Shattered (23 page)

For the horrors I’d sensed, I’d gone back
to the thing that used to calm me down before I had Nathan’s kisses or my mother’s
arms–prayers to God and the saints and anyone else up there with a
listening ear. There wasn’t anything I could do besides praying for those kids.
They were undoubtedly being tortured, but getting involved beyond what I’d already
done was a disaster waiting to happen.

I was praying for them when Sophia came
in with my second dose of the potion. I drank it without hesitation to keep
suspicion down. “You packed your clothes all by yourself?” she asked.

“Sure did,” I said. I’d jumped at the
chance to pack my own clothes to keep the jar of magical dust hidden.

“Ready?” my dad said, in the hallway. He
hadn’t left me alone for more than five minutes since the fire alarm, and he
walked into my room right on schedule. “New place, new start.”

“New place, new start,” I repeated,
because it was what he wanted to hear.

Sophia took both of our hands, and took
us out of my mostly empty room in California.

When her blinding light cleared, I heard wind
and waves and birds calling above them. It sounded like a recording of
paradise, the stereotypical sounds of peace. I opened my eyes in a room covered
in plastic. Dad had taken his time to preserve this home that he used to share
with Mom. The plastic had frozen it in time. I really wanted to ask why he
would keep it like this and not sell it. He obviously didn’t come here often.

Staring out of the window, it
was difficult to distinguish where the house ended and the beach began. The
walls were mostly made of glass that brought the outside world in. It felt like
stepping one foot to the left would bring me to the middle of the ocean.

It was grand, not so much in
size, but in style and elegance. It felt like a place where rich people
vacation to get away from their fancy cars and expensive things. It was simple,
unpretentious luxury.
 

“I’ll start dinner,” Sophia
said. “…and get this place cleaned up.”

“I can do that,” Dad said.
But Sophia was already headed to the kitchen.

Dad showed me to my new room,
pulling up plastic and rolling it into a huge ball in his arms on the way
there.

“Did you guys have a thing
for real estate?” I asked. “You lived in Miami, which has plenty of beaches,
I’m sure. Why did you need this place?”

He chuckled and yanked the
dusty curtains back, revealing another piece of the ocean.

“No. Neither of us cared
about real estate. This place was Cecilia Shaw’s idea of a wedding present. CC gave
it to me. She said her daughter wasn’t great at receiving gifts and would’ve
found something to hate about it.”

“Did she?”

It took him a while to
answer, his eyes somewhere on the beach.

“No. She loved it. I doubt
she ever told her though.” He kissed the top of my head and squeezed my
shoulders. “I’m going to help Sophia with dinner. The poor woman works all day.
Can I trust you up here alone?”

Instead of whining about him
hounding me, I nodded. After spending time with Pop in the volt, fighting with
him about bringing Nate back or trusting me not to run away felt even more pointless.
I didn’t have the nerve to call my life unfair after learning Kamon had
captured almost forty little kids and faked their deaths.

“I’ll come back to check on
you in a minute,” he said. I didn’t doubt that.

My room opened to a small
balcony overlooking the beach. It seemed unnecessary to have a view like this
when the entire house was made of glass. The hammock from the pictures of Mom
I’d seen in Dad’s attic swung in the breeze below me. He’d taken those here, back
when things were good between them. Before me. Before this superhuman world
swallowed their relationship whole.

The empty hammock had no hope
of the former couple ever occupying it again. It was wasted, like this house
and their love. Everything about this place felt unsettled. Being here reminded
me of the feeling I used to get when staring at pictures of human cities right
after the war. People had fled in a hurry. They had no time to pack, no time to
sell houses and close chapters in their lives. Buildings were left unoccupied
like this home and our other ones. They were monuments of our war, of broken
lives and failed relationships.

I refused to make any more
monuments. One day, I would have Nate back, and we would return to our home, to
our lives.

Later that night, after a
pleasant dinner with my father–where I didn’t mention Nate and he didn’t
mention that I couldn’t mention Nate–I saved my dinner roll and took it
to my room. Outside of my open window, I heard him playing his guitar under the
stars. It was the perfect time to use my powers.

