Rage (18 page)

Then again, it would be nice if her folks had time to see her at one of her games.

When it was her turn, Missy ran down her list quickly: soccer practice after school every day except Tuesday; games on Tuesday and Saturday; tests scattered throughout the week.

"You should think about doing some volunteer work," her father said as he poured a glass of orange juice. "That will look good when it's time to apply for college."

"Dad's right," said her mother, highlighting like crazy. "Find something you're passionate about and get involved."

"Like the teen crisis help line," her sister said, sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock. "I can't think of anyone who can relate to troubled teens better than you, sis." Her smile said "I care" and her eyes said "Drop dead." It was quite the trick.

Missy saluted Sue with her coffee cup, making sure to leave her middle finger extended just enough for Sue to see it.

"What a marvelous idea!" That was her father, terribly pleased.

"Absolutely," crowed her mother. "Melissa, you'd be a natural. Terrific suggestion, Susan."

Sue grinned as if she'd won a shopping spree at her favorite shoe store.

Missy smiled tightly and thought of what it would feel like to kill Sue. Slowly. "I'll think about it."

Then it was her sister's turn to wow everyone with her jam-packed schedule for the week. Missy stopped listening once Sue started babbling about a bake sale to raise money for Cheer. As if any of the cheerleaders dared to eat anything with carbs in it.

S
HEEP,
War whispered.
L
ISTEN TO IT BLEAT.

Missy finished her breakfast and smiled at her sister, thinking about taking the Sword and carving away Sue's life. The lies, first—the plastic face she presented to the world (nothing at all like Missy's own dead face), the one that showed her as perky and cute and a team player. Then the intentions: the surface goals of good grades and being a dutiful daughter, baring her true self to the world. Her sister would scream over getting dirty. She would scream out of indignation.

And then, when the steel cut deep, she would simply scream.

Missy sipped her coffee, and smiled, and pretended to listen to her sister as War whispered in her mind.

***

"Here."

On her bed, Missy looked up from her pre-calc textbook to see Sue waving a piece of paper in front of her. "Ever hear of knocking?"

"Ever hear of closing your door if you want privacy?"

"Get that out of my face." She slapped at the paper, but Sue kept holding it, shoving it right at her. Glaring at her sister, Missy plucked it out of Sue's hand. It was a phone number scrawled on loose-leaf paper.

"That's the local teen crisis hot line," Sue said. "You should call them."

Missy, safe behind her dead face, drilled her gaze through her sister. Blood should have spattered on the door. "I said I'd think about it. I don't know if I have time for volunteer work."

"Who's talking about a job?"

Anger throbbed behind Missy's eyes.

Sue crossed her arms and thrust out her hip, playing at indignation, and her mouth pulled down in a pout. "Call them. Maybe they can talk sense into you."

"I'm fine," Missy said, voice flat.

Her sister moved faster than Missy would have guessed possible—one second she was standing over the bed, the next she had Missy's right arm in her hand and was pushing back the shirtsleeve.

"You're
not
fine," Sue hissed, spitting fury. "You look like you ran into a lawn mower."

Missy yanked her arm away, her head pounding in a drum solo. She wanted to scream, to hide, to shove her fists against the wall until her bones shattered. She needed to take her razor and cut herself until all she felt was sting and bliss, sting and bliss. She had to atone for her sins in blood. Blood washed it all away and left her clean. Pure.

Taking a deep breath, she shoved everything into the glass jar of her heart, pushing it all down before she did or said something she would regret.

Because oh, she wanted to do something. She wanted to grab Sue by her hair and slam her face against the wall until her features were nothing but a red, lumpy blur. She wanted to peel away those judgmental eyes and yank out her sharp tongue. She wanted to hit her, and hit her, and hit her until her sister's body was little more than tenderized meat.

Y
OU COULD,
War murmured.
Y
OU COULD DO IT SO EASILY.

Sue was staring at her as if she were a rabid dog that had crapped on the carpet—her eyes brimmed with disgust and fear and caution, and something else, too, something that Missy couldn't pinpoint.

H
URT HER.

