by Bella Jacobs
And sexy. So damned sexy… I mean, the man is basically a walking, talking, scowling, brooding testimony to why girls love bad boys.
My gaze slides his way against my will, drawn to those dark eyes I can feel skimming over my body as Sierra and I patiently circle each other, waiting for an opening.
The moment my focus drifts away from the ring, Sierra strikes.
I catch a glimpse of movement in my peripheral vision, and then I’m down on the mat, flat on my back with the wind knocked out of me.
“One to zero,” Sierra says cheerfully, ruffling my ponytail as I roll onto my side, coughing and gasping. “You okay there, buttercup?”
“Fine,” I choke out, feeling like the lowest form of loser. Worse, like a teenager who walked into the street and got run over while checking a text from her boyfriend.
Only Luke isn’t even my boyfriend. Luke is my fight coach, and he is as unimpressed with my performance as I am.
“Come on, Princess. Head in the game. You can think about what color you want to paint your toenails later.”
I glare at him as I come to my feet.
Yes, I painted my toenails a few nights back. So what?
“A girl can enjoy feasting upon the blood of her enemies and sparkly purple toes, dude,” Sierra says, coming to my defense. “Just because you adhere to a model of badassery that has no room for pretty things in it, doesn’t mean we have to. Right, mama?”
I cough in agreement, my lungs still reluctant to return to normal function.
“So far I haven’t seen this one snacking on the blood of her enemies, let alone feasting,” Luke says drily. “You ready to go yet, purple toes? Or do you need to braid Sierra’s hair and make sure you guys are still best friends forever before we get back to business?”
“I’m ready,” I bite out, hating myself for wasting a single second of my life considering the sex appeal of this man. He is not sexy; he’s loathsome.
I loathe him. I would like to bite him. Repeatedly. And not in a sexy foreplay kind of way.
“The worst, right?” Sierra murmurs as we resume our positions, facing each other on the mat.
“The very worst,” I grumble back.
“But you still want to do him,” she whispers, too softly for Luke to hear—I hope.
“I do not. Hush up,” I hiss back.
“Do, too.” A wicked grin curves her lips. “You want to saddle him up like a pony and ride that big bad wolf all night.”
“Less whispering more sparring, ladies,” Luke says. “This isn’t a sleepover.”
“No, I don’t,” I bite out, fingers curling into my palms.
“High ho, Silver. Ride ’em, cowgirl,” Sierra teases beneath her breath.
“Are you trying to make me want to punch you?”
“I don’t know, is it working?” she asks, laughing.
I laugh, too, and then I lunge for her. This time, I take her down, but just barely, and we end up on the mat, giggling and fake-punching each other until we’re out of breath.
Clearly, neither of us has our heart in this today.
I’m flat on my back, breathing hard and fighting another giggle fit when Luke’s face appears above me, silhouetted against the storm clouds rolling in from the west. I can tell he’s trying to make his angry face, but he’s not pulling it off, and the sight of his forced scowl makes me start laughing again.
Sierra giggles beside me. “Relax, Wolf Boy. We sparred. We learned things. Now we need to laugh. Haven’t you ever heard that laughter is the best medicine?”
Luke shakes his head slowly, like Sierra and I are the saddest excuses for warriors he’s ever seen in his life, and I laugh so hard tears leak from the corners of my eyes.
“Luke can’t,” I wheeze between giggles. “He’s vision-blind and laugh-blind.”
His mouth twitches at the edges.
I gasp and point at his face. “Wait! Look! It’s happening! He’s going to do it. He’s going to break.”
“I’m not going to break,” Luke says, but his lips are already curving.
“You are!” I clutch my stomach. “Stand back, Sierra, he’s gonna blow!”
“Take cover!” she gasps beside me as Luke’s shoulders begin to shake.
A second later, all his pearly whites are out for show-and-tell, and his Adam’s apple is bobbing lightly in his throat as he laughs. He laughs and for a moment I can see who he might have been if he’d had a different life, one filled with love and laughter instead of terror and violence, and it makes me sad.
