by Sarah Fine
When Malachi and Laney started to make plans to go to the computer lab during their free period, my legs moved by themselves, carrying me out of the cafeteria, past Evan “Dirty Jeans” Crociere, who was handing a baggie to a pimpled stoner; past Greg leaning against the wall, texting it up on his shiny iPhone; past Jillian and Levi, sneaking in a make-out session behind the double doors; and out into the cool air in front of the school. I sucked it in, driving the scream down deep.
“Slow down, Lela, wait up,” Ian shouted as he came through the doors, leaving them to crash shut.
I jolted to a stop, glancing with longing at my car. There was no way I could leave now. Nancy the probation officer would be after me in a second, accusing me of truancy or worse. Ian drew level with me. He clutched his juice in one hand and a sandwich in the other. Mayonnaise was smeared in the crease between his thumb and pointer finger. He held up the food and chuckled. “Want to have a picnic?”
It was such a lame invitation, but unless I wanted to go back inside and watch Malachi flirt with Laney, I didn’t have any other options. We trudged over to the low wall that separated shrubs from concrete and sat down, facing the Aden memorial. I rolled my apple in my hands. “How are you doing?”
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Ian. I know it hurts.”
He turned to me, his chestnut-brown hair falling over green eyes full of sadness he seemed too young to bear. Green eyes that reminded me a little of Nick’s, that tugged at my heart. “I know you understand,” he said. “You were close to Nadia.”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah.”
“Two of them within a month.” He blinked and bowed his head. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Nadia had issues for a long time. She tried to hide them from all of us, and finally she just couldn’t deal with them anymore.”
“Do you think it was that way with Aden? Do you think he’d been feeling this way for a while?” He cursed under his breath. “I was his best friend. I’m supposed to know that kind of thing, so I don’t know why the hell I’m asking you.”
He glanced down at his sandwich, cursed again, and tossed it into the garbage bin a few feet away. “Sorry,” he muttered. “That was an asshole thing to say.”
I twisted the stem off my apple. “No, it wasn’t. You said it because it’s that confusing. Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah. He just—it’s like he became this different person in the space of a few hours. He was clean. I know he was. I mean, he’d been drinking that night, but you know. Nothing serious. And then he runs off, and we find him at a freaking meth house? It’s like he went crazy. But I never thought—I never even considered that he’d—” His gaze traveled up the wall of the school, to the place the Mazikin had jumped. “Fuuuuck,” he said, his voice shaking.
At the edge of the memorial was a picture of Aden on the pitching mound. He looked like a teenage god—strong and flawless, one of the luckiest, the angel-kissed—destined for a perfect life. I hoped he was living that perfect life in the Countryside now, free of pain and worry and missing all that he’d had to leave behind.
“I don’t think he was in his right mind,” I said quietly. “I don’t think he chose it.”
“What are you talking about?”
I bit my lip. “I don’t know, really.” Though I did. And I wished I could explain because Ian was blinking tears away again. It didn’t fit. He was one of the angel-kissed, too, lucky in so many ways he didn’t even recognize. Rich. Loved. Good grades. Ace batting average. Pretty girlfriends. Nice car. But the look in his eyes was that of a confused and hurt little boy. “I just meant that your best friend, that Aden, didn’t make the choice to kill himself. He wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. This isn’t the same thing that happened to Nadia.”
“You think so?”
I nodded.
“If that meth house hadn’t already burned to the ground, I’d do it myself,” he said. “I want to find the freaks who gave him whatever ruined him, and I want to kill them with my bare hands.” A tear slipped from his cheek and landed on the sleeve of his shirt, and he swiped the backs of his hands across his face and turned his back to me. His shoulders started to shake.
Crap. Was it what I’d said? Hesitantly, ready for him to shrug me off, I reached out. My hand hovered close to his back, not knowing if it should land or circle a few times. Then he gulped in a deep breath, and my palm collided with his body. He relaxed, the knotted muscles of his back going loose under my touch.
