Authors: J Bennett
“Gabe?” I whimper.
“Jesus!” he blinks and lowers his gun. His brows come
together, and he grimaces, as if in pain.
“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling the blood come rushing into my
cheeks, “You sounded worried.”
“Just…don’t do that again. Ever.” Gabe tucks the gun back
into his waistband, and his eyebrows come away. He softens his voice. “I didn’t
know where you were.”
I assess his aura, looking for his true emotions, but, as
always, they follow his face. The color is calming down to his natural blue,
and the spikes recede to a steadier flow.
“I wasn’t able to pick up on a trail, but Tarren called from
the morgue. We’ve got radiation on concert guy,” Gabe says. He hands me back my
hat.
“Radiation is confirmation,” I say and am relieved to see
him smile. “I found something too.” I pull the fabric swatch from my pocket.
* * *
We pick up Tarren from the hospital. I watch in the rearview
mirror as he flips open his briefcase and tucks his glasses into the side
pocket. Next goes the medical tech badge.
“How’d it go Dr. McDreamy?” Gabe asks.
“Radiation on the body,” Tarren replies. He shrugs off his
blazer. “Angel.”
“Stakeout?” Gabe’s eyes flick to the mirror.
Tarren nods. Both their energies rise, Tarren’s all pointy
and nervous, Gabe’s a general swelling with little ripples all along the edges.
I don’t know what this means yet, what complex emotion they are unconsciously
sharing with each other.
“My turn,” Gabe sighs.
* * *
Tarren follows us to our beige room. I give the rabbits a
longing glance. I’m beginning to twitch again, and I wrap my arms around my
body, pressing my hands hard against my ribs.
Tarren unzips a side compartment of my duffle bag. “We leave
in half an hour,” he says to Gabe who nods and collapses backward on his bed. I
expect him to argue against my participation but he doesn’t. Good, because
there’s no way in hell I’m sitting out another mission even though I’m getting
queasy and itchy in weird places all over my body.
“Take this.” Tarren hands me a rough stone block. “And
this.” A little black bottle with no label drops into my hand.
“This is that thing the pedicure people use,” I say rubbing
my fingers across the stone.
“Pumice.” Tarren looks like he’s frowning even when he’s
not. Maybe it’s the expectation of his displeasure, or maybe he’s somehow
perfected a way to frown only with his voice. “Go in the shower. Let the water
run over your body then scrub with the stone.”
“But —”
“Everywhere. Push hard —”
“They use this on people’s feet, you can’t —”
“Go over everything twice. Then turn the water off and rub
the lotion on your entire body. Hair too. Don’t miss anywhere —”
“What is it? Come on this is we--”
“Wait two minutes then rinse off. There’s an outfit in there
for you. Black.”
I hear a sound from the bed, but when I turn Gabe’s got his
eyes closed. It sounded like a snort.
“What kind of outfit?” I ask, suspicion mounting.
“We didn’t have a lot of time —” Tarren begins, but I’m
already pawing through the bag.
“These are pajamas!” I accuse, pulling out black stretch
pants. “You want me to wear pajamas on a stakeout?”
Gabe is sitting up on the bed, his eyes twinkling in an
extremely unsettling way. “Not just any pajamas…”
I unfold the shirt and cry out in horror. A smiling teddy
bear sits on the front holding a pink heart between its paws. Its beady black
eyes mock.
“No. No way.”
“It was the only black outfit in your size,” Tarren tells
me.
“What about the boys’ section? Did you check the boys’
section?”
“Oh.”
“This isn’t funny!” I scream at Gabe who is snickering
behind me. I huff to the bathroom and slam the door.
“Half hour,” Tarren calls after me.
“Man, she is pissed,” I hear Gabe say to his brother just
before I turn the water hot and begin to scrub.
The pumice eats away at my skin, but I don’t mind. I push
harder, leaving angry red rashes across my breasts and stomach. The pain helps
distract me from the hunger, but the scrubbing also seems to be wearing away my
barriers, allowing carefully guarded emotions to seep through. Fear escapes
first.
Suddenly. Utterly.
