by Melissa Faye
Harrison breathed out slowly. I shivered, and he rubbed my arms to try to help me stay warm.
“I don’t think you’ve forgotten them. I think you probably think about them a lot. The part that I don’t understand is why you don’t talk about them more with us.”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t sure why I never talked about this with them either. I was ashamed that I wasn’t taking action. I was ashamed that my life had gone on for nine years, and I never questioned their deaths. I was worried that I’d never be able to find them. But most of all, not doing anything felt best. It was like they were in a display case, carefully shelved away in this future time where I could find them once I was ready. It was safer not to reach out for them yet.
“I don’t know why I don’t talk about them. I guess I don’t know what I would say. I miss them a lot, and the way I miss them changed since I found out they’re alive. I even saw Jasper take them. How will I figure out why Jasper did that? What does he have against them or against me? Why hasn’t he come for me yet if I’m his target?”
I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes and hastily wiped them away.
“June.” Harrison squeezed me tightly again. “I’m sorry. I’ve been obsessed with my name being on that list. I could be this traveler’s next target. But you’re a target, too. You handle it a lot better than I do.”
I leaned backwards out of Harrison’s arm.
“It’s totally different!” I grabbed Harrison’s shoulder. I wanted him to understand this point very clearly. “You’re allowed to flip out over this succubus. I’ll keep you safe, I swear, but it’s reasonable that you’re afraid for your life. My fear is much more ambiguous. Like someone is coming for me, but I don’t know when. Tomorrow, or in a month, or in ten years. Maybe my parents will escape from Jasper and get back here before I even have to face the guy! But meanwhile we have Teddy to worry about, and you, and everyone else.”
Harrison stood up and helped me to my feet. We brushed dirt and leaves off ourselves before heading back to my grandparents’ house.
“I’d rather neither of us were targets for deranged travelers. Is that an option?”
I laughed. It was my preference, too.
Chapter 8
Ridge arrived early Thanksgiving morning with flowers and a homemade pie. Ma and Pops loved Ridge. He was always around when I lived with them, and though they didn’t know why I was friends with Ridge, I think they always appreciated it. I supposed that when a girl doesn’t have parents, the more stand-ins she has, the better.
Ridge pulled me aside soon after he arrived.
“I know I’ve been giving you grief about your friend and your professor. But I’m going to try to trust you. And the work they both did to save that friend of yours - we couldn’t have done that without their help. So I’m glad. I’m still going to play devil’s advocate, but for right now, I’m glad.”
Ridge reached out to formally shake my hand, but I pulled him into a hug. His trust meant more to me than I realized.
“You’re not as scary as you think you are,” I whispered.
“Oh, I know you’re not scared of me one bit. It’d be nice if you’d let Harrison fear me a little while longer, though.”
I smirked. I went to the kitchen to put away some of the extra baking supplies Ridge bought, but Ma immediately sent me to the den to entertain Pops. That was the easiest job there was, and everyone preferred that I didn’t cook. Pops and I watched football games. Harrison joined us once in a while to check in, but Ma and Ridge used him in the kitchen as much as they could.
“Junebug?”
It was a commercial, and Pops suddenly addressed me.
“What is it, Pops?”
He lowered the footrest on his armchair and turned towards me.
“I know you know about...the stuff going on with me. And I don’t want you to worry about it, alright?”
“Alright, Pops.”
The room resounded with Pops’ distinct laughter, and I couldn’t help grinning at the familiar sound. I was so focused on what was wrong with Pops that I kept forgetting all the parts of him that were still there.
“Yeah, that’s what you said when you were younger. I’d tell you to do something, and you’d say, ‘alright, Pops,’ as if you were going to follow my instructions. Then you’d go off and do who knows what. I doubt you’re going to follow them right now, either.”
“Probably not.”
Pops grumbled to himself, but I caught a shadow of a grin upon his face.
