The Affliction Page 12

  “I could have gotten it myself,” I mumbled to Isaac, but he just shook his head.

  “We alternate who does meals and it’s Mariah’s turn today. Enjoy the days when Mariah, Eleanor, or Cyrus take to the kitchen. You might want to skip eating altogether when it’s Tobias’ turn, or else you’ll probably end up eating something unrecognizable coated in a black crust and smelling like someone’s hair’s on fire.”

  “Oh, ha-ha, very funny Isaac…like your cooking’s any better!” I heard what must have been Tobias’ voice from a few rooms away. “At least I’ve never burned the kitchen down.” I laughed and only weakly tried to stifle it when Isaac shot me a loaded glance and made his own retort, pulling a face and mocking Tobias’ words.

  Then a striking woman walked through the door with a plate of food in her hands. I suddenly acknowledged why she and Cyrus were a couple. She stood over six feet tall with fiery carmine hair pulled back into a slick ponytail. Her black tank top showed off an array of impressive tattoos snaking and clawing down her arms. She was thin but muscular, and I would’ve bet that if you punched her stomach you probably would have broken your hand. My mind immediately threw out words like “threat” and “danger” as it took her in.

  However, she smiled dazzlingly at me when she walked in and set the plate down on the table for me. “Do you want anything else with this?” She asked.

  “Um, no I’m good, thanks,” I replied.

  “Okay, just let me know if you need anything.” And then she dashed out of the room with Isaac’s plate before I could watch her leave. I was glad I was on her side, and not the enemy facing her.

  Isaac stayed to finish our conversation while I ate even though he had already cleared his own plate.

  “So me and Cara are dead, huh?” I asked, yearning for the details of how they had made the story work.

  “Yep. Cara got beat up by a hobo who broke into her parents’ camp. As far as her family and the people in Sundown know, that’s what happened. You guys went to the hospital and she died there. We cleaned up afterwards, and made sure there were appropriate records for the police to find.”

  “Wait, so what was with the thing at the hospital? Who are they blaming that on? It sounded like a lot of destruction was done; the lights went out and the whole building was shaking. That can’t go unnoticed,” I said.

  “Nope. Gas explosion,” he said as if that was the only explanation needed.

  “Gas explosion?” I asked skeptically.

  “Yeah, lucky for us that hospital was old and in need of repair but they’ve been putting it off because it hasn’t been making a lot of money. They’ve been breaching all kinds of codes. Not hard to convince people a line leaked.”

  I considered this. “Are you sure all this was the best way? And what about our bodies?”

  “Lost in the explosion,” Isaac said impatiently, as though I should have already known that.

  “Right. And my house just decided to spontaneously combust, then?”

  Isaac laughed. “No. You, blondie, left your stove on when you rushed to Sundown to help Cara.”

  “Okay, well I guess that works,” I said doubtfully.

  Isaac made an attempt to reassure me. “It is the best way. It makes the most sense with what the outsiders witnessed. There had to be a reason Cara was taken from Sundown in an ambulance, and a reason for the hospital upset and your disappearance, too. And, this is the safest way for both of your families. Plus people do believe the story we planted…this sort of stuff pops up in outside news all the time and everyone buys it.”

  “Hmm. I’m still not sure,” I disagreed.

  “Oh, come on, Aubrie, you’re gonna have to get used to this stuff. And anyway, we sure confused the hell out of the Black Shadow.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, they’re wondering if we really killed you both, because they know we’re making a cover story. Only they think it’s just to cover our own murders.” He rolled his eyes. “Oh, well, makes things easier for us.”

  “Yeah. At least maybe they’ll leave us alone now.”

  “For a while anyway,” he mumbled, getting up to leave the table. “Hey, has anyone given you a tour of the inside of the house?” he asked, obviously hoping I would say no.

  “Are you offering to give me a tour?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, unless you want Gabriel to do it.”

