"I noticed," he told the girl, holding his palms up. But she was no longer looking his way. There was another girl, somewhere nearby talking to her just softly enough for Marx to miss most of it.
"Who's that?" Marx asked the girl.
He'd learned the hard way that the saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, wasn't always accurate, but as far as Marx was concerned, anyone locked inside a prison like this, was officially on the same team. At least for a little while.
The girl's clothes were a mess, and her knees were bleeding. A sure sign she'd been recently roughed up. She wore denim shorts, but they were brown with the same muck that coated Marx. Her ponytail was a knotted mess, and dirt streaked her face except where tears had freshly run down her cheeks, and she was sunburned all over.
"Kate," the girl whispered, and she sank further in on herself.
"She's..." the blond girl began, as though she was about to deliver some truly terrible news.
Dying, was what Marx's brain supplied, she's dying. But those weren't the words the girl uttered next.
"We're... we're not human."
5
Ari wasn't used to the feeling of surprise, but it welled up in her chest and threatened to choke her. She wasn't sure how people managed that fear on a daily basis.
The boy who'd been watching them, the boy whose name Ari now knew as Peter, had tackled one of her pursuers, and that had shocked her more than anything else.
Unfortunately, Ari knew she was at her most vulnerable. It was easiest to slip plans by her in the universe the more directions she was forced to view all at once—and at that moment, there was hardly a thread of time where she wasn't looking.
She'd spent days, weeks, and months searching for a girl who didn't want to be found, it seemed. A girl who had lived and loved far more lives than the average mortal could, and all those threads had been tripping her up, splitting her thoughts like a broken mirror, making her look at every shard at the same time.
And Ari knew that she was bound to miss things.
And Ari also knew that their current life had made them a little lax.
But it had been so long since anyone had hunted them, hunted her. It had been so long since anyone who wasn't in their circle even knew there was an Oracle left to seek out. The fact that someone did know… that meant that they were surely in for more trouble than even Ari could have foretold.
Her mind was too focused on what was happening behind her for Ari to come up with any kind of real plan. A song filled her with nothing but beating fear and the sound of Marx's name over and over, and Ari couldn't think.
But then Marx had told her to run, and so had Peter.
So she ran. Ari ran back toward the pyramids, tourist traffic, and prying eyes, hoping every pair of eyeballs within a mile radius was now watching the spectacle that was her—because that would make her that much harder to capture.
Ari ran until her ankles felt like they'd snap, and she continued to run. The automatic doors at the front of the building split, allowing two people to step outside ahead of her.
They hadn't seen her yet, both walking with their heads down close together. They looked to be speaking in hushed whispers, not paying attention to their surroundings. By the conspiratorial gaze Leo and Ripley held, it seemed they may be up to something Ari wasn’t privy to. Not that she cared at the moment.
A few minutes earlier, she’d wanted nothing more than to escape their eyes, and now she wanted nothing more than to have them turn to her. It was a sad state of affairs, but there was nothing she could do about it but scream.
She meant to say, “help,” or call out their names. She meant to say anything, but it came out like a growl, and there was no taking it back. It wouldn't crash back into her chest via the path it had been ripped from. She couldn't just white it out.
Both boys were looking at her now, and Ari knew what an absolute sight she must look to everyone else.
And though they were artists, and lovers, and certainly not fighters despite the era-long war they'd been waging, Ari was never so happy to fall into anyone but Marx's arms, as she was to go tumbling into Ripley's outstretched ones.
"Ari, what's happened to you?" Ripley asked her.
It was only then that Ari realized she was crying—crying and bleeding from the straps at her shoes; they had cut away at the tops of her feet in deep tracks.
Leo had moved to position himself between the pile Ari had made with Ripley—as they had both tumbled to the ground—and whatever was headed there way.
Ari had seen Leo fight: he was slow to anger, an easy to hold a grudge, but he was still so young. Even though Ari felt safe, she worried. She worried so much so, that she couldn't even reach out for a book in her mind. She saw herself recoil—like the knowledge could strike at her like a snake, and she feared it. Feared it for the first time in a long, long while.
There were days, probably a great number of days even, where Ari hated what she was. Today was definitely one of them.
The man who had been chasing her hadn't followed. Peter stood, hand gripping one thin brown arm a few feet away. Leo had coiled into, what would have to pass for a fighting stance, but Ari just did her best to compose herself and shooed him off.
"It wasn't him," she told Leo and Ripley.
Ari had taken a number of deep breaths since she stopped running. Her side ached, and she pressed her fingers into the pain, hoping that, just for a moment, she could make it stop. She'd been a nurse in several lives, and later when women had finally been allowed, even a doctor. But all of those doors were currently locked inside of her mind, and she didn't have the mental capacity to go rooting for the keys.
She'd have to make sure what she was doing would help. Sweat was dripping from her skin, running down her arms, wetting her shirt, and causing her hair to cling to anything within its reach.
"This is Peter," Ari started, "I’m trying to figure out exactly who he is, and why he helped me, and how the hell he knew people were trying to find me, but..."
