by Everly Frost
I wondered if Michael was the last person I would ever look at.
It took an age for him to shuffle up to his knees, his face down, his hands planted on the tops of his thighs as leverage. I dreaded what I would see in his face when he looked up.
He finally raised his eyes to mine. “We’re outcasts now. You and me. Nobody will ever look at us the same way, treat us the same way. We’re different.”
I didn’t shake my head this time, didn’t try to deny it.
“You’re the first mortal, Ava.” His expression was dark. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so raw as the look on his face. “But I’m the first murderer.”
Chapter Ten
MICHAEL SAID, “I can’t go home.”
I couldn’t hide from the look in his eyes, the look that said he had nowhere else to go and he couldn’t leave, even though I’d just tried to strangle him.
Worse was the realization that he wanted me to. He wanted to die, but he couldn’t.
“The way everyone looks at me.” His head dropped, mercifully, and I didn’t have to face the ripped look in his eyes anymore. “I’m the one who tore the world apart.”
I remembered the drive to the recovery center. He’d sat there, staring at the tunnel lights as though he didn’t care whether we crashed or not.
He looked up again, pinning me. “Do you know I can regenerate faster than anyone else? It takes me three seconds to restart my heart when the average is thirty. The other guys are always coming at me because if they can beat me, then that means something. That night at the Terminal, some idiot chopped off my arm and it didn’t even hit the floor. Dad says I’m one of the…”
He must have seen how pale I’d become because he stopped. “They should be charging me, but they aren’t going to. The Attorney-General said there was no intent to kill. And then he told Dad we should change our name and move to another city—maybe one of the country towns in the western region where they don’t get the news so much. Yesterday when I went to buy milk, a little girl started screaming when she saw me. She thought I was going to kill her dead. People won’t come near me because if I killed someone, then I can kill them too. They’re saying the same thing about you on the news already. That it could be catching. That people should stay away.” He chomped his lip, sucking in a breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
The stars were so bright above us that his words didn’t seem to matter anymore. The night sky sparkled without the usual house lights obscuring it. I focused on the constellation of the Milky Way, thinking about how soft it looked, how radiant. I wondered how amazing it would look from the top of a Starsgardian tower. All those stars swimming through the darkness, shedding their light like shedding skin.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me too?” I asked him, the words slipping from my mouth in a dizzy haze. “Don’t you know I could kill you just by looking at you?”
He choked. “Don’t you know I could kill you just by touching you?” He swallowed, his eyes suddenly glassy, his voice hoarse. “You’re no more deadly than moonlight, Ava Holland. I’m sorry I’m the only one who believes that.”
As he spoke, the curtain of night tilted. The ground suddenly tipped, and I was cushioned in something as nice as cotton candy.
“Ava!” Michael’s face was close to mine, hovering above me, his chest next to my cheek, one arm cradling my head.
I tried to speak, but my mouth was hollow. At least my head had stopped spinning and I felt safe for the first time all day.
He broke eye contact, looking past me to his other hand, the one that had caught me, turning it back and forth. “Your back’s bleeding. I’m taking you inside.”
I was propelled along in the air before I knew it, and it was at that point that I understood how much he’d allowed me to hurt him before, how much he hadn’t fought back.
I felt it, in every part of my body that touched his.
“Energy,” I said, and he gave me a curious look.
He shoved the laundry door open with his back, and I found the will to grab his arm. My entire hand tingled. I wondered if Sarah Watson had felt like this when she hung off Michael’s side that day at school. I considered whether normal girls could feel the energy zipping through him. I’d danced with boys in dance class and none of them had ever felt like this.
It was like touching a live wire. I wondered briefly whether it would kill me. There was a part of me that didn’t care.
Then I remembered about the floor. “Watch out for the glass!”
“I saw it. Don’t worry. I’ve got boots on.”
I bit my lip. “I’m getting my voice back. That’s a good sign, right?”
“Yeah, you had me worried for a minute there. Looks like you’ve lost enough blood to make standing a bad idea right now.” He gave me a perplexed look, and I realized that he’d stopped moving. “So they’re really gone.”
“My parents? You say that like you knew they were leaving.”
“I heard Cheyne talking. It’s why I came here. He told Dad you’d disappeared and they were looking for you everywhere. I wanted to find you, make sure you were okay.” His arms tensed, one shoulder lifting as if he’d shrug if he could. “Look, that doesn’t matter right now.”
I followed his gaze around the empty living room. “Just put me on the floor. Mom’s not here to stress out about getting blood on the carpet.”
He was about to rest me down in the middle of the living room—the back of my calves prickled on the woolen fibers—when he yanked me back up again.
“It’s covered in glass. Those idiots must have tracked it all through the house. You got anywhere better? It’s not like I can clean up and carry you at the same time.”
I managed a smile. “I dunno. You could fling me over one shoulder and vacuum with your free hand. I’m sure you could manage.”
The serious look on his face changed into a sudden grin. “Don’t tempt me.” Then, “Seriously, Ava, I can’t put you down on that, and it’ll take too long to clean up. We need to figure out what’s going on with you.”
I sighed. “Upstairs. To the left. My parents left my room intact.”
