Arianna Rose: The Gathering (Part 3)

by Martucci, Christopher

  “Honestly Arianna, I do not know the answer to that question,” Desmond answered and looked as confused as she felt. “All I do know is that we need to stop the attack on the school. It cannot happen,” he said firmly and his eyes had hardened with his words.

  Arianna agreed, and there was only one solution that came to mind. “Let’s go now,” she said determinedly. “Let’s go to Scott’s house and kill them now before they ever have a chance to set foot on campus tomorrow morning.”

  “I thought of that too, believe me. That would be the simplest way. But there are other witches involved, others who have been recruited for this day, for their cause. They are a part of it. I don’t know who they are. They were not named.”

  “Then what do we do?” she asked, desperation seeping from her veins.

  “The only option we have that I can see is to stop it as it happens.”

  “What, so we’re going to wait until tomorrow?” Arianna asked incredulously. “That sounds way too dangerous.”

  “I know. I agree. But what other choice do we have? If we go now, we risk running into more of our kind than we can handle at once, and with powers that are unknown to us. I don’t know about you, but I think that puts us in more danger than picking them off one by one tomorrow morning.”

  Arianna did not know what the hell she thought. She just knew the attack must never happen. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she agreed with him halfheartedly.

  “They are planning to lock everyone in the school after the first bell rings and everyone is in their first-period class. When the bell rings to end first period, it will begin.”

  “So we have a little more than forty minutes in between to stop them, is that what you’re saying?” she asked dejectedly.

  She wished she could close her eyes and will it away, will all of the madness away. But she could not.

  “Yes, and hopefully we will be able to stop them without being seen,” he said.

  She had not considered the fact that they needed to be careful for reasons beyond general safety. The task before them grew increasingly difficult with each detail that was revealed.

  “What is going to happen? What do we do?” she asked.

  “We’re going to have to kill them all, and if my father is there, we are going to have to kill him, too. Actually, you will have to kill him,” Desmond spat.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “His powers are too strong. Mine are hardly a match for his. But you, you have untapped powers that will surpass his and mine combined. You will have to release them, though. You will have to be the Sola, just as you were with Howard Kane.”

  She remembered the transformation when she’d killed Kane. However, the change had been spontaneous. Intense emotions had fueled it. Loss, grief, and pain unlike any she’d experienced until that point had spawned a veritable fire within her. She wondered whether she could do it a second time; unleash the great beast that slept within her. But with Desmond at risk, all doubt left her. She would be able to. She would not risk losing him ever. She would let her love for him be the catalyst. Her profound love for Desmond would spark the Sola’s return.

  Though her spirits were lifted somewhat by the confidence she was feeling, one factor remained.

  “What about George?” she asked. “He can block my power.”

  “He is just a teenager by mortal years and extremely young and inexperienced by warlock years. He cannot stop us both. I will place myself behind him, teleport there without him ever knowing, and take him out first,” Desmond promised, and by the resolute set of his jaw, Arianna did not doubt he would deliver.

  Arianna felt the weight of the world resting squarely on her shoulders. The task ahead of her was insurmountable. She was terrified of the responsibility.

  “Don’t be afraid, Arianna,” Desmond whispered as if he’d heard her thoughts. “You can do this. You will do this. You will lead everyone as they were truly meant to be led. Stopping this attack will show our kind the truth. It will show them the true meaning of your existence.”

  His words, his faith in her, touched a part of her that had never been touched before. He believed in her unwaveringly. He saw in her what no one else had ever seen. He saw goodness and strength. He saw his present as well as their future, together. Desmond was her beacon, the light that guided her in dark waters.

  She did not bother responding to him verbally. Words were incapable of conveying all that she felt for him. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He pulled her close to him, so close that she felt the steady beat of his heart. The sound of it, along with the heat of his body, sent a wave of relief over her. It washed away her fear and doubt, and she allowed her body to fall into his. She pulled back briefly, just long enough to gaze into his eyes. They were matching pools of tropical water, warm, clear, bottomless. She found herself lost in them.

  “I love you,” he said and brought his forehead to hers.

  “I love you, too,” she breathed.

  “We will survive this,” he promised her.

  She hoped both of them would, and knew she would sacrifice her life for him. But she would not allow him to do the same for her.

  Yes, you will survive this, she thought as she smiled and nodded at him.

  He closed the small distance between them and drew her against his chest again. He sunk back slowly until his back rested against the pillows. They spent the remainder of the night wrapped in each other’s arms as they lay in her bed. They clung to each other and the fleeting feeling of safety, fighting sleep, for as long as they could.

  Chapter 20

  The low, irregular grumble of her mother’s Toyota was the background music for Arianna’s frantic thoughts as she waited outside Hallowed Hills High School. Desmond sat beside her, his large hand wrapped around hers, and was the only thing anchoring her to any semblance of sanity.

  Neither of them had spoken in the last ten minutes. There was not much left to say. Their purpose was clear. They knew what they needed to do.

