The Warrior

by Kay Camden

  My braid—into hornets? I never agreed to that. I never taught him that either.

  I can’t dwell on it, though, because the magic from his pill is spreading like a flash flood. Each muscle wakes with new life, stimulated with impossible power. All fatigue and exhaustion gone. Hunger eliminated. There’s a prickling in my blood; if I don’t run a marathon right now, I just might explode. I’m a burst of lightning, a hurricane. The fiercest elements thrum in my blood, in muscle and bone and synapse. I’m earth magic and black magic, power half pure, half illegal, multiplied.

  Shots flash around us. Rex and I duck, scooting against the wall. We unholster our guns, both chamber a round. The air contains more hornets than oxygen now, but they aren’t after us. Rex ducks a flyby, curses, and ducks again. He takes my hand and starts into the room, losing the nerve at the last second. I’m not able to tell him what I’m thinking: Your own summoned hornets won’t hurt you. But maybe he has a phobia or something. So I stand and walk into the room, dragging him behind me.

  Two women are trying to escape up the stairs. Rex holds them while I bleed them and draw the symbol. Two at once is tricky, but we get it done. Rex’s pill has made me so high I can’t tell where I’m stashing the hate. It’s an assembly line of blood, symbols, and harvested darkness. Rex supplies victims and I perform the cure. The hornets keep the guns away. Then we’re running down hallways, escorted by our swarm. New rooms, new people. Men and women, young and old. A stash of children locked in an upper-floor room, compliant and less afraid of Rex than the adults. My steps are losing bounce and gaining drag.

  One more, Rex says. But it’s not just one more. It’s a hundred.

  I fall, Rex picks me up.

  I watch Rex grab Jared, cut his throat. I can’t figure out where we are. The room is blinding white but dark at the edges. Did I try to cure Jared already? Did it fail? Rex drops him on the floor, watches the blood puddle against his boots. He spits. Wipes a hand against his mouth. Blood on his hands, smeared up his forearms. Blood everywhere.

  He comes to me. I can’t. No more.

  A new room. Rex’s dad? Yes, Dillon Moore. His mouth is bloodied. It’s all I can see. Rex walks around him. Stops. Hesitates. I can’t let him kill his own father. I push away from the wall that’s keeping me up. Rex’s hand on my arm. I shrug him away. One more. I can do one more. I see my finger draw the symbol. I feel the hate fill me, the last space, the last bit of me, gone.

  Chapter 30

  Rex

  Sloane collapses in the middle of the foyer. I lift her shoulders up, cradle her head against my arm. Her eyelids haven’t closed completely but her eyes have rolled all the way into her head. Like a dead person.

  It’s not supposed to end like this. I didn’t sanction it. This house is mine now, and I say no to this.

  Five minutes ago she was tearing through the house like the hornets I called, not a single girl but a swarm, in several places at once. Disabling one body, latching onto a new one a second later. Terrifying in her efficiency. Now I can’t fucking find her pulse. Can’t see any evidence of breathing. She’s crumpled in my arms, a wadded, discarded paper. All used up.

  She took on too much, and I let her. I shouldn’t have let her and I don’t know what to do.

  I drag her onto the rug and lay her on her back. My ear against her chest, I beg to hear a heartbeat. All I hear is my own screaming, my mouth muffled against her chest. A finger against her wrist, her throat, nothing.

  I take the bottle of black magic out of my pocket. This is how it was supposed to end. She can’t die without my permission, not in my own house, the one I now rule, the one she helped me overthrow. I test the cork. An almost insignificant creak loosens it by a hair. The black magic swirls inside, ready, anxious. There was a time I questioned this end because I wanted to spare her. Well she hasn’t been spared. Decision made. Easy.

  Her skin is still warm. How long does it take for a corpse to cool? I put my ear to her chest again and really fucking listen this time. Miracles happen or we’d have no word for it.

  Miracles don’t happen to me.

  I stand, wrap my fist around the bottle. I’m not going to uncork it. I’m going to crush it to pieces.

  “Rex.”

