Crimson drapes coat the walls in an alternating pattern of thick velvet fabric and bare, black walls. The floor is black, too, all but a thick band of white running down the center of the room that leads to the low platform I fell on. Inside the white band are symbols and words that have no meaning to me. I step back as I realize they continue up onto the raised platform. I still have no idea what they say, but my eyes follow the pattern to an even more incredible sight. There’s an…altar at the back of the platform. An ornately carved table of the blackest wood I’ve ever seen stands sentinel on the very center of the back wall. Here the drapes are farther apart, leaving a wide expanse of black wall. This wall isn’t bare. It’s filled with weapons.
And I’m not talking about guns. Swords, knives, things I’m not even sure what they are, all hold places of honor on the wall. They look old, too. Really old. The detailing on the handles is incredible, and some of them even have designs on the actual blades. They’re gorgeous, but very, very creepy. The book on the altar is freaking me out, too. It’s just a book, but the picture painted on the front makes both of us cringe.
A person—I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be a man or woman, or something else entirely—is standing in a pool of blood. The creature’s mouth is open, caught mid-scream with a look of pure agony on its face. At first, it looks like the blood is pouring out of the creature. When I look closer, I see that the blood droplets are running up the person’s body toward its mouth. Like it’s eating it.
My own blood seems to run and hide in my core, my fingers and toes going icy cold. The similarity certainly isn’t lost on me. Kneeling in front of the blood-eater is a young woman. She’s the most disturbing of the pair. Dark, wavy hair frames a peaceful face. Her quiet smile in the face of what is standing behind her doesn’t make sense. The knife she’s holding to her own throat makes even less sense.
“What is this place?” Ketchup asks.
“I don’t know, but it’s beyond freaky.”
He nods. “If I had any doubts before, I don’t anymore. Something is definitely wrong with Ivy. I mean, what does she do in here? Swords, weird writing all over the floor, some bloody guy on a book. What is she messed up in?”
“What is Zander messed up in?” I ask.
We’re here in her dojo from Hell, and I still have no idea what’s going on. Reluctantly, my fingers stretch toward the book. I know the blood eater must be someone like me, someone who feeds on pain and anguish, but what could this book possibly say? Does it hold whatever answers Oscar found? Is the reason behind his murder of our parents hidden within its pages? My hand shakes as I flip open the cover.
Sei stato scelto. Solo coloro che hanno dimostrato…
“I have no idea what any of this means, do you?” I ask.
Ketchup scans the passage at the front of the book and shakes his head. “I’m sure we can find out, though. Give me a minute.”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket and has a translation app open a few seconds later. “Why do you have that on your phone?” I ask despite the serendipitous usefulness of it.
“I suck at Spanish.”
“You cheat on your Spanish homework?” I’m actually kind of shocked. Ketchup has the scoundrel act down pat because of the way everyone treats him, but I know he’s a pretty straight laced guy.
“Not all the time. The instructions on our homework are always written in Spanish. How am I supposed to do it if I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do?”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t think this is Spanish.”
“No problem. This translator can do a bunch of languages. It’ll even identify the language if you type in a few words.” His thumbs start tapping away like mad. He gets the first sentence down and the app immediately comes back with an answer of Italian. Kind of surprising, since with a last name like Guerra, I didn’t figure Ivy for having Italian ancestors. As Ketchup starts typing in the passage, I wonder whether Guerra is her real last name.
“Okay, I got it,” Ketchup says. “Here, take a look.”
You have been chosen. Only those who have shown courage and strength are chosen for our most sacred of missions. The trials of your choosing have proven your worth, but you must endure one last tribulation. You must sacrifice for your beliefs one final time. The rewards for your sacrifice will be the highest possible. Blessed eternity will be yours, but not without your final contribution. Your life is the price of this honor. Open the book and begin your journey to eternal happiness, your journey to vanquish the assassin.
Chills run a marathon down my spine. “Oscar was right,” I whisper.
“Looks like it. Ivy was chosen, by someone, to kill the assassin. Whatever that means. Who exactly are the assassins, anyway?”
“It must mean Zander…and me.” I can feel Ketchup press in closer to me after hearing my words. His concern is comforting, but Ivy’s sights are set on Zander right now.
“The assassin. That doesn’t really sound like Zander, though. Sure, your brother’s not the most compassionate guy in the world, or the most interesting, but he’s not an assassin. Unless you count the teams he plays against.”
I look down at the original passage in the book. I know what the words mean now, but I feel like we’re missing something. The clue appears in the last word. The Italian word for assassin is Sicarius. I recognize the code word my parents taught us from birth and suddenly feel sick. Oscar was right. If they taught us that word, they knew about all of this. Anger builds under my skin, but I force my attention back to the words.
The translation put no significance on the word when it spit it back out, but I notice that the word in the book is capitalized. Sicarius. “It’s not just a noun,” I say. “It’s a title. Look how it’s capitalized, Ketchup, like a team or a company name.”
“Like a terrorist group, an enemy.”
“But, that doesn’t make any sense. How could there be this whole group of wackos intent on killing me and my brothers? I know there have been others in our family, but how big of a threat can we really be?”
