by Sarah Noffke
“You’ve hesitated to kill me. You’re not a killer. And that’s the reason you’re going to die,” she says, a look of cold satisfaction on her face.
I lay the palm of my hand out flat, comb my fingers forward twice. “Bring it on.”
“Consider it done,” she says, her eyes hovering above my head.
I chance a glance in that direction and to my horror a glint of silver catches my eyes. A knife with a dark handle dances through the air above my head. It teeters to the left and to the right, not giving me a proper idea of which way I should retreat to avoid it. Then, like a missile zeroing in on a target, its point pivots downward and cascades toward the earth.
I step backward and to the left. Invasive pain, worse than a bullet wound, surges through my body. Hot. Breathing fire. Tarnishing everything around it. When the blade sinks down into the place between my shoulder blade and shoulder I question the judgment I made to escape it. But it could have been my head, I reason to myself. Still, the blade makes no place for me to move as it takes residence in my body. I stagger, reaching for it and then stopping, afraid to bring my hands around the knife that’s now connected to my flesh. Allouette looks too amused, coolly watching as she leans against a nearby tree.
“Vould you like some help vith that?” she says, in a voice so sweet you’d think I should offer her a compliment in return. “Here you are,” she sings. The blade, tearing muscles and ligaments, rips back out of my flesh and rises into the air. I stare up at it, a point coated in blood staring down at me with menacing grace. A single drip of blood falls off its tip and lands on my cheek, like the first droplets of a summer rain storm. In a rush I take three steps back, my shoulder making mention of each step like a trumpet blaring in my head. “You’re afraid I’m going to stab you again?” she asks, like we’re deciding which restaurant to patronize tonight. “Oh, no vorries. No more knives. Your death is a personal one and one I want to enjoy…vith my own hands.”
I clatter backwards, finding a dead end at the same cluster of trees I’d hidden behind earlier. How had we traveled back and forth that much across this forest? The dark-handled knife is now hovering beside Allouette’s face, like a bodyguard. It soars up in the air and turns downward, rocketing at my face. I suck in a sharp breath and roll in the opposite direction, landing on my backside, arms splayed out behind me on the earth. The blade sticks into the base of the birch tree I was stationed in front of.
“Good girl,” Allouette cheers. “You learn so quickly.” She takes two steps toward me and I kick back on my hands and feet, but find the same dead end as before—the tight cluster of trees.
The forest is now coated in mostly blacks and blues of the approaching night. For this reason I don’t see Allouette’s dark frame until it’s pressing up against me. She’s managed to pin one of my arms under her knees. Then she straddles me, pinning my other arm right where its bleeding from the laceration under her other knee. “Are you comfy? I do vant you to feel cozy as you move into ze next life.”
Her long fingernail comes closer to my face, almost in slow motion. I jerk, trying to free myself from the pin she has me in, but she’s impossibly strong. “Now, now,” she soothes in a most unsoothing voice. “Ztay still.” The finger traces the contours of my forehead, along my nose, around my lips, over my chin, and down my throat. There she joins it with her other hand. “Zay goodbye, you filthy Lucidite, the dark spot of my life, the ruiner of all things.” Her hands clamp down on my esophagus. Air is no longer welcomed into my body. Air inside me has no place to go. I’m trapped inside my prison of suffocation. Again I try to move under her pinned stance, but she has me restrained from the elbow up. She picks me up by my throat and rams my head back down on the base of the tree. Stars circle in my vision, but I maintain consciousness—barely. My fingers search the earth, dirt pushing under my nails, twigs grazing my hands and then…the smoothness of the hilt greets the palm of my hand. It’s stuck firmly into the base of a tree. And with each passing second I lose my hold on this earth. On this motivation.
Being strangled and rapidly losing oxygen strangely heightens every detail. From this close distance I spy flecks of gold in her almost black eyes. Spidery veins drape her eyelids.
The rosewood handle is smooth. Taking a gigantic breath that brings me no air and empties my lungs of none of the used carbon dioxide inside me, I jerk the handle once. It stays pinned. Again, I try and release the blade, this time working it back and forth. Splinters of wood flake from the tree as I wiggle the knife free. With a force only leant to me because Joseph is somewhere close in the physical realm I lurch my arm out from under her bony knee, swing it up, and send the blade of the knife like a speeding dart into her temple.
♦
My eyes snap open. Joseph sits right up against me in my bed, his face popping with relieved surprise when I awake.
“There you are!” He grabs my hand, peers into my eyes. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve had better nights,” I say, wincing from the pain in my shoulder as I try to sit up. “What about you?” I say, touching his neck which has a small gash and is bleeding more than I like.
“Oh, I’m fine,” he says, dismissing my concern. “But I think you’re lying. I bandaged up the wounds I could find, but are you hurt anywhere besides your arms and legs?”
I look down to see he’s used pieces of a T-shirt to make tourniquets around the lacerations on my arms and the one around my calf. “Thanks,” I say. “I have a couple other injuries, but nothing serious. Why don’t you use the rest of that shirt to wipe up your neck?”
