Shadowed (Fated) (11 page)

‘Cyrus?’ she said.

Her voice was hoarse. He shook his head slightly as
if to say
maybe?

‘Cyrus,’ she said again, louder this time, his name
almost choking out of her.

And then the other two, the dark-haired guy with
the flamethrower and the girl in the army-style boots, were shouting this name
too while running towards him and suddenly he found himself buried under a hail
of arms and hands and someone’s wet cheek was pressed against his shoulder. But
the girl with the dark-brown hair and the bluer-than-blue eyes was standing
apart from the others. And through the tangle of arms he was buried in, he saw
her staring at him as if he was a ghost.

‘Jesus, man, what the hell are you doing here?’

It was the guy. He was gripping his shoulders and
his eyes were shining brightly. Cyrus stared back at him blankly.

‘Cyrus, where have you been, man?’ he asked again,
shaking him by the arms and grinning like a maniac. ‘We thought you were dead.
How did you make it back?’

‘Back from where?’ he asked.

The three of them exchanged a brief look.

‘What’s with the outfit?’ the other girl, the one
with the spiky short hair, asked, pulling back an inch to look at him, her
expression wary.

He cleared his throat, not sure whether he should
say anything about his recent escape. But these people seemed to know him and
for some reason, which he couldn’t believe was just co-incidence, his instincts
had brought him to this place, and these people seemed to be fighting the
monsters too, so surely he could trust them?

‘I’ve been in hospital,’ he said simply.

‘Yeah, I can see that,’ the girl said, taking hold
of his hand, her eyes still wide and marvelling. ‘Jesus, you’re freezing. Come
on, let’s get you in the car. You can’t walk around the streets like that.
You’re going to get arrested and taken to the funny farm.’

The girl with the blue eyes cleared her throat. ‘I
think that might be where he’s come from,’ she said. Her voice was husky and
tinged with an emotion he couldn’t quite guess – something more than
sadness, greater than relief.

He turned. She was still standing on the sidewalk.
The others looked to where she was pointing. He tried to crick his neck far
enough to see. And there, stamped on the back of his scrub trousers in large
stencilled letters, he read:

GATEWAYS
MENTAL HEALTH CENTRE

The three of them looked at each other the way the doctors had looked
at each other when he told them about the things with the tails.

‘Cyrus, dude, what were you doing in a mental
hospital?’ the guy asked.

They were treating him as if he was dangerous now,
edging away from him. The girl with the short dark hair narrowed her eyes and
tipped her head in confusion. Then the other girl stepped between them all. She
put her hand, the one that monster had hurt, on the guy’s arm.

‘Ash’, she said, ‘let’s forget the questions for
the moment and just get out of here before more of them come.’

He stared at her, feeling grateful and something
else too – something had stirred in him when he saw her put her hand on
Ash’s arm. He wasn’t sure what it was. It didn’t feel like jealousy, but it
certainly wasn’t happiness either, not that he was too sure he’d recognise
either emotion. Ash nodded and started off towards the car, which was still
parked haphazardly across the road with its doors flung open. The girl with
short hair hovered by his side, shooting him nervous glances that were making
him feel frustrated. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t remember who he was or who
they were.

He turned back to the girl with blue eyes. ‘What
happened to that thing?’ he asked, pointing to the pile of clothes on the
ground. ‘Where did it go?’

The girl stared at him in silence, her lips parted
slightly, and he wondered if she had heard him right. ‘It vanished,’ he added
for clarity’s sake. ‘I saw it disappear right in front of my eyes. What was it?
Where did it go?’

The girl swallowed nervously. ‘I think you need to
get in the car,’ was all she said.

He glanced up the street. What if it was a trap?
What if he wasn’t friends with these people at all? They were strangers. And a
voice in his head was urging him not to trust strangers. Though, he reasoned,
he wasn’t a stranger to them. They had seemed genuinely happy to see him. And
there was something familiar about the way they had said his name and had
thrown their arms around him. As familiar to him as the sword had felt when he
took it in his hand and used it to kill that monster.

The girl was waiting. And the other girl just
behind him was hopping from foot to foot. She felt her tug on his elbow.
‘Cyrus,’ she said in a soft voice, ‘come with us. We’ll explain everything on
the way.’

‘The way to where?’ he asked, letting her pull him
backwards towards the car, which the guy was revving.

‘To your apartment,’ she said, unable to keep the
incredulous tone out of her voice.

His apartment? He had an apartment. And a name. And
he knew how to wield a sword. And this girl was still looking at him as if he
was a ghost but that’s because they’d thought he was dead. Which explained why
no one had come looking for him or reported him missing. He was finally getting
answers to some of the questions he’d had running around in his head the last
few weeks. And, most importantly, he knew now he really wasn’t crazy. The
doctors could stick that in their pipe and smoke it.

He gazed around the interior of the car. It felt
familiar too. The girl with blue eyes was wedged into the corner of the back
seat, beside him. She hadn’t stopped staring at him since they’d got in, though
it felt like an invisible force field lay between them, a divide he couldn’t
cross. He looked at her, feeling nervous all of a sudden. She was nursing her
wounded arm, holding it against her chest as if she was a bird with a broken
wing, though she hadn’t complained or said a word about it.

He felt an overwhelming urge to make it better
somehow, but there was that barrier between them and a general wariness in her
gaze, so he kept his distance. Were they just friends? Or were they something
more? And what about the girl up front? The one with the spiky hair and the
piercings? Was she with the guy?

The guy was driving in silence. There was a weird
tension in the car as if they were all holding a collective breath. He stared
between them, wondering if he should say something to break the ice.

