As I walk down the hallway, these thoughts float through my head. There is a man standing next to a window, staring out, watching for movement. I stop next to him and ask him if he has seen Ashley. When he gives me a curious look, I describe her.
“There have been a lot of people coming through here,” he says. “She very well could have too. You could ask Jeremiah. He’s in that room down the hall.”
“Which room?” I ask, my heart starting to beat faster. I’m not surprised that my father is here in the middle of the action.
“Third from the left.”
I nod a thanks to him as I make my way toward the room. Perhaps Ashley was there with him. Or maybe my father has seen her. The door is closed when I reach the room. I knock lightly, and I’m met by an angry voice.
“Unless they’re attacking, leave me alone.”
“It’s me,” I say.
My father cracks open the door and a puff of cigar smoke wafts out. He stares at me for a long moment. “What do you want?”
“Let me in,” I say.
He opens the door wide and motions for me to come through. I don’t know if he was going to let me in anyway or if the new Starborn power just overtook his will. I guess there’s only one way to find out.
“Close the door,” I say as I walk into the room. It’s small and windowless. There is a desk in the corner and a few chairs. On the other side of the room there is a couch. It looks like it used to be an office for some pencil pusher that was no doubt depressed after spending years working for someone that didn’t appreciate the work. The greyskin virus was meant for people like this.
My father closes the door as I commanded and I walk to the front of the desk and sit down.
“It’s good to see that you’re alive,” my father says.
“Have you seen Ashley?” I ask.
He shakes his head and sits across from me in the pencil pusher’s seat. His chair sits just a little higher than mine. “Not since yesterday.”
I’m sure my disappointment shows, but I don’t care. How could I have lost her? Where was she looking?
“This fight is a mess,” my father says. “Samuel will have this place overrun by tomorrow, I promise you that. Right now he’s just resting his soldiers. He has no reason to hurry.”
“Well,” I say, “I’m afraid Shadowface won’t be getting what he’s looking for.”
“What do you mean?”
“The blood. It’s gone.”
My father’s eyes narrow as he takes a puff on his cigar. “What happened to it?”
I can feel my jaws clench. I feel nervous, but I shouldn’t. I’m the one with the power here. I shouldn’t be afraid of my father. He’s just a normal man. It’s not like he’s a Starborn. Besides, now I can make him do whatever I want. I hate his accusing eyes. I know that he automatically blames me for the blood being gone. Though he wouldn’t be wrong for him to do so, it would be nice for him to seem somewhat surprised.
“I’m going to tell you the truth, and you’ll remain in that chair until I tell you to get up,” I say.
He looks confused, but he doesn’t argue.
“Also, you must keep your voice down,” I continue. “I don’t want others to hear what we’re talking about.”
Again, he’s confused, but he says nothing.
I take a deep breath and I let the words flow out of me like a fountain. “I drank the blood. I still taste it on my tongue. I can tell you that it is a very powerful tool, and I’m glad Shadowface can’t get his hands on it.”
My father remains calm, though his face is turning red with anger. “Did we not decide that Ashley needed it to get close to Shadowface?” he asks. His civil tone is almost disturbing. “Why did you think it would be all right to take it for yourself? Do you not realize how dangerous that is?”
“I don’t care,” I say.
He shakes his head, drawing another long puff on the cigar. “You don’t make it difficult to know what the power is, the way you’re ordering me around.”
“For some reason I get the feeling that you already knew what the power was before we even got here.” I lean forward and set a hand on the desk. “I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and you’re going to tell me the whole truth. You will not lie to me.”
My father grits his teeth at me. It’s almost like he wants to kill me. There’s a hunger in his eyes that seems out of place—or maybe it has always been there.
“Who is Shadowface?” I ask.
“A woman named Olivia,” my father answers. He almost grimaces as the involuntary words come out of his mouth.
A woman. That explains why he accidentally said ‘she’ the other day instead of ‘he’ when referring to Shadowface. But I shouldn’t be surprised. My father is a liar.
“How do you know Olivia?” I ask.
He answers without hesitation. “I met her at work about twenty years ago. I was a young professor, and she was a researcher.”
“Rich?”
“Yes. Very rich.”
“Tell me about her.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Is she responsible for the greyskin virus?” I ask.
“Partly.”
“What do you mean partly?”
“I am responsible to a degree.”
My mouth drops open and I can feel the color leave me face. What is he saying? How could he be responsible?
“Talk,” I say.
“Olivia is a few years older than I,” he says. “When we met, I was a young college professor. She got me interested in the idea of the Starborn. I mean, the notion that they were people—descendants of people—that were from different galaxies. They were people living among us with the potential to do amazing things.
“Olivia was very wealthy and funded many archeological digs for research. On one of the digs, I discovered some texts that proved her theory of the Starborns. And I have been fascinated by them ever since. The more we researched, the more we found that these powers came about when the individual in question was in danger. We talked endlessly about the possibilities.”