  They’d only arrived twenty minutes earlier, but the time spent waiting and watching for the henchmen of the apocalypse felt like eternity. Not that she was at all eager to see them. She just wanted to identify who the enemies were as opposed to allowing them to remain phantom, faceless entities menacing her thoughts. So they continued to survey the campus.

  She looked out her window at the pristine landscape. In the bright early-morning sunlight, the snow glistened as if crushed diamonds, not snowflakes, had fallen from the sky a day earlier, sparkling and glittering dazzlingly. The beauty of it was a sharp contrast to the ugliness that lurked on the horizon.

  Evil, putrid and primal, breathed its foul breath down the necks of everyone that milled about, poised and positioned to strike. Students and faculty made their way into the building, smiling and chatting, oblivious of the fact that mankind teetered on the brink of a great precipice and that a group of witches and warlocks expected her to stand at their back and pitch them over it to their demise. She could not conceive of the mercilessness that was expected of her. It was unconscionable.

  Suddenly, the air felt too warm, too thick to breathe, and the collar of her shirt felt too tight around her neck. She felt as if she’d been dropped in a pit of quicksand and it was rising around her and spilling over her chin. Her entire body felt overheated. Her cheeks blazed and her breath came in shallow pants as her heart sprinted. She scanned the faces of the people in the front parking lot. Some smiled, some made silly faces while others looked serious, yet all of them held a common bond. They were all innocent people just going about their lives, working, attending school. They were neither deserving of nor prepared for the hell that was about to rain down on them and end their lives on Earth.

  Arianna felt tears begin to burn the back of her eyelids. What if they were too late? What if plans had changed and there was no chance of stopping the intended attack? She wondered. Too many what-ifs existed.

  The shrill peal of a bell made her
jump and signaled the start of first period. Arianna turned to Desmond and was about to ask, “What do we do now, just go in?” when a rusted and dented black passenger van rumbled into the lot. It parked on the far side of the space, close to the school building, but far enough so that few cars were parked near it.

  Awareness slithered down her spine with serpentine deliberateness. Desmond gave her hand a gentle squeeze and she knew he’d felt the same sensation she had. Agnon’s reinforcements had arrived.

  They watched with bated breath as both the driver’s side door and the passenger side doors opened simultaneously. Arianna gasped aloud when she saw what climbed out of each. Four people in all exited. None of them stood even the slightest chance of going unnoticed among the students and faculty.

  The first of them circled the van, looking over his shoulder so often she was surprised someone had not called the police for his suspicious behavior alone. Then, when Arianna saw his face, saw all of him, she was genuinely shocked. Long, dark, greasy-looking hair draped to the middle of his back. His facial piercings reflected the sunlight and glinted dangerously. An equally frightening-looking man joined him at the rear of the van. Thick and barrel-chested, the man had a smoothly shaven head adorned with what looked like large, fanged snakes tattooed on it. Earrings trailed up his earlobe and one among the many had a chain that linked to a piercing in his nostril.

  “Oh my god,” she breathed and Desmond drew his breath in sharply. “Do you know them?”

  “No. Those are not the kind of warlocks I know. Those men do not walk among my people,” he said and his words were like ice that penetrated her core, chilling it completely.

  “What was Scott thinking, bringing those freaks here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know Scott, but those mutants look like the work of my father.”

  She was about to ask why and how his dad knew such people, but the other two made themselves visible.

  A woman, the only female with them, emerged from the shadows. Long, bedraggled hair hung to the small of her waist, dry and frizzy. Her skin, a ghastly ashen hue, was as wrinkled as a woman well past her seventieth year of life, yet her body was lithe and youthful looking. She wore jeans with the knees torn out and a tight, cropped top that exposed her midriff. A slender snake tattoo wound around her waist like a permanent belt. The fact that the temperature hovered below the freezing mark and there was snow on the ground and she was wearing a half-shirt was the least of her problems. She would pass for a teenager about as well as the Monopoly man would pass for Justin Bieber. Another man joined them as well. He, too, had long, unkempt hair that fell past his shoulders, only his was a shade of blonde Arianna had never seen. Yellow so bright it bordered on neon was the color of his hair. He wore a sleeveless denim jacket and jeans, both tattered and dirty looking. He gazed out, his eyes searching the parking lot. When he did, she saw that his face was tattooed with a similar image to the bald man and the woman. Snake tattoos wound their way up his neck and ended at his forehead, their opened mouth and fangs primed to strike near his eyebrows.

  “What the hell?” Arianna said quietly. “What’s with the snakes? The bald guy has them on his head, the woman has one on her waist, and the guy with the yellow hair has them on his face for heaven’s sake.”

  “I don’t know. It could be the symbol of their coven,” he guessed.

  “Or their sick mascot,” she mumbled.

  The four freakish-looking strangers lingered near the rear of the van, glancing all around them like drug addicts in desperate need of their next fix. The bald one opened the rear doors and they all busied themselves, reaching and digging. When they stopped digging and leaned away, they each held lengths of thick chains equipped with locks.

  “Oh my god, it is definitely them. This can’t be happening. It’s like a scene from a nightmare,” Arianna said.

