Rage (16 page)

But War doesn't want her to die. War wants her to live. And that is ever so much harder.

"E
MBRACE ME
,"
says War,
"
AND
I
WILL GIVE YOU THE WORLD.
"

"
I have not yet decided." Missy sips her tea, but it has gone cold.

"E
MBRACE ME
,"
War bellows,
"
OR
I
WILL TAKE WHAT
I
WANT
!"

The magma roils, and it reaches for them with fingers hotter than passion. The sword gleams on War's breastplate as the fire takes them.

***

She awoke suddenly, caught in that state between dreaming and fully conscious, and for a long moment she didn't know who she was. A metallic taste lingered in her mouth—spilled blood, spiced with emotion. Her blood; she had bitten her lip in her sleep. As for the emotion, she couldn't put a name to it.

F
EAR
. T
HAT'S FEAR YOU'RE FEELING
. I
T'S QUICKENING YOUR HEART AND TRIPPING YOUR BREATH.
I
T'S POPPING SWEAT ON YOUR BROW.
Y
OU'RE AFRAID.

Cold words; heated intention. The voice was a thing of frozen fire, chilling her and singeing her until she was nothing more than a cinder buried in snow.

Y
OU'RE AFRAID OF ME.

No,
she thought.
Not of you. I'm afraid of
me.
Who am I?
Shivering, she wrapped the blanket around her and swallowed blood.
What am I?

A
FLAWED SKIN.
A
DEFECTIVE SHELL.

No, she was more than that. She had to be. She was...

A
VESSEL, AND DAMAGED AT THAT.
T
HAT IS ALL YOU ARE.

A notion of
being
dangled before her, then danced away in a pirouetting of noontime shadow. Back again: a glint of identity, bright as sunlight on metal. Yes, she had it. She was—

"Missy," she said aloud, her voice breaking. "I'm Missy."

Oh, thank God. She had a name.

She closed her eyes and breathed, then breathed some more. She knew who she was: Melissa Miller, sixteen, self-injurer. Beneath her thick comforter, she rubbed her arms, feeling the raised flesh of her scars as she traced their lines. "Scars," she whispered. The word itself was like a cut: the initial smooth motion of the
S
as she raises the blade; the quick flash of the hard
C,
biting her skin; the fluid
AR
as her blood wells; the final, lazy
S,
leaking out of her, mixed with all the badness that had made breathing so very difficult.

"Scars," she said again, firmer. Instant gratification forever branded on her flesh. When she would cut, she wouldn't think about things like consequence; all that mattered was forcing the Too Much to bend into something manageable, bearable. She ran her thumb along the crook of her elbow, secret rendezvous of too many razor kisses to count. After cutting, it was all about hiding her actions, as if she'd committed a crime.

Laughter in her mind, like the sound of steel ringing against steel.

A crime? Ridiculous. What she chose to do to herself wasn't anyone's choice but her own. She nodded to herself as her thumbnail pressed against her elbow crease, moving back and forth, back and forth. The only one she was hurting was herself; it wasn't as if she were a sociopath in training.

...
Graygirl, limp in her arms, her final warbling meow already fading
...

Frowning, Missy shoved the memory away. This wasn't about what she'd done to her cat two months ago. This wasn't about anyone, anything, other than Missy herself.

Steel chimed; a blade sliced through the air, making music in the wind.

She opened her eyes, blind to the anger simmering in her gaze. Yes, she cut herself sometimes. She did what she needed to do, and if people didn't understand that, that was their problem, not hers.

Her lip curled into a sneer.
Their
problem.
They
always had a problem, didn't they? Whether it was with her clothing or her attitude, her grades or her scars.
They
would always find fault with her.

And she let them.

Not my problem,
she screamed silently, directing her fury to the heavens as tears scorched tracks down her cheeks.
I don't have a problem. I don't!

Tucked away in its lockbox, her razor beckoned.

It would be so easy to take it out, to touch the blade to her thigh and let it taste the salt of her skin, the penny-sweet tang of her blood. She scraped her thumbnail against the curve of her elbow, biting deep. But it wasn't the same.

