by L. L. Crane
I thought for a moment, not really seeing a problem with it. “So, you’re mad just because you weren’t invited?”
Troll drew in a deep breath, clenching his fists to his side. “No.” He hesitated for a few seconds then let loose with a string of words jumbled so close together I could barely make them out. He stopped muttering then, and his words came out loud and clear. “Damn it Vanish!” He rubbed his hands through his shaggy hair again. “I’m mad ‘cause I can’t be there to protect you.” He stopped for just a second. “And the baby.”
I lifted my chin, shock smacking me in the face like an oversized hand. “I can take care of myself.” I wasn’t too worried about my safety since I knew how precious a child was to the Blue Spectrum band. “Besides, I’ll take Lily. If anything happens, she’ll take care of me.”
Troll sighed, then chewed on his bottom lip for a second or two. “That could work…for right now. But what about later? What about when you…you…get bigger?”
My lips curled up softly and I gazed at Troll. He always seemed to be a step ahead of me. I had never really given much thought to the fact that my stomach would become enormous. I had been too busy just trying to save the Peanut. “We’ll worry about that then, okay?” I reached out and brushed the bangs out of his face.
He was still pouting, but his blue eyes sparkled a bit and I could make out little specks of darkness on the rims of them. Still, he crossed his arms over his chest and spoke like a whiny child. “I have to stay here. He’s waiting outside for you.”
“Who is?”
“Shade.”
I studied Troll’s face for a minute. “You’re jealous,” I exclaimed.
“Am not,” he childishly answered.
I studied his face for a moment. “It’s okay, Troll. If I choose anyone to claim me, it will be you.”
He paused, his blue eyes locked onto mine. “Really?”
“Yes. Now turn around so I can get dressed.”
Troll lithely twisted his body around, but not before I caught a cocky smirk on his face, so much like Orion’s that my head spun in circles, a cyclone of jumbled emotions and questions that were waging war inside of me, a battle I had no idea how to win.
Chapter 43
Surprise
The robe I chose was exquisite. I felt a little guilty wearing it when I compared it to the simple dresses that the other women wore, but I was playing by their rules now. I giggled internally. Jesus, so many things had changed in just a few days. I slipped into the satiny blue robe. It was adorned with beads that were silver and gold and had stitching of different colors elaborately displayed around each bead. I swirled in a perfect circle, feeling like a real queen, the ones that had shown up on our vids and tablets since we first entered Citizen School.
The dress was loose, which suited my needs. I searched the room for my body shield, finding it in the bottom of the closet. I still didn’t trust these people well enough to know what they wanted from me, if anything. I wasn’t about to go to a council meeting without the shield to protect the Peanut. Next, I wrapped my knife belt around my expanding waist. Fortunately, the robe was loose enough so that it didn’t show up.
I brushed my hands through my short hair, waiting for the day for it to grow out. I had noticed that both men and women had long hair in the Asters. I wondered why Garment had insisted that I get it cut so short.
Finally, I slipped my shoes on and walked out into the front room. Troll was pacing back and forth, a wolf protecting his pack. He stopped suddenly when I came out, and he whistled in a sexy kind of way.
I blushed, embarrassed by his outward appreciation of my appearance. Then he started fussing over me, checking to see if I had knives, my body shield. He adjusted the finger necklace so it was centered perfectly. Then he kissed me lightly on the forehead.
“I’ll be here. If anything goes wrong, just run here, and we’ll figure something out.”
“Okay…okay,” I laughed at him. I kissed his cheek and turned around toward the front door, calling Lily to come. Before I could open the door, Troll was there, the handle in his hands. He jarred the thick door open and I meandered through the arch, Lily trotting along happily.
Rain immediately drizzled down on me and a chill went up my spine. The entire front yard was filled with people, all dressed in different hues of blue. Shade was in front, and he lifted one arm up. The crowd immediately became silent. Shade grabbed my hand, and I had no choice but to let him have it. Lily growled menacingly. “It’s okay, girl,” I told her between clenched teeth.
