Whatever came over Olivia, she didn’t know. In a blaze she scrambled to her feet and dove for Montgomery. But when her legs touched down, they buckled under an alien numbness as the first bullet entered her spine.
The second bullet made everything go black.
6
“J, you gotta come visit. Please,” Jessie said on James’ cell phone, whining the ease until James interrupted.
“—Jes, you don’t need to convince me to visit you. You know I love it there. Plus, I’m in a bad creative rut right now—swimming in some New York art should get my juices stirring.”
“Yes! I could really use you right now—this city has taken more getting used to than I anticipated. Mom and dad just visited.”
“Oh?” James said and stiffened his back against his bed’s headboard. “How’d that go?”
“They’re doing well. You should really talk to Dad more—he asked about you a lot.”
James looked out his window at the Chicago skyline. “Yeah, I should. What’d he ask about me?”
“You know, the usual. ‘Why can’t James be more like you?’ Just because I got lucky and landed a job with Google.”
“I wouldn’t call it luck, Jes.”
A moment elapsed before Jessie said, “Thanks. I still think I got lucky.”
“Stanford Magna Cum Laudes don’t get lucky. Okay, maybe ones fresh out of college—I’ll give you that.”
Jessie giggled in a way that warmed James’ heart—she had that effect on him. “I suppose,” she paused, “Anyway, James, what are you doing with yourself? You and Joe still playing around with those art installations?”
“I wouldn’t call it playing, but yeah, that’s actually going great. We have a show soon—our pieces are selling well.”
“Oooh big, fancy artist man! Look at you…maybe you can quit that teaching job soon.”
“Eh, I don’t know about that. I love my job. Love the students and faculty. Love UIC,” James said but abruptly stopped as his enthusiasm waned.
“You sure about that?”
“No…No I’m not,” he said and cracked his neck before letting his head fall to his chest.
“Oh J…what happened to you?” She said. “You used to be so full of life—sorry I shouldn’t say that.”
He sighed.
“It’s all right. I really thought pursuing this art thing was what I was meant to do. I still think it’s important, and I love what Joe and I are doing, but—dammit—if I don’t feel like I’m missing something.” He slapped his thigh.
“Like what?”
“Not sure,” he said. “I just remember when I first started tinkering with hardware. When I soldered my first joint and watched as my first robotic arm came to life. It felt like the entire universe was on my side. I knew I could take it as far as I wanted. I saw an opportunity in the art world and leapt at it…” James jumped from his bed and paced the room.
“Are you happy? Or are you having trouble committing?” She said. “I remember a time or two when you had trouble with commitment.”
“Shit, I hope not,” James said. “I’m trying Jes, I really am.”
“Well, all I remember is a big brother that could do anything,” she said. “I remember when we were young and you blew me away with solving the craziest problems. Seeing the craziest things. Remember that one Tarot reading?”
He blinked away the sudden recollection and chuckled.
“Yeah, wow…that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“How did you do that by the way? You were, what, eleven at the time?” Jessie mumbled to herself. “Yeah, eleven years, three months and four days—to be exact.”
Jessie’s mental math athletics astounded James—he envied her.
“I dunno, after the psychic started flipping out and forced me to guess the cards she’d held up, it went kinda fuzzy,” he said and scrutinized his reflection in a hallway mirror—he admired the muscle he’d gained recently after starting a new exercise program, but still thought he was too skinny for his height.
“You guessed twenty cards in a row correctly. The odds of that are pretty much impossible.”
James inspected his teeth in the mirror and watched the corners of his lips crumple as he frowned. James didn’t enjoy talking about his past. While he had certainly amazed those around him—Jessie included—with these supernatural tricks, they frightened James and happened on more occasions than he cared to admit or share with others. He had an ability to see what others couldn’t.
“I don’t know. So, how about I visit you soon, like really soon. Maybe in two days?” he said and lunged into a chair by his coffee table.
