by A L Hart
I hadn’t realized I’d asked or even wanted a reason to open my eyes in the morning until I’d gotten it. Until yesterday, when their presence hadn’t given me any other choice but to open my eyes. Until yesterday, when I realized it’d been the first time in five years I’d actually felt something other than the gray.
I never even thought to thank them.
So now I was asking the world for just one more chance, one more chance to prove I could protect what it’d given me.
I closed my eyes and sought out the world.
And I’d swear, the world looked back at me.
Around me, everything snapped into regular speed.
I no longer felt Ophelia’s hand around my arm.
Instant panic cast a blanket of apathy towards the men and their guns as I turned, vision threatening to go black, afraid of how many bloody holes I would find in the women—
Ophelia was nowhere to be found.
“Peter, get down!” Jera forced out again. Angrily.
Her foot collided with my back, shoving me flat on the ground with that unnatural strength. I wheezed, squirming, but she dug her foot in harder, the heel biting into one of the appendages.
I roared, reaching behind me to grab the insane woman’s leg and haul her off of me, but I barely made contact with her.
She was already moving, leaping over my flattened form to stand directly in front of me. Just like she had done for Ophelia the previous night.
What she hadn’t done the previous night was throw her hands out in front of her as if she was blocking a flying object—and expel an ungodly inferno of flames so bright it burned just to witness.
The black and red combustion absolutely devoured everything in its path. Even that which wasn’t.
Crackling, spiraling and creating a suction sound like a windstorm, the fire arched and moved seemingly of its own accord, seeking out the men in a perverse bid of hunger.
I laid there on my stomach and watched them burn.
I mean burn.
Their black garb incinerated. Their weapons exploded, their flesh melting as they flailed, screaming a hellish sound men weren’t designed to make. They all fell to their knees, skin charing, their bodies becoming indiscernible from the corrupt fire.
The heat got to me before the smoke did, and no matter how low I was or how much I forced my shoulder sleeve into my mouth, the burning sensation suffocated all the air around me. Tears pricked in my eyes but I couldn’t tear them from the macabre. The men were literally melting, evaporating, and that which couldn’t became little black piles of sooty ashes.
The smell had the power to turn anyone vegan.
I didn’t realize how long I’d been choking and staring in horror at the scene until Jera’s face interrupted my line of sight. She took my body into her arms and lifted me to my feet as if I didn’t weigh a thing. The white stabs in my back was the least of my worries.
“We have to go,” she said, giving me a pointed look. She didn’t know where the car was.
Still hacking up my internal organs, I squinted through the flames, but couldn’t make out any of the signs.
With one flick of her hand, the fiery catacomb perished as though sucked into oblivion, leaving behind nothing but hideous scorch marks against the stone and the ceiling rafters. Then there was the ashes of the dead.
I swallowed, my stomach turning. Somehow I managed to direct her towards the A-West exit sign, almost forgetting to collect the shopping bags.
It was only when we got out into the full night air that I sucked in a large breath, only to instantly regret it as I digressed into a coughing fit.
Jera released me boredly, stalking the remaining distance to our car in what was now a totally empty lot.
“Ophelia,” I coughed out.
Jera stopped dead and was in front of me in a second. “Try again. My name’s Jera.”
I shook my head, hacked out spit, then looked around. “No, I mean, where is she?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“Jera!” I grabbed her and shook, not understanding what her problem was. This was her sister. She should be more concerned than I was!
She growled up at me, a fresh wave of heat sweltering over my skin right before she hooked her hand in my shirt and dragged me towards her. “Why her?!” she spat.
Incredulous and pretty sure we would hear sirens any minute now, I shot back at her, “Because she’s missing!”
“No, why her?”
“Look, I don’t know what just happened back there in that garage and we don’t have time to work through your issues—”
“My issues?”
“—but I just watched you burn about fifteen men alive without a match. And their remains are still back there, in case you’ve forgotten. So right now, our main priority is figuring out where your sister is and getting out of here.”
Her gaze up at me sobered abruptly, her body losing its tension in my grasp. She released my shirt. “I see,” she said ominously.
“Good. Now do you have any idea where she could have gone?”
Still in that placid, eerie voice, she said, “Wherever you sent her.”
“Wherever I sent her?”
“Your slowness baffles me at times, Peter. At any point during the altercation, did you think of a specific location?”
Altercation, she called it. I almost laughed, but that would have been the first sign of my insanity.
Instead, I thought back. All I could remember was asking the world for one more chance and a whole spiel of self-reflection. But had I thought of a location? The only thing that came to mind was when I’d imagined how I’d wanted the two of them home, safe in the coffeeshop.
I shifted. “The coffeeshop?”
She pried herself from my grasp and made for the car. “Then that’s where we’ll find her.”
*****
Sure enough, the woman was upstairs, swaddled in a sea of duvets, completely unconscious. I stood at the foot of the bed, my mouth hanging open. I didn’t care how many bizarre things happened around me, I didn’t think I could ever get used to them.
