“Listen, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t stop your brother from wanting to kill me. That’s just who he is right now.”
She laughed again, sounding truly amused. “Starling, I don’t care if he kills you. I just don’t want him to lose his mind while he does it.”
And here I thought we were having this bonding moment. Psht.
“I’m going to go back to bed now.” I took three steps back, so grateful for the blessing.
“Wait,” she called after me and for some stupid reason I stopped. She seemed to hesitate too. Apparently she hadn’t expected me to listen. “You can’t save those children.”
“Watch me.”
“Nobody can save them. Aliah has them. He keeps what’s his. He never lets it go. Never ever ever.”
Okay, we were back to Crazy Town. “I thought you traded them? I thought you sold them to someone else?”
“He won’t let them go,” she repeated, not seeming to have heard me. “He will never let them go. They’re his. They’re his forever. He keeps what’s his.”
“Oh, geez.” I sighed and against my better judgment walked back over to her, stopping just on the right side of the blessing. I didn’t want to deal with her tonight and I especially didn’t feel like it was my responsibility. Hello, where was Seth or Aliah to keep tabs on her? But here she was, and I wanted to go back to sleep. If she was all worked up like this, I just knew I wouldn’t be able to. “Seven? Seven?” I clapped my swords together. “Hey! Seven!”
She finally blinked back to sanity and her eyes slowly returned with the presence that signaled she wasn’t catatonic anymore. Whew.
“I’m going to get those kids,” I promised her. “I will find them and save them and take them back where they belong. If you’re worried about them, don’t be. But it might help if you just told me where I could find them to start with.”
“You can’t leave planet again,” she snapped. “He was so close to losing it when you were gone. He was an animal. He only saw Darkness. He paced and paced and paced and growled and growled. He wasn’t what he was supposed to be. You can’t leave again. You can’t.”
“Okay, slow down. That’s not exactly what I mean. Just relax.” My heart clenched in my chest at her concern for Seth. Had he really been that bad? So bad that his scrambled sister had been worried for him?
“He needs you.”
I nodded slowly because I knew that was true. Seth did need me.
“Is that why you’re here? You want to make sure I keep him safe.”
“Nobody’s safe,” she said instead. “He keeps what’s his.”
I swallowed against a sympathy I didn’t understand. I was worried for Seth, I knew I felt that, but this was something completely different for someone completely different. My brain told me I felt bad for Seven, but that couldn’t be right. This girl had tried to kill me multiple times.
I couldn’t feel sorry for her.
I wouldn’t feel sorry for her.
“I’m going to kill him one day too, Seven,” I swore it as an oath. A vow that I promised with my very soul.
She walked a slow circle around me and I held very, very still. My hands flexed against the hilts of my swords but she made no move to hurt me.
When she faced me again, she said, “It’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”
I nodded. I agreed. Obviously it would be.
“I think he’ll kill you,” she said in a gentle voice. “I think he’ll rip your pretty head straight from your body and feast on your heart.”
I swallowed roughly against that image. “I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.”
“Better hope you’re right,” she smiled. Then she was gone.
She took off into the sky almost as fast as Jude could move. I watched her go until her Light disappeared in the sky overhead and I knew I was alone again.
It wasn’t until my journey back to the house that I realized she’d walked onto my property and come within an inch of me. I hadn’t noticed that she’d bypassed the blessing.
Again.
Chapter Seventeen
I dove to the ground, throwing myself on the hard floor with everything I had in me. My hand pancaked in front of me and slapped the glossy court with stinging surety.
The ball bounced off the back of my hand and right in front of Piper. She got her outstretched arms under it just in time. The ball had more control coming off her practiced hands and set up perfectly in front of our middle hitter. Her open palm came back behind her head and lined up flawlessly with her elbow. Her feet left the ground and she hit the ball with enough force to land it right in the middle of the court on the other side of the net.
Kill.
Major kill!
Point Mead High.
The crowd went wild. I jumped to my feet and gave a two-handed high five to Piper and our middle, Chelsea Nolan. The six of us on the court made a fast huddle near the ten-foot line and gave quick pep talks before we broke apart and went back to our places.
It was my serve. Again. I’d already served three times, resulting in three more points on the scoreboard. We were currently playing Sterling, another small Nebraska high school. Last season they beat us in four games. We had it out for them tonight, but in our fifth and final game of the night, with each of us having two wins, this last game was getting gruesome.
I tugged down my itty bitty spandex shorts and adjusted one of my knee pads. Sweat trickled down my temple and I brushed it away with the back of my hand.
My team was counting on me for this serve. We were up by two points now and all I wanted to do was keep increasing our lead.
One of the corner refs tossed me the ball and I caught it easily. I spun it in my hands and bounced it on the gleaming wood floor a couple times. I let out a few slow breaths and took my stance on the outside of the taped court.