“Van,” Ketchup says slowly as he thumbs through the book, “I don’t think this is just about you and your brothers. This is way too much for a couple of messed up kids. Look how old all of this stuff is. Centuries. There’s more of you somewhere. There has to be. And whatever crazy group Ivy is a part of, they’ve been hunting these Sicarius people for centuries all over the world. If it was just one family, they would have killed them off a long time ago.”
“More?” I feel a little lightheaded all of a sudden. Was that the lie my parents told that broke Oscar?
Knowing there are more of us, that could mean help, knowledge, a real life maybe. The tiniest shake of my head makes me sway. My hands grip the table for support as Ketchup wraps his arm around my shoulders. More people like me. I don’t know whether to be relieved or terrified. Oscar killed our parents. Zander, he…he killed Lisa. What lives will I steal?
Visions of dozens, hundreds of people dying to feed an eternal hunger assail me without stopping. But amid the waves of death and carnage, there is a bubble of hope in my mind. If there are others, maybe they can help me learn how to control my hunger. Surely my family isn’t the first ones to try and abstain. Are we?
“Van, what are we going to do? It’s getting late. School will be out soon and Ivy will be meeting Zander after his practice.”
I was already scared that Ivy was going to do something bad by helping Zander. Like every other answer I’ve gotten today, this isn’t the one I wanted to hear. “Ketchup, we have to stop her.”
“How? I have a feeling there’s a lot more to Ivy Guerra than we thought.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to stop her from killing Zander. I won’t lose another brother.”
My brain starts running at high speed. There has to be an answer somewhere. Spinning, I take in the room again. Nothing. Bare walls and velvet curtains. I drop my gaze to the writing on the floor. Reaching for Ketchup, I’m about to ask hi
m to translate the writing. His own hand gripping my arm stops me.
“Van, she isn’t going to kill Zander.”
Those words should be good news, but I can hear the dread in his voice. “What?”
“The book said, ‘your life is the price of this honor.’ It said she’d vanquish the Sicarius, but not by killing them. She’s the one who has to die, not Zander.”
“But…that doesn’t make sense. Why would she kill herself…?” The rest of my thought trails off as realization slaps me. “No, no, no. Ketchup, she’s going to make Zander kill her! He must have told her enough that she knows how to trigger his hunger so he’ll lose control. She’ll sacrifice herself to expose him.”
“Why? What would that accomplish? It’s like you said before, everyone will forget after a while. She’ll be dead and gain nothing from it.”
I growl at the holes in my knowledge. I know I’m right about this. There’s a piece of the explanation missing. I’m sure it’s in the book, but we don’t have time to translate an entire book on a phone! There has to be something else. Something in this room. My eyes fall back to the writing on the floor.
“Ketchup, tell me what that says. Hurry!”
Maybe it’s nothing, but it was important enough to turn into a work of art on the floor of Ivy’s personal suicide temple.
“Okay,” he says after a minute, “here’s what it says. One life for the destruction of many. Expose the Sicarius to seal his family’s fate.”
The air seems to grow thick around me. It slides down my throat and chokes me. Somehow, I manage to force my voice through the cloying panic. “If Ivy makes Zander kill her, these psychos will know that my family are these Sicarius things. They’ll come, and they’ll kill the rest of us, just to make sure we don’t hurt anyone else.”
“Van, that is the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard,” Ketchup says. “Why go through the trouble of having one of their own people commit suicide? I mean, it sounds like Zander has already given Ivy plenty of reason to convince her that he’s one of these Sicarius people. So why not just come and kill him and his family? Why waste the life of one of their own?”
I shake my head, confused as well. “I don’t know. This group is old. These traditions seem to go back for hundreds of years.”
“Tradition can’t really be enough to give up your life when you don’t need to,” Ketchup argues. “Maybe we could convince Ivy.”
Judging by her temple, I seriously doubt that. My mind replays the translation again. One sentence sticks out, possibly giving me the answer. “Maybe it’s the reward,” I say.
“What?”
I grab his phone and go back to the first translation. “See. It said that if she gave up her life she would be given the highest reward possible. Ketchup, I don’t think this is just some group Ivy belongs to. It’s more like her religion. I think she believes that if she forces Zander to kill her, she’ll go to some kind of martyr’s paradise and have everything she ever wanted. Isn’t that why Muslim suicide bombers do what they do? The reward of forgiveness, paradise, and dark-eyed virgins?”
“If this is her religion,” Ketchups says, “then I don’t think we should waste any time trying to change her mind.”
I nod in agreement, but am sickened at the realization that there is only one way to stop her. I thought that all I had to do to save my brother’s life was stop one twisted girl. That’s not even the half of it. An army of ancient sword wielding fanatics is about to find out my family’s darkest secret, and we’re the only ones who know. It’s me and Ketchup against a centuries-old secret society of trained killers.
I don’t know how I resisted telling Ivy everything last night. I had already decided that keeping her close was worth the consequences of revealing the truth. I didn’t know where to start, though, so I let Ivy take the lead by asking me questions. Her first question, “How was Van able to heal herself so fast after scorching her hand on the oven?” seemed to knock some common sense back into my head. My sister’s name reminded me that I wouldn’t be the only one facing the consequences if I told Ivy everything and got burned.