In the cleanest part of my
closet, where Sophia would never need to be, I’d hidden the small jar inside of
one of my long boots. I brought the dinner roll to the closet and sprinkled the
antidote over it.

After three bites, I sensed Kamon.
The air was full of him–his voice, a heavy feeling of evil, and a million
whispers of the words:
New Orleans
.
He was there, right now. Tempting … but I hadn’t opened my mind to sense
anything about him, so I chose to ignore it.

Past this almost purposeful
cloud of Kamon in the air, I heard the kids again. They were crying, and their
bellies were rumbling with hunger. I felt the all too familiar feeling of
hopelessness, just one hundred times more intense than anything I’d experience
at St. Catalina. Those things felt present.

My brain also reached to the
future, and it also felt hopeless. And chaotic. I had the urge to run and escape
something I knew I couldn’t really escape. I braced my hands over my ears as my
powers reached further into the unknown and brought out screams and what
sounded like something collapsing. Rock, rubble, a building.

“Mom’s plan,” I said. “She’s
going to cause so many problems. What would change this?”

I shivered as an image
replaced the horrible things in my head. I saw myself ... running through
Kamon's prison towards the sounds of painful cries. I raced past cells in a
dirty hallway. I was wearing a hooded robe like one of his brainwashed
followers, but I wasn’t there to worship him. I was there to …

“Empty the place out,” I
said, when the words suddenly came to me. “Oh God.”

I’d seen this before. I’d
dreamed it the night Mom rescued me from the chapel. Back then, I’d brushed it
off as nothing. Now that I knew who he had and that I could save them, this
vision was way more than nothing.

The desire to make it true
boiled inside of me. My impulses were screaming: Save them! Now! They need you!

“No!” I yelled, and shook out
of the vision. “I can't do that. I won't do that. I'm different now. I’m not
stupid.” I took a deep breath to settle myself. “I wanted my powers for Nathan.
The rest is not my business. Only hear and see Nathan.”

But Nathan was nothing but
empty space, the night sky without stars, a silent vacuum where a distant world
should be.

****

Over the next week, I stared
into the black hole that was Nathan every night and didn’t hear or see a thing.
And every night, the air kept breathing Kamon, the trapped people kept
screaming, and I kept seeing myself run into the arms of danger to save them.
The temptation burned, but I knew better, I
was
better, so I continued to ignore it.

 
“Pumpkin pie,” Dad said. “What are you staring
at?”

I didn’t have to lie. My
powers were currently off in preparation for Emma to come over. She didn’t want
to hear about war signals and starving children. Nor did she appreciate me
staring off into thin air.

“The neighbor,” I said,
pointing to the closest house to ours. Their roof was just visible through the
trees. “Mom checked our perimeter, you know … to keep us safe … and she said
they were the same people who lived there when you two stayed here.”

“She was only here for three
minutes the other day,” he said. “She managed to say all that before running
back to her life?”

“Dad …”

“Sorry. That was petty. I’m
working on it.” He chuckled and sat on my bed.
 
“Come
talk to me. It’s important, and I want to do this now before Emma gets here and
I can’t get a word in with you two.”

I giggled and joined him on my bed.

“I was talking to Sophia before she left
a few minutes ago,” he said. “She thinks I’m being too hard on you, and I kind
of agree. I don’t want you to think you’re in trouble. Besides covering things
up, you didn’t do anything wrong. This is all on him. So …” He pulled my
cellphone from his pocket and handed it to me. It had been ten days since I’d
heard Nate’s voice. I nearly screamed. “This is to show you that I trust you.
Don’t break my trust.”

I guessed that meant: don’t call Nathan
even though I’m tempting you to.

“Wow,” I said. “Thanks.”

“His number isn’t in your phone anymore,
but I’m assuming you may know it or can get someone to tell you. So … the
moment I learn that you’re talking to that boy again, it’s gone.” I’d watched
Paul and Emma with their parents enough to know how this little game went. What
he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “And it’s your night to do the dishes,” he
said, fighting a smile.

“Lies! You traded tonight. Em and I did
them last night
and
the night
before.” Em had used a spell both times, but he didn’t need to know that.

