Shattered (9 page)

After seeing her hurt herself today, I
understood why Lydia was having that vision. Christine had very little control
when she was angry. It was like someone flipped a switch in her head. She could
go from sweet little Chris to a raging, but fragile, maniac in the blink of an
eye.

 
“So you want me to protect her,” I said.
“Is it just Kamon and those guys? The people at the house?”

She shook her head again. “There are the
triplets, his highly trained guards, and…” She let out a loud sigh-moan mix,
emitting waves of terror from her skin. The scent of it curled my stomach. “And
his army.”

“Army,” I said, mostly to remind myself
that Kamon had one. For years he’d been catching and purging lost magical souls
and turning them into vicious killers. They were responsible for the attacks
for the portal spell. I’d heard that many of them only had one or two psychic
powers, but that was enough to kill thousands.

“And they all know about my kid,” she
said.

I tried to sit up, but my back wouldn’t
allow it.

“Why can’t you just go kill them
tonight?” I asked. “Why go through this? Just go to New Orleans and take him
down right now.”

“It’s not that simple. It has never been
simple. That’s why I’ve never tried to kill him before. Kamon has a plan to
expose the existence of magical kind and human hunters in the event of his
death. It’s not just a threat. He could easily do that. Dead or alive, he is
the enemy of peace, so I have to be careful. It will take me some time.”

“How much time?” I asked.

“Sixty days.” I nearly fell out of the
chair. I was hoping she would say something closer to a week or two. “I had a
vision of Kamon’s dead body months ago. The details are fuzzy, but I’m sure it
will happen and that it will take me that long to pull it off without the
backlash he’s promised.”

I sucked in a long breath. I hadn’t taken
one in a while.

“Do you know how many people could know
about her in sixty days?” I said. “What if the magical
world
found out you have
a child? They’re going to think she’s a copy, and
things are already bad, aren’t they? I mean … Lydia Shaw committing a Statute
Ten violation? That would be huge.”

She looked somewhere between annoyed and
impressed. I’d read every word of that treaty, and I knew the lingo. My
girlfriend was a direct violation of Statute Ten, the clause that outlawed
copies and forced psychic agents and hunters to train humans the hard way.

 
“It would be,” she said. “…but I’m not
worried about that. I’ve found a way to ease the tension Kamon’s attacks
caused. Trust me. The idea of a new war will be long gone. Even something like
my daughter’s identity coming out–which it won’t–wouldn’t start
things up again.”

 
A nervous laugh pushed out of my chest.
To say that I was skeptical would’ve been an understatement. “Must be some
plan,” I said.

“Yeah. It is. I’m letting the Magical
Council revise the treaty. Everything is up for negotiation except remaining in
hiding.”

My jaw dropped to my lap. That was the
last thing I’d thought she’d say. Anyone with a drop of magical blood in their
veins would have killed over after hearing her
say
that. Our laws, the oppressive standards we were expected to live by, were
about to change. She was right. If she changed the right things, that would be
enough to fix anything. That would be enough to have an angry magical nation
worshiping at her feet.

“That’s just … wow,” I said.

“I have an equally as impressive plan for
Kamon that I won’t get into tonight, but I need to know if you’re on board for
the sixty days it will require,” she said.

“Sixty days of fighting an army, ” I
said, my head swimming with pink balloons, Kamon’s army, and the idea of new
magical laws. “How am I supposed to do that?”

She pushed to the end of her chair,
leaning closer to me, and trapped me in an intense gaze. I had a feeling I
wasn’t going to like what she was about to say.

 
“You are immune to our powers, Nathan.
It’s so perfect that it makes me believe her when she says you two are soul
mates. You are exactly what she needs.”

If we weren’t sitting here talking about
protecting Christine’s life, I would’ve smiled. Her mother thought we belonged
together and that my weird powers and her weird life were somehow a perfect match.

“Do you know what you are?” she asked.

I almost rolled my eyes at the obvious
question. “A shifter.”

“Yes, but not just any shifter. Have you
ever heard of the Ghosts?”

Ghosts. Not many words could make my
heart stop, but that happened to be one of them.

I was sure when normal little boys closed
their eyes to sleep, they didn’t usually see white dogs surrounding a campfire.
I was also sure that those normal little boys didn’t have those strange
reoccurring dreams most nights out of the week, even well after they’d turned
eighteen. I wasn’t a normal little boy. I still wasn’t normal.