Ridge, Ma, and Harrison cooked way too much food. Ma claimed it was because Harrison was so tall and had to eat more. Harrison’s eyes twinkled with a hint of laughter, but he didn’t disagree.
We were halfway through the main course when my phone lit up. A text from Honey. She was home with her family in Atlanta, and I couldn’t imagine why she’d be texting me. I snuck the phone out of my pocket.
CALL ME ASAP 911
I excused myself and snuck into my bedroom to call.
“What’s going on, Honey?”
“It’s Teddy!”
My heart skipped a beat.
“We exchanged numbers, and I’ve been expecting to hear from him. I haven’t heard anything since we spoke. I thought, ok, this boy doesn’t want a freshman girl crushing on him. But I checked online, and he hasn’t posted on any of his usual sites since before he left. Then I...I did more digging.”
Apprehension spread through my body, and I tensed up.
“What kind of digging?”
“I - I called his parents’ house. I thought, this is what June would do. They’re calling the cops. No one has heard from him in a few days. June, what do we do now? I thought we fixed everything. Is he gonna....”
My pulse raced. Harrison snuck into my bedroom, closing the door softly behind him. I grabbed his hand for support.
“Maybe, Honey. I don’t know. This is really bad.”
“But we gave him the antidote, right?”
“The person who’s after him...might not need a tracker. Or might not need whatever else they injected him with.”
Harrison knelt on the ground in front of me. All the excitement and cheer from the day washed off his face.
“Teddy?” he mouthed. I nodded. His face turned white.
“Honey, I’m going to try to find him. Maybe we can still stop them from -”
“June, you have to be careful! Do you know how to find him? Will you call the cops?”
“Maybe. I’ll text you later.” I hung up.
I pulled out RIdge’s Map and one of our extra samples of Teddy’s hair. Teddy was currently in a building on the outskirts of East Harlem. I showed Harrison.
“We have to go. Now.”
Harrison bobbed his head up and down. I felt him squeeze my knee so hard that his knuckles turned white.
I stormed out of my bedroom and into the dining room.
“Ma, Pops, Ridge, I’m so sorry. Harrison and I have to leave.”
Ma stared at me, her face dark.
“I don’t see why you’d have to leave in the middle of dinner, June.”
I could tell she was angry when she didn’t call me Junebug.
“I’m sorry, Ma! It’s one of our friends.” Harrison looked nodded pointedly to Ridge. “He’s in trouble, and we have to go find him.”
“What are you talking about? What friend? Why do you have to get involved?” Ma sputtered.
I tugged on Harrison’s shoulder.
“We’re leaving now, Ma. Thank you for this incredible dinner. We’ll be back as soon as we can, ok?”
I sprinted out of the room, Harrison at my heels, and overheard Ridge trying to calm Ma down. He knew what was going on. This wasn’t even the first time he was put in the position of convincing my grandmother to let me go.
Harrison tossed me my jacket, and we raced towards the subway.
Chapter 9
I GAVE HARRISON RIDGE’S Map, and he obsessively checked it every ten seconds as we r
aced towards Teddy’s location. He was alive. So far.
The traveler had Teddy in a large abandoned school building surrounded by a tall fence. Harrison pulled me away before I could rattle the chain links, and instead pointed me to a corner of the lot where the fences were misaligned. We headed over and snuck inside.
“What’s the plan, Wires?” Harrison kept his voice low and crept behind me. My Some Gun was already in my hands.
“We stop this. Right now.”
“How?”
“Improvise. The goals are first, to save Teddy, and second, get the traveler out of here. Hopefully that means they get sent home. But if it means they’re killed in the meantime, fine. Better them than Teddy.”
“You don’t mean that, June,” Harrison muttered.
No. I definitely do mean that.
There were two main entrances to the school, but we snuck along the outside of the building to find a more discrete entrance. Ridge’s Map showed us exactly where Teddy was. He was towards the east side of the building, and we entered on the south side.