“What happened?” he asks, pressing the wadded up shirt to his neck.
My head swims in a sea of images and dizziness. I’ll tell you, but I only want to go through the story once,” I say, standing up and swaying slightly. “Take me to Trey.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Shouts echo from Trey’s office as we approach. I’d press my ear up to the door and listen if I wasn’t certain passing out was a mounting possibility.
My knock is weak, and sounds more like a cat pawing. Joseph gives me a nervous look. “You lied. You’re not all right,” he says, searching my body for the other wounds.
“Not right now!” Trey answers through the closed door, his words on fire.
“Yes, right now!” Joseph says, beating on the door.
A second later it slides back, revealing a red-faced Trey and beside him Aiden looking equally flustered.
“What is it? I’m in the middle of something,” Trey says, gritting his teeth. I’m not sure if the blood loss is making me imagine it, but he’s almost hostile.
“Whatever it is, this is more important,” Joseph says, half dragging me into Trey’s office. I’m leaning on him increasingly by the minute.
“Fine,” Trey says, throwing his hands through his hair. “Aiden, we will continue this later.”
Through my swimming head and blurring vision I spy Aiden burning a hole in the floor with his eyes. “You’re dismi––” Trey stops. Reaches out. Grips my shoulder. “Roya, why are you bleeding?” he says, picking up my hand and inspecting Joseph’s dried blood. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say, surprised to hear my words slur. “And that’s not my blood.”
He grips my shoulder harder, not realizing his fingers have just reached into the gash in my back. Pulling his hand away he looks at the fresh blood now covering his fingers.
“Oh, well, that’s my blood,” I say, aware that I sound drunk.
“What? What’s happened?”
“I just killed Allouette,” I say, and then all my body weight slumps against Joseph and the world goes black.
♦
“Why didn’t you take her straight to the infirmary!?” Trey says.
“She wouldn’t let me!” Joseph answers.
“Would ya keep it down?” I say too slow. “I’m trying to sleep.” The bed underneath me is all too familiar. I’m in the infirmary, the stiff brown covers t
ucked up to my chest.
“Roya,” Joseph says, moving around Trey and grabbing my hand. “How do you feel?”
“Like someone stabbed me in the back,” I say.
“Top of your shoulder,” Joseph corrects. “When I asked you about your other injuries you left that one out. Oh, and the bloody gash on the back of your head.”
“I actually forgot about the last one.” I wince from the light in the room, my head an explosion of unrelenting pain. “Not anymore though.”
Trey moves to the position beside Joseph, worried frustration coating his face. Aiden eyes me from the corner with a cautious look.
“Roya, what happened?” Trey says, his tone still frantic.
“I told you,” I say, gasping for breath between each word. “I killed Allouette.”
“I was hoping for details,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“With a knife,” I say.
With a heavy sigh he turns to Joseph. “What happened?”
“Hell if I know. She abandoned me.”
“I saved your life,” I say, pressing up into a sitting position, my shoulder screaming about the effort.
“After I saved yours,” he says.
“Fair enough,” I say, smiling a little at Joseph.
“Would you two stop?!” Trey says, flaring his nostrils. “Roya. What. Exactly. Happened?”
“Allouette followed us last night. Was planning on murdering us. She was about to slit Joseph’s throat.” An audible gasp falls out of Trey’s mouth. “I knew, well seriously hoped, she’d track me using my ripple, so I disappeared. I’m the one she wanted to kill most. I traveled to the Voyageurs National Forest.”
Joseph bursts into a laugh. “Nice!”
“Silence,” Trey commands.
“Anyway, we danced around a bit,” I say through measured breaths. “She stabbed me. I gave her a few bruises and I stabbed her. That’s the story.”
“And you’re certain she’s dead?” Trey gives me a skeptical look.
The memory rushes back to me, bringing with it bile in my mouth. “Yes, usually people don’t recover from a knife in their brain.”
“Damn, Stark!” Joseph says, gripping my fingers tighter. “You’re twisted. Why didn’t you go for something less disgusting? Like the chest?”
“I didn’t have much of an opportunity to plan my attack since I was being strangled to death,” I say, pinning my eyes on the fresh gauze bandages wrapped around the wounds on my arms.
Joseph raises my hand, placing the back of it against his cheek. “I am so, so, so sorry I wasn’t there.”
“I’m not,” I say, repeating the scene in my head of propelling a blade into another human’s brain. I don’t want anyone to ever see what I did.
“I do understand that you two had to defend yourself,” Trey says, glancing between Joseph and me. “But why didn’t you escape by dream traveling?”
I look at Joseph, knowing our answer is the same. “Because we wanted to kill her.”
“She could have killed you,” Trey says too loud, making my head sear suddenly.
“Do we want to talk about what happened or didn’t?”
“You take too many risks,” Trey says.
“You have no idea,” I say, thinking about Chase.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” I dismiss the question. “And it’s funny you say that since all my enemies are because of you.”
