by J Bennett
We return to the office. Gabe still has his gun trained on Krugal.
“Granddaughter,” Tarren says. The reaction of Krugal’s energy confirms his guess.
“Oh, you sick fuck,” Gabe says.
“Who else?” from Tarren.
Krugal leans back, suddenly small within the wide curve of his chair. “My son is a disappointment. Always was. I sent him and his third wife to a beach in the Caribbean with a hundred grand in his pocket. He’ll drink it up in a month. But my granddaughter is different. Amber is sharp. Not just book smart, but cunning, clever. She can read people, twist them to get what she wants. Competitive. Passionate. She is worthy of the chance to excel. So I gave it to her.”
Krugal’s eyes linger on the half-finished ship inside the bottle. “It is love that propels us to do anything for our children. And perhaps our own need to leave something important behind.” He glances at Gabe’s gun and smiles. “Amber knew to run if anything happened. She’s gone.”
“You stay with him,” Tarren tells his brother. “Make sure he’s telling the truth. Find out who infected the girl. Names. Numbers. Anything relevant.”
“You want me to torture an old dude with cancer?” Gabe hisses, keeping his eyes and weapon on Krugal.
“Yes. And kill him when you’re done.”
“He’s human.”
“He’s on their side. If he lives, he’ll warn his contacts.” Tarren clutches Gabe’s shoulder, and they share a quick look. “This is the job. Use the tub. Wipe down everything when you’re done.”
Gabe gives a small nod and then fixes his gaze on Krugal. “Take Maya with you. She shouldn’t be here.”
Tarren says “Come on.” I follow him to the door and stop.
“Did you give her a choice?” I ask Krugal.
He looks back at me, hands clasping the arm rests of his chair so tight I can see the bones of his knuckles through the thin parchment of his skin.
“I asked her if she wanted to be better than all her classmates.”
Nothing snaps inside of me. No breakage. No boiling. It just comes, the anger. It’s there, filling me all the way up. I walk with purpose into Amber’s room and gaze at the picture of the cheerleaders giggling behind their pompoms. The anger grows bigger and bigger inside of me.
Tarren steps into the room behind me. He opens his mouth, no doubt to issue a rebuke about me wasting time.
“She’s at the park,” I tell him.
“She knows we’re coming. She wouldn’t go back there,” he counters. “We’re wasting time.”
I stare at the girl in the middle, counting her freckles like I sometimes count the stars. Green eyes, pointed nose. Poor little angel girl. Amber.
“She’s afraid and confused. The park is where she goes to think. She feels safe there.” I look at Tarren, and because he can’t possibly understand, I make it easy for him. “You got any better ideas?”
“No,” he admits. “The car is down the block.”
“It’ll be faster to cut through the houses on foot.”
“Maya, you can’t come with me.”
“I know.” I walk out to the balcony; let the misting rain cool my skin.
“You won’t be able to keep up.” I leap over the railing. My feet crush divots into the soggy ground. I run, kicking up muddy water, letting my legs propel me to their full speed. Wings would be nice, but there are other ways to fly.
Chapter 43
The rain is calming down when the houses give way to the wide open fields of Marymoor Park. Everything seems drowned, hunched over to wait out the night. Ryan always accused me of being overdramatic.
Flashlights cut through the branches, diluted with distance. I hear the soft sucking of boots pulling away from mud. The police are still searching through the night for Sunshine Bailey, unaware that her killer is a little redheaded cheerleader who could snap a grown man’s neck with her bare hands.
I look up into the trees, earning a fresh baptism. I know where she is.
I climb, hands digging into the tree trunk, pine needles combing into my hair. The branches tremble and shed pearl curtains of water when I step upon them. I am soaked and shivering, sucking on my torn fingertips as I jump from branch to branch. After a few slips, I kick off my shoes to gain better traction.
My new memory serves me well. I’m condemned to remember every laceration on Tarren’s body in precise detail and the glassy eyes of every animal I’ve murdered, but it doesn’t take me long to retrace my steps and find Amber.
