Then
The food at the picnic kind of sucked, and I longed for my iPod so I could slip into my own world for a while. Mrs. Icahn—call me Betty—had gotten behind the raw-food movement. We didn’t have any hot dogs or hamburgers. Just mushrooms resembling burgers and onions, beets, and carrots for the hot dogs. I liked my vegetables but I liked them on the side. Or in a salad. Or cooked.
Jason had done something to anger his father and then disappeared. His father had ordered him to take a walk and get his beast under control. His beast? Couldn’t he say temper like everyone else? Beast? No wonder Jason behaved strangely sometimes. My family should adopt him and get him out of his crazy house before he got too old to undo his father’s weird parenting. But then we’d be brother and sister. Yuck.
Isaac Icahn creeped me out and I’d made a beeline to the back of the house. They lived on some kind of grand estate. My family had a lot of stuff and I guessed a lot of money; the Icahns redefined the parameters. I thought I might be able to walk and walk through their property and find myself in Massachusetts before it ended. The party going on inside made me want to try.
“Are you as bored as me?”
I leaped into the air. I’d not heard anyone approach, but then again I spent a lot of time lost in my own head.
“Where did you come from?”
The guy next to me stood at least six inches taller than me, and at five-feet-ten inches, I tended to tower over everyone. He had dark hair and brown, playful eyes. I’d spent enough time around guys my age to know a flirt when I met one. Still, I smiled because I couldn’t seem to stop myself. He had the kind of grin I had to respond to. And I’d bet he knew it.
“I saw you come outside. I’m here with my brother. The Icahn Foundation pays for his college tuition. Or it will, when he starts next year. So we always have to come here and act grateful. I mean, we are, grateful. But the constant parading around like trained ponies?” The still-unnamed guy rolled his eyes and stared up at the sky, taking a sip from a cup filled with a dark cola-looking liquid. “My parents say Isaac Icahn is a big deal in government. My dad works for the FBI and he knows these things. I shouldn’t complain. Icahn wants to pay for my tuition, too.”
“Right.” This conversation had moved way out of my depth. I didn’t know about anything to do with the government except I knew I hated the TSA. Taking off half my clothing at the airport really made everything move so much slower. I’d never given a thought to my college tuition. My mom’s job always took care of whatever we needed, and if it didn’t, Dad’s did.
“I’m Micah Lyons, by the way.” He held out his hand and I shook it. “Your hair is gorgeous. It’s like the sunset over the mountains where we spend our summers.”
My cheeks became beacons of flames. Or at least I assume they did. Hot, molten lava flowed through them, or maybe I just blushed really badly.
“Thanks.” I looked at my feet. No one but Jason ever flirted with me. Micah was really cute, like stop-my-breath cute.
“You’re welcome.”
“Stop pestering her.” I looked back up to see a girl I hadn’t noticed before walk up to us. She had a fast pace and her hands on her hips. “Is my brother bothering you? He thinks he has to hit on anything moving.”
My good feelings plummeted to the ground. Micah must behave this way with everyone. He’d probably used his line a million times before, too. Sunset. Please. My hair more closely resembled an orange peel.
The girl held out his hand. “I’m his sister, Tia.”
“The bane of my existence.” Micah raised his glass to me and walked a distance away to stare up at the sky. I wondered what he found so interesting up there.
“Don’t mind him. His head is always in the clouds. Sometimes literally. He wants to join the Air Force right out of high school but Dad’s insisting he go to college first. He takes flying lessons on weekends, which is where he’d be now if he hadn’t had to come here.”
I’d just met seconds earlier and she’d pushed a lot of info about her brother on to me in that short span of time. Maybe Tia happened to be one of those girls who really liked to talk, no matter the subject.
She pointed farther out onto the lawn. “My other brother is over there.”
I followed her hand motion to where a guy who looked like Micah, only taller and darker, talked to an older man who must be his father, since both Micah and the second brother resembled him. “His name is Chad.”
“Nice.” What else should I say? I’d never been so thoroughly introduced to people without actually making their acquaintances.
