The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (22 page)

I sighed, and it damn near turned into a sob. I clamped my mouth shut and looked out the window, away from Jason. I took a few deep breaths. I was so tired. I’d burned through just about everything I had in that fight. It was like Kirby Lake all over again.

Only this time, I’d played the part of my father. At least Eric Finn’s guts were still on the inside of his body.

I shuddered. My mouth filled with saliva, a threatening precursor to puking whatever bile was left in my gut. I swallowed and took a few more deep breaths.

“She’s seen worse,” I finally said.

Jason shook his head. “You shouldn’t see her.”

“Gotta.”

“What are you gonna tell her?” His voice went up, volume and pitch. “She’ll know, one look at you. She’ll know what went down.”

“I know.” I closed my eyes, snapped on the fight, opened them up again. “We have to talk. I have to ask her about some stuff.”

“Oh, no. Get out. You—you’re not buying that shit, are you? Dude, the fucker was trying to psych you out, man. It’s all part of his bullshit!” He glanced at me again. “You don’t have to ask Lina anything, Nate. Fuck.”

I closed my eyes; looked at the ceiling of the car; opened my eyes. “Are you gonna take me? ‘Cause I’m just gonna get on my bike and go there anyway if you take me home.” I laughed; it was pitiful. I looked at him. “You’re seriously gonna make me ride my bike after all of this?”

Jason expelled a long breath and licked his lips. “She’s not gonna like it.”

“You’ll take me, though. Right?”

He nodded without looking at me. We didn’t say anything else until he parked at the curb in front of her house, when I asked him to go get her. The way I looked, if her folks or brother answered the door, all hell would break loose.

I waited in the car, watching. Lina answered the door herself. She was dressed in gray sweats and a Care Bears T-shirt, probably pretty much ready to relax before bed and cute as hell.

It was terrifying to see her.

As she followed Jason down her lawn, I stepped out of the car.

Lina saw me, stopped, and actually took a step back. Her mouth fell open.

“What…did they come after you? Is it them?”

The fear poured off of her. I didn’t understand.

And then I did. She thought this was to do with the people who’d caused us grief last year, the people who came after us in Kirby Lake with augmented killers and who continued to come after my mother and me with lawyers.

It threw me, how freaked out she was.

“No. No, no, nothing like that,” I said quickly. “I’m okay. It wasn’t them. It was…”

Her relief came and went. “Then what the hell, Nate? You look horrible! You’re…bloody!”

“Lina…” My legs shook. I think the term is “wobbled,” and right then, I clearly and fundamentally understood what that meant. My arms felt like rubber. I couldn’t tell if I was dangerously fatigued or just scared to say anything else to her.

But I had to. Tonight was all about “had to.”

“I saw him. I saw Eric Finn.”

“You what?”

“I saw him.”

Her face turned hard. She kept her focus on my body.

Her words came out just louder than breath. Plenty loud for me.

“Is he all right?”

I felt like my legs might stop working. I reached back and braced myself with a hand on the roof of the car.

“Is…he…
all right
?” I repeated.

The stone in her face was breaking apart under the force of her anger. “Yes! You’re standing here, Nate; I know you’re fine. I know what you can do, and I know you’re fine; you’re…” She indicated me with a thrust of her right hand, quick and sharp. “You’re here. So what about Eric? Is he all right, or are you in deep fucking shit?”

She used his first name. “He’s gonna be okay. We called…Jason called…”

Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened and closed. She glanced at Jason and back to me. “Called? As in, ‘called 911’?” She shook her head slowly. “Did you actually fight him, Nathan? Did you actually pick a fucking fight with him? You?”

I didn’t say anything. Shame wrestled with indignation at feeling shame. I was silent a beat too long, apparently.

She took a step toward me.

“Answer me!”

She was so angry. Why was she so angry? Why was this going like this? What was happening?

Why was she so angry at me?

“Yeah. We fought.” She jerked away with a grunt. I pushed through. “I didn’t pick a fight with him, Lina. He pushed me. He’s…he’s an asshole!”

“No shit, you…idiot!” Her hands were clenched, her arms stiff at her sides. “So you thought you could just…fuck!” She grimaced at the bloody smears on my sweatshirt. “Did you fucking cut him?”