Don't cut,
Erica whispered.

Missy scrubbed away her tears and told her friend to shut up. Her thumbnail, ragged and wet along its edge, rubbed against her cheek. Blood and salt water mixed on her face, pale fluid mingling with red.

Erica's voice again, a whisper, maybe a plea:
Crying doesn't make you bleed.

Missy blotted the wetness with her shirtsleeve. Enough. She wasn't about to argue with a memory, not at—she glanced at the alarm clock on her nightstand—3:13 in the morning.
Three o'clock, and all's well.

Yeah, right.

Missy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. So she'd had a bad dream and had woken up disoriented. That happened, even to normal people who didn't have Swords and warhorses and a slight crush on Death. A bad dream, and nothing more.

So never mind the lingering notion that she didn't know who she was. That was just a dark corner in her brain, detritus in the soup pot of her mind. Everything would settle back into place and she'd go back to knowing exactly what she was: an outcast, a lone ship with no safe harbor, forced to sail through the shark-infested seas of high school.

Oh, God. How was she going to make it through Monday? Everyone would know by then what Adam had done to her. How was she supposed to walk down the halls? Sit in class? Act normal? She swallowed thickly.

F
EAR,
War murmured.

No, stop. Monday wasn't for another twenty-some-odd hours. She didn't need to freak about it now. She needed to go back to sleep. That's what normal people did, right? She told her heartbeat to slow down. It ignored her. And now the rest of her body was following suit—she started feeling
up,
that
gotta-move
feeling she got before a soccer game. Fight or flight, baby. Monday was coming.

Fight or flight.

She sat up, clutching the blanket to her chest.

Come out and grab the ball,
Bella taunted, her voice playful rather than cruel.
I dare you.

Missy got out of bed and went to her window. Outside, dappled by moonlight, Ares waited for her. She wished it had surprised her, but part of her had known her steed would be there.

Now?
she thought, staring at the red horse. She was supposed to go out now, in the middle of the night, and play War?

The warhorse snorted as if in agreement. Or maybe it was just chiding her to hurry up already; the night wasn't waiting for her.

Waiting for me,
Missy thought, turning away from the window.
But which me?
Did the steed follow the girl with the penchant for razors and withering gazes? Or was it the Red Rider that Ares waited upon? Which face did the red steed see when it looked at her?

Who am I?
she wondered as she pulled on a pair of jeans.

If Ares had an answer, the steed kept it to itself.

***

They flew, War on her steed, the two of them ripping a path across the dark sky.

Her hair whipping her face, her heartbeat surging in her ears, Missy gripped the reins and dug in her heels. Escaping her life, even for a stolen moment in a witching-hour ride, felt deliriously good. Up here, with only the stars and moon to bear witness, she didn't have to think of the dread reality that waited for her by sunlight. Up here, she could lose herself without consequence, without needing to reach for the razor or strap on her dead face. There was freedom to be found among the stars. Maybe she wasn't sure who she was. But in the sky, on her steed, it didn't matter. She
was.
That was enough.

Beneath them, people dreamed, their emotions colored in bleeding reds and harsh blacks, in furious greens and slick yellows. Missy felt them all, experienced those small wars and savored the sensations. Soon she was feeding on those feelings, sipping joy and nibbling despair. Feasting on desire. Gorging on anger. Drunk with emotion, she flew onward. And below, people's dreams turned violent. Some muttered dark things as they slept, things that would stay with them once they woke. In the morning, they would glare at loved ones and find all manner of things unspeakably foul. Their days were ruined long before they even opened their eyes.

Melissa Miller's mouth stretched into a wide grin, but it was War who rumbled laughter.

Soon, though, reds and blacks gave way to white, and the feeling of sickness slithered along Missy's limbs, coating her in rancid butter. She slapped at it, but it dug deep, getting under her skin. Suddenly lightheaded, Missy leaned down to clasp Ares' neck.

Sick. She was sick.

No. Something was
making
her sick.

She frowned down at the town sleeping below. There. The feeling was centered somewhere down there. She debated whether to fly on and ride past that sickly feeling of white, but something about it had hooked her curiosity. What was the harm in looking? She had her Sword. She had Ares. Nothing could hurt her; she had already been hurt far too much to fear small things like minor dizziness. She nudged Ares and told him to land.

