Fractured
Authors: Sarah Fine
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Fantasy & Magic, #Paranormal
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 by Sarah Fine
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York
ISBN-13: 9781477816912
ISBN-10: 1477816917
Source photos courtesy of Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
For Alma, my very own warrior girl.
CONTENTS
ONE
MY CAPTOR PACED THE
entryway with heavy footsteps while I sat in a wooden chair backed against the wall. My heart beat hard against my ribs, keeping time with my primitive, animal thoughts:
escape escape escape
.
My rational side, dwarfed by instinct, somehow managed to whisper,
It’s not like this is a life-threatening situation. I’ll get out of it alive. I hope
.
I leaned forward and planted my feet on the floor, estimating the number of seconds it would take to reach the exit.
The fierce stare of my jailer told me she was thinking the same thing. She halted in front of the door and crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t even think about it, baby. I’m responsible for you. This is a big deal.”
I leaned my head back and banged it softly against the wall. “Only because you made it one.”
Diane made her all-purpose
mm-mm-mm
sound of disapproval. “You’ve just gone through something big, and now—”
I was saved from a lecture by a knock at the door, but the knowledge of who it was sent my heart rate skyrocketing. I stood up on shaky legs as Diane turned the knob and swung it wide.
I was still getting used to seeing him in regular clothes rather than armor and fatigues. A week ago he’d shown up at my school, looking like an ordinary high school student instead of a deadly Guard. Well, “ordinary” probably wasn’t the right word. He couldn’t look ordinary if he tried. And he was trying. Tonight, he wore jeans and a zipped-up gray hoodie. His face was angular and stark, with olive skin framed by ink-black hair; his eyes, which were so dark they looked like solid ebony circles, held an expression I’d seen before.
He was doing his best to look harmless, but he wasn’t very good at it. He still looked like he could kill someone without breaking a sweat.
Probably because he could.
“Ms. Jeffries?” Even though he spoke perfect English, every consonant was harder, every vowel deeper, resulting in this clipped, precise accent that perfectly matched his appearance. He held out his hand. “Malachi Sokol. So nice to meet you.”
I drew up alongside Diane in time to see her eyebrows nearly hit her hairline. She’d spent her entire career working as a corrections officer at the medium-security prison, so she had a pretty keen sense of danger. Malachi had obviously triggered her alarm. She shook his hand and stepped back to allow him into the entryway. “Nice to meet you, too. Lela said you just arrived here in the States?”
“Yes, it’s a brief exchange program. An opportunity to experience American culture before I graduate,” he replied, but his focus had already shifted from Diane.
To me.
His smile was a devastating curl of his lips as his eyes met mine. From behind his back, he produced a small bouquet of flowers, a few yellow-and-white blooms and several pale-green buds, wrapped in cellophane. “These are for you.”
It took me a few seconds, but I managed to get my hands and fingers to work together to take the flowers from his hand. “Thanks,” I said, but it came out as a choked whisper.
Malachi’s brows lowered and concern flashed in his eyes before he turned back to Diane. “I’d like to introduce my host father.” He gestured toward the front steps.
Raphael, dressed in khakis and a sweater, stepped into the entryway and held out his hand. “Ms. Jeffries. I’m John Raphael. Thank you so much for inviting us to dinner. I was so pleased to hear Malachi had already made a friend.”
As he smiled, his face transformed from forgettable to indelible, from ordinary to … well, angelic. Whenever Raphael smiled, I wished I had my camera to capture it.
The tension melted from Diane’s body as she shook Raphael’s hand. Her face relaxed into a warm smile. “I was happy, too, for Lela,” she said, which nearly made me laugh, because we’d had a raging argument this afternoon about whether I could go out with Malachi tonight. It was the first time I’d ever asked to go out with a boy, the first time I’d ever mentioned one, actually, and judging by the way she’d clutched at her chest when I did, it really caught her by surprise. Especially because things had been so miserable since Nadia killed herself. Diane couldn’t understand how I’d “snapped out” of my grief in the past week.
She didn’t know I’d followed Nadia into death. That I’d seen my best friend again. That I not only suspected Nadia was in a better place—I knew it at a bone-deep level. I’d made sure of it, in fact.
I’d sold my own freedom to make it happen.