  I spin. In the doorway stands my father. Ripped collar stained bloody. Swollen torn cheek, soon to be very black eye. I don’t remember roughing him up so much. He raises his hands. I lower the gun I’ve unconsciously drawn. His eyes go to Sloane. I step in front of her, ready to blow his head off.

  “Get her out of here. She’s—all this…” he gestures above us, all around “…it’s killing her.”

  “She’s already dead.”

  He shakes his head. “But she will be if you don’t get her out of here. That oak on the west lawn—can’t you feel it calling?”

  I notice then the pulse, the one I hoped to find in Sloane, riding toward me. It’s hers but not of her. It’s been stolen, preserved. I reach and trace it through the wood of the house, the earth and stone outside.

  “It’s…” he turns in that direction, squinting as if viewing through the walls “…I don’t even know. This is all new to me.”

  I’m already heaving her up. New strength bursts through me. I pound down the front steps and out in the grass with her limp frame draped over my shoulders. The exiled bats dip and cry. Coyotes race across the lawn to meet me and run ahead like they’re my guide, like they know what a screwup I am, that I might miss the obvious.

  I lay her under the shelter of the oak. Wind gusts from nowhere. Falling leaves blanket us. I don’t know any magic for this. I’m stupid and lost, and she’s too dead to help me. I take her hand, flatten it against my heart, wish I could transfer my own heart to her. Wind hits me again; I prop an arm against the oak’s trunk to avoid being knocked over.

  Moths flutter down from the branches—a hundred, a thousand. They cloud around us, keeping their distance from the bats above. It’s so much commotion, so many bodies. I need to make them leave so I can focus on Sloane, but I don’t know how.

  Sounds dial down and away like I’ve ducked underwater. There is one thing left: my heartbeat. And another sound far away, but gaining volume. A second heartbeat slowed beyond comprehension but gaining, syncing to mine. When the beats join, I feel the rough bark of the oak’s trunk on my palm and pull it away. The day’s sound returns: the rustle of wind, the cries of a crow above us.

  Wetness shines on Sloane’s cheeks. I touch it. Rain? Dew? It’s smeared the makeup on her eyes. Tears. She’s corpse-still but those tears are new and corpses can’t cry. I breathe in, calling the elements to unite around me for the first time in my life. Please, le do thoil, help me. I’m not a king but a servant, and I’m begging. Restore her; make her right. Take my life in place of hers.

  I lower my ear to her chest and listen. It’s not real, the pulse I hear. I’m mistaken. It’s mine. It’s the earth’s. I find her wrist, press my fingers against it. An unmistakable surge of blood. Slow, but there. So very there.

  If my dad was right about this, he’s right about something else: I have to get her out of here.

  *

  I don’t think about where I need to take her, I just find the interstate and drive. She’s strapped in and reclined in the seat next to me, but I’ve stretched her arm into my lap so I can check her pulse often. And by often I mean every thirty seconds. It’s obsessive, but I can’t help it.

  Hours later I stop to hydrate because my lips have gone chapped I’m so thirsty, and she must be too. The gas station has too much activity for me, though, so I get back on the road for a few miles then pull to the shoulder. Leaning in on her side I give her a sip of water. She chokes it back up in her sleep. I hold her and scream every curse I know. She can’t hear me. No one can.

  It’s uppers, scarfed food, and fuel stops for I don’t know how many miles. I exit the interstate for not
hing else. Somewhere in the Midwestern nothingness, I start hallucinating. Dusk invites ghosts into the car, their icy fingers in my hair, on my neck. Demons land on the roof, the thump of their weight nearly sending us into a spin I hit the brakes so hard. When I’ve swerved for the third murky pedestrian and see once more in my mirror there was nothing there, I pull to the shoulder and down the embankment, pop a downer, and crash hard into sleep.

  Waking up wet with sweat next to a three-quarters dead Sloane sends me out of the car to scream again. Her pulse is barely there. An offered drink is more successful now because it just runs down her throat, her choking mechanism broken, unconsciousness plummeting deeper by the hour. With the bottom of my shirt, I dab the water that leaks from her lips. Where’s that superhuman Bevan healing?

  I get out of the car and holler at the sky. Me calling the shots wasn’t supposed to be like this. I need someone to tell me what to do. My decisions are crap. They only lead to failure. I text Aaron: Help.

