“The black one,” I told Gabriel once I got to the garage and found him trying to decide which vehicle to take. We had a collection of expensive vintage cars from my great-grandfather, but Sam bought me a newer one when I got my driver’s license, making sure it had all the best safety features, like the mini-van he was strapping his daughter into.
I watched Deanna’s minivan drive out, then punched in the alarm code, got into the passenger’s seat and let Gabriel take me to the plantation. My family had lived there for generations, until Cassie married Alan Roosevelt and we moved into the manor. I still spent a couple of weeks there every summer with Embry, but I hadn’t been since it was remodeled last Fall.
“Speak,” I said while we drove through the wooded trails. Most people would feel safest near a city, or in a place where you could walk to your neighbor’s without it taking you an hour, but the plantation was completely isolated. There was the forest between the plantation property and the manor, then acres of land between it and any neighboring fields. It would be easy to keep track of any incoming visitors, but outside help would be extremely hard to come by.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he dismissed me, keeping his eyes on the road.
“How about, ‘Hi Lucy, it’s been a while! How was graduation? It’s good to see you too?’” I gave him suggestions.
“It’s best if we stay quiet,” he warned, still not looking at me.
I leaned over and turned the radio on to whatever station annoyed him the most. I didn’t particularly enjoy the techno station either, but I could practically see the vein pulsing in his forehead while he forced himself to keep on ignoring me instead of making me change it. I would find it funny if I wasn’t so worried and annoyed with him.
When we got to the house, he parked and got out of the car.
“What are you doing?” I asked. It could have been some prank to leave me alone in the middle of nowhere, but he left the key in the ignition.
“The house was retrofitted in case something like this ever happened. They had your DNA so you have free roam of the house, but everyone else needs to be given permission for each room.”
“Like vampires need to be invited into your house? Or like booby traps and trolls?”
“With a high-tech computer security system. Embry and Sam know more about what happens if someone isn’t invited in, but I got the impression it was more like loud noises and laser beams.” He wasn’t amused by my question, but it sounded just as reasonable as the rest of his story. I wanted to point out that getting dissected by laser beams was way more intense than being yelled at by an alarm, but Gabriel walked away from the car and motioned for me to drive up.
I tried to move into the driver’s seat as gracefully as I could in my prom dress, but there was a lot of tulle and it was tight in places that made this incredibly difficult.
I stopped in front of the garage and wondered how I was going to get it to open. I was about to try ‘Open Sesame’ when a dark grey box came out of a hole in the ground, adjusting itself to be at my eye level.
“State your name,” a computer-animated voice rang out.
“Lucy Owens,” I said, but nothing happened. “Lucine Suzanne Owens.” It was on my birth certificate, but no one ever called me by it. Except when Mrs. Boyd had been upset, or wanted to make sure I listened to her.
“Vocal Recognition Achieved. Move closer.”
I saw the screen had switched to a handprint, so I put mine down and waited for it to say, “Digital Imprint Approved. Look here.”
Here was a vague description, but the handprint was replaced by a red dot, so I moved closer and stared into the screen.
“Welcome Lucy, please proceed.”
The garage door opened, and the inside looked the same as it always had. It was big enough for two cars, but half the space was taken up by bikes and toboggans and junk that hadn’t been used in my lifetime. The major difference was a grid made from tiny green lasers. I bit my bottom lip as I drove through it, half-expecting it to chop me into tiny pieces like in Resident Evil.
I looked back to Gabriel, who called out, “I’ll patrol tonight. Shut the door and get some sleep.”
It was easier said than done. He watched as I shut the garage door, but once I was in the house, other than the little computer screens that showed an analysis of every ChapStick and pack of gum it found when scanning the car, everything was dark.
I was always more afraid of the unseen than of the creatures that lurked in the night, but I was currently wishing that whoever put me into the system would have put Embry and Gabriel into it as well. Yes, it made sense to not let other people in if there was some evil guy trying to kill me, but the guys protecting me should be allowed to follow me in.
