The Veil (52 page)

Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. “Oh my god…I haven’t even thought about it. I’ve been so busy with everything that….”

“I know man. You’ve been through a lot lately…we all have. It’s not much, but I wanted to do something.”

“Thank you so much, Del. I can’t believe I forgot that it’s my eighteenth birth- ”My words stalled in my mouth as I remembered that it wasn’t just
my
birthday. 
Gabriella is my soul twin, we were born at exactly the same time.

Delagio’s grin faded. “I know what you’re thinkin,’ bud. And we’ll celebrate with her, just as soon as we get her and the others out of whatever hellhole that psychopath took them to.”

The lump in my throat was back and I couldn’t swallow it away this time. I closed my eyes as the tears threatened to spill. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that even in the worst of times, Delagio still managed to remember that it was my birthday. It only served to reinforce what he’d just said.
I can’t believe I suspected him.
He’s not the enemy. He’s my family

“Thank you,” I croaked.

“No problems buddy,” he said patting my back. When we’d pulled apart, he produced a lighter from his uniform jacket and sparked the match to life. “Now make a wish.”

I stared down at the cake, and thought of my words. It wasn’t hard to know what to choose.
I wish for our journeys to be successful – that we  find Gabriella, Grey, Troy and my father alive. And then when they are all safe, I wish that I get the chance to put Crimson right through that bitch Lilith and her deranged father.
I blew at the match and the flame winked out in a puff of grey smoke. Del gave another grin. Then he grabbed the cake and flung it overboard.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I gasped.

“Oh, the ingredients totally weren’t edible for humans, but it’s the thought that counts right?” I gave an incredulous laugh as he placed an arm around my shoulder and made me sway with him from side to side, whilst he sang ‘happy birthday’, exchanging my name for Sorrowslayer.

“So…I’ll be honest, I didn’t get you a gift,” he said with a grin. “
But
you can put in a formal request now, and I promise I’ll get it for ya when we get home.”

I looked at Delagio underneath the pool of light – his Stetson water stained and damaged from the battle, one section of it ripped by a Hydra Spawn’s fangs. “Actually there is a gift you could give me, but it’s not an object.” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Is that right? Okay, hit me.”

I leaned back over the side of I’orin, keeping my eyes on his. “I want you to tell me your real name, because I get the feeling it isn’t Delagio.”

“Alex…don’t,” he warned, his tone shifting from light-hearted to serious in a split-second. It was clearly a subject that he wasn’t comfortable with.

“You don’t have to tell me Del…and I promise I won’t force the issue. But you said yourself that we’re all family, and family share their secrets. Midnight told me what happened to his family and Gabriella told me what happened to hers.”

“So you’re nosy, is that it?” Delagio barked uncharacteristically.

“No Del, but I
do
care. I know that there’s something behind this whole thing, behind all jokes and subject changes. Like I said, you don’t have to tell me, but it can be good to tell someone the truth. And besides it’s my birthday…and you asked me what I wanted.” I gave a smile.

Delagio didn’t respond for a long while. When he did, it was to remove his Stetson– which he placed down on the top of a support strut – and sit down on a barrel, staring down at his clasped hands.

“Alex, Delagio is dead.”

33

In the Name of Forgiveness

My real name is Ricardo Diaz.

The people who know that also know that ah used to be a Huntmaster. That was back when I was servin’ at Blackwall, the Alliance base in Austin, Texas.

Before my Awakening I was obsessed with four things – women, drinkin’, drugs and baseball. A minor problem when you’re a teenager livin’ the high life, a major problem when you’re still obsessed with three of those four things after your Awakening.

I met Kieran Delagio on the first day of elementary school. We was both raised in Lockhart, a small city on the outskirts of Austin with a population ‘bout a third of Chapter Hill. Our folks bought us into school late, and we had to sit together in the hall whilst the teachers sorted everythin’ out. Kieran had a bunch of these baseball trading cards on him. He offered to show me. I’d been a baseball nut from the moment I learned how to walk upright. From then on, we was like white on rice.

I’m not sure when exactly I started callin’ Kieran by his last name, but he didn’t seem to mind much, in fact he seemed keen on it. The whole thing caught on pretty quickly, and soon everyone knew Kieran as Delagio or Del – even some of the teachers. When we weren’t at school, Del spent most of his time at my place – either watching old World Series games my pa had taped, or playing catch in the yard. Del was happier at mine than at home. He’d never had much of a good family life – his folks married right out of high school, and by all accounts the cracks in their relationship had formed pretty soon after. By the time we was both fourteen, Delagio’s old man was a full-time drunk and his ma the local hussy, trying to recapture her cheerleader glory days by knockin’ boots with any guy who looked at her twice.

Del was quieter than me, and in a lot of ways, I guess he was a bit odd. Like he was always stealin’ his pa’s favourite Stetson, which didn’t fit at all, but he just loved it for some reason. I didn’t care that he was quiet; in fact it worked well with me being the loud one. All that mattered is that we got on like a house on fire.