  He calls immediately. My end is a frantic, hysterical stuttering of words, and I’m instantly ashamed.

  “Go, Rex. You’re doing the right thing. Hang up and drive. Go!” The line goes dead.

  The right thing. Then what’s the wrong thing? I take the bottle of black magic out of my pocket and watch it fold around itself in the daylight. Cracking it open at this point would be a mercy kill. Plus the end that I wanted. I look at Sloane, at her limp arm hanging out of the car, the one she slides around my stomach when she snuggles me in bed. The mega bruise on her chin she earned curing my family. Her blood-caked fingernails. And the short piece of hair on her shoulder where I severed her braid.

  So I don’t chuck this bottle so hard at the ground it explodes on impact, I tuck it away. I get behind the wheel, and I drive.

  *

  The land in this country never ends. The R5 is nothing but a speck blowing across it. I’ve covered so many miles I can’t believe I haven’t hit an ocean. I must’ve gone through a wormhole at some point, probably when I was hallucinating. Any minute I’m going to hit the eastern edge of Richmond and be right back where I started.

  Sloane’s pulse is bordering on pitiful. I need to sleep. I pop another upper instead. The road is razor straight, flat featureless land flanking us. We might be on another planet now. Either that, or I’m hallucinating again.

  *

  We’ve reached mountains but they’re fake. Not just CGI, but bad CGI. They annoy me, but I can’t stop looking at them.

  Sloane’s arm slips off my lap, and I reach for it, panicking when her wrist gives me nothing. I screech to a halt on the shoulder and check her neck, my ear against her chest, listening. I find it, but it’s too weak to be a comfort.

  I steer onto the road and hit the gas. Eighty feels like sixty. A hundred feels like eighty. It’s just not enough. And the silence in the car has been painful for so long I’m afraid I might off myself just to end it.

  *

  There’s a mailbox on the road next to a gravel driveway leading into the forest. The pines at the opening look more like guards than trees. I take the turn anyway. Time is running out.

  The R5’s nose dives as the road pitches down. It’s a severe descent straight into premature night. I flip on my headlights because the shadows are deep and we’ve lost the light from the sky.

  A black car heads toward us. Camaro versus R5—it’s a game of chicken at gravel-road pace which means plenty of time to decide who’s going to yield and who isn’t. We end up stopped nose to nose. I put it together. Black Camaro ZL1—it’s him. It’s gotta be him. I am so about to die.

  He gets out, all twenty feet of him. He’s as massive and angry as I imagined. I try to forget how many people he’s killed. He’s an old man, Rex. Yeah, the kind of old man who’s seen so much brutal shit he’s no longer human.

  I climb out with my hands up because I’m not stupid. I wish I had a shotgun trained on him. No, two. That’d be bad, though, because right now my prey-animal pulse would be coercing my trigger finger to squeeze and I need his help.

  He’s closer now. I can clearly see his eyes. Behind them lay the ruins of a decade’s long, hard-fought war, and he’s the last man standing. Is he the war hero or the criminal? Unconfirmed. He wears crazy like it’s normal, unnoticeable, like move along, nothing to see here. Only you can’t.

  And I finally understand why my family hates him. Why he’s untouchable. Unstoppable. It’s not just who he is but what he is. That thing that sparks our hate matches a fear buried a million miles deep in my subconscious that I never felt until now. What he’s made of has been encoded into my blood, a genetic memory passed down. He’s both enemy and victor. Indestructible because it’s true, because no one’s tried, we’re all too afraid, and our ancestors passed all that down to us. Fear creates hate creates war.

  He ducks, checking the inside of my car.

  “She’s…” I want to say dying but figure that would be bad to say right now. “I need help.”

  He rips open the door and lifts her out. He takes off down the driveway past his car, and I stay put, unsure what the hell to do.

  Over his shoulder, he says, “In front of me where I can see you.”

  Orders. Good. I’m used to that. I lead the way, my pace fast enough for my boots to scatter gravel, but he keeps up fine even with Sloane’s weight.

