Tremble (18 page)

I strangle the wooden stick, just as something with the heft of smal vehicle thrashes me against the wal .

A series of primal groans emote from my chest. My skul feels fractured in multiple places.

It’s touching me!

I scream a gurgled cry. The putrid smel bites right through my open mouth and I taste it. Then I remember what the shovel was for. I tighten my grip on the shovel and squirm around and dig my foot into its stomach. I think of Carly and her Logan-loving ways, and push. The beast shoots back a good four feet, and I marvel. It’s just like that day at the pool when I sent her sailing.

Out from the left, the other one squats into position. I lunge forward and spear the shovel at its chest, but it moves and ditches my efforts. The shovel slips from out of my hands.

I can’t lose it. I can’t let my dad burn. I’l never see Logan. I’l never see anyone if I’m taken captive, or worse, eaten by Fems and regurgitated in pieces out on the lawn.

I don’t fight the Fem for the shovel. The flat steel tip nose comes at me and I duck just in time to miss my own decapitation. In my mind’s eye, I see Carly. Her fake innocent face, her legs wrapped around Logan by the pool, and I snap.

The Fem’s tail wraps around my arm like a lariat, and I clasp onto it, curl it into me like a dancer. I don’t mix words or ideas or any other crap.

I dig my hands in its throat until my fingernails break through its rubberlike flesh, and it writhes in a series of quick jerking motions, scratching at the top of my head, opening my scalp like tearing through paper.

Green thick liquid runs down my hand, already partial y congealed. I think of Carly and the way she flips her long blonde hair into Logan as I let the Fem fal to the ground, place my foot on his chest, and let out al of my jealousy inspired frustration by twisting its head around.

Staggering towards the center of the yard, I spin in a careful circle looking for the next one.

“I’m ready,” I hiss, ful out of breath.

There’s a slight breeze, initiating the sound of rustling leaves from up in the oak tree with its hundred-year wingspan. Before I can look, he pounces on me—flat on my back with a thousand crushing pounds. I can’t breathe. No air. I squeeze my eyes shut and make myself feel like I’m fal ing, until I do.

Then I’m gone.

Chapter Forty-One

Gone

I jump out of bed and text Gage.

Where are you? ~S

A warm gush of liquid slides down the side of my face and my fingers press into it. Blood. I’ve brought my injuries back with me.

I wait with morbid patience for ten straight minutes before I decide to go back, but first I need to get Chloe.

I close my eyes and pray nothing happens to Gage in the meantime, after al it’s been two freaking years.

Chloe is busy dancing around her room with the dresses she’s going to be kidnapped and buried in.

“I real y hate to break up the party, but you have to come with me, back to L.A.” I grip her by the shoulders. “I left Gage.”

***

Chloe and I head back immediately. My bedroom looks disrupted. The closet has vomited out its belongings al over the floor and my desk is turned upside down.

“Chloe?” My voice is strangely even keeled. “It wasn’t like this before. Gage wouldn’t do this.” I’m shaking now.

I burst into the hal with Chloe by my side.

“Dad?” I shout his name as I speed down the stairs. “Daddy?” It comes out a frightened cry. The dining room table is overturned, and his laptop is sprawled out on the floor.

My entire body seizes.

“It’s the Fem,” I say, looking up at the broken window in the living room. I make a mad dash out to the backyard and find the Fem I kil ed has disappeared, save for a patch of dead grass where I left him. It’s brittle and dry, but not one drop of green fluid, nothing.

“You think they’ve taken my dad and Gage?” I think back to the underground layer at Paragon where Ezrina took me al those weeks ago.

“We’l never find them,” I say just beneath a whisper.

“We’l find them.”

“You think this changes things?” I ask.

“I think this changes everything.”

Chloe and I spend the entire morning and afternoon searching the neighborhood for clues, but al traces of Dad and Gage end inside the house.

In less than two minutes, the old me is going to come home from school pissed off about a boy who slipped his jockstrap in my backpack.

It’s the last lucid memory I have before I learn about my father.

“Sit on the porch and explain the situation to me before I come inside,” I tel Chloe. “I’l do the rest.”

