Ravens (7 page)

“You still think this is some elaborate
prank?”

She didn’t honestly know.

Liam gently grabbed her hand. Kendra
jumped and stiffened as he placed her palm against his cheek. “I’m real. You’re
here.”

He released her shaking hand.

“The eyes for one thing.” He looked
directly at her. “I can’t fake that, now can I?”

She trembled at his closeness. His stare
unnerved her. “Some sort of special contacts,” she muttered.

“Oh yeah? On you? Try getting them out,
then.”

He grabbed a mirror from the pillar at
his right and held it out to Kendra. She cringed when she saw her reflection.
Taking the mirror from him, she examined the new similarities between his eyes
and hers. She had dark gray sclera, and white irises and pupils. They were
inhuman. Kendra blinked a few times, and stared back into the strange abyss,
the gray and white voids. Kendra couldn’t deny the facts. He spoke the truth,
despite how surreal it all seemed.

She pushed the mirror away,
half-disgusted. Liam returned it to its perch on the pillar.

“Difficult to get used to at first, but
everyone who passes through the portal has eyes like ours.”

“Why don’t you wear contacts to look
normal? The eyes are weird, creepy.”

“I’ve tried, but the electric energy
melts them. Our eyes need to breathe.”

“How many are out there?” she inquired.

“I’ve met dozens, some nice, most, not
so nice. We make enemies quick here, and it becomes difficult to be seen as the
happy, good guy. The
humans
, since they like to distinguish themselves
from us, are, for the majority, afraid of us. We call ourselves otherworld
mutants because we know where we came from, the other dimension. We can’t prove
it, and the humans don’t believe us. And mutants, well, that just sounds kinda
cool, better than freaks. We’re superhuman here, and the more who fall through
the portals, the more this world becomes ours.

“But the humans call us Ravens because
of our black eyes. Most of us stay in during the day and have nightlives. Many
humans are beginning to accept us, but there’s still a big handful that don’t.
Most of us don’t have jobs because of stupid or ignorant humans, so we steal,
and that works out fine for me. Whether the humans like us or not, I’ve never
met one that didn’t cower in fear. And rightfully so. They
should
be
afraid of us.”

“Why?”

“We have powers, some different from
others, but all in all,  we are much more powerful and dangerous than the
humans. Humans always fear what they don’t understand, and right now, they’re
not taking the time to understand.”

“What kind of powers do you have?”

“Energy that we emit through our hands,
like the kind I used to shut the door on you. We have super strength, speed,
and agility. I personally have adaptive healing qualities, an instinctive sense
of smell, and I can cause illusions in other people. I’ve been working on a way
to get in contact with you. At first my skill, blurry and childish at best,
roamed only to people I knew, and they had to be close enough to me at the
time. Then, I spread out to strangers and people far away. Then I tried to
think of you. At first, the illusion didn’t come across clear, but very
fragmented. It got better, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s how I know so much about who
you’ve become, like the martial arts, the tattoos,
Randal
.” He rolled
his eyes. “Seriously, what is it about him?”

“He’s very nice and always there for me.
If you’re not lying, then you, of all people, should know that.”

“
I’m
the one who’s always been
there for you,” he argued. “I was the voice in your head. You weren’t going
crazy, ya know? I kept you from getting into trouble. I kept you from falling
back into your stuttering and from being reclusive. I pushed you out. I pushed
you into martial arts, made you keep your grades up, helped you to ignore
stupid kids, kept you out of drugs, and by the sheer force of it, away from
sex
,
especially with that Randal guy.”

“What?”

“You noticed my voice in your head.
C’mon, darling, it’s not like yours at all. It was real. Who do you think
growled every time he tried to kiss you? I can’t even count how many times he’s
tried, and feeding you that line of, ‘Oh, I don’t want to push you, I can
wait.’ Who does he think he is?”

“You’ve really been in my head all those
years, not just during the dreams? They were illusions, and you knew my
thoughts?” she asked, horrified. This was worse than a stalker who watched from
the outside. This person had been watching from the inside, knowing her
thoughts, her fears, her desires, her needs. Kendra shuddered.

“That wasn’t my intention. I just wanted
to communicate, but I wasn’t in there all the time. It was sporadic.”

“You’ve seen what I’ve seen?” She
recoiled.

“Sometimes. Lately. By accident.” He
looked away.

“So you really were there in the
bathroom the other day?”

“Accident. Sorry.” His lip twitched.

“You saw me naked?”

He smiled, no longer able to keep the
grin off his face, and responded in a low voice, “If it makes you feel better,
you can see me naked.”

Kendra screeched, pushed herself away
from the counter, and jumped down from the stool.

She wrapped her arms around her chest as
if she stood bare before him at that very moment. She felt demeaned,
defenseless, not the emotions she intended to display. She couldn’t allow this
guy to strip her of her dignity.

Liam spun around on his stool with
little remorse for having inadvertently intruded on her privacy.

Kendra dropped her arms to her side, and
placed them on her hips. Her outfit didn’t scream modesty, and she didn’t
intend on hiding.

“Did you like what you saw?” she asked
rudely.

Liam laughed. 

Chapter Seven

The day neared noon, and neither person
moved. Kendra leaned against the back of the couch a few feet from the
barstools, and stared at Liam. Her hair fell in disarray around her shoulders, tickled
her throat.

Liam sat on the barstool with legs
apart, amused with the droll, rough exterior Kendra tried to portray.

“How cute,” Liam muttered. “Well, more
than just cute. Sorta hot. I like your aggression. I molded you right.”