  No longer alone in my screaming worry for her, I take the first actual lung-filling breath in days. The air is cool, unweighted. Stories-high pine trees create a gauntlet around us. I’m too fascinated at seeing Sloane’s place of origin to think about how stupid it is I’m not in my car right now getting out of this. He’s occupied. He won’t drop her to pursue me. I could totally get away.

  A cabin comes into view, dwarfed and mobbed by all the pines. Everything my family said is true. They do live in the woods with the animals. They are common, content with their crude lives and savage ways. And right now I’m wondering why any of that’s a bad thing. Sloane’s spirit is here. I sense it all around me. Her confidence. Her defiance. Her clear sense of right and wrong. Her connection to the elements so present here it’s like the magic itself is being fed.

  The porch is as far as I’m going. I take a seat on the wood pile and get out my phone, pretending I have people to contact. At the door he pauses for my attention. Some power makes me look up even though I don’t want to. His face promises death if I try any shit. I don’t want to see the rest of the scene: Sloane’s dead limbs, her knotty neglected hair, her eyelids only half closed even though she’s unconscious. He takes a long, stalkerish look at the burn scar on my arm. As he turns to go in, I get this weird vibe that he totally understands. More than Emily and Aaron. More than Sloane.

  I text Aaron, Made it. And he hasn’t killed me yet.

  How is she?

  Not good. Alive though. And in much better hands than my own.

  Keep me posted.

  Two dogs tear across the front yard and cut around the house. I get up, go to the edge of the porch, and look up past the eave at the trees towering over us. I can’t get over these trees. From the road it’s one thing. Standing underneath them? Completely sick. Fantasyland, and I wonder for a second if I’m hallucinating. My last nap and meal happened a billion miles ago.

  I take the bottle of black magic out of my pocket and wrap my fingers around it.

  The door opens. It’s him again. “Why.”

  Is that a question? And how do I figure out the rest of it? Somehow I think it needs some kind of answer from me—fast—so I’m going to go with Why did you come here? “Had nowhere else to go.”

  “You’re not fucking welcome in my house.”

  I extend my arm like a bridge between us. In my sleep deprived vision it happens in severe slow motion. Or maybe that’s my brain trying to slow down the insanity displayed in front of it: my open palm, the offered bottle.

 
This wasn’t planned. I don’t even know what I’m doing. A peace offering? Maybe. Proof of my goodwill? No one would believe it even with the bottle. Reality is I just don’t want the thing anymore. It’s a knife in the back every time I think of it. I want it away from me.

  He looks at the bottle for so long I’m afraid there’s something wrong with me. The pills, hunger, and sleep deprivation have finally caught up and this is the first symptom: slow-mo vision. I wonder how I’ll ever drive the R5 again.

  Staring. So much staring. He finally takes it but won’t stop looking at me, intense as all get-out. I need those two shotguns. Or maybe it would be better just to run. No way this guy raised Sloane. She’s much too sane.

  “I’m good with the wood pile.” I say it to get us back to before that exchange so I no longer have to think about the power I just surrendered. I’d return to my comfy-as-hell seat to drive it in, but I don’t really want to lose my balanced stance right now. And keeping my ground and my eyes on his is proof of something, I’m just not sure what. I’m not about to lose this contest, though, that’s for sure.

  He goes back in the house. I wish I’d asked him to tell me when she’s better, because I have a hunch he wouldn’t mind leaving me out here forever. I sit on the edge of the porch. And whoa, those trees. The breeze crinkles through them. They sway, just enough to flaunt their deadly might should one of them decide to come down.

  Two women walk into view on the road. I’m tempted to hide before they see me because at this distance one of them looks frighteningly like my mother. They don’t appear to be dressed for a hike, but oh yeah, the driveway’s blocked. They had to park and walk. Neither say anything as they pass by and go into the house. The granny gives me a thoughtful look-over. The other one isn’t so much like my mother close up. And from the hostile look she gives me, I gather she hates me more than my mother, which is a pretty major thing.

  Alone again, I rest my head on my knees and close my eyes, breathing this damn perfect air, wishing I could get in the R5 and shoot out of here. Impossible without knowing she’s okay first. Impossible without saying goodbye.