Arianna entire body trembled, humming and buzzing with energy she could barely harness. “Why are you trying to kill us?” she demanded of him, her voice shrill and frantic.
“I’m trying to kill you,” the man said and pointed a meaty finger at her. “Not him.”
“What? Why?” she asked, but in the dark recesses of her mind, she knew why he wanted to kill her.
“You are a soldier of evil,” he spat. “Killing you is the Lord’s work. I am doing the Lord’s work.”
“You are the one who’s evil!” she screamed at him.
“No!” he shouted back. “I am a servant of God!”
Arianna took a step toward the man, wanted to look upon his face for a feature or characteristic familiar to her. He wore glasses; that much she could see. But perhaps he had a birthmark or freckle, something that would set him apart from others. As she approached, however, his face faded temporarily, replaced instead with the orange-red glow of flames. Heat swathed her once again and flames crept up her body. Her arms and legs were bound and she suffered. But through the thick smoke that billowed all around her, a face appeared, and it did not belong to man with the charred and scarred flesh. This man’s head was cloaked in a heavy, dark fabric that edged his pasty skin. Beady, black irises gaped at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses. The flames snaked up her body and began to melt away her skin. She wanted to cry out, desperately needed to, but under the watchful, maleficent gaze of the beady eyed man, she could not. When finally, the flames engulfed her fully and she felt life begin to escape her, she saw that the man smiled, a satisfied, self-righteous smile.
Blackness teased at the edges of Arianna’s vision as she relived her friend’s final moments.
“You were there when she was murdered,” she said through her teeth recognizing the beady bespectacled gaze of the man before her. “You watched her die. You watched a sixteen year-old girl burn to death, and you enjoyed it!” she hissed and felt ire roil and swell inside of her.
“She was evil!” he countered.
His words set off a firestorm of reactions within her. Every cell in her body began to teem with anger, anger unlike she’d ever felt before. It rose like molten lava, pressing and surging, brimming so closely to the surface of her flesh, her skin felt heated. She struggled to suppress the urge that raged inside of her, the powerful need to punish the man who’d tortured and murdered her friend.
“She was the devil’s minion!” he offered a final charge. And with his words, she erupted.
“She was my friend!” Arianna screamed in a voice that sounded foreign to her own ears.
“Arianna, no!” she heard Luke cry out from a distant remote place. His voice called to her, weak and muddled as if she were submerged in a vast ocean and he ashore. She was gone. Her vision was awash in crimson, her body adrift on a blood-red tide. She felt her arms shoot out in front of her and she watched through a scarlet veil as the man who’d brutalized her friend levitated several inches off the ground. He shrieked in terror, seemed to sense his fate, but she did not care. She felt a charge rush through her arms to her fingertips before leaving her body, then saw the man’s head and neck twist sharply, violently, to one side. She heard a sickly snap and witnessed his head flop and loll to his chest. His lifeless body dropped to the grass, motionless. Arianna dropped her hands to her sides and felt drained. Color slowly returned to the world around her, driving out the crimson. A voice called to her, a panicked voice; Luke’s voice.
“Why did you do that?” Luke cried. “How did you do that?”
“H-h-he killed her. I saw him, he enjoyed it,” she replied in a trembling voice.
Luke took a tentative step back, away from her, away from the two dead bodies that littered the backyard of the Andrews house.
“I don’t understand,” he said in horror. “I just don’t understand what happened here. It just, it’s just, all so unbelievable.” He raked his hands through his hair and rested them at the nape of his neck. “Y-y-you killed him, without even touching him. What the fuck are you?”
His words stung. She had not intended to tell him of her powers, much less example them for him, but had used them twice in his presence, nevertheless. The first time had been to rescue his sister, and herself, from a brutal attack, and this time, she’d had avenged her friend’s murder and had prevented them from being exterminated in the process. Of course, he had no knowledge of the truth of what had happened at the nightclub with Stephanie. But he had witnessed everything that had occurred moments earlier. Arianna swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in her throat. Her heart clenched and felt unnaturally heavy in her chest. He saw her for what she was: a monster.
Luke looked at her and held her gaze for the briefest of seconds. Usually, his eyes nearly sparkled, their silvery hue shimmering and dancing with delight, with warmth. But when he looked upon her now, his eyes had hardened, their silvery shade replaced with steel, cold and mirthless. In the fleeting second that he looked at her, Arianna knew that nothing between them would ever be the same again.
Tears burned her eyes, and the lump in her throat grew so large she worried words would not escape her lips.
“We have to leave now, Luke,” Arianna managed, her voice a hoarse whisper. “We have to get out of here.”
He nodded mechanically and his eyes refused to meet hers again. She turned and walked toward the front of the house, toward Luke’s pickup truck. The only way she knew he followed, was the soft shuffle of his feet echoing behind her.
