Rising (16 page)

I try to go away. From this. From here.
But the blood distracts me.

It winds down my left wrist from the
metal that bites through my skin. Thick shackles enclose each wrist. No
breakable or pickable cuffs. They connect to a heavy chain that wraps around
the big center beam of the roof. My toes touch the floor, allowing me a
precarious balance. I’m in the small living room of the guest house. The
previous owners obviously took pains to make it warm and inviting. The lemon
yellow walls complement the folksy, rustic furniture, shoved roughly against
the back wall. One of those automatic puff air fresheners and a year’s worth of
National Geographic
magazines litter the floor next to the upended
coffee table.

Across from me, an expansive recreation
of Monet’s
Water Lilies
hangs on the wall. I stare at the painting and
try to escape into it – if only for a moment – but my shoulders are beginning
to ache, and my swollen left wrist throbs. I can only pull weak, shallow
breaths into my stretched diaphragm.

In front of me, the angels cluster
together in heated conversation, Gem, Diamond, War, Heather, and one other, a
plain looking man with a shiny pate. Heather’s voice rises above the rest, and
her arms swing wildly. I ignore their words. None of it matters. The outcome is
clear. They’ll hurt me. I’ll talk. They’ll kill me, probably in a slow and
gruesome manner.

I float in the lake, lilies brushing my outstretched
arms.

My brothers are safe. That’s the beauty
of Styx
.
With a day’s head start, Tarren and Gabe will have abandoned
the house in Farewell and gotten Lo, Dr. Lee, and Francesca out to some safe
new hideaway. They will have destroyed all the phones, deleted the email
accounts. Any way I knew of contacting them will be blocked, closed, dead
ended.

I hear the croak of frogs and the heavy
drum of my heartbeat in my ears, magnified by the cool water.

There’s no way I can betray them, which
is a mercy, because it means I don’t have to be strong. I don’t have to hold
out or try to think up lies or do anything except give up what I know and die.

The water is cool on my body, a peaceful
caress.
Tendrils of
pressure bloom in my skull. I’m not alone. A cloaked shadow stands on the
lake’s shore.

A nice thought
,
a
voice intrudes into my daydream. I flounder in the water, and then, like that,
I’m back in the guest house, balancing on my toes, feeling the blood trickle
down my arm. Gem has stepped away from the group and stares at me with his
father’s eyes…my father’s eyes.

He’s thinner than Grand. Too thin for an
angel, for the tides of power I feel exuding from him. Those tides grow as he
comes closer. I can smell his aftershave, see every pore on his face, but I
can’t read his expression.

He walks behind me. “This is how your
brother was chained,” he says, and his voice is soft. “So my father could cut
both sides of him.” His fingers brush across my back as he comes around to my
left.

I feel him slip into my mind again, and
suddenly I’m in a different room, staring at a gruesome scene from behind a
different pair of eyes. Tarren, a younger and very frightened Tarren, hangs
from shackles, head sunk to his chest. Grand walks around him, trailing the
point of a long blade in the same path of Gem’s fingers on me. Tarren’s eyes
are closed, his mouth pinched together, but he can’t stifle the moan as another
ribbon of red opens up at the blade’s kiss.

Grand looks up at me. “Try again,” he commands.

Then I’m back in the guest house,
shivering, disoriented enough that I lose my balance. The ache in my head is
heavier. I struggle to find my footing and shake away the horror of that vision.

Gem comes back into my field of vision.
“He made me watch. He wanted to show me how we treat our enemies.” Gem looks at
me. “They were very brave, Tarren and Tammy, but my father used their love
against them.”

He thinks this will scare me, the
thought of my skin laced with the same white, shiny scars that disfigure Tarren’s
body. It won’t. My fate is already sealed, and my brothers are safe, so what
more is there to fear?

Gem’s mouth quirks up, just a little,
and when that happens he doesn’t look like Grand at all. “I’m not going to
torture you. I don’t need to.”

“Yes we are!” Heather cries. Her hands
are balled into tight, blood-stained fists. I notice blood on her jacket too.

Gem turns away from me. “That isn’t
necessary,” he says to Diamond.

She stands away from the group near a
big window. The darkness is just beginning to lighten. Hanging on the wall next
to her head is a framed black and white poster of two children hugging. A big
caption at the top says “A hug is like a boomerang – you get it back right
away.”

I know this is funny, but I can’t find
it in me to laugh.

“You’re just here to extract
information,” Diamond says to him.

“She’s still family,” Gem says, that
voice, Grand’s voice, but different. There’s a note of emotion within it. I
stare at the back of his head, all that messy, whirling hair.

“She chose her family,” Diamond says,
and thunder growls loudly overhead. “Now find them.”

Gem nods and turns back to me. There’s
something in his expression, something that strikes past the barrier of my
numbness. Sympathy.

“You’re very different from him,” I say.

“Something he never tired of pointing
out,” Gem replies. He steps forward and extends his hand toward me. I flinch
back, losing my balance. My wrists and shoulders scream in unison as they take
the weight of my body, and I can feel the shackles sinking deeper into my skin
even before the thin channel of blood grows fast and heavy down my left arm.

“This will be easier if you try to
relax,” he says, placing a firm hand on my back and steadying me on my toes.
His hand moves up to my shoulder and tightens.

Light pulses beneath his skin, even
behind his eyes, and they glow like blue lamps. I feel his power focusing,
pressing into my mind. He is drilling a channel between us, something invisible
but strong. I feel him, not just his fingers digging into my shoulder, but the
whisper of his thoughts, the sadness inside him.

No, No, NO!

I thrash, losing my feet again, twisting
in my chains, trying to break that channel. Gem holds me fast, and he’s inside
my mind, this horrible, heavy, foreign thing. I throw my head back and forth,
trying desperately to dislodge him. This is wrong. So fundamentally wrong. An
invasion into the most private, sacred part of me.