  “No!” I exclaimed a little too quickly. “I’d like you to,” I tried to amend, and attempted not to laugh when his face basically said ‘score!’ and he motioned for me to follow him.

  Headquarters wasn’t quite as large as I had first thought, though it was probably ten times the size of a normal house. This was mostly due to the fact that it boasted a main living area, separate living wings for individual families, and then also a more office or business-like area that more befitted the title of Headquarters. The old Victorian composed of only two stories but spread out wide with sections jutting out at odd angles.

  Everyone spent most daytime hours in the main living quarters, which looked like an ordinary house, with living room, kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms. The Wells’ and the Kolarov’s had their own wings. As master of our chapter, Adam had his own wing. One wing lay empty. My suite sat in a side hallway on the second floor, off of which also lay Ashley’s, whenever she visited Headquarters. Isaac and Gabriel had similar suites on the other side of the house.

  “Welcome to my lair,” Isaac proclaimed, as he threw open a door that looked like it belonged in a medieval dungeon. I stepped into the dark room and noticed how the enormous TV on the wall and various gaming systems littering the floor monopolized the space. “It’s kinda messy,” he said unnecessarily, as I stepped over piles of clothes.

  “It’s…interesting,” I said, scanning all the posters on the wall; all typical for a teenage boy, except for one. “What’s this one supposed to be?” I asked, pointing to a three-foot square canvas covered in the colors of fire, only the way the streaks of red and orange swirled and intertwined didn’t look like any fire I’d ever seen.

  “Oh, that’s life,” Isaac said, as though that should have been obvious. “Gabriel painted it.”

  “I didn’t know he was an artist,” I said, drawn to the painting. “And what do you mean by ‘life’?” I asked, trying to make sense of the dark non-flames.

  “Well, all of his work is up for interpretation, and they’re usually too mysterious for me, but I had to have this one. To me, life is like fire, always growing or dwindling, too hot or not hot enough, looking for more fuel to sustain it. And depending on what you feed it, it can become whatever you like. It has the power to destroy or keep you alive. But I like this painting, because there’s a lot of differences between life and fire, too, like how sometimes life doesn’t always burn in one direction. Sometimes it flips you upside down and burns you into the ground.”

  I slowly took my eyes away from the painting and looked incredulously at Isaac, who shrugged and said, “I have philosophies on life, too, even if I’m not as serious as Gabriel.”

  “Yeah, why is he like that?” I asked. “I mean, other than the affliction? I’ve tried to intuit that, but there’re too many walls around him.”

  Isaac shook his head. “You’re not gonna get through those. He doesn’t tell anyone what happened to him. He wasn’t born in our chapter and we still don’t know where he came from. Eleanor said he just showed up here on the porch of Headquarters when he was eight. She walked out the door and he was just standing there, like a little ghost kid. Pale as the moon, fresh scratches burning red on his face. Scared the hell out of her.”

  As we walked back out into the hallway I wondered about what Isaac had said. That apparently I wasn’t the only one reluctant to talk about myself.

  “He’s such a hypocrite,” I said, as we passed his bedroom door.

  “I would just forget about it,” Isaac said. “It’s nothing personal, that’s just the way he is.”

 
I laughed. Isaac’s excuse was the same exact one I had given Gabriel. And now I knew what it felt like on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t just forget about it.

  Chapter 16

  I had looked away from the window for less than a minute, but in that time the day had turned to night. I had watched him walk in from the fountain and turn down the path to the back door of the house. I saw him looking at the purple sky and then suddenly he looked straight into my eyes. I gasped and turned away, and when I knew he had moved on I looked back, into the pitch black night air. I thought it was funny how that happened, how the dark attacked the day so quickly, sometimes before I had a chance to enjoy the last bit of light.

  I couldn’t forget the look in his eyes as he stared up into mine, just for a moment before I could steal my gaze away. The look that said, “I’m sorry.” The look that said, “I’m hurt.” My heart pounded fiercely as I choked down the guilt that stuck in my throat and wiped away a tear.

