by Kaleb Nation
His eyebrow perked up hopefully, gaze shifting to look at some screen through which he was able to see me. I didn’t respond.
“It means ‘who is like God?’,” he revealed, showing his perfectly straight, entirely white row of teeth. “It’s a Hebrew name, with a question inside. I bet you didn’t know that though.”
Another scratch of his shoes, another dizzying turn and twist of the camera. He was amusing himself again, like he was already thinking of the punch line of a joke as he told it.
“Are you like a god, Michael?” he asked, lifting his free hand as if in deep question. I still couldn’t reply. He stared through the camera for a few seconds, waiting on me. Then, as if realizing why I wasn’t responding, he straightened up.
“Leilah?” he said. “Please adjust Michael. It slipped my mind that he should be awake for this.”
The woman arose from her seat again and went to my left side, turning the dial. Then she went to one of the metal tables, taking a needle and syringe already filled with liquid. She turned my other arm over, pricking me with sharp end. I didn’t feel the needle sliding in, but whatever was inside the syringe revived me quickly enough to make me feel it going back out.
All of my muscles constricted at once, then suddenly relaxed, and I fell back onto the bed shaking uncontrollably.
“That’s better,” Wyck said through the sound of my painful wince. “I’ll repeat: are you like a god, Michael?”
I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to talk to him, not even utter a single word. I knew that he was playing some sort of mind game, and once I allowed myself to talk he’d use that to keep me going. It was a trick that I’d used on my harsher clients: small talk would lead to deeper things. Tiny victories would win the war. I refused to entertain Wyck.
He detected what I was doing immediately. His eyelids fell halfway and I heard the plastic of the camcorder being squeezed between his hands.
“Are you like a god?” he roared suddenly, voice going so deep that it was like the scream of a death metal singer, making me jump in terror as his teeth nearly slammed with the camera. The speakers threatened to burst under the onslaught of his yell.
“No!” I shouted, immediately cursing that I’d allowed myself to be cracked so easily. Wyck was left out of breath, bloodshot eyes wide with the rage that he’d let loose. Then, realizing he’d lost his cool, he forced his breathing down, spluttering until it was cleared, straightening his hair back into position.
“But you kind of are,” he said, clearing his throat, voice returning to his regular sneer. “Can’t you come back to life when people kill you? You can, right? How interesting.”
As he said this, he started to sway from side to side, turning around so that I could see the rest of the blank wall. Then when his movement exposed just a few more inches, I knew exactly where he was. The wall was from my kitchen back home.
I wish I were wrong. But I saw the dishes we’d used now broken in pieces across the counter, my mom’s herbs dangling in the window, the metal faucet on our sink cracked off from some violent scuffle and dribbling water everywhere. Wyck got the camera secured into his hand, wobbling unsteadily as he wiped his forehead free of perspiration.
“But what about other people, Michael?” he went on, continuing to rock back and forth as if unaware of my horror. “Can you bring other people back to life after they’re dead, too?”
No. You can’t be there. You can’t! I was petrified by the insanity in Wyck’s eyes.
“I don’t think you can do that,” he said. “In fact, I know you can’t.”
Then he tripped over something and threw his hands in front of himself to catch his balance. I heard a shout of pain through the screen, a terrifyingly familiar sound that made my eyes go wider. The camera’s view dipped when Wyck caught himself, and for a flash of a second I saw my mom.
She was curled up on the floor, her face under her arms and her back pressed into the corner of the room next to the wreckage of what had been our dining room table. I screamed as loudly as I could, suddenly a furious beast tearing at the straps again.
“Don’t hurt her!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, my own voice paining my ears and scratching like sandpaper against my throat. Wyck realigned the camera so that I couldn’t see my mom anymore.
“Please!” I screamed. “Don’t hurt her!”
“Now you suddenly seem so eager to speak to me,” Wyck said in observation. “How nice of you. For a minute I thought this conversation would be completely one-sided.”
