Iron Inheritance (16 page)

I looked to the side at Josh. His essence was more of a Red Delicious now, floating through him like he was made of light instead of skin and bone. None of the others around us looked like him or me—their essence hovered around their solid torsos like hazy starburst patterns of yellow or pink or blue or gray. Lots of gray.

Josh put his hand on my shoulder. I blinked and looked up—his stone cut jaw rigid, blue eyes staring straight ahead.

I followed his gaze, the essence fading from my vision as my pulse slowed. A man in a white dress shirt caught my eye, his chest oscillating between too bright and too dark.

He looked back at us, straight at us, and smiled. He scraped his bare feet across the gray tile and lifted his hands slightly. He tilted his head back like he was singing in some silent musical, his fingertips flitting across people’s shirts and pant lines without them even noticing.

The effect was immediate. Their faces crunched into disgusted, angry scowls. They glared at the others around them, and their own essence dimmed.

Five seconds later, they started yelling. Ten people’s angry voices erupted and echoed off the concrete walls until every eye in the station was on them. They were inches away from each other, mouths spitting accusations and threats, eyes bulging, arms flexing. Any moment, it would turn into a riot.

And yet, my ears cancelled out the noise. I locked my eyes onto the man in the white shirt, his trail of destruction behind him. He had moved to the bumpy yellow edge of the platform. His neck cricked to the side, and his limbs jerked uncontrollably, violently.

Then I blinked, and he was gone.

My legs twitched into a sprint.

“Eve, don’t touch his—” Josh called, just behind me.

I pushed through the yelling crowd and jumped down between the tracks. He was unconscious.

I crouched down and tried to lift him up, but when my hand touched his skin, he convulsed again and raked his nails into my arm.

I screamed and jumped back just as Josh’s feet crunched into the gravel. The man lunged forward and sank his teeth into Josh’s calf.

Josh grunted, surprised, and swung his right fist down on the man’s forehead like a hammer. His jaw sprang open like Josh had hit a reset button.

“Hold him!” Josh sucked in air through his teeth.

I dove forward and pinned his shoulders to the dirt paste between the railroad ties. My mind whirled in disbelief; my body acted almost independently.

The man in white blinked to consciousness again and screamed, his head twisting, teeth gnashing like a wild animal.

A deep, molar-rattling horn blared behind us. Another train was coming. I could almost see its single headlight singe the dark tunnel wall a football field away.

“We don’t have time for this,” Josh said, pinning the man’s legs as he continued to try and thrash about. “We have to put him down,” he said, his eyes glinting in concentration as he raised his hand over his head. A red hammer with a thick rectangular head appeared instantly.

I stared up at it. What did he mean, put him down?

Josh’s muscles tensed, and he swung the hammer toward the man’s chest like he was going to smash through his ribcage and splatter his heart on the rusty tracks.

“Josh, no!” I flung my whole body forward, my ear pressed to the man’s ribcage, my eyes wide open to the blinding, peripheral red light.

Josh didn’t falter an instant, his eyes more intense than I’d ever seen them.

Fear exploded inside of me. I wanted to scream, but all I could manage was to tense up for the crushing blow.

The brunt of the hammer sailed through my head with a thousand hot tingling sensations firing into my nerves. Distorted images of Josh flashed through my mind like memories but faded as quickly as they came.

Josh yelled, and my eyelids sprang apart. “Eve!”

I looked up. He had the man propped up and was trying to force him back onto the platform. People reached down, shouting at us frantically, their eyes no longer filled with the anger and hate that had encompassed them moments ago.

I stumbled up and helped Josh push, but just as the man’s feet went past my head, Josh collapsed.

The train’s horn blared again, the light close enough to blind.

I bent down and grabbed Josh’s shirt. He lay on the ground, reaching toward his leg in apparent agony. A black, writhing leach sucked on his wound. He clawed at it, trying to scrape it off, but with each attempt, he grew weaker and weaker.

I scooped one arm under his back and the other under his legs, willing my mind not to think about how heavy he would be, how even if I managed to shove him onto the platform, I wouldn’t have enough time to pull myself up.