Shade’s hand was huge, like Orion’s, only more rough and callused.
Scanning the crowd, my heart was racing and I felt panic move through me, not knowing what to expect. I had always preferred the silence of our apartment until I moved in with Dove and my dad. But they were family, not strangers and I reveled in the noise and chaos of Snow and the toddlers. Aching for Troll to be with me, I sucked in a deep breath, knowing this was entirely different. A few months ago I was just a student in Citizen School, and now I seemed to be some sort of celebrity.
The crowd of people parted as Shade propelled me down the path. At some point, Spice joined us, taking my other hand in hers. I relaxed a bit after that. There was something about Spice that seemed to put me at ease. Of course, Lily never left my side. I noticed that her tail was not wagging.
We strolled down a rock path that was bare except for a few bushes and benches along the way, the horde of people bunching up behind us. The drizzly rain relentlessly spattered down, and I began to shiver. Immediately, a thick fur coat was thrust over my shoulders. I turned to see who had placed it on me, but the crowd was too thick for me to tell. I felt nervous, not knowing what was in store for me, edgy and out of sorts.
Eventually we reached the other end of the immense crater. A large building, very similar to the home that Troll and I had been given, loomed before us. It was built into the side of the gigantic orange crater and had brighter blue paint than our home. Gold and silver emblems glistened all around the front of the building, a direct contrast to the dreary rain that continuously spattered down.
Shade dropped my hand, and Spice did, too, as if they were machines that had been programmed to do so. Then Shade knelt before the door, one knee up and one down, and put his hands to the top of his forehead and then to his heart. He rested there for a moment, and then stood up slowly, reverently, and opened the thick arched door.
I stood behind him, studying the door as a chill ran through my body again. The door had one single decoration on it. An arrangement of stars that had been etched into my mind, my heart, and my body. One that I could never ignore.
It was a constellation, and I drew in a sharp, painful breath.
Orion. The hunter.
Perfect blue stars spaced exactly like the constellation in the sky.
It took me a moment to gather myself together, but apparently nobody noticed. Spice was kneeling down in front of the door, performing the same odd ritual as Shade’s. She purposely stood up and walked through the open door.
Someone I didn’t know whispered into my ear.
“You are next, Lordess.”
I wanted to turn around and thank him, but I figured that was probably not the best thing to do. I copied what Spice and Shade had done, to the best of my abilities, kneeling clumsily on my knee and touching my forehead and then my heart, hoping that I was doing it correctly. I pulled myself awkwardly up, the weight of the knives and the shield unbalancing me. I regained my footing, took a deep breath, tipped my chin up, and strode through the door with Lily.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
Chapter 44
Reunion
My eyes barely adjusted to the dim blue light casting an eerie glow over the huge room. I blinked over and over until I was finally able to focus. After a few minutes I could spot hundreds of wooden chairs spread out in a wide circle. My eyes tipped upward to an ornate throne, carved out of the same wood as
the cabinet by my bed. It was perched in the middle of some sort of stage, which was even more elaborately engraved than the throne.
The throne.
My breathing stopped. My heart stopped. My life stopped.
Spasms of anger and rage thundered through me.
Orion.
I sucked in a huge breath, my heart blasting violently against my ribcage, my hands shaking like miniature bombs exploding in each finger. Lily let out a small growl next to me.
I narrowed my eyes, thinking there must be some mistake, but there was no doubt about it. It was definitely Orion. My Orion. His blonde hair had grown longer, shaggier and was tied behind his head in a short pony tail like Shade’s. A row of tattoos lined up his perfect arms and across the open collar of the robe he wore, covering the scars that I assumed only I knew about. Blue stars of different shapes and sizes.
He was dressed in an almost exact replica of my robe, and I hated him and loved him all at once, as if there were two people inside of me fighting for ownership of my heart. He looked like a god up there, and for a moment my breath was taken away, my heart beating so fast that I thought it might burst through my chest.
