Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (19 page)

We placed an order that four normal adults could’ve eaten. It didn’t last long in our hands. I wanted to talk about her near death experience. I wasn’t ready. Neither was she. We munched and slurped and dabbed napkins at our mouths, speaking with our eyes. At one point she was on the brink of tears. Had she seen something on the other side? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Mom had already challenged everything I thought I knew about the afterlife.

Near the end of our meal, I checked the time on my Geiger counter watch. We’d left Pennsylvania an hour behind King. According to the address on the restaurant’s front door, we were in Nebraska, more than halfway home.

Hand-in-hand, we left the restaurant and circled around to the back. The scent of used burger grease and garbage was strong from the dumpsters.

“How do you feel?” I finally managed to ask her.

Rhapsody pulled me into a kiss. “Different.” She said it like she said everything.

Unsure how to take her answer this time, I opened my arms, expecting her to come closer so we could take off.

She hesitated. “Wait,” she said. Rhapsody walked in a straight line across the dirt alongside the road, sidestepping a piece of road kill. “Not weird different,
good
different. Like I thought I was using your power to turn us invisible like before. I wasn’t. It was mine. I felt it.”

The solution King had concocted gave her powers without prisms. That was no surprise. Didn’t explain why she wanted me to wait to take off. “C’mon. We should go.”

She crouched down like a distance runner and jumped so far away that I couldn’t tell where she landed. A moment later she landed in a cloud of dust a yard or so away. “Whoa. That’s new,” she said.

Rhapsody had my powers, too? I hope she didn’t.

Out of breath, she walked up to me. “How do you fly?”

“I just do it. I don’t really think, except where I’m going.”

She licked her bare lips. “Hmm.”

“Can we go now?”

“Wait.”

She knelt down again and jumped off the ground, higher this time. Outside of me and King, I’d never seen anyone leap that high before. She landed just as fast. Again she rocketed straight up. This time she shot higher but came down slow in a soft landing. Smiling devilishly, she put her mask on. “Now, we can go.”

We didn’t have time to experiment, but letting her fly alone was the only way I’d get her to stop trying to do it. Part of me held back telling her what I could do when I carried her. If my blood gave her my abilities, it would give her all of them – my strength and invulnerability, too.

I shot into the air and looked around, waiting for her to meet me. It took a minute, but she did. I’m sure she was grinning behind her mask. I pointed west and sped off. She caught up beside me. I hopped up to supersonic speed and soon she followed suit.

We were flying alongside one another and she had turned us invisible. That was a good thing, because this time I was positive we were being followed by military aircraft. Slowing down meant giving King extra time. They’d have to follow us.

I had a bad feeling that they planned to do more than just track us. Hoping Rhapsody got the message, I started thinking
slow down,
and I zig-zagged back and forth. My body responded, decelerating until my hearing returned. That’s when I noticed what must have been bullets popping close to my arms and hitting my backpack.

I couldn’t see Rhapsody. Thinking she was close, I flipped around and flew backwards. Six black jets whizzed past me and soared forward in an attack formation. I trailed them until Rhapsody appeared alongside me and gave me a thumbs up sign.

We were in the clear. For now.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

i hate haunted houses

I whispered out of the side of my mouth. “Do you think we beat him here?”

Rhapsody didn’t answer at first. Her eyes slowly drifted from me and then to the home-turned-insane asylum in front of us. She was thinking what I was thinking. Even if we had outpaced King, it’s not like we’d receive a prize for doing so.

I swallowed hard. The whitewash had worn off a little more since the last time we’d been back. A gentle breeze blew past and rattled an old bell hanging on the open porch. You’d think I’d remember such a spooky detail as a random bell, but I didn’t. Something down in my gut told me we should walk through and search it. Debra would say it was my spirit. Most times I thought it was gas and ignored it.

“We should go through it, I think,” she said exactly what I was thinking in the way I was thinking it. She could read my mind, too? If so, our relationship was about to get weird.

The iron gate squeaked as I pushed it open. Though Rhapsody had my powers, she stayed at my shoulder, letting me take the lead. Insects swarmed around a baby bird who hadn’t quite mastered flying and died in the weeds. I turned my head to ask Rhapsody to turn us invisible and she did it before I had a chance to speak. Now I knew she could read my mind and it freaked me out. There had to be some privacy between us. She could already walk through walls and become invisible.

“Sorry!” she whispered. “Little scared here. God, I could use a smoke right now.”

I wondered if we should levitate up the front steps. Each time we moved, fast or slow, the splintered wood creaked and yawned. Anyone inside who could hear knew we were here. They just wouldn’t see us coming. The weathered front door was shut. Rhapsody held my hand and ghosted us through it. The house’s two-story high foyer was dark.

To our right, an antique staircase led to the second floor. Aware that Rhapsody might not be able to control her new powers that well yet, I took her hand and flew up. Coasting at a minimum rate took much more concentration and control than letting loose and soaring past the speed of sound.