Anyway we both practiced baseball hard enough that I started pitchin’ for Lockhart Lions when we reached high school, and Del got a spot as catcher. Whenever I was up there on the mound and he was crouching behind the batter, it was like we was communicatin’ telepathically. Together, we pitched more strikes than anyone in the team had ever done. Man we were
good,
and we earned ourselves a reputation. By the time high school was done, neither of us had trouble gettin’ places at the University of Texas on full sports scholarships, playing for the Longhorns under their baseball program. Del and me roomed together, we played on the same team together, and we sure as hell partied together. We were living the dream – two close buddies spending the best years of their lives with each other, hearing the crowd cheer our names, gettin’ the gals at the after parties n’ making a bunch of new friends in the process.

Things started out innocently enough, but after a while Del and me started to get a reputation for the wrong reasons. Like I said we was good at the game, but the problem was we
knew
how
good, and that arrogance went to our heads…especially mine. We’d use our status on campus to get away with everythin’. We’d slack off classes n’ assignments, go to underage drinkin’ parties, get hammered and do stupid things like sleep with other guys’ girls, get into brawls, oversleep and miss practice the next day – that kind of thing. Being honest we became real little shits, but we were just kids and we were havin’ the time of our lives.

My real problems began when I started to choose partyin’ over practice. Del wised up after a while and sorted his act out. He became the one to leave at the right time – trying to get me to head back with him and grab some sleep – but I’d be the one who always wanted to stay for that extra couple beers, or to seal the deal with the gal I’d been chattin’ to. He became the voice of reason, trying real hard to bring me back to reality, but I was having none of it, and after a while he stopped botherin’.

Without my best bud there to help guide me, I fell in deep with a bad crowd, doin’ a ton of drugs and partyin’ far too hard. I’d come back to our dorm room later and more messed up each time, and wake up the next day in a
bad
way. I didn’t care about my grades all too much – I’d never been much of an academic, but it was also affectin’ my game, and that hurt. Delagio did his best to cover for me with the coach, but it was obvious to everyone what was going on.

By then I had developed a serious drink and drug problem.

It started to affect my friendship with Del. I was always irritable from the constant comedowns and hangovers, n’ I began to take it out on him, chewin’ him out for the smallest thing. The worst part was that Del never gave me crap back. He would just sit there on his bed and take the abuse I hurled at him, staring down at the floor and lookin’ like each harsh word was carvin’ a piece out of him. Each time I got after him, I knew at the back of my mind that I was bein’ an asshole, but I was just too damn moody to stop myself. At some point he finally tired of my bullshit attitude and requested a dorm transfer. I remember the day that he moved out, I was lying in bed with a hangover so serious it felt like a Longhorn was sittin’ on my head. Del was packin’ up his stuff and trying his best to avoid my stares, and I was trying my best to think of something to say to make things better, but I couldn’t find the right words in my scrambled brain.  So then he was gone and the wall opposite mine that had always been full of posters of the greats – Mantle, Cobb, Koufax and Ruth – was suddenly bare.

In place of my best bud, I got lumbered with an exchange student called Yegor, who couldn’t speak more than a handful of English, but would shout down the phone at his parents in Russian pretty much every evenin’. Del and me would still text from time ta time, but it just wan’t the same. We didn’t hang out with the same people anymore and we didn’t have the same connection on the field.

I’d broken our friendship.

*

My Awakening was caused by a bad slug during a conference game with the Rams. If I hadn’t been hungover I probably would’ve been able to get out the way, or at least protect myself in time. But instead, I just stood there like some kind of idiot and the ball hit me right in the forehead. Bam! Lights out.

My concussion was severe enough that I was held in hospital overnight. By the time I was discharged I was full swing into my Awakening – obviously without me having a clue. When I got back to campus there was a girl called Lisa – who I’d been trying to get into for a few weeks – just waitin’ in my dorm room. Turned out she was actually an infiltratin’ Guardian called Tara. She asked me to go with her and I agreed, mainly I think because I was still too out of it to argue. Tara took me to an underground base called Blackwall, where I met the leader, who introduced himself as Sage Navarro. I think you met him at your joining ceremony? Anyway, he tried to give me the whole bit about Pandemonia, the Ageless War and the role of the HASEA. While he was talkin’, I was barely listenin.’ I was somewhere in my own mind, terrified that that the ball had knocked somethin’ real loose in my head – either that or I was havin’ one hell of a hallucination due to the hospital meds mixing with the uppers I’d taken the day before. I mean you know from experience man, it’s a pretty crazy thing to be told. Plus at that point none of my abilities had come into play yet, so to me his explanation that I was some kind of superhuman didn’t hold water. The Sage could tell that I wasn’t in much of a state to listen to what he had to stay, so he told me to go back to college and gave me a number to call when I started to
‘experience things I couldn’t explain’
.

Two days later I discovered I could move things with my mind.