So I tried to answer her questions as vaguely as possible. I did admit that we can both heal quickly, and that we have trouble controlling our impulses, but I tried to play it up as some of the same craziness that landed Oscar in a mental hospital. Ivy didn’t completely believe me and I ended up giving her a very basic explanation of our hunger. She did seem to be satisfied with the answers she was able to get out of me and stopped pushing after a while.
I know the conversation isn’t over. At some point, I’ll either be forced to tell her the whole truth or walk away. I can’t stand the idea of walking away from her.
Ivy thinks she can help me. No one else has been able to, but she seemed so sure of herself. She wants to help me, which feels incredibly good. It’s probably wishful thinking on her part. If not…if she could really show me how to control my hunger, there might be a real possibility of me getting to live a semi-normal life. That’s a huge if.
Walking quickly, almost skipping, Ivy makes her way across the parking lot to me. The struggle to control my hunger begins. Watching her come toward me sends equal amounts of anxiety and pleasure through my body. She doesn’t seem to share in my nerves. Her bright smile is almost enough to chase away my dark thoughts, but not quite. The way Van flipped out when I told her about the movie keeps shoving my hope back down.
“So,” Ivy says when she approaches me, “are you ready to give this a try?”
I hesitate. “Ivy, I’m not so sure a movie is a good idea. It’s dark and close…”
“But we’ll be surrounded by other people too, and movies are always so loud. You said noise and other people help distract you.”
True. That was part of the reason my mom always kept classical music playing in our house, and why we were encouraged to try team sports rather than individual sports. But a theater might contain others that excite my hunger, and that will only make this harder. “It’s still risky. I’ll be right next to you, smelling and feeling you every second. It might be more than I can handle.”
“You’ll be fine,” she reassures me. “I told you how after the break in at our apartment I was so freaked out that my mom made me do all this meditation stuff. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. It will help.”
“Ivy…”
Giving me a stern look, Ivy says, “The only way you’re ever going to be able to stay with me is if you can get used to me, right?”
I nod.
“So we have to try something or we might as well just go our separate ways now. Is that what you want?”
“No, of course not.” I argue with her, but in truth, I will try anything she suggests. I have to find a way to be with Ivy without killing her.
Ivy slowly moves closer to me. The scent of her, the feel of her life force nudging my hunger tightens my muscles. She takes another step. An ache begins in the center of my chest. Ivy’s plan is to desensitize me to her presence. Judging by how being close to her now feels even worse than last night, I don’t have a lot of faith in her plan.
“Why don’t we start out small?” Ivy suggests.
“How small?”
She smiles. “How about, what movie do you want to see?”
Thoughts start running through my head. I looked up the local movie schedule during lunch. My decision doesn’t have as much to do with my movie preferences as it does my cynical outlook. “There’s a documentary about some underwater cave in South America playing at the theater on San Mateo. Let’s try that.”
“Spelunking?” Ivy asks incredulously.
I frown at her. “This is already going to be hard enough without violence, sex, or anything else that might set me off playing on a huge screen right in front of me.”
“Sorry,” Ivy says, “I know this isn’t about the movie. You’re choice just caught me off guard. It sounds like a perfect movie for what we’re doing. What time does it start?”
“Not fo
r a few hours. Do you want to get something to eat first?”
“That sounds good.”
Ivy steps around me as if it is completely natural for her to be getting into my truck, but she takes care not to touch me or get too close on her way. I am not nearly as confident as I follow suit. My steps are sluggish. In my head, Van’s outrage and warnings are blaring again. I have gotten practiced at ignoring such things, and I do it again now. I have to. All my focus goes into getting into the truck next to Ivy without losing control of my hunger.
Right away, I turn on the air conditioner and the radio. The semi-physical barrier of blasting wind between us mixed with voices loud enough to drown everything else out helps…somewhat. I try not to look at Ivy as she sits very still in the passenger’s seat. I shake my head against the intensity of the affect she has on me.
I really thought this would get easier.
With Ketchup, I know it has gotten more bearable to have him around. The first day we met, when I came home to find him and Van on the porch swing with their mouths inches away from each other, much to my dismay, my main intention in approaching them had been to break up the make-out session. Van was only thirteen at the time, way too young to be starting in on that type of behavior. My goal hadn’t been to ruin their relationship, but once I got within five feet of him my hunger leapt into the driver’s seat and sent me lunging for his throat.
I hadn’t even suspected I would react to him, so that made it worse. He had been a friend of Van’s so long, he felt familiar to me because of how much she talked about him. At that moment, it didn’t cross my mind that I had never officially met him. If I had remembered that, I never would have walked up so casually. Regardless, my hunger wanted him ferociously. After that initial contact, even seeing him forced me to scramble for control. I forced Van to say goodbye. She did, and I know how much it hurt her to do it. I hated myself for demanding it of her.
Wicked Hunger (Someone Wicked This Way Comes) Page 24