Arianna Rose: The Awakening (Part 2) (16 page)

“I have you now, witch,” the man said and did not hesitate to fire.

Arianna saw the instantaneous flash of the
shots being fired
and screamed, “No!” 

A bolt of energy rushed through her body to her fingertips and branched like electricity.
She felt the heated streak flare from her fingertips and leave her body in a burst of blue light like lightning and lurch outward toward the man.  His bullets halted and fell to the dew-covered
ground
and the man pitched backward
, stunned
.
  His gun fell as well.
  The man did not venture toward her.  He remained where he was, immobilized, his face a mask of shock.

Arianna entire body trembled, humming and buzzing with energy she could barely harness.  “Why are you trying to kill us?” she demanded of him, her voice shrill and frantic.

“I’m trying to kill you,” the man said and pointed a meaty finger at her.  “Not him.”

“What?  Why?” she asked, but in the dark recess of her mind, she knew why he
wanted
to kill her.

“
You are a soldier of evil,” he spat.  “Killing you is the Lord’s work.  I am doing the Lord’s work.”

“You are the one who’s evil!” she screamed at him.

“No!” he shouted back.  “I am a servant of God!”

Arianna took a step toward the man, wanted to look upon his face for a f
eature or
characteristic familiar to her. 
He wore glasses; that
much she could see.  But perhaps he had a birthmark or freckle, something that would set him apart from others. 
As she approached, however, his face faded temporarily, replaced instead with the orange-red glow of flame
s.  Heat swathed her once again and flames
crept up her body.  Her arms
and legs were bound and she suffered.
But through the thick smoke that billowed all around her, a face appeared, and
it did
not belong to man with the charred and scarred flesh.  This man’s head was cloaked in a heavy, dark fabric that edged his pasty skin.  Beady, black irises gaped at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses.  The flames snaked up her body and began to melt away her skin.  She wanted to cry out, desperately needed to, but under the watchful, maleficent gaze of the beady eyed man, she could not.  When finally, the flames engulfed her fully and she felt life begin to escape her, she saw that the man smiled, a satisfied, self-righteous smile.

Blackness teased at t
h
e
edges of Arianna’s vision as she relived her friend’s final moments.

“You were there when she was murdered,” she
said through her teeth recognizing the beady bespectacled gaze of the man before her.  “You watched her die.
You watched a sixteen year-old
girl burn to death
,
and you enjoyed it!” she hissed and felt ire roil and swell inside of her.

“She was evil!” he countered. 

His words set off a firestorm of reactions within her.  Every cell in her body began to teem with anger, anger unlike she’d ever felt before.  It rose like molten lava, pressing and surging, brimming so closely to the surface of her flesh, her skin felt heated.  She
struggled to suppress the urge that raged inside of her, the powerful need to punish the man who’d tortured and murdered her friend.

“She was the devil’s minion!” he offered a final charge.  And with his words, she erupted.

“She was my friend!” Arianna screamed in a voice that sounded foreign to her own ears.

“Arianna, no!” she heard Luke cry out
from a distant remote place
. 
His voice called to her, weak and muddled as if she were submerged in a vast ocean and he ashore.  S
he was gone.  Her vision was awash in crimson
, her body adrift on a blood-
red tide
. 
She felt h
er arms sho
o
t out in front of her and she watched through a scarlet veil as
the man who’d
brutalized her friend
levitated several inches off the ground.  He shrieked in terror,
seemed to sense his fate,
but she did not care.  She felt a charge rush through her arms to her fingertips
before leaving
her
body,
then saw the
man’s
head and neck twist
sharply, violently
,
to one side.  She heard
a
sickly snap
and witnessed his head flop and loll to his chest.  H
is lifeless body drop
ped
to the
grass,
motionless.
 
Arianna dropped her hands to her sides and felt drained.  Color slowly returned to the world around her, driving out the crimson. 
A voice called to her, a panicked voice; Luke’s voice.

“Why did you do that?” Luke cried.  “
How
did you do that?”

“H-h-he killed her.  I saw him, he
enjoyed
it,” she replied in a trembling voice.

Luke took a tentative step back, away from her, away from the two dead bodies that litt
ered the backyard of the Andrew
s house. 

“I don’t understand,”
he said in horror.  “I just don’t understand what happened here.  It just, it’s just,
all so
unbelievable.”  He raked his hands through his hair and rested them at the nape of his neck.  “Y-y-you killed him, without
even
touching him.
  What the fuck
are
you?
”

His words stung.  She had not intended to tell him of her powers, much less example them for him, but had used them twice in his presence, nevertheless.  The first time had been to rescue his sister, and herself, from a brutal attack, and this time, she’d had avenged her friend’s murder and had prevented them from being exterminated in the process.  Of course, he had no knowledge of the truth of what had happened at the nightclub with Stephanie.  But he had witnessed everything that had occurred moments earlier.  Arianna swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in her throat.  Her heart clenched and felt unnaturally heavy in her chest.  He saw her for what she was: a monster.