I returned my gaze to Micah. Chad looked nice enough, but even if he’d only been playing with me earlier, Micah Lyons made the already warm day ten times hotter.
“He’s cute. Everyone thinks so. He has a ton of girlfriends. So many we can’t even keep up with them.”
I looked at Tia. She stood just a few inches shorter than me with sandy-blond hair and bright blue eyes. So far, she didn’t lack for confidence. I bet she didn’t have trouble dating, either.
“I have a boyfriend.”
Tia’s eyes lit up. “I saw him when you came in. He’s really cute.”
People loved to express their opinion on how good-looking they found Jason. I couldn’t blame them. The first day I’d met him, I’d been blown away. Lately, I’d started to wonder if they weren’t also telling me how cute he was so I could be sure to know what a catch he was for someone like me.
My beauty didn’t get discussed like Jason’s. Most people thought I’d really lucked out to have found him, not the other way around. Well, my parents were the exception. They wanted Jason out of my life and mostly thought I was too good for him.
A slight twinge of homesickness rocked me. How much longer would I have to stay here?
Micah meandered back in our direction. “I hope my sister hasn’t made you want to run for the hills.”
“Not yet.” I smiled at Tia. “It’s nice to see another girl.”
I guessed I meant what I said. I didn’t have too many girlfriends anymore. Jason took up most of my time. The extra hours I did have, I didn’t want to go bar-hopping with fake IDs in New York City. There had to be some middle ground. I just hadn’t found it yet.
Tia grinned. “I think we’re going to be really good friends.”
I stared at Tia. I might not have gone so far to declare a person I’d only met moments earlier a good friend but then again, I probably wouldn’t have told her all about my family within seconds of greeting each other, either. She really had a strong, forceful personality.
Micah leaned over. “Watch out. Once she gets her claws in you, she never lets you go.”
It wasn’t Tia’s claws I wanted in me. I smiled at Micah. “Would that mean I get to see more of you if she did?”
Even as I said them, I couldn’t believe the words that left my mouth.
His face lit up with a real, broad smile, different than the flirtatious one he’d given me earlier. “Would you want to?”
A growl filled the yard, coming from behind me. I whirled around. Had someone let a dog into the party? For a second, I couldn’t believe my eyes. A giant Wolf tore through the grass toward us. I gasped, covering my mouth, too horrified to even scream.
The feral creature charged in our direction, and I couldn’t be sure why I knew with such certainty it had death in its eyes. But as much as I knew my own name, I knew the beast wanted to kill someone.
It leaped in the air the same time I did. Instinct made me push Micah forward and out of the way of the creature’s assault. I screamed as the Wolf and I hit the ground together. For a second, I could see seemingly familiar crystal-blue eyes staring at me before I blacked out.
***
Now
“The Warriors live in this part of town.” Micah pointed down the block where I knew his family resided. “But, I think, for now, we’re going to stick you elsewhere.”
I could have laughed. I hadn’t gotten to live among the Warriors when I’d actually been one of them because of my father’s behavior. I’d had to live with the rest of the population. Looked like, from the direction Micah steered me, we were going back to my old neighborhood. Maybe all the old biddies could stare at me out of their windows again and point like I had two heads and three arms.
“Am I going to be living alone?” I stared up at the ceilings, watching as the lights used to replace sunlight dimmed to late-afternoon substitution. I’d gotten so used to living above ground. How on earth was I going to adapt, even temporarily, to this again?
“Unless you’d like a roommate.” Micah raised his eyebrows, staring at me with heat in his eyes.
I missed a step and almost fell to the ground before I righted myself. Seriously? We were back to this? All the years I’d lived in Genesis with him, he’d thought of me as a sister, a best friend, an ally, and eventually, his brother’s girlfriend. Never as a romantic interest. All of Micah’s flirtations with me had happened before we’d been cryogenically put away.
“No thanks.” I swallowed. “You’re not my type.”
“Really?” He laughed, staring up at the ceiling for a second. “No one says that to me.”
“Oh? You think you’re some kind of gift to women? I’m supposed to swoon because you dared to suggest I spend the night with you?”
He shrugged. “Basically. Yes.”
