Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  He fired up his purr.

  Lucy inhaled a surprised breath, and Michael Stein knew that she could hear him purr. That made him very happy.

  “I know this just a dream,” Lucy said. “I love it anyway. I don’t want to wake up.”

  “It’s no dream, Lucy,” Michael Stein said.

  She drew back and stared at him, and he told her the whole story.

  Well, almost the whole story…

  “There’s one catch,” Michael Stein said when he couldn’t avoid the topic any longer.

  Lucy frowned. “What’s that?”

  “I should probably show you. Let’s go outside.”

  The porch and the porch steps and the sidewalk all the way down the street were filled with ghost cats. Big ones. Little ones. Gingers and tabbies. Black cats and Siamese and longhairs and mixes of every variety. Even one Egyptian hairless. And a one-eyed Maine Coon, who looked both distinguished and grave.

  “Do you see them?” Michael Stein asked.

  “Do I ever! Are they all…well, I mean…are they all like you?”

  “Yes,” Michael Stein said, “they’re all ghosts. But for cats, being dead doesn’t mean we end or go anyplace or anything like that. We stick around near the ones we love.” He felt a little guilty for ever thinking that he wouldn’t stick around, but Lucy didn’t need to know that. He didn’t want her to ever think he wanted to leave. He didn’t even feel like the same cat anymore. “And that’s the thing…”

  Lucy looked like she wanted to rush out into the throng of cats, but she held back. “What’s the thing?”

  “The problem is that we ghost cats can’t help the living. Humans don’t even know we’re around. Living cats know about us, but they don’t exactly listen.” Michael Stein realized he was talking about himself just a week ago, but he kept going. “So, in return for allowing you to see me, I said that you would hear ghost cats’ problems and help them. Sometimes a crime has been done. Sometimes one is going to be done. Sometimes it’s just an injustice that needs a living human to deal with it.” Michael Stein swallowed. “I said that you would be that person.”

  “You mean…” Lucy said, “that I’m a detective for dead cats?”

  “You could think of it that way, I guess.”

  “Awesome!” Lucy whispered. “This is like the best job imaginable! And I’ve got all summer…”

  She stepped through the door and fell right into conversation with the ginger kitten. Michael Stein felt a great deal of relief, though he also knew that he had changed more than just what she was going to do with the summer. The gift would be with her for life. He’d have to talk about that with her sometime. But today he was just pleased to have her back.

  Lucy turned around and mouthed the words, “I love you, Michael Stein.”

  Michael Stein couldn’t help it. He started to purr. He realized that his relationship with Lucy hadn’t ended with his death. Instead, it was just beginning.

  A voice beside him startled him. It was Pax. He had a way of sneaking up, all silent like. “So,” he said, “I reckon this means you’ll be staying around. Told ya.”

  For once, Michael Stein didn’t try to have the last word.

  I have a soft spot for minions. Lackeys. Henchmen. The sycophantic underlings who make a good villain great. Who would the Joker be without his flunkies? Hans Gruber without his crack team of gun-toting criminals? Sauron without his Uruk-hai?

  And, in my debut novel, Struck, the villain, Rance Ridley Prophet, would have been a lost and lonely soul without his twelve adopted Apostles, particularly the twins, Iris and Ivan.

  In recent years, we’ve gotten to delve into the origin stories of some of pop culture’s favorite villains. Darth Vadar. Magneto. And now Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter. But we rarely get to go behind the scenes with their trusty minions.

  For this reason, I decided to more closely examine the origins of Iris and Ivan, fiercely loyal followers of Rance Ridley Prophet. Who were they before Rance adopted them? What was it about their lives, their experience, that primed them to become his true believers?

  And, most importantly, what is in the heart of a minion?

