House of Slide Hybrid (39 page)

I felt his presence tugging at me, like someone had reached inside my chest and was pulling on my heart. I couldn’t bear it, not when he was so close, not when my blood began to ache, pumping poison through stinging veins.

I sat there for a long time, struggling for control, reminding myself over and over again that Lewis managed to leave me unbound. He’d endured the agony, so I would too. If he could do it, then I could. Eventually I found Orrin and sat down, barely capable of exploring the raw feelings that had been left dangling behind the block, nowhere close to being able to manipulate them. Besides the blood bond and the bloodlust there was an immense amount of awareness that crushed me when I inhaled, opened my eyes, or listened to anyone or anything.

I refused to sit in my bed with my blanket over my head, but it felt like I’d gone from living in a pitch dark cave to stepping out in the bright sunshine, with no warning. Orrin’s eyes weren’t grey, they were a million different colors that managed to look grey if you were practically blind. The mud wasn’t gray either but it was so full of energy as spring took hold, as the mud seethed with life. I saw so much more now of the other sight that it was hard not to see it. Chloe had so much energy that when she moved she buzzed, sparks of green and gold filling up more space than her physical body. I tried to focus on that, on the good stuff instead of letting my head instinctively swing to the North where Lewis was. I could feel Chloe’s concern about me, like she’d spoken it. I had to be mindful of keeping my blocks up so no one else would be inundated by my aches and euphoria. I knew instinctively that I could be like my father, slicing through people’s consciousness if I wasn’t careful. Luckily the stone walls still came down when I unintentionally leaned.

That night I lay in my bed staring at the roof of my tent, listening to the sound of Chloe’s breathing. Aiden wasn’t part of the camp. Jones and Chloe had made that clear. They’d told me that at first they welcomed him but then he’d been so erratic and had the strange idea that he was supposed to be in charge of the camp, bossing Jones around. When Aiden started stealing supplies, Jones put his foot down. He’d thrown Aiden out of camp, a fight that the Hybrids had cheered enthusiastically.

I didn’t really care about anything besides Lewis. I should go to him. It was dark, cold up there. He could be dying for all I knew. Maybe completing the blood bond, ripping open his skin and taking his blood would help him somehow. I closed my eyelids tight enough that I began to get a headache. No. I didn’t trust Aiden. My senses stretched around me taking in the camp, the souls that lay so quietly around even as their souls burned with a light and fire that I could almost taste.

***

I lay beneath the canopy at the Hollow house, the drapes billowed and curled around me like mist. Lewis was beside me, his arm beneath my head. I could hear the pulse, the steady pounding that made my heart race, made my mouth water. He was close, desperately close.

“Dari,” he whispered, his low warm voice stealing down my spine, warming every particle of me. “The bond is the only way to save your brother. He’ll be lost if you don’t complete the bond. I’ll be lost.”

I turned my head to see him but the gauze kept him from my gaze, the only thing that I could see was his arm, golden skin, white scars, and the veins that pulsed with life.

“Dari,” his voice came again, desperate with need I’d never heard before. “Save me.” I nodded, turned my face to the flesh and bit down.

***

My screaming went on until I realized what had happened, that it was a dream but not only a dream, that I’d bit hard enough into my own arm that bits of blood and flesh were on my tongue. The taste of my blood was so potent. My eyes had trouble focusing in the darkness at Chloe where she sat, her soul burning sporadically before it was drowned in darkness that was all my actual eyes could see. After a few eternal heartbeats Chloe’s voice started making sense, words that brought me back into myself. She turned on a flashlight, spreading a paste on my arm before she wrapped it with gauze.

I could see her nostrils flare as she smelled my blood and I felt an unexpected craving from her. I watched her pupils dilate as she finished wrapping my arm, a little too tightly before she burned the gauze with a match that reminded me of Lewis. I tried so hard not to move because I wasn’t sure which direction I would go in, but knowing that it wouldn’t be a good one.

“That happens to me sometimes,” she said in a low voice as she sat on her own cot, a safe distance away from me.

