Dominion

by Melody Manful

  We had come up with a ridiculous tale about a pirate captain, an evil stepmother, a beautiful maiden, and an awesome knight. Now it was up to us to act it out.

  I still couldn’t believe the fast, unexpected twist in my plot to kill Abigail. How had I let four days go by without killing her? Was I going soft? Why couldn’t I just get rid of her? Had I even been trying hard enough to get rid of her? Of course I had.

  So why the heck was I sitting beside her with my hand in hers, playing with a bunch of useless children?

  “I’ll be the pirate!” Vincent exclaimed when we asked for volunteers.

  Once the roles were assigned, we started acting out the scenes of our story. Finally, we reached the ending, and I, playing the awesome knight, rescued the beautiful maiden, Abigail.

  “O wonderful knight, thank you so much for rescuing me.” Abigail curtseyed.

  “My pleasure, beautiful maiden.” I bowed. “Marry me,” I said and stepped closer, taking her hands in mine. “Please, marry me,” I said earnestly, and then Abigail’s heartbeat quickened, and I realized it was because I was standing so close.

  “Where’s the pastor?” I heard someone ask. I stared into Abigail’s beautiful eyes.

  What the hell was I doing? Was I sick?

  “I’m here,” someone said. “Dearly beloved—”

  “I object!” Vincent shouted, and both Abigail and I turned to him. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.” We all laughed, except for Tristan, who for some reason didn’t seem to understand what I was doing. He stood invisibly behind the children.

  “We are…blah blah…” the young pastor said. “You are married. You may now kiss the bride.”

  My eyes met Abigail’s, and for a split second, I wanted my lie to be true. I wanted Abigail to be my girlfriend. I wanted it to be true so I could kiss her. Yeah, now I knew for sure that I was sick!

  Abigail’s heart pounded faster when I leaned toward her. What was wrong with me?

  “We don’t...” Whatever Abigail started to say trailed off.

  I could feel Abigail’s breath on my lips because of how close we were. It took every bit of willpower I had to not kiss her fully on the lips. When my lips finally touched her, they pressed against the corner of her mouth.

  The children cheered, and at the sound of their voices, I pulled away.

  My eyes met Tristan’s, and the look on his face was indecipherable. Could he tell something was wrong with me, or was he as surprised as I was?

  After that rather awful displacement of my sanity, I said a quick goodbye and left, coming up with a ridiculous excuse that I needed to go home and help my mother move furniture. Abigail offered to drive me, but I said I’d take the bus.

  But, of course, I didn’t go to the bus stop or home to help my mother with her furniture. I went straight to the Underworld to visit D. I wanted to see her because she was the only friend I had. I wanted to ask her if she knew of an angel disease I didn’t know of, because I was certain I was sick.

  “D, open this stupid gate or I’m breaking it down!” I shouted as I retracted my wings.

  Every time I wanted to visit D, I had to wait behind the monstrous gate for her to open it. The Underworld was the darkest place I knew. Its huge, iron black gate extended high into the dark sky. Behind the gate lay an envelope of darkness out of which voices of unfortunate souls could be heard.

  The Underworld wasn’t my favorite place, but I didn’t dislike it. The sad cries and screaming were like sweet melodies to my ears. I liked listening to the cries of lost souls asking for help in a place where help never came.

  “D, I swear if you—”

  “Relax, Gideon. I could hear you all the way from Earth!” D appeared beside me. “What’s the problem?”

  “Remember the human girl that I wanted to kill?” I asked. I didn’t know why I said wanted to kill, because I still wanted to kill her. Didn’t I?

  “Tristan’s human? Is she dead? Did you come here so we could celebrate?”

  “No, she’s not dead!” I shouted angrily. “She’s still alive and—”

  “Alive?” she asked, sounding surprised. “Don’t you have a three-day policy or something?”

  Worst friend ever, pointing out my failures when all I wanted was help.

