabelle curls against me and rests her head against my chest. “What happened?”
I struggle to explain everything that happened tonight to Annabelle, because I don’t fully understand it myself. Something was happening with Ivy, but I don’t know what. All I can be reasonably sure of is that it wasn’t a bad thin
g.
“What does it mean?” Annabelle asks.
Shrugging, I pull her against me more tightly. “That’s what we need to find out.”
Another round of silence falls between us as we both try to shake off tonight’s experience. It’s not until I begin to wonder how we got here that I speak up. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you had a lot of homework to do. That’s why I didn’t stay at your place.”
“I did, but I finished it faster than expected. I hadn’t heard from you about Van and Ketchup and you weren’t answering my texts, so I decided I better come over and see what was going on.”
Mention of Van pulls me out of my own problems. I disentangle myself from Annabelle and yank my phone out of my back pocket. A few quick swipes bring up my text message list and I breathe a sigh of relief when I see one from Ketchup saying they’re fine and on their way home. That was almost twenty minutes ago, so they should be arriving any minute. Knowing they’ll want to report, I pull Annabelle over the bench Ivy occupied only a few minutes ago and sink down to it with her under my arm.
She snuggles in automatically, but there is a certain amount of tension in her muscles. I think I understand why until she actually tells me. “I’d say thank you for trusting me about the tattoo in front of Ivy, but I have the sneaking suspicion that you didn’t need trust because you already knew.”
“I did,” I admit, not feeling guilty about it, either. I needed to know.
“When did you look?” she asks.
“The first night I stayed at your apartment, after David broke in.”
Annabelle nods, but she doesn’t say anything else.
“Are you upset?”
“No,” she says. “I knew you would want to know as soon as you told me about it. I would have shown you if you had asked, but I guess I could have volunteered the information, too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Surprisingly, Annabelle’s lips curl up in a grin. “I guess I hoped you’d find a more… entertaining way to find out whether or not I had any hidden tattoos.” She giggles, making me laugh as well.
“I was tempted.”
Annabelle sighs dramatically. “I’m just not tempting enough, I guess.”
Grabbing Annabelle’s chin, I force her face up to look at me, rough and teasing at the same time. “That is the most foolish thing you have ever said.”
Annabelle’s breath catches. “Is it?”
“Why do you think I stopped you in front of Ivy? She wanted to see my reaction more than she wanted to prove you were false. She wanted to see where we stood with each other, and I wanted her to know.”
“But,” Annabelle says as she sits up to face me, “it wasn’t true, the way she took it. She thinks we’re sleeping together.”
“Not yet,” I say, “but I wanted her to believe we were so she doesn’t mistake any attempt on my part to help her as a sign that I could ever return her feelings for me.” I push Annabelle’s hair back from her face so she can see me clearly when I say, “I wanted you to know that, too.”
“Thank you,” Annabelle says. She leans in, but not a half second later, Van and Ketchup come bursting through the back door, ready to report.
“We’ll come back to this,” I whisper in her ear before turning my attention to Van and whatever she’s dying to tell me.
Chapter Twenty-One: By Choice or By Force
(Vanessa)
The last of my dancers filed out of class half an hour ago, but I’m reluctant to leave. David is working with Zander again tonight. Strangely, I’m not as eager for the break as I once would have been. I slip down the hall to where my boss is locking up the other studio rooms. She sees me coming and smiles.
“Everything all right, Van?”
“Yeah, I was just wondering if I could stay a little while longer. I’m finally starting to feel more like myself, and I’d like to work on my own for a little while. I know I’m behind everyone else.”
Lydia chuckles and pats me on the shoulder. “Even on your worst day, you’re still miles ahead of any other dancer I’ve ever taught. You’re welcome to stay as long as you want. It’s been nice having you back.”
“Thanks, Lydia, for everything.”
She smiles again and gives me a quick hug before heading for her office to close everything down for the day. I head in the opposite direction, back to my studio, where I already have everything set up. I gave Lydia the excuse of needing to work on a few dances but, really, I want to finish what I started with David last night.
As I walk into the studio and close the door behind me, the bizarre set up of dance ribbons and ballet barres—plus a few other things—give me a strange sense of satisfaction. The contraption David set up at a facility we’ve been working at this week was definitely more refined and scientific, but this will work just the same. Ducking under a few ribbons, I settle myself in the center of my strange maze.
