Reborn

by Jennifer Rush

  “Stay there. I’ll be in town soon.”

  All the warning bells in my head were going off. It was like a fucking holy hour of bells.

  Something wasn’t right. Staying put was probably the last thing I should do.

  ’Course, if anyone was good at doing the exact opposite of what should be done, it was me.

  18

  ELIZABETH

  I PULLED THE GABRIEL BOTTLE FROM the shelf and popped out the cork. I took in a deep breath, and that night came flooding back in disjointed images.

  The woods. The moonlight. The branches snapping at my feet and snagging my hair. The log that tripped me. The dry leaves rustling as I rolled over.

  And finally Gabriel.

  Nick.

  “Take care of it,” someone shouted.

  The gun was pointed at me.

  In the dark woods, the barrel was darker. Black. Empty. Bottomless. It was like staring into an abyss.

  Nick whispered, “Say nothing. Do you understa—”

  He cut himself off, and I whimpered at his feet. We were in the middle of nowhere. There was no one but Nick and the man in the distance. No one would hear my screams, so there was no point wasting my energy.

  Nick shot. I was squeezed so tightly into a ball when the gun went off, I couldn’t breathe. A ragged, choked sound escaped me.

  The bullet sailed over me. I wrapped my arms around my head. Every part of my body hurt. Fire in my veins. And fire in my lungs. My side was slick with blood. My chest, too. If Nick didn’t kill me, I’d be dead anyway. I was dead if he left me here.

  “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’ll be back.”

  His footfalls sounded like thunder in my head.

  “Go,” he told the man. “I’ll take care of the body.”

  “Decapitation, remember? Carry her back to the warehouse,” the man said. “Wrap her in this, so you don’t leave a trail of blood.”

  The ground smelled like coming winter. Like the end of everything. Or maybe that was just me and my dying, bloodless body.

  The word decapitation kept running through my head like a flashing red marquee.

  The man made a call on his cell. “It’s taken care of,” he said, and left, the leaves rustling as he walked away.

  Nick reappeared with a roll of plastic. “Wait until he’s farther out,” he told me. “No sound. None at all. Got it?”

  I nodded.

  I was shaking so bad by that point, I felt like gelatin.

  Nick took his coat off and wrapped it around me. Pine and musk and cinnamon and something else woodsy and sweet. I focused on the smell of his coat, dreaming up another life, another scenario, where I wasn’t this girl slowly dying on the forest floor.

  We waited so long, I swear I saw the moon tick through the sky. Until it was nothing but a speck of silver far below the tops of the trees.

  Without warning, Nick scooped me up, his arm tight around my waist, the other sturdy beneath my knees. I cried out. Tears leaked from my eyes. I wanted to die in that moment.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  I capped the glass bottle, and the images flashed away. The pain was a distant memory, but the hopelessness, the need for the whole ordeal to end, was with me still to this day.

  In my closet, I ducked down and pulled out an empty bottle from the box Aggie bought me the last time we’d been at the New Age store. I grabbed my treasure trove of oils. Some high-grade essential oils, some cheaper fragrance oils.

  The new bottle needed a base of musk. I filled it halfway and added the rest on top of it. A third of the bottle was vanilla. Then bergamot. Pine. And finally, lavender. I stirred it with my glass stick and took in a breath.

  Perfect.

  Last to go on the bottle was a label. I wrote Nick’s name on it in cursive, then plugged the neck with a cork.

  I set it on the shelf behind the GABRIEL bottle.

  A knock sounded on my door. Aggie ambled in. “Brought you some cookies.” She put a plate with three cookies on my desk.

  “Thanks.”

  “They turned out better than the last batch. Nice and gooey in the center. Just how I like them.”

  She paused in the middle of my room, and I got the distinct feeling she wasn’t here to share cookies.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “This boy…”

  “Nick.”

  “Nick.” She sat on the edge of my bed. I leaned against the desk. “You don’t really know him from school, do you?”

  I shifted and looked at the floor. “No.”

  “He a good kid?” she asked in a way that said she already knew the answer, but wanted to hear my opinion. Aggie was a fan of letting me make my own decisions. Freedom to grow and make your own mistakes, she’d often said. At first, I’d felt constricted by the freedom, as if there were too much of it, too many choices, for it to actually mean something.

  “‘A good kid’?” I echoed.

  Hearing someone refer to Nick as a kid seemed silly. He might have been under twenty, but he seemed further from a kid than a house cat from a cougar.

  “Yes,” I answered, even though I didn’t know if it was true.

  She eased off the bed, wincing when she made it upright. Her hips had been bothering her for a long time. But she didn’t like to complain about them. In fact, I couldn’t recall Aggie ever complaining about anything.

  “Just be careful, huh?” she said, and winked at me as she shuffled past. “Oh, and…” She turned around briefly, to wag a finger at me, “he’s not allowed in your bedroom with the door shut.”

  Okay, so maybe she drew the line at some freedoms.

  A giggle burst from my throat at the thought of what she was implying.

  Aggie wagged her finger a second time, a smile on her face. “I’m serious!” she said.

