by Naomi Martin
He looks down at his hands, a frown creasing his lips. I can see him still silently berating himself, but all I can do is point out that it’s not his fault. Because it’s not. I just feel awful for him because some people do see him as a monster. They don’t look at the circumstances surrounding what happened and what led him to that point.
Elliot is forced to carry the full weight of the blame, while the boys who were tormenting and abusing him are suddenly turned into martyrs. It’s wrong and it pisses me off.
“Yeah, well, I guess I don’t have to worry about it anymore,” he says, tapping on the band of steel around his neck.
“That’s not going to be forever, you know.”
A small, sad smile touches his lips. “I like your optimism. But nobody’s looking for us. Nobody cares we’re here,” he says. “Heck, I bet if you asked most people in this country, they feel safer with people like us locked up.”
“Heck? Who says heck?” I laugh.
“I do.” He laughs along with me. “I don’t like swearing.”
“Wow, I think you might be the only person I’ve ever known who doesn’t swear.”
He shrugs. “It’s not that I haven’t used a swear word before. I just prefer not to.”
“Okay, that’s fair.”
Over the next couple of hours, Elliot and I share stories about our lives, and I laugh more than I have in a long time. More than I thought I ever would again, to be honest. In some ways, he reminds me of Eric. He’s got a great sense of humor. He’s smart, easy to talk to, and I feel really comfortable around him. It makes me glad I decided to come up here and apologize to him. But we still haven’t addressed the elephant in the room. I look over at him and clear my throat.
“Earlier, when you said you felt like you knew me, were you just saying that to open a conversation?” I ask, my words coming out slowly. “Or did you mean it?”
“I very much meant it,” he replies. “I don’t know how it would possible, but there’s something about you that feels… familiar.”
I nod as if it makes perfect sense. It doesn’t, of course. There’s no possible way that our paths crossed at any point in our lives. We were born and raised in two different states, and he’d never been out of Iowa before. My folks believed in traveling and we’d vacationed in a lot of different places well outside of Pennsylvania, but Iowa had never been one of those places.
And yet, I can’t deny that sitting here and talking to Elliot, I feel something familiar. In a way, it feels like a puzzle piece falling into place deep within me. It makes absolutely no sense. But being with him makes me feel more vibrant inside. More powerful. It’s almost like he’s flipped a switch inside of me and turned on some backup generator that I never knew was in there.
Fat lot of good it does me, though, with this fucking collar around my neck.
A shrill buzzer sounds, making me jump nearly out of my skin. I look around then look to Elliot, who’s grinning like an idiot.
“What is that for?” I ask.
“Lunch hour,” he replies. “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. You’re new here.”
I grin, feeling stupid. “Yeah, you shouldn’t laugh. Jerk.”
“Go grab a spot in line,” he says. “I’m going to wash up and I’ll be down in a second. Maybe we can sit together?”
He says it like he’s afraid of rejection, unsure whether I’ll say yes, and I get the sense he has little experience with girls. It’s actually kind of adorable.
“Of course,” I tell him. “We have to stick together. Buddy up. Protect each other from the big, bad world.”
“You have no idea how true that is,” he says. “But I’m glad we can have lunch together.”
“Me too.”
I jump up and leave his cell, padding my way down the walkway to the stairs. As I approach the staircase, I see a large man leaning against the railing. He’s six-foot-three at least, with shaggy, sandy blonde hair that falls to his shoulders and eyes as dark as the deep reaches of space. He’s got thick, sloping shoulders, massive biceps, and a trim waist. He reminds me of some of the football players I used to see lumbering through the halls back in school.
He turns as I draw near, and I see his eyes sliding up and down my body, drinking in every inch of me. A slow, salacious smile crosses his full lips and I see a sparkle in his eye. He obviously appreciates what he sees.
But the way he’s looking at me creeps me out. It’s like he sees me as a plaything, a toy to use for his amusement. I’ve dealt with plenty of these kinds of dirtbags in my life and I know all the warning signs.
“You coulda picked somebody better to pair up with,” he says, his voice low and rumbling.
I tell myself to keep moving but my body betrays me and I stop, turning to look at him. And when our eyes meet, I feel a physical jolt. It’s intense, and fills my belly with a warmth that spreads to every corner of my body.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“I said, you coulda picked a better fuck buddy,” he says, waving vaguely in the direction of Elliot’s cell. “That one, the ginger. He’s useless in a fight.”
“First of all, we’re not fuck buddies,” I hiss, not knowing why in the hell I’m even dignifying his remarks. “Second, I don’t need him to protect me. I can take care of myself.”
“If you say so.”
“Fuck you,” I spit.
“Oooh. Fiery.” He grins. “That’s adorable.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“You don’t even know me,” he says with a chuckle. “You should at least get to know me before you make that decision.”
“Not interested.”
I turn and huff down the stairs, my anger at his presumptuousness making my blood boil. As I go, though, I can’t escape the energy coursing through me. That jolt I felt when our eyes met has left me tingling—and rattled. It feels almost exactly the same as the jolt I felt when I locked eyes with Elliot. It filled me with that sense of the familiar, like I somehow know him. And it gave me the same rush of power I felt with Elliot—I can feel it swelling inside of me.
