Chaos (2 page)

A deep pain returned to her temples, and Jasmine rubbed at the spots with her fingers. The light and noise drove tiny knives into her skull. The sounds of construction surrounded her—men drilling into the concrete and dump trucks collecting debris. It was too much. Every sound built on another until it reached a crescendo.

Jas walked faster, and she caught her breath when the hospital entrance came into sight. She had been brought here when she overdosed, and hoped to never come back. And now, here she was.

She needed to sit down for a minute, to tune everything out.

The doors whooshed open and Jasmine walked to the reception desk, leaning on it as she regained her senses. The smell of chemicals made her stomach flip.

“Are you okay?” the woman at the desk asked. She looked concerned.

“Yes—yes, of course,” Jasmine stammered. “I’m here to see a patient. Jack Simmons?”

The woman nodded, then tapped on her keyboard. Jasmine looked around and realized how chaotic it was. Nurses and doctors hurried up and down the hallways, and the waiting room was overrun with people. A man was being treated in the hallway, a nurse in green scrubs wrapping a white bandage around his head. A doctor in a lab coat pushed along a woman in a wheelchair, barely missing Jasmine’s foot.

Jas swallowed uncomfortably.

“Room one twenty-nine,” the woman behind the desk said. “Down the hall, take the first right, and then push through the double doors and take a left.”

“Thank you,” Jasmine said. She willed her feet to move down the hallway. The deeper she went into the hospital, the stronger the smell of disinfectant was. It clawed at her throat, and she had to cover her mouth and put her head down.

The gray tiles under her feet didn’t change as she walked, so she turned left and started to count them. When she got to twenty-two, she looked up and saw that she was only steps away from the room number the woman at the front desk had given her.

One twenty-nine.

Jasmine stood at the doorway. A soft
beep-beep
came from a machine at her father’s bedside. The overwhelming scent of antiseptic filled her lungs.

This was a mistake. She turned and almost ran into a nurse.

“Hello. Are you a relative?” the nurse asked.

“His daughter,” Jasmine managed to get out around her constricted throat. “Is he okay?”

“He’s suffering from severe alcohol withdrawal. It’s a good thing he checked himself into our detoxification program when he did.”

“And how long will he be here?” She avoided looking in her father’s direction. He looked small and sickly against the white sheets of the hospital bed.

“He’ll need to meet with a mental-health professional. Then he’ll begin a weeklong inpatient stay.” The woman placed her tray down and checked his monitor. “He was given a sedative to help with the withdrawal symptoms for now, but you can say hello if you’d like.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Jas said, backing away from the bed.

“But there are no visitors allowed during the program.…”

“You said it was a week long?” Jas asked. “I can wait until he’s out.” She’d gone a week without seeing her dad before. At least he was here instead of passed out at O’Rourke’s pub. She didn’t want to say hello; she wanted to run away as fast as possible. The lights overhead made dots dance in her vision, and the sickly-sweet scent of hand sanitizer coated her tongue. She needed to get out, now.

She turned and ran.

At the end of the hall, she saw a bright red Exit sign and focused on it.

The doors exploded open under her hands.

Outside, she hesitated for just a second before turning left and running faster. Her only thought was to put distance between herself and the hospital as quickly as possible. She ran down Sacramento, turned right onto Fillmore, and then left, where a tilted sign indicated she was now on Clay Street.

She slowed to a walk, amazed that she didn’t even feel winded. Luc always made fun of her for being a sloth, just because she didn’t see the point of running up and down a field and kicking a ball into a net. And it was true she did fake illnesses a lot to get out of gym class. One time she’d even claimed she was coming down with whooping cough.

Since when could she run so fast?

She felt strangely alive, buzzing. Beneath the squealing of tires and occasional blaring of alarms and car horns, it was as though the air itself was speaking to her. She felt
connected
to everything—to the people lighting a fire in the alleyway as she passed by, to an old lady walking across the street, to the old lady’s small dog. She could
feel
them, could feel what they were feeling.
Hunger. Loneliness. Curiosity
. She could suddenly sense all of it around her, as though the whole world’s volume had been turned up.

Just across the street Jas saw Alta Plaza Park, which had not been damaged too badly by the earthquake. A longing rose up, fierce and fast, to run her fingers through the grass and inhale the moisture of the ground.
The wind whispered through the trees and she imagined it was saying
Jasmine
. She was halfway across the street before she even realized she had moved.

“You’re supposed to block the ball, you shithead!” a voice shouted. The loud, familiar shout was followed by laughter.

Tyler, Justin, and Devon, all in their soccer uniforms, were kicking a soccer ball around the field just next to the trees. Jas ducked into the grove of trees. The last thing she wanted to do was explain to those guys what she was doing on this side of town on a Sunday.

She didn’t trust them enough not to spread it around school that her dad was in the hospital, either.

She sat down and closed her eyes. The sounds she heard brought colors to mind—the bright blue
shush
of the ball through the grass, yellow explosions of voices, the deep purple of the wind. It made her feel a little dizzy.

She must have hit her head on something,
really
hard.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, motionless, when she realized that Tyler and the others had gone. She peeked out from the trees and saw them, distantly, at the other side of the park, getting into a car she recognized as Tyler’s.

She stood up, leaning against the trunk of a tree for support. There was a faint pulsing under her fingers, through the rough bark. The air shifted. She felt as if the tree was a hand, warm and inviting; she could feel its sap like blood. A high-pitched whine started in her head, just like in her dream, and it made her pulse leap. When she
inhaled, there were new aromas, exotic ones that had no place in the middle of San Francisco.

