Alien Me (5 page)

The men ignored him and looked at Sean. “Sean Banks?” one asked.

Sean’s expression of bored courtesy vanished. “Yes.”

“Darcy Hinson?” the other asked.

I didn’t answer.

“What is this?” the vice principal asked, this time using his teacher’s voice.

“I’m Detective Torgeson and this is Detective Blaine.” The man looked from Sean to me and back again. He pulled out a badge and it flashed golden for a moment before he put it away. “We’ll need to talk with both these students.”

The blood drained from my face so fast that the room spun. So the rumors were true. I was going to be charged with attempted murder for what happened to Martin. How did he manage it? There hadn’t been any drugs in his system. Or had there? Had his mother lied to mine? Did he overdose himself and blame it on me? But what did this have to do with Sean? I thought he must be in on Martin’s scheme. As I suspected, this was a trick.

The vice principal gaped. Sean pulled his cell phone out of his backpack.

“I won’t talk to you without my parents,” Sean said as his fingers slid over the touch screen of his phone.

“We will interview them separately,” Detective Torgeson said to the vice principal.

“There’s a conference room down the hall,” the security guard said to the officers.

“Wait a minute. I need to contact their parents,” the vice principal said.

Detective Torgeson ignored him and gestured for me to get up. “Come with me.”

“No, you’re not taking her,” Sean cried, grabbing my arm. “Darcy, don’t move.”

I remained frozen in my chair, too intimidated to move. The skin on my arms began tingling, almost snapping, a sensation I didn’t understand.

“Are you refusing to follow the instructions of a police officer?” Detective Blaine said ominously to me.

“These men aren’t police officers,” Sean said, still holding my arm. His hand felt like ice amid the pins-and-needles heat that was stirring on my skin. “Can’t you feel them? Can’t you feel that they’re different?”

At this point I was so frightened and overwhelmed that I didn’t know what I felt. The men in the room had an air of menace that terrified me. Strangely, I swore I could feel the air throb with the heartbeats of one of them.

“Take her into the other room,” Blaine told the security guard.

“Darcy, don’t go,” Sean said. “You can fight them. You’re stronger. Fight them!”

The security guard seized my elbow with a gloved hand and forced me to my feet. I wanted to refuse, but the habit of obeying adult authority figures was strong and my legs obeyed. Sean’s hand fell away. The detectives watched me with a silent intensity that frightened me. As I passed by them, I felt a powerful tingling in my hands, the same sensation I felt before shoving Sean. Detective Blaine followed the security guard and me into the hallway. I thought my skin sensed the fluttering of anxiety in his stomach. I wondered why he would be afraid of me. I could hear Sean arguing with the other man and the vice principal inside the office.

“Darcy! He’s going to try to hurt you!” Sean cried.

“Get into that room and sit down,” the security guard said when we came to the conference room.

My heart beat against my ribcage. Detective Blaine’s energy felt different from what I sensed from the vice principal. I faced him, suspicious. Not taking my eyes off of him, I took my cell phone from my backpack and slid it into the pocket of my jeans.

“Darcy, run!” Sean shouted from inside the office.

Blaine’s expression never changed as he lunged toward me with a crystal dagger he pulled from his sleeve. I didn’t have the chance to scream. I pivoted but not enough. The dagger sliced neatly through my upper arm and glanced off the bone. I screamed and did what my mother had always told me to do. I went for his face, trying to punch him in the nose and poke out his eyes. The second my hands touched his face, he gave a terrible, inhuman moan and fell limp, as if his bones had turned to jelly. He melted into a heap on the hallway floor and I felt an adrenalin surge.

“A missusan,” the security guard said. He picked up the dagger and came after me. His movements were fluid and lethal, like a snake’s.