Ari didn't want to admit it. If it had been anyone else, she certainly wouldn't. But there were three sets of eyes on her, so there were only two things she could do: lie or offer an honest explanation. Still gasping for air, Ari bit down on her tongue, as if the air itself was going to take up the notion to tell all of her secrets on its own.
"We can't talk here," Leo said, and he reached out to help Ari get back on her feet.
Ari noticed he left Ripley on the ground to dust himself off. Her boys and their chivalry. It's not dead, it's just been reincarnated over and over.
"Marx?" Ripley asked.
The mention of his name was like taking a railroad spike and driving it angrily through her rib cage with a sledgehammer.
"They have the Oracle's sentinel," Peter said, but his eyes were on Ari with a strange and knowing sort of intensity.
"Sssshh," Leo hissed, the only one looking around, noticing who was observing the foursome.
Ari had forgotten they'd had a crowd, her own grief muting her surroundings and everything else in the world.
"Your house is closer," Ripley said to Leo.
Ari didn't care where they went, so long as it was away from where they were now. Dread had overtaken her in a rolling wave, just as the day was overtaken by night, and everything changed from light to dark.
"I don't think we should go to anyone's house," Leo said.
He paced a few feet from them. Ari stared at him, hoping he'd say what he was thinking. His brow was creased, and his face was eerily white. She didn't want to have to go searching in her own head for the answers. It still hurt.
"They'll be looking for you at your place," Leo said to Ari, but he didn't look at her. "And if you're being followed, we shouldn't bring them back to any of ours."
Leo ran his fingers across his chapped lips; they were cracked and raw, and the gesture made Ari wince.
For a terrible fleeting second, Ari thought they'd abandon her. That no matter how m
any times she'd come to their aid, that because she'd failed them at the exact wrong moment, they'd cast her aside and leave her to her own problems.
But that was an awful, awful thought, and neither Leo nor Ripley were capable of that kind of cruelty.
Not unless they were the people who wanted to strike them down or take away what they held dear.
"Can we trust him?" Leo asked Ari.
He didn't bother to whisper; they were already crowded too close together. Ari was standing in the middle, near enough to each of them to feel their breath, and that made the stickiness she felt even worse.
"I..." But Ari didn't know, and she was still afraid to search her mind. "I think so," she said, but it wasn't anything she saw in her head, it was what she saw in his eyes.
The boy was Asian, Korean, Ari guessed, and even younger than she’d first thought him to be. He didn't look particularly dangerous.
"I am not sure I'd trust me," Peter told Ari. "You don't know me."
"I know you saved me," Ari said to him.
It was a strange feeling, Peter trying to talk her out of this. She wondered if it was a kind of affronted false modesty, but he didn't look like the type.
"But you don't know why," the boy hissed.
He seemed to come alive at that moment. Bigger and more than he had been only minutes before. Ari could feel it, and yet she wasn't afraid of it.
"Okay," Leo said, putting himself between Ari and Peter for a second time, "I'll bite. Why did you save her?"
Clearly, Leo had forgotten that they shouldn't be having this conversation here. The workers taking tickets at the entrance had angled themselves strangely so as to peer at them outside the door. It wouldn't shut because they were too close to the sensor. Tourists exiting and walking past them all huddled there, letting their eyes linger too long.
"We have to move," Ari said, her words spoken like a wall of bricks.
And when Ari spoke in such a way, no one ever questioned her, and that was precisely what she'd been counting on.
"I'll call a cab," Ripley said, but he'd already walked away from Ari and the open door, phone in hand.
*
The cabbie was a harpy, or a half one, anyway, Ari noticed.
And she supposed she shouldn't look a gift van ride, taking them someplace private, in the mouth.
The Soul Painters had such weird friends, and she knew, not because she was looking, but because she was one of them.
Ari and Marx lived alone together, even as younger teens. Leo and Ripley, and the rest of their group of friends might know that they had reincarnated from a young age, but that never kept them from forming bonds with their birth families, but for Ari, it was always a challenge.
She was pretty sure the problem was her.
It was like that saying about bad relationships: if all your relationships end poorly, the common denominator is you. Ari wasn't human, and for the most part, she had a great deal of trouble relating to them. There were exceptions, though; many of her friends had been human once. Marx had been, way back in the beginning, but that was a very long time ago. Much too long ago to go digging up now. Ripley had been human, too, still was, mostly, even now. He'd signed a contract that couldn't be broken by anything or any being… and Leo… well, Ari had never been so sure about him. She wasn’t always able to clearly see otherworldly beings, non-humans, and Leo spent so much time with Lucia, that he tended to be blotted out of Ari's mind right along with her.
It took a lot more concentration, skill, and luck to find truths about the beings who eluded her, and maybe that had something to do with who was hunting her now, and why she hadn't seen any of them coming.
The harpy cab service dropped them at the last red light before they reached The Strand. Old-looking shops lined either side of the cobblestone street, causing them to bounce and rock, until they'd come to a stop and been ejected near their destination.
