Earthbound

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Five minutes later I step into a scalding shower and sigh in sheer pleasure. After lathering twice I knead my sore neck, then look down to take stock of my sad, battered body. The pink scars on my right side from the plane crash—small lines where two broken ribs pierced through my skin, a staple-marked scar on my thigh where they put the worst of my broken bones back together with a metal plate, even my comparatively tiny trach and feeding tube scars—are so familiar now that it’s hard to remember what I looked like without them.

I shake my head, thinking of Elizabeth’s declaration that I’m an Earthbound. This body, riddled with scars and aches, should be proof enough that she’s wrong. Mistaken. A supernatural being couldn’t be so broken. If not for my gift, I wouldn’t believe her at all.

And now I have new marks.

An enormous bruise is purpling on my left hip from where I fell running from Quinn last night. The edges are just starting to turn yellow and the middle resembles an eggplant. My knees and hands are both scraped from the pavement earlier today and still sting a little from the vigorous scrubbing I gave them a few minutes ago.

Visually seeking out a vague throbbing on my upper arm, I see the shadow of forming bruises where Benson’s fingers dug in when he dragged me away from the car crash.

When he rescued me.

The coming bruise makes me chuckle and shake my head. I won’t tell him. He’d feel awful. Benson would never hurt me. Not intentionally.

Sometimes I think he’s the only one.

My mom.

My dad.

But they’re gone.

A small surge of guilt shoots through me as I realize I’ve hardly thought of my parents the last few days. Slowly, so slowly I didn’t realize it until just this moment, Benson has slipped into their place. The person I can trust with everything. Not just life-altering secrets like my powers and the people trying to kill me, but silly ones. The time in fourth grade when I laughed so hard I wet my pants, the baby bird that fell out of its nest that I tried to save … and how I cried when it inevitably died. The kind you only share with true intimates.

Family.

I straighten in surprise as the word races about in my brain and then settles.

But why shouldn’t Benson have become my family?

I think of Elizabeth’s warnings against him yet again and a prickle of anger makes my face heat. No one, no one, has proved as loyal as Benson. I would take him over the whole lot of them.

I stand under the hot spray until my whole body is pink, then take my time getting dressed, first blow-drying my short hair with the loud hotel blow dryer, then pulling on a simple baby tee and yoga capris and finally slathering some hotel lotion over my scratched arms and hands. It all feels like such a luxury.

I’m too keyed up to sleep. I try watching TV, but all the stations are talking about another breakout of the mysterious virus—this time in a small town just north of the Canadian border.

A one hundred percent fatality rate. It makes my stomach churn.

Jay’s words echo through my head: My work, we’ve found connections between the Reduciates and the virus, and if you walk away, I’m not sure I—

What was he going to say next? For the first time, I almost wish I’d stayed. I wish I’d listened. Could something this devastating, this random, be the work of an organization that had nothing better to do than hunt down an eighteen-year-old girl? It seemed impossible.

There’s a doctor on the news now, outlining the symptoms of the virus, the possible vectors of infection. I close my eyes, not wanting to hear.

I’m so sick of bad news.

I click off the television and turn to look at the two ancient journals. I haven’t had a chance to even skim through Rebecca’s journal since this morning, so I flip to the end so I can check out this mystery language.

The handwriting is the same, but Benson’s right: it’s impossible to read.

I turn to Quinn’s much shorter diary instead.

Quinn’s journal doesn’t go into depth, but the brief descriptions are enough. If Quinn is to be believed, these two groups—brotherhoods, he calls them—have had their fingers in everything from the French Revolution to the Knights Templar to the councils of Nicaea. History changing.

History making.

And I should have realized how ubiquitous the triangle has been as a symbol throughout history. The Templars, the Masons, the Egyptians; hell, it’s on our dollar bills. The Earthbound—and through them, these brotherhoods—are etched across the history of civilization.

If I was scared before, I’m terrified now.

No wonder they seem to always be a step ahead of us. They’ve had thousands of years of practice.

When I hear the door unlock, my heart leaps and races. Benson pokes his head in tentatively—probably to check if I’m sleeping—before slipping in.

I glance at the clock and am shocked to see that it’s been two hours since he left. I scarcely noticed the time passing.

He comes in and shuts the door behind him without a word. He stands with his back to me for a long time, and when he finally turns, I lift both of my hands to my mouth with a gasp. His eye is purpling in what’s sure to be a major shiner tomorrow, and a scrape on his upper cheekbone has a smear of blood across it. His hair is mussed and the knuckles on his right hand are bleeding through a napkin.

“Holy crap, Benson, what happened to you?” I rush to him, but he puts out a warning hand and I pull up short.

“Please don’t,” he says, and his voice is brittle, almost to the breaking point. “I think my ribs are bruised.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Get your stuff, we have to go.”

“What do you mean go?”

“Not far, but we aren’t safe here. There’s another hotel across the street.”

“But—”

“Please Tavia, there’s no time!”

The desperation in his voice shocks me into action. I circle the room, grabbing everything I can see and throwing it into my backpack. I hold my loaded bag against my chest and huddle beneath my coat as Benson opens the door again. Chilly air rushes in and swirls around my bare calves and sockless feet shoved into tennis shoes, but when Benson turns to ask if I’m ready to run, I nod.

We sprint through the snow, struggling not to slip on the iced pavement as we cross from one hotel parking lot into another. Benson leads the way around to the far side of a long wing of rooms and then reaches into his back pocket. “Stand over there, in front of me,” he says, pointing.

I do, confused, but understand when I see Benson working on the old dead bolt with his tiny lock picks.

“You didn’t book us a room?” I whisper.

“Do you want to be dead by morning?” he retorts, in a completely uncharacteristic display of impatience.

That’s when I understand how scared he is. “No,” I answer softly. “Thank you.”

The door opens moments later and Benson gestures me inside. He drops my backpack as he flips on the light, revealing what could have been a mirror image of the room we were just in. Different colors, one less lamp, utterly interchangeable.

The silence feels thick between us.

“What happened to you?” I finally ask, hating the suspicion that he ran into my trouble. My mind flashes back to Sunglasses Guy, who apparently managed to track us up to the library. And we really haven’t been that careful this evening. Not careful enough.