The Warrior

by Kay Camden

  I turn toward the spot in the woods where Sloane disappeared, rubbing my head, trying to determine if this pile-on of bodies is an issue for us. If it’s added Moores, it just means more work for Sloane, more danger to her in the long term, and a reach into a part of the family we never expected to break down. If they’re just hired soldiers, it’s going to make each household harder to breach, harder to keep people away as Sloane does her work, harder for me not to up the body count.

  “And I can’t help you anymore. I need to disappear. My dad sent Bethany and Jess on a long cruise—”

  “Who’s Jess?” I keep my face turned away. I don’t want him to read anything from me when he answers.

  “My girlfriend.”

  Of course he has a girl I don’t know about.

  “My dad’s heading to Montana to help protect Sloane’s family. I need to stay on the move, until this is all over. Rex—”

  I still don’t look at him. The sucker punch of withheld info so key to his life carries the same jarring power it always has, even though now I have Sloane, and I’m not such a loser with nothing but online friends. Sloane is real but temporary. Aaron will never think I’m good enough to be his real brother. To be anyone worth telling anything about his life.

  “Hey,” he says. “I was going to introduce you to Jess.”

  “Imeacht gan teacht ort.” Because simply telling him to fuck off just isn’t strong enough considering how much I overuse that word.

  He chuckles. “I took a real beating for you, man.”

  I finally look at him. “You don’t have a clue.”

  Whatever shred of joy or irony that hatched the chuckle dies hard. A shadow crosses his face, almost like he knows the shit I’ve been through. Almost like he cares. “I guess I don’t.”

  Before it gets any weirder, I say, “Okay, Bro. Message received. I’ll charge my phone so you don’t have to play private investigator anymore.”

  “You were stuck in that house. I’m not going to bring my girlfriend there for any reason. You see that, right?”

  “Yeah, I get it.” But not really. Because he could’ve still told me. Video called me with her. Sent a dumb picture or something.

  “Our mother would put her on the menu for dinner.”

  “I said I get it.”

  The shadow hasn’t passed though, and the way he’s looking at me … it almost looks like—I step back but not quick enough. He’s got me, arms restricting shoulders, voice so close it’s vibrating against me. “I’m really proud of you, Rex, you know that?”

  I’ve escaped, but he’s got a look on him like he’s going to do it again. Sloane can hug me. I haven’t made the call about anyone else though, so he needs to back off. “Okay, Aaron, I get it. Stop being weird.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Don’t smile, Rex. It would only encourage him. “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” He socks me in the shoulder. “Don’t die.”

  “If I do, it’ll be my doing. Not theirs.”

  He takes a moment to roll that around, and to my surprise, decides not to say a damn thing. Instead, he squeezes my shoulder, gets in his car, and tears away. Okay, what? My overbearing brother recognizing my autonomy? Just like that? I need to find Sloane so she can bring me back to the ground.

  I find her in the woods, huddled in the deep shadow of giant oak. She’s working on something in her a lap, a pile of half-dead leaves clusters beside her. She raises her face, her eyes still shielded by sunglasses, and signs, I’m sorry, then spells Aaron’s name.

  “He’s okay. He understands. He’ll catch you next time.”

  I’m not sure how much of that she caught, but she goes back to her work as if satisfied. This shade has sure taken the edge off the heat. Because I need to re-chew what just happened between Aaron and me, I sit down, feeling grounded again just by having her in my sight. Aaron’s full blessing to do whatever I want seems entirely terrifying now. The old me would question his motive and find it obvious: they beat the shit out of him and he wants to sic me on them for revenge. The new me says no, that’s not Aaron. It’s really just what he said. He’s proud. Which means he backs the decisions I’ve made to get here. And he wants me to make him prouder.

