Arianna Rose: The Gathering (Part 3) (30 page)

“Very good,” she heard Desmond’s voice echo around her.  “Now, continue to see yourself as one with the air, but envision yourself inside the school.  You will be using two powers at the same time, layering them.  I know you can do it,” he encouraged her.  “You and I are going to teleport inside the school while maintaining our invisibility.”

“And then what?” Arianna heard her voice fill the car.

“We will each go to the doors and take them out.  They will likely split up to lock the doors.”

“Okay,” she said and acknowledged their simple plan. 

“Just remember, you have to reappear before you can attack them,” he cautioned.  “Your powers will be too weak from sifting and upholding the invisibility to hurt them, much less kill them.”

Arianna started to nod then remembered he could not see her.  There were so many rules regarding her powers, rules she was simply unaware of.  What if she screwed up?  What if she discontinued her invisibility too late and Agnon’s freaks were able to hurt some of the students or staff? 

The what-if
s began to plague her again.  She felt her focus waver and her hand reappeared briefly, flickering like the picture on an old television set without its antennas.

“Arianna, are you okay?” Desmond asked concernedly.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said.

She forced herself to center her thoughts on remaining invisible, but worry still nig
gled at her brain.  Hundreds of lives were at stake.  She did not have time for self-doubt.  Her mother and Luke flashed in her memory and made her heart clench.  But the pain strengthened her resolve.  She would not see more innocent people die.  She’d already let too many fall to dark forces.  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, filling her lungs with air as light and insubstantial as she wished to be.  She felt herself merge with it. 

She looked down and saw that h
er hand no longer flickered, and she felt herself fade away.

“Are you ready?” Desmond asked her.

“Yes,” she said and meant it.

“We will teleport into the
school.  You need to go directly to the rear entrance and I will go to the entrance on the west side.  Don’t say a word.  Just kill them,” he said somberly.  “We do not know what powers they have, but I’m guessing that if my father chose them, he chose them for a reason.  They must be powerful.”

Three warlocks and one witch, whose powers were undetermined but likely great, needed to be caught off-guard and killed.  No problem, right?  Desmond seemed to think so
, or at least he gave her that impression.  She wished it were that simple.  But her body screamed otherwise.  A voice inside her, the voice of loss and reason, instinctively balked at what they were about to do, balked at her confidence.  She could not bear to lose another person she loved.  She could not bear to lose Desmond. 

“Please be careful, Desmond,” she pleaded.  “I cannot lose you again, I cannot survive it.”

“I will be,” he assured her.  “You be careful too.  I cannot live without you either.”

She wished she could hug him, wished she could melt against his strong chest and hear the steady beat of his heart.  But she knew time did not exist for such an indulgence. 
She was about to say good-bye and wish him good luck when an unexpected phenomenon occurred.  For a moment, she felt Desmond’s warmth surround her.  The fine hairs on her body rose along with goose bumps, the same reaction she had when he held her.  Though she could not feel him physically, she sensed him all around her, felt his soul link with hers.  She breathed deeply and smelled a spicy, leathery scent,
his
masculine scent.

“I love you, Desmond,” she breathed and felt his presence slowly ebb.

“I love you, Arianna,” she heard his voice whisper through her, and then he was gone. 

She did not get to say a proper good-bye to him and would never fo
rgive herself if he were killed.

Pushing back fearful thoughts, she sifted.  White light filled her field of vision and cold raced through her veins.  She pictured herself standing in front of the rear doors of
Hallowed Hills High School as visible as the air she breathed. 

When light returned to her, she floated inside the building
, hovering like a wraith.  With a hand she could not see, she reached out and tried the door handle.  Her heart stopped as she realized the door did not budge.  It had been chained shut already.  She tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone dry, panic and terror conspiring against her. 

She was about to call for Desmond, to reach out to him with h
er powers alone and alert him to the shocking discovery she’d made, when she heard voices coming from the gymnasium.  Gym classes were not scheduled during the first period of the day.  Yet, voices came from there. 

