“Backyard’s good for that,” she said. “I’ll go with them.”
Meaning her friends. “Stay with them. No taking off this time.”
She nodded.
I turned to go.
Red tracked with me. “Keep you company.”
It wasn’t an offer that could be declined.
Our walk through the house was a blur. I noticed some things—my training wouldn’t allow me to shut down completely regardless of whether fear for Faith and the others threatened to take me to my knees, or whether I was about to have a dreaded conversation with Red that I’d known would come eventually if I stayed in Portland long enough, just not like this. We walked downstairs again and down the long hall past the living room, where I caught a glimpse of an overstuffed, brown leather sofa and a long, leather-wrapped coffee table around which the kids had congregated while Ben hunkered down in front of the hearth, building a fire, and through the kitchen, which smelled richly of dark roasted coffee. We passed through the laundry room, which held a huge plastic basket overflowing with dirty clothes, then out the door onto an indoor/outdoor porch.
There was a roof over our heads, a circle of painted, white wooden chairs with dark green outdoor cushions on which to sit, and an unlit, blackened woodstove in the center of the circle. The porch looked out onto a mostly fallow garden, but part of the plot held winter greens that grew strong. A windowless, wooden shed with an aluminum roof crouched in the very back of the yard. Droplets of mist covered it all. Mist hung in the air, too, as if it were suspended and time itself had stopped.
What I wouldn’t give for that to happen, even if I could have only a few minutes to clear my head, to think.
It wasn’t to be. The mist gathered on the roof of the porch and dripped from the eaves, reminding me that time moved on. It always had.
My legs trembled—maybe a little from the cold, but mostly from the avalanche of doom that had started before dawn and continued to fall. I sat in the nearest chair with a view of the garden, squeezing a whistle of air from the cushion as my weight settled.
Red shoved the chair beside mine as close as he could get it, then sat on the edge of the seat. He leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. When he glanced up again—at the yard and then at me—he reached for my hand. I let him take it and hold it in both of his. They were warm. I hadn’t realized my hands were cold.
“There’s some things I need to tell you,” he said.
Chapter 6
THE PORCH FELT COLDER, the water that dripped from the eaves striking the edge of the floor and the earth sharply, like knives. The mouth of the woodstove looked like a door to hell. The mist seemed to obscure the garden and the wooden shed in the back of the yard, closing us off from the world. There was only Red and me and whatever secret he’d harbored.
He wasn’t the one who was supposed to be hiding things from me. It was supposed to be the other way around.
He avoided my gaze, looking down at his hands and my hand sandwiched in between. His silver hair fell across his face. “I was waiting for the right time to say all this, but it never came.”
“Maybe now is the right time,” I said.
“The only time, Night.”
“Okay,” I said. “Spell it out, whatever it is.”
“You were expecting demands,” he said. “Why’d you lie to me, who are you really, what in God’s name is going on—all that?”
I nodded.
“I do have those questions, and I’m gonna need answers, but you’re not the only one who’s been holding out, and my secrets are as old as yours.”
I’d never really wondered. I mean, I’d considered why he hadn’t asked more questions when he hired me, and the level of trust in me his actions showed, but I hadn’t wanted to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. I hadn’t wanted to ruin a good thing, not when I finally felt like I had something to lose.
“I didn’t recognize you at first,” he said.
Recognize me? I narrowed my eyes at him. How could he know me when I hadn’t known him until I’d walked through the door of his gym?
He went on. “I mean, I thought you were something special because of what you said, and because of how you were with the kids who came into the gym, and then when I met Faith, I was impressed with how you were with her. You were so closed-mouthed about your past. I could respect that. And then about two weeks after you started, when you were extra tired, you laid down on the floor in my office to catch some shut-eye. Just a nap.”
I’d only done that the once. I’d been up all night with Faith. She’d had a hard time adjusting, and she felt sick. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, so we’d just snuggled on the sofa and watched movies until just before dawn. The next day, she hung out at the gym with me in the morning. She’d met Jess, made a friend. They’d gone to get coffee and I’d sacked out for a twenty-minute power nap.
“What about it?” I asked.
“The way you slept, the way you looked, reminded me of someone I’d known a long time ago. I did some digging.”
“There’s nothing to dig into,” I said. I’d been very careful in constructing my identity. I had no past to discover, as far as the rest of the world was concerned. No one would be able to find anything on me that I didn’t want found, and I’d never reveal a thing. At least, that’d been the case until today.
“I noticed,” he said. “But my research isn’t—wasn’t—confined to normal channels.”
Normal channels. Mundane, everyday channels. “Magic.”
He nodded.
“You see the good in people when others don’t,” I said.
“Reading my halo?”
I blinked at him.
“Thought so.”
“How’d you know?” Knowing the flavor of other people’s magic wasn’t something that most people had the aptitude for.
“I see into people, Night. More than the good. Also the bad, the ugly, and the unspeakable. Usually, my view is pretty surface-level, but I can go deeper if I want or need to. I can catch a glimpse of someone’s soul. I’d seen yours before.”