Fear of anything and everything, but mostly because I’m so
damn tired. Why do I still lose my breath at random moments in the night,
paralyzed with the conviction that this can’t possibly be real? Why is it so
quickly followed with the equally certain conviction that I’m a monster, that
I’m losing control, that it’s only a matter of time before I give in wholly to
the song?
The lotion burns and reeks of alcohol. I grit my teeth as I
wipe down my raw skin with the gooey mess. I didn’t realize that two minutes
could possibly take this long; that seconds could endeavor to stretch
themselves so far before breaking.
When I come out, Gabe is sitting at the desk reviewing maps
of Marymoor Park on his laptop.
“Hurts like a bitch right? That’s the best thing about being
bait. I get to stink.” Gabe leans back in his chair and looks me over. “Man,
that outfit.” He shakes his head. “Sorry about that. I told Tarren…” his voice
trails off as he looks up and sees the expression on my face.
The bear on my chest pants angrily. It’s everything about
this day and the hunger still here, growing loud.
“Maya, don’t go with us tonight,” Gabe says, but I’m not
about to let him get started on that bullshit again. I walk over to the rabbit
cage and pull open the door.
“Not the gray one,” Gabe’s voice is soft.
“You shouldn’t get attached,” I say, coating frost over my
words and sounding more like Tarren then I meant to. The gray rabbit stands
apart from its huddled companions and stares at me with bright black eyes that
seem strangely aware. Its nose trembles. I reach around and pull out one of the
remaining white bunnies.
I can’t get my glove off fast enough. The explosion of
energy when my palm connects to the animal’s energy field is riveting. I slump
against the bed, eyes closed, forcing my breathing to slow. I drop the limp
body on the floor.
Gabe turns his face away, but I catch the flicker of
disgust.
“I’ve been meaning to ask…” I pull my glove back on,
wriggling my fingers through the holes. The words don’t come. The only
questions left are the dangerous ones. The ones that might be lions in
disguise.
“About what?” Gabe picks at the holes in the knees of his
jeans.
“About how you found me. Why you came back after all those
years.”
Gabe flinches like I’ve pressed against an open sore, and
now I know I’ve made a mistake.
“Grand found out about you.”
“How?”
“Grand has his ways. Tarren and I, we never meant for this
to happen, for you to be dragged into all this.”
“You’ve said that already.”
“I just want you to know that.” Gabe is studying his knees
intensely. “We never tried to find you. It was safer that way. You were
supposed to be happy. Be normal.”
“I believe you.”
“I’m not asking for forgiveness; I won’t ever ask for
that.” This is my brother Gabe, in his scruffy jeans, dirty tennis shoes,
laces tangled with knots, and that sad sad look digging deeper into his face.
“Just tell me the rest.”
“Grand got sloppy. Showed up on our radar in Nashville,
though we didn’t know it was him at the time. We almost caught up to him too,
but he slipped away just before we got to this huge condo he was staying in. He
left a laptop behind. Everything was encrypted of course, and not that pansy
off-the-shelf crap. This was big time. Took me a couple days, but I cracked
it.” Gabe gives himself a congratulatory smile.
“We learned that he was looking for you — had hired the best
trackers, given them every resource available. They were close. It was only a
matter of time, Maya. We had to find you first. We had to protect you.”
“Why does Grand even care about me?”
“His family takes blood very seriously.”
“Like you.”
“That’s different. Blood’s all we got. All we get.” Gabe
clears his throat, brushes the hair out of his eyes. “Mom did a good job of
hiding you. She never told us where, well, never even told us about you until
just before she died.”
“So how then?”
“Me being a genius, of course.” A smile flickers on Gabe’s
face but doesn’t get far. “And Tarren, a little. He was six years old when you
were born. Mom must have thought he would forget if she never spoke of you, but
he didn’t. He remembered that Mom took us for a long ride a little while after
you were born. You were crying and stinking and generally annoying him even
from your earliest days. Finally, she stopped at some motel and put us all to
bed. The next morning, you were gone.”
“What did she tell him?” This feels so hollow, like we’re
talking about someone else. This isn’t my life, my mother driving me to exile
with such conviction.
“He doesn’t remember,” Gabe replies, “just that you were
gone. Which, for our purposes, meant that you could be anywhere. That’s when me
and my genius brain got involved.”