In one of my dreams, an older man always
told legends about shifters with a special immunity to psychic powers and a
responsibility to magical kind because of it. He spoke of them as though they
were nothing but a myth with a slight smirk on his face, but he called them
Ghosts.

“I may have heard about them once or
twice,” I lied, it felt like I had to, an order I couldn’t disobey.
 

 
“I think you’re one,” she said. I laughed.
“I’m serious. It wasn’t until recently that I put it all together. The
immunity, the fact that you never get cold, and how incredibly protective you
are. That’s what they were known for–protecting your kind from hunters.
Or, at least, that was the myth. I remember hearing about them when I trained
years and years ago. Julian thought they might be wolves, but he wasn’t sure.
He’d never seen one for himself. He wanted us to catch one, but none of us ever
did.” She cleared her throat and averted her eyes. “Goodness, I didn’t mean to
say catch, like … they were
objects
.”

My mind flashed away again while she
stuttered an apology for her hunter slip.

In the reoccurring dream with the old
man, he always stood in the middle of a circle of white dogs as embers from the
campfire blew around him. He said the same thing every time. “
They move through the night, as silent as
ghosts, rescuing our people from the snares of our enemy. To catch one is an
amazing feat, a trophy for any worthy hunter
.” And every single time, for
countless nights throughout my life, the dream ends when the large white
dog–Zain, the one I always wrestled with–yanks me closer with my
arm in his mouth.

I shook my head and cleared it of the
snowy world.
Just a dream
, I told
myself.
Just like they’d always been.

“You’re eighteen,” she said. Her voice
startled me. I’d forgotten she was sitting there for a moment as I spiraled
deep into my memories. “When you were a year old, there would have been plenty
of reasons for a child to get separated from their pack. That was a terribly
chaotic time for everyone. I think you were separated from the Ghosts.”

I felt the need to snort, to protect a
secret that was probably all in my head, a product of my dreams.

“Whether you believe it or not, I think
you belonged to the Ghost pack, and by the scars on your back and the fact that
no one has seen one since the war, I think you may be the only surviving
member.”

I shook my head, completely rejecting her
theory. “These are birthmarks,” I said.

“Have you ever seen a birthmark, Nathan?”
She chuckled. “Christine has one.” She paused, probably waiting for me to admit
to knowing about it. It was on her thigh, visible in a bikini, innocently
exposed, but I still acted clueless. “It’s on her thigh,” she said. “A little dark
circle of skin. That’s a birthmark. You have scars. Something clawed through
you, and you lived. That’s obvious.”

The chair creaked underneath me as I
adjusted slowly, trying to appear calm. I didn’t want to talk about ghosts, or
packs, or the hundreds of times I’d dreamed of dead white dogs in bloody snow.
That was for my nightmares. My waking moments were for Christine.

 
“You can take me to another country faster
than I can take a breath,” I said. “And Kamon broke my spine. It doesn’t matter
if I’m the last Ghost,
if
they even
existed. I don’t think my sporadic immunity is helpful.”

“But it is. It
can
be,” she said. “I can teach you to expand your shield to
protect your body. It would make you untouchable. Being untouchable makes you
the perfect bodyguard.”

“You can teach me things?” I asked.

“I can. Yes.”

I let the A. C. fill the silence for a
minute, imagining myself training with Lydia Shaw. Nervous energy stirred in my
stomach. I didn’t want to fight an army, but I did want to protect Christine
with more than candles and laundry shoots.

Sixty days, I thought. Sixty long days.
So much could happen in sixty days, but I knew one thing that
wouldn’t–Kamon wouldn’t lay a finger on Christine, so even though I was
scared out of my mind, I said, “Let’s get to it. Train me. I’m ready now.”

****

I stood in the open space between the
balcony and Christine’s bed and practiced the techniques Lydia had taught me
before leaving Paris. It was all in my thoughts. Believing I was untouchable
was half the battle. Attacks of the mind, she’d said, I could naturally block.
Attacks of the body would be more challenging to ward off.

Clear
your mind
, she’d said.
You are alone on an island. Just you and
your brain and the skin you live in. There is nothing else. Do you feel that?

Normally, I would’ve laughed and said
something about how weird she was being, but this was about Christine’s life
and her safety. I didn’t laugh. After a moment, I felt what she’d wanted me to
feel. A stillness, the sense of being alone, even though she was right next to
me in the surveillance room.