“What are you grinning at?” she barked
in annoyance, knowing very well his thought pattern.

“Not that I’m complaining, but what
prompted you to get that done to your tongue?”

She pushed aside any hesitance, and
shamelessly replied, “I like how it feels.”

Liam’s grin spread. He couldn’t help but
to laugh. “Oh, darling, I can’t figure out which I like more: your tenacity or
your persistence in trying to make me believe that you aren’t embarrassed by
what I think and know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she softened her
voice and licked her lips. “I bet you wonder how good it feels, but too bad
you’ll never know.”

“Such a tease,” he growled.

“Well, as fun as this may be, and as
lovely and fascinating as this new world sounds, I need to get back. I’m sure
Randal is worried.”

Liam rolled his eyes. “Again with this
Randal character? He tried to interfere with you getting here, always taking
you away as if he knew the portal waited for you. He’ll turn against you, you
know? He doesn’t understand. He’s such a fake and only after one thing. Can’t
you see that? Don’t bother yourself with him.”

“And who should I bother myself with
then,
you
?”

“You said it, not me.”

Infuriating grin! Kendra didn’t know
what to do when he flashed that smoky smile at her. It ripped something vicious
through her belly and chest, like butterflies gone completely mad.

“How are my parents?”

The question surprised her, halted her
thoughts. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. They moved years ago, and our families lost
touch. I think it was easier for them not to remember, and they remembered that
day every time they saw us.”

“I see.” He looked away. “This is a
parallel world. They exist here, ya know?”

“A parallel world,” she repeated. “Do my
parents exist here, too?”

“Yes. I met them a few years back. None
of them have kids.”

“So we didn’t exist here before we
passed through the portal?”

“No. Those of us who passed through
never existed here before. It’s probably why we passed through in the first
place. There is no shift in reality if we come here. The only shift occurs in
the other world where we once existed. From what I understand, our generation
is the first to pass, so there aren’t paradoxes here. I just haven’t figured
out why the universe dragged us here.”

“You sound kinda smart.”

“Tried hard to understand things.”

“What about people who exist here and
not in the other world? Do they portal there?”

“Not that I know of. Have you ever heard
of super humans in that world?”

“No, I guess not.” She paused. A sliver
of hope met her anxiety. “Julie’s alive for real? When will she be back? I want
to see her. Does she remember me? All that time you communicated with me, why
didn’t you have Julie communicate with me or bring her with you? But wait, you
told me she needed my help. What’s wrong? Where is she, Liam?”

“First of all, Julie doesn’t possess the
ability to transmit. Second, there are a lot of hate crimes against our kind.
Some humans think they can trap us like animals and do experiments since no one
believes the truth about where we came from. These humans, the hunters, have Julie.
They took her a few weeks ago. You have to help me find her.”

“I see.”

She was angry and felt guilty at the
same time. She thought Liam wanted her to be here because he wanted to be with
her, not because he needed her help. Liam might have wanted to get into her
head all those years, but apparently, he only wanted her here to find Julie.

Julie lived and hadn’t been killed years
ago.

I should be relieved,
Kendra thought.

This fact didn’t alleviate her pain. In
fact, every emotion she felt when Julie disappeared years ago resurfaced
because of recent events.

“She’s... she’s a prisoner?”

“Not a prisoner, a lab rat,” Liam
growled through clenched teeth.

He didn’t take Julie’s abduction
lightly, and someone, or several someones, would pay with their lives for
messing with the girl. He wasn’t a novice at surviving in this world if those
dreams and hallucinations reflected the truth.

“Will you help us?” he asked.

“Us?” 

“The others are coming, ones like us.”

“Why don’t they help you? I’m new. What
can I possibly do?”

“Very few Raven blood siblings pass
through the portal. You two are unique. You’re sisters. You have a connection
in this world, just like I had some connection to you in the other world. It’s
in your thoughts somewhere. You already know where she is. We just have to get
you to find the location. We’ve searched for her without a real clue. A Raven
prison is a slaughterhouse. We don’t have much time. They’re here.”

Liam seemed confident that it would
work. He staked his and Julie’s life on it, standing on a thin border between
speculation and desperation.

He jumped from the bar stool and opened
the door before the man in the hallway lifted a hand to knock.

Two men and a teenage boy entered the
apartment, greeting Liam and pausing when they saw Kendra. They examined her as
if trying to figure her out. When Liam stood between Kendra and the men, she
felt less threatened. She knew that Liam, for the most part, wouldn’t allow her
to be harmed, especially if he needed her help.

Kendra fought the urge to cross her arms
and shy away. 

Liam introduced the men, starting with
the oldest, who looked as if he were in his upper thirties. “This is Nathan. He
found us ten years ago and took us under his wing. He had a more violent entry
into this world, which gave him that scar. He can see through things.”

Nathan stood six feet in height with a
muscular build and black hair. A rugged scar slashed down his left cheek,
parallel to his jaw.

The next guy was in his early twenties,
a few inches shorter than Nathan. He was broad and bulky, with sandy blonde
hair, pale skin, and a devilish quality in his eyes. Lou wore jeans and a green
shirt that was wrapped snugly around his lean torso.

“This is Lou, nothing interesting about
him.”

Lou grumbled as Liam focused on the
youngest one, a teenager. “This is Mark.”

Mark was the tallest of all the guys,
but had a wiry build. He had brown hair and fair skin. His attire mimicked that
of Nathan, but he didn’t seem interested in finding out about Kendra. He didn’t
gawk at her like Lou. He nervously glanced around the room, shifted on his
feet, and seemed anxious to get on with something.