"I'm not Avelayan."
"You're a Chronomancer, so it will still work." Xander retrieved a thin knife from his belt and sliced into Jack's hand before stabbing his own with the tip. "You know what to do."
Jack nodded and pressed his hand into Xander's and closed his eyes. "I don't think I'm strong enough to make it."
"You will be, I promise." Xander wrote out the date and destination around the Chronomancer mark on the back of his hand then nodded. "Stay with me, Jack. I'll get you home."
Chapter 10
Orange glow from the streetlight outside danced through the bedroom blinds, the softness of a cold December evening gently shaking him awake. Jack blinked in the darkness of Mr. Allen's bedroom where he was bundled up in three ancient quilts of colorful fabric scraps. He was undressed aside from clean plaid boxers and one of Niki's black t-shirts. A short brown beard had grown across his chin and the lower part of his jaw. How long had he been out of it?
The throbbing pain in his left arm drew his attention to the numerous ointment-soaked bandages that were wound around his arm where the armband had been removed. A sharp headache pounded behind his dry eyes, but the fizzy water on the bedside table helped ease his dehydration.
Jack sat up and ran a hand through his short hair had been recently washed. All the grime from being in that cell for days had been scrubbed away by someone, leaving him smelling of green apple body wash and cocoa butter lotion. He slowly unraveled himself from the cocoon of blankets before looking at his swollen ankles that had turned black from bruises where the shackles had rubbed too many times. At least he could move them.
Bottles of pills and empty syringes littered the bedside table on the other side of the bed along with bloody gauze and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Jack picked up one of the syringes and looked it over. What had they been giving him? With a long sigh, he stood from the bed, but had to grab onto the closet door to keep himself from toppling over with his hazy eyes and swimming head, nearly knocking a painting of the Eiffel Tower off of the beige wall.
He shuffled to the bedroom door that had been left slightly ajar. When he peeked through the crack, he saw Mr. Allen, Opal, and Niki in the living room down the hall. They were eating takeout and arguing with each other over the news that was muted on the television. He listened to them bickering about him.
Niki threw a plastic fork across the room where it bounced to the floor. "It's been a week. I don't care what he went through with those bastards. It doesn't change what he's done, what he is. I don't want him in our house."
"Our house?" Mr. Allen set aside his box of fried rice. "You're the one who has been living in some motel room because you hate being around me. As long as he's breathing, Jack will always be welcome here. I promised his father-"
"What about Ellie? Did you promise her anything?"
Opal placed her hand on Niki's shoulder. "Niki, baby, calm down. You wanted to find him, didn't you? We have him back. Just sit down and talk with him. Maybe this is a big misunderstanding. Don't throw away your life-long friendship over something like this."
Niki snapped back at her. "You're a woman, Opal. How would you feel if someone took advantage of you like he did to Ellie? You haven't been abused like that."
"I think you should stop talking, Niki, before you say something to me that you don't want to say. And who are you to know what I've been through? Maybe there's a reason I won't sleep with you yet."
Mr. Allen stood up and wiped his mouth on a napkin. "Enough, both of you. Don't wake Jack up. He needs his rest. Once he is recovered, we will deal with this calmly and with level, open minds."
Niki's shoulders slumped. "Baby, I'm sorry."
"Forget it, Niki. Drop it."
"I won't hurt you like that. Never. I love women."
Mr. Allen chuckled. "You're not helping a thing, son. Give her space."
"God. Where's the booze, Allen?" Niki jumped to his feet. "I need something strong."
Mr. Allen crossed his arms. "Detective Amethyst was just arrested while you were at his apartment and you want me to authorize underage drinking? Are you insane? And why do you smell like smoke? Have you been smoking?"
"Cigarettes, Allen. I'm old enough for that."
"Not while you're under my roof."
Niki scowled. "Hence why I live in a motel room with a family of cockroaches I share crackers with. Maybe that's why Opal won't sleep with me."
"Are you always this much of an idiot, son?"
