Authors: David James
Only:
Become who you are, Caeles...
What did that mean?
I looked around. My vision blurred, all tilted shadow, nothing more. My neck felt raw and wet; I touched the back of my head and tried to massage away the pain. Slowly the shadows gave way to shapes and colors, and I began to see.
I was in a black Jeep. The passenger side window was dark and blurred from night. The moisture from the cool rain was mixing with the warmth of the car, making the glass swirl with indefinite confusion.
My first thought was,
Nothing.
And then, as hot air burst into my lungs, I jumped in my seat; a ghost of something in the window, a haunting reminder of earlier. The memory of my Dad flooded back into my mind like a virus, sickening me to a pale white; a realization of loneliness, drowning me in panic and stillness.
Tyler.
Was he -
no, please no
- dead?
Dad.
What happened?
I closed my eyes and saw death.
Opened: Life.
I closed and opened and closed but nothing changed; life and death looked so much alike in this dim light.
My hands flew up to my mouth. The scenery outside was flicking by rapidly, barely there. Above, the moon looked blue in the star-dotted sky; I knew I was far from home.
Dizzy, my head rolled back.
“Don’t spew in the car, thanks,” a voice to my left said, the tone gritted with disdain.
Without looking I knew. My fingers curled into my palms, nails pushing against skin almost breaking. My heart, beating wildly, threw itself against my ribs. My jaw tightened. Against my racing pulse, my mind screamed at me to jump out of the Jeep; do anything but sit here. Escape.
Run.
My face burned, and even though I felt like I was catching fire, against it all I was helpless.
Against her I felt helpless.
Closed.
Kate.
“Seriously. If you get sick I’ll break your face.” I felt the Jeep gun forward. “I know twenty ways to kill you without even taking my foot off the gas.”
Opened.
Against it all, she was here and so was I.
I could hear the thumping of my heart as it threatened to cripple, torturing me as if it was trying to kill.
Tyler has to be alive. I can’t be alone.
It was all a dream.
If I closed my eyes, I could remember.
I could hold on to my friend.
My brother.
“Do you ever feel like you don’t belong?” I asked.
He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“Like you don’t fit in with everyone else?”
Tyler smiled and ran his fingers through his hair when he said, “I just want to feel. Have a kiss that changes me, ya know?”
I asked, “You think you can tell if you love someone from a kiss?”
“You can see into someone’s soul through their eyes, Calum, but you can touch their heart through a kiss.”
For a moment, silence was the only noise.
I said, “It feels impossible to be who everyone thinks I am when I can’t even figure out who I am alone.”
“Exactly.” Tyler smiled.
A monstrous burst of lightning split the sky a hundred ways, sucking the blackness out of the air, gathering with it the glowing stars and the bright crescent moon. Even the light from the headlights faded and we were lost in the flash. The thunder that immediately followed broke the night with one swift blow, and sent the world back in darkness.
We were gone in the light, and in the dark.
I blinked and felt a tear fall down my face. I reached to wipe it away but stopped. Instead, I let it slide down my blood-covered skin and drop off my chin, dotting red on my jeans.
It was the first time I had cried in so long-
I let it fall to nothing.
I took one breath. I could feel the weight of my voice in my throat, feel the way it burned crawling up. “Why did you take me away? Tyler could be dead! Dead! I could have saved him!”
Her lips curved up. “You could have saved him? Please, Calum, look at yourself; you couldn’t do anything. And your father is still alive.”
“My father? You think I care about him? After seeing
that
?” My head fell from side to side. “What about Tyler? Is he alive?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Probably not.”
I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t. “We have to go back! Turn around right now. I have to know if he’s alive.”
“We can’t,” she said, her voice spilling out through a haunting smile that moved like ashes on waves; there, then not. “If we turned around now, all you’d find when you got to Lakewood Hollow would be a town burning. And with your father on the rampage, it’s only a matter of time before the entire county is destroyed for good. It was already halfway gone when we left.”
I felt my ears go red, my teeth tight together against the unresolved. “How can you just sit there and say that? We need to go back and help Tyler!” My voice cracked and sizzled with sadness. My throat was sore and dry. I felt the sting of fresh tears fall easily, noticed the splatters of red everywhere, on my hands, pants and shirt. “Help all of them.”
“It’s no use trying to save those people when you already saw them die,” Kate said.
A boom of thunder made my hand shake, vibrating along with the outside world. I reached up slowly and pulled down the visor. The skin around my eyes was black, and my face was blistered pink. My hair was more wavy than this morning, and strands of it were tinted red. My eyes looked dead. Hollow.
My face was unrecognizable, too splattered with blood and tears. But after everything, I felt a jolt of happiness fly through me, and as much as I hated that, I didn’t push it away; I was too relieved to not see my father looking back.
All my energy left in an instant. “What happened, Kate? Will you please just tell me the truth? I’m so... I just don’t understand. Are you the one taking all the people, the ones on the news? Is that why you kidnapped me? Are you working with my Dad?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, her laugh like breaking glass. “You’re even more of an idiot than I thought.”
I threw up my arms. “Well, what do you expect? Seriously! Do you have any idea how lost I feel right now? And all you can do is laugh and call me an idiot? What does that make you then, Kate?”
Her lips stretched tight. Even in the dark, her violet eyes shone bright.
Looking at her reminded me of the first time I saw her, in class with Tyler.
If ever there was a time I could have wished away my memories it would have been then. I desperately wanted to look up at the sky and find a shooting star, make a wish, and go back to yesterday, back to Tyler, but I knew that was impossible. The sky was too dark wherever we were, the night too forsaken. We were driving too fast to even see the stars clearly.
