Anathema (17 page)

It’s Alexander.

He stands there with his arms folded, watching me with a direct and uncompromising stare. “What are you doing out here, Kathryn?”

I squint at him. “What are
you
doing out here?”

His head tilts negligibly. The ocean breeze ripples his long, dark coat, tousles his hair. There’s a lazy sort of alertness to him as he moves towards me like he’s poised for attack even here on the sunny front lawn of my house. “You haven’t been in school and the
Showdown
crew disappeared. I have a theory you’re involved.”

“You’re right.” The whisper barely escapes me. “It was me. I killed them all.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “All by yourself? You have the wrong hazard index.”

“No, of course not by myself. How can you joke about this? I told them you were at the Waste so they followed me there. It turns out you have some old friends there.”

“Ah.” He nods slowly, understanding it.

“They shot them all! They just killed them.”

“What did you think would happen?”

“Not that. I thought… I thought there’d be a bunch of anathemas and they’d fight them off. I didn’t think it would be an outright
slaughter
.”

“So two massive crowds of people with knives, and that’s what you planned on,” he says. “And you thought that would be preferable.”

“It would’ve…” It just would’ve been fair. What a stupid thought that was. Fairness didn’t change the fact that people were dead – a lot of people were dead – and it was because of me. “You’re right. I’m a horrible person. I might as well have killed them all myself.” Self-disgust grips me. “That producer, Mitch, he told me if I didn’t hand you over to them, they’d kill me instead. I thought I was saving us. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences.”

He shrugs that off with an impatient gesture, his eyes still locked on mine. “They were hardly innocent people.”

“They weren’t all hunters. Some of them were just cameramen, crew!”

“Who aided and abetted the murder of hundreds of anathemas. They knew what they were signing onto when they took a job with
Showdown
.”

“It doesn’t make it right! It’s still mass murder. I feel sick whenever I think about it. I did that.
I
did it. I can’t live with it, Alexander. I just can’t.”

My breath seems to be straining at my ribcage. Seagulls are cawing in the distance, a few fluttering white forms circling in the clear blue sky overhead. I throw my gaze back, just wishing I could grow wings and depart this mess forever.

“This is the reality of our world, Kathryn: kill or be killed.” His voice is swift and rough. “You can condemn yourself for fighting back, then lay down and die, or you can do what you must to survive. That’s what you did. It’s what you still should do.”

“I hurt people just to save myself. I won’t do it again.”

“Then don’t put yourself in that position.”

“My existence puts me in that position!”

“No, it doesn’t,” he snaps. “Stuff like
this
does. Sitting on your front lawn alone and unarmed.” He gestures around us, sunlight sliding over his face. There’s something vital and electric to his brisk movements like the carefully leashed power he hides behind a placid facade is slipping out with his vehement words. “You don’t want to kill, that’s fine. But don’t invite danger or it will come to you.”

“I don’t care if anyone kills me,” I say miserably.

“Yes, you do,” he says. “Now go inside.”

“No. I’m going to just stay out and live like a normal person for a few days and if I die, I die.”

“That is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard. Dying isn’t going to bring the
Showdown
people back.”

Deliberately I tune him out and focus on the sun, warm on my skin. Distant waves roar against the shore. If I sit here, I can pretend I’m on the beach. Maybe I should go to the beach. I can die on the beach with the waves foaming about my ankles.

“That’s it. I don’t have time for games,” he says abruptly.

And then his footsteps crackle towards me. In one movement, he lifts me up and throws me over his shoulder. The easy grace of the movement catches me off guard. “What are you doing?” I shriek in outrage, hitting his back, but it might as well be a wall I’m striking. There’s nothing fragile in the heavily muscled body below me.

Alexander carries me through our front door, and deposits me on our couch. I try to spring to my feet, to get away from him. His hands land on my shoulders, sparking static along my skin. He kneels there in front of me, gaze locked on me like an alert tiger’s.

“What happened at the Waste was necessary.” There’s a savage bright glitter of conviction in the crystalline depths of his eyes. “It was our lives or theirs and you chose ours. Now you are going to have to learn to live with what happened.”

I start to shake my head in furious denial, but the warm fingers of his hand closed over my chin, stopping me.

His voice softens. “There are going to be more than enough opportunities to lose your life in the years ahead of you. It’s not worth taking stupid risks and inviting death on yourself because your conscience is troubling you right now. Those people were killers. They’re not worth your life, Kathryn. You simply need to deal with this and get over it.”

But my chest is raw and aching and I don’t want to accept what he’s telling me. Helpless anger washes over me. I need to strike out at someone, anyone. This all suddenly seems like his doing. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe I just can’t deal with you right now!” I shout at him, and throw the first punch of my entire life.

At least, that was my intention. Alexander catches my wrist while it’s still in the air, his grip firm and utterly unbreakable, unmovable. His strength so utterly overwhelms mine that a cry of anger escapes my lips. Then he hauls me up from the couch, gripping my waist with his other hand. My captured wrist remains clasped in his fingers.