“Are you insane? You’l be in a mental institution before midnight. They’l hop you up on so many meds you won’t remember your name, let alone the idea there were two of you.”

“True.” A flash from my brief stint at the psych ward races through my mind. “Then…just tel her your boyfriend is running around trying to get the people who ransacked my house. Tel her…me, that he’s nice, and to help him because he’s homeless.” Shit.

I watch through the window as the old me comes plodding down the street. I look so much younger, even my gait is lanky and awkward. Old me spots Chloe and approaches her with a hesitant interest. I can hear Chloe’s voice murmur through the window. There’s silence on my part as she tries to explain, then I see my hand cup over my mouth in horror.

A hard line creases my forehead as my eyes squint into half moons. That must have been what I looked like when they told me about my father. I see more of Mia in myself than I do in the me I know now. I look so frightened—desolate.

Chloe gets up and gives her a hug. I wish I could do the same.

So maybe I didn’t think through how I was going to get out of the house or Chloe was going to get back in. So I probably shouldn’t be too surprised when the old me hears a noise in the kitchen and snatches the basebal bat from out of the entry closet.

Shit. I’m going to get my brains bashed in, by me.

“I hear you,” she shouts. I can see my blonde hair crowning the corner before anything else.

The whack of the bat lands hard on the kitchen counter and bits of peach tile explode into shards.

“I’m not afraid to use this,” I hear me shout, thrashing the bat against cabinetry. I hear glass shatter—wild echoing thumps—water splashing al over the floor.

I make a mad dash out the broken window in the living room scraping the flesh on my new Chloe arm in the process. I land cockeyed on my foot and manage to twist my ankle hard on the concrete below, but I keep running.

“I see you!” I can hear myself scream from the back of the house. I run and dive onto the grass and watch as the bat goes flying through the air—tumbling over itself with gravity-defying fury. I watch in horror as it comes towards my head, dead on like a Tomahawk missile.

Chloe lands on top of me. I can feel the laughter bubbling out of her chest.

We wake up in her bed, and she’s stil laughing.

Chapter Forty-Two

I Can Explain

I real y can’t explain why Gage has gone missing. So I don’t bother. Instead, I hitch a ride to school with Briel e and Drake, ignore the wild texting spree from Logan, and try to brush off Marshal ’s incessant barrage of possibilities during math class. Sometimes ignorance is bliss—it’s difficult to imagine when that might be. But for today I have to pretend I’m someone else, not Skyla Messenger—most idiotic angel on earth who misplaced her boyfriend and inadvertently kil s her father each times she visits.

I try to distract myself as I drag from class to class. I let El is act like a kook and gush over how much money I’m going to save his dope habit just by the sheer fact he can repeatedly steal his own stash.

“How are you able to steal it again and again?” I’m puzzled by this. “If it’s gone last year, that means you never smoked it, right? So if you smoke it now how is it stil there a year ago?”

“You make less sense than I do, and I’m high.” He adjusts his backpack against the bench. Briel e and Drake have gone off campus for lunch because it’s final y not raining, and you can actual y make out the road. Or they probably just wanted to make out, either or.

“I lost Gage,” I confess.

“He hooking up with Carly again?”

“What?” It comes out a shril cry.

“Relax. It was like months before you got here. And I know how much you hate her.”

“Hate her more now.” I fold my arms across my chest.

“So where’s Gage?”

“In L.A. being eaten by overgrown panther’s with horrible human-like faces.”

“Remind me never to light drive with you again.”

“What about the stash?”

“Except then.”

Michel e walks by. Her entire face is pasty and swol en.

“Looks like she’s rotting.” El is says as she passes.

“She’s being bitch slapped by Fems.” I let out a hard sigh. It’s my fault everyone I know is suffering. “I hear that kind of activity picks up this time of year.”

“I’m counting on it. They liven up my Hal oween party. It’s cheap, violent, wicked fun.” He gives a greasy smile.

A shadow fal s over us. For a second I’m afraid to look up, afraid at what monstrous nightmare has decided to embel ish the landscape, but I take a smal peek.

“Logan.” I jump to my feet and give him a quick hug.

“Where is he?” His eyes round out to boyish circles, and for a moment I think he’s going to kiss me.