  I sat by the window for two hours, repeatedly reciting the list that contained all the reasons not to follow through with my plan. But the truth was I had to do a lot of repeating because the list wasn’t as long as I pretended. Why was I so stubborn?

  I watched the candles flickering again like I had the night before, the searching flames throwing distorted shadows onto the robin’s egg walls. Without warning, all of the candles were snuffed out without protest, the room in almost perfect darkness as suddenly as if someone had flicked off a light switch. I saw no flailing about as they tried to stay lit, no smoke as evidence that they ever had been.

  I tensed up and pulled my feet onto the window seat while I tried not to breathe. And then the flames were back with a gust of light and for a few seconds I had to consider the possibility that I had imagined those things. But then I knew. The candles hadn’t gone out, at least not for real, not to anyone else. But they had for me and I refused to ignore them.

  As I closed my door behind me, I could hear the TV running in the living room below, hear Isaac’s boisterous laugh. My bare feet didn’t make any noise as I crossed the house, the soft carpet muffling my footsteps, the wooden banister smooth beneath my unsteady hand.

  He didn’t answer when I knocked, but I knew he wanted me to enter, so I pushed the door open and let myself inside. His room was different than Isaac’s. He didn’t have a TV and his walls weren’t littered with half naked girls or sports icons. He had turned the walls into one big canvas on which he had painted the most beautiful art I had ever seen.

  “The beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he said, watching me gape awestruck at his work.

  “Yeah? Well I think it’s incredible,” I said, amazed at the way it looked like you could run right into the trees, how the waves looked like they would crash right into his room, how the back of the girl seemed so real, her blonde hair fanning out behind her into the wind as she reached out for something unseen. All of those images on different walls, and on the one behind his bed I saw part of what he didn’t want to tell me. A family stood on a moonlit beach, and on their faces…fear. The water that lapped at the edge of the scene…tainted red. “It’s a story,” I said. He nodded, fidgeting with something in his hands.

  “I’ve never told anyone what happened. Before I came here.” I walked over to his bed and sat down beside him. He looked into my eyes again but I didn’t turn away as he said, “sometimes when you don’t talk about things they build up. They eat away at you every day, and you can’t let go, you can’t move on.”

  “Is that why you paint?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “I paint my thoughts out, try to make sense of it all, to understand why it happened.”

  “I wish I could do that,” I said. “Then maybe I could move on.”

  “So you are hiding something. And anyway, I’ve painted it all out, but I still can’t see the reason why they had to die. You know, I thought it had to be in there somewhere, and if I could blow it up in front of me I could find it. But I was wrong.”

  “That’s your family,” I said, indicating the man and woman, the two kids. “Your mom, she was a Sage.”

  “She was one of the best. She was the first to realize that the rebels had started to rally together, the first to predict the Apocalypse. Her and my dad, along with a couple of others, had formed a sort of team, a special ops of The Mystic. They almost snuffed the Black Shadow out before they had a chance to begin. But the rebels had a powerful Sage, too, and they hunted down every member of the team and murdered them, along with their families.”

  “Oh, my God. How did you survive?” I asked, horrified.

  “My dad was also one of the best Guardians. We were on the run for a year, and had outlived the rest of the special ops team.” He stood up and walked to the wall with the trees. “We were in North Carolina. It was the middle of the summer and it was so hot out. I thought we would just be eaten alive by the mosquitoes, and my little brother, Eli, he wouldn’t stop whining. He felt sick, he said, and when he threw up everyone was looking at him. Just for a few seconds. Then my mom was screaming my little sister’s name and I looked around but Sera was gone. She had wandered away into the trees, and it only took a minute before we heard her screams receding toward the beach.