“Please know that I realize I’m one hundred percent responsible for all of this. I apologize,” he says, his tone weighted with guilt. “Until I give you different instruction I do not want you to dream travel. Is that clear?” His authoritarian tone has a quality of protective fear. It does something strange to my insides. Unable to look directly at him, I nod, staring intently into Joseph’s green eyes.
All right, let’s give Roya a chance to rest,” Trey says, placing a hand on Joseph’s shoulder.
Joseph gives me an uncertain look, my hand still in his. “It’s all right,” I say. “I’ll call for you as soon as I wake up.”
“Before you have any visitors though,” Trey interrupts, “I want a full psych evaluation done on you today.”
I nod and watch them leave. “Wait,” I say when all three are filing through the exit. “I need to ask Aiden a question about my patch. It will only take a minute.”
Trey gives Aiden an unreadable look and nods. “Make it fast and then I want you in my office, Dr. Livingston.”
Once the door closes, Aiden hurries to my bed, tentatively peering over his shoulder. He looks like he wants to reach for me but doesn’t. “Roya, if you show up in my presence one more time half dead, I’m going to have a heart attack,” he says in an angry rush.
“Well, if you survive it, you can recover in the bed next to me.”
He allows a small smile.
“I just need to know why Trey looks like he’s infuriated at you. I won’t be able to rest until I do.”
Aiden shakes his head. “You just stabbed someone in the head and you want to know about my drama?”
“Oh, believe me, I’m about to have an emotional breakdown about what I’ve just been forced to do, but I wasn’t going to allow myself to in front of Trey,” I say, battling a sheet of tears. “Just tell me what’s going on because the extra worry is more than I can take. Is this about...?”
“No.” Aiden takes a seat on my bed and holds my hand. I close my eyes, suddenly relieved by his touch and that one word. “It’s about me and my work.”
Aiden releases a long, furious exhale which makes my eyes spring open. His eyes are burning with anger. “Trey wants us to keep our current security,” Aiden begins. “But I’m demanding that he allow me to upgrade it. He refuses. He thinks that the upgrade fails and that’s how Zhuang gets into the Institute. But I think the reverse is true. I know about Joseph,” he says, his tone milder suddenly. “I think Zhuang knows how to break the security because of the access he had into Joseph’s thoughts, the things he would have seen. But Trey isn’t willing to see that. He keeps taking my pleas as attacks at Joseph. He’s colored by his protectiveness of you two.”
“And you think this is how Zhuang gets into the Institute?”
“Yes.” Aiden grips his hair like he wants to pull it out. “And Trey won’t listen to me,” he says with a growl.
“But Bob and Steve once told me that Trey is usually right on these kinds of things because of his gift. Could he be right?”
“I don’t think so because I don’t think his intuition is guiding him here, it’s his bias toward Joseph. Zhuang will know to submerge in water to enter the Institute. If we just changed that to something he didn’t know then we could stop this whole thing.”
Aiden’s right. Instinctively I know he is. And it burns the blood in my veins to know Trey won’t listen to reason. That he’s taking it as an attack on Joseph. “Do you want me to say something?”
“No!” he says at once. “He’s too mad, he’d kill me if he knew I discussed any of this with anyone...especially you. Just...don’t even worry about it.”
All I want is to comfort him, wrap my arms around him, ease his pain, and that’s the last thing I can do.
“Really, I don’t want you to worry about this,” he repeats. “You have enough to think about.” He gives me the look visitors offer the animals who have been at the pound for too long, those animals that are no doubt lonely and bordering on insanity due to the confines they’ve been sentenced to.
“You think I’m a monster, don’t you?” I say, a searing pain spreading through my chest.
“No,” Aiden says, shaking his head furiously. “Not at all. You defended yourself and you purged this world of a disgusting person.”
“I’ve killed someone, marked my soul with their blood. It’s not like when Amber died. This time I actually performed the act that ended someone’s life.”
Aiden shuffles forward on the bed, leans headfirst, and presses his forehead against mine.
It’s warm and his eyes are so close our eyelashes are almost touching. “Your soul is perfect. And if it’s even possible I love you more for what you’ve done. I love you for––”
“Please stop,” I choke out. Tears spill out of my eyes in a torrent, all of them racing to be the first to spill over my chin.
Aiden eases back, unbridled heartache in his eyes.
Pulling my hand from his, I wipe the tears away, but not faster than they are replaced by new ones. “You have to go––or otherwise Trey’s going to be even angrier with you. The longer you stay here the––”
“I don’t care, Roya,” Aiden says, wiping a tear off the side of my chin with his thumb and resting it against my jaw.
I pull back, angling my face so he’s no longer touching me. “I do,” I say, unable to look at the expression of disappointment I know he’s wearing right now. “I care what happens to you.”
“Then stop pulling away from me,” he says in a half whisper.
“No.” I lie back, pressing the side of my face into the pillow and staring as far away from Aiden as I can manage. “Trey could walk back in here at any minute. And he probably will if you don’t leave right now.”
“And he’d see me comforting the girl I––”
“And he’d have another reason to fire you,” I say, revolving my gaze to Aiden’s.
“Please stop worrying so much about me.”
“Fine, then leave so you stop giving me more to worry about.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight