Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (35 page)

“You live like this?” I blurted.
I had never seen anything so crude as this bathroom.

“We rarely stay here, or for very long,” Zofia said crossly.
“We just didn’t want to lead your Graystone friends to one of our better homes.” With a scoff that indicated her living situation was my fault, she walked out of the makeshift bathroom. I used it since I was there and replaced the paper towels on the rack. When I returned to the main room, Zofia was back on her sofa.

Japheem lit up to see me.
“Do you like our place?”

“Yes, Japheem,” I said.

“Oh, but you shielded at that, and I am unsure it is the truth,” he chided, and I cursed inwardly that my soul was open for him to read. “But do not worry. Once Makala can fly, we’ll move on to a far grander place. That lovely resort in Orling is a favorite of mine. Darling little vacation homes spread all about and half of them never occupied. Did you give her a pillow and blanket, Zofia?”

“Just take some off my bed,” Zofia grunted without looking up.

“Do as she says,” Japheem said, so I took a pillow and blanket from her bed and carried it through the crevice. Even with these things, it was going to be excruciatingly cold tonight. I returned for my water and sandwich. Although I had hoped to eat them alone, Japheem motioned for me to sit beside the sofa at his feet.

I cringed at the chords and forced myself to eat.
He could torture me without ever laying a hand on my flesh. Just to bear his presence was difficult. The chords stripped the food of flavor, and made my jaws feel unhinged as I chewed.

As I forced down the potato chips, Japheem said in a
tender voice, “You might be thinking of jumping tonight, Jessa. But I wish you to know that the anemoi will catch you, and bring you back. Then they will tell me what you did, that you wish to cut the new thread you were given, this second life that belongs to me, not to you. I don’t like to misplace my belongings, and I will be very angry indeed.” His brows lowered. “Are you going to try this tonight?”

“No,” I said, although if anemoi were not down there, I might have.

His brows lifted. “Wonderful! And you might think to live, not die, and to try to climb the rocks. Oh, I almost lost two of my belongings that way, but the anemoi helped me to retrieve them. You also might try for that door to the grass outside. But we are quite out of the way here. You won’t find anyone to help before I find you. I expected to have to throw your cell phone away, so no one could track you using it. Why did you not have a cell phone in your pockets, Jessa? Zofia didn’t find one. All you had were keys.” He motioned to Adriel’s keys, which were partially under the sofa. “Was it in your backpack?”

“Spooner doesn’t have cell service,” I
explained. “So I don’t always carry mine with me any longer. There isn’t much point.”

“Get with the times, eh?” Japheem laughed.
“No cell phones. Would you give me one of those chips?”

It wasn’t like I had the ability to say no.
I gave him one. His fingers brushed against my fingers and he shook his head. “The amount of shielding on you . . . oh, the first Jessa had that, too. It is normal. It will fade in time, once you come to accept your new circumstances. Right now part of you still believes that you own yourself. But one day, one day soon, you will light up to see me.”

I doubted that very much.
Once I had finished my meal, he flicked his finger to indicate I could clean up my trash. I made it last a long time, just to have some separation from the abominable music that he exuded in a miasma all about him. Makala laughed at something about the movie.

“Jessa.”

I turned around. “Yes, Japheem?”

“You are going to tuck me in bed now.”
Dread filled me at the prospect of going to his bedroom with him, but he pointed to the blanket over his sofa. I unfolded it and set it over him, making sure to cover his feet. He jerked his head to the crevice to dismiss me.

Night was falling outside, and the wind had died down a little.
I made a bed for myself with the blanket and pillow close to the skeleton. Then I crept to the edge and looked down. Anemoi played down there, tumbling about on the wind and barely discernible. Into the cliffs they splashed, dashing their pieces in white wisps all around, coming back together and darting over the sea to let the wind propel them into the cliffs again. One saw me looking out, because a growl passed up to the cave. I couldn’t go up or down, to either side, I couldn’t go through that crack to the grass to freedom . . . I could go nowhere, and nobody knew I was here. The Kreelings weren’t looking, and Adriel had not seen me abducted in order to follow.

