The Affliction

by Wendy E. Marsh

  “I’m leaving,” I told him.

  “I’m coming with you,” he murmured while pulling a bag onto his back.

  “I know.”

  I pulled a back pack of my own from under my bed, which I had packed previously in the case of an emergency, and felt Isaac behind me. I stood up and turned to face him, my fingers digging into his shoulders, and I stared hard into his dark eyes, wanting to see the commitment there.

  He looked so young in that moment and I wavered. I knew he wouldn’t stay behind, even if I begged him to, but somehow I also knew I would put him in danger. I could tell he clenched his teeth together, resolved to act as my temporary guardian as I searched for the one I needed, and I believed him.

  We ran and jumped through my ice-laced windows and time faltered. We were suspended in the now dark air and the snowflakes seemed to freeze mid-fall along with the shards of glass that flew around us like shrapnel in slow motion, illuminated by light from my bedroom glinting off every unique angle as the ground rose up to us slowly. I breathed mist into the air and it hovered in front of my face, a sign that I was alive, and I wouldn’t waste my life any longer. I could evolve into the person I always wanted to become.

  This was my last chance to back out, but I knew clarity now and I refused to close myself off again. I blinked and felt my stomach drop out, felt the earth breathe again. Isaac caught me just before impact, placed my feet on the ground, and then we dashed for the woods.

  “No cars,” he said. “They would track us in a heartbeat. As it is I put up a block as soon as Tobias told me what you were feeling. He has an idea of what we’re planning but he won’t give that away to Moraine or anyone else.”

  I felt a surge of relief and thanks to Tobias. He was sort of like the father I never had and I knew that he was aware of where my life was headed even if I wasn’t.

  We would have to analyze our every move before we made it, make sure we didn’t slip up. The Black Shadow would surely wait for a chance to attack any of us. The rest of our chapter would not approve of what I did. Moraine would warn the elders and foil my whole plan. I didn’t honestly know what my plan was but it formed, in the back of my mind, slowly unfolding with every move I made.

  I didn’t know why I couldn’t wait until I officially finished with training and I largely relied on my intuition to pull it all together. I placed my trust in something very unstable, but I had to take risks; if I never tried, I would have already failed.

  Chapter 27

  Our plane flew out of Philadelphia International Airport at 9:45 p.m. I rested my head against the small oval window and watched the runway lights disappear with the rest of the city below us. After a while, I couldn’t see anything but the proximal end of a dimly lit wing and pulled the shade down in mild frustration. I knew we moved at high speeds but peering out into the night revealed nothing to prove this. I didn’t know how I would tolerate seven hours of inactivity, although I was tired after our run from Headquarters.

  We had avoided main highways and any roads as much as we could as we followed Isaac’s internal compass in a southern bee-line for a plane at the Pittsburgh airport, which had hopped us over to Philadelphia in no time at all.

  Teleportation would have been faster for me but it would also have been dangerous. High levels of activity, such as teleporting large distances, would have placed me on the Black Shadow radar for sure. Not only that, but I needed a Guardian and Isaac couldn’t teleport with me.

  So we had run most of the way, catching an unknowing semi, bus, or train for short distances when we grew tired. It had been a physically and mentally demanding trip, as I had constantly run in fear of discovery, the image of a Shadow chasing us always lingering in my mind.

  As the mammoth airbus flew us over the Atlantic I knew that we both thought the same thing: we had made the journey without confrontation or chase. We should have been relieved at this but we weren’t, and a sense of paranoia settled into our thoughts. For the first time since I resolved to go to London, a nasty unsettling feeling swelled up inside me.

  Flashes of light from the family friendly movie playing up front threw shadows on Isaac’s face as he watched me slowly lose my nerve. My foot tapped. I asked for a drink. I grasped the arm rests until red lines crimped the undersides of my frozen fingers.

  “Fist bump,” Isaac said, holding his fist up in front of me in waiting.

