The Warrior

by Victoria Scott

  Charlie and I fumble into the room we’ve claimed as ours. My chest feels like it’s engulfed in flames, and other parts of my body do, too. Ever since Aspen stayed in hell, Charlie has slept in Annabelle’s room. She said it wasn’t right that we enjoyed each other while our friend was in such a terrible place. I understood what she was saying, but I’m not sure I believed her reasoning. Maybe what she said is true. Or maybe it’s that she blames me for Aspen remaining in hell.

  Charlie stops before the bed, and for a moment, I miss the flush of her cheeks. The color that bloomed in them before the soul contract made her perfect. If she was her old self, I’d be able to see the excitement written across her face.

  We’re both breathing hard, and our eyes never leave each other’s faces. She reaches out, and my body shudders in anticipation. Her palm comes to a rest over the center of my chest. It’s like she’s feeling for my soul, like if she concentrates hard enough, she can cradle it in her hands. The dead aren’t supposed to have souls, not even liberators, and I sometimes wonder what it means that I’ve been allowed to keep mine.

  But right now, all I can think about is Charlie standing before me. I groan against the feather-light feel of her touch. And before I can stop myself, before I even know what I’m doing, a slight burning smell wraps its arms around us.

  Long, black wings slide from my back. I arch them over Charlie and use them to pull her closer. She curls into herself and lays her head over my heart. My arms wrap around her waist, and I feel inky feathers brush against my own skin.

  I nudge her cheek until she lifts her face, and then I close my mouth over hers. Something changes in our kiss. Before, leading up until this moment, our kisses were hungry. Now they are tender. I pull my arms out from around her and use them to clasp her face, my thumbs brushing the smooth skin beneath her eyes. Charlie’s hips press against me, and I almost lose my grip on this gentle moment, almost allow the monster inside of me to devour her whole.

  She pulls back suddenly. “I should go to bed.”

  Her words blast like shrapnel inside my head. I don’t want her to leave this room, don’t want to sleep another night without her. But I won’t push her to stay.

  She runs a hand through my hair, and I close my eyes against the sensation. Then she touches a place on my outer arm. She fingers the tattoo there, the one of a tree rising from my elbow and branching over my shoulder. Her hand lingers there too long, and it’s as if she’s telling me something. “You’re worthy of the cuff you’re wearing, Dante. He believes in you, even if you don’t.”

  My wings open on impulse, and I step back as if stricken.

  I don’t know where that came from, and I’m not sure I understand what she means. We talk about a lot of things, but my lack of heavenly dedication isn’t one of them. She’s always known that everything I do is for her and not because of a higher calling. And she’s never once brought up my nonexistent relationship with Big Guy.

  Charlie kisses her fingers and touches them to my lips. I watch her as I would a lion in tall grass, with a mixture of intrigue and fear. How can her words affect me so much?

  She leaves through the bathroom that connects this room with Annabelle’s room. I don’t understand why she went from sexy time to that. Charlie still dwells on Aspen being gone, that I know. I dwell on it, too. But what was that about him believing in me?

  What a bunch of crap. I mean, I love the girl, but that’s manure of the smelliest kind.

  I consider taking a cold shower or maybe plunging myself in a tub of ice, but opt instead to try and sleep off my craving for Charlie. With the smallest of smiles, I decide there’s enough pent-up desire in this house to set off an atom bomb.

  Once I’m in bed, and I’ve calmed myself down, I turn over her words again. Big Guy believing in me—what bull. I mean, next she’ll be telling me he actually cares. Like, that Big Guy loves me and crap. I’ll tell you one thing right now, I don’t care how merciful they say he is, or how loving he can be, I know the truth. No one forgives that easily, especially someone they say is all-knowing. I’ve done enough rebellious things that can be seen with the naked eye to make a prison warden blush. And this guy is supposed to know our thoughts, too? Charlie says he believes in me. Thinks I’m worthy of a liberator cuff.

  False.

  I wipe a hand across my brow and then tug at my hair. I toss onto my right side and throw my fist into the pillow beneath my head. Then I flip onto my left side and grit my teeth.