I’d teleported a woman. In my hazy, silent pax with the world, I’d removed Ophelia from the path of bullets and placed her here with nothing but a mere thought.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” I breathed.
Jera had been quiet the entire nervous, paranoid ride back. She clung to the corner of the bedroom now, arms and ankles crossed as she leaned against the wall, watching me. For once it wasn’t a glower of perturb or even the chilling gaze of before. It was an absence of both, of everything. She’d carved the slates of emotions, leaving a void behind.
I stared right into it. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say, but at some point she was going to slip up and that hollow space was going to tell me everything.
For now, I was going to have to pry the answer out of her with words. “Any ideas?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Deduction.”
“Meaning?”
“Use it.”
I sighed. “What am I deducting?”
“Earlier we tried to get you to search for the dark energy and you couldn’t find it in either of us. I suspect tonight you found it. What was different about earlier’s practice scenario, the night HB came for my sister and I, and tonight?”
I considered this for a moment but couldn’t find anything missing. That first night, I’d made a horde of men vanish from thin air without even knowing or trying. Tonight I’d made Ophelia vanish without even knowing or trying. Earlier today, when I’d been practicing searching for the dark energy, I had been trying. Maybe the key was to not try—
Jera shook her head, guessing my train of thought. “It’s not something that can only be accomplished subconsciously. There was something about that night you ran out onto that field and this night that made you able to tap into your dark energy, sense it and control it.”
“Maybe because in both of those instances I was in imme
diate danger, whereas earlier we were just sitting on a bed joining hands in friendship.”
She gave me a bland look. “That’s not—” Her face changed, her brows furrowing. It reminded me of how Ophelia’s had knitted together and made her out into something too celestial to entertain, but that expression on Jera? It made her out into something too celestial to resist.
I blinked away the thought hard and fast, then asked in a suspiciously sharp tone, “What is it?”
“Explain to me that night and this night. Don’t leave anything out.”
She really was intent on milking this stony resolve thing.
Unsure where she was going with this and not in the mood to get further on her bad side, I sat on the edge of the bed slowly and started from the beginning. I recounted my idiotic spurt of heroism that’d sent me out into that storm.
“Typical,” she muttered.
I ignored it, telling her how I’d chased her down the direction I’d watched them flee.
“I don’t flee.”
I used a vivid description when I got to the part of spying them in the park, facing off with the men in black. At some point, I must have adopted a spark of admiration in my voice when going over how I’d witnessed the way she’d moved in front of those men, how she’d stepped in front of Ophelia like there wasn’t a thing on earth that would touch her sister so long as she still breathed, because in that moment, I saw the void in Jera’s gaze tremble. Pride.
Only for her to empty the emotion out tenfold so that they were more hollow than before.
I continued as if I’d never seen it. I told her of the feeling I’d gotten when I saw one of the men whip out the gun and aim it at her head. That sensation of invincibility pumping through me like a drug. Then how I’d run out across the field towards the park, those rusted swings, towards her because I’d been so sure I could save her. But in the end, it hadn’t been me who saved her. It’d been Ophelia, when she’d seen the same thing I’d seen—Jera a hairline away from death. I told her how I hadn’t really had a chance to do much of anything after Ophelia had exploded into a force of lightning, how in that moment I’d been sure I was off to join my parents.
At that, I could tell Jera wanted to press questions, which only reminded me I’d never told either woman about the accident. There was no reason to, and I doubted Jera had glimpsed any revelation of it when snooping in my journals.
I finished the story off by recounting how I’d stumbled towards them in the aftermath, when the men had already vanished.
Jera nodded, her face giving away nothing. “And tonight? Recount what happened.”
I pursed my lips. “You were there. You probably know what happened better than I do.”
She waited.
I sighed, kicking my shoes off, suddenly all too aware of the outside. Jera had assured me the hunters would clean up behind themselves, that even the police force worked hand-in-hand with HB, so any reported abnormality or suspicious event would be swept under the freak-accident rug. It didn’t stop my paranoia, believing that any moment now special tasks forces would come barging into the shop, demanding blood and justice. After all, she’d also said HB had devices capable of tracking dark energy waves and that was how they’d found us in the first place . . .
“Peter, focus.”
I scrubbed a hand through my hair, frowning at the sheer mass of it. I couldn’t remember the curls having ever been so thick. Mom and Dad were both brunettes. Mom had always had a head full of hair that went on for days, thicker than a forest. She’d passed it on to Liz. I’d had Dad’s average shucks of half curly, half no-hope-in-sight rogue locks; he’d begun balding in his late thirties.
“Peter . . .”
My eyes snapped to hers. “I walked out into a garage and almost got shot, Jera, that’s what happened.”
“Details.”
