ARC: Crushed (18 page)

“What way?” I ask dimly.
Good. Bad. Alive.

His lips tighten. “Leashed.”

Leashed. Locked in my pen at night. Fed at their convenience. A pet monster.

You can’t understand them, not even a little bit?
Jo had accused. But when she said
them
, what she meant was
us
. Because she is one of them and I am one of me.

“Hey,” Armand says, gently, and I look back into his eyes. Demon-dark, hungry, angry, and yet with the tiniest bit of softness. Eyes that can see me for what I am, can accept me for what I am. Because he’s like me.

Together we make an us.

And it’s us versus them.

They don’t want me here, I don’t want to be here. I tried to be good. But I’m an addict, addicted to bad, and they keep waving it under my nose. They try to pull me in with it, then punish me when my rehab fails.

But they do not have a monopoly on my future. I have options, and one is right in front of me. Freedom, escape, sin, danger, violence, all rendered beautifully on his too-perfect face. He’s offering everything they deny me.

If they won’t give me my freedom, I will take it.

Heat pumps through my body, my hand tingles in his, and fire follows the tender slide of his thumb over my cheek. The power that comes with freedom electrifies my nerve endings, and that dark part, cramped from being penned in its cage, springs to the surface.

For too long, I’ve let them dictate my worth, let them decide what I should be. I may not be a Crusader but I am not nothing. I am everything. I am valuable. I had forgotten, I let them make me forget, swallowing their “should” pills like a good little psych patient. But I am not sick, or crazy, or broken.

I am Meda Melange, demon-saint monster girl. I make full-grown men scream in terror. I break bones and drain blood. I turn nightmares into reality.

I am the most powerful creature on earth. I do not wear a leash.

The darkness seethes under my skin. I blink and the world is a new place.

Armand senses the exact moment I flip. His teeth come out in a smile, and he wraps his large hands on either side of my face. Our foreheads touch again, and I know he would kiss me if I let him, but I am not in a kissing mood.

I put my hands against his hard chest and grab fistfuls of shirt. I can smell his breath, feel the softness of the fabric crushed in my hands. I can count his every pore, see every dark-on-dark fleck in his eyes. The world around us pulses with life and brightness and energy.

“Come for me tonight,” I whisper, staring at his mouth too long. “I have some things to take care of.”

So I act like a monster, do I?

I’ll show them monstrous.

Chapter 22

Contrary to what you might expect, I don’t go on a murderous rampage.

A real monster is too clever for that. A real monster shakes the hands of elderly couples as he invests their life’s savings in his Ponzi scheme; she kisses babies and runs for political office; he waits until she’s in love. A real monster knows that an attack hurts; but a betrayal scars.

So I return to my room. And, later, when the Sarge tells me to come, I don’t argue. When she tells me to sit, I sit
. There’s a good girl, Meda
!

She feeds me excuses disguised as explanations. She pretends to care that it’s unfair; she pretends to apologize.

I pretend to believe her.

I, too, pretend to care.

But my other ears are now open, and in her words I hear all the things she doesn’t say. The real reason I can’t visit Luke. The real reason I’m locked in my room. The real reason Graff was allowed to possess me.

I read once about miners who took canaries into coal mines. I can see them, little dots of singing sunshine, desperately out of place in the dark. Although they kept the miners company, cheerfully noisy things that they are, they weren’t pets. If the miners hit a pocket of poisonous gas the canary, with its small, delicate body, would die long before the miner, letting him know it’s unsafe.

That’s what I am to the Crusaders; what the Sarge won’t say. I’m useful but inhuman. I’m not worth what they are. She looks me in my young-girl face and doesn’t want to admit I’m expendable.

Some things, terrible things, are better left unsaid, I suppose.

To that end I won’t tell you about how, after I leave the Sarge, I go back to my room and plot my revenge. I won’t say how the thunk of the key locking my door no longer feels like a slap. How it now feels like a challenge, a call to come out and play. It’s a reminder and a tease and taunt, but no longer a slap. Its sting is gone.

I won’t say how I wait while the old building goes to sleep, but how I have never felt more awake. I won’t talk about the ferocious look on a monster-boy’s face when he lets me out of my room. I won’t tell you about following the delicious shape of a bad-boy’s back up to the attic, then leaving him and my belongings there, while I have my revenge.

I won’t talk about how I scale a certain building to a certain hidden window with a broken latch. How Jo showed me the building’s only weakness.

I won’t say how that thought makes me laugh.

I won’t tell you how I search for a certain map, or how I know it’s here somewhere because Jo used it against me. I won’t tell you that I find it.

And I certainly won’t tell you that I steal it.