I see her silhouetted against the sky — a dark shadow of a girl sitting on a preposterously high branch. It’s the same towering spruce tree where I found the swatch of flannel, and now I know what it came from. She’s wearing the same blue flannel pajama pants along with an old Strawberry Shortcake t-shirt soaked against her body.
The girl watches me as I climb. The wind has decided to rest its voice. The rain is a faint mist. This is peace by exhaustion.
“Hey,” I call.
“Leave me alone.” Her red hair is unbound and plastered around her head.
“But I just climbed up this huge tree.”
“This is you trying to be my friend.”
“No,” I pause, thinking. “I just want the record to show I climbed this huge tree, and it was hard.”
“Not that hard,” the girl says softly. “Not for me.”
I manage to balance on two thin branches a little below her.
“Amber?”
“Are you going to kill me?” Her voice is solemn but beneath it I catch a hiccup of fear.
I look up at her. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not actually supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say ‘no, of course not. I just want to talk.’”
“I do want to talk.”
Amber’s face is the false calm of exhaustion, the kind when you’ve wrenched your heart so hard you can’t feel anything anymore. Ryan with worms crawling out of his eyes.
“Maybe I deserve to die.” Her pale feet kick back and forth. “I’ve killed people.”
“I know.”
“I killed Amanda. I told her not to come over. Ever again. That I was moving to Tahiti to live in the wild. Amanda came over anyway. She’d made a card.”
“Oh,” and that’s all I say, because so often when the moment demands something brave or comforting or meaningful, the good words dissolve like ghosts from my mind, and what I’m left with are crumbs like “oh.”
“And Grandpa says I’m special now. We’re going to move, but I’ll kill people there too. I’ll just keep killing.”
“You can control it.”
“No, I tried.” Her hands fold into tight fists. Glowing fists.
“I know what you’re going through.”
The girl gives me an appraising look. “No you don’t. You’re muddled.”
“Muddled?”
Amber slides backward, so that she’s hanging upside down, knees bent around the branch. Her face is close to mine, and I feel the energy emanating from her. No, not from her — within her. The light pulses softly beneath her skin, someone else’s energy. She’s fed recently.
“I can see your energy, but it’s gray, and there’s not much of it. Gray like smoke,” she says.
“I don’t have an aura.”
“Yes you do. There’s still some human left in you.” She swings back and forth, thick clumps of hair coming loose from her back, hanging like tentacles. “You’re not as strong as me. I can tell. And you’re hungry. Really hungry.”
She’s right. Even as we’re talking, even as I’m trying to keep my balance on the branches beneath my feet, the song of hunger is tapping off each rib, echoing through every blood vessel.
“Grandpa says I need to accept this new reality. That I’m an angel, and angels are meant to be better than humans.”
“That’s not true.” My voice sounds weak, unconvincing.
“We’re stronger and smarter. I’ve memorized most of my history textbook.
Ask me anything about the Civil War. You might be surprised to know that the greatest killer of all was disease. Dysentery was rampant.”
“Amber, I think I can help you.”
“And that’s not all…” The girl lifts her legs and allows herself to fall. Her body is in motion. With a sharp, graceful twist — the type of grace that usually requires a harness and ropes or CG effects to accomplish — she’s suddenly standing in front of me, balancing on my branches as they bend beneath our combined weight. I know somewhere, somehow this is funny. My teddy bear and her Strawberry Shortcake grin at each other, hiding murder beneath wet fabric and cold skin. Two terrified hearts drum against each other.
She is taller than me, thicker and more muscled from her transformation, glowing with the vitality of a fresh kill.
“There’s also this.” Amber extends her hand, and a phantom force pushes me off my perch. I tumble backwards, enfolded in night and shrill wind for a horrifying second before crashing into a branch below. As I slip off, I wrap my arms around it and twist back on. The air isn’t getting into my lungs fast enough, and pain crashes cymbals up and down my arm.
