The room is like any other penthouse suite, ornately decorated to the point of being gaudy. Two other men, who sit poised and ready to pounce, occupy the sitting area. They eye my wound. They know they’ll be able to overtake me and so I yell again, “Ariana!”
The double doors to the bedroom area are off to the right. When they open, Ariana steps out in all her glory. Her auburn hair is ironed straight, hanging in sheets next to her face. Her green eyes practically glow while her lips form the faintest smile.
“Gage, to what do I owe the pleasure?” She saunters across the room to the bar cart, uncaps a bottle of whiskey and pours herself a glass. Though she offers me one, I wave her off, gun still in my hand.
“Have a seat,” she says politely.
Cautiously, I follow her to the sitting area. The two men move, allowing us to sit. They lurk behind Ariana, flanking her, arms crossed in a protective stance.
“We need to talk alone,” I tell her and nod to her bodyguards.
“I’ll lower mine, if you lower yours.” She motions to my gun.
Slowly, I place it on the table as a sign of good faith. She and I both know I have other weapons and that this is only a gesture, but she seems willing enough to play along.
With a slight flick of her head, she instructs her bodyguards to leave us, which they do. If she needs them, they aren’t far. She’s completely confident in her ability to overtake me.
Sipping her whiskey, she crosses her legs and leans back into the couch. Showing me that she’s perfectly comfortable is another power play. I lean forward showing her that I am not intimidated.
“You’re bleeding,” she points out.
Gingerly as possible, I raise my sleeve and expose the gash in my skin. Though she tries to hide it, her entire body freezes. To cover, she slowly sips her drink.
“Ethan!” she yells. Almost instantly one of the body guards returns. “Get Gage some rags and a bandage before he ruins the carpet.”
Ethan fetches the items. When I press the warm rag to my skin, I grimace.
“Let me,” Ariana offers. She sits next to me on the couch and with the care of a mother, she cleans and dresses my wound.
“Thank you.”
“You have questions.” She leaves my side and sits across from me. “You aren’t the only one.”
“What do you want to know?” I ask her.
“Where is my daughter?”
“I don’t know.”
Again, her body tenses. Her lips set into a thin line and she does not blink. When she does move again, it’s slow, purposeful. She refills her glass at the bar cart and this time, she doesn’t ask if I want a drink, but she hands me one anyway.
I take a small sip and let the liquid burn down my throat and into my gut. Quickly, the burning morphs to warming and I feel myself settle in a bit.
“I thought you were keeping Mercy at the meat packing plant. But she wasn’t there.”
“Keeping Mercy hostage in a meat-packing plant? No, my dear boy, that wasn’t me.”
There’s innuendo in her statement as well as accusation. “But I thought … ”
She interrupts, “You thought wrong.”
“Why did you come here?”
She laughs. “What do you know about Guides, Gage?”
“Guides?”
“Yes. That’s what I was before I became … ” she pauses “ … this.”
“Guides are the ones who help the souls cross over. They find the lost, the ones that remain and they help them.”
“Exactly.”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“You’ve been fighting this war your entire life. Wouldn’t you like to at least know why?”
Ariana readjusts herself on the couch, like she wants to get comfortable before telling me her story. No matter how cooperative she’s being, it’s never far from my mind that we’re enemies.
“Guides, like me,” she begins, “were governed by The Assembled. The rules were simple. Do your job, ask no questions, follow orders, don’t break the rules.”
“What rules?”
“Same as yours; no human interaction.” She shrugs. “Seems simple enough and yet, over time, things got … ” she takes a healthy swig of her drink before adding, “ … complicated.”
Impatient, I wait for her to go on. She enjoys having the power over me, enjoys that I’m at her mercy.
“Humans have such freedom, such luxury to live as they please. As you know, we are not afforded the same. We are slaves.”
I flinch at the word slave. I never saw it that way. We have extremely important positions, which require a sense of duty that most beings, especially humans, can’t provide.
“To put it simply,” Ariana says, “I wanted more.”
“You wanted more?”
“Yes, I wanted more. I wanted what they had, choices, experiences.”
“Why didn’t you just ask to leave?”
Ariana laughs deeply. “You think I didn’t?” She’s mocking me.
I am beginning to understand. “They didn’t let you. The Assembled, I mean, they refused.”
“Of course they refused! They needed me to do their dirty work.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Who crosses over, who doesn’t, they decide. And the ones that are left are … ” She doesn’t finish her sentence, instead taking another drink.
“What?”
“Discarded.”
The very idea sickens me. Why would The Assembled do that?
“It was Nathaniel who broke the laws first. He was supposed to help her cross over. He loved her and so I helped him and together, we became outlaws.”
“You were sentenced to be human. You got what you wanted.”
“What we wanted?” She rises from the couch and towers over me. “This is not what we wanted! We’ve been discarded, Gage. Just like you.”
