by Lucy Auburn
I open my mouth to protest, so she moves her arm, shoots wildly just inches from my head, and readjusts her aim. There's a look in her face that I recognize from the mirror, the day I took down Jack. She's got it in her. The willingness to kill.
"Move, and I shoot."
Chapter 22
"Just wait a second." I stare at her, wondering how the fuck I got myself into this situation. It turns out that acting without thinking is a bad idea. "I was only defending you."
"I can defend myself." She says, shifting her weight back and forth nervously. "You should mind your own business."
"He was going to hurt you," I tell her. "We both know it. What he does, it isn't alright. He shouldn't speak to you that way, shouldn't do those things."
Delia licks her lips, glancing over nervously at her boyfriend, then back to me. He seems to sense a shift of tension in the air, so he insists, "Just fucking shoot her already, Del. Or give the gun back to me."
In a quiet voice she asks, "What were you doing with the gun, anyway?"
"It's for self-defense." He narrows his eyes at her. "Unless you think it was for something else?"
"I don't... I don't know. I've just been so confused lately, Richard. I don't know what to think."
Her arms sag a little, her grip on the gun loosening, and I see my opportunity. If I just let her be distracted by her boyfriend for another second or so, I can step close enough to grab the gun and do... something. I've seen people grab guns in plenty of movies and TV shows, but somehow real life is never quite so slow or focused. Everything is a little bit messy.
"I know you're confused, Del, but you can't honestly think that of me." I slide one foot forward a little, a strand of my blonde hair swinging out in front of my shoulder, every breath I take feeling like it might be my last. Through gritted teeth, Richard grinds out, "You think just because I'm working class, like my brother, that I'm some kind of animal? That I would resort to violence just like that?"
I can't keep myself from rolling my eyes. We both know he's hit her more than once already; it's why his face has a bit of guilt to it to go with the self-righteous indignation and anger. He's left marks, and no matter what he says after he leaves them, they never truly fade away.
I'm so full of irritation at his denial that I must make a little noise or move too quickly, because in that moment Delia looks back at me, frowning, the gun still loose in her hand. Richard takes advantage of her distraction and grabs the gun, then lunges for me, his meaty hand closing over my arm as he yanks me towards him like I'm a sack of potatoes.
I snarl in rage as he manhandles my back against his chest, stomping on his feet and trying to summon my powers. The feeling of the gun as it presses against my head stops me in my tracks, and I freeze, everything in the room narrowing into focus.
Delia says, "No no no," and he points the gun at her.
"Shut up," he snarls, his breath like hot onions, before swinging the gun back against my temple. "This bitch is putting ideas in your head, Delia, and I don't like it. We both know you think too much for your own good sometimes. Maybe if you see what happens to women who run their mouth and jump to conclusions, you'll reach clarity."
"Please don't do this," she begs.
Her voice is too familiar in my ears. I feel some part of me drift away, towards the place where I'm not me and there never was a boy named Jack.
Jack—Richard—puts his arm around my throat and presses back. "Delia, baby..." His voice changes, turning soft and pleading like he's a little boy who did a bad thing. "I never wanted it to come to this. I thought if I just told you how I feel, you would understand. But there's always some reason. Some excuse why you can't be with me when I need you, why you have to choose other people over me."
"It's just work, baby," she says, tears streaming down her cheeks. She tries to catch my eyes, but I'm slipping away, an observer now more than a participant. "I promise if you don't do this, if you take it all back, I'll... I'll take a vacation! I have days off saved. We can travel together, you and me, like we're always talking about."
Of course my powers would desert me in a time like this. They've never saved me from the world before; why start now?
"No," Richard says, his voice like the closed lid on a coffin. "You've broken promises before. Not this time. This time you'll learn."
My eyes drift, and something inside me wakes up.
