Order of Vespers

by Matilda Reyes

  “It’s unlocked.”

  Jude walked in and plopped down on my bed. “Ya did it now, Sparky.”

  I should throw sparks at you, goddamn it. I hate that name.

  “Livie said it was fixed. She did her mind control voodoo, and no one is pressing charges. I’m not even suspended.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but today wasn’t your usual narcoleptic boomer.”

  My fingers itched with the desire to curl up into a fist and plow into my brother’s eye. His refusal to meet my eyes and gentle tone made him seem shifty. Worse, it made me wonder if he was on my side.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I snarled. “I’m aware. The throbbing lump on my temple is a constant reminder. What would I ever do without your insight?”

  Siblings fight. Twins fight harder. Us? We were close to an all-out, hair pulling, kicking, calling-mom-to-referee death match.

  Jude weighed his choices. “You’re so lucky this crap is serious,” he said. “This was a big one, Jas. How long do you think it will take before this story is in the local newspaper? Regional?”

  Jude mentally, possibly telepathically — we weren’t exactly sure — poked at me and conveyed his fear that today’s incident had sent up a flare signal and announced to the world that we were here. If they were real, and they showed up, they would… neither of us wanted to finish that thought.

  My sleep-drugged mind finally caught up to the conversation. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stared at Jude. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Jude, they’re sending me off with these strangers who are supposedly like us. Mom thinks it best that I go into hiding.”

  My brother pulled his knees to his chest and pulled some of my quilt over his body as if the thin blanket could shield him from the truth.

  “No.”

  I shook my head, my hair tumbling into my face like shadows attempting to hide me from the world. “Read this.”

  Jude snatched the note from me with shaking hands. His eyes ran back and forth across the page; his lips moved as he read the note to himself.

  Once.

  Twice.

  “No, Jas.” He shook his head until I thought he might hurt himself. “No.”

  “As soon as they find these people, whoever they are, they’re disappearing me. Permanently. Jude? What am I going to do?”

  “What are we going to do? Did you really think I’d twiddle my thumbs and watch a mysterious unknown take away my best friend? Did that lump scramble your brain?” Jude shook his head again. “Did you go back downstairs to talk to Mom and Dad?”

  “I couldn’t,” I admitted in a small voice. “What if they repeated themselves? What if they insisted that everything was real that they were shipping me out?”

  “Jasper, I don’t think you get it.” Jude met my eyes and did something unexpected. He reached across and held my hand in his. “You’re not going anywhere without me. Twinsies, remember? Your big brother isn’t going to let anyone hurt you.”

  I smiled slightly. Jude was exactly ninety seconds older than me. He was also five inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, so he called me his little sister.

  “It’s not going to happen. Jude, you to do everything we’ve always discussed. Go to college. Join a fraternity. Don’t let me ruin your future.”

  “It’s not happening,” he said flatly. “And you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise.” The worry lines on his face deepened. It seemed to age him, the weariness of protecting our secret carried the weight of the world.

  I closed my eyes and thought about the ways we’d exposed ourselves in the past. Once puberty hit and Jude and I came into our abilities fully, we were walking billboards outside of school. We’d drive out to the woods near us and practice using our powers safely. Being the giggling idiots that we were, practice meant creating sparks of electricity that Jude blew around. It was all good until one of those sparks hit a tree and set it on fire.

  Jude commanded the wind to torment the people who messed with us. Gossips, ex-boyfriends, and bullies were inexplicably pushed around, lifted into the air, and bothered by “ghosts” that brushed against their skin.

  Thanks to Livie, we had always been able to keep things quiet. She used her mind control to convince people that certain events never happened or that we weren’t where they said.

  That was just how the Andrews clan rolled.

  “We’re screwed, aren’t we? But do you really think they’d kill an eighteen-year-old who wasn’t doing it on purpose? Who didn’t even know how it happened?”

  “The fact that your powers are growing more unstable is probably enough reason to take you out.” Jude curled three fingers into his fist and pointed at me like a gun. “Pew, pew, pew.”

  Our eyes were perfect matches, down to the flecks of hazel inside the chocolate brown. We stared at one another for a moment before bursting into laughter. Only my brother could make me laugh when I was facing such traumatizing circumstances.

  “Jas,” Jude said quietly, “I’m not letting anything happen to you. When are they supposed to be here?”

  “I got the impression that it would be before the end of the week. Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped. “I know we only have twenty-four hours. Why do you think I did most of my packing earlier?”

  Jude blew out a breath, his hair that was overdue for a cut floating horizontally for a moment before falling in his eyes. “Okay. We can handle this. Tomorrow I’ll…”

  We stared at one another helplessly.

  “Move over.”

  I turned off the light and held my brother’s hand tightly. For longer than I remembered, whenever one of us was scared, we’d lie side by side in the dark, squeezing hands and praying for a different outcome.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered.

  “No, it’s not. I’m going to miss you so much.”

  The sobs finally wrenched themselves from my chest, and Jude put an arm around me. It wasn’t until I hovered on the edge of sleep that I realized the tears weren’t all mine.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Mom!” I shouted from my bedroom. “Did you at least get a name?”