I take a long breath and try to concentrate. Outside, the light
is fading away, leaving a damp, uninterested gray to embrace the coming night.
Rain patters light fingers on the roof of the motel, and I envision just this
very same grizzled and lifeless day when my mother kissed me for the last time
and left me in the cold.
Gabe is still speaking, “…From there, all I had to do was
find a needle in a pile of needles. I downloaded records from every orphanage
in the country for the years we thought you might have been born, and I put
together this huge list of names and social security numbers. Mom didn’t leave
any clues. We had nothing, until….”
“What?” my voice is all breathy, more air then sound.
“Tarren remembered that you had a birthmark on your back
somewhere, which was better than nothing, but honestly, not much….”
And then I don’t hear him anymore.
I’m in a vacant storage unit, shivering,
weeping, as a naked bulb swings its too-bright spotlight over me. The stranger
trails his fingers down my shoulder. Searching for something.
I push the memory back, way back, chain it to the farthest
corner of my mind, spin a whole roll of duct tape around its mouth, pull a hood
over its face and slap it around a little just for good measure. When I come
back up for air, the room seems to be tilting, and all the sounds and smells
and hungers that I have been keeping at bay all rush back into my
consciousness. I have to sit down on the bed and plunge my hot hands deep into
the comforter. I shiver.
“...put together some wicked searches. Name by name. Mostly
for images, filtering out all the girls on my list who didn’t fit, looking for
that birthmark,” Gabe continues. “It was brutal. I don’t think I slept for a
week, honestly. We were in the crappiest motel on the planet. The air
conditioning was broken or something, and it was like 100 degrees outside. I
was sweating buckets, staring at pictures until my eyes were crossing, but I
kept going ‘cause I knew Grand was getting closer and closer to you. And then
one day I got to your name on the list.”
Damn him, I can actually see happy lilac streaks pulsing
through Gabe’s aura. As for me, another shiver sweeps through my body, rattling
my bones. These daggers in my lungs feel so real.
“Your high school newspaper archives all of its issues
online. Two years ago, March, in the sports section there was this picture of a
girl winning a race at a track meet.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“No,” Gabe smiles, “but there were three girls cheering her
on as she crossed the finish line. All wearing tank tops. The girl in the
middle had a birthmark on her shoulder. You could barely see it, but it was
there. I still have that picture. From there I hacked your Facebook page, and
there you were. Right in front of me.” Gabe laughs a small laugh. He’s still
trying to find my eyes, spread his smile to me, but I can’t lift up my head.
“I knew right away. You look like Mom. And it was so…so
amazing to see you there. All these pictures of this person I’d been imaging.
There’s this one,” he laughs again. Purple blushes all around him. “…where
you’re playing Guitar Hero, and you’re, like, totally into it. You’re biting
your lip, and you have this look in your eyes like nothing is going to stop
you, not ever. Mom got that look too. All the time. There were all these
postings from your friends and that guy Ryan. Lots of weird literature stuff
and inside jokes. Some stuff in Latin, I think…”
“Okay,” I bark, because he’s hurting me and doesn’t know it;
tearing open the boxes I’ve packed so carefully, throwing my vulnerable, tender
memories all over the floor.
“You had a life. You had friends. It was, like you were…”
“Normal?”
“Happy. Or at least not unhappy. We went straight to
Connecticut from Tennessee to figure out the situation. Tarren grabbed a cup
you threw away and sent it off to Lo. He confirmed that you were you, our sister.”
Half sister. Half everything.
“The day we found out was the day Grand took you. We were
trying to figure out what to do, how to keep you safe, you know, without
fucking up your life.” Gabe’s voice grows softer. “We should have seen him
coming, but there were no unusual deaths, no angel activity. He just…just stole
you away. If Tarren hadn’t insisted on sneaking a tracker into your purse, we
never would have found you again. Occasionally his paranoia does pay off.”
I open my mouth. “Grand didn’t know,” my voice cracks. The
air is so hard to pull in.
“Huh?” Gabe says.
I need to breathe; need to get to a window or a toilet. A
knock on the door, and Tarren’s energy jumping behind it. Gabe’s face is
growing suspicious. Lines creasing along his mouth.