Of Delicate Pieces (35 page)

“He never intermingles,” said Liv. “He stays out of everything.”

The baby-faced hunter who could see the dead had relocated himself without Alex noticing. He was now whispering into Mr. Seyferr’s ear.

Thea repeated herself. “Alex, you really need to go inside. Get to my phone.”

“Why?”

She whispered even lower now. “You’re worth a fortune. I’m not sure yet if they know quite how much.”

“They can’t catch a spirit, can they?”

Thea’s voice dropped several octaves. “Believe me, I—”

She never finished her thought because something clicked from the forest behind her. Whether the cue was intentional or not, the hunters opened fire. Chase leaped sideways to force Thea to the deck while Alex shoved Liv backward through the open doorway. Torpedo-like darts pelted the siding while small copper rocks bounced to the deck. Glass snapped and shattered, falling down on them like rain.

Alex and Liv rolled to their stomachs. Liv’s face paled to a bleached white, and her green eyes glowed like a burst of sunlight behind a stained-glass window. Her black hair stood on end. Energy shot from her like fireworks, merging forward into the ground where a tornado of dirt rose, twisting and spitting rounds of gravel at the hunters. Some of them dodged while some tried to withstand the shots, aiming their weapons at the house. Alex picked up one of the copper rocks to use it for ammo, but it stung her with its heat. She yelped and dropped it.

The hunters moved as one, inching closer. Seyferr Junior fell to a knee and took aim, but a burst of fire erupted in front of him, setting the ground aflame. He rose and stepped through it without flinching. More flashes of fire burst from areas around the attackers, but it didn’t affect them whatsoever.

“We know your tricks,” Seyferr called. “We know what’s real and what’s not.”

Lightning struck from sky to ground in a crooked cobweb of a threat, but Seyferr shook his head. “You’re actin’ like we never hunted a witch before.” He lifted the barrel of a misshapen rifle and aimed it right at Liv.

Alex ran forward, but Chase pulled her back right before a hunter took aim and shot a copper-colored rock in her direction. “Don’t let those hit you!” Chase bellowed.

Liv flicked her chin and the rifle directed at her flew from the hunter’s grip. He chased it, and five more hunters appeared behind him. There were too many of them. Alex couldn’t turn her back to one side because another would move in. Chase cursed as a copper bullet grazed his shoulder. They weren’t going to win this. The hunters walked slowly forward without fear, only a few feet away now.

Through the dust, Alex saw a hunter fly off his feet, shoved by an invisible force, and in the same blow, Seyferr Junior’s body lurched sideways. Alex and Chase both looked left to right in search of who had come to their aid. In the hunter’s place, stood Jonas, his arms extended. In her moment of shock, Alex stood long enough for another hunter to fire at her. The copper stone hit her arm, burning like fire. She howled and bent forward, clutching her head where it hurt the most because her arm no longer existed.

Chase lunged for her, but a steady flow of copper rain formed a barrier between them. Alex felt a hand snatch her by the collar and drag her into the flames. She flailed in panic as the yellow and orange fire immersed her, but she stopped when she felt nothing but a breeze. The flames weren’t real. She looked through the blaze to find Professor Van Hanlin. Van Hanlin! Alive! He ran off, projecting himself in different areas of the grounds closest to Thea. He joined Jonas, knocking guns into the air and kicking hunters from their feet.

Why? How? Alex scooted back to the nearest tree and scrambled to her feet where the Jester stood, observing the fight.

“You won’t help?” she cried.

“I can’t,” The Jester replied. “I can’t risk my freedom. It’s my job to protect the woods and that’s all.”

The ground exploded in front of them, dust and dirt flying. Alex took the opportunity to move. She tried to mimic Jonas, flickering to various spots around the hunters, appearing only to disappear again. They couldn’t take aim long enough to get a good shot. She hoped it would at least distract them.

From behind the barrier of the porch, Thea rose. She lifted her cane high and made her way down the steps without so much as a wobble. She twirled the cane around her head, creating a halo of sparks and anger. She fell to her knees and slammed the cane in the ground, causing the air to quake. Giant globs of rain fell from the sky, accelerating into sheets. To Thea’s right, several hunters pinned Liv facedown in the dirt, but large, jagged rocks barreled in from the nearby cove and came zipping in the direction of Liv’s assailants. With resonating cracks, they made contact with the heads of the hunters, and Liv scooted away.