Sue sniffed loudly. "Get some help. You think I want to be the sister of an emo cutter freak?"

Control,
Missy told herself, breathing deeply.
Control.
She sealed the glass jar and tucked it away. Her dead face in position, she leveled a blank gaze at her sister. "I don't give a damn what you want. Get out of my room."

Sue's shoulders tensed. "Not until you promise to call the hot line."

"Fine." Missy sat up, dropping her textbook onto the bed. Enough, and more than enough. She was a Horseman of the damn Apocalypse. She didn't have to sit in her room and take crap from her little sister. She stood up, forcing Sue to take a step backward. "You stay," Missy said. "I'm going downstairs."

As she walked past Sue, Missy bumped her—a nudge of her shoulders, just enough to push her sister aside. She didn't have to; there was plenty of room to have maneuvered around her. But she had wanted to. Just a little bump, a push, a quiet statement that warned her sister not to ignore her. Actions, after all, spoke louder than words.

And oh, that action had felt
good.

Missy was at her bedroom door when Sue shoved her, hard, on her back. Missy staggered, her arms wide, and for a crystalline second she hung on the precipice, startled, poised to fall. Missy reached out, and War took hold. An instant later, she planted her feet, two cushioned thumps on the carpet. Hunched forward, knees bent, she stood there, breathing heavily as her vision tunneled to two points of red.

Her sister
pushed
her. In
her own room.

Hairline cracks sprouted along the glass jar, thorn-sharp.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Sue shouted. "You don't bump me! You don't walk away and
bump
me!"

The cracks spread, lattice-like, until they covered the jar.

"You hear me, freak? I'm talking to you!"

The jar shattered, and Missy let the Red pull her under.

H
URT HER,
War crooned, the voice hypnotic, insistent.
H
URT HER BADLY.

Slowly, Missy pivoted until she was facing Sue. She smiled, showing teeth. It was the smile of whimsical murder, of gleeful slaughter.

Her sister's face went ghost white.

"Get out of my room," Missy said very, very softly. "Or I'll hurt you. Badly."

Sue ran. A moment later, a bedroom door slammed shut. On the heels of that, their mother's voice called out, scolding fiercely about slamming doors.

Missy's smile twisted into something cruel as she silently closed her bedroom door. Too easy. For all of her attitude, Sue was just a Barbie trying to be a Bratz doll. Sue had no urge to hurt anyone, to strip away falsehoods and leave the truth naked and bleeding. Violence was just a word to people like her. When it was time for fighting, they were the first to crumple.

S
HEEP,
War laughed.
T
HEY'RE SHEEP
. E
ASILY LED.
E
ASILY FRIGHTENED.

Sue had definitely been frightened. Her fear had filled Missy's nostrils, had given her a sugar rush.

F
EAR IS SWEET,
War agreed.
B
UT TERROR IS ADDICTIVE.

That made Missy pause, and the smile slipped from her face. Did she want her sister terrified of her?

O
F COURSE YOU DO.

No, she didn't. So why was her fist clenched so tight that it was trembling? Why did she want to lash out and break whatever was in her way?

Missy hugged herself, told herself that this fury would pass, that it wasn't filling her and spilling out of her pores. That she could handle it.

That she didn't need the blade.

B
UT YOU DO,
said War.

Missy closed her eyes and saw Sue's horror-stricken face. She bit her lip and imagined her hands stained with Sue's blood.

No,
she thought, desperate.
No. This isn't me.

B
UT IT CAN BE,
War said.
W
E CAN BLEED THE WORLD DRY.

And the truly horrific thing was, Missy wanted to do exactly that.

Her eyes popped open and she lunged to her closet. No more thinking; no more whisperings and urges and thoughts she couldn't control. She yanked the door open. No more visions of Red drowning the world as she held her Sword aloft. Missy grabbed her lockbox and fumbled it open.

No more words.

She took out her razor and pulled back her sleeve and slashed a line in the bend of her elbow. And she did it again. And again. She did it until the anger bled out and her arm was dripping and numb and her hand shook so much that the razor slipped from her fingers. It landed on the carpeted floor with a muffled thud.

