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18

The Correct Response Is to Be Freaked Out

I f this was just their assessment of us …” Brady said, eyeing Hunt in the passenger seat then the rest of us in Bonnie’s rearview mirror before shaking his head. “Then, shit , I can’t decide whether to be freaked out or excited, ’cause there isn’t a single doubt they’re going to hand us our asses.”

Again in the middle seat in the back, since Griffin had taken to leaving shotgun to Hunt so he could sit beside me, I let my head plunk heavily onto the seat, trying to carve out some space between my chest and Bobo’s body, which was a freaking furnace. I’d shucked my drenched workout clothes and once again wore my jeans and snug quarter-sleeve shirt, but the fabric was sticking to my sheen of sweat.

The note I’d tucked under my boobs was soggy and damp. I’d been well on my way to kicking my own ass for deciding it was safer with me than in the locker room until I realized the clothing I left behind had definitely been rifled through. I’d paid close attention to how I’d left my pile of belongings, and my jeans and the sleeves of my shirt were at slightly different angles than I’d left them. Whoever had gone through our stuff was good, but not perfect. Had I not anticipated how very complete our lack of privacy was, I might not have even noticed.

I could only hope I’d still be able to read whatever Jude had written on the paper. I hadn’t yet had the chance to properly examine it, sneaking it from one place to the other without unfolding it because of the surveillance of hidden cameras. Even with the risk that the text might now be a challenge to decipher, at least Magnum wouldn’t be privy to Jude’s secrets. With the odds stacked against us as they were, it barely seemed like a win. But we’d had so few, I was going to count it as one anyway.

When the others hadn’t yet answered Brady, I told him, “The correct response is to be freaked out , def to be freaked out. Now that they know we’re all in shape and that we know what we’re doing at least a little, they’re not going to hold back. And when they hand us our asses, I’m afraid it’s gonna be in the dead way.”

Homer, Yolanda, and Armando had made us sprint till our leg muscles burned, climb up and down ropes tied to the very top of the maybe fifty-foot ceiling, spar and grapple with each other, kick and punch and strike every which way. They’d even made us break slabs of wood with both our hands and bare feet. They’d shoved us to see how well we’d catch ourselves or if we’d fall, and they’d swept our feet out from under us any time we weren’t paying attention.

My mind was as exhausted as my body—and there was no way we could let down our guard. Not as long as we were stuck on this campus.

“At least we know we’ll learn cool stuff though, right?” Brady said. “I can’t wait to see what they can do. The three of them look like total badasses.”

“Again, not necessarily the best thing when their job descriptions literally include killing their pupils.”

Brady slowed as the admin building loomed up ahead.

“Whatcha doin’?” Layla asked.

“Looking,” he said.

“For what?”

“Something sus.”

Griffin huffed. “Well, I don’t think you have to look far to find that. It’d be harder to find something not sus around here.”

“No kidding,” I said on a heavy sigh, leaning my head against Griffin’s shoulder as Bobo tried to circle around my lap to get comfy. I patted his rump and guided him to sit before his foot could press against my full bladder.

When Homer had finally dismissed us, he informed us we had exactly an hour and a half before our academic teachers expected us over in the academic building. It wasn’t all that much time for the showers we all desperately needed, plus a quick lunch for us and Bobo, but we’d decided the relative privacy of our own house was better than exposing ourselves to the locker room showers and figuring out the dining hall.

Brady slowed nearly to a crawl as we passed the office building, leaning forward to peer at it through the windshield.

Griffin rubbed Bobo’s ears. “It’s time to get Clyde back up and purring. I’m thinking tonight would be a good time to grab some cold ones and start working on him. You guys down? It’d be good not to have to all pile into Bonnie every time.”

We were in the midst of agreeing to the plan for the evening when Brady brought Bonnie to a complete stop.

“OhmyfuckingGod, Brade!” said Layla, throwing her hands up into the air. “Get us home already before we get any riper in here. We stink like a pile of sweaty jockstraps. I can literally smell your ass crack.”