Jack pulled the door open the rest of the way before stumbling down the hallway and into the bright lights of the living room. He blinked through squinted eyes.
"Jack!" Mr. Allen came up to him and touched his shoulder. "Jack, are you okay? How are you feeling?"
Jack looked down at his swollen arm that was wrapped and bleeding through the bandages.
"I can't give you any more painkillers. You've had more than you should. A couple of hours, okay?"
He nodded his head.
"I'm glad you're back with us. I was getting worried about you in and out for so long. You're looking better, though. Merry Christmas. Well, it will be in four days. How long were you in that cell? I know time can pass faster or slower in the past."
A fast shadow spread across him when Niki barged up to him with clenched fists. He grunted when he was shoved backwards against the wall by the much stronger hands. Jack looked at Niki's rage-filled eyes and shook his head. "Niki, please. Please. Please don't hurt me. Please listen to me."
Mr. Allen's voice was serious. "Don't you lay a hand on him, Nikolas. He's hurting, weak, and recovering from the torture they put him through in that cell. I'm warning you, son. If you touch him, I'll fight you myself. Look at him. He's beaten already. Do you really want to win a fight against a kid who is already half-dead?"
Niki gave him a final shove before stepping away and turning his back on him. "I don't want to fight someone who is already dead to me."
Jack watched his friend go to the cabinet in the kitchen and take out a bottle of scotch then drink straight from it, much to Mr. Allen's dismay. He couldn't let his friend just ignore him like that. "Niki, please."
"Did you hear something? Must be the wind outside."
Why was he pretending he didn't exist? Was he really being that childish? "Niki! You're my friend. You're my brother. You're my everything. Don't ignore me. Don't abandon me. Please. You're killing me. I am dying because you won't talk to me. I need you, Niki!"
"And I need answers."
"I'll give them to you. I'll tell you anything you want to know. No more secrets."
"Then you'll tell us. Now." Niki snapped his fingers. "And I want you in cuffs."
"What? Why?"
"Because you're dangerous. We know now."
"I don't-" Jack jumped when Opal took out a pair of handcuffs from her large red purse then came up behind him. "Please. I'm not going to hurt anyone."
"Opal, is this necessary?" Mr. Allen asked. "He's falling apart."
"If it gets Niki to talk to him, then it's worth it." She cinched the cuffs closed around Jack's wrists. "Too tight?"
Jack pulled against them, but they stayed closed.
Niki grabbed Jack's arm and dragged him to the sofa. He shoved him down against the cushions then stood there, towering over him. "Is it true? Is what you wrote in that journal true?"
The blood drained from his face with that realization. "You read it."
"We all did. Mr. Allen made copies before he let Detective Amethyst have it."
"Why would you give it to him?" Jack shouted at Mr. Allen in disbelief. "Do you want me to go to prison?"
"He needed everything he could get in order to help find you."
"Find me? Who was that man who found me? How did you two get back to the present without me?"
Niki shoved him deeper into the cushions. "You answer our questions first. That's how we're going to do this."
Mr. Allen reprimanded his stepson. "He's recovering, Niki. You leave him alo
ne. Jack, you don't have to say a word."
"I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything, Niki. I will."
Niki dragged a chair in from the kitchen, the legs scraping across the hardwood floor. He brought it in front of the sofa so he could face Jack like some kind of interrogator. "We're done playing games. This ends now. What happened that day in middle school?"
A cold shiver prickled up Jack's spine, but he took a breath to steady himself before he began. "Friday, September fifteenth or sixteenth, I can't remember. It was right after school started back for the year. I was walking home with Ellie like I did every day. We were going to stop to get donuts and rent a movie to watch while I helped her with algebra. We took the shortcut through the woods on the school yard. We were running late because she had to talk to her poetry teacher about putting a poem in the student paper. It was around four when we went into the woods."
Mr. Allen seemed to sense his hesitation. "Go on, Jack. We need to know the truth."
