Alizarin Crimson

by Erica Millard

  Save me, I told the red.

  The massive, red metal garbage cans around the room exploded with a deafening crack that sent people screaming and running.

  For a split second a red hazy cloud rose into the air, undulating and powerful. I’d never seen anything as beautiful as that pure color. It could have been my anger in visual form, swirling and lovely. Could it really be me who could control such power?

  I focused on Dune and Mike and the other two men.

  Come, I said.

  The red, bound to metal shards, sped toward my captors with a high-pitched whistle. But then I realized what those tiny pieces of metal would do to human flesh. I had to stop it!

  But once I called the color, I lost control.

  What had I done?

  The anger turned to horror, and I screamed, trying to warn them.

  Dune realized what was happening, and instead of saving the others, she stepped between the wall and Mike, and pulled him against her, just as the shrapnel lodged in his skin.

  The surprise and pain showed on Mike’s face for a brief moment before he fell to the floor, choking and writhing in pain.

  I hit the ground hard on my knees, gasping for breath, as the full impact of what I’d done struck me. Three men lay in front of me. Pools of blood oozed out of their clothes, and I felt the red, dark and rich. My stomach clenched, and I tried not to be sick. I could barely stand—my body was so weak. Screams and panicked footsteps echoed. Chaos overthrew all logical thought in this place, as people ran from the explosions.

  Dune didn’t spare a glance at her men on the floor. She was covered in blood, and I didn’t know if it was hers or Mike’s.

  She stared at me with a look of fury and hate before she lunged at me. I leapt away from her and slipped on blood, but I caught myself before I fell. Dune tripped over one of her companions.

  I didn’t know what else to do. So I ran.

  Dune’s voice echoed through all the screaming and hit me like a gale.

  “I will own you!”

  5

  And then, when dusk fell, imagine the silence, the peace!

  —Vincent van Gogh

  I ran for the train bound for Scarborough. Screams followed me down the hall before disappearing in the distance. I jumped on the train just as the doors were closing. My clothes were splattered with blood. My skin had absorbed all the other red that had touched me, and the last thing I wanted was the blood of those men inside me.

  I ducked into the bathroom before anyone noticed.

  I splashed water on my face and pinkish-orange dripped back down into the sink. Even when it was gone, I scratched at my skin with my fingernails, trying to make sure none had settled into my pores. I jerked my blood-spattered clothes off and stuffed them in the garbage. The thought of any part of them touching me was too much.

  And the red was there on my skin, the lines thicker, more defined and distinct. With the tip of my finger, I traced the rippling pattern. The red swarmed toward where I touched, like it longed to be used. The power of the color called out to me—screamed for me to use it somehow. I pulled on a different shirt and jeans, willing the marks to disappear.

  What the hell had just happened? Why would they attack me? Tears leaked out my eyes, and I tried not to sob openly. And what had I done?

  Did I kill them? Were they dead because of me?

  The red! The anger overpowered, screamed out for action, and it felt so good. The strength and command were irresistible, but I’d done something awful, terrible.

  I found a seat by the door. I was exhausted both mentally and physically. The rocking train tried to lull my weary body to sleep, but every movement of the people around me sent me into a panic. What if there were more of them? Or worse, what if there were more of me?

  The image of blood pooling around the bodies of those men remained in front of my eyes whether I closed them or not. Could a person survive thousands of tiny metal slivers slamming into them? Had I killed three men? They were obviously going to hurt me, but I hadn’t wanted to kill them. That would be insane.

  I thought of my mom, so kind and gentle, so opposite of what I’d experienced today, opposite of what I’d been today. Did she know anything about my dad? Right now she was probably getting her lessons ready for the classes in the fall. She’d once been one of the top cellists in the country, and first chair in the New York Philharmonic. She met my dad at a high society function, and they fell madly in love with each other, or so she’d said. I wasn’t quite sure of that now. Had he manipulated her into loving him?

  “Next stop, Scarborough Landing,” crackled the voice over the intercom.

  What would I find there? Hopefully no one trying to kill me. The people who had trained my dad would be there. Trained him to do what? Manipulate people into doing or believing whatever he wanted?

  I grabbed my bag and headed to the exit. No one glanced up as the door opened and I stepped off.

  The train disappeared down the track. The station was empty, with a decayed feel, like a human hadn’t worked here for years. One automated ticket machine and a bench sat next to the decrepit building. Trees surrounded the wooden-planked platform and the other side of the tracks.

  My phone rang, and I dug it out of my backpack.

  “Hi, Mom.” I tried to sound cheerful, even as tears threatened to spill over.

  “Hi, love! How is school going?”

  Hearing her voice made me feel better, even if she didn’t know about this world of Aolians. She wouldn’t be able to help me, but it was nice to have someone who didn’t know.

  “School? It’s okay.” I kicked at the wooden planks of the train platform.

  “Did you start your new painting yet?” She sounded so excited.

  School was so far away.

  “Yeah.”

  “You seem distracted,” Mom said.

  “Sorry, I’m just tired today,” I said—or I was just attacked by some crazy group of Aolians.