I was prepared for Brady to give her shit in return when he muttered, “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

Three seconds later, Hunt snapped, “Guys, look !”

With Bonnie in the middle of the road—granted, there was no other traffic—Hunt cracked open the passenger door but didn’t push it open.

Bobo was still standing on my lap and his head lifted as he stiffened with sudden alertness—blocking the front window. I wrestled him out of my view while glancing through the side windows across my friends’ laps. I didn’t manage to make sense of whatever was going on before Hunt pushed his door the rest of the way open and jumped out of it, immediately breaking into a run.

“What’s going on?” I asked urgently, but Brady was already pushing open his door to follow, and Griffin and Layla were getting out, too. When Griffin reached his hand back in to me, Bobo stared up at me, waiting for my permission to go.

“Good boy,” I said in a hurry. “Go. Follow.”

From my lap in the middle, he leapt out onto the ground, waiting for me.

The second I was out, I whirled in Griffin’s arms, trying to look everywhere at once and asking, “What the hell’s happening?”

For the second time today, a man was running with such desperation and scrambled speed it could only mean he believed he was running for his life.

The administration slash office building was at his back as he scrambled down a steep hill.

“Do you see who’s chasing him?” I asked Griffin and Layla, who remained beside the car with me, trying to make sense of the scene before we ran out into possible danger. Hunt was already running toward the man, Brady jogging more slowly after him.

“No,” Griffin said. “I see no one. Let’s go.”

As we all ran toward him, the man noticed us and switched direction to aim for us and our car.

But when his attention crawled across Hunt, he stumbled and fell to his knees, his mouth agape for a few seconds before he pushed up to his feet to continue running.

“Holy fuck,” I mumbled under my breath as the man and Hunt intersected, both stuttering to a halt to gape at each other.

Even with a good twenty feet still separating us from them, their resemblance was obvious.

The man and Hunt shared the same sharp nose and high cheekbones, although Hunt was a little leaner than the older man, who appeared to be in his mid-forties. Their hair was the same shiny black, their skin a similar brown, their eyes dark. They were both tall, although Hunt had a couple of inches on the other man.

“Holy motherfucking shitballs,” Layla breathed. “Is that … ?”

“His father?” Griffin whispered so reverently I didn’t want to correct him to say “sperm donor.”

Two men simply could not look this much alike and not be related.

The stranger was studying Hunt like he was seeing a ghost. Gingerly, he reached for Hunt with both hands. His long hair had come partially free of the long braid that draped down his back, framing the wildness in his eyes; they burned with the urge to flee while being apparently unable to look away from Hunt.

Brady, Griffin, Layla, Bobo, and I all drew up around Hunt as his father cleared his throat and rasped, “Son?”

Hunt’s throat bobbed while his forehead bunched into lines. “I … think so?”

The man’s eyes, a darker tone than Hunt’s chocolate brown, glistened. His voice was an awed croak. “How truly mighty the Great Spirit is. I believed you were lost to me forever, my son.”

“I was told you were dead.”

The man’s lips pursed, making the fact that they were thinner than Hunt’s more apparent. “ Lies .”

“Is someone after you?” I interjected. In his shock, the man seemed to have forgotten whatever he was fleeing. “Do we need to help you get out of here?”

When his eyes landed on me, they widened. “You.”

I flinched until he added, “You walk my dreams. I thought you were a witch come to steal them.”

“Nope, no witch here.”

He studied me for several seconds we probably didn’t have to waste before nodding. “Not a witch. You look like the white man, but my ancestors stand with you.”

“Your ancestors of the Eastern Band Cherokee?” Hunt asked.

His father glanced at him. “No. My tribe, the Aquoian people.”

Hunt harrumphed. “I thought you were Eastern Band Cherokee. That’s what they told me.”

More lies . The explanation went unspoken.

“My ancestry— your ancestry —lies to the west. The blood that runs through my veins is all Aquoian. It’s their secrets and power that the rich white man wants, that he kills for.”

“Then we need to get you out of here, right now,” Griffin said, and I nodded as a sense of urgency undulated beneath my skin, urging me to move.

