Raven: The Young Adult World of Genetically Modified Teens and the Elite (Swann Book 6)

by Ryan Schow

  She glances over, wonders how I know Chuck’s name, then says, “It ain’t gonna be in no fancy cups, but he can make sweet.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Been at it awhile now with the girly drinks. Makes all the little honey pots wanna come back with their boys, which makes the money end of things better.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “He’s good at the appletini,” she says.

  “I’ll eat my own ovaries before I drink a gosh damn appletini,” I say. “No offense.”

  She laughs and says, “None taken.”

  “Just, I don’t know, tell Chuck to surprise me. And make it unusual. Because if you bring me any kind of variation on the martini, I swear to Christ, I’ll take my shit and leave.”

  I say this jovially.

  Elise gets the point.

  5

  While Chuck’s making me a surprise drink, I’m watching the six men watching the UFC fight getting more and more drunk. My eyes flick to Jake, then to the two groups of people between me and the bar, then back to the adrenaline soaked party going on while some dude gets his face busted open on live TV. The place erupts in cheers.

  My eyes return to Jake. He’s just drinking.

  Two college girls with three college guys are so boisterous you can tell half of them will be puking inside an hour. Me and Jake, we’re the only ones drinking alone. And I’m not even drinking yet.

  Jake turns around, looks at the college girl who was wandering around and bumped his barstool. She’s giggling, putting her hand to her mouth in mock surprise, then going, “Oh my God, you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

  He is.

  Jesus in Heaven, he is.

  She starts touching his arms the way drunk bar chicks touch the arms of guys like Jake. Elise walks me my drink on a tray. She sets it down and it’s an amber, almost buttery looking drink in a spotless tumbler with dried rose pedals sprinkled on top. Forget what Elise said about Chuck’s presentation earlier, this one’s one hundred percent high-society.

  “The Rose & Rye,” Elise says. “It’s Rittenhouse rye whiskey with a sugary rose syrup, lemon juice, and a sprinkling of Fee Brothers bitters. If that don’t wet yer pallet, don’t know what will.”

  She’s smiling, showing me her not-so-pearly whites. If I wiggle my way into her brain will I hear the sounds of crickets? Or would she be genius-quality stuck in the low life? I know one thing for sure, looking at her thin liver-colored lips, it’s hard to imagine neither mouth nor dick has touched them in decades. I feel bad for her. This is a woman who has not been in love or loved in a long time.

  My first sip of my Rose & Rye has me floating. “Oh sweet Jesus, Elise, this is perfect. Seriously, tell Chuck it’s just perfect.”

  Behind Elise’s sloped shoulders and Pillsbury dough boy body, one of the college guys is trying to pry the drunk blonde off of Jake, and Jake’s being all nonchalant, smiling the way you smile and gesture at a dog while it’s sniffing your crotch or trying to dry hump your leg with its pink lipstick rocket of a cock. But the girl, she wants Jake badly. She’s dropping f-bombs at the college guy right, left and sideways, and so finally Jake holds up his hand and says, “Just let her be, man. It’s cool.”

  The college guy lets go of the girl, who falls backward into the bar, then straight down on her ass. The giggling flares up. Her face goes red. The girl is wasted enough for the front doors of her mini-skirt to flare open and show everyone how her bright yellow lace panties don’t match the rest of her otherwise boringish outfit.

  A couple of the UFC patrons look over and snicker. I sip my drink. Smile. The laughing UFC guys, they piss off the college kid who’s got himself new muscles, cropped ginger hair and the stance of a guy just shit-housed enough to get himself in a heap of trouble.

  One of the UFC guys slides awkwardly off his stool and tries helping the panty-flashing blonde to her feet. The ginger who tried dragging the blonde off Jake, in his drunken stupor, he thinks the UFC guy is disrespecting him, so he drops him with a wicked fist to the face.

  Oh, boy.

  Sip, swallow; sip, swallow.

  Gosh damn this drink is good! It’s practically religious how well it goes down. All hell is breaking loose though, and I know my last sip will be my last swallow. In that moment, with that one punch from the college kid to the UFC guy, whatever civility the bar once had is now a memory.