Awareness glided through her with winding fluidity, curving and bending as sinuously as a silk.  She knew Agnon’s people were there
.  She moved toward the open doors, the very place she’d listened to Josh and Jess plot this day hours ago.  But this time, she did not have to cloak herself in shadows.  She did not need to cower behind a door.  She was hiding in plain sight. 

“As soon as the bell rings, move into the hall and kill anyone you see,” the bald man hissed and the colossal serpent tattoos on his head pulsated with every word he spoke, as if they’d come to life.  He addressed the man with the facial piecing and dark, greasy hair. 

“I know, I know,” the man with the greasy hair replied and twitched anxiously as if craving a hit of a drug.  But as far as she could tell, his drug of choice did not come in the form of a pill or injection.  What he seemed hell-bent on getting high on was bloodshed.  She could feel the excited beat of his murderous heart pounding. 

Arianna advanced several steps, determined to end their
hellacious existence on Earth.  But as she moved forward, both men stopped talking.  Their heads snapped to their side, in her direction.  She had not made herself visible yet.  Still, they sensed her, saw her, somehow.  She felt the weight of their lethal stares, felt their deadly intents penetrating her skull. 

The bald one sniffed the air, the chain between his ear
and nose quivering as he did.  The man with the greasy hair’s tongue darted in and out like a snake, as if he tasted and smelled the air as they do.  She froze and held her breath, convinced that they saw her.  She waved her hand in front of her face and did not see it, yet the minute swish of air it generated caused the men to take tentative steps toward her.  They exchanged glances and were likely communicating telepathically when a sound distracted them.  It came from a storage closet and sounded like a basketball falling to the hardwood flooring. 

They looked to one another and nodded before moving with impossible speed and grace to the closet.  The bald man yanked the door toward him and opened it.  The smell of marijuana filled the air, pouring from the closet in a thick
, white cloud. 

“Out, now!” the bald man ordered and four boys filed out, all dressed in pants so baggy their underpants showed.

“Whoa, dude,” one said to the bald man, his face a mask of terror as he stared at the monstrous snake tattoos on his head.

“Shut the fuck up,” the bald man spat and the boy took an instinctive step away from him. 

“Now what the hell do we do?” the man with the greasy hair asked.  “They heard everything we said, but we aren’t supposed to kill anyone until the bell rings.”

“We won’t say anything, man,” one of the boys said in a shak
y voice.  “I promise.  Just let us go and we’ll leave the school right now.  We won’t say a word to anyone.”

“Yeah, man, please.  Just let us go,” another begged.

Arianna felt a sudden surge of energy seep into her system, wild, frenzied energy.  She knew that both the man with the greasy hair and the bald man were vacillating, that they were on the verge of giving in to their deadly desires.  She could feel it, feel their intentions.  She was about to appear and attack them both when the bald man spoke.

“We will keep them here until we he
ar that bell,” he said determinedly. 

“So we’re not killing them yet?”
the man with the greasy hair asked with restless longing saturating his tone.

“No,” the bald man said and shot a look of warning his way.

“Please don’t kill us,” one of the boys begged, his voice faltering with emotion.  “We won’t say anything, I swear.”

“Qui
et!” the man with the greasy hair said sharply, and though he did not raise his voice, the boys jumped as if he had.  Two of the boys began to cry as they quietly begged and pleaded for their freedom despite greasy hair’s stern warning. 

“Shh,” he bald man shushed them
tranquilly.  “Just be cool,” he continued and his voice no longer sounded as it had earlier.  Suddenly calm, his voice was a clear, rich, deep baritone.  “Everything is cool. You’re fine.  All of you are fine,” he assured them, his cadence as soothing and lulling as floating on a raft on a gently rolling river.  She did not know how he’d done it and guessed it was part of his power that enabled him to charm them with his voice.  And charm them he had.  She could see that they’d been hypnotized into submission.  His words coaxed them into relaxing visibly.  The worried creases in their faces smoothed.  Their rigid posture loosened.

