The Gathering (21 page)

I let his words sink in. They make sense. A lot of sense. And yet, they don’t bring the relief I long for. Jillian is still dead. And my grandmother was a betrayer. I resume my head-cradling and stare at the floor. My throat feels raw—like I’ve been screaming for hours, only I’ve hardly spoken all day. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

I give him a wry look.

He sets his cube on the table. He’s being strong for me, but I don’t miss the pinched look in his eyes. He and Jillian were good friends. “Come on, Xena. You have nothing to apologize for. If Jilly-Bean were here right now, she’d say the same thing.”

Tears prick my eyes.

“Jillian is dead because of your grandmother. Not because of you.”

“But I—”

“Invited her. So what? We all let her stay. Don’t play the blame game. Nothing good comes of it. Trust me, I speak from experience.” He crosses the stone floor and leans against Cressida’s desk, releases a long sigh and scrubs his face. “My father wasn’t a very nice guy. He used to hit me. A lot.”

His confession comes like a glass of ice water to the face.

“I never knew what would set him off, you know? There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. He could be in a perfectly fine mood one second, laughing even. I’d say something innocent, and the next second,
wham
.” He smacks his fist against his palm. “I’d be flat on the floor, my ears ringing.”

I picture a ginger-haired little boy, beaten and bruised, and bile burns a path up my esophagus.

“I spent years and years trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Trying to figure out what I could change so he’d stop hitting me. It took a solid twelve months of being free from him, away from that dysfunction, before I realized I didn’t do anything to make him hit me. It was his fault; not mine. Just like Jillian’s death was your grandmother’s fault; not yours.”

A tear tumbles down my cheek.

“I know what it’s like to be betrayed by someone who’s supposed to love you. I know what it’s like when nothing feels safe. I know what it’s like when trust feels impossible. But I also know that if we give into those feelings, if we start doubting every move we make or let ourselves live in isolation, then Xena …” Link looks deep into my eyes. They’re as serious and as certain as I’ve ever seen them. “The enemy has already won. We might as well surrender right now.”

Burial

B
eyond the patch of woods, the Rivard family property has a small burial plot. This is where we lay Jillian to rest. All of us gather around her grave to say goodbye.

The muggy air twists strands of hair around my face as Link gives an impromptu eulogy. He speaks like he’s talking to her—his friend, Jilly-Bean. And as he does, vignettes play through my memory like moving images on a film reel. The agile way she hopped over the sofa and smiled at me that first night in the hub. The quickness with which she volunteered to go with me to New Orleans. The way she handled the gun in the alley after we escaped Agent Bledsoe. How quickly she forgave me after I accused her of betrayal. The smile we shared when she said that someday, she’d have a lifetime worth of crazy stories to share with her family.

Only now, she won’t be able to share them. Death is such an odd thing, the way it happens in the middle of life. Yesterday, Jillian was here, all excited over our recent discovery regarding the list. And today … she’s not. Today, she’s with her father, wherever that is.

When Link finishes, we take turns dumping a shovelful of dirt into her grave. The hole becomes a small mound, one I stand by long after everyone else has gone, alone with the humidity and the bugs.

A mosquito stings my shin.

I slap at the spot, and notice another mound. Off in a lonely corner, as fresh as Jillian’s. I told the Rivards to dump my grandmother’s body in the river. Or burn it like the patients at Shady Wood, but they insisted on burying it. Murderer and murdered, laid to rest less than fifty yards apart. Without any thought or intention, I creep closer until I’m sitting in the dewy grass with my grandmother’s leather straps clutched in my fist. They’ve been in my pocket ever since I pulled them off her. She couldn’t see the mark. Only I could see that. Scarface must have warned her and so she covered it with these. I wrap one around my ankle and toss the other on the mound.

As dusk begins to settle, somebody sits beside me.

It’s Cressida.

“She doesn’t deserve to be buried here,” I say.

“She was a human being.”