Where the cold was, the nothingness, warmth flickers. I feel her wither away and die, the girl I used to be: the girl who loved a boy named Jack, who went limp in his arms when he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the floor, who had nothing in her core. That Ellen was gone, I thought, but it turns out there was a little part of her still inside me, and she came out when faced with a man like the one who made her who she was.
It's time to kill the last sliver of her. I only want to be the Ellen I became that day with the knife in my hand: the Ellen who kills. The one with powers beyond imagining, who would never be held still by a terrible man. The one who makes plans. She wakes up and stretches, yawns and looks around, and figures out what's going on, how to make it all stop.
Focusing my eyes on the seemingly empty hallway outside the laboratory, I feel a sudden surge of all-consuming rage. It's nothing like what I felt when I saw the dick holding onto me yell at his girlfriend and clench his fists. That was a tiny bit of rage, like the moon reflecting the sun; this is the source of it all.
I breathe in. Feel power surge within me, like so much blood. Breathe out. And smirk, because I'm going to eviscerate this motherfucker.
Power surges to my palms as I push my force field out and straight back at him, throwing him into the wall of cabinets behind us. Delia screams. The cabinets crash and tremble. I spin on my heel and face him as he gets back to his feet, the gun still in his hand, and try to figure out how much force it'll take to knock it out of his fingers.
"You bitch," he snarls. "Now I really will—"
As the words come out of his mouth, his face goes slack. At first I think he's having some kind of stroke or something, but he doesn't go limp like I expect.
Then I feel them in the room. More specifically, I hear Levi's impossibly loud footsteps, the ones that got them caught in the first place. I startle a little at the sound; I'd almost forgotten they were here.
But no, I didn't forget completely. When I looked into the hallway... what I felt... how I felt now...
"Drop the gun." Grayson's voice has power and confidence behind it, his cane lightly tapping against the tile as he walks into the room. His eyes are focused on Richard, and something about the determination on his face, the ruthlessness even, sends a shiver down my spine and an uncomfortable heat flaring in my abdomen. "Set it down, now, and step away."
Richard obeys. I lick my lips, flicking my eyes over to Delia. She looks incredibly confused. Grayson barely looks at her before saying, "Get out of here. Forget tonight happened. Go back to your life."
Her face goes blank. For a moment it looks like she might struggle; her feet don't move, and she shakes her head a little, like there's a bee between her ears that needs dislodging. But then she seems to decide she'd be better off somewhere else, or Grayson's power decides for her, and slips away out the open doorway, out into the hallway and beyond.
"Look at him." Levi steps up to stare down at Richard, shaking his head in dismay. "Ellen, you should fart on him. It's a fate worse than death."
I roll my eyes. "Really, now?"
"You shouldn't have gone on this mission alone." Mason is quiet as he steps up behind me, the illusion he wove that brought them into this room undetected falling away completely. "It's dangerous, doing surveillance alone. And there's a warrant out for your arrest. Not to mention, you have no fucking clue what you're doing."
That's an understatement. I don't understand why my powers barely worked before, but are flaring to life right now, crackling beneath my skin like an electric current. And I have no idea why I was sent to watch Delia
when it's clear this guy is the real threat to humanity. But I'll figure that all out once I'm done with him.
"You're a real piece of shit, you know?" Advancing on Richard, I stare down at him, and he stares mulishly up at me. "The world would be a better place without you."
In a quiet voice, Grayson says, "We haven't received a Mark to kill him."
"Yeah, but no one said surveillance can't include toying with the subject." Levi cracks his neck. "Remember how we messed with Ellen? That was fun."
“It so wasn’t,” I argue. “Especially that thing in the bathroom mirror.”
Levi raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t do anything to your bathroom mirror. I did mildly poison your breakfast, but you ran away before I got to see that one through. We could do plenty to this guy.”
"Cheap tricks." Wyatt takes a step forward, and Richard's eyes widen comically at the sight of how big, and strong, he is. "Should... end it n-now."