I tried to find the light switch, so I could look for a user’s manual that would allow me company, but they moved the switches when they remodeled. I knocked over what sounded like a vase, and the crash nearly made my heart stop. For the third time tonight, I was terrified. I didn’t like not knowing things and Gabriel’s ridiculous story made me feel like it was just as likely that a zombie would crash through the window as a burglar or a ninja assassin.
I found a light switch just as something else fell, either from the wind or some side effect of my stumbling around, but my heart felt like it was going to leap out of my chest. I quickly walked to the front of the house, turning on every light on my way. As soon as I got close, I ran to the front door and wrenched it open, calling out to him, “Gabriel!”
He had been off in the woods, but got to the porch before I even finished his name. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking into my eyes with all of the intensity I could remember from his visits. He used to come every time Embry did, or at least summers and most holidays, but I either did something or he got bored and stopped coming right after my eighteenth birthday.
“I understand that you want me to stay here alone, but is it really breaking the rules if you stayed on the balcony tonight?” I asked of him, suddenly nervous. Embry was the easy-to-talk-to one who would understand that the last thing I wanted to do after being ripped from my home because my life was supposedly in danger was to spend the night in a huge, mostly unlived in house, alone. I would prefer Embry or Sam or Deanna, but Gabriel could do the trick if he stopped running away.
He looked angry that I had made him worry and rush to my side for nothing, but I think he understood, though he hated it. If he didn’t want me to imagine the worst and scare myself into a heart attack, he either had to give me more information, or stay close.
“Just tonight,” he warned before walking away.
“Thank you,” I told Gabriel, handing him sheets and pillows through the French doors that led to the balcony from my bedroom. The thought had occurred to me that he agreed because the balcony could be a liability otherwise, but I was comforted all the same.
“You should get some sleep,” he said dismissively, keeping his eyes on the bundle I had given him.
“Gabe, could you please just tell me who this Big Bad is? And why you’re being cold and distant? Are you going to hurt me? Will I hurt you? Are you keeping a secret and you’re worried I’ll get you to tell me? Give me a reason,” I asked, putting a pillow and blanket for myself on the bean bag near the balcony. This wasn’t the first time I’d had someone camp out here, although last time it was Embry who stayed on the balcony with me. At the time, he’d said he wanted to see the stars, but now I was thinking it might have been to keep an eye on me, like Gabriel was doing now.
“He knows you’re here,” he told me simply, like it was something I should understand.
“I’ve always been here. Grams kept me locked up in the manor. The Boyds let me get out sometimes, but they still keep me close. We’ve been here for generations,” I reminded him, starting to take out the bobby pins that kept my prom hair in place.
“He checks in on your line every once in a while, but a lot less than we do. I knew the moment I saw you, even if you were younger, that he would come after you. Because you look like Annabelle.”
“Like all the dolls,” I realized. One for each of us the Big Bad hunted.
“We’ve kept an eye on every woman in your family, but you, Beth, Cassie and Rosie were the only ones who looked like Annabelle.”
“Because we’re related.” I knew the dolls looked the same, but Grams could always tell them apart. She liked to call it a family resemblance.
“Identical,” he argued. “Down to the very last freckle. The only differences are the ones you make, or don’t. Scars, haircuts, tattoos…but every dimple, everything about you is her.” He looked at me with a different kind of intensity, filled with pain.
“He’s been hunting her since the 1600s and now he’s after me.” I nodded like this made sense and wasn’t terrifying.
“He hasn’t made a move yet, but he will.”
“How do you know he knows?” I pressed.
“He’s recruiting.”
“An army?” I could picture those old Uncle Sam posters shouting, ‘We Want You!’.
“He has the ability to control people who are like me and Embry. If he touches you, it forms a bond and he can manipulate you, even if he’s far away. People like us are disappearing.”
“What do you mean by people like you? Immortals?”
“Some people like us live a normal life and then die without coming back. It’s only if you die before you accomplish what you’re meant to do. There’s no official name, but some call us The Gifted.” He revealed that he wasn’t invincible, he just came back to life whenever he died.
“And they’re all protecting people?” I asked of The Gifted.
“No, but we all have something to do. Some of them are poets or authors or great figures in history. Scientists and explorers. It’s an insurance policy to make sure the world doesn’t go without whatever their talents are. Embry likes to tell it like they all had great tasks to accomplish, but Einstein also created the hydrogen bomb, and Hitler did a whole lot of shitty stuff before he finally got it right.”