“Not a good one.”

“She wasn’t an all-bad one, either.”

Laughter escapes in a huff through my nose, leaving a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. “She killed Jillian. She was willing to kill Link and Luka in order to hand me over to Scarface. All for her
freedom
.”

“She also raised your father. And spent the majority of her life tormented by evil and locked up against her will.” Cressida plucks a blade of grass and twirls it between her fingers. “Your grandmother wasn’t the enemy, Tess. She was
used
by the enemy. It’s something we should never forget.”

Someone approaches behind us.

I twist around.

It’s Luka. We haven’t spoken since I told him to leave me alone in the library.

Cressida pats my knee, and with her words echoing in my ear, she pushes up to standing and leaves the two of us alone. Luka sits beside me, careful to keep his distance. It’s only a few inches, but it might as well be the Grand Canyon.

“I spoke with Cap. He wants us to leave with Hezekiah as soon as possible.”

“Does his car have enough room for all of my baggage?”

Luka doesn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question, anyway. Instead, he gently takes my forearm in his hand, frowns at the angry red welts on my wrist, then nods at the leather strap around my ankle. “Why are you wearing that?”

“As a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“Of who I never want to be.” When I first found out about my grandmother—that she suffered from psychosis, I was terrified I would turn into her. A crazy person locked up in Shady Wood. Then Dr. Roth told me and Luka who we were—members of The Gifting. We weren’t crazy at all, and that terror melted away. Now it returns. I’m afraid of turning into her all over again—a woman who let fear win. Someone willing to sacrifice lives in order to get what she wanted.

“You’re nothing like her,” he says.

I’m not so sure. “Sometimes I wish our roles were reversed.”

He looks at me with those eyes. I could get lost in them a thousand times over, all in a single day. “What do you mean?”

“I wish I was your Keeper. I wish the only thing I had to consider was you.
Your
safety.
Your
happiness.
Your
life.” I reach into his lap, slide my fingers down his palm, and thread them with his.

He grabs on tight, like my touch is his life raft. “But you’re not.”

I shake my head. No, I’m not. It’s time to stop hiding from the things that cause him pain. It’s time to stop ignoring what’s right in front of my face. “As much as I want to think about you and only you, I can’t. I don’t have that luxury.”

“I know.” He pulls me into a kiss, so soft and gentle it makes me shiver. “I promise not to hold you back.”

He says it bravely.

Confidently.

Like the words don’t kill him.

New Home, Familiar Faces

C
ressida gives us a new notebook that contains each of the prophecies we’ve been studying, along with the list. I guess she’s been working on it ever since we arrived. We thank the Rivards for their hospitality, and under the cover of night, we slip into Hezekiah’s sedan and drive away from New Orleans, one person fewer than when we came.

I sit in between Link and Luka in the back seat. Link sleeps against the window. Luka stays awake, looking out of his window, his knee touching mine while he messes with the attachments on his Swiss Army Knife, pulling each one out and snapping it back into place, over and over again. His own version of Link’s Rubik’s Cube.

At two in the morning, we stop in a small West Virginian town for gas. We drive through a sparse downtown, consisting of a bar, a pharmacy, an antique shop, a Hardee’s, and a dilapidated park with a chipped bell-shaped statue. I jot a note to Agent Bledsoe and duct tape it to the inside of the bell. Luka has finally fallen asleep, so I don’t have to explain. I haven’t told him that Link and I’ve been doing a little dream hopping at night.

When I’m finished, I climb back into the car and stick the ear bud in my ear—the one that puts me to sleep. Bledsoe’s dream is hazy, disjointed. But stable enough for me to find him and tell him what I need to say.

We’ll see if it works.

*

The closer we get to Newport, the sparser civilization becomes, until eventually, we’re the only car on the interstate. Dark clouds swirl overhead. A warning to stay away. To stop and turn around before it’s too late. Hezekiah pulls off the interstate and stops in front of a tollbooth with a heavy-duty metal traffic gate barring cars from going any further.