  “What?” I asked in annoyance. He just held his pose, insisting with a look on his face that I cooperate, so I gave in and raised my fist to his. Right before our knuckles touched, he opened his fist so I hit the palm of his hand instead.

  “Turkey!” he yelled while wiggling his fingers and gobbling. Everyone around us looked our way but I couldn’t help but laugh at my own sense of perplexity. It felt great to laugh and I felt the unease lift a little. It felt nice to breathe freely and I felt my leg stop quivering, my jaw unclench, and I finally let my eyelids fall shut.

  I woke to a sunlit cabin, neck cramped, and the pilot telling us we would land in Heathrow a little ahead of schedule. We descended through pastel shaded clouds that far outsized the plane and I felt a sense of awe. We were in a different world up there and I wished that I could just walk off into the clouds, with Gabriel, just walk into them together and never come back.

  I wanted to live in the color and the light and peace and dance to the beautiful piano music that would surely play there. He would hold me close, twirl me around, and I would laugh like I hadn’t in so long.

  I smirked at my silly daydream but all the same, a tear drop crept down my cheek.

  “Isaac, you have to see this.”

  “I’m busy,” he replied, and I looked over to find him still asleep. Interesting, I thought, I can talk to him telepathically in his sleep.

  “Isaac, wake up, you moron.” I wanted him to see the alternate world but we lost altitude faster now and the clouds started to thin considerably.

  “Leave me alone, I’m busy.” Yeah, sure looks like it, I thought, and I shook him until he woke, complaining. “Aubrie, I was in the middle of a really good dream.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re getting ready to land, but look out the window real quick. It’s…” I felt my ears pop as I glanced out the window to see mere ghosts of the behemoths I had beheld just minutes before. “Ugh, never mind, you’re such a slug. Get ready to grab our bags; I don’t want to be the last ones out of here.”

  I swiftly forgot the celestial land above as one thought consumed my mind. I was so close now, I barely knew what I did as I shuffled down the aisle, broke loose from the crowd and all but ran through the terminal, frustrated by the time it took for customs to process us.

  “Where is he?” Isaac asked, and I hesitated, not sure that I knew.

  “Ever seen Big Ben?”

  “He’s at Big Ben? That’s a little touristy, isn’t it?”

  “No, across the street actually, at Westminster Abbey. Cara felt like sight-seeing today.” I was barely able to keep the acid out of my voice.

  “Oh, that’s awesome, you’ll get to see her too!”

  “Yeah.” I turned away from him so he couldn’t read my face, which was surely covered in jealousy. I didn’t want to acknowledge the twinge of pain that shot through my stomach and heart as I thought about Cara spending so much time with Gabriel, but I couldn’t deny it. Selfish and wrong? Yes, but it didn’t change the fact that I felt it. Heat pulsed through my body and we took off.

  I stood behind Isaac on the bottom level of a double decker bus, which trundled along as a few flakes of snow fell to the ground like feathers. It was so crowded that people were standing on the small stairs to my right and I was dangerously close to the large older gentleman sitting to my left.

  I was getting impatient but Isaac didn’t want to attract attention by running through London’s streets. I had briefly told him about the unsettling feeling growing in me, a wrongness like I hadn’t felt before, but that reminded me horribly of the Apocalypse. I knew it was
n’t related to my decision to find Gabriel; on the contrary, I knew I needed to get to him as soon as I could manage. The pressure set me on edge again and I felt like if anyone agitated me I would explode like a bottle of champagne.

  We hit a bump, someone pushed me from the stairs and I knocked into the large man, who proceeded to curse at me in French.

  “ISAAC! This is too much, get me off of this damn bus now.” The world rapidly flickered in and out of color like a rogue television and I was worried I would cause a scene. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the moving bus. We slipped in between two black taxis, turned a corner and faced a set of stairs to the underground.

  “Are you opposed to this?” He asked as we sped down a wide hallway and passed an old Indian man playing some sort of musical instrument I didn’t recognize. I figured I didn’t have a choice either way but didn’t know why he would bother to ask.

  “No, why would I—”

  “You’ve never been out of rural PA?”

