Halfblood Legacy

by Rheaume, Laura

  He answered candidly, “I’ve never met a Human like you. You’re...I don’t even know what.”

  An older Scythe said from right next to her, “She’s alive.” He, too, was mesmerized by her.

  The young teenager turned to face the shadow, his older self, This woman, Lena, she...

  “She rescued me.”

  The boy nodded and looked back at her.

  “I can’t believe I get to see her and Ian like this again,” Scythe said. “Can we do it over?”

  “We can only go forward now, sorry.”

  “Why can’t you go back?”

  “It’s not that I can’t go back, it’s that I need to go forward.”

  “Oh.”

  Scythe was pulled forward to a time he had left behind.

  -----------

  The bus station was noisy, but he would have liked it a little louder. It if were louder, he could have left. He gripped the handle of his duffle. Across from him, sitting perfectly quietly and chatting it up like a pair of freak mimes in their own silent world, were a Class A Pocket Protector and the Sign of the Apocalypse.

  She had her ticket, and they were just waiting another twenty minutes before her bus’s departure. Then, after a quick mind erase session with Mercy’s number one fan, Cord could go back to the good life.

  Just one thing was bugging him, sneaking around and muttering in the back of his head. He couldn’t get that thing to shut up.

  It wasn’t that he cared at all about her. She had attracted trouble for as long as he’d known her. Heck, he had been her first trouble. There was no question of whether or not she was going to buy it. The question was, how many would she drag down with her, and would you be one? She was stupid, stubborn, totally spoiled. And stupid. He couldn’t care less about her.

  His promise to watch over her was nothing: he’d broken his word a thousand times and it didn’t bother him a bit. A promise was just giving people what they wanted, so they could feel good about some asinine thing they knew better than to do anyway. A promise was something you said, and as soon as the sounds faded, well, you were about done with it, because it had never been about you in the first place.

  Scythe’s family, their home, their lives, they were nothing to him. Bland, boring, spiceless. Easy? Sure. Enjoyable? Sometimes, if you kept your sense of humor. But it wasn’t his idea of living.

  Scythe was nothing to him, as a person. Aside from some damn respectable skills, he didn’t have anything to offer. At his best, he was a drain on the patience.

  But, the decision he had made...that was something.

  When Scythe had stood there in Cord’s cell and said, “Your life is over,” and he had shown him what order had come down, Cord realized there was no way he could avoid it.

  If that person wanted him dead, then, he was dead.

  People who hadn’t faced that particular trump card didn’t really appreciate what a change it could bring to the person who experienced it. Everything got thrown out the window, every little thing, and with your mouth open and your head empty of even one coherent thought, you looked around at nothing. When you were standing there, in the center of nothing, a tiny scrap of paper, even if it had used gum stuck to it, was looking pretty damn good to you. And look, there was even a joke on the back.

  That was the best damn piece of paper, ever.

  So if someone was whining about a scratch on their new car, or the five minutes they had to wait in line for their super jug of freezie goodness, it was hard to sympathize, because you remembered when you were grateful just to get a scrap of paper.

  But grateful wasn’t the right word to describe how Cord had felt when Scythe had plucked him right out of the nothing pot. Grateful was the shadow cast by a lizard sunning itself below an enormous, distant burning star that tethered entire planets to it simply because it was so goddamn big. Tethered: that’s what he was. Bound. Connected by an invisible scrap of paper that one man had offered and another had reached out and taken.

  To Cord, it didn’t matter why he had done it...without a doubt it was some idiotic thing...the bottom line was that he did. Scythe had stretched out from his secure perch and held out his hand to Cord as the shelf crumbled away below him. Because of that, instead of lying in a cold grave, Cord stood there in a shiny city after a handful of extremely pleasant nights and cursed a whispering, inescapable, pestering two word truth: Life Debt. Cord owed Scythe a debt, a life debt.

  And, right in front of him was Scythe’s life.

  Little Miss Train Wreck.

  -----------

  Scythe tasted blood. Once it got in the mouth, it took forever to get that taste out, no matter how much you spit or swallowed. What made it worse was that she kept doing things that put the blood right back in there. Sometimes it drained down from his sinuses. Usually it came from an injury to his mouth. A couple of times, he coughed it up, and once he had thrown it up. He couldn’t get free of the salty, metallic, tangy sensation on the back of the tongue; it made him nauseous and it drowned his sense of smell and it was his lifeline.

  Think about the flavor, the scent, the thick feeling.

  Don’t think about the pain. Don’t think about never getting out. Don’t think about them waiting to hear from you, never knowing what happened.

  Think about the way it feels rolling down the throat, or churning up the stomach, or dripping from the cut. Think about the color: there it was still deep rose red, but there it had faded to brown. Estimate how long it would take to fade, how much was pooled there, how much you could lose before you passed out.

  He had to focus on something, and the blood was so convenient because it was everywhere.

  He didn’t have to concentrate on what they wanted, because they hadn’t asked him any questions yet. They were still in the punishment phase of the operation.