The horse snorted, clearly displeased, but it did as it was told. It was a good steed.

Y
OU'RE A FOOL TO THINK SUCH THINGS,
said War.
T
HE BEAST WOULD KILL YOU AS SOON AS LOOK AT YOU.

Missy remembered how Ares had come to her defense when she had first met Famine.

G
IVEN THE CHANCE, YOUR STEED WOULD BETRAY YOU, AS QUICK AS A STAB TO THE HEART.
I
T'S A WARHORSE.
I
T KNOWS NOTHING OF COMPASSION.
I
T CARES NOTHING FOR PRAISE.

They landed before Missy knew how to respond, which was probably for the best.

Ares' hooves touched down in a gallop, and as the warhorse slowed, Missy took in their surroundings. By day, the shopping mall could have been home to a thousand stores, with a million customers tearing through the bargain racks. But now it was just a stage prop: a massive chain of buildings, brooding and dark. The parking lot sprawled, empty, its neat rows of spots grinning. Refuse dotted the lot in clumps, blackheads on the face of the asphalt. It smelled of hollow soda cans and dead cigarettes.

Deeper than the smells, though, was the sensation of illness that she had felt in the air; it was a greasy white coating that clogged Missy's pores. She sneezed once, violently. Wiping her nose on her sleeve, she blinked, then blinked again.

Faint white lines pulsed on the blacktop, threading through the lot and leading out of the shopping mall. Missy was certain those lines hadn't been there a moment ago. Looking at them made her head spin; looking away from them wrenched her heart.

She thought of every horror movie she had ever seen, and she knew that following that glowing trail was a Very Bad Idea. But she also knew she
had
to follow it; something about that white path called to her even as it turned her stomach.

Well,
she thought,
if I die, I get to see Death again.

Picturing Death dressed in a dead musician's skin, Missy urged Ares to follow the faint white threads out of the empty lot. A steady
clop-clop-clop
of hooves on pavement hung in the still air, the background noise of a disembodied heartbeat. The main road stretched away from the mall in a sharp curve, framed on either side by the thick woods of undeveloped land. Deer country, based on the big warning sign to drivers: watch out for jumping deer. If not for the mostly full moon, Missy would have been all but blind. Apparently, roads populated by jumping deer didn't have streetlights.

As they walked, that sense of sickness, of
wrongness,
grew stronger. Mere lightheadedness became severe dizziness, and her stomach pitched and rolled. Missy darted glances to either side, unnerved by the enormous trees. They stood in the dark, impassive, silently observing the road. Unseen leaves rustled in the wind, the sound like soft laughter. Missy felt their wooden eyes on her, watching her, waiting to see if she would be tempted like Little Red Riding Hood and traipse off the path. Waiting to see if they could show her their teeth.

Always follow the ball,
Bella warned.
Don't look away too long.

Missy snapped her gaze back to the faintly glowing trail, ignoring the black trees that stood sentry. Though the nighttime air had a bite to it, she began to sweat.
This is crazy,
she told herself.
Alone at three in the morning, out in the night.
She should go home, go to bed.

Go home,
Adam sneered,
and cry to your mommy.

Missy swallowed thickly and nudged Ares to keep going.

About a mile down the road, the path came to an abrupt end at the feet of a man in white, his clothing so bright, it seemed to glow. The man sat in the dirt, his back against a tree, his gloved fingers laced together as he slowly rocked. A white horse, its coat as bright as the man's, stood near him.

Missy coaxed Ares to a halt. Though she hadn't known exactly what to expect, it hadn't been this. But considering how her life had been going the past day or so, she shouldn't have been surprised. Staring at the man, trying to ignore the way she felt like she was going to vomit any second, she slid off her steed. She landed with her knees bent and feet wide, ready to move, to run, to launch herself into the air to block the goal. But there was no soccer ball coming her way; no opposing team player charged her. There was only the man, in his pristinely white coat and pants, rocking in the dirt, muttering.