The Wake Up (The Seers Book 1)
Page 19
Dude doesn’t waste time, a cold little corner of Lexi’s brain acknowledged. She recalled the briskness with which Dominic had collected her phone number in the hospital.
Today was a year to the day.
By the time Dominic had freed himself from the Cretan businessman’s clutches, Lexi was out the door and running to the pick-up. But he’d recognized her. He followed her now, just as she hoped he would.
Lexi was no stranger to nightmares. She knew how they played out. She’d either wake up or die. It had to end somehow.
Her hands and feet guided the car subconsciously. She led Dominic away, far from Zach. Back to El Greco. To her grandfather, who was coming or had already come to help her. To her grandfather’s house, essentially; that’s how she’d used to think of the factory before Gabriel had moved in with the rest of the family. To Grandfather’s house we go… Together they’d fight off the monsters. Yet Dominic had encountered Gabriel; seeing Pappou’s cap and Yin’s leash was proof enough of that. Had Dominic killed them both, man and wolf?
Rage and grief blinded her.
Something bolted across the road, startling her. Lexi swerved, sensing she couldn’t hit the brakes at the speed she was going. The pick-up drifted, turning full circle on the asphalt before the tires caught on a patch of ice. It veered out of her control and she screamed her frustration, twisting the steering wheel. The seat-belt bit into her chest as the vehicle rolled, tires flashing at the sky.
Lexi's head cracked against the windowpane and thrust her into darkness.
#OnceUponAFracture
“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
–Chuck Palahniuk
“Pain is a good thing,” her gym teacher had told her. “It means you are alive.” Twelve-year-old Lexi ignored him, cradling her fractured leg and bawling her head off in the middle of the playground. The gym teacher picked her up and carried her to the school clinic.
Anastasia came for her as quickly as she could, leaving her youngest daughter with Pappou. She drove Lexi to the hospital. In the car, she distracted her daughter by telling her a story about pain. “The Heart Abortion,” she called it.
It went something like this.
One day a broken man decided to try an experiment. But he was confused. He wasn’t sure who would be the best man for the job. The surgeon? The illusionist? The priest? The butcher?
He decided to try the butcher first. It would be the quickest way, and probably the cheapest. He walked into the butcher shop and explained exactly what he wanted the older man to do. The butcher listened, pale and wide-eyed. He gradually began to shake his head, faster and faster. He couldn’t contemplate someone even thinking such a question. “No!” he shouted, and showed the man out with a wave of his enormous cleaving knife.
The man gave the knife one last longing glance and walked out to the street. He decided to try the surgeon.
The doctor greeted him politely and welcomed him into his office. His eyes lit up at the envelope, stuffed with money, which the young man promptly dropped on his desk. “I’m listening,” he said with a smile. But when the man made his proposition, the doctor’s face reddened. “Sincere apologies,” he stammered, “but I won’t be able to do that. It’s against the Hippocratic Oath. And you, sir, should seriously reconsider.”
The man sighed in frustration, left the envelope behind, and stormed out of the office. He walked until he sighted a church. The smell of incense burned his nostrils when he strode through the door.
The priest glanced up and shook his head. “That’s not how we do things here,” he told him quietly.
“But I didn’t even ask you anything!”
“Your eyes did. I’ve seen a thousand such eyes. I feel your pain. But extracting your heart is not the answer. It will not extinguish your pain. It will amplify it.” He didn’t speak of heaven or hell. He just spoke the truth, which was worse.
The young man respected that. But he did not agree. He bowed his head and left.
The illusionist opened the door when the young man knocked. He was dressed in clothes that blended so well with his surroundings that the young man had to squint to ensure that his eyes in fact did see an old man in front of him. The old man smiled—such a strange smile, like that of the Cheshire cat; it appeared, disappeared, reappeared, disappeared. A parade of emotions flitted across the illusionist’s face. Were they real? Were they not? And did it even matter?
It did.
The young man realized that he preferred emotions over illusions. That was life. It was an ever-changing surface of pleasure and pain. And he if he tore his heart out, he would damn himself to apathy. Pleasure and pain complemented each other. You couldn’t have one without the other. They were needed to make one, well, one.
The young man tipped his hat and walked away without speaking. He did not want a heart abortion anymore. The illusionist watched him go. When the young man had rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, the illusionist glanced down at himself.
He could not tell where his skin ended and the shadows began.
Part Seven
And the realization comes, rather quietly, that you don't need to impress people all the time. In fact, you needn't try to impress them at all. You are what you are—with angels and devils riding your shoulders and braiding your hair—and the only real fight that exists is the one against yesterday's self. So go where you are celebrated, not just tolerated. Go where you are enough—where you are more than enough. Go where you can give, and keep giving. You know that you knew this already, but perhaps you could use a reminder. Go where your soul sings.
38 / Eulogy
The red-scarfed man found Lexi’s diary.
