Suddenly, it’s like I’m right there and the weight of the massive ball is on me, on my very shoulders, crushing me down. It slows, but barely enough. My knees bend. It’s falling, gravity doing its job, like a reliable worker that never relents, never takes a vacation, never fails.
I scream with the effort, with the ache in my tendons and the electricity that seems to course through my veins. Rheema’s below me, eyes shut, tight-faced, ready for death. My back bends and I feel I’ve been at this for hours, but know it’s only been an instant, a life-saving or life-ending nanosecond.
And I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
I’m breaking under the weight. I’m crumbling.
Suddenly, there’s a whoosh and blur of movement, and I break into an infinity of shards. Bits of me slide through the floor like snowflakes caught in a strong wind, tumbling end over end and leaving a beautiful trail of dancing light and whimsy glamour. I’m all over the floor, wasted, destroyed.
Then I’m not, and I jolt back, a thousand rubber bands snapping me into place. The tension is gone. I’m whole again, not broken, but still a failure.
“Rheema.” Her name a word that, at first, spells regret, and then it doesn’t. “Rheema!”
To my shock and relief, she’s not under the shattered disco ball. She’s standing away from it, safe in James’s arms, shaking her head, disbelieving her luck and still-beating heart, then believing again. James lets her go and gives me an acknowledging nod.
I did it. I gave James enough time to pull her from under the wrecking ball. A fleeting smile touches my lips, but then it’s gone, driven into a hard, cold line by a chill racking its finger down my back.
I turn, almost in slow motion, almost wishing this second would split into two again and again, so I could keep turning forever, until the end of the world.
Xave is standing there, staring at me with wide, hazel eyes that betray so, so much. Even in the poor light of the club, I see it all, see the surprise, the doubt, the hurt. I see James’s and my secret facing the light, coming out into the open where no explanation will suffice, where the truth will mean the end of IgNiTe’s subtle balance.
But then, just as the secret shatters, so it rebuilds and hides again, retreating back into the dark, drowned by the emptiness that replaces all emotion in Xave’s eyes. I reel at the abruptness of his vacant, lost expression. He looks exactly the way I thought he would before I turned with that chill on my back.
I blink, follow his drooping gaze to his chest and lose my mind, my heart, my soul.
There’s a stain blooming on his abdomen, a wet circle that seeps and leaks what little strength was left in him.
Xave falls to his knees, a hand pressed to his middle.
“No!” I catch him before he hits the floor and lay him gently on his back. “Xave, Xave, Xave,” I call his name as if he wasn’t here in my arms.
My fingers fumble with his shirt. I tear it open. Buttons fly and fall to the floor, making small tip-tap sounds. His torso is dark, dark red. His shoulder torn. His middle seeping and spurting blood like an oil spill.
He’s been shot. I turned for a moment, left him for just a moment, and a bullet found him—a bullet did this.
I press a hand to the wound. Blood sneaks between my fingers. I press harder.
“Xave!”
I search his gaze, but his eyes are closed.
“XAVE!”
His eyes spring open, swivel from side to side, trying to find me.
“I’m here. I’m here. Please hold on, hold on.”
He takes a labored breath. His eyelids begin to close.
“Open your eyes.”
They close. All the way.
“Open your eyes. Please, baby.”
They open. He looks at me and smiles.
His lips move. “I …”
“Don’t talk. Save your energy.” I look behind me, waiting for someone to come help, for James to scoop Xave up and save him, just the way he saved Rheema. James is fast and strong. He can take Xave out of here, take him to …
“… never told you,” Xave says in a wet voice.
“No, no.” I shake my head, swat tears away with a bloodied hand. This isn’t happening.
No. No. Please.
Red rubber boots.
Cinnamon breath.
Untold love.
Xave coughs, then pushes the words he desperately wants to say out of his too-pale lips, “I love you.” For a moment, his hazel eyes fill with tenderness and something I’ve never seen in his gaze before, not in the twelve years I’ve known him. And my heart swells at this new emotion and at the intensity that, even in his weakness, he’s been able to conjure with three simple words.