“You’ve bitten yourself in your sleep?”

She giggled. “No, I’m a foreteller. Sometimes I see things and I think they’re actually happening. The bird thing the other day, that was one of those times. I wasn’t sure if it was real at that moment, so it was hard to know how to react.”

“Right. Otherwise you’d know exactly how to defend against the bird.”

She smiled, and went back to bed. I waited a few minutes before I kicked off my blanket and pulled on my boots. The camp was silent around me. I couldn’t pretend that I was fine or it would be Chloe’s blood I took, her death I tasted. The surrounding woods were dark and silent as I moved through them like a ghost. I felt the souls of the trees I passed, heard distant wings of bats in the night air, saw the small, glittering soul I called, pulling it towards me. I ignored the distant soul, the dark heat of Lewis.

The soft warm body perched in my hands trustingly, wings fluttering. It waited for me to twist its neck. I felt the rush of death while its soul flew singing far up into the sky, leaving its body to cool in my fingers.

Sick, I dropped beside a tree, unable to put down the body I’d betrayed. It didn’t matter that it had given me its life. In some ways, that made it worse. Strength spread through me even as an ache burned in my throat while thoughts of Lewis took whatever I had left over from guilt. Orrin found me the next morning, curled up with the bat’s body. It took me a few tries to understand his words.

“That’s why most Cool’s become vegetarians,” he said, gently taking the corpse out of my hands. “You made a choice between animal and human.” He pulled me to my feet. “You have to maintain balance between your conscience and your reality. You require life to live. Some Cools become so sensitive that they can’t consume plant life either. They don’t live long that way. We all consume.” His energy soaked into me as he spoke. I found myself nodding, seeing the cycle of life, of my life and how it would not last forever. Nothing lasted forever, not even the long living Cools. I had to do what I could to make the whole of the world better, to justify what I consumed.

All that day, I could barely concentrate on what anyone said. At least I wasn’t staring at their throats, at the beating blood I’d been so eager to taste. When Orrin lectured, I heard too much what he wasn’t saying. When I was supposed to fight, I was more passive than ever. I was worried that otherwise I’d slip inside someone’s head and kill them without meaning to.

“Orrin,” Chloe said after dinner when I sat staring into the flames, thinking of Lewis and the way his eyes flickered when he looked at me, burned sometimes when we touched. The tips of my fingers were still tender, and I noticed that there was a tinge of red to my soul there as my sight flickered as it did so often.

“Yeah?” Orrin asked in the low voice he rarely used.

“Play something,” she said as she pulled out a prehistoric looking drum. She tapped on the hide, a constant thumping that reminded me of my heart beat, of the way that sound had been so intense when I’d had Lewis’s soul. He was so close. I frowned as I tried to remember the way back to the house, but my concentration ended when Orrin started to play.

The sound of his flute was soulful, a tune so heartbroken and beautiful that it made my heart ache and bleed a little bit. I pulled my knees to my chest and thought about Lewis, about how many times I’d hurt him. I hated that if I completed the bond his future would be irrevocably tied to mine—and all the pain that signified.

Someone else picked up the drumming, and the tune shifted, Orrin’s slow soulful tune changing to something so happy that I couldn’t remember ever hurting Lewis. All I could think of was the way he smiled when he smoothed back my hair, of the warm glow of his skin beneath the scars, of the tightening of his hand on mine, the smell of the soap he’d used on my hair, and I remembered dancing.

I found myself on my feet, swaying in time to the rhythm of the drums, the flute Orrin played so beautifully while Chloe opened her mouth and sang, a tune so strong and sure I didn’t need to hear the words to know it was about life, love, happiness, all wound tightly together, the force of those elements strong enough to keep away every other bad thing that could threaten me.

I wasn’t sure how to dance, not when this wasn’t a place for ballroom or dance team, but my body knew how to go with the music, the same way that Chloe knew what notes to sing. I spun and jumped around the licking flames, feeling the blood pound in my heart, in my brain while the sound rose around me.

