Rising (7 page)

“Styx,” I whisper into the phone and then
toss it as far away as I can.

The world fills with color, a deep,
triumphant blue as Rain steps in front of me. I’ve made him happy somehow. He’s
speaking, and his words drop on me like snowflakes or maybe cheesecake or
anvils.

“…all the victims you have murdered,”
he’s saying, but the snow is warm and beckoning. White like a pillow. I lay my
head down and sleep.

I stand in the center of a labyrinth
next to my battered Christmas tree decorated with my few measly homemade
ornaments. Walls rise up around me, smooth and gray, the color of Tarren’s eyes
when he gets angry. I can’t see above the walls, but I feel distant auras
tugging at my consciousness. I instantly identify them – Ryan, Gabe, Tarren, Rain
Bailey.

Each is trapped in an opposite corner of
the maze. I must save them, but who first? Each of their energies calls to me,
and I start toward one aura, only to turn back and move toward another.

Faint voices echo from unseen places. A
shimmering ghost flits by, and I recognize my adoptive mother, Karen.

“Careful,” Karen says, “stay away from
her hands.”

“But you’re not dead,” I insist before
she evaporates.

The ground lurches. I fall, and for an
instant I’m not in a labyrinth, but somewhere else with a wet rubber floor.

“I said careful with her,” a voice comes
from above. I’m back in the labyrinth and its endless gray walls.  

More ghosts float past – Aunt Rose who
died of skin cancer. Mr. Harren, the janitor of my high school gives me a smile
filled with crooked teeth. I see Jane, with her styled black hair and Snow
White complexion. Guilt tears through me as I look at her. I took something
from her. No, not something,
someone.
Kyle. Jane and Kyle were kind.
They offered to complete my transition, to teach me how to control the hunger.

Jane comes up to me, and her hands dance
with electricity. She wants to hurt me, and I deserve it. She grabs at my
clothes, pulling, ripping.

“No,” I cry out. Then she’s gone, and
I’ve lost my coat.

Heavy steps stomp behind me. Loud steps.
Scary steps. A minotaur. Just as I realize what it is, I hear its angry roar,
which sounds like the squeal of brakes. I move faster, feeling the minotaur’s
breath on my neck. Endless gray walls.

“Shouldn’t she wake up by now?” Francesca
asks in a man’s voice as she floats past.

“Her heat signature is higher than what
we’ve seen before,” Dr. Lee responds, and his brow crinkles. “It’s all very
curious.”

Gabe is the one I will rescue first.
Tarren can fight. Rain Bailey shot me, and Ryan is already dead. So it will be
Gabe. I sprint toward his aura.

“But we need to question her,” Ambrosia
the stripper says as she clomps around in her heavy go-go boots.

“No, this one is mine,” Lo answers, his
dark eyes angry. His voice is different, though familiar. “No one touches her
but me.”

I turn a corner and feel Gabe’s energy
grow closer.

“I could have made you invincible,” a
voice says with the fervor of a true believer.

I know that voice. Grand is the
minotaur. Grand, my biological father, the one who changed me.

I run toward Gabe, toward his beautiful
throbbing energy the way it was.
Blue as Blue, True as True.

“Wake up, dammit!” Lo hollers as I rush
past.

It comes to me – the way out the
labyrinth. My ability. I can use my telekinesis to lift myself up and over the walls,
or to lift out someone else. It doesn’t matter that the one and only time I was
able to use my power I could barely hover a gun in the air for thirty seconds.

I just need enough fuel, and I’ll be
able to fix everything.

Fuel. Human energy.

Gabe’s aura, so close. I remember again
the taste of it, how it filled me and made me strong. As I turn the corner, I
don’t know whether I want to save my brother or kill him all over again.

I reach the back of the labyrinth, but Gabe’s
energy is gone. His broken corpse lies on the ground at my feet, honey-colored
eyes closed, lips pale and bloody.

A figure stands over him.
Grand.

No, not Grand, the other angel, the one
who stood on the roof of the warehouse the night I killed Grand. He lit the
match when my hands proved unsteady and smiled as I burned Grand, burned Jane,
burned away all the evidence of that terrible night.

He looks up and smiles at me again, that
same enigmatic smile that I can’t read. There’s something about his features – the
blond hair, round forehead, china-blue eyes, and delicate hands. It comes to
me, quite suddenly, how much he looks like Grand.

 “You killed my brother,” I say to the
angel named Gem.

“You killed him,” Gem replies, that
smile never leaving his face. “You killed them all.”

His words are true. The other auras in
the labyrinth are gone, like candles pinched out, and I instinctively know that
in each corner the others are dead, drained and bloodied. Grand is not the
minotaur.

“I’m the minotaur,” I say even as the
walls of the labyrinth rapidly fade, replaced by hot stiches of pain around my
wrists and the tug of hunger pulling me somewhere dark that smells of anger.

“I’m the minotaur,” I say again as I
open my eyes and see the shadow of Rain Bailey standing over me, lit like a
torch with the colors of vengeance.