  — Jennifer Bosworth

  STRANGE RAIN

  Jennifer Bosworth

  Iris knew her mother didn’t love her, had maybe never loved her, not the way a mother is supposed to. There was something broken in Anita Banik. Maybe it happened when Iris’s father left Anita for another woman (or several) while she was hugely pregnant with twins, her stomach extruded three feet in front of her, the skin stretched taut as a balloon about to pop. Or maybe it had more to do with the complicated birth that nearly killed Anita, and had ravaged her body so that she could never have another child. Not that she seemed to want the ones she already had.

  Iris and her identical twin, Ivan, had once been more than identical. They had been joined, literally, at the hip, and down the thigh as well. Conjoined twins, separated at birth. They were a cliché, but Iris didn’t care. She loved looking at the pictures of her and Ivan as newborns, before the surgery that sliced their fused flesh and removed them from one another. Iris had asked Ivan once if he ever wished the doctors had left them how they were. Nature had intended them to enter the world as one body. Maybe that’s how they should have remained.

  Ivan had thought she was kidding. He laughed and said sarcastically, “Oh, yeah, that would have been great. Life would be one never-ending three-legged race.”

  Iris laughed along with her twin, and then excused herself to go to the bathroom so she could wipe at her eyes before Ivan noticed she was crying. With the door locked, she unzipped her pants, pulled them down, and examined the soft, pebbly scar that stretched from her hip to the top of her knee. Sometimes she imagined she still felt Ivan attached to her, a phantom limb amputated against her will.

  When Ivan laughed off her question as too ridiculous to be considered, Iris should have taken it as a sign of things to come. She should have been prepared for the day when her twin would tire of her company and need…more.

  Iris knew her mother didn’t love her, would probably never love her. But she expected her brother to love her forever. Her, and only her.

  Ivan made his pronouncement the spring before they were to start high school. They were fifteen, but Ivan was already six foot two, and Iris was hot on his heels at five foot eleven. With their pale skin and colorless eyes, Iris was already dreading how inconspicuous they would appear in a new school. Sometimes she stared into the bathroom mirror and spat the word “freak” over and over again to get used to the sound of it being hurled at her. To build up a tolerance.

  “I’m going to try out for football,” Ivan told Iris one afternoon, leaning against the wall across from her bed, his arms crossed defensively over his chest as though anticipating her reaction, an involuntary burst of laughter she immediately regretted. She couldn’t help herself, though. The idea of lanky, bookish Ivan with his delicate, almost feline features and his porcelain skin playing football was a joke.

  A joke Ivan didn’t think was funny.

  “Oh, come on,” Iris said when he scowled at her. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Dead serious, actually,” Ivan said.

  Iris took a moment to digest this development so she could figure out the best way to bring her twin back to reality.

  “Why?” she finally asked, so she’d know what to argue against.

  Ivan shrugged his narrow, pointy shoulders. “Why does anyone play football? To make friends. Be on a team. Be a part of something.”

  He might as well have slapped her. “You are a part of something.”

  He stared at her blankly, clueless. Iris felt the back of her throat begin to burn.

  “You and me,” she said. “You’re a part of us. We’re our own team. You don’t need a bunch of meathead jocks to give you that. You were born with it.”

  Ivan sighed and turned to leave her bedroom. He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. From the kitche
n, they could hear their mother crashing around, probably looking for another bottle of the cheap booze she loaded up on each week. Iris wondered if they could buy alcohol in bulk at Costco. Of course, then they’d have to get a Costco membership, but it might still save them some money, which they needed. Anita had been fired (she preferred to say laid off, but that wasn’t the truth) three months ago. Money was tight. She liked to remind them of that at least once a day, even though she never gave them any money. Iris used the cash she earned babysitting to pay for lunches and school clothes, and more often than not to buy groceries for all three of them. She was lucky their neighbor paid her fifteen bucks an hour and liked to go out a lot, otherwise they’d all starve.

  “Mom’s drunk again,” Ivan said, speaking more to himself than to Iris, but she responded anyway.

  “Yeah, the sun must have risen this morning.”

  Ivan looked back at her; his eyes were like those of a person at a funeral. Watery. Fighting to maintain control.

