Iron Inheritance (2 page)

“Ok, Miss Badass.” Ria scoffed. “Maybe we just need to get you in MMA or something. You’re seriously ok?” she added, her voice honeyed.

I nodded and added a smile I didn’t really feel.

A peppy grin spread across her mischievous lips. “Then that could be our new summer project after graduation.” She clapped her hands together, caramel locks bouncing on her bare shoulders. “I can make your costume, get you some sponsors…”

I pressed my lips into a tight smile. Now that was the Ria I knew and loved. How did she just cut through the guts and gore of what just happened to see that shiny kernel at the center? Her thoughts might be motivated by money and the prospect of me not leaving for New York sooner than she’d like, but still—shiny.

“MMA’s not professional wrestling,” I said. “There’s no costumes. You know that, right?”

She flicked her hand dismissively and continued to rattle off things to prepare for my first professional match. I tried to push off the thought of ever getting in a fight again.

“How did you guys know where I was?” I said suddenly, remembering that I’d been waiting by the fountain as a reprieve from Ria’s shopping spree. “I left when you were trying on the tenth dress in a row.”

“I know, and I don’t know why. Eleventh time’s always the charm.” Ria tossed her hair. “We went to a couple more stores. I was putting some makeup on Nate when—” She paused with a coy smile, waiting for Nate to jump in and deny it, but he didn’t. He just kept leading the way, stalking forward like a hound dog following a scent. Every few steps he glanced up at the ceiling as if he could see the sky beyond.

“Then Nate grunted and doubled over like someone hit him in the stomach.” Ria paused again, waiting for him to say something.

Instead, he quickened his pace.

Ria huffed and turned back to me. “Then he just ran. I didn’t know where he was going until we saw you.”

I narrowed my eyes, my heart rate picking up again. “Nate, what’s going on?”

Sliding doors spread apart in front of us, and a blast of desert heat whipped our faces.

Nate clenched his jaw when he saw the clear blue sky. “I just got a feeling that you were in trouble.”

Ria and I raised our eyebrows at each other. If this had been the first time one of his “feelings” had sent him racing to my side, I might have been curious.

Instead, all I thought about was Grandpa and what had happened last time.

I gripped the seat of Nate’s beat up, old Jeep, the hot wind tossing chocolate hair into my face. “Do you think Grandpa’s ok?”

“What?” Nate flicked his green eyes to the rearview mirror to make sure he’d heard me correctly. “Affirmative.”

Yeah. Answers like that make me feel so much better.

I didn’t know why I was so worried about him. Even if someone had called already and told him what happened, it wasn’t like the news was as horrible as last time. He wasn’t going to have to come pick me up from the police station. He wasn’t going to have to talk to friends’ parents and apologize profusely. He wasn’t going to have to hear me yell and whine and turn my mistake into blackmail that would let me go to a regular school for my senior year. He wasn’t going to have another stress-induced heart attack because of what I’d done…I hoped.

I sunk back into my seat and watched massive billboards and jumbo screens flank our exit as we pulled onto The Strip—Sin City. Twelve-story bikini women posing partway between seductress and contortionist winked their alluring Siren’s call of anonymity. Whatever happened here would stay here.

What a load of crap.

It took almost forty-five minutes to get from the center of Vegas to Red Rock. The dense, red, clay earth on either side of the two-lane highway was speckled with prickly shrubs that changed color with the fading light—sometimes pale green, sometimes purple. In the distance, jagged red cliffs rose across an expanse of color-sapping, shifting sands. The wind carved the cliffs like clouds until everywhere you looked you saw a portrait of someone you knew.

That’s what Grandpa used to tell me, anyway. Used to.

I missed that.

Each of our three families had ranch houses twenty miles outside the city. Ria’s was near the resort at the base of the canyon—still technically Vegas, her mom always said. Nate’s was in the middle. Mine was the most remote and the one we spent the most time at.

We pulled onto the gravel driveway, and all I could do was wonder what I’d tell Grandpa. His contacts in town might have kept me out of jail, and maybe Mr. Domestic Violence deserved what he got, but that wouldn’t change the fact that I’d broken a promise—however involuntarily. Grandpa was big on promises.

I wiped my knuckles on my jeans again even though they were thoroughly clean by now. I’d rubbed every crack clean with a tissue and a water bottle as we drove, but they still felt dirty.