  I glared. “Don’t you think I know this already?”

  “Why are you so worked up? Can’t you just kill her now or later? What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that I can’t kill her!” I shouted. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and the air around me was too dense, suffocating me. Was I having a meltdown? “Whenever I try to hurt her, I feel…I feel something.”

  “Feel something? What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I wanted…I want to kiss her,” I said, and D broke into laughter.

  “Wait. You’re serious?” she asked. She stopped laughing after seeing that I wasn’t joking. “Well, go kiss her and then kill her. Problem solved.”

  “But I can’t…it’s Friday tomorrow.” What the hell was wrong with me? So what if it was Friday tomorrow?

  “And it’s Thursday today. Your point?”

  D didn’t understand the length of the problem.

  “Fine. Don’t kill her tomorrow. How about the day after or the next?” she proposed.

  “She’s supposed to get a new book this Saturday. We have to read to the children on Monday, so I can’t kill her.”

  “The children? A book?” D stared at me, a look of confusion marring her features. “What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t kill her tomorrow because it’s Friday, and you can’t kill her this weekend because of a book?”

  When she put it like that, it did sound like a really stupid, pathetic excuse. I wanted to kill Abigail—well, maybe not as much as I did before—but what if I killed her and…and I… Gideon, back away from that thought.

  D stepped closer to me. “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me that you are f—”

  D didn’t finish her sentence because I grabbed her by the neck, and she choked on her words. “Don’t you dare say that out loud,” I whispered through clenched teeth. I released her.

  “We have a problem,” D said when I let go of her. “Come on, let’s go hit you on the head with something and return you to normal.”

  Now that was the friend I was looking for. I was actually thinking of doing the same thing. “I vote for a car,” I said as D took my hand, and we disappeared into the darkness.

  DARK KNIGHT

  *Abigail*

  “If I were yesterday, I’d laugh at those who wish for a do-over.

  If I were today, I’d laugh at those who didn’t make it this far,

  but if I were tomorrow, I’d laugh because I’d know

  the best is yet to come.”

  Melody Manful

  

  The next day at school, Gideon was waiting by the gate when I arrived. He waved me over, and I joined him. We walked to class together.

  This time, I sat with him at the back of the room and we talked about the children at the library.

  “Come on. I’ll buy you lunch,” Gideon said when the lunch bell rung.

  He took my hand and led me down the hall. I didn’t protest because I was kind of used to him doing so lately. When we went to the library yesterday, he had grabbed my hand, saying that we needed to make the children believe our boyfriend and girlfriend story.

  Reality check: This boy wasn’t the Gideon from my nightmare.

  Gideon still had my hand in his when we turned a corner and walked into the cafeteria. I felt his warmth rushing through me like electricity, striking and then lingering long enough to leave me breathless. Then it faded before the strong surge returned.

  “You eat that human stuff, right?” I stopped walking when Gideon asked this. “I mean food.” I smiled at his add-on, because it made him sound normal and not crazy.

  There were moments when Gideon mad
e me feel alive, and then there were moments when he said things that turned me back into the crazy girl who freaked out when I learned his name in class. Since I was getting used to his weird comments and no longer freaked out around him, I just wanted to escape with him to the cafeteria and forget the whole world.

  “Sure.” I wasn’t hungry, but I didn’t want to say no when he offered to buy me lunch.

  He led me into the cafeteria to where my friends were sitting. I took a seat next to Tristan, and Gideon sat on the other side of me. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to feel the way I did, but I was a teenage girl, sitting between two incredibly hot guys who left me breathless. I was pretty sure I was allowed to feel breathless.

  Gideon left to grab the food. As soon as he walked away, Sarah stared at me with her I-want-all-the-details look.

  Moments later, Gideon returned with a tray of food, which he placed in front of me. Smiling up at him, I took the juice from the tray and started to take a sip, but the moment I did, someone shouted from behind us. Half the people in the cafeteria looked toward the voice.