The intimacy of what he said, and the plain way he said it, made me want to pull my hand from his. I tugged, but he refused to let go.
“We’re from the same place,” he said.
A place I never wanted to go again. A city I still saw in my nightmares. “Houston.”
“You spent two nights and a day at my house.”
I shook my head. “I’d remember that. I’d remember you.”
“You were twelve,” he said.
I’d left the city at that age. The Order had taken me.
“Your house was burning,” he said. “I hid you in my closet that night and most of the next. I kept you safe.”
I sucked in a breath.
Just a few hours ago, Addie had brought up that night. I’d told her I wasn’t that girl any longer. I’d meant it.
But in this moment, it wasn’t quite true. If I closed my eyes, I could feel the heat on my skin and smell the stink of my own singed hair, the ends brittle and broken off in the dark confines of a long, narrow place—a closet—occupied by myself and two others.
A boy with dark red hair that stuck up where he’d slept on it—he was one. He spoke with a subtle Southern drawl and wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a hastily donned pair of jeans creased at the seams from ironing. He wore scuffed white sneakers without socks. There’d been no time for socks. There’d been no time for anything except doing.
He’d grabbed me around the waist as I slinked through his backyard, clapping a hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t call out—not that I’d have so much as whimpered. I didn’t have it in me. I wanted only to disappear. I had nothing left inside—no feeling, no fight. If he’d tried to hurt me, I don’t know whether I’d have had it in me to struggle against him. He was strong, his grip like iron. I was small and wiry and weak. He hadn’t hurt me.
His halo was colored with green and earth-br
own. Solid. Steady. Safe.
He spoke low in my ear, the minty scent of toothpaste on his breath, about cops and the fire department on the way, and I believed him because I could hear the sirens. He said bad people were in the neighborhood. That they’d search for me. If I didn’t hide, maybe they’d find me. I believed that, too, because it rang true in the depths of my bones, so I went inside with him.
He settled me in the dark, carpeted closet in his room with a pillow and a sheet and a guard—a blond Lab so old that her muzzle had gone completely gray. He said her name was Dorothy, like from The Wizard of Oz. I wrapped my arms around her and breathed in the heady perfume of grass and dirt and oatmeal shampoo. Dorothy let me do that. She rested her head on my shoulder.
The clothes hanging on the overhead rack made the space seem smaller, more secure. Shoes had been pushed into the far corner, but the sweaty-feet smell wafted along the floor and clung to the carpet.
After a while—after the law and the firefighters arrived, sirens cut off, red-and-blue lights still flashing—they shone in through the boy’s bedroom window and through the crack in the center of the closet’s double doors—sleep swallowed me whole. I didn’t wake up when Red crawled into the closet and closed the door behind him, or when the fire was finally snuffed out, or when the sun poked its head over the horizon. I slept through the whole day.
I know this only because Red told me when I finally did wake. He said nothing about the bad people, and I was afraid to ask.
He brought me some leftovers from dinner that he said was macaroni and cheese, but it tasted like ashes in my mouth. My hair stuck to my face, damp with sweat, and reeked of smoke, as did my pink T-shirt and soot-stained white shorts. I sat up in the closet and pushed myself back against the wall, drawing my knees in close.
Red asked questions. I tried to answer them, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. The emptiness that I’d felt before I’d fallen asleep had gone. In its place, I felt like a hollowed-out stone into which every awful feeling in the whole world poured itself like poisoned water. Rage and terror and grief. My eyes filled with water, but no tears fell.
Red said I should sleep some more. He said he knew what I had done and he didn’t blame me. He said that in the morning, we would figure out what to do.
I think he meant to stay up all night, watching over me, but eventually his eyes fluttered closed. Maybe he’d stayed up all the night before, and two nights wide awake was too many.
He knew what I had done and he didn’t blame me.
How could he know when I didn’t remember what had happened? I took his words in and imagined every possibility, zeroing in on the only possible conclusion: I’d killed my parents.
I shoved the thought away as though it burned me, like the fire had burned them.
I slipped out of the closet and out the bedroom window, scraping my leg on the sill. I had no idea where to go, just that I couldn’t stay. I took one last look at my house next door, at the blackened beams and shattered glass, imagining all the memories inside that had burned up. The first good feeling pierced my heart: gratitude.
The smell, though—the horrible stench the flames had left behind—rushed into my nose and mouth. My stomach rolled over. I leaned forward, hands on my knees, and threw up what remained of the macaroni and cheese.
After that, I forced myself to take shallow breaths. I made myself look at Red’s house, at the yard with a drainage ditch at the curb and scraggly grass, at an old, decrepit oak tree with an aching back bent over on the lawn. The little frame house had been painted bright blue with white once upon a time, but now the color had faded to barely there. A clay garden gnome lay on its side on the postage-stamp porch.
I’d seen Red a lot of times over the years, mostly by himself. His mother worked three jobs. I never saw her. Red worked after school, stocking grocery shelves. If he had a father, I’d never seen him. If Red’s mother had come home while he’d been hiding me, I hadn’t heard her. The thoughts jumbled in my head, not making sense.