I crouched down to use my legs for the impossible lift, preparing for the strain, the intense burn of acid that would eat away at muscle. Hands stretched out toward us, faces pale from terror and the sapping light beaming from the center of the train’s eye.

The horn was constant now. A metallic screech filled the air as I pressed off the ground with everything I had, the train’s light at eye level.

Until it wasn’t anymore.

It was below—the whole train was underneath us going by in slow motion.

My legs had launched us twenty feet into the air in between the steel I-beams that cantilevered over the tracks. The train sailed by beneath, and we drifted to the left—floating through fifty pounding heartbeats—until my feet slammed into the concrete platform like two sledgehammers.

Dust plumed from the craters under my feet and shielded us from view. Josh was cradled in my arms, one hand still clutched around the dark mass, the muscles in his forearms tensed like they had been set in stone.

I laid Josh on the ground, and people formed a circle around us, no one saying a word.

“Wake up, Josh. Wake up,” I pleaded, touching my fingers to his lips to see if he was breathing.

He was, but only barely. The obsidian black leech still sucked on his leg.

Raw panic seized my chest, and I plunged my fingers into the darkness. It was like squirming gelatin motor oil, but the tighter I squeezed, the firmer and easier to grip it became. I peeled it back, and Josh’s eyes burst open instantly.

I fell back, relieved, finally able to breathe because he was.

Someone shouted behind us, and I saw the man in the white shirt lying on the floor five feet away. “What happened? Where am I?” he coughed.

The entire group around Josh and me shifted its attention from us to him. The man sat up and looked at them all, dazed as if he might still be in a dream world and didn’t know which reality to believe.

I turned back to Josh, but he wasn’t there. He had hopped up on his uninjured leg and made his way behind two large columns, somewhat hidden from the crowd. I saw him as he threw his back against the wall and sank to the ground.

I ran over and kneeled next to him, surveying every part of his face. He was still pale, and his eyes were bloodshot. I squinted to try and see his essence, but it was no use. All the colorful lights had concealed themselves from me again. The gelatinous mass squirming in my hand was the only proof that this had all been real—it wasn’t just a dream. “What is this thing?” I held it up to my eyelevel to examine it.

I expected Josh to be happy I’d gotten it off him. Instead, he looked like I’d just stabbed him through the chest.

“What’s wrong?” I said, the dark mass something between vapor and solid, continually shifting its weight back and forth like a waterbed in my hand.

“Give it here, please.” Josh sat up and held out his hand.

A part of me I couldn’t explain didn’t want to give it back. What if it attacked him again?

My pulse quickened as I extended my hand toward Josh’s, a faint glimmer of red around his fingers somehow visible enough for me to see.

The mass was calm and cold against my skin, but the moment it touched his, it writhed uncontrollably. Josh clamped his fingers down, and his whole hand was flung to the left then the right. He grimaced, trying to control it. “When you have a chance, I could use another hand. Mine doesn’t seem to be working right now,” he said without any emotion.

“What can I do?” I said hurriedly.

The mass piloted his hand around incessantly, constantly trying to return to the bleeding wound on his leg.

“Pin my hand to the ground.”

The words weren’t even out before I knelt down next to him, my hips parallel to his, and pinned his wrist to the ground.

“Not too tight now.” He looked up at me with the first semblance of his old sly grin. “Guess you finally found your talent, eh?”

I shook my head in disbelief, my eyes blinking repeatedly as my brain processed what he meant. “I’m a—” I looked down at my hands and felt something more than adrenaline, more than blood pumping through my veins—cool and warm all at once.

“Too tight!”

“Sorry.” I loosened my grip
. I can’t believe this. I’m a Warrior. A Warrior.
Even saying it in the privacy of my mind, I couldn’t believe it.

I took a deep breath and focused on the darkness that thrashed back and forth between Josh’s fingers. “What is it?”

“A demon, sort of. Essence o’demon, really.” Josh grimaced. “When my weapon forced it out of its host, it must have latched on to the weakest part of me it could. Babylonians usually infect humans prone to suicide with them and send them into crowded places, but that hasn’t happened in more than a decade.”

“Demonic suicide bombers. Peachy.”