Countless Mardi Gras decorations hung from thin wires overhead, displaying gold-and-violet masks in large glitter letters taller than Ari was. The streets and parking spaces near them were already packed, and it was still too early on Friday for the real partying to start, but that didn’t seem to stop the hundreds of people who were hanging around the streets, waiting for the festivities to begin.
Ari cringed. While there was something to be said for having an audience, they needed to have a private conversation.
"Leonardo?" Ari asked, and she hated asking questions. "Why did you pick here of all places?"
Leo smiled back at her then, either pleased with himself for the clever idea, or just pleased to have been asked by Ari at all. The late afternoon sun cast shadows that bit into his face like thick black bars.
An image hit Ari then, like a flyball, slamming into her with impossible pain and speed, straight out of left field when she least expected it.
She'd had her back turned toward that field of thought; she had been trying to avoid seeing any of it at all.
It was a vision of Marx. He was behind very real bars, like the ones Ari had just imagined on Leo's face. Raw power shot through him like he'd swallowed a live wire. The feel of real voltage shocked Ari out of her trance.
And Ari had to catch herself from falling.
6
"You didn't hear anything I just said, did you?" Leo asked, his head looming above her, even though he hadn't yet reached manhood.
It had been her Marx, she was certain of it, but it wasn't something that had happened yet. It was dark in that vision, and the sun would linger for several more hours. But there wasn't a way to keep the vision from becoming a reality. Ari's visions seldom worked that way. Changing one little piece here and there couldn't alter every truth of the universe. It just wasn't done.
"What did you see?" Ripley asked.
He looped an arm through hers and led them along after Leo. Peter idled behind them, giving the group a wide berth. He was looking at Ari with a strange expression, as she glanced back at him while Ripley still held onto her, leading the way ahead.
It wasn't as though Peter was surprised to have found himself in this situation, but he was wary of it just the same. It was a look Ari knew well.
"As I was saying," Leo said, and Ari sorely hoped she hadn't just missed his plan again.
But Leo carried on, and she sighed, tension still refusing to leave her neck, and digging her fingers nail-deep into her palms without realizing it.
"I thought it would be good to come here in case we were being followed," Leo said, as he gestured around.
Ari was numb, though, and didn't understand right away. While it was good to be in a crowd for a few reasons, and made it harder for people to run up and snatch her, it put a damper on their plans altogether. Like making the possibility of them having a private conversation about what the hell they were going to do more challenging.
"Because of the traffic," Ripley added.
Ari wondered if he could see how lost she was just by looking.
"Yes, if they followed us all the way here, they'd have to park somewhere and walk. And we'd just lose them in some beer line or another."
There were long lines, snaking out the antique doors of many of the restaurants and shops. Wild-looking people were everywhere. A man wearing a green feather boa raced around them, aforementioned beer in hand, laughing at something a woman wearing a sequined top the color of peacock feathers had said.
"I see the irrational logic…" Peter trailed off.
Leo gave him “the look,” the one that made it visible he was more of a menace than he looked—because he was—and Peter tossed his hands up to concede.
"It's not like we're planning on staying here," Leo said, “we've got a few great hideouts on The Stand to choose from.”
"But we're not choosing," Ripley added, making even Leo stare at him quizzically as he smiled at Ari.
"We're picking the one that has coffee."
Ripley wasn't going to hear any arguments there.
Tucked down a
n alley, in the strangest of hidden places, up a flight of brown-carpeted stairs that seemed to lead nowhere, was what had to be the world's least-visited coffee shop, The Wicked Brew.
Ari knew the place, but so many of the Soul Painters hung out there, she tended to avoid it. She had already seen several of them more than she'd like to admit.
Leo's birth mother stood behind the counter, flipping an art magazine, curls spilling around her face and blowing in delicate swirls from the air of a box fan. Ari had met her before, and she'd always been nice, but due to prior experiences, Ari wasn't super fond of parental types.
She smiled at Ari as she spied her from behind Leo, though, and the knot that always existed in the pit of her stomach loosened a bit.
"Hey, guys," his mom said, putting away her magazine. "Leave the field trip a little early?"
Her tone wasn't scolding, though, it was light-hearted and teasing.
Both the boys in front of Ari seemed to seize up, but Leo managed to recover before he could alarm his mom.
"Ugh," he cried, the way only moody overdramatic teenagers could, "it's this whole crazy long story. But we're here now, and Ripley’s going to die if he doesn't get coffee, so..."
Her laugh was so light, Ari wanted to fill a pool of the sound and just fall into it. Everything else was massive and awful and cutting. Ari tried to leave it all behind, but the image of Marx behind bars burned itself into her eyelids again, and she realized even the idea could further wound her.
"Ripley, my love, I think you need to consider decaf," she teased. That was her “Mom voice,” Ari realized. She was the cool mom. Ari didn't think she'd ever had one of those and wished she knew who to see about that. It wasn’t like the Fates cared, they didn't exactly get along, even before she'd befriended Lucia and helped her escape their clutches in every lifetime since.
Except for this one.
Another flinch, another horrible step into a field of landmines she was inching closer to by the memory.
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