“That’s great! Promise?”
“Promise. New York City. Two days. I’ll text you the details. I gotta run now—see you then.”
“I’m so excited—I can’t wait. And cheer up grumpy face. Love you J!”
“Love you, too,” James said then pressed the end button on his phone and stared at Jessie’s name on his screen. He placed the phone into his pocket, flipped open his laptop and, after scouring several websites, bought a plane ticket.
New York would be good for him. Great, even.
He thought on his father. They’d had a falling out, so to speak, a few years back when James had first decided to move to Chicago. His father disapproved of James’ desire to pursue art—now James wondered whether he should have listened—not due to a lack of success but for a lack of fulfillment. James’ and Joe’s fame had skyrocketed in the past year and their dysmorphic, responsive sculptures had found their way into many rich people’s homes. It was all pretty cool—it even allowed James to live in his fancy Chicago loft.
His father taught law at Brown University and wanted James to follow in his stead. The law lulled James to sleep—he was much more interested in computer engineering as well as drawing and painting, and the act of combining art and tech enthralled him. While his father supported computer engineering—“Engineering has a future—a purpose, son,”—he abhorred the idea of his son practicing liberal arts. “You’ll end up like one of those hippy-dippy, pot-smoking, nobodies.”
James did enjoy smoking pot but he was far from a hippy nobody. He sighed—he loved his dad and wanted him to be proud. He wanted to be proud of himself. Something was amiss, however. He couldn’t put his finger on it, which was odd since his intuition tended to be spot on, but the idea that the universe had more in store for him stared him in the face.
A numbness crawled into his brain—his bed invited him to nap.
A shadowy James lurked in a hallway lined with gold—beside him, a mountain of a man crouched, eyes fixed down the hallway, his hand held high as if about to give a signal. Next to the man knelt a woman dressed in a leather tunic, her hair knitted into a complex braid adorned with a crown of leaves. Beside her, another man squatted—he was smaller than the mountain, but strong, James knew, with jagged muscles and piercing eyes.
The mountain swept his hand forward and they ran—James as well, his feet following instructions not his own, as if he inhabited a foreign body and watched these events through a mask. The hallway blurred into squiggly lines and he came upon a vast chamber that held a solitary throne. On it reclined a figure draped in venomous black garb—a hood over the figure concealed an ominous, dark hole where a face should have been.
James settled into a line with his companions, and they aimed their weapons at the onyx figure. With some effort, James coerced his loose, fleshy mask to look down at a new item in his hands: a lethal, silver dagger. The woman now held a bow and arrow, and the smaller man clutched a mace whose handle glittered with rubies and inlets of bronze. The giant brandished nothing more than his fists, one of which he raised toward the figure. He spoke words in a language foreign to James.
The earth rumbled.
Snakes slithered from the figure’s vacant face and wound themselves around James—commotion and cracks in the earth—shouts and screams—a tugging, and the ground sucked James down,
down, down… He clawed, grasped for anything—a rock? No. Shadows. He grasped at shadows. He was shadow: a consciousness adrift.
James came to—eyes shuttering open like an aperture gone haywire, sweat draping his brow. He rubbed the sleep away and massaged his temples.
That damned dream again.
7
Jordan’s grip slackened on top of Olivia’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Olivia pleaded with the tears in her eyes to return to their ducts. She reluctantly removed her hand from Jordan’s and placed it on her lap—she wanted nothing more than to touch him, to embrace him, but she couldn’t bring herself to cross that chasm.
They were supposed to see Belfast through. Jordan saw it otherwise, treating their relationship like a funfair.
Jordan’s blue eyes, wet and glassy like diamonds, begged her lips to move. She kept mum. All the love she held for him balled together with the fear of being alone, of her facing a life in Belfast without another’s comfort. It drove her stark mad.