At the sound of my voice, the black demon essence lunged an almost imperceptible inch toward me, still clutched in Josh’s hand.

Josh took a deep breath, turned his body, and looked straight at the darkness as he said a word I didn’t recognize.

“What was that?” I leaned forward.

It stopped gnashing at his subtly red hand as if frozen in place.

“Hebrew. I said its name,” he said. “With something this weak, their name is all you need to get them to calm down.”

Weak?

“How’d you know its—”

“I’ve done this before. It’s the only way we might be able to interrogate it, find out who sent it, and why.” He scowled and turned his gaze back to the frozen darkness. “Who sent you?”

Its cloudy black insides twisted and writhed beneath its new five-fingered prison. A high-pitched cackle spoke. “Filthy Patron. Don’t know anything, do you?”

My eyes widened in shock.

“Enlighten me,” Josh said coolly.

“My master will return. He will be free! Not even the mighty Brooks could but burn. He still burns.”

A lump caught in my throat. It knew about Grandpa, what happened to him…what was happening to him now. I gritted my teeth to keep from crushing Josh’s wrist. “Who’s your master?”

It turned Josh’s hand slightly as if gazing at me. “Oh, she knows. She knows.”

“Knows what?” I said, reaching out my other hand to choke it.

Josh blocked me with his arm and stared straight down into his hand. “The name of your master.”

It laughed, the cackle scratching my eardrums. “He will find her. He cannot be stopped.” It turned toward me again. “He will find her. He cannot be stopped.”

“Yeah, we heard you the first time,” Josh said, his red hammer in his hand again. He pressed it up against the mass like he was going to force the whole thing down its nonexistent throat.

A sharp screech of laughter echoed in my ears. “She knows!”

Red light flashed in Josh’s hand, and it screamed in agony. Then, an overwhelming smell of charcoal spread through the air with a final puff of smoke.

I released Josh’s wrist, and my head swam with more questions than answers. Who was his master? Was Grandpa really burning? How could Grandpa’s “loving God” do that to him?

I breathed hard; steam would have been coming off my skin if it had been colder. Several people stood around us now, though none of them looked directly at us. They stood aloof, like they were glad we were ok but didn’t want to interrupt.

I peered across the platform. The train was still stopped, the interior lights illuminating the man in the white shirt and the people he had touched. His eyes were wide, as if everything around him was new, and they were apologizing to one another for their yelling. Did they have any idea what had just happened?

My gaze continued across the platform and stopped on a glass display case just opposite us. I saw our reflections, except it didn’t show us just sitting there looking dumbstruck. Instead, we were tangling more limbs than I could count in a mad, desperate, passionate kiss that would have been accompanied by epic music at the end of a romantic movie.

My eyes widened, and my cheeks flushed. “What’s—”

The intense, thoughtful scowl Josh had donned for the demon disappeared when he looked up and saw our reflection. He blushed as red as the essence I’d seen around him moments ago. “It’s a mirage—essence powered, tricky to make in the best of times. High emotions and all.” He pushed himself up onto his good leg. “Don’t worry. You’ll be able to control it one day.”

“You think I—”

Mirror-him grabbed my hips, pulling me closer. His lips glided over mine as my hands reached around his back.

Josh peered around the crowd toward the stairs. “Humans can’t see essence most of the time,” he whispered. “But when there’s an overwhelming amount, their eyes play tricks on them—mirages, hallucinations,” he finished quickly and motioned for me to follow him up the stairs. “The whole time we were on the tracks, they probably saw something completely different.”

I nodded, looking back when I got to the top. The people who had been around us didn’t even notice us getting up, but a pair of eyes from farther down the track seemed trained on my back. When I blinked, they were gone.

I stayed slightly behind Josh as we walked down the main tunnel toward the other platforms. There were narrower burrows to the left and right, leading to different trains every twenty feet or so.

“We’ll take this one, and then circle back through another station,” said Josh, attempting to walk normally as a pair of police officers jogged past us.

We turned down another set of stairs and boarded a train just as it was about to leave. The rigid plastic chairs creaked as we sat down, our shoulders bumping together.