“Thanks, Lela,” he whispered.
I left my hand there, scared to keep touching him, scared to pull away, until the bell rang and yanked us back into the churning routine of our day.
The call to Ketzler’s office came during sixth period. I guessed they’d already run through the cheerleaders and baseball players and were now hitting the third-stringers, the kids who weren’t close to Aden but who were there when it happened. When the note arrived and the teacher nodded at me, I knew my turn had come.
Too much was happening. I still had the growing infestation to deal with, and that was my first priority. The Mazikin were attacking the most vulnerable people around, and they were building their numbers. They’d even gotten my mothe—no. I shoved the thought down and crushed it beneath my heels as I stalked toward Ketzler’s lair.
The Mazikin were recruiting the homeless. On top of that, I was willing to bet they’d make a play for another one of my innocent classmates. Tegan. Ian. Greg. Someone who had been important to Aden. Important enough for Ibram to tell Sil about. Someone they could use to get to me and Malachi. I had to protect them. I couldn’t live with myself if the Mazikin got any of them.
As if all that weren’t enough … I couldn’t figure out how to deal with Malachi. Or how to think about him. But he had been so right: letting emotion interfere was compromising the mission in multiple ways. I needed to let him go and look at him the same way I looked at Jim and Henry. A colleague. A fellow Guard. If only it were that easy.
“Oh, Lela,” said the gray-haired secretary, giving me a tremulous smile. “They’re waiting for you in there.” She pointed to the little conference room next to Ketzler’s office.
“I’m here to see Ketzler?” I said, thinking maybe she’d made a mistake. The conference room was where they cornered students. Confronted them and ganged up on them. It had happened to me a few times. Nancy had done it once or twice, teaming up with Ketzler to let me know they “all worked as a team” and were “here to support me.” Translation: Ketzler would tattle if I put even a toe out of line, and Nancy would see I got court-ordered back to the RITS.
The secretary nodded. “She’s in there, honey. Your foster mother’s here, too.”
What the heck? My dread mounting, I crossed the room. The door swung open before I got my hand on the knob. Ms. Ketzler, mascara-free today, greeted me with a softly serious expression on her face, like I was about to be executed and she felt kinda sorry for me. I craned my neck and saw Diane, who looked the same way.
“Diane,” I said as I walked into the room, my heart thumping heavily. “What’s up?”
My eyes scanned the room. My child welfare social worker, Jen Pierce, was sitting in the corner with a thick file in her hands. Nancy wasn’t there. A horrible thought occurred to me, one I’d never considered before now. Oh God oh God. My lungs stopped working. I sank into the nearest chair, staring at the pained look on Diane’s face. “You’re giving me up, aren’t you? You’re ten-daying me.”
It had happened to me so many times before. But I’d started to believe it wouldn’t happen with Diane, that her house was where I belonged. I should have been prepared for this, though.
It was easy to give me up.
It wouldn’t even be the first time this week that it had happened.
After a moment where everyone seemed frozen in place, Diane got up so fast her chair tipped over. She made it across the room quickly, and her arms were around me in t
he next second. For once, I welcomed them. “No way, baby. How could you think that?” she asked fiercely as I came undone, the pressure and sorrow bubbling up and leaking around my welded defenses.
My hands shook as she clutched at them. She tilted my chin up and looked down at me. “You’re mine as long as you want to be. That’s not what this is about. I’m so sorry you thought it was.”
I blinked up at her, still absorbing the moment. She’d said I was hers. “Okay,” I said stupidly.
My social worker righted Diane’s chair. The thick folder sat on the tabletop. Ketzler set a box of tissues on the table. Diane withdrew her arms and took a seat next to me.
Jen put her hand on the folder. “Lela, you’ve been in substitute care for a long time, I know. You’ve been in a lot of different placements. We wanted permanency for you a long time ago, but things never quite worked out …”
Her eyes darted up to Ketzler’s, and the counselor’s hand closed over my shoulder. I clenched my teeth and slowly leaned away. She didn’t take the hint.