“What in the hell is going on?” I mutter.
Chapter Seven
Four Years Ago…
Gray
“It’s what we do,” Roger says, his voice low and gruff. “This is how we live. You know that, kid.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I don’t want to.”
“If you don’t, then you can’t stay here. You can’t stay with us,” he tells me, his voice dripping with scorn. “You have to earn your keep around here.”
“I’ll do anything else you need, Roger,” I argue. “I just don’t want to use my power to—”
The night is dark and we’re sitting in the parking lot of the bank. Through the windows, I can see what looks like the cleaning crew and security guards moving around inside. My stomach churns and my throat is dry. I don’t want to do this, but if I don’t, they’ll turn me out. Just like my parents did almost a year ago.
I was fourteen when I my ability first started to manifest. It was subtle, at first—increased aggression, a gnawing hunger, a desire to break and smash things. I tried to write it off as simple hormones. Part of growing up and going through puberty and all. But by the time I was fifteen, I realized that wasn’t it at all. It was way worse, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I was scared of what would happen—of what was going to happen—so I said nothing and tried to hide it. I hoped and prayed it would just go away. It didn’t.
Shortly after I turned fifteen, I shifted for the first time. It was an experience that still terrifies me to think about. When I became a bear that night, I wound up killing not just my family dog, but several other pets around the neighborhood. I woke up the next morning covered in blood and gore, with no memory of what happened. It was only after my parents reconstructed the night that it all came back to me and I realized what I was. That they realized what I was.
They were terrified of me. And maybe they were right to be. To them, I wa
s a monster, and there was nothing I could do to change that. Shortly after that night, they gave me a choice. They told me I could leave their house, or they’d call the authorities to come take me away. We’d all heard the rumors of people with abilities like mine being scooped up and shuttled off to some prison out in the middle of God-knows-where. We’d heard people like me were kept indefinitely and experimented on. Tortured and killed.
Personally, I didn’t believe it, back when the rumors had first started to surface. I thought it was just a bogeyman kind of story told to people with abilities to keep us in line. Give us something to be afraid of. But faced with the prospect of finding out if there was actually any truth to the stories or accepting my banishment from my family, I chose the latter. Maybe it was the coward’s way out, but I didn’t want to run the risk of being somebody’s fucking guinea pig for the rest of my life.
After I left my parents’ home, I lived on the street by myself for a while. I wandered aimlessly, trying to teach myself how to use my ability. Doing what I had to do to survive. I tried to figure out how to control my shifting, to keep myself from turning into a monster. I tried to suppress it. I still try to suppress it. It’s been a painful, sometimes violent process, and I’ve accidentally hurt some people along the way. I’ve killed people. And the guilt I feel about the things I’ve done is thick and it’s deep.
I don’t want to be a monster. I hate it. I hate that I’ve been afflicted with this ability and there have been more than a few times I’ve thought about ending it all. I haven’t had the courage to do it, though. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve chickened out. I guess I’m a coward at heart, but I just don’t want to die. As repulsive as I find my existence, it’s still better than being dead.
I was at a really low point, both mentally and emotionally, when I fell in with Roger and his crew. This was about three or four months ago. They took me in, no questions asked. They didn’t seem to care that I was a shifter. They didn’t care that I could turn into a bear that was capable of tearing all of their throats out. I was a kid, and they seemed to accept me for who I was. They accepted me in ways not even my family could manage to. And it felt nice to have a new family, a group of people who genuinely seemed to care about me.
At least, until a few weeks ago, when Roger started to push me to use my ability to help them in ways I wasn’t—that I’m still not—comfortable with. He badgered and berated me into stealing for them. It was small stuff, at first. Break open this door to the grocery store so we can get some food. Break open that door so we can get some warm clothes, because it’s cold out. It was stuff we needed, things I could justify helping them do. Things I thought wouldn’t be misusing my ability.
That was how it started.
Tonight is different. Tonight, the stakes have been raised to levels I’m not only uncomfortable with, but that I’m terrified of—and I feel like I’m caught in a no-win position.
“But, Roger, there’s people in there,” I argue.
“And when they get a load of you comin’ through that door, they’ll piss themselves,” he says, his breath coming out in steamy plumes. “They’ll be fallin’ all over each other to get the fuck outta there. You got nothin’ to worry about.”
The night is dark, but the parking lot of the bank is brightly lit. We’re in a copse of trees to the side of the building, the small rise we’re standing on giving us a good view of the entire place. I look up to the sky and see the thin sickle of silver suspended among the velvety blackness above. The stars shimmer and twinkle, looking like chips of ice. It’s beautiful, and I would rather be admiring it anywhere else but where I am right now.
“I can’t do it,” I tell him.
“Kid, if you don’t do this, then we’ll move on without you,” he growls. “Do you really want to be out on the street alone again? Shit kid, we gave you a home. A family. All I’m askin’ is that you give a little back to us.”