He looked through the camera and beyond me, tapping the glass of his camcorder lens. “Leilah? I think you can turn on the other screen now. Mother will want to see.”
The nurse walked out from behind me as I gritted my teeth and pulled at my wrists. Inside and out, my body and mind cried. It was like being stuck in a nightmare after taking sleeping pills, begging to be awoken but physically unable to escape. I fell back on to the bed, voice gone. I didn’t want to think of what Wyck was doing, what he’d already done.
Leilah flicked the switch on the other screen and it came to life at once.
On screen were now a woman and a child. I recognized the older instantly: she was the same olive-skinned, black haired woman who’d appeared in my second nightmare with Wyck, the one who’d ordered him to kill me. His mother, Morgan. Just like Wyck, her eyebrows were solid white, and the gaze of green that she stared with showed as little emotion as I’d seen in my dream.
She was sitting in an ornate wooden chair whose back was so tall I couldn’t see its full height. Most of the room behind her was too dark to perceive. In her lap was a child who couldn’t have been older than eleven or twelve, a boy with hair in black curls on his head and eyes that matched hers. His eyebrows were white, and also like her, he had a red ring on his right hand. He looked at me intently.
“Ah, mother,” Wyck said, breathing out quickly, looking excited that she was watching. “I’ve—”
“That’s him?” the younger boy broke in, with a hint of an English accent that his brother lacked. Wyck spluttered to a stop, blinking at the interruption.
“Yes,” Morgan replied. “That’s Daniel Rothfeld.”
“Why is he in bed?” he asked. “Make him stand up for me.”
“We can’t, Teddy,” she replied gently. “He’ll run away.”
“Can you still hear me?” Wyck said, unable to disguise his irritation at being interrupted. The eyes of the other two moved away from me and to his screen in their room. Wyck hesitated under his mother’s gaze, still panting for air through his mouth.
“We can hear you,” she said with coldness. “Go on, Wyck.”
“Yes, yes,” he stammered, trying to bring himself back on track but put off by their disruption. He turned again, looking around for something that he’d left leaning against the corner of the counter: a broomstick. He seized its handle.
“Well, we’ve been through this so many times, I figured a repeated episode would get mighty boring,” he said, swallowing. “You see, we keep chasing you, Michael. We keep running. I don’t like to run! I’m tired of it. I’m ready to end this whole thing.”
He furrowed his brow. He gestured to me.
“It’s like…you’re a disease,” he said, coughs punctuating his words. “We’ve just been treating the symptoms of you for decades. But now it’s time to vaccinate the source.”
My brain had started to clear itself again. I knew that Wyck was talking about the Blade—he probably already knew that I’d gone after it as soon as I had escaped them.
“I don’t have…the Blade,” I told him. I didn’t feel the denial was giving him too much.
“No no no no no,” he broke in, waving his hand furiously. “You don’t have to lie yet. I’m not even asking you yet. We’ll get to that.”
He turned the broom over, exposing its bristles on the other end. Then, with a wild swing, he slammed the end of it down onto the counter. I heard the crack echo in my old kitchen, the long p
ole breaking off with a jagged, spiked edge on its end now.
“Just while you’re watching,” Wyck said, spinning the broken handle back over, “be sure to come up with a good lie. And hold onto it. I’m gonna want to hear it after class.”
“My family doesn’t have anything to do with this!” I burst. Even when he sniffed at my objection there was a lack of care…an inkling of entertainment lapping up my pain like it was nourishment to him. But he paused nonetheless.
“Well,” Wyck said after thinking a moment, “I guess they’re about to have something to do with it.”
He shrugged. “And besides: the color red looks good on a human.”
He looked to the floor.
The camera jerked, a whoosh as the broom handle swung down in Wyck’s fist. I heard the painful scream of my mother amidst the crack of something striking her. It was almost like one of my own bones had broken, so harshly that I couldn’t make a sound.