The jeep hit a bump in the road, causing my heart to jump up and down. I knew I should have been livid, but I was too tired. Even anger couldn’t have survived today.
Suddenly, just as thunder crashed, Kate shivered.
“You just don’t get it,” she whispered. Her voice quivered slightly, making me freeze. “You should. You should know everything, but you don’t. They said you would understand everything before we got there, but you don’t.”
“Who said I would understand? Where are you taking me?”
I waited for her to answer, but no words came.
I turned and looked out the window, taking in the rainy scenery. We were still driving fast, soaring down a single lane road through the mountains with large trees running across both sides. They were some of the tallest I had ever seen, their leaves spotted with light greens, yellows, and reds, all muted and blurred in the dark storm of this autumn night. The horrible beauty rushed by me as if a painter had taken the three colors and ran with the paintbrush over the canvas, like a child racing down a driveway with a stick of bubbles at midnight.
I could barely see the world.
After a few minutes of waiting, I gave up.
Attempting to break the silence, I said, “I don’t understand-”
“You shouldn’t have to,” she whispered, her hushed voice somehow overpowering my own. Her eyes were large, glued to the road. Her voice was so quiet I was sure she wasn’t talking to me. “If you don’t already know, you shouldn’t have to understand. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I have no idea what’s going on now. Not anymore. Everything that was supposed to be true... This is all so different than what they told me.”
Under her breath, she mumbled words I couldn’t make out. Then slowly, as if she was afraid to look directly at me, she leveled her face with mine. Violet eyes pierced my soul and I felt like crying, though I didn’t know why until she spoke. “My family is dead.”
“What?” I said, not sure what to say. I felt my throat tighten.
She took in a breath, deep and long, as if she were taking in the right amount of courage. She looked at me, really
looked
at me for the first time ever, I think, since that first day we had locked eyes in Mr. Brandt’s class.
There were tears in her eyes.
Maybe I was wrong about her.
I felt my heart beat a little faster.
She turned back toward the road, breathing heavily.
“My family,” she started again, “is dead. They died five years ago, or at least that’s what I was told.”
“What do you mean
that’s what you were told
?” I asked. Something in her words rang true in my head. Maybe I hadn’t lost Tyler. Maybe there was still hope.
“They’re not really dead,” she said. “At least my sisters aren’t. I was told my parents were murdered in cold blood, and that my sisters were too. But now I know the truth. My sisters are alive. I was told I needed to find you in order to find them, that you were enough leverage to get the information I need. I was told that if I didn’t find you, no matter what, I would die in your place. You are my only chance to live again. Now though... Now I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t.”
Maybe Mom is safe,
I hoped.
Maybe Dad didn’t get her.
He said it was all for me.
This is my fault. Did I cause this, too?
Kate’s jaw clenched. “But I still can’t let you go. If there’s any chance I can have my sisters back.” She turned to me, her eyes like knives. “I will never let you go.”
My throat burned.
Kate’s knuckles turned white. “There is a prophecy called the
Legend of the Dreamer
that tells of a boy who is born time and time again because he is the son of the Devil. No matter who he is born to in each life, he is still always the reincarnation of his original self, the Dreamer. The Devil’s son. You, Calum, are that boy, the Dreamer. You’re the one pawn everyone wants. You are not who you think you are. Your true, first father was the Devil himself, and because of your bloodline you are the only one capable of stopping a secret war. The prophecy says that you will be the one to end it all. Even the Orieno, the soul-sucking demons fighting against our side, want to find you so they can use you.”
She looked at me but didn’t; her eyes moved up and down my body as though she were looking at someone else entirely. She said, “But how can you be what they say? You’re so weak. I bet you couldn’t even throw a proper punch.”
My mind was frozen, my entire body rigid with confusion.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my voice hard and weak at the same time. “This can’t be possible. This can’t be real.”
“I don’t think a hero ever believes in himself until the story is almost over,” she said. Kate closed her eyes and opened them again, quickly as if she wasn’t believing this either. But when I heard her sigh and saw her fingers grip together until they turned white, I knew it wasn’t a joke.
A cold sweat touched my back.
Terrified, I waited.
Kate took in a slow, deep breath as rain pounded down outside. “Just listen, Calum. Listen.”
Inexplicably, in the dark void of not knowing, my mind painted a picture of Tyler.
Kate’s eyes blinked shut. “Let me explain.”
Chapter Ten
Song of a Killer
-Kate-
An old Warrior song haunted my
thoughts, one I had learned as a child during those grueling years of training. Sung slow, it sounded almost like praying:
Drums, drums, all around
Giving hell to all the hounds.
Warriors, Warriors, raise your hands,
Beat and fight and hurt for man.
Take those red-eyes down for size.
All they do is spread those lies.
Order is where truth is found,
Our faith we praise the Order now.
I wasn’t sure why it kept playing over and over in my head, but the fact that it did was comforting. With my eyes closed, I could see myself as a child running against the wind in my old, familiar gray clothes, playing a game of “Catch the Killer” with the other Warrior children. I pictured them falling down around me as I tackled them, winning always, even against Zackery Solt who, aside from being the only Warrior close to my age, had a heart that beat like mine: For blood and only blood. I saw those children’s faces as I lunged at them, hands out and eyes wide. I saw their fear, saw how they were terrified at the sight of me, and I knew that my lack of fear would be my greatest weapon. I won then because they were afraid and I was not.
If I had nothing to lose, no one could touch me.
Like Zack always said: “Being afraid is just as useless as being in love.”