  “We’re not normal, Iris,” her twin said.

  She nodded, sort of proud. “I know.”

  “I want to be normal.”

  And then came the news that stole Ivan from her. He didn’t even tell her himself. She had to find out in the worst way possible. From their mother while she was blackout drunk.

  It was summertime, the heat in their house oppressive. The air had weight, slowed everything down. The air conditioner had died, and Anita said they didn’t have the money to get it fixed. Iris assumed that was why Ivan had been spending so much time away from the house.

  Then she started to notice he was getting a tan, and that his waify, garden hose arms had filled out a bit. She wanted to ask her twin if he’d been working out at the gym, if maybe she could join him, even though she hated working out. But she was lonely. Iris did not have friends. She’d never needed them, because she’d always had, and always would have, her brother. Why bother with superficial relationships when she had such a unique bond with another human being? How could any other friendship compare?

  Iris was in her room one evening, reading something she couldn’t pay attention to and wondering when Ivan would be home and what, if anything, there would be to eat for dinner, when Anita burst through the door. She had a bottle of five-dollar rotgut vodka in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.

  Iris sat up, dropping her forgettable book, suddenly afraid. Her mother had never hit her, but she was vindictive. Anita reveled in emotional torture when she could find a way to get at the twins, like it was revenge for them being two people, for ripping her insides apart in their attempt to vacate her body.

  Anita waved the piece of paper in Iris’s face. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. He didn’t tell you, did he?” Though she was stumbling around the room like she was on a ship going through rough waters, her voice was surprisingly clear. Not a trace of her usual drunken slur. She was obviously trying hard to be articulate, over-pronouncing each word. She didn’t want Iris to miss anything.

  “Guess what this is. It is a fucking bill for the football gear your brother is going to need next year. Ha! Who knew that delicate little boy of mine would ever become a jock. I expected him to spend a lot of time in locker rooms, but, you know…on his knees.” She cackled at her joke. She’d been insinuating that Ivan was gay since he was eight years old and she had caught the twins playing dress up as each other. Ivan looked just like Iris when he put on her dresses, but after Anita ridiculed him, he never wanted to play that game again.

  Iris snatched the paper from her mother’s hand and read it carefully to be sure. She had to be sure.

  And now she was.

  Outside, her window lit up as heat lightning flashed somewhere close by. The thunder wasn’t far behind.

  She was awake when he came home, sitting in the armchair in the dark, like a wife waiting up for her cheating husband. It was raining by that time, and Ivan came through the door dripping. He shook his hair like a dog. Iris could smell him, but he didn’t smell like her brother. He smelled like sweat and grass and mostly like betrayal.

  When Ivan saw her, he froze. “Mom?”

  Their mom had passed out an hour earlier, luckily in her own bed, which was not always the case. Most of the time she never made it farther than the couch or the kitchen table.

  “It’s me,” Iris said.

  “Iris?” He sounded confused. “What…what are you doing?”

  Outside, lightning flashed again, so close it was blinding. Iris could feel the electricity in the air, especially along the scar on her hip and thigh. The skin there tingled with hundreds of tiny shocks. The scar had always been the most sensitive part of her body.

  Iris shot to her feet and brandished the equipment bill at him the way their mother had brandished it at her. “You keep secrets from me now?”

  He didn’t take the paper, only glanced down at it and then away, obviously ashamed.

  As he should be, Iris thought.

  “How could you do this to me?” she demanded.

  “What?” Ivan brought his gaze to hers, and she was startled to see that his shame had already disappeared, and in its place was only fire and defiance. “What did I do to you? Huh? Did I get in the way of you having a life of your own? No, that was you! Did I try to hold you back from something you wanted to do because of my own selfishness? Nope, that was you, too! Tell me, twin, what did I do to you? Tell me!”

  He was shouting into her face now. Ivan had never shouted at her. He’d always been so calm and thoughtful and composed. Now he was a jock. Worse, a jock with a temper.

