“You’re right. I’m so sorry, pix. You’re getting old enough to be able to handle all this. We won’t keep anything else from you.”
For some reason, I seriously doubted that.
“I think it’s going to hold,” Mr. Walsh said. He’d been inspecting the room, walking around it and checking for faults in the metal. Brooke was sitting against the vault door with Cameron, and for the first time, I realized she was shaking uncontrollably. I was about to step to her but was blindsided.
“It’s up!”
We all turned to Glitch as he beckoned us from the doorway.
“Glitch?” Brooklyn asked, surprised. “What are you doing here?”
He winked at her, then turned back to my grandparents. “We have audio and video out. Nothing in.
Didn’t have time.”
After another thud that sounded like the earth beneath us was giving way, Brooke and Cameron stood.
We followed Glitch as he led the way to yet another outer room, a small supply closet on the other side of the vault. There was a monitor set up, along with other technical equipment.
“Did you do all this?” I asked him.
“With the help of Mr. Lusk, Cameron’s dad, yes.”
Mr. Lusk popped up from underneath the desk and nodded a hello. “Cameron, how are you?”
Cameron massaged his throat. “I might need a beer, but I’m okay.”
Mr. Lusk cast him a dubious frown.
I frowned at him too. “I thought beer didn’t do anything for you.”
“Okay, an aspirin, then.”
I looked closely at the monitor, at the green glow of a night-vision camera projected onto the screen. It was Jared. I sank into a chair and watched as he paced like a caged animal, his shoulders hunched, his movements sharp and calculating.
Glitch reached over and turned a knob on a speaker. “It would be better if I’d had more time, but it should work.”
That’s when I heard Jared’s breaths, his whispery curses, his soft footsteps.
“We can hear him, but he can’t hear us. I didn’t have enough—”
“Are you sure?” Brooke asked, interrupting. She’d come in behind me and noticed the same thing I did.
“Because the minute you said that, he turned.”
Jared had spun around when Glitch spoke, looking up at the camera in the corner, his eyes bright, his stare hard and intentional.
I decided to test it. I leaned forward and asked, “Can you hear me, Jared?”
A slow, purposeful smile spread across his face, one that I was getting used to. One that held no humor whatsoever, no warmth, nothing but scorn and indifference.
“What happened to you?” I asked him.
He took a step forward. “Open the door and I’ll tell you.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I’ll take you quick, Lorelei, painlessly, if you open it now.”
Grandma gasped and put a hand to her mouth. Granddad draped an arm over her shoulders.
“Why do you want me dead?” I asked.
His head tilted to one side. “It’s what I do.”
My chest squeezed painfully around my heart, hitching my breath, stinging my eyes. Was it all just a game? From the beginning to the times that we’d kissed, was he just playing with me?
“Come on, pix,” Granddad said as he took my arm to lift me out of the seat. “No good can come of this.”
“Stay,” Jared said, his voice calm, threatening. I stood to leave the room and he stepped closer to the camera. “Stay or they all die.”
I hesitated, then sank back down into the seat. Grandma kneeled next to me. “If he gets out of there, hon, we’re all dead anyway. He’s just taunting you, baiting you.” I suddenly understood why everyone was so afraid of Jared when they had found out what he was. I could now empathize on a level I didn’t want to.
“No,” Cameron said, bending to the monitor. “He probably does want her to stay, so he’s making empty threats.”
“And the hybrid speaks,” Jared said.
“How is he hearing us?” Glitch asked, checking wire after wire. “That room is encased in steel ten inches thick. And there is no audio in. I guarantee it.”
Cameron reproached him with a baleful look. “He’s an archangel, Glitch-head. He can do things like that.”
Glitch flipped him off, but Cameron paid no attention.
“Why would he want her to stay?” Grandma asked, and Cameron offered her a much softer version of his reproach.
“Because he really is in love with her.”
My grandparents bristled, but I didn’t believe him. This wasn’t love. This was hatred. Contempt. Blind rage.
“Then, then I don’t understand,” she said.
“He’s an archangel, a messenger. He doesn’t kill for the sake of killing. He kills because he’s been ordered to. But there’s a balance.” Cameron sat beside me. “You remember what I told you? About how he is made of light and darkness, right?”
I nodded, trying to understand, but sinking deeper and deeper into a state of despair.
“Something has shifted, has caused the darkness to overtake the light.”
“What?” I asked in helplessness. “What could do that?”
Before Cameron could answer, Jared took another run at the door. He was still strong, still ridiculously fast, but he apparently couldn’t dematerialize. Granddad was right.
When he failed again, Jared gazed into the camera. His expression was filled with so much hatred, so much apathy, I took a mental step back. Then he turned away, and the strangest thing happened. When he spun back around, he became a blur. He did dematerialize, became a mass of smoke and fog that spun and swirled like a whirlwind.
As though proving he still could.
As though he’d heard my thoughts.
The camera shook, vibrating until the room went completely black and only sound was left. And the sound we heard was like the fluttering of a thousand birds. It grew louder and louder, feathers brushing against the speakers, wings rustling against one another in a chaotic frenzy until, in an instant, it stopped.
Silence, abrupt and surreal, settled in the room like a blanket.
I gazed into the monitor, searching the blackness. “Jared?” I whispered. When I received no answer, I asked, “Is he still in there?”
Granddad looked worried too, but Cameron nodded and said, “Parlor tricks. He can’t get past those walls. I guarantee it.”
After another minute of waiting and watching, Granddad took me by the shoulders and lifted me out of the chair. He set guards on the vault and one at the monitor while the rest of us went back to the house to regroup. I just wanted an explanation. Something to help me understand what was happening. Before
Jared escaped and killed us all.
My grandparents had been right all along.
“How did this happen?” I asked as we sat around our kitchen table. Betty Jo was making coffee and
Glitch was setting out sandwich meat and bread at the behest of my grandmother. She sat in the chair beside me, so tired and so scared, she seemed to have aged right before my eyes. A sadness had consumed me as well, along with a genuine desire to die. I’d never been particularly suicidal, but would death be so bad? On the plus side, the pressure to save the world would end.
“I don’t know how they did it,” Cameron said, “but somehow, when the descendants got a hold of