He laughed. “Just thought I’d try.” He
walked out and shut the door halfway. Half trust. While he so obviously stood
just outside of my room, waiting for me to do something wrong, I stared at my
phone. I didn’t know if this would be my key to talking to Nate, but a week of
staring into nothing and missing him like crazy made me very anxious to try.

When Dad walked away, for real this time,
I dialed his number from memory, fighting the logic that said detained people
didn’t have phones. It went straight to his voicemail.

Hi,
it’s Nathan. Sorry I couldn’t answer. Leave a message
.

He’d changed his greeting. He had his
phone for sure. It felt like my heart was ascending towards its final beats
when the phone beeped in my ear, my signal to talk to him.

Words rushed in and out of my head too
fast to grasp. They jumbled and twirled and soared with my heartbeat. I didn’t
know where to start. With a question, a plea, a tearful explanation of what
really happened. There was so much to say, so little time to say it in.

“I love you,” was all I could manage,
before I heard footsteps approaching my door.

A week passed with me falling in and out
of my skin without warning, without time to react. Cold water wouldn’t bring me
back as a dog, and during the nights when my bones would snap and grind
together, I couldn’t become Sparky to save my life.

Sophia
came to check on me every day, but I was usually unable to speak while she was
here. Once, she’d said Christine’s name and I lost myself inside of my fur for
hours.

My
insides were still messed up. I guessed I just didn’t know where to start–with
Chris? With the rooms in the house I hadn’t gone into? With my guilt? My
problems felt so much bigger than me.

But today, after ten days of being
single, I got a new incentive to try to fix myself. After finding my way back
into my human form, with my body feeling like one more change would be the end
of me, I plugged in my phone that had died from neglect.

As it regained life, twenty-two new text
messages and thirteen voicemails appeared on the screen. I listened to the
voicemails first.

It’s
Paul. Where are you? I saw the picture of you pushing her. What’s going on?
Call me.

Hey.
It’s Paul. Dude, are you in a cell? You can’t be in a cell. You changed your
voicemail. Douche move by the way. I’m worried. Call me.

It’s
Emma. Thought I’d try. Bye.

Sparky,
it’s Paul again. Answer me. You’re pissing me off.

It’s
Emma again. You didn’t die, right?

I deleted the rest of the messages from
Paul and Emma’s numbers without listening. Then, the message lady said, “You
have one new message from 504-276…”

I pulled the phone away to delete it
before listening, feeling my body pushing me towards another involuntary shift,
but Christine’s voice cut in before it happened.

I
love you.

The three words pulled me apart, then put
me together again. A thousand thoughts entered my head, but it all came down to
one: I couldn’t stay Sparky forever because I needed my thumbs. I needed them
to press play on this message for the rest of my life. It felt like she’d
answered my question of where to start.

I needed to start with her voice.

Her next message was longer. She’d left
it ten minutes after her first one.

I’m
fine. If you’re worried about me, please know that I’m fine. I hope you’re
shifting better, Nate. And, if it helps, I don’t go to Trenton anymore. I’ll be
pretty much barricaded in my house for the next ten days, until you know who
goes to you know where.

She paused, and I smiled, sensing
something adorable about to come out of her mouth.

I’m
talking about Kamon … and hell … if that wasn’t clear. That probably wasn’t
clear. Sorry about that. Um … so, anyway, he won’t find me. Nothing bad will
happen to me. You have absolutely nothing to worry about. If you can, please
call me.

I didn’t call her because that message
was enough. She was safe and she didn’t hate me. Those two things made me feel
firmer in my skin than I had all week.

I called Sophia just to tell her I’d
shifted, and she sent me food that I didn’t ask her for. I decided not to return
any of the other missed calls or texts.

After dinner, I lay across my bed and
caught up on the tallies I’d missed over the last week. In ten days, ten marks
on my crumpled piece of paper, Lydia was going to make Christine safe for good,
and in the meantime, she would be barricaded inside of a house.

I took a deep breath. I hadn’t been this
calm in a long time.

I spent the night in my skin, watching
cartoons, and letting her message play over and over again.