I can see why.

A giant bridge looms ahead, a monstrosity climbing up out of Narragansett Bay, with crumbling towers and broken suspender cables. It looks on the verge of collapse.

“Are we driving on that?” Link asks.

A very legit question.

After twenty-three hours in a car with only two paranoid pit stops, I’m as eager as anyone to reach our destination and stretch my legs. I’m just not sure I want to risk plummeting to our deaths in order to do so.

Luka nudges my knee with his, his eyes pointed up and to the left. I follow his line of vision to a security camera. It swivels, then stops with its lens pointed directly at us. A man wearing sunglasses and a navy blue windbreaker steps out from the tollbooth, and for one panicked moment, I’m positive we’ve been tricked. Hezekiah isn’t trustworthy either. He’s led us straight to Agent Bledsoe.

But the man’s nose is straight.

I release a stream of shaky breath. My heart, however, is still racing over that security camera. Our faces are being plastered on every news station across the country. We may almost have Bledsoe on our side, but he’s just one person in the entire FBI. Society knows us as armed and dangerous criminals with a quarter-of-a-million-dollar bounty on our heads, because that’s what the media has fed the public, and the public eats what the media feeds it. And here we are, sitting complacently in the back seat of a sedan, letting this man and this camera see us.

“What’s going on?” Luka mutters.

“It’s all right,” Hezekiah says. “He’s on our side.”

His words offer little comfort. I wish I could trust that Hezekiah is who he says he is. Thanks to Claire and Clive and my grandmother, trust is hard to come by. Their betrayal has tinted everything in a shade of suspicion.

The man gives Hezekiah’s window a rap with his knuckle.

Hezekiah rolls it down.

“I’m sorry,” the man says. “You’re gonna have to turn around.”

“We’re here to see Felix.”

The man loops his thumbs through his belt loops. I can practically see his eyes behind the sunglasses, zooming in and focusing on each of us just like the camera overhead. After a beat, he returns to the booth. There’s a clattering. A clanking. And the metal gate lifts.

Felix
must be the magic word.

I lean forward. “I’m assuming that guy knows about The Gifting?”

“He’s part of The Gifting.”

“Really?” I twist around, trying to see him again, but he’s out of sight.

And we’re driving onto the bridge of death. There are parts of the bridge that have been blown off completely, so only one lane remains with no guardrails. Hezekiah veers around a hole. Not a pothole. A literal hole.

I grip the edge of my seat and force myself to look at the ceiling as the wind blows and our tires bump over loose chunks of gravel. The bridge is already long, and since Hezekiah has to go extra slow to avoid the whole plummeting-to-our-death ordeal, the trip across the bay drags into agonizing eternity.

When we arrive, raindrops spit at the windshield. Newport—or what’s left of it, anyway—is all rubble and ash and charred buildings that stand at half-mast. We’ve entered a war zone while the rest of the world celebrates peace.

“I visited the city a few times before the attack.” Hezekiah turns on his wipers. “Had a cousin in the navy.”

“Was he here when it happened?”

He nods grimly, and I take note of the past tense.
Had
a cousin.

“Do you think they’ll ever rebuild it?” Link asks.

“Not as long as the meters keep showing radioactivity.”

My unease quadruples. Radioactivity? “Are we going to grow an extra arm or something?”

“Tests aren’t hard to fudge.” Hezekiah’s gaze meets mine in the rear view mirror. “There are more people on our side than you realize. Felix is very well connected.”

Felix. That name again. I’m assuming he’s the captain of our new home. Makes me wonder how our own Cap feels about his demotion to mate.

The spitting rain turns into a downpour. We drive without speaking as the wipers squeak against the windshield and rain pounds the roof of the car and the clouds press lower overhead, spider webs of lightning crackling across their darkened underbellies. I think we’ve reached the naval base now, but it’s hard to tell.