  Nothing helps.

  I can’t get the damn thought out of my head.

  That Big Guy could care about me after the life I’ve led.

  Somewhere late into the night, I finally succumb to sleep. When I open my eyes again, Aspen is waiting for me.

  6

  You’re Already Dead

  “What took you so long?” Aspen takes a drag on a cigarette. When she exhales, smoke drifts out of her mouth like fingers.

  “Had trouble falling asleep,” I answer.

  Aspen is sitting on a boulder. Her knees are pulled against her chest, and she’s gazing out over a dark chasm. I walk to the ledge and glance down. The expanse goes on forever, and gray spikes line the floor of the crater. Along the chasm’s teeth, bluish-black fog swirls. The effect is like staring into the mouth of a great white shark.

  I’ve been seeing Aspen every night since I left her in hell. Though the last couple of nights, the dreams have felt more real and have lasted longer. I haven’t spilled to anyone about my seeing Aspen in my sleep, and I don’t intend to. But truth be told, she’s the real reason I believe the key to our success lies in the scroll.

  “Why are we always somewhere like this?” I ask.

  “You tell me,” she says with a wry smile. “We’re in your head.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way, Aspen,” I say. “It feels like we’re in yours.”

  Her smile grows, and suddenly the world around us changes. Now the sky is so blue it feels like we’re swimming in it. There are no clouds, not even a sun. Just a canvas of blue so bright it sings. Though Aspen is grinning, I can see the intense concentration in the fold between her eyes. Her shoulders fall like she’s tired of holding the ruse, and a long, jagged line forms across the sky. It shatters without a sound, and pieces of blue fall to the earth like shards of glass. The sky is dark again; the chasm has swallowed all the blue and buried it beneath its belly.

  “I miss you, Aspen.” I sit down next to her on the boulder. Aspen hands over her cigarette, and I take a drag. Her hair, black as death, falls over her shoulders and stretches toward her hips. The diamond stud glitters in her nose, and her hands are embraced by green, fingerless gloves.

  “Let’s not talk about that.” Aspen takes her cigarette back and pulls on it. She exhales, and as smoke streams from her nostrils, she says. “Tell me about Charlie. How is she?”

  “She pretends everything will work out, but I know better. She can’t stop thinking about you.” My stomach clenches. “I can’t, either.”

  Aspen points at me with her cigarette. “You know the drill. If you start that again, I’ll leave. What’s done is done. It was my decision.”

  “You mean I’ll leave,” I say. “It’s my dream, right? My head?”

  Aspen smiles again. “You wouldn’t ever know, would you?”

  I shake my head. “’Spose not.”

  When I glance at Aspen’s hair again, there are tiny black spiders crawling up and down the length of it. It looks a little like she’s underwater, her hair rippling with the tide. One scurries across her cheek. I try to brush it away, but it disappears inside her ear before I can. Aspen never even flinches.

  “Aspen there are fucking spiders in your hair,” I say. But even as I say it, I’m not that concerned. It’s only a dream. She’s told me time and again.

  I never quite believe her.

  “Have you learned the words?” she asks.

  “You mean on the scroll?”

  She doesn’t answer. She nev
er answers that question. In a blast of movement, Aspen’s head snaps in my direction. She opens her mouth and speaks a phrase I’ve long memorized. “You’re already dead. Go back to sleep.”

  I don’t bolt upright in bed. I don’t even open my eyes. I just wake up and lay there in my bed, alone, imagining I feel a spider crawling across my knee.

  …

  When I can’t fall back asleep, I get up from bed and pull on a t-shirt. Then I wake Charlie and tell her about the dream. I’m not sure why I decide to now after keeping it to myself for so many nights. But the war has been signaled, and she’s a part of this war. Also, she’s my girlfriend. The last time I tried to shield her from harm, she ended up in Zack’s brutal grasp.

  She listens quietly until I reach the end of the story. “So you think she’s talking about the scroll?”

  I nod.

  “It makes sense. Kraven wouldn’t be bringing in that guy if he didn’t believe the same thing. I wish you’d told me sooner, though, Dante.”