She yelled for him to stop and he did, turning to look up at the end of the stick. He studied its jagged edge as I watched in wide-eyed, wordless horror.
“Nope, still no blood,” he said with dissatisfaction. So he struck again and I screamed so loud that I couldn’t hear the sound my mother made, struggling to pull myself from the bed even if it meant tearing my own arms out in the process. But my claws refused to emerge.
“Stop! Stop!” I shouted, but Wyck refused to. I shook, feeling my ankles hitting against the straps, like I’d vomit if I had enough strength inside. I heard the whistle of the stick again, the sickening snap, the weak sob.
Morgan sat back comfortably into her chair. How could she simply ignore the sounds, to let it go on? Wasn’t she even going to ask for something, to at least attempt to get the location of the Blade from me? She just watched my reaction. And Teddy slid to sit on one of her legs as she wrapped her arms to hold him up.
“I’ll tell you!” I yelled. “I know where the Blade is!”
My mom’s screams had left all of my defenses broken, so that absolutely nothing else mattered to me at that moment. I heard another shout, and another…
Don’t tell them, Michael!
You can’t tell them!
You can’t ruin everything now, not when you’re so close!
“See, right now,” Wyck said, pausing to catch his breath and wipe his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand, “my goal isn’t to kill you.”
He took a deep breath, readying the broomstick again, lifting it back behind him, gritting his teeth together.
“It’s just to—” He swung the staff forward. “—make… you… feel… dead.”
Every word: another strike, another scream, another crack that drove itself through me. I cried horribly, unable to see, unable to shut out the sounds.
“It’s in Saint Helen’s Cathedral!” I broke out in a moan, unable to fight any longer. The words spilled from my lips, eyes sagging, and arms weak now in the bonds that held me down. Wyck, hearing me, looked up at the camera. He seemed surprised that I’d broken, as if all along he’d been expecting me to resist to the end.
“What city?” he asked. He didn’t even give me a second to get enough breath to reply before he’d kicked my mother on the floor, a crash as she hit the bottom of the dining room table. I jumped in fright.
“In Lodi!” I shouted. Wyck’s eyes shifted to look beyond me.
“Is he telling the truth, mother?” he asked. I realized that Morgan had been staring at me intently, and when Wyck had startled me, she’d been reading a Glimpse in my eyes.
It was too late for me to look away. So my power was Guardian after all.
“He is,” she confirmed.
Teddy clapped with glee, his eyes jumping from one side to the other as he watched Wyck and I with rapture. Seeming satisfied, Wyck finally stopped his beating, sweat now rolling down the sides of his pale face. I couldn’t even hear my mother’s weeping anymore.
“That was…tiring,” he said, unaffected. He lifted the end of the broom handle, and smiled when he saw that it was stained with a splattering of red.
He tossed the broom across the floor and I heard it clattering away. I felt limp, worthless, discarded. I wished I could have passed out anything to block the echoes of my mom’s screams.
Wyck, though, started to pull something off our counter, mixing jars of liquid together while the camera swayed in his uneven grip. He grabbed something out of his pocket: a cigarette lighter. He flicked it and suddenly a tendril of flame flared up from the side of the camera.
“Wait…” I said, lips barely able to move. Wyck didn’t listen.
“I…told you the truth…” I said, blood pounding through my neck. No, Wyck. What are you doing? Don’t… I stared at the screen with tear-filled eyes. He shrugged again.
“This place could use a little brightening up,” he said, and then turning from the camera, he threw the lighter and the jar. The contents sprayed across my kitchen, immediately feeding the tiny flame and flaring up into a burning trail. When the rest of the can hit the ground, there was a massive explosion like a bomb going off, and the lights burst into Wyck’s face.
He readjusted the camera, and in this motion I saw my mother lying unconscious on the floor, in a mess of blood now lit by the growing fire. Unmoving. Trapped.