“I’m getting stronger.” Amber looks down at me, tentacle hair framing her face. “At first I could only move little things. Flip open a book. Toss a tennis ball across the room. But each time I feed I can throw a little harder. Pick up heavier things.”
I scramble up as she leaps off her branches and lands on the edge of mine.
“I don’t think you can do that,” she says. Her face is too stoic for a child. Too cold.
“The killing gets easier too.” Amber takes a step forward. Phantom hands push me back a step toward the trunk. “I’m not evil, at least not yet. I feel bad about the people I’ve killed. There was a cop tonight. He probably had a family. A wife. Children. It tears me up inside. I think about Amanda all day. About her parents. I come up here to cry. I can’t be evil if I still cry, right?” Her voice warbles and pain echoes across her pale face. For a moment she stares at me. Beseeching. Lost like I have been lost ever since the day Grand stood in my path.
Amber takes another step forward. I hold against her power, but my feet are slipping against the wet bark.
“The thing is,” her voice is hardly above a whisper, “maybe Grandpa is right about the new elite. Maybe this is the way things are meant to be. A new and better race. Wolves and sheep. I don’t know about that. The only thing I do know about is the hunger. I have to feed, so that’s what I do.”
Amber closes the gap between us. “I don’t want to die, so I’m going to have to kill you instead.”
She leaps toward me, but I tear myself out of her power and jump to the next tree. Pine needles grab savagely at my hair as I pull myself up on a steady branch. Even as I’m scrambling for my balance, the branch trembles, and Amber is standing in front of me again. She is a checkered ghost — hidden where the shadows drape across her body and shining as the newly-revealed moon touches her through the branches. Before I can stand, her fingers wrap around my throat. She slams me down on the branch, and the night pulses strange colors in my eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into my ear. A tear trembles on her lower eyelid then makes the jump to her cheek. “You’re the first one I’ve gotten to apologize to.”
Chapter 44
I kick hard, connecting to Amber’s ribs. She hisses with pain and tightens her hold. I’m grappling with her wrist, trying to loosen her hand, but she’s stronger than me, much stronger. Thoughts are backing up in my mind, crashing into each other as the knots of panic tie off reason. I know I’m dying, and for some strange reason I only want to laugh. Her nails pierce my skin. I’m terrified and giggly. I get a knee into her stomach, and the hands loosen. I try to snatch a breath.
Amber pulls me up and slams me down against the limb again. This time the night blinks out. The world is quiet, the hunger gone…for a moment, and then I’m back. Confused. Twitching. Almost out of air. A little girl’s face peers over mine, long tentacles reaching for me. Why is she in pajamas? My hands drop away from her wrist. I should try to kick again, but my legs are too heavy. I can’t seem to understand what’s happening or really care anymore. The terror is loosening but whatever thoughts were backing up are gone. There is only a darkness that might not be the night sky. I can’t find the stars.
A hiss and the rain starts again. Not rain. The fingers on my neck relax. Amber is falling toward me, rolling off the branch. Then she’s gone, and I’m gasping for breath, tasting metal in my mouth. I hear her body smack against a branch and then a final thump as it hits the soft ground below. The stars are back in the sky. Maybe they never left. Head throbbing. Thoughts percolating but unfinished. Blood? Don’t fall.
A voice calls below. “Maya?”
I carefully twist over to my stomach and squint past the powerful flashlight beam. Tarren is peering up at me, the gun at his side.
* * *
The pain drums through my skull, big, powerful timpani beats. Small clips of time keep slipping away. Arms shaking, so weak, as I lower myself from the branches.
Gone.
On the ground, somehow, kneeling against the tree. Tarren’s eyes in mine.
“Is it raining again?” I murmur, because we need something to talk about, or this might be awkward. I have a strange croaking voice that I don’t recognize. My neck feels pulpy and bruised like rotted fruit.
Gone.
Tarren on his knees in front of me, saying something. That scar and the others concealed, but I can still see them. Secrets hidden in the scars or because of the scars.
