by Trisha Leigh
Even though caution tries to stop me, to remind me we’re not invisible anymore because Ko is dead and Cadi probably is, too, the bed beckons. Without changing out of my jeans and sweatshirt, I slide under the comforter next to Leah. After a minute, Pax crosses to the cleansing room and shuts the door.
Leah rolls over so we’re facing each other and smiles. “He’s nice.”
“Pax? Sure.” I pick at balls of lint on the pillowcase, unfamiliar with this kind of conversation and nervous about screwing it up for some reason.
“I mean…he doesn’t act like I’m stupid or anything just because I’m not like you guys.” There’s something new and odd in her gray eyes, the way they’re soft instead of sharp, and all of the sudden it dawns on me—she likes Pax.
Something like jealousy swells inside me, even though I have no right to feel any such thing. After a moment it settles into something more akin to protectiveness, perhaps like what Griffin feels for Greer. “You’re not stupid, Leah. Pax will expect you to pull your weight, now that you’re in.”
The door to the cleansing room swings open and Leah and I fall silent. My eyes close to the sounds of Pax getting settled in the window seat, and by the time he whispers good night, I barely hear him.
CHAPTER 11.
The next morning Leah lets us use the shower, making me glad we took her up on the offer to stay. The smallest amount of guilt tries to ruin the moment, reminding me that we don’t know where Lucas is or what he’s going through, but I squash it. Lucas made the decision to leave, and he can make the decision to come back to us. Until then, I have to do everything in my power to move our quest forward without him.
And I’m not turning down a hot shower when it’s staring me in the face.
Pax goes after me, and while he’s in there Leah offers to loan me some fresh clothes. She’s at least four inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter, but the thought of clean clothes is too intriguing to dismiss without trying, so I wander into her closet to poke around.
I pull a thick purple sweater over my head, then snort when the sleeves land well short of my wrists. It’s stuck around my ears when Pax’s muffled voice comes from the bedroom.
“It’s not like the books at Cell. It’s like…the person who wrote it made up the people and what happened to them. You can keep it if you want.”
“I can? What’s it about?”
“It’s about a man who drinks people’s blood and a man and a woman who are trying to stop him. It might scare you.”
He’s describing Dracula, the book I had no interest in. And doing a horrible job, from what I can tell. I hadn’t realized he’d brought it with him.
“Does it scare you?” Leah challenges.
“Not really. It’s made up.”
“Then why should it scare me?”
I’m trying not to giggle, running my fingers over more of Leah’s miniscule clothes—which would come closer to fitting the waist-high half-breed who came to get Lucas than they will me—when a third voice lands in my stomach like a mass of writhing snakes.
“Leah, honey— What? Who is this?” The voice falters, confused.
It’s a sound I’ve heard before, one that rushes like a howling wind between my ears, and I step out of the closet. A woman, taller than Leah but with the same mass of black spiral curls, still has her hand on the doorknob. Her dark eyes are glued to Pax, her mouth opening and closing but no sound emerging. When her eyes start to flick madly around the room, between her daughter, Pax, and me, I know what’s coming next.
“Pax, she’s going to Break. It’s happening now. Her veil’s coming loose.”
“I…I have to go downstairs, notify the Wardens. You shouldn’t be here. I have to report you all.” She sounds unsure of whether or not she wants to bring the Wardens’ attention to her daughter, as though somewhere in the rational part of her brain she realizes they’ll take her away. “I have to,” she whispers again, staring forlornly at Leah while backing up to leave.
Leah gets hold of herself, dropping Dracula onto the bed and crossing the room. She presses her mother’s free hand between hers. “Mom. Mom, it’s okay. These are just my friends, they came over for free hour.”
“That’s not going to work, Leah. People see us now.” I move to her side, pry her mother’s other hand off the doorknob, and force her to look at me. I haven’t put a veil back up since the fat Healer last autumn, and that working was pure luck.