The balcony fronted a set of bedrooms. All the doors were closed, meaning we’d at least have to peek into each of them to see what was inside. Rhapsody squeezed my hand, meaning she wanted me to do it. I pressed down my own fears and leaned into the first door. Completely empty. The window had yellowed threads that were once drapes. The glass was spotted with dirt and allowed only trails of sunlight inside. There was a funny, familiar scent in the air – mothballs. Grandma Barbara’s house was full of those. The ceiling’s plaster hung down in awkward shapes. One resembled a dinosaur’s head.

I ducked out and plunged my head into the next room. It had a layout completely opposite to the one we had just seen. Again, emptiness. A mouse squeaked and scratched its claws on the wooden baseboard inside of the closet. I hate mice. There was no way Rhapsody read my mind. She would’ve heard a lot of swear words.

I didn’t know what we were looking for in this place. Whatever it was, it had to be close. I felt something similar to a magnetic pull. It wanted me to go forward to the last bedroom left on the corridor.

Someone was inside. We got closer. Was that crying? I’d been tricked by King when he sent Taylor the shape-shifter after my blood. Also, I had thought Mom wasn’t real until she called me Boogie. Keeping that in mind, I stepped close to the wall. The wood wasn’t creaking there. Rhapsody followed suit. She treaded on my heel by accident.

I took a deep breath and walked through the closed door.

At the center of the room was a metal chair. Sitting in it was a woman in a neck brace. Her hands tied behind her back and knotted to the chair, she rocked back and forth. She prayed and sang a song I recognized from church. “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power.” It was my signal to wake up because communion Sunday service had ended. Her voice was strained and thin but still melodic. Unsure it was really Debra, we hung back and watched, waiting for a sign to proceed. If anyone I knew would be singing a gospel song to stay calm, it would be my stepmom.

She stopped singing and launched into a prayer. I thought she’d ask God over and over again to free her. That’s what I would have said. Rather than do that, the first thing she said was, “Please protect Jason. He needs you more than he thinks he does.”

That’s all I needed to hear. “Debra,” I said.

Debra stopped praying. She didn’t talk at all. From the side I could see her cheeks tensing and relaxing. She’d gotten more than what she’d prayed for. I’d come to save her.

Rounding the chair, I came face-to-face with my stepmother. I dried her tears with the back of my glove and hugged her. “We’re gonna get you out of here,” I told her.

“Stick to our terms, Jason. I kept up my end. She’s still alive.”

I recognized the tenor of King’s voice yelling from the backyard, which also happened to include a cemetery. His wife, Margaret, was buried there. Now that he had the aquamarine, would he raise her from the dead? That would require humanity he didn’t possess.

Rhapsody snapped Debra’s rope binds and helped her up. She hadn’t been beaten or mistreated other than being kidnapped from her rehabilitation session three days ago. Dried tears streaked her makeup-free face. She wore black sweatpants and an orange, yellow, and cream-striped blouse tied at her waist. Debra hadn’t showered in days and I didn’t care. I wrapped her in another tight embrace and she practically collapsed in my grasp.

It was time for me to keep my word. I’d give King my blood to save Debra. Rather than take the long way through the house to the backyard, Rhapsody ghosted us through the back wall and we floated down. King had rolled the providence aquamarine next to the graveyard. He’d placed a chunk of it in the soil in front of Margaret’s headstone. He had done the same with four other gravesites – I counted them.

Whom did he intend to bring back?

The aquamarine was above ground. I didn’t see Esteban who mustn’t have been captured. I hoped that meant Sasha was able to carry out her part of the plan since Courtney was here. Esteban’s brothers, Julio and Luis, stood guard on either side of her. She had been bound at the hands and feet with rope and robbed of her heliodor. Every second that passed her body aged a little. They had captured Hughes and taken his prism, too. Hunched over, he breathed with great difficulty.

At Hughes’ left was Selby and to his right…
Ryan Cain?
Esteban said he’d teleported Ryan off somewhere where he couldn’t hurt me. Apparently, it wasn’t far enough. Now we were in the same place. He was included on the list of people who tried to kill me but failed. He, King, Peters, Selby – maybe this time one of them would actually finish the job.

King patted the navy blue headrest of what looked like a dentist’s chair with white plastic tubes and bags hanging from it. “Have a seat and think happy, vulnerable thoughts. Try to escape and I’ll collapse Debra’s brain vessels one-by-one.”

I was too young to give blood the right way. This was the setup for it. Except the Red Cross stopped at one pint per person and King wanted all six pints from me. I eyed Rhapsody and Debra. Their concern was obvious.
Are you sure about this? Is this how it ends?
Hughes and Courtney didn’t look at me, so I read their minds. Hughes kept thinking “My fault, my fault.” I couldn’t read Courtney’s beyond bright flashes of light.

