Ravens (28 page)

****

Liam created a twisted and vengeful
illusion. He couldn’t do more than make the men think that they went insane
just enough to allow Kendra time to escape.

Mr. Dandial stared at the doctor’s gun.
He screamed, seeing instead, a slithering cobra wrapped around his partner’s
wrist and arm.

“What?” Dr. Orian yelled over the roar
of thunder.

Mr. Dandial glanced up and then jumped
back, aiming his weapon at his partner.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” Dr. Orian
lifted his arm in a non-threatening manner.

The driver stared into the restless
white and black eyes of the doctor. How could he never have known? His own
partner was a Raven!

The weapon clicked in the torrential
downpour.

Dr. Orian lowered his weapon when he saw
the spark in his assistant’s eyes. “You’re one of them,” he snarled.

Liam grimly watched on with the power of
a puppet master. He took a liking to this ability; it was more powerful than he
could have ever imagined with the possibilities. He lacked the time to venture
into his true potential.

He would come back for them later. Right
now, he needed to get Kendra out of here and the best plan of action was to
take the men out. They didn’t own real guns, so they couldn’t kill each other.
They would lie on the side of the road until someone found them and called the
police. They would be okay. The sting would wear off in a matter of hours and
they would fight their way back to consciousness, only to find themselves in
the hospital.

What would they say then? They stole a
young woman for research on parallel worlds but found themselves in a tempest,
and their partner was a Raven? What in the world was a Raven, the police would
ask. Only a normal person who passed through a portal into this world from a
parallel universe and turned superhuman with freaky eyes and electric powers,
the hunters would say. They stunned each other because they couldn’t let a
Raven get away, even if that Raven was their own partner.

The medical doctors would check them out
and reveal that neither was superhuman and they had the bruises and trembling
nerves to prove it.

****

Kendra stumbled out of the car onto the
soft, dry dirt. Grabbing onto the car, she pulled herself up. Every bit of
effort seemed tumultuous.

With a grunt, she clawed the top of the
car as she tried to drag herself up to a steady stand. She focused on the two
men in front of her and gasped in horror. In the middle of the clear autumn
afternoon with a light breeze, the sun beating down upon the earth, her two
captors stood at a faceoff with tazers aimed at each other.

Kendra squinted as the men pulled their
triggers at the same time. The hunters electrocuted each other, crying out and
falling down in spasms. 

Kendra jerked away. She couldn’t feel
bad for them, they deserved it.

They stopped close enough to Kendra’s
home that she could walk, but far enough that neither Randal nor her parents
would pass by them.

“Get back to the barn. It’s not far
now.” Liam appeared next to her. “Here, let me help you.”

He wrapped his burly right arm beneath
Kendra’s armpit and around her ribs, helping her to move along. Liam’s touch
wasn’t real, just another illusion, but she could feel it and it played tricks
with her mind. If she thought another person physically helped her, she could walk.
If she felt her weight leaning into him while Liam took the brunt of the work,
she could move faster.

How could she have doubted him? How
could she face her parents and Randal again? She couldn’t. It took all of this
for her to realize that she did not belong here.

“Getting some feeling back, darling?” he
asked with his lips at her ear.

She groaned. “Never better.”

There was still the matter of getting
her back to the barn and sneaking her into the small building that once again
sat barren because the men instructed her parents and Randal not to enter until
they returned to complete a full evaluation of her living conditions.

“You came back for me?” she grunted,
trying to keep pace with him as he hurried her along, moving her away from the
road and into the tree line.

“Of course I did, darling, I promised.
Did you think that I’d leave you?” He smirked.

“Even after our fight?”

“Call that a fight?”

He laughed, hiding the urgency of the
situation. It would take a couple of days for the men to regain consciousness
and be deemed sane enough to call their headquarters or whomever they worked
under to find the girl. They would check the barn first, but by then, Kendra
hopefully passed back and the portal would never reopen at that location again.
Their portal site might be lost forever. It only opened for certain people, and
once they were in the parallel world, the portal didn’t have the need to
reappear.

“I didn’t really mean it,” she muttered.

“Yeah, you did, love, but I understand.
What kind of a guy tells a girl not to trust her parents?”

“One who was right, one I should have
trusted,” she mumbled.

The late evening cooled by the time
Kendra made it back to the barn. The sun had long ago given up and retreated
beyond the horizon. At least by now, Kendra didn’t have to crawl onto her
parent’s property. Her legs no longer wobbled, and her strength returned by
sheer force of will. She battled against her own body, but in the end, her mind
prevailed.

Randal’s car was in the driveway behind
her parents’ cars. The living room light illuminated the room, but the curtains
were drawn. She couldn’t see them, didn’t know if they wept over her or were
glad to finally be rid of the burden.

“Don’t think that, love.” His voice
swept into her ear.

“Can you hear my thoughts?” Her
breathing labored.

“Don’t have to, darling. It’s on your
face. Don’t blame them. They acted in your best interests. This is the hunters’
fault. They’re the ones who lied.”

Kendra locked the barn door behind her
and slid to the ground. Sweet relief! Getting here seemed like it took forever.
Moving was painful, but now the sting from the medication wore off and her body
ached less.

“What now?” she asked.

Liam sat down beside her, taking her
into his arms. Kendra rested her head on his shoulder and snuggled with him.
This felt nice, but not enough.

“We wait for the portal.”

“How long will that take?”

“Hopefully, not long.”

“I’m hungry,” she complained.

Liam took her hand in his, stroking her
palm with his fingers. He wanted to heal her, to take her away from this so he
could protect her in person and then go back and take out the other world
hunters. He couldn’t actually heal her or send waves of energy, but the
deceptions of the mind made more of a difference than one could ever expect.