I find myself agreeing with the big man. But as I take a step towards him, Mason grabs my arm, his voice urgent. "Ellen, if you kill a target without receiving a Mark, the punishment is severe. The last student I knew who did that received ten months in the dungeons with only water and bread. By the time she came out, she was a shell of herself... literally and metaphorically. And that punishment was considered light because she turned herself in."
"I was in prison for nearly that long," I point out, feeling a rumble of anger flare inside me just looking at Richard. "Besides, this guy wasn't the target. His girlfriend was. And he's the one who walked around with a gun, breaking things and threatening people."
There's a moment, a beat. Richard starts pleading for his life, but I ignore him; all the pleas in the world matter little if they come after you hit your girlfriend, not before. What matters is what we can get away with, and why.
Richard's pleas fall silent as Grayson orders him, "Shut the fuck up."
I only have one thought now. "What do we do with him?"
Raising his hand, Levi offers, "I can poison his blood so his dick never gets hard again. That will show him how to treat women.”
"That's nothing." Grayson's smile is cold and cruel. "I can make him jump off the roof of this building. No one will ever know he was killed. He'll be forgotten, just like he deserves—and he'll never touch a woman in anger again."
"Death is an easy out," Mason observes. "It's so peaceful and painless. I can drive him mad—tap into his deepest emotions, his every fear and vulnerability, and turn him into a drooling shell of himself. Give me five hours with him, and by the time I'm done he'll be trapped in the worst prison of all: his own broken mind."
Clearing his throat, Wyatt says, "Ellen decides." He adds, as if an afterthought, "I can h-hit h-h-him. Won't hit mm-me back." The motion he makes, and the flick of his brows, makes it clear he's offering to punch the living daylights out of Richard, until nothing is left.
Does it make me sick inside that I want all four of these terrible, heartless, cruel things to be done to the man at my feet? Maybe. But suddenly I can't deny that fate somehow tied me to the Fuckfaces. They echo the worst of me, which is also maybe the best.
Someone needs to take care of men like Richard.
Like Jack.
We all know an asshole or two. A person who makes the world a worst place just by living. Someone we would all be better off without. It's hard to be the person who does the dirty deed, though. No one likes having fingers stained with blood.
I still wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, convinced I need to wash the red from my hands. But Jack's blood is long gone, and my hands are still dirty. They always will be.
As seconds tick by, the terror in Richard's eyes grows. His mouth is sealed shut, but I can hear the pleas he can't say because of Grayson's Affinity. No doubt he's willing to promise never again and I'll be a better man. All those words become dust the instant he's not at our mercy.
I know what I want to happen to him.
The question of how is answered as something moves near the ground beside him. It's a tiny little thing, freed by the crash of Richard's body against the glass-front cabinets behind him: a scorpion. Somehow it didn't get crushed in the mayhem. The glass it skitters across has a piece of masking tape keeping two pieces together. Written on the tape in black letters is a single word: VENOMOUS.
"No one will investigate it if he dies in an accident," I say aloud, reaching for Wyatt's hand. He steps forward, his fingers slipping into mine, and I feel the cold wash of our undeniable connection double, then triple, my strength. "If he didn't want to die tonight, he shouldn't have gone into his girlfriend's secured laboratory and started breaking things. Sometimes doors are locked for a reason."
I reach out and brush my awareness against the scorpion's emotional core. It's all instinct: bright lights, fast movement, heat and cold. Right now it wants nothing more than to crawl over to the heat vent and curl up for a while, but first I nudge it in another direction.
I give it my anger and my cruelty. I show it the target. I urge it to consider using its venomous stinger, which is poised at the ready, since it's still on edge after falling from the cabinet.
The scorpion scuttles close to an exposed patch of skin, and Richard thrashes, trying to break from the control Grayson has over his mind.
Grayson offers, "Shall I let him beg for his life?"
"Don't bother," I tell him. "He has nothing worthwhile to say."