  Tiburon had made his visit. He...had been rough. Justice had been by. He had leered and said, “I told you.”

  That was about it. No, there had not been a lot of visitors. They didn’t want to interrupt the woman he spent most of his time with, the one they had recruited to teach him a lesson. Their sense of humor was finely crafted and entirely sadistic. They didn’t choose one of their employees or family members, they had found an outsider who was willing to do it for free.

  Summer was breathing heavily, leaning on the table and staring at her most recent work. Scythe closed his eyes and rested while he could.

  “Say it again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said obediently, because he was. He was sorry for what had happened to her. He was very sorry she thought that he, a friend of hers, had done it. But, mostly he was extremely sorry that the talented professional he had known and worked with had been converted into the bitter, unstable vengeance craving creature in front of him.

  He waited for the inevitable response, “It’s still not enough.”

  He nodded and thought about how the blood burned his sinuses.

  He cracked his eyes open when he heard a clinking sound. She had put the bar she had been using back on the table, her hand shaking from the exertion, and maybe a little from the effects of what she had done. He closed his lids and purposely kept himself stone still, because, while every inch of his body hurt, each movement made it ten times worse. It was mind-blowing, how much pain could take over your entire existence, pushing rational thoughts aside, pushing everything aside, to greedily have you all to itself.

  That was why torture worked so well for interrogation; because when you’d had enough of it, you weren’t really there anymore. All that was left was a fragment of your personality, usually the part that was really focused on surviving; that one didn’t mind sharing so much.

  Scythe thought it was ironic that there was very little that the Families were going to want from him that he wasn’t already willing to give them, without any force necessary. After all, what did he know that they needed? He didn’t have Tiburon’s third seal information, he hadn’t worked for the Scere for years,
with the exception of the last few months, so his old information was unlikely to be any real help to them. The operations that he had helped design had already transpired. There wasn’t much he could help them with.

  So why the special treatment? Just maliciousness? He doubted it. The Families, with the exception of Tiburon the crusader, were business people. They didn’t waste resources on personal matters; they had money to make and personal stuff wasted money.

  She chuckled a little and dragged something metallic across the table, knowing that the sound would do what it did: his heart began beating heavily. His shoulders hunched inward at the jabbing sensation that started up again. His heart had been working so hard that he had a constant pain deep in his chest all the time.

  He sucked at the blood in his mouth, thinking about the flavor.

  “My hands are a little shaky, sorry,” she said, and he opened his eyes to see her holding the scalpel up. It was vibrating in the air in front of him.

  A breath built up behind his lips and then blew through them. A tiny groan escaped with it.

  “No more sleeping,” she said. “If you don’t keep your eyes open where I can see the pain in them, I’ll cut them out. Got it?”

  “Yes.” She was truly lost. He didn’t think this was helping her out, either. In fact, she was much worse than she had been when she first came in. It would have been some comfort to him...a very small amount of comfort...to know that his pain had alleviated some of hers. The fact that it seemed to be doing the opposite made the whole situation that much harder to accept.

  If only he had his power, he could have helped her, helped them both. But, one of the attendants who checked periodically to make sure Summer hadn’t killed him yet had explained that the suit he was wearing underneath the straightjacket kept him from using his power. It created a second energy field that covered his body that was set to a frequency that was opposite his own, keeping his power unstable. They had adjusted it to his particular field while he was unconscious and were very pleased that it was working as well as it did. Apparently, they were still perfecting the technique.

  So, powerless and hopeless, he waited and watched.

  Chapter 14

  “There aren’t any fairies,” Lakia accused Scythe, “Or princes either.”

  “I met a prince once,” Scythe said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Well, he was a governor’s son, but he was like a prince. He was tall and brave and true.”

  “What do you mean? Like tell the truth?”

  “No, like reliable, does the right thing.”

  “A hero.”

  “Yup.”

  “Was he like you?”

  “What?”

  “Did he look like you?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Then he can’t be a prince, ‘cause princes don’t look like you. You look different.”

  “Maybe there are different kinds of princes...”

  “No, there is only one kind, and they look like my daddy.”

  “You are probably right,” he said. The conversation, like the growing pile of lies, was not sitting right in his stomach.

  “Why do you look different?”

  “Because I am different.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I know. Why don’t you go play with your sister?”

  Lakia looked at the younger girl, who was now crawling around in the flower bed. “Naw, I want to climb up there, but mom never lets me.”

  “She doesn’t want you to get hurt, princess.”

  “I won’t get hurt if you help me.”

  “I won’t help you though, cause it would scare your mom.”

  “Because you’re different?”

  “Yeah, because I’m different.”

  “That’s stupid.” She glared at him for a bit before going over to her mom.

  “Mara! You are messing up your dress!” yelled Margie. To her sister she complained, “I tell you, it never ends.”

  “Momma, I want to go on the big monkey bars.” Lakia pointed to where Scythe sat.

  “No, honey, I told you that before. It’s too dangerous. Go play with your sister, or go...”