Jen cleared her throat. “Anyway, I know you’ve been through a lot, and that you have stability here with Diane. You’ve become one of our success stories. We don’t want to mess that up.”
I glanced over at Diane. “Me neither.” If Diane wasn’t giving me up, were they taking me away from her?
Jen fiddled with her watch long enough for me to want to reach across the table and rip it off her. Her eyes lingered on the folder again, a catalog of all the places I’d been, all the things that had happened to me. All the things she had allowed to happen to me. Maybe that was why she looked so stricken.
“Come on, Jen, you’re killing me. What’s going on?”
Finally, she met my eyes. “Your mother came to my office today. She’s filed a request to see you.”
EIGHTEEN
THE MAZIKIN WANTED TO talk. And they were going to use the body of my mother as their mouthpiece. That well of pain at the core of me turned cold, a column of ice along my spine.
Jen squinted at me. “Are you all right?”
Ketzler dove for the tissues and waved them beneath my chin. I looked up at her with dry eyes, and she cradled the box against her chest like she was personally offended by my rejection of them. Or convinced I was an emotionless psychopath. Diane’s warm hand closed around mine, which was chilled to the bone.
“Yeah,” I heard myself saying. “I should see her.”
Jen’s mouth dropped open. “Lela, just so you know, you don’t have to. You have every right to refuse. Rita Santos’s parental rights were terminated years ago, but we were legally obligated to let you know she’d made the request.”
And the Mazikin would have known that, because by taking over her body they had gained access to all my mother’s memories. They probably wouldn’t have cared about her past—until she recognized me last night. Until Rita Santos’s memories betrayed her own lost daughter. Now they knew they had something important, and they were going to try to use her against me.
I wouldn’t allow that to happen. I smiled at Jen. “I know, and I’m glad you told me. I want to see her.”
Diane squeezed my hand, but her eyes were locked on Jen’s. “Was Rita … all right?” She knew that my mom had been diagnosed long ago with schizophrenia.
I held myself back from replying. No, Rita Santos definitely wasn’t all right. She was trapped in the Mazikin realm—a place of fire and death—and I couldn’t get to her. I couldn’t do anything for her except try to liberate her soul by cutting the throat of the Mazikin occupying her body. Probably I shouldn’t do that during our first visit, though.
Jen grimaced. “Well, you know she has profound mental health issues, and that doesn’t seem to have changed. Lela, I don’t know if you remember her—”
I didn’t want to talk about this. It was irrelevant anyway, because the person who wanted to visit me wasn’t my mother. My mother, when she was alive, had never asked to visit me, as far as I knew. She’d never come for me. She hadn’t shown up to any of the planned visits. And finally, she’d just disappeared. Into oblivion.
“I remember enough,” I said. “And I’d like to plan the visit with her.”
I looked over at Diane. “It’s okay,” I reassured her, because she looked almost as worried as when Nadia died. “You know what they say: Closure is healthy.”
After fleeing from Ketzler and saying good-bye to Diane, I endured the rest of my classes. I’d just reached my car when I heard panting behind me. Ian jogged toward me, his backpack over one shoulder and his tanned cheeks ruddy. “I feel like I’m making a habit of running after you,” he called out.
I tossed my backpack into my front seat, and then kept the car door between us like a shield. “I’m not that hard to catch.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how bad they sounded. “I mean—”
He laughed. “I know what you meant. But yeah, you are.” He’d stopped running, but his cheeks were still ruddy, and now the red was creeping toward his neck. He bowed his head. “I just wanted to … um.”
“Are you all right?”
He nodded. “Are you?”
I frowned. “Sure. I mean, I’m sad like everyone else.” And overwhelmed and wrecked and worried and feeling like the weight of the world is crushing me.
“No, I mean—about Malachi?”
“Oh.” My throat tightened.
“So I guess you guys aren’t together.”