  “I know. Of course, Aggie. No closed-door escapades.”

  She shook her head as she left, chuckling to herself.

  But when I was alone again, I couldn’t help but picture Nick in my room, sitting on my bed, here among my things. The door closed. His ridiculously blue eyes on me and only me. What that might entail.

  The fire in my face said it all.

  19

  NICK

  I WATCHED TREV ENTER THE BAR FROM across the street, hidden in the shadow of an alcove. I didn’t want to find myself cornered inside if he arrived with Riley or any other Branch agents. At least here I could keep an eye on the street.

  Trev had arrived alone in the same black Jaguar he’d been driving a few months back. He’d done something weird to his hair, though. Half shaved, half long, like someone had started buzzing it from the bottom up and then quit before it was done.

  He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved henley. No combat gear. No stock Branch uniform. I didn’t miss the bulge of a gun at his back, though.

  He went inside, the door creaking closed behind him, sealing the noise of the bar with it. I waited. A few other vehicles drove past. A minivan. A Jeep. A motorcycle. Another minivan. I scanned the roofs of the buildings.

  Nothing.

  I jogged across the street, pressed my back against the bar’s exterior, hands loose at my sides.

  The door opened, and Trev came out.

  I stepped into him, grabbed him by the arms, whirled him around the corner of the building, and slammed him into the darkness of the next street, into the brick wall of the bar.

  Trev countered quickly with a gut punch. My lungs emptied in a gasp of air. He brought his left hand up, slamming my bottom jaw into my top, and my teeth clacked together. He kicked me in the knee. I went down, rolled, pulled my gun out from beneath my shirt, and pointed.

  Trev already had his Glock on me.

  “What is this?” he asked, cool, calm, as even as ever.

  “Why were you so close?” I asked.

  “If you’d given me five minutes, I could have told you.”

 
I spat blood to the sidewalk, felt a split in my lip when I ran my tongue across it.

  “Are you alone?” I asked.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  We remained that way for several long seconds, me on the sidewalk, aiming a gun, him standing two feet away, gun trained on my head.

  “Fine.” He turned the gun away, hands up. “Let’s talk.”

  I got to my feet, glad he was the first to give in. “Want a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Smells like you’ve had enough already.”

  I scowled at him as I passed.

  Back inside the dimly lit bar, I ordered a beer, because Trev was probably right, but hell if I was going to admit it. We sat at the table farthest from anyone, the jukebox blaring a bluegrass song ten feet behind me. It was enough to give us privacy.

  “I don’t work for the Branch anymore,” Trev said. “Let’s just get that out there right now.”

  I took a draw from the beer and waited for him to go on.

  “They knew I’d turned when I helped you guys escape. And, of course, they suspected I was the one who planted the bombs.”

  “How much is left?”

  He didn’t need clarification to know I meant the Branch.

  “Riley, obviously. He’s the one running whatever is left. He just got a big push from someone in the Department of Defense. I don’t know what it was. Or why. But I’m guessing they’re working on some new program.”

  I cursed and tightened my hold on the beer bottle, wanting to smash something so badly my fingers itched. “So if you don’t work for them, then why are you here?”

  “Because…” He glanced at the bar’s entrance, then at the back door, before going on. “We got word that there was something here that Riley might want, something to kick-start the new program. I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “We call ourselves the Coats.”

  I cocked a brow. “The Coats?”

  “Short for Turncoats. Remember Sura mentioning she was part of a group that opposed the Branch?”

  I nodded. Sura had been Arthur’s ex-wife—Arthur was the scientist who ran the program at the farmhouse lab. He had also posed as Anna’s dad for five years, after the Branch wiped her memory and made her forget her real parents.

  Despite all the shit Arthur had put us through, and the lies he’d force-fed Anna, he was all right.

  “The group Sura was part of,” Trev said, “was the Coats. They’re all ex–Branch employees. They still have some people on the inside, who provide us info as it comes in.”

  “So you were already on your way here to check out what Riley might be interested in?”

  Trev nodded.

  “Is Riley on his way here now?”

  “Not yet.”

  Was Riley coming to Trademarr for me? Or for something connected to Elizabeth? He had to know she was still alive—the news of her rescue had been plastered all over the place.

  “Will you know when Riley is coming?” I asked.

  Trev nodded. “They’ll keep me up-to-date on his movements.”

  “Good. Because I have a few things to take care of before then.” I stood and drained the rest of my beer, slamming it on the table when I was finished.

  I moved for the door.

  “Wait,” Trev said. “There’s more.”

  I paused, and glanced over a shoulder. “What?”

  He leaned back in his chair, stared me right in the face. “There’s an old lab here, too.”

  Trev drove south of town, taking an old highway lined with decrepit, barely functioning factories. The Jaguar’s engine roared as Trev picked up speed.

  “What did this thing cost you?” I asked.

  “A lot of money.”

  I grunted. “The Branch must have paid you well.”

  He glanced at me for a second before turning away again. “I would give it all back if I could.”

  “You mean, instead of turning on us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still feeling the guilt of that decision, huh?”