  “You haven’t been staying up late have you?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm, well I miss you. The house just seems so empty without you here.”

  “I’ve only been gone three weeks.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Mom? Can you tell me about Dad?” I hadn’t asked about him in a long time. I had all the time when I was young, but Mom missed him so much, I hated to bring him up. Not because she didn’t like to talk about him, but because she always felt so sad I didn’t remember him.

  She paused. “What did you want to know?”

  All the stuff she couldn’t tell me. How did he discover he was an Aolian? What was it like having the power to convince someone of anything? Had he ever hurt anyone?

  “I don’t know. I was just wondering about him, and don’t give me that ‘he would be so proud of me and he loved me’ thing. What was he really like?” The phone shook in my hand, and I stared into the empty forest around the platform. To give my hands something to do, I put my backpack on the ground and pulled out my sketchbook. I let my hands and eyes work on a drawing while I focused on what my mother was saying.

  “When you put it that way . . .” She was silent for a long moment. “How do you condense someone down, someone with a life and love and experiences and passion and fear into a full book, let alone a phone conversation? And we were only married six years. I know that seems like a long time to you, but it isn’t nearly enough time to get to know everything there is to know about someone.”

  She was more right than she knew.

  “But if I did have to say what he was like, well I do know he adored me, although I could never figure out why. And he had such a way with people! Even his friends saw him as the lawyer he was professionally, but they never got to see the side of him that would laugh until he cried or the one that didn’t actually like high-fashion parties and traffic. But I saw that side, when perhaps no one else did. His sides were so different—I often had a hard time reconciling the two. Maybe all of us ha
ve sides we don’t show anyone else.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Maybe Aolians had two sides trying to rip them in two.

  “Of course. When you come home we can talk more.”

  “Okay.” So why had he left the letter with Jessie instead of my mom. He couldn’t have known we’d move to Montana, and it made more sense to give it to mom. “Mom, did dad leave anything for me? A letter or anything?”

  “No, sweetie. He never could have known that he wouldn’t be there to see you grow up.”

  “I know.” Jessie said he was frantic when he gave her the letter. He couldn’t have known, but why else would he have left the bracelet and opened the bank account?

  “And, Aya? He loved you and would have been proud of you. And so am I.”

  Would she say that if she’d seen what I did today?

  “I have to run,” I said.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  As soon as I hung up, the feeling of calm filtered away. Did I really belong in a place with other students I could hurt?

  The wind rustled the leaves in the surrounding trees. Anger replaced exhaustion as I tried to see into the forest. Were there more Aolians out there, somehow able to mask their actions from others, able to stuff me into a car and drive away without anyone seeing? I’d been an Aolian all of twenty-four hours, and I’d already attacked and mangled several people and damaged who knew how many others. The anger bloomed inside me, like a blood-red rose, beautiful but with vicious thorns. Movement ran along my skin. I lifted my sleeve and the red grew and pulsed. It changed my emotions, forcing the anger to spread. My vision turned red, and I panted as I tried to take control of my body once more. But the red’s power ate at me, leached into my muscles and bones.

  But with this power, I’d saved that little girl . . . and myself. But that positive glimmer did nothing to staunch the growing anger.

  “Stop!” I screamed. But the fear of myself added to the other overwhelming emotions already broiling inside me.

  A tree, twice as tall as me, grew on the other side of the tracks. I focused all my anger and pushed the red away from me, into the bark of the tree. This time it was different than in Grand Central. There, I’d used the red in the room, called and forced it to obey. Here, there was no red to call.

  The force lifted my feet lifted off the ground and I flew backward. The back of my head slammed against the station behind me, and I gasped for breath. My pencil and sketchbook dropped out of my hands. But my emotions were sweet relief. The anger returned to a normal, manageable amount.

  I had to stop losing control. Just the memory of getting attacked set me off. I didn’t even bother getting up, but lay on the hard wooden planks of the platform. What was happening to me?

  Unfamiliar voices roused me from sleep.

  “Grab her backpack,” a woman said. “We might have to carry her to the car. After their first few Releases, they can sleep for days. Ayami?” Someone shook my shoulder. Her voice was kind and soothing. “My name is Leslie. Your aunt called me, honey. I’m here to take you to my house.”

  I sat up, groggy. “Scarborough Mansion?” I asked.

  “That’s the place. Are you strong enough to stand or should I have Scott carry you to the car?”

  “There’s no way anyone’s carrying me.” I slowly pushed onto my knees on the wooden platform, each movement sending a blazing pain into my head. Leslie held out her hand, and I used it to get to my feet. “Why does my whole body hurt?”

  “Pain is the body’s reaction to many situations,” Leslie said. “And you’ve been through a lot, I think. The car’s just over there.” She motioned to the parking lot, but I couldn’t look away from the platform.

  The blast had thrown me from the platform edge to twenty feet away, and the tree looked as though someone had shot it up with a red machine gun. The leaves were shredded, and the trunk was covered with red, like it’d been tagged with spray paint. At least it wasn’t a person.

  “I want my backpack,” I said to the man. My sketchbook had landed a few feet away, and I picked it up.

