United (The Guardians Book 2) (19 page)

He ruffled her hair affectionately. “Not your fault. Besides, from what I read, you're no stranger to loss yourself.”

She smoothed out her face into a neutral expression, more from habit than anything. It had been eight years since her parents had died in the fire that had taken everything from her, but the memories and grief still had the power to bring her to her knees. It was a weakness she was unwilling to share. “You read about me?”

“You think the Guardians don't have a file on you?”

“Yay,” she replied dryly. “I'm famous.”

“Infamous, more like.” He grinned, losing the haunted look in his eyes. “It's a
big
file.”

“Doesn't surprise me, you Guardians are lame.” She sat back, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What happened to the vampire? Did your parents kill him?”

“No, he got away. My parents blamed me for Valens' death. Hated me so much they almost didn't let me go to Guardian School. But I was determined to be the best damn Tracker I could be, and then I'd find that mother fucker and rip out his heart, just like he did to Valens.”

“And did you? Find him, I mean?”

“Not yet. But I will.”

“If we live through this maybe I'll help you.”

“Road trip!” he joked.

“You bring the snacks, I'll bring the tunes.” She joined him up on the boulder, her brow furrowing as she pondered something. “You know, you didn't hate me when you met me like most of you Guardians do. Why is that? You read my file.”

He shrugged. “We're alike, you and I. We both have missions in life. You to bring home your friend and me to find my revenge. I recognized something in you that I see every time I look in the mirror.”

“And what's that?”

“Desperation.”

Silence. She had no reply; he was right.

“Are you guys done?” Queenie called, half covering her eyes as she wandered back over with Hue's pants.

“You know I'm not actually naked, right?” he teased her.

“No, but your boxer briefs are
very
tight. Here. I had to use bottled water. The lake water is. . . Well, you'll see.”
 

He chuckled as he pulled his black pants back on. They were ripped and wet, but they would dry and Queenie promised to mend them when they made camp later that night.

“So what's the what?” Gable asked when the three of them rejoined the others.

“Our friend needed a little persuasion,” Zay told her, nodding at the guard she'd advised him to question. “so Ward sank him in quicksand. It did the trick.”

“Do they know we're here?”

“Not us specifically. Apparently they noticed some kind of disturbance out here, but without surveillance equipment they didn't know what. They only have electricity in their compound, thankfully for us. Usually they patrol in pairs, but obviously this was a set up.”

“We should expect more guards then?” Queenie guessed with a sigh.

“Yes. They'll be looking for trouble.”

“What about these ones?” Hue wanted to know, staring down at the guards in distaste. “Memory zap them?”

“Are you strong enough to wipe so many memories at once?” Nicky asked Ward doubtfully.

He pulled a face. “Maybe. Seems like the only plan we got going for us right now.”

“You stable enough?”

“Not really. The fight has shaken my powers up a little. I might've used them too much.”

“You're right,” said Zay. “It's the only plan we've got going for us. We can't have them alerting anyone that we're here until it's absolutely unavoidable.”

“Won't they wonder about their injuries?”

He shrugged. “Let them come to their own conclusions. People make up excuses for things they don't understand all the time. Maybe they'll do the same.”

“And if they don't?”

“Then things get harder,” he replied simply. “Ward, get started. Gable, Cadby, you stay with him. The rest of us will check out the boat.”

A little more confidently than he'd done earlier, Ward knelt down next to the woman who'd held a gun to Gable's head. She was slowly beginning to stir, but before she could awaken properly, Ward gripped her head and stared at her with his glowing eyes.

It was fine for a few seconds, but then something happened. Ward began to shake, his eyes growing impossibly brighter, like two miniature balls of sun.

“Ward,” Gable snapped when he didn't let the woman go. It was almost like he was in a trance. She reached down, trying to pull him from the woman, but he was holding on tight. “Ward! Stop!”

“Be careful!” Cadby warned tensely. “Don't look into his eyes. His energy is all over the place right now.”

With great difficulty, the two of them were finally able to pry his hands from the woman. She fell to the ground and then just lay there, staring unseeingly up into the sky.