A reply burns on my lips, and I bite it back. I squeeze my mouth tightly because the thought of saying “I love you” under these circumstances feels final, feels like the end to something that has barely even begun. I bite the words back because I can’t accept this terminal notion that has entered my mind, because I refuse to believe that life will do this to me.
These can’t be the terms under which we tell each other “I love you” for the first time. They can’t be. I won’t accept it.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I say, trying to smile. “You don’t need to go all gooey because you hurt a little. You’re going to be fine. You promised.”
His eye narrow, and it’s the best he can do to show me he’s actually amused. Then he blinks and his gaze drowns in sadness; a sadness deep and total that tells me he knows, irrefutably, that he won’t be able to keep his promise.
It is then that the pretense, the denial that is holding me back, vanishes and it’s replaced by soul-crushing sorrow. My bones turn to powder. My heart flattens, squeezing all the blood out and denying it further entrance. The useless muscle in the center of my chest refuses to work and my lungs fight for oxygen, pumping and pumping.
“No no no.” I grab Xave by his shirt collar. “Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave. Don’t don’t don’t.”
He fights to stay and make good on his promise. His eyelids blink open in slow motion, but a dark force shuts them back down.
“No, Xave. Stay with me. I need you. I need you forever and ever and ever. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll wear a dress and go out on a girly date with you.” I press my forehead to the very center of his chest, then raise it right back. There’s a flicker of light in his beautiful eyes, but it’s faint, so very faint.
Then I know. I feel it with damnable certainty. I realize that this is his last moment, the last glance over his shoulder before one last step into the unavoidable beyond.
And whether or not he’ll remember this moment once he walks across the line, I owe him better than this. So I take a deep breath and hold it until my lungs ache and burn and incinerate my rage.
I close my eyes and imagine his crooked smile and the happy-green hue of his eyes. Tears spill down my cheeks and, from the wasteland of my fury, my heart fills with tenderness for him, for my first and truest love. For Xave.
And with that, I open my eyes and look at him, hoping to give him something worth remembering wherever he’s going.
“I love you, Xave,” I say with conviction. “I love you,” I repeat, then I kiss him goodbye.
Chapter 12
When someone pulls me away from Xave’s still body, I’m done being strong.
All the reasons are gone and, in their place, I see only ghostly shapes of the things that used to matter; the things that made fighting worth it.
“Marci,” someone says. Hands slide under my arms and separate me from Xave.
Aydan. Horrible, despicable Aydan who makes my head buzz like one of the monsters.
No. I don’t want to move. I want to stay with my head on his chest, because at any second his voice will rumble, his heart will beat. I have to stay, stay, stay. Every part of me fights to remain, except my body, my defeated limbs. I try, but barely manage to lift a hand.
“No, Xave.” James kneels
next to him, index and middle fingers against his neck, desperately looking for a pulse. “Damn it.” There’s a growl deep in his chest.
Blare stands behind him, eyes dark and in a trancelike stare that anchors her to Xave’s slackened features.
I was supposed to save him if he needed it, and I failed him. My head falls to the side, slumps against Aydan’s chest.
Steps. Someone running.
“C’mon, c’mon, let’s get outta here.” Rheema runs past, too pumped on adrenaline to notice anything except the two guns she’s using to fire backward, over her shoulder, and forward, opening a path toward the exit.
James curses, gets to his feet. “Go! I’ll cover. GO!”
The command is fierce and snaps Aydan and Blare into action.
“Marci, we have to go,” Aydan says.
My eyes lift to his with disinterest. There’s something like shame on his face. He knows what he’s asking for is cruel beyond measure. I can’t leave. I have to stay with Xave. He can’t stay here all alone, growing cold, no one to guard him from the trampling beasts in this godforsaken place.
“Help yourself!” Blare urges me, not unkindly.