No matter how we walked, our footsteps echoed through the hallway and squeaked along the tiled floors. The empty classrooms made me feel like we were in a horror movie. Some of the rooms had a random assortment of desks inside. One room featured a single student desk and a lone chalkboard. My nose filled with the scents of a schoolhouse combined with an old factory. Chalk, pencil shavings, dust, linoleum, and metal.
I wanted to run full tilt towards Teddy’s location, but had to exercise restraint. I led the way with the Some Gun, but I gave Harrison the prototype Gravity Boots. We only had one weapon, but Harrison could throw the small disks, probably more accurately than I could, at a traveler or accomplice to stop them in their tracks.
We turned a corner and backed away immediately at the sight of an armed man. He was dressed similarly to the other accomplice we found; he wore a factory uniform and looked to be middle aged. He sighed as he paced back and forth in front of a door.
I checked Ridge’s Map one more time. That had to be the door behind which Teddy was being held.
“Stun him!” Harrison hissed. “There’s only one guy. This succubus sure is arrogant.”
“It’ll be too loud. I have to use the Cage of Light.”
The Cage of Light function on the Some Gun was exactly what it sounded like. If I aimed well, and I usually did, it encased a person or object in a cage made of beams of light. No one had escaped it yet without my help.
Harrison nodded and waved me forward.
I slowly poked my head around the corner. The guard was in his own world, as if he knew no one would be coming. It was a safe assumption, since no one caught the traveler in action after four separate murders. I moved slowly, careful to avoid drawing any attention my way. With a adjustment to my aim, I pulled the trigger.
The guard’s yell was almost immediately stifled by the noise dampening effect of the Cage of Light. The yell was like a gurgle before it disappeared completely. Harrison peeked around the corner to see what was going on, and nodded approvingly. I waved him forward.
Harrison kept checking Ridge’s Map. Teddy was still alive. Unfortunately, the map told us nothing about Teddy’s vital signs. He could be near death by now. Who could tell how long the second injection - which I was starting to understand was more like a blood draw - would take.
We walked in slow motion towards the door. We were fifteen feet away, then ten, then five. I made a mental note. I needed technology that could see through doors so I wouldn’t have to expose my head looking through a glass window. I raised my eyebrows towards Harrison and gestured to the Gravity Boots. He held them up.
“Ready!” he mouthed.
I held up a hand to make sure Harrison didn’t move until I was ready. I slowly lifted my head so I could see into the room.
Teddy was there, and he wasn’t alone. He was accompanied by the traveler. I couldn’t see her face, but she was a tall, blond woman wearing a long trenchcoat. It was hard to see with her back to me, but she appeared to be holding something up to Teddy’s neck.
Teddy was laid out on a stretcher with his arms, chest, forehead, and legs held down by straps. His eyes opened and shut groggily, but he said nothing. He watched with interest as the woman took her next step. She pushed the device towards Teddy and with a jerk of her arm, twisted it towards him. Teddy barely reacted. He lay still, looking at the woman, at the room, and finally at the door, where he saw me.
As soon as I saw the woman’s head start to turn, I lunged through the door. I held the Stun Gun in front of me and screamed at the woman.
“Stop right there!”
The woman turned towards me and I could finally see her face. It changed as I looked at it. She had scar tissue on her left cheek and her left hand, and as I watched, it disappeared. Her face smoothed out, erasing any imperfections and any signs of aging. It happened almost instantly. I barely had time to raise my Some Gun and shoot.
The woman leapt out of my way with a laugh. Harrison threw the Gravity Boots at her. They hit her in the back, but didn’t stick. Either my invention wasn’t working yet, or it didn’t work on her for some reason. She sprang into action while we approached. Teddy was almost as gray as the others had been, and she unhooked him from the stretcher and dropped him to the ground.