I don’t know if it’s going to work. I didn’t take the veil down, and I can’t make her unsee us. But we can’t let her report Leah. We need her, but more than that, we’re responsible for her being in danger in the first place. “Pax, come here.”
He joins me without asking why. I grab his hand. “I’m taking some of your power. I’m going to try to fix her—maybe we have a better shot with two of us.”
Pax nods and a moment later, the ripe scent of apples and spicy cinnamon, fills my nose. I see Leah’s head whip around in surprise at the thickening smells, her gray eyes wide and scared. I ignore them both and stare into Mrs. Olsen’s rolling eyes.
It’s okay. We’re not here; you never saw us. Leah’s alone, so there’s nothing to report. Just a normal Saturday morning. Close your eyes.
To my great surprise, she follows my instruction.
You’ve just come into Leah’s room to get her for breakfast.
Her eyes stay closed and I pull Leah into a quick hug and mouth, I’m sorry. She shakes her head once, tears filling her eyes, and jerks her chin toward the door. I turn Mrs. Olsen loose and grab Pax by the hand, tugging him into the hall. At the last minute, when we’re out of her sight, I pull a bit more power from Pax and think, Open your eyes.
Pax and I race down the stairs as quietly as possible. The sound of the shower rustles from the master bedroom, so we let ourselves out the back door and make our way to the park to wait for Griffin.
I don’t realize I’m crying until we stop—and I see that Pax is, too.
***
Griffin takes a long look at our twisted faces when he arrives in the park but says nothing. Instead, he simply makes us a portal in the shimmering morning air, and by the time we step through it, he’s disappeared.
The inside of the cabin brings on a bout of cloying claustrophobia, and not even Wolf’s kisses can make it better. Pax’s frustration with what happened in Danbury bursts out in a fit of rage that resulted in a broken window. One minute he is standing in the middle of the living room, the next he picks up a heavy candlestick from the end table and hurls it through the window.
Now he squats down, picking up the pieces of glass after he’s covered the opening with a blanket. It reminds me of the ranger’s station we sheltered in not so long ago. The slump of his shoulders makes him look like I feel—awful and buried under guilt.
Leah could be in trouble right now. They could be taking her away, or her mother could be permanently damaged by my blundering attempt to reinstate the Others’ control in her mind. It’s one of the reasons Lucas and I hesitated last autumn to involve the humans; a lot of the time we hurt them, and after Portland last winter it is clearer than ever that we don’t have a clue what we’re doing when it comes to veils.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell Pax that I know exactly how far we are from Deshi, and that we need to get there as soon as Lucas returns, but then I realize I can’t. If he knows about my trip into the tunnels alone, he’ll be angry. Honestly, thinking about the confrontation wears me out.
Instead I don’t say anything as he finishes cleaning and takes the shards of glass into the kitchen. I fold up the maps and tidy the table, then crawl onto the couch with the Holy Bible book, but the words are confusing and there are too many of them. When Pax ambles back into the living room and grabs his jacket off the rack, I look up with interest.
“Here, Wolf. C’mon, buddy, want to go for a walk?”
Wolf’s ears perk up at the invitation and he trots to Pax’s side. Pax finds my gaze, his eyes a li
ttle hesitant. I wonder if he wants to be alone.
“Want to come?” A strangled note in his voice convinces me the invitation surprises him as much as it does me.
“Sure.” I shoot to my feet and stride toward the bedroom. “Wait a minute for me to change clothes?”
He nods, his face closed off from expression.
Anything sounds better than climbing the walls inside all day. Over the winter, when Pax and I had a destination, if not a plan, I enjoyed the time to read the books we found along the way, then reread them searching for clues about this planet, about the human side of our past. Now, the inaction and Cadi’s words—time is running out—throb inside me like an extra heartbeat.
The time for reflection is through, and now we need to act. We need to find Deshi, figure out who’s on our side and how they can help us, and then the four of us need to save this planet.
