The Affliction

by Wendy E. Marsh

  “Yes, there is another option, which most decide to take. We bring in the outsider and then a sort of induction into our chapter takes place. They then become a non-functional member, you could say. However, we must exert caution in such circumstances. As you may have seen, outsiders are dangerous to us because they have no way to defend themselves against our enemies and we have to remain vigilant in protecting them. They don’t lead normal lives, but over the centuries they have all but few been downright happy and better off than they would have been if left to their normal lives. Some of us cannot make the decision, and choose to live their life alone.”

  I nodded, thinking about what she had said.

  “Now, there’s something else I should warn you about,” she said with an almost giddy look in her eyes.

  “I’m guessing it’s not something bad?”

  She laughed. “It’s called the Draw. Sometimes two members have such a strong attraction to each other, it’s almost as though they’re pulled together by gravity, like two magnets. It doesn’t happen all the time or for everyone, and never with outsiders.”

  “Do you and Tobias have the Draw?” I asked.

  She nodded. “You bet. He visited the Capital in England when we were both just eighteen. I had never been there before that, but I was sent on a mission in London unexpectedly and it just happened to be at the same time he was meeting with the elders. At that time they were considering him for the master position, which he ultimately declined.”

  “What happened when you saw him?” I asked, intrigued by this phenomenon.

  “I’d never believed in love at first sight, but there he was looking handsome as ever and we both knew what happened. We were consumed by the Draw and we’ve been together ever since” she finished happily.

  I smiled back at her, and even though I tried to stop it, the thought of Gabriel passed through my mind. Was the Draw what we had?

  Eleanor stared at me through her blue eyes, holding me in a penetrating stare down that gave me the impression she knew the thoughts swirling through my head. She quickly confirmed my suspicion when she picked the tray back up, headed for the door and said to me, “don’t look too hard for the answer, dear, you might not be ready for what you find.” Amazing how she had read me so easily; she probably had practice after marrying a Sage. And I knew she was right. I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I still wasn’t ready to let go of Michael even though I now realized it had been the idea of love rather than true love that had held us together.

  Toward the end of our conversation, I started to become impatient as I felt like something important was about to happen. Eleanor, with all her grace, left me in my room with more to think about than I had ever imagined, and not enough time to consider it at all.

  And besides, I was about to have much more to deal with.

  “Are you ready?” Gabriel asked as he stepped through the door, his uneven smile lighting up his face.

  “Of course,” I answered, “I saw you coming!”

  He shook his head and then said, “You are gonna get in no problem. The elders can’t deny your gift when you’re already doing stuff like this.”

  “I’d feel more confident about that if you were a Sage,” I taunted.

  “Ouch. Don’t you trust me?”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I skirted his question, “it’s that I don’t trust myself. I just can’t believe that I’m what they’ll want, that I’m good enough.”

  “Oh, you definitely are,” he assured me enthusiastically, and then tried to backpedal as he saw the expression on my face and realized how uncomfortable I felt with his compliment. “Sorry, I’m just…no, never mind,” he said, leaving me confused.

  “No, what?” I asked, and as I tried to purposely intuit what was going on, a jolt of pain shot through my head, like I’d run straight into a wall. “Ouch!” I gasped, as I slapped my hand to my forehead, and saw Gabriel looking at me apologetically. “You did that, didn’t you?” I accused him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, looking truly miserable. “It’s a guardian talent; we can put up walls against Sages so they can’t read us.”

  “That’s not fair!” I said.

  “Really? Because I don’t think it’s fair that you get to know what I’m thinking or feeling or what I’m about to do all the time.”

  “Okay. Good point,” I conceded, feeling guilty. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “No problem. Can I at least show you around?” He asked, looking as though he expected me to say no.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, mentally adding, ‘as long as you don’t keep acting as though I’m some kind of angel.’ I couldn’t take the pressure of high expectations when I didn’t believe in myself enough to think I could somehow fit into this society and make it through training. And I couldn’t stomach the implications of what he had said, which had me indisputably feeling as though he might actually like me. The thought of that being a very good possibility made me nauseous.

