by Jayla Kane
But I was good at sports. I was fast—faster than people expected, given my size—and I sure as hell wasn’t afraid of getting hit. I don’t mind hitting people who know what they’re signing up for either.
I wish I was smart. But I’m not. So as excited as I was that I could do this strange thing—that I could walk through time and space, just a little bit, always just a jump or two ahead—I kept thinking about how the Society was going to use me when they found out. And I just could not see a way to escape. I wasn’t smart enough.
I was stuck.
The only choice I had, I felt, was to get better at being… Whatever this was. To lie to my only friend even while he stared at me, his eyes gaunt as he fished around for clues about these pieces of shit, to help him with the girl he pretended he didn’t love more than life itself, to jump through time a little bit, here and there. And pray nobody noticed.
But I fucked up.
I don’t have much of a temper—people expect me to, which is just another testament to the fact that people are generally crap. Just because I look like a big angry redneck doesn’t mean I actually am—angry, anyway. I was too worn down to be angry, for the most part. Vigilant, sure, but angry… Anger is for people who think they can change something, people who hope for fairness. Jake was angry. Constantly. He simmered, really, would be the word. But I don’t. I don’t think the world will ever be better; I don’t think people will ever be better; I don’t believe in fairness, because that shit is a fairy tale. So I’m not angry.
But I lost my shit when I found out they whipped Raven in the Vault.
And I couldn’t say a goddamn word.
Jake didn’t tell me when it happened; Percy did. Jake had just been so fucking weird I knew some real shit had gone down—something else, something besides Tristan leaving--so I found him in the library. And he told me, his eyes dark with anger, and I knew it must’ve been bad if that rich-boy Delta piece-of-crap was pissed on her behalf.
And that might be another reason why Jake wasn’t sleeping. Or eating. Or speaking.
The days were blurring together for me; I wasn’t sleeping a lot myself. I was still working hard to try and finish some of the work college required, which was very hard on me, and also trying to learn how to control my jumps. That’s what I started calling them. Just little jumps between seconds, from one moment to the next, one place to the next. I’d realized it wasn’t speed—I wasn’t super fast. I was just stepping through one second and out of a minute on the other side. It seemed like the kind of thing you could aim better, control. And I imagined that I had to know where I was going, because you could land inside of a tree or a wall if you didn’t pay attention—I hadn’t yet, but the possibility seemed very real. I had to focus on the place where I wanted to jump, do this kind of push—I could feel the magic now, when it gathered into a bundle inside of me, and it almost felt like steadying your body for a leap—and then land. Usually while moving. I fell a lot, but our property is really big and no one is around, so I had a good place to practice after my dad passed out. Which was earlier and earlier these days. But I was having trouble remembering to eat, and had to text Molly for reminders about where to pick her up more than normal, and I felt guilty about Jake. He was in bad shape, but I knew I couldn’t do anything about that—he was lovesick. A word that would’ve made him die laughing if I said it out loud, but that’s what he was. I might be a hillbilly, but we have some useful expressions.
The day we found out Raven was innocent was a relief, I guess; I understood more when Percy finally told me about the whipping, understood the way Jake had been looking at Raven a little more. It started to click into place. A part of me hoped he would get sick enough to want to get better, once I understood what was happening.
He had to forgive her. He had to, right?
Chapter Five
Hunter
And then I was summoned.
They didn’t use a phone with me, which I found confusing. Jake had one, and it seemed a hell of a lot more convenient than having someone walk up to me on the Commons and hand me a letter—did they just wait around until they saw me? Did I have no urgent business? No character assassinations to perform? I guess I should’ve been grateful.
I tore it open and read it, then headed up to the same office, preparing myself for an interrogation.
“I have a job for you,” the woman said, and she didn’t shape-shift this time. She left the mask on and I closed the door behind me, wondering how she would explain it if someone who knew what Society members looked like saw me in here with her. If I could finally tell Jake. It’d been almost two weeks; it felt like a hell of a lot longer.
“I told you I’m not killing anybody,” I said, but she sat down and smoothed out a paper on her desk, her face still unreadable under that mask.
“Relax,” she told me. “We’re not murderers, Mr. Black.” Her voice had a smirk tucked inside of it. My hands itched. I don’t ever, ever hit women, not even as a rule—as an instinct. Cruelty towards women repulses me. But I tell you… I hated her. Hated everything about her. “I told you: character assassination.”
I said nothing, and waited, my hands clenching and unclenching to relieve the tension. I knew she saw when her mask tilted slightly to the side and there was a hitch in her breathing.
“We need you to… To procure someone.”
“What does that mean?”
“I believe you know the Kellers?” She looked at me for a long, hard moment, and I realized there was nothing under the mask; there were no eyes there, no lips, no shadow beneath her cheekbones or indents for her nostrils. The sight was somehow worse than when she’d blurred her form before, and when I swallowed, the fear momentarily getting the better of me, I could’ve sworn she smiled. “Yes,” she said, and removed the mask, “I thought it might be better not to have to put on the show. This is just to keep my identity secret. Sorry if it’s a little… Alarming.” No eyes. No face. Just a smooth, flesh-colored void.