S
EE?
War whispered.
Y
OU DO NEED THE BLADE.

Sobbing, Missy pressed her sleeve against the hungry wounds. She waited for the small bit of serenity to come over her, to wrap her in strong arms and rock her until everything was calm.

She waited a long, long time.

Finally, she let out a miserable sigh and began to clean up.

After a session with her razor, Missy usually felt peaceful. At the very least, she became more focused, able to handle the overwhelming emotions and thoughts that had driven her to the blade. Sometimes, that sense of peace would extend into something almost rapturous and she'd feel as if she had seen the face of God. Other times, she was left with a simple feeling of quiet, of warmth and solace.

This was the first time she had ever felt bleak.

She rocked on her bedroom floor, the lights off, the door closed, her arms wrapped around her knees. A gray lump sat in her stomach, a wretched stone of guilt that crushed any semblance of peace. She had wandered out of the land of Too Much and set up camp in Emptyville. Tumbleweeds blew in her chest, and she breathed the dust of abandoned buildings.

She had wanted to hurt her sister. And more than hurt—she had wanted to feel her sister's face beneath her fist, bruise her knuckles on her sister's bones. She had wanted to draw the Sword and make her sister scream. She had wanted that so very much.

She didn't know who she was anymore.

Melissa Miller rocked, alone in the dark. And she despaired.

***

At the dinner table, Missy and Sue didn't speak to each other. Missy, for that matter, didn't speak at all. Their parents chatted for a bit as they served huge slices of steaming pizza out of the box, while the girls sat in strained silence. But after ten minutes of discussing various work-related projects, their father tried to draw Missy and Sue into the conversation. Neither sister complied. Finally, he asked them why they were, as he put it, "in a snit." Sue pointedly refused to answer; she picked at the vegetables coating her slice of pizza, took sips of water, and didn't look Missy in the eye. For her part, Missy sat slumped in her high-backed chair and stared at the cooling food on her plate.

"Girls," their dad said, "come on. Talk it out."

No response.

"I'll help negotiate the Miller Peace Accords," he said gamely.

Nothing, not even an eyeroll from either sister.

Their mother sighed as she reached for another slice. "Look, we understand that sisters sometimes need to be mad at each other." She leveled a significant look at her daughters. "But I wish it wouldn't be at the dinner table."

Missy knew a cue when she heard one. She scraped her chair back and grabbed her plate.

"Melissa," her mom warned. "You weren't excused."

"You don't like how I'm acting at the table. So I'm going out." Missy marched out of the dining room before her shocked mother could respond. She dumped her uneaten pizza into the trash and shoved on her sneakers. As she walked through the living room, she heard her sister say, "She's out of control."

If her parents had any reply, it was cut off when Missy slammed the front door.

She walked without purpose, her feet dragging. It wasn't until she felt a gentle bump—so very unlike her sister's two-handed shove—that she realized Ares was walking behind her. She turned to face the warhorse, and she managed a smile as it nuzzled against her shoulder.

"Hey," she said, scratching behind its ears. "Hey there." She swallowed thickly. "You don't have to keep me company. I'm okay."

The warhorse's ears flickered.

"Really,Ia m."

The red horse nuzzled her again. Its intention was clear: it wasn't leaving her side.

"You're a good steed," she said, her voice breaking. She threw her arms around Ares' neck. "The best," she whispered, hugging tightly.

They stood there for a time, a girl and a horse, each taking comfort from the other's presence. And then the girl climbed up onto the horse's back and the two went out into the night.

***

They moved among the humans, invisible, weaving through their lives. Missy hefted the Sword, but instead of urging people to violence she sliced through their pain, working as she had just yesterday in a desert land. She bled them, and hope closed their wounds. Agonies—over money, over love, over all the things that make people doubt and hate themselves—slowly eased from Missy's steely touch. Small wars ended, if only for a little while. Tomorrow, people might once again lash out at one another, might allow their wants to dictate their needs. But for tonight, they settled down, content with their lot. For tonight, peace reigned.