Lying down on the chair, I realized what he meant by thinking “happy, vulnerable thoughts.” I’m invincible and operating without my prisms. The only way he could penetrate my skin with a needle was
if I let him do it.
I wondered how long that had been the case. King skipped any kind of preparation and stuck the needle into the bend in my arm. It stung when he pricked me. In an instant blood flowed from down the tube into a vial.

Imagine that, I’m vulnerable only when I think I’m not
.

“Clench and unclench your fist,” he said.

While it filled, King did the most torturous thing he could to me – give me a lecture. “Since we’re waiting, you probably should know some things your friends here have been hiding from you,” he said.

It was a sore subject for me. The Collective told us what they thought we needed to know when they thought we should know it. Although they were all scientists they didn’t see why since it never turned out well that way.

He snatched the first full vial of blood, dropped an aquamarine prism into it, and shook it up.
Did my blood just dissolve a rock? Freaky.

“I call it ‘blood water’,” he said, drinking the first vial himself.

He drank it! Rhapsody had done it, but she was dead and didn’t have a choice.

“The aquamarine takes some of the taste off. Absorbs straight into the skin. Eris, you’re fond of paraphrasing
Bible
verses. Isn’t there one about eating flesh and drinking blood?”

Even I knew Jesus wasn’t being literal when He said that. The absorption explained how it worked on Rhapsody.

He continued, though I wish he’d stop. “Solomon, you knew it would come to this. It’s why you tasked Taylor with drawing and testing his blood and then killing him.”

The revelation struck me in the chest. Hughes had
never
been on our side. It was a front. At least when things got hot and heavy he backed out.

Ryan’s jaw tightened. He must have heard that Taylor electrocuted herself to keep from giving away secrets. She’d played us the first time and then him second. He must feel more stupid than I did.

Rhapsody shouted out, “Are you serious? For real, Hughes?”

“You were going to kill my son?” Debra perked up with anger. “Why?”

I thought I already knew the answer. He hadn’t expected me to survive the explosion in the first place. When I did, he wanted to know how my body lived through it. I violated his scientific theories and he couldn’t stand being wrong about me.

“Solomon,” Courtney groaned. “How could you?”

“He’s a
child,”
Hughes’ voice rattled. “Unprepared for immortality.”

“When you put it that way, I guess an immortal psychopath is better,” Rhapsody joked.

Unfastening the second vial, King prepared the blood water and drank it. Sighing with satisfaction, he said, “Michael,
he
has the qualities for survival. He’ll kill when it’s necessary…”

“…or
unnecessary,”
Rhapsody said. “He murdered twenty people in one afternoon for no reason other than he could.”

“Twenty-one,”
Selby corrected her. “Welker, too.”

Ron Welker was the only one I hadn’t known about. Our old principal had been murdered, probably because he hadn’t done what his boss had sent him to do. Originally, it was to trade him the providence emerald in Reject High’s basement. King promised Welker heliodor prisms in trade to keep him alive. Problem was, Cherish Watkins killed herself, I met Rhapsody at Reject High, and we got to it first.

On King’s third vial, Ryan stepped forward and stopped him from of drinking it. “Share the wealth. Selby’s not the only one here fit for immortality.”

King yanked his hand away and downed the blood water. Glancing at me, he said, “There’s more where that came from. Be patient.”

Looking at my own blood trickle out of my arm freaked me out, so I turned my head. Debra reached out to me with her eyes. She was literally watching me die to save her life.

“You’ve got me and my blood,” I said to King. “Let Rhapsody take Debra out of here.”

He wagged his hand back and forth. “Not until I have the last drop.”

“Then how do I know you won’t kill her once you do?”

King grinned, like I’d played into his plan all along. He had no intentions of cutting Debra loose or letting her survive this. “You don’t. I’ll kill her now and go after Aunt Dee and Zachary, if you need extra motivation.”

He knew where they were? Of course he did.

“You trusted them,” King said, talking about Courtney and Hughes. He pointed to where he’d planted the aquamarines. “You die so the Collective can live again.”

Rhapsody’s eyes widened. “The Collective? For what, Pinky, taking over the world?”

The last time she’d mouthed off to King, he kicked her off of a building. This time he chuckled at her comment before downing his fourth vial of blood water. “The nine of us, we’ll remake the world into a better place. You’ll see.”

How? Tear the government down and create a dictatorship? Nuke the planet and rule over the leftover rubble?
Seemed like a waste to become immortal, resurrect his old group members, and slaughter countless numbers of people to rule over ruins. But what did I know?
I went to an alternative school and he’s been alive since the 1800s.
Debra always said age doesn’t mean you’re smarter or more mature. It just makes you old.

“You’re okay with being used for his dirty work?” I asked his minions.

They all gave answers varying their levels of commit-ment. Ryan agreed without hesitation. Selby sucked his teeth and said “yeah” and the brothers looked at one another. They weren’t dedicated to King’s cause, at all. But each of them anticipated drinking the blood water. Selby was the worst. Everything he did, from tapping his foot to crossing and uncrossing his arms, he did at super speed. It gave me a headache just looking at him move.