ARC: Cracked (16 page)

I need to remember that.

But for now, I think it’s a good idea to kill our enemies. I jump on her side. “But she’s not really killing them, is she? I mean, they’ll just be reborn, right, as long as she doesn’t purify them?”

Chi thinks about that, then with a shrug and a swing he takes another demon’s head off. I force myself to hang back while they finish the slaughter, even though my blood pounds hot and heavy with violence. I look away as black souls pour from the demons’ bodies, then dissipate into the air.

Over the earpiece people are asking who froze the demons and how, but I care only about whether they can continue freezing them, not about who or how.

But I should have.

Because then we hear clapping. Not from us, from outside the walls. We exchange confused looks, then run into the nearest classroom, dodging desks to get to the large windows. Outside, the demons all clap, politely, as if at the intermission of an opera. There are still hundreds of them. Maybe a thousand. Chi, Jo and I look to each other for an explanation, but none of us have one to offer. Then the voice comes out of all the demons’ mouths.

“Had enough yet?” The voice is dry; the question is patronizing.

Understanding punches me in the gut and I stumble back a few steps, bumping into a desk. We didn’t win because we didn’t freeze the demons. They froze themselves, or the voice froze them. Because they can, because there are hundreds more to replace the few we just killed. And if the voice is willing to kill his own people just to get our attention, what more would he do to us? It’s meant to intimidate us. It works, on me at least.

“Now are you ready to negotiate?” the voice asks.

I look at Chi and Jo and read in their faces the same realization. I feel a little panicky, but they’re stoic.

“They’ll negotiate, won’t they, Chi?” I ask, but I already know the answer.

“No,” Jo says.

“Never.” Chi.

“But we’ll all die!” I argue with them as if they make the decision.

Chi looks at me and manages to quirk up a corner of his mouth. “Weren’t you ever taught not to make a deal with the devil? You never win.”

I can only sputter.

“At least all the children escaped. That’s all that matters,” Jo says with a stiff nod.

But I don’t care about the children. “You’re willing to die? Just like that?”

Jo turns towards me. Her voice is calm but now I see her eyes blaze in a holy hazel fire. She doesn’t want to die, but she will, for what she believes in.

I need new friends.

“We still have a few tricks up our sleeve,” Chi says, patting me on the shoulder. “There’s still a chance we’ll escape.”

“How?” That battle we already almost lost was just the demons toying with us. He’s insane.

Chi smiles and his eyes go to the ceiling. “Well, for one, we still have the holy-water sprinklers.”

“
What?
” I recall the burn on my shoulder with searing intensity. Please let him be kidding. I hear a creaking in the pipes overhead. For the first time in my life, I feel faint.

The voice pulls our attention back out of the window.

“Well?” demands the voice from a thousand mouths. “Do we negotiate?”

“Never,” whispers Chi again. The two of them exchange deliciously violent looks, jaws set.

“Bet I kill more than you do,” Jo teases.

“You’re on.”

They’re insane.

But then a voice comes over the PA system, startling us all.

“Yes, we’ll negotiate,” the voice says. Chi and Jo gasp, and my earbud kicks to life with people shouting their disagreement. They can’t all talk at the same time and the earpiece clicks around to different voices.

“What–”

“No–”

“But–”

Then the voices in my earbud all go mute. All except the voice that recently came from the PA system, our mysterious leader behind the curtain. Now he’s talking right into our ears. “The exodus failed, the tunnel is blocked. All the children are on their way back.”

Chi’s face whitens and Jo sinks to her knees, her inner candle blown out. Silence echoes as the news is digested.

The voice clicks out of our earpieces and back on to the PA system. “We’ll hear your terms.”

“Excellent,” the demons all hiss. “It’s really quite simple. Just one life in exchange for all the rest. That’s it, just one. Surely that’s a fair deal. One we are going to take regardless – you just get to decide whether or not it’s done over your dead bodies.”

They were ordered not to kill girls, the coincidence of their attack the day after I arrived. My stomach sinks before they even say it.

“Give us the girl. Give us…
Meda
.”

ELEVEN

My first instinct is to run. Jo’s first instinct is to stop me. She tackles me as I bolt for the door. We go down, her on my back, and I feel her knife on my neck. I freeze, cursing.

