Shattered (22 page)

“Dear, what do you sense?” Pop asked.

I opened my mouth to answer him, but
nothing came out. The overwhelming need to reach my hand to the shelf swept
over me. Before my fingers reached a burgundy book that I didn’t know I was
aiming for, Pop said, “Be careful. These are-”

“Sacred texts,” I finished.

Whatever this book and the others
surrounding it contained was definitely sacred information. Ancient secrets.
The burgundy book seemed to glow in the dark corner of the volt. I had to touch
it. I had to read it. It felt like I’d wanted to do those things for years. I
touched the spine and shivered. A triumphant feeling filled my chest like I’d
reached the end of a really long journey. I’d made it. I was here. I’d found
what I was looking for–this book I didn’t even know I wanted.

Printed in gold on the burgundy canvas
book cover was an oddly familiar crest. The symbols on my grandfather’s rings
formed an arch between two torches. I stared at the same curled star, moon,
lion, fox, sword, shield, heart, and flames and shook my head.

“Where have I seen this before?” I said.
The crest had a nagging familiarity, like something I’d seen a million times
but couldn’t place or like a song I used to know but could only hum the melody
now. “Where have I seen this?” The question brought nothing into my mind, not
even a clue.

I yanked at my powers, trying to pull
closer to the answer, but my body rebelled and shook fiercely. Pop pressed his
hands against my cheeks and forced me to look into is calming gray eyes.

“You are in control,” he said. “Don’t
forget that.”

I felt blood pooling in my nose, ready to
leak at any second. My teeth chattered like I was in the middle of a blizzard.
I held on to his words. I was in control. Of my powers. My body. My life. I
didn’t have to drink potions. I didn’t have to fear myself.

“I’m in control,” I said, pushing the
buzzing away. The book, while annoyingly familiar, was not worth having a
seizure and complicating our covert outing. Today was about getting my powers
back and finding Nate. Nothing was more important than him, so I let the
curiosity over the crest and those symbols flow out of my mind.

“That’s it,” Pop said, dabbing the tiny
drop of blood that had escaped my nose with a handkerchief.

He clutched me in a tight hug and rocked
the life out of me. “That sure beats going to the hospital,” I said. His chest
shook as his raspy laugh poured out of it.

“I’m proud of you,” he said. “You managed
to control yourself
and
find the
names my wife and I have been trying to uncover for weeks. I’ll take it from
here. I should get you home before your father wakes up.”

Pop squeezed my hand, and I glanced at
the burgundy book with the gold crest. For a fraction of a moment, just before
Pop yanked us out of the room, I thought I saw the symbols glimmer.

At home, I gave my grandfather’s rings to
Pop and said goodbye to my vampire mirage.

 
“There is now a jar in your closet,” he
said. “As promised, it contains the antidote to the potion. It looks like
pepper. Continue to drink the potion when they give it to you, but sprinkle that
powder on anything you eat, just a pinch, and the effects of it will wear off
in seconds.”

He winked, and I threw my arms around
him. After I thanked him a million times, he waved at me and left. I changed
into my pajamas, and Emma appeared on my bed.

“Daddy dearest will be awake soon,” she
said.

I took my position on his lap, and waited
for her spell to wear off. A few minutes later, he yawned in my ear. I covered
my face and pretended to cry over Nate.

Lydia Shaw had a wicked sense of humor.

She’d told me she was taking me to a new
home where I would heal from old wounds. By new, she’d meant used. By home,
she’d meant hellhole. By wounds, she’d meant my past.

She moved us from the cell to my parents’
living room. My first instinct was to run, so I did. I bolted through the
kitchen and to the side door.

“Get back here, Nathan,” Lydia said. She
always managed to put terror in everything she said. I was sure she could ask
me if I wanted a million dollars and still make me shiver.

So, after I shivered, I walked to the
living room. She held her phone to her ear, and said, “Tyler. Yes. I need power
restored to 8798 Oak Hill Drive. Los Angeles. Yes. Charge the bill to me. Now,
please. Thank you.”

At her request, the lights flickered on
in the house. I couldn’t even count the amount of people I’d met who would kill
for someone to give them electricity with a phone call. Most packs of shifters,
other helpless beings, and the witches and wizards who couldn’t control their
magic well were usually drowning in past due notices and living by candlelight.
And this woman, this terrifying woman, could make that all go away with a call.
 

But I guessed it wasn’t feasible for her
to charge millions of bills to herself. The money had to come from somewhere
logical so the human world would continue to believe in the extinction story.

Lydia sat in my mom’s floral chair and
crossed her feet at her ankles. I sat on the floor with my back facing John’s
chair so I didn’t have to look at it.

“Christine told me you don’t like to talk
about them at all. That’s kind of strange, and I thought it then, but I’ve
never said anything. I think … I think you should stay here for a while.”