She glanced at the window, its curtains were drawn, and it let in a cold, washed-out light—clouds hung low over the Belfast sky and a trickle of rain spattered against their flat’s exterior—rather, her flat, now that Jordan was leaving. He wasn’t the first to leave.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Yes, I mean, my mum is better and she wants to go back to England,” Jordan said. “Are you sure you can’t come?”
Olivia wouldn’t have been in Belfast, wouldn’t have applied for a position there, if it weren’t for the treatment Jordan’s mother required. It was Olivia’s fault. She sought the therapy and recommended the doctor. But could she really blame him for wanting to remain near his mother? But he’d promised her he’d stay.
“You know I can’t leave—not yet,” she said. “Moving here turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for me—for us.”
A glint in Jordan’s eye surprised Olivia as she confirmed that she wasn’t leaving. Jordan’s gaze meandered to his right, somewhere far in the ceiling.
“I’ll miss you,” he said, laced with an unfamiliar iciness. He placed his hand on her knee and squeezed—this normally would have tickled Olivia and elicited a smile from her, but something about the way he spoke those words countered its influence.
Is he hiding something from me?
“When is your mother leaving?” she said.
“Two, three weeks. I’ll return to London with her then.”
She fidgeted with the bottom of her baby t-shirt and then with the pockets of her jeans.
“Why don’t you stay with me until you absolutely have to go?”
Jordan edged away from her.
“I think it’s best if I stay with my mum—you know how she can get.”
“Jordan,” she squared her face with his, “is there something you aren’t telling me?”
The seat of his pants squirmed—Olivia had never seen him react this way before. He said nothing.
“Jordan? Why are you really going back to London?”
Jordan scrunched his lips, leaned over and placed knuckled thumbs to his forehead.
“Olive—don’t… Let’s just move on, okay?”
And there it was. The distance he’d put between them expanded like a fire to fresh air. Olivia drew her long legs to her chest and scooted back into the couch—she faced Jordan and pushed aside the nausea welling in her tummy. She wanted answers, no matter how harsh.
“Jordan—you tell me what’s going on, right now. I deserve that, at least.”
He sat there awhile, hunched over, inhaling methodic breaths. Olivia observed the curve of his back swell and contract as, she assumed, he weighed his next words. He looked at her.
“Olive—I love you, and—” A conniption overtook him until he settled himself. “If it wasn’t for you, my mum probably wouldn’t have made it. What? With your ability to tell when people are sick…”
Olivia recalled the day she had been enjoying a cup of tea with Jordan’s mother. A sensation arose in Olivia’s hands that spread through her arms and eventually to her cheeks and brow. Then, an ethereal light emanated from his mother’s chest, glowing yellow with bursts of menacing purple and red—somehow Olivia understood his mother was sick and asked her to visit a doctor. This wasn’t the first occasion a disease had alerted Olivia to its presence. It was why she’d decided to become a nurse.
“…and I’ve met someone else.” He looked away. “I’m sorry.”
Olivia didn’t understand. Someone else? When? How?
“What?” She had done nothing wrong—the opposite even—she had given Jordan everything. She so badly wanted to rip apart Jordan’s thoughts, dig her hands in and discover the truth.
“Look, it doesn’t matter. I’m all packed up—I need to get out of here.”
Olivia threw an arm toward Jordan but it fell limp—her body disobeyed her every command. With that, Jordan fled from their little flat, and loneliness whisked into the brand-new vacancy. A horrifying reality dawned on her: that she may as well resign to a bachelorette’s life, as her mother—who’d single-handedly raised her—had done. Tough times. Times where Olivia was the only person in the world. Times where she needed companionship.
Olivia’s mother rarely stayed put—the demands of her mother’s work forced Olivia from city to city and her mother out of Olivia’s grasp. Friendships required time to form—time Olivia never possessed. Books afforded her solace and she did well in school, receiving a scholarship to a respectable uni.
