by Sara Preucil
He had been lying face up, strapped to the dining table, his shirt had been removed. Red stained his skin, evidence of the torture he had endured. His head was turned toward the door, his blue eyes no longer seeing the exit.
Something had been branded into his forehead. It was that same small image. Two overlapping triangles.
Kenna’s grief tore through her throat, expelling from her in a resounding cry as she shattered. She went limp, her body relinquishing its last ounces of fight. She would have fallen into the snow, but she had been caught roughly by the arm and was now being carried by one of these evil men. They were heading for the river bank. She struggled against the man only once, just to turn toward the house, toward Kai.
That was her last mistake. She turned just in time to see the company of men filing out of the house, torches in hand, which they then set to the wooden structure. Kai was still inside.
“NO!” Kenna screamed, watching in horror as the flames grew, consuming the house.
She didn’t notice that something was being tied to her ankles, nor did she notice the sound of metal scraping against the river rocks. She only saw the flames, only felt her soul ripping apart.
It was when the frigid water sloshed around her ankles, shocking her system into awareness, did she realize what was happening. But it was far too late. One great shove to her chest, and Kenna fell back into the rushing river. She plunged below the icy surface. She tried to kick, but her legs were bound. The heavy metal shackles pulled her quickly to the bottom of the river as the current enveloped her.
As the last of the air left her lungs, Kenna felt an odd sense of peace. If she couldn’t be with Kai, at least she was surrounded by the very element that was a part of him. In a strange way, it was almost like he was surrounding her, holding her.
Kenna smiled and closed her eyes.
Chapter 10
Emmy still hadn’t heard back from Austin by the time Monday morning rolled around and she was parking her car in the lot at school. She did so in a daze, still affected by the horribly vivid nightmare that had woken her early that morning. She had dreamt of the same two people, she was sure of it. Just as she was sure that they had aged a couple of years between dreams. Tear stained, she had woken, gasping for breath and shivering as though she had just been the one drowning in that frigid river.
She turned off the Geo’s engine, still gripped by the aching sorrow she experienced whenever she thought of that man with the weird star-like symbol branded into his forehead. She recalled his empty light eyes and felt another pang in her chest.
She took a deep, steadying breath.
“It’s just a dream,” she said quietly to herself. “Just a dream.”
Emmy then pulled up her hood, shielding her hair against the half-rain half-mist hybrid that had developed outside, climbed out of her car, and hustled into the shelter of the school building.
Inside, she nervously looked for Austin. She wasn’t sure how to approach him. Would it be too clingy to ask why he didn’t text her back last night? Should she pretend like everything was normal between them?
Emmy mulled this over, chewing the inside of her cheek as she walked down the hallway. Fortunately, she didn’t need to take the initiative. Austin, already at his locker, caught her eye as she approached. He closed his locker and hurried over to her, a sheepish grin on his handsome face.
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night,” he said quickly. “My phone died before I got home, and I didn’t see your text until this morning.”
The weight Emmy had been carrying all morning lifted instantly.
“Oh.” She let out a breath that she hadn’t realized she had been holding and smiled. “That’s okay.”
They walked together hand-in-hand to Emmy’s locker and then to biology. Emmy carried the water bottle Austin had given her to class, hoping he would see how much she still appreciated the gift. As they quickly settled back into their normal rapport, Emmy’s mood lifted. She felt silly for worrying, and was now confident that it was going to be a good day after all.
That was, until she was in her seat during the very next period, and their Spanish teacher, Señor Marshall, called the class’s attention to the front.
“Atención, estudiantes!” Señor Marshall clapped his hands together sharply. “Tenemos un nuevo estudiante: Dylan Thomas.”
Emmy, head propped up against one of her hands, pulled her eyes away from an illustration in her textbook in which a table was set, its objects labeled in Spanish, to gaze wearily at her teacher.
Her head snapped up, arm falling to the top of her desk with a thunk.