The man stared at Griffin, then me again, next Layla and Brady, before his gaze returned to his son. His brow furrowed, causing his eyes to narrow. “I don’t understand how or why, but my ancestors have chosen all of you.”

His attention focused solely on me until the force of it made me shudder. But I refused to look away. Something about this man made me want to draw closer, to learn every possible thing there was to know about him.

“Especially you,” he told me. Then to all of us, “You’ll defend the knowledge entrusted to us.”

He stopped as if to listen to something—perhaps the ancestors—that I couldn’t hear. Frantically now, I glanced behind him at the admin building; still no one appeared to be in pursuit.

He smiled sadly. “For many generations, my tribe’s given everything to keep what we know safe. I speak with the ancestors. You’ll protect our secrets now too.”

“We, uh, can come back from death,” Hunt admitted.

The man’s eyes widened again, this time tinged with panic. “A gift of the sky people,” he whispered in a thready pitch I could scarcely hear. “Shit. It might already be too late. We have to hurry.”

“Yes, hurry ,” I repeated, all too happy for us to get moving.

I turned and started jogging back toward the car with Bobo at my side, prepared to pile up into each other’s laps to make room for this man, when a hoarse scream rang out before quickly stuttering to a strangled end. Whirling, my mouth dropped open.

Blue light crackled and sizzled as it wrapped the body of Hunt’s father, now rigid as a board. A web of blue trapped every hair and every limb. His features were twisted with pain, his skin cast in the eerie hue of lightning—

And a dude I’d never seen before, with Magnum right behind him, stood at the crest of the hill the man had run down, with strings of a haphazard blue light wrapping his bare forearms to shoot from his fingers—straight into Hunt’s father.

The father gurgled helplessly and shook all over. His eyeballs vibrated and even seemed to swell—not fucking good—before they rolled into the back of his head.

I sprinted back toward him. The loose strands of his hair stood on end as he staggered and pitched forward, unable to do anything to catch himself, and fell straight into my open arms.

The electricity jumped from him to me, racing into my own body, and then into Bobo’s as he pressed his snout to my bare arm in a worried whine.

No, Bobo, no! Don’t touch me! But I couldn’t get out my warning. Either way, it was too late.

My teeth clamped together; I couldn’t get them unstuck. Even my eyeballs felt like they rattled in their sockets. My head trembled uncontrollably atop my neck. Everything was too tense, too tight, too overwhelming.

My friends screamed—maybe I did too—while I struggled to keep my eyes open long enough to save Hunt’s father.

But his eyes took on a glassy and empty sheen as the tattoos that wove down my forearms leapt from my skin to his. Somehow, some inexplicable way, they climbed across his fingers and hands to latch on to his arms. My tattoos hooked in, hung on, trying to keep him with us.

Crackling blue coated our bodies and Bobo’s as I gawked at the inked lines distorting from their usual geometric patterns of Layla’s design to snake around the man’s arms like vines. Was I hallucinating? Was the current making me see things that couldn’t possibly be?

Arms wrapped around me. I heard more whining and cries and realized with a start that I was no longer staring at my tattoos as they moved , but was now blankly studying the sky. At some point, Hunt’s father had slipped from my grip and I’d slumped to the ground. Around flashes of my friends’ faces that I couldn’t get myself to focus on, the air vibrated, differentiating itself into an infinity of sparks and fractals. The air, which I’d always believed was just empty air, as it appeared to the naked eye, was actually composed of millions—bajillions!—of geometric designs. The air was a puzzle made up of more pieces than I could ever possibly count, each fitting into the next with perfect precision. I was staring at translucent designs more wondrous than any mandala, a beautiful reflection of the many symmetric and harmonious patterns all throughout nature, both in plants and animals.

In a way I’d never imagined, the air was alive . Writhing, interlocking, inhaling, exhaling, moving, dancing, pulsing, being .

As I gaped and gawped and stared at the designs filling my vision, desiring to memorize each and every one of them, I tried to decide: Am I dying again? Or was I becoming more alive than I’d ever been before?