  We spent the rest of the morning outside, and I was grateful that he consciously withheld from anything that might make me uncomfortable as he showed me around the astonishingly beautiful property that encapsulated Headquarters.

  The house was immediately surrounded by wide sweeping lawns, which devolved into fields and forests. An outdoor training course stood in an overgrown field of Timothy and wildflowers and continued on into the woods behind it.

  “Naturally, we’re abnormally physically fit, but we train to be even better,” Gabriel said as we passed a long set of monkey bars set at a steep incline.

  He told me that society members arranged and managed all the landscaping and garden work because of the danger of employing outsiders.

  “Besides, even if we could hire someone else, Eleanor, Adam, and Marielle would probably take over anyway. Shamans kind of have a thing for nature and gardening,” he explained.

  A shooting range suitable for both handguns and rifles caught my attention, and I told Gabriel of the one thing I was confident in.

  “That reminds me!” He said as he headed back towards the house. “Wait here.” I obeyed and sat down on a wide rock, listening to the crickets chirp in the tall grass while I thought about how easy I was able to forget everything that previously bothered me. As Gabriel kept his distance and the conversation topics remained impersonal, both of us slipped into a relationship of ease.

  I had never been overly prolific with my words, but with him, my thoughts seemed to flow out of my mouth as easily as they would around my own brain. I hadn’t ever experienced that with anyone, not even Cara. Comparing it to interactions between Michael and me was a joke since conversation between the two of us had been a struggle the whole way. As I looked back, the only thing that seemed to have worked between Michael and me was our physical relationship. Sex definitely isn’t love, I thought.

  “Aubrie,” Gabriel said from behind me, and chills ran up my arms. I had to admit that I liked the way he said my name. “You should have this back,” he said, placing my Beretta into my grasp.

  “Oh! I wondered where this went!” I said.

  “Yeah, I took it from you, that first night. I was afraid you were gonna shoot me with it.”

  “Weren’t you invisible?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know how good you were with it. For all I knew, nobody had shown you how to use a gun before. They can be dangerous in the hands of those kinds of people.”

  “Yeah, but extremely useful in the hands of someone like me,” I murmured, as I racked in a shell, flipped the safety off, and shot the twenty-five-yard target right in the center. I spent the rest of the rounds between three targets, leaving them with ragged holes where the bulls-eyes had been.

  “Remind me to never get in a gun fight with you,” Gabriel teased.

  “Right, because that would ever happen. And I bet you’re better than me anyway,” I said.

  “Umm, I think it’s impossible to top that,” he said, “but I’m
not horrible.”

  “Let’s see,” I said, as I replaced the empty cartridge and handed him my gun.

  “All right, but no laughing.”

  “I promise.”

  I held my breath, wanting him to shoot well. He shot at the first target, hitting at the top right of the paper. His second shot went astray, too, but his third hit about two inches high and to the right. After that he spattered the target in a decent grouping. He wasn’t half bad.

  “Needs work,” he said, handing me back my weapon.

  “You’re just not used to it,” I said, “that was very good.”

  “That’s a generous assessment. My first two barely hit the paper.”

  “Learning curve,” I explained.

  “I suppose. Offense really isn’t my thing anyway. My job is to protect people, not shoot them.”

  I laughed. “I guess mine probably isn’t either.”

  “That’s all right, it’s still useful to know how to defend yourself. You never know when the Apocalypse will happen.” He was serious.

  “The Apocalypse?” I asked, “Isn’t that a bit dramatic? I mean I know everyone’s obsessed with all the end of the world stuff, but…”

  “No, not like that,” he interrupted me. “The Apocalypse is the term we use to refer to the takeover by the Black Shadow. When that happens, the world won’t be the same.”