I was exhausted from my battle with the demon dogs last night, and barely recovered. After the debriefing with Serena, Nate and Jupiter and my bizarre midnight visitor, I’d barely gotten any sleep. This morning I’d filled my parents in on Seven’s strange midnight rendezvous, but they’d been more concerned with the fact that I hadn’t woken them up to tell them I was going out there than what Seven actually had to say.
Of course, I didn’t blame them. The ramblings of the mad woman made little sense to me either.
This morning they’d also filled me in on more of their trip to the Lower Realm. The council had refused to listen to them about the missing children. Another one had been taken just before they arrived, but refused to believe that there was someone directly involved from the Council.
Of course, now we knew it wasn’t just one person, but several.
My parents had stayed in the Lower Realm for three days fighting their case. No one seemed to listen to them until they announced their departure. Suddenly, the entire Council was all ears. They interrogated my parents with everything they had. They asked question after question and delayed their departure several more days. Finally, my dad made the announcement they were leaving no matter what.
Just as my parents had made the move to fly home, a Shadow had been conveniently caught near the borders of the Lower Realm. The Council declared they now had a suspicion of who the traitor was and that my parents should stay for the trial.
Both of them refused. They didn’t know if it was pure instinct driving them home to save me or if they had been tipped off by the strangeness of the Council’s behavior. Sometimes hindsight was too clear, and neither of my parents could say with any absolute objectivity which set of feelings had prompted them to leave.
In some ways it didn’t matter. They’d arrived just in time. They could sense something was extremely wrong once they’d neared the skies around Mead. They’d flown immediately to the school in order to investigate the looming evil and found me just barely holding on to life.
Now it seemed obvious that the Council had discovered I was alone on Earth and devis
ed a plan to murder me. We still didn’t know if the entire Council had been corrupted or if it was simply a few influential members.
But we did know that their plan nearly worked.
I’d gotten ready for school while my parents called Jupiter and Serena to fill them in. Serena and Nate were busier than ever and Jupiter was preoccupied with the Alpha Hieros.
Also, I think they were used to my near-death experiences by now. Stella almost dying but just barely making it out alive was becoming commonplace these days.
Personally, I was getting pretty sick of it myself.
In retrospect, Seven didn’t seem nearly as scary as a portal straight to Hell, so there was also that. And it wasn’t like there was a way to exterminate all the attempts on my life. If anything it was good training.
I had to deal with it no matter what and it was more important that I survived the attacks than get to the bottom of them. There was no guarantee that they would stop even if I caught the person responsible for them. And as naïve as it sounded, Seven didn’t really feel like all that much of a threat last night.
My life would always be at risk. My safety always relative and always somewhat of a joke.
The important thing was that I kept surviving.
I bounced the ball again, in that perfect little spot just to the inside of my extended left foot. The ball came back to my hands feeling so warmly comfortable. I cupped it with my left hand beneath the ball, and my right hand over it. My arms were straight out in front of me and I breathed in deeply as I prepared to serve.
I cocked my right arm back, my bent elbow stringing tightly behind my shoulder and my palm opening in preparation to hit this ball as hard as I could.
With my left hand I tossed the ball into the air. I waited until the ball was perfectly high and sprung my arm forward and released some of my massive strength into my open connection. I hit it exactly right. The ball whistled over the net with absolutely no spin. It dropped deep in the back row and I thought it would be an ace for sure.
Just at the last minute one, their Libero dove long and popped the ball into the air. It was a good dig and I hated her a little bit for it. The play set up on the other side of the court.
I stopped paying attention.
Jude had appeared in the middle of the doors that led to the lobby. He looked frantic. His hair was wildly disheveled and his clothes wrinkled and askew. He caught my eye and started waving frantically for me to follow him.
I stood up straight and looked from him to my parents in the crowd. They had followed my distracted gaze and found Jude too. They were already moving down the long bleacher stairs to consult him in the hallway. They spoke in hushed tones while I strained to get the gist of their conversation.
Piper yelled at me while the ball moved around the back row, but since it didn’t come to me, I ignored the game. My dad gave me a frightened look and inclined his head in a gesture that told me I needed to be out there.
Then I lost hearing in my left ear as I sprawled out on the ground in a painful collision with ball to the face and then face to the court floor.
“Ow,” I groaned.
“What are you doing?” Piper shouted at me. “We’re in the middle of a game here!”
I pushed up with both hands and looked up at her. “I have to go.”
“What?” she screeched. Then all of my teammates started yelling at me too.
Coach filled my vision from the sideline. Her angry words were punctuated with each color change of her face. First she was only tomato-red, then a deeper, scarier crimson. Now she was eggplant-purple and I was a little concerned for the condition of her heart.
“I have to go,” I repeated, pushing myself to my feet.
“You can’t go, Stella!” Piper growled at me. “We could win this game.”
I gave her a meaningful look. “Pi, I have to.”
“Life or death?” she whispered while others continued to shout at me.
The crowd had stood to their feet while the refs tried to calm my coach and organize us back into rotations.