Without the element of surprise, I had no idea what to do. I tried to run, but the security guard tackled me, hitting my legs like a battering ram. My breath was knocked from my body when we hit the floor. He landed on my legs, and with inhuman strength, I pulled myself free and, still on the floor, kicked him in the face. He grabbed my ankle with one gloved hand and raised his dagger in the other. I kicked him in the head and knocked the dagger from his grasp. He clutched my ankle and dragged me toward him. I struggled, but very quickly he was over me. He held me with one hand and reached for the dagger with the other. Terrified, I grabbed his wrist, and in our struggle his sleeve pulled up. My hand made contact with the skin above his glove. His eyebrows shot up and he gasped as if he’d taken a punch to the stomach. Then I felt his energy surging into me, an amazing vitality flowing into my veins and muscles like a narcotic. He was like a rag doll when I let him go.

In five running steps I was inside the vice principal’s office where Sean was in the fight of his life. The vice principal was on his feet against the back wall of his office croaking hoarsely for everyone to stop. The detective seemed like a maniacal machine, wielding a crystal dagger again and again at the backpack Sean was using as a shield. Without thinking, I jumped on the detective’s back and grasped his throat. The man stiffened for a moment before collapsing under me. As with the other two men, energy pulsed into my veins like an electric elixir. In a moment the only sound left in the room was the whimpering of the vice principal. Sean drew a gurgling breath as he fell against the wall and sank to the floor leaving a gory smear on the wall. Blood droplets sprinkled his face.

“Sean! Sean!” I cried as I went to him.

The vice principal staggered into the hallway and shouted for someone to call 911. A cut on Sean’s forehead bled into his left eye. Another on his shoulder flowed red and wet. A wound on his chest sucked air and blew red bubbles. A gash on his abdomen pulsed blood. I pulled the linen scarf from my neck, wadded it up, and held it on the abdominal wound. The blood bubbled up between my fingers and saturated the scarf. I threw it onto the vice principal’s desk and put my hand directly on the puncture. Where my flesh touched his flesh, I felt a tingling heat. Sean lay back as if sleepy. I thought that must mean he was dying.

“Why are you bleeding so much? Come on. Help is on the way,” I whispered. “Stop bleeding. Stop bleeding.”

I willed him to live. He had to, this boy who had tried to save me with his warnings. Outside the office I could hear shouting and screams, the vice principal ordering the lockdown of the campus. I kept whispering Sean’s name, and his breathing seemed to ease. At first that alarmed me further, fearing he had lost consciousness because he was dying. Then I became weakened and felt queasy. The room receded into gentle darkness. My eyes closed and I fell forward over Sean’s body. I hardly noticed until Sean’s voice drew me back.

“Darcy! Darcy! Come on. We have to get out of here.”

I felt Sean pull me to my feet. His wounds had somehow closed, all of them, even the one that had gurgled. Only the red trails of blood on his face and his torn, dripping blood-saturated shirt and jeans gave evidence to what had just happened.

“Come on. We have to go,” he was saying as he reached into the pockets of the detective who lay motionless next to us. Sean pulled out his badge and wallet and dropped them into his battered backpack. Then he went out into the hall and collected the same things from the other men. “In a few minutes this place will be locked down and covered with cops.”

“Are they dead?” I asked, unable to process how I had done that.

He swung his backpack over his shoulders. Sean was so strong and graceful in his movements that I could hardly reconcile the fact that he was the same person who had lain dying a minute before.

“Who cares? They weren’t real cops. These badges are solid gold. I can tell.” He reached up and pulled off his black diamond earring and tossed it on the vice principal’s disheveled desk. It clattered and bounced playfully against the man’s keyboard. The blood droplets on his fingers fell like rubies.

“Then who are they?”

“Assassins. I told you we weren’t supposed to meet. Take off your earrings and necklace. They’re using them to track us.”

I wasted no time in pulling off my jewelry and letting the pieces bounce and skip across the vice principal’s vast desk. My and Sean’s blood left red fingerprints on the jade beads.

“Did that fake cop manage to cut you?” Sean asked, his eyes on my arms.

“He did. I felt the knife hit against the bone.” I lifted up my sleeve to show him. Though my arm was still wet with blood, the cut was gone. “Okay. I can’t explain this. Or what happened to you just now.”