What she said doesn’t make sense. They interfered in human life and so they were given the chance to be human. And at the end of that life, they should’ve crossed over. But they didn’t.
I’ve always thought it was their choice. But what if it wasn’t? What if the true punishment was becoming a Breacher? It couldn’t be, and yet …
“I don’t understand,” I tell her.
She slams the glass down on the table. “Let me spell it out. The Assembled tricked us. They didn’t make us human. We just became a different type of slave. They wanted to use us to manipulate the humans, to tilt the world and put it on its knees. We breached the bodies they wanted and we thought, maybe, if we continued to do their work that they’d give us what we’d asked for, our own lives. But they never did. Century after century we started wars, ended lives, did whatever they asked. And when we finally refused, well, that’s when you came along.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mercy
Nathaniel is quiet. I don’t want to pry, but I want to hear the rest of his story. I try to picture him in love, being tender or sweet with a woman. It isn’t that difficult to imagine. Nathaniel is driven and downright scary at times, but he’s showing me the real side of him, the caring side.
When the silence is too much for me I ask him. “Will you tell me about her?”
He looks into my eyes and says, “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”
There’s such pain behind his words and I want nothing more than to take it all away. It’s important to me that he trust me, that he know I’m not going to do anything to betray him. The war between him and Gage is just that—their war. As far as I’m concerned, I am Switzerland.
“You can tell me,” I tell him.
He exhales. “Her name was Ellie. She was young and beautiful with hair that I wanted to tangle myself in forever.”
It’s difficult to listen to him describe his love for someone else, more difficult than I expected.
“But I wasn’t allowed to know her,” he contin
ues. “It was forbidden for me, as her Guide.”
“Her Guide?”
“When you die,” he tells me, “a Guide is there to help you cross to the other side.”
“So, what happened?”
“I revealed myself to her, which is entirely forbidden. Every night, I’d go to her and talk to her about what it would be like to be on the other side. She wouldn’t be sick. She wouldn’t be scared.”
Nathaniel clears his throat. “She didn’t have much time left. All I wanted was to be with her.” He exhales slowly. “When I was sentenced, I thought I’d live one lifetime and die. That’s what we were told. But that wasn’t what happened. We were used, Mercy. Breachers were used as puppets and we did the bidding of The Assembled. I’ve done terrible things. Things you can’t even imagine. When I tried to escape, they ripped a rib from my body and created my brother and forced him to hunt me down.”
He releases me and steps back, raking his fingers through his dark hair. It’s nearly impossible for his eyes to get any blacker and yet they do. The fury he feels turns them midnight on a starless night.
When he looks like that I fear him, but I know that he won’t hurt me and so it isn’t so much of a choice as it is a gut reaction to go to him. My right hand finds its way to the side of his face and though he resists at first, he eventually settles into my gaze.
We study each other’s faces as his hands explore my arms, working their way around to the back of my neck. He curls my hair around his fingers and lets it drop. The sensation when he touches me exhilarates and ignites my skin, which is odd, because I’m not wearing my skin.
I almost laugh when I realize that if someone were to walk by, they will only see Nathaniel and that will appear odd, to say the least.
But it doesn’t matter to me if anyone walks by and sees what’s happening. Everything I want is right in front of me. Nathaniel looks at me so intensely that it isn’t long before the world disappears and all that exists are he and I.
I flinch when he leans closer, not because I don’t want him to do what he’s about to do, but because I want the moment before to last longer. He seems to understand me. When he leans in again, he lingers.
His lips hover above mine, our breath mingles together and then neither of us can take it any longer, though he has more control than I. He brushes his lips to mine, gently, with caution as if he’s waiting for my answer to his advance.
I inch closer to him, pressing myself against him as I shape my mouth to his. We work in rhythm, give and take, push and pull.
I could have kissed him forever. That’s why when he pulls away and whispers, “Mercy, I can’t do this,” my heart nearly fractures in two.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Gage
It can’t be true. All the things Ariana is saying, they can’t possibly be true. The Assembled are not the monsters she’s making them out to be. She’s twisting this around so that I’ll feel sorry for her. Her powers of manipulation are like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. She almost has me convinced, but luckily, I catch myself before I fall too deep into her web of lies.
Ariana is a Breacher. She steals other people’s bodies so that she can continue to live. The Assembled have nothing to do with it. They created me to end Breachers. What she is accusing them of isn’t possible.
There’s one small thing that’s nagging me and though I know I will regret asking, I can’t help myself.
“How are you alive?”
“That’s a curious thing, Gage, considering you killed me.”
The battle between Ariana and I took place on Mercy’s tenth birthday. They’d gone to San Francisco for the day and I’d followed them. They spent their time shopping and enjoying each other’s company. They looked happy.
Ariana dropped Mercy off at school near the end of the day. That’s when I knew she was on to me. She made sure Mercy was safe first.