  Iris realized suddenly that tears were pouring down her face. She wiped at them furiously. She didn’t know whom she was angrier with, Ivan or herself. He was right, she’d tried to hold him back from what he wanted. But only because she assumed he thought like she did…that there was no one else in the world with whom he could share the kind of bond he had with her. So why bother? Why bother with other people at all?

  Iris’s scar buzzed like a doorbell. She pressed her palm against it to try to calm its insistent tingling. She spoke softly. “Do you ever feel your scar humming…or, or begging, like you took something away from it, and it wants you to give it back?”

  When she dared look at Ivan, she wished she didn’t. He backed away from her, holding up his hands, as though in surrender. Or fear. That was the answer.

  No.

  He was afraid of her.

  Her twin did not feel the same connection to her that she did to him. Maybe when the doctors separated them, they took more out of her and gave it to Ivan. Or maybe it was all in her head, this undying twin-bond she’d only imagined.

  Ivan’s look of apprehension turned to pity, and he reached for her. “Sis,” he said, but Iris slapped his hand away. She bolted for the door, and was through before he could stop her. She ran from the house, out into the rain. Her scar—that huge scar that spanned from her hip to her knee, an irregular, pinkish landscape as wide as her hand that looked so rough but felt, to her fingertips, like velvet—burned like it had been doused in acid.

  Iris didn’t even get to the sidewalk before a crooked arm of white light stabbed straight through the top of her head and stopped her in her tracks.

  For a moment, Iris’s entire body was on fire the way her scar had been a moment before.

  Then the burning consumed her, and it was all that she was.

  “Iris! Iris, wake up! Please be okay. Please be okay. I’m sorry for what I said. Please be okay!”

  She knew the voice better than any other. It was Ivan, calling to her from far away. But when she opened her eyes, he wasn’t far away. His face was above hers. Her gaze was drawn past him, though. Something loomed above him. Above them both. A black mass of what she first mistook to be smoke. But then she felt the raindrops on her face, raindrops that were not coming from the sky, because the clouds far above had cleared. Only this black cloud remained, hovering no more than ten feet off the ground.

  Iris sat u
p, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. Her head felt like it had been removed from her neck, dropped on the cement from twenty stories up, and then returned to her body. Even the raindrops falling from the low black cloud, light as they were, felt like hammer blows when they tapped her skull. She wished the strange little cloud would stop spitting on her, hurting her.

  As soon as she thought it, the rain stopped.

  “Oh my god…Iris, your hair.”

  Iris raised a shaking hand to touch her hair, and found that there wasn’t much to touch. What was left on her scalp was brittle and smelled like smoke.

  “Can you stand?” Ivan asked. “No, that’s a bad idea. I should call an ambulance.”

  “Don’t,” Iris snapped. “We can’t afford an ambulance. Anyway, I’m fine.”

  “How can you be fine? You’ve been struck by lightning. I saw it happen.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I believe you.” Iris winced as she tried to stand. Her head screamed mercy. “I felt it.”

  She wobbled on her feet, and her brother helped to keep her steady. Something crumbled into her eyes. She picked at her lids and came away with a dozen singed eyelashes.

  “They’ll grow back,” Ivan said, trying to sound reassuring. “I’m taking you to the hospital. You need to at least get checked.”

  Iris shoved him away, remembering the reason she’d run out into the rain in the first place. “No. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of you having a life. Besides, I’m sure you’ll be spending plenty of time in the hospital over the next three years after you get pummeled by ’roided-up human bulldozers.”

  Though her head felt as though it might crack open like an egg and spill out the scrambled yolk of her brain, Iris walked on her own back inside the house. She didn’t realize the dark cloud had followed her inside until she was in her bedroom. She lowered herself onto the mattress she’d slept on since she was five (she’d peed the bed on it a number of times back then, but her mom refused to buy a new one) and when she lay back, she saw it. The black mass bunched above her. She reached up and raked her fingers through it. The cloud looked so substantial, so dense and tangible, but it was no more solid than a thought.