by Daniel Price
By the fifth day, Heath cautiously began to mingle, though the conversations were limited to topics of his choosing. With Zack, the subject was always Josh Trillinger, a pinch of salt in a suppurating wound. With David, it was his wristwatch. Heath had become fascinated with the antique silver timepiece, the last surviving remnant of David’s old life. “Where did you buy it?” “How often do you wind it?” “Has it ever stopped working?” “Can I have it when you die?”
With Amanda, Heath only wanted to talk about the power they shared. He was curious to know if she ever killed anyone with her tempis (“No.”), or hurt someone accidentally (“Well . . .”).
“I’ve never hurt anyone,” Heath boasted. He’d found Amanda in the kitchen and watched her closely as she cut up an onion with a self-made knife. “My wolves do what I say, except for Rose.”
Amanda looked at him strangely. “Rose?”
“Rose Tyler,” he said. “She’s the meanest one in the pack and she doesn’t always listen to me. She’s mad because she wants to kill people and I don’t let her.”
Amanda’s tempic blade rippled with distress. “You have to watch her, Heath.”
“I try. But she has her own mind. There’s only so much I can do.”
He peeked into the pot and scowled at the bubbling sauce. “That smells like puke.”
Heath continued to keep his distance from the rest of the group, despite their numerous attempts to be friendly. Whenever Theo and Mia tried to engage him, he simply glanced at them with a skittish side-eye, as if they were ghosts or figments of his imagination.
“Don’t take it personally,” Jonathan told Mia. “Heath has a weird mental filing system. He’s just figuring out where to put you.”
It was no mystery how Heath had filed Peter. The man was a Gotham, a rather loud one at that. Amanda could feel Heath’s tempic energies spike whenever Peter barged into a room, bellowed with laughter, or invaded Heath’s personal space. She feared the day would come when Peter pinched the boy’s last nerve and got a formal introduction to Rose Tyler.
As for Hannah, everyone could see that Heath didn’t like her, and her servile attempts to please him only made it worse. She followed him around like an anxious new stepmother, offering him every amenity under the sun. She prepared meals to his exact specifications, only to have them pushed away over a smell or color issue. She sewed him a beautiful replica of his football jersey, only to have it languish at the bottom of his dresser. He shrank from her touch. He scowled at her questions. He bristled at the cloying voice she used around him, as if she’d just brought him home from a puppy farm.
On Heath’s seventh night with the Silvers, he finally exploded. He threw his dinner plate at the wall, kicked over his chair, and then made a screaming dash for the front door.
Jonathan stumbled after him, but the kid was too damn quick. “Heath, no!”
Hannah jumped into blueshift and passed Heath in the foyer. By the time he registered the hot breeze at his side, she was blocking the door with her body.
“What’s your problem with me?” she asked him.
Heath doubled back to the kitchen door, only to find Hannah blocking that too.
“I’ve been nothing but nice to you.”
Howling, Heath ran upstairs to his attic refuge, and barricaded the door with a dresser.
Hannah watched him from the edge of Jonathan’s mattress, her legs crossed, her lips curled in a frown.
“I can do this all night.”
Heath spun around, bug-eyed. “Leave me alone!”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need you doing that!”
“Doing what? The cooking? The sewing?”
“Pretending to like me!”
Hannah blinked at him, mystified. She’d lived with David so long, she forgot how insecure some teenage boys could be.
“Heath, why would I pretend to like you? What reason could I possibly have?”
Flustered, he began tidying up the bedroom. He hung Jonathan’s guitar on a wall hook, then gathered the handwritten song sheets he’d been working on, night and day, for the last eight months. With Jonathan’s help, he’d restored sixty-five classic rock songs from memory, and he was just getting started. Heath refused to let the best parts of his world die in some freak cosmic accident. Note by note, lyric by lyric, he would bring them all back.
Hannah’s face softened as she watched him scurry around. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been trying too hard. I go a little crazy sometimes when I like someone and they don’t like me back.”
“Why?”
“Because it hurts.”
“No. I mean, why do you like me?”
“Oh.” She needed a good ten seconds before she could formulate an answer. “Because you remind me of someone.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Heath turned around and eyed her skeptically.
“What?” Hannah asked. “You think we don’t have anything in common? Music’s everything to us. And we didn’t just stumble onto it like Jonathan did. There was someone in our lives who passed that love onto us. For me, it was my mother. Who was it for you?”
Her stomach did a cartwheel as she saw Heath’s dismay. The last thing she needed was a faceful of wolves.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “But I see it in you. I recognize it and it makes me . . . I don’t know. Ever since I met you, I’ve had this overwhelming urge to take care of you.”
Heath frowned at the floor. “You want to mother me.”
“I want to sister you,” she corrected. “And if you knew me, you’d know how rare that is.”
Hannah looked down at her hands and let out a bleak laugh. “I’ve never been a big sister to anyone.”
Over the next few days, she noticed a marked change in Heath’s behavior. He didn’t grit his teeth when she talked to him. He didn’t complain about the meals she cooked. He even managed to find his way into the football jersey she’d made for him. The royal blue fabric practically glistened against his skin.
