Shattered (21 page)

“Son, if your bills are too heavy, you
can always come back,” Gregory said. “Your bed is currently free.”

“You mean that very hard couch? My back
will always ache from the year I spent on it.”

They laughed, and I joined them after an
awkward moment of standing there like an intruder. He led us down the hall, the
two of them huddled together like old friends.

We stopped in front of a silver volt.
Marcus released Gregory and passed his hand in front of it. It shimmered like
iridescent fabric and opened. Despite the magical opening, the door groaned on
its hinges as we stepped inside.

Shelves of old books, and folders, and
dusty bottles that seemed to hold magical things lined the walls from the
ceiling to the floor of the circular room. A winding staircase twined through
the middle of it, leading to five open levels above my head. The room felt
sacred, like whatever the books, folders, and bottles held were important to
magical kind.
  

Marcus and Gregory lingered by the door,
laughing and talking about Sophia’s famous pound cake. I stared at the
stained-glass ceiling. Yellow five-point stars dotted the glass sky. The center
point of each star curled slightly. Such detail didn’t strike me as purely
ornamental. I felt like if I stared long enough they’d mean something
eventually. I looked down at my hands, at the ring with the star. Its center
point curled too.

“I have to do my rounds, Pop,” Marcus
said. “Will you need me to come back?”

“No thank you. We’ll leave from here.”

 
Marcus slammed us into the volt, and I
held the star ring up to the light. “Gregory, these stars are the same.”

He sighed and ruffled his thinning hair.
“I see this is going to be as hard as getting Emma to call me Pop. But she’s
been in love with my grandson for a long time. I can see why it’s weird for
her. You, on the other hand, have no excuse. My feelings are hurt.”

“I’m sorry, Pop.”

“That’s better,” he said. “And those
rings contain very old magic, and this is a very old building. Are you ready to
get started?”

I nodded, and he walked to the other side
of the room. I followed him, my eyes on the interesting patterns etched into
the tile. In the corner of each one, there was a fox, like the one on my middle
finger.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d
seen these symbols somewhere before.

“This room contains magical archives,” he
said. “Birth records, death records, major events, restricted spells, you name
it. For someone like you, this room gives your brain thousands of leads to go
on. This wall in particular,” he said, gesturing to the shelves of brightly
colored folders in front of us. “…is where we keep records of the missing. I’m
hoping you can tell me who Kamon has, why they are staying, and if they can be
saved.”

He wanted me to decide who should be in
that explosion or not. He wanted me to play God. I sighed and leaned my head on
his shoulder. “My mom and Sophia are right about me,” I said. “I’m a Gavin, but
I have
Shaw
crazy running through my
veins. I always do too much. What if I do more than look through those
folders?”

He laughed and pressed his lips to my
forehead, disregarding that it wasn’t technically my forehead. He’d kissed a
vampire. “I’m right here with you. I won’t let anything happen. Trust
yourself.”

He stepped away slowly as if to give me
room to work. I didn’t know where to start. I sighed as I stared at the dusty
shelves, feeling the fate of the world beating down on me.

“I think you’re overestimating me, Pop,”
I said.

 
“It’s quite the opposite. I think everyone
in your life besides me
underestimates
you.”

Fearing I would stand there like an idiot
for hours if I didn’t make a move, I grabbed a green folder with
October 2001
written on the tab. My mind
floated back to the week of training I’d had with Mom before her schedule took
her away from me. She’d taught me how to breathe, when to let go, and how to
channel the energy ripping through my body.

My muscles jerked like a speeding car as
my brain kicked into gear. I took a deep breath to settle myself.

I opened the folder and heard five names,
all whispered slowly and clearly.

Yanis
Nelson, Ana Benavidez, Timothy
Fitzgerald, Gillian Hargrove, Petra Thompson.

They were also the names printed at the
top of the first five pages in the folder, along with a brief description of
their case. I didn’t need to read them.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Like these people are dead.” I felt cold
and empty reading their names. With Timothy, my chest hurt like my lungs were
collapsing. Something had plowed into him as he died. A force. A magical one.

I shook off the buzzing threatening to
pull me in. I wasn’t here to solve murders.

I flipped through the pages, past more
dead people, waiting for life to strike me. I assumed it would feel like the
opposite of death, and I was right. On the tenth page, a feeling of warmth
entered my chest. It made my heart beat faster.

“Pamela Carmichael,” I said. “She’s
alive.” I wondered more about her–location, health–and shivered. I
saw a blurry image of a small kitchen. She was sitting at a table with a man, a
furry one who could almost be human if his facial hair wasn’t so out of control.
She was laughing. “She ran away with a guy. She doesn’t want to be found.”

“Good, dear. You’re doing great.”

I sighed, fanning the thick pages in the
folder back and forth. And this was just
one
month of
one
year. “This is going to
take me all day, Pop.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. He took the
folder from my hands, slipped it back in place, and pulled me away from the
shelf. “You don’t have to touch each one. You’re psychic. You could call their
names out to me at home if you wanted to. Being here should just make it easier
and more accurate.”

I didn’t bother saying I couldn’t do it. I’d
slammed Kamon Yates into a wall for crying out loud. This should be nothing.
Well, it
should
be nothing, if I
could manage not to lose myself in my powers.

I turned to the shelf and extended my
palms in front of me, and the light from the stained-glass windows made the
rings sparkle. I focused my thoughts on Kamon, his followers, and the colorful
folders on the shelves. Names began to whisper into my ears.