Chapter 12
For more than five hours, Arianna had ridden alongside Luke, and he had not spoken a single word to her. They had not stopped to eat at a diner and they had not shared a motel bed together. Instead, they’d traveled in silence without even stopping to visit the drive-thru window of a fast-food restaurant. When finally they’d reached her trailer park, Luke returned her just beyond her doorstep, hungry and enervated, and had refused to meet her eyes with his. Their silence was not for lack of subjects to discuss. They’d experienced a traumatic incident, had committed murders. He’d seen her powers displayed in a most violent manner. And unlike their uncommunicative trip after their night together in the motel, she was certain Luke’s reticence had nothing to do with sex or insecurities; it ran far deeper than that.
Once she was inside her trailer, she dashed past the living-room area, thankful that her mother wasn’t home to ask frivolous questions about her trip. She had not cried yet, but knew that one look at her mother, one attempt at speaking to her, would have granted her some sort of unspoken mother-daughter permission to cry. She did not cry often, and feared that if she started, a great floodgate within her would break and she would not soon stop. Yet, it seemed unavoidable.
Stopping at the bathroom to splash cool water on her face, she felt her throat constrict, felt a lump swell in her throat. She swallowed hard against it, an act she was all too familiar with, and choked back the tears that threatened. The events of the last few weeks, all the death and destruction that surrounded her, all of it fell upon her with crushing heaviness. She felt her chest rise and fall against the seemingly insurmountable weight of it and clutched her head with both hands. She was responsible for all of it, she was the source. Her friend had died because of her. The man in the alley, though he had attacked her and Stephanie, had died at her hands. And now, two more men could be added as casualties. Of course, they had been shooting at her and Luke and would not have mourned her death, but celebrated it. Nevertheless, she was not comfortable with killing. She was not experienced at it as they were. They had burned Lily to death. No matter how enraged she’d been at them, how angry she remained, and no matter how much she tried to justify their deaths, it all came back to her. The men would have never been hunting Lily had she never been friends with her in the first place. She was the Sola. She was the one issued a death warrant by Howard Kane and his people. She wondered how many others had lost their lives in his quest to slay her.
The thought
of more acquaintances, more innocent people whose only crime had been associating with her, losing their lives, sent a shiver of revulsion through her body. Bile rose in the back of her throat and she dropped to her knees before the toilet as sickness threatened. When several moments had passed and she was confident the need to vomit had passed, she stood and stripped her clothes off, the need to shower overwhelming. She turned the water on and stepped behind the shower curtain. Standing beneath the spray, she was reminded of Luke’s comment about their motel shower’s water pressure, how it had been better than the one at his house. She had agreed, and he had been right, the motel shower had been better than his and hers, as well. Everything had been better at the motel.
With a meager mist of water cascading down her body, a chill settled over her, and the heaviness in her chest was immediately replaced with emptiness. She reached out and turned the temperature control knob to the left, making the water hotter, in an attempt to rid her body of the chill that felt as though it had seeped into her very core. But even as the water flowed over her, it did little to warm her.
She wrapped her arms around her waist not only to warm herself, but to physically hold herself together. She leaned her forehead against the cool vinyl of the shower inlay and replayed the entire drive in her head. Her memory revealed the scene at Lily’s house as it had unfolded. Luke’s face looped in her mind again and again like a film reel, the look of shock and horror after he’d wielded the pickax, his look of repulsion when she had not been merciful with the man who’d intended to murder her, who had murdered Lily, and had chosen instead to use her powers in front of him. She rubbed at her eyes, tried to rid her mind of Luke’s look of disgust at her. All the while, tears began to mingle with the water that fell down her face.
Salty droplets streamed down her cheeks as she agonized over what had happened, and how things had changed. She doubled over, her body racked with sobs, and yielded to pain of the raw and ragged hole that had been punched in her chest since her powers had been revealed; since she’d learned she was the Sola.
The Sola; the name made her knees weak, made her cry even harder. She found the title absurd, her role the stuff of science-fiction novels. Yet, no matter how much her brain wrestled with and resisted her designation, a deep-seated sensation persisted, one that confirmed all she wished to deny, one that resonated with certainty.
The realization was a harsh truth. She released her grip on her waist and straightened her posture. Several deep breaths did little to alleviate her profound sadness, but helped take the edge off of it long enough to halt her tears. She washed her hair and scrubbed her body, allowing to the clusters of bubbles and lather to slide off her body and down the drain. Cleansed, she turned the water off and stepped from the shower.
As she dressed, other issues arose in her mind. Chief among them was the fact that she would see Luke the next day at school. She had no idea what to expect from him, no way to anticipate what his attitude would be. She wondered whether he would continue to ignore her. She supposed she’d find out in the coming hours.
The thought of him disregarding her sent a pang of sadness through her once again. She’d barely managed to stave off tears during the long car ride home, and then it had been just the two of them. At Herald Falls High School, Luke was her only real friend. Without him to ally herself with, she would be utterly alone.