Orion. It was Orion.
He was alive.
I let out a breath of air, relief that I knew he was at least alive flooding out of me. But I locked my eyes onto his, paralyzed.
Orion faced me, first with a look of confusion that instantly transformed to recognition. His lips slowly turned up, and his blue eyes became soft round pillows, bearing the expression that always made me feel like those eyes were meant just for me, that I was the only girl in the universe for him, that blue smoke would surround us as our lips and bodies found each other, two souls clamped, no, entwined so closely to each other that the world felt like it quit spinning when we were apart.
We had been apart for a long time, and my world had not only quit spinning, it had exploded.
He started to rise, speaking only one word, a question. “Rain?” He smiled again, tipping his perfect, magnificent head to the side as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t left me without a trace, a simple good-bye…pregnant and alone.
I was still frozen in place, Lily locked by my side. What I thought had once been love transitioned into hate so fast I could barely keep up with it. My emotions were a hurricane, and Orion was the eye of that storm. I hated him then, so deeply that I was shaking from the inside out, twisting my gut into tumbling knots…so many that I thought I might spew the contents of everything I had eaten in the past four months right onto him. I wanted nothing more than to wrap my hands around that thick neck of his until there was no life left. Until he just faded away. I wanted to hurt him as much as he had hurt me.
I let my jaw drop, swallowing him like a mountain of food. I just couldn’t decide if it was tasteful food or not. A mutant finger necklace was draped around his neck. Twelve fingers. Leave it to Orion to outdo everybody else, I thought. Underneath the finger necklace was a familiar silver chain, and even though the light was dim, I could make out what it was.
The broken heart necklace. The other half to the one he had given me.
It was the necklace that sent me over the edge. Of all the stupid things that made me go crazy, it was the necklace. My mind flashed back to when he gave the other half to me, how he promised we would always be together.
“You son of a bitch!” I screamed at him, hate spewing out of my lips, my lungs, my soul…my very pregnant body.
He stood up, contorting his face. “Rain.” This time it wasn’t a question. It was a statement. He took a couple of hesitant steps toward me.
I was hysterical by then, shouting at him, words that I couldn’t begin to remember, strung together with a steely rope that couldn’t be destroyed. It had been building inside of me for too long.
I knew that there were others around us, but my mind was thick butter, and I was treading through it, confused and disoriented, focused only on Orion. Those people meant nothing to me as my heart turned to steel. I was a machine, nothing more. A machine that could talk. A machine that could kill. The next words left my mouth like poisonous darts aimed right at him.
“You.”
“Left.”
‘Me.”
I bellowed those three words at him while at the same time reaching under my robe for my knife belt. In one quick movement I had a knife in my hand, took a deep breath and pulled it back. I wanted my aim to be pure. I wanted him dead, so I took my time. Focused on that perfect face, that wondrous body. That lying heart.
I scoped in on his heart. I wanted it pierced, shattered, smashed. Ruined. Like mine.
With the knife pulled back, I thought of Troll. Troll loved me more than this beast of a human ever could. I was just about to zing the knife at his heart, about to let it go and sail solidly through the air, just like Pan had taught me to, when a small head poked out from behind Orion’s legs.
A child’s head.
I held the knife steady in my hand, then suddenly dropped it, as if it were on fire and burning my hands. It clanked to the stone floor, chiming – a musician without a melody. Lily squirmed by my side, growling in a threatening way, but she seemed far away, like in a blurry room that circled next to me.
I recognized the child at once, his blue eyes and black hair so much like Snow’s that I let out a cry of despair and confusion. I snarled like an animal, then, knowing deep inside of me that I was caged and cornered. As usual, Orion held the trump card, and he played it well. Lily wined somewhere in the background and I wanted to comfort her. I just didn’t know how.