  “Oh, you actually think that will happen?”

  “No, we know it’s going to happen. Or try to anyway. The Sages can see the Attack that would lead to it, but they can’t read the outcome because there are too many variables. And it could happen any time. Nobody can decipher if it will be now, in ten years, maybe not for fifty years. But you never know,” he finished.

  “I see,” I said, and I did. For a few seconds the color was sucked from the world, the sounds of life disappeared, and a chill ran over me as my instincts screamed at me to run, to hide. “I can feel it, too,” I said as reality snapped back but the taste of the Apocalypse lingered in my brain. I knew he could see the fear in my eyes even as I tried to keep it out.

  “Don’t worry about it though. It probably won’t happen for a long time.”

  “Sure. I’ll just try to forget about it then,” I said sarcastically. But it didn’t take long before I did, at least temporarily.

  I couldn’t decide what area of Headquarters was my favorite, though I considered the hidden rose fountain a possibility. Roses, bleeding hearts and creeping thyme softened the flagstone path that led to the little picturesque clearing, in which a rather large fountain stood. Clear water splashed over uneven and garbled river rock netted with vines. The fountain’s imperfection and randomness drew me in, and I sat at the base with Gabriel and talked as our skin absorbed the rays of the baking sun.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said, leaning forward so he could see my face.

  “You’ve been asking me questions all day,” I replied, knowing fully well it meant he was about to ask me something he knew I wouldn’t want to answer.

  “Why are you so guarded?” he asked hesitantly.

  “About what?” I replied stiffly, keeping my eyes closed. Alarms sounded off in my head, my hands started to sweat. This was what I was afraid of, I thought.

  “Everything,” he pushed. Shit. I knew this would happen. We’d start to get too close and he’d want to know all about me, and I didn’t like that thought. That’s when you start trusting them and become vulnerable; wide open for them to steal your heart and do with it as they please, my mind rambled.

  “Because it’s safe,” I answered bluntly, surprising myself. Usually, I denied I had this problem.

  He nodded. “Will you at least tell me why you don’t trust me?” He asked and the question felt like a little stab to the heart.

  “Gabriel, it’s not that. It’s got nothing to do with you personally. It’s just the way I am.”

  “Why, though?” he persisted.

  “Because, I don’t know. Maybe because my mom didn’t love me, because I didn’t have a dad, because every time I trusted someone they threw it away or stabbed me in the back. Is that what you want to hear?” I asked, my voice raised an octave.

  “Yeah, actually, it is,” he whispered. And then he grabbed my hand and I lost it.

  “No, don’t!” I said, and I pulled my hand out of his and ran back to the house.

  Chapter 15

  Isaac sat at the kitchen table mechanically inhaling an impressively tall tower of sandwiches even though lunch, apparently, was not a community gathering. Ugh. Teenage boys.

  “Hey! Look who it is!” Isaac shouted, with a mouth full of turkey. “Tell me you didn’t just wake up?”

  “Nope. Gabriel’s been showing me around outside all morning.” I tried to keep my voice smooth like nothing had gone wrong. I didn’t want to think about what had just happened.

  “Oh, was that you I heard shooting?” he asked, as I slouched into a chair across from him.

  “Yeah,” I said, laying my gun on the table between us. “Gabriel gave me my girl back.”

  “Oh, man, can I?” he asked, pointing at it.

  “Sure,” I said, watching as he picked it up and inspected the smooth black metal, felt the weight of it in his hands, mock aimed it out the window.

  “I guess I haven’t properly introduced myself,” he said, placing the gun back on the table. “I’m Isaac Desmoreaux, Guardian extraordinaire.” He performed a little bow in his seat.

  “Oh, so you guys do have last names. I thought it was only a one name thing…like Madonna…or Pink.”