She smiled sadly at the irony of her aloneness and her title as the Sola. After all, the Sola had been prophesied as the one who walked alone, and she had been alone her whole life. She was a walking example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But loneliness was not the only concern that plagued her. Numerous questions nagged as well. She wondered whether anyone had seen Luke’s truck parked on Lily’s street. His truck did not exactly fit with the vehicles that typically lined the wealthy neighborhood in Rockdale. Surely, someone had noticed his rusted, out-of-place truck. And if the truck had been noticed and coincided with the sound of shots being fired, eventually, Luke would be implicated. She guessed the police had paid a visit to the Andrews’ residence and had found the two bodies in the backyard. Luke had handled the pickax with his bare hands, had undoubtedly left behind fingerprints. His truck, paired with forensic evidence, would all but seal his fate.
The very real possibility of Luke going to prison, of another life being destroyed because of her, left her breathless. She combed her hair quickly and strode down the hallway, fully intending to hop on her motorcycle and ride, ride as long and as far as it took her to organize her thoughts. She was about to open the front door when it dawned on her that her bike was not beyond it, chained to a post on the front porch, that it remained in Luke’s garage. Her temples began to throb and she contemplated punching the flimsy front door to punctuate her frustration. She was stranded, left only with her thoughts and devoid of any type of outlet.
Chapter 13
After a night spent drifting in and out of restless, nightmare-laden sleep, Arianna woke to the sound of the front door opening. The sound startled her. She opened her eyes and sat upright, alerted, only to see shadows covering her room with dusky fingers. A thin stream of light trickled in from the kitchen through her partially open door and cast eerie shades on familiar objects. A quick glance at the alarm clock on her nightstand revealed that it was just after three in the morning. She climbed out of bed and listened at her door. Footsteps padded upon the carpeting and the jangle of keys rattled. She assumed her mother had returned home alone after a night out until a man’s voice echoed down the hallway. It was immediately followed by her mother’s laughter. Clearly, her mother had brought a friend home.
She nearly groaned aloud. Another man would be sharing her mother’s bed. She knew she shouldn’t be as annoyed as she was. After all, he was just one among a seemingly unending line of suitors. Arianna felt nauseated. Too little sleep and too much stress united and aggravated an already offensive situation. She slammed her door shut, an immature message to her mother that she was awake and did not approve, but a message, nevertheless. Shushing followed by giggling suggested that both her mother and the mystery man were intoxicated. The situation was not unfamiliar. In fact, it was all too familiar to Arianna. But her blood boiled more than ever before. She collapsed on to her bed and rested her head on her pillow. Her alarm clock had been set to ring in three hours. She needed to force herself to fall back asleep, but as riled as she was, she felt it impossible.
To her surprise, sleep found her faster than she could have guessed. But it was not peaceful sleep. Horrific images flashed over and over, images of burning people tethered to posts, screaming and pleading for help, for mercy. But neither help nor mercy came for them. Instead, cloaked shapes chanted, their voices carrying in the wind as unnervingly as a haunting wind shrieking through trees.
When the shrill cry of her alarm clock sounded, she did not stir immediately, rather she believed her dream had continued. But a brightened sky peeked through the narrow rectangular window overhead and warned that a new day had begun. A night of broken sleep that had been filled with nightmares and gruesome images did little to lift her heavy heart. In fact, dawn brought with it not only the recurring recollection of her dreams, but also the realization that she would see Luke again at school. He had not mentioned picking her up for school as he’d done in days past. She guessed she was on her own.
Thoughts of Luke made her throat squeeze and brought an instant sting to her eyes. But she forced herself up to a sitting position and slid her body out of bed. After gathering her clothes quickly, she headed to the bathroom, confident she would not run into her mother or her mother’s overnight guest. Both had been drunk hours earlier and had likely fallen asleep not long before her alarm had sounded. She brushed her teeth and washed her face then styled her hair. A few quick coats of mascara and a swipe of eyeliner completed her morning beauty routine and she was left with the task of figuring out how she would get to school. She strode down the hallway, not bothering to make an attempt at
quieting her movements. She gathered her backpack and rummaged through it to be certain she had a full pack of cigarettes then stepped outside.
The morning was unseasonably warm. A fine drizzle fell from gray skies and a balmy breeze blew. She pulled a cigarette from her pack and placed it between her lips. She ignited her lighter and watched as the flame wavered in the winds. With her cigarette lit, she drew smoke from it and inhaled it deeply into her lungs. As she did so, she glanced about the trailer park and noticed that someone watched her.
“Hey asshole! I thought I warned you not to spy on me!” she threatened and knew she could support any threat she made.
His face disappeared from the grimy window of his trailer. She was about to breathe a sigh of relief when it reappeared attached to a body at his front door.
She immediately dropped her cigarette and turned toward him, her stance defensive, prepared. With her feet spaced shoulder-width apart and her hands on her hips, she squared off with one of the least attractive men she’d ever seen.
She expected him to come out shouting, or angry, at the very least. She had called him an asshole, after all, and most people did not prefer to be called that. But instead of yelling, he smiled at her. His teeth were a dull greenish brown and looked as though they were all competing for the same spot in his mouth. Overlapped and jagged, his teeth made his smile look more like a grimace. He held up his hands in surrender.
“Just gettin’ my paper is all,” he called out to her. “Don’t want no trouble.”
Planet Urth Boxed Set Page 38
