House of Slide Hybrid

by Juliann Whicker

  “Demon taint is not a good way to die.”

  Jones went on with the training, getting us to fight each other. There were no other bird episodes, but Chloe kept glancing up. She wasn’t the only one.

  I wondered if Ash was up there, watching me, whether Lewis had come to, if there was something I could do for him other than take his blood. I shook off the thoughts of Lewis, trying to keep my mind clear but all the concentrating with Orrin, time when I’d been able to put Lewis out of my head was over for the day.

  Jones was nothing like Lewis, but his eyes glowed, just for a moment, enough for me to think of Lewis, of his eyes and the way I felt, the way everything else disappeared when he looked at me like that. There was watching people fight and thinking that no one fought like Lewis did, wondering if I’d ever get to watch his grace and intensity again. Dinner didn’t help, a stew that should have reminded me of Old Peter but instead was Lewis, his hand holding mine, touching my skin after I’d nearly burned out.

  Should I go back? What if he was dying up there, what if he would never open his eyes again? How could I be here instead of there? Maybe my skin contact would make a difference, save his life. The memory of the dream haunted me though, and not only that. When Zeke sat beside me with his bowl of soup, I fought the snarl that formed on my mouth, struggled to stay focused on where I was instead of his throat where I could see his pulse beat. I swallowed then abandoned my soup, realizing that he was staring after me as I fled. After dinner he found me pacing outside my tent, trying to get tired enough to lie down.

  “Hey,” he said with an awkward smile, his white hair visible in the darkness as the fire died down. “I’m sorry about this morning, the nerve paralysis. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  I stared at him, waiting for the blood lust, but it had passed. I exhaled shakily then shook my head. “No, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have run; I just had a couple of bad days.”

  “Demons?” he asked. I nodded without going into details. “I’ve never had trouble with demons. I know most everyone here has had some experiences that were horrible, but I’m running from different monsters.” His face twisted and I saw bitterness that made me curious, but I didn’t want to tempt the bloodlust.

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to bed now.” I turned and ducked through the door, glad to see Chloe where she sat on her cot writing in a notebook. “Hey.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “I noticed that you didn’t finish your dinner.”

  “I feel crazy sometimes.” I wasn’t sure why I told her that, but she only nodded like she knew what I meant.

  “I heard you talking to Zeke,” she said with a slight frown between her eyebrows.

  “How long has he been here?”

  She shrugged. “He came here right before the girl…” She didn’t say anything else but I knew it was the one she had unspoken issues about. I almost wished she was more like Snowy so I didn’t have to wonder what it was about the girl that bothered Chloe so much, but then I would have been up all night.

  The next day followed a similar pattern, except that I met the rest of the camp. The camp was divided into two unofficial groups. Zeke and Jones were the only ones who seemed to ignore the ‘no mingling’ vibe.

  The girl Chloe had issues with was none other than Orrin’s friend or sister, Erin. She didn’t even look at Orrin while he watched her without watching in that Cool way of his. She definitely didn’t talk to me, didn’t acknowledge me. I’d thought that she didn’t like me, but it was like she was completely indifferent to Orrin now when she’d been desperate before.

  I couldn’t put my finger on what Chloe disliked about her because as far as I could tell their only interactions were perfectly businesslike.

  After lunch I overheard Erin telling an eager audience all about the atrocities that Wilds had committed, and the anger in her voice, the murmur of hatred and violence her words were met with made my skin cold. This was what Wild’s wanted to prevent—Hybrids becoming trained that wanted to destroy Wilds. I’d assumed that Wilds were being overly paranoid, but apparently there was actual dissent. Since Chloe had Wild blood because she had foretelling maybe that made her feel uncomfortable to be around someone who hated parts of you that much. Maybe that was why Erin had hated me immediately when she met me.

  She didn’t act aggressively towards anyone with Wild blood that I could tell, but there was something about the way she never looked directly at you. She seemed to be the leader of the others, the ones who asked questions that didn’t entirely relate to how they should use their gifts for destroying demons. I realized it was the Coolness, the fact that when she spoke you couldn’t help but listen.