My head is a balloon filled with helium
and a few rattling pennies. I feel moisture between my legs, and for one long,
terrifying moment, I think that I’ve gone and peed my pants. Then a large drop
splashes onto my thigh, and I feel thin rivulets of water sliding down my neck
like fingers.

Not pee. Oh thank god it’s not pee! I
reach up to brush the wetness off my forehead, but my hand doesn’t obey. I look
down and notice metal handcuffs around each wrist pinning me to separate arms
of a steel chair I’m propped in. I don’t understand.

“Look at me,” Rain Bailey says. The
penguin mask still hides the top half of his face, and he clutches an empty
pitcher in his hand. Somehow the pitcher and the water are connected. I try to
think how, but there aren’t enough pennies in my head. My eyes are heavy, and a
part of me still wanders that labyrinth. All those ghosts.

Rain takes a step toward me. His aura
flicks with colors so angry and sharp I think I could cut myself on them.

“You don’t know who I am,” he says in a
quiet, hollow voice, “but I’ve been waiting for this day for—”

“You’re Rain Bailey,” I interrupt.

His aura jumps, and I lean forward in the
chair, straining against the cuffs to get closer. I shouldn’t feed on him. I’m
pretty sure I know this, but my body doesn’t listen.

“How did you…” Rain starts.

“I thought I peed my pants,” I tell him,
and my voice sounds thick. “But it’s just water. Did you pour water on me?” My
eyes land on the pitcher in his hand, and I finally make the connection. “You
did, didn’t you?”

“How do you know who I am?”

Little worries begin knocking on my
door. Something’s wrong with my head. Am I drunk? How can I be drunk when I
can’t consume alcohol anymore? I glance around and realize that I’m not in the
motel room at the Bluebell Estates. I’m not anywhere I’ve ever been.

Rain’s aura keeps distracting me,
scattering my pennies just when I’ve started collecting them into neat piles. I
try to wipe the water away again. This time I register the cuffs.

“What’s this?” I pull against them, waking
aches in both wrists. My mouth feels dry as a desert, and I run my tongue over chapped
lips.

“Just a little insurance so that we can
have a conversation.” Rain looms over me. My eyes travel his long, well-limbed
body, looking for some smiling or welcoming part of him. His big hands clench
into fists, and those brown sleepy eyes don’t look quite so sleepy today. I
find no safe harbor on his face, not even a hint of softness there, so I just gaze
at his thick crop of unkempt brown hair. His heart pounds so fiercely, I wonder
if he can hear it.

My eyes don’t stay on his hair for long.
They fixate on his aura, and I try to read his mind in the swirl of violent
colors. The deep, burnished reds must be his anger, the flame-colored orange
his frustration, and are those streaks of white his fear? The hues writhe and dance
and spin my eyes until I’m dizzy with hunger.

Rain watches the skin scroll back on
each of my palms, revealing the glowing chambers within. The reds expand in his
aura.

“Tell me your name,” he says.

I look around at the wide, windowless
room, desperate for something, anything to help me gain my bearings. The
pennies are beginning to stack up.
Peoria. We were in Peoria. Tarren was in
my pocket. I told him…I told him…oh shit.

“Your name!” Rain demands. “You owe me
that.”

“Buffy.” More pennies. More stacks.
Drugged.
Not drunk. I’m drugged. They didn’t kill me.
I look down at my cuffed
wrists.
Fuck a goat, no they sure didn’t.

Rain Bailey folds his arms across his
chest, seems to find it awkward with the pitcher in his hand, and then unfolds
them.

He shaved off his goatee,
I think stupidly, remembering the first
time I saw him six months ago in Redmond, Washington. Dark stubble covers his
jaw now. I would like the new look so much more if he weren’t bathed in colors
of hate.

“Well,
Buffy,
” he says with
exaggerated sarcasm to let me know he’s seen through my brilliant ruse, “The
Totem has you now. My teammates will question you later. It won’t be pleasant.
But first it’s just you and me.”

I expect him to go on, but he gazes
intensely at me, like maybe he thinks he can stare me into submission.
Or
maybe he’s nervous, unsure.

He brings his hand to his forehead for
just a moment, and his open coat pulls back to reveal a filled holster at his
hip. So much anger, so much hate, simmering in his aura. I wonder what he used
to be like, what kind of life he was living before his sister was killed six
months ago. The artsy t-shirt beneath his jacket and those torn jeans give off
a hipster vibe. I can almost imagine him working behind the register at an
Apple Store or pouring lagers and discussing the latest indie bands with
regulars at a craft brewery. He was probably so utterly normal and happy before
his sister went missing; before she was drained. Maybe he even stupidly ached
for adventure, just like I did before Grand stepped into my life.

“My sister’s name was Sunshine,” Rain
says, and his aura flares – Red, Red, Red!

My body is a puppet, straining toward
him. The song drowns out my frontal cortex, smashing Ryan’s ghost to pieces. I
might even moan a little.

Rain takes a step closer. Damn him.