She wasn’t really sorry. “What do you want?”
“I think the casual term is kidnap,” she said, and I gritted my teeth.
“No.”
“Oh, I think you’ll like this one,” she said, looking down at the paper in front of her again. I had a feeling that if I walked around behind her and stared over her shoulder, it would be blank. She just liked toying with me in any way she could. “You’ll like it a lot. Raven Keller, our Sineater, has a younger sister named… Missy? Is it?”
I was silent. I knew that was the nick-name she used at school. And that this was some kind of bait, some way to prod me into talking about her. No one in the entire world knew I’d ever met Baby Keller. They might know Molly went to the same school, and they might know I’d seen her once or twice, walking around town or when I went to pick up Molly. Baby was hard to miss—for anybody. She was so beautiful that whenever I did see her, I saw at least three other people staring at her at the same time. She looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine.
So I said nothing. This bitch couldn’t read minds, as far as I knew.
“Well. We need you to go pick her up.”
“No.” Pick her up. Like I was taking her to the fucking movies.
“Yes. You will pick her up and bring her here, to this room.” She waved her hand and a door appeared directly behind her, just as ancient and gruesomely carved as the legs of the desk where she sat. “You will find a staircase behind this door. You will carry Missy Keller down the stairs, and you will put her in one of the cells below.”
“No fucking way.”
She laughed at me. “On what grounds, exactly, do you think you can object to my directions?”
“This is illegal. And wrong.” I leaned forward and spoke through my teeth, letting how much I hated her show. Even without a face, I could tell I’d startled her. “And fuck you.”
“Mr. Black, how gauche.” Her voice was just a little too high, the register slightly off; I’d frightened her. Good.
I cracked my knuckles and stood upright again, watching her. “At any rate, you don’t have much of a choice, do you?”
“Of course I do.” Another thing I’d learned, the kernel that lead me to my hard-won wisdom about the general nature of human beings: you always had a choice. Most people just chose to be shit.
“No, you don’t,” she said, and I could tell I was pissing her off. “Maybe you’ve forgotten—I can take away everything that matters to you with the snap of my fingers. Everything.” She stood up and leaned across the desk, but that just made something in my belly clench. I hated her. “I can help your sister, Mr. Black. Do you remember? Or,” she said, her voice lowering into a growl, “I can—”
She didn’t get farther than that. I jumped—I didn’t mean to do it. I was standing across the room, not even in the chair that was in front of her desk, the one I imagine the rest of the Society members she dragged in here would use. I didn’t want to sit; I didn’t want to be here—I didn’t want to be in the goddamn Society. I just understood her reasoning about choices… And I’d chosen. But kidnapping?
Kidnapping Baby?
Something about that made me even angrier than it made me sick—something deep inside of me, the same part of me that Baby wrapped around her finger with a hint of a smile and one knowing look. So I jumped, through time, through the space between us, and when I landed right beside that bitch and kicked her chair over one of my hands was on the desk and the other one…
Claws.
I’d never seen them before. They didn’t seem real… They weren’t human. Talons, almost fangs, curving out of my fingers in long, bony arcs. They belonged on an animal. Not on a human. Not on me.
But I was holding them up to the blank face in front of me like I was about to rip it off, my breath coming hard, and the Rose was shaking as she leaned away, her terror evident even without eyes to widen, a mouth to plead with.
“I’m not kidnapping anyone,” I told her again, and I didn’t recognize my voice. It wasn’t just the hatred—I hated other things. Lots of them. Myself, some days.
I sounded like an animal.
“Please, Hunter,” she whimpered, and right in front of me, she changed into Molly. Every detail was perfect—this wasn’t like the time when she changed into me, when I could still see, if I looked long and hard enough, the tiny differences in the shape of my face and hers. This was Molly. My little sister—everything about her was the same, right down to the way she looked when she was scared.
I couldn’t help it. I backed off immediately even though I knew she wasn’t my sister. And before I could change my mind, she disappeared.
I thought the office was empty, fury over-taking me as I slammed my fist onto the desk and listened to it list to one side as a leg gave way. That’s when I heard the sound—a low scurry, something I never normally should’ve been able to hear. But along with my hands, my hearing was more animalistic; I listened to that noise and realized she’d transformed into a small animal, or a bug. In a rage, I picked up the desk and threw it over, the hard wood holding fast but landing with a satisfying crunch. “Come out now!”
She didn’t. Where-ever she was, she held perfectly still.
So I began to destroy the room. Systematically. Trying out my new claws on every surface—the fancy wallpaper someone so thoughtfully chose a few hundred years ago, that little lamp with the candle, the stuffing in the chair she sat in. And she was trapped, I knew; her powers didn’t include vanishing, or she’d have gone already. She was stuck in the room somewhere, both doors locked, and even as an ant I doubt she would be able to get through them. Not with the spell that made the office look like this still intact. I slammed the chair against the wall and watched the pieces of it splinter and shatter all over the room, and heard that sound again. “I’m going to find you,” I warned the room, “and rip you to fucking shreds, and no one will ever know what happened to you if you look like a goddamn cockroach. No one will give a fuck.” I picked up a piece of wood from the shattered chair and threw it through the window, watched it drop down to earth and land in some tree branches on the Commons. I’d half-wondered if it would just evaporate, if the spell made it dust when it left this room. It didn’t—and that meant she wouldn’t, either, when I chucked her body out the fucking window next.