  “I went to Pittsburgh once…”

  “Well, welcome to the world.”

  “What?” And right on cue just as we neared a woman at a pay phone she dropped all the coins in her hand, turned two feet from me and I looked into two eyeless sockets. I gasped and stumbled backward as Isaac’s hands clasped around my arms and steered me away.

  I glanced back over my shoulder and saw her fumbling around, continuing to scramble to collect the coins. “Shouldn’t we help her?” I asked Isaac, finally overcoming the initial thought of coming face to face with a zombie.

  “Keep walking,” he mumbled, still holding tightly to my shoulders and propelling me forward through the crowd. I looked back again and though she had no eyes to see with she stared directly at me as though she were an otherworldly predator who could sense my thoughts.

  My skin still crawled as we flew down a flight of stairs, ran down two escalators and around a corner to another set of stone stairs that didn’t look at all as though the public should use them. That’s when the air hit me and I gasped as though it wasn’t air at all but poison. It was hot and I could taste the thickness of the filthy underground breeze as it hit me in the face.

  I became claustrophobic as we waited in the crowd for the right train. Finally, we stepped into one and I watched as a man with a three-legged dog boarded and Isaac worked out which stop we needed to get off at.

  A couple of minutes later he dragged me off the train to run once again through the underground, up and down stairs and escalators, through tiny back stairways I wouldn’t have been able to navigate by myself. “We’re gonna miss it!” I thought to Isaac and he broke into a sprint with me barely able to keep up. We finally arrived at the platform and caught the train just as it was about ready to leave. There were so many people on this train that I felt like I would fall backward out of it when the doors opened.

  As it slowed to the next stop, Isaac pulled me close to him with one arm, another braced on a rail and when the doors opened he swung both of us out onto the platform so the people behind us could disembark. We stepped back on and took up a more comfortable position. I stared at the geometric patterns on the seats as I waited for Isaac’s cue to get off.

  My Sage senses were going nuts. The notoriously familiar hollow feeling of the Apocalypse had overwhelmed me since the double decker and I was scared because it had never lasted that long. Flashes of intuition kept hitting me…little pieces about our current route, Gabriel, and something else that was bigger and sent me reeling with a sense of foreboding.

  We exited the train at Westminster Station, emerged from the ground at the foot of Big Ben and I stood awestruck for a moment at the tower’s magnificence. For those few seconds I was just a tourist, just like anyone else, and then a lot of things happened at once. I doubled over as it felt as though an arrow pierced my heart, a yellow flash of light obscured my vision, and Isaac left me, yelling “I have to go!”

  I felt like I was going to be violently sick and made my way to the railing of the bridge, where the cold stone beneath my fingers sent some clarity washing into the rest of my body. I looked to my left and watched as Gabriel ran towards me through the crowd of interested onlookers. There were too many emotions in his face to read it and I was nervous, but he ran to me, threw his arms around my waist, picked me up and spun around in a circle as I wrapped my arms around his neck.

  I felt safe. Complete. I never wanted to let go.

  He set me down but continued to hold me tight. “Aubrie, what are you doing here?” I didn’t answer and resisted as he tried to look at my hidden face because tears rolled down my cheeks. I couldn’t suppress the release of the torture that built up in me for the past six months. I acknowledged the fact that he knew I cried but I couldn’t look at him anyway.

  He sighed, let me rest my head on his chest, and ran his fingers through my hair. “You cut your hair,” he whispered. I couldn’t resist the poorly hidden nuance in his voice and looked up into his irresistibly handsome face. I remembered he didn’t know about all the talents I had developed since he last saw me.

  “You seem disappointed.” And I had to smile at the look on his face despite the remnants of the last tears residing on my cheeks.

  “Did you just…”

  “Talk to you telepathically, yes.”

  “Oh, my God, do it again.” And he broke into a giant smile that sent my heart racing.

  “So do you still find me attractive…that is, assuming you did in the first place?” I hadn’t been meaning to say that at all, but it was definitely what I had thought and it translated into my telepathic communication so fluidly.

