Kia and Gio (2 page)

It was getting dark; the bush we were in was already swamped in shadows and the sky turned turquoise through the trees above us. Gio fumbled in his pockets and then produced a black cigarette. I gasped. He rolled his eyes, fumbled again, took out a lighter. The sugary scent of cloves filled the air; it was sweet and perfect, Giovanni's magic pixie powder.

“How you gonna be all mad that I'm loud,” I hissed, “and then light a great big beacon of flame and send all that smoke out? You know he gonna see it.”

“He's not even home yet—look the lights are out. Anyway, you can't really stake out a house and not smoke. It's like, the rules.”

“I guess. If by ‘stake out' you mean ‘stalk.'”

“Shhh!”

I was about to remind him he'd just said no one was home when a light went on. Jeremy appeared, pulling curtains out of the way and then lifting the window. He stuck his head out, smelled the summer breeze (the cloves too probably) and then disappeared back into his room. I elbowed Gio, for no real reason but to indicate that I'd told him so. He nudged me back, but kept smoking.

“You're an asshole,” I whispered. It felt good to swear, mature.

“Shh!”

Music swirled out of Jeremy's room. It was trancelike: a gush of strings and then a heavy beat. Jeremy sailed past his window, arms over his head, a perfectly executed grande jeté. He emerged, pirouetting, in the next window just as a pleading, luscious voice came in over the beat.

I tugged on Gio's sleeve. “What's this music?”

“It's Björk.”

“What's a
Björk
?”

“Shh!” That was the moment I understood he would never marry me. The boy was entranced. I could see Jeremy dancing in Gio's eyes, the glare from the bedroom lighting up his face, his mouth hanging slightly open. I might not've had the words for it at the time, but inside I knew: it was love. Not that bullshit TV love; not the corny love-song love either.
True love.
The kind that people get themselves killed for. The kind that makes you do really, really stupid things.

“Gio?”

“Girl, if I have to tell you to shush one more…”

“What are we really doing here?”

The music churned on. Gio kept his gaze fixed on the window.

*   *   *

Something is clogging up the air in the botánica. My eyes are watering, and I can't tell if it's because I'm getting all emo from thinking about Giovanni or if some thickness has settled over the room. No, it's definitely not me. I peek through the aisles, but Eliades is hidden behind a bookshelf. I can't inhale fully; my breath stops at the top of my chest and makes me cough. I'm just thinking how strange it is that there's no actual smoke when the smoke alarm goes off. My heart is in my ears, pounding away, before I can even leap into action. All these saints, all this spiritual power—and yes, let's be honest, some of it is junk, but there's plenty of sacred relics too—I can't be the one that let it all go up in flames. I leap out from behind the counter, scanning the air around me for signs of smoke.

But there's nothing there. No smoke. No flames. I still have to fight to tug oxygen down my trachea though, and my vision is getting foggy. “Eliades!” I yell, but the bleating alarm blots it out. I stand up on a chair and a fiddle with the plastic thing till it shuts up. Then I look around.

It's back.
Eliades' words echo through my head over and over again.
It's back.
I didn't even bother asking what—it's not my business and what could I do about it anyway?
It's back.
He elongated the
It
in that way people do when they're talking about something they don't want to speak out loud, like just saying it was a punch in the gut.
It's back.

“Eliades?”

The room is so quiet now. I don't even hear the traffic outside or the shoppers around the corner on Graham or the bachata that usually streams out of the music store across the street. “Eliades?” I sound like such a little girl—pathetic. I'm standing on this chair, looking like an arch idiot, gazing over a perfectly still room. Awesomely, I left my cell back on the desk. I could call Baba Eddie, but I don't want to move from right here. Somehow I'm positive that if I move, it's all over. So I don't. I wait.