Taking her out was easy, almost too easy. Rae and I approached the house and Ariana was on the porch sipping tea. She didn’t put up much of a fight when I attacked.
We didn’t just discard her, we separated her into pieces and scattered them across the beyond. For her to be sitting here in front of me there has to be an act of, well, an act of The Assembled.
“I don’t believe it,” I tell her.
“Whether you believe it or not doesn’t make it any less true. The Assembled brought me back. They needed me to do their work. They still do. But I’m done playing it their way.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, Gage, that I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill every single one of them and if you stand in my way, I won’t even blink before killing you as well.”
“And Mercy? What are your plans for her?”
Ariana’s wicked smile spreads across her face. “I’m sure you’ve pieced it together by now that Mercy isn’t an ordinary Breacher. She has a special gift that makes her uniquely qualified to assist me.”
“Mercy isn’t interested in fighting your battles, Ariana.”
One step too far. She sneers at me. “You know nothing of my daughter, Gage. And thanks to you, she knows nothing of me. But things change.”
“I won’t let you get away with this!”
“You think you know what’s going on, but you don’t. The mere fact that you think I’d lock my daughter in some meat packing plant is evidence enough. You want to know who burned down your warehouse, who killed your precious team? Go ask The Assembled.”
My mouth cracks open. I stare at her in disbelief as I replay her words in my head. “No. They wouldn’t.” I shake my head.
“Open your eyes! The truth is right in front of you.”
Ariana heads back toward the bedroom. As she approaches the doors she spins around and calls, “Ethan!”
The bodyguard returns, all hulking six-foot-three of him.
“Show Gage to the door.”
He steps toward me and I’m off the couch in one quick motion. “Don’t do this, Ariana. Don’t drag Mercy into all of this.”
She seems to consider my request.
“I can see that you have feelings for her, which you and I both know is the reason why you were cast out. You are of no use to The Assembled, but you can be of use to me. We’re on the same side. Mercy’s side. I will do whatever I have to do to protect her and I will destroy whomever stands in my way. That’s your choice, Gage: Help me protect Mercy, or be destroyed by the lies The Assembled fed you.”
* * *
As I walk the streets of midtown, I feel clueless, lost, broken. Moisture fills the corners of my eyes and slowly trickles down my face. I swipe the tears away as quickly as I can. Hunters are above petty emotions, but I am no longer a Hunter. I am human. And my whole life is a lie.
If this is what it means to be human, to succumb to feelings, to feel destroyed, then I’d rather pass.
I wander until I end up in a small park. Across the way, I see the strangest sight. A man is kissing someone, but there’s no one there. It’s like he’s kissing the air. As I draw closer I realize what I’m seeing. My gut twists into knots.
Nathaniel is kissing Mercy.
I have this overwhelming urge to beat him senseless.
“Nathaniel!” I call to him and jog over.
He doesn’t exactly look thrilled to see me.
“Mercy is with you.” There’s no point in dancing around; he can’t deny what I just saw. She’s there with him and they were just kissing.
“She breached the body of a dead girl, so getting her out was, well, let’s call it messy. What happened on your end?”
Rolling up my shirtsleeve, I expose my wrist. “Had a little chat with The Assembled.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “Cast you out, did they?”
“Yes. And I’ve seen Ariana. She told me everything.”
Nathaniel laughs and rubs his chin. “Did she?”
“Why didn’t you tell m
e?”
“You say that like you would’ve believed me. You were created to destroy me, remember?”
He has a point, but that does nothing to lessen my anger.
Nathaniel asks, “What exactly did she tell you?”
“Her version of the truth.”
“You’ve had your whole world turned upside down. I know how that feels. But I’m not willing to give up and you can’t either. We can fix this.”
“Ariana wants to fight The Assembled. She told me she’s going to kill them all.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Mercy
Everything is shifting. Seeing Gage fall apart is startling. But I understand what he’s going through. His whole world has been upended and he has to reconcile that. Nothing is black and white anymore. What he believed is a sham. It must be hell for him to face it all.
It’s hell for me also. Just a few days ago, I considered myself fairly average, and fairly lucky to have a calm life. I didn’t know that my entire life has been a lie as well. Nothing about me is ordinary or usual. I’ve faced horror after horror. The dead bodies are piling up around me.
When I touch Gage, I can really feel him. I know he can feel me when his hand slides over mine.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers to me.
“I know.”
“This is all so much. I can’t … ”
“You can’t breathe. I get it.”
He holds onto me. I feel whole, nearly the same way I do when Nathaniel touches me. Behind me, I feel Nathaniel tense up in reaction to Gage and I being so close.
I have no idea how to fix any of this. As I stand there, knee deep in self-pity, I think of Lyla. She breaks me out of my head.
“Gage, are Lyla and Jay safe?”
Gage’s whole demeanor changes when I mention their names. The soldier in him is always just below the surface. He reaches for it so easily. “I sent them to the hospital to check on Jay’s mother.”
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