  “Aubrie, first of all, I find you more than merely attractive, long or short hair. It’s just, the past six months when I thought of you, it was always with long hair…it’s just a shock to see you here, right in front of me.” He lifted his hand to touch my cheek. “You’re not just a dream.” I put my hand on his and then I froze, just now recognizing something I missed when Isaac left and I almost collapsed. Gabriel so consumed all of my attention when he appeared, that I ignored one feeling altogether.

  “Something’s not right,” I told him before he could ask. “I’ve been feeling it for a while now and I think it’s the Apocalypse but I’m not sure, it doesn’t feel like before. Where’s Isaac?” I suddenly added, scared of his absence. Then I answered myself in the same thought, “Oh, right, he went to guard Cara.” Gabriel looked guilty.

  “Sorry. I know I’m shirking my duties, once again, but I can’t help it. I feel a Draw towards you that I just can’t resist. But I don’t like what you’re saying…there’s been a change in the atmosphere at the Capital here, too, and I didn’t know what it meant but I’m thinking it’s related to what you’re feeling.”

  I suddenly knew and nodded. “It is. We have to go.” I looked around, expecting a member of the Black Shadow to come stalking around a corner, to sneak up from behind us and tear our throats out as soon as we registered their presence.

  “We need to go to the Capital.”

  I looked out over the Thames River and cringed.

  “The elders know I’m here.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “I didn’t come to see them…”

  “They have to evaluate you; we need you as a Mystic. And don’t worry, from what I’ve seen you’ll pass their test.”

  “Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “We need to go,” he repeated my words.

  “All right superhero, take me to the Capital.”

  Chapter 28

  We walked in mutual silence through an intricately designed and ardently maintained garden. We stopped running as we entered the realm of the Capital, slowing out of respect, and for me, fear. Though the world was gray and bleak to the English horizon, I felt a sort of majesty as we passed through snow dusted bushes, approaching one of the largest free standing buildings I’d ever seen. I marveled at the Olympian pillars, the sheer number of wind
ows, and the long-forgotten architecture that flowed from roof to terrace to oversized engraved wooden doors.

  We reached a wrought iron gate, angels intertwined with climbing roses guarding the final wall before the Capital. I stared at their too-real faces, thought I saw the metal rose petals flutter in the wind and I swallowed my resolution. What was I thinking? Was I strong enough for this?

  The apocalyptic feeling hadn’t disbanded; it hovered in my mind like a storm cloud on the edge of a sunlit blue sky. For then, I let it hover; pretending it wasn’t there, hoping it would pass. Besides, I had more pressing matters to fret over, like the panel of elders that waited for me inside.

  “There’s so many of them,” I worried, slipping into telepathy. I had been speaking aloud, not quite sure what Gabriel thought about my new gift or how much I should use it around him. But as he opened the gates the yellow haze shot buzzing shocks to my fingertips and toes and I was terrified of facing the judgment the elders would place on me.

  He stepped through the threshold but I didn’t follow, rather I stood with feet planted, back stiff with stress. I felt my eyes widen, my heart beating frantically as my intuition shrieked at me in caution.

  I must have looked frightened because he looked truly alarmed. “What’s wrong?” He darted instantly to my side, pulling me back towards a row of frosted rose bushes, and I knew that we were invisible. I didn’t answer him at first, the mini sobs were building in my throat, and he looked at me in pained frustration.

  “It’s fine, we’re fine. I just. They’re going to kill me if I don’t prove myself worthy of being a Mystic. I’m too much of a burden otherwise. Damn it. I knew it would come to this,” I rambled, letting my thoughts merge into my telepathic conversation.

  I had faced death before, but this wasn’t the same. In the car accident, it was so fast I didn’t have time to comprehend what happened. I had plenty of time now, and thanks to my Sage abilities I knew for a fact that their backup plan to my failure was to execute me. How could I just walk in there, knowing it could be to death? How could anyone expect me to, assuming I had any survival instinct at all?