Nate cut off the rumble of the engine, and my ears took a while to adjust to the lack of wind pounding into them. I exhaled slowly. Grandpa would be in the garden this time of day. I should just tell him now, whether he’d heard about it or not. The consequences didn’t even matter anymore. I had three months before I left to college, and I wasn’t going to leave things broken between us again. Not again.

I rubbed my thumb over the broken blue stone of my half-wing necklace. I knew myself well enough to recognize that guilt weighed more heavily on me than most people. I had enough to deal with without adding anything more with Grandpa.

“How about you two head inside or something while I talk to him,” I said from the back seat.

Ria misinterpreted my intentions and widened her eyes in a psychic trance. “You have to tell him the truth. He’ll know. It’s like a Mom-mind-reading thing, except he’s older, wiser, and wrinklier.” Her face contorted. “He’s that tiny green guy in those movies with the laser thingies.”

“Yoda?” I raised an eyebrow and couldn’t help a smile from creeping across my lips. “You think he’s Yoda?”

She nodded, eyes still wide.

I squirmed when she didn’t look away. “Stop it. You know that weirds me out.” I creaked open the side door. “I’m going to tell him exactly what happened. I deserve some kind of lashing for what I just did.” I swallowed, but a lump still stuck in my throat.

Ria dabbed her eyes, careful not to smear her makeup, as she pretended to cry with joy. “My baby’s finally growing up.”

I rolled my eyes and started for the garden. Nate got out too, his red hair bobbing up and down as he walked toward the workshop near the back of the property, his job of getting me home safely achieved. I’d known him for four years, and he’d always been that way—more like a loyal bodyguard than anything else…except for Ria. To her, Nate was a lot more than “anything else.”

I walked carefully around the perimeter of our brown and tan single-story house, the paint peeling just enough so people thought someone either very trendy or very old lived there. A twenty foot ring of “treasures,” as Grandpa called them, were embedded in dry patches of grass and bare red soil around the house so people
knew
someone crazy lived there. Some of the treasures were old trinkets he’d collected from his travels in the military. Most of them were pretty nice too—old glass bottles from the early 1900s, rusted medallions, and coins with coats of arms and people I couldn’t even find in Google. But after the trinket stash was depleted, he’d started planting shiny rocks and things he found on the side of the road.

Grandpa called it decorating.

I called it hick-ifying.

That had been in seventh grade before Ria told me about hickies.

The total effect of whatever it was called was a minefield of objects to avoid with a game of skips, jumps, and treading lines so straight and narrow they could have been tightropes. The game started for fun when we were six. Now we kept it so we didn’t trip.

I turned a corner and found Grandpa’s white shirt and beige Panama hat hunched over the garden—green tomatoes hanging from vines.

I pushed down my nerves and forced a smile. “Those don’t look ready to pick.”

“The vine will yield its fruit, and the heavens will give their dew.” His voice was deep and gravely, sinking into the soft brown earth he’d cultivated to perfection.

“The dew might be a problem, seeing as we’re still living in the desert.”

He turned and grinned, wrinkles around his eyes cracking into existence. The brim of his hat was smudged with dirt, and his gray mustache looked like a thick caterpillar on his upper lip. “God always finds a way.” He pushed up his hat as his old eyes were finally able to focus on me. “In all these years, I thought I’d taught you to block punches as well as throw them.” He looked sympathetically at my busted lip.

A knot released in my chest. He already knew. I shook my head and exhaled through my nose. “You taught me a lot of contradictory things. Like learn every possible fighting style but never use them.”

“I never said never.” He scowled and stood with a slight groan. “Only that you should exercise control.” He walked around the other side of the garden and inspected more of his parched crop.

I waited for him to say something more. Everything was a test with him—could I exercise enough self-control not to say anything to defend myself? Could I be patient?

I liked it better when these games ended in him giving me a cookie.

He adjusted his hat again and looked up at the sky with a sigh. “Do you remember what set you off? What triggered it?”

My moment of indecision resurfaced with the burden of guilt. “He hit her,” I said, pushing the feeling back down into the pit of my stomach. “I tried to stop him, to get her to come with me, but then—” I remembered his finger flicking my shirt. “Until that point I was fine—in control. Then he broke her nose and I blacked out.” I flinched, wishing I had left out that detail like I had with Ria and Nate. Blacking out only made this whole thing worse—like something was wrong with me. “When I came to, he was down.”