  Sloane leans toward me to place her creation on my head. An oak leaf crown, just like the one she’s now putting on her own head. Magic revs high all around, raining down, bridging us. The oak rising beside us like a beacon, our knees against earth magnetic. She takes my hands and I feel the otherness of her second half. She’s dual-powered, hybrid, a new technology built to advance beyond the others. A secret weapon built to overpower me. I was never supposed to win this. My whole family was duped. Or maybe they knew I’d fail and promised me the opposite, hoping I’d believe it and run with it, a lie turned self-fulfilling prophecy.

  She stretches out my arm and writes, Maybe I should call that black witch.

  Learning to harness that other power would be sweet. It might make our work easier. It might keep Sloane from caving in under the burden of that darkness she’s not trained to carry. The bad news? That black witch knows about the bottle and she’d expose me. Once Sloane finds out, she’ll know what I plan to do. She’ll never trust me again.

  She shouldn’t trust me now, but she does, and I’m keeping my hold on that as long as I can because I’m a Moore and I’m selfish. I’d feel shitty about denying her the help she needs if I didn’t know she could handle it without help, because she totally can. So I take her arm and write back, No, you can do this.

  She readjusts the crown on my head before answering. She could help me.

  She’ll use you. And turn me in. Which is not a lie. So I don’t understand why I feel like such an asshole when I write it.

  It’s changing me and I don’t know what to do. The pressure she uses on my arm is a bit intense, and when she’s finished she holds on, fingers encircling my wrist.

  I should probably ask her to explain what she means by “it” before I respond, but the area on my arm probably isn’t big enough. Her eyes under that oak crown tell me more than a thousand words. I write, You’re The Catalyst. Nothing about you should change.

  She blinks at me like she’s surprised at how much I understand. When she takes my arm to respond, she sits there holding it a moment as if sharpening her thoughts. Then I’m doing something wrong, I just don’t know what.

  It’s too late to tell her trying to salvage my family is wrong. It’s wrong to spare them. If she knew all I know, she’d be killing them in their beds and torching every house. None of this matters though, because in the end she’ll have the peace she’s worked so hard for. But what she’s gained from this, that thing inside her that’s changing her—I’m starting to think it’s not her problem to take on, but mine. My family’s sewage. Our constructed hate, generations old, its origin not even known to the two kids tasked to end the war it’s mutated into.

  She’s not the one doing something wrong. I am.

  *

  We don’t even discuss our new strategy: teamwork or die. It’s a truth so real we don’t need to say it. Our next stop is New York, a trendy neighborhood packed so tight we ditch the R5 miles away. The house lights up the night like a party. Sloane sends a team of city-dwelling bats on recon, and we find it’s just as Aaron warned: hired soldiers crawling every square inch. We don’t have a choice though, so we move in, skirting into the house undetected.

  It’s just as stupid inside. As we know, the sleeping stone works on my people but not the patrolling security now too numerous to work around. Sloane won’t let me kill them. The two KOs I manage are too noisy and just bring more people to KO. If I could get them to queue up, I could do them assembly line, but without each of them knowing and starting a mass attack …? Good luck. So we hole up in a closet. She goes into my pocket for my phone. Should I admit what that still does to me? No,
Rex, please don’t. Not now.

  With the volume muted, she types out: I have an idea.

  I roll my hand at her to get her to spit it out. I’m not claustrophobic but this closet is making me sweat. We’ve parted the hanging coats, but they’re still draping all over me, returning like pests every time I shove them away. Losing it right now would be bad timing, so I hit snooze on the freak-out and hope we get out of here before it goes off. Breathe, Rex. You’re fine.

  Water effect. Child’s play, remember? In the phone’s light, she’s grinning at me for the first time in days. You did it to your car when we first escaped.

  Yeah, and I had gallons of water on hand. Not so awesomely prepared now. She slips the phone back in my pocket and pulls me up, peeks out the cracked closet door before slipping out. We move in the shadow along the wall, into a hall bathroom where she closes the door and locks it. A porthole window glows with light pollution from the city. She unloads her pockets. Unloads mine. I wish I could load them up again and make her do it all over.

