Page 15

The road looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic film—and I knew, because I’d watched every single one in existence. Usually, my favorite films had zombies. I sincerely hoped, for my sake, that it would be zombies coming for me instead of a terrifying invisible creature that snatched humans up.

I was alone and waiting as bait. Maybe for a zombie, but more likely for whatever had snatched poor Fred.

In an attempt to block out any chance of Kane coming through for a solid minute, I pretended to be a nature documentarian and shouted my thoughts inside my head. On my left, note the majestic pine trees entangling with the disgusting, sour-smelling underbrush of the Immortal Plane in a crime against the natural order. Weep at the glorious opportunity for picnics dashed by the insane men, mortal and immortal, who caused all this.

Weeds had sprung up in the cracks of the road. When Ms. Rodriguez told us how Fred had been snatched, I hadn”t realized the spot came this close to the lake”s edge. The water continued right up to the forested area where the Leftovers started. If someone tried to bike down this road, they ran the risk of abduction by hungry immortal creatures. I studied the plant life that dotted the area just beyond the boundary. The leaves were bright and spiky, completely tropical and foreign looking against the remaining muted greens and browns of the Sierras.

At least the trees hadn”t moved. I was still watching for that phenomenon, but it hadn”t happened yet, and it was already early afternoon. I stayed alert, though, as the reports also stated that things could change very quickly. The land itself might be unstable. I scanned back and forth around the boundary, keeping a vigil for myself as my comm occasionally flared with comments from Holt. The Hellraisers weren”t seeing much, but we were willing to wait.

”Nothing on the scanner,” Jessie said. The waiting and the anticipation were the worst parts. I would much rather the beast just come out so I could start a fight.

”The days pass by with no semblance of time,” Kane whispered to me. I bit my tongue to stop myself from whispering that his temporary silence would be much appreciated. Secretly, I liked it… but I worried I might respond to it like I did on the last mission. And Jones was chomping at the bit for something to hold against me. He and Evans were on opposite ends of the respect spectrum, but I was positive that he’d complained to her about his chat with me.

”The air has a heavy feeling here,” Kane muttered. His voice grew so soft sometimes that it was like hearing my own random thoughts flitting by. Who knew he was so poetic? When I saw him again, I would tease him mercilessly about this. The minutes trickled by as my team reported in. There was nothing to do but listen to Kane”s occasional commentary and watch the trees.

”I”m not sure how long we”ve been here,” Kane said. He had moved on from his grappling lesson with whomever he had been wrestling. Now, his thoughts—I assumed—sounded like he was alone for the moment. ”My hunger is going to rip a hole through me. I can”t tell them that.” He was protecting whoever he had found. Most of all, he was being Kane. He never let those walls down. With him, I always felt as if I was pressing up against an invisible fortress. These words from him were surprisingto me… even comforting. I liked that he thought like this, even if this did end up being nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

I shifted from foot to foot as Holt gave me another all-clear signal on the comm. Kane continued, ”It”s always been hard. Hard made me this way. I can take a little more.” My heart stirred with empathy. I knew the feeling. For a moment, a sense of embarrassment crawled over my entire body. Assuming these were his private and personal thoughts, I felt like an intruder.

Why was it hard on you, Kane?Hard was not something I associated with him. Everything he did, he did well. I couldn’t see how someone who radiated strength like that might be struggling… but I wanted to understand. He couldn”t hear me, but I could still press.

”I don”t want to think of the past,” he whispered, more as if he was talking to himself than me. ”But it keeps coming back to me. I had to work twice as hard to keep up with everyone. Dorian was smaller than me, but he was better at everything. I couldn”t understand why it took so much work for me to catch up. My mom just kept pushing and pushing me. I hope she”s okay. She must be worried. I”ve always been one mishap from pushing her over the edge. She had such a weird back-and-forth dance with me. One minute, she would be telling me to work hard to be twice as fierce and cunning as the others, but… then she would freak out over nothing. In LA, she hovered over me like I was made of glass. Why does she look at me like that? I”ve never been able to figure it out.”

Mommy issues. Uh-oh. I swallowed a hard lump in my throat, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. Yes, I understood issues with mothers as much as the next person. It was different from my own mother, who only nagged me in the rare moments when she decided to take on a parenting role. Those moments were always at random. Too bad she’d gotten a daughter who actively sought out danger. At this very moment, I was literally using myself as human bait to tempt a deranged creature into coming out and attacking me. Maybe that was another reason why Kane and I got along, but… I was sure Kane wouldn’t have wanted me to hear this. And yet, I had no choice but to listen, because he just kept talking.

”I was raised to be twice as good as everyone around me, but being here is torture. I’m starving half the time and going slower than ever. At least the kids don”t seem to notice.” He sighed with such heaviness that my heart felt an actual pang of hurt. I wanted so badly to see his face. Where was he? Was he talking about the Harvester kids we’d been escorting when the meld hit? He snorted to himself. ”This reminds me of that time when my mother thought she was cheering me on and handed down her most back-handed compliment yet. I got up two hours earlier than the others to run through drills. Mom was so good at making sure I had extra-nice clothes, and my hard work earned me more muscles. I used to grow out of my clothes at an alarming rate, but Halla always managed to stitch together the nicest things for me. My teachers commented on my size positively, as if to soften their criticisms about how hard it was for me to keep up. One morning, I came back to the house after my morning drills and found her at the table. She was younger then, but her eyes always had that bitter edge to them. I learned how to look intimidating from her. She looked at me, offered to mend my beaten clothes, and gave me the warmest smile she ever had. Why did she say it, then?”

Tell me, please. Tell me what Halla said. My stomach twisted. I had never imagined a younger Kane, because his entire presence told me who he was and that the past was something buried for him. Many of the vampires were like that. There was too much pain underneath the sands of time.