Thea’s eyes became an orange-brown fire. Chase ran forward to help her, but Thea cried for him to get back with Alex. She threw her cane to the side and lifted her hands in the air. Several of the hunters screamed as blackness leaked from their eyes. It trickled to the ground at their feet and spread like death through the dirt. It rose like night and stunk like winter.

The last thing Alex saw was Jonas with Van Hanlin, who grabbed the boy with the shackles, ripped the bag from his head, and took off into the trees. Then, darkness shrouded everything.

Alex blinked, and it made no difference. She was blinded. Brutal silence accompanied it.

“How did it come to this?” Thea asked. “Sephi said these times would lead to peace.”

The Jester’s voice interrupted the darkness. “Sephi also said things would get worse before they got better. That boy must be important for rebels to come rescue him. The hunters could have taken Alex, so this was necessary.”

“They weren’t here for her.” Liv couldn’t have been standing more than a foot from Alex. “They wanted their son or did everyone already forget that crying mother?”

She was right, Alex realized. They had a bargaining chip no one had considered. “Can any of you hear me?” The sound of shuffling feet and muffled conspiring ceased. “I have something you want.”

Mr. Seyferr’s voice moved through the darkness. “Who’s speaking?” He was closer than Alex thought.

She didn’t hide her surprise. “He can hear me now?”

“Take away one sense.” Thea’s voice cut through the blackness with sparks of yellow. “Heighten another. This will open his mind. This will make them
see
.”

“Is it you, little Havilah?” In the blackness, Seyferr was moving closer.

Alex felt the urge to move backward, but she couldn’t see where the doorway began, where the porch ended, or where she was at all.

“I have a trade.”

“Not much need for trades.”

“I’ve heard information is more important than anything else.”

His voice traveled closer. “Not sure who’s been fillin’ your head, but it ain’t hunters.”

“I want you to go. Say the boy ran away and leave here.”

She felt the presence of someone in front of her. She panicked until she felt Chase press against her front and then reach back a hand and wrap it around her waist. He was a barricade between Alex and the hunter.

Chase finished Alex’s thought. “And we can return your son to you.”

Somewhere, in the depths of the woods, a woman muffled a sob.

“What do you know of my boy?” Seyferr hissed.

“He’s tortured for being what you forced him to be,” Chase said.

“We know him,” Alex said. She paused and allowed the words to travel, to reach the ears of the woman sobbing. “We’ve known him for a whole year.”

“You threatening me?”

Alex didn’t understand. Chase’s thoughts rushed into her head.

He thinks we’re threatening to harm Reuben. He thinks everyone is as vicious as he is.

“We can bring him to you,” Alex said. “Send him home. We know he wants to come home.”

The sobs grew louder.

“I give you my word.”

Like a light switch, it was day again. Reuben’s brother rested his hand on Seyferr’s forearm, and in a flash of color, Chase’s mind showed Alex what she couldn’t see. A haze of colorful hope puffed around the father and son.

“They’ll accept the trade,” said Chase. “He isn’t lying.”

“How did you do that?” Alex leaned toward Thea. “The darkness?”

“Oh, child.” Thea shook her wrinkled head. “All I did was expose their minds. Their blindness. Funny, right?” She picked up her cane and clutched her hip. “Perspective is so much more powerful than force.”

Like a summer storm, as quickly as the hunters arrived, they were gone, leaving an overcast sky and small rumbles of thunder in their wake. Alex sat cross-legged on the ground outside the Frank house, waiting. Rae would come here. She knew it. Rae had sketched the pictures. She’d led Alex to Parrish to find her.

“Alex, we need to go soon,” Chase urged.

“I know,” she whispered. The humid air stuck to her, trying to trap her there.

“I don’t know why you think she’s here.”

“I feel her,” Alex said. “It’s weird, Chase. It’s like those letters. There’s a string attached, and I know if you wander into my head, you’ll feel it.”

Chase mumbled something she couldn’t hear, but he plopped back in the grass, yielding. “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”

“What else is new?”