For one crystal clear beat, though, I wondered whether Red really had anybody. Whether he was all alone.
The moment passed. The air was still and heavy and humid. It clung to my skin. I walked along the curb, walking in the opposite direction of the burnt husk that had been my house, focusing on keeping to the shadows so that no one would see me—the shadows of the houses, of the live oaks and pines in the yards, the shadows of the cars parked on the sides of the road. I stayed out of the puddled light of the street lamps.
I made it five blocks before the long, black car pulled up in front of me and the woman got out. She wore all black, like a mourner—even her hair. She smelled like ice and her halo was the color of liquid silver, her voice rhythmic like the song of cicadas. She said she’d come to help me. She said she knew I had magic, and that was all right with her.
She didn’t feel safe like the boy had. She felt dangerous, but she seemed to be on my side. And I had nowhere else to go and no one to go to, and the bad people were still out there somewhere, so I went with her. The air conditioning in the car chilled the skin on my arms to gooseflesh. The leather seat stuck to the backs of my legs.
She’d taken me to the Order. She—
I breathed out a ragged breath.
The misty chill of Portland was a far cry from that sticky summer night in Texas. The boy who’d helped me had become the man who sat beside me now, though the halo looked and felt exactly the same. How could I not have recognized it the first time I walked into the gym? How could I not have recognized Red?
It’d been so long. A lifetime ago.
My voice shook as I started to speak, steadying as the words flowed. “What are the odds, Red? What are the odds that you and I would end up in the same place at the same time again?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “Be nice to think it’s a coincidence, but I don’t believe in those.”
“No one with magic believes in those.”
“Like I said, I was planning to tell you as soon as I figured out the right time and the right way. I thought you’d be angry.”
“Maybe I should be, but I have bigger, badder things to be pissed about right now, and you have my back.”
He glanced away, scanning the garden. “I didn’t follow you or track you down or anything like that. You disappeared from my life when you were twelve, and I had no way to find you. So if this isn’t a coincidence, what’s brought us back together?”
“Could be all the current threats,” I said. “Or any single one of them.”
“Could also be something else altogether.”
“No way to know,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”
He nodded. “So how much do you remember about that night?”
“Too much,” I said, “and not enough. I blocked out most of it—everything that happened that night inside my house, with my parents. I remember being asleep, but not deeply. I hadn’t been able to relax enough to sleep properly in a couple of weeks. I remember the sound of footsteps coming down the hall toward my room, and the creaking of the floorboards. That’s it.”
“Maybe that’s a blessing.”
I shook my head. “Just because I don’t remember consciously doesn’t mean that the memories aren’t still in here somewhere. I need to know what really happened.”
Red looked at me. “Why?”
“It haunts me. I have nightmares.”
“What if knowing makes things worse?” he asked.
“Anything would be better than wondering.”
“No,” he said.
“I have a very good imagination and a lot of experience with a lot of very bad things, Red.”
“So you keep saying.”
I shifted in my seat, angling my body toward his. “What did you see in me that night?”
He squeezed my hand and mulled the question, taking his time with an answer. “It’s not what I saw in you that night that mattered, it was what I saw before when I looked into you.
The magic, sure—that was obvious. It was the way you were reluctant to use it because you were afraid of hurting anyone with it. There was a sweetness inside of you, an innocence, a sense of wonder. You had a good heart, Rose.”
Rose. Rosa Guadalupe Jimenez Ruiz. The name my parents had given me the morning I was born.
“No one’s called me that in a very long time.”
“It doesn’t fit anymore,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t.” I breathed the cold air deep into my lungs. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Because it wasn’t important,” he said.
“It’s important to me.”
He swallowed hard. “The night your parents died, when I looked into you, I saw nothing at all. It was as if you—whoever you’d been before—were just gone. It was as if you’d become a blank slate. Then there was one small, hopeful thing—a barely-there spark that lit inside of you as the sun came up.”
“Any idea what the spark was?”
“Maybe a will to live? Maybe something inside of you waking up for the first time,” he said.
I didn’t know what to think, or what to feel. The emptiness made sense, and the spark. Red’s words flashed me back to this morning’s talk with Addie, and what she said about the god known only as the Awakened, the god that dwelled inside a person of magical power, but remained dormant until one day it would come to life.
If it dwelled inside of me, if it had been the spark in me all those years ago, surely I would know by now.
“Red?”
He met my gaze.
“What do you see now?”
“It’s part of why I didn’t recognize you. It’s different—not like either of the times I looked before.” The corners of his mouth curved into a soft smile. “You’re all sharp, steel edges, and the sweetness is nothing but a memory.”
That hurt to hear, although it rang true deep. I curled my free hand into a loose fist, rubbing my knuckles over my heart.
“Sweetness is overrated,” Red said. “You’re different now because you’re older, and you’ve been through a crucible—at least one. What you have now is kindness. That’s valuable. That’s everything.”
Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1) Page 8