On the nineteenth of April, a full two weeks after Heath’s arrival, Hannah stepped out of her bathroom to find him sitting on her bed. She tightened her towel.
“Uh, sweetie, you should probably knock before you . . .”
She stopped when she noticed the scissors in his hand. They hung loosely between his fingers, the loops pointed awkwardly at Hannah.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s with the, uh . . .”
Now she could see the pleading look in his eyes, the frustrated way he tugged at his curls.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened in revelation. “Oh!”
An hour later, Hannah escorted Heath to the edge of the living room, where five of their housemates had gathered to watch a movie. One by one, they turned away from the lumivision and marveled at Heath’s transformation. His unruly afro had been trimmed into a short and tidy wave cut. The style made him look five years older, and stunningly handsome.
Jonathan’s mouth fell open. “Holy crap. Who is that?”
“You look good,” Mia said.
Heath acknowledged her with a twitchy half grin before losing himself in the movie. He sat on the carpet and watched with rapt attention.
Jonathan made room for Hannah on the sofa. He leaned in close for a whisper. “What did you do, drug him?”
“He came to me,” she whispered back.
“Well, you’ve done it this time, sister. He’s both of ours now.”
Soon Peter and Amanda joined the others in the living room. As the movie progressed to the second act, Theo looked around in the light of the lumivision and studied the faces around him—everyone on this world he cared about. Thankfully, the two new members of the group had a clean and stable future here, at least as far as he could see. Jonathan wasn’t dropping out of
their lives anytime soon, and Heath had become an all-but-permanent fixture in Theo’s visions.
But there was discord in the Silvers’ strings, a creeping fog around the future of Theo’s closest friends. He’d never seen anything like it before, and nothing he did could penetrate the mist. All he could feel was an impending sense of loss and bereavement. All he could hear was the sound of Amanda’s screams.
NINE
Gingold woke up at sunrise, dazed and disturbed. The night had brought such vivid dreams of Palestine that his brain needed a moment to catch up to the present. He wasn’t slitting throats in Qalqilya anymore. He was back in the States on a cat-and-mouse mission, chasing a new breed of criminal who redefined the term “foreign threat.”
He peeled the battery chargers from his lenses, scanned the sleeping body next to him, then staggered naked across the bedroom carpet. The Atherton Citadel was one of Manhattan’s plushest hotels: a fifty-story obelisk of goldsteel and mirrorglass. Gingold’s top-floor suite was so ridiculously posh that he couldn’t help but feel ambivalent about it. After fourteen years of sleeping in hovels, he was certainly entitled to some luxury at the taxpayers’ dime. But then he knew that comfort had a way of dulling the senses. The domestic Integrity agents were the softest bunch of sad sacks he’d ever seen.
By the time he finished relieving himself, his mind was awake and focused on his targets. Zack Trillinger and Hannah Given had recently caused trouble at a Greenwich Village tavern, despite the fact that Integrity had their corpses. That was quite a trick. More impressive, they’d both managed to elude the agency’s ghost drills. Zack’s spectral trail ended in a haze of solic static while Hannah seemingly dissolved into the dark waters of the Hudson.
Gingold only had one last hope of finding them, a Hail Mary plan that would eat up his entire day. He took another look at his sleeping companion, then crouched at the side of the bed.
“Hey.” He poked the man’s shoulder, then gave it a shake. “Hey.”
His guest came awake with fluttering blinks. Kevin Mando was a lithe and sprightly blond, a drummer in a band called the Quadrants. Though he’d already shared what little he knew about Jonathan Christie (“He was just a hired sub, man. He said his name was Trevor.”), Gingold kept coming back to him with questions—again and again, until Kevin finally called him out. Just ask me back to your place, man.
Kevin turned over in bed with a drowsy smile. He stroked Gingold’s jaw. “Hey yourself, shade.”
“No. None of that. I need to work in the other room. You don’t have to leave but you can’t bother me. I need absolute concentration. You hear me?”
His severity did nothing to dull Kevin’s cheer. There were the rare, fleeting souls in Gingold’s life who weren’t intimidated by his scars and lenses, his steel-wool abrasiveness. Gingold found himself hopelessly drawn to those people, even as they got on his last nerve.
“I’m serious.”
“Seen and heard,” Kevin teased. “I’m just quilling up a second deal.”
“No second deals. You either leave—”
“I’ll leave in twenty minutes. And I won’t cloud you till you call me, when and if. But . . .”
Gingold raised an eyebrow. “But?”
Kevin ran a hand down Gingold’s neck, fingering the four-inch knife scar he’d earned while undermining British interests in Syria.
“It ain’t the time, shade. It’s all about the smiles.”
Twenty minutes and one shower later, Gingold plopped himself down in an easy chair, then activated his laptop image thrower. The lumivision came to life with black-and-white satellite footage, an infrared view of Hudson Pier 7 on the night of Hannah’s foot chase. For the hundredth time, Gingold watched Hannah and Jonathan topple backward over the rope rail, plunging deep into the water, never to be seen again.
Unless . . .