My wrist throbbed
. I hated to have his mark burned into my flesh. This would heal with a scar, marking me forever as his. If only I had gone to the compound . . . I’d be locked away and resentful there, thinking of everything in my life that I was going to miss out upon, and not knowing there was a worse existence out there. I thought of that naïve girl in anger for what she didn’t know.

But
I had made my decision to risk it. So this was it, my life as it was now and until it ended. I belonged to Rippers. Wrapping myself in the blanket, I buried my face in the pillow and cried.

Chapter Fifteen: The Darkness

The Graystones had wanted nothing from me, only to live and go on with my life, a second chance to do as I would. Often over the days to pass, I thought of the human man that Drina ripped, the one she decided she could not keep since it was wrong to deny the man his liberty. The Rippers felt no such compunction about me. I was the hand to light their candles, make their meals and fix their beds, change the radio station and clean up after them. I would have rather been in Drina’s hands, drinking down the sleeping draught to send me to death. That man hadn’t known how lucky he was to be captured by her, rather than fallen angels such as these.

Makala’s next set of feathers w
as growing in, a mix of healthy and singed, and she had me pick up the singed ones after Barasho smoothed them out of her wings. As I did, she spoke hatefully of Drina, who had been the one to wound her. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen her. Do you even remember Drina, Barasho?”

“Yes,” Barasho said.

“How dare she do this when we were once friends! Why did she involve herself? This wasn’t her affair.” She grimaced as more of her feathers came free. I picked them up and put them in a plastic grocery bag. Makala continued to grouse. That Drina who had withdrawn her friendship how many thousands of years ago; Drina who thought that she had some lock on ethics. Ever the goody-goody, that was Drina taking in the newly fallen and raising them as her own sons and daughters like she was the only one who could do it. But Makala could as well!

Lifting her head, Makala spoke directly to me. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said, since she wanted an answer.

She pointed to Zofia. “I can raise them, too! Look at my daughter! Such a bedraggled thing she was, living as a homeless person after her fall. Foraging from garbage cans for food and sleeping in filth. I found her and brought her home. And isn’t she beautiful?” Without waiting for a reply, she looked away.
Rippers didn’t see their wings and fire as ugly. And yes, Zofia was an airbrushed perfection, but I couldn’t find her beautiful. Not when she was a Ripper. Makala returned to cursing Drina for saying it was wrong to rip humans. When no one else was supposed to have them, why should fallen angels feel guilty about helping themselves?

Makala wished me to brush her hair and bring her drinks, to fetch another blanket from her bed
and her slippers when she was cold. Refill the dispensers with shampoo and conditioner in the shower. Scrub a stain from her sweatshirt. Move the light. She rose late and sat in the recliner to surf travel websites, trying to find some place that she had not gone, some new thing to see. Eternity stretched out in front of her, and everything in it was boring. One morning she came out in a shirt she had stolen from me in Seataw, and her eyes upon me were wide with challenge. “Do you like my shirt?”

Did she really expect me to protest
that it was mine or call her a thief? I didn’t care if she stole every shirt in my closet. I just wanted to go home. “Yes. It’s a very nice shirt, Makala.”

“The shirt is nice.
Yes, girl? The shirt is nice,” she said in mockery. Makala referred to me as the girl, and sometimes with just a wave of her hand.

Barasho rarely addressed me even as that.
I had no more presence in his mind than a shadow on the wall. He got up at dawn and tended to his own hair. Then he darkened his wings and raced low over the ocean. When he returned, he wanted his breakfast. After that he rested in his chair for much of the day. All of the centuries he had lived and he still had no idea what to do with his time. He just sat there like a toadstool, answering Makala’s queries as she flicked through travel information and otherwise contributing little more. Sometimes he watched movies or drew on a sketchpad that he kept next to his chair. His pictures were very different from Adriel’s beautiful sketches over the decades. Barasho’s were defined by their empty spaces, an ocean with a bare beach, no dolphins jumping in the waves, not even rays coming from the sun. Everything looked stark and barren. Something about the crispness of the lines, the sharp angles of the waves and deep dots of the sand, was angry. I never felt in danger around him, although there was danger in him not caring what anyone else did to me. He wasn’t here to hurt me, but he wasn’t going to help either.

