Odin's Murder (28 page)

I nod. “I think so.”

“Is this what it’s like for you and Julian? The twin thing? I can sense him. And Faye, too. They’re nearby. Not like before. When they were—” He grimaces, doesn’t say it aloud. “They aren’t in my head.”

I nod again. I let go of his shirt, and stroke my fingertips down the inside of his good arm, and watch him shiver at my touch, and the flash of
connection
that lingers between us. His nipple hardens under the t-shirt. “Do you sense me, too?”

“
Yes.
Hell, Cherry.” His voice rasps, and his fingers mirror mine, on the tender skin inside my elbow. I gasp when they keep going, light but bold, under the curve of my breast. “How am I going to get through this without you?”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for. Mary will get me through this year and it all will be fine.” His words are promising but he shifts, moves away a little.

“So Mimir is still going to be your case worker?”

“She’ll be around. Someone needs to keep an eye on me.” He kisses the corner of my mouth. “And you.”

“Can I visit?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I can’t? Or you don’t want me to?”

“I don’t want you in that part of my world, Memory. It’s just...”

“I don’t care what it’s like!”

“No, it’s horrible. Those guys. No. I don’t want them to see you or talk about you or try to talk to me about you. I don’t want you to see how I live. It’s jail. Bars on the windows, stainless steel toilets, bunk beds and cafeteria meals three times a day. Let me finish my time. Let me finish it up and then be done with it.”

“No fights.”

“None. I promise,” he says, but the corner of his mouth is twitching, and his eyes promise nothing.

“And I’ll behave.”

He laughs. “Right.”

“I will! I can behave. No boys or fighting with Julian, or breaking into houses. I swear.”

He catches my chin between his hands. “Everything will be okay. In a year we’ll start our life over and deal with everything then. In the meantime, just have fun.” His eyes are clouded with gray, like he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, so I kiss him, soft, and then not.

“I don’t want fun,” I whisper against his mouth. “I want you.”

He stops my words with his lips, a hard kiss that leaves me gasping for more, clinging to his heat and my sanity. His hands are everywhere, shaping to my body until I moan. I grind into him, tugging at his shirt, pulling it up, frantic to touch his skin.

He pushes me away. He’s panting, eyes electric again. Then he smirks. “So, isn’t this like incest?” he asks. “Aren’t we like brother and sister, or cousins or something?”

I smack the arm that isn’t bandaged. “You’re so gross.”

A rap on the door has me pulling away. “Come in,” I sigh.

Faye and Julian stand in the doorway. Both look exhausted, dark purple rings under their eyes.

“Hey,” I say, smoothing my hair. “You guys okay?”

“Just wanted to say goodbye,” Faye says, pouting at Ethan. “I’m going to miss you.”  Ethan nods and ducks his head. Only Faye could cause this boy to blush.

Mimir walks in without knocking. “Time to go. It’s a two hour drive and I need to be back before dark.”

Ethan’s arms tighten around me but I wiggle loose. I gawk at the ring that wraps her middle finger, now with a round smoky brown topaz in the eye-shaped setting, where the amber gem used to sit.

“Is that Sonja’s...?” I can’t finish. The others look as horrified as I feel.

“The bargain was struck, and I am bound to it, both then and now,” Miriam says. Her eyes, the same color, fill with tears, but they don’t spill over.

“She’ll be back,” Ethan says, but he doesn’t look at her.

“Time to go,” she says again.

Julian offers Ethan a hand. With a surprised glance, he takes it, letting my brother help him off the bed. Jules says, “Look, I wanted to thank you for all that...I mean, everything. For me and the girls...”

“Group effort. Don’t thank me.”

My brother shakes his head. “You were willing to risk everything for all of us.”

“You were the one who first figured out that something was weird with Anders. We should have listened.”

Miriam calls Ethan’s name from the front of the house.

“I’ll see you around,” my brother says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Ethan grabs my brother’s arm and nods in my direction. “Take care of her.”

“Like she’ll let me,” Julian says and follows Faye out the door.

Ethan hugs me but stops short of actually leaving. He rubs his hands over his face. “This sucks.”

“Totally.”

“Quick,” he says and I run over for one more kiss, and boy, does he ever give it to me, urgent and hot, lips and teeth and tongue and searing light. I let him go and shut the door, pressing my back against the wooden surface, unable to watch him leave, breathless.

A dark image of wings is burned into my mind.

29.

Emancipation

The heavy metal door bangs behind me, trapping the rowdy voices on the other side. The guard nods and a buzzer sounds, shifting the locks, separating me from them for the last time. Goodbye block eight, hello world. It’s quieter than I remember.

“Got everything?” The corrections officer asks. He passes me a bag. “That’s all you had in your intake locker.”

I take the belt and the shoes, but push back the pants and the shirt. “These won’t fit anymore. Can you pass them on to one of the guys?”

According to the nurse’s release form, I’ve grown two more inches and gained 30 pounds since I got here. I’ll have to make do with my one allotted pair of dark blue work pants and single white T-shirt.

“Sure,” the guard says. He performs the obligatory search on the zip-lock bag of the few things I’ll take with me: a stack of forty-two letters, one for each week—though not these past three, because I told her to stop writing near my release date, not knowing if I would get them before I was out; the stone Faye slipped me under the table nearly a year ago; a couple books Julian sent with Mary, and the weird little Scandinavian comics that were mailed with no return address.

“Hope you got that picture of your girl in there. The guys were eyeing it pretty hard when it came in.” 