I won’t tell you that I know what it means to the world if the Crusaders lose it. I won’t tell you that I know what will happen if the demons ever manage to get a hold of it. No, I won’t tell you any of that.

Because some things, terrible things, are better left unsaid.

As I move through the hallways of the school to meet Armand in the attic, the thing I won’t tell you I stole stuffed in one of those nylon-and-sting triangular sports bags. I trot up stairs until I reach my hall. I pause, listening, but it’s silent. I slide around the corner and slither down the dark hallway. My feet move over the creak-happy boards so softly, they barely sigh. I move by Jo’s door, then mine with its despicable lock, but I don’t spare it a glance. It was never truly mine. A person doesn’t belong to her dog, the master doesn’t belong to her slave, and a cell doesn’t belong to its prisoner. The one with the power is the one who owns. But I don’t belong to that room anymore. The world belongs to me.

I slip down the hallway, but just as I reach the stairs up to the attic, I hear a metallic scrape behind me. I duck inside the entry to the stairs, sinking into the shadows.

Jo’s door opens and she slips out into the hallway. She’s in her pajamas, a white tank top and sweats, lumpy over her leg brace, but it doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping. Her eyes are swollen. The key hangs on its long chain around her neck. It gleams in the light flooding from her open door.

Never say Saint Jo is breaking the rules.

She steps silently into the hallway, but slowly, as if she isn’t sure of herself. She pauses at the door and her fingers slide up to fiddle with my room key. My stomach flips.

No, Jo. No. Don’t go to my room.
Trust Jo to ruin my plans. If she finds me missing, I haven’t the slightest doubt that after what happened today, she’ll call the Crusaders down on me in a heartbeat, the traitor. My legs coil on the stairs as I consider options. They aren’t great. Run, but I doubt even I could escape fast enough that the Crusaders couldn’t catch me. And if they catch me with the Beacon Map…

But that only leaves one other option: stopping her.

I would have to silence her so fast, she couldn’t call for help. There could be no betraying tussle, no thud as I tackled her. I’m stronger and faster than she is, but all she has to do is make a noise and I’m caught. Despite her pathetic showings in S and C, the girl’s a natural at ass-kicking. She must be… silenced, before she even becomes aware I’m here.

Don’t go in my room, Jo.

But the girl was born to be contrary. She walks the ten paces to my door. Armand locked it to give us the greatest head start, but that helps not at all when the one person who comes to check on me has a key. She pauses outside my door and I hold my breath. She raises her thin arm, white in the darkness, to knock, but pauses to wipe her cheeks, then she lowers it again without ever rapping. She stares at my door, and I Jedi-mind-trick the hell out of her.

Go away, go away, go away
.

Because she lives to piss me off, she instantly lifts her arm again, quick this time, as if she wants to get it done before she can change her mind again, and raps softly on the door.

No one answers.

Go away
. Actually, no, this is Jo.
Please, do come in,
I think instead. Can you reverse Jedi-mind trick someone?

She knocks again. “Meda,” she says softly. “Meda, please talk to me.” She presses her forehead and hands against the door. She looks pale and thin. Thinner than me, now, maybe. She looks like she’s had every ounce of fight sucked right out her. It occurs to me, in the cold vacuum in my chest, that not only did I start a war, a war that potentially means the death of everyone and everything she believes in, I made her help me do it. Jo turned me into a Crusader in the demon headquarters. I didn’t ruin the world alone, she helped me.

How that must feel to someone with a conscience.

“Meda,” she says again, then adds a few taps with her knuckle. When my reply doesn’t come, her jaw sets. She swipes her hand across her face. “We’re friends, dammit,” she snaps. “Now open the door.”

I wince. If she keeps up making noise like that, I’ll be caught anyway.

Fortunately she takes a breath, and when she continues she’s calmer and quieter. “Look, I’m sorry about how I acted today. I know I should have trusted you.” She trails off, frustrated at talking to wood. She makes a quiet growling sound in her throat, then hisses, “Open the damn door!” Ah, a classic Jo apology.

But I can’t open the door, no matter what she has to say. And she can’t be allowed to, either. She says she trusts me now, but it’s too late. Her trust is misplaced. I’m ten feet away in the wrong direction, mid-nefarious plan. Ah, Jo. As Armand always says, you should never trust a demon.

She’s lying anyway. Actions speak louder than words, Jo, and you don’t trust someone you lock in a cage.

As if she heard my thoughts, her hand reaches for the hated key gleaming against her chest. Fed up, apparently, she whips it off in a quick jerk.

She’s going to do it. She’s going to let herself in. She’ll sound the alarm and I’ll be caught stealing the Beacon Map and it’ll be over. The hated existence I’ve lived until now will seem like a dream in comparison.