  “We have to stop them before they hurt a single person,” Desmond said, his voice filled with an urgency she’d never heard before. “Arianna,” he turned and faced her. “I know you can teleport like me. Have you ever made yourself invisible?” he asked and his question would have seemed preposterous months earlier. Now, however, it seemed anything but.

  “No. I’ve never tried, though,” she answered and knew that, of late, any supernatural feat she’d attempted, she’d succeeded at executing.

  “All you need to do is envision yourself as one with the air around you. Picture yourself as weightless and buoyant,” Desmond continued, but she was too busy concentrating on the sensation she was experiencing to focus on his words any longer. She felt her entire body tingle and prickle, the same way her foot or hand would when it fell asleep, before she felt herself fade. Her arms and legs became insubstantial, like flimsy fabric flowing in a gentle breeze, then the rest of her followed suit.

  “Very good,” she heard Desmond’s voice echo around her. “Now, continue to see yourself as one with the air, but envision yourself inside the school. You will be using two powers at the same time, layering them. I know you can do it,” he encouraged her. “You and I are going to teleport inside the school while maintaining our invisibility.”

  “And then what?” Arianna heard her voice fill the car.

  “We will each go to the doors and take them out. They will likely split up to lock the doors.”

  “Okay,” she said and acknowledged their simple plan.

  “Just remember, you have to reappear before you can attack them,” he cautioned. “Your powers will be too weak from sifting and upholding the invisibility to hurt them, much less kill them.”

  Arianna started to nod then remembered he could not see her. There were so many rules regarding her powers, rules she was simply unaware of. What if she screwed up? What if she discontinued her invisibility too late and Agnon’s freaks were able to hurt some of the students or staff?

  The what-ifs began to plague her again. She felt her focus waver and her hand reappeared briefly, flickering like the picture on an old television set without its antennas.

  “Arianna, are you okay?” Desmond asked concernedly.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said.

  She forced herself to center her thoughts on remaining invisible, but worry still niggled at her brain. Hundreds of lives were at stake. She did not have time for self-doubt. Her mother and Luke flashed in her memory and made her heart clench. But the pain strengthened her resolve. She would not see more innocent people die. She’d already let too many fall to dark forces. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, filling her lungs with air as light and insubstantial as she wished to be. She felt herself merge with it.

  She looked down and saw that her hand no longer flickered, and she felt herself fade away.

  “Are you ready?” Desmond asked her.

  “Yes,” she said and meant it.

  “We will teleport into the school. You need to go directly to the rear entrance and I will go to the entrance on the west side. Don’t say a word. Just kill them,” he said somberly. “We do not know what powers they have, but I’m guessing that if my father chose them, he chose them for a reason. They must be powerful.”

  Three warlocks and one witch, whose powers were undetermined but likely great, needed to be caught off-guard and killed. No problem, right? Desmond seemed to think so, or at least he gave her that impression. She wished it were that simple. But her body screamed otherwise. A voice inside her, the voice of loss and reason, instinctively balked at what they were about to do, balked at her confidence. She could not bear to lose another person she loved. She could not bear to lose Desmond.

  “Please be careful, Desmond,” she pleaded. “I cannot lose you again, I cannot survive it.”

  “I will be,” he assured her. “You be careful too. I cannot live without you either.”

  She wished she could hug him, wished she could melt against his strong chest and hear the steady beat of his heart. But she knew time did not exist for such an indulgence. She was about to say good-bye and wish him good luck when
an unexpected phenomenon occurred. For a moment, she felt Desmond’s warmth surround her. The fine hairs on her body rose along with goose bumps, the same reaction she had when he held her. Though she could not feel him physically, she sensed him all around her, felt his soul link with hers. She breathed deeply and smelled a spicy, leathery scent, his masculine scent.

  “I love you, Desmond,” she breathed and felt his presence slowly ebb.

  “I love you, Arianna,” she heard his voice whisper through her, and then he was gone.

  She did not get to say a proper good-bye to him and would never forgive herself if he were killed.

  Pushing back fearful thoughts, she sifted. White light filled her field of vision and cold raced through her veins. She pictured herself standing in front of the rear doors of Hallowed Hills High School as visible as the air she breathed.

  When light returned to her, she floated inside the building, hovering like a wraith. With a hand she could not see, she reached out and tried the door handle. Her heart stopped as she realized the door did not budge. It had been chained shut already. She tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone dry, panic and terror conspiring against her.

  She was about to call for Desmond, to reach out to him with her powers alone and alert him to the shocking discovery she’d made, when she heard voices coming from the gymnasium. Gym classes were not scheduled during the first period of the day. Yet, voices came from there.

  Awareness glided through her with winding fluidity, curving and bending as sinuously as a silk. She knew Agnon’s people were there. She moved toward the open doors, the very place she’d listened to Josh and Jess plot this day hours ago. But this time, she did not have to cloak herself in shadows. She did not need to cower behind a door. She was hiding in plain sight.

  “As soon as the bell rings, move into the hall and kill anyone you see,” the bald man hissed and the colossal serpent tattoos on his head pulsated with every word he spoke, as if they’d come to life. He addressed the man with the facial piecing and dark, greasy hair.