by S. M. Beiko
He scoffed, kneading his hand into his forehead. “But I can still feel them!” Then he looked at me, and I bit the inside of my mouth. “What about your uncle? He’s the one that did it. Can’t you get anywhere with him?”
“I’ve already told you,” I groaned, “he’s never around, at least not when I’m there. And the last time I confronted him, he did something that made my spirit eye go all crazy, some kind of protection. And what would my aunt say if we started beating on each other? The cops would get involved and then we’d all be screwed.” I took a breath, feeling suddenly guilty as I noticed how much redder Barton’s face had become in the wake of my excuses. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
“Well, what about me?” He switched tacks. “What if I talked to him?”
Phae and I exchanged glances, which I’m sure didn’t do much to take Barton off the offensive. She stepped forward before I could open my mouth. “We need to focus on getting the Families together on this whole thing. We can’t risk more conflict right now.” I could see that Phae’s pragmatism wasn’t holding up against Barton’s dissatisfaction, even though she was right.
The bell went off and Barton snapped his brakes up, eyes cutting us both. “Yeah, well, it’s easy for you two. I’m supposed to be a part of this, too, you know, and I’m still on the sidelines. Maybe it’s time you thought about finding someone else.”
Phae reached for him uselessly, trying to offer comfort. “Hey, we know that your dreams mean that something interrupted in the ritual, that it wasn’t fully complete. There’s still a chance it can be reversed. We just need a better plan than ambushing someone who could do a lot of damage to us.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waved her off.
He turned to wheel away, but Phae held her hand up. “Wait a second.” She turned to me suddenly. “Did you find the book?”
“Oh, yeah.” I jerked my bag off my back and dug out a small heavy journal. “Cecelia apparently got it from a Rabbit a while back, as a gift. She said it’s a primer on rituals and all kinds of stuff from the perspective of the Five Families. Hope there’s something useful in here.”
“Well, if there is, Barton will find it.” She passed the tome to him. He looked slightly perplexed as he flipped through the pages of cramped writing and faded diagrams.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” He quirked an eyebrow, but he seemed brighter than he had been a moment earlier.
“From now on, you’re the intel,” Phae said. “We need all the information we can gather on the Families, anything we can find that will help us get rid of that river snake.”
He was already caught up in reading. Pushing his glasses back on his nose, he looked up at Phae with the same gratitude I’d seen on his face the day she brought him back from the dead. “The intel, huh?”
She nodded. “The more we know, the better prepared we’ll be.”
“Okay, okay.” Barton flapped his hand again, but this time it wasn’t dismissive; there was a bit of a smile on his face. “I’m on it.” He tucked the book into his bag, nodded, and wheeled off.
We let out a breath simultaneously. Phae and I had felt equally frustrated in our inability to help Barton, but at least this would allow him to contribute.
“Nice going, homie.” I patted Phae on the back. “That’ll keep him busy. And knowledge is power.” She’d done Barton a solid, of course, but she still looked defeated.
“I really hope there’s another way to reverse the severing that doesn’t involve your uncle.” We turned together and made for the chem lab. “And even still, if we can reconnect Barton with Ancient, it isn’t going to give him back his legs.”
I patted her on the back again, feeling just as useless as ever. “I know. We’ll figure it out. It’s just been a tense couple of weeks.”
Well, that was an understatement by half. Things had gone downhill since Phae and Barton had been dragged into the hazards of being Denizens (and associating with the one that everyone wanted dead). Once Barton’s parents finally let him in on the secret world they’d kept him from, he didn’t come to school for days. He didn’t answer texts, either, and Phae and I worried that he’d never come out of it. I didn’t blame him for being so mad; they’d laid a bombshell right on him just after he recovered from demon possession — a situation that rivalled his nightmares.
And here’s the kicker: I had tapped him to join us, to take part in this weird epic we were all tangled in, but until we could figure out a way to bring him back into the Ancient fold, he would always be on the outside looking in, and we’d still be one step away from bringing the Families together. Even the local Rabbit elders, who had been visiting the Allens since they tried reconnecting with the Family, had nothing to offer except looks of pity. The one thing Barton hated most, and the last thing he needed. He finally came around, though, determined to make a difference in any way possible.
In the past week, we hadn’t made much of a difference at all, and we all silently shied away from that fact. All we could do now was try to work with what we had in front of us, though Barton’s power-revival side quest was dividing our personal time. We needed to learn how to control these powers, and soon. It was almost February. The impending spring was haunting our steps.
Meanwhile, Arnas kept a cold eye on me from time to time, but he had basically checked out of reality. I started sleeping with my dresser pushed against my door, just in case. He’d gone off his hinges now that he was aligned with the Owls, and I’m sure trying to run me over was just the beginning.
Poor Deedee had been rocked by what was going on, too, completely in the dark as she was about all the Ancient shenanigans going on around her. But she was still trying to hold things together. I tried talking to her about Arnas, tried reassuring her, but she had built an impenetrable suit of emotional body armour to keep her heart in one piece.
So she just smiled and pulled a Roan — “I’m fine. Don’t worry,” she’d mutter, and off she’d scurry, burying herself in her work. And this worked in our favour, because we could effectively stay out of each other’s way, and that was key to what Sil and I had been up to.