Relax.
Gem’s voice is everywhere, echoing around my skull.
D
on’t resist, or it’ll be unpleasant
for us both.

His fingers scroll across my thoughts
like a collector flipping through a bin of vinyl records. I stop thrashing my
head and concentrate inside, on those fingers. I try to bend them back one by
one, but Gem has a thousand fingers, and the more I push, the stronger they
become. The meaner and sharper.

The pressure inside my mind ratchets up,
pushing outward. My skull is going to split, my eyeballs are about to pop out
of their sockets.

Relax,
he says again.

GET OUT!
I howl at him helplessly, but those fingers just multiply. Each
memory he touches opens up in my mind, and soon my head is a deluge of quickly
shifting images. Even as my body convulses, and the pain in my head becomes its
own black void, I see my life forcefully played out.

Karen and Henry, my adoptive parents, are
both held up for inspection and quickly discarded. So are the family
Christmases dominated by Karen’s massive fake tree filled with carefully color coordinated
bulbs. The memory of hitting my cousin when I was six and getting
unenthusiastically spanked by Henry. Eating ice cream in my huge, bloated
Saturn costume after my third-grade play. All those high school track meets
where I was lucky if I finished second to last. The fear and adrenaline of the SATs.
Getting lost on campus that first day and trying not to cry.

Another memory opens. Ryan, our nights
together and his rumbly stomach. Avalon, the dream that was always a dream. Gem
pauses on this one for a moment before tossing it away like the rest.

But then he finds my brothers, and my
mind floods with their faces.

And even though I know it’s over, I keep
fighting, because I can’t let Gem take this from me. He already has my blood
and bones chained up in this room. I’m prepared to give him addresses, phone
numbers, all the pointless digits.

But he can’t have Gabe’s goofy grin – the
one that used to light up his face when he thought he’d said something clever.
I won’t give up Tarren’s his eternal guilt, or the way his expression can
soften, making his face almost painfully handsome when he thinks no one is
watching. I have to protect that day on the motel roof when Tarren told me the
story of how Gabe dislocated his shoulder as a kid.

No, no, no, NO, NO, NO!!!
I screech in my mind.
Stay away from them!

Far away, I hear myself screaming out
loud. The ragged howl of heartbreak.

Gem finds it all. Tarren’s artic eyes,
the scars, all those nights on the roof with Gabe and the stories he told me of
Diana and Tammy. Gem watches our shovels dig shallow graves for the ones we
killed. He even sees Tarren constantly adjusting the setting on the windshield
wipers so that they move in perfect harmony with the rain.

There are more. So many more. He finds
Lo and Dr. Lee and Gabe’s hopeless crush on Francesca. He sprawls on the roof
with me as Gabe tells me how Tarren and Tammy used to make him wear dresses as
a punishment for losing their made up games as children. Gem finds my odd
obsession with Rain Bailey. He hears my cry of agony as I use my sputtering
telekinesis to pull the trigger that puts a bullet through Grand’s head. The
beauty of Gabe’s energy soaking into me – he sees that too.

And then it’s over. The pressure is gone
like a sudden vacuum, leaving only a heavy, throbbing emptiness in its wake. My
thoughts are strewn around my mind, like someone dropped a beautiful vase,
watched it shatter, and then walked away.

I blink, and the living room comes back
into focus. I’m gasping for breath, and my hair is plastered across my lips. I
don’t even bother trying to stand. Blood pulses from both wrists now, but what
does that matter?

Gem takes a step back, panting. His face
is white.

“You…can’t…have them,” I say roughly.

“She’s not affiliated with the other
group,” Gem says. He swallows, straightens up, and turns to the angels. I
ignore his words and retreat inside my mind, huddling among all the ruins.

I just want them to kill me. Why can’t
they just kill me?

Gem says the word “Styx,” and I tune
back into the conversation.

“…code word,” he’s saying, “when she was
taken by the other team. They’ve cut her off. Left her to save themselves.”

“Some family,” War sneers.

“They’re professionals,” Diamond says. “I
can see the sense in it. So we can’t use her?”

“They won’t come for her,” Gem confirms.

“Do you think you could still find
them?” Diamond asks him.

“Perhaps. I know them better now, how
they think, what resources they have. It won’t be easy, though. They’ve
prepared for this possibility.”

“You won’t find them,” I manage, though
my voice is nothing but a creaky whisper. “But they’ll find you. One by one.”

“There’s too many of us now,” says the bald
angel. “They’re swatting raindrops in a downpour.” He laughs, but no one else
does.

“And what of my brother?” Diamond asks.

Gem turns to face me. His skin is ashen,
and his hands shake. My eyes wander down his rumpled corduroy jacket, the jeans
that bag around his ankles, and his scuffed tennis shoes. I wonder how old he
is, but it’s hard to tell. Older than Tarren probably, but not by much. I let
the thoughts go, it doesn’t matter.

“She killed him,” Gem says, “with lies.
With betrayal.” He grabs my chin and pulls me toward him. Our eyes lock. “And
then she burned him.”

They’re both close
,
his voice whispers in my mind. I instinctively lash out,
but he bats away my mental defenses and pushes roughly into my thoughts.
Would he risk his life to save
you?

He picks up a piece from the shattered
vase. In my mind I see Tarren trudging next to me through the swirling snow.
He’s cold and miserable, that granite jaw stubborn as always as he lectures me
on the stupidity of my mittens and scarf. Gem is showing this memory to me for
some reason.

Would he risk his life to save
you?
Gem’s voice is more insistent.

I understand what he wants.

No,
I think back at him as fiercely as I can.
He’s not stupid enough to fall
into your trap.