Chapter 10

Reagan:

My head pounded. It always pounded now, every single day. This didn’t happen when I was little. I’d made the mistake of mentioning to the doctors that it had been getting worse and worse as time went on. My skin felt tighter, I bled for longer when I got cut. I couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore. Walking hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Elena said, rubbing my back after I’d emptied out my stomach in our toilet. We both sat on the floor of our room. I tried to breathe but everything in my body hurt. It started getting blacker, wanting to suck me up until there was nothing left.

“Why are you sorry?” I rasped, my throat shredded. “You didn’t do this.”

Her dark eyes looked grim as they watched me. “No, I guess I didn’t. I’m still sorry. You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do if it could fix this.”

She spoke as if she didn’t experience the same symptoms. I could see the bags under her eyes, and I knew they’d been there for years. We might have been sixteen the last time either of us had felt like real people. We were pushing twenty now, and it didn’t look like we would live to even that. If we could go three hours without a nosebleed, it seemed like a miracle.

I sat with my back against the wall, staring at my mirror-self across the eight by ten room we’d shared for almost nine years. We even sat in the same way, with one knee pulled to our chest and one leg stretched out. We wore the same white scrubs, as we had for years and years. Our hair was the same mess of straw-like brown strings. It used to curl, but it hadn’t done that since we’d started getting sicker.

“Can you walk?” Elena asked me. “They’re going to come get us soon.”

I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t start crying. I’d never cried this much before. I would think about them coming for me, they would open the door, I would break. It… it hurt. Everything they did hurt.

“No,” I cried anyway, my voice snapping like a twig. “I don’t want it. I can’t do it anymore.”

I heard Elena’s clothes shifting. That stiff, awful fabric made so much noise when we moved. I felt her when she sat beside me, pulling me against her. Elena felt like fire, even then. Even when it got sucked out of her day by day. I was ice. I made her shiver when she held me.

“We’ll be okay,” she promised, smoothing my hair. “We’re always okay.”

“We’re never okay. I can’t breathe, Ellie. Everything is blurry. I can’t even see out the window anymore.”

She turned, looking to the long, rectangle window at the top corner of our room. It was about two feet long and six inches tall. Just enough to show us the wall of the building next door. I couldn’t see the sky, even when I pressed myself all the way against the wall or stood on my cot. Elena’s too. I forgot what shade of blue it should have been.

Elena brought me closer to her, letting me cry. She always let me cry. She never told me to stop or to shut up. No matter what, she would listen, letting me get everything out until I couldn’t stay awake anymore.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked me. “I have these dreams about you. I’ve been getting them more and more lately. I close my eyes, and all I see is you.”

I lifted my head to look at her. “What? Where are you?”

She shrugged. “It’s you in the middle of a baseball field. You have a helmet on, gloves, the whole thing. Your hair is long and messy in the wind as you step up to the plate. Your eyes are like fire, narrowed and waiting as you hold the bat. You know the one. Yellow tape around the handle, Mom’s name carved on the fat end.”

“Most of it,” I laughed. “Dad hurt himself in the middle of carving it. Mom should have never let him use that knife.”

Elena smiled. “No, she shouldn’t have. But you’re holding it in my dream. Your eyes, they’re so green. Like when we were little. And this ball comes out of nowhere. It’s flying at you like a bullet. You hit it. First try. The thing goes soaring into the sky. You drop the bat, and you run. You run so fast and so far. You don’t stop running until you’re home.”

A pink tinted tear dropped onto her shirt. She didn’t wipe them from her cheeks, and I tried not to look at the red rimming her eyes.

“I can’t run,” I said.

“No, but you will.”

I flinched when I heard the beeping of the door. I hadn’t seen Dr. Warner show up, but saw her then. She didn’t look at us through the bars as she put in the four codes that kept us locked up.

We struggling to our feet. Elena and I held onto each other as the doors opened with a loud beep. The two of us stepped over our pile of books—all hard covers with the front and back ripped off. Then we left the cell.

The compound kept us in the annex. No one could hear screaming or crying, and no one could enter without the right passes. That meant about twelve people even knew we were alive. The cell attached to what looked like a hospital waiting room, but without all the seats. Big enough they could bring in all the doctors and people in charge, letting them comfortably watch as Elena and I demonstrated our abilities. They loved watching. And there was enough room for the two guards with guns. They stared at us, fingers on the trigger and ready to end us if we stepped even in inch out of line. If I stepped out of line, they would shoot Elena, and if she stepped out of line, they would shoot me. After years of poking and prodding, they knew every weakness we had.