Against the doc’s orders to get a few days’ rest, I arranged to meet up with mah ‘friends’ the next evenin’ after I was discharged from hospital. We all did a bunch of drugs and downed a few bottles of bourbon under the bleachers of the college baseball stadium. I didn’t mention anythin’ that had happened to anyone I was hangin’ with, for fear of them thinkin’ I was crazy…they weren’t exactly the understandin’ type. So when my Awakening kicked in full scale and ah started convulsin,’ the assholes thought I was having some kind of bad reaction to the drugs and bolted – leaving me thrashing about in my own piss and vomit – just so that they could cover their own hides. 

I woke up in the morning in my own dormitory bed, soakin’ with sweat and confused as hell. I was also sporting somethin’ close to a 9.8 on the headache Richter scale. I kept a bottle of water and Advil on the bedside table for those types of emergencies.

When I reached out for the bottle, it flew right into my hand by itself.

I remember my heart beatin’ a million miles a minute as I stared down at this pill bottle, my mind replayin’ the stories that we’ve all heard or read about some nameless person who finally did too many drugs and broke their mind. I chucked the bottle across the room, the pills spilled everywhere and I started cryin’.

It took me a long time to calm myself down. I reassured myself that I wasn’t losing my mind, that it was just a combination of all the things I’d done to my body over the last few days taking their toll. I was tired and I was fed up with my shit behaviour. So right then and there, I vowed that I was gonna clean myself up and get back to doing what I loved most…baseball. Plus I was gonna bite the bullet and admit to Del that I’d messed up, and beg his forgiveness.

Bu first I had to get better.

I didn’t move from my bed the whole day and night, just lay there feelin’ sorry for myself and sufferin’ from the worst case of fever I’d ever faced. Of course now I know that it was just my soul goin’ through the Awakening, but at the time I thought it was a bad case of cold turkey. I was glad it hurt, I knew that I had messed everythin’ up bad and had no one to blame but myself.

When daylight hit the next mornin’ I woke to find that I felt like someone had slipped me into a new body overnight. For most my life I’d been physically fit and slim, but the months of partyin’ had started to take a toll on my body. You know how this goes man, but I practically jumped out of bed n’ when I checked myself in the mirror, the person starin’ back at me was younger and healthier than I’d been in ages. I couldn’t explain how I looked, but most of all I couldn’t explain how I felt. For the first time in months I felt clear headed and focused.

Baseball practice was that day, n’ I was already late. I grabbed my kit and literally ran all the way to the field. The coach was pissed at me but I managed to convince him to let me play. As soon as I stepped up to the mound I knew that it was going to be a good day. When I pitched, the baseballs screamed into Delagio’s mitt at well over a hundred miles an hour, I could actually see that it hurt his wrist to catch ‘em. But beyond that, it was like I had some kind of mental control over the balls. When it looked like the batter was about to connect, the ball would curve at the last possible second and they’d strike out. No one could believe what they were seeing, most of all me. The rest of the team were going nuts, and even Del was giving me thumbs up.

During that Saturday mornin’ training session everythin’ finally started to fall into place for me. It was just so painfully obvious that Del had made the right choice in givin’ up the bullshit and I’d made the wrong one. I realised I’d been wastin’ my time getting messed up with people who honestly didn’t give two craps about me. It just reinforced what I’d felt in my dorm room. It wasn’t about gettin’ wrecked, it was about making somethin’ of my life. That’s all that mattered…it had just taken me a lot longer to realise it than my friend. I remember that day so clearly. Standing on that mound with the baseball in my hand and the mornin’ sun on my back, Del crouching behind the batters and signalling the pitch. It was the day I got my pride back.

The coach drug tested me that afternoon.

Apparently the test was ‘random’ but I knew that was bull. Like I said, everyone knew what a train wreck I was, and the fact that I hadn’t been tested before had surprised me to be honest. I guess that playin’ badly wasn’t too much of a cause of concern beyond spending more time on the bench, but doing an overnight reversal and suddenly playin’ out of my skin. Well that was somethin’ that couldn’t go ignored.

I tested positive for traces of coke, molly, pot and speed. Maybe I could have gotten away with the weed, or maybe even the coke, but the ecstasy and speed was a definite no. The worst part of it was seein’ the disappointment on my coaches’ face. He’d been hopin’ as much as I had that the results would somehow miraculously come back clean – he didn’t want to get rid of me as much as I didn’t want to leave, but the rules are the rules. As quick as spit I was dropped from the team.

I was broken. The same day I had finally realised what I wanted from life was the day it was taken away from me.

I went back to bed and didn’t speak to anyone for two days. I ignored Yegor when he started mouthin’ off at me in Russian and pointin’ at the pills which were still scattered all over the carpet, and I ignored the seven calls and four text messages from Del, as well as the knocks on my dorm door. I was too busy feelin’ sorry for myself.

I kept a bottle of Jack’s underneath my bed. I knew it was a bad idea, but I pulled it out and just started drinkin. It might sound stupid, but without baseball I felt like I had no purpose left – it had been mine and Delagio’s dream since we were tots, and now I had a blemished record, there was no way that I would ever make it into the professional league.