  He raised one eyebrow half in confusion and half to tease me. Then he smoothed his face in a sort of resignation. “Okay, I see where you can get that. We don’t exactly throw our full names out to just anyone. It’s dangerous. But you should know the rest of us. See, you got Tobias and Eleanor Wells, Cyrus and Mariah Kolarov, Gabriel Alexander, Ashley Vancouver, although nobody knows if that’s her real name or not…hmm, what have you thought Adam’s last name was this whole time he was dating your friend?”

  I told him.

  “Yeah, that’s not real, it’s Riley.”

  “So, if Adam’s real last name is Riley…”

  “That means he had a fake ID,” Isaac finished for me. “Nobody knows we exist. When we show up in normal documentation, it’s not our true identities.” He tilted back in his chair, lifting the two front legs off the floor, smug look on his face as he let that sink in.

  I was a little concerned then. “So what about me? My real identity is already what I go by in the outside world, what’s already on normal documentation.”

  He chuckled darkly, letting the chair fall back to the floor with a thud, and kind of looked away like he didn’t particularly want to be the one to tell me what he was about to say. He still looked out the windows when he said a little more quietly than he had been talking before, “well, Lander isn’t your real identity.”

  I didn’t know what he meant at first and he didn’t elaborate. But I eventually caught on and when I realized what he insinuated, my eyes widened in surprise and I shook my head minutely in denial.

  “You can’t possibly mean…will I have to…my dad…no, I don’t want to.”

  “For a Sage, you’re sure slow,” he teased me. If I hadn’t been across the table I might have taken a smack at him. Instead, I settled for glaring. “Just kidding,” he continued, “but really, you’re going to have to take your dad’s name…I-I mean we all know that’s hard because he’s such an, well, you know, but it’s only right…” he glanced at me sheepishly as he dug himself into a deeper hole, seeing the expression on my face.

  I gritted my teeth together. “I don’t care that my name’s the same on the outside. I will not be called by that poor excuse for a father’s name. He didn’t even want me, he…”

  Isaac interrupted me, “…Okay, okay, I’m not getting into that.” He put his hands up in surrender and then whispered more to himself, “Maybe we’ll just make up a
fake name or something.”

  “So what is my dad’s name? I mean I know he’s Dahlia’s dad, but that’s about it.”

  “You really wanna know?” Isaac double-checked.

  “Yes, I need to know.”

  “His name is Jonah Kellogg, he-”

  But I interrupted him. “That’s fine, that’s all I wanted.”

  He had placated me for the moment, but I knew I would never call myself Aubrie Kellogg and I would not take a false name either. I wanted to at least keep something from Angela, knowing I would never have the ability to sustain a relationship with her. Which reminded me, in a moment of horror, that my mom had no clue where I was; if I was alive or possibly no more than a pile of ashes at the bottom of the rubble of my old apartment. Would she just assume I had died since she hadn’t heard from me? Was the fire scorching enough that the investigators would think there was nothing left of my body?

  “What’s wrong?” Isaac asked, alarmed, clearly not as doubtful of my talent as he led on. I hadn’t realized I had been pulling faces, but I apparently had been because he looked like he was about to run for help.

  “Nothing big,” I answered, “just wondering what everyone’s going to think happened to me…and Cara. My mom has to be flipping out, what with my house burned down, and Cara’s parents aren’t going to go without missing her for long. Shouldn’t we have made a cover story or something? Planned to go on a trip to Africa or something? Maybe…”

  “We did. You just didn’t know it. We didn’t think it was that big a deal, well, at least compared to all the other stuff going on,” Isaac interrupted me again. I gaped at him for a few seconds.

  “Oh, you…you did? So where am I? Where is Cara?”

  “You’re both dead,” Isaac said nonchalantly.

  Isaac finished the last of his lunch and called, “Mariah? Mariah! We need more sandwiches!” I hadn’t focused on the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything yet. I was too engrossed in the conversation with Isaac, and so was embarrassed when he called Cyrus’ wife to bring me food.