My stomach pitches as I grow aware of his body pressed up against me. I’ve seen what he can do against attackers, enough to appreciate the latent danger and grace contained within him. His chest rises and fall with rapid breaths, but it’s his calm, even gaze that holds me captive. It seems to brush my skin like a touch, heating it to a flush. He’s so tall I have to hike up my chin to hold his eyes. For a moment I imagine our hearts beating in frantic time.

Effortlessly, he slides his thumb across my palm, prying my fingers open. “Not like this.”

“What?” My question comes out as a stuttering, shaky breath.

“Don’t punch anyone with your thumb tucked in.” I can feel the vibrations of his voice
 
against my chest. “If you do that, you’ll break it.”

My body feels like liquid suddenly, warm and soft and malleable. Alexander eases my fist closed again, positioning my thumb so it’s pressing up against the side of my index finger. His warm, long fingers curl over mine for an instant, his touch like a flame on my skin, sending a tingling path down my arm. Then he then aims my punch for me, in slow motion, until my knuckles brush the hard slant of his face.

“Keep a straight line from wrist to knuckles and throw your whole weight behind the blow. Don’t lock your elbow. It’s going to hurt your hand, but the goal is to hurt my face a lot more.”

All I’m aware of is the boy pressed so closely against me, the other anathema, the one who tore Russell away from me. The one who jumped out of the car to lead the hunters from my position. My wild, frantic anger has dissolved into numbed despair. Even when I try to hurt him, Alexander takes the time to show me how to do it more effectively. He’s that unflappable. My blood is humming with awareness of him yet he stands so close to me with a remote expression on his face like fog over distant trees.

“How did you get like this?” I wonder. “You don’t feel anything.”

His gaze touches mine, his irises a stark blue beneath his sooty lashes. “This is how I stay alive. This is the only way to stay alive. Detach. If you suffer all the injustices of the world and keep raging at a fate you can’t change, you’re not going to last long as an anathema. It’s too hard.”

My voice is a whisper. “I can’t just turn my emotions off. I can’t just stop feeling guilt.”

“Then I’m sorry for you. This existence is going to cause you a lot of needless pain.”

He releases me. His touch slides from my waist, leaving a path of tingling skin. He steps back from me quickly like he’s locking something away, withdrawing into himself. I see his pulse leaping against the line of his jaw.

His lowered lashes forms black crescents above his cheeks. He reaches down and picks up a family portrait, handling it very gently in his powerful grip. My parents are smiling, and I’m a toddler holding a big ‘K’. They gave me the letter to keep me from causing trouble while we were posing for portraits.

“Your parents love you, Kathryn.”

Through the haze of my misery, I feel a pang. “They do.”

“So if you’re not going to fight for yourself,” his gaze caresses mine, “then do it for them.”

I gaze at the photo, realizing suddenly what a terrible thing I’d just risked. After everything they’ve already given up for me, I planned to throw my life away. How would Mom and Dad have felt if a hunter
had
found me? They would have come home to discover their daughter’s mutilated body on the front lawn.

My life doesn’t just belong to me. It belongs to them, too.

I was stupid. I won’t do this again.

“You’re right, Alexander,” I say hollowly. “You’re completely right. I shouldn’t have just risked myself for no reason. I owe them more than that.”

He shoots me a searching glance. “You’re sure?”

“I’m getting there.” I swallow hard and nod. “I’m going to live with this.”

And I will. I’ll live with this guilt because I have to. The only alternative is to give up and die, and that’s not an alternative now. So I’ll live with it.

He turns away, once again remote, removed from me. “I’ll go now.” He draws towards the door with that usual lazy grace of his, his movements so smooth he seems to sweep away rather than walk. “Take care of yourself.”

“Hey, Alexander? Thanks.”

I’m not sure he hears my whisper until he pauses by the door. Then he crooks me a fleeting smile over his shoulder before disappearing out into the sun drenched day.

I realize it with a flicker of surprise: that’s the first time I’ve seen Alexander Metz smile.

Over the weekend, I survey my hair, the inch and a half of brown roots growing out. Mom’s offered to buy me hair dye so I can touch up, but I need a change. A big one.

I want to feel like a new person.

Monday morning in school, I reflect on the way it seemed like a good idea at the time. I run my hand through my newly short locks self-consciously. Mom tried to salvage my hair after I panicked and wailed for her help. She trimmed off segments that look too uneven, but, well…

It is not quite what I envisioned.

“Oh my God,” Heidi exclaims when I pass her in the hall. “It’s so…”

“Yeah,” I say, cringing.

“It’s edgy,” she tries.

I laugh. “You’re incredibly diplomatic. It’s a disaster.”

She tries to think of something else. “It really brings out your eyes.”

I think my hair disaster would have been more upsetting a few months ago. Or even a week ago. Today I am preoccupied. This is my first day back in school since the massacre. Dad left late for work today to drop me off. My spontaneous self-haircut may have worried my parents more than mini breakdown did. I know he can’t do this every day, so I have to arrange new morning transportation.

