Ambrosia Shore (8 page)

Since we were planning to walk around outside, right in the middle of a crowded market full of people, Jax thought it would be best if he toned down his usual look. I just hoped he could tone it down enough that there wouldn’t be any screaming fans recognizing him on the street. It seemed to me like Jax could use a break from all that, and I didn’t want any misguided attention to somehow end up on me. I doubted there was anyone out there that would recognize my face, but I figured it wasn’t a good idea to take any chances.

“How do I look?” Jax said as he trotted down the stairs in my direction.

The words caught in my throat, leaving me speechless. He looked so…normal…and handsome. The make-up was gone, his hair was styled but natural, his clothes were classic and casual in a well-groomed sort of way. And for once, his violet eyes looked soft, even gentle, almost like Rayne’s, like he was happy to see a friend, not trying to seduce me into the bedroom.

“Are you ready to go?” I heard Jax say.

I caught myself staring at him and fumbled for my composure. “Oh, um…yeah. Let’s go.”

By the time we walked across the street to the huge park at the center of the city, I was starting to miss Rayne more than ever before. As Jax and I strolled down the path, I had a clear view of the Court of Ambassadors building a few blocks away. Rayne was probably in there, and it hardly felt like I had done anything to help him. I hated waiting. Why wasn’t my father back yet to take care of this? Didn’t he care what happened to us?

I knew it had only been half a day since Rayne was taken in, but it felt like half a day too long. I wished there was something I could do right now. I wanted to march right up to that building and break Rayne out of there myself. How could I think about strolling out to the city for something to eat, when Rayne was stuck in there somewhere?

I stopped on the sidewalk. “Jax, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

“Oh, come on, Sade. We’re almost there. We’ll just grab the food and go back, okay? No one’s going to recognize us. There are hundreds of people out here for us to blend in with.”

I hesitated for a minute but finally gave in. “Okay, but can you at least check with your friend to see if he’s passed through the border to call the Ambassador?”

Jax agreed to make the call, but his friend didn’t answer.

“Don’t worry,” Jax assured me. “He’s probably over there as we speak, that’s why he didn’t answer. Let’s just hurry and get our food and then we’ll go right back to waiting for his call.”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed Jax further across the park until we reached the food stand he had told me about earlier. Of course the line was long, which seemed really frustrating to me at the moment, but Jax moseyed to the back like it was nothing unusual.

He leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “Normally, I don’t have to worry about lines, but since I’m here in disguise, we’ll have to wait just like everyone else.”

I never thought being seen with the celebrity version of Jax sounded very appealing, but now, the idea of skipping to the front of the line was actually pretty tempting. The idea wasn’t exactly smart, though, so I would have to wait in line just like everybody else.

When we were finally just a few people back from the front of the line, I felt Rayne’s phone buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out and examined the name and number on the screen. It was Rayne’s sister, Violette. For a second I thought maybe I should answer, but I quickly changed my mind. If Rayne wanted his family to get involved, or if they could help him in any way, he would have given me instructions before he left.

It was probably better that they didn’t know where he was anyway, stuck in some prison cell at the Court of Ambassadors. There was no reason to make his family worry. We were going to get him out of there as soon as possible, and he didn’t deserve to be there in the first place.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Jax said.

“No, I’ll just let it go to voicemail.”

Jax stole the phone right out of my hand. “Why not? Who is it?” he teased.

I reached for the phone, struggling to take it back, but before I could do anything to stop him, Jax answered the call.

“Sadie’s phone…” Jax said in a musical tone. “Rayne? No he’s—”

As soon as I heard Rayne’s name, my eyes bulged and I shook my head, trying to make it very clear that I didn’t want Jax to tell Violette anything about him.

“Um, actually…” Jax continued, following my lead, “Rayne can’t come to the phone right now, but Sadie’s here if you want to talk to her.”

I grabbed the phone from Jax’s fingers as soon as I could. “Violette…hi…” I began. “No, that’s no one. He’s just a friend of Rayne’s. We’re all back in the city now.”

Luckily, Violette wasn’t that concerned about talking to Rayne directly. She was just calling by the request of her mother to announce that Ivy and Flint’s baby was born and Rayne was the proud uncle of a little baby girl.

“That’s so great. I’ll be sure to tell him,” I replied.

“Oh, one more thing,” Violette added. “There was this guy here looking for you when we got home, but I can’t remember his name. Sorry.”