“Please, Marci. Get up. Help me,” Aydan says.
His arms struggle with mine and, limp as they are, I’m impossible to wrangle. My dead weight is more than he can handle. I don’t even need to fight him.
Shots. I think it must be James, trying to buy time, prolonging the inevitable. He thinks we can defeat this evil, but we stand no chance. We are outnumbered and weak. Eklyptors have sneaked up on us, have corroded our world right under our noses and we’re no match for them. Not even close. Humanity holds no aces up its sleeve. Just like others didn’t stand a chance against us and met oblivion at our hands. The irony will be sweet and Mother Nature, the gods, and whoever else, will laugh and laugh, and we will deserve it.
“Damn it,” a curse from Blare as she helps Aydan sling me over his shoulder.
The world is upside down as I dangle at Aydan’s back, unsure of how I got there. And for a moment, it doesn’t matter, until Aydan begins to walk and we move away from Xave.
“Put me down,” I order.
Whether or not he hears me above the shots and animalistic growls that break behind us, Aydan tightens his grip on my legs and begins to run. My head bounces up and down. I make my hands into fists and beat on the back of his black jeans, wriggling and hating him more than I’ve ever hated anyone. I had thought him weak, but he doesn’t relent, barely even wavers. Shimmering bits of glass twinkle from the floor. The smell of spilled alcohol drills a path into my sinuses.
“Don’t! Let me go, you bastard. I have to stay with him. Don’t you see?” My throat strains with the shouts, feeling as though it might tear open and bleed all over Aydan.
A cool breeze hits my wet face as we step outside.
“He’s alone. He needs me.” Tears run out the corners of my eyes, onto my forehead and into my hair; then I confess the truth, the knowledge that is tearing me apart molecule by molecule, atom by atom. “Please, I—I need him.”
My voice dies, drowned in a fit of coughs brought on by my exploding words and the sheer force of my anguish. With my voice so leaves my will to fight him. I fall limp again and just dangle, useless and beaten, wrung empty by sorrow and something else that grows and grows at a prodigious rate.
Guilt.
Guilt because I turned away from Xave, because some unknown force in me chose to turn away and save Rheema. Guilt because if I wasn’t the freak I am, I would have never abandoned him to perform mind tricks; I would have taken him to safety, to … to his brother who’s suddenly here, helping Aydan push me into the back of a van.
“Shit. What the hell is she doing here?” Clark asks, hoisting me onto a seat. “Where are you hurt? Fuck, so much blood.” His eyes, so much like his brother’s, sweep the length of my body. He wipes my face, and he doesn’t know. Oh God, he doesn’t know the blood isn’t mine.
Blare and Aydan pile into the van, too.
“Where are James and Xave?” Oso asks from the driver’s seat. His kind, brown eyes peer into the van’s dark rear.
Blare exchanges a quick glance with Aydan. Clark doesn’t miss it.
“They’re coming, right?” He looks outside through the open sliding door, his body leaning forward as if he’s about to take off running into the club. No one answers. He steps out of the van and onto the sidewalk. “They’re coming, right?!” he asks again, this time in an angry shout.
The hum of electric streetlamps and traffic fill the silence. Clark’s chest pumps and pumps. I absently stare at the back of his neck, foreseeing his pain and the huge crack that will tear him in two never to be put back together again.
Suddenly, he whirls. “Is somebody going to fucking answer?” he screams, then shudders with the force of a fear that twists his face into a terrible grimace. He looks from Blare to Aydan to me. “Marci?!”
I jump at the thundering sound of my name. His eyes search my face then lock with mine, looking for the answer my lips won’t give him. But there’s nothing in my gaze. Nothing. I know because I feel it. A great emptiness, a void, a depthless expanse like a black hole.
Clark shakes his head, understanding inching its way into the beginning fissures of the crack that will be his undoing. Except, he doesn’t let it grow and tapes it over with denial. “No!”
