Crucified: The Rise of an Urban Legend (Swann Series Book 9)

by Ryan Schow

  She gets all the way under the covers, and I tuck her in then kiss her on the forehead.

  Back in bed, August is sleeping peacefully. I crawl in beside him, close my eyes and fight against a mounting dread. What will the remainder of this night yield? To my great delight, however, I settle into a dreamless sleep, only to be woken several hours later by my phone.

  No, August’s phone. It’s his father.

  Half drowsy, feeling drugged and unable to sufficiently open my eyes, I listen to August talk to his father, telling him his voice is different because he’s tired, because he was having a lot of fun last night at a music festival…blah, blah, blah. All the lies we tell to protect the truth from those we love.

  When he hangs up, it’s because he finally promised his father he’d catch the first plane out of Vegas. He didn’t tell his father he was in Palo Alto. With me. He told him as little as possible, which honestly, was pretty intuitive.

  I’m sitting up now, staring at him, worried.

  His eyes catch mine and this stops his train of thought. He finds himself wholly immersed in my expression, which either pleases or worries me.

  “What has you so troubled?” he asks.

  “Who says I’m troubled?”

  “Your body’s changed, but your expressions have not.”

  Lying back down, I pull the blankets over me, then turn away from him. “I have to tell you something,” I say.

  “Then tell me,” he says.

  Take a deep breath. Close your eyes and focus. Just freaking say it already.

  “Holland planted a bomb in your head.”

  “What?!”

  I hold up my hand to stop him, then say, “One way or another, it has to come out. So I have a question for you and you don’t have to answer right away, but the sooner you answer the better.”

  “You had to tell me this now?” he says, gently turning me over by the shoulder so we’re looking at each other eye to eye. His intensity is both scary and sexy all at once. He’s no longer a boy. Augustin Sandino is most definitely a man.

  I reach around his head, to the base of his skull, just below his brainstem. “Here,” I say, touching his head lightly. “It’s an insurance policy.”

  “When you were radiated…” he says, letting the statement hang.

  He’s referring to my first transition, how The Virginia Corporation used radioactive isotopes and RFID chips to basically melt half my body. He tells me this so I know he understands the gravity of what I’ve just told him.

  “I can get it out, but again, I have a question for you and you need to answer it. How you answer will determine how much pain I put you through, and how much effort I’ll have to exert to keep you from dying.”

  He pushes my hand away, turns his eyes elsewhere, his entire being shrinking away from me. “You knew he did this.”

  “Only after,” I say, taking his arm gently.

  He shrugs me off.

  “Honestly, there is so much good happening right now, but there is also a world of bad. Sabrina is gone because of satanic worshiping nut bags, I’m a different person but with a bomb in my head, you’re with me now but you might kill me getting this thing out, and I’m supposed to go home and face my family? Of all of these things, seeing my family is what scares me the most.”

  “It’s too much, I know.”

  “You don’t know,” he says.

  “Can you really say that, knowing what you know about me?” I ask, my tone delicate yet pointed.

  He runs his hand over his scalp the way he does when he gets frustrated. He stops at the place on the back of his head that I pointed out only moments ago.

  “I kind of liked your hair,” I confessed.

  “I’m not the kind of guy who wants to spend more time doing my hair than I do putting on deodorant.”

  He tells me this almost like he’s grumpy.

  “It still looks good,” I say, touching his scalp. He lets me and this causes me to scoot toward him. I sit behind him, curl my legs around his waist, pull him into my arms and say, “How long have you been dreaming of having sex with me?”

  “Since I saw your tits for the first time,” he says, honestly, not a trace of humor in his tone.

  “And how was I?”

  He puts his hands on my calves, my thighs, then he turns inside the circle my legs have made around him and says, “You were like nothing I’d ever let myself dream of,” and this makes me smile. I know he’s scared, that he’s trying to adapt to a lot very quickly, and I know his mind is still trying to settle from the swift and sudden genetic changes. “Ask me the question.”

  “Will you marry me?” I tease.

  “Not that one, not yet. The other one, the more serious one you said you needed to ask.”

  My body stills to match my mind. Part of me wants to ease into this, but I am not that kind of girl. I prefer blunt, the way Netty does it. “Do you want to be immortal?”

  “Like you?”

  “Not like me, with me.”

  “That’s possible?”

  “I took a large vile of Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum, not just for this moment, but for the future if your answer right now is ‘no.’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, God,” I say, not wanting to get into this right now, not with so much on his plate, “how do I put this?”

  “Just spit it out,” he says.

  “We live together in the future, on this little ranch out on fifty acres of property, and we’re happy. I already told you that part. What I didn’t tell you in detail is that our lives in the future were interrupted by me from this time coming into that time to stop something really bad from happening.”

  “Bad like what?”

  “Something that requires you having this serum if you have any chance of surviving.”

  “I can’t hear this right now,” he says, getting up. “It’s too much.”

  He’s shutting down, and I don’t blame him. I’m a lot to take these days. But isn’t this how you get an iron spine? You face the truth time and again no matter the shock? No matter the emotional strain?