  “Yes, I’d love to!” Behind us knelt a guy, giving a girl a bouquet of flowers.

  “That’s so sweet,” Sarah swooned.

  “What just happened?” Gideon asked.

  “The school’s thirtieth anniversary is next Friday, and he just asked her to go with him to the dance the school is throwing,” Danny explained. “You guys will be going, right?”

  “Do we have to?” Gideon asked.

  “No,” Jake answered, “but I’m going to be taking Doreen,”

  “Dude, the girl has a restraining order on you,” Sarah said, and we all laughed. “She wouldn’t go with you if you were the last guy on the planet.”

  Jake took a bite of his sandwich, ignoring our laughter. “Who are you going with, Danny? Asked Lois Lane yet?”

  “I’ll ask someone, and she will say yes.”

  “You forgot the fork, Gideon,” Tristan said as he looked at the salad sitting on my tray.

  Gideon shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  He leaned toward me and said, “You have something behind your ear.” Then he pretended to pull a fork out. Everyone at the table gasped in surprise when his hand actually revealed a fork.

  “Wow, Houdini,” Jake exclaimed, “where did that come from?”

  “Here you go,” Gideon said as he held the fork out to me with a flourish.

  “So, Great Bikini, are you—” Danny started.

  “It’s Houdini, genius,” Jake corrected Danny. “Bikini—where do you come up with this stuff?”

  While we laughed, Caleb, the captain of the football team and a handsome charmer, walked over to our table. A few of his teammates stood behind him.

  When Caleb called Sarah’s name, we turned around to see him go down on one knee. He and a few of his teammates were dressed in suits, and they all held flowers. Sarah gasped when she saw them. Caleb asked her if she would do him the honor of being his date to the dance. She screamed, “YES!”

  Then, one by one, his teammates handed her the flowers, and some people in the cafeteria clapped.

  “I can’t believe even you have a date,” Jake said, frowning.

  Sarah said to me, “I so wish you would go.”

  For some reason, I felt sad that no one was going to do something that nice and special for me.

  Tristan sounded surprised when he asked, “You’re not going?”

  “No one ever asks me to these things. The last time someone did, my bodyguards ended up interrogating him and scared him away.” They laughed.

  “I’m sure someone will ask you,” Sarah said. She was always hopeful. “If not, you can share my date.”

  “Thank you, but I just ordered a new book.” I had convinced myself that I didn’t care about going to the dance. I would be fine staying home. After all, my father had promised to visit.

  “Well, I think that even though you’re not going, you deserve to have a rose.” My heart leaped with joy when Gideon said this.

  With a wave of Gideon’s hands, a beautiful red rose appeared.

  “Dude!” Jake shouted, while both Sarah’s mouth and mine fell open. “That is amazing. Teach me that so that I can do it for Doreen.”

  Gideon faced me.

  “A rose for a rose,” he said as he handed me the rose.

  And without as much as a breath, I did it—I allowed myself to fall.

  LA BELLA E LA BESTIA

  *Gideon*

  “It is better to be feared than loved,

  if you cannot be both.”

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  

  “It seems as if your fake friendship with Abigail is working,” Tristan said a few moments after Abigail walked out of the classroom with her friends. “Are you going to ask her to the dance?” I looked around the empty classroom.

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re talking to me.”

  “Yes. Are you planning on asking her to the dance so you can keep pretending to be her friend?” Why was he talking to me?

  “You give me the creeps, you know that?” Everything about Tristan made me nauseous.

  “I figured.” He walked over to where I sat, smiling as if he’d just won the lottery. “So?”

  “Why would I ask that stupid human girl to a useless human event?” I asked, quite annoyed. I spend some earthly time with him, and all of a sudden we were friends? “You know that the only reason I’m entertaining her is so that I can—”

  “Abigail!” Tristan blurted, and I turned to the door just in time to see Abigail run out into the hall.