Micah ushered me up to a cabin, and my heart dropped into my stomach. I couldn’t move, my feet frozen to the ground as my mind reeled against what I saw.
“Something wrong?”
I wanted to scream about Icahn’s sick sense of humor. I would not, could not, live in the cabin he’d assigned me. I’d already spent too much time inside of it when I’d lived with my father in Genesis. This place? It held too many bad dreams for me.
The Rachel whose nights had been spent inside the four walls of the small cabin in front of me had been so alone in the world she hadn’t known how to get through even one day without feeling hopelessly lost. I didn’t feel like her anymore. I could be on my own and not even experience any loneliness. Still, I didn’t know if I wanted her crawling into bed with me every night and threatening the newfound confidence I’d created for myself.
I smiled at Micah. “No, just remembering another time.”
He nodded. “Did your tribe have homes like this?”
I wished I’d never uttered the word “tribe.” Why couldn’t I have come up with something else? I’d made my bed and apparently I needed to continue to lie in it.
“Why are you thinking about trying to locate other humans? You know, so you can hit on them, too?”
The lightness returned to Micah’s gaze, and he opened the door to my former home for me. “You’re really something, aren’t you? Are you sure I’m not your type?”
“Well, maybe I’m certain I’m not really yours.”
I wandered through the small rooms, letting my hands stroke the walls while I did. The touch beneath the pads of my fingers made the whole experience feel less remote and more real. Nothing about this place had the power to change me. I’d left here; I’d made myself who I needed to be. The building couldn’t release fairy dust onto me and turn me into a whiny, confused version of myself.
“You okay?”
I spun around to regard Micah. Out of everyone I’d left, I knew he’d understand what I’d done. Micah had been a dream of mine for so long, something I’d carried over from one life to the next. A crush in both realities until he’d become so much more. He might like to pretend he wasn’t deep, like he wanted to be some kind of modern-day Lothario, but I knew better. Micah had depths to his soul no one had seen yet, and if anyone could have understood what it meant to finally take control of my life, Micah would get it.
“What if I told you there was a whole world out there you knew nothing about?”
Micah tilted his head to the side to regard me. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Places not on any maps. Schemes and plans controlling our lives without us even knowing anything about them.”
“I’d say you sound like you believe in conspiracies.”
I took a step toward him. “I live in one.”
“Who are you?” The teasing Micah had fled the room.
Good. I wanted him gone. For a mere second of time, I needed my friend back. “My name is Rachel.” I smiled.
“You know I wasn’t asking your name.”
A knock sounded on the door seconds before it swung open. Whatever Micah and I would have said to one another ended with the arrival of his sister. I almost called out her name in relief. Fortunately, I caught myself before I slipped up. She strode in with her head down, staring at her feet.
Micah swore, turning over his shoulder to look at her. “What are you doing here? You should be in bed.”
Tia’s eyes met mine, and I couldn’t believe how she’d changed in the months since I’d been gone. Gone was the Tia who had been my best friend and my biggest critic. Even after she’d given birth at seventeen years old, she’d had a levity about her, a certainty of her own worth and importance. This person looking at me now seemed defeated, exhausted, and beat down.
“I don’t want to be in bed.” Tia swallowed visibly. She’d lost a ton of weight, and as she walked forward, I could see her bones poking out from beneath her loose shirt. She pointed at me. “I want to see her.”
“Are you sick?” I knew I shouldn’t ask. In this life, I didn’t know her well enough to intrude and yet seeing her like this felt akin to having a knife stabbed into my gut.
“Not sick.” Micah answered for her. “Crazy.”
Tia flinched and with an instinct I couldn’t have controlled even if I’d wanted to, I punched Micah in the arm. “Don’t talk to her so meanly.”
“Damn.” He rubbed his skin where I’d struck him. “You really can hit.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Well, this is my sister, Tia. She’s not really supposed to be out among the general population unescorted.”
Tia hadn’t uttered a word to defend herself. I stared at her again, looking for a hint of the girl I’d left behind. Her gaze held mine but seemed vague, like she didn’t really know where she stood.
“Why?”