I whined.

“I could easily get you an apartment,
Nathan, or I could send you with Sophia, but I don’t think that will help you.
There are parts of your past that you need to come to terms with or you’re
never going to be okay. This is partly my fault for not seeing how much stress
I was putting on you, but it isn’t all of it. You’re carrying things around.
You’re carrying
hurt
around. The mess
with Kamon only made it worse.”

I whined again and lowered my head to the
ground.

“I think I know what it is. Seeing your
parents
dead, no matter how you felt about them, is hard.
From experience, I can tell you it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.
I found mine headless. Imagine that.”

She chuckled and shook her head, like she
still couldn’t believe it happened. She went on about her parents and how she’d
managed to pull herself together after finding them like that. Like me, she felt
responsible for their deaths.

“I have to go,” she said. “Are you going
to be okay here?”

If I had the ability to speak, I would’ve
asked her if it mattered. If I said no, would I get to leave? I seriously
doubted it. But it was a wonder she didn’t kill me. I probably should’ve spent
more time thanking her for that.

“Sophia will be here soon,” she said. She
wiggled my cellphone in my face, and then put it on my mother’s chair. “Let me
know if you need anything.”

When she left, I lay on the floor,
staring at Mom’s chair. It was so empty and more faded than I remembered. In my
head, this chair glowed with brilliant reds and yellows. In reality, the
flowers were a pale and dirty cream with hints of brown that used to be red.

I finally turned my head to his leather
chair. He’d worn the cushion down so much that his butt would be there until
the end of time … or until the end of this chair.

The end of this chair.

I didn’t have time to think about it.
Once the thought entered my head, it quickly set my whole body on fire, and I
jumped to the chair with my teeth bared. The leather tasted like smoke as I bit
into it. But I chewed and clawed and jerked at the cushions until the chair was
as dead as he was.

Now no one could sit there and order
frail women around and make little boys stay cooped up in rooms. Now no one
could sit there ever again.

“Oh, dear,” Sophia said. I dropped a
mouthful of leather and cotton stuffing on the floor and jumped down. “I guess
I’ll be getting rid of this. How are you, my love?” I whined. I didn’t want to
lie. I felt beyond horrible. “Right. It’ll get better.”

She snapped and took John’s chair away.
Fun’s over
, I thought.

“Christine is doing fine,” she said. I
knew that was a lie. She was either screaming or being eerily quiet. With
Chris, in a situation like this, there would be no in-between. Unless … unless
she wanted me gone. Unless she was as relieved about them taking me as I was
about John being dead.

“She misses you,” Sophia said. “I’m sure
it will all work out.”

I shook my head at her as she cleared the
mess I’d made. She didn’t respond. She just started snapping and whispering
spells. Soon, mops started mopping on their own, dusters swept over the
shelves, and a vacuum cleaner got to work in the living room. While magic
cleaned the house, she filled the refrigerator and cabinets with food. Their
food was already gone. I assumed she’d cleared the perishable items out months
ago.

She followed her vacuum cleaner into my
mother’s sewing room, and I didn’t dare to go inside. She only spent a few
minutes in there. I guessed it was clean like it always was.

She closed the door behind her and moved
on to the other two rooms on that hall–the spare that had never seen a
guest to my knowledge and their bedroom.

She made a right turn and found the last
bedroom in the house. My room. I waited in the hall as she cleaned. Somehow
going in there made this move too real, too permanent. I couldn’t believe I was
really back here.

She peeked her head out of the door and
winked at me. When I stared at her long enough, I saw that she’d obviously been
crying. “Come in, love. We need to talk.”

I trotted in slowly and stopped. To my
utter surprise, the room was exactly how I’d left it. The Batman sheets I’d
never outgrown were still covering my full-sized bed. The black comforter was
folded down just enough to see the yellow bat signal. My walls were still
covered with posters–the Lakers, Spiderman, and of course more Batman.
Growing up, I’d thought there could never be too much Batman.

My mom hadn’t touched a thing. My name was
still drawn in block letters on the inside of the door, and the research I’d
done into what kind of dog I was, when I was into that sort of thing, was still
pinned under my window. I’d narrowed it down to three different breeds until I
realized it didn’t matter what I was and completely lost interest.

I couldn’t imagine how or why the room
was still like this, other than that John probably hadn’t bothered to open the
door and see the things I’d left behind.

 
Sophia snapped and my things from the
life that was now over appeared on my bed. She snapped again and my clothes
found their places in my drawers and on hangers in the closet. I spotted the
sneaker with the hidden condom box slightly poking out of it and dragged it out
of her reach.

Later, I would throw it away because …
well because I would never need them or ever see her again. How I was going to
make it through the night without jumping off a cliff was beyond me.

