Devil Inside (18 page)

“For now.”

Harley, immaturely, felt like sticking her tongue out at him.  But instead she slumped in the seat.  No longer distracted by the fight, the reality of the situation finally crashed over her and she felt her blood rush to her head.  As the adrenaline faded she was left cold and stunned by the events that had just happened.

“Holy shit!” she exclaimed.  Levi seemed to have been expecting this reaction and barely glanced at her.  Maybe 20 minutes had passed since Levi had first stepped out of the truck.  The fight response had blocked anything that she didn’t need to survive.  And now it was all coming back.  She had shot someone. 
Two someones!
  She tried to not panic as Levi pulled out of the driveway.  She felt slightly sick to her stomach.  She could feel the drying mist of blood that peppered her face and hands.  Her shoulders ached from the kick of the shotgun.  Her brain flashed images of Levi drinking the Burner’s blood at her—seemingly saying “Here, don’t forget about this.  Deal with this too.”  And the most shocking was the Ignis from the bar saying her name. 
How did he know my name?

“How did he know my name?”

Levi glanced away from the road.  “I don’t know.  I was going to ask you the same thing?”

Harley racked her brain.  She had definitely NOT told him her name at the bar. 
Have I met him there before
she wondered?  Her head began to hurt.  From both the shock of the fight and from desperately searching through her memories trying to find the man in the multitude of people she had met at one time or another.

“Earlier, why did you ask about records of Ignis that had died?” Levi asked, interrupting her desperate attempt to remember where or why or how the Ignis knew her.

Harley sighed and rubbed her temples.  A burst of realization caused her to sit upright.

“Fuck me!”  She exclaimed.

Levi looked at her—momentarily surprised by the outburst.  “I’m guessing you remember him?”

“I—I think so.  It was your asking me why I asked that question.”

Levi waited for her to continue.  “I think he knew my parents,” she finally replied.  Her stomach sank. 
Here we go
she thought. 
Time to dredge up those memories again
.

Levi scowled at her.  “Your parents were associated with the Turba?”  He sounded doubtful but encouraged her to talk.

“I think my parents WERE Ignis—or my Mom at least.”  Harley refused to look at him.

“OK.”  He gave her time to continue.

She took a deep breath.  “So, I guess it’s time for the whole life story thing, right?”

Levi raised an eyebrow at her.  “Probably.”  The lightness of his answer made her think that he was expecting her to be wrong.  But he was waiting to hear her out.  Her stomach tightened and she realized that she was clenching her jaw.  She sat up straighter in the seat.

“Fine,” she said finally.  “But if I’m telling my sob story, I get to hear your story too.”

Harley began her story as they merged onto I75.  This time of night there was not much traffic.  She stared out the window watching the trees and fields pass by in a blur.  Her stomach rolled and tightened.  She hated telling anyone the story of her childhood.  She usually avoided that whenever possible.  And she really didn’t want to tell Levi, but she knew that she needed to.

Harley took a deep breath.  “I’m sure my parents weren’t always bad.  I just don’t remember them any other way.  My dad was a construction worker.  And my Mom?  I remember her having a real job, vaguely.  But mostly I remember her being a prostitute.”

Harley waited to see if Levi would have a reaction over that.  Thankfully, he didn’t.  Instead, he continued to drive silently waiting for her to go on.  “Both of my parents were drug addicts.  Dad barely kept a job.  He would work at one site after another—getting fired eventually for not showing up.  Or showing up high.  Mom would bring men over every day.  Usually different men every day.  I didn’t really know what it meant at the time.  It was later that I put the pieces together.”

Harley waited for the shame of that revelation to settle over her.  She closed her eyes tightly, willing herself to not cry as the emotions tried to force themselves from her stomach and into her throat.  She reminded herself that it wasn’t her fault what her parents did.  That it didn’t reflect on her.  “They fought all the time.  It wasn’t just Dad beating on my Mom.  My Mom gave as good as she got.  That’s how it was for as long as I could remember.”