The door of the house squeaked, and Liv emerged.

“How often does this happen, Liv? The selling?”

Liv sat on the grass a few feet away. “I only found out about this a few months ago. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”

“How are they getting away with it?”

“They say a crime was committed. The gifted child was sent here for punishment.”

“You agree with this?”

“No one said that. If I don’t follow these rules, though, I’ll be down in the Parrish Paradise and sold within a day.”

Alex glanced at the woods, and her mind livened with memories, stories about the things that went bump in the night. She remembered the lights that sometimes erupted from the trees, or the way the ground shook. How many times had they sat out here as kids? They played on the steps and climbed the trees and picked the flowers. They never knew what hid under their feet.

“Liv, you said you knew Rae?”

“She’s always here.”

She knew it. Alex jumped up. “Where?”

“Next to you.”

Alex spun around but found no one.

“You have to look for it. There’s a tombstone right over there.”

Buzzing filled Alex’s head like a flatlined heart. She thrust her arms over her face, refusing to believe it.

“Alex,” Chase whispered.

She removed one arm. Then the other. And she saw a kneeling angel carved from gray stone.

Liv scooted closer. “The bodied imprison them. The spirited sell them. The gifted attack both of them. There are riots. And there’s a Truce March next week. I hear Sephi Anovark is going to be there,” she snickered.

“She won’t,” Alex said. “I won’t.”

Thea’s footsteps came from the porch. She scuttled out and landed on the porch swing. The siding next to it was punctured with holes. “I wonder if this is what Sephi had in mind. She said everything comes full circle.”

The Jester appeared next to her on the swing.

“It’s beginning again,” she said. “Time is up.”

“Things change,” Chase said. He met Alex’s gaze.
If things come full circle, we’ll end up exactly where Sephi and Raive did. I can’t accept that.

“It will repeat.”

“Things change,” Chase repeated with too much force.

The swing creaked under Thea’s weight. “You played sports in life?”

Chase sighed and nodded.

“What is it called each time you try something new with your teammates? With different formations or what not.”

“Like a play?”

She snapped her fingers. “If a play doesn’t work the first time, what do you do?”

“Try it again, I guess.”

“Exactly. Like anything else, history has a mind of its own. History will keep trying until it gets it right.”

Alex tugged at Chase’s shirt, trying to get him to calm down. “Why does it feel like everything leads back here to Parrish?”

“Because it always leads back here.”

“That can’t be coincidence.”

“The Havilahs had a hand in each world. So many parts of them are sprinkled throughout this life and the next. You’re the last one. And Sephi always said the last one would be the most important one. Sometimes we don’t see right until we try all the wrongs.”

“No offense,” Chase said, “but if Sephi knew what was so wrong with the world, and everyone loved her so much, why didn’t she fix everything herself?”

Thea dabbed at her smeared lipstick, using her cane to push the swing back and forth. “Because Sephi allowed someone else into her mind, and it ruined her. Evil infected her in the form of love and lured her to her death. It imbalanced her. You are Sephi’s creation of balance. You are Havilah and Anovark.”

But Alex’s thoughts were not her own either. Not only did she share them with Chase, but Chase had a link to his brothers.

“I can’t imagine what your Havilah family thought when your father carried you through the doors of the Eskers, half dead. I knew though, when Liv told me you were taken there, I knew with that face of yours that you weren’t coming out alive.”

The Jester kicked his feet to make the swing go higher. “She didn’t listen. I tried to warn her to stay away that night they drove into my woods. I even left my post and gave her a house call.”

Alex glared at him. “You weren’t very specific.”

He ignored her and hummed the Havilah rhyme.

On the nights when the breeze stinks of indigo

Shut your window tight on the sill.

The Havilahs dance in the shadows

Leaving fingerprints shaped like Anil.

Alex’s hands fell into her lap. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Oh, child. I think that’s the entire purpose.”

***

Alex didn’t have much time, but she needed to walk at least a block in order for the street to feel “real” again. She watched her feet as she stepped over the lines of the sidewalk. She saw no cars in the street, no kids at the park, no birds in the trees because she didn’t want to. She didn’t need to. She was only here for one thing.