“I’d only known him a few days. It’s not like it was a big deal.” Every word was a lie.
Ian nodded. “But it seemed like you liked each other. A lot.”
I let out a humph. “Yeah. Well. That craziness is over.”
“And what about that blond guy you were with last Friday? I saw him in the cafeteria earlier.” He gave me a cautious look. “He seemed kind of into Tegan.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t worry about it. I’m good. I just want things to get back to normal.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Normal?”
“What—I’m normal. Sort of.” Boy, I was full of lies today.
His mouth curled at one corner, like he was biting the inside of his cheek, but then he said, “You’ve been at this school for over a year and haven’t gone out with a single guy. Not even once. Is that the normal you’re referring to?”
“I go out,” I protested. Not really. I had followed Nadia to parties and driven her home.
He raised his hands in surrender. “Okay. I didn’t mean to give you a hard time about it. I was just—thought maybe you might want to hang out sometime?”
All the blood in my head drained to my feet. Ian Moseley, jock extraordinaire, wanted to hang out. I looked up at him, and his lips twisted up into this rueful half smile. Only one dimple showing.
“Hey, I didn’t want to make it a big deal,” he said. “With everything that’s going on, I thought …” He scratched at his chin and let out a quiet laugh. “I don’t know what I was thinking, actually. You just seem cool. Bullshit-free, if that makes sense.”
I rubbed my clammy hands on my jeans. “I guess it does.”
If I got to know him better, I could make sure he was protected from the Mazikin, who would almost certainly come after him. Young guy. Strong. With resources. Embedded deeply in Aden’s memories. The Mazikin probably knew all about Ian.
I smiled at him. “And yeah, we can hang out. I’d like that.” And this time, I realized, I wasn’t lying.
We exchanged numbers but didn’t make any plans. I told him I would be at the wake and the funeral, and he gave me a brave smile and said he’d see me there.
I drove to the Guard house in a fog. The sleep deprivation was catching up with me. I couldn’t go on like this forever, and neither could the other Guards. We were all human, after all, and our bodies were frail. None of us would be able to make good decisions or fight well if we tried to subsist on two hours of sleep a night. The only time I got any rest these days was when Raphael put me unde
r so that he could heal me.
I didn’t bother knocking when I got to the Guard house, just walked in, only to find all three of them waiting for me in the entryway, their arms crossed over their chests. I laughed. “Hey guys. Is this an intervention? Do you have a therapist tucked away in the corner?”
Identical looks of puzzlement crossed their very different facial features. “You said you would brief us,” Malachi said solemnly.
Henry’s eyes were locked on my boots as he spoke. “I wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself before I took my concerns elsewhere.”
I stalked into the parlor and sat down. “You mean before you call Raphael in here. What do you think he’s going to do? Demote me? At this moment, Henry, that sounds fucking awesome.”
Henry took a seat across from me. “Last night. You were talking to the wild-haired Mazikin. It didn’t look like you were trying to capture her.”
“Sorry, my arm was kind of shattered at the time,” I snapped.
“Which was why I shot at her,” growled Henry. “I was trying to protect you.”
I looked away from him, and my gaze landed on Jim, who was still in the entryway, watching us warily. “See, Jim?” I called. “I’m a screwup, too. We should start a club.”
He gave me a small smile but said nothing. Henry glanced at Malachi and then leaned forward, recapturing my attention. “This isn’t funny, Captain. We need to know why you jumped in front of my bolt to save that Mazikin.” His expression changed, like a mask falling away, and in that instant, he allowed me to see the true effect of whatever horror and tragedy he carried inside his head. “I could have killed you. Do you know what that would have been like for me?”
“I understand,” I said calmly, determined not to take this out on him and make his suffering worse. I got to my feet, needing to move. “You don’t know me, Henry. So I get why you might be confused, why you might think I’d protect the creatures we’ve come here to exterminate.” I glared at Malachi. “But you know me better than that.”