A determined expression shapes his face and he begins to turn. He’s going inside because that would be a lesser madness than standing here, splitting in two.
“Don’t!” Aydan exclaims, understanding Clark’s intention all-to-well.
But Clark never gets to turn all the way toward the nightclub, because the madness comes to him instead, breezing into the van in James’s arms, then landing on the floorboards in the shape of his brother’s lifeless body.
“Go, go, go!” James’s voice, hoarse and desperate.
A volley of shots rings in the night. The engine revs as Oso steps on the gas. One of the mandrill-like creatures bursts out of the nightclub into the street and bounds toward the van like some sort of projectile. James snatches Clark by the collar, pulls him inside and slides the cargo door shut. There’s a deafening thud followed by an inhuman shriek. The van rocks slightly with the impact. Outside, tires screech against the blacktop while, in here, Clark begs his little brother to please wake up, but Xave will not talk to us again. He’s still and I try to pretend he’s asleep, but it doesn’t work. His handsome face holds a pained expression that makes it impossible. I long to see his expressive hazel eyes, but they are forever empty now. I want to clean the blood that stains his fingers, but what good will it do?
In my peripheral vision, the shapes that make up my world run downward like wax, like rain, like so much blood.
Shadows.
Then I realize that outside has become far worse than inside has ever been.
So I shut my eyes and let them take me.
Chapter 13
I wake up in a familiar room with white walls, white ceiling, white lights, white sheets … white everywhere, still I feel the darkness, right behind my eyes, beckoning, calling me back. I wonder why I’m still here. Why surrender isn’t working.
I’m alone, curled on my side on a stiff, hospital-style bed. I’ve been here before when I first found out Symbiots have accelerated healing powers.
The Tank. I’m back. Go figure. Yippee.
There’s a tube connected to a needle in my arm. I yank it out and let it fall to the floor. Dark blood beads in the crook of my elbow and I watch it, absently, until images from a living nightmare spring into my mind. I shut my eyes and curl up even tighter, ready to try again.
C’mon. Take me away. I dare you.
“Been waiting for that sedative to wear off,” a voice says behind me.
My eyes spring open. I roll over slowly, almost without meaning to.
James is sitting by my bedside, the too-white, fluorescent lights reflecting on his shaved he
ad, hurting my eyes. I squint. He wears clean clothes: jeans and a black t-shirt with the “IgNiTe and FiGhT” logo on the breast pocket.
“Sedative,” I repeat without enough breath to even make it a question.
“Something Kristen formulated to help Symbiots in times of … duress. It keeps the mind clear, so the agent can’t take advantage of the situation.”
So that’s why I’m still here.
“Bummer,” I say.
James frowns and pushes to the edge of his chair. “You can’t be thinking about …” He starts but can’t finish. He takes a moment to consider. “Marci, there’s still much to fight for.” His tone is tired, but there’s great conviction in his stormy, gray eyes. He truly believes this.
“Maybe for you. Though I doubt it. I think you’re just lying to yourself. It’s a hopeless battle. We’ve lost. Too little, too late. They’re everywhere. My head won’t stop buzzing, no matter where the hell I go. So let me be or give me some more of that sedative.”
“We can’t give up. There’s always hope. Kristen is working day and night to find a vaccine and maybe a cure.”
Maybe a cure, an idea that used to give me the hope he talks about, except that was …
Before.
My cynicism is such that it even gives me the will to laugh, even if in a dry, throaty way. “We’ve already failed.”
“We’ll only fail if we stop fighting,” James counters.
“Bullshit! We fail even when we fight. The way I failed him, because this thing in my head took over when he needed me most.”
I suddenly realize that I’m sitting up in bed, face hot, throat torn open, eyes melting into tears I didn’t invite. James is telling me to calm down, to breathe, to get a grip before I end up shadowed, imprisoned in my own brain without the use of my body and any of my senses.
Ha. Bring it on. I deserve it. My life is pointless as it is.
Eclipse the Flame Page 7