Breaking Away (The Man in the Shadows) (10 page)

***

Guilt ridden, yet proud to be alive, and even more than that, to have gotten away with the perfect deception, he stepped up to the front door of his modest abode. He could talk himself into thinking that he hadn’t sent his men to their definitive deaths, and he might even start to believe it eventually, but somewhere inside his soul, past the murky clutter of his treachery, the mark would always haunt him. Murderer.
Murderer.

Taking in a deep breath, he wrapped his fingers around the door knob, and turned it open. The house was eerily quiet; on a typical day, all the candles illuminated the halls like a séance, laughter echoing from wall to wall like a ping pong ball, her violin resounding from the back room. Today, there was nothing. Something was out of the ordinary.

Setting one foot inside, and then the other, he looked around slowly, attempting to figure out what had gone wrong, if anything. Perhaps she was just gone to the market, or to a friend’s house. He knew those options to be untrue, as it was late into the evening, normally she would be readying herself for bed.

“Annika! My lovely diamond, are you here?” Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called to Annika. Fighting to stay calm, his stomach turned with fear as his steps sped up. He jogged through the living room and turned sharply to his right, down a long corridor. He beckoned her again, “Annika? Please answer me, Diamond...”

All of the candles perched upon the sconces hanging equidistantly on the walls were out. Some of them were still smoking, as if snuffed out recently. This observation set off an alarm of red fury in James’s mind, and his feet carried him as fast as he could muster further down the hall. Trying to keep his balance, he toppled this way and that, slamming into a wall, opening a door to a spare bedroom to find nothing, and carrying onward, until he came upon the very last door. He and Annika’s bedroom.

Frightened to even touch the door, as if his touch would turn the door to ash, he reluctantly laid one finger upon the finely carved wooden door, then another, until a fraction of his weight pushed against it. It moved forward delicately, and no voice, no light, no joy came through the crack to welcome him. Pushing it open enough for him to creep through, darkness was the only thing he could see. Misery worked its way up his throat, threatening to spew everywhere just at the thought of what would greet him when he lit a nearby candle. Removing a match from his pocket, he struck it against the wall urgently, and once the flame erupted and cast the room in a dim glow, his worst nightmares were realized.

His beautiful new bride was dead.

All strength left him in an instant, and he fell to his hands and knees, dropping the match to once again leave him in darkness. A scream of agony, as sharp as everlasting penance lashings, raged from his gut and was vocalized without any conscious thought, like a fog horn. James’s head hit the floor, and he heaved with sobs that couldn’t leave his body fast enough. He had kissed his beautiful Diamond two weeks ago before he had left for his assignment in the mountains. Remembering her warm lips and flushed cheeks, her radiant smile and auburn hair as bright as cherries, her contagious laugh and welcoming demeanor, he lost his sanity. He would never talk to her, touch her, experience her essence again. He could suck up her soul in the trumpet, but all of his muscles were contracted and spasming, and he couldn’t bear the thought of drawing up and absorbing the love of his life like forgotten lint hidden in the cracks of the floor.

Coming from the back of his mind slowly, quietly, was the thought that he knew was somehow true. He didn’t know how, but it was...
Someone found out. Someone knows your transgressions. Someone took revenge on you, and killed Annika. The only thing in this world you love, and they took it from you. YOU FOOL! How could you save your career, your own skin, to sacrifice the woman you’ve waited so long to marry?

Lamin had said to him through the portal, “... hurry home. A fanfare awaits you.” A fanfare awaits you... Had that meant something? Was he being sarcastic? Had he known? Maybe the royal mercenaries had found Colonel Jaffries and couldn’t make him confess; believing his story, the actual true story, they knew James was the true perpetrator. And he had to be made to suffer. They knew that worse than his own death, would be the death of Annika. Why let him die, when he could live for all eternity in anguish?

Raising his eyes from the desolate spot on the floor where he had landed, he gazed across the room, unbelieving, at his wife. His eyes now adjusted to the dark, he could make her out, sprawled on the floor, and by the scratches on her skin and the tears in her nightgown, it appears she put up a fight.
That’s my girl
, James thought.
Always a fighter.