The boy from the football game was standing next to Señor Marshall. She had all but completely forgotten about him over the weekend, but there he was, at the front of her Spanish classroom, looking as painfully striking as before. Up close, he was taller than Emmy remembered, his long, slim limbs emphasized by his skinny dark jeans and long sleeve navy shirt. His platinum bangs peeked out from under a gray beanie.
Emmy’s chest tightened when he, seeming to feel her studying him, caught her gaze. His eyes, those impossibly deep blue eyes, held Emmy’s, and she suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to be near him.
Señor Marshall said a few more words that were completely lost on Emmy, and then the boy moved, breaking their eye contact, to take his seat.
Emmy felt a mixture of emotion when his gaze released hers: relief, because she could breathe normally again; confusion as to why he affected her so; but mostly an immediate emptiness like he had reached into her soul, stirring something she didn’t understand within herself, and then plucked it from her the moment their connection broke, leaving a small void where she hadn’t known something had even existed.
Once Emmy came back to reality, she silently chastised herself. She had Austin. He was sweet and caring and handsome, and he deserved better than his girlfriend ogling the new guy.
The only open desk was, mercifully, three rows away from Emmy’s. Dutifully, she set herself to the task of ignoring the new boy for the rest of the period.
When the bell rang, Emmy queued up in the line of students filing out of the classroom, keeping her eyes determinedly on the French braid of the brunette girl in front of her, and refusing to wonder where in the crowd the new guy was.
“Kenna?” A sweetly deep voice with the hint of a southern accent asked from right behind her. It was no louder than a whisper, but that word resurrected something faint in the cocoon of Emmy’s memory, like a butterfly’s first stirring.
“What?” Emmy turned around to come face-to-face with the new kid, whose eyes she could tell were searching hers, but she refused to look directly into them.
“Emma. Your name is Emma, right?”
Is that what he said? “Oh. Close.” Emmy’s brow furrowed. Faint images not yet fully formed were fluttering at the peripheral of her memory. She brushed them aside. “It’s Emberly. Everyone just calls me Emmy. Or Em.”
A faint look of disappointment crossed his fair features, only to be replaced with the smallest of smiles. “My mistake. I’m Dylan.”
“Oh. Um, hi.”
Dylan just stood there, watching her like he was waiting for her to say something else. Emmy’s face grew hot.
“Well, nice meeting you!” she blurted out, and turning away, walked out of the classroom, melding into the throng of students in the hallway.
Emmy hurried to the art room, spending that period purposely engaging in conversation with Aidan as they continued to work on their oil paintings. Hers had turned into a muddied mess, bringing their art teacher, Mr. Sellar, to suggest she white it all out and start over. At lunch, willing herself not to search the cafeteria for Dylan, she threw herself into the conversation, and after one particularly loud laugh, earned herself a questioning glance from Mariah. She toned it down after that. English and gym went by as usual, and by world history, Emmy was relieved to find out that she didn’t share a second class with Dylan.
&n
bsp; Tuesday flew past in a similar fashion. Emmy determinedly ignored Dylan in Spanish class, taking uncharacteristically meticulous notes. Whenever she saw Austin, she zeroed in on his every word, redoubling her efforts to think only of him. She even encouraged him to talk about football, trying her best to remain as enthusiastic as possible over the subject. She fell ridiculously short, but she thought Austin appreciated it nonetheless.
This was her first relationship, and she wasn’t going to ruin it because of a mysterious newcomer. No matter how inexplicably drawn she felt to him. Or how she knew, without looking, when his gaze fell on her in class. Or when, even though her eyes would be fixed obstinately on the back of the person ahead of her, she knew when he passed her in the crowded hall.
At the end of the day, Austin swung by Emmy’s locker to say goodbye before heading to practice. While she was hugging him, she swore she could feel Dylan’s eyes on her back. Forcing herself not to check, Emmy then turned to Mariah.
“Boulevard Park, or what?”