“Mind if I have a smoke?” one
asked with heavy eyes and a thick voice that sounded as if he’d just roused from sleep.  He slowly slid a cigarette from his pack.

“Go ahead,” the bald man said in the same soothing tone he’d used seconds earlier.

The boy placed his cigarette between his lips unhurriedly then began patting his pants pockets.  “Got a light, bro?” he asked one of his friends.

“Please, allow me,”
the man with the greasy hair offered, his demeanor suddenly cool and composed. 

“Cool, bro,” the boy
drawled.  “I think I left mine in the –,” he started but did not get the chance to finish his sentence. 

The man with the long, dark, greasy hair raised his hands and flames launched from them in a whit
e-hot arc.  They lashed forward like a raging lasso and licked the boy’s entire body.  His face contorted into a mask of agony in a flash as flames engulfed him.  He started to whimper, a weak, defeated sound that urged a veil of crimson to befall Arianna’s eyes.

The sound had barely escaped his lips when, i
ncensed, greasy hair’s fire blazed brighter and within a split-second, the boy was completely consumed by fire until his flesh melted and fell from him, his body reduced to a pile of bones. 

Seeing their friend incinerated, the
remaining three boys, the ones who had been in the closet, stared in shock, their mouths wide with terror.

“You scumbags!” Arianna screamed and
burst forth from the hallway, her form no longer invisible. 

She felt a familiar sensation hiss and crackle
just beneath her skin.  It quickly raced, gaining momentum until it throbbed through her veins with more force than her lifeblood.  Fury overtook her body and her vision was shrouded in crimson. 
Kill them
.  The words passed through her with tremors that shook her, vibrating and echoing to her core. 

They both turned and looked at her and she saw it, saw the tick on both their faces.  They saw her eyes glowing. 

Heat began to consume her, sweeping like brushfire and searing everything in its wake.  The inferno storming inside her raged as it had the night she killed Kane, towering and soaring to the point where she felt her skin would not be able to contain the immense swell of pure energy.

The man with the long, greasy hair snarled at her and raised his hands.  But before he could release his fiery attack, she shot both arms out to either side of her
body and watched as both of the man’s arms ripped from their sockets as easily as they would have had he been made of straw.  Of course, he was not made of straw, and gore gushed from where his arms had been seconds ago.  His limbs fell to the hardwood floor with a sickly thud shortly before the rest of his body did.  Blood pooled around him, smearing as he writhed and howled, producing the most bloodcurdling cry she’d ever heard.  But instead of being revolted by the sound, a trill of excitement tiptoed through her. 

With the metallic stench of blood hanging in the air like mist, overwhelming her, fueling her, she spun and faced the bald man.  Fear flashed fleetingly in his narrow eyes as he trained them on her.  For a moment he held her with his gaze and she saw straight down to the depths of his blackened soul.  A small sneer tugged one corner of his mouth and she felt the storm inside her intensify dangerously, growing to a great tempest of rage. 

She swept a hand to one side, a small gesture, and was shocked and amazed when the bald man’s body rocketed past her and smashed into a concrete wall of the gym.  His skull slammed against it hard then ricocheted forward, flopping reflexively.  She knew his skull had been fractured, had heard the loud pop, but he lived.  She could still hear the beat of his heart.  Lying on his side, he attempted to raise his hands and use his powers.  A thin arc of fire dribbled weakly from his fingertips and Arianna balled both of her hands into tight fists, envisioning every bone in his body splintering.  As she did, he wailed in agony and his hands drooped.  The crunch and snap of his bones breaking filled her head and echoed as if being amplified mechanically.  He slumped, unmoving, no longer a threat to the students of Hallowed Hills High School.