“Did they hurt you?” His voice sounded
surprisingly affectionate.

“Just in my back where they stunned me.”

“Let me see.”

Kendra twisted away from Liam and pulled
up the back of her tattered and dingy shirt. The concentrated weapon they used
singed through the fabric. Liam ran his fingers across the wide bruise that sat
low on the left side of her back beneath the dragon’s tail.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes, feels like an open wound.”

“I’m sorry, love.” He lowered his head
and kissed it, offering a slight reprieve. “I’ll take care of it when you
portal back.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry. I should’ve
trusted you, listened to you. You tried to help me.”

“It’s all hindsight.”

Kendra sighed. She invited the warmth
and sensation of the tingles from his flesh, but she was tired. She yawned. She
sat back against the young man. Kendra inched closer to sleep, moaning against
the stubble on Liam’s cheek. He let her hand go and raised his left hand to cup
her cheek.

“C’mon, love, stay awake,” he urged her.

Kendra groaned, and pried her lids open.

Liam sounded urgent. “I’ve got to go,
stay awake, or at least change your clothes, get ready, and if you fall asleep
then sleep on the portal site. Kendra? Are you listening?”

He lifted her head, holding her with
both hands.

Her lids fluttered. “I’m awake.”

“I promise to get you steak and lobster
after all this is done, huh? Don’t you have food stashed in here?”

“Just chips and candy, oh and I think
beef jerky.”

“Better than nothing. Go on, get
dressed.”

“Don’t leave,” she muttered, her lids
falling again.

“I’ll be back, trust me.” Liam brushed
his thumb across her cheeks and pressed his lips to hers.

He held onto her mind as long as he
could. He could easily be in danger in his world, and low on energy from all
the time he spent with Kendra across an infinite and intangible space, not to
mention having ventured into the strangers’ minds with such fierceness that he
warped everything in their reality.

“Where are you going?” Kendra opened her
eyes.

His disappearance startled her into
clarity. She shook off her drowsiness and dragged herself across the floor. She
rummaged through her things. Ah. She leaned against the wall and ripped the
bags open. Beef jerky and chips, what a meal. She ate everything she could find
and then wandered into the bathroom to gather faucet water in her cupped hands,
drinking fiercely. She starved. The asylum didn’t get around to feeding her.

With a twinge of renewed energy, Kendra
meandered up the stairs and fished through her clothes. She grunted. It’d been
laundry day when they took her, and most of her clothes were damp and dirty.

She had on a singed and filthy shirt,
and ripped jeans from recent events. She had dirt in her hair from stumbling so
many times in the woods, and scratched skin. She needed a quick shower not only
to clean off, but also to wake up.

At the top of the steps, Kendra rummaged
through her closet. She found only cold weather items hanging on the hangers,
but not one pair of jeans. She fumbled through her dresser. Socks, undies, and
more socks. Stupid laundry day.

She managed to find two articles of
clothing: a pink and brown plaid skirt and a brown tank top. Liam said short
skirts weren’t ideal for kicking butt and raging raids, but she didn’t plan on
delving into a battle. It would have to do.

Kendra pulled off her clothes and took a
quick shower. She let the warm water beat against her skin and carry away all
of the dirt and pain. She scrubbed her skin hard as her anger built against
Randal. She couldn’t be upset with her parents, they only meant for the best,
but Randal was another story and unworthy of stirring her thoughts. He would
have to live with what he did, and if he had any bit of conscience left, this
would serve as enough of a punishment. If only she could show him, prove to him
that he’d been wrong.

She leaned into the water, dropping her
hands. Leaving was for the best, and she didn’t regret this decision. She
wanted to be with Liam and Julie. She wanted to be a Raven. It was her calling,
like every other Raven. Kendra might have been young, but she wasn’t a novice
when it came to knowing what she wanted.

Lifting her head, she froze beneath the
stream of water, staring despondently at the tiled wall. Kendra swallowed. Her
throat felt dry and ached as she held back tears. Something sharp cleaved
across her chest, beneath her ribs where her heart lay. She would put her
parents through another nightmare. They would grieve over her, and who knew if
they could bounce back? Suddenly, all the fights, arguments, and hostility
clustered together into a tight ball at the forefront of her mind. Those
moments were futile and pointless, and could have easily been handled better or
avoided altogether. She couldn’t go back in time and fix those moments, and she
couldn’t see her parents one last time.

After her shower, she took a seat on the
floorboards where the portal formed. Grabbing a notebook and a pen, she wrote a
short letter. It couldn’t be much, since she knew it wouldn’t be safe for her
parents. Kendra expressed her love and her regrets. At the end, she couldn’t
help it. She divulged the information of what happened to her at the asylum,
where they could find the men to prove her story, and where she headed. At the
very end, she asked them never to release this information for fear that the
men would hurt them. It was best to destroy the letter and mend their broken
hearts with the truth their children were alive and doing well.

With a moan, she folded the letter and
held it in her palm, considering the best place to stash it for her parents to
find.

Kendra thought that a shower would have
kept her awake. Instead, it made her drowsy. She passed out in no time.

She woke up during the early morning
hours while still dark out. She groaned and sat up. Her head throbbed. Too much
junk food made her stomach queasy, and she slept on the floor in an awkward
position that led to a crick in her neck. She went from rubbing her throbbing
temples to massaging her aching neck. Liam hadn’t come back. He said he
wouldn’t be gone for long, but hours passed since she last saw him. She
wondered where he could be. This wasn’t like him.