Jack cleared his throat. "Right. We were walking and joking around about stuff. It was so normal, like we did every day. We got to the deeper part of the woods where the physical education classes would sometimes do rope courses and stuff like that. Ellie stopped to tie her shoe. Then, three older boys came out of the woods and started calling us names, asking if we knew what sex was, and if I had ever touched her. I told Ellie to run, but they were fast. I think they played football or something. They grabbed her and threw her down on the ground. One of them . . ."
"You don't have to say any of this." Mr. Allen stood and ran a hand over his balding head. "You can stop right here."
"No. I have to tell the truth."
"We're not judging you. Please, continue if you want to."
"One of them took her wrists and pinned her down while the big one sat on her, like across her waist. The one with the short hair forced me to my knees. He said that he was going to show us what making love was. The skinny one holding her wrists kissed her. He kept kissing her and she was crying. I tried to get up and run, but the guy held me there. Then I felt it against my head. It was cold. I knew what is was. Then I heard it cock . . . right next to my ear. They were laughing. He told me to unbutton my pants or he'd shoot me. So, I did."
Opal made a tiny whimpering sound and turned away.
"He then told me to do the same with Ellie. I did. Then he said to lift her shirt, that women liked that. I was crying, but so afraid to move or make a sound with that gun against my head. I didn't understand what was going on, but I was so scared. Ellie was screaming. The big one moved off of her so I could do it. I pulled her pants down. I begged them to let us go. When I wouldn't touch her, the one with the gun shoved me down next to her and said that if I wouldn't be a man, that he would make me the woman and that I'd have to watch as they did it to me, too. One of them had a camera. He kept filming. I don't know why."
"What happened then, Jack?" Opal asked, her voice a tiny whisper.
"The skinny one took out a knife, a switchblade. He trailed it down my back. I screamed and told him I'd do it, begging him not to hurt me. So, I sat up and I . . . pushed her shirt up. She stopped crying. She just looked at me and closed her eyes. Then she nodded her head. I touched her chest with my hands. In a flash, it was all over. Someone from the road saw us. He was shining a flashlight through the woods. I think it was a resource officer. The attackers took off, leaving me and Ellie there. I held her and fixed her clothes before anyone saw. The police showed up and I told them that those boys had tried to beat us up. I didn't tell them what really happened because I was scared. I thought I was going to be in trouble for my part in it. I felt so dirty, so guilty."
Niki stood from his chair, took the back in his hands, then sent it flying across the room where it crashed into the stone fireplace. A couple of the legs broke off and clattered out into the middle of the living room.
"If you don't believe me, I have a scar, Niki. I rode in the ambulance with Ellie, but I didn't tell anyone that I was hurt too. There's a reason I wear a shirt swimming and I don't like to be naked around people. It's from the knife. Will you unhandcuff me?"
Niki tossed the handcuff key to his stepfather without a word.
After Mr. Allen released him, Jack pulled down the back of his boxers to reveal the four-inch-long pink scar that had healed well on its own across the left side of his lower back, right below the hip bone. "I put a bandage on it and kept it clean like Mr. Allen taught me when he would clean my scrapes from falling on my bike."
Mr. Allen sighed with tears in his eyes. "That's why your shirts had blood on them. I thought it was paint or something."
"No. It was from that. I'm so, so sorry. I couldn't save her. I helped them."
Mr. Allen shook his head. "Because you were a child with a gun to your head. No one here places any blame on you."
Jack's eyes burned, but he clenched his jaw and maintained his composure. "But I do. I do. It should have been me. I should have told them to rape me instead."
"That wouldn't have solved anything. Did they actually . . ."
He lowered his head. "They would have. They would have done it and kept laughing. And it's all my fault."
"None of this was your fault." Mr. Allen toyed with the handcuffs as he thought of what to say. "None of it. You and Ellie were the victims of a violent attack, an attack that you held off long enough for someone to call for help. You are a hero, Jack. You saved her."
"How? How are you saying I saved her? You heard what I just told you, right? You read my journal."
Opal turned back around to face him, looking paler than normal. "Your journal was vague about exact things that happened. You left out the part about the attackers."