Ward's eyes faded back to their normal hue as he came back to himself. He crawled backwards, panting hard.

“Are you okay?” Gable took a hold of his arm, helping him to sit up.

He shook his head. “I couldn't control it. It went too far. I. . . Check on her, please.”

Gable nodded at Cadby and he went to the woman, pulling her to her knees. She watched him with wide eyes, awareness finally settling in. “Where am I?”

“What do you remember?” he questioned her.

“I don't. . . I don't remember anything. I don't remember
anything
. Oh God, I don't remember my
name
! Why don't I know my own name?”

Ward made a noise of distress in the back of his throat. He hadn't taken away the last hour of her memories, he'd taken
all
of them.

“I can't undo it,” he muttered, gripping his hair. “There's no way to fix her.”

Gable allowed herself five seconds of horror before she hardened her heart again. There was no time to pity this woman. This evil, kidnapping, torturing woman. “It's not your fault,” she told him, somewhat coldly. “You didn't mean to.”

“I took away all her memories, Gable. I took away her life.”

The woman had begun crying pitiful sobs. Cadby sat next to her, awkwardly patting her shoulder.

Gable yanked Ward's hands down and pulled his chin up to face her. Sometimes tough love was the only way to go. “It's not nice, and it's not ideal, but you let this eat away at you and you lose. That's all there is to it. That woman was a bad person. She's a part of this whole thing, a part of keeping those Outcasts locked away. So what if she doesn't remember it? Hell, maybe you did her a favor.”

“What's going on?” Zay called, rushing back over after hearing the woman sob.

“Shut up!” Gable snapped at her.

“I took all of her memories,” Ward told Zay blankly. “All of them. Please don't make me do that to the rest of them. I know they're bad, but. . .”

Like Gable, Zay seemed to give himself one short moment to process, to feel the raw chill of what had been done. And then he got over it and nodded, always thinking, always planning. “Then we'll tie them up, take the boat and get as much of a head start as we can. Hopefully we'll find the Outcasts before anyone even notices the guards haven't returned. If we're successful, then we'll come back for them once we're headed home.”

They took in his plan and accepted it like everything else he'd told them to do so far. He hadn't led them wrong yet.

Ward glanced at the woman once more before standing. “I'm sorry,” he said hoarsely. She was shaking so hard she didn't even seem to hear him.

“You think we should tie her up?” Zay asked uneasily. Gable could see his point – the woman was just so. . .
pathetic
that it almost seemed wrong to restrain her. Almost.

“Better had,” she said, and then took the job upon herself since nobody else seemed to want to.

Another guard, tied up and gagged, glared fiercely and mumbled something unintelligible at her. She resisted the urge to knock him out. “Killing you all would be so much easier,” she told him pleasantly. “Please stop tempting me.”

She wouldn't, of course. Because despite all her bravado, despite all her coldness and hardness, Gable didn't think she had it in her to take another life. One had been enough to haunt her for the rest of her days.

The boat was just a regular wooden thing, clearly man made and not of faerie origin. It rocked dangerously from side to side as they climbed aboard.

“You think Pablo might have sprung for something a little safer,” Queenie muttered uneasily as Hue helped her in.

“Maybe we should take two trips?” Ward suggested, the last to board.

“No time,” Zay pointed out. “We'll be fine. Nicky and I will row.”

“I can help,” Hue interjected. “We can take turns.”

Zay shook his head. “You just got stabbed in the leg, dude. Give yourself a break.”

The boat began to move steadily, though not fast enough to generate a wind. Gable tied her hair up in a ponytail, tired of pushing it away from her sweaty neck.

She pulled a face as she peered over the edge of the boat. Unlike the ocean they'd arrived in, this water wasn't beautiful or mesmerizing. It was a dark, greeny black, like thick oil. It looked poisonous, disgusting. Curiously, she reached down to dip just the tips of her fingers in, but Queenie, sat right in front of her, whipped back with surprising reflexes and snatched her hand before she could even break the surface.

“I wouldn't do that,” she warned. “I read about these fishy type creatures that eat flesh. It was a super brief description so I don't know if it's true, but I don't think we should risk it.”