I nodded at Piper. “More death than life. But yeah.”
Her eyes flashed with hurtful understanding. This was the part of my life she didn’t understand, that she had only just begun to see. I’d never had to leave a game before and I knew that when I did, the human side of my life would suffer major consequences. But I didn’t have another choice.
While my classmates and friends prepared to enter their next stage of life by enjoying their senior year, I was forced to let go of mine. My next stage of life required me to give this up. And instead of soaking up these last blissful, no-responsibility days, I did the opposite. I took on more responsibility; I let in the pressure and the heavy load of tasks and goals. I said goodbye to my humanity and embraced the destiny that had been given to me even before birth.
“Give ‘em hell,” I grinned at her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she groaned. “Just get off the court so we can play already.”
I nodded and ignored the pang of disappointment in my chest. I looked up at coach and mouthed, “Major family emergency.”
She let her hands drop to her side and a look of anguish crossed her face. I didn’t carry the entire team, but I was a major part of why we won so often. Even if I hadn’t started this game. She didn’t know if we could beat Sterling without me.
Honestly, I didn’t either. But my life had evolved into more important things than volleyball games.
I pushed my knee pads to my ankles and offered Piper one last piece of advice, “Don’t get killed.”
When I stood up, she met my eyes with fierce gravity. “You either.”
I shot her a small smile and booked it out of the gym, without grabbing my things or my belongings from the locker room.
My parents waited in the lobby for me to join them. Jude kept looking over his shoulder, and I knew it was a huge risk for him to be here.
We conversed all the time and he was constantly checking up on me via the guidelines of the contract, but this felt different. Instinctively I knew he wasn’t supposed to be here right now.
“Do you want to save those kids?” he asked in a low voice as soon as I arrived. I almost didn’t hear him over my own deep breaths.
I nodded.
“Then we need to go, now.”
“Is this another trap?” my dad asked in an equally quiet tone.
Jude shrugged and pulled out a cigarette. “I don’t honestly know. It could be. But it’s also your last chance to save those kids. He’s taking them tonight, one way or the other.”
“Aliah?” I whispered.
Jude shrugged again.
“This is someone else?” My mother’s interest had surged from a spark into a full blown fire. Jude nodded. “The Council? This is someone from the Council?”
Jude looked around again and inhaled deeply from his cigarette. “This is the reason Stella had a first-class ticket to hell last night.”
“Let’s go,” my dad growled.
And so we did. The three of us ran outside into the cooling September air. We grabbed our stored weapons from my dad’s truck and tucked them into all the places we could. My katanas were buried next to my dad’s heavenly forged blades and they looked tiny in comparison. I tightened my grip on their taped handles and prepared myself for the battle ahead. We made our way around the side of the building and prepared for flight. We took off, one right after the other.
Jude was easy enough to follow. His Light burned brighter than ours and I could smell him. We usually all smelled like burning Light- a hard scent to describe. There was something rich about our heat, pleasant to the senses. Jude had that same allure, only enhanced by the three levels of heaven that separated his class from mine and he mingled that incredible aroma with burning tobacco. It was the oddest combination of perfect Light and imperfect Earth.
He took us to another abandoned warehouse. This one was somewhere in the general vicinity of South America. I thought Mexi
can desert, but I couldn’t be exactly sure.
It was nighttime here too, so I knew we hadn’t crossed a time zone. Or at least not many. The dry desert air settled over my skin with its own prickling heat. Sand blew around my face and dug beneath my light, t-shirt-styled red Mead High jersey. My tennis shoes kicked up grit and dirt when I landed, imbedding it in the sweaty knee pads still around my ankles.
I was not exactly intimidating in my full high school volleyball uniform, but there was nothing I could do about that now.
We crept into a huge structure with sagging metal panel walls and a red dirt floor. The ceiling creaked and groaned as the wind rushed over it and lifted the corners of the shingles overhead. Equipment of some kind hung on all four walls. And a collection of rusted, decaying tractors had been pushed to the wall. It smelled like must, corroded metal and sulfur.
Apparently Jude had been given great directions.
He turned around and leveled me with the somberness in his expression. “If you don’t stop him tonight, those children are gone forever.”
“We’ll stop him.” I glanced over my shoulder in search of Nate and Serena but they weren’t here yet. My dad had called Jupiter too before we left, but he couldn’t make it. He was already on a mission, he said.
Whatever, Jupiter, you crazy old Martian.
I flicked my swords back and forth in front of me, letting the blades run up and down each other in delicious anticipation for the destruction ahead of me.
“He’s probably already started,” Jude continued. “You don’t have much time.”
“Then why didn’t you come for us sooner?” Now was probably not the best time to argue, but if he had all this info on Team Evil, why couldn’t he confess the details at a more convenient hour?
He shook his head and looked over his shoulder to where a room extended from one of the back corners. Light spilled out from the crack beneath a paint-peeled black door.