18
Snowflakes And Fire
The moment that the fire licked its way across the floor and hit my mother’s medicine cabinet, suddenly everything on screen went aglow. Her alcohol-based remedies and mixtures began to pop and feed the flames as Wyck walked slowly through the kitchen door, and I began my screams again.
The absolute silence of Wyck was now even more terrifying than his incessant babbling had been. I yelled to him but he didn’t stop. He’d gotten what he wanted.
“See, Teddy?” Morgan went on. “This is what makes us different from the worthless eaters. It’s called death. It’s most curious. It’s like an end—to everything—for a human.”
She gestured at the screen. “He lived with that human for a very long time. He might even think he is a human like her. I don’t understand it.”
Teddy grinned. He wasn’t watching me anymore, he was watching Wyck’s screen, reveling in the fire as it slid across the carpet in the place I’d once lived in. Morgan, seeing that her son’s interest in me had waned, reached forward and pressed a button, and her screen died.
I was left with only the cracking sounds of the fire, the breathing of Wyck as he moved toward my house’s back door. The smoke began to gather and mask the walls and the pictures that hung there. Surely the fire department would come! Surely they would save my mom and Alli—where was my sister? Had Wyck already shot her and left her dead upstairs?
The fire was too powerful. The police would never arrive in time.
My gaze spotting something off the screen. Beside my bed on one of the tables was my cell phone. I could grab it…I could call the police! I stretched my hand out. My phone was only inches away. I pushed harder, letting the strap pull higher against my arm, cutting off the blood pressure so much that my hand went scarlet. My bonds slid up, tightening on my arm, the chemicals on my other side again starting to take over.
The end of my finger scraped the volume button on my phone. One more inch…
The woman in the white coat turned around from her desk and spotted me. Gently, she reached out and touched my phone, sliding it across the table, too far away from me. I collapsed. She shook her head in scolding.
“You’re a very difficult person to sedate,” she said, voice like the croak of a frog. She took my outstretched hand and slid to place it back beside me on the bed.
But that was close enough. I seized her by her wrist, pulling her toward me with all the rage that I’d pent up behind my tears. My motion took her by surprise and she fell over across me. Her flailing arm hit the I/V from my other elbow, ripping the needle out.
The moment the chemicals stopped, my mind emerged from the muddy water. The woman fell over, b
ut in the second between her falling from my bed and when she would have struck the floor, I exploded in all directions.
There came the sound of four giants tears as the straps and mattress burst into frayed string and material, a crash as the table beside me went flying when the scales on my hand hit it. I erupted from the bed so wildly that my razors cut the plaster of the room’s walls, the back of my other fist landing squarely into the woman’s chest, sending her flying to crash into the television screens.
All in the space of a second, I was free.
The room rang with crashes as the tables went flying, the instruments clattered against the floor, my claws tore at the tiles and the computers until they were sliced into bits of metal and glass on the floor, pounded like dough into each other. My shout was a roar of fury, sparks flying from the television screens as I spun and turned the room into wreckage.
The lights disappeared over my head, likely as a result of my claws tearing them straight from their sockets. I was immediately engulfed in darkness but I didn’t stop, taking to the air, pounding the backs of my hands into the ceiling. Every strike was painless, the scales like armor protecting me as the ceiling buckled. I was so filled with rage that I was nearly blinded until I’d carved a hole in the roof: tiny at first, then growing with each punch, until daylight streamed through, and all the processed air was replaced by the scent of outside.
I gave the ceiling one final slam, the floor rocking beneath my feet and the room swaying on unstable supports. Grabbing my cell phone from the floor, I launched into the air, sliding through the hole that I’d created, blinking as I found myself escaping into another world.
I had erupted from a trailer that was hitched to the back of a large truck. It came as a shock—the fresh air, the sunlight, and the clouds in the sky. The room of horrors had been a small square box that nobody would ever pay attention to, parked behind a grocery store. I could see people driving around the corner, pulling in to parking spaces, picking up food for their families, while I had just emerged from a prison they didn’t even know existed.