The names of Kamon’s willing followers
filled my chest with dread, a heavy evil I didn’t want to hold in my body for
longer than a second. Other names made me feel trapped and afraid. With each
one of those, I asked myself how they were captured, if they were afraid of
Kamon, and if they’d grown to love his way of life. When a name passed all
three questions without filling my chest with the murky feeling of evil, I beckoned
their missing person report down from the wall and passed it to Pop. The stack
grew quickly in his hands.

I cringed when I heard the name
Remi Vaughn
. She was last seen at her parents’
home in Deerfield, Michigan. “Remi,” I said. “I guess we don’t need her page.”
It was the darkest feeling I’d felt yet. She was the worst of them so far.

“She is a very lost young lady,” Pop
said. “I don’t see her allowing us to help her.”

I didn’t see myself wanting to. She’d
told Kamon a secret my mother had given her life to protect. It was my fault,
of course, for being there in the first place, but I was sure she’d run to him
gladly, hoping he’d kill the girl she hated for no reason at all.

Because of her obsession with Kamon, in
eighteen days, she would be in his headquarters when it went up in flames.

Almost all of the missing person reports
from this year and last were because of Kamon’s hunters forcibly taking magical
kind. As I’d seen in his chapel, he’d only given them two options: join or die.
Many of them were already dead.

With more than a hundred reports in his
hand, Pop waddled to a table in the corner. I felt the need to keep working,
keep walking. There were more names here.

I inhaled deeply, keeping a firm hand on
my powers, as I made my way around the volt. I wandered up the winding
staircase with my ears open for names.

“Be careful, love,” Pop yelled from the
bottom floor. “Those are death records.”

“I will.”

As I stood before the shelves, more names
came to me. Carlos, Victor, Mira, Christina. It felt like they were trapped and
hungry and small.

“Children,” I said. Thirty-four more
names screamed for me to hear them in this section, and I guided their death
records down from the wall. With the papers in my hand, I became very sure that
Kamon had them somewhere in his prison. They were all under the age of ten and
already being mourned by their families. I saw empty caskets. Their bodies were
never found. “He’s Satan,” I said. “He is really the devil.”

My father would probably disagree as he
thought my mother held that position, but I was sure Kamon’s dark spirit made
him a better fit to be the man in red. Or, in his case, the man in a black
tailored suit.

I strained against the urge to find those
children and the churning in my stomach that ached to make Kamon pay. This
impulse was the reason no one trusted me, not even myself.

I sent the thirty-eight death records
down to Pop and walked away with my impulses in check.

“These are all from the attack in Mexico.
They were reported dead,” he said. “Dear, are you sure they’re alive?”

“Yep,” I said, too afraid to ask myself
what conditions the children were living in. I knew seeing more would make me
do something. I took a deep breath and let the beating feeling of life among
the dead drain from me. It wasn’t my job to save them. I was just here to help
make that happen. I had to trust that it would happen in its own timing.

A memory came to me of sitting in a
circle around Sister Constantine at St. Catalina. I was nine. She was telling
us a story about planting flowers in the courtyard and waiting for them to
bloom.

Everything
has a season
, she’d said.
Not just flowers. You have a season. Your
wishes have seasons. And your dreams. Anything you can think of
.

The girls shouted out more things to her,
asking if those things had seasons since she’d claimed everything
did–like toys and candy. Sienna, a little ahead of her time, asked if
boys had a season.

Yes
, Sister Constantine had answered.
And the season for boys will come when you
get your mingling privileges at sixteen and not a moment before
.

I told myself that the children in
Kamon’s prison had a season, and that Pop or Sophia or my mother would rescue
them at the right time. It hurt to let it go, but I knew it was for the best.

My shoes thudded against the floor in the
silent room as I passed a section of the dead who were actually sleeping peacefully.
An unnatural breeze floated from the shelves. It sounded like distant and calm
waves, an endless ocean of peace.

“You seem happy,” Pop said, suddenly at
my side. “Someone might find that odd, given where you are.”

“It’s just this part. Back there, with
the kids, I was very upset.”

He chuckled. “Upset? Most people would be
terrified. They would be crying. They would want to leave and get back to their
happy lives as soon as possible. You’re still walking, and you seem to be
enjoying yourself.”

 
“And you seem very smug right now.”

He laughed harder. “Oh, honey, just admit
it. I was right about you. You’re not happy wasting your powers. Are you? You
like this.”

I tried to fight my smile, but I failed
miserably. He was right. I loved being in this room, hearing the names, and
feeling what I was feeling. Even in my anger, even with wanting to run off and
fight Kamon.

“Okay, I admit it, but it’s not like
anything will come of it. So what if I like using my powers? I’m not going to
grow up and be an agent. My mom would never let that happen.”

“Who says you have to be? You’re not one
right now, are you?” I shook my head. “You don’t need a title to help people.”

Help people? I hadn’t even thought about
that. I usually thought of myself as reckless, not helpful. Maybe that was what
I liked to do. Maybe that was why being here felt so natural.

“I don’t think I’m ready to tell my mom,”
I said. “She’d flip. Can we keep this between us?”

He nodded. “No one will know we talked at
all. You are in your father’s lap right now. Remember?”

We laughed, and he walked with me to view
the rest of the shelves. After finding a few more not so dead people, we took
the stairs down to the ground floor. I followed the curving wall deeper into
the volt. It felt like something was tugging me forward. Dusty shelves of
dustier books squeezed closer and closer to me as I walked through the
narrowing hallway.