  UFC guys descend on the red headed kid; his two college buddies throw themselves in the mix; the other three people—two middle aged dudes in cowboy hats and Wranglers and a country girl with too big of boobs and a shovel flat ass—they drop a twenty on the table, then power walk to the large, studded front door.

  I’m on my feet, feeling the whisky, wishing I would have sipped more than I swallowed. The blonde college girl is now laughing like she’s an escaped mental patient and telling Jake to dance with her. She’s trying to dance sexy, but it comes off looking trashy, meek and whorish. Jake’s saying no, but she’s pulling at his arm and he’s trying to fend her off.

  One of the college guys says, “Getcher fuggin ands offer,” and spits in Jake’s face. Jake gets off his stool to fight, but he can’t even stand up straight. He ends up looking the way a kid looks when you spin him around fifty times then let him loose to stagger sideways and ultimately run face-first into a wall, or the ground. Jake topples sideways, smashing into a table and chairs, which he lazily tries to grab to keep from going over. It doesn’t work. The college kid, who’s in a full-fledged fit, now goes after Jake, starts punching and kicking him everywhere.

  My first priority: protect Jake.

  The college guy hitting Jake, I step in, kick him with the ball of my foot on the outside of the shin bone. His body sags to one side against the shot. The second he wavers, I crack him in the eye with a bundled fist. Jake’s attacker crumples hard. I step in, take a look at Jake. He lifts his eye up at me; it’s split wide open and gushing red. It’s bad. I reach for his hand, but one of the other college guys, he grabs the back of my hair, yanks on it, then spins me around and head-butts me right between the eyes.

  I see stars. I see entirely new solar systems.

  Down to a knee. A big hand palms my head, pushes me over. The stars I’m seeing fade, faster than normal, and I am back on my feet. A glass tumbler from the UFC section of the bar zings through the air, catching me square on the mouth. My lip trenches open, but I don’t care. It isn’t that bad. Except for all the blood.

  Behind the bar, Chuck is screaming, and racking a shotgun. No one cares. What’s he going to do, shoot us?

  The college kid who head-butted me, he’s in my face saying, “Get lost spook show!” From my hip, I drive my palm straight up the front of me and into the guy’s chin. His teeth crunch together; one breaks in half and flies out, bouncing needle-sharp off my nose.

  He staggers backward, right into the clot of drunk guys where he goes down in the crush of punching, kicking and biting. One of the guys in the center of the brawl, he takes a hard shot in the stomach, drops to all fours, crawls out of the mix under a bar table and blows guts all over the floor. No one but me even notices.

  “You alright, honey?” Elise says, trying to drag me out of the mix. I turn to answer, and she sees my split lip healing fast. This startles her enough to let go of me. “What in blazes?”

  The whole place is a massive, violent brawl now.

  Jake. I turn and see someone grabbing him, hitting him. It is a UFC guy who’s bloody but supercharged and just wanting to hit and kick a body like they were doing on TV. Moving past Elise, who is now sure I’m evil, I punch the UFC guy in the ribs so hard he collapses into a writhing fit. Jake scuttles backwards, tumbling though overturned chairs and spilled drinks, his face bloody and half panicked. The UFC guy I hammered, he’s laid out on his back, squirming and hollering that his fuggin ribs’re broken.

  “That’s right, bitch,” I’m snarling over the top of him, “I broke ‘em!”

  Grabbin
g Jake, because he doesn’t look like he’s got enough in him to hold his own, I’m wondering, how much did he have to drink? His eye is doing this weird twitching thing, like the socket is fractured, and I’m thinking, oh, no, there goes that pretty face.

  We’re on the move out of there when something rock-hard smashes the back of my skull. Broken glass explodes out everywhere, sprinkling all over my head and into my field of view.

  Black spots hit me; my legs lose feeling for a second. All the screaming and yelling and breaking sounds of things sort of comes in and goes out, all wobbly and woozy.

  Slowly turning around, my eyes feast on the blonde college bitch. Her face is a Picasso painting of blood and drunk insanity. Her body is a cut knee, pulled hair and a shirt ripped open to reveal a fire-engine red bra that doesn’t match her yellow lace panties.

  “He ain’t yers,” she snarls. “I seen ‘im first.”