The entry for that day—the last day of February—was blank. She hadn’t had a chance to write it, though night already enshrouded the skies. Now, the man decided, she never would. He leafed through the pages. He read to her from them, as if reciting a premature eulogy, before tearing out each scrap of paper to the floor and setting it on fire.
Once upon a time, people took pride in normalcy; they preferred things in black and white, for salt and pepper are easier to digest than gray matter…
Lexi couldn’t hear him. She hadn’t woken up yet.
39 / Storms & Priestesses
“What makes night within us may leave stars.”
–Victor Hugo
The nurse adjusted the comatose woman’s IV, absently wondering how many years it was legal to keep a vegetated human alive. One mistake was all it would take to empty this bed. One forgotten IV. One unplugged cord. She studied the woman’s sallow face. It was nowhere near as beautiful as it once was. Eerily calm. Pale as a corpse’s. And it was befitting. Anastasia was one of the oldest members of this near-death clubhouse.
The nurse froze as the patient’s eyelids flickered.
Anastasia had been having the strangest dreams. There’d been snakes in the room, writhing and climbing on the bed beside her in Elias’ absence. Someone had brought in an earthquake graph maker, too, and set the machine nearby. Robed priestesses appeared sometimes, checking on the machines and smiling when they saw the drawings of constant zig-zags.
A steady palpitation of earthquakes, then—that was considered good in this world.
Sometimes Lexi came, too. She ran in and crept up to the bed as she used to as a child in the dead of night, when storms or nightmares woke her, when she wanted to be read to. Instead of her mother telling her stories, though, it was Lexi who now told stories to her mother. Others spoke of sleeping princesses and armored knights; Lexi spoke of angels and demons. She bridged the stories, one beginning where the prior had left off.
One day in the dream, Lexi stopped sharing stories. The storms no longer drove her to her mother’s bed. So her mother had continued the stories alone, picking up fragments of conversation from the robed priestesses and the clacking machines.
Anastasia’s eyes snapped opened. Her bony hand rose and seized the wrist of the nurse adjusting her IV. The nurse shrieked in surprise.
Her body unable to keep up with her heart, Anastasia began to convulse.
40 / Retaliation
“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil held a wishbone between them. And its snap split the world in two.”
–Laini Taylor
The first thing Lexi saw when she opened her eyes was a young woman’s bloodied form, lying on a gray stone floor, a few yards away from her. Her heart skipped a beat in fear at the unsettling sight, then swelled with sympathy. Although for some reason she could not see well out of her one eye, she realized the woman looked much like her, slender and dark-haired. And in a terrifying moment, she saw the swollen eye gazing back at her and registered the pain and realized that she gazed upon her own reflection.
Dominic’s face was the next thing she saw. In the mirror overhead—one of the many ceiling mirrors of El Greco, which now reflected a surreal scene of shattered mirrors and small piles of burning books and benches surrounding her—she could see the back of his horned head as it faced her. She recalled, as suddenly, how her pick-up had veered on the ice and upended before they turned on the road to the factory.
In the time it had taken her to revive, he’d done his share of destruction.
He sat near her on an upturned bucket, staring down at her. A brown leather notebook, all its pages torn out, dangled from his hands. She tried to focus on it, her vision blurring at intervals. He’d been talking as she regained consciousness, before she opened her eyes. Was that her journal? Had he been reading to her?
“Well, hello.” Dominic smiled. “Back from the dead already?”
Lexi swallowed. Her hands and legs were untied. When she tried to move a leg, however, she nearly blacked out from the pain. It felt broken; at second glance, it looked broken, too. Of course he hadn’t bothered looking for a way to contain her.
“Stupid of you, leaving your diary unattended. It has been rather fascinating to see your perspective on the situation.” Dominic tossed the remnants of the torn journal into the nearest fire and stood up, dusting off his pants. He walked around, keeping within her line of sight, snatching at the fire like a daredevil child zipping his finger through candlelight. His shoes crunched on the thousands of mirror shards, weeks’ worth of work crushed underfoot in mere moments. He’d missed the two she’d strapped onto two remaining beams of the half-open ceiling. “Have you missed me?”
“I see you’ve made yourself at home, hellfire and all.” Slowly so as not to spook him, making hideous grimaces of pain that she wished were less than half-pretense, Lexi struggled to sit upright.
“Oh yes,” he said cheerfully. “I suppose the flames will spread nicely by the time we’re finished here. It just wasn’t done right the first time.”
He thought the first fire had been a product of the government. Good. “You can destroy a place,” Lexi snapped, buying time as she inched away. “But you can’t kill an idea.”
Dominic began to laugh. He laughed until he ran out of breath, bending over and resting his hands on his thighs. “You should have joined the Party. Can’t kill an idea? That is the Hydra slogan. Chop off a head and twelve others will grow in its stead. We are more alike than you ever imagined, you know.”
“We are nothing alike.”
