Arabella (7 page)

“And you believed him? Do you not realize he is our enemy?” My father leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his drink, his eyesight never wavering off of me as he did so. “You can’t honestly be that foolish.”

“To be foolish would be to believe anything that comes out of your mouth.”

“How dare you speak to me like that when I’m the one that made you who you are.”

“Exactly, you did this to me. You turned me into a weapon,” I shouted. “I never asked for this, but that never mattered to you.”

“I gave you powers. I gave you something that most people would only dream of.”

“You gave me a death sentence.” I grabbed a folder off of his desk and mindlessly flipped through the papers inside, taking pleasure in the anger that radiated off of my father.

“A death sentence like the one you gave your sister?”

I tossed the folder onto the ground and slammed my palms down on his desk. Anger coursed throughout my body, eager for some sort of a release, and I fought to rein it all in. “You can use her death against me all you’d like. You don’t know how much it pains me on a daily basis,” I assured him. “But don’t you dare try and pin her death entirely on me. Had you not locked us in here, away from the world outside, she would still be here.”

“Don’t you try and turn this around on me,” he shouted.

I threw my head back and turned my attention to the ceiling tiles above. “Since you’re far too ignorant to admit your own wrong doings, how about I point a few more out for you?”

“You’re teetering on a fine line, Arabella,” he threatened.

“You can threaten me all you’d like, Father. I really don’t care what you have to say.”

“As do I you.”

I sat up straight in my chair and turned my focus back to my father, all of a sudden drawn back to our conversation. “See, I don’t believe that, because I happen to know a few interesting secrets about you.”

His body went tense as he waited for me to continue. “Ah, I thought that would get your attention.”

“You can’t prove anything.”

I slipped my hand inside of my pants pocket and pulled out the hard-drive that Cole and I had recovered from the Horde facility. I made him copy all of the files from the hard-drive onto the internet earlier in the day, knowing that once I showed it to my father, he would do whatever possible to delete the data.

“Assassins always think ahead,” he’d told me when I was younger.

That they do
.

“How do you have that? Cole was to hand it over to Mara when you both returned from the Horde facility that night.” He went to snatch it from my hand, but I quickly pulled it away from him. The glory of super speed.

“I had Cole hide it after we came back.”

“You will hand that over to me, immediately.”

I turned the drive over in my hand as I recounted everything that the Horde guy had told me. “All of this time, you were the one releasing the drives, only to have us recover them afterwards. You made money without losing anything,” I continued. “And had we not run into the Horde that day, you probably still would be raking in cash. But now that I know what’s on these things? How you have a bunch of clones stored away in pods in the lower levels? I’m going to do whatever I can to ensure that doesn’t happen anymore.”

“You would go against your own father?” he asked.

“Why not? You went against your own daughter.”

Without another word, he pressed the button on his desk, ordering the security to his office. As the men came pouring in, I reached inside of my pocket and pulled out a shock disc and placed it on top of the hard-drive before activating it.

The crackling noise that erupted from the hard-drive drew a smile upon my lips. “And on that note, I’ll be on my way.”

He stood up from his chair, and turned his back to me as he leaned over the bar counter that sat behind his desk, his fingers gripped the wooden edge with full force. “If you want to leave, go ahead and try, Arabella. Maybe if the Horde don’t catch you, you’ll come to find that the world outside isn’t ready for your kind.”

“That’s a chance that I’m willing to take.”

I walked over towards the door and stopped once my fingers reached the door knob.  “Oh, and Father? You should probably check the internet.”

“Why would I want to do that?” He turned to face me with his hands folded at his waist. Anger radiated off of him as he spoke, and I could tell that he had been on the verge of exploding, something I took far too much pleasure in.

“Because you’ll find that Bilson Corporation’s research has made its way online.”

T
hree days later...

I tossed my legs over the edge of the Keers building, taking in the scene of the nightlife below. It had been three days since I left Bilson Corporations after having released all of my father’s research online.

Leaving Bilson Corporations knowing that society now knew that we existed made things a bit more difficult, as they viewed us as mutants. But I was sure that I had made the proper choice.

Freedom always came with a price, and fear amongst the general public had been mine.

I was a Super, an unknown specimen as far as they’d been concerned. But I wasn’t only a Super. I was still human. I was still alive.

I replayed Cole’s words from the night on the rooftop shortly after Gwen had died. I had been so obsessed with the idea that because I was a Super, I couldn’t also be human.

“You can’t allow this thing to consume you. It’s not all that you are, Bell. It’s only a part of who you are, you need to remember that,” he’d said.

And it wasn’t until I peered down on the streets below, my fingers clenching the edge of the building that I realized just how true his words had been.

I had made terrible choices in my past, choices that had resulted in horrific consequences. I’d been so consumed with the idea of being something more than a superhuman, that I ended up losing things that I held dear to me.

“I thought I’d find you up here,” Cole’s voice sounded from behind me as he exited the rooftop door.

“I see you’re still making it a habit of following me,” I joked.

“Hey, now that the Bilson Corporation is under investigation, I don’t exactly have anything better to do.”

“Boy, you sure know how to wow a girl.”

He lowered himself down on the roof’s edge beside me. “It’s strange how different everything is now. It’s like an entirely different world out here.”

“In a way, it is, though. They’ve just discovered that we exist, and we’re just now learning to adjust to their way of living. It’s an entirely new world for both of us,” I stated. A fact that was both fascinating and terrifying at the same time.

Cole nudged me with his shoulder, a grin spread wide upon his face. “I’m going to head back downstairs. Try and stay out of trouble, will you?”

“You do realize who you’re talking to, correct?”

He gave me a quick hug before leaving through the rooftop door.

It took us taking down my father and Bilson Corporations in order to get the guy to understand personal space, go figure.

I glanced back down at the street beneath me, checking to make sure there was no one around – a force of habit that I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over – before leaping off of the edge of the building.

I pulled my cowl and gloves off and stuffed them in my utility belt. I probably shouldn’t have gone out in public in my leather jumpsuit, as I was still getting used to the feel of curious stares from the general public, but there was still a part of me that clung to my former identity because that was still who I saw myself as.

As a twenty-something year old, I couldn’t help but to feel that I should have known who I was and what I wanted out of my life. But having been forced to live within closed confines for most of my life, I was an outcast among society; someone without an identity.

The only thing for sure was that I had control over who I became.

My name is Arabella Bilson, and I’m more than a weapon
.

THE END

A
rabella
was a spur of the moment project, one that I wrote out of my love of comics and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. For those wondering why the novella is told in mostly flashbacks, it’s because I drew inspiration for the format from comics.

This was a very difficult story to write as I needed to tie everything up within approximately fifty pages. But the fabulous cover created by Christa of Paper & Sage Design helped me to focus on perfecting the story to the best of my ability.

I originally planned on releasing Arabella in July, but as most of you are aware, July was not a good month for my family. This resulted in the delay of not only
Arabella
, but also
Stouthearted
(which will be out next month). So, for those of you that have been patient with me, I want to say thank you. I hope you enjoy
Arabella
. It’s something a bit different for me, but it was a welcome change.