Breathlessly sad.
My giggle fit ends as abruptly as it began, leaving me heavy on the mat.
Joy and sadness. They come so close on the heels of each other these days, like a snake eating its own tail. No matter how fast I run toward the light, the darkness is always there, clinging tight.
“You two finally pull yourselves together?” Luke asks, his smile fading.
“Laughter looks good on you,” I say, folding my hands over my laugh-sore belly.
“It does,” Sierra agrees. “You should laugh more often.”
“Yeah, well… Not much to laugh about these days, is there?” He runs a hand over his closely cropped hair.
He gave himself a buzz cut last week, shearing away all his gorgeous glossy hair, but he’s still handsome without it. He’s just more…haunted looking, like a tree without its leaves, bare against a winter sky.
“I’ll work on my stand-up,” Sierra says. “I used to be funny. Back in the day. Before…”
She doesn’t have to say before what. We all have a before, a life that was ripped out from under us. That, even if it wasn’t the best life, was familiar and our own.
Now, we can’t afford to take anything for granted.
“It’s going to rain.” Luke glances up at the sky. “You two should head back, get some rest.”
“Be there in a minute,” I say, not moving a muscle. “I want to watch the clouds for a little while.”
Luke nods. “Don’t stay too long. It could be a big one.”
“It won’t be.” I inhale, drawing the scent of the storm into my lungs. “It’s a baby storm. I can smell it.”
Sierra sits up beside me, tilting her head back to drink in the dark sky. “I want to learn how to do that. Smell the size of a storm. Kite tried to teach me once, but I didn’t have the patience for his long-ass explanations.”
I smile because I love those long-ass explanations. They’re one of the things that make Kite, Kite. “Stay. I’ll give you the cliff notes version.” I turn my attention to Luke. “You can stay, too, if you want.”
He shakes his head. “Thanks, but I’m going to grab some lunch. The run made me hungry. You two psychos look out for each other. Stay together.”
“Will do,” I promise, while Sierra assures him, “I’ll keep a close eye on your star pupil, coach.”
He waves and lopes away through the woods at an easy jog.
I stay on my back, but I can’t help rolling my head to the side to watch him go.
“Admiring the view from behind?” Sierra asks.
“Shut up,” I say good-naturedly.
She laughs. “No shame in it. That ass is almost enough to make me consider giving men another try.”
I arch a brow as I shift my gaze back to her flushed face. “You used to like men?”
“Um, no. I used to sleep with men. Back when I was a teenager who was scared shitless of being gay. Didn’t say I liked them.”
I frown. “Why were you scared? Family? Church?”
She rolls her eyes. “Both. My mom is old-world Catholic, and the nuns at school made it pretty clear where girls who liked to kiss other girls ended up.”
“Roasting in eternal hellfire?” I ask, my nose wrinkling sympathetically as she confirms my suspicion with a click of her tongue and a finger-pistol fired in my direction. “My church was more subtle about the hellfire stuff,” I say, “but there was still plenty of guilt to go around. We were supposed to
stay virgins until marriage, only sleep with our husband or wife, and avoid being gay if at all possible.”
Sierra snorts. “And if it wasn’t possible?”
“Then you were supposed to keep it a shameful little secret. They used to say ‘love the sinner, hate the sin,’ all the time when LGBTQ issues came up in meetings for the shelter.”
“Hate the sin of what? Loving someone a bunch of assholes don’t think you should love?”
I nod. “Pretty much. I kept at the elders until I was able to give queer kids the same services as the straight kids. Back then I didn’t have the strength to fight for more than that.” I study her profile, which is uncharacteristically sober. “I’m sorry.”
She turns, meeting my gaze. “Why are you sorry?”
“I could have been a better ally.”