*   *   *

I gasped when I realized we weren't alone in the woods. The men standing around us—they didn't walk there; we would've heard them. They just appeared out of the darkness. There were six of them. They had white, almost greenish skin, broad shoulders, bugged-out eyes, and smirking, deeply lined faces. They hunched over slightly, all of them the same way, but their arms were long, too long. I almost screamed when I noticed them, but I kept it in. They just stood there, staring at Jeremy's entrancing performance much like Gio was. Ever so slowly, I wrapped my little hand around Gio's wrist. He was about to shush me but I squeezed, squeezed so hard he shut up. When he finally saw the men, he let out just the tiniest of gasps. I thought it was too loud, but they didn't look over, just kept those pushed-out eyes squinting straight ahead at Jeremy's house. The air filled with whispers, a dissonant hissing and occasional mumbled words:
come, one, master, breaker, only one, come.

Then they started walking, all at the same time. They moved through the trees into the backyard. It was a slow, deliberate walk, each step careful and precise, long arms dangling by their sides. I couldn't stop staring at them, but something else was tweaking my attention in the corner of my eye. Something was moving. I looked towards it, but it was so dark, the trees were just shadows against the night. Still, there was movement. The trees—the trees were moving. They were alive somehow, shifting, writhing in the darkness.

No. I stepped closer to look at the nearest one to me. No, it was alive with insects. Shiny-backed cockroaches swarmed over the thing, the big kind. But they weren't the normal dark orange color; they were pale, almost pink.

I opened my mouth to scream and a hand wrapped around it. I was about to start fighting for my life when I smelled that shea butter/BO mix that I knew so well. Giovanni. He lifted me up and turned me around. “Don't say a fucking word,” he hissed. “Don't even fucking cry.”

I nodded, tears streaming down my face. Giovanni would make everything all right. He always did. Giovanni would get me out of here.

“Listen to me, Kia. Go home.” My stomach plummeted. “Go now.”

“N…”I started to say, but he shushed me with a look.

“Don't look back. Just go. I'll be home soon.”

I shook my head.

“Kia.” No debate, no whining. This was not a game. And I had no choices. “Go.” He put me down and turned towards where the six men made their slow journey towards Jeremy's house.

The trees all around me crawled with pale roaches. I took a step backwards, but Gio didn't even look to see if I'd gone. He launched down the hill, quiet as a ninja. I saw the light glint over his muscley arm, saw a splotch against it, another roach, just before he swiped it off. I cringed. My whole body wanted to vanish, burst out of the trees and get as far away as I could. But my heart wouldn't let me turn away from my cousin. I stood perfectly still, caught between the two impossible choices, and anyway: useless.

Gio came up behind the first man at a sliding crouch. He anchored one leg in the dirt and flew up into the air, flashing the other leg out in a stunning roundhouse kick. His foot found its mark; the man collapsed with an eerie silence. I think Gio was as stunned as I was: for a solid three seconds he just stood there gaping at the man sprawled on the ground. The others didn't seem to notice, or, if they did, they didn't care; the slow march toward the house continued.

I took a few steps down the hill. I couldn't watch, couldn't stop watching. Gio stepped over the one he'd taken out, but a hand came up from the ground and wrapped around his leg, dropping him to one knee. The man rose up fast, faster than he should've been able to after taking a hit like that. Two of the other men stopped and turned slowly towards the fray. Gio stabilized himself in a sturdy horse-riding stance, so he was ready when the blow came. It was clumsy and slow, like the man couldn't quite get his limbs to do what he wanted them to, but I could tell from the way Gio leaned to the side that there was an unnatural force to it. Gio sidestepped and let the weight of the guy's hit do the work, just like he'd been taught. As the man stumbled forward, Gio brought his elbow down on the back of his head.

The two other men moved in from either side. Gio's hoarse yell cut through the quiet suburban night: “Jeremy! Run!” Even the attackers seemed startled. Jeremy appeared at the window and everyone looked up at him. Gio took advantage of the confusion, kicking in the kneecaps of one man and then spin-smashing the other, another roundhouse. The first was done—I saw him crumple, again with that impossible silence, but the second guy recovered quick and barreled into Gio.

The back door of the house swung open and Jeremy gaped out. “What's going on? Giovanni?” It was like an electric shock went through the three men not busy with Gio. They lurched forward, crowding around Jeremy, blocking the door from closing.