“Okay, you want details? Alright, well, how’s this: I was scared out of my mind. Not everyday I have special grade weapons pointed at my head after buying clothes. So I froze. It’s wonder I didn’t wet myself and I don’t care how unmanly that sounds. I froze, but just for a moment, then I did something stupid like grabbing two women who aren’t really women but demons from another dimension, and I threw them behind me because I guess testosterone and instinct is actually good for something these days. One of the said women struggled to get away as if she wanted to get shot,” I gave her a pointed look. “While the other squeezed my arm like she was trying to rip it off. That woman had the good sense to be scared. Then the men fired the guns and I . . .” I didn’t know how to explain the next part. How time had been moving at your everyday perceived speed only to suddenly snap, as if it’d run into an imaginary force, causing it to move at a fraction of real-time.
“You what?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Time just slowed down. I could see everything, but I couldn’t move. But you and Ophelia could. You broke away from me, Ophelia shouted my name, trying to push me out of the way. Well, she did push me out of the way, down to my knees.” I didn’t tell her the dread I’d felt or the conversation I’d had with the world, the plea I’d made.
But could it have played a role in this?
When I’d closed my eyes, I’d felt something larger than life itself staring back at me. It’d been similar to the other night, when I’d sprinted across that field and felt that same presence, except that night, rather than look at me, I’d felt as if the force had possessed me.
Jera was studying me hard and I could see her tossing over everything I’d said.
I finished with, “Then time snapped forward again, you so lovingly ground me into the asphalt with your foot, and then you proceeded to cook a mass of men alive. But at that point, Ophelia was already gone.”
She wasn’t listening to the last tidbits. She’d began to stalk towards me, that studious look gone from her eyes. She stopped in front of me, too close in the low lighting. With her raven curls spilled down her frame like that, it cast the perfect shadow over those cold steel eyes.
“Unbutton your shirt.”
I choked on my tongue. “What?”
“Unbutton your shirt, Peter.”
I didn’t move. “Look, I don’t know what impression you got from that story—”
She reached forward and yanked the V of my collar, the buttons bulleting across the room, her hands moving across my chest before any form of protest could break free. That peculiar awareness struck again. Hypersensitivity flushing over my skin, and without fail, all I could feel was the heat pouring from her fingers.
I understood one thing in that moment: no matter how cold she tried to make herself on the outside, in the vault of her gaze, she couldn’t empty out the fire inside of her. It was a part of her. So much so, that the heat spilled from her fingertips inevitably as they traced the outline of my chest, the tufts of hair, my left pectoral.
When her nail rasped over the nipple, my thoughts broke apart. Just as my lips did when a silent gasp stumbled in.
Stop her.
Stop her.
Kiss her.
The titillating cruise of her fingers rose. Gliding over my shoulder, towards my back. Her pink flushed lips glistened, closer to mine with that rosebud curl at the corners, and I was sure that I could do it, lean forward, take them against mine and taste all the fire she stored away, hoping she could stoke the pathetic embers in me.
Rather than grimace in pain when her touch grazed the wounded section along my left shoulder blade, I shuddered. Needed.
She didn’t give.
Instead, she stopped and said, “I see.”
“You . . . see?” My voice was thick, a low guttural chafe I didn’t recognize. When she said nothing, I tore my eyes from her lips to meet her gaze.
A number of things swirled in the gray orbs. Hunger was one of them.
I couldn’t say why that shocked me from my trance, but it did. Completely sucker punched me into reality to where I leaned away from her as if she wasn’t the
most gorgeous woman I’d ever encountered in my life. Maybe it had everything to do with the blurred line she existed on, that of murderer and something burning to the touch.
She mirrored the reaction, and like second nature, she snuffed the smoke in her eyes. “Your shirt’s flayed at the back.”
I was slow to come around, my tongue roving around in my mouth in disappointment, having been so sure that it would have a taste of something.
In time, I made out, “Your point?”
“I thought it was my fire that did it, but that’s not the case. Hm.” She looked thoughtful. “Even with the nuller, Ophelia is one of the most superior examples of our race.”
When my face said Your point? again, Jera glared. “My point is, dark energy communicates with dark energy, Peter. While it may not be possible to create an immortal by transferring dark energy, the element does respond if it comes in contact with more dark energy.”
Clearly it’d been too long since I last had any kind of relief, because my mind was still clouded, gaze still struggling to maintain eye contact instead of lip contact. “So you’re saying . . .” I said slowly, waiting for her to pick it up.
Her glare sharpened. “I’m saying, both times you managed to perform the teleportation, you’d come in contact with—”
“Ophelia.”
“Ophelia’s dark energy,” she corrected. “What you called “lightning” isn’t lightning, but watts of heavily concentrated dark energy. She struck you that first night in the chest here.” Her fingers roved over the scorch mark that’d turned into an ugly red bruise on my left pec. “And here.” She indicated the spot on my back, where Ophelia had pressed me down onto my knees tonight. “I told you the dark energy affects all immortals differently. For me, it gifts me the ability to summon and control various forms of heat, but with Lia, she can discharge dark energy with enough force to rival an exploding star.”