“She was…she was….” Rain’s voice
trembles. “She’d always put a hundred creams into her coffee. It’d be almost
white before she drank it. And she’d give Fat Joe a dollar every day when she
walked to work even though I kept telling her he was an addict.”

I grip the armrests of the chair, trying
to steady myself against his emotion.

“She…she…actually believed in me,” Rain
says, “even though I never gave her a single damn reason to.” He swallows, and
tears swim in his chocolate eyes.

Rain pulls off his mask, and I can see
the red indents where it pressed into the sides of his face. His voice is loud,
shaking. “She was a good person. Really, really good. I want you to know that.”
His eyes are frantic. “You have to know that.” His eyes never leave my face. “And
now she’s dead.”

Yes, killed by a fourteen-year-old
teenager with frizzy red hair and a face full of freckles named Amber Krugal.
We’d tracked her down, and Tarren put a bullet through her forehead, but not in
time to save Sunshine.

I look at Rain, at all the parts of him
I’ve already memorized and studied carefully in my thoughts at night – the defined
jaw, the startling green rings around his pupils, the little mole on his
collarbone.

“I’m sorry,” I manage.

He opens his mouth, stops, closes it,
then tries again. “You’re…sorry?” he sputters.

Quantum Queen of Tact.
I rush to fill the silence even as his
aura churns. “For what’s happened to you. For w-w-what you’ve been through. I
didn’t…didn’t kill your sister.” My tongue is clumsy as his aura spikes with
emotion.

“You’re sorry?” he says again. “YOU’RE
SORRY?”

He raises his arm, fist curled so tight
I can see the bones of his knuckles. I tense, waiting for the blow to land. Rain’s
arm hangs in the air, and we stare at each other awkwardly. He’s shaking, and
so am I, but for entirely different reasons.

Finally, his arm drops, but he doesn’t
relax his fist.

“I saw you!” he hollers, “Standing over
Father Reynolds.”

I remember that wet night in Marymoor
Park. Volunteers were still searching for the missing Sunshine Bailey. My
brothers and I were searching for something else – the angel who killed her. It
was my first stakeout, and I’d ruined it in grand fashion by rushing toward the
sound of a dying human, desperate to help. I’d been too late to save the
preacher, too late for anything except to get caught in the beam of Rain
Bailey’s flashlight. He’d chased me. Stupid boy.

“I was trying to help him. I got there
too late,” I manage. It sounds weak, even to me.

“So, what, he dropped dead of natural
causes, is that it? And Sunshine too?”

“They were murdered by a different
angel.” I lick at my chapped lips. “We stopped her, killed her. That’s what we
do. We’re on the same side.”

“No!” Rain screams. “No! No! No!” His
cheeks flush red, and he raises his arm again. His whole body shakes with rage.

“You can hit me,” I say softly, “if
it’ll help.”

A flicker of hesitation stalls his
momentum, but then his fist lands on my cheek, knocking my head back. The
impact is solid but strangely light, hardly more powerful than the nicks and
bruises I get from Tarren when we spar for practice. This is how I learn that Rain
Bailey does not often punch people, if at all.

He stares at me, his face grim and
scared. For some dumb reason I notice that he still holds the green pitcher in
his left hand. Painted cherries dance around its neck and base.

 “I hit you,” Rain says, a touch of
shock in his voice.

“We stopped the angels at that barn in
Poughkeepsie,” I say into the quiet. “My brother dragged you out of that
burning house. We hunt angels. We kill them.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” His voice
is low, desperate, and he heaves in shuddering breaths.

“Saying what?”

“You keep calling them angels. You’re
not angels. You can’t be angels.” Currents of color swirl around him like
riptides.

“That’s what they call themselves,” I manage
through all the noise in my head. My wrists strain against the cuffs even as I
will them to stop. I want to touch Rain Bailey, drain him.

“You’re one of them.” He steps back and
looks at his red knuckles.

“Not by choice and not all the way.”

For a moment doubt flickers across his
features, a tiny shoal of hope, but then he gazes at my glowing hands. He can
see my body trembling, and he knows what it means. All I can do is keep my
palms pressed against the armrests of the chair so he won’t see the feeding
bulbs.

“She was a good person,” he says again,
his voice flat and empty. “She loved everyone…even me.”

“I know.”

“No,” he says, in that soft, cold voice.
“You don’t know anything about her. All you did was kill her.” The reds fade
within his aura, leaving behind one bright and blooming thread of yellow,
bright as a daffodil. Sadness. He turns and starts toward a staircase tucked in
the front corner of the room.

“I’ll explain as much of it as I can,” I
say, my voice wavering. “Please, you just have to—”

“You’ll tell us everything anyway.” Rain
looks over his shoulder, and all I see is that yellow halo of sadness around
him. “Puma will get you to talk.”

He climbs the stairs, still carrying
that stupid green pitcher. I listen as he opens a door above and closes it
behind him, leaving me with only this coiling dread in my chest and the
ever-present hunger.