  “‘You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.’”

  “Great. You’re doing that thing again.”

  “I just mean…” He trailed off as he slowed to make a left turn. “I trusted the Branch too much, is what I mean. But I thought it was worth it. It wasn’t.”

  The others had forgiven Trev, to an extent. We’d all been warped by the Branch. They were good at telling lies. Good at cracking open your head like a pumpkin and scooping out the guts. All the things that mattered. I think that’s why Sam, Cas, and Anna had cut Trev a little bit of slack.

  I was still having a hard time following suit.

  You screw me over once, that’s it. Didn’t mean I couldn’t use Trev, though. He owed me.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, cracking a knuckle, “you’ll always be a fucking rat in my book.”

  His hands tightened on the leather steering wheel. “I don’t have to help you, you know.”

  “Fine. Then don’t.” He slammed on the brakes. I braced myself with a hand on the dash. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Get out.”

  I glanced at him. “Come on. Don’t be a dick.”

  “Get the hell out of my car, Nick.” His freaky orange eyes flashed in the light.

  A second ticked by. Then another. I tried getting a read on him, wondering how far he’d push.

  “Get. Out. Of. The. Car.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know it?”

  He grabbed the back of my head and slammed my face into the dash. White dots exploded in my vision. A sharp pain radiated out from my forehead, across my skull, and down my neck.

  While I tried shaking off the blow, Trev reached over, opened the passenger door, and shoved me out. I hit the pavement on my back, still half in the car.

  Trev stomped on the gas, and my legs slipped out. He stopped to slam the door closed and took off again.

  I crawled to my feet and watched the beads of the red taillights disappear around a bend in the road.

  “Shit.”

  Cornfields surrounded me on both sides. Behind me was the road we’d come in on, and more cornfields. In the time we’d been arguing, the factories had disappeared, replaced with absolutely nothing. Except corn.

  How long had we been driving? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

  My head swam, either from the hit, or the booze, I couldn’t tell which. The contents of my stomach sloshed around and then was coming up, eyes burning, bulging. I stumbled to the shoulder of the road, crashed to my knees, and hurled everything I had in me till my stomach muscles ached and my head pounded.

  I lay back in the grass trying to catch my breath, and let the wooziness pass. Now I was well and truly screwed. Why did I have to go and open my big mouth? Trev was the best lead I had, not only on the lab, but on Riley, too.

  Locating the lab would be a big step in finding out what had gone on here and why I’d been sent here in the first place.

  Now Trev was going on his own, leaving me completely out of the loop.

  I started walking in the direction we’d come from, hoping I’d make it home at least before midnight.

  20

  ELIZABETH

  AGGIE AND I ATE DINNER WITHOUT NICK. Of course, he’d said he’d eat in town, but part of me had still hoped. Despite the fact that he’d been out of my life for six years, now that he was back, it felt like he’d never left.

  I’d known him for only a few hours, six years ago, but it’d been enough to leave an imprint so large, I felt like he would forever be a part of me. Like he’d always been a part of me. He’d arrived in my life when I didn’t feel like it was worth much. And he’d showed me that it was.

  Sometimes, when I was with Chloe and Evan and the others at Merv’s, my past seemed like a horror movie I’d watched one night when I was too young to tell the dif
ference between fiction and reality. It seemed too terrible to be true. Chloe’s and Evan’s lives were so normal that when I was with them, I could pretend that mine was, too.

  After Aggie went to bed, I washed the dinner dishes by hand, telling myself it was simply because there were so few, and running the dishwasher seemed like a waste. When really it was because the window over the kitchen sink afforded me a clear view of the carriage house.

  I finished just after nine and still Nick hadn’t returned. I scrubbed down the counters. The table. I swept. I emptied the trash. I returned to the window. I stared at the carriage house until my eyes burned.

  By ten o’clock, I had convinced myself I’d imagined Nick.

  By eleven o’clock, I’d gone to bed, only to get back up and tiptoe to Aggie’s sewing room. I set a chair in front of the window that looked out over the backyard and resumed my post.

  I stared at the carriage house.

  I stared some more.

  The windows were dark. Nothing moved.

  My chest grew heavy with waiting.

  The minutes turned into hours. The hours into agonizing days.

  He would come back.

  Please come back.

  Why did I want him to come back?

  What would I do if he didn’t?

  For the past six years, I’d been trying so hard to make sense of what had happened to me. How it had ended. How Nick fit into it.

  I’d tried telling myself I’d heal from the wounds. The physical ones. The emotional ones. The wounds that didn’t even have a label. But as the years went on, they still felt wide open and festering. I felt like I’d never be right again.

  Nick’s arrival was a stitch in the gash, and a little part of me felt real again.

  He had to come back.

  I pulled my legs up, propping my feet on the edge of the chair, my arms wrapped around my knees. I glanced at the clock hanging above Aggie’s sewing desk, and the hands marked midnight.

  He was never coming back.

  Movement out of the corner of my eye pulled me to the window.

  Nick crossed the pool of light cast by the carriage house’s exterior light, his steps slow and unsteady. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the house.