All the different medical rooms had been attached to the main room. All in all, it was a pretty tiny section. It always made me feel trapped. We’d would go into four rooms for our exams. We started in the needle room.

Elena sat on the table first, extending her arm so Dr. Warner could take what she wanted. The woman was only in her forties, but she felt so much older to me. You couldn’t be this evil without time to let it simmer. She had yellow hair pulled back tight in a bun. She always looked like this. A woman in a doctor’s coat, taking blood from my sister and I. Touching us. Hurting us.

It was a bad day. Every two weeks we had to go through the ringer. While I sat in a chair, Elena got hair taken, blood, a full body exam with her clothes on the floor and no dignity left in the room. It would be my turn soon, but I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wasn’t eleven, screaming in protest when the doctors took my clothes off. I just let them now.

“Damn,” the doctor hissed, stabbing Elena again in the arm with a needle. “Can’t find a vein.”

She tried ten times, leaving so many holes behind. Elena flinched, face still a mix of blood and tears. It coated her teeth and under her nails from the scabs that didn’t get the chance to heal.

Finally, the doctor got her blood. We watched as she did what she always did, putting it in some spinny thing while she typed up stuff on a computer. The door stayed open, so Dr. Urie walked in with his tray of toys. I saw a scalpel there, those awful things that kept our eyes wide open so we couldn’t blink, stuff to look at our ears and throat, and things I couldn’t name but knew would hurt me.

“I’ll need to borrow them for a bit,” Dr. Urie said, still holding his tools.

Warner didn’t turn from the computer, sighing. “This is going to make for a very unhappy Gregory.”

“What is?”

She pointed to the computer. “They’re getting weaker and weaker. The magic is killing them faster than we thought it would.”

“Okay, then we just need to do more tests. Get what we need ASAP.”

“I think that’s what’s doing it. We’re doing too much. They can’t handle it.”

I looked to my sister. Every moment of every day reminded us that we were both dying. That the magic we had been born with was broken in half. It tried pulling itself out of us, trying to seek its other half. One of us would survive it, and we didn’t know who.

Dr. Urie sighed, shifting from one foot to the other. “What are we supposed to do then? How much time do we have?”

Dr. Warner seemed to remember we were in the room. She looked to both of us, not giving an answer. That itself seemed to have been an answer. Typically, they didn’t care if they spoke in front of us. What did it matter if we knew what they learned? We’d been locked up for so, so long now, never so much as leaving the building even once.

Doctor Urie brought us into the other room.

I hadn’t had my exam yet, and I felt like the bloody nose I got did nothing but irritate my doctors. Dr. Urie dabbed at my nose with a cloth as Dr. Warner sifted through the tools that had been set down at the computer station. I tried not to look over at the armed guards, worried they would see something in my eyes that they thought was worth another beating. It had been three months since the last one and I still walked with a limp.

Elena looked paler than usual. She stood shaking, rubbing her eyes as she tried to breathe. I wanted to ask if she was in pain, but I knew the doctors would swoop in and push me away.

“Is Reagan doing her exam?” Elena asked so I didn’t have to after she’d finished with hers.

Dr. Urie barely glanced her way. “In a minute. Given what we just learned, we might have to double check and see if we should hold off. We’ll do a once over for now. Both of you, take off your clothes.”

I started pulling my shirt up, but Elena didn’t move to get rid of hers again. She swayed, another shaky breath leaving her lips as she watched me. Something in her eyes made my stomach hurt and I couldn’t explain why.

“Oh my god,” she said, her voice even. Dead. “Rea, what happen to the bottom of your foot? Is it turning black?”

My heart thudded, feeling time slipping away from me. How much longer did I have?

I tried to look down at myself, but I was barely strong enough to stay standing, let alone lift a foot.

Both doctors cursed, shooting past my sister to get to me. Dr. Warner held my shoulders while Dr. Urie bent to lift my leg up.

Elena had that dead expression in her eyes. She stared at me, and it sent a chill through my body to see how badly she shook. How scared she looked.

“I love you,” she told me in the moment before heat flooded the room.

I didn’t understand what happened at first. Everything got hot as the doctors examined me, muttering that nothing was wrong. Then I got it, seeing Elena aim her outstretched hands at the armed guards. It started as a sputter, the light. Then it poured out of her, leaking from her pores and moving toward the guards.