“I beg to differ. We chase ideologies. Yours died yesterday, though—that’s where we differ. Have you been playing the part of the walking dead as well as the sleeping dead? Have you not read the papers? Have you not walked the streets? We’ve all but annihilated your idea. All that’s left are a few scraps to burn.” He grinned. “A few people.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, laboriously writhing away from him. He watched her with the amused eyes of a cat toying with a rat, sensing how much pain she was in. But she didn’t want to get far. Her fingers fumbled on the ground behind her until she pricked herself on a small shard of glass. She kept inching back until her back touched a wall. “Even if you kill me, there will always be others.”
“Aww. That’s what your mother said when we interrogated her.” Dominic’s smile thinned to become a mirthless curve. “She was brave, I’ll give you that. But such an idiot. I see where you get it. She tried to fight us when we took your father away.”
Lexi froze. Her hands clenched of their own will. The glass shard bit her fingers and drew blood; she dropped it. “We?”
“I was the youngest of the recruits. I’d only joined the Party that summer. They trusted me, though. I was the one the agency assigned to your family.”
She fought to breathe, fought to keep her head clear, focusing on the anger that kept her blood flowing. “Assigned to my family? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Did you actually think I was infatuated by you, Lexi? Did you consider me your lover? Your soulmate?” He turned to face her, his eyes as empty of empathy as she’d ever seen them.
“You broke up with me,” she retorted, her brain struggling to keep up. She remembered the coincidence of their first meeting, how he’d been there right after she’d rushed headlong out of the hospital elevator, distraught. How he’d courted her so carefully, apathetic about her past and always avoiding personal questions on both ends. How he’d never met her family and how he’d known so much about them. “You couldn’t have done that if you were assigned to me…” Unless your assignment was over. Unless you couldn’t keep up the lie any longer. Unless your inkling of attachment or remorse threatened your leaders.
He knew of the Tzami because she’d told him. She’d never told him of El Greco. And yet here he was.
“Where is Pappou? And Yin?”
He turned his back on her so that she would not see the tumult in his eyes.
“You wonder why I’ve spared you? You had to survive to feel the pain. You had to decide how many more lives must end for your selfishness. Honestly, I feel a bit obliged to thank you.” Dominic extracted something from his pocket. He held it up and showed her the tapering shard of a spiraling black horn, barely longer than his hand. One end was the tip of the horn; the other end was jagged and blunt, as if it’d been sawn or cut off with a knife. “You were the one who introduced me to my greatest weapon. It seems the more you believe in these things, the more real they get. Doesn’t matter how often you trim them. They grow back.”
Lexi froze.
“Have you ever heard of a government keen on giving its people access to weapons of mass destruction? Of course not. It would go against the nation’s very constitutional mandate to protect its citizens.”
“You do not protect people by lying to them! You are not shielding them—you’re blinding them.”
“Weapons are dangerous when they’re in the wrong hands. But in the right hands… weapons can be life-altering tools.” He twirled the horn in his hand like a baton. “I have a proposition for you from the Party, addressed to the endangered species of mirror-makers. Come with me and work for us. Do this mirror-making business that you love. Use it for a better cause. Help us and we will spare your life.”
It sounded like a recitation. Surely it wasn’t the first time he’d given this spiel before. Lexi swallowed and forced the words into the air. “Where are they? Pappou. Yin.” They hung there for an agonizing second, trapped within the ephemeral smoke of her breath. “What did you do to them?”
He did not say.
She remembered the heartlessness of that night in the restaurant, how abrupt and cruel he’d been. And yet there had been moments of kindness and connection, intimacy, need. She’d labeled him bipolar, psychotic, mad… was he, indeed, a murderer, too? Of beasts or men, or did i
t matter? What came first, the monsters or the war? Did monsters create wars or did wars create monsters?
The devil turned his back on her, making a show of warming his hands above the flames. “Are you afraid, Lexi?” he asked. “You should be.”
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? People get angry when they’re scared. People get dangerous when they feel threatened. She stared at his face as he turned to her again, willing herself to see through it. No one is born with a mask.
“They assumed that you would not agree to simply obey me and stop your new day-job,” he said. “In which case, I promised them your head.”
“You promised me your heart.”
That got a laugh out of him. “It’s nothing like the hearts you used to draw for me on post-it notes.” He strode over to her, covering the distance between them in just a few paces, then straddled her and grabbed her shoulders, pinning her against the wall. She yelped from the pain he exerted with his legs against hers. He ignored it and leaned closer. “It’s shaped like a piece of horse shit. I should know; I’ve extracted so many.”
I need more time. “You remember the notes.”
“You keep forgetting none of that was real.” Dominic caressed her face as he murmured in her ear. “They’ve told me to bring back your head. They don’t want the rest.”
“You do.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “I warned you that retaliation has consequences. I wrote it to you once. I warned you twice. I could not tell you a third time.”