While Diane and Raphael chatted about the joys of parenting teenagers, I went to the kitchen with the flowers, staring at those thinly veined buds as my throat tightened. I opened a cabinet to pull out a plastic vase, and when I closed it, Malachi was standing beside me.
“You don’t like them?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I love them. It’s just … no one’s ever given me flowers before.” I turned my back, rolling the delicate stems between my fingers. It was one of those cheap grocery-store bouquets. Tegan, the new queen bee of Warwick High School since Nadia’s death, would have scoffed at the already-wilting necks, the scraggly little petals. But to me …
Malachi’s fingers skimmed along my shoulder. “I have never given a girl flowers before.” He laughed quietly. “I hadn’t actually seen a flower up close in a long time.”
He’d spent the last several decades in a walled city of cement and steel and slime, where the only things that grew were the festering wishes of the dead, sorrowful people trapped there. Because it was always dusk or midnight, never day, nothing green or lush or
real
could grow. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Something had grown between
us
.
I turned back to him and reached for his hand. I wasn’t used to this yet, this permission to touch. His skin was so warm. Real.
Here
.
“Unbelievable,” I whispered.
He grinned and pulled me toward him, but at that exact moment Diane entered the kitchen. Malachi let go of me and stepped back, clearing his throat.
“I hope you like pasta,” she said to him. Her tone was light, but she shot him a look. He’d been warned.
“I suspect I will love anything you cook,” he replied. I had no doubt that was true. Malachi hadn’t eaten a decent meal since well before his death, sometime in the early 1940s.
Malachi and I set the table while Raphael poured us each a glass of lemonade. Dinner had been Diane’s idea. She had insisted on meeting both Malachi and his “people” before she would allow me to go out with him. She kept narrowing her eyes, like she was wondering if he’d come armed. I was wondering the same thing. And while I’d seen Malachi kill Mazikin with deadly accuracy and powerful grace, I’d rarely seen him do anything as mundane as setting forks on a table. By the way he watched his own hands and carefully placed each piece of cutlery, he was probably thinking about it as well. I was dying to ask him what was going on inside his head, to finally get to know the real him better. Maybe there would be time to do that now that we were here, on Earth, and not trapped in hell.
The past week hadn’t given us many opportunities, though. We’d spent what little time we had together focused on making sure Malachi had the basic skills he needed to function in the modern world, like operating a microwave and using a cell phone. I’d spent the rest of my after-school hours dutifully attending a series of doctor appointments Diane had set up to make sure I wasn’t in need of psychiatric hospitalization. As soon as I’d walked her back from that cliff, I asked if I could go out with Malachi. We couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
“Where exactly are you from?” Diane asked him as we sat down to eat.
“Bratislava,” he said. “Slovakia.”
“What do your parents do?”
My throat tightened again as I watched him give Diane a small, sad smile. “My father owns a shoe store,” he said slowly. “My mother, she stays at home. She’s a very good cook.” He bowed his head for a second. “I miss her cooking.”
The sharp edges of Diane’s expression and voice immediately softened. “You’re homesick, poor baby.”
Malachi swallowed and took a breath. “Always. But I am happy to be here. And happy to have met Lela.”
“Thank you for agreeing to let Lela drive,” said Raphael, passing the garlic bread to Diane and drawing attention away from Malachi, allowing him a chance to recover from the mention of his parents, who had died at the hands of the Nazis.
“Actually, I think it’s good for Lela to do the driving,” said Diane. She’d told me she wanted me to be able to dump Malachi and drive away if he got “handsy.”
Raphael was a charming dinner companion and had no trouble getting Diane to talk about herself, her family, her pride that I was college-bound. As he kept her going, I watched Malachi eat. Every bite looked like an act of worship. He told Diane how delicious it was at least ten times. She probably thought he was kissing her ass, but I knew it for what it was—the absolute truth. The food in the dark city sucked.
“We need to leave soon if we’re going to make that movie,” I said as we finished up. I was more than ready to make a break for it and be alone with Malachi.
“Which theater are you going to?” asked Diane. “Not Providence Place, all right?”
Here we go
. “No, but it’s really not a big—”
She gripped her fork like a weapon and glared at me. “Those crazies were caught on video only about ten miles from here. You’re not going anywhere near that city until they catch them.” She wasn’t the only one freaking out. We lived in Warwick, but Rhode Island was the size of a teacup, and the entire state was in an uproar about the sightings.