  “But I don’t want to do that baby playground! I want to play up there!”

  “Lakia, I said no. That means...”

  “It won’t be dangerous if that boy helps me. He’s big.”

  Margie kept her eyes fixed on her daughter when she said, “It doesn’t matter, I already said no.”

  “It’s not fair!” Lakia marched off towards the smaller playground before changing her mind and turning toward the flower bed.

  On an uncharacteristic impulse, Scythe jumped down and started toward the place where Mara was yanking on a particularly large flower that refused to budge. He pretended not to hear the gasps from behind him or notice the movements of several men standing around the playground.

  The click he heard when he was only halfway there, however, made him stop in his tracks. He held himself relaxed, hands loosely hanging at his side despite his racing heart. A voice spoke calmly to his right and it’s metallic twin echoed through a headset on the other side of the playground, “Stand down, Marshal.”

  “He’s a threat,” was the reply of one of the newest guards. Marshal hadn’t figured out yet that he was there to protect Scythe from Humans, not the other way around. This always happened whenever someone joined the security team for the first time. They took one look at Scythe’s angular Kin bone structure and his gray skin and they knew right away who the monster was.

  “Stand down, Marshal, or you are off this duty.”

  “You don’t know what he’ll do to those little girls...” The guard's voice was tense and pitched up a level. He was obviously so concerned for them that Scythe wondered if this time he really would be shot.

  Not able to hear and not bothering to see, Marge and Sara continued to chat about their plans for the weekend. “I’ll bring the drinks but you’ve got to make that potato…”

  Ahead of him, Lakia had stopped next to her sister and was staring down at where she trampled through the grass. She used her foot to move aside a few tall flowers so she could see something in the dirt below. Then she sighed and, looking around, noticed that Scythe had stopped in the middle of the playground. She started to walk toward him.

  “Lakia,” Scythe said quickly, “Help your sister.”

  “Marshal, stand down, return to the van and surrender your weapon to Jack. Now.” The captain's words were strung with the same tight strings that bound Scythe’s chest.

  Lakia hesitated, glancing back at what was obviously an unappealing task.

  “That’s what big sisters do, right?”

  She considered for a few seconds and then turned around with a huff. She went to crouch down by Mara, moving aside a patch of long grass with the back of her hand.

  After what seemed like a long time, Scythe heard a second click. It was followed by the sounds of retreating footsteps stomping through the grass and leaves.

  Scythe let out the breath he had been holding unconsciously and turned his head to look back at the captain. The man nodded minutely, and, his heart still fluttering in his chest, Scythe slowly closed the distance to the flower bed, passing the ghost of his older self, arms crossed and leaning against a tree.

  Mara was sitting in the middle of the flowers, her face smudged with dirt. “I couldn’ fin’ any fairies,” she complained with her lower lip stuck out.

  He resigned himself to one more lie, now that the damage was done and the truth would only cause more problems.

  “That’s okay. You would have really scared them anyway, because they are so small. You are like a giant to them.”

  “Oh.” She considered that for a moment.

  Scythe sat down across from her, leaving a good eight feet of space between them. He reached out and picked one of the longer flowers, a beautiful red and orange one that had just opened. His fingers circled the stem, brushing against th
e thin, soft hairlike strands that covered it, and stopped just above the leaves. Using his thumbnail, he pinched and twisted expertly to make a clean break that wouldn’t tear or crush the tip; immediately the wet, bitter scent of the plant mixed in with that of the flowers and soil around him. He breathed in deeply, enjoying the way it tickled the back of his throat. He lay down the flower and quickly went to work on gathering more. He had done this a lot when he was younger. They had done it together.

  “I don’ wanna scare dem,” Mara finally decided.

  Lakia sat down with another, louder huff right next to him, prompting Scythe to slide over.

  “That’s because you are a nice princess who cares about other people’s feelings.”

  Scythe leaned over and held out for Mara a small bouquet of flowers tied together with a few long blades of grass. “You should give this to your mom so she won’t be so mad about your dress.”

  Mara’s eyes widened with delight. “Okay!”

  Lakia watched Mara run and give the flowers to her surprised mother, and then turned back to see Scythe holding out another small bundle for her. She smiled, her anger forgotten in a second, “Thanks. Wait, are these for my mom, too?”

  “No, princess. Those are for you.” Scythe got up, brushed off his pants, picked up the rest of the flowers and walked over to his housekeeper, who was just turning off a timer that was vibrating inside her purse.

  “Why did you choose this one?” Scythe asked. He hardly remembered it himself.

  Why not?

  -----------

  “No,” Cord said and steered her toward the bus.

  Alan protested, “But there is still so much I want to know. I could just go the first leg with you...”

  “Guess this is good-bye,” Mercy said with a short wave. Then, she looked at Cord, who was shaking his head and frowning, “What?”

  “A couple of hours ago, you were threatening his life. Now you are letting him go with all your information”

  “Mistake number fifty?”

  “I stopped counting when I realized the base ten system wasn’t going to be adequate.”