“Huh?”
“I asked if you’re bleeding.” Tarren’s voice is soft. Something strange in his face.
“I think it’s hers. Are those my shoes?” A pair of muddy sneakers are tied together at the laces and slung over his shoulder. “Why did you steal my shoes?” The song. He’s too close, and there’s this expression on his face.
Gone.
“Come on Maya, your head. Did you hit your head?” His voice going deeper like the creases across his forehead.
“Of course not. I was very good about my head. The tree did though.” Nothing from Tarren. Doesn’t he think this is funny? Won’t he ever smile?
Tarren reaches out, hesitates, then touches my head lightly, running his fingers over the surface of my scalp until I hiss in pain.
“Ah,” he says.
Gone.
Fingers in my hair, feather touches, but it still hurts.
“I feel the contusion, but there’s no blood,” Tarren says. “That’s good.”
And suddenly I’m so afraid, because I can’t be losing time. Not when Tarren is this close to me with his energy and its colors and the song making me so crazy that my thoughts are scattered like puzzle pieces; broken like glass shards; splattered like raindrops; scrambled like eggs; spotty like a Dalmatian; far, far away like the stars hidden behind the clouds. Not when I’m fighting each and every second with all the reserve I’ve got left.
“Tarren, please,” I cry out, too loud. I twist my head away from his hands and scramble backwards into the solid tree at my back.
Tarren flinches and drops his hands. “Oh, of course,” he says, and his face is changing. The creases come out, and his mouth sets. Whatever was there before, the thing that I would have sworn was concern if it hadn’t been perched upon that particular face, is gone.
My thoughts are coming back, stitched crooked but good enough. I instinctively press my palms into the ground, groaning as mud seeps between my fingers. Amber is sprawled a couple feet away. Her arm is twisted behind her, and she looks like a broken doll some careless child dropped and forgot to put away.
“You killed her,” I say, turning back to Tarren.
“Yes. She clearly could not control her hunger.”
I take note of this slight shift. Tarren could have said because she was an angel. Maybe it’s all the same to him. Maybe not. His eyes are all dark and hooded now, and he’s being
more careful with his energy. I’ve tipped him off too much about what I can see.
I look at the girl, who was still a girl even when she wasn’t. Monster and victim. “What now?”
“I bury her.”
“Oh. Okay. Where?”
“Don’t worry about that. You’re going back to the motel.”
If I were brave, I would say “no, you shouldn’t do it alone.” I would accompany Tarren into the night. I would help him wrap up the broken, bloody body in tarp. We would wrestle the wet ground out of the way with our shovels and lower the child into a shallow ditch. If I were brave, I would say something good and meaningful to Amber before we pushed the sloppy mud upon her. Maybe I could forgive her, or at least tell her that I really do understand about the hunger and the things it made her do. These same lures dance in my head, so close to reality that a single slip will propel them from my mind into a living nightmare.
But I am not brave. I am tired and wet and numb. I feel like a little girl myself as I sit in the car waiting for Tarren to emerge from the woods carrying his tarp-wrapped burden. When he does, I notice the slightest dip in the vehicle as he lays her body down in the trunk.
Tears slip down my face as we head back. Tarren is silent about this and the lipstick, which is no longer on the back window, and about everything else I have done wrong tonight.
I lean against the doorframe, opening and closing my eyes, trying to figure out which one is less painful for my throbbing head. I try to swallow then stop trying. Instead, I wonder about the strange expression I caught on Tarren’s face. About why he got so close to me without keeping a hand on his gun.
Gone.
We are at the motel. The car idles. Tarren waits for me to get out. I turn my head and stare at my brother. Tired and strong. Smart, bristling, cut to shreds. Handsome and hidden. So angry. Afraid of living most of all.
I decide it’s time to throw a battering ram at the wall between us, see if I can wend some cracks through the thick mortar.
“You remembered me,” I say.
“You were unarmed. I couldn’t let…”
“When I was a baby. You remembered.”