”Slight fluctuations coming from the left, and we just spotted an immortal bird in the treetops. Looks like a fairly small creature, so nothing major,” Holt interjected on the comm.

My reply was numb and hurried. ”Got it.” It was hard to focus on the present when Kane was so consumed by the past.

”She said things bluntly. She loved me…” Kane muttered, resigned. ”But I”d never say that to a child… You can”t tell a kid that they”ll be adequate as long as they keep up such grueling training. She looked me right in the eye and said my extra work was the only thing that gave me a seat at the table with the other vampires.” He lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and sadness for him flooded through me. I shut my eyes, just for a moment, to suck in a breath. Nothing had changed when I opened them. I was still bait on the road.

“I guess in the end, as much as I wanted to be tough, Halla was always tougher,” Kane mused. You can”t fake that kind of survival instinct. She never told me her own problems. She always thought she was doing her best to make me stronger.”

My heart was breaking for him. I wanted to know as much about Kane as I could, but I also couldn”t believe that this was happening. Someone”s private inner life was sacred. I would hate for him to hear the self-loathing thoughts I sometimes had, or the stubborn, angry reactions that flared up in my mind before my logic could fight against my brain. I had many dark moments, and now I knew Kane did too. Still, at least I had information I could pass to Lyra once she got back from her mission. I knew more about his circumstances, now.

He was unhappy. He was lost and hungry, reverting back to a state where he felt more in common with the child-self he’d left behind. How hard Kane had worked to move beyond his situation and his limitations. I wanted to ask him why it had been harder. I had never considered him any different from the others. He’d always presented himself as powerful and in control. Oh, I guess that hits close to home for me, too. That was part of what made me mad about Lyra half the time. She had a control that seemed to be innate, which frustrated me. She’d been born into the ideal Bureau family, whereas I’d had to fight for my place… just like Kane had. It was hard to see people around him moving forward in life at a faster pace.

Most of all, I wished I could ask him why he’d never told me about any of this.

Kane, were you scared to tell me? I would never judge you for that.

Silence was my only answer. All my hidden fears made me antsy. I couldn”t seem to sit still as I rocked back and forth on my boots, which suddenly felt too tightly laced. Everything was too tight on me at the moment. I’d eventually have to fess up to him that I was hearing all this, right? Or worse, this all might be simply a manifestation of my own psychological issues and worries. Bryce always talked about trauma as being a huge deal for soldiers, but none of us had had any time to stop and heal when the world was splitting apart at the seams.

A rush of frustration hit me next. I had zero control over this. Kane”s voice was like a radio station that I couldn”t turn off. He needed to know I was here, but I had already tried ”thinking” my way to him.

Perhaps I could shout?

”Another small uptick in fluctuations,” Holt reported.Right, shouting out loud was a no-go.

Jessie came on the line. ”Another bird. They look like crows or something.”

”It”s more like a raven,” Jordan corrected. I mumbled something to them about hearing their message and let the twins argue off the comm. They didn’t usually butt heads so much, but they had always been naturally competitive with each other.

I tried to shout silently. Kane! It was so harsh and loud in my own brain that I immediately felt ridiculous. It didn”t work.

Growing up, my mom always had a love for psychic TV shows. I tried to center myself with deep breathing, calling out in a more ghostly tone in my brain, the way a movie heroine might do it. Nothing.

”Another day ahead of us,” Kane mumbled.

Listen to me, idiot! I wrapped one hand into a fist and tried a new method. Forget the calming nature of breathing; I would try to tense every muscle in my body and psych myself up to reach him.

My psychic attempts to connect to him failed. I resigned myself to that as I listened closely to the air around me. And soon, I was listening closely for Kane”s next words. The air around me calmed.

”It only gets harder,” Kane said. ”Why doesn”t anyone tell you that about growing up?”

They”re trying to scam us about growing up, Kane. I let the thought float up to the center of my head. I focused on Kane”s face, specifically on the image of him next to me before he went away. Or I went away. I focused on the hard tilt of his scowl and the way he used to rile me up so easily in our practice fights. Our sparring was a dance, even if nobody else saw it. I moved forward and he reacted perfectly. It was more beautiful than any waltz, with a subtle humor to it. He met my flaws in combat exactly where his own began. We were two sides of a coin that someone had flipped, only for it to fall through the bars of a storm drain. We were never supposed to make it, either of us.

But we did, didn”t we? I sucked in a breath. All I could hear was the occasional buzz of my comm, Holt telling the twins to quiet down, and the unspoken words that couldn”t seem to reach Kane no matter how hard I tried. Please, Kane. I”m here. I”ve always been here. It doesn”t seem fair that you”re the only one who gets to torture me. We”ve already faced enough together. Memories of the sanitarium came back to me. We had been given the choice to hurt one another or be hurt ourselves. Too bad they put two gluttons for punishment up against each other. Then there were the charged moments and the heavy air before our first kiss at the Hive party. I could still feel him pressed against my lips and remembered how I had been bold before that moment. I knew I was flirting with him, and I didn”t care who saw, least of all Lyra, whom we’d shocked so badly.

They don”t have a monopoly on human-vampire romance. I smirked to myself. I felt so connected to you. I guess sort of like now, even though I didn”t do this on purpose.

The silence came. A slow, creeping sensation of being watched tingled in the back of my mind.

Kane… are you listening to me?

It felt like someone was standing beside me, breathing in my ear. It was as if he was here with me. In the distance, something gave a long, high-pitched whine.

”Presence spotted in the trees,” Holt said urgently. ”Taylor, there”s a supernatural energy signal approaching you. It”ll be upon you in moments. Prepare yourself.”

The whine stopped, and I turned to face my fate. Wherever Kane was, I would do him proud with a good fight today.