Harley thought hard, sifting through scraps of childhood memories.  “I am pretty sure that the blonde guy from the bar was one of the men that my Mom brought home.  He was one of the few that came back more than once.  His hair was longer then.”  Harley focused on one memory in particular, of her mother and the man sitting on the couch.  They both had blood on their arms from the needle that still lay on the table and her father was slumped over, sleeping in a weird position that Harley had been able to tell just wasn’t right.  She remembered feeling sick, but not understanding why, when her Mom put her head in the blonde man’s lap.  She had watched, hiding behind boxes that had the blonde man had brought and piled in their living room.  The man had put his hand on her mother’s head and smiled at her, knowing she was watching what her mother was doing.

“I remember seeing him do drugs with my Mom.  They were sleeping together too.”  Levi still didn’t interrupt her story.  “My parents died when I was seven.  Mom and Dad had been fighting all day.  When they weren’t passed out anyway.  They would wake up, do more drugs, drink more and fight then pass out.  I hid most of the time and tried to block them out.  I hid under the table when it started getting really heated.  My Mom kept making my Dad angrier and angrier.  Sometimes she would look at me and laugh.”  Harley trailed off, rubbing her face.  It was amazing how after eighteen years the pain of her mother’s cruelty still hurt.  “I think she liked that I was watching.  That I was scared.”  Harley heard her own voice and how hollow it was.  By removing all emotion she was able to maintain control.  If she let any emotion break through it would overwhelm her.

“My Dad finally threw a lantern at her.  Our electricity had been turned off—again.  The house went up in flames as they fought.  The only reason I got out was because our neighbor—who had always been nice to me—got me out.  He didn’t go back for my parents.  I don’t blame him.  He knew how they were.  He knew they weren’t worth saving.”

Harley wondered what had happened to Andy and Tally.  She knew that they had tried to take her in.  She had heard them discussing it with her case worker.  But they had been denied.  Andy had some sort of police record.  It had made them ineligible to be foster parents.  “I was put in a foster home after that.  I got moved around a lot—but it wasn’t so bad.  Jamie and I became friends in high school and her parents were really good to me.

I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly or not, but I’m pretty sure my Mom’s eyes shone like a Burner’s that night.”  She closed her eyes and watched the memory of her father, having run out of other things to break, picked up the kerosene lantern.  As her mother laughed, her father slung the lantern across the room with a roar.  Harley had flinched and buried her face in the soft head of the teddy bear as the lantern slammed into the wall and shattered.  The lamp exploded in flames that raced across the wall as her father lunged at her mother.  They both fell to the floor struggling with each other.  She watched the flames race up the wall, too terrified to move.  The fire quickly ate up their cheap decorations and furniture and the thick noxious smoke burned Harley’s eyes and throat.  She had sat underneath the table for far too long before she was rescued.  Fear had frozen her to the spot, watching her parents claw and slap at each other when the living room was slowly engulfed in flames.

Harley heard Levi take a deep breath, but he didn’t say anything.  He didn’t offer her a pointless gesture of pity.  For that she was grateful.  Finally, he conceded.  “It’s definitely possible.  It would explain why the blonde guy is so fixated on you.  He knows you.  Maybe he’s pissed because you made it out as a child.”  Levi was thoughtful for a few minutes.  “If all this is right, he probably brought your mom into the Turba.  Maybe he had a plan for her, your dad, even you.  Maybe he’s pissed it didn’t work out as he planned.”

“You think?”

Levi flexed his hand on the steering wheel and with the other he rubbed his face.  “Hell, I’m not sure.  It’s all conjecture at this point.  WHEN we finally catch this bastard we’ll interrogate him before we kill him.”

Harley smiled at his words.  She couldn’t wait for the opportunity to make blonde guy pay.  “OK,” she said after a while of silence, “your turn.”

Levi took a deep breath.  “I told you before I was born in 1903.  My family owned a farm in Virginia.  We grew tobacco and had some cattle.  I had two younger sisters.  My parents were good people.”

Harley watched him tell his story.  She knew she had looked as haunted as he did now when she told her story.  She could see the reflection of the headlights of passing cars wash across his face.  He didn’t just look sad.  He looked angry too.  It didn’t surprise her that after all of these years the emotion was still strong enough to illicit a physical response.

