I had just guided Gabriel through a fissure in the wall when relief flared up inside me. Tobias was almost there. Fifteen seconds.
“We’re gonna make it! Tobias is coming!” I told him. And right then Tobias appeared out of the thinning smoke and took Isaac from Gabriel. And then we ran.
Chapter 35
“How is he today?” Gabriel asked me as soon as we opened our eyes. He had asked me the same question every morning for the past two weeks, but my answer hadn’t changed. I rolled over to look out my bay window, ready to give him the same standard answer of, ‘he’s still healing. Don’t bother him yet,’ but something snagged in my intuition.
“He’s ready for us,” I said in astonishment, sliding out of bed. Gabriel jumped to his feet and hurriedly pulled on some clothes. I was a little stunned. I hadn’t expected this to happen for a while yet. When I told Gabriel Isaac still needed to heal, I didn’t mean physically. Gemma had taken care of most of that when I teleported him back to her.
She had healed his burns and fixed his spine, all the little, fractured processes, the herniated discs, the lesion to his spinal cord that would have left him paralyzed from his belly button down in ordinary circumstances.
I referred to his mental state. He and Cara had been in charge of watching over The Mystic kids while they hid in the secret passageways. When the assault on the building began, they realized they had to evacuate. Some of them didn’t make it.
“Ready?” Gabriel asked, and I nodded.
The door to Isaac’s suite was open, and we found him sitting in a hard plastic chair, staring at the red fire painting on his living room wall.
“Isaac?” Gabriel asked, but Isaac didn’t move. I bit down on my lip nervously as Gabriel looked at me. I hadn’t told him. I had hoped he would come to the conclusion on his own, what with the condition Cara was in. I didn’t think it appropriate to explain it now, behind Isaac’s back. While he couldn’t hear me. So I just shook my head.
“Isaac?” I said, and he jumped. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” I apologized, as he turned to face us. He shook his head but didn’t say anything at first. I sat down on the couch but Gabriel, I think, was in shock.
“I’m glad I can still hear your voice,” Isaac finally said. “Even if it’s in my head.” I didn’t know what to say. I knew his hearing wasn’t coming back. He and Cara had been too close to the explosion. Even Gemma couldn’t heal it. Eleanor had tried, too, even though Tobias told her it wouldn’t work.
“You can’t hear anything?” Gabriel practically shouted at him. Okay. I should have told him. He could have prepared for this meeting better, but I thought we’d have more time. I sensed a blow up coming.
Isaac just looked at him, knowing he had asked him a question. “Dude, I can’t hear you. I can’t hear a damn thing anyone says, except her and Tobias!” He jumped up from the chair and speared it into the fire painting over and over again. “I…can’t…hear…this…” he said, each word pronounced at the same time he swung at the wall. Finally, the painting fell to the floor in ruins.
He turned and made for the TV he usually played video games on. Gabriel didn’t need intuition to know what would happen next. He intervened before Isaac could smash the screen, pushing him up against the wall.
“What’s the point?” Isaac yelled. “It’s not like I can use it anymore! I can’t hear movies or video games, I don’t even know how loud I’m yelling right now! Do you know how fucking hard it is to not even hear your own voice?”
“Stop!” Gabriel yelled back. “You can use the closed captioning or something, I don’t know, your life isn’t over, just calm…” but Isaac cut him off in a strained voice.
“I. Can’t. Hear. What. You’re. Saying.” He said, and his voice broke on the last words. He started to cry and Gabriel let go of his shoulders. I watched it all, frozen, uncertain how to react. I wasn’t going to interpret what Gabriel had said to Isaac. I knew he didn’t want to hear that he should be happy to be alive just then.
Gabriel looked to me for help. I walked to Isaac and hugged him. “It’s going to take a while,” I let both of them hear. “And none of us are all right. But we’re Mystics. This is our calling. Things won’t be the same but they will work out.” He nodded into my shoulder.
“What if I forget how to talk?” he asked, and I was glad he couldn’t see my face. I pulled it together before I backed up.
“You won’t. But even if you did, we’d figure out a way to communicate.” He nodded and looked a little less depressed. I had pacified him, for the moment.
“I’m going to go see Cara,” I said, throwing Gabriel a notepad and pen from the kitchen table. “I’ll let you guys work it out.” I kissed Gabriel and then teleported to the front porch.
Cara and Adam sat on the porch swing. He kept both arms around her while pushing the swing lightly back and forth with one foot. She stared at the siding on the house; or at least it looked like she did until she turned her head in response to Adam’s squeeze. The bandages covering the dark holes where her eyes should sit revealed that she wasn’t staring at anything anymore.
“Good morning, Cara,” I said. “Good morning, Adam.”
“Hey, Aubrie,” Adam replied.
Cara waved vaguely in front of her and I took her hand. She hadn’t said a word since we returned from the Capital, but we already had a sort of communication in effect.
“Are you feeling good today?” I asked Cara.
She squeezed my hand once.
“That’s good!” I said. “Are you in any pain?”
She squeezed my hand twice.
“Do you need anything?” I asked.
One squeeze. I held my other hand flat, palm up for her, and she wrote “D…R…I…N…K” on my skin with her index finger.
“You’re thirsty?” I confirmed, and she nodded. She liked the squeezing better b/c she thought she looked like a bobble-head with all the head nodding and shaking.