  “No,” she shouted back from her room down the hall where she’d sequestered herself to hide her devastation. “All I was told was to expect a black Lincoln Town car.”

  Fan-frickin-tastic. Taken away by strangers in the single most generic car in the state of New York. Not sketchy at all.

  I wondered why my parents didn’t seem concerned about the shadiness of this venture. Jude and I had spent the last twenty-three hours researching what little information we could on this mysterious group. Neither of us was surprised when nothing came up, not even on the dark web.

  Jude snorted from his spot on the paisley rug on my bedroom floor. He was painstakingly writing in a notebook he refused to show to me. “Nope, not at all suspicious. Do you remember your self-defense class?”

  The pounding at my temple continued even though the lump named Boom had shrunken significantly. I rubbed it absently. “Yeah.”

  “Do you have my number programmed into your new cell phone?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Jude’s eyes glittered with protectiveness, and his hands curled into fists. “You call me the second anything seems shady when you get wherever you’re going; I don’t care if you can’t tell me the location.”

  “I know.”

  The last twenty-four hours had gone similarly. My parents avoided me, the shame of shipping their daughter away too much to handle. Olivia hugged me once and was cooking up a storm. She said she wanted me to have a little bit of home wherever I went. And Jude peppered me with questions every few minutes.

  “Jas, as soon as you get there, find the exits.”

  “Goddamnit, Jude! We’ve gone over this a million times. If you don’t stop, I’m going to junk-punch you, rip out your pomade spikes and tell everyone that you wet the bed last year.”

&
nbsp; “I was sick, jerk,” he hissed. “And asleep for twenty hours.”

  “So was I, but I didn’t pee on myself.”

  I exhaled and shook my head at the absurdity of it. I had less than an hour left to spend with my twin, and we were arguing about teenage bed wetting.

  Keep classy, Andrews Twins.

  Jude jumped up and ran to his room, slamming the door behind him. A single wall of plaster and particle board separated us, but he felt miles away. I hated that we were arguing.

  Before I decided on a course of action, Jude stomped back in with a parcel in his hands. He plopped down next to me on my bed.

  “Here. I’d feel better if you had this.”

  I stared at the bulging manila envelope full of ten- and twenty-dollar bills and watched him rifle the cash with his thumb. “Jude,” I breathed. “That’s our life savings.”

  He smiled slightly. “Just about five thousand dollars. I have a feeling you’ll need it more than I will.”

  “Can’t. Won’t. You’ll need it for college.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he retorted. “I’m not going to college. Once we figure out where the lair of anonymity is located, I’m coming for you. We’ll figure things out from there.”

  The lump in my throat refused to go away. My brother was giving me the money we’d been saving for a post-graduation vacation. Frugal to a fault, he handed me the result of years of painstaking budgeting.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. Something told me that Jude wasn’t coming for me or, if he tried, his chances of finding me were nil. “Okay, I’ll take it. Jude, do you have that pit in your stomach?”

  “The one that comes from my little sister getting ready to leave home for good? Yeah. Why?”

  I shook my head — forty-five minutes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MY BAGS WERE PILED next to me on our front patio. After an awkward and painful goodbye, I refused to go back inside our house. Their house.

  The restlessness, the fear, and the anger were too fresh, and I was afraid I’d trash everything in sight.

  Ironically, She was silent, possibly absent. My anger was enough for both of us.

  My mom came outside and sat next to me. “I love you, Jasper.”

  “Love you, too,” I replied woodenly.

  “Your grandmother swore that these people were friends of friends. Or something like that. In any case, you should be fine. And you call me as soon as you get wherever to let me know you’re okay.”

  “Right.” I shivered and wrapped my arms around my chest to protect myself from the chill of the September air. “Call mom as soon as I get to the place where I’m going to be held prisoner.”

  “Jasper, stop. It’s not imprisonment. Hopefully, we’ll be able to see each other soon. There’s always email. Skype. Text messages.”

  “I’m not going off to college, Mother. Would you please leave me alone? I need to take a walk. I can’t handle talking about this, not right now.”

  T-Minus twenty minutes.

  “Practice walking with your camping bag,” my dad offered from the door. He looked worse than any of us. His normally smooth face was covered with uneven stubble, and his eyes were bloodshot. “Just in case there are secret tunnels to traverse.”

  I scoffed, “Glad to see you find the humor in this. Gonna stay on a bender for a while?”

  My mother looked at my father for a long moment. “Mark? How long have you been drinking? What on Earth made you think that being blind drunk was a good idea? Really.”

  “Why do you care?” he slurred. “One kid is gone, Delia, I heard you talking to your sister. Thanking God for these people. Can’t wait until she’s gone, you said.”

  “Asshole,” she hissed. “That was a private conversation. You’re taking things out of context.”

  Mission get-them-to-leave-me-alone accomplished. Ignoring the ongoing conversation, I swung the heavy camping bag up onto my back and took off for the meadow behind my house. By the time I reached the far edge of the clearing, the midday sun had warmed my skin. Yet, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the chill in my bones. Something was wrong. The gut feeling that had been nagging at me all morning told me to go back home immediately. She even made an appearance to warn me that something bad was about to go down. She was there to protect me.