Jo would never forgive me. Even Chi would be hard-pressed to justify my theft. I’d finally prove to them that I am what they’ve always feared.

This is it: I’m caught or she’s dead. Those are my choices. Her or me. But hasn’t that always been the case? Mom or me. Jo or me. We butt heads, we battle. And in the end we always come to this point. Her or me.

I crouch in the darkness, a monster prepared to pounce. A wicked thing, incapable of letting anything get between It and what It wants.
She doesn’t care about you
, I tell myself. S
he’ll pick the Crusaders every time. She’s not your friend. She’s your enemy.

Jo looks at the key in her hand, the symbol of her control over me.

Now. I have to do it
now
. I bend, I curve, I pretend away all those things I wish weren’t there. I force a silent snarl to my lips. I’m ready.

And yet, when she slides the key in the lock and twists, I stand in my dark doorway and watch, unable to move. My impending destruction curves over me like a breaking wave, and I’m frozen, waiting for it to crush me. Drown me. Pull me under and swallow me.

I deflate. Wasted adrenaline and shame combine to make me shake jerkily. Shame because of what I almost did or shame because of what I couldn’t do, I don’t even know.

I can’t be good, but apparently I can’t be bad either. I’m a wasted half of everything. I won’t kill Jo. I smother a silent bark of laughter that I ever thought I could. Kill her. I couldn’t even hurt her. Furious as she makes me, she’s…
Jo
.

Jo pulls the key from the lock, and I wait, helplessly, for her to open the door and sound the alarm. I don’t even run. I lean against the wall quivering. I’m pathetic.

She still doesn’t open the door, but rather contemplates the key in her hand. But it doesn’t matter how long it takes for the inevitable to occur. The stressful part is the decision making. Do I stop her, or do I not?

My best friend, worst enemy, and certain destruction, and yet, somehow the answer is “no”.

Then, as I watch, Jo closes her hand around the key into a fist and drops to the floor. I stand in shock as, with a smooth swing of her arm, she sends the key skittering under my door.

She rises to her feet as smoothly as her bum leg will allow and sticks her chin slightly in the air. She looks as relaxed as I’ve seen her in weeks.

It’s always the decision-making that’s the worst part.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she says to the door. “Whenever you’re ready to talk.” She waits one more moment, then turns and pads back to her room. Right before she closes the door, she adds “
Doctor
.” Then closes the door with a quiet snick.

Doctor
. It’s what I told her to call me when we were in the demon headquarters and I wanted her to finish casting the spell. She knew what I meant was “trust me” and, despite everything, all rationality, she did.

And now she’s saying it again. After I almost…

But some things are too terrible to be spoken.

I twist and take the steps two, three at a time. I run across the beam over the rotten floor until I reach the window, still open from Armand’s exit. I lean against the frame and try to breathe. After I get some air I shove my fist into my mouth and scream silently into my knuckles. Then I punch the air, swinging wildly, so frustrated, so
torn
. I push my hands into my eyes, grinding my palms into them and drop to the ground.

Jo always has a way of ruining my plans. Just rarely in the way I expect.

Suddenly there are strong hands on my arms. “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” Armand tugs my hands from my eyes. He looks slightly panicked and his eyes fly over me searching for injury.

I look back at him, sick, and just shake my head. I don’t even know what I’m saying “no” to.

He pulls from my expression the problem, and for one brief moment he looks as sick as I feel. As if he can feel my shame. And maybe he can, in a way. Only he can understand the pull of the darkness but capacity for light. He’s given up the fight, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember the battle.

The battle he eventually lost. We haven’t the capacity to win. How could a girl who plots the– But no. That will remain unsaid.

Armand strokes my arms with a gentleness I wouldn’t expect from him. “Come, Meda. You can’t stay here.” His eyes ache. “They’re tearing you apart.”

That’s exactly what it feels like, being pulled in different directions until the flesh tears. I needed to get away, to take a break. To breathe.

I close my eyes. A break. I open my eyes again, and Armand senses the change that’s come over me and rocks back slightly on his heels.

“You’re right,” I say, hoarse and slow. Then I cast my eyes around my little retreat. The one I used to share with Jo. I close my eyes again and take another breath, and make a decision. My eyes open, and I’m calmer still. “Just give me a minute, will you? I need…” I wave my hands uselessly, letting him conclude what he will.

He looks like he thinks it’s a bad idea. His lips tighten a hair, and again I can’t miss that unexpected look of concern in his eyes. But “no” is not really an answer I would accept anyway, and he knows. He climbs to his feet, and with one more look at me, slips out the window.