  A shotgun goes off and everyone but me jumps. I can’t believe Chuck shot the ceiling of his own bar. Or is this Elise’s bar? It’s called Ned’s Tavern, but so far, no Ned.

  “You busted his ribs,” one of the UFC guys says to me about his buddy. Jake leans on me for support when the same UFC idiot says, “And Robert’s out cold, half his teeth crushed.”

  Um, hello! Did anyone just hear Chuck’s shotgun?!

  Right now Jake is pawing at me, not holding himself up so well. Our hands meet. I drag him back to his feet, which are soft and rubbery at the ankles the way he’s trying not to fall back over.

  “So he got hurt,” I say, my eyes going back and forth from the guy in front of me to the fight winding down to Chuck’s shotgun, “so what? This is a bar and he picked a fight he lost.”

  “I said he’s mine!” the college blonde is saying. I’m not listening to her. I’m not even looking at her except in my peripheral vision.

  “Where’d you learn to hit?” he asks. A crimson trickle is leaking down his head from his hairline where the greyish-brown hair is stained in a patch so red it’s almost black.

  That wasn’t me, I almost say, but I don’t.

  With roughly half a dozen eyes darting to the left of me for warning, I’m suddenly aware of everything. My paranormal senses are officially online. Lightening quick, moving faster even than Sensei, my right foot slides up my inner thigh all the way to my peach, then shoots out with bone-breaking force. The blade edge of my heel catches the attacking blonde right in her gut. I can’t say I feel bad. She folds forward, grunting hard. The heavy glass bottle she was swinging at me falls from her hand and clinks unbroken to the floor.

  The college blonde’s friend—another blonde sans the alcohol-fueled rage—she grabs and overhands a salt shaker at me. I catch it mid-air, the salt slamming through the shaker’s holes in a bursting white waterfall that lasts only a second.

  Everyone’s like, “Oh!” and the offending blonde’s eyes shoot open in surprise.

  The Elise behemoth is pushing everyone apart, trying to really break it up. And Chuck? He’s now scurrying through the bar, nudging past people with the butt of his shotgun and yelling over some high octane Garth Brooks song like he’s running crowd control.

  And me?—I’ve got Jake again, and I’m hauling his drunk, kicked ass out of there. He is recovering fast, by the weight of him, and seconds later he seems to be walking fine.

  Okay…

  The minute he gets fresh air, he pushes off me and manages to stand alone. He’s still a bit wobbly, but he’s doing it. Thankfully, no one follows us outside. Yet. One look at Jake’s face, though, and I about to fall over in my own skin. The son of a bitch…he’s healing the same way I heal.

  “You absolute piece of shit,” I say.

  6

  I can’t believe it. He’s…he’s like me. Is he one of Holland’s creations, too? A genetically modified human?

  “Why are you healing at an impossible rate?” I bark. At this point, the way I’m standing hands on hips in the dark dirt parking lot, how my eyes are narrowed in an accusatory stare, I’m practically demanding he answer me. Elise bursts out of the bar, stands on the makeshift porch, watches us. Into her mind, I say, “We’re fine. There’s nothing to see here.” Seconds later, Elise heaves a sigh and goes back inside.

  “I have a high white blood cell count,” Jake stammers, still a bit unsteady.

  “The hell you do,” I snarl.

  “Who are you,” he asks, easing closer to me, “and why did you do that for me?” He’s looking at all the blood on my face, and not seeing any cuts. He’s looking at the place on my forehead that should be lumped from a head butt, but isn’t.

  “It’s what I’d do for any damsel in distress,” I mutter. If I were an artist, dark sarcasm would be my medium. Or my coping mechanism. “Now tell my why your wounds are closing themselves shut, and don’t give me any crap about white blood cell counts.”

  Looking at me through hooded eyes, an overhead phosphorus lamp casting shadows over his blood smeared face, his mouth remains perfectly shut. As in, he’s not answering me. What he doesn’t know, though, is that I asked the question so his brain would think of the answer he was trying to guard, and then I think, screw it, and hop into his mind to retrieve the answer.

  What I find staggers me.