We were there in what felt like a couple of seconds. Too soon for me, although I wondered what I feared most. Part of me didn’t want him to let go of me, as though the buzz was all that was keeping me alive. The other part of me didn’t want him to step foot in my room. It wasn’t like a boy had ever seen it.
He pushed open the door and rested me down on the bed. The softness of my butterfly quilt replaced the warm tingle from his body.
“Do you have a spare blanket?”
I frowned at him. “If they’ve left Josh’s room alone, there’ll be one in there. Why?”
He was already gone and returned in seconds with the quilt from Josh’s bed in his hands.
It meant they’d left Josh’s room intact, and I felt a sense of peace about that as Michael pulled the blind closed, tucked the blanket over it, and then flicked on the lamp, snatching up one of my t-shirts from the floor to fling over it, dulling its brightness.
He shrugged when he found me staring at him. “I don’t want the light to be a beacon for every Basher around.” He gestured at my back. “Let me take a look.” He said it like an order, but I heard a question.
In answer, I turned onto my side and flicked at my shirt, giving him permission to lift it. “How bad is it? No. On second thought, don’t tell me.”
There was a pause. “What did you do to yourself?”
I almost cried. “What did I do? It wasn’t me—it was them. All that flying glass. And that bullet, I swear it missed me by nothing. What do you think I did? Broke out my favorite dance routine for them? What I did was hide in the corner. And then … and then…” I didn’t want to remember it, running over glass, climbing the roof, finding out Josh knew all along he could die…
Michael was quiet. I listened to the silence, hearing nothing outside, slowly becoming aware of
the damp on my back, the deep ache of the wound.
He finally spoke. “I, um … I kind of don’t know what I should do. There’s a lot of blood and it’s not going away. Wait a minute.” There was another pause, and I sensed movement. I turned just enough to see him move toward the dressing table and pull open the top drawer.
“My underwear isn’t going to help.”
He jumped away from the drawer and went bright red, and his reaction surprised me since I figured mine wouldn’t be the first he’d seen. Or, at least, that was my assumption, but I realized there was a lot I didn’t know about him. All I had were assumptions, and the more he spoke to me, the more I realized none of them might be true.
He said, “I need something to wipe your back clean. So I can see what’s wrong.”
I pointed, and the pain between my shoulder blades made me wince. “Try the second drawer. I’ve got some old cotton tops in there.”
He came back with a white singlet, and I tried not to shrink away from him when he touched the wound.
“There are two pretty big flaps of skin here. They’re each about three inches along, but only a quarter inch deep. You were lucky the glass didn’t puncture your lungs.” I turned again to catch sight of him run his hand through his hair.
He met my eyes and shook his head at me.
I sighed. “I think you have to stitch me up. With a needle and thread. You took Home Studies, right?”
“Yeah, I know about stitching. But what if it doesn’t work for you?”
“Well, it’s all I can think of!” I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, it’s just that you get to zip yourself up, but I don’t. I need a bit of help doing that.”
He took a deep breath. “Got a needle and thread?”
“There’s a kit downstairs. On the kitchen table.” I bit my lip, hoping he wouldn’t ask where I got it. “It’s got medical stuff in it. Stuff that can be used by someone like me.”
He pressed his lips together, his eyebrows drawing down. I waited for the difficult question, but all he said was, “Okay.”
He was gone before I could say anything else and I dropped my head back onto the pillow. The pain in my back had deepened. I wondered how dirty the glass was, whether I was getting sick. Every now and then there’d be a story on the news about someone who got dirt in a wound that closed up too soon and they had to have it cleaned out. What did they call it—infection? One time there was a kid who healed too fast around a bullet. His brain started to go funny, so they got a bunch of hot-shot surgeons in to operate. Nobody ever said whether the kid was okay afterward, but the surgeons were all over the news.
My face was clammy. Sweat pooled under my chest. Something wasn’t right with me, I knew that much. I stuffed my face into the pink butterfly that covered most of the pillow and waited for the next disaster.
A tap on my shoulder made me leap off the bed, slamming into Michael.
“Ava!”
I registered his face and the tingle where one of his hands rested on my shoulder, stopping me from startling further. He was half on the bed, half off, and he seemed to be waiting for me to relax. “Sorry. You were asleep.” His hand moved to my forehead. “I was kind of worried.”
“What? That I’d died or something?”
He removed his hand and I missed the cool tingle as he shrugged. “I brought up the box.” He gestured to the dressing table and the blue container sitting there wide open. Then he lifted his other hand to show me the contents.
A vial of black liquid rested in his palm, the golden scorpion partly visible.
He wasn’t smiling and there was something tense about his jaw. “Where did you get this?”
I couldn’t tell him because then I’d have to tell him about Josh, but the truth was I didn’t really know where it had come from, where Josh had got it. I bit my lip, trying not to remember the green room and the needle filled with black liquid and how I’d thrown myself against the wall after they injected me. How I’d cracked the wall after they injected me. I said, “You know what that stuff is?”
“Do you?” He said it carefully, as though he was saying one thing and asking another.
I narrowed my eyes at him while uncertainty and wariness warred against each other on his face.