  “Abby.” I couldn’t explain what came over me, but I ran out the door after her. “Abby, wait!” I shouted. “Stop!” With a little magic, I caught up with her. “Stop,” I said again, taking her hand and stopping her in the middle of the hallway.

  “Why? So you can call me stupid and…” She tried to hold back her tears. “I came to ask you if you wanted to go to the dance with me, but now I know your answer.” She freed herself from my grasp.

  I hated hearing the pain in her voice, hated the way I felt seeing her sad. Really? Now? Couldn’t she have asked me sooner? Wait, wasn’t I the one who was supposed to ask her? Was this a human trick or something? Was this one of those female things? Was I having a female problem now?

  “I didn’t…I wasn’t…” I didn’t know what to say, and seeing anger and sadness in Abby’s beautiful eyes was…I just used the word beautiful—again. I was seriously sick! “Tristan is just so annoying, and…” My voice trailed off. Why was I stressing myself over this?

  “Joke’s on me, huh? This past week has been…I thought there was…” Tears streamed down her cheeks now. “Forget it.” She wiped at her tears and then turned around and walked away from me.

  I made Abigail cry. I should be happy, but all I felt was—what was it that I was feeling? I didn’t know because it was a new feeling.

  Seeing Abigail walk away and knowing how I made her feel made me angry—so angry that before I knew what I was doing, I punched the locker beside me. Not only that locker, but also all the other lockers in the hall exploded. The hallway filled with flying pages of books, broken locker doors, pens and pencils, pictures, and other items.

  Abigail turned around and gaped at me. Her face filled with shock as her eyes traveled over the mess and then back to me. How was I going to explain that?

  “How—how did you—” Abigail stuttered.

  I didn’t blame her. I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to say or why I had allowed myself to be so careless. Abigail stood still, frozen in place by her shock. Papers floated to the floor.

  “Abigail, I didn’t…”

  Abigail backed away and fearfully whispered, “It’s you. You’re the Gideon from my nightmare.”

  And then she ran.

  I didn’t understand why she was scared. I was about to follow her when the school principal walked into the hallway.

  “What happened here?”
he asked.

  I didn’t have time for him. I started thinking of how to get rid of him, but Valoel already had my hand.

  “Just play along,” she ordered. “You just ruined his school. You don’t have to kill him, too.” Where the hell did she come from?

  I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to hear her talk. My mind was filled with thoughts of Abigail.

  “I don’t know, I…”

  The principal walked over to me. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  I nodded, and then he told me to follow him to the nurse. He left the moment he dropped me off at the nurse’s office, and since Valoel was breathing down my neck and telling me to act normal, I had to stay and have the school nurse check me out.

  I sat in the nurse’s office, angry at myself for what I said about Abigail. I shouldn’t have let what’s-his-face get to me. And now, I had hurt Abigail.

  “You almost exposed us! What’s going on?” Valoel asked the moment I stepped out of the nurse’s office.

  I didn’t have time for her. “I need to see Abigail.” I snapped my fingers and found myself inside Abigail’s bedroom.

  Abigail stood in front of a mirror inside her walk-in closet. She held a gun in her hand, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. She wore a skintight leather jumpsuit, with a belt buckle and gun holsters. Her reflection looked sad and distant.

  Where the hell was she going? I looked around for Tristan, but for some reason, he wasn’t there.

  “You look dangerous.” The moment I said this, Abigail whipped around, startled.

  The second her eyes met mine, she pointed her gun at me.

  “Gideon, what are you doing here?” Her voice was shaky, and the hand holding the gun trembled.

  “Abigail.” I stepped toward her, and she took a step back.

  “What do you want?” I hated hearing the fear in her voice. “Did you come to ask for a ride so you can kill me?”

  What the hell was she talking about?

  “I don’t know what you mean, but no, I didn’t come here to kill you. So, you can put that thing away now.” I pointed to the gun.