“Mr. Black,” her voice came, and when I turned around she still wasn’t immediately visible. Her voice was quiet, like it matched the size of the creature she was inhabiting. “We under-estimated you.”
“I don’t think so,” I snarled. “You picked me to become your assassin. Maybe,” I snapped, using my enhanced vision to study the room, “you thought I’d be assassinating somebody else, but you clearly knew the stakes.”
“I think we understand each other better now,” she said, and I reached down and began ripping the carpet up, thinking that if she were an ant or something she might be beneath it. “Mr. Black,” she said, and there was no change in her tone to indicate what I was doing made her more nervous, “you have no choice. This is the primary objective for your position. We don’t have another job for you. You were chosen to procure Baby Keller and tend to her in the cell. If you do this,” she said, and then I banged the carpet, hard, on the floor, “you will never have another job for the Society. Baby Keller is your job,” she said, and I knew I’d rattled her. She was somewhere underneath. I tore it off of the floor and stared at the hardwood beneath. Her voice had a thread of panic. “If you don’t—Mr. Black! Mr. Black if you don’t do this, we’ll be forced to—”
I slammed the carpet back down, listening to it arc through the air with the whistle of a whip. I must have missed, though, because her voice came again a second later, breathless with terror. “Mr. Black! We’ll kill Molly! We’ll have no choice but to kill her—”
“I thought I was your assassin,” I snarled, cracking the carpet through the air once more and listening as it landed with a thud. When I stood upright again I imagined her, crushed in the body of a spider, mashed against the floorboards, and smiled.
“You’re not our only assassin,” she finally said, from another corner of the room, further away, and I held still.
I thought about it.
Of course I wasn’t.
Of course they had someone else—one of the people so goddamn pleased with themselves when she said they could do fucking magic that they bounced up and down in that chair, that she took for granted everyone would be pleased—someone who might be happy to do whatever they told them to do. Someone who didn’t care about who they hurt, or why they had to hurt them, or that hurting people was just plain wrong.
Because people are shit.
And people who can do magic are even worse.
“You have three days to complete the task,” she said, and I could hear her ragged breathing, the relief mixing with terror in her voice as she watched me consider kidnapping a beautiful young woman and stuffing her into some magic drawer, so my own sister could walk around free.
She didn’t speak again.
She was smart. Like I wish I was—calculating, like Jake, and able to act after she had all the information and only then. She’d made a couple bets and they were riskier than she thought they’d be, but in the end, I was still a member of the fucking Society. I signed the goddamn book. And I was going to kidnap Baby Keller.
I was trapped.
If I went and walked off a high-rise in Philly they might still kill Molly and kidnap Baby. They could; if I could do this weird shit and she could turn into a bug there had to be more of them, doing more shit that belonged in nightmares and comic books. And my little sister had no one. No one.
I left the room, my hands still curved in claws that carved away at me at night, my brain swept with images of my little sister tortured and killed. Heartsick.
I left the room, and went to go find Baby.
Chapter Six
Hunter
I didn’t plan it out; I didn’t sit and think sinister thoughts and rack my brain
for ways to trick her the way she’d tricked me. I didn’t think I could, or I wouldn’t go through with it.
There was too much that was fucked up about it—the idea that someone like me, because I was bigger, I guess, and because I thought I had to—someone like me could just take someone else. Make them disappear. Make them go somewhere they didn’t want to, do things they didn’t want to. I almost threw up in my truck, sitting outside of my house.
I have issues, sure. One of the reasons I like Jake is because deep down, we both know what that’s like; it’s strange to be a big guy, a guy other people look at and fear instinctively, and know exactly what they’re imagining. The way force can be used to crush someone else, to pound them into submission. I understood that. I’d lived through it more than once—and it changes you, forever. You’re never the same.
The whole reason we became friends is because Jake bullied another bully in front of me after a game. That’s it. I saw it in his eyes—he has this thing he does, when he latches on to someone and focuses his venom on them, and it’s fucked up to look at. You can’t see the way his face changes and not become instantly aware that the target is about to get slaughtered. He didn’t even like the kid that was getting bullied; he just hated bullies. Ironic, right? But that was all it took. Jake tilted his head and leaned against the locker and told this piece of shit that’d just humiliated a freshman what his girlfriend’s pussy tasted like. And how good she was at sucking dick. And then he asked him if he could borrow her again—just like that. Do you think I could borrow her for a while after school? The guy threw a punch and Jake dodged it, letting him crunch his fist into the locker, and then he lit into him. Left him spitting out a tooth on the locker room floor, but only after he leaned down and looked him in the eye and said he’d never fucked his girl, but now he was going to tell her that he thought she was a slut. So he would probably be fucking her soon.