“Awesome. Just when I thought this island couldn't get any freakin' creepier.”

Sure enough, it wasn't long before large, eel like creatures bopped to the surface. They were the length of human legs, their skin rotting and gray like a zombie. When they opened their mouths to snap at the air, sharp teeth the length of fingers caught everyone's attention.

Gable scrunched up her face in revulsion. “Okay, officially more disturbing than the blood sucking trees.”

“They have no eyes,” Cadby observed, cocking his head to the side as he watched, his expression matching Gable's. “Just empty eye sockets.”

“They can smell blood,” Queenie informed them.

Gable raised an eyebrow at her. “Feel free to stop sharing your gross facts.”

“We'll be fine, I think. As long as we don't upturn the boat and fall in. It's not like they have arms to reach up and grab us.”

“Yeah well, I had similar thoughts about the trees last night,” Zay grunted, panting with the effort of rowing. “Look how that turned out.”

“Hue, you should probably stick to the middle of the boat and try not to move too much,” Queenie added. “Or. . .at all. If they smell your wound they might get hungry.”

“I like it when you don't say words,” Gable told Queenie helpfully.

Despite Hue's careful stillness, more eels slithered up to the surface the further into the middle of the lake they got, sniffing the air as they searched for his blood.

“Did you feel that?” demanded Ward. It had been just a soft nudge underneath the boat. But then there was another, and another, and another. Soon the boat was rocking from side to side.

“Aw, man.” Hue glared down at his leg. “Sorry, guys. This is all on me.”

“You need to hurry up,” Cadby told Nicky and Zay. “before they knock us over and we all become eel food.”

“On it.” Nicky strained to push the oars even faster, his biceps bulging with the effort.

There was a scarily strong nudge and Queenie toppled off her bench seat. Gable grabbed onto the back of her vest and yanked, making sure she landed in the center of the boat instead of outside it.

“There's the other side,” Zay puffed out. “You guys need to buy us some time. Can you talk to them, Ward? Maybe tell them to chill the hell out and stop trying to eat us?”

“No. Like the trees, I don't understand them and they don't seem to understand me.”

“Something else then. Anything!”

Practically growling in agitation, Gable whipped out a dagger and leaned as far as she could over the edge of the boat, swiping viciously at an eel. Thick blue blood sprayed out of its wound, and the eel screeched before disappearing beneath the oily surface. Another reached up and snapped at her, almost taking a chunk of her arm. With wide eyes, she pulled back and sat down on her seat. “Guns it is then.”

The eels were surprisingly quick, able to avoid most of Gable and Hue's gunshots, but the loud noise seemed to frighten them away.

By the time they had reached the shore, only one determined eel remained. Hue shot it and it exploded.

“Not cool,” Gable told him, flicking a piece of eel smush off her arm.

Finally out of the boat and back on dry land, Nicky and Zay flopped down onto the muddy sand, breathing hard.

“Think I'm dying,” Nicky complained. “Let's camp here tonight.”

“No can do,” Zay replied unhappily, and Nicky groaned. “We're too out in the open. We need the cover of trees.”

“I hate you.”

“You too, bro.”

They all eyed the tree line where the rainforest began again. The trees awaited them, their dark branches beckoning like sinister, open arms.

Cadby sighed as he came to stand next to Gable, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Today kind of blows.”

They continued onward, fighting through a rainforest that was thicker than ever.

“How in the hell are the guards doing this everyday?” Zay asked nobody in particular, hacking away at some thorny bushes with a knife.

“They've probably made a pathway for themselves,” Hue pointed out. “and we just haven't found it yet.”

“A good thing. We should stay off the path.”

Every now and then Gable would spot a little purple flower. They were round and fluffy, almost like dandelions, and they seemed to grow everywhere and anywhere – in patches on the ground, out of cracks in the trees, from underneath rocks and boulders and the middle of bushes. She pointed one out to Queenie. “They're nice, right? Kind of makes me feel like not everything here sucks.”

Queenie froze, grasping onto Gable's wrist. “Everybody stop moving!” she instructed tersely.