“Meda, Jo – stop!” Chi says, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me out from under Jo. She allows it, but pulls her sword free and keeps it to my chest. “Meda, calm down. They won’t turn you over!”

My eyes dart, searching for an escape route. I’ll have to fight them. But I don’t know if I can win. They’re tough and Jo, at least, will be expecting it.

“Meda.” Chi shakes my arm until I look at him. “I promise, they’re stalling – they’ll never turn you over. There has to be a reason the demons want you so badly. I told you, you can never make a deal with the devil, you’ll never win.”

What he says starts to sink in. It makes sense in Templar-world. My eyes flick to Jo.

“He’s right.” She looks disappointed so I know she means it. “I don’t know what their plan is, but they aren’t going to turn you over.”

Chi releases me slowly and I don’t run. I’m not sure where I thought I was going to go anyway, I’m surrounded by two armies with one common enemy – me.

Meanwhile our earpieces crackle with Templars trying to figure out who the mysterious Meda is. Chi ends the debate with a press of a button and a few words. “Sir, Malachi Dupaynes here. We have her.”

“Bring her to headquarters.” Nothing else. I imagine an implied, “So we can keep her safe even if it kills us all,” so I don’t completely freak out.

“Yes, sir.” Chi takes the lead – he absolutely loves turning his unprotected back to me. Jo doesn’t, she falls behind and I’m extremely conscious of the point of her sword on my spine. We start down the hallway and the light flickers, damaged in the magical attacks. As we pass the bodies of the Templar students, I notice that Chi and Jo keep their eyes averted. I don’t. I examine them, relieved not to find a splash of bright red hair or dark mocha skin. Chi looks in the room where I had my little scuffle. Two headless bodies sprawl inside the door and a throat-less one leans drunkenly against the wall, her blood-soaked shirt as scarlet as her lips. Chi stops abruptly, but I’m too alert to bump into the back of him. Thank God, Jo is too.

“Did you do that?” I hear the confusion in his voice but he doesn’t turn around.

“No…” The other guy did?

I don’t know whether he buys it, but he moves on and we follow. My eyes crawl along the wall and dodge into doorways, searching for both threats and potential escapes. Bodies litter the hallway, both demon and Templar, and the living come to watch us as we pass. The rest of the Crusaders don’t have Chi’s restraint and the demons are being hacked to pieces and their false life drained, so they can never be reborn. The earbud crackles with more updates and a defense strategy in case the demons attack again. People start moving along the hallways with us. We’ve lost so many defenders, those who remain are being consolidated to protect the main building. As more people join us we start picking up pace. I’m the focus of curious stares – apparently everyone heard Chi’s comment about having the girl. A blood-splattered boy catches my eye, his expression is… bewildered. Trying to figure out whether I’m worth it, maybe.

That one’s easy. I’m not.

I look away.

The headquarters are in the central section of the building, on the ground floor. Chi drags his thumb across his sword as we approach the security sensor. He goes a little overboard with the cut and leaves a smear on the little glass screen.

We enter a small room with no windows and the walls covered in flat screens showing footage of the school grounds. Each one is filled with a black-suited ocean. Below the monitors, desks with computers are shoved against the wall. Six adults are in the room – two women and four men. All of them waved their middle age goodbye so long ago they probably forgot about it. Four are watching the computer screens and talking into earbuds, calling the immediate moves in the death game.

The headmaster and The Sarge stand over a map on a table in the center of the room. Her frizzy hair is pulled sloppily back into a half-assed bun, giving an unimpeded view of the mottled scar that twists her face. The headmaster has half-moon spectacles perched on his nose. Coupled with his beard and biker get-up, he looks like Santa gone bad. Their lips move rapidly, too fast for me to make out what they are saying. Chi clears his throat and they turn on us –
to
us. I mean, turn
to
us. I hang back, close to the door.

“Malachi, explain,” the man barks and I recognize his voice as the one from over the PA system, the man behind the curtain.

Please, Mr Wizard, if I could only have a heart!