“I can.” Sean glanced into the hallway. “My car is in the parking lot. Are you feeling well enough to run?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed my hand and we sprinted through the sunny atrium of the front office. We left a trail of blood drops on the tile floors as we passed the young clerk who crouched under her desk crying. The vice principal and the rest of the staff were nowhere to be seen. Sean and I burst through the front doors and ran full speed toward the parking lot.

The tires squealed on the asphalt as Sean raced his car out of the parking lot. He ignored the stop sign near the school and stoplight at the next intersection. Several cars sounded their horns and screeched their tires as they swerved to avoid us. Sean kept checking all the mirrors to make sure that we weren’t being followed. I hardly noticed. Right this minute the inside of this car had to be safer than the vice principal’s office. I began shaking in reaction.

“Why did those men come after us with knives?” I asked in a voice whispery with fear. “If they were trying to kill us, why didn’t they use guns?”

“They don’t like human weapons like guns. And those were not ordinary knives.”

“Where are we going? The police department?”

Sean accelerated through a second red light. “That’s the first place they’d look for us. We’re going to fall through into Geminay. If we’re going to survive this, we’ll need the protection of our Houses.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Fall through? And what houses? What are these houses you keep talking about?”

“Our Houses. You’re the Sworn Asset of the House of Beck and I’m of the House of Picard. Our Houses won’t throw away our lives like that. They need us to bring them energy from the yellow sun, so they won’t want to lose us. If anyone can call off the assassins, they can.”

I stared at Sean. “So these Houses you keep talking about aren’t the ones who sent the bad guys and their glass knives after us?”

“No, that would be His and Her Majesty,” Sean said as he repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. “They’re in charge of enforcing the Treaty. The Original People have a complex system with lots of rivalries and rules.”

“So you’re saying that there’s a monarchy in a country called Geminay that is under the surface of the Earth?” Before Jonathan died, he told me he could tell that I was one of those who could bring the light. Were these the beings he was talking about? “That’s not possible. People couldn’t survive there.”

“They know how,” Sean said.

“What happened to all of our knife wounds? How did we get healed? My arm was slashed to the bone and now it’s gone.”

“You did that with the life energy you took from the assassins. We’re Sworn Assets. We’ve been engineered to carry the energy of the yellow sun in our bodies because of DNA manipulation and I don’t know what else. We can then give that energy to others to heal them.” Sean slowed down as he turned into a residential neighborhood and drove past an elementary school. “That is why the Original People created us.”

“Created? I have a mother and a father.”

“And has your mother told a story of how when you were a baby she found you not breathing? Does she say how she revived you using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and that after that you were the healthiest child, barely ever getting sick? Does she mention how you have perfect friends, loyal, good influences?” Sean brought the car to a screeching halt. “Our families were chosen to foster us. They’re called our Earth tenders.”

My head was swimming with all this information. “Our Earth tenders?”

Sean stared over the steering wheel. “I think we quit breathing when they put our life energy into these bodies. I think that, but I don’t know for sure. When I ask the question, everyone acts like they’re surprised that this matters to me. To the Original People, making Sworn Assets is business as usual.”

My heart skipped a beat and I felt myself become very hot. “So you’re saying that whatever we are was put in these bodies?”

Sean turned to me, his face pinched. “I don’t know what I’m saying. If I think about it too hard, then I feel like I’m walking around in someone else’s flesh. Or then I think we’re nothing but some kind of disposable animal who has a purpose, like a chicken meant to produce eggs, and that we’re not responsible for whatever happened during our creation.”

“And what happened to the life that was in these bodies in the first place? Are we it—I mean is it part of us?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what are we? Transplanted souls? I’ve been to church. I know about these things.”

“I don’t know. I asked those questions too, but my shaman, Whitlock, told me that it’s a question for the Mechanics, the ones who run the technical part of Geminay. And I have yet to meet a Mechanic. They don’t mix much with the other Original People. And Whitlock said not to worry about it. He pointed out that we humans create lives for our purposes, you know, like raising chickens and hogs, and this wasn’t any different. And he said that we’re hybrids and should be grateful for our enhanced lives. That’s what Whitlock said we are, you know, enhanced.”