“Because she’s nuts.” He shrugged. “But then again, maybe you two can talk conspiracies together.” Micah rubbed his arm again. “Someone will come by later with food, and I guess you’ll be expected to come to the morning meeting tomorrow.”
The what? It must be something new. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what a morning meeting is.”
“It’s when the great Dr. Icahn tells us what he expects from us during the day.”
Micah spoke those words without even a hint of irony hidden in them. In case I’d had any question as to how far Icahn had turned them when he’d reworked their minds, I no longer wondered. Even before we’d caught Isaac Icahn the first time and realized he’d been lying to us, we’d not been in love with him. He hadn’t determined what we did with our days. He controlled the Warriors but not much else.
Apparently, Icahn had decided a good dose of hero-worshiping had to be included in the redo he and I had arranged. It didn’t surprise me he’d done this; all it did was add to my already formed disgust.
“I guess I’ll leave the two of you alone to get to know each other, since you’ve snuck out to meet our new visitor. Would hate to see it all go to a waste. I’ll give you ten minutes, Tia. Then I’m telling Mom you’re out.”
I waited a full minute until I heard his footsteps travel completely away from my childhood home before I spoke to Tia again.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t have anything to offer you to eat or drink.”
She lunged forward, knocking me backward with the force of our bodies colliding. The wind knocked from my lungs, I rolled, looking for a weapon, but I’d been completely disarmed when they’d brought me inside of Genesis.
It took me a moment to realize she hugged me. Shorter than me by a few inches, Tia’s head rested on my shoulder as we both lay on the floor. She panted like she’d run a race.
“I knew when I saw you.”
“Um—”
She didn’t let me finish whatever I would have said, although what I would have uttered, I had no idea. “I’m not crazy. If you’re real, then I’m sane and everyone else has…forgotten or something.”
I peered back to look at Tia, pulling myself slightly out from under her as I did so. Her eyes were wild and bloodshot. The poor girl. She must, somehow, be remembering what she shouldn’t. Why hadn’t Icahn corrected it? Did he know? This was unequivocally my fault. What was the right thing to do?
“I need to clarify some things.” My heart beat fast against my ribs. “You know who I am?”
She sat up on her knees. “You’re Rachel.”
I nodded. “Did you know my name before someone told you?”
Tears swam from her eyes. “I did, and if you’re Rachel, then the other things I’ve remembered have to be true as well.”
“Like what?” Even as I asked the question, I wished I hadn’t. Tia hadn’t been a good Warrior. She’d not been able to handle the fight, had become catatonic the first time she’d encountered a Vampire.
“We were living one kind of life. I was married to Glen, like I am now, but he didn’t hate me or think I couldn’t be around our baby. I was sane. We were happy. I didn’t want to fight. You were around. You loved my brother, Chad.” She sat farther up on her knees. “He died and you replaced him with some Werewolf.”
Not exactly. Tia’s perspective, however, didn’t surprise me. She’d always been limited when it came to understanding other people’s motivations.
“Then everything went askew. I went to sleep. Woke up somewhere else and we all had different memories. You weren’t here and I was the only one who noticed things had changed. Why doesn’t anyone else know?”
The better question had to be why Tia did. I’d wanted Micah to remember. I needed a friend in here if I was going to get out and continue on my mission to bring down Icahn.
I closed my eyes. I’d never been so torn in my life. Did I use this broken girl to help me? If she’d been the Tia of the past, there would have been no question of her competency. In fact, Tia had once betrayed me to Keith because she’d been so certain she was right and I was wrong.
Or do I leave her alone? Make Icahn fix her somehow and go on by myself without her.
I opened my lids. “Tia, listen to me. You’re not crazy.” I shook my head. “And I need you to help me get out of here.”
I knew I’d chosen the most selfish option available to me. If I managed to do all the things I needed to accomplish, she’d have her mind back. If I couldn’t manage to bring down the whole operation, I’d be dead. And, despite the pit of dread forming in my stomach as I chose to confirm her so-called delusions, I couldn’t control the whole world anyway. I’d tried to six months earlier and if Tia was an indication of things, I’d made a terrible mistake.