She could hear everything: not just the wind through the leaves, but the clouds floating overhead, the trees inhaling and exhaling.

And … footsteps.

Two people were with her in the grove talking in hushed tones. A boy and a girl.

“I don’t see him anywhere,” the girl said
.

“He is expendable. She’s the one we’re after.” The boy sounded cold and determined
.

Their whispers were as clear as if they were talking directly to Jasmine.

Jasmine felt uneasy, filled with a buzzing electricity that came from the air, from the wind, from the trees. She crouched in the cluster of trees, listening. She heard the wisp of metal against denim, knew instinctively that one had just pulled out a knife.

“There she is!” the girl shouted, pointing in Jasmine’s direction.

A shock of red hair flashed between the branches as the girl fought her way toward Jasmine. The boy, a dark figure dressed in camo pants and a black hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his face, threw himself at the thick curtain of leaves between them, slicing through them with his blade.

The tree screamed—or maybe the screaming was just in her head. Jasmine felt hurt as though it were her own body that had been cut. She moved in the opposite
direction. Her skin screamed in pain as she backed up against the trunk. The whine got louder, but the boy didn’t appear to hear it at all.

He lunged again, and the noise grew deafening. Bloodlust ran through her veins like a fever. Without thinking, she grabbed the boy’s wrist and twisted it forcefully, sending the knife to the ground. His eyes grew wide and he tried to get away, but he couldn’t. Jasmine was stronger, and yet she felt completely wild—she had no control over this strength, no idea where it came from.

Her fingers slid around his throat and she started to squeeze.

The hood of his sweatshirt fell back.

A calm deadliness settled over the grove.

The scent of blood filled the small grove. Instinct took over.

The sharp points of her teeth felt unfamiliar against her tongue.

“Jas!” A voice pierced through the high-pitched sound at the edges of her mind.

Jasmine stopped to listen. Luc appeared several feet away, gasping for breath, and stopped when he saw her, his eyes wide with disbelief. Reality seeped into Jas, cooling the bloodlust, and her grip loosened.

What the hell was wrong with her? She let go of the boy and he stumbled back a few feet, where he fell onto his hands and knees, gasping for air.

Luc started toward Jasmine but then stopped and
picked something up off the ground. The boy’s knife. He paled and spun around, facing the boy.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Luc demanded.

The boy just stared up at Luc with a mixture of pain and resolve on his face.

Luc stood over him with the knife clenched in his fist. Oh God, was he going to hurt the guy because of her? This was all so wrong. The whining had stopped, and now Jasmine heard the familiar sounds of the city. Her hands still shook, and she could still feel the faint beating of the boy’s pulse under her fingertips. The lust for blood was gone too, and she felt sick, like she’d just ridden a mega roller coaster.

Something horrible had taken over inside her, and the worst part was that it felt so natural.

“Luc?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her.

She saw the hesitation on his face.

The fear.

Was he afraid for her or
of
her?

“We’re only doing what we must.” The girl stepped hesitantly from behind a tree. Her palms were turned up to show she wasn’t armed. “You of all people must understand that.”

Luc growled at the girl, “Haven’t they taken enough already?”

Jasmine looked from Luc to the girl. Did they know each other?

“We don’t make the rules,” she said with a shrug.

Her casualness seemed to make Luc even madder. “
I
don’t believe in your rules. That should be clear by now.”

Jasmine watched the exchange, growing more confused by the second.

“You know how this has to end,” the girl said. With a wary eye on Luc, she walked over to the boy and helped him stand.

They disappeared, and Jasmine sagged under the weight of what had happened. Luc wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her against his chest.

“I don’t understand.” Jasmine felt as though she’d stepped out of a nightmare into that place where dreams and reality are still mixed together. “What just happened? Who were those people?”

“Shhh. It’s okay.” She couldn’t help but notice how his voice shook.

Jas wanted to believe him, but it didn’t feel like things were ever going to be okay.

How
was
this all supposed to end?

Luc paced in the kitchen. Jasmine was taking a shower. It was pure luck he’d seen Jasmine at that park. He saw the boy first, creeping around with what looked like a knife in his hand, and had reacted instinctively. Some loser, he’d thought, out to rob someone, or worse.

And then he’d seen Jas, and the real fear had kicked in. She’d looked too much like how he’d found her in the Forest of the Blood Nymphs: pale and feral and deadly.

But just as quickly, she was his little sister again, scared and confused.

They’d walked to the bus stop after Jasmine insisted she didn’t need to go back to the hospital to have the cut on her arm looked at. The wound stopped bleeding almost immediately, but Luc couldn’t relax. Dread was still a solid mass in his stomach.

Jasmine thought the attack was random, but he knew better. The knife he had found was achingly familiar.

Corinthe had had one exactly like it.

Just thinking Corinthe’s name sent a pang through his chest. He missed her. He needed her.

She was his other. He knew it now, and he’d stop at nothing to get her back. He remembered sitting in the Great Gardens of Pyralis Terra. Corinthe lay dying, her head in his lap. They were surrounded by millions of stars.

“Please stay with me, Corinthe. Be with me. Choose me. I need you.”

Her smile this time was the barest flicker, like a candle trying to stand up to a storm
.

“I did choose you, Luc. Luc … I …”

That was the last thing she said before her eyes closed. He had promised her then that he’d find a way for them to be together again, and that promise fed the fire in his gut. He would never give up on her. But it appeared as though the Unseen Ones were trying to stop him already.