“Einstein and Hitler?” I asked, to which he nodded. “I’m pretty sure Hitler didn’t get anything right.”
“He lost his way and became the dictator he was born to defeat, but he did accomplish his task eventually.” I waited for him to smile, or tell me he was teasing.
“When he committed suicide?” I asked, making sure that was what he was implying.
“There are many ways to get something done, and not all of it is pretty. The pharaohs turned their people into slaves to get the pyramids, we used nuclear power as a weapon instead of an energy source…not all contributions are worth it.” He sounded bitter, but I couldn’t tell if it was over the horrible things that happened on the way to discoveries, or the pointlessness of his contribution.
“And if my Big Bad controls these people, he can use them forever, making them commit murders, as long as they never do what they were supposed to?” I verified, not liking it one bit.
“It won’t work forever. Once you discover what it is you need to accomplish, the drive is almost impossible to say no to. Some people tried to avoid their calling so they could live forever, but it doesn’t work.”
“Is he like you? The guy who is after me?”
“Yes.”
“And what he needs to accomplish is to kill me?” I confirmed. There had to be a worthwhile reason for me to die if the universe was giving him an insurance policy for it. How horrible was I going to become?
“I don’t know what he needs to accomplish. I don’t know if he’s working on something else and happens to want revenge over some slight from Annabelle…”
“But he’s definitely trying to kill me, and you and Embry are staying alive to protect me from him?”
“Among other things,” he agreed.
“Is Embry okay?” I asked, worried that maybe he was one of the people being recruited, which would mean the end game for me. Even if Embry and Gabriel weren’t exactly friends, they would still lay down their lives for each other, which meant that if Embry was sent to kill me, both of us would let him. Or at least I would.
“He’s on his way,” he assured me. “He hasn’t been recruited, he’s just taking his time to be safe. We believe the bond breaks and has to be re-established every time you die, so Embry would be a prime target. And in case it doesn’t, we can’t risk getting too close to you.” He implied that they’d been under his control before.
“Do you know why he wants to kill us, or what Annabelle did to him?” I asked, taking advantage of him answering me, but it was one question too many, as he sighed.
“Get some sleep, Lucy.” He let me know the conversation was over.
I let out a loud sigh, to let him know I was annoyed too, and wasn’t happy with everything he was keeping from me. Still, I wasn’t going to press after he had conceded to partially explain it to me.
I went over to the walk-in closet and managed to untie the bow at the bottom of my back, which loosened the gown enough that I could wiggle and step out of it. Magical proms, I thought to myself, though this was not at all what I had imagined. I found a pair of sweatpants and T-shirt and put them on, still trying to wrap my head around everything I was supposed to believe now. True, Embry and Gabriel didn’t look any older, but neither did Sam. Younger me would have believed all of it. She believed in fairy tales and magic, but the only way my life compared to a fairy tale was the castle-like manor and people dying around me. Which was cancer, not magic.
I went back to Gabriel and tried to get comfy on the beanie bag, playing with my pillow and blankets, but I knew I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. I was used to losing people after my mom, my grandmother, Mrs. Boyd and Mr. Boyd, but Sam had always been there for me. He was like a big brother before his parents took me in, before I even met Gabriel or Embry, and now he felt so far away, with his family possibly in danger, because of me.
I kept glancing at Gabriel, who wasn’t moving, but couldn’t be comfortable on the ground like that. I wondered if he had old bones and a bad back, even though he didn’t look to be older than his early twenties. His skin was tanned, but otherwise flawless; no wrinkles, no cuts, and no bruises. I was wondering if he was sleeping, which was almost impossible, when he said, “You could always sleep in the bed,” with his eyes still closed.
“I’m fine,” I assured him, deciding to lie on my side. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I didn’t want him to make me leave if I moved around too much.
I concentrated on watching him sleep for a while. He was the more intimidating of the two. The one who never warmed up to most people, but asleep like this, with his dark hair a mess, his face peaceful…it almost made you forget how he could get when he was awake.