Mariah tapped a purple fingernail to her lips, pursing them while she thought. “How about the mall? I could use some more makeup, and maybe we can get you away from that dark palette.” She smirked.
“You can try.” Emmy grinned. They both knew it would be futile.
“Or you can go totally goth,” Mariah suggested as they made their way out of the school building to the parking lot. “Just lean into it.”
“You’ll be sorry you suggested it.”
They climbed into Emmy’s Geo. As she pulled out of her spot, she caught a glimpse of someone with platinum hair out of the corner of her eye. Emmy didn’t need to look to know that it was Dylan.
Chapter 11
The summer sun beat down on Emmy’s shoulders as she peered out from under the Mariners baseball cap she had borrowed from Austin. It was the last week of break before school started again, and Emmy wanted to soak up every last bit of it. She squinted across the shimmering waters of Lake Whatcom, following Austin’s progress on his jet ski. He drove it into a tight donut and then zoomed off to the south end of the lake and out of sight.
Emmy marked the page of the book she had been reading and set it down on her towel. She stood up, stretched, and walked down to the shore where she waded into the cool water. The gentle waves rose and fell around her thighs as she watched the various happenings on the lake.
Not far off the shore, a girl attempting yoga on her paddle board fell into the water with an indelicate splash. Two kids nearby were throwing a stick for their chocolate Labrador to swim after. Emmy watched the dog paddling back, snorting water as its head bobbed just above the surface of the lake. It deposited the stick on the rocky shore, and one of the kids promptly threw it back into the water. The dog bounded after it.
“Cute dog.”
Emmy wheeled around toward the sound of the voice.
Someone was standing in the water next to her, although it barely reached his knees; the hem of his shorts was dipping into the lake. Two slender arms tattooed to the wrist were crossed in front of a torso that, although slender, was defined with lean muscle.
Heat rising to her cheeks, Emmy looked up into the boy’s face. He was stunning, and she felt her blush deepen as she took him in. The sharp bones of his cheeks and jawline added angles to an otherwise oval face. His platinum hair was pushed back off his forehead, and Emmy guessed that it was a habit of his to comb his fingers through it to give it that swept-back look. His dark brows were raised in an expectant gesture, the intensely blue eyes under them were watching Emmy. There was something behind their depthless blue, an unspoken question that Emmy couldn’t quite translate.
“Yeah, cute,” Emmy said slowly, thrown off by the boy’s intense gaze. “The dog, I mean.”
The boy kept looking at Emmy with that oddly expectant expression, like he was waiting for something.
Emmy gave him a small smile, and then turned to head back to her towel.
“Wait,” he said.
She turned halfway back, eyeing him suspiciously.
“Don’t you remember me?” He asked with a light, southern drawl. He looked at her hopefully, his platinum bangs falling over his forehead. He swept them back again with his long, thin fingers.
Emmy shook her head slowly. “Sorry, no.”
The boy looked around quickly. “What about this?”
Emmy watched, confused, as he dipped a finger into the surface of the lake. Slowly, he began to swirl the water. He smirked at Emmy, a dangerously attractive half smile, and then withdrew his finger.
But then, something strange happened. The water followed his finger. A small swirling cone grew out of the surface of the water, its tip attached to his finger. He then flexed his hand, splaying out his fingers, and the cone split into five streams that arched and fell gracefully back to the water.
Something stirred in the back of Emmy’s mind. A feeling of familiarity more than a concrete memory.
“How are you doing that?” Emmy stared at the inexplicable fountain he had seemingly created.
He opened his mouth to respond, but a motor’s roar grew steadily louder, and at that moment, Austin’s jet ski came into view.
The boy dropped his hand back to his side, and the water broke its formation, returning to the lake without a splash.
Austin idled the jet ski up to the dock, and tied it off.
“You ready to go in for lunch?” he asked, gesturing toward his family’s lake house just across the street from the public beach. He looked from Emmy to the strange boy, frowning slightly.