  I didn’t know how I felt about Wilds in general. While I resented them, at the same time they were part of me. I loved my uncles however screwed up their morality seemed sometimes. I tried not to listen, to focus instead on learning everything I could to destroy demons before they hurt another person I loved. I wanted to be more like Chloe who was second to Jones but never acted like a jerk, and she got through fights without needing an eagle to rescue her.

  My fights always ended badly for me. When I wasn’t thinking, if I was surprised enough my borrowed instincts kicked in but otherwise I ended up staring stupidly from my back at the ring of faces above me. Zeke was good, a little too aggressive sometimes when he went off with his instincts, but he was fast, and no one wanted him to touch them.

  The second day after I heard Erin talking, I saw Orrin on the edge of camp, staring into the trees like he was searching for something.

  “Orrin,” I said quietly so he wouldn’t jump.

  He smiled. “You’re not asking me about Erin, and I’m not asking about you and your Cool friend.”

  I stiffened as I realized that of course he would know that I wasn’t alone and that Ash was lingering on the edges of camp. “I won’t if you don’t want me to. I wouldn’t whether you chose to blackmail me or not.” My voice was as low as his but so much less interesting.

  He turned to look at me though, like I’d said something that got his attention. “We all have reasons for doing what we do, even if they only make sense some of the time.” He sounded tired.

  “You followed her here,” I said, not sure why I’d say that out loud, but feeling like it was true.

  He nodded then shrugged, looking at the woods. “She wanted me to live, so here I am. She kept me alive, tried everything she could do. I owe her.”

  I nodded like that made sense, and maybe it did. Cools weren’t motivated by the physical stuff, but they were motivated. They did love or my father wouldn’t still love my mother.

  I turned away, unable to continue a conversation that made me think about love, about owing someone, about Lewis.

  By the third day I was almost accustomed to waking up with a burning need in my throat, a burning that grew to a tolerable ache throughout the day as I focused on demons, on fighting the people I got to know and like. I knew that Ash lurked above us. I even caught glimpses of his soul sometimes. He would tell me if something had changed for better or worse with Lewis, so things must be going on the same. I tried to forget the pale face, the icy hands and focused on the mud between my boots.

  When I looked up Aiden was scant inches in front of me. He put his hands on my shoulders and I felt the pull towards Lewis intensify a hundred times as the blocks cracked and crumbled as Aiden tore them down.

  I fell to my knees when he let go of my shoulders, lost in the dizziness of being without Lewis that I barely noticed yelling and people running past me, Aiden gone.

  “You okay?” Jones asked, panting. I might have nodded because he continued after Aiden, the stupid, young Hotblood who didn’t know how to die but was always asking for it. I sat for a long time against the trunk of a tree, instinctively pulling strength from the tree, grounding myself, keeping myself there so that I didn’t tumble off the face of the earth, free falling to wherever Lewis was.

  I felt his presence tugging at me
, like someone had reached inside my chest and was pulling on my heart. I couldn’t bear it, not when he was so close, not when my blood began to ache, pumping poison through stinging veins.

  I sat there for a long time, struggling for control, reminding myself over and over again that Lewis managed to leave me unbound. He’d endured the agony, so I would too. If he could do it, then I could. Eventually I found Orrin and sat down, barely capable of exploring the raw feelings that had been left dangling behind the block, nowhere close to being able to manipulate them. Besides the blood bond and the bloodlust there was an immense amount of awareness that crushed me when I inhaled, opened my eyes, or listened to anyone or anything.

  I refused to sit in my bed with my blanket over my head, but it felt like I’d gone from living in a pitch dark cave to stepping out in the bright sunshine, with no warning. Orrin’s eyes weren’t grey, they were a million different colors that managed to look grey if you were practically blind. The mud wasn’t gray either but it was so full of energy as spring took hold, as the mud seethed with life. I saw so much more now of the other sight that it was hard not to see it. Chloe had so much energy that when she moved she buzzed, sparks of green and gold filling up more space than her physical body. I tried to focus on that, on the good stuff instead of letting my head instinctively swing to the North where Lewis was. I could feel Chloe’s concern about me, like she’d spoken it. I had to be mindful of keeping my blocks up so no one else would be inundated by my aches and euphoria. I knew instinctively that I could be like my father, slicing through people’s consciousness if I wasn’t careful. Luckily the stone walls still came down when I unintentionally leaned.