  Or perhaps that’s just me. Maybe I’ve become so inhuman that listening to rational responses damn near borders on exhaustion.

  It’s just me. I know it is. I’m different, I tell myself. Not all the way human anymore. Rebecca is just human; August just human. And even if I give August the shot and successfully take the bomb out of his head—even if he survives the impending holocaust—he’ll still be human. Maybe he can heal from any wound, and not show any visible signs of aging, but the fact is, he will still be human. And I won’t be. Because of the human/reptilian hybrid from Dulce. Because after he switched me on, I’m something else entirely.

  I need to realize this and be sensitive to August’s feelings. To Rebecca’s feelings. There’s no way I can push these things on either of them so quickly. They should have a choice in the matter. Just then I look up and August is standing there naked and looking at me.

  My heart bumps and clunks a bit, then drops gears and starts to race. My pulse doubles, my face warms and a hot rush of warmth and need overwhelm me.

  “Are we showering together or what?” he asks.

  Getting out of bed, breathless and grinning and taking off my clothes, I say, “We are. We most definitely are.”

  After a righteous round of shower sex, we get ready for the day, and naturally, he’s ready before me. I can’t exactly shave my head, even if it would cut forty minutes off the time it takes me to get ready.

  When I leave the room, I find only Orianna in the kitchen. August and Christian are out back talking, and getting along by the look of it.

  “August and I have to go to Texas,” I say. Yeah, I just sort of blurt it out.

  “Oh,” Orianna says.

  “But then I’m off to see a man about a baby.”

  She raises her eyebrows and so I tell her the entire story of Rebecca’s children, which leaves her speechless on so
many levels.

  “Here’s the kicker,” I say, and she waits for it, still dumbfounded by the revelations, “you’re going to have to cover for Rebecca, say the baby’s yours. That she’s adopted or something, or maybe she’s your dead sister’s child.”

  “My sister’s not dead.”

  “Yeah, but you never see her so she’s pretty much dead to us.”

  “What’s your point?” she asks.

  “My point is, if Jacob finds out she’s Rebecca’s child, he’ll ask about the father. And if Rebecca tells him about Heim, he’ll want to do something about it.”

  “Someone should do something about it!”

  “We already have, and keep your voice down!” I whisper harshly.

  “You and who else?”

  “The doctor who did this, Dr. Heim, he’s as good as dead.”

  “You killed him? Oh my God, Savannah…what the hell kind of life are you living?”

  “Stop!”

  Fully panicked, she says, “You stop!”

  “He’s technically not dead.”

  “Then what is he?” she asks, the old demandy version of herself coming out.

  “He’s buried under a coffin in a cemetery in Auburn.”

  “Then surely he’s dead!” she barked, leaning over me.

  “Who’s dead?” Rebecca asked from behind us. We both startle, then at the same time say, “Nobody.”

  “Who’s dead?” she asks again.

  It seems the revelations about her baby early this morning might have forced a touch of maturity to blossom in her. One look at her and I know she’s considering the whole idea of getting Skye back.

  “The man who took you. Dr. Heim.”

  “Good,” she says, walking into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee. “I’ll be out at the pool when you’re done talking to her about…the child.”

  My heart stops. Rebecca doesn’t seem to see this.

  To add that unnecessary punch, she says, “I’ll be out there looking at August.” She says this thinking it will sting, but inside, it makes me want to laugh. My little sister is growing up!

  “Remember what I told you,” I say, straight-faced.

  “Everything you do you do because you love me,” she says, coming around. “I know this.”

  Turning to Orianna, who is barely keeping up, I say, “Well, it looks like we’re going to have a baby.”

  Chapter Six

  We book tickets on the first plane out of San Francisco International. As we’re waiting to board, August tells me his father got the letter from the FBI.

  “I guess that’s what triggered this whole thing. I thought he found out about the plastic surgery. Turns out it started with the letter about Vegas.”

  “If you hadn’t agreed so easily to going home—”

  “This isn’t easy,” he says, flashing me a look.

  “I’d have told you to sack up and see your father, not because you owe him that, but because he loves you and he should know the truth.”

  “He loves me because he doesn’t know the truth. When I get home with this face, this body, as me now…who the hell knows what’s going to happen? He’ll say I’m breaking my mother’s heart.”

  “Which mother?” I ask, grinning.

  His eyes go cold. “Are you really cracking jokes right now?”

  “Sorry.”

  “If I ask you not to talk to me on the way home,” he says cautious, “will you promise not to take it the wrong way?”

  “Are you asking if my feelings are going to get hurt?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then, yes. I promise not to take it the wrong way. Just don’t get mad if I want to touch you, or be affectionate. I’m still thinking about getting dicked in the shower this morning.”

  And with that, an older couple gives me a stern, sideways glance.

  “Inside voice, please,” he says, and we both smile.

  Looks like it’s going to be a long, quiet flight. Not that it matters. We’re going to have the rest of eternity to talk if I have my say in this. I’m just hoping things will be okay with his father so I can get a “yes” on the immortality thing and pull Holland’s bomb out of his head.