They didn’t even have time to raise their guns. As blood started dripping from Elena’s nose, the light consumed them from the inside out. I knew what it would do, setting them on fire. Blinding them. Ending them. They dropped dead.

The doctors scrambled as my mind swam. It couldn’t have been what it looked like. I’d dreamed of it a million times, but it never happened.

Dr. Urie went for the computer, typing fast as Dr. Warner went after my sister. I stood there, still as the dead as Elena swiped her hand through the air. Blood shot from Dr. Warner’s throat as she clutched it, going down hard. I didn’t even see when Elena took the scalpel in her hands.

Dr. Urie fell last. It happened fast, like the others. Blood left him too, and then we were in a room of the dead.

I tried to breath as alarms sounded above us. The doctor had called for help and I had no idea how much time we had. No idea what would happen next.

“We need to leave,” I gasped. “Elena. Elena?”

She blinked at me, scalpel tight in her hold. She didn’t look like Elena right then. Soaked in blood, trembling but standing tall, she looked like an angel after the fall.

“I love you,” she said to me.

“I love you too.” I reached for her arm, wanting to take it so we could, what, run?

“I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything, Reagan, and I’m so sorry.”

“What? What the hell are you sorry for?”

They would be on their way soon and if we wanted a chance, we had to go. She knew that. Didn’t she?

“You’re going to be strong. Finally,” Elena said, tears running down her cheeks, cleaning them of blood. “I promise. It might not feel like it, but you will.”

Then I got it. I got it and it was like an earthquake in my chest. “No. We’re both leaving. We’re both leaving right fucking now.”

Elena shook her head. “We’ll never make it. We’ll never be fast enough, cut in half like this. But it’s okay. I swear, it’s okay.”

“How is it okay? How is it okay! I’m not the one…”

She shook her head again, her hand cupping my cheek. “It was never going to be me. You knew that.”

“Don’t,” I cried. We could die together. We could die right there in that room, as long as we would be together.

“I love you,” Elena said for the last time, shoving me backward. I fell to the ground, landing on my bottom.

I screamed. I screamed so fucking loud when she dragged that scalpel across her throat, cutting deep and fast. Elena died before she hit the ground, and I wished I was dead too.

It felt like a rubber band snapping into place. Instant and painful as the light came to me, clamping down on my soul, on my mind. It came to me and put a claim on a body that wanted nothing to do with it. No, that wasn’t right. A soul that wanted nothing to do with it. My body starved for it.

I stared at Elena’s body on the floor, not caring about the new power. Not caring that I felt strong enough to stand, or that I could breathe just fine, that my head didn’t pound and that I could see clearly. None of it mattered, because it was stolen power.

“No,” I said. Once. Quiet. No.

Nothing came of it.

Get up, a voice in my head commanded. It was new and loud and not my own. It sounded like Elena.

Ready yourself, it said as I heard people coming. They would be here soon. They would be here to kill me if I let them. And I could have let them. I could have sat there on my knees, draped over a girl who wouldn’t come back. One who died so I could have a chance to run. Run like she’d told me to.

I stood up, legs shaky, breath uneven.

Fight, the voice ordered.

The doors swung open as people flooded in, guns aimed. Aimed at me.

I took hold of my new power, and then I let it loose on the world.

I woke up screaming. Not crying, but screaming at the very top of my lungs. The room was black, and I sat upright as my head filled with memories that I wanted to forget. They took me and I could do nothing about it.

The screaming didn’t stop, even when my door swung open. Noah stood there, dressed in nothing but pajama pants and staring at me with sleepy, confused eyes. They looked around the room, probably searching for danger.

“Reagan!” he called, coming over to the bed. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

I couldn’t speak, my screams turning into sobs so loud and wretched that I could barely breathe. Noah dropped to his knees at the side of my bed, looking lost, as if he didn’t know where to put his hands.

“Please,” he said. “You, you need to try and quiet yourself. I know that’s shitty, but you’re going to terrify the kids.”

In my mind, I knew I had to stop. I knew that it had only been a nightmare. One that showed me every hell in my life, but a nightmare nonetheless. It was over. I was in a house and as safe as I’d ever been. I shouldn’t have been screaming.

“Please,” Noah begged again. “Reagan, please.”

I couldn’t stop. I tried apologizing, but my body didn’t belong to me then. Someone else took it away and filled it with horror.