"I didn't, though. I mentioned the gun. I mentioned the others."
Mr. Allen placed the handcuffs onto the coffee table. "That's what you meant. I thought the others were other thoughts you were having or voices in your head."
"I'm not crazy. I'm not."
"No, I know you're not. The one thing I still don't understand is that you wrote in your journal that you . . . enjoyed it. How?"
It was the one thing that Jack regretted most of all. "Because I thought she was beautiful. That's why I hate myself so much. While she was scared and hurting, I saw her body for the first time and I thought she was so pretty. I thought I was a monster because of that. I wanted to see her again. What kind of sick person-"
"A hormonal teenager who just saw his girlfriend's breasts for the first time. That's all. It had nothing to do with you being a monster or something else. Your mind and body act on their own sometimes. Did you want to hurt her?"
How could he even ask that? "No! Of course not. I would never do that to her."
Mr. Allen's bushy eyebrows furrowed. "Just because you thought she was pretty in a split second, you think you're a perverted rapist who needs to be in prison?"
"Yes. I couldn't control it. I can't stand to think about women at all now. I have a blocker on my own computer to keep things from popping up or websites that may make me think that way again. I don't want to hurt anyone."
"You know those feelings are normal, right?" Opal asked.
"No, not like this. I wrote that in my journal after I dreamed about her, what I saw of her, on a beach somewhere in the sun and we were happy and I was kissing her."
Mr. Allen placed his hands on Jack's shoulders. "Jack, oh, Jack. This falls on my shoulders. I should have explained things to you that your father never had the chance to tell you. Attraction is normal. You just happened to have your first time seeing something you were attracted to be a traumatic experience. That's not your fault. It doesn't make you a bad person in the slightest."
With a red face and eyes like razor blades, Niki grabbed his leather jacket from the back of a chair in the kitchen then stomped across the living room to the door where the keys jangled from the hook.
"Niki? Niki, no. Don't leave. Niki!"
The slamming of the door was the only answer as
Jack watched his Time Knight leaving him once again.
"Don't worry about him, Jack. He'll be back." Mr. Allen held out his arms. "Come here and let me hold you. We can talk through this and make everything better."
"No. Stop. I don't need you to coddle me anymore. I'm not a baby or a child. You don't know what happened to me in that Syndicate cell, but I'm not the same person I was when I went in. I know I shouldn't feel guilty and I know I have been overreacting all these years. But it's not over. I want to find them. I want to find the bastards who did this to me and Ellie and I want to gut them. I want to go after the Syndicate and the Inquisition and kill them all. I want them dead . . . or at least where they can't hurt anyone anymore, something. I want to get Ellie back, then I want them all to pay the price for hurting the people I love. I won't be scared this time. This time, I'll be the one with a gun."
"Maybe you should calm down for a moment, Jack. Think about what you're saying."
"I had plenty of time to think about it when I was locked and chained in that cell. I know what I want to do, what I need to do. We cannot let them win this. No one hurts the people I love and gets away with it."
Opal braided the end of her hair. "Are you serious about this?"
"As serious as I've been about anything in my life."
"Then I have the people for you. That man who rescued you was Xander Sutcliff, my Chronomancer."
"I thought he was missing."
"He was. While you were only gone for a few days in your time, it has been three weeks here in the present. A lot has happened. The people who helped get us back to the present are the same people who are going to help get Ellie back. We are called Sand. We are a group of Chronomancers and bonded Time Knights who work to take down the Zurvan Syndicate and the Inquisition of Purity. One of our spies was in Venice and we got in touch with her. She brought us here. It took two trips, but it worked. I was trying to get in touch with a spy on the inside of Base Mark 16 to get you out, because we figured that was where you had been taken, but they have pretty much gone radio silent. Something big is coming that they are working to nip in the bud before things go south. From what Xander told me, he had been in that same facility that you were in, but he was being trained as an agent. When he found out that you were being held, he took it on himself to get you out of there."
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