In the morning, I grabbed John’s keys and
hopped in his truck to get breakfast. I didn’t want what I had in the house, and
I refused to call Sophia to take care of me when I should’ve been taking care
of myself.

I didn’t have to go far. There was a
shack of a restaurant that sold the best breakfast tacos you’ll ever taste a
few blocks away from the house. I pulled into the tiny parking lot. There were
no painted lines, just an understanding of not blocking the exits. I stopped
right in front of the sign.
Mike’s
.

The years hadn’t touched the ratty wooden
shack, maybe because it had been falling apart since I was seven. How much
damage could time do to something that was already decrepit? There it stood, in
the same spot, about ten steps from the bus stop where Mom and I used to wait
for Bernard. We came here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday without fail. How
John never got wind of our activities, I would never know. I guessed we were
good at living our secret lives as normal people who left the house and enjoyed
the real world.

The cashier didn’t recognize me. She took
my order for three egg and potato tacos and a strawberry lemonade without
looking up. Grateful, I dropped my change into the tip jar.

My tacos came out a minute after my
strawberry lemonade, and I went back to the truck. Mom and I used to eat at the
bus stop, but today, I would eat in John Reece’s macho machine. I was sure it
had never seen a drop of food before this moment.

I banged the straw against the armrest,
and it squeaked against the plastic as I jammed it into the cup.

My stomach turned over as I let myself
think of the little things that used to make life fun. Like how Mom used to
make up the silliest stories about how things were made. Like how strawberry
lemonade came from straw-lemons, a rare fruit that grows in India. She’d start
it, and I’d finish her crazy story. I remembered saying that straw-lemons got
to America on the backs of whales. When they do the blowhole thing, the
straw-lemons get scattered into our country. Then a few of them land in a blender.
And that’s how you get strawberry lemonade.

“I miss you,” I said, without warning. I
hadn’t felt the words develop in my mouth. “I should’ve said it the night I
brought Chris to see you. But I was upset. You looked worse than you ever have.
And you never came after me.”

A rational voice begged me to see that a
woman who wasn’t supposed to leave the house certainly couldn’t scour the
country for her missing son. I shouldn’t have expected her to come.

I was sure I looked like a psycho driving
home, stuffing my face and brushing away tears. I sped to the house. I needed
to be indoors before my body forced me to shift.

I parked the truck on the grass to save
time and to piss off John’s spirit, if spirits could see from hell. I ran to
the door, but even as I unlocked it, I didn’t feel the urge to shift rolling
through me. I was just crying. Right now, I wasn’t an at risk shifter. I was
just me, just Nathan, a person who’d lost too much.

I’d lost my mother twice. Once when I
left and again in the forest. And now I’d lost Christine, the girl who, if I
let myself be very honest, reminded me of my mother sometimes. I wasn’t really
sure if I liked that or if those were the parts of her I’d wanted to change. I
couldn’t decide if the similarities between them made me an aspiring hero or a
villain, or a victim crawling to what was familiar.

This was why I didn’t want to open this
box. The Mom box. I knew swarms of questions would fly out of it, questions I
couldn’t answer about Devin and that night and how complicated it was to lose
someone who wasn’t even there.

I still hadn’t shifted. I still didn’t
need to.

I closed the front door behind me and
walked into her sewing room like I expected to see her. Everything was exactly
the same. She could’ve been here today.

“But she wasn’t,” I said. “She won’t ever
be in this room again.” I waited for that to crush me and change me into
Sparky. It still didn’t happen.

“This is just a room,” I said, as I sat
in her recliner. “It’s just a room, and she’s gone, and I’m sorry.”

I
was
sorry. I was sorry I didn’t stop it and sorry she wasn’t still in this house
living the life she’d worked so hard to keep. This was happiness for her,
whether I agreed with it or not, and I was sorry Devin had ended that.

Now that I was in the middle of this
thing I’d feared, grieving, I saw that I’d blown it hilariously out of
proportion. It was like fearing a high cliff and being pushed to the edge only
to see that the ground was surprisingly close.