“Clear your mind,” I said, just like she
had. “You are alone on an island. Just you and your brain and the skin you live
in. There is nothing else.” I felt the stillness again in Christine’s room. I
was ready for the next step. “Let go of everything but yourself. Your skin. Your
body. It’s where your powers lie.”

For the second time tonight, after
hearing those words, I shivered. Lydia was only going off of what she knew
about shifters and what she’d heard about Ghosts, she’d said, but apparently that
was a lot. My body had reacted to the words with her and now that I was alone.

“I am untouchable,” I said, and shivered
harder. “I am unmovable.” My stomach tightened. “I am untouchable.”

My skin tingled. It was working. Lydia’s
technique was working. Then I shifted–a quick, terrifying, involuntary
shift.

I shook all over, a reflex I couldn’t
deny, and tried to change back into myself. Like earlier, my fur felt
permanent, like it had been and always would be my true skin, like there wasn’t
a boy inside of me waiting to get out. But he was in there–I was in
there–just trapped inside of a dog. Outside of the idea of Christine
being Kamon’s pet, nothing on this earth was more frightening than this moment.

Nothing I tried worked. Pushing the
animal down, willing the boy inside of me to claw his way out, nothing.

I ran into the bathroom to try the only
other trick I knew. I jumped in Christine’s tub. It took me a moment to get a
grip on the knob with my mouth, but I did. I cranked the cold water on full
blast. I nudged the drain stopper up to hold the water inside and held my head
under the stream. After a minute, I remembered what it felt like to be Nathan,
to have hands and feet and the ability to speak. With the help of the water, I
slipped out of my fur like I’d never struggled at all.

The first day on campus after the baby
shower was the scariest. Every noise sounded like Kamon. Every shadow looked
like Remi. But just as fear would consume me, Nate would poke his head into my
classroom and let me know he was there. There was something different in the
way he stood now. Taller, stronger. It echoed the words he’d told me as I
dressed for school.

One
hundred percent, no one will get through me.

I’d asked what made him so confident, but
he’d shrugged it off and changed the topic. That was the thing about Nate. He
loved to talk about me but hated talking about himself. I wasn’t sure of where
to draw the line between respecting his wishes and wanting to know more about
him.

Nate believed that I knew enough about
him already. I knew the basics–the John and Theresa saga and that he’d
shifted for the first time almost a year and a half ago, but there had to be
more. He was someone else before me, and he’d locked that person away.

But there he was, the guy I loved but
possibly knew nothing about, cleaning outside of my classroom with a look in
his eyes that said he was ready for a fight. He didn’t get one on the first
day. Or second. Or third. By the end of the week, with still no word from
Kamon, Mom sent a text that made me stop waiting for him to do something.

Soon,
there will be no Kamon or Remi or anyone. Soon, there will be no danger. Soon,
I will work less and see you more. I promise. Enjoy your day, honey. I have
everything under control.

It felt like I should reply with
something like
Sir, yes, sir
or
Aye
Aye
, Captain
,
to assure her that I was following orders and staying in line. Her way proved
to be the right way. I didn’t have to spaz out or cause problems. I just needed
to paint and pay attention in class. That, I could handle.

At the end of a second uneventful week, she
sent me pictures of the view from her meeting room in Dubai with another
message.
I’m thinking we need a vacation
after everything is over. What about this place?
It felt like a reward for
good behavior.

She didn’t mention her progress or the
fact that I hadn’t seen her since the creepy baby shower. I didn’t mention
anything either. I didn’t say
I miss you
or
I’m scared
or beg to know more
details about Kamon. I told her I couldn’t wait to go to Dubai, or some place
like it, and left it at that.

Soon, with Mom and Sophia not worrying
and Nate standing strong outside of my classrooms, Kamon faded into the
background of paint splatters, history papers, and the surprisingly sexy scent
of pine that now clung to Nate. And then came midterm exams. No Kamon. And then
another week to receive midterm grades. Still no Kamon. And I was
properly sedated and properly following rules
like a proper
daughter should.

“Hey, how did you do?” I looked up to
find one of my classmates leaning across the mildly cushioned lecture hall
seat. After an hour, it always felt more like a rock than a chair. “For
midterms?” she said, and smiled sweetly. We were somewhat familiar with each
other, in the way that we’d maybe spoken five times and I wasn’t entirely sure
of her name. Not nearly familiar enough to share grades, I thought.