Chi opens his mouth and vomits the truth. (
And please, Mr Wizard, perhaps a brain for my friend?
) He leaves nothing out, not breaking the rules, lying or disguising me to sneak me in. Personally I feel it could have used some editing. Although the headmaster turns an angry red and The Sarge’s lips thin, they do not interrupt. Chi wraps it up with the disclosure regarding my mom and the headmaster is visibly shocked. A couple of the old people at the computer screens turn at the revelation. The others are probably too deaf to hear.

Chi ends with a sheepish, “I’m sorry, sir.”

“You should be. I’m disappointed in you, Malachi. And you, Jo.” He turns hard eyes on her. We’d all forgotten she was there, lingering in the back. She probably figured she’d be sent out if they noticed her.

“But, sir! I just went to bring him back!” Jo retorts.

He cuts her off with a wave. “I’m not angry about the sneaking out to fight demons, though you are too young. You certainly aren’t the first students to sneak out to try their skills a little early.” His eyes seek out the old lady’s and they share some memory. Then his face hardens and he leans back to glare down his nose at the two delinquents. “Wanting to fight demons is good, even if it is a little premature. But, when you knew she was a Beacon and brought her back to the school, why did you lie about who she is?”

Chi turns white while Jo looks at the floor. The headmaster waits for them to answer.

Is this really the time to dole out moral lessons? Whip the puppies later – if we live that long.

But he waits until Chi finally answers. “So we wouldn’t get into trouble.”

“Precisely. And who does that help?”

“No one. Just us.”

“Exactly. You hid the truth so you wouldn’t get into trouble. It was cowardly. Had you come forward and told us we had a potential Beacon on campus, we would have known we needed to step up our protections.”

Chi looks as if he’s going to be sick. Jo hasn’t lifted her face from the floor so I can’t see her expression.

There is one more beat of silence as he skewers them with his steely gaze. “I just hope you live long enough to appreciate this lesson.”

“Now,” The Sarge cuts in briskly. “What do we do now?”

About time.

She turns in my direction and a sky-blue laser beam hits me. Thank God she doesn’t have two. “You’re Mary Porter’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“So she didn’t die.”

“Not then, no,” I answer carefully.

Her eye hits the old man and he picks up where she left off, turning to me. “When and how did she die?”

I swallow. “Two years ago. She was… attacked.” I try to block the visual. “Now I know something demonic did it, but I didn’t at the time.” All this is true. True like the tip of an iceberg.

“I’m sorry, child,” The Sarge says, and her sky-blue eye is soft now. “She was a wonderful girl.”

I nod. She was wonderful. “How did you think she died?” I ask.

“She was taken captive while on patrol with her mentor. He didn’t make it.” She exhales. “There was nothing we could do. We built her shrine, as we do in these situations, and, one day, her candle was lit.”

I don’t know what that means and let her see my confusion.

“The candle’s kept lit by the Inheritance,” she explains. “When a Templar dies, the Inheritance leaves their body and lights the candle.”

But my mom didn’t die, so how could her candle light if she was still alive? But The Sarge has already turned back to the headmaster and half-sentences ricochet between the two as they finish each other’s thoughts. I wonder why they bother speaking out loud when they can apparently read each other’s minds. I’m glad, though. Unlike them, I’m not a mind-reader.

“It can’t just be…” she starts.

“…because she’s a Templar,” he finishes.

“They wouldn’t trade one hundred weapons…” Her.

“For just one.” Him.

“Unless that one was a nuke.” Her.

How long do people have to be together to manage this particular feat?

“There’s something special about her.” Him.

“For them to want her so badly.”

“So we can’t let them have her.”

YES! YES! YES! I almost dance.

Jo cuts in, alarmed, “But the children…”

Shut up, Jo! There’s more where those came from.

The Sarge’s mouth tightens then she lets out a breath. “Jo, I know it seems bad, but we can’t make deals with the devil. I promise in the long run, we will lose.”

Jo sputters trying to collect herself enough to shout, but the lady puts up her hand. “We have a plan. Several, really. We’re not going down without a fight.”

The headmaster takes over the explanation. “Right now the students are back under the school. They’ll go out another tunnel – scouts are determining which ones have been compromised. For now, we stall and give the exodus another opportunity. Eventually the demons are going to realize we aren’t going to turn her over and they’ll attack again. Hopefully reinforcements will get here in time to help.”