I sat in her sewing room until the sun set,
wishing Chris were here, folded up in my arms as I said goodbye to my mother.
She would’ve loved to see me this honest.

****

I spent the next week ignoring phone
calls from everyone but Sophia and clearing out the house in an attempt to make
it my own. It had yet to work because I still didn’t like this place, but at
least I’d gathered a lot of things to donate.

I’d packed my mother’s clothes neatly and
with the respect she would’ve treated them with and tossed John’s into a messy
pile for the trash. Though I’d shed a few tears while clearing her fancy
dresses that had eventually hung unattractively from her bones, I managed not
to leave my body.

Two weeks of hard labor had made me a
grief champion. And with grief out of the way and Christine safe and sound and
calling me all day, I’d gone back to shifting like a sane person.

There were only two rooms left. My room, which
needed to stay intact, and my mother’s sewing room that I’d finally decided to
clear.

I filled several boxes with her
magazines, embroidered handkerchiefs, and the mound of crocheted things that
didn’t serve any real purpose other than to occupy her time. In a neglected
corner of her closet, behind Christmas gift-wrap and old trick-or-treating
buckets, was a lump of fur that I almost mistook for a dead cat. I kicked it to
be sure.

It was a blanket. I kneeled down to pick
it up. It was the kind of fur that either cost a fortune or nothing at all. It
looked like it had been taken right from the animal’s back and sown into a
perfect four foot square. Rough thread weaved through the edges, binding two
pieces together to make both sides furry and comfortable. I turned it over and
gasped. One side was covered in blood, old blood. It looked like it had been
cleaned but not very well. Or like the stains had clung to it despite the
scrubbing.

“I
so
don’t have birthmarks,” I finally admitted. One of the worst nightmares I used
to have as a kid was of white dogs dying in bloody snow. The most terrifying
part was how real it always felt. “My family,” I said, admitting another
obvious truth.

The woman in the blue dress, the dog–Zain–that
I always saw myself wrestling with, and the older man and woman that appeared
in my dreams were my family members, the pack I used to belong to.

My past was white dogs around campfires,
bloody snow, a crazy but loving mother, and a controlling man who didn’t want
to be my father. It wasn’t so scary when I just put it out there at once. It
wasn’t this awful thing I needed to forget and change.

I contemplated changing my voicemail to:
You have reached Nathan Thomas Dali Reece
… but decided it would’ve been a bit excessive.

In a box near the blanket, I found pictures
of Mom and me that she would have never dreamed of posting. I’d taken most of
them. We were outside in a freak snowstorm that she couldn’t get me to stay out
of. She was all bundled up in jackets and scarves, and, in the pictures she’d
taken, I had on shorts.

I had to be about eight. I smiled at the
silly faces we were making. I used to think we looked alike, but now that I
knew my biological mother was a shifter who’d died in an attack I survived, I
looked very adopted in the pictures.

I crashed on my bed and flipped through
the channels.
I stopped on a made for TV movie with
cheerleaders and no plot because I missed Chris. She’d called me nine times
today.

I could’ve answered just to tell her I
wasn’t answering, but I wanted her to keep calling. Every minute that she’d
called was another minute that she was safe. There were only two more days left
until Temple night. Maybe then, when she was truly safe and I wasn’t at risk of
wigging out again, I would answer to say I wasn’t answering.

Her most recent voicemail made
me tear up. She wanted me to come over for pizza. She either had no clue that
we were broken up or was refusing to accept it.

I wanted to see her more than
I wanted to breathe, but I couldn’t be that weak. What we had felt tainted and
ruined beyond repair, branded with the words DATING VIOLENCE.

My phone rang, and I answered
it. It was my only approved caller.

“My love,” Sophia said.

“Hi.”

She yawned in the speaker.
“Go to your kitchen. Dinner’s ready. I don’t want to hear that you don’t need
my help today.”

I chuckled and said, “Thank
you.” She hung up, and I followed her orders and went to the kitchen.

The saint of a woman had sent
me a large pepperoni pizza. Not just any pizza. It was
Sophia’s
pizza, the one she made by hand.

“Nice,” I said. This would be
dinner for a few days.