  Then she’s turning on the shower and beckoning me inside as her hair and clothes flatten under the stream of water. Deaf girl must not be aware that a running faucet makes sound. I put an ear against the door and listen to the hall. Then I realize something. At home, there’d be no threat in the sound of a running faucet at night. Also true for a house this size. Someone could be getting up for a drink. An appliance could be kicking on. No one’s going to think running water means Rex and Sloane are here.

  I get in with her, keeping my distance until she takes my arms and spins us so I’m under the stream. The spell words evade me—she’s too close, and I can’t get my head there. So I close my eyes and think myself back to that night, those jugs in the back of the R5, my fresh escape. And I whisper them under the water, my hands on Sloane’s hips, feeling the magic drench us, cloak us, make us one.

  Every house we hit from then on starts with me and Sloane under a shower head. Bangs hanging wet in her eyes, clothes clinging. It’s all business until the time I steal a kiss. After that, it’s every house me and Sloane making out under a shower head. Then she cuts people and steals their hate while I try hard not to kill them with the hate I carry. She purged my hate of Bevans. My hate of Moores roots too deep to be purged by any magic, and it’s revived by each one of them I see.

  We work our way up the coast. It gets cooler and wetter. The photos in my phone prove how many houses we hit because I’ve lost track. Then we move inland and work our way south. Sloane seems to have found a way to cope with her dark burden. It involves ignoring me, ignoring everything, really. Except for my hair. It’s started growing out, and she can’t keep her fingers out of it. I’m pretty sure I’ve learned how to purr. The only other thing that eases her burden is lots of deafening psychill. Every time I fire up the audio, I’m afraid the speakers will be blown but they hold up just as Sloane does. Maybe they’re powered by magic too. We need to finish this soon. I don’t know how much longer she can last.

  Chapter 27

  Sloane

  We’ve become nocturnal. I’m so punished by sunlight it’s a necessity now to do all the driving and work at night and sleep, eat, and plan during the day in motel rooms with the curtains drawn tight. I can’t think too much about it. Panic looms over my shoulder. I’ve turned so much mental space over to the hate I’ve collected I don’t know if any of the real me still exists or where to find her if she does. The more of me I give it, the less of a burden it feels like. And for this dark mass of hate to not feel like a burden—that’s like candy to the panic. Rex has already called dibs on panic attacks. I need to pick something else, like fainting or insomnia or serial murder. But I think Rex has dibs on that last one too. He finds some reason to execute at least one person per house, and he never tells me why. I feel like the reasons travel into me from the hate I remove from them, and I’d rather not have the gory details to apply to the roiling monster that has made a home inside me.

  And if I decided to use this monster of hate I’ve collected as fuel to the black magic I know, I could tear apart the world.

  Rex is the only thing keeping me from doing that. The elements sing through him. When I plant my fingers in his hair or snuggle against him to sleep, it awakes the elements in me, and I remember the life I used to have that feels more like a distant memory with each house we hit. I remember bare feet against pine needles. My dad’s strong arm around my shoulders. My mom’s bright morning smile. Coyotes pranking my dogs while Marcas and I walk the woods at dusk, Marcas bending over with laughter. The elements remind me to be homesick. Without them, I’d forget. I’d stop caring. I’d lie down and give up, just let the Moores take me.

  I’m like a wildcat now. Short bursts of energy followed by days of rest. Rex has bought an expensive gaming laptop so he can have something to do while I sleep. This lethargy should concern me, but I’m too lethargic to be concerned.

  There’s a new language building inside me. Not Irish, English, or ASL. Nothing with concrete words I can see but in bursts of thoughts, hazy at first but becoming clearer with each house we hit. It’s providing a new understanding of this war we’re fighting, of justice and consequences. It’s knocking away dreamy ideals that used to matter to me but don’t anymore. I’m not becoming hardened. I’m waking up.

  I need to have a talk with Rex about what needs to happen when we finish. What I’ve collected can’t ever get loose in the world again. It has to be destroyed. And since I don’t have a way to remove it from me, I might have to be destroyed along with it. Sloane Bevan the martyr. I was right all along.