“Shut up.” I have three pictures, though in her letters she says she sent more. I realize I haven’t officially been released and toss out a, “Sir,” to cover for my disrespect.

He ignores it and says, “She waiting for you?”

“Yeah.” At least I hope so. My stomach twists up with the anticipation I’ve spent the last year trying to suppress. Only a couple hours to go. I’m hoping Mary has her cell phone number. I don’t know it, told her not to write it in her letters, because I wouldn’t be the only one reading them.

The officer leads me outside, between the work out yard and the administration building. The sky is clear. The chill of spring is gone and humidity is already sticking to my skin. I scan the parking lot through the fence, looking for Mary’s Nissan.

We walk through the side door and to the intake room. “Let me get your paperwork,” he says.

I sit in the hard plastic chair at the metal table, feeling no different than I did a day ago. I’m still confined, two-way mirrors and automatic locking doors. I’ve waited a year, mostly patient, but these last few hours have been excruciating. Did she not write because I told her not to, or because she didn’t want to?

Mary opens the door, waving my paperwork. “Ready?”

I’m out of my chair before she even finishes the word. “Let’s go!” My words are garbled by a smile so big it hurts my face.

“Good luck, Tyrell,” the guy says, holding out a hand for me to shake. “The world is a big place. Make the most of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

He has no idea how huge my world is, or that I have a destiny bigger than his reality has room for, so I nod and smile, and hold the door for Mary. We walk through the metal detectors to the outside.  Same air, same sky, but it’s always bluer on this side of the fence.

“Slow down,” Mary says.

I stop, walk back to her, and stride off again. “I can’t tell you how good it feels just to walk out that door. I swear the air is fresher out here.”

“The officer got the right of it, Ethan. The world is a big place, and you got it all in your hands. You do right by me, you hear?”

“I’m good, Mary. I’ve had enough fighting for a lifetime. I promise.”

I don’t confess that I’m scared. That I’m on my own and that the only people in the world I have is a set of psychic twins, a weird witchy chick and an anonymous comic book sender, who last I saw was a black bird. I have no parents, no job, and no home, and a Norse god with expectations I can’t even begin to understand.

The car feels smaller than it used to be. I roll down the window, enjoy the wind on my face, but we go only about five miles down the rural road when Mary stops at an abandoned gas station.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“You’ll see.”

All I want in the world is to get to a phone, so I can call Memory. My head is so full of her, I could almost reach out and touch her skin. Another car pulls up beside us, a black SUV, huge, with dark windows, something out of a gangster movie.

“Who is that? Are you leaving me here?” I ask. The door swings open and the longest, hottest pair of legs comes in view. God, I’ve missed her. I scramble out of the Nissan and attack her. Pick her up and kiss her face and lips and neck. And damn, does she smell good.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

“Put me down?” She laughs.

“No.” I do, but I don’t let go. Not for a second.

“I figured Memory would cause a short circuit at the Detention Center if I brought her in looking like that, so we decided to meet here,” Mary explains.

“Yeah.” I can’t tear my eyes off her shorts and her shoulders and her neck. My cellmate would have had a heart attack.

“Come here,” Mary says, waving me to the back of her car. She opens the trunk and points inside. I reach in for my camera bag and portfolio. “I also packed you a bag. Some clothes and necessities to get you started. My going away gift.”

I lift the bag of clothing out and Memory takes my portfolio. She opens the back door of her SUV and puts them in. I turn to Mary. “Thanks for everything. I mean it. All of it.”

“You’re welcome. Be good. Stay safe.”

“We won’t see you again?” Memory asks. She’s beside me, fingers wrapped in mine.

“You are always welcome in my house.” She steps forward and gives me a hug, the first one from her I’ve had for a very long time. She seems tiny now. “Good luck.”

She gets in her car and drives away, leaving Memory and I on the side of the road. I pull Cherry to me and give her another kiss. The kind you give when no one is watching, that has her against the vehicle, and my hands full of her hair and her legs around my waist. I kiss her until we are both moaning, my lips drifting over her cheek, to her neck, and lower, searching through the fabric of her top for the nipple that rises to my touch.

“Stop that,” she says, as she arches into my mouth. “Or we’ll never make it to the island.”

“Island?”

“We’re halfway to the beach so I figured, why not? Catch up with the others? Julian and Faye are already ahead of us.” She climbs down from me, but I don’t let her go. “We have so much to tell you. Julian’s been researching the craziest stuff and Faye found a runestone that has herbal recipes—the house smells awful—and I’ve been dreaming, but different dreams. Interesting dreams.”

“The beach? Sand and sky and ocean?” No walls, no fences, and a girl. This girl. Sounds like heaven.

“Plus, Sonja’s giving us flying lessons.”

“Flying?”

“Look.” Cherry’s grin is scarlet red. She touches my face, one fingertip lingering on my lower lip. I look, and am caught in her memory, a dizzying spiral of distance and sky and wind and freedom, awkward and tilting, sideways, too far, and the avian shriek turns to a girl’s scream as she tumbles and crashes into water, emerging naked from the waves, spewing salt water and laughter. “Flying.”

Oh, hell, yes.

Angel Lawson
lives with her family in Atlanta and has a lifelong obsession with creating fiction from reality, either with paint or words. On a typical day you can find her writing, reading, plotting her escape from the zombie apocalypse and trying to get the glitter out from under her nails. She's the author of the YA
Wraith series
,
FanGirl
,
Serial Summer
and the Urban Fantasy
Vigilant
. You can contact her at
www.angellawson.com
, or find her on
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