“Get inside!” Gio yelled from the ground. The man closest to him smashed him hard across the face and he fell limp as the rest of them disappeared into the house.

I ran. I ran straight into the center of all that hell. Felt something tickling my arm and swiped at it over and over without bothering to even look at what it was. The man who'd hit Gio was crouching in the dirt with his back to me, and me, I thought of death. No strategy, no caution: just death. Because all my little body could do was surge forward, even as my mind screamed at it to turn back, and the man was only a few steps from me now.

Gio's leg came out of nowhere, swept like a lightening bolt along the ground, and took the guy's legs right out from under him. The guy fell so fast you could actually hear the swoosh of wind. Before I could even yell, the man was on the ground and Gio was over him, and then Gio's foot was smashing down, again and again on the man's face. I heard the squishing destruction of flesh, then a much sharper cracking sound, and then it was just a dull thud, over and over again under Gio's sobbing breaths.

And then something started moving. I saw Gio tense, but it wasn't the man, it was something else. The broken skin of his face writhed to life and the thousand pale cockroaches that had been his skin scattered away. More poured out of his sleeves, from under his collar, swarmed off his hands to reveal shreds of flesh clinging to raggedy bones. Gio and I both stepped back, but the roaches weren't interested in us; they scattered outward in a confused swarm and then flushed as one towards the house. Towards Jeremy.

“No!” Gio yelled. I couldn't even catch my breath before he'd turned and stormed past the roach swarm into the back door.

“Gio!” I yelled. We were still alive. Why couldn't he understand what a miracle that was? A few minutes ago I thought everything was over, and now we were alive: both of us! I hated my cousin almost as much as I loved him right then. The night was so quiet. I heard the gentle evening song of the cicada, a few night birds chirping in the trees above me. Someone was watching TV in a house nearby, a reality show, from the sound of it. Had no one heard us screaming? For a terrible moment, I wondered if any of it had even happened. Then I walked shakily towards the house, barely breathing, barely conscious.

Inside, there was a dim little alcove with winter jackets hung up, and a cubby area full of weathered board games. Something glinted from the short stairwell leading into the kitchen. Not roaches; it was perfectly still: blood. I moved faster, stepping around the wet spots and up into the kitchen; all dark, no one there. From somewhere in the house, Gio was yelling: “Jeremy? Jeremy?” I released a dark little sandbag of weight from my heart. Gio was safe for the moment. If he was looking for Jeremy, he wasn't fighting the crazy cockroach men. If he was looking for Jeremy, he was alive. The thought of ending this with Gio still intact made me want to sit down at the kitchen table and sob, but I kept going, through a windy hallway, past the living room—moderately fancy and very lived-in—and up the stairs.

“I told you to…” Gio mumbled when he saw me. “…I thought I told you to…” His eyes were so wide, the way horses look in movies when they get shot; like, you didn't know they could get so wide, that such noble, magnificent creatures could actually be afraid. “He's gone.” Gio fell against the wall and slid down into a crouch, sobbing. “They got him.”

“Gio.” My little ten-year old voice sounded calm, authoritative, for the first time in my life. And there I was, still in my tutu. I felt ridiculous. “We gotta go, Gio. We gotta go now.”

He looked up. I'd broken through to him. He nodded, took the trembling hand I'd reached out to him, and stood.

*   *   *

The smoke alarm screams to life again. This time my ears are so close to it that the shock almost knocks me off the chair I'm standing on. Also, the lights have gone out. It's mid-day, so I'd barely noticed, but yes, a certain glower has fallen over the room now. I turn and wrench the damn smoke alarm right off the wall with a grunt, drop it on the ground. I have to get out of here. I have to go, I have to go now. I step down and nothing comes to kill me, so that's good. The air is so thick, I feel like I'm wading through it. I'm halfway to the door when I hear Eliades groan. I was so anxious to get out I'd blocked him from my mind completely.

Eliades is responsible for this mess. He brought his crap in here, whatever
it
is. I bristle. And Baba Eddie gets half the credit for not being on time, dammit. Either way, it's not my problem. And who am I to get involved? I take another step towards the door, put my hand on the handle, close my eyes.