Some might find it strange that I seem to carry a blindfold with me at odd times but, lately, I never know when I’m going to need it. Slipping it into place, I let go of my lingering distractions. Ketchup will probably be wondering where I am soon, but I need to do this tonight. As many times as David pushed me to complete the exercise last night, I couldn’t do it. Not with him watching my every move.
I don’t understand it. When he watches me dance, I feel like I can let go of everything and truly be myself. When we train… I’m always worried about revealing too much, being too good, or not good enough, or… I don’t even know. Trying to figure it out distracts me, and I fail. Not tonight. Tonight, I can focus and prove to myself what I can really do.
My breathing is slow and even before I think about making the first move. The pain I have gathered and stored today spills through my body as I access its potential. My senses come to life, and I feel the light breeze caused by the low-level air conditioning pulsing through the stuffy building. I smell the oils and sweat left on the wooden barres from years of hands gripping it, and it orients me. The slight flicker of the ribbons rustling in the breeze helps me pinpoint their location. My goal, the apple I brought with me, sits at the back of the room, outside the field of ribbons, barres, and various other paraphernalia used with the youngest ballerinas like hula hoops and pompoms.
Extending one arm, I place it carefully between two ribbons. Neither one is disturbed by my motion—which is the point—but I don’t continue. If the point of the exercise were simply to reach the apple, I would have beaten David more than once last night. Haste is not acceptable. I hold my arm in the same position for a full minute. Only then, do I lift my right foot from the floor, positioning it over the barre and beneath what I’m almost positive is a pair of pompoms balanced atop a ribbon.
Fifteen minutes later, my whole body is quivering. I have moved less than three feet from my original position, but I’m nearing the apple. Its sweet, crisp smell taunts me, begs me to just move faster. What does it matter if I brush against a ribbon or knock down the hula hoop I’m hallway through? I don’t really know why it matters so much, but it does. I refuse to fail again. I can do this.
I put everything I have left into transitioning from one leg to another without knocking over half my obstacle course. It requires folding my arm and leg through a hoop that was meant for a six-year-old, hopping with enough control to land in perfect balance, and extending my free arm through three ribbons without touching any of them. I’m breathing hard and my leg is ready to give out on me by the time I get through, but I’m only one more move away from my goal.
Smiling, I pull my other leg through the hoop, lift onto my toe and turn, while wrapping both arms in close to my body. Halfway through the turn, my leg drops exactly where it needs to, and I step between the last few ribbons to claim my apple. I take a well-deserved bite as I yank the blindfold away. I wish I hadn’t when I nearly choke on the piece of apple like some kind of twisted Snow White.
I somehow manage to swallow, though it feels like my esophagus is being rip
ped apart. Coughing, I stare up at Noah in shock. “What are you doing here?” I demand. “You scared me half to death!”
He doesn’t respond to my questions, just like he didn’t bother to even look concerned that I was choking. Instead, his wide eyes are scouring my weird little setup. “What are you doing?” he asks.
The fear in his voice is more than just a little weird. It’s really creping me out now. I set down my apple and stare at the obstacle course. “It was just an exercise. David taught me to…”
“Do you have any idea what this is?” Noah is on the verge of full freak-out mode, but I’m still pretty lost.
“It’s an obstacle course. I have to get through it without touching anything, using my senses to guide me. It’s really not that big of a deal,” I say, hoping it’s true.
Noah starts shaking his head immediately. “No. No, this isn’t just another training exercise, Van. Don’t you see what he’s training you to do?”
I’ve been trying not to, I think to myself. In fact, I’ve been avoiding thinking about that exact thing. “He’s just trying to teach me control,” I say quietly.
“No, he’s turning you into an assassin, Van!”
Snapping my head up, I glare at him, unexplainably angry. “How could you possibly know that? How do you know what assassin training looks like? Half of the crap the Eroi spout off about is total nonsense. They think we’re demons, for crying out loud!”
“Demon was the best word they had for Godlings back then,” Noah snaps, “but this has nothing to do with myths and scary bedtime stories. The Godlings are assassins, and David is pulling all the ropes. What do you think his mercenary business is really doing all over the world?”
I close my eyes, trying to block it all out. “Protecting civilian businesses,” I say, begging, pleading for it to be the truth.
David practically assured me of a place in his business when I was ready. I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want one of his “other” positions to be covert assassin. I don’t want to be recruited for something like that. I don’t want to be good at that, at taking away lives. As many mistakes as I’ve made, I’ve never killed anyone. He can’t take that away from me. He just can’t. I can’t… I can’t become David. Zander promised me he wouldn’t let it happen. He promised. He promised.
Wicked Glory Page 16