  I turned and headed back to the house, quickly breaking into a jog. The bag was too heavy for a full-out run, but it didn’t occur to me to remove it.

  My heart was pounding, but it wasn’t driving my blood hard enough to get my legs up to speed, at least not to the speed I wanted. I felt like I was about to stall. She stepped up, finally, and we were jogging again.

  Searing heat washed over me and knocked me to my knees. I threw my hands over my eyes and flattened myself against the ground, hoping it would pass over me. But the heat seemed to flow into and through my body, hotter than anything I could imagine. And with the heat came a blinding white light. Even after I slammed my eyes closed, the light pulsed around me, shining through my lids in a pure, bright red.

  There was no roar, no snapping, no hissing — just a shrill sound that pierced my eardrums in a horrific pop. I cried out and slapped my hands over my ears, but it made the pain worse and did nothing to block the sounds. Worse, slick, sticky liquid dripped down my cheek. Blood spurted from my nose.

  Fire engulfed me. Enveloped me. Poured into my every cell.

  I wanted to die. The pain was more than I thought I could ever feel. If I ever opened my eyes, I knew that my skin would be blackened, hair gone, the little blood left oozing out of my orifices.

  My life flashed in front of my eyes, something I had always thought was a trite falsehood. But I saw myself sitting in our playpen with Jude, fighting over toys and napping on opposite sides of the mat, connected by our clasped hands. My mother beamed at Jude and me on the first day of school. That embarrassing first kiss seemed to play in slow motion; Raul’s lips were mashing into mine was as real as his teeth almost breaking the skin. I was present on the night of the junior prom when Michael and I giggled like idiots as we entered the hotel room he rented for the night.

  Tears, or possibly blood, spilled down my cheeks as a good, relatively normal life was taken away.

  The fire began to withdraw just as suddenly as it had spread. It flew out of my body, millions of fiery pinpricks shooting out of my skin. The bright light retreated as did the scorching pain searing every inch of my body.

  I gasped for air as the last of the heat retreated, leaving me cold and aching.

  My hearing was muffled, the siren sound still present, but I swore I heard a scream. I propped myself up and looked on in horror. Images from history class flew through my mind as my brain tried to give me something to compare to the destruction in front of me.

  That searing heat, the undulating light?

  It had passed over me and driven into my house.

  My home exploded with such force that a cloud bloomed above it, reminding me of the pictures I’d seen of nuclear bomb blasts.

  The fire raged for a scant few seconds before it revealed its destruction. There was nothing left. The foundation of the house and precious few support beams remained, charred and on the verge of snapping. The second floor was gone. Most of the first floor was gone.

  My home, my family, my life had just been incinerated.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  I climbed to my feet and tried to run, stumbling as my unsteady legs threatened to betray me, and my mind refused to believe the macabre sight in front of me. My legs did eventually give out, so I crawled into the blackened grass of our backyard, made it past the spot that held our secret playhouse, the non-existent vegetable garden, and the laughably melted patio furniture.

  The smoky smell that flooded my nostrils mixed with something else, something that I’d recently experience.

  Charred flesh.

  I turned my head and vomited. One of my relatives, unrecognizable and seared through to the bone, lay twenty feet in front of me.r />
  My throat worked, and I felt a scream burst from my chest.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” I wailed.

  One out of four, Jasper. Someone must have survived. Get up and move!

  She infused my limbs and gently let me know it was okay to take a backseat. She had this.

  We pushed to our feet and clumsily weaved through the wreckage. Nothing made sense. My life was reduced to indistinguishable shards of wood and metal and melted plastic. There were no walls or doors to tell us where to go, and if there had been, most of the first floor was submerged under the detritus of our bedrooms.

  She cataloged each detail with dispassionate precision, sorting and filing each bit of recognizable flotsam. We didn’t have the time for a full analysis of the data. Our family was missing, possibly injured. They were our priority.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  I sat in what used to be my front yard with my knees pulled to my chest and stared at the smoldering remains of my house. The only traces I’d found of my missing family members amounted to one of Jude’s baseball cleats, half of my mother’s antique sewing machine, and a black trunk that must have come from the attic.

  Despite its crumbling exterior the trunk, its lid and the latch connecting them were unyielding, and I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to pry it open. Coordination was a fool’s wish: even sitting, my body weaved and jerked like a drunkard after the last call.

  My head throbbed and ached. Poor Boom, my bump from the other day, suddenly had to contend for my attention. Cuts, bruises, and other lumps fought their way to prominence on my skull.

  “Crap, crap, crap. Stupid jeans,” I grumbled, poking a finger through the hole in my left knee. It separated fabric from skin with the grace of a three-day-old Band-Aid and left a coating of blue fibers like an alien mole. “Gotta beg for a ride to the mall this weekend.”

  Right. That’s not gonna happen. Focus.

  I scoffed at my choices: contemplating the destruction of my life until this moment or worrying about the imminent future. My one good ear gave me hints of sirens coming toward me.