Aggregating all of his remaining strength, and trying to call up more, he pushed himself up onto his hands, shaking. He felt that distress build up in the back of his throat again, like getting closer to her would somehow make him turn into a phoenix, rising from the flames in full blown fury, to raise the entire Empire to the ground in order to avenge her. Trembling violently, he managed to get his knees under him, and deliberately crawled in her direction. He felt stagnant in his movement, torpid; with each of his movements, he noticed another thing about Annika’s lifeless body. Her nails were painted a bright pink and her hair was done in sleek curls, no doubt she was preparing for his return when the perpetrator had attacked her. Her feet were bare, and the bottoms of them were dirty, as if she had gone outside without her shoes. As James grew closer, he could see her face. At least she looked at peace; her eyes were closed and her jaw was slack. Her cheeks still had that rosy glow, however. James’s eyes got wide.

“They’re still here...” he whispered to Annika’s body. “Or they just left.” Rushing to get to her side, he put his hand below her nose to feel for breath. Nothing. He checked for a heart beat, and nothing. The muscles in his face tensing up, he turned towards the door with renewed energy. “Ready or not, here I come,” he hissed, jumping to his feet. In a nearby drawer, he retrieved a short blade. Wielding this weapon, he charged out the door and turned to his right, viewing the chaos he had caused rumbling down the hall the first time.

Some sort of the sixth sense kicked in, and he charged down a definite path like a blood hound hunting down a fox. Running down the hall, he passed the living room and crashed through the dining room and kitchen, and out the back door, into Annika’s beloved garden. Closing his eyes briefly, he thought he could hear another person breathing. Since he was the only other living person on the premises, and he was holding his breath indefinitely. There was someone hiding amongst the vines and roses.

“Show yourself, coward,” he growled, stalking forward like a wolf. “Fight like a man, you gutless invertebrate.”

With these words, he heard a loud rustling straight forward, in the lilac bushes. He lunged forward, his blade whizzing to and fro, but he was too late. A man scaled the retaining wall at the back of the garden like a monkey, jumped over it, and was running across the neighboring corn field before James could mount the wall to fly after him. Perched atop the wall, James watched him disappear into the corn field, into the abyss. All he could see of his wife’s murderer was a red cape. No one in Monde de Lumière’s military wore a red cape... but those of the mountain tribes did. He gritted his teeth and dropped his blade.

***

Zareh didn’t remember her childhood. Not even a little bit of it. There were no pictures, no family to tell her stories. Apparently, when she was four years old, there had been an ambush on her little village, and her home had been burned, with her parents and three siblings inside. How she escaped with her life is, to this day, beyond her comprehension. Her entire family had died, as if they hadn’t existed at all. She was then placed into foster home after foster home, with no permanent placement, and thus, not one picture of her existed growing up. This was all true until she turned sixteen, when she was declared her own legal guardian by the government. Miraculously, she finished high school, and that’s when she met Baruti. The rest is history, as the saying goes.

Everyone she had met thought her personal history was beyond bizarre, so she stopped letting people get close to her. She was sick of explaining to people the perplexing details of her life and how she did not, and could not, let it bother her. Nope, she wasn’t normal. Zareh didn’t see why it was such a big deal, but everyone else did. Because of the walls she put up around her heart, and how she tethered her trust close to her like heavily guarded treasure, she had no friends other than Baruti.

Until Maika came into her life.

Maika seemed different from the start. A bright speck in a dark and lonely world, her very soul called out to Zareh. She had just gotten to America and was settling into her new apartment on Lake Street, when she was shopping at a corner market for some milk and cereal. Radiant, Maika was almost emitting a sound like angels singing; Zareh just had to say something to her. How could she not with such strange lures cast out into the ether like that?

“Did you know that you have your own theme song?” Zareh asked, quizzically. Smirking, she added, “Where’s the orchestra hiding? Am I on Candid Camera?”

Maika looked her in the eyes, and when she did so, she was taken aback slightly. Such beauty! She could gaze into her soul quite easily, and she couldn’t do that to anyone but Ethan. Grinning, she answered, “Oh, it’s all prerecorded. I just press play and it booms out of nearby speakers.”