I’m afraid to say, so I bite down on my lip in an effort to stave the truth from vomiting out.

“Where is he?” He asks with a little more agitation. His amber eyes swirl like a kaleidoscope. There’s just enough real anger to fuel the conversation. I don’t think we’l need to rely on any fake intensity here.

There are two ways I can do this—the truth and a lie.

“Maybe you pissed him off,” I say. I think the lie has more fortitude right now. “Maybe he couldn’t handle al the crap you give him and he swam off the island.” I don’t want to clue El is in on how desperate I am to have Logan help me, either.

It might work to my benefit to have El is think I’m over both Logan and Gage and into him. That way I could get him to deliver a list of Counts, in exchange for his stash.

Do I even hear myself?

I ponder the irony of how I’ve become a glorified drug dealer—the angelic vessel of al things il egal. If I’m going to do that, maybe I should have a fake relationship with Marshal and have him bring my father back.

The bel rings, and El is takes off.

“He’s stuck in L.A. We have to go back and get him,” I plead.

Logan’s eyes close, and he takes in a quick breath.

“I can’t.” He shakes away the thought.

“Yes, you can. If I can do it, anybody can,” I plead. “Are you afraid? Is this like some kind of phobia you have? Gage is afraid of Mastodons and you’re afraid of time travel?” A tiny part of me is thril ed that I might be braver at something than Logan.

“It’s not that.” He shifts uncomfortably and puts his hand over mine. If I time travel, there’s a good chance I won’t come back.

Yes you will. I swear I won’t lose you. I’m taken by the fact he’s holding my hand right here in the quad.

He shakes his head. A sad slow look spreads across his face.

A thin layer of clouds drag over the sun like a dirty veil and darkens the landscape.

Skyla, there’s something I have to tell you. He gives an uncertain smile. I’m not from this time. He closes his eyes briefly. I’m from the past.

Chapter Forty-Three

Loaded

I waited al day for school to get out, then for his shift to finish at the bowling al ey before he could meet me in the butterfly room.

So when my parents died... He pauses.

I rub the back of his hand with my thumb encouraging him to go on. My Uncle Barron… his older brother, Liam, he came back to the day of the fire and rescued me. I was a baby in my mother’s arms, and he saved me. He ends his near hour-long narrative.

So your dad is Uncle Barron’s older brother by twenty-one years, and technically you’re the same age as your uncle. Creepy.

I know. I’m sorry. I meant to tell you, but it never felt right. And when you think about it, I was brought here around the same time he had Gage, so I’ve been raised here. He pul s me closer and leans his head on my shoulder. I remember my time locked in that body, heavily disfigured. It was a prison, but here with you in this place, on Paragon, this is life.

So he saved you because your burns left you disabled. You lived that life for thirty-six years? I crawl over into his lap. I’m so glad he’s OK.

Liam and my Uncle Barron thought it’d be best to initiate the rescue before the burns incurred. That’s when they took me, but the rest of my life over there still left an impression.

What happened to your Uncle Liam? I ask.

He stayed behind, died a few years back. There are rules involved with time travel to prevent people from going back or forward and plucking people out at will. It’s a soul for a soul.

A soul for a soul. I repeat. Then Gage should have no problem coming back. I just need to find him. I hold my breath at horror of the Fems finding him first, if they haven’t already.

What’s your memory tell you? What happened that day your dad died?

I remember Chloe, and the intense panic I felt when I stepped inside the house—of course trying to kill future me with a baseball bat…but I never saw the boy she spoke of, and my father died in a car accident. It’s that last part that makes me cringe. It’s because of me he’s lived out his fate way more than anyone should. I perk up. Marshall says he could bring back my father, so it’s possible.

Logan lifts his head. He doesn’t think much of Marshal , so the thought of something good coming from him is doubtful.

If Marshall said it, then it must be true, he says.

So Sectors can’t lie?

He can if he wants, although it’s never referred to as lying. They’d refer to him as a deceiving spirit. What does this thing want from you anyway?

I’m startled to hear him refer to Marshal as a thing. A part of me doesn’t want to tel him about the whole super race hypothesis.