Zofia read books by the dozens, one after another in a dreary march.
Romances, thrillers, mysteries, horror, fantasy, nonfiction, children’s books, she was learning of the human world through them, and her sporadic questions brightened Barasho and Makala into explaining. What was speed dating? What did the skull and crossbones mean? How did solar panels work? Once she had her answer, the page would turn. Zofia found me stupid, since I was unable to braid her hair in the complicated fashion she saw in a magazine picture.

I didn’t have any higher opinion of Zofia, not that my opinion mattered in the slightest.
She missed Trenton and wanted to reclaim him, but as he had been left behind, that wasn’t possible at this time. Trenton knew to make his way to the nearest home should he be abandoned in public like that. They trusted that he had boarded a bus to Herman much farther north where they kept a house in the country. The plan was to let the wounded Rippers heal and then hop and skip their way from Santa Cruz up to Herman to rejoin him.

“Trenton knew what kind of soda I like,” Zofia said grumpily when I gave her a meal one day.
Trenton did everything better. They had picked him up last winter, a skier who went off-trail and got lost in the mountains. In the tapestry, he was set to die there. Worried that she was going to see my aggravation in the shielding, I didn’t say anything and brought her a different kind of soda at the next meal. Making a mental note that that one didn’t inspire a complaint, I figured it was the one she preferred. Once she asked me to go to her room and find a book she wanted to reread. She couldn’t remember the title or even the genre, but there was a character in it named Lance. Then she sniped at how long it took, like I was magically supposed to know which book of the dozens around her bed she meant. I had had to page through them fast, hunting down a mention of a Lance.

She wasn
’t vicious so much as dumb. Barasho and Makala were generally indifferent to my presence, but Japheem terrified me through and through. His mood could change on a dime, happy to raging, raging to sad, sad to happy once more. There was no rhyme or reason to it, only the whims of madness. Once he had the anemoi surround me, and I stood there in terror at the rasp of fur, the teasing bite of their teeth on my legs. Blood ran down my skin from shallow lacerations and I screamed while Japheem laughed. The only reason he stopped was due to Makala snapping, since the screams were interfering with the movie she was watching beside Barasho. Japheem sent me away, and I waited in dread during the hours that passed for him to call my name.

As his leg was still healing
, he made me walk him into his room since sleeping on the sofa was not as comfortable as upon the bed. His weight was heavy against my shoulder, heavier was his jangling music pulling me apart, and heaviest still was the horror that he was going to want me to stay in there with him for the night. And he did for a while, but only to clean up his clothes and tidy his belongings while he lay upon the mattress in sour spirits. Books and magazines and clothes, toys and knick-knacks and random items, it was like Kishi’s room but without projects bringing it to any cohesion. It was just a dump. I stacked his books along one wall and piled the magazines beside them. Into a basket I dumped all of the toys. As I started on the clothes, he said hatefully, “You like them, don’t you?”

“Like what?” I asked in fear.
There was nearly a dark aura around him, and I couldn’t figure out if he meant I liked his toys or his books.

“The Kreeling
hunters,” Japheem said. “You like them.”

“I don’t even know them,” I answered.
What he saw in my soul did not try his temper further. It was the truth; I hardly knew them, and I hadn’t enjoyed the short acquaintance we shared. Still, I would rather listen to them being rude about the Graystones than be here. None of them bore me any ill will. They just weren’t very warm and fuzzy people.

“Such pretty chords your soul plays,”
Japheem said, retreating to placidity. “Plunk-PLUNK-plunk.” His fingers waved in the air like he was strumming the strings of a harp. “Oh, I will always be able to find this sound now, wherever you might go. I hear souls, Jessa Bright. I can hear so much music all at once. But hearing yours now, hearing it over days, it marks itself indelibly upon me. I can find it in all of the racket that is this world. Wherever you go, I can follow. Plunk-PLUNK-plunk. Plunk-PLUNK-plunk. Miles could be between us and still, and still I will be able to hear it, just like I hear Trenton’s. His is not so pretty. Thud-thud-THUD. Thud-thud-THUD. But you and I, you and I will play hide-and-seek sometime around these caves, and you will see how I can always find you. One day we will play this game in a city. You will creep about and think this place, this dark place down here, this dark place down here he will never find me! And you will crouch down and wait and wait in this dark place for me to reach a count of one hundred, and straight shall I come to you. Japheem! Japheem, you will cry! Japheem, how did you know? You will laugh with joy at how I found you so easily, and hold out your arms that I might embrace you. And I will say plunk-PLUNK-plunk goes your soul, and it draws me here. Go away right now! I will close my eyes and cover my ears and count to ten. You hide in another room. Go, go!” He waved his hands in excitement.