  That night I lay in my bed staring at the roof of my tent, listening to the sound of Chloe’s breathing. Aiden wasn’t part of the camp. Jones and Chloe had made that clear. They’d told me that at first they welcomed him but then he’d been so erratic and had the strange idea that he was supposed to be in charge of the camp, bossing Jones around. When Aiden started stealing supplies, Jones put his foot down. He’d thrown Aiden out of camp, a fight that the Hybrids had cheered enthusiastically.

  I didn’t really care about anything besides Lewis. I should go to him. It was dark, cold up there. He could be dying for all I knew. Maybe completing the blood bond, ripping open his skin and taking his blood would help him somehow. I closed my eyelids tight enough that I began to get a headache. No. I didn’t trust Aiden. My senses stretched around me taking in the camp, the souls that lay so quietly around even as their souls burned with a light and fire that I could almost taste.

  ***

  I lay beneath the canopy at the Hollow house, the drapes billowed and curled around me like mist. Lewis was beside me, his arm beneath my head. I could hear the pulse, the steady pounding that made my heart race, made my mouth water. He was close, desperately close.

  “Dari,” he whispered, his low warm voice stealing down my spine, warming every particle of me. “The bond is the only way to save your brother. He’ll be lost if you don’t complete the bond. I’ll be lost.”

  I turned my head to see him but the gauze kept him from my gaze, the only thing that I could see was his arm, golden skin, white scars, and the veins that pulsed with life.

  “Dari,” his voice came again, desperate with need I’d never heard before. “Save me.” I nodded, turned my face to the flesh and bit down.

  ***

  My screaming went on until I realized what had happened, that it was a dream but not only a dream, that I’d bit hard enough into my own arm that bits of blood and flesh were on my tongue. The taste of my blood was so potent. My eyes had trouble focusing in the darkness at Chloe where she sat, her soul burning sporadically before it was drowned in darkness that was all my actual eyes could see. After a few eternal heartbeats Chloe’s voice started making sense, words that brought me back into myself. She turned on a flashlight, spreading a paste on my arm before she wrapped it with gauze.

  I could see her nostrils flare as she smelled my blood and I felt an unexpected craving from her. I watched her pupils dilate as she finished wrapping my arm, a little too tightly before she burned the gauze with a match that reminded me of Lewis. I tried so hard not to move because I wasn’t sure which direction I would go in, but knowing that it wouldn’t be a good one.

  “That happens to me sometimes,” she said in a low voice as she sat on her own cot, a safe distance away from me.

  “You’ve bitten yourself in your sleep?”

  She giggled. “No, I’m a foreteller. Sometimes I see things and I think they’re actually happening. The bird thing the other day, that was one of those times. I wasn’t sure if it was real at that moment, so it was hard to know how to react.”

  “Right. Otherwise you’d know exactly how to defend against the bird.”

  She smiled, and went back to bed. I waited a few minutes before I kicked off my blanket and pulled on my boots. The camp was silent around me. I couldn’t pretend that I was fine or it would be Chloe’s blood I took, her death I tasted. The surrounding woods were dark and silent as I moved through them like a ghost. I felt the souls of the trees I passed, heard distant wings of bats in the night air, saw the small, glittering soul I called, pulling it towards me. I ignored the distant soul, the dark heat of Lewis.

  The soft warm body perched in my hands trustingly, wings fluttering. It waited for me to twist its neck. I felt the rush of death while its soul flew singing far up into the sky, leaving its body to cool in my fingers.