“But I’ve done everything—”
“We need this, kid,” he snaps. “Don’t you wanna take a little bit of that cash and say get a hotel room for the night? Don’t a warm shower and soft bed sound good?”
They sound like absolute heaven to me, but at what cost? What if I can’t control myself? What if I hurt somebody in there? I’ve gotten better about being able to control when I shift. I’m still not perfect about what I do after I’m in my bear form.
“Do it this one time. Do it for me. For all I done for you,” he says evenly. “And after this, if you don’t wanna do it again, I won’t ask. That’s fair, right?”
The problem, though, is that I know this won’t be the only time he asks, the only time he threatens and demands. If I open that door for him now, he will never stop asking me to do things like this. I may only be sixteen, but I’m not a moron. And having been with Roger and his crew for a little while now, I’ve seen how they operate. I know what he’s like. If I do as he asks and break into that bank, it will literally be like feeding the neighborhood stray—they’ll keep coming back.
But what is my alternative? If I don’t do it, they walk away from me. I’ll be back on the street, all by myself. I’ll be alone again. At least with Roger, I have some semblance of a family. And he’s right, they did take me in without question when I first found them. They treated me like I was one of their own. Don’t I owe them something for that? Shouldn’t I be willing to give back when they’ve given to me? Especially when they didn’t have to take me in?
I sigh. “Fine. I’ll do it. But just this one time. I won’t do anything like this again, so don’t bother asking.”
“Deal,” he says. “No sweat.”
“I mean it.”
“I hear ya, kid,” he says. “I won’t ask again. This one score will probably set us up for a while, anyway. You got my word.”
I give him a grim smile and I nod, although we both know this isn’t going to be the only time he asks. It won’t be just this one job. By doing this for him, I’m opening the door to a life of crime that’s just going to continue escalating. It probably won’t be long before he has me trying to break into Fort Knox.
“All right. On your way, then,” he urges.
With a sigh, I step out of the trees and circle around to the back of the bank. I walk across the lot and stand before the back door, drawing in a deep breath. I let it out slowly and focus, calling up my power and letting it fill me. It fills my every cell with an intense heat that’s only getting hotter. I throw my head back and cry out as my bones start to snap, my muscles tear, and everything inside of me begins to break apart.
The pain is searing and I collapse, falling to the ground where I writhe and thrash. My skin starts to split, and I feel my body reshaping itself. Bones pop into place and my blood feels like it’s on fire. It is the purest agony imaginable. My vision wavers and as I open my mouth, letting out a roar of anguish that echoes through the night.
* * * * *
When I come back to myself, I look down and shudder. I’m naked and covered in blood. It seems like I’ve been here far too many times to count. My head is throbbing and my body aches in a thousand different places. Just as it does every time I wake up after shifting.
I groan as I get to my feet and look around. I’m not surprised to see the torn and broken bodies that litter the ground all around me. I’m standing in blood and gore, pieces of the cleaning crew and the security guards who’d been manning the bank strewn all around. There is blood high on the walls, arterial spray reaching the ceiling and running down the tellers’ plexiglass windows.
The smell of blood fills my nose and sets my body tingling. I can’t deny that I find the scent of it exciting. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t light me up inside in ways nothing else does. I’d be lying if I said becoming the monster, running wild and free in that form, wasn’t invigorating. It repulses me that I get a trill out of it, and I hate that. I hate what I’ve become. But I can’t deny that it’s a part of me.
“Roger,” I croak, my throat dry
and my voice hoarse. “Where are you?”
I turn in a circle, my eyes narrowing when I don’t hear a reply. When I don’t hear anything. The door to the vault has been ripped off its hinges, and although I don’t recall doing it, I know it was me. There’s no other way it could have happened. I don’t hear any sounds coming from inside, though. Roger and his guys should be in there, loading up their bags with the cash. There should be sounds. Voices. Something. But there’s nothing. It’s as silent as a tomb.
Quickly, I move back to the vault, and find it empty. Roger and his men have cleared out already and, judging by the mess they left inside, took a good chunk of cash with them. They got what they wanted and then bailed.
“They left me,” I realize. “They fucking left me.”
As I stand there, staring at the carnage in the vault, my heightened senses warn me that they’re coming. I can smell them. My stomach lurches and the anger inside of me boils anew. I turn to the broken-out doorway of the vault and see the men in black tactical gear standing there, weapons at the ready.
A low growl passes my lips. Before I can shift, though, I’m hit with more darts than I can count. I look down at a group of them sticking out of my chest and abdomen. My vision starts to waver, and I suddenly feel lightheaded. My legs turn to rubber and I fall to my knees as the darkness hovers at the edges of my vision. I have never been more afraid than I am right now.
The last thing I remember before the darkness claims me is a man in black snapping a silver collar around my neck.
Chapter Eight
Present Day…
Gray
I take my tray and step back out into the common room. I see the glances of some of the girls and hear their whispered giggles as I pass by. I favor a few with a smile, making them titter wildly. I even tip a wink at Josie, a water elemental, setting off a bright red blush in her face.