Then there had been sadness. It had made me smile. “He was right, but he gave me a chance,” she’d said. “He’d let me look at our path and where it led. I told him no. Little things can change. The whole of your life or death cannot. I refused to look and he refused to risk me without a guarantee I would be safe. That I would survive. I’ve thought since I came here of my sin and my lie. I loved him so much that I broke my only rule. I did look. And then I left. He was right and neither of us should have to see it happen.” Her voice was soft and would have been boring had it not been for the information on Caliban.
She’d put her other hand against my face. I’d felt the warmth of it through the hair that fell across my cheek. “I know you won’t believe me, as he didn’t believe me, but the first day you sat in my class I knew you. I broke my rule again and looked into your future too. I won’t run and I won’t blame you. You were born to be who you are, Grimm. We are all born to a purpose.” I hadn’t told her my real name in class, yet she knew.
I really hated those damn seers.
“Balance in this world is far more important than those who live in it.” She’d leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “But, Grimm, you will not tell him what you think to do here.”
Not tell Caliban I sliced up one of his old girlfriends? Yeah, that was a promise. Stupid bitch.
Her hand on my face had burned, and the brown—no, what color?—of her eyes had turned to pure glowing golden amber, and I thought felt something leave…no, something stolen from my mind. It was there. It was about Caliban, who was in NYC, but what…? I wasn’t supposed to tell…tell him about my teacher? Why would I?
I’d forgotten her name and face the second I used a switchblade to slice open her stomach. It wasn’t like she was important. Finding Caliban, after all these years, that was the only thing.
I’d retracted the blade to put back in my pocket, shook my head, and removed my sunglasses to rub at my eyes, my headache fierce. The teacher, Georgina…George…G.
Eh, it was gone. Why would I waste a brain cell on her name or her face anyway?
I’d left her sprawled across her desk. Blood pooled around her. I couldn’t really tell what color her hair was—brown? Black? Red as her own blood? I did see the palm of her hand—it was the same silver-white as my hair. Freaking bizarre.
But she was gone and so was I. And the world was better off with one less psychic. I’d planned on killing her when the GED class graduated anyway—martyrs and psychics. Hell with them. And I knew where Caliban was, NYC—I didn’t know how I knew, but suddenly I did know—and teachers were a dime a dozen. I was on the move. Blood dripped to the floor. I vaguely remembered gutting her, but not with the intensity I normally did. I loved a good gutting. I liked to lie in the grass or abandoned buildings or even a bed and relive them from time to time. I shrugged. She must not have been that interesting.
Now the blood began to splatter the floor.
But that’s what happened when you broke your own rules. My kind had no rules. We lived—or had lived—in the same place, but dwelled in different worlds.
I was sure she thought she’d gone to a better one. They always did. There were other worlds, I knew. Whether she went to a good or bad one wasn’t up to her, whatever she thought. It was up to that ever-spinning and capricious universe. And if it had made me, it couldn’t be very good and generous, could it?
She had been a good teacher, though.
I took the apple out of my jacket pocket, polished it on my sleeve, and left it in her limp hand before I left. I’d brought it to be ironic. An apple a day will never keep an Auphe away.
I walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me. I thought I heard the sound of something being tossed into a metal trash can, the kind by the teacher’s desk. With my Auphe hearing, if I heard something, there was something. I glanced back through the frosted glass and saw a misty outline of a crying woman, face in her hands, red hair.…I rubbed my eyes again and it was gone.
Just a dead human on the altar of a teacher’s desk, martyred as she’d meant to be. A human without a face or color or a name.
“I’ll find a way to change it. I will. I don’t care if it’s never been done. The world can’t stop me. No one can stop me.”
It was a woman’s voice choked with tears and determination. Familiar. I turned to look again, but then I’d found myself on the first floor with no memory of coming down the stairs. Too much excitement, too much glee at the games to come. My brother. Fighting, blood, family joined again and maybe a few hundred deaths or so.
Because he was in…She’d said he lived in…Fuck.
I’d known.
I’d just this second known and it was gone too, like the other things…like…what other things?
Absently I put my sunglasses back on, left the building, and stepped down to the sidewalk. Why was I standing here doing nothing? I could be in the library searching the Internet for Caliban. Or I could be off showing one of those gangs downtown that when they said they were going to take your money and shove your head up your ass, it was harder than it sounded. You had to break a lot of vertebrae to do that, have some real upper-body strength, and a machete to make that back door a few sizes bigger. I had the ability and the motivation. Tonight, I’d thought, I’d be the teacher.
Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen a face in the window…colors of brown, red, and amber. I’d smelled the pumping heart and the circulating blood of healthy life.
I’d heard one word.
Forget.
The desert heat made me sleepy as I tasted my own blood from the tip of my leather-covered finger. It had made me dream. An enjoyable dream.
Forget.
I could see the blood, brighter than any other blood I could think of. It was all I could see. It was a curtain pulled over everything else. But I didn’t mind. I liked blood, and I liked red. As I began to tumble into a healing semicoma, I had an image of me handing Caliban an apple and laughing. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing.
Forget.
I could hear a woman crying. “I’ll find a way to change it. I will.”
Forget.
Had I dreamed? It didn’t matter. If I had, I would sleep again and dream of better things, things that I could remember. Such as Cal’s sword in my stomach. The Second Coming.
Family.
The end of the world.
The beginning of mine.
11
I told Niko, Robin, and Promise about Grimm, the Auphe-bae, every detail I could remember, except for the specific ones of what I’d done in South Carolina to the other imprisoned failures. That I glossed over. Niko already knew them. I’d told him the day I’d returned home. I told Niko almost everything, and not only because he was my brother. He was all that stood between me and the world. I wasn’t worried about myself. Of the two, the earth and Cal off his leash, I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. I was sane currently, and I did go back and forth on whether that was a good thing or not, but who knew if that would last?
Not if. How long…