  Sick, I dropped beside a tree, unable to put down the body I’d betrayed. It didn’t matter that it had given me its life. In some ways, that made it worse. Strength spread through me even as an ache burned in my throat while thoughts of Lewis took whatever I had left over from guilt. Orrin found me the next morning, curled up with the bat’s body. It took me a few tries to understand his words.

  “That’s why most Cool’s become vegetarians,” he said, gently taking the corpse out of my hands. “You made a choice between animal and human.” He pulled me to my feet. “You have to maintain balance between your conscience and your reality. You require life to live. Some Cools become so sensitive that they can’t consume plant life either. They don’t live long that way. We all consume.” His energy soaked into me as he spoke. I found myself nodding, seeing the cycle of life, of my life and how it would not last forever. Nothing lasted forever, not even the long living Cools. I had to do what I could to make the whole of the world better, to justify what I consumed.

  All that day, I could barely concentrate on what anyone said. At least I wasn’t staring at their throats, at the beating blood I’d been so eager to taste. When Orrin lectured, I heard too much what he wasn’t saying. When I was supposed to fight, I was more passive than ever. I was worried that otherwise I’d slip inside someone’s head and kill them without meaning to.

  “Orrin,” Chloe said after dinner when I sat staring into the flames, thinking of Lewis and the way his eyes flickered when he looked at me, burned sometimes when we touched. The tips of my fingers were still tender, and I noticed that there was a tinge of red to my soul there as my sight flickered as it did so often.

  “Yeah?” Orrin asked in the low voice he rarely used.

  “Play something,” she said as she pulled out a prehistoric looking drum. She tapped on the hide, a constant thumping that reminded me of my heart beat, of the way that sound had been so intense when I’d had Lewis’s soul. He was so close. I frowned as I tried to remember the way back to the house, but my concentration ended when Orrin started to play.

  The sound of his flute was soulful, a tune so heartbroken and beautiful that it made my heart ache and bleed a little bit. I pulled my knees to my chest and thought about Lewis, about how many times I’d hurt him. I hated that if I completed the bond his future would be irrevocably tied to mine—and all the pain that signified.

  Someone else picked up the drumming, and the tune shifted, Orrin’s slow soulful tune changing to something so happy
that I couldn’t remember ever hurting Lewis. All I could think of was the way he smiled when he smoothed back my hair, of the warm glow of his skin beneath the scars, of the tightening of his hand on mine, the smell of the soap he’d used on my hair, and I remembered dancing.

  I found myself on my feet, swaying in time to the rhythm of the drums, the flute Orrin played so beautifully while Chloe opened her mouth and sang, a tune so strong and sure I didn’t need to hear the words to know it was about life, love, happiness, all wound tightly together, the force of those elements strong enough to keep away every other bad thing that could threaten me.

  I wasn’t sure how to dance, not when this wasn’t a place for ballroom or dance team, but my body knew how to go with the music, the same way that Chloe knew what notes to sing. I spun and jumped around the licking flames, feeling the blood pound in my heart, in my brain while the sound rose around me.

  When Ash stepped forward and took my hands, I didn’t question where he’d come from or ask what had happened to Lewis, I only smiled, his hands being a natural extension of the rest of the dance, the song. More people got up, spinning and moving, more drums seemed to pound, as we moved faster and faster. I threw my head back to laugh and for a moment the moon exploded, the trees above us, the very wind becoming a kaleidoscope of color and sound as they danced with me, tangled in my energy, in my life the way I was tangled in the other Hybrids and Ash. In that moment I could see, distantly, a dark green soul that I’d recognize however far away, however wrong the color. Lewis was alive and steady but without the fire.

  I stopped moving as the soul sight vanished leaving me with Ash who was spinning around me, apparently lost in the music that no longer made sense to me. I turned, confused as I wondered where he’d come from, needing to sit down before the choking need at the back of my throat made me scream, or worse.

  The darkness beyond the campfire between me and Lewis moved, shifted in a way that made me remember Aiden and all the other dark things I didn’t understand. I stumbled to the fallen log where I could slide down the edge until I was huddled beneath it, watching the dancing, hearing the music, but from a distance, the beauty and joy drowned out by the darkness between us.