“My sister Elizabeth, the oldest girl, began courting a man name William.”  Harley smiled a little as his use of the outdated word “courting.”  “Things were different then,” he continued, “women didn’t have the freedom that they do now and my father didn’t approve of William.  He didn’t have a job.  He had been causing trouble in town.  But of course, my sister didn’t see it.  No matter how many times we lectured her.  No matter how many times we tried to prevent her from seeing him, she found a way.  It caused so much trouble in my family.  Looking back on it, William had enjoyed the trouble he caused.”

He paused in his story and Harley could see his jaw clinch in anger.  “My father and I came in from the fields one evening and found my youngest sister—Abigail—crying on the porch.  Then we heard the shouting inside.  We rushed in and found Elizabeth packing a trunk and my mother was fighting with her trying to make her stay.  Elizabeth had decided that she was running away with William.  William was there, watching the whole thing.  Legally we couldn’t stop her and William had convinced her to abandon her responsibilities to her family.  That kind of rebellion was just—unheard of, in those days.

“My father went after William.  I had to hold my sister back from going after my father.  My mother and Abby were together crying.”  Levi trailed off, most likely reliving the events just as Harley had done.  His face and voice were tight with anger and regret.

“William got the best of my father—of course.  At the time I just thought he was younger and stronger.  But he was a lot stronger than he should have been.  I didn’t know until later that he was supernatural.”  Levi paused, taking a deep breath, “he shot my father.”  Harley grimaced and her chest tightened in empathy.

“I froze,” he said angrily.  “I just stood there when he turned the gun on me.  I remember my sisters and my mother crying and screaming. I didn’t even feel the shot.  I just fell and couldn’t move.  But I could see and hear what was going on.  He shot Abby and my mother next.”

“Elizabeth was crying as he raped her.  I couldn’t do anything.  I couldn’t move at all.”  His voice had turned cold and steely.  The hairs on the back of Harley’s neck stood on end.  “Afterwards she asked him why.  He shrugged.  Said it was just something to do.”  Levi visibly struggled to take a deep breath before he continued.  “Then he shot her.  He must have thought I was dead because he just left us all there.”

Harley shuddered at his story.  She hadn’t gotten used to the cold malevolence of the Ignis yet.  “The next thing I know, I woke up in the Den.  Nya was there and explained what had happened.  A Nocte who had been tracking William found me.  He brought me to the Den.  He figured if I was still alive, survived the gun shot, that I deserved a shot at joining the Praesidio.

“I couldn’t walk.  The bullet had done something to my spine.  I could only move one arm and my head.  I wouldn’t have lived much longer regardless.  Not back then. Not in that condition.  So, I went through the bonding process.  It worked,” he stated the obvious.

“Did you ever catch William?” Harley asked.

“Sure did,” Levi said simply.  His eyes darkened briefly.  Harley swallowed hard.  She could only imagine what he had done to him once he caught the man who had killed his family.  She was glad that Levi had gotten his revenge.  She currently carried that burning desire inside her.  It made the loss so much worse—the pain of injustice—the unfairness of it all.  And now she understood why Levi was so prepared to give her chance for revenge.  He knew what it was like to lose your family.  To have the only people in the world who truly care about you ripped away from you.

“Was it worth it,” she asked softly.

Levi didn’t hesitate.  “Absolutely,” the word was spoken through a jaw clenched in long remember anger.  The admission eased some of the anxiety that Harley did have concerning the bonding.

“Are all Nocte people who have lived through some kind of tragedy?” she wondered out loud after a moment of contemplation.

Levi was thoughtful for a moment, “No.  A lot of us have.  But not everyone.  Some people have become Nocte because they feel compelled to help.  They want to keep the world safe.  I think something about living through that kind of pain makes us appealing to the Nocte though.  Kind of like the Ignis I guess, in that respect.  It’s easier to make a bond when the person has suffered.  It’s like a bone that gets stronger after it’s broken.  It takes a strong person to complete the bond.”