Nothing prepared me for the signs all over school.

I turn circles in the hallway, taking them all in. Most pertain to the big news: the Shelter Valley Massacre. Our Fall Formal next Friday is also going to be a charity ball for the families of the missing
Showdown
victims. Police advisories warn about walking outdoors at night. There are tip lines people can call with any information pertaining to the fates of the
Showdown
people.

And there’s a brand new Cordoba Bay High School hunting guild.

I halt before the large sign in front of our chemistry classroom. Someone’s plastered a poster board, bright yellow with a girlish scrawl and hearts over the lowercase ‘i’s’.

Cordoba Bay students unite against crime! Join the Bay High Guild and help protect our streets! First meeting Monday night at 7:00 outside the gymnasium. Pizza and refreshments provided. (Valid hunter registration required on sign up, bimonthly fee $7.00 with student ID, $10.00 standard membership).

I stare at it incredulously. What can they possibly hope to accomplish? Apart from the anathemas at the Waste – the ones people don’t know about – there are only a handful of us in Cordoba Bay. The poster has glitter on it and a few stickers.

I can imagine suddenly some girls making it, a few boys hanging around them as they do. All of them laughing and joking around. Like those disaster relief drives our school has sometimes, or that day in elementary school when teachers had us all send a dollar to kids in Afghanistan. We knew most of the things we were collecting weren’t
actually
going to the victims of the war, but it made us feel good to pretend we were doing something. Now my school is forming its own hunting guild to unite in outrage over the destruction of the
Showdown
people. None of them truly care. Not really.

I bet they’ll spend the meeting tonight comparing weapons the way people compare cell phones or outfits. I’m sure a few will have Gucci or Dolce & Gabanna blade handles. Others may have those trendy pink ones designed just for girly girl hunters. There’s probably an ‘in’ weapon this year that every fashionable murderer carries. I saw an excess of machetes among the
Showdown
types, and those were people from Hollywood who were probably on the cutting edge of trends.

The funny thing is, I bet if a lot of the hunters in this new school club saw an actual anathema being butchered, they wouldn’t gleefully Snapchat images of it to their friends. They’d scream and grow frightened and vomit on themselves. That’s reality. Reality is not cute little hearts over lowercase ‘i’s’ or glitter or designer brand names. Reality is ugly and cruel and totally without mercy.

In the blackest, most vindictive corner of my soul, I suddenly hope the girl who put glitter on this stupid poster comes to see the world the way I have. I hope one day, she views it up close and personal in a way she can never forget. It’s the only justice I can hope for anymore.

“Gives you chills, doesn’t it?”

The skeezy voice from behind me does in a way the poster never could. Loathing and revulsion grip me like a vice. I turn slowly, fists clenched, to face Russell. He hangs back by the other side of the hall. His skin is bruised and swollen, his lip split. I’m satisfied to see Alexander’s damage has lingered on his face far longer than his has lingered on mine. My gaze drops automatically to his hand—and the cast encasing his thumb and wrist.

“Your work?” I say to Russell. “I should’ve guessed. Must’ve been tricky doing bubbly letters with your fingers all broken.”

His eyes narrow. “I didn’t do the poster, but I’m a member. Anything to serve my community. I’d invite you and Metz to join, but it might not end well.”

“For
you
. Or did Alexander hit you so hard you don’t remember begging him to stop? Oh, and by the way,” – anger like pure venom makes my voice shake – “so, so sorry you’re off the team. I could’ve wept for pity when I heard you’d lost any shot at the NFL.”

His face reddens, quivering with rage. “You will be sorry. I can’t wait to get you. I don’t even want you anymore, not with that butch haircut. Next time, I’ll slit your throat and watch you bleed out.” An ugly smile crosses his lips. I tense as he leans very close, his voice dropping to an intimate whisper, “Oh, and Amanda knows all about how you begged me to be your patron. Too bad you couldn’t take it when I rejected you.”

I don’t realize what I’m doing until my fist lashes out. Then pain slams up my wrist, my arm, and Russell rears back a step. I clutch my knuckles, shocked by the throbbing of my hand, by the instinct of my aggression. Around us, people spin around to look, gaping. Then they look away quickly, realizing it’s the anathema assaulting a hunter—not taboo citizen-on-citizen violence.

At least I remembered to keep my thumb out. I definitely got him with my knuckles. And my wrist really hurts.

Russell straightens, touching his face. For a moment he looks stunned, and then he forces a laugh and raises his voice so the whole hallway can hear. “I told you, I won’t be your patron! I love Amanda, not you!”

Anger bursts through me. I’m ready to go after him again when I see her. Amanda.

Russell and I both freeze, looking at her where she’s appeared, white-faced and expressionless a few feet away from us. A knot forms in my throat. I am dreading and desperate to hear what she’ll say.

She brushes past us both into our shared homeroom.

I look at Russell one last time, such white hot hatred pouring through me I wish I could incinerate him with the sheer rage in my heart. He holds my eyes with malice, and slowly draws a finger across his throat in silent promise.