“You did what you could,” she says with a shrug. “That’s all any of us can do. And it sounds like it won’t matter in the end. We’re all going down together, gay, straight, and everything in between.” Her eyes narrow. “It was bad, wasn’t it? What you saw last night? Dust gave me the heavily edited version, and even that sounded like a fucking shit show.”
I sigh. ‘Yeah. It’s bad.”
“How bad?” she asks, sitting up.
I sit beside her, bracing my arms on my bent knees, taking a breath as I try to think of the best way to break this kind of news. I don’t want to send Sierra spiraling into the same despair pit I barely crawled out of this morning, but I don’t want to lie to her, either. She isn’t a child. She’s a member of this mission who is putting her life on the line for the future, just like the rest of us.
She deserves to know exactly what she’s fighting for.
“Because here’s the thing,” she says, breaking the silence before I can put my thoughts together, “when it comes to suffering, I have some pretty strong opinions. I’ve had them for a while. Even before this.” She holds up her stump, sending that familiar pang of guilt flashing through my chest.
It’s not my fault that she was tortured and maimed. But it feels like it is.
Maybe if I hadn’t fought her that night, if we’d gotten away from my house even a few minutes sooner, we could have made it to safety. Maybe Atlas wouldn’t have pulled her out of the river, and she wouldn’t have such brutally informed opinions on suffering.
But “could have been” is always a losing game. I should know that by now.
“Tell me.” I turn on the mat to face her, wrapping my arms around my shins and hugging my legs to my chest.
“It should have an end in sight,” she says, her expression as serious as I’ve ever seen it, even on the morning she first showed up at the hotel with Leda. “Suffering is a part of life. None of us can escape it, no matter how rich or powerful or pretty or lucky we are.” She pauses, tapping a measured finger on the sock covering her still-sensitive stump. “But it shouldn’t be something that goes on forever, you know?”
I nod, my throat going tight. “I hear you.”
“Do you?” Sierra’s brow furrows. “’Cause I don’t think Dust heard me this morning. He kept talking about salvaging what can be salvaged, but…” She shakes her head. “That sounds like a bunch of cruel bullshit to me. Not to mention elitist as fuck. I mean, he can fly away to higher ground, no matter how high the sea rises. He can swoop his griffin ass off to the artic when the mosquito plagues start killing off everything south of the Rockies and the storms get so bad the tropics aren’t fit to live in. But what about the rest of us?”
“We’re going to help everyone we can, Sierra. I promise you, I will do everything in my power to—”
“But is that going to be enough?” she cuts in. “Even if you manage to take the throne from this monster, you’re not going to be a god for real, Wren. You’ll be a super-powerful supernatural, one with a sweet soul instead of a bag of dicks for a heart. But so what?” She lifts her hand, fingers spread wide. “No offense, but no matter how sweet and powerful you are, you won’t be able to save everyone. You won’t be able to save half of everyone. There won’t be enough inhabitable planet or enough resources, those are the cold hard facts of where we’re headed. Even if we win, and we both know what a big fucking if that is.”
I press my lips together, fighting the despair pressing on my heart.
“So maybe it would better to just…stop,” Sierra says, a hitch in her voice. “Just lay down our weapons, take an honest look at the big picture, and find a gentler way to end the human experiment.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
She meets my gaze, the clear, calm of her brown eyes saying she’s never been more serious. About anything.
“You believe in kindness above all else,” she says. “All I’m asking is that you look at this with your heart, without letting cultural shit or some deep-seated belief in the sanctity of human life get in the way.” She opens her hand, holding her palm out between us. “Or maybe you should take that last part into account. Because there is nothing holy about living out the rest of your days sick and starving and scared out of your mind, without even the relief of knowing there’s a chance things will get better. For millions of people, there will be no chance, Wren. No hope, nothing but suffering, world without end, amen.”
Before I can respond, before I can argue that there has always been suffering, but there will always be hope as long as we refuse to let the light go out in our hearts, a fat raindrop plops into the center of Sierra’s hand.
Her lips quirk. “I smell rain now, too.”