“No, I…” Something clicked off in my head. I shut my mouth and looked away from her; took a harsh, hard breath.

“Lina, why do you care? The guy tried to rape you!” I sniffed. I wasn’t crying, not exactly. Things were just so intense, I felt like I was saturated. Things were bound to leak, if I didn’t flat out collapse in a flood first. “Didn’t he?”

She flared again. “What do you mean, ‘didn’t he?’ You’ve obviously got the whole fucking story—who told you? How’d you find him? Never mind; it doesn’t fucking matter. What the fuck do you mean, ‘didn’t he?’"

You know how you feel when you’re running really fast, but you don’t keep your body straight enough? Your center of gravity’s all off, and your momentum starts to pull your head closer and closer to the ground. All of a sudden: wham, you’re doing a shoulder roll on the pavement, full tilt.

That’s how my head felt. That’s what my thoughts were like. My feelings. I couldn’t stop. I was going to hit the ground, and I couldn’t stop.

“What were you like back then, anyway?” I said. “Why would you even be with a guy like that?”

Full tilt. No way to stop.

Wham.

Her jaw dropped and her eyes went wide. For a split second, her face went slack, like all of the muscles had just given up, or couldn’t organize themselves.

It didn’t take long for the hurt and anger and betrayal to take over, and that’s when Lina—
my
Lina—cracked and fell away from her. I saw it in her face, in the way her eyes reflected or, I guess, didn’t reflect anything at all when she looked at me.

“God, Nate. You must be right. I must have been crazy. What was I thinking?” She was right in front of me then, right up in my face. I could smell the Lina scent, but just barely, all but lost under adrenaline and rage. Her eyes were rimmed and glistening, but the tears refused to fall past her lower lids. Refused to let go.

“Lina…”

“No, I know! What kind of a little slutty cunt was I, right? Jesus, he’s like, what, fifty years older than me, right? All sly and slick and shit! Why would I do that? Why would I do him?”

Do him? “You didn’t…” No. She was pissed. She was trying to hurt me.

“Didn’t I? Are you sure? How do you fucking know, Nate? Who was I? Huh? Who was I? Maybe I did! Maybe he didn’t have to fucking drug my sorry ass to get me to fuck him, huh? Huh? What do you think, Nate?”

“Stop it,” I said. My tears were not as strong as hers. They fell down my cheeks. She couldn’t be serious. She couldn’t be.

She pushed me, both arms, palms flat on my chest. My back was against the car, hard against me.

“Why should I,” she growled. “Why should I stop? You didn’t! You went right ahead and did whatever you wanted, Nate. Right? Who gives a fuck what I want? Right?” She pushed me again. “God! You asshole!”

“Stop it!”

She pushed me again. “Fuck you!”

I pushed her back.

She stumbled a few steps before her balance failed. She sat down fast and hard on the grass of her front yard.

That was the same moment her father came through the front door.

“What the hell is this? Nate?”

I looked at Lina, on the ground. Her head was turned to the side, looking at nothing.

Graham Porter came down the steps of their porch and crouched behind his daughter. He put his hands on his shoulders.

He looked angry. Sure.

But the thing that sent me down the street, running away in the true Charters tradition as fast as my exhausted but still allegedly better-than-human legs could take me? The thing that had me practically choking on my snot and tears as I put streets between me and Lina and Jason and him?

The other thing I saw on his face.

The disappointment.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Thirteen

I didn’t get far.

For one thing, I just couldn’t run for long. My augmented reflexes and strength, as well as, no doubt, the energy required to process the information from my extra-sensitive senses, are paid for with a fast metabolism. After the fight with Eric Finn and the stress fighting with Lina, I didn’t have the energy.

For another, Jason found me. He pulled the Bonneville over, opened the passenger-side door from the inside, and nodded to me when I got in.

He didn’t say a word until we got to my house.

“You all right?”

“Nope.”

His eyebrows jumped, and he nodded.

I needed to know my options. “When do your parents come back?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Can I call you tomorrow morning, if I need to?”

The look on his face told me I was pushing the limits of our friendship. I’d asked him a lot tonight.