  “So you don’t think I’m crazy?”

  Charlie holds up her hands. “I stopped believing in crazy when blue lights shot from my hands.” She laughs. “Or maybe when a boy crawled through my window at night and showed me how his cuff could turn him invisible.”

  I do it now to hear her laugh again, then I snake my invisible arms around her.

  “Hey, not fair.”

  I shake off my shadow and stand up. “I want to talk to Oswald while everyone is asleep. See what he knows. You up for it?”

  “Oh, we really shouldn’t.” She says this, but she’s also smiling and pulling on a hoodie the Quiet Ones gave me.

  Looking at Charlie, it’s hard to breathe. Because as much as we smile and joke, we both know time together is precious. We don’t know how much longer we’ll be safe, especially with collectors popping up unexpectedly. Or with sirens hovering outside. Or with war only two weeks away.

  I hug her once, quickly, to mask my fear and satiate my hunger to keep her against me forever, and then we leave the room. Kraven said he gave Oswald the basement area to study the scroll, so that’s where we go. We run into several humans on the way there, all who look like zombies walking the crude mansion. Their eyes are blurry from lack of sleep, and I wonder if I gave them a bowl of brains, if that wouldn’t perk them right up.

  I knock once on a door that’s half off its hinges. The Hive is nothing if not built to last. When no one answers, I push the door open, half expecting Playboy bunnies to be hopping around Oswald’s silk robe collection. Since it’s the middle of the night, Oswald might be sleeping, and if he is, we’re going to seem really unstable tiptoeing around his bed while he slumbers.

  There are more lamps in the room than I have ever seen in my short, mind-blowing life. Some are floor lamps and others lounge on desks and shelves and boxes. A few stand without shades, naked for the world to see. Others have shades that are too big, or too small, and some that are just right. The bases color the room in different hues, and the bulbs cast a maddening light across the entire area. I change my mind on the whole sleeping thing. There’s no way someone can get shut eye up in here.

  “Whoa,” Charlie says from beside me. “That’s a lot of light bulbs.”

  “I expected you two would come,” someone says.

  I spin on bare feet and spot Oswald standing near one of two desks. There’s a mischievous glint in his eyes.

  “And so we have,” I respond. “We’ve got questions for you.”

  Oswald motions to mismatched chairs, and Charlie and I sit down. The old man sits across from us and tucks his robe around his frail frame so his junk doesn’t fall out.

  No sense in beating around the proverbial bush. “What else have you found on the scroll?”

  “Why?” Oswald picks up a book from a table near his left arm. He flips it open and pretends to peruse the pages. The action tells me he’s unaffected I’m here. In actuality, though, I think he’s anxious. “Is it important?”

  I narrow my gaze. “No, it’s just I’d like to know.”

  “Kraven says you’re one of his best pupils,” Oswald says to me without looking up, his voice shaky.

  I bounce between feeling prideful that Kraven said best, and anger that he thinks of me as a pupil. “Doesn’t surprise me. I’m pretty gangster.”

  Oswald finally glances up. “Dante Walker, you’re about as gangster as Will Smith.”

  “What’s on that scroll?” I demand.

  “Why?” he counters, his confidence blooming. “It’s just a piece of paper.”

  “Nice robe, Hefner. Where’s your Viagra?”

  “Nice attitude, tough guy. Mommy issues?”

  I stand up.

  So does Oswald.

  “Who are you really?” I growl.

  “Just an old man with a flair for fashion.”

  “Covering your wrinkly ass in a bed sheet isn’t fashion,” I say. “It’s called giving up.”

  “Who are you, Dante?” Oswald says.

  “I’m whatever Kraven says I am.”

  “No,” Oswald says carefully. “You’re a collector turned liberator. You’re a demon with wings who’s in love with a savior.”

  “Oh, damn,” Charlie says from her seat. “Pow, pow!”

  7

  Language of the Dead

  Oswald sets down his book and appears nervous again. It’s like he had a streak of confidence and now it’s extinct.

  “Did I get that about right?” he asks, his gaze averted.