A beat later, the sky opens up, the clouds releasing the burden they’ve carried over the mountains from far away, pelting us with raindrops that used to be oceans and lakes and tears rolling down cheeks to evaporate into the air.
In seconds, I’m soaked to the skin, and the mat beneath us is sliding sideways as the ground beneath turns to mud. Squinting into the assault, Sierra and I scramble off the mat, prop it against two trees to be rinsed off in the rain, and start back toward camp in silence.
The smack-patter of the rain against summer leaves is too loud to talk without shouting, and I suddenly find I don’t have much to say.
I could argue my side, but I’m not sure it really is my side. This morning, cradled in Creedence’s arms, even a flash of light in the darkness seemed worth fighting for.
But now…
Now there’s a dragging feeling inside my brain and a weight on my heart and leviathan-size questions I don’t have any clue how to answer.
I glance over at Sierra to find her already watching me through the veil of rain. She reaches out, taking my hand and giving it a hard squeeze. “I’ll be there, though, mama. Count on it. If you’re going in, I’m going in with you. Okay? No doubt about that, sister.”
I return the squeeze as I nod.
I know she’ll be there. I saw her in my visions last night. In every single version of the future I glimpsed—even the ones where I was missing from the final line up—she made it across the killing fields. Sierra was the only constant in all the shifting sand.
I would say she was born under a lucky star, but there’s nothing lucky about being on the front lines of a fight as ugly as this one, and she’s already lost so much.
We all have, and the losing isn’t over, I’m afraid.
Not by a long shot.
Chapter 27
Dr. Martin Highborn
It’s been over a month since we lost Subject 7.
Thirty-two days, to be exact.
Long enough that the tension has begun to seep from my shoulders. That I walk the halls of the institute without slowing before every turn, wary of what might be waiting around the corner. Long enough that, just this morning, I gave my new operations manager orders to transition half of our shifter force into remission.
Keeping a genetic modification that severe in active shift mode is hard on the human parts of the organism’s body. If they aren’t going to be deployed on a moment’s notice, it’s better for the long-ter
m health of our warriors to be allowed rest and a more traditional training regimen.
I convince myself that’s what Atlas would want if he were available for consultation. I convince myself the monster’s attention is required elsewhere, and that he will be pleased with the way I’ve tended to his interests in his absence.
When I arrive home late one afternoon to find the front door standing open and the flower pots on the porch overturned—Bea’s pansies strewn across the brick steps like soldiers fallen on a black, potting-soil battlefield—I realize the error of my ways.
I drop my briefcase on the lawn.
My keys fall next.
I break into a run, heart in my throat, blood rushing in my ears. The sound reminds me of a seashell, and how on our last visit to the Natural History Museum, Wendy begged for a souvenir from the gift shop—a conch that when held to your ear, sounded like the sea. I explained there were no waves inside, but Wendy didn’t care.
It’s been decades since the beach was safe to wander looking for shells, and even longer since mollusks were wiped out by algae plagues. It was a valuable artifact, but not worth what the museum was asking.
But I should have bought the damned shell.
I wish, now, that I’d given her the magic, because inside the house, the destruction continues.
Glassware on the entry table smashed. Potpourri Bea made herself scattered, the dried flowers from our garden like the brittle shells of beetles bursting beneath my feet as I stumble to the kitchen.
Pop, pop, pop…
“Bea? Wendy?” I know they won’t answer. The house is too quiet, the kind of quiet that means empty.
Or dead.
Empty or dead, empty or dead… The words repeat on a gut-wrenching loop as I careen into the den, the study, the playroom where Wendy keeps her toys in such meticulous order.
She was such a sweet girl, just like her mother.
I’m already there—at was, at past tense, at the worst-case scenario, teetering on despair—when something outside catches my eye. I look up through the large picture window with the built-in seat where Wendy and Bea love to read on chilly autumn afternoons. But for now, it’s sunny and warm outside, the leaves are bright green, and the pool is filled with peaceful blue water.