Harrison ran towards Teddy and called his name, slapping his face in an attempt to keep him awake. The woman laughed. I ran at her with the Some Gun, and she dove out of the way again. Everything was a jumble. Teddy lay at Harrison’s feet, and Harrison screamed his name louder. My attention was torn between Teddy and the woman.
Every time I looked at the traveler, she appeared to be younger. Her scars were gone now. I tried to stun her again, and she rolled to the side. She was doing something to prepare the stretcher, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I raised the Some Gun one more time to try to Stun her, and before I had my arms outstretched, something struck me hard across my whole body as if I’d run into a brick wall. I staggered backwards on my feet and collapsed onto my back.
I thought I heard her say one jumbled sentence.
“Ha-Harrison! Is that you?”
It was the last and only thing I heard the woman say before I blacked out.
I woke a moment or two later. Teddy was in the same position on the floor, but now Harrison was slapping my face. I shoved his hand away.
“Teddy?”
Harrison shook his head. My face welled up with tears, but I took a deep breath and pushed those feelings aside for the moment.
I strained to sit up. While it felt like I ran into a brick wall, there were no scratches or bruises anywhere on my body. I pushed the pain away, too, and stumbled over to Teddy.
His face was pale. His skin clung to his skeleton as if all of Teddy had been drained away. His hair was a bright white.
“Where did she go?” I hissed.
“She went out the back.” Harrison pointed to another door in the room. “I was still checking on Teddy before she left, and then you ran into something.”
“She said your name, Harrison. Didn’t she?”
Harrison squinted.
“I don’t know why she would have said my name. Maybe you were hearing things?”
Maybe I was hearing things, but maybe not. Harrison wasn’t acting like himself. His face was pale, and he was visibly shaking.
I called the police and gave them the address. Then I made Harrison help me scrub the room as best we could. The woman’s stretcher had disappeared somehow, and there were no other clues that she or the stretcher existed. Mine and Harrison’s DNA could be all over, so we scrubbed the floor down with a mop from a nearby classroom then did a final inspection of the floor for stray hairs.
A mop doesn’t scrub away DNA.
We heard sirens coming closer. Not much time left.
I looked back at Teddy. It was an awful, disgusting way to go. If I had done my job, that traveler would be sent back to her Present by now. But I wasn�
��t fast enough, and now our friend was dead. I wanted to throw up, but the strange, logical side of my mind told me that it would only leave more evidence linking me to the scene.
With one last look at Teddy and with the sirens echoing even louder now, Harrison and I hurried out of the room. The guard stood in the hall, stuck inside the Cage of Light. In my rage, I considered leaving him there to starve. But if he was like the other man, he was only an accomplice. His life was in danger as much as any of the students on our list. Harrison and I tucked ourselves around the corner, and I flipped off the Cage. We sprinted out the doors, using our coat sleeves to touch everything so there wouldn’t be fingerprints.
Or at least, there wouldn’t be more fingerprints than we already left.
We ran as fast as we could in the opposite direction of the sirens. We were several blocks away before I stopped. I realized my face was covered in tears. Harrison’s was, too. He collapsed onto the middle of the empty road, clutching his head. I knelt next to him and squeezed him tightly with my arms. He pulled me closer and I cried for a long time. Our friend wasn’t dead. He’d been murdered by a psychopath with an arsenal of technological tools I could barely understand. I should have been faster. I should have seen this coming and insisted on staying with him longer. He shouldn’t have been left alone, even after we gave him the antidote. The professor’s students weren’t even sure it worked.
Hell, we should have told him what we were doing. At least he would have had a fighting chance if he knew he was a target. I didn’t even give him that small bit of power.
Honey was frantically texting, but I ignored it. Ridge called, but I let it go to voicemail. Ridge texted Harrison, who sent a few words back. Ridge stopped calling. We sat for a long time until I finally got my breathing under control. We finally stood up and walked back to the subway, hand in hand, skirting the streets near the old school building where the police must have already found Teddy.