“I got an A in everything but history,” I
said, because I didn’t see a way out of telling her without sounding rude. “That
one will be a B minus, I think. You?”

“Same, but C in World History. That class
sucks.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “And that
test was impossible. If you missed number thirty, you had no choice but to get the
whole last page wrong.”

“Yeah! It was so unfair,” she said. She glanced
down at her phone then back up at me. “Anyway … good to hear you’re doing so
well. I saw a post about you failing out. I’m glad that’s not true.”

I rolled my eyes. Sometimes, the blogs
made up whatever they wanted to report. I’d learned to ignore them.

“Chris,” Nate said, half standing in my
class and half in the hall. I waved and finished packing my things.

“I’m glad I’m not failing too. I’ll see
you tomorrow,” I said, leaving off her name on purpose. I didn’t want to call
her the wrong thing. I smiled politely and met Nate at the door. He took my bag
and kissed me sweetly on the forehead. After, he added a very unsexy yawn. “Did
you hear that? Apparently, I’m failing.”

“Oh yeah? Thank heavens for those blogs,
or else we might not know anything about ourselves.”

I laughed. “Or that my outfit yesterday
was ‘Tribal Chic’. What does that even mean? It’s like they just throw any word
in front of chic and call it a thing.”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m Custodial Chic,”
he said.

We made up more fashion trends until we
made it to the basement. He unlocked the door with his massive ring of keys,
and we stepped inside. “Nathan?” Griffin said.

“It’s me. And Chris.” We passed the
tattered blinds of his office window and waved at the oldest man alive. “See
you tomorrow.”

“See
ya
, buddy,”
Griff said. “See
ya
, cutie pie.”

We took the backdoor out of the custodial
lounge to a dark hallway with huge pipes running over our heads. The spooky
basement hallway led to the staff parking lot where we’d parked every day since
Mom started letting me take my own car to school.

My phone dinged in the quiet hallway. It
was my daily inspirational email from Gregory.

“Be
not the slave of your own past–plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep,
and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and
with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.” ―
Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is greatness inside of you, my dear, just waiting to
be unleashed. Have a happy day.

I thanked him for those kind and
beautiful words, but even though Kamon knew who I was, I still didn’t agree
with him. He’d sent his quotes every day to get me thinking about using my
powers, but they had nothing on Mom’s daily messages. I hadn’t seen much of her
in person, but pictures of possible vacation spots and daydreaming about a week
with her without her running off to work was exactly what I needed.

Nate opened the door and ended the
silence of the basement with a sudden rush of noise. Revving engines, loud
horns, screeching tires. Some showoff on a motorcycle popped a wheelie a few
feet from our car and zoomed off.
 
“What’s with that guy?” I said.

“It’s just some creep. Don’t worry about
it.”

He locked the doors as soon as we got in
and sped backwards out of the spot. He didn’t bother waiting in the line of
cars trying to get out of the parking lot. He sped around them and took a side
street away from Trenton. I’d grown accustomed to his intolerance for traffic.

He took an unfamiliar street that led to
a sketchy neighborhood and flipped the radio to my favorite station. I propped
my feet up on the dashboard, enjoying the music without interruption from the
world. The moment was peaceful and perfect, my love at my side, until a guy on
a motorcycle weaved into our lane. Nate jerked to the left and avoided a
collision.

“What’s wrong with that guy?!” I yelled.
“We could’ve killed him.” Nate made a sharp turn that threw me against the
door. We were going entirely too fast for the quiet street we were on. “Was
that the same guy from the parking lot?”

“Uh … maybe,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I will be even better when you
stop speeding.” He eased on the brake and stopped driving like a lunatic. The
roads had enough of them today.

When my heart settled from the near
accident, I leaned back in my seat and gazed out of the window. The new part of
town we were in had a quaint charm to it. Small shops and little restaurants
with outdoor patios lined the street. Each passing sign was more interesting
than the last. Denim Boutique, Sweetie’s Yogurt, Nan’s Homemade Jewelry. Without
even asking, Nate pulled the car over in front of Nan’s Homemade Jewelry.

“Aww,” he said. “It’s closed.” He pointed
to the sign on the door. I couldn’t read it from here, but, apparently, he
could. “It looked like a place you’d like.”