The question of whether or not Lucas will still be on our side if he returns, or if he even was when he left, scrapes the back of my mind. There seems to be a very real chance that he’ll decide he wants to stand with the Others. Or maybe he won’t come back at all.
If that happens, according to Cadi, we might as well give up.
Ignoring the thought as best as I can, I yank on a pair of jeans, slip a thick hooded sweatshirt over my head, and pull my hair into a ponytail. Lucas can make his own decision, true enough, but I’m not letting the Others have him without a fight. The memory of his face as he held mine in the kitchen, promising that he wasn’t giving up on us, flashes behind my eyes. If he still has feelings for me, he can’t be planning on leaving Pax and me alone.
Unless he thinks he can convince me to change my mind about the Others.
The chain reaction that thought sets off occupies my mind for the first thirty minutes of our early morning stroll. Wolf brings back a fox, and Pax and I absently work together to nab a few squirrels. With the ingredients in the cabin’s pantry, we might be able to make a stew. Not as tasty as one Mrs. Morgan would have made, but it’ll do. I wonder if Fire used to cook me dinner…it’s hard to picture her in front of a stove.
Then again, she probably wouldn’t need one.
The thought of my mother turns my mind that direction, and how all of her actions since last autumn still baffle me. She’s been a source of encouragement, has seen me through some of the most stressful moments I can remember—maybe saved my life with her calming influence a time or three. But she also betrayed me to the Prime’s son, whether she intended to or not.
Then Flacara worked with Air and Water to help us escape.
It’s too confusing. Again, I wish I could fit her into a neat box of good or bad, place her on the right shelf. That would make the coming decisions easier, although I think even if I knew 100 percent that she loved me and was on my side, I wouldn’t choose the life she’s led. Hopping from planet to planet, killing everyone and everything in the way, doesn’t appeal to me, whether it means I could be with Lucas or not.
“What are you thinking about? Winter?” The hesitance in the question makes it sound as though he both does and doesn’t want to know the answer.
“A little. But not the way you’re thinking.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
I quirk a weak smile at him and he returns it with something just as halfhearted. What happened this morning with Leah and her mother tugs on my faith that we’re doing the right thing, that we’re moving in the right direction when we’re stuck not moving at all. “True. But I was thinking about what we’ll do if Lucas decides to stay with the Others, or if Deshi is too hurt to be able to help us. Will we just give up? Or beg the Prime to take us with him?”
Pax stops in a meadow, tossing a stick for Wolf. “You have a tendency to worry about things we can’t control, Summer. Right now, there are two things I know. First, Winter’s coming back. He’s just all sappy and mixed up right now because his daddy has been filling his brain with all kind of loony fantasies about how great life would be if the Others took us away with them. But he’s going to realize soon enough that’s a bunch of baloney, because our own parents are prisoners. Why would they treat us any better, especially when we know they think we never should have been born?”
He waits, as though expecting a reaction. It makes a lot of sense, what he’s saying, and Lucas analyzes before deciding what he thinks about any subject. It’s possible he is confused, like Pax says, and right now his emotions are getting the better of him.
It’s funny that the aspect of life we can give back to the humans is the very thing causing the three of us so much trouble at the moment. Finally I nod, tossing what’s left of the stick when Wolf drops it at my feet, panting. “Okay. I’ll go along with most of that. What’s the second thing you know?”
“I know Deshi—he’s as tough as we are. And the Others aren’t going to do any permanent damage to him, not while they don’t know if their precious Elements are going to provide a second set of heirs, right? We’re going to find him. He might be messed up, but we can fix him.” He reaches out, wrapping his hands around mine, rough like they were two nights ago. “I don’t know what will happen after that, or if the fact that we can unveil the humans is enough to make a difference, but we’ll get close enough to find out.”