  I struggle to catch my breath, my jaw grazing the dust-covered floor. I suspected the old dude knew more than Kraven thought he did. But now I know, know. I glance at Charlie to gauge her reaction, but she doesn’t seem all that surprised. “That was pretty baller, Oswald.”

  He smiles to himself but still doesn’t meet my gaze. The old man shuffles across the room to one of the desks and straightens a stack of papers.

  “Do you know everything?” I ask. His back is to me, but I see the way his head bobs. “You know who we work for and what we’re trying to do?” He nods. “You know about Aspen and where I went with her?”

  “I know everything,” he confirms.

  Charlie stands up. “Do you know about my ability?”

  “Yep,” he answers. “That, too.”

  “Who told you?” I ask.

  Oswald checks the door like he’s ensuring no one is there. He should try listening instead. Those honking ears of his couldn’t possibly miss anything. “Kraven told me.”

  My brow furrows. “Why did he lie to us then?”

  Oswald shrugs.

  I step closer, and he fidgets with the papers even more. They’re about as straight as they’re going to get is what I want to tell him. “So why did you tell us?”

  The old guy turns his body so that he faces us head on. “What you did to try and save her soul…that was very brave.” He motions toward Charlie. “I told Kraven that he should make you both aware of who I really was.”

  “And who are you really?” Charlie asks.

  “I’m a scholar. That part is true. He just didn’t tell you that I already believed in all of this, in all of you, before he found me.”

  My stomach twists thinking about the collector who nearly attacked Charlie earlier tonight. “You spoke about unlocking words on the scroll. Something about doorways.”

  Oswald chews his nails. “They’re called vultrips. They act as portals between hell and earth. As I understand it, there is only one entrance to hell that you are familiar with.”

  I nod, remembering Aspen and me spilling our blood onto the roots of a spruce tree, and then watching as a black hole stretched open.

  “There have been times in the past where those of your kind, those who wear the dargon and call themselves collectors, were able to step onto earth from any point.” Oswald pulls on one of his monstrously big earlobes with his monstrously long arm. “You may remember some of these times from your history lessons: The Bubonic Plague, the Gr
eat Depression, the rise of the Third Reich.”

  A cold sweat breaks across my chest. “How does it happen?” I ask. Oswald’s gaze flicks across the room wildly. He doesn’t want to tell us. “Answer me, old man.”

  The guy shuffles his feet and avoids my eyes and then… And then he starts turning in a circle.

  “What are you doing?” Charlie asks.

  Oswald turns a little faster. “Oh. Oh, I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything.”

  I’ve seen nervous tics before—Charlie’s cheeks turning red is one of them—but this is something else.

  I grab the guy’s shoulders and stop him in place. “First off, don’t do that again. The turning in circles thing? Super weird. Second, tell us what you know. The answer is obviously weighing on you.”

  Oswald shivers in my grasp, and I let go, giving him space to breathe. I can’t believe this is the same dude who told me to my face that I have mommy issues.

  “There’s a traitor among you,” he whispers.

  My legs go numb. “What?”

  “Who?” Charlie asks at the same time.

  “In order for the vultrips to be opened, someone from the other side must speak the words. I don’t know who.”

  “A liberator?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “It can be anyone, but the words must be spoken with treachery in their heart. Scholars believe there are a great many things these words can do that we don’t know about, but this we do.”

  Traitor. The word bounces around my head like a bullet ricocheting inside a steel room. “What are these words? What do they say?”

  Oswald strides toward the second desk. He touches a glass box and gazes inside to what must be the scroll. “There’s a dead language demons and angels speak. Some of what is hidden on this scroll requires those words to be revealed.” He turns to me and Charlie. “It’s the same language used to open vultrips.”

  Charlie takes a step in his direction. “How do we stop it from happening?”

  “Find the one whispering them open,” he replies.

  “What will you do?” I ask.

  “Me?” He touches a finger to his saggy man boob. “I’ll try to reveal the rest of what remains on this scroll. I’ve unlocked some—the part about the vultrips—but there’s more here, and I need that in order to help in your impending war.”