I smiled. “It does. Maybe some other
time.” I spotted the Starbucks nestled between a small bookstore and another
trendy boutique. The commercial franchise looked out of place on this street,
but it was clearly open.

“Maybe we could go to Starbucks instead?”
I said.

He glanced at the rearview mirror with a
subtle frown on his face. “Actually, I just remembered that Sophia said to
hurry … um … because your grades are in. I forgot.”

He turned the car around and zoomed down
the street in the direction we’d come from. He was speeding and looked
incredibly tense. Maybe the thought of the spontaneous outing had freaked him
out. We did the best we could, but it was impossible not to let our ghost of an
enemy affect our lives in some way. Nate, if I was reading him correctly, was
affected right now. I grabbed his free hand to calm him down and held it until
we pulled into our fake garage.

The automatic door closed much faster
than I’d thought a garage door could close. That wasn’t the only impressive
thing about it. As soon as Nate put the car in park, the gears activated. The garage
walls scrolled past my window as the car lowered into the condo. This place was
made for someone who lived a more exciting life than we did. Someone who would
need an elevator for her car to be the only real entrance inside.

I checked around my feet for any of my
things before getting out. Leaving my phone or something for school behind
would be a hassle. My car lived here. We didn’t.

Sophia was waiting in the kitchen to
bring us to our real home.
 
She blew
me a kiss as I got out of the car. “You opened the mail already, didn’t you?” I
said.

She grinned and waved the envelope at me.
“I didn’t open it,” she said. “But we didn’t need to. Your mother got it this
morning.” I chuckled. My mother didn’t need to open envelopes to know grades, I
guessed. “You can’t imagine how happy you made her. She cried.”

“She cries for everything,” I said. I was
aiming for a typical teenaged reaction, but I wanted to cry too. Constantly
checking myself and sedating myself was paying off.

Since I didn’t have psychic powers, I
ripped the letter open and unfolded the paper inside. Just like I thought. I made
an A in everything but History.

“Can I say something?” Sophia said. She
always asked but started speaking before I had the chance to answer. “After the
portal, when you and I talked-”

“You mean when you yelled at me?” I
interrupted.

She chuckled. “I didn’t yell. I spoke to
you sternly. But that day, I really didn’t think you were headed down a good
path.”

“Because I have a tendency to be
destructive and perpetually unhappy?”

She shook her head. “Because you have
a tendency to act like
your mother.” I frowned. More than
anyone, I couldn’t take Sophia referring to me as a copy. It reminded me that
she’d watched me my whole life with that thought in her head.

“Don’t frown, my love. It has nothing to
do with what you are or what you’re not. My daughters act like me too. It’s
just that, for you, acting like your mother could mean you’re being rebellious,
and I’d thought we were headed down that path.”

“But I straightened out,” I reminded her.

“You did, and I want to thank you for
that. I will not live through caring for another Lydia Shaw. I’ve nearly
strangled the first one to death too many times to count.”

I laughed and smoothed out the letter
from Trenton. I just wanted to touch it for a moment and focus on this very
tangible proof of my hard work.

“I like to think of you and Mom as secret
best friends,” I said. She cackled, one hand over her chest and one on her
stomach.

“Your mother is a terror,” she said. “But
… she’s much better now that she has you, I can say.
Much
better. She’s talking about taking a vacation for the first
time ever, and she’s way less crabby than she’s been in years.”

“Really?” She nodded, and I smiled. My
mom, who’d been unhappy for years, was better now that she had me. For my life,
it didn’t get much better than that.

****

Nathan

For my life, as a shifter, I needed
harmony and balance. A happy homeless wolf had told me that outside of Wal-Mart
one day last year. He’d sniffed and stopped me as I walked out of the door. He’d
guessed what I was and smiled. “
Dog
,”
he’d said. “
A big one. As big as me as a
wolf.
”

I sat with him, because I’d never spoken
to another magical being before, and he told me everything I needed to know to
survive. But now, as I was speeding down a street to lose the demon seed on the
motorcycle–William Yates–I wanted to forget everything Edwin had
told me. Because my life, right now, was the opposite of harmonious. And I felt
it in my skin, in my bones, and in the countless times I’d shifted this month
without coming back easily. I felt the need for harmony. For peace. For the two
sides of myself to settle.