“Yeah.” He didn’t look at me.

“Thanks,” I said. I dragged myself out of the car.

After Jason drove off, I stood in the driveway. I wasn’t sure what to do.

The front door opened. My mother said, “I thought I heard a car. Are you coming in?”

I turned toward her and got another shocked reaction from my haggard, bloody appearance. She recovered quickly, though. She pursed her lips, glanced up and down the street in as much as she could see it from where she stood, and waved her hand.

“Get in the house.”

I slipped past her and fell on the couch. She closed the door and turned around. She shook her head. “Is anyone…Nathan, is anyone seriously hurt?”

“No one’s dead,” I muttered.

“Then get yourself off of the couch; you’re filthy. Take a shower. Eat something. Or the other way around; I don’t care. When you’re done, we’ll talk.”

She sat down on the loveseat and directed her attention to the television. It was clear she was pissed, but my mother could be almost offensively pragmatic sometimes.

So I ate half a package of pastrami, most of a block of cheddar, a few pieces of bread, and a handful of pickles. I washed it down with hard swallows of milk right from the carton. If she was going to ignore me until I did what she said, I was fine with doing things she wouldn’t approve of for the sake of taking care of myself.

Not an unusual state of affairs for us, really. But not one that had worked out all that well so far, either.

Eating and showering gave me time to stabilize and think. By the time I was fueled and clean, I had an idea of what I needed to do. It sucked that I’d need her help for it.

I presented myself to her in the living room.

“Okay,” I said.

She got up, turned off the television, and sat back down on the loveseat. She pointed to the couch. “Sit down.”

I sat down.

“What’s going on, Nathan? Who did you hurt?”

That put me off, right out of the gate. Bad enough when Lina had done it.

Aw, fuck. Lina. What kind of conversation was she having with her parents tonight? How much did her dad hear?

“Are you going to tell me, or will I find out when the police arrive?”

I wondered if they would. Would Finn report this and risk incriminating himself? What was the statute of limitations on attempted rape?

“I got into a fight,” I said. “Why don’t you ask me how I am?”

“Because you’re you,” she said flatly. “With who, and why?”

“A guy named Eric Finn tried to rape Lina, a year or so before we met. I found out about it.”

She stared at me with the mixture of disgust and anger she had practiced so often in the last year or so.

“So you decided to fight him.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not like that. And did you hear me? The guy tried to rape Lina.”

“I heard you. I’m concerned about tonight, right now. Who…” She sighed. “I can’t believe I’m asking it, but who started it?”

“I—I’m not sure. He said some stuff. I…I lost my temper.”

She regarded me. “Your temper.”

“What?”

“I’m still not used to you having one,” she said. “Before…you were a different kid, Nathan. A good kid.”

This wasn’t going so hot.

“Before.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice; like it or not, I needed her on my side right now. “Before I knew the truth, you mean.”

She shrugged.

“So you fought with this boy. And he lost. How badly is he hurt, Nathan? What can I expect to be dealing with, here?”

“You?”

She leaned forward. “Yes, me, Nate. It’s me who’ll have to deal with his parents. They’ll probably sue, but I guess they can get in line, right? They might press charges. Do you know how serious this is?”

“Do I know—?” No, this was not going well at all. “First of all, you won’t be hearing from his parents. Eric Finn isn’t a kid, mom. He’s, I don’t know, like twenty, twenty-one.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything, so I kept going.

“If he says anything about me, I say something about him trying to rape Lina. He’d be stupid to do it.”

“Does Lina intend to press charges? You have to tell me everything about it, Nate, so I know where we stand.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what has she said? Hell, what do her parents have to say?”

“I don’t know!”

She studied me for a moment. “Oh. You had a fight.”

“She just told me about this whole thing a few days ago,” I admitted. “She told me to let it go.”

“You couldn’t.”

“Hell no! What was I supposed to do?”

“Off the top of my head, not pick a fight with the guy.” Her voice got an edge. “They won’t protect you, you know.”

She meant the Sovereign.

“That’s not why I did it.”

“No,” she said. “You did it because you could, I bet.” A bit of anxiety mixed with the hard anger on her face. “You have to be better than this, Nathan.”