  When we reach cruising altitude my body starts to shut down. The stress of everything is taking a toll. If I think about it, it was yesterday morning when I got back from the future. Yesterday morning when I woke August from his genetic slumber. And the sex? Oh, Lord…don’t get me started! The point is, it’s crazy how when it rains it freaking pours. And sometimes, just sometimes, it can get downright torrential.

  Before I know it, my eyelids are bobbing, then magically…I’m asleep.

  The dream that swallows me up quickly becomes a nightmare, and in the nightmare, pieces of my journey to Alice Jr.’s apocalyptic future return with fiery force.

  My God, why is my mind doing this to me?

  It’s just a dream, I tell myself inside the dream, but it’s not. Not inside the dream. In there, it’s real because when I was there for real, it felt exactly like this.

  It’s just my mind replaying the events, I tell myself. Still, it feels real. And this dream is unfolding exactly as I saw it, exactly as I experienced it...

  I’m standing inside the lab. Standing before the two Alice’s. Then I’m gone. Blinked out of that timeline and sucked far into the future. The pain of traveling is a cerebral feeling on par with being crushed to death then pulled apart over and over again. This cycle of degeneration and regeneration does things to me that defy description. I’m never fully destroyed in the wormhole, but I’m never fully remade either. At least, not until the shatting-out of this body into the desired timeline. The year is 2147. The place is New York. I blink into the future on wobbly knees holding down my guts, stumbling twice before falling to a knee on the sidewalk edge smack dab in the middle of hell.

  This trip forward in time is my longest yet. Already this is worse than Berlin.

  Alice Jr. gave me the coordinates, but now that I’m here, this place looks nothing like New York. I mean, it almost does. It almost feels like it.

  But everything here is deeply, fundamentally wrong.

  Standing in a bleak downfall of pillowing ash and ubiquitous fog, I break into a coughing fit then cover my nose and mouth. The air is all warm ash. The trees are skeletons, the crispy looking grass dusted grey and starved for water and sunlight. Looking up, the sky’s usual brilliance is lost. With the sun tucked so far behind the devastation, it’s but a subtle glow in a sea of smoke. Half the buildings disappeared into it. Half of those have been shelled to shit. Utterly destroyed.

  This New York I’m looking at is nothing like the New York you know. Nothing like the New York I know. The thing about the air is, it’s like being downwind from a forest fire. The sting of it hits my eyes, burns my throat, dries out and squeezes my lungs. Everything smells like charbroiled garbage. Barely anything moves. Almost like this is a photo of a nuclear winter and I made my way into an animated backdrop, but for what? What is happening here? This is no December in New York—not even a romantic January. But I know this already.

  I know this in the dream because I was just here for real.

  Standing in the middle of the street, I find Elizabeth’s home in ruins. It looks like it survived a bombing. And everything around it? The park? The trees? They all look the way your garden would look if you took a flame thrower to it, then shot it all to hell with rock salt and then emptied your fireplace into a standing fan just to watch it settle over everything.

  There is so much I love about New York, but not now. Right now I can’t help being scared. Attuning my senses, I pick up the subtle sounds of activity. People murmuring, arguing. People running. Then it’s perfectly quiet. So still you can hear the compressed sounds of ash being squished beneath your shoes with every little shifting of your weight.

  These brief pillows of silence could suffocate a grizzly.

  In the back of my mind, I try to remember Spring. The tree
s in bloom. The delightful scents of fresh flowers and cut grass. For a second, tapping into Elizabeth’s memories, I remember how the park bustled with people, with their animals on leashes, how families used to picnic here just soaking in the amazing New York atmosphere. In these memories, everyone looked happy. Children were playing. Dogs were chasing Frisbees and barking at other dogs and generally enjoying life. My heart breaks a little at the sight of things. I almost start to cry. This is the aftermath. There is no other explanation: this is a nuclear winter. My God, what have we done to our planet?

  What have I done here?

  New York is no longer the great, beautiful migrant city that was once the result of so many cultures and trades. It is now a dystopian movie set dragged up from the innards of hell, replete with the choking filth of smoked oxygen and an endless, desperate twilight.

  That’s when I hear different sounds. Screams. Shrieking. Something dying in the distance. And then he’s there—standing across from me. Eyes like black onyx, blood all over his face, those clawed hands and that half torn open, detachable jaw.

  “I see you, motherfucker!” I yell, enraged, shaking with an influx of too much energy.

  That’s when I wake up in the plane to everyone looking at me. August is shaking me, trying to wake me up. In the next row over, I hear a woman say, “Wonder what kind of life she lives to have to use that kind of language.”

  I’m a bit embarrassed. I know my mouth is a problem. And I know that, contrary to our California way of life, the f-word is still an uncultured word in many circles. Like religious circles, or the Bible belt, or most all of Utah.

  “Same old Savannah,” August mutters, clearly embarrassed.

  “Are we almost there?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  When we land and collect our bags, I see a woman holding a sign that says BRAYDEN JAMES and we walk right past it, Brayden not even giving it a glance. Outside we hail a cab and he gives the cabbie the address.

  Half an hour later we’re pulling up to this gigantic palatial estate and August is telling me he feels like puking.