“Stop.” He grunts and I can tell right away that he has used a Bind on me because I feel as if I have been frozen into place. I can’t even open my mouth to scream.
“I am going to take the Bind off of you in a moment,” he says through clenched teeth. The anger he showed while arguing with Reece yesterday was nothing compared to the rage I now see displayed across his face. It looks like, at any second, he might burst a vessel in one of his eyes with the way he is glaring at me. “You are not going to run. You are not going to scream. Hell, I don’t even want you to fucking breathe. You hear me?”
I gaze into his sapphire eyes trying to express as best as I can with mine what a dumbass he is for expecting a response while I am unable to give one, but he doesn’t seem to read the iris language, he just continues with his instructions.
“When I remove the Bind, I want you to get the hell off of me and sit down Indian style right here.” He nods to the spot next to where we are currently positioned. “Keep in mind that I could force you to stay in place the whole time, just like I am right now, but I won’t… if you cooperate.”
He takes a few seconds to catch his breath before uttering, “Move.”
And I can once more. I shake my head to try and get some of the dust off of my face and hair, sending it directly down onto him. I give him a smug smile. It’s childish, yeah, but if I’m to believe his threat, it’s the only retaliation I can give him for stealing my free will. I hastily remove myself from him and sit down as he instructed with my arms folded across my chest. If I am going to be forced to stay in the same vicinity as this murderer, I’m going to show as much displeasure at my predicament as possible.
He stands up and dusts himself off with his hands and then starts pacing in front of me. “Hmm, how to explain?” he questions himself. I can feel his eyes on me but I am staring out at the horizon. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of active listening.
Before he can even come up with his explanation, I have broken my vow of silence. “You just murdered innocent people.” I point back towards the site. My statement is obvious, but I am still in shock and it’s about the most coherent speech I can come up with in the instant.
“Yes, they are all dead,” he agrees. “But, I didn’t do it alone. We did it, the resistors. If you will allow me to show you why we did it, you might not think those men so innocent.”
“Don’t throw around the royal ‘we’ with me. I heard you plan it with Jinx. He said to be at the spot at ten for the show. I also heard you use a Bind right before the place exploded. It’s your fault that this happened!”
“There are Mages planted all around this area. Where do you think your savior Reece and his little lap dog Cass are right now? This was a coordinated and planned out attack against the New World Order. The Bind I used was only to protect us from the blast. And yes, I smiled about it; I can close my eyes right now, imagine it is happening all over again and smile once more. Do you know why?”
I can do no more than shake my head as a tear makes a trail through the dust down my cheek. Reece and Cass can’t be somewhere down there. I was just getting to know them, but I thought they were two of the good guys. Then again, I willingly married Donovan Brand. I am obviously not the person you can count on to be a good judge of character
“No, I don’t imagine you would, Princess,” he acquiesces.
There is a tense silence between us and I am not sure what he will do next. I feel depleted. To escape one monster, only to become ensnared by another; it’s just as Reece said the night he took me.
Spencer paces over to the berm and picks up my jacket. Then he comes back over to me and drops it in my lap. “Come on, I could try to explain this until I’m blue in the face, but it wouldn’t have the same impact as seeing it for yourself.”
He makes to walk back to the car, but I stay immobile. My mother always told me that if I was in a situation where a dangerous man was trying to get me in his car I should fight like hell. Once you are in the car, you have barely any chance at all of coming out of your situation alive. If you try to get away, you might still die, but at least you’ll go down fighting and not duct-taped and zip-tied in the back of some psycho’s trunk. Instead of attempting to escape again and failing, I decide to try to bargain with him. I open my mouth to start adlibbing a reason for him to let me go and…
“Nope.” He lets the word pop, bursting my idealistic bubble. “You are going to come with me now. I told you that you will have a choice on whether you join us or not, and you are going to know everything before you make that choice. Going our separate ways at this point is not an option.”
I close my mouth, incensed, but I still don’t move. What’s he going to do, drag me back to his car?
In a flash, he has moved over me, picked me up, and thrown me over his shoulder. I can’t believe it; this fucktard is carrying me as if I am a twenty-pound sack of dog food he just picked up from the store.
I wiggle and squirm around yelling for him to put me down and he does, right next to the passenger side door. We are nose to nose, and mine is exhaling like a mare on a cold winter morning, the corners curled up and no doubt red with irritation. He is mirroring me in both posture and expression. What does he have to be mad about? Nobody was manhandling him.
“I get it, you have issues with trust,” he fumes. “You gave your heart and trust to the wrong guy, and you got screwed for it. I don’t want your heart or your complete trust. I just need another hour of your time so I may shed some light on the darkness that has been your entire existence up to this point. Think of it as a gift, the gift of someone pulling your pretty little head out of your pretty little ass. If I were Reece, you’d probably have no problem with getting in the car. Maybe the issue is that you keep doling out trust to the wrong guys.”