Luke looked at her and held her g
aze for the briefest of seconds.  Usually, his eyes nearly sparkled, their silvery hue shimmering and dancing with delight, with warmth.
But when he looked upon her now, his eyes had hardened
, their silvery shade replaced with steel, cold and mirthless.
In the fleeting
second
that he looked at her
, Arianna knew that nothing between them would ever be the same again.

Tears burned her eyes, and the lump in her throat grew so large she worried words would not escape her lips. 

“We have to leave now, Luke,” Arianna
managed, her voice a hoarse whisper
.  “We have to get out of here.”

He nodded mechanically and his eyes refused to meet hers again.  She turned and walked toward the front of the house, toward Luke’s pickup truck.  The only way she knew he followed, was the soft shuffle of his feet echoing behind her.

Chapter 12

For more than five hours, Arianna had ridden alongside Luke, and he had not spoken a single word to her.  They had not stopped to eat at a diner and they had not shared a motel bed together. 
Instead, they’d traveled in silence without even stopping to visit the drive-thru window of a fast-food restaurant.  When finally they’d reached her
trailer park
, Luke returned her
just beyond her
doorstep
, hungry and enervated, and had refused to meet her eyes with his.  Their silence was not for lack of subjects to discuss. 
They’d experienced a traumatic
incident
, had committed murders.  He’d seen her powers displayed in a most violent manner. 
And unlike their
uncommunicative
trip after their night together in the motel, she
was certain
Luke’s reticence
had nothing to do with sex or insecurities; it ran far deeper than that. 

Once she was inside her trai
ler, she dashed past the living-
room area, thankful that her mother wasn’t home to ask frivolous questions about her trip.  She had not cried yet, but knew that one look at her mother, one attempt at speaking to her, would
have
grant
ed
her some sort of unspoken mother-daughter permission to cry.  She did not cry often, and feared that if she started,
a great floodgate within her would break and
she would not soon stop.  Yet
,
it seemed unavoidable. 

Stopping at the bathroom to s
p
lash cool water on her face, she felt her throat constrict, felt a lump
swell
in her throat.  She swallowed hard against it, an act she was all too familiar with, and choked back the tears that threatened. 
The events of the last few weeks, all the death and destruction that surrounded her,
all of it fell
upon her with crushing heaviness.  She felt her chest rise and fall against the seemingly insurmountable weight of it
and clutched her head with both hands.  She was responsible for all of it, she was the source.  Her friend had died because of her.  The man in the alley, though he had attacked her and S
tephanie, had died at her hands.  A
nd now, two more men could be added as casualties. 
Of course
, they had been shooting at her and Luke and would not have mourned her death, but celebrated
it.  Nevertheless,
she was not comfortable with killing
.  She was not experienced at it as they were.  They had burned
Lily to death
.  No
matter how enraged she’d been
at them,
how angry she remained, and
no matter how much she tried to justify their deaths, it all came back to her.  The men would have never been hunting Lily had she never been friends with her
in the first place
.  She was the Sola.  She was the one issued a death warrant by Howard Kane and his people.  She wondered how many other
s
had lost their lives in his quest to slay her. 

The thought of more acquaintances, more innocent people whose only crime
had been associating with her,
losing their lives, sent a shiver of
revulsion through her body.  Bile rose in the back of her throat and she dropped to her knees before the toilet as sickness threatened.  When several moments
had
passed and she was confident the need to vomit had passed, she stood and stripped her clothes off, the need to shower overwhelming.  She turned the water on and stepped behind the shower curtain.  Standing beneath the spray, she was reminded of Luke’s comment about their motel shower’s water pressure,
how it had been better than
the one at his house.  She had agreed, and he had been right, the motel shower had been better
than his and hers, as well.
  Everything had been better at the motel. 

With a meager
mist of water cascading down her body, a chill settled over her, and the heaviness in her chest was immediately replaced with emptiness.  She reached out and turned the temperature control knob to the left, making the water hotter, in an attempt to rid her body of the chill that felt as though it had
seeped into
her very core.  But even as the water flowed over her, it did little to warm her. 

She wrapped her arms around her waist not only to warm herself, but to physically hold herself together.  She leaned her forehead against the cool vinyl of the shower inlay and
replayed the entire drive in her head. 
Her memory revealed the scene at Lily’s house as it had unfolded.  Luke’s face looped in her mind again and again like a film reel, the look of shock and horror after he’d wielded the pickax, his look of repulsion when she had not been merciful with the man who’d intended to murder her, who had murdered Lily, and had chosen instead to use her powers in front of him.  She rubbed at her eyes, tried to rid her mind of Luke’s look of disgust at her.  All the while, tears began to mingle with the water that fell down her face. 

Salty droplets streamed down her cheeks as she agonized
over what had happene
d, and how things had changed
.  She doubled over, her body racked with sobs, and yielded to pain of the raw and ragged hole that had been punched in her chest since her powers had been
revealed;
since she’d learned she was the Sola.

The Sola
;
the name made her knees weak, made her cry even harder.  S
he found the title absurd
, her role the stuff of science-
fiction novels.  Yet, no matter how much her brain wres
tled with
and resisted
her designation, a deep-seated sensation persisted, one that confirmed all she wished to deny, one that resonated with
certainty
.