From that first interaction onwards, they were fast friends. Turns out, they only lived a few blocks from each other, so they had dinner together or played card games with their friends almost every day. Almost seven years later, Zareh and Maika were about as close as she and Ethan had been for all those years.

Zareh, though, had some strange experiences with the other people she met in Minneapolis. Some told her how beautiful she was, but that something was frail,
flimsy
, about her. She would ask them to elaborate, but they could never put their finger on it.

One time, a man she bumped into at the grocery store told her he hadn’t seen her right away, because it was like she was there one moment, and gone the next, almost like she was ebbing in and out of view. She cocked her head to the side, unhinged suddenly. Stupefied by his statement, she had quickly excused herself and abandoned her cart to go into the bathroom. Heading straight to the mirror, she stared herself in the face. Strangely enough, she
was
ebbing. Slowly but surely, she faded and she could view the stalls behind her as plain as day.

Building up the courage to ask Maika about such an absurd notion, she called her on the phone a few days later. “I have the most ridiculous question for you.”

“I’ve heard it all, Babe,” Maika said, cooly. “Lay it on me.”

“Do I ever...
physically
... fade?”

“What?”

“See! I knew it was stupid...”

“No, no,” Maika corrected, quickly. “Just what do you mean... fade? Like loose interest, or not call people back or...?”

“None of those...” Zareh became flustered, insecure. “I mean... do I ever ebb like a blinking Christmas light? Like, can you ever see
through
me?”

Silence took over the receiver as Maika thought about it. After a painful minute, Maika gasped. “You know... maybe you do, but I just thought I was seeing things.” Putting her hand over her mouth, she continued. “There has been a time or two where I thought I could see through your torso to whatever was behind you. Why do you ask?”

Zareh swallowed hard and replied, “I’ve had people, complete strangers, mention this, just in passing. They say they can see through me, or that my image is flimsy or flat... I finally took it seriously the other day and looked in the mirror, and... Maika, good God, it’s true.” Embarrassed and puzzled, she asked, “What is going on, you think?”

“Hmmm...” Maika wanted to help her friend, but she had no idea what the fading meant. She offered, “Maybe it’s an optical illusion? I’m sorry, Sweetheart, I have no idea... maybe go to the doctor?”

Zareh smiled despite the situation. She loved how Maika always tried her hardest to assist, even when the situation was beyond help. So kind, so generous. “It’s okay, Love. It’s just a relief to know that you see it, too, and that I’m not going crazy.”

Snorting softly, Maika pressed her lips together.
I’m not going crazy,
repeated in her head again. And again and again. With the weird things that have happened to her in her life, she wondered if she was going crazy.

***

Maika was special; if you looked at it that way, she was an alien surrounded by creatures that knew nothing of her kind, and couldn’t relate to her. As James observed her growing up and struggling to make friends at every grade level, at every school she attended, time and again, he began to feel bad for her.
She’s such a good girl,
he thought.
She doesn’t deserve to be treated like an outcast by her peers. She deserves a close girl friend. She
needs
a close girl friend.

This got the wheels in his head turning. He looked at his face in the mirror. His life was effectively over, but Maika’s was just beginning. Why should he practice restraint when it came to making her life better? He was given the biggest responsibility with the Magi, and of course he wouldn’t use it to kill anyone. But he could use it to conjure up someone.

To create a human.

Because the Magi hadn’t come with an instruction manual, he took his chances. He didn’t think he wanted to play God, so he found a human that already existed, across the world incase things got out of hand, and infused in her a type of magic that would make her the perfect companion to Maika. He took her human soul out and replaced it with a Luminite soul, like the one that occupied Maika’s body. Only it wasn’t a
real
soul, it was something he made from pure magic. For all he knew, one wrong motion of the Earth, or of a star exploding ten million light years away would disturb his conjured soul and break it up, and thus the human body would drop dead. Knowing it was a thin line to tread, he kept a close eye on this little girl, all the way on another continent, in a country called South Africa. Her birth name was
Dikeledi
, but once he saw that her family was gone, he renamed her what he and Annika had planned to name their first born girl: Zareh.