Gingold had experienced a minor epiphany last night, a revelation as to why Melissa Masaad had better luck tracking these people than most. It wasn’t because she was especially clever (though she was), she was simply willing to take her logic to strange new realms, places rational thinkers didn’t dare go. With these freaks, anything was possible. They broke the laws of nature just as easily as the laws of man.
From that perspective, it seemed perfectly reasonable to wonder if Hannah Given, a woman who could move fast without a speedsuit and leave a corpse without dying, was able to stay underwater for unusually long stretches of time. Maybe she could hold her breath all night.
Gingold sat like a statue, watching the satellite video with unblinking focus. One hour passed, then two, then nine. Once daylight broke across the lumivision screen, Gingold feared he’d wasted his time.
But then a cluster of ripples broke the water by the pier. Gingold leaned forward in his seat, slack-jawed. Hannah and Jonathan were treading the Hudson in full sunlight, back among the air-breathers.
Smiling, Gingold reached for his handphone and dialed his second-in-
command.
“Get the ghost drills and meet me at Hudson Pier 7,” he said. “We have a new trail.”
—
Hannah charged into the dining room in a hazy blur, ruffling every napkin on the table. She de-shifted in her seat and flashed a rattled look at her companions.
“Okay, Heath’s coming. I think he’s all right but—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Peter. “What happened?”
Amanda looked across the table at the two empty chairs. Jonathan and Heath were late to dinner and she had a good guess why.
“You told him.”
“We told him,” Hannah confirmed. “He knows.”
Heath was the only one in the group who had yet to learn about the second apocalypse. Jonathan and Hannah had resolved to break the news to him, carefully and at just the right time, but they kept finding excuses to put it off. The others could hardly blame them. No one wanted to play Chicken Little to the boy who cried wolves.
“How did he take it?” Mia asked Hannah.
“Hard to say. He just looked at his feet the whole time. Didn’t ask questions. He didn’t even make a sound.”
Theo processed the news with a furrowed brow. “That seems, uh . . .”
“Out of character,” David said. He looked to Hannah. “Are you sure he was listening?”
“I don’t know. I mean—”
She paused at the sound of footsteps. Everyone at the table watched Heath nervously as Jonathan escorted him into the dining room. The boy took his seat, served himself, then glanced around suspiciously at his housemates.
Jonathan cleared his throat. “Hey, Amanda, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No. Nothing bad. I just want to know what Hannah was like as a kid. She says she was a delight. As you can imagine, I’m skeptical.”
Hannah smacked his arm. “I never said that, you hair clog. I said I was an entertainer.”
“She was definitely an entertainer,” Amanda confirmed. “Always singing and dancing, and beautifully, too.”
Jonathan frowned at her. “I see. Going for the polite answer, then.”
“Afraid so.”
“Just give me a hint of the impolite answer. Come on.”
Her eyes shifted coyly from Jonathan to Hannah. “Let’s just say she had a knack for drama, too.”
Heath was the only one who didn’t chuckle. Theo peeked up from his plate and saw his thousand-yard stare. He listened, Theo thought. He heard every word.
Peter gripped Amanda’s arm and smiled at Hannah. “And while you were making drama, I imagine this one was cornering the market on precocious maturity.”
Hannah rolled her eyes. “You have no idea. She was reading Proust at age ten. She refused to sit at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. And whenever we started to argue about something, she’d throw up her
hands and say, ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Hannah.’”
The laughter rose. Zack noticed Peter’s fingers, still firmly wrapped around Amanda’s bicep, and lost his sense of humor. Christ, he thought. At least wait till the corpse is cold.
Mia smiled at Amanda. “It’s all right. When I was younger—”
“We had sisters in our group.”
All eyes turned to Heath. He combed his rice with a listless fork. “They were twins, but they didn’t look alike or act alike. Carina was nice. Deanna . . . had issues.”
Jonathan writhed uncomfortably in his chair. “Buddy, let’s not—”
“She could see things before they happened. One day she started screaming and crying until they had to sedate her. I went to see her in the infirmary and I asked her what she saw in the future that made her so upset. She just cried and said, ‘Nothing.’”
His dreary gaze landed on Theo. “Now I know what she meant.”
No one spoke for a full minute. Heath slouched in his seat and twisted his Pelletier bracelet, the very last one in the house. Zack had offered on numerous occasions to remove the damn thing, but Heath stubbornly refused to part ways with it. It’s part of my colors now, he’d insisted.
Heath turned his attention onto Zack. “When Josh found out that Carina and Deanna were sisters, he was convinced you were still alive. He said that if siblings were getting bracelets, then you must have gotten one in San Diego. We had to talk him out of leaving us.”
Jonathan gripped his arm. “Heath—”
“He wanted to go look for you.”
Zack pushed his chair back with a loud wooden scrape. His voice trickled out in a quivering whisper. “I’m sorry.”
He hurried out of the dining room. Peter leaned toward Mia. “Sweetheart, maybe you should—”
“Yeah.”
Before she could get up, a second chair flew back. Amanda jumped to her feet and made a beeline for the basement stairs.
David shot her a grave look. “Amanda . . .”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t even start.”
Zack barely had a chance to register her footsteps before she rushed down the stairs and wrapped him in an ardent hug.