Sil still hadn’t let me in on what had caused her sudden illness, a basic power-outage in her being, and Phae had been unable to heal her. But as the days passed and she recuperated at home, her familiar vitality and bullying persona had returned in full force, and she had plunged me back into the summoning chamber and all it entailed. Pull it from the Veil, concentrate, focus, what are you doing? Use the fire, become the fire, earn your power. Rinse. Repeat. Wax on, wax off. I was still sustaining injuries, unable to keep myself as grounded as she wanted me to be, the power I’d let consume me at Omand’s Creek now out of my reach. Sil had said I didn’t want that kind of power. But I did. It’s all I thought about. And I wondered how long I could go on ignoring it as I took beating after beating, unable to defend myself against ghosts.
We reached the chem lab and started setting up our station. Phae had gone off to collect materials for the experiment that was written on the whiteboard, and I was in charge of paperwork. It was surreal to be going to school when you had an enormous threat looming just after the three p.m. bell, one that hung over your life, the life of your friends, and the fate of over 700,000 people. What use was the periodic table when the thing you needed to destroy didn’t follow logic, reason, or reality? If ever there was a need for Demon Sealing 101, now was the time to petition the school board.
As I got our lab packages sorted, my ears twitched, turned to a conversation in the back of the room that was very much out of human earshot, but not mine. My senses had become almost painfully keen as I became more involved in the world of Ancient, and sometimes I had to rein them in. But not now. A bunch of kids were talking about the most recently murdered girl who had been discovered on the bank of the Red a few days ago.
“I hear the police are coming to each school, advising redheads
to dye their hair and stay inside at night . . .” one whispered, fear threaded through her tone as she clutched her safely blond locks.
“Ugh, my curfew is balls right now,” another girl groaned.
“They’re calling the victims the Red River Girls, I heard,” one boy cut in. “It’s a horror movie waiting to happen.”
Another boy joined his line of thinking, one from the group I was supposed to be tutoring in English, and he sneered. “I bet it’s a serial killer with some sick, twisted past. Totally Silence of the Lambs. Maybe they will make a movie out of it and this one-horse town will get some respect.”
Sigh. Kids my age, seriously.
One thing from their convo stuck with me, though — the police were coming to every school. At first, that seemed innocuous; it was probably to talk to us about protecting ourselves and staying safe, seeing as we could so closely relate to these dead teenagers. But this wasn’t fourth grade, where you get a special presentation from a policeman showing off his regulation sidearm and telling you not to cross the street without a grown-up. Maybe they were coming to gather information about the victims, to link them to possible suspects. Not like they’d ever find the culprits, since testifying that the murdered girls had all been torn apart by spectral river beings was grounds for insanity. Or expulsion. But —
“Roan Harken?” came Mr. Godinez’s voice from the front of the classroom. Phae had just come back with our beakers and tools, but we both froze as though we’d been caught midcrime. I gaped.
“Can you come with me, please?”
All eyes laced into me, and I felt their judging weight on my back as I obediently stood and shuffled out of class. I gave Phae a backwards glance, knew she wanted desperately to follow, hoping that it had nothing to do with our secret affairs. Don’t do anything stupid, her face urged. As I turned back to Mr. Godinez’s penetrating stare waiting for me in the hall, I knew I couldn’t promise anything.
“Did I do something?” I asked. His typically placid face seemed more ashen than usual, and he shifted his lip, making his thick black moustache dance.
“I don’t really know what this is about. There’s a police officer in the main office asking to speak with you. He wouldn’t give any other details.”
I went cold. I tried to summon the fire that Sil was coaching me to control, but I just imagined my heart had turned into spent white embers at the bottom of a pit. Why were the police looking for me? What could they possibly have on me that wasn’t related to Ancient and my questionable adventures throughout the wintry city?
The reason dawned on me before we even crossed the office threshold, and I confirmed my suspicions almost instantly. The police officer stood in confidence with the school principal at the back of a conference room. Principal Fraser, a thin, progressive woman with a blond shock of well-manicured hair, saw me in the doorway and hushed their conversation. When the officer turned, his head swivelling and grey eyes latching onto mine like precise talons, I knew what no one else did. An Owl. He was one of them.
“Thank you, Hector.” The principal nodded dismissively to Mr. Godinez, who at first seemed uncertain if he should leave me or not. He shuffled his feet and headed back towards his classroom, his transient moment of loyalty fading with his footsteps.
Principal Fraser smiled at me, but her eyes stayed serious. “Come in, Roan.” She said my name familiarly, though I’d only met her a handful of times. She paced towards me with leonine agility, pulling the conference room door shut. She gestured to the other end of the table, where the officer, eyes still on me, had taken a seat. I took the opposite chair, the principal at the head. She folded her manicured hands on the linoleum tabletop, pinning me to my seat with her plastic smile. “Now, I know this must seem quite alarming, summoning you here like this. But Officer Seneca has a few questions for you.”