“Sure…” Emmy mumbled, her brain still trying to rationalize what she had just seen. It had probably just been some trick the guy did to impress girls; some cheesy lakeside magic act to pick up dates. Frowning to herself, Emmy waded out of the lake, gathered her book and towel, and waited for Austin where the dock met the pebbly beach.
Austin took her by the hand and led her up the beach, to the street toward his family’s summer house.
At the top of the small hill, Emmy sneaked a peek over her shoulder.
The blonde boy was still standing in the lake, the water lapping around his knees. He was watching Emmy walk away with Austin, his blue eyes stormy, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Chapter 12
Emmy woke to the sound of her alarm chiming. Bleary-eyed, she searched for her phone until, finally, she fished it out from under her covers. It was already after eight; her alarm had been going off for nearly twenty minutes.
“Shit.”
Emmy threw off the covers, grabbed her bathrobe, and hurried down the hall to the bathroom. She showered quickly, marveling at how deeply she had been sleeping to have ignored her alarm for so long. It had been the dream that had kept her so engrossed. Emmy turned off the shower, trying to recall the boy’s face that had so mesmerized her. She stepped over the tub’s edge on to the blue bathmat, and wrapped a towel around herself.
He had looked so familiar. She remembered his slender hands manipulating the shimmering lake water, and with a jolt that she felt in her gut, she realized who the boy was.
Emmy rushed through her morning routine, dressing quickly. Dashing down the stairs, she pulled her wet hair up into a messy bun before grabbing herself a package of toaster pastries from the kitchen and hurrying out the door.
The tardy bell rang just as Emmy slid into her seat in biology, earning an appreciative glance from Austin and an exasperated one from Mrs. Pérez, who was already passing out the day’s lab instructions. Emmy glanced at the paper. They were to be dissecting cow eyes today; Emmy’s stomach lurched at the thought. Luckily, Austin kindly took the reins on this one.
“It’s easy if you don’t think about it as belonging to a living creature,” he explained after class as they made their way along the river of students in the halls.
“I don’t know how you can detach yourself like that.” Emmy cringed, unable to stop visualizing him cutting into the nectarine-sized eyeball.
&nbs
p; Austin just shrugged. “Sometimes, you just have to.”
The disgusting lab was still on Emmy’s mind as she made her way to second period. Only when she entered the classroom, and glimpsed the head of platinum-blonde hair, did she remember Dylan. And her dream.
Sitting in her usual seat, she flipped to yesterday’s class notes and began reviewing the verb conjugations. Or at least, that is what she appeared to be doing from an outsider’s perspective. In reality, Emmy was desperately trying to avoid eye contact with Dylan by looking busy.
She stared at her notebook, as Señor Marshall began talking at the front of the class, but she didn’t see the words written in it. She pretended to take notes as Señor Marshall continued his lecture, but she wasn’t paying the least bit of attention. Images of this morning’s dream flashed in her mind. Stormy blue eyes and that impossibly attractive smirk…
Emmy felt her face flush at the memory, but then was immediately consumed by guilt. What would Austin think of her blushing about a dream she had about the new kid?
If Emmy hadn’t been so preoccupied with these conflicting emotions, she would have heard Señor Marshall telling everyone to partner up.
“Compañero?”
“Huh?” Emmy looked up.
Big mistake.
Dylan’s impossibly blue, fathomless eyes were looking down intently at her. He smirked.
“It’s Spanish for ‘partner’.”
Emmy glanced around the room. Indeed, everyone had coupled into pairs.
“Oh, right.”
Dylan pushed a nearby vacant desk next to hers.
“We’re supposed to be practicing the conversations on page thirty-five.”
Flustered, Emmy opened her book to the aforementioned page. The directions were to practice asking and answering basic questions from a following list.
“Ah—okay…” Emmy stared down at the book. “You can start.”
“Cuál es tu nombre?” Dylan asked without looking at his own textbook.