  “Oh, Scott can carry that for you,” Leslie said.

  “I can carry it, thanks,” I said with my hand out, and Scott passed it to me.

  They walked at my slow pace down a peeling wooden set of stairs to the small gravel parking lot. Weeds grew along the building. We climbed into the waiting black four-door sedan.

  “The house is a fifteen-minute drive from here,” Leslie said in that same soothing voice.

  I leaned on my backpack against the door, unable to keep my eyelids open. My dad said these people would teach me how to use my power. The last thing I wanted to do was lose control again. I had to know how to repress it. The horror of the past days crashed down on my consciousness, dragging me into sleep.

  How was I going to survive?

  6

  What has changed is that my life then was less difficult—less gloomy.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  Pain pounded against my skull when I woke. I didn’t know it was possible to be this sore. I lifted my arm above my head, testing my movement through the pain. This had to be what felt like to get hit by a train, without the pesky problem of shattered bones. Although, with how I was feeling I couldn’t be sure something valuable inside me wasn’t broken.

  Unconsciousness was a respite. I wanted to climb inside sleep and have it cover me in a thick layer of fantasy.

  But thirst made me feel as though I’d swallowed cotton. I flipped back the covers, and put my sore feet on the polished wooden floor.

  Morning sun tried to fight its way through ruffled curtains. Gaudy images of carved fruit and leaves covered the sleigh bed where I’d slept. The rose-colored silk damask bedspread and deep carnelian-painted walls almost sent me into a panic. Too much red. No amount of light could brighten this room’s dark molding.

  I wore the same clothes I’d changed into on the train. My backpack sat next to the bed, and I reached in to find my phone.

  Dead, of course. How long had I been asleep? On a table in a corner, a small faced clock chimed ten.

  I needed to find Leslie. I grabbed my bag and stepped out into the hallway. Had I gotten transported back to the 1890s? Wood-paneled wainscoting lined the walls to my waist. Above, delicate blue birds flew between long ropes of ivy on silk-textured wallpaper. Every few feet antique family portraits or soft landscape paintings hung on the wall in ornate frames of gold or mahogany. Pale light showed through the red and yellow glass mosaics and clear, dripping crystals that made up the wall sconces.

  Leslie appeared at the hall entrance. “Ayami, I was coming to see if you’d finally woken up. How are you feeling?”

  “Like someone dropped me out of a plane without a parachute,” I said.

  “Ha! I know how you feel,” Leslie said. “Everyone’s first Release is an overwhelming and exhausting experience. I’m sure you’re hungry. Let’s go see if our cook has anything left over from breakfast, shall we?”

  Leslie had to be in her mid-forties, with olive skin, and golden highlights in her shoulder-length hair. Her clothes were mix of practicality and elegance.

  “What is this place?” I asked as we descended a wooden staircase carved with geometric patterns.

  “This is Scarborough Mansion. It was my great, great grandfather’s house, built in the late 1800s with railroad money. According to everyone around it’s a bed and breakfast, but it really houses teens like you who’ve recently found they’re Aolians. It’s been beautifully restored, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” I reached out and let my fingers drag along the smooth wood paneling. “My father came here?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. He was a little younger than me, but I still knew him. A sweet talker, I was sorry to hear about his accident.”

  “I don’t remember him,” I said.

  We entered a massive and modern kitchen with a walk-in refrigerator and stainless-steel appliances that didn’t match the
rest of the house.

  “Hi, Pat.” Leslie addressed a thin woman with graying hair who stirred some kind of batter in an industrial mixer. “This is Ayami. Do you have anything left over from breakfast? She’s been sleeping a full day.”

  “I think I’ve been awake six hours in the last two days.”

  “You must be starving then,” Pat said. “I’ll warm up some breakfast leftovers.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Oh no! I was supposed to call my aunt as soon as I arrived.”

  “Your aunt called while you were asleep when she couldn’t reach your phone, so she knows you’re fine,” Leslie said.

  We sat in the center of the kitchen at the long table that seemed to be used mostly for prep while Pat bustled around, fixing me a plate.

  “I have a terrible headache,” I said. “Do you have any pain killer?”

  “There’s some aspirin,” Leslie said. “But it won’t help you. Release headaches have to heal on their own; painkillers don’t help.”

  “Great,” I mumbled, rubbing my temples. “So are there a few . . . kids like me here?”

  “Sure, I get about a hundred to a hundred twenty-five teens during the summer. There are a hundred here now. I have eight more scheduled to arrive tomorrow, and a few more usually show up at random.”

  I nodded. “Do they go back home during the school year?”

  “Some do, some don’t.”

  I crossed my arms on the table, resisting the urge to scratch at the red in my skin. “Do their parents know what they can do?”

  “Most of our students have Aolian family members, and the ones who don’t . . . well, that really depends on the students and their parents.” She shrugged. “Every relationship is different.”

  “My dad left a letter with my aunt for me, but it was pretty confusing.”

  The cook placed a strawberry-topped waffle and eggs on the table in front of me, along with a tall glass of orange juice. I thanked her.