  I’m inside his brain, weathering his emotions, sorting through the layers of his past, but it’s not easy because I’m bathed in a fear so oily and consuming, it’s practically debilitating. I never would have imagined this. How much shit he’s hiding. His fears become my fears. The anger inside him over having been beat up because some drunk college slut wanted to have his abortion, for a second, I can’t distinguish his exasperation from mine.

  Digging deeper, piecing together his secrets, I sift through decades of time and incident only to learn he changed into this version of Jake only recently. As in two and a half years ago.

  No…this isn’t possible.

  Is it?

  My brain shot from first gear up through fifth, then dropped hard into reverse, which for an unguarded transmission equals death. At this point, two plus two equals seven. At this point, this is Dulce all over again. This is me discovering that I can’t die. That I can’t be hurt. That I can be anyone I want regardless of the governing laws of science and humanity.

  Seeing inside Jake’s brain, this is me realizing parallel universes.

  The way I’m looking at him, not-comprehending what he is, how he has come to be here, and why he’s even here at all, his dread blooms, and he can’t help fearing that I know his secrets. Those incredulous truths he’s protecting with his life.

  “You’re not possible,” I breathe, the words falling hopelessly out of my mouth. It’s the sound of a girl in love finding out that—no matter how much she loves a boy—he will never be hers.

  “What do you mean?” he asks. Suddenly, my old flame, he sobers up. Those two legs that were knocking together from the beating he took a few minutes back, they’re now solid oak.

  I drag myself out of his brain because his emotions have their hands wrapped around my neck in the worst of strangleholds.

  “You’re genetically modified, but not from Holland, or Gerhard.” He’s staring at me and I’m staring at him and it hits me all at once, every single implication of who he is. The truth has my organs in a fit. My knees buckle; I drop down hard beside some old truck. Right there in the parking lot in front of God and the Jake thing, everything I consumed in the last day or so comes blasting hot and acidic from my mouth. When my guts are empty, all that’s left is sour disbelief. He’s holding back my hair, telling me it’s going to be okay. I realize I’m sobbing.

  There’s no f*cking way this is going to be okay.

  “Look,” he says. “I should to go. Thank you for…what you did…back there.”

  I look up at him, my eyes red and sopping wet, my body bent over as I strain to look into the eyes of this man who was my dream man, but now isn’t.

  “You’re married,” I say. Coming out of my mouth, t
hose words have become the death sentence of my love life. What my mouth refuses to say is far worse than him having a wife.

  Oh God, it’s so much worse.

  He lets go of my hair, stares down at me and he’s thinking, how does she know this? I thought I pulled out of his brain. Apparently I’m still sitting inside it. He’s thinking, oh crap, she’s one of them.

  “One of who?” I ask. My filter’s down. The precautionary measure that keeps random thoughts in my head from pouring out my mouth.

  “You’re…you’re in my mind?”

  My eyes burn his eyes. Screw the guilt. I don’t care anymore, because whatever kind of a freak I thought I was, this motherfreaking butthole is worse.

  “What are you?” I ask. After a long silence of him not verbalizing an answer, and me now knowing what he really is, I say, “What’s a traveler, Jake?”

  I don’t ask nicely. The answer, however, lays like an open book in his head, as clear as day for me to see.

  “Oh boy,” I reply, rocking backwards on my butt, my shoulders still slouched, my head punched with the syrupy kind of dizziness that can only come with the truth of this thing. Is this a dream? If it is, I need to wake up!

  “You’re in my head,” he says, stepping backwards, “aren’t you?” His face is no longer a menstruating vagina. The blood is there, but not the dark lacerations from earlier. Just the mess left behind. Same as me.

  “I am.”

  “How?”

  “Does it matter?” I say, my tone filled with such sad resignation.

  “Yes, it matters!” he booms. “If you know, then they’ll know and do you know how hard it’s been for me to hide? Do you have any idea?!”

  Okay, this surprises me. And now I’m the one sobering up fast.

  “I…I won’t tell.”

  He throws his hands up to his face. He’s pacing, kicking at the dirt and wanting to know if he kills me, will it stop me from knowing? Will it stop them from knowing he’s here?

  He stops pacing, walks to me, fast enough and purposeful enough to spike my senses. “If it’s in your head, someone sees it,” he snaps. “Someone knows it.”