“Would you like me to stay the night,
Nathan?” Sophia asked. I shook my head. I wanted to be alone. “Would you like
to come with me? We can hide it from Lydia.” I shook my head again. “I didn’t
think so.”

She petted my head and left me alone. I
fought the urge to rip up more of John’s things and jumped on my bed. I fell
asleep quickly on my Batman sheets with my head on the bat signal.

I woke up as me–naked and sad and
newly single. My aching bones told me that I’d spent the night doing more than
sleeping. Thankfully, I didn’t remember my body twisting enough to cause me to
be as sore as I was. And thankfully, I was back in my skin. Now that I had
enough energy to think about it, I was still afraid of being stuck forever.
Even without Christine, I didn’t want to be trapped.

After showering in my old, and new,
bathroom, I sat at the computer desk in the spare bedroom. The outdated monitor
slowly found life, and I chuckled. My name was still listed on the login
screen.

N. Reece. Password: batman.

I was obsessed. Or maybe it was time to
admit that I was crazy. I had to be crazy to hurt Christine.

I clicked the internet just to see if we
had it. We did, thanks to Lydia I assumed. I searched Christine’s name, and the
first result was about her dad. The second was about her latest fire alarm
disaster. According to the media, we were in a toxic relationship, and several
students had come forward to attest to that.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t remotely
strong enough to call and tell her that, even if a call were possible, so I
closed my eyes and said it with every ounce of feeling I had. “I’m sorry,
Chris.”

A phantom apology was the most I could
do, and now it was time to get over it. The way I got over things was just to …
move on.

I opened my phone and erased my new
messages. I changed my voicemail greeting to something more generic, and told
myself that leaving my life with her behind would stop hurting eventually.

I roamed the halls, looking for something
to do, until my stroll led me to the garage. I found cans of eggshell paint stacked
between John’s truck and the wall. Mom must have been planning to redecorate
with an even blander color before her death. Or maybe John had made a snide
comment about the perfectly good paint that was on the walls.

It didn’t matter. I needed something to
do outside of staring at the pictures of me pushing Chris online.

If not for the fear of running into her
one day as a hobo, I would’ve jumped in the truck and drove until I ran out of
road. Here, at least I had a bed to sleep in and a working
shower–luxuries to anyone who had ever slept behind a dumpster.

After painting over the perfect walls in
the living room, I moved on to the next room. The kitchen walls were covered in
the same yellow and white wallpaper that we’d put up when I was twelve.
Painting over it would be both unnecessary and painful. I remembered the day
we’d redecorated in here. We’d spent hours working and laughing as we guessed
what John would say about the wallpaper. I chuckled, remembering when he’d
walked right past us, grabbed a beer, and retreated to his chair without
mentioning our work.

“Good ‘ole John,” I said.

I had just enough paint for the hallway
leading to my room and bathroom. Until I would fire up the truck and venture
out into the world, I was done painting.

I’d driven his truck many times. After I
turned sixteen, to Mom, she would risk it and let me take the truck while John
was sleeping. On the weekends, we would hop in his bulky macho machine, and
she’d teach me the rules of the road. Of course she always ruined it by saying
something like:
You have to learn how to
drive so your wife doesn’t have to
.

And I’d say something like:
Wouldn’t it be easier for her to get around
if she knew how to drive and had her own car
?

I shook my head to clear it of my mother
and used my wrist to pump soap into my hand at the sink. The water sputtered
out of the faucet. I guessed it hadn’t been used in a while.

I froze, my hands still under the water, as
I spotted her wedding rings next to the knob. So much for not thinking about
her.

“It happened here. Right here,” I said.
Devin must’ve taken her while she was in the kitchen, going about her normal
routine in her dreadful life.

She only took her rings off when she
cleaned or showered. Her fingers were far too skinny to hold them up while wet.
When her weight loss had just started to become an apparent problem, they would
slip off anytime she stuck her hands in water. After one close call with the
drain, she’d left them by the knobs without fail.

I clutched the rings in my hand and slid
down to the floor, my back against the cabinets. I felt like my heart couldn’t
beat any faster and my stomach couldn’t twist any tighter, like my body
couldn’t take anything else.

I shifted against my will. It happened too
fast to stop. I was starting to understand why Lydia had left me here. It was
impossible to just move on. My mother was everywhere–in the rings tossed
near my paws, in the towel hanging on the oven, in the glass cookie jar shaped
like a rooster. I couldn’t hide from her here.

****

Christine

In the two days it took for Sophia to
protect our new home, I’d dusted every bit of food I had with Pop’s antidote.
I’d seen Kamon, Remi, and crying children every time I closed my eyes. I hadn’t
seen anything pleasant or the boy I wanted to see most. Focusing my thoughts on
Nathan, even with my powers blasting, felt like staring into a deep black hole.
There was less than nothing there to decipher.