College offered up one hazardous relationship after another. She learned all-too-quickly that men often sought very different things than she did, and that she must guard herself. She’d thought Jordan was different—clearly she’d been wrong—and now the idea of love stabbed her nerves. Perhaps the ultimate defense was to commit to a solo life.
Jordan.
They had met during Olivia’s senior year in college. Olivia stumbled into the uni coffee shop after an all-nighter and fumbled her way through her usual coffee order: “Hey Sam,” and “Yea, the usual” and yawn “Thanks” and she went to pile on a mound of cream in her cup when she knocked over a napkin holder. Embarrassed—she was sleep-deprived, after all—she dove to pick up the snowing napkins and smashed heads with a handsome fellow attempting the same. Lucky for her, she walked away with her reputation intact. Lucky for him, Jordan walked away with a date.
A perfect year raced by. She graduated. He graduated. They saw only each other in their futures—and then Jordan’s mom grew ill. And, well, the rest sort of just happened.
Now she had decided to stop whingeing and seek fulfillment in her work—in helping others. Focus on others, that’s the secret—forget about yourself since you don’t matter.
Whatever.
Panic and pain drove Olivia. Her throat burned and a thousand bricks bore down upon her chest, forcing her to the floor—her cheek lay against the ground, its surface sleek and cool.
Where…?
She vaulted upward, fists out and dangling, and spotted a man standing a few yards from her. She locked eyes with him, ready to strike—and then he blurred—she saw two of the man…two of the man—her head swam as clouds lifted the soles of her feet.
Thud.
A calmness—the type that approaches only after complete exhaustion—cradled Olivia. She floated in a warm bed—pain—she gingerly touched a spot on her head and smiled at the nice man holding her.
Wait!
She thrust her leg upward, catching the man in the chest, ejecting him from her.
“And just what do you think you were doing?” she shouted.
The man—a young man—coughed and sputtered, then said, “Damn… Dammit! I…was trying to see if you were okay!”
He answered honestly, she could tell. Something about his large, brown eyes, as well as a weakness in his voice, told her so—this young man hadn’t yet accepted the responsibilities of life. He was but a boy inhabiting a man’s body—a c
ute boy, but a boy nonetheless. Nevermind that.
The woman exploded into the gymnasium, stumbling on shaky legs. She pulled her head back and let loose a guttural roar that melted into a shrill, teeth-clenched howl and turned into a fit of sobbing. Her shoulders stooped as if an invisible lead coat hung upon them. She sank to the floor and curled into a ball.
James watched her.
She jumped, frantically looking about the room like a parent searching madly for her lost child.
Her eyes met James’. He feared their savageness.
The air between them brimmed with electricity. She looked like she might attack, but then her disposition softened. Her presence overwhelmed him, though she stood twenty feet away.
“Are… Are you all right?” James said.
The woman stared. Her expression blank. Then she passed out, crumpling to the floor like a rag doll. Her head made a sickening thump as it struck the ground.
Oh, shit!
James rushed toward her, took a knee and slid to within a few inches from her, which he’d later reflect would have looked downright cool if anyone had been watching.
She lay face up, pupils visible through slivered eyelids. He cupped the nape of her neck between his hands and laid her head on his knees. Her chest rose and fell in a steady, predictable pattern. He tried not to notice the rest of her shapely figure as he placed his fingertips to her neck and detected a rhythm similar to his own.
James did not know why he played doctor or what it might accomplish, though the idea—the necessity—of protecting this woman was inescapable. From where this compulsion originated eluded him. Perhaps his subconscious had reacted to the word “Protect.” Or, more likely, a beautiful, young woman lay vulnerable and alone on the floor and he was the only one who could protect her.
She stirred, then whimpered.
“Hey, there… You took quite a fall. How are you feeling now?”
She reached her hand to the back of her head and rubbed the area that had contacted the floor, wincing. Her eyes flittered open, stealing a quick glance at James, and her lips curled into a groggy smile. She snuggled her head into his legs, getting comfortable.
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