  “We ran out onto the sand and they had her there, holding her under the water. I tried to protect Eli but a Silencer attacked me. His nails were like claws and they sliced through my skin as though it was water. I realized they were killing me slowly so my parents had to watch me suffer. I was so confused when he stopped slashing me open. It was the first time I had gone invisible.”

  He paused there, and I knew he must prepare himself for the last part of his story because I knew what had to happen next. I hesitantly reached out and squeezed his hand and he wouldn’t let it go. His hand was warm in mine and I didn’t want him to anyway.

  “Sera’s body was lying at the edge of the beach, like a washed up fish. I crawled over next to her and the salt water stung worse than when the Silencer was cutting me up, but I had lost so much blood already and I couldn’t move. They looked for me, without luck, and I just lay there, watching them slaughter my family. I wanted to close my eyes but I couldn’t. When they were done they set up camp beside them as though dead bodies were of no consequence, like murdering a whole family didn’t bother them at all.

  “It was the longest night of my life. I thought I would bleed out into the ocean or I wouldn’t be able to stay invisible and they would look over and see me laying there. But when I woke up in the morning they were gone and a Shaman was working over me. I told him he had come too late and he said he was sorry, but I couldn’t forgive him. I ran away half healed and made my way here. Eleanor found me on the porch and finished healing me, but the scars never went away.”

  He ran his fingers absentmindedly over his left jaw and sighed.

  “Wow, Gabriel, I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine…”

  He shook his head and reached into his nightstand, procuring a bottle of cheap vodka and a plain black shot glass. “I don’t expect you to say anything. I don’t want pity,” he said as he poured a shot and handed me the glass. I could smell the stringent odor of alcohol and thought, thank you college for teaching me to enjoy something that tastes like shit and burns like hell.

  “No, I know how pity feels,” I said, tossing back the shot and managing not to make a face. “It feels like everyone is looking at you like you’re some kind of alien. They treat you like you’ll break if they don’t tiptoe around you.”

  I waited for him to agree with me but he didn’t say anything. It took me a moment to realize that he also waited for me, to explain how I knew what pity felt like. So there it was. He was about to witness the point at which I lost my stubbornness, where I let vulnerability take me over for once in my life.

  I sighed and handed him back the glass, which he filled for himself. “Okay, I give up, but only because you told me something you’ve never told anyone else.” He didn’t smile and I
realized too late that I’d qualified why I was about to share something with him. Letting my guard down was even trickier than I thought.

  I moved further onto his bed so I could lean back against the pillows and draw my knees up in front of me. He passed back the glass and I gladly took it. Liquid courage.

  I struggled to start, but once I did I felt relieved. He listened avidly while I told him about my mom, how she didn’t love me and why. About the various human friendships I’d attempted to maintain but had inevitably failed. And I told him about Michael; how I thought I’d loved him but didn’t, how the accident left me with nightmares that still corrupted my sleep.

  I had told Cara everything before, but I somehow felt better when I let it all out to Gabriel. I had finally dropped down my guard and told someone things I didn’t even like admitting to myself.

  “But all that’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through. I wish I was as strong as you are.”

  He laughed. “I’m not as strong as I like to pretend. Sometimes I wish I had died, too,” he said. “That I didn’t have to live with the memories and the guilt.”

  I knew all too well how that felt. “Sometimes I wish for the same thing,” I said, and his eyes suddenly looked much more gray than blue.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, as I put back another round of vodka and shook my head. I was confused, but I left the glass on his bed and stood up to follow him anyway.

  I had felt fine sitting down, but once I stood up, the heat pooled in my stomach, the blood rushed to my head and I had to take an extra step to stand still on the floor. I didn’t usually drink so a few shots of liquor made me wobbly pretty fast.

  “Whoa, steady,” Gabriel laughed as he placed a hand on my shoulder to stabilize me.

  “I’m fine,” I said in a higher voice than usual, taking a few steps toward the door to show him that I was.

  “All right, let’s go,” he said and disappeared into the hallway.