“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. But the gun didn’t waver in his hands, even as the sweat that ran down his face and in his palms threatened to make it slip.
“I can’t be Lonnie!” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t die that way.”
“I’ll leave then!” I told him, lifting my hands. “No one will ever know you had me here.” The monk was insane with terror.
“It’s too late for that,” the monk said. “I can’t let you go. Not if I want them to let me live. You’ve got to stay here until he comes back.”
Everything hit me at once, and I realized just how stupid and blind I had been. In my fright at seeing the corpse atop the church, I hadn’t taken a moment to dig for a Glimpse from Brother James, to even wonder if I should trust him at all. Now, across the room and deep in the eyes of this crazed man, I could see answers to all the question that had appeared. Threatened. Cornered.
Someone had gotten to Brother James before I arrived.
“Are they here?” I asked, knowing full well what was happening, why I’d been led back here. My mind raced for an escape.
“Soon,” he replied. “I—I told him you’d be back this morning after mass. I’m sorry, Michael. I just couldn’t do anything else when he…”
Then I saw why he’d kept his arms crossed all this time. His left hand was bent painfully forward and still didn’t move, scaling and red with the worst burns I’d seen. Parts of his skin were blackened even past his wrist, dried blood around white gauze he’d tried to wrap around it. When he saw I was looking, he hid his hand away again, still trembling.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I’ll disappear. They’ll think you killed me.”
“They want you alive,” he whined. “They want to make sure. If I don’t keep you here, he’ll know. He’ll get me, just like Lonnie. You don’t think they can, and kill my whole family too?”
“But we’re on the same side,” I said, though I already knew the attempt was in vain. His mind was made up, strengthened like a barrier of fear he’d been building ever since the night before. I could imagine the horror he’d witnessed: the killing of his friend, the threat from a Guardian… who even now was likely on his way back here to collect me, and finish what Mr. Sharpe could not.
Never had such terror washed over me as I remembered the chase from nights before, and realized that I had fallen right into a trap. They wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I had to get out of there.
Brother James’ gun hand had started to shake. I moved to the side, trying to get out of its way, but he stepped between me and the door again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and even then I could tell that he meant it.
So I tried to run, knowing his conscience would make him hesitate to shoot. But he was fast, diving to the side, slamming into me and throwing me hard against the wall. I yelled, pushing him off of me, running again only to be knocked hard against my back, falling over and gasping for breath.
He was kneeling on top of me in a second. I grabbed the end of a fire poker that was next to the furnace, swinging it at him. I knocked his arm and he screamed, but he managed to grab it and wrestle it from me. I heard the reverberating metal fly to the other end of the room, smashing through a computer screen. All the while I continued to shout for help, my words bouncing uselessly off the walls.
I tried to roll over but he had me down, pushing my back with his knee, pressing a cloth against my face and blocking my mouth and nose. I gasped and got a whole lung-full of whatever chemical he was trying to get inside of me.
It hit suddenly, such a strong smell like alcohol and a doctor’s office. It only made me gasp more, dizziness racing through my head as I struggled to fight against it and the monk who held me down, no longer even needing the pistol to keep me there.
“Quiet down!” I heard him hiss at me. Something was banging above our heads, each sound like it was in an echo chamber. There was a crash. A pounding against the locked door.
Was it someone coming for me? Had they heard me?
But I wasn’t screaming anymore: why wasn’t I screaming?! I drifted on a magic carpet that hovered from the floor, room spinning, muscles still trying to lift me though nothing ever brought me up more than a few inches.
I could feel things happening inside me: strange sensations that felt like a dam threatening to explode and made me want to vomit at the same time. My finger throbbed where the silver ring was. It felt like it was tightening slowly, like the device that nurses put around my arm to check blood pressure. All of my skin felt like it was constricting, floating, plummeting…
The cloth remained pushed against my face, the room like I was looking at it through a fish tank before fading into black as my eyelids closed. I could still hear the sounds though. I heard a creaking of hinges, a crashing of wood being shredded. I heard two voices yelling, just before the pressure holding me down disappeared.
There was a shot.
Gentle arms lifted me.
Warm sunshine fell on my arms and legs.
Then I was going up…up…up into the air, until all I could hear was the wind and gentle echoes.
Sirens.
Birds.
Silence.
9
Cessation
I dreamt of flying.
One moment I was frozen in a chemical blackness, and the other I was surrounded by blue and white, soaring and free of the wooden, dirty smell that had enveloped the secret room. Warmth ran against my back, down my legs and arms as the wind flew in my face and up through my mouth into my lungs. The smell of salt water rushing up from below awakened me.
My eyes were already open but it took some time for anything I was looking at to sink in. I was soaring high above the coastline, the people below me little more than specks and the cars and houses like faraway models. Like a toy town. It was so peaceful, so silent besides the muted hiss of air as it pressed around my head like bees. My eyes were not bothered by the rushing: it was as if a glass cone was over my head like a helmet, keeping me safe, sealing me from the air and the sky. Gravity couldn’t keep its fingers on me. I floated free of the Earth. I was invincible, and I was silver.
It startled me only slightly. I had looked down and seen my hands firmly pressed to my sides and noticed something was different. Silver covered the outside of my hands from my knuckles to my wrist in overlapping, reflective scales like the skin of a snake. They moved when I clenched my fist, part of me as if it’d been under my skin all along and I’d only uncovered it. The scales gleamed like mirrors that echoed the sun into my face.
In the dream, this didn’t feel strange at alclass="underline" the glow of the silver on my hands seemed no more unusual than that of the ring still on my finger. And the flying too. I simply willed myself to go higher and suddenly I was heading upward on my own accord, legs and arms pressed together like I was a long silver bullet. I was actually flying.
I wasn’t alone either. The girl from my dream suddenly appeared from over my shoulder, hands with scales just like mine pressed to her sides. The magnificent silver was even more vibrant in the sunlight. I grinned then leapt higher, as if trying to tempt her into racing against me. I heard her laugh from over my shoulder, a sound I’d never heard from this girl in any dream before. It was enough of a distraction for her to dart ahead.