If it’s even possible, I push my face farther into his and hiss, “Just because you got to peek around inside of my head, uncover secret shit that no one has ever known, and watch my entire life like some goddamn movie in 3D, doesn’t give you the right to start psychoanalyzing me and telling me what I should or shouldn’t do. You know what I think you should do? Mind your own freaking business!” With that I open the car door, fling myself down on the seat and slam it shut again. I go to put my seat belt on and realize that I have closed the door on my jacket. I open it back up, straighten out the situation and slam the door again. I’m guessing the second slam wasn’t so impressive because I can hear Spencer chuckle as he comes around and gets in on his side. Asshole.
We drive for half an hour until we pass the welcome sign for the township of Canton. It’s a miniscule town way out past the suburbs of the city, one that I have never had reason to venture to until today. As we drive slowly down the main stretch of road, I stare wonderingly out of the window at what appears to be a modern day ghost town. The place is completely empty. No cars on the street or people walking around the heart of the town. We pass a corner pharmacy with closed signs and windows boarded over and a dog groomers, florist shop, and auto repair business that seem to have shared the same fate.
We turn a corner and come upon a gated schoolyard. Spencer pulls up to the curb right alongside it and turns the ignition off. He sits in heavy silence for a moment, as if he’s collecting his thoughts. He’s taking deep breaths and staring at the school as if something about it is compelling his eyes to remain locked. I watch his pupils move back and forth with the motion of one of the swings on the playground, blowing with the breeze.
The silence in the car and the silence of the town are immensely brash—it feels as though the whole population is hiding behind all of the buildings and trees, and at any moment they are all going to jump out and surprise us. As if this is all just some game. How does an entire community become a void? The questions are swirling around in my mind and on the tip of my tongue when Spencer begins to speak.
“Four years ago, you probably would have seen children running around on this playground, you know. A Friday at noon, the
whole yard would have been crazy with their activity.” He smiles as he says it, and it feels like he is talking to himself rather than to me. He continues to scan the playground as if he is still seeing the children he described playing tag and taking turns for the slide.
“When Oberon won the first election, he did so by convincing the commons and even most of our own that he was going to bring a change to the country. It was badly needed at the time. You saw how desperately everyone was struggling four years ago; we all felt the fear that was out there. People heard Chancellor Brand speak with his waxy smiles and promises and saw his finger pointing here and there … spreading hate and disgust amongst everyone, making people believe that there were those among us in society who were the reason for the deficiencies in all of our lives. And people bought it.”
As I look out at the playground again, I realize what Spencer is trying to say. This town must have been full of people who were taken in the reaping.
“They were all criminals,” I infer. How can an entire town be a harbor for the lawless?
Spencer lets out a cold, hard, mirthless laugh, “Once again, that’s what you would think, wouldn’t you?” He shakes his head as if he can’t even believe the idiocy of my statement and I bite my tongue, holding back the string of venom that wants to be discharged at his face. “No, Ophelia Brand, they weren’t all criminals. They were all Mages. Every. Last. One. The same goes for anyone else who was rounded up during the so-called reaping. Not only were they Mages, but they were all Mages who happened to have children under the age of eighteen.”
“But why? I don’t understand. Why would Chancellor Brand take Mages with children?”
“If you can figure out the answer to that, Mrs. Brand, I would be forever in your debt. It’s a question I have been trying to answer for the same amount of time it has been asked.”
Ugh, why does this man resort back to referring to me as a member of the Brands whenever I ask him questions? Yes, Brand is, regrettably, my last name, but he doesn’t have to act like I wear it with pride. Also, I can’t understand why he should think that the sound of my name is more abhorrent than his own, thinking of the dozens of unknown men who will never leave the site we just came from.
“Wait, if they took Mages and not so-called criminals, I saw them,” I say, “I watched it on TV just like the rest of the nation. They rounded them up and took them to prisons. Adult prisons. Where are all of the children?”
He looks at me as if I am an imbecile. “They are in the reformatories, but I’ll get to that. Before the reform policy, Mages tended to stay together in groups.”
I open my mouth to question this. If my mother was a Mage, why didn’t we live around others like us? Why have I never heard of my own people until now, and why doesn’t the general population of the world know about these supernatural societies living right under their noses? Before I can even get one word of my thoughts out, Spencer has laid a finger across my lips, silencing me. I want to bite it off.
“I can see the hamster wheel beginning to turn in your cute little head. Hold it. We’ve reached the answers part of the programming, save all further inquiries until the end of the broadcast. Got it?”
This man makes me crazy. If I wasn’t so hard up for knowledge, I would be tempted to try to ditch his PT Cruiser driving ass again. He frowns at me as if he knows what I’m thinking, and damn, he probably does. I shrug my shoulders and give him my best innocent “carry on” face. His index finger remains on my mouth for another moment before he drags it down and runs it softly over my bottom lip before removing it and continuing his story.
“In most large cities, you could have found a faction of Mages. They would occupy a couple of blocks, a neighborhood, or even an entire borough in some cities. Mages founded this town over a century ago. They lived here, peacefully coexisting with one another, until the day that the reform policy went into place. Now, all of those communities are empty just like this one. Mages who remained began calling them the crumbles because these shells are all that is left. Like crusts from a loaf of bread, empty towns and empty houses that will never again be part of a whole life.