My eyes narrowed as I turned my attention to him. He certainly wasn’t going to smile anytime soon, and that relieved a bit of the tension in my jaw. This was business. The outline of his Owl-self was as unmoving as his human face, and his eyes seemed carved from glass. He knew who I was, he had to. As I levelled him icily, I hoped he realized I knew him, too. Equalling the playing field. I looked back to the principal.
“Can I ask what this is about, first?” I wanted to sound as cool as possible, though my hands were hot, twisting in my lap.
She kissed her teeth as though my question had been an inconvenient fluff on her blazer. “As I’m sure you’re aware, there is an ongoing investigation into the tragedies” — she sidestepped murders with the grace of a politician — “and they unfortunately started with this school. The police are just asking any students who knew the victims if they can offer any information to stop these heinous crimes.”
I frowned. “But I didn’t know the victim at all. This school has, like, over two thousand people in it. So why bother asking me specifically?”
For once, the principal’s even facial expression broke, and her eyes darted to the officer. “I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t know her,” I repeated, trying to keep the shakes out of my voice. What was going on here?
Officer Seneca made his first move, hand entering his jacket and producing an envelope. He didn’t say a word, merely started unlooping the string around the cardboard dial that kept it sealed. The principal finally spoke up. “Officer, you said this girl —”
“Is this you?” His light tone tinkled in my ears as he fanned out the photos on the boardroom table. There I was, in perfect focus, standing stricken over the body of victim number one, each photo a frame in a dance that saw me turning, horror-struck, to face the photographer.
My mind peeled backwards to that day in the cutting cold morning, the flash of silver eyes and the mean smirk beneath them. A character in this tableau I had completely erased until now. Maybe that’s what he’d wanted, so I could be implicated in this, instead of him. And I could see it now, etched over the memory — a smirk that curved into a beak, and the same slicing glare that I was being served by Officer Seneca.
I just stared at the pictures, and the principal sat agape. “What is this?” she asked the room. “What’s going on here? Is this even legal? Due process —”
The officer finally flicked his gaze from me and looked at the principal, his expression reaching out and stroking her face. A catatonic glaze relaxed the tense muscles in her forehead as his voice carried her elsewhere.
“Thank you, Mrs. Fraser,” he oozed. “You have been most helpful. You will forget this encounter as soon as we leave the room.”
She nodded and stared straight ahead. I knew that she would be silent for the rest of this conversation, a virtually empty seat that had left me alone with a hungry predator.
“I’d read that Owls were given the power of suggestion, to use all their limitless wisdom to tap into people’s minds,” I spoke evenly, quoting Sil as though I were doing a classroom presentation. “But I thought Ancient decreed the Owls were only allowed to use that power in cases of ‘dire urgency.’” I poked the oblivious principal. “Or, you know, something like that.”
Seneca eyed me, jaw tightening. His features were severe — like all the other Owls I’d seen so far — and if it wasn’t for his absolute, hungry confidence that I immediately hated, he would’ve been good-looking.
“When you’re this far from the Authority, you tend to make your own rules. Isn’t that so?” The sound of his voice prickled in my eardrums. Would he try to control my mind, too? Would I let him, without knowing it? The frustration of my vulnerability lit the flame inside me, and it climbed protectively.
He tapped a finger against the photos, as though bored with them now. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to harm you or wrangle you. Just to warn you.”
“What, that you could arrest me at any time? I’ve seen enough crime procedural TV to know that I should have a lawyer present to be even talki
ng to you. If this was in any way legal.” Though, what would it matter, if the Owls controlled the police? But I needed him to know I wasn’t afraid of him or his Family. Even though I was.
Seneca raised an eyebrow at me, almost pityingly. “This isn’t about human law. This is about our law. I know you aren’t familiar with it yet, but you will be, before the end. You can’t run from your fate forever.”
I cringed, biting back a snarl. “Go ahead. Arrest me and hand me over, then. It’s what you all want. What’s stopping you?” I was taking a chance, but I knew if that’s what he wanted, he wouldn’t be standing on ceremony by summoning me here.
Seneca eased back into the plastic chair, taking in the creaks of the wheels as though they were prey-bones popping beneath his weight. “Nothing really. Nothing’s stopping me, or anyone, from snatching you and tossing you to the river. But we do have some rules we must abide by. We can’t intervene directly, unless at the moment of dire urgency.” He threw my words back at me. “Which we fully intend to do, if you don’t co-operate.”
“You’re the ones who sent the river hunters after me! You’re the reason they’re out killing people who have nothing to do with this!” My hands shook, and I felt the air around me getting hotter. He sensed it, too, and instead of turning fearful like I so desperately wanted, he grinned.
“And until you give yourself up willingly to the Council of Owls, for the good of this city, they’ll keep killing those girls: Their blood will be on your hands.” The smile dropped from his mouth. “It’s as simple as that.”
Simple. I said nothing. I felt numb, trapped. I couldn’t burn my way out of this. Sil was right, I needed to control the fire before I unleashed it; I was going to need the Owls on my side, after all. This wasn’t something I could do alone, or without their help.
“I can do it,” I said, stilling my sweating palms in my lap. “I can bring down Zabor. I know I’m green, but I can try. You just have to give me a chance.”