He said, “It’s my dad’s research. He’s done a lot of work for the government—tranquilizers, nanobots, tracking technology, but this…” He eyed me. “This is seriously classified. It’s called nectar, and it’s still experimental. Only a handful of people know about it, including Cheyne. It’s supposed to speed regeneration, decrease rehabilitation time, completely remove pain from the dying equation. It’s supposed to make everyone like me. And more. Stronger. Faster.” He looked down at the bed. “Dad’s still testing it.”
They’d tested it on me. “So it makes normal people heal faster?”
“Way faster.” Then his expression changed, and I knew what he was thinking.
“No.” I shook my head and scooted away from the little bottle, right over to the opposite edge of the bed. “I’m not drinking that.”
“If you take this, you might not need stitches. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but it’s worth a shot, right?”
I stared at him, knowing that what he said was true. After they’d injected me with nectar in the Terminal, the wounds on my forehead and neck had healed. If I drank it now, the rip in my back might heal, too. But I shook my head because of what else it did to me: blurred vision and uncontrollable strength, so much energy inside me that I burned from the inside out. “I can’t drink it.”
I’ll set fire to the house.
“Stitches are really going to hurt. You need to try this first. Drink it. If it doesn’t work, then … then I’ll stitch you.” He leaned over and pushed the vial at me. The scorpion seemed to leap out at me.
I shoved his hand away and pressed my lips together.
“Please drink it!”
I shook my head, glaring at him.
In response, he ran a hand across his forehead and studied the ground for a moment. His fists clenched and unclenched as if he was trying to control himself. His next words were quiet. “I need you to drink this because I can’t … I can’t do this—stitch you up—if I know it’s hurting you.”
I stared at him, stricken, biting my lip. I didn’t know what he would say or do if I told him what happened when I drank nectar. That I became someone—something—else. Something fiery and uncontainable. That we wouldn’t have to worry about lamps because I would be the beacon drawing the Bashers to my house.
“I can’t drink it. They gave it to me at the recovery center when they tested me and it … it does weird stuff to me. It won’t just heal me.”
A wary look replaced the frustration on his face. “What do you mean—weird stuff?”
I struggled to find the right words. I remembered what it was like at the recovery center when Reid gave me the first injection of nectar. I’d healed and the pain had disappeared, but then the splotch on the wall had turned into a rose and the room had filled with things that weren’t real—vines and a scuttling scorpion like the one on the vial. Everything had shimmered, I couldn’t focus, my vision had been so bad I’d even thought one of the guards was Michael.
I looked into his eyes, begging him to understand. “It changes me. It makes me strong—unbelievably strong—but I can’t control it. It’s like having all the fire of the sun trapped inside me, and it has to come out.” He was about to speak, so I hurried on, not sure if I was making sense. “And I can’t stop it. It forces itself out of me. It makes me do stuff. Crazy, insane stuff, and it’s really not good.”
How could I tell him I’d burned so hot that I’d breathed fire?
I tried to draw breath, the words tumbling out of me. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry that you have to stitch me up. If I could do it myself, I would, but I can’t reach, and I know it’s going to hurt, but I promise I won’t cry.”
I stopped and stared at my hands in the sudden sile
nce. If I was really honest with myself, it wasn’t the nectar I was afraid of.
It was what Michael would think. I had no idea what would happen if I drank it. I only knew what happened the first time: that I broke a metal chair with my bare hands and crushed a man’s chest just by shoving him. I wasn’t going to drink it in front of Michael and scare him away. Or worse—hurt him somehow. Not that anything I did could probably hurt Mr. Restart-My-Heart-In-Three-Seconds. “I’ll be brave. I promise.”
He sat down, studying the vial in his hand. It looked as if a million thoughts raced through his head. “Dad said nectar is like immortality trapped in a bottle. I don’t think it’s meant for people … like you.” He looked grim, his face ashen. “I’m sorry they gave it to you. I won’t make you take it if you don’t want to.”
He crossed to the cupboard, put the bottle into the medical box, and firmly closed the lid. “Okay. You’ll need to hold on to something.”
I turned onto my stomach and pulled my hair out of the way. I exhaled fully. “Just get it done.”
I sounded a lot braver than I was. I turned my face away from the needle and thread he pulled from sealed packages because I didn’t want to look at them.
The needle entered my skin and I was not prepared at all. There was nothing to save me from this pain. I couldn’t even stamp my feet or thump my fists. After the first involuntary twitch made the pain intensify, I had to stay very still.
So I shouted instead. “I’m not brave. Not at all. I lied. I am going to shout. A lot. Until you’re finished.” I yelled each word like I wanted to yell at my parents for leaving and at Josh for dying. Like I wanted to yell at every person in my street who left silence around me, and every person who would look at me like I was an outcast. But I stayed still—for the ten thousand years it took Michael to stitch me back together.
I knew it was over when his hand rested on my shoulder again, soothing vibrations on my trembling skin. “Sorry, Ava.”
“Sorry for helping me? Don’t be.” I bit out the words, my teeth chattering. I wiped my palm across my sweating face, ready to sit up.