  *

  We arrive at another house. Rex knows which one. It’s stopped mattering to me. We find a shower for Rex’s spell. He kisses me like usual but for the first time I can’t kiss him back. He pulls away, water washing down his face, drips dropping of his eyelashes. What’s wrong?

  Nothing. Everything. I don’t know myself anymore. I should sign it—he’s picked up so much ASL I wonder if he’s taking lessons online while I sleep. But it’s too much effort to raise my hands.

  I close my eyes and drench myself under the showerhead. When I’m finished, he’s still watching me. Not just a casual glance but a full analysis. Well, screw him. It’s none of his business. I slip around him, forcing him to trade sides. He takes his turn under the water, and I close my eyes as he seals the spell. Then we get out, grab our gear, and go to work.

  In the first room, the bed is rumpled but empty of people. There’s an upright dark stain in the shadow near the door. Rex sees it a split second after I do, a heartbeat before it lunges, throwing an arm around Rex’s neck, the pointed end of a knife firm against his side.

  They’re both spitting words. If Rex’s spell failed, then the whole house will wake and see us. We need to call this off and run. Rex sends a headbutt backward; the guy dodges, giving Rex the tip of the knife as warning or punishment or both.

  I chamber a round and shoot him in the head.

  Suddenly relieved of weight, Rex stumbles forward. He cups his bloody side and looks at me. Looks at the dead guy on the floor. Looks at me again.

  I chamber another round and aim it at the door because I probably just woke up the whole street.

  Rex raises an S—shorthand for my name. We can’t talk right now. What is he thinking? I jerk my head toward the door. He gives it a quick glance before heading over to me. You …

  I, what? Soldier boy better get on his game or this is going to end fast. I kick him in the leg for his attention because he’s staring at the dead guy on the floor. When he turns back he says, You just killed …

  And that’s it. Because the rest comes through his eyes, locked on mine with so much shock and concern I want to kick him again. Harder. How many people has he killed? He has no right being all judgy about me taking down one.

  Bodies come through the door. I’m about to squeeze the trigger when Rex reaches,
shoving my pistol’s aim toward the ceiling. That shake of his head is a stunned, desperate no and there’s no way this level of conscience has suddenly sprouted in Rex Moore. A dream, that’s what this is, that’s why everything feels upside down, why my body is just a disconnected shell I’m traveling around in, why it doesn’t make sense that Rex would be so troubled by me killing a guy when he’s popping people now like they’re soda cans lined up on a fence.

  His face is inches from mine then. His hands cradling my jaw, tilting my eyes so I’m forced to look directly in his. His bloody hand slips against my skin, ripe, fragrant, and alive. Sloane, he says. You’re okay. You can do this. Just once more.

  Do what? I want to ask. This is a stupid dream so I get to choose. I want to swim in the ocean. I want to jump, feel the plunge under its choppy surface, the surge of the current tugging my limbs. I want to kick to the top, take a breath of sea air as a blue whale surfaces beside me. I’ll swim to the beach where Rex is waiting for me to lie with him in a bed of sand under the stars until I wake up.

  He tugs me through the door, down the hall, into a new room where a woman sleeps. He tosses the blanket aside at her feet, slices her foot deep.

  Sloane, he says. Go.

  I watch the blood seep into the sheet. Sprinkle on the floor.

  Rex comes to me, pulling me forward. Go.

  So I go. A dip of blood on my finger, a symbol on my forehead and hers. Darkness drifts to her body’s edge, tentative for a new host until it latches onto me. I draw it in like an inhale of smoke, a poison I’ve grown accustomed to. Once inside it pushes against me, too confined. I release one of the last remaining parts of the old me, let it fill the space, overwrite what’s there. With more room to expand, the compacted mass shifts into its new position. I don’t think about what I’ve lost to accommodate its expanding power. My family—I don’t think of them. My life—irrelevant. What I am is what I am now, not what I’ve been or what I’ve done. The return to normal seems far off, unlikely, impossible. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a Moore. To just give in, let the darkness fill in, the hate rule.