“You loved her, didn’t you?” I asked, feeling disgusted.
“Yes.”
I look down at the floor. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s wonderful and terrible at the same time. I’m finally getting the answers to the questions that have plagued my mind for so long, but I don’t necessarily want to know them.
“So, you developed the virus for her?”
“Eventually, but that came much later,” he says. “We had a falling out after a time, and we didn’t talk again for many years, though I never gave up learning about Starborns.”
“What did you have a falling out over?”
It’s the first time he hesitates in this line of questioning, but he can’t keep himself from answering. “She got pregnant.”
Now I feel sick to my stomach, because I have an idea where he’s going with this.
“She didn’t want the child.”
“But you did,” I say.
“I didn’t want to kill it.”
“That’s ironic.”
I wait for a long moment before I get to the next question. I don’t know what to think. What is worse—the fact that for the past three years I’ve been trying to help my father hunt down and kill my mother, or that my mother is, in fact, Shadowface?
The next question is only to confirm what my gut already tells me. “Am I Olivia’s son?”
“Yes,” he says. His voice sounds thick, almost as if he’s remorseful. “Everything went downhill after the pregnancy. We fought. We couldn’t make it work.”
“And you absorbed yourself in work for my entire childhood,” I say bitterly.
“Yes,” he says. “I don’t have an excuse. I know I wasn’t a father to you. I didn’t know how to be a father. I regretted it every day, but I also didn’t know how to fix it.”
I shake my head, not wanting to hear anymore about our pitiful situation that some
might call a relationship. “Just get on to the part about why you made the virus.”
He clears his throat. “I didn’t see Olivia for a long time until she showed up in my office one day. She talked about how she wanted to get back together for professional reasons. She told me that she had gained an extensive collection of Starborn blood. She thought it best to keep them hidden in my lab.” He nods at me. “One of those is the blood you just drank. She thought it to be the most important until…until she told me that she had discovered the Holy Grail of Starborns. A man gifted with immortality. No disease could harm him. Cancer cells would dissolve in his body. The only thing that could kill him was an outside force. She wanted me to use a virus on him that I had accidentally created while attempting to make a super vaccine. I called it the grey cell virus.”
I sit and stare at him, completely baffled. A flood of thoughts pass by my mind, not least of all the thought of my own views about the virus. For the past three years I’ve been thinking that it was good for humanity in some way or another. But now that I am sitting face-to-face with the man that created it—my father—I feel sickened by the thought. Ashamed. To be related to the person that brought humanity to its knees makes me feel like I am the child of the devil.
“What happened then?” I ask.
“By the time I had concluded extensive research on rats, Olivia had the man kidnapped and brought to my lab. She insisted that I do the lab work side-by-side with a non-Starborn human, so I recruited a girl named Willow to help me.”
“Recruited?”
“She was one of my brightest students, but I fed her lies about how we were going to change the face of humanity by providing immortality to all. I made it seem like the man had given himself willingly. She didn’t know she was going to be the first human test subject for the grey cell virus until she got to my lab.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand how you could be so cruel. So…callous. You were truly a terrible father, but I never took you for a cold-blooded killer.”
“You don’t know your mother,” he says. “She has a captivating spirit. The things she promised, the plans she has had…it all really makes you look beyond the moment. Olivia fueled a passion within me that made me look beyond the murderous actions. But by the moment I injected Willow and the Starborn with the new virus, I was too far gone.”
“Too far gone?” I ask.
He nods. “There was no turning back after that. I had done the worst. All I had left was to move forward. But that was when everything got out of hand. I took a break, and left the building for only a few minutes. When I got back, Willow had escaped from the guards I left behind. She carried the virus within her. In a scuffle with the guards, all the rats that I had been testing got out. I killed the guards and the Starborn man came after me. I shot him, but not before he bit me.”
“He bit you?”
My father pulls off his jacket and lifts a sleeve up to his shoulder. A row of teeth marks scar him.
“But he was carrying the virus,” I say.
“And so am I,” he answers.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to react. It doesn’t make any sense to me. “Then how are you still alive?”
“The same reason you have the ability to control minds,” he answers. “The Starborn’s power of long life was passed to me. But so was the virus. I sit before you a living, but rotting body. I never died, but I live with the effects.” He lifts his cigar in the air. “I hate these things, but what else am I supposed to do? It covers up the smell of rot and decay. I figure someday I’m going to have to raid some cologne stores.” He attempts a laugh, but it is forced and awkward.
“So, you’re just going to rot until there is nothing left of you?”
“I can replenish myself to an extent,” he says. “I don’t really know how to tell you this without just saying it, but I have a desire to eat. Not food. Nothing from a box or a can. But I need blood. Fresh blood. It’s an uncontrollable desire, that, I’m afraid, gets the best of me sometimes.”