“While the rest of the country was in an uproar about a reaping that would soon take place, a new law, the reform policy was put into place for our kind as well. We were given a mandate that all children born of Mage parentage were to be brought to special facilities at a specific date and time. Oberon said that no harm would come to them; he only wanted to begin to catalogue the power and type of all Mages in the country, starting with this generation. He said that he wanted to use the information as a type of census so that he could track whether the Mage population grew and thrived as the years went on or if the numbers were declining, as some of our kind had begun to fear. What you watched on the news was our own people being loaded up and taken to what we thought were these places. No criminals were ever taken, only us.”
I don’t know what to make of this information. If Spencer is telling the truth, our entire nation was lied to. I would say that I don’t believe the Brands capable of such deceit, but that would be untrue.
“We were weary of this new mandate, but Oberon was one of us,” Spencer continued gravely, “so we foolishly trusted him. When the buses took off that day, they drove straight to the reformatories that had been secretly built around the country with no one the wiser. The adults were lined up and killed; their children were brought inside. They have never come out. The reform policy states that any child born to Mage parents must immediately be brought to New World Order officials now. There are even members in every hospital in the country ready to collect infants as soon as they take their first breaths.”
“How were they just taken? Why didn’t any of their parents fight back? What’s the use of having all of these powers if you don’t use them to defend yourselves?” I can’t help it—I have to ask. Forget Spencer’s hold all questions to the end command, there are just too many of them. I’ve never been any good with commands anyway.
“Many tried, but they perished nonetheless. The childless Mages that remained didn’t know what had happened for days. By the time word spread, it was too late. Most Mages are not as powerful as Oberon or me. You’ve seen what Jinx and Cass can do. They have abilities that can make their lives a lot easier, but nothing that can be used as a defense tool. Until after the reform policies, we lived alongside the commons undetected, and we lived peaceful lives. Even if we had the power to produce offensive abilities, none of our people ever cultivated those. They just weren’t necessary. Even now, after I have taken pains to ensure that those of us who are left can defend ourselves, a bullet could still stop most of us. We may not be completely human, but we still share some of the same weaknesses. Bleeding out remains one of them. Our people had no defense against armed men herding them to their dooms.”
“What happened to the children?” I’m afraid to ask. My heart is constricting in my chest as I begin to come to grips with the truth. How could I have been so closed off and in the dark about all of this? My life feels like one big lie.
“No one knows for sure, but I will show you what we do know,” Spencer replies. His eyes are on mine now and I let them rest there. There’s vulnerability about him at the moment, a deep hurt locked away in his heart. No wonder he can be so sullen and severe at times, he carries these misdoings on his back as if they were done by his command.
He pulls his stare from me and takes one last look toward the playground. I wish I had Spencer’s ability to read minds with a touch so that I may know his. The pain on his face speaks of an injured soul, a soul that I’m starting to wish to understand. I want to believe the sentiments I’m seeing in him are coming from an honest place, but I just can’t allow myself to be there with him yet. After this morning, I don’t know if I’ll ever be. With a shake of his head, he tugs his stare back to the road, starts the car, and we are off.
“What happened to the rest of them?” I nod my head at an empty diner as we pass by. “If no
t everyone was taken, where did all of the people without children go?”
“Some of them left, got their shit together and got out of the country. Some of them are still here—they won’t be coming out while a strange car is cruising around. Now that their trust and their spirits have been broken, they manage to scavenge a life together in hiding. Most have joined the resistance, many of them; even many from this very town live in my building. There are pockets of resistance all over the country. We’ve done a good job of reorganizing our people, educating them on how to remain undetected by the New World Order, or NOW, and training them to defend themselves. We try to use every member’s abilities, no matter what they are, as a tool to fight this war against the Brands. It’s been slow going, but we revel in all of our victories.” He turns his head and scans me as one side of his mouth turns up into a conniving smile. “I’m hoping we will be having a lot more of those soon.”
I know what he is implying by that statement and I dismiss it as soon as it falls from his lips. He may feel that what he does is warranted, but I’m still not convinced. I sure as hell am not about to join in with his merry band of murderers. No matter the cause of the situation, it seems that there is an infinite number of recourses one may choose to take that don’t result in violence or loss of life. Spencer’s quest is an understandable one, but what does he hope to gain by it, vengeance or reparation? The way he’s going about it now, it seems like he would be willing to do whatever it takes, honor be damned. I can’t see myself bending to that ideology. Ever.
He drives back in the direction of the city. With new eyes, I watch the people we pass and those who speed by us. All of them content to go about their lives, unknowing of the injustice that is occurring to an entire population of people right under their noses. I wonder if any of them would care if the same light being shone on me brightened their minds as well. Would they demand the wrongs be made right? Or would they go back to their TVs and cell phones, weekend trips and business meetings, and let justice fall on someone else’s shoulders. I have a feeling that I know the answer to that. Most people don’t seem to be too overly concerned by rainclouds if they don’t threaten to dampen their own doorsteps. They won’t allow themselves to care if it isn’t directly affecting them and their day-to-day lives.
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