“There was someone at your house looking for me?” I repeated aloud, so Jax could hear.

Jax caught my message, and whispered, “Ask her if it was my father.”

“Um, was it—” I started to say, but I realized I didn’t know his father’s name.

I looked at Jax, who squinted at me suspiciously like I should have known, but answered for me anyway by saying, “Councilman Orion Bennett…”

I repeated the name to Violette.

Violette laughed. “Councilman Bennett? No, I think I would have remembered if someone like that was asking for you. This guy wasn’t anyone I recognized.”

Violette didn’t seem to have any useful information on the subject, so after a few unproductive questions, I finally let her go.

I turned to Jax, feeling uneasy. “Something doesn’t feel right,” I said to him. “I think we should go back.”

But just then, the man in front of us moved to the side, and it was finally our turn at the front of the line.

Jax turned to me quickly. “I promise this will only take a minute. We’ve already waited this long.” He pointed to a table at the side of the food stand. “You see that container of sauce over there? Why don’t you fill us up a few cups, and our food will be here by the time you’re done.”

Reluctantly, I agreed and made my way over to the table with the sauce, but I couldn’t help feeling paranoid after the phone call. Who could have been looking for me? If it wasn’t anyone Violette recognized then it couldn’t have been my father. I started looking back and forth at the crowd of faces around me, nerves beginning to tense.

Suddenly, something odd, almost eerie caught my eye. A man—an old, wrinkled, elderly man, staring right at me from several yards away. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. I went back to filling the second cup with sauce, but when I glanced up again, the man’s eyes were still in the exact same place. His entire body hadn’t moved even a millimeter.

I thought maybe he was just old and stuck in a wandering thought, but then he lifted his arm and pointed right at me. A hustle of people moved around us, but they were nothing but a blur. All of the man’s focus was centered directly on me without anyone else seeming to notice at all. He moved his finger away from my direction and pointed at something to his side that I couldn’t see, something inside a sales booth surrounded on all sides by thick fabric walls.

The strangest curiosity grew inside me, almost like I was being summoned, and my feet started to wander forward toward the man and the sales booth where he stood. When he saw me coming towards him, the elderly man nodded in my direction and disappeared around the corner.

When I lost sight of him, I started moving faster, feeling worried that I wouldn’t be able to find him, or the message he was trying to deliver. I finally reached the booth where the man had been standing, but stopped when I turned the corner to go inside. There he was, waiting for me. The booth was filled with black and white sketches and pencil drawings, every single one of them a portrait of the same face over and over again, a girl’s face. It almost looked like…my face.

The man took one of the smaller sketches in his hand and held it out toward me. “It’s you…” he finally wheezed. “Aurora.” A strange, bewildered gleam shone through his eyes as he said the word again. “
Aurora
.”

I shook my head in a panic. What was this? Why did I even follow the man here?

The man shuffled forward and grabbed my arm with shaky fingers, staring down at my wrist. “The mark with no end holds the key to the source,” he said in an almost worshipful tone. “The Aurora will harmonize the spheres.”

It was like Rayne’s delusional grandmother all over again, but only weirder and scarier. I pulled my arm away and stumbled backward.

“Aurora,” the man said, following after me, “Aurora…”

“No, I’m Sadie,” I cried out. “Not Aurora, Sadie…”

The old man shoved the sketch of the girl into my hand. “You must protect the key,” he continued urgently. “Harmonize the spheres, or all is lost.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, pulling anxiously away.

I turned my back quickly and pushed myself through the crowd of people, searching every face to find Jax. I had to find Jax. But I was disoriented, unable to remember which direction I had come from in the first place.

I spotted the food stand where we had waited in line, and for a moment I thought I could breathe. But as soon as I took another step forward, there was a man standing in front of me, blocking my path. It wasn’t the old man from before; it was a bigger, younger, stronger man, with a look of terrible gratification on his face. I tried to slip past him, but he shifted deliberately in my way.

“Sadie is it?” he said, clenching his grip around my elbow. The man looked at me with a diabolical smile. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

A loud clank down the hall and the rustling of boots along the concrete dragged Ash away from his miserable sleep. It was probably sometime in the middle of the afternoon, but Ash didn’t care. He would sleep twenty-four hours a day if he could. In fact, he might as well sleep for the next two hundred years. He would do just about anything to escape the pain, anything to erase himself from the face of the planet, so he wouldn’t have to feel anymore. The more time he spent in unconscious oblivion the better.