“You’re a cannibal?”
“Worse,” he says. “I’m a greyskin.”
I don’t know how long the silence rests between us. I stand from the chair and start pacing the room, trying to let the thoughts process. There have been plenty of times where my father has broken from the group to be alone for a few days. It makes me wonder if he was out looking for victims to eat.
I want to kill him. I want to take a knife and stab it into his brain. He is a monster. But I can’t just do that. He is my father. Despite his horrible attempt at raising me, he did provide for me my entire life. I got an education. I got the food I needed. In a way, he was always there for me. In a way, I love him for it. In another way, I hate him and wish he hadn’t tried to take care of me. I don’t want to believe that he is what he claims. And it has to be the truth doesn’t it? I’m forcing him to tell me everything. He isn’t telling me this willingly.
I turn toward him and swallow. “Why are you trying to kill Olivia?”
“Because of her plans,” he says. “Because she has this elaborate network that she is creating. She brought the world into a pit only so she could rise out of it and have everyone follow her. She has been planning this from the beginning.”
“And you want to stop her from gaining power?”
“Yes.”
“So the world can rebuild as it should?” I ask.
“No.”
“Why then?”
“Because she doesn’t want to share it with me. I provided the way. The least she can do is make me a part of it. After the outbreak, she and I went back to the lab to get the blood—the blood you drank. I assume her plan was to hide it away somewhere safe until she wanted to use it. When we got it, she abandoned me. She wanted nothing to do with me. But I knew her plan, and I was going to take it from her.”
“And how do you expect to do that?”
“She is Shadowface to everyone else,” he says. “There are few that actually know who she is. And I know that she’s planning a big reveal sometime in the future.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it was part of the plan! She would stay in the shadows until the network got so big. Then, once so many places relied on her, she would reveal herself as this all-sufficient savior of the people. They would love her for everything she has done.”
“So, why the Shadowface? Why the secrecy to begin with?”
“Because she can work better that way. If no one knows who she is, then she won’t be assassinated by someone else that wants power.”
“Except by you,” I say.
“Yes.”
“So, why did she need the blood?”
“To force the leaders who resisted,” he says. “But she has always been afraid of the possible effects of ingesting Starborn blood. She could die. You could die from it.”
I ignore his attempt to scare me. I don’t feel sick or weakened. I feel indestructible. I stare at him, seeing him in a completely different way. I already hated him, but I could respect what I thought he stood for. Now, I loathe him.
“You betrayed me,” I say. “All this time I’ve been following you around, trying to take down someone that wanted power. While all this time, I should have taken you down as well. Both of you deserve to die!” I say this a little too loudly and I can’t help but look toward the door, wondering if someone might have heard me. But should I care? Maybe I should announce to the whole world that the only reason everyone is fighting is because my father wants to take down Shadowface.
“Innocent people are caught in the wake of your rivalry,” I say.
“Don’t stand there and condemn me, pretending that you don’t think these people deserve every bit of what they are getting,” he says hotly. “I know your view of life. I know your cynicism. But it just got real. You don’t know how to handle it, so you default to heroism. You look down on me for something you once praised.”
“You’re wrong,” I say.
“I’ve heard the words come out of your mouth,” he says. “You’ve said that you think the outbreak was good for humanity so they can be brought back to a truly human existence. Mankind was living in dreamlands, chasing after wealth and power, forgetting about their neighbor. A completely self-serving society, I believe you called it.”
“I praised the idea,” I say, “not the actual event. I lost people to the virus, too.”
My father shakes his head with a clenched jaw as he puts out his cigar on the desk. “You’re a hypocrite.”
“And you’re a liar!” My heart is beating fast and I can feel my limbs start to tense. If I don’t get out of here quickly, I’m going to lose it.
My world is falling apart. Ashley is dying, my father is a greyskin, and my mother is Shadowface. I hate my parents for bringing this on me. I hate the Starborns for bringing this on me. I wish they were all dead.
I storm to the door and swing it open.
“Where are you going?” my father asks.
I stop for a moment, wondering if I should actually answer him. I never want to see him again. I never want to speak to him. It would only take a few words. All I would have to say is ‘shoot yourself in the head’ and it would be over.
“Ashley has been shot,” I say. “I’m going to find her and try to save her.”
Chapter 19 - Waverly
Ethan and I weren’t bothered through the cold night as we lay on the rooftop. I didn’t sleep because I was too nervous about someone coming up and finding us. I thought for sure that Shadowface’s men would be using the building but it never happened. We spent most of the night in silence, watching the stars above us, trying not to listen to the occasional burst of fire down below. We both knew it was only a matter of time before Shadowface took over the whole town. We talked some about stealing a vehicle and trying to escape, but there was no attempting that at night. There were greyskins all over the place, not to mention if we were caught, we would likely be killed by Shadowface’s men.
Away From the Sun Page 21