I turned away as Grandpa looked at me intently with bright blue eyes, waiting for me to say something more.

“Did you take any hits to the head? If you blacked out, maybe we should take you to the hospital. Get an MRI.”

I looked up skeptically. “
You
want me to go to a hospital? This coming from the same man who refused to get me immunized as a kid? The same man who set my bone and made a cast out of newspaper and cardboard when I broke my arm doing back flips?” Each memory came flooding back with a soft smile.

He shrugged. “Last time I went, they did all right.”

My shoulders dropped.

He softened the intense gaze of his blue eyes. “Evey, you have to stop blaming yourself for that.” He stepped forward and put his dirt-caked hand over mine. “This old ticker was bound to have a hiccup sooner or later. Just like that head of yours.” He wrapped his knuckles on my head softly.

“I don’t, I just—” I pulled back, wanting to forget this ever happened. “What’s my punishment?”

He crunched his brow until the wrinkles strained. “You promised me no partying, no more immature teenage antics, if my memory serves me correct.”

His memory always served him correctly; it was like having a computer at my side at all times, recording every mistake and thinking up corresponding consequences. When we were younger, Ria had convinced me to put pudding in another girl’s hair at the park. Each day for the next month I’d learned how to make every dessert imaginable and had to bring it to her family’s doorstep.

He brushed a stray hair out of my eye and smiled. “How ’bout we skip the usual formality tonight and just forget this?” He turned and started back toward the porch, taking his hat off and wiping his short gray hair with a handkerchief.

I raised my eyebrows into bewildered confusion. “What do you mean forget about it?” The concept was as foreign as Ria turning down dessert or Nate cracking a joke unrelated to Indiana Jones.

Grandpa stepped up onto the porch without answering and found Ria practicing her knife throwing—a common past-time at my house. She released just as he walked up.

A millisecond later, there was a sharp
pop
as the glass bulb overhead shattered, and the knife thudded down, point-first, by Grandpa’s toes.

Ria flashed a sheepish grin. “Sorry, Grampy.”

“Maria?” he said testily, his deep voice like a low wave rolling over the shore.

“Yes, sir.” Ria looked down, defeated.

Grandpa stepped around to her side and handed her the knife. “How many times will I have to remind you?”

“Just one more?” She peeked out of the corner of her eye, pursing her lips into inquisitive cuteness.

He smiled and turned her shoulders toward the round, wood target at the end of the porch. It’d been there since I was a kid, and there were thousands of dents and sliver-sized holes to prove it. “Release at shoulder level.” He guided her arm back into a throwing position. “Ready?”

She nodded, eyes set with determination.

Her wrist and forearm flung forward, and the knife sailed toward the target, ending up sharp-end-first in the radio three feet to the left.

“I did it!” Ria screamed and smiled as she ran to retrieve the knife.

Grandpa sighed and shook his head. “That girl has absolutely no coordination.”

I laughed, forgetting my day for a brief moment that washed over my entire body like cool water.

“Your turn, Evey.” Ria returned and thrust the knife into my hand.

I shook my head. Having the knife in my hand felt wrong, like I’d lose control again—black out, wake up, and see something more horrific than I could bear.

Maintain control. Never let your emotions get the best of you. That’s when accidents happen.
Grandpa’s voice rang in my ears even when he wasn’t speaking.

I turned to him. “Why are you teaching us all this? We could kill somebody.” I set the knife down on the railing.

The jubilee of Ria’s progress evaporated. Grandpa narrowed his eyes like the answer to my question should have been apparent my whole life. “So you can defend people. Protect them, and yourselves, from those who mean you harm.”

The words sunk in without having an effect. I took a deep breath and tried to remind myself that it was only a few more months. The past two years felt like I’d been living someone else’s life, like none of this made sense anymore—how could it? It wasn’t just the combat training—his term, not mine—it was the trinkets around the yard, the knives and swords around the house, the nuclear drills that sent us to the bunker under the workshop. This wasn’t normal, and a part of me had finally woken up to that fact. It wasn’t just something to laugh at and call crazy. It was dangerous in the wrong hands. My hands.