Adam slipped from behind her to get her something to drink. He wouldn’t be gone for long; he rarely left her for more than five minutes anymore. He would never forgive himself for what happened to her. I was amazed Adam remained cordial with Gabriel, who had been her personal Guardian, and left her. We were lucky Adam understood the unbreakable draw Gabriel and I had towards each other.
The elders that managed to escape the attack had originally planned on keeping Cara in London with them, but their argument didn’t hold up for more than a minute against Adam’s demand to bring her home. It would take some time before the Capital building was functional again, and she would have full protection from our whole chapter at all times at Headquarters. Besides, now that Gabriel was back in Chapter C with me, there was nobody in London to watch over an outsider who was now both deaf and blind.
Cara and Isaac had both lost their hearing as result of the explosion so close to them, but Cara had had the misfortune to encounter a Silencer who apparently found the disfigurement of an outsider amusing. I had the bad luck to witness a vision of the Silencer as he used his beastly claws to slice through her eyes. Eleanor had tried to save what was left of them, to no avail. I felt Eleanor’s frustration at her inability to bring back Cara’s vision and neither she nor Isaac’s hearing.
Adam returned, a look in his eyes that said he had expected to find his beloved harmed in some new fashion. Out of anyone’s, I thought Adam’s eyes haunted me the most.
“Adam’s back,” I told Cara. “He has a present for you first.”
He carried a water bottle since cups hadn’t gone over so well, and a bright pink rose, which was so fragrant I could smell it as he placed it in her outstretched hand, and her face lit up. She could still smell. She could still feel the silkiness of the petals on her skin as she brushed the flower against her cheek.
I said goodbye to them with a promise to see them later. But for now I needed to spend some time alone, so I teleported to my old standby; the fountain. We had an odd spell in the weather; the sno
w had all melted and the air was warm. I lay down on my back and stared at the too-white clouds streaming by at what seemed an unnaturally fast pace.
Since our return, I repeated the words “I’m fine” and wore a pretend smile every day because my concern for everyone else eclipsed my own pain. I felt obligated to appear composed for their sakes.
Comparatively, I had escaped the battle with the Black Shadow in good shape. But I wasn’t all right. I had seen too much for my mind to forget. And we were all left with too many scars, both internally and externally.
Gabriel and I had started sleeping together at night. We were both too scared of the nightmares we now shared, worried about another attack, and terrified at the thought of losing each other again.
I had to turn my head away from the sky because I kept seeing shapes in the clouds that had disturbed me since the battle. A faceless corpse. A pack of feral Silencers slinking on all fours. The Davos that for some reason had worked with the Black Shadow. And the children, too far gone to save.
I splashed my hot face with frigid water from the fountain, trying to forget the smell that accompanied the macabre images, and thought back to the events that led to my current state of mind.
In less than a year I had gone from average college-aged girl with an abnormal view on life to lethal killer with supernatural abilities. I knew I had to define myself as a murderer from now on; recognized that I couldn’t hide behind naivety and pretend I was a saint. Because, whether I liked to admit it or not, whether I could control it or not, I had transformed into someone capable of things I would never have thought possible.
What I had been born into automatically signed me up for a life of burden, years of seeing and enduring a side of the world that ordinary people got to ignore. I had always known there was more to life, and I finally took the opportunity to see what it entailed. I knew there was no way to go back, and I didn’t want to.
Something had wormed its way into my mind since the battle, changing the way I thought. I couldn’t let go of what the Black Shadow had done to my new family, and I was unable to ignore the fact that some of the rebels were still alive and out in the world, inflicting more pain, and planning their next attack on us.
The days since the battle had been full of recovery, but I started to become restless. I felt like I needed to do something, avenge all the Mystics who had died and punish the remaining Black Shadow members for what they’d done to us all. And I couldn’t help but think that Gabriel felt the same way. After we had rested for a couple of days, he had thrown himself back into training like I’d never seen him do.
He spent his days exhausting himself on the obstacle course and had asked me to help him with his shooting. By the time he crawled into my bed at night and pulled me close into his arms, I was lucky if he heard me say goodnight. He told everyone it was to take things off his mind, but I knew better.
Part of his strategy was used to escape the memories of the battle, and I began to join him in that regard; but there was another, unspoken reason that I knew we shared. We never said it aloud or acknowledged that it existed because the implications of carrying it out scared us. It would mean playing offense when, so far, we remained in the defensive position against the Black Shadow.
“I thought I would find you here,” Gabriel said, and I managed not to jump. I sat up and he joined me as I looked out over the brown landscape the winter had left behind. The trees were bare but it wouldn’t be long before the buds appeared and green leaves thrived again. I looked at Gabriel and knew that we weren’t yet ready for the adventure we’d eventually have to embark upon, but it wouldn’t take long before we were.
He looked back at me, and I smiled sadly at him. In his eyes I saw the phantom that now eclipsed my own and everyone’s around me; the affliction, so dark, and the nightmares will never go away.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy E. Marsh
Wendy E. Marsh grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where she developed a passion for reading and creative writing. She loves reading books that keep her awake into the early morning, and creating stories that do the same. She has her Doctorate of Physical Therapy and works with children with special needs and developmental delays. She currently lives with her fiancé and their two fur kids, Bandit the tabby cat, and Kara the hound dog.
In Wendy’s spare time she enjoys riding her horses, hunting, and anything else that gets her outdoors. Whether she is making silly faces to entertain a child learning to walk, or writing about two characters falling in love, she lets her imagination direct her passion.
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The Affliction Page 26