‘Do you know who I am?’ the girl next to him asked
before he could figure out what to say.

He frowned at her. He did know who she was. In some
part of his brain he knew – he just couldn’t locate the information right
now.

He shook his head. ‘I know I know you. I just don’t
know who you are or why I know you. But I’ve seen you … in my dreams.’ He
stopped abruptly, noting the look on her face. ‘I mean,’ he went on in a hurry,
‘I kept seeing you and some monsters, like the ones we just killed. But
everything’s messed up – nothing’s clear.’

‘Do you know my name?’ she asked.

He noticed the very tip of her left ear was
missing.

‘No,’ he admitted.

Up front the guy shifted gear noisily.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Evie,’ she answered.

Evie
, he repeated silently. That made sense.
It slotted into place, felt comfortable on the tip of his tongue as if he’d
used it a lot. It felt as if another layer, gossamer thin, had floated off the
top of the fog in his head.

‘And that’s Vero and Ash,’ she said, pointing to
the two up front.

He nodded in greeting and tried to smile.

‘Do you know
your
name?’ Evie asked.

He noticed that her tone was overly genial, forced
almost, like the voices the nurses had used in the hospital when they’d first
brought him in.

‘I’m guessing it’s Cyrus,’ he said, giving her a
half-smile. ‘And I’m guessing that those things you were fighting back there
are part of the reason why I can’t remember anything. Would that be right?’

The girl’s eyes suddenly filled up with tears.
‘Something like that,’ she whispered.

He looked like Cyrus again now he was showered and
wearing his old clothes. Only his hair looked different, lying wet and tousled.
The old Cyrus had precision styled his hair with enough product to turn him
into a walking fire hazard.

When Evie watched him saunter across the wooden
floorboards of the warehouse towards them she thought she caught a glimmer of
his old arrogance in the way his body moved and the confidence in his stride.
But when her eyes tracked up his body to his face she felt her uncertainty
return. The mocking smile Cyrus used to wear all the time was gone and the
spark in his eyes had been replaced with a wariness and a seriousness she
didn’t recognise. The only thing that was really familiar about this new Cyrus
was the slice of dark amber cutting through the iris of his left pupil, marring
the greeny-blue colour of his eyes. No, she corrected herself, not marring,
more like
defining
.

Her gaze fell to his lips and she inhaled softly,
remembering all of a sudden how he’d kissed her just before he walked through
the gateway. She’d been surprised by how soft and gentle that kiss had been. If
she’d stopped to think about it before – which she never had – she
would have assumed Cyrus’s kisses would be rough and demanding, just like he
was. But that kiss had felt like it had contained his entire soul. It had been
the kiss of a dying man, filled with passion and remorse and pain and enough
desire to burn up hell.

Evie felt herself flushing at the memory. She
looked away, flustered, as Cyrus came to stand by her side. He kept glancing at
her with this curious expression on his face, and it made her fidget with the
bandage on her wrist that she’d
 
put
over the Mixen burn. She crossed to the sofa, as far away from him as possible
and sat down, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around
them.

Ash sat opposite, his elbows resting on his knees,
while Vero perched on the arm of the sofa beside him. They were both staring at
Cyrus as if they couldn’t work out whether he was really Cyrus or in fact a
cyborg.

‘This is my place?’ Cyrus asked, looking around,
his eyes scanning the rafters. He seemed to be finding that part the hardest to
get his head around.

‘Yeah,’ Ash answered, not taking his eyes off
Cyrus.

‘And I was a Hunter. I – I mean
we
– fought these monsters?’

‘Unhumans,’ Vero cut in. ‘And we’re still fighting
them.’

Cyrus frowned at her. ‘Unhumans,’ he said, testing
the word out. ‘And they’re from other realms, you say?’

Vero and Ash nodded at him.

Cyrus chewed his lip for a bit. ‘There are ones
with tails, aren’t there?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes,’ Ash nodded.

Cyrus snorted through his nose. ‘I told them. I
kept telling them.’

‘Telling who?’ Evie asked.

‘The doctors. All the people who kept trying to
keep me in that place.’

‘Yeah, that was probably not the best thing to tell
the people doing your psych evaluation.’

‘What do you remember?’ Ash interrupted, leaning
across the coffee table, a sense of urgency in his voice.

Cyrus shook his head. ‘Not much.’ He turned slowly
to face Evie. ‘I remember you and I remember seeing this blinding white light
and the next thing I can recall is walking naked down a street holding a knife
or a sword or something – I barely remember. A cop car pulled me over.
Then they took me to the hospital and locked me up – pumped me full of
drugs. They kept asking me the same questions again and again until I thought
they were actually trying to drive me crazy.’ He looked over at Ash. ‘How long
have I been away?’ he asked.

‘The last time we saw you was almost nine weeks
ago.’

Cyrus frowned, his gaze falling to his lap. He
started pulling at a loose thread on his T-shirt.

‘Where did they pick you up? The police. Where were
you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was all a haze.
There were big houses, though, huge lawns. I remember lying down on one –
I thought it was a carpet. And gates – lots of gates. But that’s all.’

Evie exchanged a brief look with Vero and Ash. It
sounded somewhere expensive – somewhere like Bel Air or Beverly Hills.
Nowhere near downtown.

‘So let me get this straight,’ Cyrus said. ‘We were
all Hunters and we were trying to close this way through gateway thing –
to stop any more of these unhumans from getting here?’

Evie nodded.

‘And the way through was in that building –
the one we were just outside?’

‘Yes. There was a big fight. We fought our way
inside. I think that’s what you remember when you say you saw a blond guy and
Evie stepping between you. It was an Original. They’re like Thirsters, only
worse. Evie killed it.’