With a casual flick of its tail, the scorpion pierces the bare skin of Richard's leg. Levi raises a lazy hand and uses his power to urge the poison on, growing its strength until every vein in the asshole's body is grey, then black.
As he dies, Richard struggles, then gives up, going limp. His eyes stare dejectedly into the distance. The life leaves him, and there's nothing there: no spark, no anger, no begging for mercy.
A little part of me wishes that he'd struggled more.
But I push that part down. This was far from a good kill or a clean kill, but there's satisfaction in knowing that the gun Richard bought, the one he pointed at my head and was sure to one day use on his girlfriend, won't be fired at anyone ever again.
"Well," Grayson says, "you've made quite a mess of everything, Ellen. If our fates weren't tied to yours, I'd say to Hell with it, but we've got some security tapes to doctor and evidence to clean. The work isn't over until we can leave this place without any sign we were ever here."
Groaning, I mutter, "Can't we just burn the building to the ground or something?"
"Oh yeah," Levi quips, "good thinking Ellen, no one will notice that."
Sighing, I slip my hand out of Wyatt's and get to work, ignoring the expression of sympathy the big guy shoots me. I also try to ignore the jokes Levi keeps making, and the way Mason looks at me any time I brush against him, or how Grayson casually orders everyone around as if he's always inside our heads.
We wipe fingertips. Break into the security room. Infiltrate the system, and loop Mason's illusion of the empty hallway over the footage. By the time we're done Richard's body is cold.
As the others finish up the work, I watch Grayson, his face calm and even, as if he does this every day. "Why help me?"
"You're mistaken." His voice is just as even and empty of infliction as his face. "It wasn't you I was helping, it was me. Our fate is tied—I'm one of your Conduits, that much is certain. If you fail out, I fail out."
"So what, that's it? You followed me so you wouldn't get kicked out of school?"
He looks at me, raising a cool red eyebrow. "Would you rather there be another reason?"
"No," I respond too quickly, heat blooming at my collar. "I guess I'm just surprised, is all."
"Don't be. You're stuck with us now, and we're stuck with you."
"Ah." I don't know what to say to his despondent voice. "Sorry?"
“Apology accepted. Just stop farting."
I can tell that little incident is never going to be forgotten.
We walk out into the h
allway, and Grayson calls the doors somehow, merely looking where he wants them to be a moment before they appear. Before we can all go through, though, Mason stops us, a nervous expression on his face.
"Do we tell Headmaster Shu about this?"
Levi snorts. "And get turned into rugs? No way."
"Technically it was... an act of self-defense," Mason ventures.
Grayson shakes his head. "Not by the time the deed was done. We tell no one about this." Frowning in my direction, he adds, "Including Eve."
"Fine." Sighing, I grudgingly add, "And thank you, all of you, for saving my ass."
Wyatt is the one who says, "It's a n-nice ass."
I laugh at that, while Mason ducks his head, Grayson remains stoic, and Levi waggles his brows exaggeratedly. Stepping forward, Grayson pulls the doors open and waits for us to go through, the expression on his face making it clear that he's thoroughly done with all of us.
I can't forget the way it felt as he walked into the room and took command.
He took over those minds so easily. Unlike mine, which he struggled to get into. Maybe that has something to do with our connection—a way to prevent us from killing each other; I don't know. All I know is that I wish he'd been around when Jack was going in on me.
Levi slips through the doors first, making an impossible amount of noise, followed by Mason. Wyatt glances back to wait for me, but I motion for him to go first; he has to push the doors open further to fit through.
That leaves just me and Grayson, who's staring at me contemplatively. "Clearly you have something on your mind."
"You could read it," I point it.
"I could," he snaps, "but somehow I have the feeling you'd make me pay for the demonstration in blood."
He's not wrong. So I ask the question aloud. "Why not just make me do what you want? If I'm so frustrating."
"What makes you think I could if I wanted to?"
"What you did in there."
"Ah." He glances over to the ruined lab. "Some minds are weaker than others. They haven't been through hardship."