Ash was nothing now, a ghost, an empty shell, a worthless piece of dirt.

He dragged his body upright unwillingly on the stiff prison bed, waiting to see who was coming down the concrete hallway to interrupt his self-pity. It had only been an hour or two since they cleared away his lunch tray, so it wasn’t food. He hoped they weren’t coming to force him outside for exercise again. He didn’t care about the sunlight anymore.

As the shuffle of feet grew closer, Ash could hear an extra set of footsteps. It still wasn’t enough to motivate him to stand. He did peer out of the corner of his eye to watch, though. The guard entered the dark basement room with another prisoner in his grasp, pushing the man forward toward the short line of metal cells, and when the dim light finally hit the man’s face, a flash of suppressed pain jolted back to the surface. The prisoner was Rayne.

Ash couldn’t bring himself to stand. Maybe it was the shame or the regret or even anger that held him back. All he could do was stare. Rayne eyed Ash right back with a steady stream of loathing as the guard escorted him right into the very next cell.

Now Ash couldn’t hide. He wished there were thicker walls to separate them, but all that stood between him and a big fat constant reminder of his guilt was a grid of open, iron bars, leaving Rayne the opportunity to glare at him all day and night.

Of course. Out of all the people in Banya…Rayne would be the one to walk through those doors. Suddenly, the irony of his new cellmate drove Ash to come apart at the hinges. A roar of deranged laughter burst from his gut at the sheer absurdity of it all. It was too perfect, exactly what he should have expected. The purpose of Ash’s life was obviously to endure torture, and now Rayne was there to make sure he got what he deserved.

Rayne glared back at him more fervently now, like steam rising up from the blood boiling through his veins.

“You don’t know how much I wish I had a camera right now,” Ash finally said, as his laughter shriveled to dry humor. He sunk back to the bed and leaned against the wall. “If there’s one thing I never thought I’d live to see, it’s Banya’s little sweetheart, come to join the heathens at the bottom of the sludge pit.”

Rayne turned his back and leaned forward, resting his arms through the gaps in the dark iron bars. “Just save it, Ash. The only reason I’m here, is because the Ambassador is stuck back in California trying to clean up the mess you created. As soon as he’s back, I’ll be walking out those doors, leaving you behind to wallow in your misery.”

Ash responded by laughing once under his breath.

“What?” Rayne demanded.

“Good idea,” Ash mocked. “You just go ahead and keep telling yourself that.”

Rayne turned his glare back in Ash’s direction. “I’ve been working with Hamlin for over ten years. I have no reason to doubt that he’ll come through for me.”

“You can believe what you want,” Ash said with a shrug, “but Hamlin’s got a lot at stake here. In the end…he’s going to do what’s best for him, not you. That’s just the way it is. People only care about themselves.”

“You know…” Rayne said. “It’s kind of sad…”

Ash folded his arms, trying to appear disinterested. “What is?”

“How pathetic you’ve become.”

Ash clenched his teeth. “
I’m
the pathetic one? I bet if Hamlin asked you straight out to take the fall for his mistakes, even if it meant spending the rest of your life in prison, you would do it without hesitation.”

“So what if I would?” Rayne challenged. “There’s a little something I like to call loyalty, Ash, something your little pea brain can’t seem to comprehend. Maybe you should try it sometime.”

Ash was too affected to answer, too angry, especially at himself.

“I mean, did our friendship ever mean
anything
to you?” Rayne went on. “I just…I can’t for the life of me figure out how you could agree to go along with your father’s sadistic scheming for even a minute. You knew what he was capable of. How could you drag Sadie and Leena into that?”

Ash closed his eyes, trying to shut out the truth, unable to allow Rayne the satisfaction of knowing he was right. He moved off the bed and came to the corner of his cell, moving so close to Rayne’s side that he could whisper through the gaps in the metal bars. “It’s almost painful to see how naïve you are, Rayne. You sit here and preach about loyalty, when you have absolutely no idea how in over your head you are. If you understood what you were really up against, you’d realize that there’s no point to any of this. You need to give Hamlin up and get out while you still can.”

Rayne’s face turned slowly as he shook his head. “Why am I not even a
little
surprised to hear you say that…”

Ash couldn’t help it; he had to look away. “You’re just going to have to accept it, Rayne,” he said, turning to retreat to the bed. “We can’t all be superheroes like you.”