The boy’s face was emotionless, but those eyes stared back at me, what I hoped was in recognition.
He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have too. I knew that he didn’t have many words in his vocabulary because he was S.L.A.G.
I let out a pathetic cry, falling to the stone floor in despair and confusion, trying to ignore Lily, who was pawing at me.
The boy. It was my brother, Ice.
The one who had disappeared from the Clinic about the same time that Orion went missing.
I couldn’t take it all in, couldn’t process two ghosts suddenly appearing from my past. Two ghosts I thought that I loved.
I twirled around, just wanting to get away, find Troll and look for a different band. It wasn’t too late. We had the mutant fingers. We could find another band of people to join up with, the Red Spectrum would probably take us in.
Breathing heavily, my center of balance off, I pushed myself up off of the floor and twirled around, my robe fanning out around me like a circus tent. I took one last look at Orion, hate blazing through my own blue eyes and took off running, pushing through the crowd of people, Lily at my heels.
Nobody made an effort to stop me.
I was at the door of the conference center, my hand on the odd handle when a word stopped me cold. It didn’t come from Orion’s mouth. Nothing he could say would change how I felt. But this word, this single word stripped me bare.
“Wain?”
It was Ice’s voice. My brother, Ice, who had been locked up in the Clinic his entire life, who had a vocabulary of about five words, my name which wasn’t one of them, had just uttered it.
He knew my name. He remembered me.
I halted, motionless, my jaw hanging slack. Tears burst from my eyes, slipping down my cheeks like polluted rivers in a downward path I knew could never be retraced.
Just then Ice came blasting forward, racing toward me. I expected him to flap his arms wildly like he did in the Clinic and to make zooming noises, one word guttural responses as he circled around me, never touching me.
But Ice ran into my arms, just like Snow used to. I held him to me, feeling his little chest moving in and out and breathing in the scent of him like it was the most expensive perfume you could buy.
Chapter 45
Ice
It was an earthy, heady scent of woods and sweat and smelly feet. And the freshest rain I had ever smelled. A normal, l
ittle boy smell.
I squeezed him to me, not ever wanting to let go. I pressed my nose into his thick black hair again just to make sure he didn’t smell like the antiseptic, medicinal odor that always encircled him. Any traces of the Clinic were long gone, and for a moment, I forgot about Orion.
I laughed out loud. He actually smelled like dirt. A S.L.A.G. child out in the wild…in the Asters, living a normal life. Unthinkable!
I held him back, away from me and examined him. He had put on weight since I last saw him. His face was rounder, pudgy, like a normal little boy’s. Like Snow’s.
Then I couldn’t help it. I squeezed him to me again. He pulled away, which is what I expected. I had never hugged him before. He looked me in the eyes. Directly in the eyes. His blue eyes mirrored Snows, and they sparkled with normal little boy mischief. I tilted my head, studying him.
“Wain, you come.” It took me a few minutes to realize what he said. My heart swelled when I realized that he had spoken a complete sentence.
By then Orion was by my side. I tipped my head up, forgetting for a moment how mad I was at him.
“He talked,” I whispered. “He said a sentence.”
Orion nodded in agreement, his flawless blonde eyebrows rising into arcs. His voice was soft, husky. “He’s changed a lot.” Orion paused, then, his blue eyes never leaving mine. “He’s happy here.”
I examined Ice again. He smiled at me, a crooked grin with two missing teeth in front. At that moment I missed Snow and the toddlers more than ever. I wished that I could bring my entire family to the Asters, to be with Ice and me.
But what about Orion? I met his stare again.
“Why?” I asked, pleading. “Why did you leave me?” I had calmed down by then. Orion still took my breath away. Just having him near me set every nerve I had on edge. I wanted to be in his solid arms again more than anything, have him kiss me repeatedly until I couldn’t remember who I was, who Orion was. I was so much his prisoner, that even if I wanted to escape, if someone handed me the key to my cell, I wasn’t sure I could.