When Ash stepped forward and took my hands, I didn’t question where he’d come from or ask what had happened to Lewis, I only smiled, his hands being a natural extension of the rest of the dance, the song. More people got up, spinning and moving, more drums seemed to pound, as we moved faster and faster. I threw my head back to laugh and for a moment the moon exploded, the trees above us, the very wind becoming a kaleidoscope of color and sound as they danced with me, tangled in my energy, in my life the way I was tangled in the other Hybrids and Ash. In that moment I could see, distantly, a dark green soul that I’d recognize however far away, however wrong the color. Lewis was alive and steady but without the fire.

I stopped moving as the soul sight vanished leaving me with Ash who was spinning around me, apparently lost in the music that no longer made sense to me. I turned, confused as I wondered where he’d come from, needing to sit down before the choking need at the back of my throat made me scream, or worse.

The darkness beyond the campfire between me and Lewis moved, shifted in a way that made me remember Aiden and all the other dark things I didn’t understand. I stumbled to the fallen log where I could slide down the edge until I was huddled beneath it, watching the dancing, hearing the music, but from a distance, the beauty and joy drowned out by the darkness between us.

Eventually the dancing stopped, and Ash was the focus of attention. He dropped beside me and took my hand in his firm grip, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“Do you have anything I can eat?” he asked Chloe before she had a chance to grill him. She frowned at him while I stood, needing distance from the faces that stared curiously at us.

“I’ll go ask Jones if there’s more stew,” I offered, moving away from Ash. Why was he there? Why had he left Lewis alone? Maybe if I brought food he would be done answering questions and I could find out.

“Don’t disturb Jones. If there’s anything left it’ll be in the pot,” Chloe warned never letting her gaze off of Ash. “Hybrid camps don’t usually have any Cools, much less two.”

I scrambled away from the fire and barely heard Ash’s reply, something about coming to check on his cousin, like Orrin was his cousin. Maybe he was; what did I know? I found the stew pot and a bowl and was busily scraping the sides when Zeke sighed beside me.

“Sand, I think I’m leaving,” he said, sounding so alone and sad that I turned around to look at him. His white hair stood out as bright as ever but his downcast face hid his eyes.

“Why? You don’t know enough to be safe yet, do you? You should stay.” I had a hard time concentrating on his words when I wanted to get back to Ash, afraid to find out but needing to know. I’d definitely seen Lewis, hadn’t I? What had happened to the color of his soul?

He looked up at me, and there was a flash of something strange in his eyes that made me really see him. “I think I’m ready. All these drills that we do, over and over again, and I don’t get to use my full potential. Besides that, I feel like I don’t fit in. I’ve got one of the strongest gifts here, but I’m not being taught how to use it, only general stuff about demons. It would be different if we had a real trainer instead of Jones who tries, but he can’t have seen and faced down anything real.”

“You’re really leaving here to take on demons? Wow. I didn’t think you were stupid. How can you fight something if you admit that you haven’t learned enough?” I heard my voice rise, but wasn’t sure why his words frustrated me so much.

“Maybe I’ll find a different camp, one where they have us go and actually do something instead of stay in a carefully protected cell keeping occupied while the rest of the world burns.” His voice was so angry, his eyes like shards of ice as he looked at me.

“Do you want to keep the world from burning or make it burn faster?” I wasn’t sure. There was something so desperate about him; it reminded me of myself.

He shook his head as he backed away from me. “I just wanted you to tell Chloe that I’m sorry that I had to go. Tell her tomorrow, okay?”

“So you have a head start and she doesn’t have time to drag you back where you belong? I don’t think so. You’ll get killed out there, seriously, it’s not safe…”

“You think it’s safe in here? It’s been nice knowing you, Sand, but if you think I’m safe anywhere I am, you’re crazy. The longer I’m here the more in danger everyone else becomes. It’s always going to be like that. People always get hurt around me, the ones I care about get hurt the most. I meant to stay away from people here—I always do, but I get to know them and it’s harder…”