Through the blanket, I felt Noah’s hand on my leg. He squeezed it like it was my hand, looking at me like a helpless child. He had no idea what he’d taken on. He had no idea I could never earn my place in his house. He had no idea that I only knew how to be a burden.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, squeezing me again. And it sounded weak and quiet and unsure, but I believed him. I stared at him through my tears and as I wished I knew how to stop weeping. “It was only a dream. You’re safe.”

Safe, the voice in my head told me. Safe now. Take his hand and you’ll know.

My crying hadn’t stopped when I saw a bundle of children at the door. Simon knocked, making Noah look over.

“What happened to Reagan?” Simon asked.

“Did you get hurt?” Allison said.

“Who do I have to kill?” Pippa asked, a nail file held high in her fist. She had on pink jammies with a black sweater. Her hair had been tied in sloppy buns on her head and she looked like she had been asleep thirty seconds ago, but somehow ready to murder on my behalf.

“She had a nightmare,” Noah said. “I can take care of this.”

“Can you?” Pippa asked, walking in as the children started moving to me. “You can go if you want. I know you don’t like this kinda stuff.”

Noah didn’t go anywhere, staying on his knees with his hand on my leg. My own hand rested not an inch from his. I didn’t know why he wouldn’t take it. I would have let him.

“We can protect you from the bad dreams!” Allison said, climbing onto the bed and not caring about my sobbing.

“Yeah!” Lizzie agreed. “We’ll make sure none of the monsters get you.”

Simon gasped as he lifted Clare up onto the bed. “I’ll be a wolf so I can smell it if bad guys come!”

“You don’t have to do that,” Pippa said, lifting the blanket and sliding into it. “We’ll all keep her safe.”

Simon stripped, much to Noah’s chagrin. He sighed as his brother tossed his clothes aside and took the form of a wolf. The shift was fast, his limbs changing and fur growing. One minute, a boy, and a wolf the next. That wolf went to lie in front of my door, putting his head down and closing his eyes.

“Good idea!” Clare said. “I’ll be a wolf too.”

“No more wolves,” Noah tried and failed to command. His sister shifted into a wolf pup, sitting at the end of my bed.

Allison climbed onto my lap, putting both her hands on my shoulders. “It’s okay, Reagan,” her sweet voice said. “You can stop crying now. We’re here.”

I wished I could have told her I was grateful, but I could only hold the little girl to me as I cried. Allison held me back for a few seconds before nestling in and making herself at home.

All the other kids had settled on the bed, picking their spots and hunkering down. The bed was so full of life, trapping me there in a cocoon of safety. All these children I barely knew had vowed to protect me from monsters. They didn’t understand that I was the monster.

“You don’t have to stay,” I whispered to Noah, finding a break in my tears.

“I’m staying,” he said. “I’m staying until you fall asleep.”

I moved aside as much as I could in the bed, trying to make room for him. He looked at the spot, rising up from the floor. “That’s, uh, that’s okay,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a lot of room.”

“I’ve had less.”

He denied me again, walking to the wall. He took a seat on the floor, eyes on me. I wished I knew what to say.

“Nothing is going to get their hands on you,” Noah said. “I, I don’t know what you dreamt about, and I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but I swear to you, you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

My lips parted, the words stuck on my tongue for a moment. “I don’t know how to not be afraid.”

“That makes two of us.”

***

I slept uneasy, but I did pass out some time during the night. When my eyes opened, the sun hadn’t even risen yet. I knew I couldn’t sleep again. I couldn’t risk closing my eyes and seeing Elena’s body. I’d hoped to see Noah when I woke up, but he wasn’t there.

All the children had stayed, though. I moved Allison aside, tucking her in with Pippa so I could get up. When I did, I scooped up wolfy Simon in my arms. He didn’t stir, but he sniffed at me in his sleep. I put him in my spot and pulled the blankets up so he could stay warm.

Bundled in a sweater, I padded out to the hallway. Noah’s door stood open, but no one was in his bed.

Downstairs, I heard in an eager voice.

I walked fast, smelling chocolate as I reached the stairs. I saw Noah sitting there, now wearing fresh clothes. I could smell the heat of shower steam on him, and his hair was damp as he sat at the table. The chocolate scent came from the mug in his hands.

“You should be asleep,” Noah said, not even looking up as I came down the stairs.

I didn’t say anything as I walked toward him and took a seat at his side. When I did, he slid his mug toward me. I took one sip and gave it back.

“My, my dad died when we were ten,” I said. “Or, they told us he’d died. Elena and I never saw the body. That was when they took us…”