He drops my hands and continues to play with Wolf. A power starts in my toes and crawls upward, the certainty that even though we can’t control everything, the pieces we can control may be enough to give us an advantage. If Lucas is confused, we’ll straighten him out. If Deshi is hurt, we’ll help him heal. Those are the parts of this equation Pax presented, and with his confidence wrapping around me in this meadow, I feel stronger, more sure that we’ll get at least that far. It heats my heart in a different way this time. Instead of Pax’s mere presence igniting a fireball of what can only be desire in me that grows and grows, his unwavering faith in me crawls through my blood, infusing it with strength and leaving warm affection in its wake.
Wolf barks and bounds into the trees, and I hear him whining a moment later. Immediate worry dampens my previous surge in confidence. When he doesn’t come back in response to Pax’s whistle, my hands grow cold. I move toward the tree line where he disappeared, barely able to feel my dead-filled limbs as they slide across the grass. Pax’s steps are firm but somehow hesitant beside mine, as though he’s not balking about moving across the meadow but is wary of what we’re going to find beyond our line of sight.
What we find is a graveyard.
The Others did away with burying people in cemeteries upon their arrival on Earth—our dead are burned on funeral pyres. We’ve only been advised of the existence of such idea such as burial so the Others can inform us of all the ways their handling of death are better. I’ve certainly never glimpsed a graveyard, but the neatly spaced rows filled with cement markers are exactly as the Monitors taught us.
My amazement at the sight evaporates when I spot Greer sitting on top of a particularly worn-down headstone, scratching my dog between the ears and cooing. At the sound of our footsteps she looks up, a gorgeous smile lighting her face.
It doesn’t look quite right below the black bruise blooming across her cheek.
CHAPTER 12.
“What happened?” I race to her side, biting my lip and resisting the urge to reach out and touch her as easily as she’s always touched me.
This sensation of female friendship still largely escapes me as far as appropriate behavior, but it doesn’t stop my heart from climbing into my throat at the sight of her marred face.
Greer brushes her fingertips against her cheek and winces. “Oh, this? It’s nothing.”
“Who did that to you?” Pax asks in a low growl, as menacing as anything that’s ever passed Wolf’s lips.
She waves a hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have the morning to spend with you two lovelies.”
A chill descends from Pax like I’ve never felt, pumping waves of apples and cinnamon into the a
ir, and he takes a step in front of her, peering up directly into Greer’s face as she stays still on top of the headstone. “Was it that Warden? Natej?”
“Good boy, Hard Place. So willing to fight for a girl’s honor.” She gives him a sad smile and reaches out, patting the top of his head. “But no. You might find it hard to believe, but Nat has a gentle soul.”
I don’t know what a soul is, but the word gentle doesn’t apply to the knowledge of Wardens rattling around my head. Still, I don’t think that Greer would lie, and I also don’t think she would love someone who physically hurt her.
She drops her hand from Pax’s hair, then hops to the ground and falls into a crouch in front of the faded stone, running her fingers through the grooves that once must have proclaimed the deceased’s name. It looks like one of the years begins with a one and an eight, but that can’t be right. “Her name was Jane. They called her Calamity Jane. Quite a character.”
“How do you know that?”
“I told you—Griffin and I spent time in these hills as children, and what’s more fascinating to children than dead people?” When we don’t answer, she continues. “Jane was famous for a number of things, mainly being a pretty badass woman who did things women didn’t normally do. She’s buried here because of him, though.”
Greer jerks her head to the right, and I follow her direction.
“Who? That grave inside the fence?” A dilapidated wrought-iron fence has mostly collapsed around what I would guess is an important person’s grave.
“Yes. Wild Bill Hickok.” She snorts. “Wild Bill. She loved him, but according to legend, he didn’t feel the same and they buried her here as a joke on him. A joke.” An ugly smile twists her lips. “I’ve always hated that story.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Greer?” Her rambling makes me nervous, and the edge that’s chased the wistful hope from her eyes spears irrational fear through me.