I went obediently back into the corridor as he counted with his face buried in the pillow
like a child. In silent steps, I concealed myself in the room that Barasho and Makala shared. They lived in heaps. A heap of clothes, a heap of toiletries, a heap of books, like mountains behind their mattress. Crouching down behind the heap of clothes since it was the tallest, I waited there.

“Ten!”
His mattress squeaked. “Plunk-PLUNK-plunk. Little Jessa has gone to Barasho and Makala’s room!” He laughed and laughed as my heart chilled. There was no way he could have seen me go in there, or heard me either. He bid me to come back and I did.

I returned to picking up his clothes.
Still laughing on his bed, he said, “You will like that game one day! And you will like my mark on your wrist! It is so very pretty. Let me see it.”

When I showed him the brand
upon the wrist of my left hand, he smiled and relaxed. “That was the mark they put on the cave I was within, its address so the caretakers knew where to go. I stared at it for many long years, since back then they did not bind our heads. Now I put that mark wherever I go, burning it into places as they burned it into my eyes. Now I make them look at it! I got out of there, those Ripper caves. They thought they could keep me, riding along in my memories until the world ends. But no, no, no, I didn’t float away like the others. I
stayed
. And then that girl came through, that lonely girl set to checking on us. She couldn’t be a hunter, no, no, no. Oh no, not with that gimpy knee of hers that she picked up in training. Do you want to know how she hurt her knee?”

“Yes, Japheem,” I said.

“She landed the wrong way while jumping over boulders on a kreolos obstacle course, a course that she had run many times. How sad. Relegated to cold assignments all of her life when she was hungry for action. Oh, she was hungry, Jessa! I saw that in her soul. Like a racehorse taken to the gate, pawing and eager to run, just waiting for the bar to fall. Three . . . two . . . one . . . STOP!” He cried it so loudly that I jumped and dropped a shirt. This he found funny.

When at last his humor ran out, Japheem said, “How did I escape the Ripper caves, Jessa?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you guess?”

“It has something to do with that Kreeling girl who could not hunt.”

“Yes!
Good, second Jessa. Oh, we talked and talked. I apologized so much for the music that surrounds me, and I insisted that she stay back. How I loathe the way it troubles people. Some humans do not hear it as much. They feel it though, like a current along the bottom of a wave. And they dislike it, and dislike me. Sit, sit!” Japheem said sweetly. I didn’t move, unclear if he meant the girl in the story or myself. Again he cried, “Sit, sit!” So I sat and folded the clothes I had gathered, staying in the entryway where the chords were muted. For the moment, he was beaming at me like we were the very best of friends.

“That was what I told her.
Sit, sit, girl! Please tell me what happened to that poor knee that pains you! Oh, how horrid. This world is so unfair.” He looked genuinely distressed. “She had good things to give to this earth, and the world failed to give good things to her. Oh, how she wanted to chase the cut, to avenge the grandmother she lost. Yes, those cut, how they need chasing! And you, second Jessa, you knew that cut one in Seataw. He was the boy to fight Zofia at your school. Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes,” I
admitted.

He shook his head in chastisement.
“Never be friends with the cut. They have no souls.”

Oh God, what I would have given to see Zakia’s sweet, handsome face at this moment.
To smell the good earth of him and be swept up by that cute smile, to wrestle over the remote control and stuff our faces with ice cream. There was a soul in those dark eyes and I felt such affection for it. He had tried to save me in the high school parking lot, and I hoped he wasn’t too hurt. I would never watch a movie like
Zombie Blast
again, and was ashamed that I had ever watched them at all.